Chapter 17 Part 6

In his peripheral vision, Sal saw the man try to take his virtual image by the arm. The main reacted instantly--almost before his fingers touched the image's arm. the ping alarm rose in Sal's ear, and simultaneously an alarm began to sound. They had broken his best encryption in about two seconds once they learned of his deception. Inner Sanctum was a force to be reckoned with. Sal would probably have been able to break it as fast if not a little faster, but he was one of the best in his field.  

At almost the same time the encryption broke, Sal's little surprise became activated. The inferential algorithms must not have liked what they were seeing, and Sal was inclined to agree with them. The bar was suddenly flooded with images of Sal. All of them were in different poses, and all of them were talking loudly to one another. The vast majority of them were moving. The men seemed less surprised than Sal was expecting. When Sal's display started sounding another audible alarm, he understood why. The men were preparing to flood the bar with Polarized Micro Particles, or PMP's for short.   

PMP's were a curious feature of the holonosphere. They had their origins in self-referential logic as present by the logician Kurt Godel. Godel had concerned himself with logic that was self-referential in the sense that numbers could often talk about themselves where their properties were involved. The easiest way to think about it would be a stranger whom one was curious to know. When one makes inquiries to a stranger, the stranger might say, "The only thing I can tell you about myself is nothing." Has the stranger told you anything about himself? yes and no. One knows something, namely that the stranger can tell you nothing of himself. Logically, such matters become tricky, as sentences arise that say things such as "This sentence is false." How does one evaluate such a statement? This question had been what Godel considered at least a thousand years ago. Godel eventually concluded that whatever system a person cared to construct logically, provided it could do basic arithmetic, that system would make some statements that could neither be proven true nor false within the system itself. It was, in essence, incomplete.    

What Godel had found even more pre-historic Zen masters had found. They had submitted that all phenomena were ultimately empty. If one believed something, it was because one had convinced themselves to believe that something. The holonosphere emergence had come about directly because people had been forced to accept that reality was a hologram. In moving away from the assumption that reality was concrete, it was possible for them to experience a different, broader version of reality. Had they given up the idea that reality was a hologram, it is hard to say what might have happened.   

Self-referentiality had a curious effect on the holonosphere, though. Since the holonosphere was adaptable in many ways, when it encountered self-referential statements in the physical form of what amounted to a Zen koan, it would cause the entire holonosphere to glitch. It would glitch because for a moment it would be trying to respond to the PMP's which were particles that basically asked the holonosphere to evaluate the truth of "This sentence is false." Such a question had the effect of making the holonosphere as an entity face its emptiness, and in so doing it would become momentarily empty before it could re-shape itself to a different representation of reality. Since the holonosphere was fractal, it was likely it would re-shape itself near a strange attractor. In other words,  it was more likely it would return to a close approximation of what it was prior to the flooding of the PMP's than it was to become something radically different. Most of the time, PMP's flooded the holonosphere just long enough to reveal holonospheric deceptions. since the old physical reality was slower to react, the PMP's didn't affect it so much. Since the holonosphere adapted so quickly, most people never noticed it glitching. Perhaps they might be near the source of the particles, but other users of it farther away in the world would not necessarily experience any unusual behavior where it was concerned.