Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called
metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of
Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by
and from their own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.
Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody
else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined. . . . It was
like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing,
unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the
intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as
they were beyond its understanding.
This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely
new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived
in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions
for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise
spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible
but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complications were
enabled.
Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant
alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked,
while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a
perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense
thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognizable
reality that would allow it to translate the rest into
comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of
universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute
enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every
single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe
was a like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering
cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious
riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised
to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the
Minds built their immense pleasure domes of rhapsodic philosophical
ecstasy.
That was where they lived. That was their home. When they weren't
running ships, meddling with alien civilizations or planning the
future course of the Culture itself, the Minds existed in those
fantastic virtual realities, sojourning beyondward into the
multidimensional geographies of their unleashed imaginations,
vanishingly far away from the single limited point that was reality.
The Minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called
it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what
they really knew it as, The Land of Infinite Fun.
It did the experience pathetically little justice.
Iain M. Banks, Excession, 4.III
