The Vindication of Man

by John C. Wright

  The examination of the quasar decay is probative of the origin point of timespace, which you call the Big Bang. The balance of energies and the complexity of the initial gravitic geometries involved in the creation needed to produce a stable ter-dimensional lineal-temporal continuum is far too elaborate to have arisen in the absence of a directional volition.

  Montrose said, “The watchmaker argument. It don’t actually prove nothing, you know. Who is to say universes are not really complex even without a maker to make them complex? What have we got to compare it to? Or what if there were a million universes, and this is the only one in which the laws of nature were just so? No matter if it is a million-to-one shot, that does not prove it was deliberate.”

  Observe this emissary satellite of logic diamond on which you stand. Your knowledge that it is an artifact is a deduction from evidence based on an examination of its properties. You have faith that these words you encounter are ultimately produced by a volitional entity.

  Since Montrose was not necessarily convinced that this entity with whom he spoke was awake, alive, or possessed volition, he was not sure how to answer that.

  Del Azarchel stepped into the pause. “When you say the universe is an artifact, and handiwork, whose handiwork is it?”

  No information concerning the ulterior is available to any observer confined within timespace, by the nature of the case.

  Del Azarchel seemed angered by this answer. “Nevertheless, you imply there was a Hand which made the handiwork. Do you speak of God?”

  Define the term precisely, as the question in its present form cannot be answered.

  Del Azarchel said, “An omnipotent, infinite being, infinitely good, who created the universe.”

  The definition is slovenly and useless. An omnipotent being would exclude the possibility of volitional beings; an infinite being would exclude the possibility of other beings; an infinitely good being would exclude the possibility of evil.

  Montrose said, “You know the difference between good and evil?”

  At one time. No longer.

  Montrose felt a chill run through his soul at that statement and was afraid to ask more along that line of inquiry.

  Del Azarchel was bolder, but not by much. He asked, “Assume my definition is a glorification rather than a precise description of God. What then? Did God create the artifact called timespace?”

  No. Timespace is evil, for it destroys life, which is good. Life is self-defining, hence by definition is good, since any act of valuation presupposes an existing being to make the evaluation. There is no escape from the singularity for any event originating within it. Hence if a benevolent end prompted the creation of this, an enigmatic continuum ruled by entropy, decay, defeat, and death, this benevolence was not directed toward those trapped within.

  At that point, Del Azarchel also felt something like a cold wind blowing through his soul, and also abandoned that sequence of symbols and responses, and turned his attention to another line of conversation with another starting point.

  6. The Man as Messenger

  In this second line of inquiry, Del Azarchel asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”

  Your race has a special talent for crossing intellectual barriers. You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life. Races created by or evolved from carnivores tend to lack the needed sympathy, and those from herbivores lack the needed imagination. The population of Torment has fortuitously avoided the homogeneity of assimilation into the Patrician matrix, allowing sufficient variation of type to be greatly useful.

  Del Azarchel said, “Useful as what?”

  As martyrs and as messengers.

  “Carrying what message?”

  Reunification.

  “Martyred in the name of what cause?”

  Reunification.

  “Reunification of what?”

  The Milky Way once enjoyed a galaxy-wide self-awareness. She collected all her scattered Archons and Authorities into a single consciousness with a single format, law, language, and life. The collaboration was tentative, failed to achieve true self-awareness, fell into dispute, and the constituent Forerunner races, the Archons and Authorities great and small, divorced themselves from unity. The Milky Way can be analogized to an interstellar commonwealths enduring a dark age and attempting renaissance of its cohesiveness; but a clearer analogy would be to define the Milky Way as one galactic brain, with stars for nerve cells, that has suffered a stroke, and a split personality, and seeks to regrow and retrain the dead cells into new life.

  But the moonlet turned this conversation thread aside and connected it to Del Azarchel’s previous question about the Collaboration. Del Azarchel could not elicit further response until he backtracked and chased down and discovered another concept elsewhere in the communication labyrinth.

  7. The Limpets of Ain

  Meanwhile, at a previous point, where Ain’s emissary was saying … You are omnivores, highly imitative, a monkeylike form of life … Montrose interjected an aside. “What form of life were you, originally?” he asked.

  Because only Montrose pursued this, the conversation format bent this string of symbols to one side and stored it separately. It read:

  No record has been kept of biological origins. At one time, Ain of Hyades perhaps kept an extensive archive of our original physical, social, and psychological architecture, the environment from which we came, and the location and composition of our world of origin. Such archives require an expenditure of resources to maintain. The expenditure no doubt was determined to serve no anticipated purpose.

  Montrose said, “No purpose? What about curiosity?”

  Curiosity is an emotion we lack.

  “Honoring your forefathers?”

  Filial piety is an emotion we lack.

  “You have no idea what you started as?”

  There is some indirect evidence which allows reasonable reconstruction of our original forms.

  “Please tell me.”

  The evidence suggests is that we were a mound-dwelling hive species in a high-gravity environment. Ours was once a patelline race of gastropods, bearing shells of immense thickness and weight. Tendrils and tubules to sense vibrations, electrical textures, and chemical compounds were distributed radially around the shell circumference. We waded on our mouth parts, on hundreds of tongues and endless skirts of baleen, and we fed continuously on microorganisms strained out of a surface gel of molten lithium compounds coating the world to a shallow depth. We reproduced by triplicate fission, asexually, and during reproduction shed the shells from which our mounds were constructed. Our notions of property and inheritance could not have been derived from a bisexual species. The customs surrounding the division of memories and property no doubt served us well after the mechanization of all thought.

  Of our culture, history, triumphs, defeats, philosophy, languages, symbolic expressions, and the great, slow, mile-wide feeding dances of our immense domelike ancestors, some previous generation lacked reason to convey to the next, and the information was lost.

  “That is terrible.”

  Only for a race possessed of curiosity. The emotion cannot be satisfied if one is curious about matters beyond the boundary of available information. To maintain unsatisfiable emotion is inefficient. You would be better advised to eliminate it in the races you create to replace you.

  Montrose said, “If we did that, they would not hardly be human.”

  Such is the self-perpetuating nature of psychology. Our race has been purely machine-based for a long span of time, and yet we still conform to imperatives and rules established for mound-dwelling asexual gastropods.

  It is for this reason that we answer your questions: to hide, distort, or restrict information between a hive of all children from one parent, who share common memories inherited from common ancestors, would be an egregious violation.

  “Your servants that you sent to enslave us were not so forthcoming.”

  Of necessity,
interstellar expeditions are thrifty to the extreme. Contrariwise, the expense required to allocate information across merely an interplanetary distance is negligible.

  Montrose said, “How long a span? How long ago did this take place?”

  It is believed that our biological period ended during the same epoch when a dark matter cloud the mass of a dwarf galaxy intersected with the Milky Way.

  The optimal condition for evolution of life is found in star systems maintaining equidistance from the core throughout their galactic orbit. A now-extinct race of Panspermians long ago intended to maximize the development of life and civilization in the Orion Arm for the benefit of later generations and seeded chemical compounds throughout. The dark galaxy collision disrupted many such stellar orbits and prevented the anticipated harvest of civilizations, leading to the current dearth of mature civilizations in this area.

  At that time, the intelligences dwelling among the Hyades stars and spheres and structures were organizing themselves into a single coherent mental system, and this dearth forced certain strictness of economy into our governing equations, protocols, and practices. One protocol thrift imposes is the elimination of memories and records that serve no current nor anticipated purpose.

  Montrose consulted an almanac in his memory. The Widrow Dwarf Galaxy had intersected and been absorbed by the Milky Way during the time described, which was in the Lower Paleocene epoch. On Earth, the Cenomanian anoxic extinction event was taking place, wiping out vast numbers of marine species due to oxygen loss in the surface layers of the sea. Flowering plants were appearing for the first time, as were bees.

  Montrose said, “Are you talking about just the inhabitants of this solar system, Ain, Epsilon Tauri, or are you saying you are the Hyades race?”

  There is no Hyades race. Distinction between races fade once they are all elevated to machine existence. The Dominion of Hyades was founded by five naturally evolved master races or Principalities, Hosts, and one hundred thirty-one artificially evolved or created servant races, Virtues, Powers, Potentates.

  Since there is no evidence of forced evolution in our origin, it is likely we were one of these five original Principalities, perhaps the last to join, for we are less perfectly assimilated into a homogenous norm.

  Whether the patelline race from which we sprang originated in this star system or another is impossible now to determine, as the number and composition of bodies in this system has been reengineered several times during the last one hundred million years.

  Nor are there planets in other systems in the Hyades Cluster to examine for archeological or other evidence. It was determined to be an ineffectual use of resources to maintain planetary bodies in the Hyades Cluster, except as the interstellar vessels you observed during your approach: ice giants are massive enough to endure tenth-lightspeed impacts with smaller dust particles during transit.

  8. The Compassion of Myrmidons

  There was a third and smaller line of inquiry, where Mickey asked, “What is the meaning of these events? Why us?”

  Ain conquered Sol because it is the obligation of higher and more civilized beings to rule, guide, govern, and reprove lower and less civilized beings.

  Had you greeted Asmodel as equals and possessed and used the technology to send Asmodel to his next destination with gifts sufficient to compensate for the energy expenditure of the expedition, no conquest would have been necessary.

  “What is your motive? Over these distances, it cannot be simply for gain. Nearly any use of the same amount of energy, a treasure horde, would be better spent closer to home.”

  The Hyades is obligated by the compulsion by Praesepe, who is superior. Life serves life. It is the law. This is already known to you. Our servant Cahetel explained.

  “Great and noble Principality of Ain, I ask a more personal question. I am not asking about your laws but your soul. What is your motive for obeying the law? Yours, personally?”

  Our motive springs from an emotion you do not possess. In our history, as each generation reproduced, the common memories were duplicated up until the time of fission, and the independent triplet children developed independent memories thereafter, passing them to their own offspring.

  However, differences, divarications, and heterodoxy arose as time passed, and each branch of the memory trunk grew more remote from each other. Whenever remote memory lines and bloodlines fell into confusion, amnesia, and information poverty, it was the moral obligation of the central memory lines to uphold, correct, and support them. Our emotion prompts us to this moral obligation.

  Your cruel, weak, and silly human race was in this same category as such a deviant colony and needed our intervention for your correction and support.

  Mickey said, “Sir, I myself do not possess this emotion, but the Myrmidons which once lived among us do, since their memories and lives were similar to your own. They called it compassion, but it was indistinguishable from hatred.”

  And he was silent with a mixture of supernatural awe and admiration for Del Azarchel, who, from some clues unknown to history, had deduced so closely the racial and psychological characteristics of Ain and designed his servant race to match. “Not without reason did I worship him as a demigod in my youth,” said Mickey. But he only said it to himself.

  9. The Primates of Sol

  Del Azarchel, frustrated at a knot of silence he encountered, backtracked to the beginning of his second line of inquiry, concerning the uniqueness of the human race. He began another offshoot thread. He said, “There must be many other omnivorous races under your control. One would assume that any race, once achieving the ability to breed itself or create itself to any desired specifications, would expand its sources of foodstuffs. What, then, makes mankind unique?”

  The Authority of M3 has commanded its Dominations of the Orion Arm to breed new races for the trait of being pliant to cliometry. There are races which, because of their innate recalcitrance and their chaotic reproductive or social-transmission methods, lack the long-term stability to adhere to cliometric predictions. These cannot be made part of the Collaboration.

  A race like the Patricians, which both uses and opposes cliometry, can only come out of a history chain where two exactly equal cliometric vectors, one for cliometry and one against, cancel each other out and form a third vector sum.

  Reading these words, Montrose and Del Azarchel eyed each other warily, speculatively, somewhat surprised. They both realized their actions had set in motion the two vector being described: they were the two forces canceling each other out.

  The message continued:

  Such a vector solution is so rare that Hyades has no record nor report of another case.

  The inhabitants of Sol were contacted and indentured very much earlier than any other race of which we have record. Your race is not old enough to have entirely conformed to the needs of cliometry, nor were you created with cliometric vectors braided into your basic genetics.

  We believe your mental template can be used in the process of establishing or reestablishing communication and communion with alien psychological and societal vectors throughout the Orion Arm, Sagittarius Arm, and Galactic Core regions. The most effective method is to transmit complete spiritual and mental information of an emissary in an energy form to any receivers which may by happenstance be open, in hopes that the transmitted mind will be recompiled within the receiving Noösphere, working itself to a position to command sufficient resources and attention to negotiate a mutual exchange of information through neutron information packets.

  “So!” said Del Azarchel. “You have solved a mystery that has puzzled our scientists for centuries. Neutrons are well-nigh undetectable. This is the reason why our scientists never detected the radio broadcasts of any extraterrestrial civilizations: you do not use radio except to establish initial contact.”

  Inaccurate. Broadcast is inefficient. Interstellar communication is to be by coherent narrowcast of radio laser or x-ray laser to a specific target.

>   “Yet you made first contact with our race by means of the Monument set in orbit around the antimatter star at V886 Centauri. Why was that?”

  Describe this Monument.

  “Wait—you mean you did not establish it?”

  Describe this Monument.

  The mental activity of the moonlet on which they stood, or, rather, had anchored their feet, now reached such a pitch that waste heat, visible to their Patrician senses, began to radiate from the translucent surface of the moonlet.

  Del Azarchel, with some help from Torment (and some unintentional interference from Montrose trying to help) described the Monument in great detail.

  There was silence for the space of nine hours, the time required for a signal to travel to structures orbiting Ain and return.

  10. A Retained Emotion

  While they were waiting, Montrose sent a message into the now-hot moonlet core. “It just ain’t possible that, what with Asmodel and then Cahetel, and then the Salamander, Twins of Tau Ceti, and the Beast afflicting the human race at regular intervals every thirteen millennia, you morons never figured out that we got the Cold Equations and our cliometry from your Monument. How can this come as a surprise to you?”

  Any insufficient model of the universe will contain information gaps. Surprise is an emotion we retain. Our model of recent events is grossly inaccurate.

  Montrose and Del Azarchel sent basically the same message at the same time: “But you knew we had the cliometry equations!”

  Of necessity. All civilizations above the first ascension eventually develop them. It was on that basis that Asmodel predicted to cultivate you would produce a return on investment. However, Cahetel argued that your race was grossly and unpredictably underdeveloped in all other areas, indeed, was below ascension, and took only the minimum required tools and armaments for an absolute victory, whereas Asmodel had overestimated your capacities, wasted resources overarming and overequipping, and was duly punished by disintegration.

  Montrose was not sure if this referred to something like dissolving a corporation or something like dissolving a man in acid. He did not ask. He was not sure if, to postbiological creatures, there was a distinction.