The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Yirella was conscious that everyone was glancing at her again. Her cheeks grew warm from the blood rising in them.

  As if sie’d sensed her discomfort, Alexandre said: “Immanueel, thank you for explaining everything to us. We do have a lot to talk about.”

  “Of course. Please feel free to use this domain to relax in. The facilities are the best we can produce, and, I expect, a welcome change from the life support sections of your ships. If you require anything, simply use your databud to order it.”

  Everyone rose to their feet like a young Immerle estate class dismissed from a lecture. Chairs scraped along the floor; everyone was speaking at once.

  Yirella walked over to Immanueel as they stood up. “We need to talk,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  In her mind, Yirella envisaged the two of them strolling along one of the gravel paths that wound between the torus domain’s old bald cypress trees, with startled birds flying between the high branches, chirping indignantly at the intrusion. Instead, Immanueel led her to a portal across the floor of the hall.

  She walked through into a weird hemispherical chamber twenty meters across, with metallic imperial-purple walls that could have been components of a machine—that, or they were inside a nest burrowed into a scrapheap. The strange geometrical protuberances had deep cracks between them—an effect that arched right overhead to the apex. Light came from a multitude of small sparks that slid slowly along the bottom of the cracks in an eternal progression, going nowhere.

  “What is this place?” she asked. The floor was so smooth she was worried she’d skid across it if she started walking. There was no color beneath her feet, as if a hologram were stuck in neutral, giving the impression she was standing on the glass lid of an exceptionally deep well shaft.

  “My centrex,” Immanueel replied.

  “Uh?”

  “Home. I wish us to be friends, or at least form a strong alliance. I believe inviting someone to your residence has a strong significance in your culture?”

  “It does. Did. An invitation to share was a large social force on old Earth, but those were different times. Post-scarcity changed the social implication. However, the custom remains—which is rather sweet. But you know this. I gave you all the records you access.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So if you are corpus, physically distributed across many elements,”—she gestured around extravagantly at the machine rilievo that made up the wall—“is this them?”

  “Some, yes.”

  “Okay, I have to ask: Why genesis human?”

  “It offends you?”

  “No. It spikes my curiosity, although I know Ainsley is responsible. I regard him as somewhat eccentric, especially for an AI—or whatever he actually is. He’s more than a genten, but less than human, despite how fast and smart he is.”

  “He described himself thusly to us, too. Smart, but without imagination. That seems to be an intrinsic part of the human soul, if not its very heart.”

  “Don’t go all romantic on me now. Intuition, imagination, impulse; they’re all part of random biochemical interactions in our neural structure.”

  “Indeed. But never really imitated outside a biological brain. However many random factors an artificial mind can generate, it cannot be truly imaginative. The idea for us came from you, not him, did it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “So simply calling you originator, or first mother, or similar, didn’t seem to convey the grandeur of what you did. In a very real sense, Yirella, you created us.”

  “Okay. I guess I can live with it.”

  “It pains us that your value is not fully recognized among your peers. You should be leading the fleet.”

  “Us? Is the whole history faction listening in?”

  “Not so much that as they are attuned to my conversation with you.”

  “But only with a small part of their consciousness, right? An aspect?”

  “Correct.”

  “Do you really need us to come with you to the enclave?”

  “Our FinalStrike can be conducted without you. Of course it can. However, your squads are ideally suited for the task. They will make a genuine contribution.”

  “Closure,” she said wonderingly. “You’re offering us closure.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’m concerned about throwing the squads into combat inside the enclave. No matter how advanced you are, and how many aspects you bring, the Olyix are equally formidable.”

  “You are correct. Even we cannot offer certainty.”

  “You must have some idea what’s in there. You build your domains on the same principle.”

  “The principles of quantum temporal mechanics that create and sustain the Olyix enclave, yes, we know them. Its internal nature, no. This is what humans have always dreaded—”

  “The other.”

  “Indeed. Olyix thought processes are genuinely alien. We can produce guesses at how the inside of the enclave is structured—logical guesses. But we can’t actually know.”

  “And once you do, you have to immediately formulate a plan.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.”

  “Exactly. An active combat environment is perpetually fluid. It needs a commander who can make choices. You, perhaps, could contribute.” Immanueel bent forward, spine curving so their tail stood up in a fashion that Yirella found oddly disturbing. They leaned against the wall, pressing hard against the asymmetric contours. The shiny purple components began to move around their body, creating an alcove that fitted like a glove. Nozzles clicked smoothly into the sockets down Immanueel’s spine, incorporating them into the wall’s constitution.

  “No thank you,” she said. “Tilliana, Ellici, and the other tactical teams might provide you with an alternative viewpoint if we come across something unexpected, but I really don’t do well in high-stress situations.”

  “I understand, and even sympathize. We will not call upon you for instant opinions, but we would welcome your participation in overall strategy preparation.” With their motionless body embraced by the centrex, Immanueel’s voice became omnidirectional.

  “Well, at least you didn’t say you’d be honored.”

  “Nonetheless, you know we would be. It would be fitting for you to accompany us; that way you may witness your triumph. You are the architect of the true FinalStrike, Yirella. Forgive the presumption, but given that the enclave is forty thousand light-years away, if you don’t come with us, you will never know the outcome. That is not what you want.”

  “Oh, Saints!”

  “May they rest in peace.”

  “You’re right, of course. All the original Morgan squads are hungry for payback. After all, it’s what us poor binaries were born for. Even I have trouble shaking my conditioning.”

  “Life is to be rejoiced. The reason for birth, good or bad, should not be part of its consideration.”

  “You really are different.” Yirella started to walk around the centrex, hunting for a pattern in the shapes and flow of lights that made up its curving sides. “But I’m glad you and the other history faction corpus members think we should make the effort to liberate our species.”

  “Not just ours. If the Neána are correct, the Olyix hold many races hostage for their God.”

  “Ah. Now there we have the puzzle at the heart of this problem.”

  “The God at the End of Time.”

  “Yes.” She turned from examining a silhouette that was like an elongated combustion chamber ribbed with slim heat fins. It took a moment for her eyes to find Immanueel’s body on the wall. The mottled black-and-blue of their skin was changing color, deepening toward the imperial-purple sported by the rest of the shapes. “Before he left to escort the seeds
hips, I asked Ainsley to make a request of whatever society arose here.” She cocked her head to one side, regarding the chameleon body with detached interest. “Did you build it?”

  “Yes. We built your tachyon detector.”

  “And? Does it work?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  “Theoretically?”

  “It has not detected any tachyons.”

  “I’m seriously hoping that’s because there are none directed at this star.”

  “So are we. The proof will come, of course, when we deploy it at the reception point.”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel obliged to point out there are problems with this path you wish to take.”

  “Such as?”

  “We believe we understand why you want it. We cannot concur your idea will work.”

  “I heard that message when I was inside Dellian’s brain; the Olyix neurovirus implanted it deep and hard. In fact, it was close to being the core of the neurovirus, because it justifies what they have done. Bring me all of your life, bring me all of your light. Together we will see the universe reborn out of us. It really did come from somewhere in the future. So if the tachyon beam is traveling back from that point to where and whenever in history the Olyix picked it up, it should also exist in this time. In fact, it should exist in every time before the moment it was sent.”

  “And as it travels faster than light, it creates a constant shock wave of Cherenkov radiation as it cuts through space-time.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Which I’m hoping will allow the detector to track where it will come from.”

  “We understand your reasoning, but first we have to confirm the location of the reception point—information that is presumably available to whatever onemind rules the Olyix enclave. Yet even if we manage to extract that data, we are then left with the task of determining the spatial location of the receiver point when the message first reached it. If the Olyix received it a million years ago, that reception point will have moved a phenomenal distance over the intervening time. Everything in the universe is in motion relative to everything else. This neutron star is currently orbiting at two hundred kilometers per second in its orbit around the galactic core. On top of that you have this galaxy’s relative speed to the local supercluster, and then the great attractor mass on top of that—and those are only two factors to be taken into account. Frankly, the farther in the past the message was received, the less chance we have of finding the course of the message in our current time.”

  “I know,” she said. “But with the proper knowledge, it will be possible to intercept it, right?”

  “Theoretically what you want to achieve is possible, but there are considerable practical problems.”

  “Ten thousand years ago the Olyix invaded Earth, and our ancestors set out to find them and bring our people home. And now here we are, you and me, finally getting close to achieving that goal. So surmounting considerable problems seems to be what humans are getting really quite good at.”

  “And what happens—what is your endgame—if you find the message tachyon stream?”

  “Go to the source—in this time.”

  “Again, we anticipated this would be your strategy. You think that by eliminating the source—a planet, a star system, a species—in the present, the message will never be sent from the future. The Olyix will not become religious fanatics, and Earth and all the other worlds will not be invaded.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what of paradox?”

  “That level of quantum temporal cosmology is beyond me,” Yirella admitted. “All I can focus on is that Saints-damned tachyon message that is changing the past—our present—by setting the Olyix crusade loose on the galaxy. Therefore if we can eliminate, here in our present, whatever civilization, species, or young god that sends it, then it will not be sent.”

  “Your logic is impeccable. But what about causality? Everything we know about causality dictates that time travel should not be possible.”

  “You are speaking of linear time.”

  “Of course. Our perceptions only enable us to see time as linear. But the very nature of linear time implies that—from an external observer viewpoint—the history of the entire universe from creation to heat death exists in a static form, allowing us—consciousness—to perceive time moving in only one direction. Ergo, the universe’s entirety—both space and time—was created as a complete whole. Which argues that change is not possible.”

  “Except that our perceptions must be wrong, because time travel has occurred,” she countered. “The God at the End of Time sent a message from the future. And you have to concede that this timeline must be different from the one that existed before the message changed the behavior of the Olyix.”

  “Ah. Well, the very concept of timelines implies a multiverse. One theory—and one that we corpus favor—has it that instituting a causality violation such as time travel is an anomaly that creates a new universe. Meaning if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, that death happens in a new universe—one where your future self does not yet exist and now never will. A universe in which you are now an interloper—but also one in which you will never have a double. However, if you were able to somehow travel back to your original universe, your grandfather would still be alive there.”

  Yirella pursed her lips. “Time travelers are Gods? Interesting.”

  “More like the builders of time machines are Gods. On every occasion the time machine is used—for every tachyon message that is sent through time, or every time someone goes back to kill their grandfather or a tyrant—that act creates a new copy of the universe that branches off from the original.”

  “Meaning every alternate universe is the product of a time machine. But they’re still a perfect copy of the ‘original’ universe up until that point just before the split?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the tachyon message the Olyix detected didn’t actually come from this universe?”

  “In the anomaly-creation theory, yes.”

  “So the God at the End of Time exists only in certain universes, whose history played out in specific ways?”

  “Possibly. But if we take as our assumption that the message was sent from the time of the heat death of the original universe—when the God perceived a condition it needed to address—then this makes our present the desired outcome of this new reality.”

  “Meaning that the God at the End of Time likewise exists—or will come to exist—in this reality, because this is its desired outcome. So the physical conditions for the God at the End of Time to come into existence are present in this universe, right here, right now. Its birth star is real. If we destroy the place it comes from here in the present, then it will never be born, and won’t send a message—which creates another copy universe. The cycle ends, and the paradox loop is broken.”

  “That is our reasoning, which is why we built the detector for you. We do not necessarily think your strategy will work, but we cannot ignore the possibility that it might.”

  “Thank you. I guess that makes the whole universe Schrödinger’s cat. We don’t know the outcome until we open the box, and even then we won’t know because opening the box from the inside means we cease to be the observer.”

  “Correct. Clearly some form of time travel or manipulation is possible; the message proves that. But have you considered the implication of classic temporal theory being correct? That there is only one universe and it is possible to alter the timeline? If so, there will be a considerable price for your strategy of resetting the timeline.”

  “Yes. I cease to exist. As do you, and everyone else alive here and now. In a multiverse, there will still be some universe in which we all exist, but if not, generations blink out as if they never existed.”

  “Not quite.”

  Yirella’s eyes narr
owed as she studied the imprecise profile of Immanueel’s body, which was almost indistinguishable from any other section of wall now. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “To negate the evolution of the God at the End of Time will mean the message will never be sent, and subsequently the Olyix will not commence their abominable crusade. They will not invade Earth. The history of the last ten thousand years will be very different.”

  “Yes, it’ll save us from this whole disaster. That’s the whole point. And if I can’t do that—if your time-travel-is-creationism theory is right—it’ll mean ending the cycle of new universes created by the God’s tachyon message, in which every one contains the same Olyix threat. That alone makes the effort worthwhile.”

  “But my dear genesis human, although the Olyix invasion was an unmitigated disaster for us here and now, the vast majority of Earth’s population is still alive in cocoon form, and our FinalStrike mission will hopefully result in us reinstating them in their bodies. Not only that, but with the technology available now, a high percentage of them will never have to endure the low socioeconomic index lives they were living up to the point of the invasion. Records indicate that out of the nine billion living on Earth at the time the Salvation of Life arrived, four billion were significantly disadvantaged by the Universal culture’s economic structure that was prominent in that era. They would never have risen out of that. Now, our initiators and gentens can provide a post-scarcity environment for everyone, and medical science can prolong the life of baseline human bodies indefinitely, as well as opening the opportunity to elaborate up to corpus level.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting to me that the Olyix invasion was a good thing for us?”

  “It depends on your perspective. For those who fled Earth and the settled worlds in their exodus habitats, it was a catastrophic time when their lives were disrupted forever. Subsequently they spent the rest of their days fleeing in dread across the galaxy—an era of such profound experience that it has shaped the psychology of every generation world since, producing a tainted legacy, with yourself and the squads as the ultimate outcome. But now the era of the exodus flights is over, one way or another. Some of the exodus, whom we should honor for their incredible commitment, strove to provide future generations with a chance at freedom. Some—billions more—fell to subsequent Olyix capture along the expansion wavefront. Were you to consider this whole epoch from the perspective of a low-income, low-satisfaction Earth resident in 2204, then if FinalStrike is ultimately successful, their view would be very different from yours. Imagine: There was a frightening disconnect in their life, and then they wake up thousands of years later in what equates to a billionaire’s paradise where they can do or be anything. Now ask yourself: Does the human race have a net gain from you changing the timeline to one where the Olyix invasion does not happen? And in doing so, becoming unborn yourself, along with everybody born from the day the Salvation of Life arrived at Sol onward? Others will be born instead, of course, but all those lives will not only no longer exist, they never will have existed.”