Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “You’re telling me the replicators ran into other replicators?”

  “An ecology of replicators. The stars are a jungle, Tyler. Fuller of life than we ever imagined.”

  I tried to picture the process as Jason described it:

  Far beyond the Spin-sequestered Earth, far beyond the solar system—so deep in space that the sun itself is only one more star in a crowded sky—a replicator seed alights on a dusty fragment of ice and begins to reproduce. It initiates the same cycle of growth, specialization, observation, communication, and reproduction that has taken place countless times during its ancestors’ slow migrations. Maybe it reaches maturity; maybe it even begins to pump out microbursts of data; but this time, the cycle is interrupted.

  Something has sensed the replicator’s presence. Something hungry.

  The predator (Jase explained) is another kind of semiorganic autocatalytic feedback system—another colony of self-reproducing cellular mechanisms, as much machine as biology—and the predator is plugged into its own network, this one older and vastly larger than anything the terrestrial replicators have had time to construct during their exodus from Earth. The predator is more highly evolved than its prey: its subroutines for nutrient-seeking and resource-utilization have been honed over billions of years. The terrestrial replicator colony, blind and incapable of fleeing, is promptly eaten.

  But “eaten” carries a special meaning here. The predator wants more than the sophisticated carbonaceous molecules of which the replicator’s mature form is composed, useful as these might be. Far more interesting to the predator is the replicator’s meaning, the functions and strategies written into its reproductive templates. It adopts from these what it considers potentially valuable; then it reorganizes and exploits the replicator colony for its own purposes. The colony does not die but is absorbed, ontologically devoured, subsumed along with its brethren into a larger, more complex, and vastly older interstellar hierarchy.

  It is not the first nor the last such device to be so absorbed.

  “Replicator networks,” Jason said, “are one of the things sentient civilizations tend to produce. Given the inherent difficulty of sublight-speed travel as a way of exploring the galaxy, most technological cultures eventually settle for an expanding grid of von Neumann machines—which is what the replicators are—that costs nothing to maintain and generates a trickle of scientific information that expands exponentially over historical time.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I understand that. The Martian replicators aren’t unique. They ran into what you call an ecology—”

  “A von Neumann ecology.” (After the twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann, who first suggested the possibility of self-reproducing machines.)

  “A von Neumann ecology, and they were absorbed by it. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the Hypotheticals or the Spin.”

  Jason pursed his lips impatiently. “Tyler, no. You don’t understand. The Hypotheticals are the von Neumann ecology. They’re one and the same.”

  At this point I had to step back and reconsider exactly who was in the room with me.

  It looked like Jase. But everything he’d said was casting that into doubt.

  “Are you communicating with this…entity? Now, I mean? As we speak?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call it communication. Communication works two ways. This doesn’t, not in the sense you’re implying. And real communication wouldn’t be quite so overwhelming. This is. Especially at night. The input is moderated during daylight hours, presumably because solar radiation washes out the signal.”

  “At night the signal is stronger?

  “Maybe the word ‘signal’ is misleading, too. A signal is what the original replicators were designed to transmit. What I receive is coming in on the same carrier wave, and it does convey information, but it’s active, not passive. It’s trying to do to me what it’s done to every other node in the network. In effect, Ty, it’s trying to acquire and reprogram my nervous system.”

  So there was a third entity in the room. Me, Jase—and the Hypotheticals, who were eating him alive.

  “Can they do that? Reprogram your nervous system?”

  “Not successfully, no. To them I look like one more node in the replicator network. The biotechnology I injected into myself is sensitive to their manipulation, but not in the ways they anticipate. Because they don’t perceive me as a biological entity, all they can do is kill me.”

  “Is there any way to screen this signal or interfere with it?”

  “None that I know of. If the Martians had such a technique they neglected to include the information in their archives.”

  The window in Jason’s room faced west. The roseate glow now penetrating the room was the waning sun, obscured by clouds.

  “But they’re with you now. Talking to you.”

  “They. It. We need a better pronoun. The entire von Neumann ecology is a single entity. It thinks its own slow thoughts and makes its own plans. But many of its trillions of parts are also autonomous individuals, often competing with each other, quicker to act than the network as a whole and vastly more intelligent than any single human being. The Spin membrane, for instance—”

  “The Spin membrane is an individual?”

  “In every important sense, yes. Its ultimate goals are derived from the network, but it evaluates events and makes autonomous choices. It’s more complex than we ever dreamed, Ty. We all assumed the membrane was either on or off, like a light switch, like binary code. Not true. It has many states. Many purposes. Many degrees of permeability, for instance. We’ve known for years that it can transit a spacecraft and repel an asteroid. But it has subtler capabilities even than that. That’s why we haven’t been overwhelmed with solar radiation in the last few days. The membrane is still giving us a certain level of protection.”

  “I don’t know the casualty numbers, Jase, but there must be thousands of people in this city alone who have lost family since the Spin stopped. I would be very reluctant to tell them they’re being ‘protected.’”

  “But they are. In general if not in particular. The Spin membrane isn’t God—it can’t see the sparrow fall. It can, however, prevent the sparrow from being cooked with lethal ultraviolet light.”

  “To what end?”

  At that he frowned. “I can’t quite grasp,” he began, “or maybe I can’t quite translate—”

  There was a knock at the door. Carol entered with an armful of linen. I switched off the recorder and set it aside. Carol’s expression was grim.

  “Clean sheets?” I asked.

  “Restraints,” she said curtly. The linen had been cut into strips. “For when the convulsions start.”

  She nodded at the window, the lengthening daylight.

  “Thank you,” Jason said gently. “Tyler, if you need a break, this would be the time. But don’t be too long.”

  I looked in on Diane, who was between episodes, sleeping. I thought about the Martian drug I had administered to her (the “basic Fourth,” as Jase had called it), semi-intelligent molecules about to do battle with her body’s overwhelming load of CVWS bacteria, microscopic battalions mustering to repair and rebuild her, unless her body was too weakened to withstand the strain of the transformation.

  I kissed her forehead and said gentle words she probably couldn’t hear. Then I left her bedroom and went downstairs and out onto the lawn of the Big House, stealing a moment for myself.

  The rain had finally stopped—abruptly, completely—and the air was fresher than it had been all day. The sky was deep blue at the zenith. A few tattered thunderheads cloaked the monstrous sun where it touched the western horizon. Raindrops stood on every blade of grass, tiny amber pearls.

  Jason had admitted that he was dying. Now I began to admit it to myself.

  As a physician I had seen more of death than most people ever see. I knew how people died. I knew that the familiar story of how we face death—denial, anger, acceptance—was at best a gross
generalization. Those emotions might evolve in seconds or might never evolve at all; death could trump them at any instant. For many people, facing death was never an issue; their deaths arrived unannounced, a ruptured aorta or a bad decision at a busy intersection.

  But Jase knew he was dying. And I was bewildered that he seemed to have accepted it with such unearthly calm, until I realized that his death was also an ambition fulfilled. He was on the brink of understanding what he had struggled all his life to understand: the meaning of the Spin and humanity’s place in it—his place in it, since he had been instrumental in the launch of the replicators.

  It was as if he had reached up and touched the stars.

  And they had touched him in return. The stars were murdering him. But he was dying in a state of grace.

  “We have to hurry. It’s almost dark now, isn’t it?”

  Carol had gone off to light candles throughout the house.

  “Almost,” I said.

  “And the rain stopped. Or at least, I can’t hear it.”

  “Temperature’s dropping, too. Would you like me to open the window?”

  “Please. And the audio recorder, you turned it back on?”

  “It’s running now.” I raised the old frame window a few inches and cool air infiltrated the room.

  “We were talking about the Hypotheticals….”

  “Yes.” Silence. “Jase? Are you still with me?”

  “I hear the wind. I hear your voice. I hear…”

  “Jason?”

  “I’m sorry…don’t mind me, Ty. I’m easily distracted right now. I—uh!”

  His arms and legs jerked against the restraints Carol had tied across the bed. His head arched into the pillow. He was having what looked like an epileptic seizure, although it was brief: over before I could approach the bed. He gasped and took a deep lungful of air. “Sorry, I’m sorry…”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “Can’t control it, I’m sorry.”

  “I know you can’t. It’s all right, Jase.”

  “Don’t blame them for what’s happening to me.”

  “Blame who—the Hypotheticals?”

  He attempted a smile, though he was clearly in pain. “We’ll have to find a new name for them, won’t we? They’re not as hypothetical as they used to be. But don’t blame them. They don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m under their threshold of abstraction.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  He spoke rapidly and eagerly, as if the talk were a welcome distraction from the physical distress. Or another symptom of it. “You and I, Tyler, we’re communities of living cells, yes? And if you damaged a sufficient number of my cells I would die, you would have murdered me. But if we shake hands and I lose a few skin cells in the process neither of us even notices the loss. It’s invisible. We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies. The same is true of the Hypotheticals. They inhabit a larger universe than we do.”

  “That makes it all right to kill people?”

  “I’m talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being—my death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can’t.”

  “They’ve done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn’t that one of the things the replicators discovered before the Hypotheticals shut them down?”

  “Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hypotheticals has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is what they do when they encounter a planet that hosts a sentient, tool-using species of a certain degree of maturity—they enclose it in a Spin membrane.”

  I pictured spiders, wrapping their victims in silk. “Why, Jase?”

  The door opened. Carol was back, carrying a tea candle on a china saucer. She put the saucer on the sideboard and lit the candle with a wooden match. The flame danced, imperiled by the breeze from the window.

  “To preserve it,” Jason said.

  “Preserve it against what?”

  “Its own senescence and eventual death. Technological cultures are mortal, like everything else. They flourish until they exhaust their resources; then they die.”

  Unless they don’t, I thought. Unless they continue flourishing, expand into their solar systems, transplant themselves to the stars…

  But Jason had anticipated my objection. “Even local space travel is slow and inefficient for beings with a human life span. Maybe we would have been an exception to the rule. But the Hypotheticals have been around a very long time. Before they devised the Spin membrane they watched countless inhabited worlds drown in their own effluvia.”

  He drew a breath and seemed to choke on it. Carol turned to face him. Her mask of competence slipped, and in the moment it took him to recover she was plainly terrified, not a doctor but a woman with a dying child.

  Jase, perhaps fortunately, couldn’t see. He swallowed hard and began to breathe normally again.

  “But why the Spin, Jase? It pushes us into the future, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “It changes everything.”

  The paradox of Jason’s last night was that his speech grew awkward and intermittent even as his acquired knowledge seemed to expand exponentially. I believe he learned more in those few hours than he could begin to share, and what he did share was momentous—sweeping in its explanatory power and provocative for what it implied about human destiny.

  Pass over the trauma, the agonized groping after appropriate words, and what he said was—

  Well, it began with, “Try to see it from their point of view.”

  Their point of view: the Hypotheticals.

  The Hypotheticals—whether considered as one organism or many—had evolved from the first von Neumann devices to inhabit our galaxy. The origin of those primal self-replicating machines was obscure. Their descendants had no direct memory of it, any more than you or I can “remember” human evolution. They may have been the product of an early-emerging biological culture of which no trace remains; they may have migrated from another, older galaxy. In either case, the Hypotheticals of today belonged to an almost unimaginably ancient lineage.

  They had seen sentient biological species evolve and die on planets like ours countless times. By passively transporting organic material from star to star they may even have helped seed the process of organic evolution. And they had watched biological cultures generate crude von Neumann networks as a byproduct of their accelerating (but ultimately unsustainable) complexity—not once, but many times. To the Hypotheticals we all looked more or less like replicator nurseries: strange, fecund, fragile.

  From their point of view this endless stuttering gestation of simple von Neumann networks, followed by the rapid ecological collapse of source planets, was both a mystery and a tragedy.

  A mystery, because transient events on a purely biological time scale were difficult for them to comprehend or even perceive.

  A tragedy, because they had begun to conceive of these progenitor cultures as failed biological networks, akin to themselves—growing toward real complexity but snuffed out prematurely by finite planetary ecosystems

  For the Hypotheticals, then, the Spin was meant to preserve us—and dozens of similar civilizations that had arisen on other worlds before and since—in our technological prime. But we weren’t museum pieces, frozen in place for public display. The Hypotheticals were reengineering our destiny. They had suspended us in slowtime while they put together the pieces of a grand experiment, an experiment formulated over billions of years and now nearing its ultimate goal: to build a vastly expanded biological landscape into which these otherwise doomed cultures could expand and in which they would eventually meet and intermingle.

  I didn’t immediately grasp the meaning of this: “An expanded biological environment? Bigger than the Earth itself?”

  We were courting full darkness now. Jason’s words wer
e interrupted by convulsive movements and involuntary sounds, edited out of this account. Periodically I checked his heartbeat, which was rapid and growing weaker.

  “The Hypotheticals,” he said, “can manipulate time and space. The evidence of that is all around us. But creating a temporal membrane is neither the beginning nor the end of their abilities. They can literally connect our planet through spatial loops to others like it…new planets, some artificially designed and nurtured, to which we can travel instantaneously and easily…travel by way of links, bridges, structures, structures assembled by the Hypotheticals, assembled from—if this is truly possible—the matter of dead stars, neutron stars…structures literally dragged through space, patiently, patiently, over the course of millions of years—”

  Carol sat beside him on one side of the bed and I sat on the other. I held his shoulders when his body convulsed and Carol stroked his head during the intervals in which he could not speak. His eyes sparked in the candlelight and he stared intently at nothing at all.

  “The Spin membrane is still in place, working, thinking, but the temporal function is finished, complete…that’s what the flickers were, the byproduct of a detuning process, and now the membrane has been made permeable so that something can enter the atmosphere through it, something large….”

  Later it became obvious what he meant. At the time I was bewildered and I suspected he might have begun to pass into dementia, a sort of metaphorical overload governed by the word “network.”

  I was, of course, wrong.

  Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

  But the other memory that sprang to mind, as the substance of Jason’s nervous system was transformed and eroded by the Hypotheticals in a way they could not have known was lethal to him, was of that afternoon, long ago, when he had ridden my thrift shop bicycle down from the top of Bantam Hill Road. I thought of how adroitly, almost balletically, he had controlled that disinte-grating machine, until there was nothing left of it but ballistics and velocity, the inevitable collapse of order into chaos.