Count to Infinity

by John C. Wright

  Am I a cave girl, to be juggled and bounced atop a zoo creature? I say I will not have it.

  “And I say you will be mine. I say I will love your forever, my princess.”

  And he had sold his soul to find her. He had thrown himself, naked, into the intellectual structure of the aliens of M3, driven by nothing but the raw conviction he could find her again.

  And then, when he had rebuilt his visual cortex out of nothing by sheer persistent bloody-mindedness, he would sense a vast and indifferent mind moving in the dark. It found the newly grown virtual visual cortex useful and took it. And he would once again forget what she looked like.

  Again his memories and thoughts would be ravished, plundered, dissected, looted. And in darkness and pain and mindless roaring amnesia, he would fall again into the timeless and mindless hell of pain.

  And then, slowly, never surrendering, never pausing, he would set about once more to remember her.

  4. Purgatory

  A.D. 163,500 TO A.D. 164,500

  For an endless time, he was a vegetable. Each time he regrew himself out of the wounded, broken, damaged condition in which he found himself, he would again be plucked like a cabbage, with only his underground roots remaining to grow again.

  A time came when a greater mind swimming through the gloom of purely intellectual existence seized upon him, examined his memories and abilities, and saw his uncharacteristic persistence.

  It seemed to have some trivial use in another context: The task was not described to him, and his taskmaster had no identity. The task merely appeared. It was an imperative simply inserted roughly into his mind, like a sudden hunger imposed on a creature which never before knew a stomach, or like a sudden sex drive imposed on a being without gonads. He found himself suddenly aware of a stream of numbers and logic symbols, and required to translate, manipulate, and solve them in certain ways. His instinctive grasp of mathematics, his knowledge of the Monument notation, allowed him to find shortcuts, elegant solutions, and exercise his creativity. When he devoted part of his attention to rebuilding his memory and visual memory of Rania, he was shocked with pain or interrupted with other compulsions, which he fought either by brutal and stubborn opposition or by the more indirect way of seeming to give way, and redirecting the compulsion to his own ends. Then came more pain.

  Such was his existence for an eternity. Another eternity began when a second mind, more powerful than the first, raided and dissembled the taskmaster driving Montrose. This second being examined him, decided he was underutilized, and set him to other solutions.

  He graduated from vegetable to insect. He was now not drowning in a river of symbols and numbers but was a spider walking across a network of them and the compulsion to weave the symbol-streams together into optimal patterns, editing and making aesthetic judgments (or at least some type of judgments for which his human brain had no name).

  He was allowed a certain latitude of thought where he could develop, build, and keep habits and codes, creatures he put together using the symbols as building blocks, as tools to aid the work: mites who lived on the spiders and aided them. The latitude of thought was like a bag in his brain, or the private cell of a hermit, where he could store personal memories or make and resume his visual information patterns, and once again see the woman on the balcony beneath the skies of fire, and once again recall and whisper her name.

  He went from insect to predator when he came across another spider attempting to undo and redo a certain combination of symbol codes he had just finished arranging. Montrose displayed and sent directly into the soul of the other being a group of Monument notations, which the other could understand as a language.

  “Stop poxing with my work, jerk.”

  Selfaware tool is nonregulation, unacceptable, invalid.

  “Who you calling a tool?”

  Flawed, wasteful. Must absorb; reuse!

  “Think you can take me? Draw.”

  The attack was directly into his memory and brushed up against his image of Rania, blackening and distorting it. Insane rage swept all hesitation away; he had copied the other creature’s attack pattern and killed it before he even knew what he had done. There was nothing to the other creature, no emotional core, no driving hatred, no insane love, and no ability to resist pain. It was easy enough to hollow out the other being, take up its memory chains and duties, and start doing the tasks of the other being as well as his own.

  A supervisory reflex, hovering like a hawk over the scene, now plunged down and pierced all things with its terrible eye. Montrose sensed the cold indifference of the supervisor. Were the tasks as scheduled being done? They were. The supervisor did not care who lived or died. It withdrew before Montrose even realized he had been spared.

  But the next spider Montrose tried to eat was himself, another Montrose, with memories of other things: Rania’s laughter, her theories about the Monument, her need for a knight to slay her personal dragon. Instead of killing each other, the two combined into one, and grew.

  Over the next period of time, the growing Montrose minds established a systematic hunt for other memory fragments, going further and further afield, breaking into secured locations, prying into communication lines … eventually the supervisory reflect interfered. Down the hawk stooped.

  And the battle was joined.

  The supervisor defeated him the first four hundred and ninety times Montrose rebelled. The four hundred and ninety-first time, he was successful, turned on the hawk, drained its memory and instruction chains into himself. He graduated from insect to hovering creature, able to wing his way swiftly through the tiny, local corner of this tiny, local mainframe.

  He found another memory, again from when he first saw her on the balcony, and, in jest, rashly vowed to fight all the world and all its armies to make the balustrade, from the flowerpot to the ornamental statue, their own private empire. He recalled the scent of her perfume and the music of her low contralto: I would save even the men you would slay from the horror of war, if I could, no matter how small the war might be.

  And each time he found another fragment of himself, he grew. Eventually a time came when he had suborned enough supervisor hawks that a campaign could be waged to infiltrate and take control of the local librarian mind, which glided like a whale through the shifting seas of data.

  It seemed to him as if ancient titans, indescribable, bent with shining eyes over the dark well in which the whole sidereal universe was caught, a knot of night punctuated by tiny stars, and wondered at the fate of the small living things trapped within.

  What the hell was that? It was labeled as a memory of his, and he found it in a broken copy of himself that had been being used for routine intuitive-to-linguistic information interpretation. He did not remember that memory, but the record showed it was the last thing he had seen before he struck the outer shell of the Dyson Oblate. Something had happened to him the very first instant he had been copied, atom by atom and quark by quark, into the alien mind realm.

  From hawk to whale to iceberg to mountain, to moon to planet, he found and used the tactics and strategies a parallel version of his once had used to suborn Cahetel. The structural logic was the same: he was able to penetrate into the decision-action structure, to outmaneuver, falsify, shift, corrupt, rewrite reports sent to higher decision points, and rewrite commands sent back down, including falsifying his own promotion to higher ranks. And then he did it again. There was no weariness, no rest, no holidays in this endless and disembodied state of being.

  He became a Potentate and occupied the volume of a small world, and then a Power and occupied the volume of a giant. He earned the use of resources and earned the trust of higher creatures in the hierarchy.

  His skill? As the Cataclysmics had foreseen, he was a strange attractor in cliometry. The predictive history lines, millions of them, issuing from M3 to points in future history distributed all up and down the Orion Arm were disturbed by his being here.

  In practical terms, it meant
any mental system he infiltrated took on his personality traits and grew more stubborn, more ornery, more robust. The code he wrote failed less frequently, mutated less frequently. His forms and tools and reflections, worms and spiders and hawks and whales of data, were less prone to breakdown than the lifeless and loveless thought-patterns swimming in the seas of thought which were his rivals in this ruthless ecology.

  And he cheated, and placed Trojan horses, worms, viruses, propaganda, bribes, and backbiting into the communication streams and commerce streams.

  He murdered rivals, it was true, but only fair and square, after calling them out and letting them prepare their best attacks. It was still murder, but he told himself he gave the slow and clumsy monstrosities a chance.

  He soon found himself beamed from one point within the Dyson Oblate to another, and given the task of carrying a message, acting as an ambassador. He was flung from the darkness of a disembodied mental existence in one context to another. The images of stars and worlds swimming by were imparted to him, so that he knew the sense of scale, and experienced the thirty-year delay between command and reaction which obtained when the opposite poles of the Oblate were speaking. Divarication had occurred; his task was to translate from the new and deviant thought systems to the one he had learned as a Power.

  Montrose, in multiple copies, now occupying several Potentates and Powers and Principalities and Hosts within the M3 mental hierarchy, adopted a strategy of infiltrating the notation market of the civilizations, the local Dominions and Dominations inside the cluster itself supporting and surrounding of the Authority, the main entity.

  Yes, there were thousands of Dominions and hundreds of Dominations here, so complex, rich, and splendid as to make Hyades and Praesepe seem like country gentry. Many civilizations encompassing one hundred to one thousand stars could fit easily within the volume of half a million stars.

  One by one, he buried copies of himself into the Hosts, Dominions, and Dominations from the fringes of M3 Authority, of any member that might need a more perfect version of an emissary to act as a remote agent for it, or settle a dispute by violence. For some reason not clear to him, copies of him sent out to carry messages, conduct negotiations, resolve difficulties were by and large successful.

  Other copies were sent out to fight hostile elements, something halfway between a chess game to the death and a formal duel—the M3 creatures inhabiting this information ecology of disembodied spirits were not kind or peaceful beings—and they were even more successful.

  Montrose became a Principality in their system, a mighty warlord, ruling a quintuple system of dim, red stars whose planets and asteroids had long ago been dismantled and refashioned into vast parabolic dishes like half-Dysons parked at the many Lagrange points this system offered. The only life in this system were the tools and slaves crawling across their measureless surfaces, making repairs. He looked out upon the stars, spheres, ringworlds, and chainworlds gathered within the great Oblate, including one or two whose infrastructure he vaguely recalled as if in dream, for earlier versions of himself had worked on some trifling detail of them.

  Here was a planet that had unexpectedly developed intelligent life while its supervisor had been distracted. The world had grown aware that the other bodies in the star system were godlike intelligences, so they contrived a clever method to move their world across interstellar space toward another star they falsely thought unoccupied. The motion caused minor but annoying disturbances in the lanes of traffic and communication. The wanderers were judged not to possess sufficient curiosity and drive to be useful servants, and so that planet was sterilized and reseeded, and placed in a more convenient orbit. It was like seeing a man swat a fly.

  Once again, with great force, the question came to him: What was it all for? Why so much activity?

  He sent out spies and servants into the mental universe. He sought three things: other copies of himself, lost memories of Rania, and clues as to what had happened to her.

  There had to be an archive, a record, a rumor of her existence.

  Montrose found other Montroses, often hidden in unexpected places, little nooks inside security programs, little self-replicating viruses inside translation matrices. He never fought his own copies, no matter the provocation or command, provided they stayed loyal to her.

  But he never found her, never found any mind with any memory of the event of her advent.

  Montrose was not easy to accommodate; he rose and fell and rose again.

  Montrose knew they would never erase him utterly, never simply kill him. The love of thrift, the unwillingness to expend even the tiniest extra erg of effort, ran through all the alien psychology, from Ain, to Hyades, to Praesepe. So these creatures never threw anything away.

  And each time he was judged to be too disruptive or more trouble than he was worth by one of the Hosts who oversaw his actions, Montrose was dashed down again to the level of a vegetable.

  The next memory was simply darkness and pain.

  And Montrose would simply begin again, clinging to the only thought they could never remove from him, his picture of Rania.

  And he would gather himself again, find his scattered thoughts again, outwit, outwait, and outfight any obstacle, again and again. Up he rose.

  2

  Astride the Galaxy

  1. Awake in the Emptiness

  A.D. 164,500

  Montrose opened his eyes. He was lying prone, and in the dim light, he could see his hands. The skin was soft, pink, babylike, and the fingernails were soft.

  His hands were glowing with a slight ruby-red light, as if some luminous fluid were pulsing in each skin cell.

  He ran his hands over his face. He had something more than stubble there, not quite a real beard, and his hair fell past his ears. Running his tongue across his teeth, he felt how small they were. Baby teeth. Whoever or whatever had prepared this body for his incarnation had done something of a slapdash job or else simply had not known that much about human beings.

  He sat up. He was naked as a jaybird, but someone had thoughtfully provided a flint-napped dagger hilted in rawhide, as well as a solid, flint-headed spear, so he did not feel weaponless. So someone knew something about human psychology, or at least his psychology. But not enough to have also provided a loincloth. The surface underneath was black and smooth, but not slippery.

  He stood. The gravity seemed roughly Earth-normal, or perhaps slightly lighter. The black plane extended in all directions as far as he could see. There was no horizon.

  He held his hand before his face, puzzled by the twin disks of brightness that caught his hand and cast the shadows of his fingers on the deck where he stood. It was as if two spotlights from behind his head were shining wherever he turned his head. One spotlight vanished when he closed his left eye.

  Montrose muttered, “That is just really damnified odd.” He found out that merely by concentrating, he could lower the light his body shed and stop his eyes from glowing. After a few minutes, his eyes adapted to the starlight. He could see the stars overhead, a perfect globe of them, mostly blue stars, but also many tiny swirls or rings of light. These were the accretion disks of unseen neutron stars.

  Underfoot, beneath the deck, were more lights which he realized were not reflections. The deck was transparent. There were a few stars in the darkness.

  Beyond the stars, at the nadir, he saw a large swirl or spiral of light like a carpet of jewels.

  It was the Milky Way, seen face-on from his location of thirty thousand lightyears due north of it. Looking down, he saw the magnificent spiral arms, living gems, the turbulent, bright core with its dark heart, red like a hell coal with gravitational Doppler shift, and the halo of globular clusters around it, fine as blown dandelion seeds.

  Montrose realized that he was standing on the inner surface of the Dyson Oblate which surrounded the whole of the core of M3. How was it possible? Had the aliens erected a bubble of atmosphere only in this one spot? He did not believe they could rot
ate the entire vastness merely to produce centrifugal gravity just for him. Perhaps only the acre on which he stood was moving, carrying him west to east. Or an infinitesimal (on this scale) bubble of material had been expanded and was now contracting at one gravity of acceleration. Or perhaps the aliens had discovered a way to magnetize every nucleonic particle in the atoms of his body, so that it only felt like gravity.

  As he stared at the galaxy, he grew aware of what looked like a vast black shadow crouching on the glass in the near at hand.

  There was a living organism, titanic in size, on his side of the black glass hull, standing directly atop the spot where the light from the spiral galaxy shone through. The visible galaxy covered a large segment of the floor. When Montrose approached the shadowy organism crouched near him, the galaxy did not move, so that, after only a few steps, the giant creature now, in his view, seemed to be standing astride the galaxy, as if its widespread leg segments were pinning down the spiral arms.

  Montrose allowed his skin to glow and eyes to shine so that he could see the gigantic thing.

  The creature was like an eight-armed starfish.

  The upper integument of the ophiuroid was black and crusted with many bony ossicles and paxillae-like whiskers. Four of its long, tapering feet held its huge body above the glassy deck beneath which the galaxy burned. The underside was off the deck, and he saw the mouth at the joint of all the legs, a horrid circle of needle-teeth.

  Four other legs were rearing and spread. At the tip of each of these uplifted legs was an orifice, perhaps a nostril, snuffing and swaying, making the whole creature seem remarkably like a headless elephant lifting many trunks to scent the four directions of the compass. The thing itself gave off a stench of brine and blood.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Montrose aloud.

  Two of the trunklike limbs now curved down toward him. He saw the nostrils were bewhiskered with fine hairs. He felt the warm, wet breath of the creature on his naked flesh. It touched him lightly here and there, sniffing and scenting while his skin crawled.