Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  ALSO BY RICHARD FARR

  The Babel Trilogy

  The Fire Seekers

  Ghosts in the Machine

  Infinity’s Illusion

  Emperors of the Ice: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in Antarctica, 1910–13

  You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Richard Farr

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Excerpt from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Copyright © 1976, 1990 by Julian Jaynes. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542048446 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542048443 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542048453 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542048451 (paperback)

  Cover design by Jason Blackburn

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  MAP

  PROLOGUE THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

  PART I: THE WORLD IN FLAMES

  CHAPTER 1 A SMALL ARMY

  CHAPTER 2 DEAD ANGELS

  CHAPTER 3 AND HITLER MAKES THREE

  CHAPTER 4 PARADISE LOST

  CHAPTER 5 THE COAST ROAD

  CHAPTER 6 ESPERANZA

  PART II: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  CHAPTER 7 A SHORT HISTORY OF ALMOST (BUT NOT QUITE) EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER 8 THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

  CHAPTER 9 FERMI’S PARASITES

  CHAPTER 10 THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

  PART III: ANABASIS

  CHAPTER 11 THREE FISH AND A GODDESS

  CHAPTER 12 MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  CHAPTER 13 PHILOSOPHICAL ZOMBIES

  CHAPTER 14 NOT BY METAL . . .

  CHAPTER 15 . . . BUT BY CODE

  CHAPTER 16 CATASTROPHE THEORY

  CHAPTER 17 THE REVENGE OF THE BABYLONIANS

  EPILOGUE YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

  FROM THE AUTHOR SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION

  MORE FROM THE AUTHOR SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

  SOME DATES

  THANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “The Architects have spoken, and the time has come for them to act.

  They know neither restraint nor pity. You will be used, according to your nature.”

  —From the so-called Akkadian Version, translated by Morag Chen (compare Ezekiel 24:14)

  “A mind, in its body, is like a gift wrapped in paper. A mystery! You touch it, and rattle it, and try to guess what’s inside. But the mind is a permanent mystery. The paper can never be removed.”

  —Professor Hideo Murakami

  “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologues and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will . . . This consciousness that is my self of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? And where does it come from? And why?”

  —Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

  PROLOGUE

  THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

  Daniel was back. His mind was back.

  He was physically strong again too, and if you’d been on that lamplit stairway, hundreds of feet beneath the screeching, rain-hammered forest—if you’d seen her collapse, seen the ease with which he picked her up in his arms and carried her—you’d never have guessed that he also had come within a cat’s whisker of death.

  The Architects had tried to pull his mind apart. They’d almost succeeded, and afterward, hovering on the verge of nonexistence, he’d been reduced to months of amazing but incoherent visions—a torrent of dreams filled with color, violence, and obscure meaning. There were flashes of ordinary life mixed into the dreams too: a familiar face, or a memory of his father, or snippets of coherent speech filtering in from the people around him. He even found the ability to speak, sometimes, and sometimes he knew Morag was there, and could half-articulate to her the new knowledge that he needed so much to—so desperately to—so urgently to—

  The dreams and their meanings were like water, though. A cold cataract, refracting sunlight: everything and nothing, passing hard and indifferent through splayed fingers. He could not contain experiences, or offer them a place to collect. In the place where a person had been, where he had been, there was no longer an experiencer, no longer any organizing self. All that was left of him in those terrible months, persisting at his core as the dreams raged over and around and through the emptiness, was an ice chip of urgency and dread. Purpose without purpose. An unintelligible need to act, driven by the one thing that was always clear—his mother’s voice, imploring but fading as she fell: Stop them, Daniel. Stop them, before it’s too late.

  Meditation gurus and self-help writers liked telling people to live in the moment. They had never experienced the state of mind they thought they were selling. He’d been to that place. He was one of the few human beings in the history of the species (two hundred thousand years, give or take; eighty billion people, give or take) who’d both seen, and lived to recall, that country from whose borne (sorry, Hamlet) a few travelers really do return.

  So Daniel knew the truth. Living in the moment wasn’t some kind of low-hassle, chamomile-flavored, off-the-peg bliss. It was hell: to live “in the moment” was to live outside of time, where you were nothing but an infinitesimal point in the infinite white desert that was both everywhere and nowhere. The capacity to be a human self, an individual, a person, required you to hang on to the sense that you owned your experiences. But that depended critically on being a creature that swam in the river of time. Knowing what is new, what is routine, what is surprising; learning and half-forgetting and seeing new things; noticing that a feeling is like-this and not-like-that. Above all, growing the knowledge that shapes everything, the knowledge that one day the road will end. When your mind has been divorced from your body, and there is no end, there can still be intelligence, but no self. Immortality wasn’t the greatest of all gifts; it was death without the benefit of oblivion.

  After Ararat, where he’d peered into that pristine heaven-or-hell and then been rescued, he had barely survived his psychic wounds. He’d lacked even the will to survive. That was why, toward the end, he’d gotten almost all the way to oblivion by starving to death. In the final weeks before Kit brought him to New Guinea—before he and Morag discovered the dark caves and desperate calculations of humanity’s long-lost cousins, the I’iwa—Morag’s worst fears about him had been justified. Like the thousands of other Mysteries around the world, those who’d come too close to the Architects and been stripped of their consciousness and left as husks, scarcely sentient, he too had been shutting down.

  Why hadn’t he followed the other Mysteries all the way to the consolation prize of dusty death? Only because of the faint but persistent e
motions, purposes, goals, that had been gifted to him by Iona. They were like the petals of dried flowers that disintegrate into your lap from between the pages of an old book; they seemed to retain the scent of time, a hint that being and experiencing were still possible. That was the nucleus around which he’d been able, at last, to re-grow himself.

  Iona had guessed what the Architects were. “Not gods,” she’d said to Maynard Jones, sitting on a park bench in Sydney. “But not aliens either. Why didn’t you and your clever friends think of it, David? If you weren’t all so arrogant, it would have been obvious! You want to make humans immortal. Digital upload—isn’t that a way of turning us into gods? So why can’t an alien species have the same dream? Foolish of you, to assume that in all the wide universe we’re the first. A pity about the implications, though.”

  He’d asked what she meant—and guessed before the words were out of her mouth.

  “It’s a new answer to the Fermi paradox, David. The Big Silence out there is because someone beat us to the finish line. And they don’t want competition.”

  Iona had become part of the Big Silence too—falling from that rock face in Patagonia before she’d had a chance to enlighten anyone but her Aussie ex-lover. It became Maynard Jones’s personal secret. Iona’s thesis, he’d called it. And he came to believe there was an escape route, at least for the few, the Babblers like himself and Morag, whose special minds had been most useful to the Architects and yet, by the same token, were to some degree protected from them. He’d been trying to work out what that escape route was when he was half-fried by a wall of lava at Ararat; he was still trying to work it out months later, when they met him again in New Guinea and he was lanced through the neck by an I’iwa spear.

  When Morag was pulled into the river and carried away, Daniel was only just beginning to come out of the fog. He thought of the I’iwa as a primitive species. A new human species, like living Neanderthals, oh yes: way cool. Protecting some buried knowledge: even cooler. But they were near-naked spear-carriers, right out of a museum diorama, and his response to them was like a sweating, frock-coated Dutch or English sea captain, puzzled by the “savages” on a burning austral beach. He was surprised to discover they were even capable of language, and it took him a while to see through their physical strangeness, and the astonishing simplicity of their material life, to what they were.

  Only when he’d seen the paintings and symbols (the art that was their science), and seen also the astonishing underground ziggurat (the religion that was their computer), did he begin to grasp that they had chosen to be materially primitive. They were like Tibetan monks, he thought now: wily, and focused, determined not to let anything as trivial as comfort distract them from their task. And the I’iwa’s task wasn’t prayer or meditation; it was calculating. Daniel’s species had gone in for technology, and after a slow, slow start was getting the hang of it, he thought. The I’iwa had almost completely ignored the possibilities of technology—but they were better mathematicians.

  Like all Earth’s civilizations, theirs had been set in motion by the Architects. But there was another big difference between them and Homo sapiens. Instead of following the usual pattern and merely tolerating, or hating or burning, the occasional dissident, the I’iwa, or those who had survived their own Babel anyway, were all dissidents. All of them had been dedicated from the start to three things: preserving an exact record of what the Architects had done to them; calculating a path to resistance; and nurturing hope that one day it would be possible to use their calculations as a weapon—mathematicians against mathematicians—to rid the Earth of its invisible controlling parasite.

  “A ‘mythos’ doesn’t have to be true or untrue, Daniel,” his father had said once, squinting up at him from the foundations of a Bronze Age Cretan palace. “The word means ‘story.’ Stories are just a way of making sense of our experiences, so it’s not that far from what we mean by theory.” As part of the I’iwa’s mythos, their deepest self-understanding, they had expected Morag’s arrival, and expected Daniel’s too. It sent shivers down his spine to think that the two of them—or anyway, a boy and a girl who clearly in some sense represented them—had existed on these walls for tens of thousands of years. The art inside the fifth level of the ziggurat had shown a tall brown-haired boy and a short dark-haired girl leaving the caves, as they were now doing. Like Adam and Eve being banished from Eden. Except that Adam and Eve were banished for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and he and Morag were being given knowledge, and sent out on a mission with it.

  In the I’iwa’s story, the boy’s mission was clear, but secondary: to keep the girl alive. The girl’s mission was less clear, but it was the big deal: to carry the I’iwa’s knowledge with her, and somehow use it out there to confront the Architects, undermine them, and save the world.

  No. Save the worlds.

  That’s what they’d said.

  The I’iwa had primitive maps of this world. Maps that omitted Africa, the Americas, and Antarctica, half of Asia even, because they knew less about the surface of the Earth than Vasco da Gama or Magellan. And yet, to translate roughly: Worlds. Worlds that otherwise will burn, as so many others have burned, as this one is burning. They’d been perfectly clear about it: the Architects were a threat not just to the I’iwa, or to the other sentient species of Earth. They were everywhere. They were—in the wordless metaphor that Stripe, standing in front of a map of the stars, had repeated to him again and again—the cancer at the heart of creation.

  When Daniel had followed Dog down into the labyrinth beneath the mountains, he’d had one of his clearest precognitions: that he would find Morag there; that, against all odds, she’d be alive; and that the hard part had scarcely begun.

  For all the nagging inchoate urgency in the back of his mind, he then had to wait, and wait. It was weeks in that sepulchral chamber before she regained consciousness. It was days after that before she was strong enough and coherent enough to sit up and tell him what had really happened while he was there-but-not-there, between Rosko’s rescue of him on Ararat and—a long summer later—their unexpected reunion with Mayo and their entry into the caves.

  He was surprised to recognize quite so much of what she told him: it was like finding out that your dreams were not dreams. Not that he was familiar with all the details. He still had to learn (or be reminded?) about the Seraphim’s global campaign to “bring people back to the truth” by destroying the world’s cultural knowledge, an aim symbolized by the burning of libraries. He still had to relearn how Morag had fallen in love with Kit Cerenkov, and how they discovered that Mayo, presumed dead, had been developing his own techno-digital, AI-driven version—No hocus-pocus required! Just computation!—of the high road to eternity. But he recognized vivid individual moments from her narrative, and like half-forgotten old friends, they made the story familiar. The bittersweet caramel smoke hanging over a ruined building on the university campus. Morag in Natazscha Cerenkov’s lab at the Institute for the Study of the Origin of Consciousness, fidgeting and blushing in response to Kit’s flirtations. The ghoulishly desiccated body of Carl Bates, hooked up to the world’s fastest computer for a science fiction experiment that would prove to have been—when you understood the big picture—as likely to succeed as uploading your mind into a clockwork toy or a steam engine.

  After Morag had stitched those moments together into a three-month narrative, he tried various different ways of expressing to her what had happened to him, at Ararat.

  “Iona spoke to me,” he said at first, and that was right, sort of, but it gave the wrong impression.

  “Mom’s ideas came to me. I mean, no, I mean her understanding came into me. Like telepathy or something.” He tried putting it that way too, and it was better, because, although he’d heard Iona’s voice, the experience wasn’t anything like listening to sentences. Her meanings had come to him whole: emotions unmediated by words.

  “Imagine your mind’s a galaxy.” (This was his next attempt.) �
�Not a single object, but a million stars moving together through space.”

  “Couple o’ hundred billion, more like.” Bullion. Lake. Was her Scottish accent stronger, or had he just forgotten her voice?

  “Morag, relax. Switch off the database. It’s just an analogy, that’s all.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “So you’re a galaxy of stars, moving through space. But a black hole forms at your center, eating you from the inside out. Great streams of stars flaring up, like campfire embers when you blow on them, and then they fade as they’re sucked away into nothing. You’re dying, from within, and you’re still not sure whether to be terrified or only amazed. But right as that’s beginning to happen, you collide head-on with the shredded remains of another galaxy.”

  “This is Iona?” Morag said.

  He nodded. “It looks like a thin fog rushing toward you. It’s mostly empty space, and so are you. The individual stars don’t collide, but the gravity of each one pulls on all the others. Nothing stays the same. You—it’s—you change shape.”

  He was frustrated: shape wasn’t right either. The whole “galaxy” thing felt like another lie, an attempt to pretend that mere language could convey something that was far beyond the power of language. He wanted to say: You have to think of it as a negative. The stars are black. It’s space, or heaven, or infinity or whatever, that’s white. And it’s a region of infinitely dense whiteness that’s sucking you in. But saying that would have been like trying to help her understand him by cleaning the wrong pair of glasses.

  The point was simple enough: in the borderland of death, his mother had somehow passed on to him what she’d known: that history had come to a tipping point, for both the Architects themselves in their lonely, disembodied roaming and for the unusually clever monkeys (genus Homo) whose minds they’d hacked—sapiens, neanderthalensis, denisova, floresiensis, and the rest. Stop them, Daniel. Stop them, before it’s too late—he knew what she meant, now. Humanity had become too advanced, too ambitious. Humanity was building a tower into the digital heavens. And the Architects feared competition.