Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  “Your body, back wherever it is, in the past, in the chamber of the Aleph Council, is still breathing. The Follower needed a distorter circuit at the landing point wherever he cast one of his shadow-images. Aleph can evidently cast our shadow-image through time rather than space, and he put us here. And, apparently, Aleph needs no distorter circuit at this end….”

  But then Gosseyn’s thoughts leaped away from that chain of thinking, fascinated. For he had recognized the overall structure of the gravitic disturbances caused by the black holes that formed the remnants of long-dead galaxies.

  It was a distorter circuit. It occupied all the available space, all the degenerate matter and energy left in this long-dead universe, but there it was: a machine the size of the universe, made of pulsations of gravitons.

  The governing mechanism was a time-distortion coming from the golden pinpoints, which altered uncertainties on a supermicroscopic scale, so that each flying particle from the disintegrating singularities met and matched the particles from each other disintegrating singularity and the huge, intricate dance of very low, dull, slow energy formed a pattern of forces. This pattern of forces, in turn …

  An engine of thought. An electronic brain, no, a gravitonic brain, composed of all the remaining stuffs of the universe.

  But Leej was interested in what prompted his burst of anger upon arriving here.

  Gosseyn could not hide his thoughts from her: They lied to you.

  The council of Aleph-Gosseyn-Lavoisseur beings had been lying. Gosseyn had not blacked out because the timeless condition had interrupted his thoughts. Had that been true, why would it affect him and not Leej? Gosseyn had not blacked out; he had been overwhelmed by nausea. The same dizziness he had felt back in the pocket-sized universe, while being investigated by Dr. Halt.

  The dizziness that signaled that the universe was a false one, too.

  Leej merely laughed. “Dr. Kair knew it. So did Dr. Curoi. The ultimate Gosseyn means for all of us to die. This universe will not survive. It’s another illusion, meant to trap you, and you will break out of it and destroy us.” Because that is just the way some men are.

  But Gosseyn’s irresistible logic, in thoughts he could not hide from her, drove him further, to a conclusion more bitter than this: Gosseyn-Aleph had chosen Leej partly because her prediction power was needed to teleport Gosseyn into ever further future segments of his false universe. Obviously the effort was meant to find some point not covered by the negative energy barrier prohibiting time-travel.

  But there was a second purpose here. The forced intimacy, the sharing of thoughts, had impressed upon Leej in a fashion nothing else could have done how fundamentally different, incompatible, Gosseyn was from her. Seeing the succession of ever stranger superbeings Gosseyn was destined to become had driven the point home. And then, meeting a whole council of them …

  Gosseyn had to assume his far-future selves were as competent master psychologists as Lavoisseur had been: Lavoisseur, who with one casual-seeming comment had deadened Gosseyn’s curiosity about his own origins of being, and had done so without Gosseyn’s suspicions being roused.

  … the council had manipulated her psychologically. Their talk of the desperation of the stakes, their exposing her to the ruthless mental impact of the Ydd creature at the dawn of time …

  Gosseyn thought to her, They mean you to sacrifice yourself. I am not sure how, or why, but something about you is unique, and useful to them….

  Even as he thought this, he knew the answer. Dr. Halt had mentioned it: “There are energy connections leading to your wife…. The energy density involved is greater than the total mass-energy value of the universe.”

  The emotions of Leej, the powerful infatuation, not only altered her electrochemical and glandular balances in her body but, acting through her Predictor power, also influenced the universe around her. Even an untrained brain, under the powerful influence of romantic devotion, could form a crude sympathy or similarity between two nervous systems. After all, the distinctions between mind and body, self and other, were as artificial, as far as the universe was concerned, as those distinguishing time and space. The powerful emotion of Leej the Predictress would be drawn to him, even across the boundaries of time.

  And Gosseyn’s horrible realization, in thoughts that he could not hide from her, was that he would have done the same thing, would have treated her, or himself, or anyone, as ruthlessly, once he was convinced of the need to do so. Gosseyn-Aleph, the ultimate version of him, had no doubt predicted exactly this flow of events, exactly these conclusions of this thought, to bring Gosseyn and Leej to the mental realization that …

  That she was right to despise him for his callousness. Some men are just like that.

  If she were exiled here, in this empty, blank, inhuman future, the final mind of this era could use her sympathy with Gosseyn to track him, to maintain the connection, once he found the “gap” in the anti-time-travel barrier blocking the universe he was evidently destined to find. Gosseyn would return to his own home era, but Leej would not.

  Gosseyn used his extra brain to attune himself to gravity flows trickling through the empty universe around him. He addressed the cosmic machine: That is it, isn’t it?

  YES.

  Gosseyn addressed the mighty being: We refuse.

  OF COURSE. YOU ARE NOT YET CONVINCED OF THE NECESSITY.

  One of the microscopic golden pinpoints, which Leej could sense but Gosseyn could not, pulled her attention toward itself. It hung in space roughly 150 billion light-years away, the nearest object in this nearly empty cosmos.

  OBSERVE THIS. WHAT IS IT?

  Leej inspected it with her special senses. The shadow-body she inhabited had the ability to make itself either more or less out of phase with its surroundings. Leej found she could orient her shadow-substance toward the golden point, rather than to the universe to which it was only partially connected, and make increasingly clearer prediction-images.

  She said, “Time is turning in a circle here. It is less than a million millionths of a second, but this subatomic particle group is playing the same split instant of time over and over again….”

  Gosseyn could not see the particle, but he could see her thoughts about it. Certain subatomic reactions were symmetrical in time at the quantum level of reality: virtual particles, usually. This set of reactions had been artificially amplified to have the energy of a small star within it, but the physics involved followed the same rules. Two points in time, very small and very close to each other, were sufficiently similar that they became indistinguishable. If the fifty-ninth second were made “the same” as the first second, time would loop and the same minute would replay endlessly. That was the principle.

  Gosseyn concluded something Leej did not have the scientific training to notice. The singularity at the center of the golden particle was a homogenous high-density mass of matter-energy, where gravity, electromagnetism, and nucleonic forces were undifferentiated. Here, in miniature, was a small model of the conditions of the first three seconds of the universe.

  No wonder the Final Mind had been using this formulation as a set of beacons to aid its communication across the abyss of time. No matter where, from an outside frame of reference, these time-warped particles seemed to be, in reality they were only one decimal point of similarity away from the earliest segment of the universe.

  ONLY THE AMOUNT OF AMBIENT ENERGY LIMITS THE AMOUNT OF TIME-SPACE THAT CAN BE CAPTURED IN A WARP OF THIS TYPE.

  Gosseyn understood the implication. This was the technique the Ydd meant to use to destroy the universe and preserve its early environment. The Ydd wished to alter the flow of cosmic evolution, to halt the expansion of the universe when it grew from the 10–32 meter to the 10–22 meter range. A period of time, the time from 10–12 to 10–6 seconds after the Big Bang, would be turned in a time-circle, the end point similarized to the beginning point, and that moment of time, an astronomically small fraction of a second, would be the life span of t
he universe: that split second and no more.

  Not only mankind, and all other life, but every aspect of the inanimate universe would also be edited out from the time-continuum: The universe would remain the submicroscopic, intensely hot, dense mathematically infinitesimal point it had been in its earliest moment. No stars, no nebulae, not even a hydrogen atom, no matter of any kind, would ever come into being. Electromagnetism and gravity would never be divorced from the primal ylem, never have their own identities.

  The inhumanity of it all was monstrous beyond words.

  THE LIMITATION IS: THE FORMATION ENERGY MUST BE APPLIED FROM OUTSIDE.

  Gosseyn wondered what sort of person would volunteer to stand outside the reaction and apply the needed formation energy: By definition, such a thing would involve the reduction into utter nonexistence—not merely death, but a condition of never-having-had-been—of the outside party.

  He was thinking of Enro. The poor, foolish galactic dictator, absolute master of countless terrified worlds, was merely the puppet, being manipulated by the Ydd into unleashing a sufficient amount of shadow-substance into the universe to allow the Ydd to collapse everything into a supertiny microcosm: a nanoverse.

  Leej was thinking of something else.

  Last Mind! Could this artificial universe, doomed to destruction as soon as Gosseyn leaves it, be saved? I have seen both the earliest moments and the latest: Do you have the Ydd technology at your disposal to similarize the two points of time?

  NOT WITHOUT THE SACRIFICE OF SOMEONE WHO DEPARTS FROM THE REALM OF TIME AND ENTERS THE OTHERSPACE.

  The knowledge and technique of how to do it was instantly imprinted into her brain. If she traveled to a position so far in the future that all matter and energy had achieved a quantum uncertainty indistinguishable from non-being, then merely by activating the prediction power, and bringing up an image of the early universe, her undeveloped extra brain matter could similarize the two points in time.

  Leej spoke into the darkness: I volunteer. Whatever needs to be done, I will do it.

  JOIN WITH US.

  A sensation accompanied the words: Leej could picture her future, once she was absorbed into the inhuman supermind of the dark universe … it was a picture of utter emptiness, a bodiless existence as a pattern of forces, a series of memories woven into a machinelike perfection. The ancient thought-patterns in this final mind were not alive, were not dead … all such distinctions were meaningless in the realm of pure thought … but the transcendental humanlessness of it was utterly repellent.

  Gosseyn could “see” the immediately intended fate of Leej: Once she was pure thought, she would be similarized into the furthest future available to the Last Mind.

  Ghostly images of her destiny appeared to him, one after another:

  She would remain, alive but disembodied, while eons passed. At 10150 years in the future all matter that used to make up the stars and galaxies had degenerated into photons. The continued expansion of the universe Doppler-shifted these radiations into a low-energy heat, not distinguishable from the background radiation, three degrees above absolute zero.

  At 101,000 years, the universe reached an ultimate low-energy state. The low-energy state was so extreme that localized quantum events became major macro-scale phenomena rather than micro-scale non-events. This was because the smallest perturbations were making the biggest difference in this era: Space and time began to warp severely.

  The span of time that she would spend in isolation, disembodied, surrounded by a dead universe, was so immense that if there was a possibility future where Leej could remain sane, Gosseyn could not see it.

  All her thoughts worn by countless eternities to nothing, till her once-fine mind was merely a mass of animal instincts. Perhaps one instinct, its purpose long forgotten, would remain: True to her mission, the relic of Leej would reach the point in remotest far-future time where the barrier blocking time paradox no longer could reach. At this point, she would trigger the prediction-similarity with the very earliest universe. One of these tiny perturbations would flower into a titanic supermassive matter-energy explosion, forming a new universe identical for all practical purposes with the old, bending all of time into a huge and endless loop.

  He could foresee no other option. The cosmic violence of the primal explosion would most likely kill the sad and long-insane remnant of the ghostly Leej.

  Gosseyn thought, No!

  But the thought-forms of Leej the Predictress, disembodied, had already been sent another nearly infinite span of time into the future.

  Her final words, full of bittersweet ache as she departed from him, were: “Do not regret my decision, Gilbert, m-my love. Without you, I have nothing to live for. If this sacrifice will show you the true depth of my feelings, it will be worth it….”

  Her body vanished. Gosseyn lingered for a moment as a disembodied point of view in the darkness, his thought-energy maintained in an automatic fashion by the forces issuing from the nearest golden atom.

  The futility! The waste! The childishness of it all! This was Gosseyn’s cold and angry reaction as he strove to save her. Through his untrained prediction power, the link they shared, he tried to foresee her where she would fall into the immensity of empty eons; he tried to memorize her thought-patterns, to form a twenty-point similarity.

  The Absolute Mind did not allow him to complete the thought-action. In his brain, Gosseyn felt the alien pressure of thought triggering that same complex of reactions in his double brain that Dr. Halt had found: a deep-rooted neural structure still attuned to the basic reality outside this universe.

  The false universe ended.

  Gosseyn was in his own body, lying on his back. Around him was the familiar weight of the space armor. Dimly, his extra brain could detect the muttering power of heavy equipment in the signal-nullification chamber around him.

  He was back on Venus.

  24

  Higher order abstractions are a perfected type of memory—that is, information that preserves itself with minimal distortion within a continuum.

  Gosseyn opened his eyes. Through vision-plates paneling the inside of his domelike helmet he could see the dull gray ceiling and little more.

  Dr. Hayakawa was saying, “The thought-sensitive electron tubes have recorded a tremendous influx of memory energy. Are you aware of the thoughts of X in your head? Or have you become him?”

  Gosseyn could not sit up in this armor, since it did not bend at the waist, but he triggered the motorized sequence that would bring him into a standing position. Now he saw the walls of the surrounding chamber, the door like a bank vault’s. Through a slit of armored glass he saw the silhouettes of the heads of Clayton, the Null-A detective, and Dr. Hayakawa and his team.

  Gosseyn found he was blinking back tears of rage. Again, the cortical-thalamic pause allowed him to find a sense of calm, to remove the heaviness from his thoughts.

  Clayton said, “What happened?”

  Gosseyn said, “I’ve merged again. The memories of a version of Gosseyn Three from an alternate continuum have been sent back through time and similarized to my nervous system, selecting the point in time when I was most receptive to outside signals. The memories include that Leej the Predictress was persuaded, or manipulated, to volunteer to remain behind in a dead universe, apparently as part of a last-ditch effort to save it. This was a parallel continuum, artificially created to allow to exist there a type of anachronic similarity, a time-travel technique, which is being artificially blocked from occurring here. Also, her sacrifice seems to allow the Final Cosmic Mind of the last stages of the universe to track my motions: For what purpose I don’t know.”

  Clayton said, “Our problem for right now is how to prove to our satisfaction that you are not the X version of Lavoisseur. A lie detector will not tell us, for obvious reasons.”

  Gosseyn knew the reasons. It was X in his guise as the head of the General Semantics Institute who had found ways to falsify the readings of lie detectors: Oth
erwise the conspiracy against Null-A would never have been attempted in the first place and the galactic soldiers would have simply attacked with abandon, rather than attempting a less costly method of conquest-by-infiltration.

  Gosseyn said, “Have the robo-operator place a call to Corthid, informing them that Illverton, head of their Safety Authority, is an agent of Enro’s. The distorter towers they are building have been misaligned in order to make the planet attuned to the Shadow Effect, rather than immune to it.”

  The reply that eventually came back from the robo-operator was, “I’m sorry. We are getting no carrier signal. The distorter connection with Planet Corthid is broken.”

  Gosseyn, at this point, was sitting in a lounge, nursing a cup of coffee. To nullify his extra brain was a multiple-vibration broadcaster on the table before him.

  And the minutes turned into hours, and there was still no word from Planet Corthid. Vessels could similarize from nearby planets to points beyond the target and “brake” out of similarization prematurely, to put themselves in the Corthid star system; but from the frame of reference of time on Earth, that process would take days.

  However, the utter absence of any communication or any inbound or outbound ship traffic from the most energetic of the three capital planets of the Interstellar League was a sufficient sign that the world had fallen.

  The time paradox involved here was: At the moment of his similarization to Corthid, a second version of himself “simultaneously” remained behind, now with memories from the future. Of course, “simultaneous” was an inaccurate approximation of a more complex reality in an Einsteinian universe. The moment of distortion was apparently enough of a break in the normal cause-effect relations for the universe to maintain its surface appearance of continuity, despite the presence of two Gosseyns from different time-segments occupying the “same” time—which was not actually the same at all.