Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  Then came the main span of the universe, the Dark Eon, long after all light had passed, and all energy came from the decay of black holes into photons. Atoms no longer existed, for whatever was not superdense hyper-neutronium was fading gamma radiation. This era was so long that the bright origin-moment of the universe could not clearly be distinguished, at this scale, from the crowded split instant of galaxy formation and decomposition.

  After darkness was night, when even photons had decayed into quantum flux. Here, no matter what had taken place in the previous universes, all events were at a terrible cosmic oneness.

  From that dark eschaton, that infinitely distant end point toward which all the universes were streaming, now came a mental force that reached across the abyss of time and touched Gosseyn’s mind.

  “I am All,” came the words. “I am the Living Universe. Every particle of matter and energy that remains, though scattered over light-centuries, is part of my mental system, a switch or impulse in my artificial brain. It is a brain less dense than a nebula, extended to all parts of space. My thoughts are slow indeed, for space is many orders of magnitude wider than in your time.

  “You have seen the parallel universes, created by the tampering with the time structure. Each of the hundreds of thousands of timelines contains an alternate possibility. By my point in time, one times ten to the power of one hundred fifty years in your future, the distinctive characteristics of the parallels have vanished, and similarity connections naturally formed between them. No matter what the prior events of the inanimate beginnings of the universe, no matter what the thoughts of the long eons of the living universe, by this era, all thought-chains of all parallel possible universes, all parallel possible versions of the Absolute Intelligence, have reached the same end-conclusions. The countless myriads of possibilities are played out: Every equation reaches this same result. Thought itself by its very nature is forced into fewer and fewer logical paths: till there is only me, the self-contemplation of a self-aware universe, composed entirely of thought thinking itself.”

  Gosseyn asked cautiously, “What do you think about?”

  He became aware of a sensation of vast, jovial, godlike amusement. “About thought! What else is there? And the great paradox of being remains.”

  “What is that paradox?”

  “No mind can fully comprehend itself. There is no solution to the problem of the levels of logic.”

  Gosseyn realized what it was he was confronting. This Absolute Intelligence of the end universe was not perfectly harmonized. It was built up of lesser component minds, which, had they been housed in matter, would have filled worlds, star systems, galaxies, clusters and superclusters of galaxies, or larger regions still. This “mind” was in fact trillions of minds, all interconnected.

  But perfect unity of thought was not possible within any logic structure, nor was perfect self-awareness. Even a being such as this, the most ultimate of all ultimate entities, had a subconscious part to its life, whole nations and races and worlds of thought-entities of which the Final Mind was unaware. It had levels to its vast mind, and each level operated by its own logic.

  It could not police itself. Like all minds, it struggled for self-control.

  “Then the Ydd entity is … part of you?”

  “I will explain. In my immediate future is the singularity, the absolute nothingness, of the end point of the universe. To you it would seem a span of time immense beyond meaning, but to me only a small fraction of my life remains and the universal end point is rapidly approaching. When all matter-energy reaches its final rest state, a null point of perfect entropy, it is indistinguishable from the null point of perfect energy. No system of prediction can determine the nature of the singularity. No one can guess what lies beyond.

  “Either it is the final and absolute end of the universe, or else it is the origin point of the next cosmic cycle of being, the creation moment of a universe almost indistinguishable from this one.

  “In the one case, the uncertainty threshold will allow small amounts of matter-energy, roughly equal to a human body mass, to be passed safely to the next universe without interfering in the creation constants. One person can survive. However, one person, properly trained, is sufficient to create a small but real improvement in the conditions, perhaps to be the first of an infinite chain of universes, each better than the last.

  “In the second case, the uncertainty threshold will allow me to extend my existence by a number of years, perhaps large, perhaps small, but it will be finite, and there will be insufficient energy after that time to trigger a Great Collapse, so there will be no next universe, no possibility of matter or energy ever again reaching any level of organization: All signals will reach zero and so remain forever.

  “Here am I, the pinnacle of material and intellectual evolution, but since I am constrained by the nature of entropy itself, I must allow myself to perish so that my components, the matter-energy sum of the universe, are available to trigger the Great Collapse leading to the next universe, one which may be a more perfect one than this. Either I may think or I may use the universe-mass of my thought-components for a constructive purpose: I cannot do both.”

  Gosseyn understood. “The Ydd comprise your component minds not willing to make the sacrifice to restart the universe.”

  A note of sorrow entered the great being’s thought. “The tendency is that those components who wish to live at any price will outlast those willing to contemplate self-sacrifice for the greater good. In future millennia, the physical structure that sustains my mind, the internal communication and nervous systems, will degrade. Both intelligence and moral capacities will fall. In the last times, the mind of the living universe will become senile: That is the Ydd entity.”

  The voice continued, “And that degradation has already begun. My communication with you has triggered an inevitable cascade of events. The civil war of the cosmic mind is beginning even as we speak: Even now, certain of my constituent sub-minds have begun using the imprinting techniques, not fundamentally different from those you know, to impose thought-structures from one level of logic within my hierarchy to another. The Ydd will achieve the mental uniformity I lack, but only by the suppression of all intuitive, creative, and scientific thought within the structure. The Ydd will then embark upon a massive attempt to reengineer the cause-and-effect relations of time, seeking out, as agents, minds psychologically similar to its own, and using them to edit events in your era and others.

  “You have seen the results of some of these manipulations. Of others you are unaware. In an early maneuver, the Ydd eliminated all forms of higher biological development, all intelligent species except for man. The Ydd spared man because, of all forms of intelligence in the original universe, your species took the longest to achieve and sustain civilization. Man is the organism most unsuited for sanity. The early form of the Absolute Intelligence which rose from that event was short-lived and badly constructed, so the onset of senility was rapid, so that the Ydd occupied many more millennia of the end universe than previously. However, man’s emotional nature also gave him a drive and vision to explore even unlikely goals, and to unlock all the secrets of the human nervous system. The development of advanced scientific philosophies was pushed to a higher level of genius by man, so that early version of me was in a position also to manipulate time, and retroactively seed history with the Null-A philosophy, and other scientific advances in thought-systems. Leej of Yalerta was preserved through the prior universe with the knowledge needed to speed the mental evolution of mankind.

  “You are the candidate for the next preservation.

  “When you are ready, you may trigger the deep neural connections implanted by Dr. Halt, and break out of this false version of the universe.”

  Gosseyn said, “Surely it is a great crime to destroy you and every living being on all the planets of all the ages of this continuum.”

  “The Ydd are seeking a universe which gives rise to the Ydd directly, without t
he need for a prior biological race to create them. The Ydd are convinced that one possible universe must exist, out of the infinities of possibilities, where the particle structures of the early cosmos will, entirely by accident and coincidence, fall together and produce its complex mental structure and supporting energy-machinery. The Ydd will continue destroying ever earlier periods of time until they eventually erase themselves, me, and all other things. It is the self-destructive power of self-delusion at its most basic.

  “This is not a sane universe. My intellect, mighty as it may seem to you, is insufficient. This plenum will perish, for this is not the version of reality where the Absolute Intelligence is composed of entirely sane and benevolent constituent minds.

  “A more perfect version of the living universe must be created.

  “Once that first Null-A continuum is erected, a structure will be in place to support all false and partial continua created by time-manipulation. The parallel continuum created from the Stability Sphere information the Ptath Council manipulated in order to have an early Ptath version send a message to you will be reinstated. Even that tiny universe created by Lavoisseur’s intervention from your memories, a plenum no bigger than your solar system, where you met Dr. Halt, this can be brought out of non-being and fitted into the cause-effect structure of the Cosmic All. All parallels can be stabilized, once a sane and self-aware base universe is established to support them.

  “Your experience with the recovery of the planet Corthid shows you the nature of the Shadow Effect is limited to certain frames of reference. A planet or a continuum that dies according to one point of view still exists according to a point of view attuned with it, provided sufficient information exists to force the similarity and reimpose the proper identity relations onto the confusion of the Shadow Effect.

  “You have the tools sufficient to undo the work of the Ydd, and have seen, in the depths of time, these thoughts of mine which lie in the furthest future sanity can reach. This universe has served its purpose: It now must give way so that the next can arise.”

  Gosseyn’s mind, stable as it was, reeled under the magnitude of the undertaking revealed to him. “You mad creature! Do you actually expect me to destroy the universe and create a new one? No one man, no one mind, has that power!”

  The vast and jovial laughter rang silently through eternity. “Young fool, every man has the responsibility to remake his own mind, which is as much of the universe as falls under his control. Act swiftly, for even now my minds are eroding into the Ydd structure, and my regrets for addressing you begin to overwhelm my reason. Ancient and vast as I am, only you, a frail man who knows not who or what he is, only you, can decide whether the living universe shall prosper or shall destroy itself.”

  Gosseyn saw in the superbeing’s thoughts how, even now, vast energies were being gathered in that infinite cosmic mind occupying so many millions of millennia of universal night.

  The anger of the living universe was roused. Particle masses in excess of the energy value of a galactic supercluster were being readied to wipe out the sections of time-space occupied by any version of Gilbert Gosseyn.

  Performing the cortical-thalamic pause, Gosseyn became aware of the buried neural structures maintaining this continuum. A simple stimulus of the proper nerve centers interrupted the illusion. The now-familiar sense of pressure and nausea overwhelmed him.

  He awoke in a condition outside of time-space.

  The universe was gone.

  39

  The perception of time is a categorical perception that identifies the plenum of events as broken into cause and effect.

  Gosseyn, braced for a continuation of the deadly attacks of the Ydd entity, encountered … nothing.

  So tense was every nerve for combat that the absence of opposition actually disoriented him, like a man who crashes through an unexpectedly unlatched door. His shadow-form blurred slightly as his control over his body particles stumbled. Gosseyn performed a cortical-thalamic pause with all three of his brains, before his nerves were steady again.

  Now he examined the nothingness-environment of non-space-time. His eyes told him no information: Photons could not exist here. His secondary brain likewise was in the no-signal condition: Neither particles nor energy flows registered. But the special capacities of his tertiary brain detected first one, then thousands, then clouds and nebulae of disconnected shadow-motes, each existing in its own isolated frame of reference, each subatomic particle or quantum of energy existing only in its own perceptual universe. The distorter-style connections, which should have existed between them, were absent.

  The Ydd entity was without thought or motion. It was dead.

  Measuring the nebular “body” was difficult, since the curvature of space here made distances meaningless. Before he lost track, Gosseyn estimated a range of two hundred billion light-years, something more than five orders of magnitude larger than the whole of space in Gosseyn’s epoch.

  The cause of death: Gosseyn concluded that the absence of the universe, of the time-structure the Ydd had used to support itself, caused it to collapse into its elements.

  Curious, Gosseyn decided to see what his secondary brain had done to fight and win this battle. Probing the memories in his secondary brain, Gosseyn forced a similarity between certain cell clusters and his cortex, so that his conscious mind had a link with that disconnected tissue mass that was his secondary brain.

  And he saw … dazzling complexity.

  His secondary brain was open to signals in the universe. That was its function. Someone had been pouring signal groups into his brain to “memorize” the various segments of the universe that came within his range, and passing the information along to the array of Space-time Spheres artificially maintaining the cosmos.

  Someone? The energy-group associated with Leej and her emotion-activity toward him, her unrequited love, had been the channel manipulated. The Absolute Intelligence at the end of time had been using Gosseyn’s extra brain as the conduit through which they fought this battle. If battle it could be called.

  His whole of this so-called battle with the Ydd entity had merely been an attempt by his secondary and tertiary brains to trace the linkages and connections the Ydd used to maintain contact within itself. Each time another volume of the Ydd had been comprehended and memorized, Gosseyn’s extra brains in an automatic fashion had passed the information along to circuits within the Sphere. Each time the Ydd struck at him with energy-forms of any kind, Gosseyn’s special brain reflexes simply traced the identification patterns of the controlling link used back to its origin and memorized yet another frame of reference occupied by the volume of the being.

  There was no memory in any of his brains about the conclusion of the battle. But its end was easy to deduce: The Ydd had reached into the universe and destroyed the Space-time Sphere system in order to erase all record of itself. Collapsing the Spheres had collapsed the structure of time-space, and this, in turn, ended the energy-process of the Ydd.

  It had killed the continuum on which it existed as a parasite, killing itself in the process.

  Why? What had made it so fearful of discovery that it preferred death over a record being made of its internal mental architecture? The psychology was more than merely aberrant.

  Gosseyn turned away from the question to contemplate a more pressing matter. Where was the next universe?

  Surely some natural process was about to bring it into being?

  Then he saw the spark.

  Just as suddenly, it was gone.

  A pearly light, immeasurably distant, flickered into existence and vanished, all so swiftly that Gosseyn could perceive it only by using the prediction system of the Yalertans to review that same split instant multiple times and slowly build up a dim energy-picture in his secondary brain. The estimated life span was less than a microsecond: The mass-energy was on the order of a few ergs. If that had been a universe, it was a small and weak one indeed.

  The disconnected shadow-part
icles merely by random motions were entering each other’s frames of reference closely enough to interact. The geometry of interaction defined what energy appeared: rotations manifested electromagnetism, whereas flat or curved motions created time-space metrics, such as gravity or strong nuclear force.

  After a few hours of subjective time, Gosseyn had seen enough of the pearly sparks flickering and vanishing to confirm a statistical distribution. The likelihood of an irruption was an inverse function of its total energy. The amount of time it would take for something the total size of the universe to spring into being naturally … the number was so large as to be meaningless.

  Gosseyn began to reorganize the shadow-substance in his body. Up till now, he had held it in a roughly humanoid shape, because that was mathematically easy. Now, he began pulling all the particles of his body into one point in space, but distributing them into two directions he arbitrarily designated as “future” and “past.” Using his secondary brain to similarize energy flows across his own internal frames of reference, he enforced a rule that entropy was always the direction of the future.

  From his own point of view, of course, Gosseyn still retained a body, the atoms and molecules and cells whereof remained in their normal cause-effect relations to each other. From an outside point of view, it seemed as if his body mass, with one atom every millisecond, could spread out through a time-volume of roughly 21 trillion millennia.

  His tertiary brain allowed him to operate within that frame. He used the Predictor technique to look up and down the time interval occupied by his body, to locate each “spark” created by a frame-of-reference collision the split second of its existence, and used his secondary brain to memorize the spark when it appeared. Each time he memorized a spark, it entered his frame of reference and became a white light like a fixed star.