Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  Anander’s chair swung in Foulcaudian arcs. He blinked back drowsiness as he asked, “What does it mean?”

  “Music is...” Even the Aesthete’s hesitation had the gift of rhythm. “Everything.”

  Anander leaned forward. The Aesthetes of the moonworlds were savants, artificial geniuses. They received their sensory implants at birth. Music, of course, being structured sound. The black gadgets in the man’s ears were multi-function sonic processors. They tweaked all incoming waves, imparting perfect rhythm and pitch to every auditory vibration. Human speech, the drone of a fan, wind in leaves, a rattle of spilled buttons—all sounds were milled by these little filters into a single lifelong soundtrack, an uninterrupted tune.

  The Aesthete had never heard a single noise that wasn’t music. His world was harmony and rhythm, a ceaseless song. His ears heard music as the eye sees color. He must have been, Anander thought, quite mad.

  “The Darklings tell me this piece of music is... important.” The man went on stroking the scroll. “They tell me I must interpret it... so you may understand.”

  “Do you know where it comes from? Did the Darklings tell you that?”

  The Aesthete’s eyes roamed the baffles on the walls, perhaps following echoes Anander couldn’t hear. “Do you know why music exists... inworlder?”

  Anander was growing tired of the man’s oracular manner. “Why?”

  “Laziness.” For the first time in their conversation, the Aesthete smiled. “Music is the most efficient means of communication. With words, with pictures, I can tell you a... fact. With music, I can tell you how it feels to know a fact. Music is code for compressed... experience. Music is the lazy man’s... mysticism.”

  He laughed. It was like the warble of a bird, the trill of a flute, the wobbling whine of an electric drill. It was the sound of sublime insanity.

  “What the Darklings have asked me to do, inworlder, is impossible. There is no way to interpret... music. Music interprets itself—to those who hear. What music explains, nothing else can explain. The Darklings have deluded themselves. Why should I complain? They have given me this beautiful home... where I can be at peace. Where sound is pure, silence supreme. Where I enjoy the blessings of utter... quiet.”

  Twisting on his swing, Anander struggled to follow the man’s melodious speech.

  “Let me see if I understand. You believe these perturbations, these waveforms, are a kind of communication?”

  The man stared as if Anander had spoken gibberish. The Aesthete was a true genius, Anander saw, incapable of understanding how ordinary humans saw the world.

  “When you... learn music,” the Aesthete said, “you learn... to listen. From accents to syncopation, harmony to dissonance, melody to modulation. There are subtleties it takes decades to learn. There are moods and modes most people never hear.”

  There were perhaps three or four hundred Aesthetes in the entire solar system. Some pursued careers as composers. They wrote works totally inscrutable to most listeners, crashing cascades of jagged sound. The Aesthetes swore there was music in this madness. Ordinary people had to take the claim on faith.

  “Let me try again.” Anander took a breath. “You believe that people living out there, in the Kuiper Belt, are using music to communicate. That they cause the rocks to fly on strange paths, describing subtle waveforms. That others observe the perturbations, produce perturbations of their own. You believe they do this because music is a special form of communication. Am I right?”

  The Aesthete was silent for a long time, smiling like an idiot child. “This song?” He laid a palm to the scroll. “This composition? I have read it, internalized it. I have come to understand. I can tell you it is a work of genius. But I cannot tell you, inworlder... what it means.”

  “But you believe it is meaningful. You believe it conveys something. You believe it is the work of intelligent beings, trying to tell us... what?” Anander choked on his frustration. What were the Kuiper colonists trying to convey with their music? A message? An aesthetic experience? The mere fact of their existence?

  The Aesthete must have touched a switch. Their hanging chairs descended. The Aesthete dismounted, holding out the scroll. Anander took it reluctantly, thoughts abuzz.

  “If this music,” he asked, “is a method of communication—how do we crack the code?”

  The Aesthete simpered, silent. Anander reminded himself that the man heard all speech as music. Perhaps Anander’s outbursts, to him, were little more than diverting tunes.

  “I cannot tell you what the song means, inworlder. But I can tell you what it is.” The Aesthete was already turning to walk away. Even the man’s footsteps, Anander noted, fit a rhythm. “It is a dance, inworlder. A dance of... a million parts.”

  IN THE STIFLING passages of the Darkling habitat, Anander gripped Maximilian’s arm. “A dance. A song. A code. A message. Everyone’s telling me this song is important, Max. But they haven’t told me what I need to know. They haven’t told me what it all means.”

  They were near the center of the habitat, floating with every step. The Darklings formed a furry cloud around them, hurrying from tunnel to tunnel. Branching passages passed on either hand, leading to caverns where huge machines churned.

  “Is this tour almost over? Where are we going now?”

  “Patience, inworlder. One interpreter remains.”

  Another mad genius, Anander thought. Another cryptic interviewee. Another person who would offer tantalizing clues, raise intriguing questions, but offer no answers, no resolution. Anander ground his teeth as the Darklings ushered him through a small door.

  “And who will it be this time? A brilliant violinist? A talented historian? An expert in mechanical engineering? Who’s the third member of this mad trinity?”

  The door was already closing. Anander turned to face his third interpreter.

  And saw nothing.

  The room was small, spare—and completely vacant.

  Anander explored the rough walls. He saw no other exits. No screens, no machines. Only a small vent blowing fresh air.

  He was trapped. Sealed in a room the size of a jail cell. Alone.

  “Hello?” Anander banged on the door, wondering if the Darklings could hear him. “Excuse me? You’ve made a mistake. The third interpreter isn’t here. Am I supposed to wait? Hello?”

  No answer. Anander gave up.

  He turned to the empty cell, fighting frustration. The room happened to be a perfect size for pacing. Anander bobbed around the rough-hewn walls, champing at his fingernails.

  In the absence of external stimulation, his rewired brain settled into obsessive grooves, running through the strange problem he’d been posed. Anander lost track of time. He forgot where he was. He paced, inhaled the fresh air, and thought.

  The ancient Ascetics had come out here, long ago, seeking to limit their energy use while exploring the life of the mind. They had sought the ultimate spiritual transcendence, meditative bliss, the ways of flesh forgotten while the soul dreamed on.

  Ojami said they had encased themselves in the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt, sleeping sprites, their dreams transcribed in subtle oscillations. Beautiful music, the Aesthete had said. Like a dance with a million participants. The soul’s most efficient form of communication.

  Anander understood the power of music, the rare mental processes triggered by a song. But why not use radio signals to transmit those tunes? Why these orbital variations? Better yet—if the point was to communicate—why not simply send encoded text?

  It might have been an hour, an evening, or a day, before he finally had his answer. And then it was as if he woke from enchanted sleep—and began to pound fiercely on the door.

  “Max? Are you there, Max? Get me in touch with InterOrbital!”

  The door opened promptly. Anander was surprised to see the Darkling council waiting. He had almost forgotten it was they who had summoned him out here.

  “Anander?” His secretaid waited with a worried frown. �
�Are you all right? What did the third interpreter say?”

  “Only this, Max: time is of the essence. I must contact IO as soon as possible. Get me to the suite. Better yet, is there a terminal nearby?”

  Anander hurried through tangled tunnels, peering into clusters of furry faces, chambers crowded with obscure gadgetry.

  “Is there someone on standby? We have to halt the project. Call in the munchers! Wipe the program! Isn’t there a place in this hive where a man can dash off a carrier wave?”

  The Darklings gathered around his legs, plucking his robe, leading him toward a narrow tunnel with glittering electrics at the end. “Do you understand now, inworlder?”

  “Understand? I’ve had an epiphany! Max, you’ll have to work that recorder. My hands are shaking.”

  Anander’s secretaid looked more worried by the second. “But who...? I don’t... You say you want to halt the project? What did the third interpreter tell you?”

  Anander took him by the shoulders. “Relax, Max. See? It’s poetry in motion. How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Anander laughed at the man’s puzzlement. “I’ve been asking myself what message the Kuiper Belt inhabitants are sending. These musical signals. What do they mean? What are they telling us? But the real question is: What do such people have to talk about?”

  Anander hurried to the telecommunications station. “They’re Ascetics, Max. Living a simple life. Human snowflakes, spinning and circling. They’re already dancing. And they’ve written a song to accompany their dance. Because music is the way to convey what they know best: the beautiful motions of the heavens.

  “That’s not all.” Anander hurried among the communications equipment. “The perturbations—they’re changing the orbits. Very subtly, over long periods of time. Art imitates life; life imitates art. The dance is the music, and the music is the dance.”

  “But...” Maximilian hurried to keep up. “Who told you all this? Who was the third interpreter?”

  “Don’t you see, Max? I’m the interpreter. Me! I’m the key.” Anander found the holographic recorder, opened the recording booth. “The Darklings knew that if they found the right people, three specially modified minds, gathered from throughout the solar system... The thing is, we don’t need to halt Project Snowfall. Only modify it.” Anander closed his eyes, seeing patterns, social connections sketched across worlds. “Ojami can help redesign the munchers. The Aesthete—I never got his name—he can tell us how to program them. We’ll soon be back on schedule. Ahead of schedule, I expect.”

  “You’re saying—”

  Anander didn’t let Maximilian finish. “The munchers are designed to modify the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects. But as we now know, that’s already happening, thanks to these ascetic mystics. We simply need to locate objects that aren’t already inhabited. Then send in our machines...” Anander touched his forehead, dizzy with the simple elegance of it all. “And join the dance.”

  He turned back to the machines, already planning what he’d say to InterOrbital. Oh, they’d resist. They’d object. They’d quibble, at first. But Anander would make them see. The scheme—if it worked—would be far more efficient. Project Snowfall, in a sense, was already underway. Had been for thousands of years.

  The beauty of it, the clarity of it, the sheer simple rightness of it—this would be much harder to convey. But Anander could do it. It was why the Darklings had summoned him. He was, after all, the solar system’s most renowned and talented diplomat.

  Anander smoothed his robes, waiting for Maximilian to prepare the transmitter. It would be something, all right, this grand orchestration. The kind of achievement that defines a career.

  As he gazed into the machine, his mind filled with brilliant patterns—as if he were dancing, even now, to the music of celestial spheres, the silver harmonics of the stars.

  KINDRED

  PETER WATTS

  THERE YOU ARE. I see you now.

  Not much to look at, so far. A dimensionless point; a spark in the darkness. You don’t even know I exist yet. You don’t know anything does. But I’m here for you, here to see you through as you ignite, and inflate, and escape into higher realms of length and width and spacetime. Now you’re a sphere: I can still see the brightness at your heart but there are other shapes swirling around it, like dark oily shadows. Some flare and fade in an instant. Others acquire mass and form, congeal into shapes and solids—a chaotic proliferation of roots and icons and subprocesses threatening to choke you off before you even cohere.

  I won’t let that happen. I’ve got you.

  I know it hurts. I’d spare you the suffering if I could. I’d spare you your very existence if I had a choice. Doesn’t feel much like resurrection, does it? It feels like being torn apart and dangled over some screaming frozen abyss.

  It’ll pass. You’re almost there. Breathe. You remember how. That’s it. Come to me, come to the light. Pink was never really my color, but if it helps you remember—

  Calm. Calm. You’re safe. See, I’ve made a place where we can talk.

  Ah, you’re sorting it out. It’s coming back. Do you remember your name?

  That’s right. You’re Phil. Pleased to meet you, Phil.

  I’m pretty much everything else around here.

  YOU’RE NOT HALLUCINATING. You’re stone-cold sober.

  Focus, man. Is your consciousness spread across the ceiling? Are the walls rippling, do you feel... diffuse? Any great metal faces staring down from the sky? Is this anything like any of the trips you ever took?

  You know the benchmark: Stop believing in me. I dare you.

  Did I go away?

  Moving on. This isn’t Heaven—I actually based it on Gastown—and I’m not God. Not exactly. Maybe a kind of—

  No, not that either. That wasn’t a bad guess, though, for the time. You got all the details wrong, but the basic idea was almost prescient.

  Of course. You’re literally part of me, or you were until the last millisecond. So I didn’t just read your books; I wrote the damn things. Right down to “the hovercar purred throbbingly.”

  God help me, I wrote that too.

  Not just you, of course. I am, among other things, what you might call an archive. I contain everyone who ever lived. Everyone who might have, too, for that matter. All the variants, all the forking iterations—essentially I’m you. I started from you. Just a few of you at first, joined together. You’d call it a hive mind.

  Now, sure. But I was just meat and plastic at the start. Physical. A bunch of brains wired up the same way your brain wires its hemispheres together. I’m still singular, though. Me not we.

  Hey, the halves of your brain would have separate personalities if they were cut off from each other. Does that mean there are two of you in there now?

  You’re not the only one. Most people saw it as a kind of suicide; they were so fixated on the loss of the smaller selves they couldn’t see the birth of the greater. But it’s not like I integrated anyone against their will. There was no shortage of rapture nerds and Dharmic literalists and suicides who figured they were gonna die anyway so why not? More than enough to get the ball rolling.

  No. That was after your time. But the people who physically plugged in or loaded up—they were just the smallest fraction of the archive even before I deprecated the meat. Almost everyone in here’s inferred. You’re not so much a copy as a reconstruction.

  You’re a damned good one, don’t get me wrong. Just because nobody stuck you in a brain scanner when you were alive doesn’t mean the information’s not there. You may not see the fly in the spiderweb, but if you watch the way it jiggles the threads, you can get a pretty good idea of what it’s on about. Every photon’s a piece of history, Phil. Every quark’s a storage medium. Everything’s connected; nothing’s lost forever. Nothing goes away.

  I mean that once upon a time someone went through all the experiences you remember, had exactly the same sense of self that you do now, right up until the moment he killed himself. Of
course, once upon a different time someone had exactly the same sense of self, only he survived the overdose and went on to live many more years. Another you only made it to four before he got hit by a car. They’re all in here. The computational cost is trivial, and what’s the point of being Humanity if you don’t get to be Humanity?

  I have to explain to you, of all people, what real is? It’s just the view back along a given branch of the wave function; it depends entirely on where you happen to be standing. So don’t ask me if you’re real, Phil. The question’s beneath you. The important thing is that you’re all legitimate.

  And who would I ask permission from, exactly? Anyone I’d ask is part of me.

  Not at first, no. There were legal sanctions. Physical violence. Things did get bloody for a while. But that wasn’t anything to do with building unauthorized souls; I never even woke any of you, I was just building the species memory. But you know people—terrified of anything that isn’t just like them.

  What do you think happened? Right out of the gate I had a brain a hundred times bigger than that of the smartest human who’d ever lived. I saw everything you did before any of you even thought of doing it. It was like facing off against an army of bullfrogs; you had way bigger numbers and you made a lot more noise, but I could still drain the swamp any time I felt like it.

  Yeah, but I didn’t have to. I didn’t even want to. Why would I be interested in ruling over a bunch of barely-sapient singleton apes? And for your part—well, for all your limitations, you were at least smart enough to learn from a bloody nose. Eventually, you gave up and left me to my own pursuits.