by Dan Simmons
“The Consortium has never released public information on the memory storage devices in orbit,” said Suma IV.
“No,” agreed Orphu, “but it makes sense that’s what those things are. All evidence fourteen centuries ago when they left the surface of the Earth was that there were only a few thousand post-human entities in existence, isn’t that right?”
“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.
“Our moravec experts at the time weren’t even sure these post-humans had bodies… not bodies as we think of them,” said Orphu, “so they sure didn’t need to build a million cities in orbit.”
“That does not lead to the conclusion that the majority of the objects that are in Earth orbit are memory devices,” said General Beh bin Adee.
Mahnmut found himself wondering what the punishment on this ship was for espionage.
“It does when you look at what the old-style humans have been doing on Earth for almost a millennium and a half,” said Orphu of Io. “And what they haven’t been doing.”
“What do you mean, ‘haven’t been doing?’ ” asked Mahnmut. He’d planned to stay silent during this conversation, but his curiosity was too great.
“First of all, they haven’t been breeding like human beings breed,” said Orphu. “There were fewer than ten thousand of them for several centuries. Then that neutrino beam—guided by modulated tachyons, I understand from the astronomers’ online publications—shot up from Jerusalem fourteen hundred years ago, a beam aimed at nowhere in deep space, and then, suddenly, there seemed to be no humans left. None.”
“Only briefly,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Yes, but still …” said Orphu. He seemed to lose track of what he was going to say, but then said, “And then, less than a century later, there were about one million old-style humans scattered around the planet. Evidently not descendants of those ten thousand or so who disappeared. No buildup of population… just wham, bang, thank-you-ma’am… one million people out of nowhere.”
“And what did that tell you?” asked Asteague/Che. The formidable little Europan seemed privately amused, rather as a teacher might be when a student suddenly showed unexpected promise.
“It told me that these old-styles weren’t born to begin with,” said Orphu of Io. “They were decanted.”
“Virgin birth?” asked Cho Li, the Callistan’s odd voice dripping sarcasm.
“Of a sort,” said Orphu, his easy, rumbling tones suggesting that he’d taken no offense at the sarcasm. “I think the post-humans have and had a million or so human memories and personalities and data on bodies stored in those orbital memory devices—who knows? Perhaps one satellite per human being—and they restocked the herd. Which leads to the explanation of why the population appears to have peaked at one million every few centuries, dropped to a few thousand, then jumped back to a million as if by magic.”
“Why?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. As with Mahnmut, the rockvec soldier sounded honestly curious.
“Minimum herd population,” said Orphu. “The post-humans seem to have allowed the old-styles to breed only to half of replacement numbers… that is, one baby per woman. And then only when there had been a death. And I’ve read the conjecture that the old-styles live exactly one Earth century and then disappear. Enough to keep the herd going given climate changes or whatever, not so many they could overbreed or wander off the reservation, but the population drops rapidly. Then, every thousand years or so, they restock the herd to its maximum size of one million old-styles. Because women have only one child, the population begins dropping until the next restocking.”
“Where did you read that old-style humans lived precisely a century?” asked Cho Li. He sounded shocked.
“In The Scientific Ganymedan,” said Orphu. “I’ve had a broadcast subscription for more than eight centuries.”
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che held up his very humanoid hand. “You’ll have to pardon me, Orphu of Io, but while I congratulate you on your deductions about the purpose of the orbital devices and about the precise longevity we’ve observed of the remaining hundred thousand old-style human beings—at least until recent months, during which time there’s been quite a drop-off in population due to these attacks by creatures unknown—you said that you could tell us why there are Greek gods on Mars, who the Voice is, how Mars was so miraculously terraformed, and what is causing the current quantum instability on both Earth and Mars.”
“I’m getting to that,” said Orphu. “Do you want me to condense it and put the whole Theory of Everything into a high-speed tightbeam squirt? That’d take less than a second.”
“No, no need for that,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But perhaps speak more rapidly. We have less than three hours before we have to launch the dropship—or not—during the aerobraking maneuver.”
Orphu of Io rumbled on the subsonic levels in a way that Mahnmut had long interpreted as laughter.
“The old-style humans are clustered around some three hundred localized habitation centers on five continents of Earth, correct?” said the Ionian.
“Correct,” said Cho Li.
“And the populations around these nodes vary,” said Orphu, “yet our telescopes have never picked up any signs of transport—no major roads in use, no aircraft, no ships—not even quaint sailing ships like the one Mahnmut and I traveled the length of Mars’ Valles Marineris in—not even an occasional hot air balloon. So we assumed that the old-style humans were quantum teleporting, even though our moravec scientists could never perfect that mode of travel.”
“It was a reasonable assumption,” said Suma IV.
“Reasonable,” agreed Orphu of Io, “but wrong. We know now because of the quantum data left by the so-called Olympian gods on Mars and on the otherdimensional Earth where the battle for Troy is still being fought what real quantum teleportation looks like. We know its footprint, and what the old-style humans were doing to get from Point A to Point B ain’t it.”
“If the old-style humans aren’t quantum teleporting,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, “then how have they been moving instantaneously from one place to the other on Earth for more than fourteen hundred years?”
“The old-fashioned idea of teleportation,” said Orphu. “Storing all the data of a human being’s body and mind and personality in code, breaking down the matter into energy, beaming it, then reassembling it elsewhere, just as in the old TV broadcast series from the Lost Era—Star Truck.”
“Trek,” corrected General Beh bin Adee.
“Aha!” said Orphu of Io. “Another fan.”
The General clacked barbed killing claws in embarrassment or irritation.
“Our scientists long since determined that storing such incredible amounts of data would be impossible,” said Cho Li. “It would require more terabytes of storage space than there are atoms in the universe.”
“Evidently the post-humans found a way to build that memory storage,” said Orphu, “because the old-style humans have been teleporting their butts off for centuries. Not true quantum-level teleportation of the kind our friend Hockenberry or the Olympian gods carry off, but the crude mechanical ripping apart of molecules and reassembling of them somewhere else.”
“Why would they do that for the old-style humans?” asked Mahnmut. “Why such an incredible engineering project for a few hundred thousand people whom they treat almost like pets… like creatures in a zoo? We’ve seen no signs of new human engineering, city building, or creativity for more than that millennium and a half.”
“Maybe the teleportation itself has something to do with that cultural retardation,” said Orphu. “Maybe not. But I’m convinced that’s what we’re looking at down there. It’s a case of ‘Beam me up, Scooty.’ ”
“Scotty,” corrected Retrograde Sinopessen.
“Thank you,” said Orphu. To Mahnmut he tightbeamed, That makes four of us.
“You may well be correct that the old-style humans have been using a crude form of m
atter replication-transmission rather than true quantum teleportation,” said Asteague/Che, “but that doesn’t explain Mars or…”
“No, but the post-humans’ obsession with reaching another dimensional universe does,” said Orphu, not even noticing in his excitement and pleasure of the telling that he was interrupting the most important Prime Integrator in all the Five Moons Consortium.
“How do you know the posts were obsessed with getting to another dimensional universe?” asked General Beh bin Adee.
“Are you kidding?” said Orphu. Mahnmut had to think that the stern Asteroid Belt rockvec general had not been asked that question many times in his life or military career.
“Just look at the junk the post-humans left behind in orbit,” continued Orphu, oblivious to the military moravec’s taken-abackness. “They have wormhole accumulators, black hole accelerators—all early attempts at ripping through space and time, taking shortcuts out into this universe… or to another one.”
“Black holes and wormholes don’t work,” the Callistan Cho Li said flatly. “At least not as transport devices.”
“Yeah, we know that now and that’s what the post-humans found out more than fifteen hundred years ago,” agreed Orphu. “Then, when they had these incredible memory-storage satellites in orbit, plus the crude matter-replication teleportation portals for the old-style humans—who, I would wager, they were using as guinea pigs in all this experimentation—only then did the post-humans start messing around with Brane Holes and quantum teleportation.”
“Our scientists and engineers have been… messing around, as you put it… with quantum teleportation and the generation of Calabi-Yau universe Membrane Holes for many centuries,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. The Amalthean was so agitated that he was almost dancing on his long, spidery, silver legs. “With no luck,” he added.
“That’s because we didn’t have the one thing that allowed the post-humans to make their breakthrough,” said Orphu of Io and paused. Everyone waited. Mahnmut knew that his friend was enjoying the moment.
“The million human bodies, minds, memories, and personalities that were stored as digital data in their orbital memory satellites,” said Orphu. His deep voice was triumphant, as if he’d solved some long-pondered mathematical conundrum.
“I don’t get it,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.
Orphu’s radar flickered over all of them, a feathery touch on the electromagnetic spectrum. Mahnmut thought that his friend was waiting for their reactions, perhaps for their shouts of approval. No one moved or spoke.
“I don’t get it either,” said Mahnmut.
“What is the human brain?” Orphu asked rhetorically. “I mean, all of us moravecs have a piece of one. What is it like? How does it work? Like the binary or DNA computers we also carry around for thinking purposes?”
“No,” said Cho Li. “We know that the human brain is not like a computer, neither is it a chemical memory machine the way the Lost Era human scientists believed. The human brain… the mind… is a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront.”
“Exactly!” cried Orphu. “The post-humans used this intimate understanding of the human mind to perfect their Brane Holes, time travel, and quantum teleportation.”
“I still don’t see how,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Think about how quantum teleportation works,” said Orphu. “Cho, you can explain that better than I can.”
The Callistan rumbled and then modulated the rumbles into words. “The early experiments in quantum teleportation—done by old-style humans in ancient times, as far back as the Twentieth Century A.D.—worked by producing entangled pairs of photons—and teleporting one of the pair—or actually by teleporting the complete quantum state of that proton—while transmitting the Bell-state analysis of the second photon through regular subliminal channels.”
“Doesn’t that violate Heisenberg’s principle and Einstein’s speed-of-light restrictions?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, who, like Mahnmut, had obviously not been briefed on the mechanisms by which the gods on Mars’ Olympus Mons QT’d to Ilium.
“No,” said Cho Li. “Teleported photons carried no information with them when they moved instantaneously from place to place in this uni-verse—not even information about their own quantum state.”
“So quantum teleported photons are useless,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “At least for communication purposes.”
“Not quite,” said Cho Li. “The recipient of a teleported photon had a one-in-four chance of guessing its quantum state—the quantum photon had only that many possibilities—and, by guessing, utilizing the quantum bits of data. These are called qubits and we’ve successfully used them for instantaneous comm purposes.”
Mahnmut shook his head. “How do we get from quantum-state photons carrying no information to the Greek gods quantum teleporting to Troy?”
“The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” intoned Orphu of Io. “He awoke and found it truth. John Keats.”
“Could you try to be more cryptic?” Suma IV asked caustically.
“I could try,” said Orphu.
“What does the poet John Keats have to do with quantum teleportation and the reason for the current quantum crisis?” asked Mahnmut.
“I suggest that the post-humans made their breakthrough in Brane Holes and quantum teleportation more than a millennium and a half ago precisely because of their intimate knowledge of the holistic quantum nature of human consciousness,” said the Ionian, his voice serious now.
“I’ve run some prelimary studies on the ship’s quantum computer,” Orphu continued, “and when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum date on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.”
“How?” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“They first opened Brane Holes to alternate universes in which there were points in space-time where entangled-pair wavefronts of human consciousness had already been,” said Orphu.
“Huh?” said Mahnmut.
“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability states?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”
Mahnmut still shook his head. He’d forgotten about the other moravecs standing on the bridge, forgotten that they might be taking his sub and the dropship down to Earth in less than three hours, forgotten the danger they were in… forgotten everything except the headache that his friend Orphu of Io was giving him.
“The post-humans were opening Brane Holes into alternate universes that had come into being through—or at least been perceived by—the focused lenses of pre-existing holographic wavefronts. Human imagination. Human genius.”
“Oh for the Christ’s sake,” said General Beh bin Adee.
“Possibly,” said Orphu. “If you assume an infinite or near-infinite set of alternate universes, then many of these have necessarily been imagined through the sheer force of human genius. Picture them as singularities of genius—Bell-state analyzers and editors of the pure quantum-foam of reality.”
“That’s metaphysics,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.
“That’s bullshit,” said Suma IV.
“No, that’s what’s happened here,” said Orphu. “We have a terraformed Mars with altered gravity and are asked to believe that such terraforming could be achieved in a few years. That’s bullshit. We have statues of Prospero on a Mars where Greek gods live atop Mount Olympos and commute through time and space to an alternate Earth where Achilles and Hector are fighting over the future of Ilium. That’s bullshit. Unless…”
“Unless the post-humans opened portals to precisely those worlds and universes
earlier imagined by the force of human genius,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “Which would explain the Prospero statues, the Calibanish creatures on Earth, and the existence of Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and all the other humans on Ilium-Earth.”
“What about the Greek gods?” sneered Beh bin Adee. “Are we going to meet Jehovah and Buddha next?”
“We might,” said Orphu of Io. “But I would suggest that the Olympian gods we met are transformed post-humans. That’s where the post-humans disappeared to fourteen hundred years ago.”
“Why would they choose to change into gods?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen. “Especially gods whose powers come from nanotechnology and quantum tricks?”
“Why would they not?” asked Orphu. “Immortality, choice of gender, sex with each other and any mortal they choose to mate with, breeding many divine and mortal offspring—which is something the post-humans could not seem to do on their own—not to mention the decade-long chess game that is the siege of Troy.”
Mahnmut rubbed his head. “And the terraforming and gravity change on Mars…”
“Yes,” said Orphu. “It probably took the larger part of fourteen hundred years, not three years. And that was with the gods’ quantum technology at work.”
“So there’s a real Prospero down there or out there somewhere?” asked Mahnmut. “The Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest?”
“Or something or someone close to it,” said Orphu.
“What about the brain-monster that came through the Brane Hole on Earth just a few days ago?” asked Suma IV. The Ganymedan sounded angry. “Is it a hero in your precious human literature?”
“Possibly,” said Orphu. “Robert Browning once wrote a poem called ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ in which the monster Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest ponders his god, a creature called Setebos, which Browning had Caliban describe only as ‘the many-handed as a cuttlefish.’ It was a god of arbitrary power that fed on fear and violence.”