And then there were the people—Cohen among them—who simply didn’t believe in Time at all. They made no sense most of the time, and would have been roundly ridiculed, if everyone didn’t agree that they had the most elegant math on their side. Li had never been comfortable with them, or with Cohen’s enthusiasm for their theories. There was something radically unsettling about their vision of the universe. And there was something even more unsettling about listening to an Emergent AI wax poetic about the idea that Time itself was not a fundamental law of the universe but merely an emergent phenomenon that someday, for no rhyme or reason, might just … stop.
It was the waxing-poetic part that really bothered Li when you got right down to it. The idea that Cohen would take such joy in contemplating a universe devoid of even the minimal structure and meaning supplied by time’s arrow. The idea that, hidden at the heart of all the pretty equations and elegant metaphors, was a sort of perverse pleasure at the idea that he himself had no real existence.
“Of course there’s no there there,” Cohen had said with a laugh the last time she’d called him on it. “What do you expect? It’s turtles all the way down, darling, and it always has been.”
But turtles or no turtles, there was one thing that everyone agreed on: You couldn’t exceed the speed of light without Bose-Einstein condensates.The condensates tamed the spinfoam’s chaos, made it possible to sidestep classical physics and scale up the quantum spookiness of the universe to macroscopic levels. They existed in some dimension that unified the quantum and the classical. Or they existed in another inflationary region of the universe where the rules were different, or in a different universe altogether, or in multiple universes simultaneously. No one knew, and the debate might well be no more than semantic. The debates of quantum cosmologists were as never-ending as wars of religion—though conducted, for the most part, to higher standards of collegiality. The only sure thing was that there was no known way to exceed light speed without them.
Except that now someone had found a way. They had found in the Drift a possible escape from the death by slow strangulation that Li had brought upon them. That was why Cohen had gone to the Drift. And very likely why he had died there.
The passage through the array was instantaneous—imperceptible even to Li’s highly enhanced human senses. There was no shock, no thereness, to the moment when the ship dropped out of normal space and shunted from one probability path—or one universe, depending on your chosen brand of cosmology—to another. AIs were said to be able to detect the shift, but when Li had asked Cohen to describe the feeling, he’d merely shrugged and said it was like trying to describe the color of smoke to a blind person.
The general collapse of the Bose-Einstein network wasn’t immediately apparent en route to Freetown. There was nothing in the smooth AI-piloted ride or the plush white-and-neutral-toned interior of the first-class passenger cabin that screamed Death of an Empire. But then there wouldn’t be. The Ring and Freetown weren’t going to suffer from a shortage of condensates anytime soon. It was the more remote Colonies and Trusteeships along the Periphery who were falling off the map one by one as they lost their field arrays, subjecting millions of posthuman colonials to the agonizing choice between becoming impoverished refugees or permanent castaways on isolated, partially terraformed planets whose impoverished gene pools and biospheres would soon doom them to the status of walking ghosts. But even here, at the rich, secure, reachable heart of human space, you could feel the panic. The frenetic pace of civilian traffic, shooting through relays one step ahead of the military closures that were announced almost daily. The sense of being on an almost-at-war footing, even though no one was officially admitting it. The now-routine presence of increasingly desperate refugees from the Periphery. Still, Freetown would have FTL, as long as there was a single live condensate to be cannibalized from some poorer planet. If Freetown ever went off grid it would spell the end of everything.
Freetown had begun life as a hard-luck generation ship colony just like any other. But with the invention of Bose-Einstein transport, it had become a hub in the UN’s FTL network. And then some local politician had had the brilliant idea of inviting in the AIs. He’d made Freetown the first officially recognized Temporary Autonomous Zone in UN space, and self-owned Emergents had been invited to take up residency in the TAZ—in exchange for contributing a reasonable percentage of their substantial earnings to the planetary tax rolls. Other AI enclaves had followed, all on the same taxes-for-freedom model. But Freetown remained the largest and most profitable. Officially it was part of the larger human colony on Freetown’s home planet, but in reality it was the closest thing in UN space to a machine-run society. An AI shadow government handled all governmental functions so smoothly that the human authorities were hard-pressed to find an excuse to exercise even the minimal rights of oversight and intervention the Freetown Charter had left to them. The AIs built and maintained their own civic infrastructure (considerately providing all the necessary amenities for human guest workers and business travelers). The AIs policed themselves according to laws they wrote themselves. And when AIs committed crimes—which they either did very rarely or so skillfully that they were rarely caught—their fellow AIs punished them accordingly. Which was a good thing, since the human options for punishing AI crime were extremely limited.
At first glance, Freetown looked no different than any other busy spaceport. But look again, and you saw the subtle differences. No threatening UNSec placards stating that controlled tech would be subject to search and seizure or that resisting UNSec personnel in the performance of their official duties was a felony offense punishable by prison time. Instead there was only a vast, glimmering holographic banner that informed arriving passengers, INFORMATION SEEKS ITS OWN FREEDOM.
There was a group of Uploaders moving through processing just ahead of her, and Li watched them, at once repulsed and fascinated. This group hadn’t yet made their final translation into the Clockless Nowever. But their shaved heads and saffron robes declared their determination to leave their organic bodies behind and drown their individuality in the vast tidal sweep of some Emergent AI’s neural nets.
Uploading was a religion, of course, though its adherents insisted it wasn’t. One of the many overwrought, millennial religions that had swept through the UN as the age of humans crumbled and whatever was coming next ate its way out of the decaying chrysalis. What the AIs got out of the Uploaders was clear: data, memories, the information for which they were so eternally and ravenously hungry. What the Uploaders got out of it was less clear—at least to Li. She understood the attraction. It had been a constant undercurrent in her life with Cohen over the years. But it was a deadly one, as seductive as the undertow to a swimmer standing on the edge of an ocean dreaming of oblivion. Surrender and you were lost, with no way to know what waited beyond the tide line until you were past the point of no return. Even the event horizon of a black hole gave you some information about what lay beyond. But from the other side of the Singularity, no sign of life ever returned.
Li only watched the Uploaders with half an eye, though. The rest of her attention was riveted on the real show: a crystal-clear, full 3-D livewall fused onto the soaring vault of the Immigration Center in a one-molecule-deep layer of DNA-platformed quantum processors. And the image on it was exactly what you’d expect it to be—exactly what millions of religious and quasi-religious pilgrims and technophiles from all over UN space came here every year to see: the Freetown Datatrap.
Li gazed up at the Datatrap, overwhelmed by awe in spite of herself, knowing that she was gawking just like any other tourist but unable to stop herself. It spun lazily in Freetown’s L5-equivalent stable parking slot, faintly glimmering even in the dark or outer space. Its quantum foliations cupped one within the next like the nested velvet leaves of an infinite rose. The leaves seemed to shift and shimmer as the subatomic structures of the Datatrap popped in and out of existence in the eternal dance of entanglement and decoherence. But
that was a mirage, of course—an illusion that said less about what the eye actually saw than about what the brain knew was there to see.
Words failed in the face of such a structure. And the failure was not merely linguistic. It arose instead from the very architecture and processes of the human brain, which was a child of entanglement, born of the intimate, irreducibly complex interlacings that bound all macroscopic systems to the Newtonian realm of classical physics. The vast structure looming overhead belonged to that realm, but it also existed in the quantum realm—and, if quantum cosmologists were to be believed, its subatomic existence was not confined to this universe, but feathered ineffably through every quantum branching of the multiverse.
You couldn’t see the parts of the Datatrap that resided in other universes. You couldn’t access them in any way, although the Datatrap’s processing power in some part depended upon them. Yet—be it mere optical illusion or figment of the imagination—they seemed almost to glimmer on the edge of consciousness, in the gaps between what the human mind could see or conceive of seeing.
The only thing that limited a datatrap’s processing power was power itself. The cosmic branchings of its folded databases could process any equation, calculate any number, prove any theorem. Except, of course, for the really tough problems: the knots that still had not been cracked four centuries into the information age. Simply performing those calculations would require more power than was contained in the universe. More power or more time, which—as Cohen would have been the first to point out, had he been here—ultimately amounted to the same thing.
Datatraps were not AIs. But neither were they less than AIs. They were something entirely other, something that had arisen not in the laboratories of cognitive science researchers or the dark foundries of military AI, but from another source entirely. They had once been called Quants. They had blossomed in the last vibrant season of pre-Migration free-market capitalism, before Earth’s long-abused biosphere suffered its own fatal crash and cut the feet out from under all the merely human modes of production. They had been built to store and process the vast stores of information, sifting through mountains of data in order to discern the subtle patterns that prefigured the shapes of the emerging economies and collapsing commodities. They had not been built to think or feel or decide or imagine. They had only been built to feed, piling bits on top of that, datum on top of datum, sucking the whole analog world into the powerful engines of their analytics programs.
The Freetown Datatrap shared nothing with those ancient Quants: not hardware, not software, not algorithms or long-obsolete coding languages. It shared only their hunger. And it was a mark of the fear and respect that UNSec held for that hunger that every other datatrap in UN space was relegated to the dark and starless reaches of the Deep, and the only one anywhere near a human settlement was the Freetown Datatrap: the living, calculating symbol of the UN’s oldest and largest Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Outside the port authority, Freetown was barely a city by normal UN standards. The streets were antiseptically clean and emptier than the streets of any human city ever could be. The only buildings really designed for humans were the high-rise luxury hotels flanking the glass and steel canyon of Hakim Bey Boulevard. There were guest worker living quarters somewhere in the TAZ, Li had read, but most workers preferred to commute in from the nearby human colony. Allegedly the rare AIs who chose to hire live-in domestic help had to pay extra to persuade employees to stay in-TAZ after dark. Superstition was an odd disease. And, at least in the case of AIs, familiarity didn’t seem to alleviate it.
Such was Freetown. Either it was a blip on the evolutionary radar or it was a first glimpse of post-humanity’s post-organic future. And Li was damned if she could even begin to figure out which.
The address the ALEF agent had given Li was in one of the TAZ’s several residential zones—a rich one judging by how often it appeared in the streamspace ads for domestic help. As Li neared the address, the neighborhood began to look more and more like Cohen’s posh Ringside neighborhood in the Zona Angeles. The same high-walled, shuttered houses. The same empty streets. The same occasional humans, always in a hurry and often dressed in formalized parodies of Old Earth domestics’ uniforms. Li had never understood that. That Cohen, whose original human memories went all the way back to twenty-first-century Earth, would cling to old habits was comprehensible. That younger AIs, many of them with no human memories at all, would do so seemed bizarre. She’d always suspected it was some kind of subtle joke—but, like a lot of AI humor, it didn’t seem to translate.
The house she was looking for seemed relatively modest at first glance. Until she was buzzed through the front gate and realized that what she’d mistaken for the main building was merely a kind of carriage gate–cum–security post. Beyond it, lush green lawns swept down to a glittering lake and a curving avenue swooped toward the ornate marble porte cochere of a mansion that Cohen would have called a monstrosity.
She paused at the gatehouse, wondering if someone was going to come out and escort her. They didn’t. So she strolled down the long drive between the golf-course-green lawns. As she stepped under the porte cochere, she could see down the next immaculate sweep of driveway toward a long, low set of old-fashioned garages, where a silver automobile glimmered in the artificial sunlight. A Rolls Silver Ghost. A nice one, from back before they got ugly. There was a boy polishing it, but he wasn’t putting much elbow grease into the job. He made a pretty picture, though, and you could see he knew it. It was obvious what he’d been hired for—and you didn’t have to be nearly as cynical as Li to wonder if he even knew how to drive the car. Apparently even though ALEF’s member AIs might not respect humans much, they had a good eye for their recreational uses.
She walked up the front steps, smelling wet earth and hearing the smooth scuff and echo of her feet on flagstone. She didn’t even have to raise the ornate brass door knocker. A butler pulled it smoothly open before her hand hit the polished wood. He had a pinched face and a look in his eye that was as plain to read as a DO NOT TOUCH sign. She had a perverse urge to clap the knocker anyway, just to see if he’d whip out a rag and start polishing off her offending fingerprints.
“I’m here to see—”
“I know.”
He turned smoothly and retreated into the house’s shadowy interior. Li was used to AI homes and their twilight dimness. Most AIs used shunts only sporadically. The need for decent reading light—let alone the prey animal’s psychic need for emotional defense against the encroaching darkness—was purely theoretical. AIs didn’t need light, any more than they needed caves or castles. They didn’t get headaches. They weren’t afraid of the dark. And they didn’t have instincts.
The majordomo led her under an elaborate wrought iron balcony—very Hollywood, Li thought—and down a long tiled corridor. Chairs stood to attention on either side, their hardwood arms carved with lions and smelling of beeswax. The majordomo’s feet ticked along, smooth and steady as a metronome, their rhythm unaltered even as he turned into an open doorway and stopped to let her pass by him.
There was something wrong with those feet, she realized. Something wrong with his whole way of moving. As she stepped through the door she looked up into his face and confirmed the suspicion. There was a certain not-quite-rightness about the set of his jaw. A certain blankness in his eye. A set quality even in the prissy frown.
He wasn’t a real person—at least not at the moment. An AI was shunting through him.
She realized suddenly just how silent the great house was all around them. Was there even anyone else in it? She wondered if she was even going to meet a real person. And then she wondered why she’d even thought she would.
The room she found herself in was more Hollywood set, vintage 1930s. Oriental carpet—but not a real one. Overstuffed furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. A carefully swept fireplace that looked like it had never held anything more warming than the vase of hothouse flowers sitting in fr
ont of the polished firedogs.
The majordomo walked across the room and sat down in a sleek club chair beside the fireplace.
He gestured to the matching chair that faced it across the hearth. “Sit down,” he said in a voice from which all trace of warmth or hospitality was conspicuously absent. “You’ve come a long way. You must be tired.”
“You know why I’m here then.”
“Of course. We summoned you.”
“No you didn’t—” Li bit her tongue, realizing she’d jumped into a silence that could have taught her something.
The majordomo gave her a curious look—the first time he’d actually looked at her instead of gazing superciliously into the air over her shoulder. And then he froze.
Li waited through the pause, watching the subtle movements of the shunt’s eyes that told her whether the controlling AI was actively operating the shunt or merely a passive rider in the rented body. It was hard to tell, but the distinction was critical.
It hadn’t only been the intimidation factor that had made Li want to take this meeting in realspace. There was another, deeper problem. You could call it a matter of overclocking or clocking speeds. Or you could face the facts and just call it Time.
Human consciousness, with its flowing, linear, rhythmic time sense, was a flesh-and-blood predator’s consciousness. It was an evolved artifact: a tool to help a hairy biped catch more meals and seek shelter from nocturnal predators looking to make it into a meal. It didn’t tell you what time actually was. It didn’t even count time in any meaningful sense. That wasn’t its job. There was, in fact, no human organ that did that job.
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