Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  Was this, I wonder, what it was like for the first humans to explore the Structure’s endless, evacuated depths?

  After a dozen silent processions from one shaft to the next, the emptiness becomes unbearable.

  This time, Cotton is the one who breaks the silence.

  “You’d never know it to look at me, but I come from an agrarian community. A small one, too. My mother was a genetic engineer and my father was an artist. They never agreed about anything, but it didn’t seem to matter. Yes, Merraton was a Structure world, but that’s not what this is about. Let me finish, and then you can pump me for information.”

  I bow my head, ashamed. She is right. This moment isn’t about the Structure or the knowledge we seek. It is all about her. Life is flashing before her eyes: her birth, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; her upbringing, education, vocation, and career; her hopes, dreams, nightmares, and failures. It is about her death, too, for we both believe that this is imminent.

  She talks, and I do not interrupt. Neither do I record the details for my accounts. I will remember without notes and decide later what I will do with this knowledge. Should I consider it data regarding a Structure inhabitant that might prove valuable in future analysis, or something that should be left to fade along with the rest of her?

  I know that even by asking that question I am admitting that my objectivity is compromised. If I cared for advancement, I would remove that detail from my account. But I was born a Guildsman, and I have a duty to disclose everything to my master. If the Structure has corrupted me, then that must be known by my fellows on the Great Ship.

  Cotton talks on, and I consider for the first time what I will do when she is gone. Until now I have assumed that I will return either to undercover work or to my former life on the Great Ship. I suspect now that it is too late to walk away unscathed. The Structure’s claws are long and thin, and not always as visible in effect as its most malevolent actor, the Director. I may be a dead man walking and not know yet it.

  But then I think of the man who delivers Cotton’s body to its ignominious interment—the haunting familiarity of his half-glimpsed profile—and I wonder. That man is definitely not Huw Kindred. He has the look of a Guild clone.

  I know the answer now, and I believe that Cotton has known from the beginning.

  I’d be careful if I were you, she told me. You don’t want to be tied to me when I go down.

  The words were meaningless to me then, and their utterance changed nothing. It was already too late.

  Time’s twisted skein has entangled us both.

  Guyonnet’s arrangement sees us all the way to Uvaya, where we will take the last transcendent shaft to Naar, purported home of the mysterious Trelayne. The entrance is the most secure we have encountered to date, with checkpoints and guard posts, and warning signs in multiple languages. The guards have all been dismissed, however, and none of the automated security systems impede our progress. We come to the doors, input our access codes, and step into the carriage.

  “This is it,” she says. Her restless energy has crystallized. She is almost glowing with anticipation.

  The floor jolts beneath us. I feel the momentary giddiness that always afflicts me during transcendent transfers.

  The doors open, and we step through them to our fates.

  The Director does not strike us. We are as unafflicted in Naar as anywhere else. But of Guyonnet and his agents there is no sign. No sign at all. Not a single drop of blood; not a scuff mark on the floor. They have disappeared into the air—which thrums with tension, as though an invisible wire as large as a planet has been strained to breaking point.

  Our footsteps echo across the flat, empty expanse of Naar’s reception area. There are no windows, no obvious doors, and no signs.

  “Hello?” Cotton calls. “Trelayne?”

  The sound of her voice falls flatly back to silence.

  “Let’s check the walls,” I say, and we conduct a thorough search.

  There are three sliding panels hidden almost seamlessly, one in the center of each empty wall. We try the one opposite the shaft through which we entered.

  It glides smoothly open, revealing an expanse so large my eyes struggle to comprehend it. We are standing on a balcony overlooking a hollowed-out world. Scarring on the interior testifies to the massive earthworks that have occurred here in the past. Spherical light sources, like small, white suns, cast multiple shadows, and hum with barely suppressed energy.

  We retreat and take the door to our right. There we find a chamber identical to the one we left, and just as empty.

  The third door takes us along a corridor to a closed door. It doesn’t open as we approach, or to our touch. Cotton knocks loudly, three times.

  We both jump as it hisses open, revealing a gray-haired man in a loose-fitting uniform with a sheet of plastic paper in one hand. He looks at us in surprise and annoyance through bright green eyes.

  “Trelayne?” Cotton asks him.

  “Yes, I’m Royce Trelayne,” he says. “What took you so long?”

  “Sorry about the mess. I’ve been here a month and it’s taken me that long to unpack. What do you mean, you’re not from the expedition? I ordered a re-supply a week ago and nothing’s come yet.

  “No, I’ve not seen anyone else today—or any other day, for that matter. Honeyman and his idiots must still be sorting out the supply lines. I tried telling him that automation is the way to go, but he wouldn’t listen. The crew needs to be kept busy, he said. Morale doesn’t fix itself on its own, you know. Well, I do know that, and I dislike being patronized as much as anyone. Bad enough that he’s wasting resources and valuable time playing tin soldiers; worse that I’m going starve down here if he doesn’t get his act together soon.

  “Honeyman? Oh, I should probably call him ‘the Professor General.’ He’s chief engineer and leader of the First Expeditionary Mission to Surya, where we found the mine entrance. You say you didn’t come from there? Well, I suppose I’m not terribly surprised. We though we were blazing new territory, burrowing like Carnarvon and Howard into alien tombs, and what did we get? Mines not tombs, signs of human habitation long before our arrival-and a curse as well, most likely. Makes you think, eh?

  “See this thing here. It’s a clock, one of several thousand I’ve scattered through the mines, along with the instrument packs you might have seen at the bottom of the stacks. An army of soldiers would have taken years to make and distribute these things, but my drones accomplished the feat in a matter of a fortnight. The data’s been rolling in for a week. Packets cross the transcendent shafts every time a carriage moves from one end to the other. The packets find their own way through the Structure and recombine here, via that thick cable leading into the wall over there. Isn’t it obvious that I could never have accomplished so much on my own? Even with an army, as I said, it’d take forever. Best to leave the machines to it so I can do all the hard work of contemplation. That’s what humans are best at, you know. Good at thinking; not so good at doing. There’s a block somewhere, an execution failure. Everything we create is flawed, somehow. We thrive despite our ineptitude because the universe despises perfection.

  “That more than anything convinces me that the Structure is not alien. Look at it! A sprawling insanity that seems from one angle like a clutch of high-rises connected by walkways, and from another a—well, like nothing we’ve ever built before. The kind of thing our armies might build if we left them to it. In would go our flawed designs, and out would come this madness. Reductio ad absurdum, except in the opposite direction, whatever that is in Latin. Extrapolation beyond all reason. All we do now is ask what its original purpose might have been.

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s one of the many answers you’ve come seeking from me, and I’ve thoughts on the matter, of course. The mines do provide valuable resources for the worlds at the top of each stack; there’s no denying that, although it seems a small ambition for something so grand. I wonder if it is a device of some k
ind-an antenna, perhaps, transmitting vibrations through the temporal ether; or a generator, similar to wires connecting far-flung points of differing electrical potential. It could be a kind of cosmic glue, or conceivably even a weapon. I’m no closer to knowing the Structure’s intended purpose, and I’m the first to attempt a systematic study of it. See where it’s got me?

  “Immortal, my arse. That’s just an error of parallax.

  “Let me show you one thing I’ve learned. This is an analysis of the clock data I’ve collected from the bottoms of all the stacks. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I can barely look at it sometimes. It gives me bad dreams. Clocks ticking slow; clocks ticking fast-clocks going backwards, even. What does it all boil down to?

  “My theory is that the transcendent shafts connect, not just different locations in the spacetime we come from, but locations in different space-times-universes, continuums, branes, whatever you want to call them. The Structure is the web tying all these different points together. The critical thing is that at some, perhaps all, of these locations, the arrow of time points in a different direction. Not just reverse, but left-right or up-down, or directions we can barely guess at. These different arrows of time exert a drag on the Structure as a whole, twisting and stretching the stacks so that there’s no universal time in the web at all any more. It’s all tangled and warped.

  “Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it’s part of a grand design we can only guess at. Either way, that’s how I can have been here a month, yet you think I’ve been here forever.

  “And you-you tell me you’re tangled in a loop of some kind. That sounds perfectly possible, maybe even likely, given the mess around us. Why ever not? There’s nothing acausal about such loops, nothing acausal at all. They can be navigated—indeed they must be navigated, one way or another. The ravages of information entropy haven’t gobbled you up, so I take that as a proof of concept.

  “What this means for the people who live here is a different question. Perhaps it’s nothing especially profound. We go about our lives as we always do, not really noticing any more than is necessary to ensure our day-to-day existence. Perhaps the finest ramification is one that Honeyman and I experienced. We’re among the first wave of explorers to leave Earth, which beyond doubt lacks the capacity to build something like this—but despite this very important fact, humans have somehow beaten us here. If time moved linearly in the Structure, it would have been empty. It wouldn’t even have existed for us to find! Yet everyone who comes to the Structure finds people here ahead of them. Where did they come from? Our future, I suppose. And in their past, they found the same thing. No one got here first. It’s always been inhabited. It always will be. There is no end to it, in time as well as in space. It just continues being. That’s why ‘Terminus’ is a terrible name for this organization you talk about. If there’s no beginning to the mine, there won’t be an end either.

  “You know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Such loops and twists come at a cost to the Structure. It’s not infinitely elastic; it can only stretch so far. It must release tension in small ways or else it would’ve snapped long ago. You might have seen something like this in your travels. Timelines truncated, perhaps, or strange sheer effects, particularly near those most afflicted by temporal back-flips.

  “Does that ring any bells?

  “I see. ‘The Director,’ eh? I suppose to someone without access to my data it might look like an intelligent being at work in the mine. And we—we flawed, we brilliant, we imaginatively blind—we persist in seeing the universe through our human-shaped glasses. We perceive an invisible hand where there is none at all. It’s just the tangled fabric of cause and effect in the Structure adjusting itself, sealing off complicated ends, healing.

  “And that other legend you related about me—my fortress of death, which killed the others you say preceded you here. I surmise now that it’s nothing more than another presentation of this same phenomenon. My clocks connect me to many, many conflicting arrows of time, gathered by harmless, unconscious machines and reported to me here, where I observe them. It’s like being surrounded by archers. I have been, unknowingly, caught in a vortex of twisted causality. While I remain connected to the clocks, I myself am safe, but anyone who gets too close will be erased from the Structure’s sum state. Instantly and without reprieve.

  “That is a grim realization for someone such as I, who never intended harm to anyone.

  “You? Well, if I had to guess I would say that you are protected by virtue of the fact that you are midway through causal loops of your own. You can’t be erased from the Structure here and now because you have actions to perform elsewhere and elsewhen. Your certain fate protects you, even while it guarantees your eventual death.

  “And yes, you are most probably a danger to those around you. Perhaps a single loop could be tolerated, but two crossing loops . . . ? Bound to be inimical to the grand design, whatever that is.

  “You seem downhearted, and I assure you that I both sympathize and apologize. My friends, I am speculating wildly. There hasn’t been time enough to conduct systematic experiments—or so I have been telling myself these past weeks. Were Honeyman here, he would remind me of the important of the scientific method before coming to any firm conclusions. Physicists like me are plagued by engineers like him. No answers come from idle speculation, just more questions. Of those we have plenty enough already.

  “Remember that my theories are open for disproof to one and all. I could be nothing but a mad old hermit obsessed with clocks whose word you’d do best to ignore. Forget my delusions; go back to your lives and enjoy them while you can. You have been successful where so many others have failed, coming this far! And you’ve shown me a thing or two that I’d managed to miss, that’s for sure.

  “Honeyman has been silent for an age, or so it seems me. I have missed my old friend, you know. Perhaps it really has been an age. It would be a terrible thing if the arrows of time twisted unfavourably and claimed him before I could tell him all about the execution failure we discovered together-marvellous and terrifying, and exactly the sort of thing he would build if given his head . . .”

 
  We left Trelayne staring contemplatively at the thick bunch of cables connecting his workstation to the clocks scattered all across the Structure.

  Cotton didn’t speak, for all that I tried to engage her. She had barely said a word through the last half of our interrogation of Trelayne. I had been the one asking questions, guiding the old man through his rambling mix of recollections and speculations. She had withdrawn into herself, and I resisted the impulse to remonstrate with her that this was the culmination of her life’s work. She had said herself that it would complete her, and therefore her disengagement seemed counterproductive.

  A moment’s thought would have revealed to me what was going through her mind. But I had my own problems to work through-first and foremost how to convey to you, Master Catterson, all that we had learned. Weapon, accident, or trap? The nature of the mine was no closer to my understanding, even having met Trelayne and listened to all he said.

  Of more immediate importance was the revelation that our time-loops were the sole things protecting us from the Structure’s causality-repairing censorship. Once my loop was closed, by putting Cotton in place in Gevira for my former self to examine, what was to stop my being wiped out of existence? Nothing. Cotton, by killing herself and expecting me to finish the job, was effectively killing me too.

  That I was distracted at the crucial junction is regrettable but I hope forgivable.

  I do not dare believe that events would have unfolded any other way than as they did, as they were always going to, in the end.

  When we arrived at Uvaya, a sole Terminus agent was waiting for us.

  “Finish it,” he said, removing his pressure mask and tossing it to me.

  I caught the mask automatically, struck by how much like a Guildsman this man l
ooked—except for his eyes, which had the far-horizons look of someone who had spent too long deep in the mines.

  I had expected Osred Guyonnet.

  Instead, he was me.

  I felt the Structure flex around me, and I wondered how many timelines were being truncated as we stood in each other’s presence. Who was paying the cost of this strange encounter? Who must have died in order that we might meet?

  It was over in a second. Without another word, he turned and walked away. A transcendent shaft opened its portals for him. He stepped inside and was gone.

  Cotton gasped and folded awkwardly to the floor.

  I was at her side, all thoughts of my self and this strange new development forgotten.

  “Cotton, what’s wrong?”

  Her pupils were pinpricks and her skin had turned a deathly shade of gray. There was no strength in her hands as they reached for me.

  I knew the answer to my question even as I pleaded with her to respond. She must have started the process in the shaft for it to be so advanced now.

  “E. C., talk to me!”

  “Always going to end here, Donnie Boy.”

  “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’“

  “He wasn’t talking to me. We got the answers—”

  I leaned in close, barely able to hear her.

  “—got the answers we deserved. Tell everyone. You know—I—”

  Her last words emerged as little more than a sigh.

  “—can’t live—we can’t—”

  I cradled her in my arms as the metabolic cascade ran its course. It ruined her mind first, then spread through her nervous system. Her organs succumbed one by one, with lungs and heart failing last of all. I held her tightly, relishing her body’s warmth while it lasted.

  The first time I touched her she had been cold, and I knew the last time would be the same, but I did not want to remember her that way.