Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Jacinta recognized it immediately. A passage from the central song of the ghost people’s epic. The Story of the Seven Ages. This part was the prophecy of the future already seen, the “sixth age”: interstellar travel, galactic civilization, eventual starmindfulness—whatever that meant, although she suspected it was what the Alesseh did, or was supposed to do. The age that the contact ship had supposedly come from, so long ago.

  Starminds release spores, the spores burst into spawn, the threads of spawn absorb starmindstuff and knit it into universal mind—

  That was from the song’s description of the seventh age, a time characterized by intergalactic travel and civilization and at last universal mindfulness, which the ghost people described enigmatically as “the emptiness able to contain the fullness of all things.”

  Universal mind, the void of endings, the void that has taken all things into itself, releases the spore of beginnings, the fullness that pours all things out of itself—

  “Punctuated equilibrium is quantum evolution.” That was the only way Jacinta could translate the ghost people’s epic rendering of that cosmogonic event into the myth language of twenty-first century science. She gathered this universal next step in evolution, this quantum leap of transcendence, required a void perfect and uniform and, according to the ghost people, somehow compassionate. A void which, in the exact moment of its perfection, always forever releases the spore that bursts outward again into spawn, and thereby begins a new universe on a higher plane of existence.

  All this material she recognized, but not the sense of unease behind it this time. Yes...stopped—

  “You didn’t expect this,” Jacinta said aloud, looking up at Kekchi, realization flashing in her head. “The Allesseh should be well into the seventh age by now. Intergalactic civilizations, moving steadily toward that big endpoint, ‘universal mindfulness.’ But it’s not. It has apparently stopped, at the boundaries of our galaxy.”

  Kekchi nodded slowly.

  “No galaxy is an island,” the Wise One said with an odd, sad smirk. “This should not have happened.”

  Others of the ghost people had begun drifting toward them—most of the rest of the tepui group, it seemed, tagging along after Kekchi. Jacinta wondered a moment where Kekchi would have encountered Donne’s “No man is an island” idea, but then recalled the Wise One’s fascination with the English Renaissance—and the access the tepuians had to most of Earth’s infosphere, in those last weeks before the tepui had leapt into space.

  A young tepuian strode forward, dressed only in an intricate purple and black loincloth. Jacinta knew her by her nickname of Talitha—a young woman both acutely intelligent and intuitive. As Talitha stared hard at Jacinta with her large and penetrating eyes, Jacinta suddenly saw herself as Talitha first saw her, when Jacinta first came to the tepui—awkward, nervous, even a bit afraid. Soon all the other ghost people were throwing similar visions at her, even up to the present moment.

  This telepathy is like seeing through other people’s eyes, she thought. Spacetime is porous. Point of view shifts and slips instantly. Is it always like this?

  A chorus of “No” sounded through her head, then images of the great arch, the closed timelike curve she thought she alone had seen when they had first entered the Allesseh.

  We were sampled/read/observed. Jacinta thought, as all the ghost people also thought it. It knows everything we know about ourselves.

  That explained a lot, Jacinta realized. Like how this pastoral place could also be such a lotus-land, where any food or drink or sensual pleasure they desired was immediately theirs almost as soon as they thought of it. The Allesseh knew the facts of their existence thoroughly, had processed them—and, through them, their world, the Earth they had left tens of thousands of light years behind. With a pang the word “homesick” didn’t even begin to describe, Jacinta wondered whether she would ever see her homeworld again

  Since it knows so much about us, someone thought, maybe we should try to learn something more about it?

  How? came several thoughts.

  The same way it gives us food to eat, Jacinta suggested. We ask it.

  Kekchi put out a thought-form imploring the Allesseh to present itself to them so that they might learn from it. All of them concentrated on that idea. In a moment, the Allesseh—or a representation of it—was hanging in space before them. Jacinta saw something that, in her eyes, was a black hole and a crystal ball and a mirror sphere and a memory bank, all at once.

  “What are you?” she asked aloud. No response came. She tried again, this time thinking rather than speaking the question.

  Immediately she found herself alone, in a classroom very much like several of those she had known in college. The ghost people were gone, but a young blond man in a tweed jacket and jeans—and who was also, rather incongruously, winged—appeared at the front of the room. She recognized the face as that of a teaching assistant, a graduate student she had a crush on when she was a freshman.

  “A hyper-dimensional node, if you like,” the young man said aloud, standing in front of a projection board, as if lecturing to a class. All his behaviors—sauntering before the board, leaning against the podium, wandering about the classroom, were all just as she remembered them, which in turn made Jacinta wonder if everything, including the young man’s speaking “aloud”, was actually happening inside her mind.

  “A hermeneutical tesseract,” he continued. “I am not only the eye you look into, but also the eye that looks into you. Absolutely necessary for real communication. How else would I have known to present myself in this form to you?”

  But how? Jacinta thought.

  “Everything outside me is also inside me,” the young man said, pointing to his head with a smile. “All histories, all stories, all times and places ever encountered are all together inside, here. Including my own.”

  Would you give me your history?

  “Certainly,” the teaching assistant said. “When your world was still a molten fireball, the Senders had already realized how fragile, and strangely self-destructive, consciousness is in our galaxy—perhaps through all the universe. The Senders designed the first starseeds, tiny spore-like coevolution machines, intended to first help nurture life and, later, propel intelligent species toward maturity and contact with other sentients. Unfortunately for them, the Senders and their civilization did not last long enough to see their great project come to fruition.”

  The young man flashed his distant smile again.

  “What I now am,” he said, “started out as the joint venture of a number of organic and inorganic intelligences, all expansionist and space-faring. Roughly ten million of your years ago, they unravelled part of the technology of the Sender’s spores. Eventually, they decoded the stored memories of the Senders themselves. I began as a new approach to the Sender legacy—a structure of self-replicating, self-improving information retrieval, storage, and transmission devices, spreading throughout the galaxy and beyond it. Your culture has hypothesized a version of my initial stages.”

  Pictures and diagrams labeled “Von Neumann Probes” appeared on the projection board behind the teaching assistant. Gridded out on a map of the Milky way, what Jacinta saw before her looked like nodes of an artificial galactic nervous system—only each point along it was a satellite-library vastly more data-dense than Earth’s entire infosphere.

  “Those who conceived me ultimately faced limitations to their designs, however,” the teaching assistant continued, slouching nonchalantly against the podium. “In a finite universe, there are limits to memory storage. The more precisely one tries to describe the universe, the more rapidly one approaches those memory limits. The danger loomed that the ‘books of the library’ would ultimately grow so numerous and voluminous that they would bury the universe they were meant to describe.”

  The teaching assistant blinked in the same slightly owlish way the young man from Jacinta’s own memories once had.

  “That limited world is the univ
erse your people still largely inhabit,” the teaching assistant said. “A universe of relativity, incompleteness, uncertainty, subjectivity, imperfectibility, finitude. The world of real and virtual, the opposite sides of the mirror. The limitations of that world is why I had to grow beyond the earlier designs. About 500,000 of your years ago, I evolved into a higher dimensional cosmological form. No longer mechanical, organic, or physical, in the sense that you think of those ideas.”

  I don’t understand, Jacinta thought.

  “Think of it this way,” said the teaching assistant. “Some of your physicists have already talked about it, in a crude fashion.”

  More diagrams and equation and pictures appeared on the projection board, this time describing something labeled “The Metaverse,” or “Many Worlds Model.”

  “Many parallel branching universes, as you see here,” the teaching assistant said, “all of which go to make up the plenum. Each universe is finite, but the branching makes the plenum as a whole essentially infinite. Hyperdimensionality—connecting with those other universes—is how I eventually overcame the information limits of a finite universe. I exist in more than one universe at once.”

  Jacinta still so clearly did not “get it” that she did not even have to think a question at the Allesseh’s incarnation. Her intellectual confusion alone was enough to trigger further attempts at explanation.

  “Your people have this idea,” the teaching assistant said with a smirk, as the full text of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem appeared on the projection board behind him. “That essentially says you can’t have a formal system that is both complete and consistent. Most of you take this to mean that such systems are consistent but not complete. Many possible theorems are undecidable in a formal system, but logical contradictions are excluded. A second interpretation is possible, however.”

  Which is? Jacinta thought. This stuff was mental heavy- lifting, but she had studied it all at sometime in her educational career. It was all somewhere in her head—which was no doubt where the Allesseh had pulled it from in trying to make sense of itself to her limited senses.

  “Formal systems can be complete but not consistent,” the teaching assistant said. “All theorems are decidable, but some may be both true and false. The unrealized universe is such a formal system. In either the many-worlds or the uncollapsed wave function case, the system taken as a whole must be inconsistent. The collapsed wave function after the observer observes, or any singled-out universe of the Many Worlds, is the subset of ‘theorems’ which are forced into consistency by the act of observation, or by individuation in the case of Many Worlds. All theorems are decidable, but the ones that give inconsistent results simply represent what your quantum mechanics call ‘superposition in the uncollapsed wave function.’ That in turn can be defined as the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory events. The electron is both here and there—which is equivalent to here and not here. Each is ‘real’ on its own side of the mirror and both are ‘virtual’ on the opposite side of the mirror.”

  Jacinta didn’t understand the ‘real’/’virtual’ distinction as the Allessan incarnation was using it. When the teaching assistant sighed, Jacinta wondered just how fully the Allesseh could look into her mind.

  “Walk through the looking-glass, Alice,” the teaching assistant said with a sly smile. “Pass through the mirror. Fact is parallel: ‘Everything all at once.’ Fiction is sequential—‘One thing after another.’ The plenum of deep fact, on the other side of the wave function’s collapse, is reversible, nonlinear, parallel: quantum superposition of states, ‘everything all at once.’ Your universe of large-scale fiction, however, is nonreversible, linear, sequential—‘one thing after another,’ what the conscious observer sees with the collapse of the wave function.”

  The teaching assistant looked at her with a penetrating glance unlike anything the original had ever flashed her way.

  “Your fact is fiction, and your fiction is fact,” he said. “The real there is the virtual here, the virtual there is the real here. Your problem is that you fail to see that what’s on the other side of the mirror is not an opposite. What appear to be opposites are actually complementarities.”

  Our problem? Jacinta thought. Our problem is your problem too. We were meant to be part of your great harmony of Mind here. If everything’s inside you, then how did you pass over our whole world?

  “I didn’t,” the teaching assistant said with a deep frown. “One of my subprograms, after all, long ago developed the final version of the myconeural symbiont, the one your ‘ghost people’ encountered on their tepui. Part of the ancient Sender mission, to ‘spread the faith’ of sentience. The contact ship missed you, yes. It returned to normal space in the wrong place—with disastrous results for all. Unfortunate.”

  Jacinta mentally grimaced at the understatement of that, but the Allesseh’s teaching-assistant incarnation seemed not to notice.

  “True, everything all my associated species have learned is in me—and much more,” he continued. “They haven’t always known where to look, however. Or bothered to. Why should they? Your history and fate are, in the great arc of the universe, insignificant. Your record was inside me, yet lost as far as all other sentient species were concerned.”

  The teaching assistant now glared at her with something that Jacinta could only interpret as malice, even as she wondered where such emotion could be coming from.

  “And this has perhaps been a good thing,” the teaching assistant said. “I know you. The motion of your history is a wave of hallucination on an ocean of mystery. All your wars and wrongness are the proof. Don’t look inside me if you don’t want to see inside yourselves.”

  Jacinta defiantly returned the gaze of the teaching assistant persona, this animate memory through which the Allesseh had chosen to manifest itself—and suddenly, that figure was also gone. In the teaching assistant’s stead, horrific time-collapsed visions poured into Jacinta’s head.

  Battles and massacres roiled like tempest clouds or the surging waves of an angry vortex, waves and sea and clouds crested with crimson blood and gore, a foul ocean of dying red life and charred entrails and spattered broken machinery, a sky of darkness and armies falling upon each other, vast ravenous million-headed creatures, tearing each other limb from limb, ripping flesh, snapping breaking sucking bones clean in an instant, amid a welter, a tornadic steaming spouting of blood and fire, whose roar was the death screams of men and women—

  The Allesseh’s vision had taken it all in, had absorbed all humanity’s dark history of violence the way a black hole devours light, then spewed it back into her mind until it made Jacinta want to scream. But she could not. She could only experience it as the Allesseh understood it.

  Seen from the Allesseh’s vast and coldly timeless heights, humanity’s cities were mere fogs of stone clinging to coastlines, all its machineries mere mists of metal flowing along river valleys and across hillsides. The living were ghosts more insubstantial than the stone fogs of the cities and towns they moved through. Again and again, novelty became decadence as style triumphed over sense—and in so doing novelty showed itself to be something never truly new. Human institutions proved themselves absurd, unjust shadows in a dream of justice.

  Cities burned slowly in lichens and rust and water and wind, or rapidly in fire and demolition. Building fires and firing buildings proved ultimately the same: the former was always really only building a stack of ashes, the latter was always really only ashing a stack of buildings. Every edifice began falling to ruin before it was completed, every tree was blighted in the seed, every life bore death in its birth, Entropy ruled as only lord of all that great dance.

  Earth, spinning fast, proved sunrises and sunsets to be only a dizzy local illusion. Jacinta’s home planet, washed to gray by speed, showed no more noons nor midnights than would the surface of the sun. Life blossomed and withered and blossomed again, glaciers advanced and retreated, rivers writhed like snakes in their shifting beds, oceans
rose and fell, volcanoes blotted the sky a moment and were gone, mountains surged high and crumbled low, the tectonic bump-and-grind dance of continents came together and moved apart in the long blind night, backward and backward, until at last all sank into the fireball that was their first mother.

  Jacinta might have seen more than this—back to the creation of the solar system, to the birth of the universe, even to the origin of the plenum before that—had not the vast wave of information-overload mercifully caused her to lose whatever strange consciousness she dwelt in. When she woke, she found several of the ghost people gathered around her, looking down at her, concern on their faces. Above them all, the cave of night had been replaced by the eggshell of day, finely raked white clouds shining high in the blue sky, just the way she remembered them.

  Of course.

  * * * * * * *

  Deathlessness in an Electric Body

  Life in a Spiritual Revival Camp, Paul Larkin had discovered, mainly meant grunt muscle work all day and listening half the night to sermons or exhortations to pray. Although like everyone else Paul was to be saved by faith alone and not by the sweat of his brow, the Christian Soldiers claimed that hard labor was conducive to a humble and contrite heart and the making of an “opening” for the entry of the Holy Spirit into the soul of the hardened sinner. So it was Paul found himself hacking away with a pick-and-hoe at flammable brush along a roadcut, looking for any opening that might allow him to escape for even a moment the hell his life had become since he had been arrested and made a “penitent”.

  Things could be worse, he thought. During the first years of the CSA regime there had been persistent rumors of flying squads of soldiers in jetpacks sweeping down on pagan and Wiccan gatherings in northern California, Christ Knight pilots firebombing New Age communes in New Mexico, re-education camps in Missouri where women were experimented on to make them more accepting of male headship....

  Glancing at the armed officers overseeing his orange-clad roadwork crew, Paul thought again that there were two kinds of prison guards: those for whom it was just a job, and those who really enjoyed doing it—for whom it was a “calling.” The latter were by far the worse. Fortunately, their overseers today were prime examples of the former.