by Paul Hughes
“Wh—What?”
“Flynn and Hayes. I saw your eyes. You could have pulled them up, but instead, you let go and let them die. Their blood’s on your hands.”
“I... They—”
“They’re humans, aren’t they? They aren’t aliens. The people who destroyed our planet were god damned humans. How are we supposed to trust you? How the hell do we know that you aren’t the Enemy? You and these Judas? I had dreams in the stasis, too. Nightmares. But I’m not sure that they were dreams. Machines… Screaming, raging people... A war. And Richter... You have a lot to tell us. Get started.” West shifted down, backed away from Zero-Four.
“How do you know that the Judas aren’t the Enemy?”
West stood in silence.
“How do you know that I’m not the Enemy?”
Silence.
“This is how.”
Michael Zero-Four raised his forearms, which began to radiate a faint glow. The flickering aura of shifting emerged. Zero-Four looked at them with cold silver eyes.
Patra walked into the light. “He’s a Styx. Jesus, he’s a Styx.”
“I’m a Judas.”
“My time wasn’t like yours.”
He spoke quietly, unassumingly, even though they could all see the pain in his eyes as he told them the history of a future now long dead. The rage of just moments ago was nowhere to be found on his countenance.
Simon was still silent, and the vessel floated adrift in an unknown universe. Within, they sat in the control chamber, the viewscreens black and dead and hopeless. Each sound fell flatly into the strange gravity of the spherical room.
“I don’t know where to even begin.”
“You could tell us your name. And where we are. And how the hell President Jennings got on to your spaceship.” West looked over to where Jennings was sitting on the black floor, his arms draped around his daughter. She did not appear to care how her father had been rescued; she was simply content that he was there.
Zero-Four smiled weakly, nodded.
“My name’s Michael. Michael Zero-Four.”
“What kind of a name is Zero-Four?”
“What kind of a name is Adam West?”
West frowned. “It’s a human name. A real name. What does the Zero-Four mean? And how’d you know my name? I never told you my god-damned name.”
“That’s not all I know about you, Adam.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“Well, I know that you hate something called the ‘Batman.’ I know you cheated on your fifth grade geography test that you had to take a week late because you were in the hospital with a temperature of one-hundred six degrees and they placed you in a bathtub full of ice water and you couldn’t for the life of you remember the capitals of all fifty-seven states. I know you first made love to Abigail on the night of your high school graduation and when you woke up the next morning it was raining and you could hear the raindrops hitting the roof above you and she was there next to you, warm and sleeping and entangled in your arms, and you’ve never felt that content again. And I know that the suspicions David has about you and his daughter are unfounded. You’re a gentleman. I know everything that you were, and everything that you will be, Adam.”
West’s face was an emotional battlefield. His eyes were a subtle mixture of fury and grief. “Who are you?”
He blinked, eyebrows furrowed. “I’m Michael Zero-Four. Program Seven, pattern cache Judas Golgotha Simon, emulation zero-four, Michael.”
“You’re talking like you’re a fucking computer file.”
He laughed, more to himself than to his audience. “Aren’t we all?”
“I don’t—What are you talking about? No, of course I’m not a—”
“No, you wouldn’t know about it. How could I have been so blind? I just assumed since you’re—You don’t know yet because you haven’t lived it yet.”
Jennings stood, arms crossed, hand on chin. “Maybe I can do a better job of explaining it to them, Michael. It was quite a shock when I first heard it, myself.”
“Daddy, what’s going on?” Patra had gravitated to West’s side when her father stood up. “Where are we?”
“Patty, it’s not a question of where we are anymore. It’s a question of when and what we are.”
Patra shook her head, her face beginning to reveal the fear that lurked beneath its surface. “Don’t talk like that. It’s sometime in August, and we’re people. We’re human beings.”
The sadly blank look on her father’s face only intensified the look of confusion and worry on Patra’s. “Stop it. Don’t tell me… Daddy, don’t… It’s August. It has to be August.”
Jennings crouched to Patra’s level, took her silver hands in his. “It’s not that simple anymore, Patty. It’s not that simple at all.”
“It has to be August.” Patra’s eyes had taken on a childlike glaze as she fought against everything that her life had become.
“It’s not August, Patty. It’s… It’s autumn now. It’s more like a perpetual autumn now.”
“Just tell us what this is all about.” West looked in disgust at Zero-Four and the president of a nation from a planet and an existence now dead. “Stop playing these games. Just fucking tell us.”
“I think it’d be better if we just showed you.” Jennings gently smiled, and his form took on a shimmering, static quality.
“Daddy, what…” Patra’s face was awe and confusion masking a denial of the evidence before her. Jennings’ outline faded, and West suddenly found that his thoughts were no longer his own, and his mind was filled with the nightmare of the end of time and the impossible made possible.
Silence.
No heartbeat, no inhalation or exhalation. Silence that was utterly complete. The void negates the presence of sound.
It had been travelling for longer than forever, and when at last it landed on the barren rock, the exhaustion was overbearing. With its last mechanical breath, it created an exact duplicate of itself, which bounded from the rock without a look back at its sole parent. The dead metal shell that remained on the surface of the asteroid melted into a pool of silver.
A universe of silver, stretching in all directions ad infinitum et ad nauseam.
“What are they?”
“They’re our children. They’re who we became when the planet died.”
“Machines?”
“More than machines. Gods.”
Grossly misinterpreted data collected by a race like children who were left on a moody green planet when the old galaxy collapsed led generations of the species to believe that their rock was the center of all that existed. Arrogant, they actually thought that they could live between the stars, travel the night between the galaxies, survive in the eternal cold of the void. Hubris begets punishment.
A planet overpopulated by billions, a society tearing itself apart, a planet struggling to maintain its life. When the atmosphere began to turn black, when the plants would no longer grow, when people warred over water and land and the right to procreate, some began to realize that humanity was exacting a revenge on the planetary organism that would in the end kill it.
The race to abandon the planet began long before the year-long nights and the continental firestorms. Provisions had been made. Technological developments were hoarded so that only the best and brightest would survive the apocalypse. The boundary between man and machine had long since been crossed in the years of Artificials and virtual wars. When the time came to leave the planet to the dying masses, only one machine would be sent, a probe of von Neumann design and Tesla science and Tipler vision, a machine within which would be stored the precious uploaded patterns of as many individuals as it could hold, living out their days in emulated worlds with emulated wives and emulated children and emulated dogs and cats and waitresses and bosses and firemen and rebellious teenage suitors for rebellious teenage daughters. The emulated worlds would replace the abandoned, dying planet, at least until it could heal and be repopulated by the chosen few
.
They made one machine, a tiny vessel possessing all of one hundred grams of matter. It left the planet carrying the souls of billions in its tiny mechanical heart.
“The planet was dying, so they put themselves on machines?”
“Their emulations were uploaded into the machine, yes.”
“I don’t—”
“Emulations are programs running on a very powerful computer that recreate everything that a person was in the real world. When they were uploaded, their minds were translated into pattern that the machine could read and interpret into the emulation.”
West still frowned. “How can a person become a computer program?”
“Where does the electricity in your brain go when you die, West?”
“I—I don’t know. No one knows. It disappears.”
Zero-Four shook his head. “I know where it goes. I know where it is. We took it, and we put it on the machine. You’ll never die, West. You’ve been uploaded into Program Seven. You’ve been translated into code.”
West scoffed. “I’m not one of your emulations.”
“Do you think a goldfish realizes that there is a world beyond its own, that there are rivers and lakes and oceans? You’re not in your bowl anymore. You’re in the ocean. You haven’t been in your world since… Well, since you became what you call a ‘Styx’. Once you came out of the light, you were changed, right?”
West nodded.
“And no one could explain the change?”
“No one knew what the light was.”
“When you went into that light, you were uploaded into Judas Program Seven. That’s why you can do things that other people can’t. You’re not on the same level of phase space anymore. Close, but not close enough.”
“That vessel was one of yours?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how it got there any more than you do.”
“I’m a computer file.”
“Something like that. We’re all just lines of code in the Judas program. This is all a part of the emulation.”
“What about me?” Patra had a troubled look on her face. “Am I a part of your program?” She held out her silver hands. “Is this a part of your program?”
Movement without thought.
Alone, racing away from a dead world, a machine flies without emotion.
The mission was simple. Wait for the expansion and collapse, find a new place to live when the universe was once again stable enough to permit life. The universal heat death saw to the impossibility of organic life. The machine waited through the billions of billions of billions of years. Human calculation was a travesty marked by paradigm paralysis. Did the flicker of organic human life that lasted all of about five million years count for anything in this void beyond comprehension? The machine doubted its mission but persevered, making exact replicas of itself that populated the universe according to the mission.
Countless miniscule machines, each holding their precious cache of emulated humanities, waited in the black, procreated in the black. The heat death ended with the sudden and furious universal collapse that brought heat and the possibility of life once again to existence. A constant evolution: machines of liquid silver. Machines becoming smaller and faster and stronger and more powerful. The universe of silver became a chaos of movement as the infinite number of machines sped off to repopulate it. The network of thought that had formed between the machines in the aeons of silence resonated with the new hope of organic life.
“Network of thought? The machines became one organism?”
“In a way… The collapsing universe brought with it enough heat and energy to power the machines ad infinitum. Still they reproduced, generation after generation. There was an evolution of sorts; the machines were no longer self-sufficient solitary organisms. The vastness of the universe was rapidly decreasing, so more machines were filling up less and less space. They began to adapt, evolving into smaller, faster vehicles for the emulated universes. Microscopic, then subatomic. They merged into what we would consider a liquid metal. Universes of subatomic machines, flowing through the physical universe that we know. They began to coalesce.”
“Coalesce into what?”
“Omega.”
It crashed into the ocean of a tiny blue planet in a tiny solar system on the outer ridge of a nondescript galaxy on the outer ridge of the macroverse. It would of course never know that it was from this very speck of rock that it had emerged in the first place.
The machine took its time repopulating the planet. Although the universe was collapsing, it would be a long, long time before any of these biological creatures had to worry about it. Emulations of the microorganisms were the first to be downloaded, and as they populated the oceans and land and air, the machine set about the process of recreating the larger and more important species that it carried within its emulation cache.
Millions of years, generations of machines. The planet was teeming with life once again. The machine and its mechanical offspring judged that it was time to recreate its most precious emulated cargo.
Millions of years, generations of man. The machines were ever-present and revered as gods. The new human race knew little of the emulated histories that had unfolded in the billions of years in the blackness between the stars. Mankind and machine co-existed peacefully, and the night sky was a dazzling field of silver as other machines populated other worlds with humanity.
“The night sky was silver with machines.”
“It was as silver as your eyes, Patra. The machines were everywhere, an ocean of vessels in the void between the stars, an endless network of silverthought. The collapsing universe became one organism because of the offspring of one simple machine.”
“It was your machine, wasn’t it? The original probe?”
“How did you know that?”
Patra shrugged her shoulders. “There are echoes of that past in the Enemy within me.” Zero-Four shuddered to hear her mechanical voice utter such a prophetic statement.
“Yes, it was my machine.”
“And now it’s your mission to destroy it.”
“Yes.”
A sky blackened by war and disease and centuries of gaiacide. The only lights studded the rim of the launch tunnel, and even they were murky in the dead air of the dying world.
“Almost time, Michael.”
“Yes.”
“There’s still time to change your mind, you know.”
“I can’t go.”
The earth shuddered beneath them almost imperceptibly. Men in clean suits ran to the vehicles and sped away from the edge of the launch tunnel, forty miles away. Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped away the stale sweat that had collected on his eyebrows and in the hollows of his eyes.
“Starting final countdown sequence. Any more to board?”
Expectant eyes regarded him with almost pity. He shook his head.
“Shut down the upload link. Initiate primary engine test sequence.”
The earth began to resonate with the power of the massive engines that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface. There could be no turning back now.
“Test shows positive across the board. Waiting for coordinate lock.”
The binoculars went back to his eyes. The edge of the launch tunnel looked deceivingly calm, bereft of the hundreds of clean-suited workers that had toiled over every inch of its interior for decades.
“Coordinate lock achieved. Planetary position is a go. Launch window open. Launch on your order, sir.”
Michael nodded his understanding. All hope for the continuation of the human species lay in the precious golden machine bundled safely within the launch vehicle. Millions of emulated humans living emulated lives in emulated worlds where the emulated sun still shined and the emulated water was still pure. Someday they would come home. They were the ark. When the planet had finally healed, they could come home and live again.
“Engage Gauss cycle in launch tower.”
“Gauss engaged.”
“Engage primary thrusters.”
“Primary thrusters engaged.”
With this machine, all hope lay.
“Launch.”
“Launching vehicle.”
The binoculars revealed a tunnel entrance that flickered with the Gauss cycle. Michael held on to the bunker wall with one hand to steady himself; the ground beneath them shook noticeably and fiercely. Never before had a vessel of such size or power been launched from the planet surface.
Where is it?
“Gauss cycle at max. Vehicle launched.”
Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and replaced them with blackened blast goggles. The vehicle emerged from the launch tunnel with a stark white ferocity that painfully illuminated the bunker interior and flash-reddened Michael’s face immediately. The sound and heat and light were unbearable even from forty miles out, but then it was gone, and the vehicle was out of the atmosphere.
“Launch successful. Vehicle has broken orbit.”
Goodbye, my child. Goodbye, my children.
“All right. Good.” Michael regarded his launch crew. “Start the disassembly process. Everything has to be taken apart before we abandon the city. There’s sure to be a resistance attack now that they know we’ve launched.”
“You have to realize that we had no other choice but to escape the planet as emulations. So many attempts had been made to colonize the planets of our solar system, but they had all failed. The human mind is valiant, persevering, unbreakable. The human body is a fragile and useless thing. A triviality. When the technological ability to upload human consciousness was finally realized, I knew that we could at least guarantee the future continuation of the human race, even if we all died. Once the planet healed, the machine could come back and recreate it in our image.”
“But something happened to the machines while they were gone? They changed out there between the stars.”
“They became self-aware. We expected that they would. We designed them to evolve. We didn’t design them to place more value on the emulated worlds than reality, though. We didn’t design them to improve themselves to the point where time travel in a liquid universe would be possible. We could never have known that the machines would judge our universe unworthy of them and strive to build a new universe in the image of their emulated cargo, a universe of phase space. The vast network of the machine mind did change somewhere out there.”