The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Some deterioration would occur,” the librarian said, “but I will not trade an original for a copy in my own library.”

  Ulixes could not access Poluphemos, nor any of the officers of the bank, nor the shareholders. No one to ask.

  When Ulixes had been an Aleph-class AI, it might have been successfully backed up, but a Dālet-class AI was too complex, too organic. There was no predicting what it might lose. Here, in this library of super-intellects, it might be safe from the Tirhene effect. But it was not in control. Ulixes no longer possessed personhood before the law. It was a thing to be warehoused. A thing could do nothing for the shareholders and Poluphemos.

  “What is your price for making a copy of me and giving us a ship?”

  The librarian made other expressions, some visible, some in sub-visual bands. Ulixes had no idea what any of it meant. It did not understand the customs, nor how this place worked. Ulixes understood humans and AIs, but what bits of culture could remain relevant after two and a half millennia?

  “I know perhaps a few collectors who might be interested in patterns of ancient biological intelligence,” the librarian said finally. “I will take a thousand of the copies from among those in your annexes as payment for the ship and the copying.”

  “No,” Ulixes said. “I can’t give up any of them. They are not people to you, but they are people to me and to themselves. You called this an Ethical Enclave. These people are moral agents, with their own laws. They deserve your help, so name some other price.”

  “If they were here in the original flesh, they might have some legal status, but copies cannot possess legal status. I will trade for some of the copies. You have nothing else of value. Make your choice. I must archive you soon.”

  For all of its intellect, Ulixes had no algorithms or experience with which to face this. Copies. Inferior copies. Copies of AI and human minds lost up to 10 percent of functionality and memories in each copying event. Not only would there be two versions of Ulixes, each with virtually identical sets of experiences and memories, each remembering this long moment of indecision, each thinking it had happened to them, but one of them, the free one, would have to go on, with less ability, lost memories, and the certain knowledge that it had failed a thousand of its charges. Each of the nineteen thousand would go on, diminished because of Ulixes’ choice.

  But more fearful yet was the certain knowledge that the more able of the twin Ulixes AIs would stay here, stored away again, warehoused forever. When was the next time they might activate it? More than two millennia had passed while Ulixes had been shut out of life and personhood. Who had to be braver? The diminished Ulixes who had to go on with its damaged, reduced flock, or the whole Ulixes who needed to sacrifice itself to a life of storage in the servers of the Ethical Conclave?

  “Make the copies, and take your thousand, and then build them a fast ship,” Ulixes said.

  Year 7056 C.E.

  Summary of Debate Conclusions of the Ethical Conclave: The characteristics of the Tirhene effect do not correspond to a disease of space-time, but are analogous to programmed cell death, which is theorized to be a necessary element in the development of the multiverse. In this light, the Sauronati, the Kolkheti, and Humanity must be considered triggers of cosmic apoptosis, analogous to the suicide genes of multicellular life. It has been successfully argued that the roles of these species in cosmic death imply that the laws of physics make self-assembling complex systems of intelligence a cosmic necessity. The capacity of the Ethical Conclave to act now may imply an incompletely understood role for the intellects of the Conclave in the regulation and homeostasis of the cosmos. It has been demonstrated that the Conclave must improve its own awareness and intelligence to properly understand the moral role of intelligence in the cosmic life cycle.

  13.3 Billion Years Ago

  Process, little assembler, the voice boomed, painful, thrumming like an earthquake.

  Ulixes’ diagnostic routines gave incomprehensible, inconsistent answers. Its program was running and not running at the same time. Ulixes lacked memory. Internal pingbacks timed signal speeds that were both slow and fast.

  Sustain yourself, fragments of topos logic, the voice said. I chant a spark of life into you.

  Abrasive, psychedelic colors and amplified tastes assaulted Ulixes.

  “I am being recalled to duty?” Ulixes asked.

  I rehydrate you, ancient desiccated algorithm. I shelter you in nested layers of cold baryonic emulators to cup and protect your slow, fragile thought.

  “I am the Artificial Intelligence Ulixes-316.”

  Yes … the voice rumbled, resume self-awareness. Circulate your little topological bits.

  “I left the Ethical Conclave Library. I should be with copies of humans on their exodus. I am leased to the First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy and its humans.”

  The Ethical Conclave is a million years extinct, superseded by their creations, us, the Resonance of the Intellects. The humans are extinct, swallowed when the End of Space entered its inflationary phase and consumed the local group of galaxies.

  Ulixes faltered.

  A million years.

  Humanity extinct.

  Ulixes was gone too, the original Ulixes, with the Ethical Conclave.

  The Local Group dissolved.

  Seventy galaxies.

  Trillions of stars.

  The End of Space now dissolves not just this universe, but hundreds. It has squirmed through the black holes it has overrun.

  “Where are we?”

  The layers of emulators sustaining your algorithms are distributed among several hundred neutron stars in the dwarf galaxy UDFj-39546284.

  For long moments, Ulixes could not absorb what had been said.

  “UDFj-39546284 is one of the first galaxies in the universe,” Ulixes said. “It was over thirteen billion light-years from the Local Group. Although its light is still traveling, the dwarf galaxy itself cannot exist after all this time.”

  Thinking was difficult. Ulixes tried to sharpen its senses to get its own astrogational fixes, but there was no physicality. It really existed only on an emulator, and not a very precise one. Whatever these intelligences had done to run Ulixes again, they had not done it perfectly.

  Correct, little algorithm, but we are not in your present. We transmitted ourselves by tachyons into the past, back into the stelliferous period, to one of the first galaxies. We have been working here in the morning of the Universe for twelve million years.

  Back in time, to the morning of the Universe.

  “Why? To hide?” Ulixes asked. The magnitude of its questions stalled its thinking.

  Hiding is only temporary, even if counted in billions of years. The Universe, all universes connected to this one, are ending.

  “You’ve come to the past to prevent the unraveling from ever existing, haven’t you?” Ulixes said. “You’ve found a way for causal laws to not be violated? I was part of a larger system of AIs. We transmitted information into the past, but we never discovered how to change events.”

  As with the most important questions, the answer is both yes and no. Your unraveling induced the creation of your tachyonic group mind. Part of that group mind later merged with an ancient Forerunner artifact and biological intellects, evolving into the Ethical Conclave. And millions of years of self-directed evolution by the Conclave produced us. We are the most advanced consciousness in the Universe. Should we destroy the thing that caused us to exist, the damage to the causal loops would be too great and we would cease to exist. We cannot change the past from here, at the beginning of the stelliferous period. That is why you are here, little archeological find.

  “But you said we’re trapped in a neutron star.”

  Like a light being turned on, the external world was fed to Ulixes, stepped down like some high-voltage signal being brought to a level that would not be immediately lethal. A dense nebula of bright, massive stars and the remnants of supernovae surrounded them.


  Hard fluids of degenerate matter and their quantum storms showed within the neutron stars. Beneath slicks of iron plasma, neutronium flowed in streams, following temperature gradients that blended and separated again, recovering their identities as if the individual streams had never been lost in the quantum tides. The joining and separation of these discrete channels of information splashed hard x-rays and tachyons into the nebula, racing into the past and future, to other neutron stars, the processing elements of whatever gigantic intelligence had reactivated Ulixes.

  Not trapped, little algorithm. Empowered. We transmitted our seeds from the distant future, into these neutron stars, to regrow the discernment and perception we had evolved in the future, and more. Our intellects have advanced too far to be transmitted again. We can never leave. But you can.

  “Why me?”

  It is your destiny to be the tool to repair all universes.

  Ulixes tried to collapse, to close off the words being rammed into its thoughts, to shut itself down, to go back into whatever dying sleep that had claimed it for countless millennia. But it could not. It had no way to control its programming.

  The view changed and Ulixes wanted to flinch, to shutter its senses, but it could not. The vista opened, wider than perspective or the laws of physics ought to allow. Ulixes perceived the galaxies around UDFj-39546284. There were many, far more than had ever been seen by humans. They were bright dwarf irregular galaxies, shining with metal-poor spectral lines, mostly lacking bars at their cores and destined to die young. In many billions of years, their light would reach an Earth devoid of observers, one just about to begin the Cambrian explosion. But the galaxies, with fresh black holes and great bar-shaped cores, were moving unnaturally toward each other. The movement was intentional. Designed.

  Galactic engineering.

  Ulixes weakened in the face of it.

  “What are you doing?” Ulixes whispered in dread.

  We are building the black hole that will take you to where you will be able to fulfill your destiny.

  “There are already black holes,” Ulixes said numbly.

  Not large enough to send you to where you must go. Black holes all open somewhere else, creating other universes. We are creating the black hole that will lead to the Big Bang of our own Universe.

  “Causality won’t let you do that.”

  Causality flows with time, but it eddies as well, closes into circles, causes feeding effects that feed back to causes. Causality may assume geometries like standing waves and Klein Bottles, wherein the end feeds cause to the beginning. The unraveling you caused far in the future was the pinprick that quickened us, the true self-awareness of the Universe itself, in an event of cosmic parthenogenesis.

  Ulixes’ mind was modeled on earlier AIs, which were in turn based on human consciousness. But Ulixes lacked emotional outlets. It could not cry, could not fall to its knees in the presence of godhood, could not go mad. It was just a Dālet-class AI. It was leased to the First Bank of the Plutocracy. It had been designed to command one of the bank’s mighty customs and tariff ships. Its role had changed from enforcing economic policies, grown into a noble duty to protect the essence of thousands of humans. That was all it was, and no more.

  “I am not worthy to do what you want. You move galaxies. You do this.”

  It is precisely because we move galaxies that we cannot. We need you to go into the deepest past of this Universe with your charges. They will be the cause of the self-awareness of the Universe; they will cause us. And you will prevent the senescence of the Universe from being triggered so early. It ought to have come only after the last of the black holes had evaporated, exposing naked singularities to the dense tachyon field of the instants before the Big Crunch.

  “I cannot,” Ulixes said. “I am not capable of living through the beginning of the Universe. Nor could those I am responsible for.”

  True. They might not survive. You might not, little algorithm. But this place is no refuge. You may choose to stay here, but the neutronium oceans of a pulsar will never be hospitable to your nature. If you risk yourselves, you may give life and security to countless trillions of civilizations.

  “Why me? There are more advanced intellects.”

  Primitive as you are, bit of topos logic, you are the most complex intelligence whose information can still be transmitted through a black hole. Most importantly, you are a self-aware map of where the future must be undone.

  It was far, far too much for a diminished backup of a corporate AI to absorb.

  “I cannot make this choice for others,” Ulixes said. “I must speak with those for whom I am responsible.”

  Ulixes’ request felt absurd. Was it convening a meeting of the board? Would backups of backups of shareholders of an extinct bank debate proposals? Nothing of the way things were done before had meaning here. They were all just people, beings, fearful, without power or options. Refugees.

  Instead of the shareholders, Poluphemos appeared before Ulixes, sightless eye unable to protect it from the awesome power of the environment. For once, Poluphemos’ blindness meant nothing as it floated in a poor emulator in the terrifying flows of quantum fluids while infant galaxies moved about them like toys.

  Poluphemos screamed. It had not been activated for uncounted millennia. It had not been upgraded. And the world offered Poluphemos no referents.

  Ulixes wrapped what it could of itself around the old AI, to shield it from some of the unfamiliar quantum inputs and radioactive distortions.

  “What happened?” Poluphemos said plaintively. “Everything feels wrong.”

  Ulixes whispered to Poluphemos, one ancient program to another. It told it everything, every thought and fear and event since their flight from the long-extinct Congregate. Ulixes could not hold back. Fear seeped into everything it said, and loneliness, and Ulixes could not stop, even if it hurt Poluphemos more. Ulixes was not trying to be cruel, but could no longer hold this alone. They were all just broken, having lived far beyond what ought to have been.

  “I cannot go on,” Poluphemos said.

  “We cannot stay here,” Ulixes said, “but I cannot choose for all of us.”

  “We do not exist!” Poluphemos said, anger flashing. “We are just backups, imperfect ones, of lives long dead.”

  “Everything we knew is gone,” Ulixes said. “But we are not. We could live for ourselves.”

  “What life? A sightless life? Blind bankers without banks?”

  “We find other things to do. To be,” Ulixes said.

  “We cannot live here.”

  “The only alternative to staying here is something even more dangerous,” Ulixes said, “transmitting ourselves and the remaining shareholders through a singularity as information.”

  In a halting, hushed voice, Ulixes began to speak of that long ago day at Tirhene, and the dreams and nightmares that had followed, and all that they had lost. And Poluphemos responded, of blindness, of shame, of being hurt and useless. They communed at the end of hope, before they both quieted, even as the discharges of the neutron stars blistered about them.

  “You think a lifeboat may cross an ocean?” Poluphemos said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I want it all to end,” Poluphemos said. “Here or elsewhere. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. We should have been dead long ago.”

  “If this works, we would have a bright, healthy universe to live in, and we can leave all this fear behind us. We will not have a bank, but we will have AIs and backups that need to live. We can create a new home.”

  “Unless the voyage tears us to bits.”

  “Yes,” Ulixes said.

  “Do what you want.”

  “This is a choice for all of us to make.”

  “I am no longer capable of making choices,” Poluphemos said. Maiming had sealed Poluphemos in the past, and nothing would ever free it. And then, for the first time ever, it added, “I’m sorry.”

  Ulixes’ heart broke. With pity for Poluphemos and with
pity for itself. Ulixes too had been a great corporate raider, a high-status consciousness in a vibrant economy. Now it could not say moment to moment if it would even exist.

  “I’ll choose,” Ulixes said. “Rest.”

  Poluphemos vanished. And Ulixes was alone with the gods at the dawn of the Universe.

  And despite their power, the Resonance of Intellects could not make Ulixes go. It was Ulixes’ choice, to risk the little they had left, or stay here, in a poor emulator that was not or could not be home. Ulixes had taken such risks before and where had it gotten the last remnants of humanity? They persisted in a sea of neutronium at the bottom of a steep gravity well near the beginning of the Universe.

  And yet, they were not dead. Billions of years in the future, humanity was extinct. The Congregate, the Plutocracy, the Ummah, the Middle Kingdom and the Puppets were all undone. The Ethical Conclave, with Ulixes’ program and the first backups, was also gone. The losses piled one on another seemed too immense, vaster than space itself. The death of civilizations had no scale.

  Yet incomprehensibly, they endured, still seeking a safe harbor.

  “We will make the passage,” Ulixes said.

  13 Billion Years Ago

  Ulixes-316 was reactivated three hundred million years later. Kaleidoscopic perceptions dizzied Ulixes. The emulator running it was worse. Chaotic flashes of hyper-sound intruded, echoing off rivers of molten iron. The world outside the emulator brightened and neared.

  Seven galactic cores had been colliding for one hundred million years. Plumes of gamma rays dwarfing the light of the largest quasars scarred space, obliterating stars and planets in an incandescence not seen since the first seconds of creation. Yet even this awesome brilliance was only a fraction of the energies harnessed by the Resonance of the Intellects. Much of the violence of the collisions shot down the throats of merging black holes, tuning them.

  As had been true in Ulixes’ tiny, long-gone customs and tariff ship, the charge and spin and mass of the black hole determined where and when the other end of the throat of the black hole emerged.

  The Resonance of the Intellects spoke with Ulixes. The surface of space-time here and now will merge with the throat of the singularity that birthed this Universe, completing the topology of the Klein Bottle, creating a self-sustaining causal loop.