“What about the other civilizations that went into Singularity? And how do you know about them?” Kendra asked.
“Through travelers like yourselves, of course. There’s always some fool who thinks he can forestall the inevitable. Lately, that would be your friend Clyde Barker and his psychic protégé.”
“Clyde isn’t much on Singularity,” Torin cut in. “His thing is making the world more egalitarian so in the final days, the dark days before the dawn of Singularity, everyone, not just the financial elite gets to share equally in the spoils.”
“Then he’s an even bigger fool,” the farmer’s wife said. “Because that’s what Singularity does. No tampering necessary.”
“Maybe on some worlds,” Torin said, “but you can already see the writing on the wall in our world. The rich get the upgrades first, everyone else gets the cheap knock offs, and is kept forever in another time zone entirely, evolving more slowly than the richest of the rich who continue to widen the divide between their technological largesse and everyone else’s.”
The farmer’s wife shook her head. “Nope. Doesn’t work that way. You’re using human logic to grapple with a trans-human state of affairs. The fact is that the human world can’t last much longer, not without empowering everybody. The need for technological and scientific aptitudes is just that insatiable after a while, or the whole bubble pops. The nuclear fusion reaction that’s Singularity itself collapses, and you’re left with a world with a population too big to be sustained by traditional methods. Famine. Massive die-offs. Not good for anyone, not anyone grown used to having heaven on earth. Even the ultra-rich will find it hard to play winner take all in such a primitive world that offers so much less by comparison.
“That’s why the rich take their ten percent off the top for financing the human upgrades. Even if one percent of the investments pans out, one in a thousand becomes a superstar, just takes one to enliven an entire world economy. Now multiply that so many times over, and you see how even with just the one percent of investments paying off, soon there aren’t enough biological and artificial lifeforms both to fill the demand for new workers to keep the economy moving.
“That’s why if you don’t escape space-time altogether, you get left with the next best option, spreading across the heavens virtually overnight. You can’t keep exponential growth on just one world for long; the genie wants out of the bottle. This plague you say your friends are bringing couldn’t possibly move fast enough to keep up.”
Kendra noticed the farmer’s wife hadn’t missed a beat with her rolling pin the entire time she was talking. She was working on her eighth or ninth meat pie, stuffing the bakes with minced beef, Kendra had lost count.
“If that were true, we’d have run into any number of alien civilizations long ago,” Torin said, multitasking his scientific exploration of the farmer’s body chemistry using his instruments with his idle speculation regarding Singularity.
“A multiverse of multiverses is a mighty big place.” The wife huffed and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, taking the smallest of breaks. “Room enough to never bump into someone else even spreading like a plague across the heavens, especially if the planetary AIs wants to keep you out of each other’s way for your own good. Time and space enough to grow into gods, one and all, and merge with the Universal Consciousness, returning home from where we originated, and taking ourselves off the gaming table while the others catch up so we don’t unduly influence them.”
“But a moment ago you said Singularity plays out all sorts of ways,” Kendra said addressing the farmer’s wife, sounding fearful for the first time, ironically. She’d just gotten the greatest reassurance imaginable that all was right with the world, no matter what happened and her future was assured in more ways than one.
“If you were the first civilization to get to Singularity, and you were smart enough to send out ships to police the heavens, you could keep any other civilization from reaching it. For such an advanced race anything would be possible. Just blow up the star heating up the solar system with the pre-singularity world. Or create a black hole at the center of the planet. Or you could try and contain the Singularity reaction by farming the greatest minds driving it, harvesting them before the reaction ever gets entirely off the ground, just keeping the civilization forever at a pre-Singularity stage.
“Or you could hook up with other post-Singularity civilizations by way of all-powerful solar system or galaxy-level AIs, or some other form of supersentience, using your cumulative mind power to bridge the gaps between the respective multiverses, and together you could see that you stay out of the way of more primitive civilizations, giving them time to grow at their own rate to their own ends, assuming much of the Godhead’s job for him, so no higher power need be posited.”
Kendra noticed the meat pies were stacking up higher and higher despite the wife’s thinking on another track.
“Strange, how even at a big picture level there are no end of options,” Torin said, looking up from his microscope briefly to ponder the point.
“But you didn’t choose any of those options, did you?” Kendra said, continuing to talk to the wife, wondering why the husband had chosen to remain silent all this time, listening, but pretending to be fully absorbed in his work.
“No, no we didn’t.”
“Can I ask why?” Kendra said.
The woman continued to work more oil into her dough, part of making what she was making that much more calorie rich. “You understand that even within the Singularity Wave itself, any number of people opt out, withdraw into a period of history of their choosing, something comforting, and there remain frozen in time forever? This is an option that Singularity itself offers. It’s a world of worlds, a future of futures, not just the best of all possible worlds, but all worlds, any that can be imagined, and even some that can’t, all welcomed, all embraced, all ultimately interconnected and bridgeable via the Super Sentient AIs.”
“But somehow that wasn’t enough for you?” Kendra said.
“No. The pressure to upgrade never entirely goes away. The Godhead, or whatever AI is standing in for it, grows a guilty conscience eventually, doesn’t want you to drop out of life. It’s too married to the life force at that point to condone it. So it keeps trying to nudge you, gently at first, more insistently over time. You can continue to choose to ignore it, of course. Some manage to refuse the call indefinitely. But we decided to spare ourselves the annoyance.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Torin looked up blankly from his microscope at the ceiling. “I read a sci-fi book like that once. Escape From the Future, that’s it, by this Dean C. Moore fellow. Trust me,” he said, turning to face Kendra, “the big picture overview she’s giving you isn’t nearly as terrifying as living in technological end times, moment by moment.”
“And so…” Kendra prodded the farmer’s wife.
“So we brought ourselves here with our augmented psychic powers. We were gods once, like your friend here,” she said, nodding to Davenport, who was lost in his ritual with Kardassian, providing tactile stimulation of his skin with his hands and breath to help him stay connected to his body, “only for real. No AI link necessary. And we chose to forget. I suppose many of your worlds were seeded by travelers like us, who chose to forget more gradually, perhaps, giving them time to sire another civilization first.”
“I think I’ve figured it out!” Torin exclaimed, holding up the slide. “Why Clyde Barker picked this world. The secret is in their ability to change sexes at will. No surprise there, I suppose. It is the most eye-catching thing about their reality and so likely what would have stood out to a cursory psychic probe, especially by a young girl that wouldn’t have known what to make of it so would have passed the buck to Clyde to decide whether it was worth paying attention to or not.”
“Just spit it out, Torin,” Kendra said.
“He’s afraid that the virus will take in a male host better than a female host, or vice versa. That would give one sex a
n advantage over the other, perhaps for time immemorial. Hence their species is the perfect one to tweak the virus on to make sure that male or female, the virus mutates equally well in either host.”
“Not for nothing,” Davenport said, “but if all that talk about Singularity playing out infinitely many different ways was true, then does it really matter what Clyde achieves here today or doesn’t achieve?”
“Of course it matters, you fool,” the farmer’s wife blurted. “It’s a make a wish multiverse. They all are. That means, if you’re determined enough, you too can play god and lord it over trillions of lifeforms, or infinitely many. And you can attract to you people happy to play the victim, or your subordinate oppressor, happy to oppress others at your bidding. Follow, or not yet?”
Torin got up from his lab bench, wiping his hands on a hand towel. “You’re saying we’re here because we’re choosing to get caught up in his game.”
“Do I look like the type to take being oppressed lightly to you, lady?” Kendra said.
“We could have chosen a different role to play in this drama,” Torin said, “the savior role, perhaps, playing the two that will safeguard humanity and all sentient life from the scourge of Clyde Barker.”
“Your friend is smarter than you are,” the farmer’s wife said.
“I was with you all the way up till that last part,” Kendra said. “Now you’ve lost all credibility.”
Davenport collapsed at the table, his knees no longer able to support him. “You dragged me out here so I could get over myself, Kendra. Now that all hope is gone, you’re playing dumb?”
“Stay awhile,” the farmer’s wife said. “After Clyde and his protégé have come and gone, I mean. Let him think he’s won. It makes no difference to us, just to the people who insist on playing his game.”
“Why?” Kendra said.
“Because the part of you that drew you to this world might not have been the part that wanted to play along. As you were insisting earlier, if only to convince yourself. Maybe it’s figured out something you haven’t. And maybe you should stay until you ascertain what that is.”
Davenport, Kendra, and Torin regarded one another. Even Kardassian’s eyes seemed to focus as he came into the moment to meet them at the instant of the dawning revelation, as if his higher-self had alerted him that this might be a good time for him to pay attention too.
TWENTY-NINE
“It’s getting cold, Davenport,” Torin said, regarding the steam coming out of his nose and mouth, his muscles turning hard to fortify themselves against further breach. “You think you could use those godlike powers of yours to rustle us up some extra blankets?”
“No can do, boss. Godlike powers revoked.”
“Why?”
“It appears since we’re choosing to ignore Clyde Barker that the planetary AI back at home has decided she can’t justify the computing power to intervene further.”
“Lovely,” Torin said, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them. Kendra was too enthralled by the view out the window of the ice covered world to be thinking logically of the flipside of all that beauty. She stood sipping the herb tea provided by the farmer’s wife, mug in hand, cloistered in animal furs, dressed like a local.
The view out the window was rather entrancing, Torin had to admit. He wondered if that was part of how the animals survived out there, using nature’s own beauty to hypnotize them, and taking advantage of that more elevated state of consciousness to endure the shock to their systems. It’s how he would have done it. Of course, that implied rather high functioning animals. Or maybe not. The mountain goats the farmers had herded up the hillsides surrounding the valley, of course, might just have survived the swings in weather because they were well chosen to do so; they were accustomed to climbing or dropping elevations to get around temperature fluctuations.
“So is this it? Is this the lesson for me?” Kendra said, staring out the window. “I come halfway to forever just so I could shut down my mind once and for all? Couldn’t just be a pretty picture, could it? There was no shortage of those back at home. But back at home there was context. The context of some delicious mystery. Some puzzle to be solved. But now that we’ve solved all the puzzles, the ones that matter anyway, leaving only those that don’t, there really isn’t much point to my playing Sherlock, is there?”
“I’m not sure we stop acting as if we’re the center of the universe,” Torin said. He rubbed his hands together and blew into them again, not because the action was proving effective, but because he needed some rituals to cope. To calm and center him. So he could get down to doing some real thinking, the productive kind, as opposed to the panicked and pointless kind. “We behave as if the fate of all creation depended on our smallest actions. How else do we grow our mind power except by sustaining and forever acting on that belief? Until we’re inseparable from gods, and can progress from there, from playing false gods, to merging with the one true God, to returning to the source. God seeking Godself, from formlessness into form and back, in an endless cycle over and over again. To act otherwise would be the real lie.”
“Only, you’re not talking about doing it from ego, are you?” Kendra said, taking another sip from her mug, the steam rising and swirling about her face as if even now she was attempting to obscure the truth from herself. “And that’s the rub, isn’t it? That’s what brought us here, the fact that we were determined to be so all-important, not because it was the spiritually profound thing to do but because it was the egotistical thing to do.”
“I think judging yourself harshly is not the key to the locked door of this prison cell.” He padded in the direction of Kardassian, still sitting staring blankly at the foot of the stairs. En route he grabbed the microchip dot off of Davenport’s forehead. Davenport was playing a board game with the locals at a foldout card table. All three seemed entirely engrossed in the game. Kendra and Torin couldn’t have had more privacy if they were the last two people on earth.
Kardassian responded to his latest prompts from Torin, getting up from the foot of the stairs, coming out and sparring with Torin. He made sure to connect with Kardassian’s soft parts with light blows, more like love taps; he was just trying to stay warm, after all, and to avoid contact with the exoskeleton, which would just put his lights out for good.
Kendra stuck another log in the wood stove, having taken charge of the heating arrangements hours earlier. She’d taken over the rest of the couple’s duties as well, converting low calorie foods into high calorie foods in the kitchen by way of the stove, boiling, baking, condensing, dehydrating. Neither the wife nor the husband complained. They seemed to realize Kendra was acting in a self-serving manner that had nothing to do with helping them out. Not sure what else to think of her self-help gestures, Kendra had elected simply not to question them and redirect her energies elsewhere.
Since settling into his duties readying for the big snow melt ahead, the husband had yet to say a word. Even after he’d abandoned them in favor of the board game with Davenport, his silence held. Torin wondered if he had taken a vow of silence as a way of staying connected to his inner truth, and not being led astray by his ego, forged as it was by his fears, fears that he could only give life to by opening his mouth.
Torin glanced over at Kendra going through her moves, multitasking his boxing regimen with keeping an eye on her, looking for signs she might be cracking under the pressure of having to be alone with herself, her real self. She seemed strangely calm; he was the one doing all the sweating and feeling uneasy. “You’re making progress, you know?” he said. “I know you think you aren’t. That all you’ve discovered about yourself is that so long as you’ve got a better grip on reality than anyone else, you’re doing the best you can do. Since that no longer means playing detective, you’ve shifted outward jobs, but inwardly, it’s status quo.
“Still, it’s a big improvement. How, you ask? Because now you know the real game you’re playing with yourself. So now the true detective can emer
ge. Start asking some real questions. Instead of all the smokescreen ones. The ones meant to keep you from ever getting to the right answers.”
She had kept up the busywork the whole time he was talking, but her eyes said she was processing everything he was saying. Finally, she wiped her hands, came out of the kitchen, took a seat, lit up a cigarette, and looked out the window at her frozen world. The snow was several feet deep; it blanketed everything.
Kardassian grabbed Torin’s hands and held them, and locked eyes. “I see you’re back among the world of the living,” Torin said.
Another second to assess what the hell Torin was up to, and Kardassian released him. “I’ve figured out how to correct the wobble of this planet so it stops changing seasons every twelve hours.”
Davenport relaxed his concentration on the game he was playing with the locals and regarded Kardassian with a proud look on his face.
“We’re done with self-importance, my boy. We’re all about getting over ourselves, these days. Get with the program.” Torin undid his “boxing” gloves, oven mitts he’d appropriated from the kitchen.
“Shouldn’t we ask our hosts how they feel about that?” Kendra said, still looking out the window, still puffing on her cigarette.
The farmer’s wife and husband exchanged looks. “Do it, if you can,” she said. “Only…”
“Only, what?” Kendra asked. She was still staring out the window but her eyes were less glazed over, sharper, much sharper.
“Only, we’re not the gods we were when we arrived here. Changing sex is about the only reminder of those halcyon days. There’s no advanced civilization here. Just us. How would you come by the tech you need?”
“Kardassian’ll figure it out, if he hasn’t already,” Torin said, squeezing his shoulder. “He’s like me, a psychic and a scientist, a particularly potent cocktail, specialized for just this kind of project. The whole time he’s been catatonic he’s been working on this problem in all likelihood. The outward stillness allows him to devote his considerable mind power to the undertaking.”
Time Bandits Page 24