by Jule Owen
“My friends, as you put it, Borodin/Kwiller, Quinn/Berek and myself, we are information. You humans are information, in fact, but you haven’t found a good way of making yourselves resilient yet. But you will. Eventually, largely thanks to Mathew and the work you will facilitate later.
“But for my friends and I, the essence of us can be stored in small packages, duplicated, and transported across space and time. If one version of us is destroyed, it doesn’t matter; we are replicated elsewhere. That means here on earth we can inhabit other bodies but when those bodies die, we don’t need them. We can move on. Bodies are a kind of transport.”
“What did you mean when you said ‘thanks to Mathew’?”
“When Mathew grows up he will create a superhuman intelligence. A group of sixteen interconnected personalities with humanlike brains but supercomputing processing resources and perfect memory. They will have exponential learning power and will advance knowledge and technology by centuries in the space of a few years. Four hundred years from this time, when humankind finally extinguishes itself, in one version of events – the original version – these sixteen will be all that is left of human civilisation. They will journey out into space to found new worlds. They will become us. Me. My friends.”
“Wait a minute… You’re telling me you’re an alien?”
Lestrange thinks about this. “I’m not sure if we can technically be described as aliens, as we originate from this planet.”
“How would you describe yourself?”
“I believe the most appropriate term in your language would be transhuman. There is a movement, I believe, in your time using this word.”
“And Mathew is your creator?”
“One of our creators. Although the vast majority of our evolution was done by ourselves and a lot of it happened once we’d left earth, while we were travelling across space looking for our home. We had a lot of time on our hands to think.”
“Then how are you here if you haven’t been created yet?”
“We are visitors from the future.”
“You have travelled in time?”
“Yes,” Lestrange says.
Clara considers this. “Mathew says this house is a time machine.”
“In essence, yes. He is right.”
11 The Truth About Mr. Lestrange
“Can you go anywhere in time?” Clara asks, closing the book in her lap.
“Once we have created a portal, yes.”
“And when is your time?”
“About one hundred thousand earth years in the future.”
She laughs, “You said earth years.”
Lestrange raises an eyebrow.
“Sorry, I can’t quite believe what you’re saying.”
“That is understandable,” Lestrange says.
“What is your world like?”
August sighs. “Can you imagine if I asked you the same question? How would you answer?”
Clara says quickly, “It’s a small blue rocky planet, mostly covered in water, about four and a half billion years old, the third of eight orbiting a sun, home to nearly nine billion species, with homo sapiens being the most successful, having a population of twelve billion individuals. I think it was a question on a General Studies quiz a couple of years ago.”
“Well, okay. We live on a planet in a binary star system, about fifty light years from this one. In terms of mass, age and evolutionary status, the star we orbit is similar to your star, the Sun. The second sun is dying. There are twelve planets in our system, many moons. When we arrived, we found one planet had water, rain and an atmosphere. There were no native species, beyond the simplest forms of life imaginable, but we populated the planet with our own variation of the blueprints of forms of life we had carried from earth. We took billions of examples of DNA with us.
“Unlike on earth, on our planet all living things are essentially the same organism. We are all connected to the same central nervous system. Buildings are also part of this organism, as is the ocean. So I can feel a flower, or a tree on my planet and know what it is thinking.”
“A tree doesn’t think.”
“You’d be surprised… even here. But they certainly do on my planet.”
Clara says, “You said all living things on your planet are the same organism, but you are a different person from those others you mentioned.”
“Kwiller and Berek?”
Clara nods.
Mr. Lestrange says, “You are thinking of our bodies as us. But they are carrying cases. They are disguises or camouflage. I’m trying to work out how best to explain this to you.
“For you to understand what we are, you must think of us as nodes on a network. We have discrete personalities, and purposes, but we constantly communicate, collaborate, and share information. We are not individuals in the way you are, or the way you think you are. Humans are more interdependent and less individual than you imagine.
“The human brain is remarkable for its ability to make associations between random bits of information. We can do that too, but we can also remember and recall everything we ever learned and process vast amounts of information quickly. I don’t need to search for a fact on the Nexus. If it is within our ThoughtScape, I will know it. That does not mean we always get it right, but there is no blame if we get it wrong.
“In your world, the cutting edge of research and understanding is available to only a relative few people on the planet. In my world, it is available to everyone instantaneously.
“You are jealous of your creations and your breakthroughs because they impact your social standing, reputation and livelihoods. In my world, everything material is free and abundant; food, water, energy – any physical thing you can think of, you can have. So of course, there is a different kind of value system. No one needs to earn money and make a living. There is no money because there is no need of it. There is no hierarchy because we think together and make decisions as a consensus. People are not born; they are created, and no one is unwanted or cast aside because we only create people when they are needed. As there is no death, the creation of life is infrequent and cause for huge celebration.”
“What is the ThoughtScape?”
“It’s what we call our collective thinking space, our collective consciousness. If I want to, I can know what Kwiller is doing and thinking right now, by thinking about Kwiller. In this way, I can share all of Kwiller’s knowledge and experience automatically. I don’t have to repeat the effort and time of learning. If you multiply that by the hundreds of millions we are, you can see we are a powerful learning machine and our path to knowledge is exponential compared to yours.
“If I want to speak to Kwiller, I need to have the intention to do so. We have protocols about this, so we’re not constantly interrupted, of course, but we do not have individuality in the same way you do. Because we are not imprisoned in our brains, privacy is a rather meaningless concept. As is deception and many of the related crimes.”
“Do you mean everyone in your world knows everything you are thinking?”
August nods.
“Do you know everything I am thinking?”
“I do, but I need to focus on it. That is our constraint; we have boundless time and massive computational power, but we do have limited powers of focus. That is why Mathew got away with being here. I was somewhere else. Also because we did not imagine he would break into the house. Of course, we’re recording everything he does. We didn’t account for the fact that we would need to create monitors and alarms in case he broke into the future.”
Clara says, “You can honestly see into my mind?”
“Yes, but it shouldn’t bother you.”
“How on earth could it not?”
“If you humans knew how alike you all were, you would stop being concerned about people reading your thoughts. You are a great deal less original and special than you imagine.”
“Thanks.”
“There is no pleasing you, is there?”
“I don’t want you looking at my mind,” Clara says.
August shakes his head. “I’ve come a long way to do that. I’m not going to stop because you are concerned I might stumble across something embarrassing.”
“I’m not bothered about embarrassing stuff.”
“Yes you are.”
“Okay, I am. But everyone has a right to their own thoughts. The government is listening in to everything we do publicly. You can’t blame us for wanting to protect our minds. At least they can’t listen to them. Yet…”
“The issue is not the fact that you have no privacy, it’s the fact that you are all at war with one another on every possible level. You can’t trust each other with your innermost thoughts. That makes you weaker, not stronger. It also makes you unhappy.”
“I am not unhappy.”
August raises an eyebrow.
“Mathew’s mother is dead. Mathew may be dead. Do you think I ought to be skipping around with joy?”
“Mathew is fine. I told you. I showed you.”
“With the other boy? The one with the dressing over his eye?”
Lestrange nods.
“How do I know what I saw was real?”
“How do you know anything is real?”
Clara thinks about this. “If you’re not human and this isn’t your real body, what do you actually look like?”
“My body is humanoid. We are taller. We don’t have genders in the way you do, believing the male and the female need to be balanced in one for a person to be whole. But bodies are mutable things. We see them much as you see your clothes. We can change our form quite easily. Most of us will spend some part of our life as another species or in a radically altered form from the one we were given when we were created. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t tied to physical reality. Many of us store our physical bodies for years and disappear into virtual worlds. We can live an entire human life out in a virtual world.”
“You live your whole lives in virtual worlds?”
“Sorry, I meant to use a human life as a unit of measurement. We often live the length of seventy or eighty earth years in virtual worlds.”
“So how long are your lives?”
“Indefinite. The oldest members of our community are as old as the Originators, those that crossed space from earth to our planet. None of us have ever died.”
“You are immortal?”
“Nothing is immortal. We are tied to the life of our universe, unless we find a way out.”
“A way out?”
“Obviously there are other universes. Homo sapiens are tied to their solar system with no other habitable planet and without the technology to properly manage your own ecosystem or geo-form new ones nearby. My species is tied to this universe. We are engaged in finding our way out in the same way you are engaged in local space travel. We are about as far along in our quest as you are in yours. That is the serious business of my people. It will take hundreds of thousands of years to solve our problem. We may never solve it, but we have several billion years before it becomes a serious issue for us.”
“What are you doing here, then?”
“I told you. I am a historian, a kind of author. I create virtual worlds that my people can live in to experience past events for themselves. My particular job is to observe and understand Mathew’s life. I am tasked with creating a virtual world that records everything that happens to Mathew so that others from my world can live his life too and understand what led him to do the things he did – or, from your perspective, is about to do. I am a biographer. But my medium is not books or films; it is reality itself.”
“But Mathew’s life has changed now, because you came here.”
“We hope to limit changes as much as possible. But yes, you are right. Your life has certainly changed. It has already been documented in its original form. We will need to update it. We will probably keep the original version as well.”
Clara’s eyes widen. “Why do this?”
“This is the way we learn, through simulation so real it becomes experience. We call reality the Presence and we call virtual reality the unPresence and there is only a sliver of difference between them for us.
“We have always done this. Every aspect of learning for us is done in simulation. When we were travelling to our home planet from earth, the Originators lived in virtual worlds because their reality was that they were huge amounts of complex information crammed into a tiny machine the size of a piece of dust, travelling across vast stretches of empty space. This is quite a fun concept and interesting initially, but after a while, empty space is not so exciting, so they imagined virtual existences for themselves.
“When we got to our planet, the planet was not what we wanted it to be initially, so we lived in virtual reality until we had finished building our new world. The history of our arrival on our planet and the development of our society was all documented in virtual reality so, rather than someone being told what happened, they could enter into that experience and live it for themselves. Everyone on my planet knows what it was like for the Originators to travel across vast distances of empty space looking for somewhere to live, because everyone has done it.
“For a long time, we did not know we came from earth; we had lost our origin story. It had been wiped from our memories by one of our human creators because they thought it would be better that we did not know. They thought knowing about humans would corrupt us.
“Some of my people – we call them the Wanderers – spend their lives travelling about space mapping our galaxy, discovering new suns and planets, starting new colonies on these new planets. There are enough planets in our galaxy alone for us to continue to spread out and grow for the next ten million years.
“Wanderers are usually people who have experienced the Originator story and found that they grieved for the experience when they came back into the Presence. The intelligence inside them is an actual mind, one with a biological body, frozen and physically located on our planet, awaiting the return of its owner, an event that may, incidentally, never happen. Some Wanderers have been gone tens of thousands of years.
“One of these Wanderers found a planet, which was not meant to exist, according to our star records, and our oldest map. In fact, the Originators had not created this first map that led us to this non-existent planet. It had always been there in our memories and it was wrong. The earth, the sun and the solar system had been wiped from our records. Our people came here to this solar system and mapped the planet Earth. It was dead and barren, but we found signs that life had once existed in great abundance. That is not the case everywhere. Such complex life is rare in our galaxy.
“We discovered evidence of an ancient civilisation. The more we looked, the more we found hints that this was where our species had originated. We found thousands of digital and written records. Slowly, we learned to interpret these records to try and understand what had happened here and how we came to exist. But the work was frustrating. Even when we had assembled a narrative we thought might vaguely represent the truth, allowing for the fact that humans are the most deceitful creatures imaginable, the author who was responsible for creating the experience for others to enter felt unable to truly represent the reality of events because none of us had ever been there to see and experience it for ourselves.
“Over the millennia, we had invested heavily in research about teleportation to make our exploration work easier. Accidentally, as part of this work, we discovered how to make portals that not only allowed us to jump across the universe, but also to jump in time.
“One of us travelled back in time to examine the origin of some of the archaeological remains we had found and to try to understand the events of the last days of humans on earth.”
12 A Visit to the unPresence
August Lestrange says, “You have historians who write books about the past. They read ancient documents, they use the latest technology available to them to dig for archaeological evidence, carbon date it, take DNA from
bones and other human remains, bits of hair, bits of skin, food and objects buried in graves. We are merely doing the same with the technology available in our time.
“If you can imagine London one hundred thousand years from now, a blasted desert, the great buildings covered in shifting sands that blow about into dunes with the winds and hurricanes howling across the treeless landscape. If you imagine visitors from the future digging through this sand to find artefacts, clues to the people who went before. They find stones, granite, concrete, some slabs with writing on, gravestones, the remains of buildings, glass, a lot of plastic, bits of rotted metal. In amongst the rubble they find stone and bronze statues. Think about walking around London, think about the men on horseback and in uniform, Lord this, Duke that… do these people mean anything to you? They are just men who happened to be the titular head of this army that happened to win a particular battle no one can remember. What would it tell us about the people who lived here? Even if we struck lucky and we found an archive of art and pictures, a library of documents, even a digital one that had somehow managed to survive through storm, heat and ice and we worked out a way to read them, what would those documents tell us? They would certainly tell us something, but would they tell us what it was like to live here now, what it is like to be you? The only way we can do that is to be here, living as one of you, observing and recording.
“The one of us who came before was a pioneer. He taught us there is value in living as a human, to experience life in a human body; you have genders, we do not, you have illness, you are mortal, you have bodily needs for fuel and water while we don’t, you are ruled by your brain chemistry and instincts in a way we are not. In order to record humanity we decided to become human.
“Since then we have started cautiously travelling back to fill in the gaps, focusing on what we think might be the most important events. We hope eventually to document all of human history. We have eternity to do it, after all, or at least until the end of the universe. But this programme is still quite new and is having teething problems.”