by Rich Horton
"If you've brought me back..."
"Yes,” the alien encouraged.
"What about the others? What about all the other people who died here—Solovyova and the ones before her? What about all the people who died on Earth?"
"There were no recoverable forms on the Earth. We can show you if you would like ... but we think you would find it distressing."
"Why?"
"We did. A lifecrash is always distressing, even to machine-based entities such as us. Especially after such a long and uninterrupted evolutionary history."
"A lifecrash?"
"It did not just end with the extinction of humanity. The agent that wiped out your species had the capacity to change. Eventually it assimilated every biological form on the planet, leaving only itself: endlessly cannibalising, endlessly replicating."
Renfrew dealt with that. He'd already adjusted to the fact that humanity was gone and that he was never going to see Earth again. It did not require a great adjustment to accept that Earth itself had been lost, along with the entire web of life it had once supported.
Not that he was exactly thrilled, either.
"OK,” he said falteringly. “But what about the people I buried here?"
Renfrew sensed the alien's regret. Its facets shone a sombre amber.
"Their patterns were not recoverable. They were buried in caskets, along with moisture and microorganisms. Time did the rest. We did try, yes ... but there was nothing left to work with."
"I died out there as well. Why was it any different for me?"
"You were kept cold and dry. That made all the difference, as far as we were concerned."
So he'd mummified out there, baked dry under that merciless sterilising sky, instead of rotting in the ground like his friends. Out there under that Martian sun, for the better part of three hundred years ... what must he have looked like when they pulled him out of the remains of his suit, he wondered? Maybe a bleached and twisted thing, corded with the knotted remains of musculature and tissue: something that could easily have been mistaken for driftwood, had there been driftwood on Mars.
The wonder and horror of it all was almost too much. He'd been the last human being alive, and then he had died, and now he was the first human being to be resurrected by aliens.
The first and perhaps the last: he sensed even then that, as Godlike as the Kind appeared, they were bound by limits. They were as much prisoners of what the universe chose to allow, and what it chose not to allow, as humanity, or dust, or atoms.
"Why?” he asked.
A pulse of ochre signified the alien's confusion.
"Why what?"
"Why did you bring me back? What possible interest am I to you?"
The alien considered his remark, warming through shades of orange to a bright venous red. Like an echo, the shade spread to the other members of the gathering.
"We help,” the leader told Renfrew. “That is what we do. That is what we have always done. We are the Kind."
* * * *
He returned to the base and tried to continue his affairs, just as if the Kind had never arrived. Yet they were always out there whenever he passed a window: brighter and closer now as evening stole in, as if they had gathered the day's light and were now re-radiating it in subtly altered shades. He closed the storm shutters but that didn't help much. He did not doubt that the ship was still poised above, suspended over the base as if guarding the infinitely precious thing that he had become.
Renfrew's old routines had little meaning now. The aliens hadn't just brought the base back to the way it had been before he crashed the buggy. They had repaired all the damage that had accrued since the collapse of Earthside society, and the base systems now functioned better than at any point since the base's construction. As mindless as his maintenance tours had been, they had imposed structure on his life that was now absent. Renfrew felt like a rat that'd had his exercise wheel taken away.
He went to the recreation room and brought the system back online. Everything functioned as the designers had intended. The aliens must have repaired, or at least not removed, his implant. But when he cycled through the myriad options, he found that something had happened to Piano Man.
The figure was still there—Renfrew even knew his name, now—but the companion he remembered was gone. Now Piano Man behaved just like all the other generated personalities. Renfrew could still talk to him, and Piano Man could still answer him back, but nothing like their old conversations was now possible. Piano Man would take requests, and banter, but that was the limit of his abilities. If Renfrew tried to steer the conversation away from the strictly musical, if he tried to engage Piano Man in a discussion about cosmology or quantum mechanics, all he got back was a polite but puzzled stare. And the more Renfrew persisted, the less it seemed to him that there was any consciousness behind that implant-generated face. All he was dealing with was a paper-thin figment of the entertainment system.
Renfrew knew that the Kind hadn't ‘fixed’ Piano Man in the sense that they had fixed the rest of the base. But—deliberately or otherwise—their arrival had destroyed the illusion of companionship. Perhaps they had straightened some neurological kink in Renfrew's brain when they put him back together. Or perhaps the mere fact of their arrival had caused his subconsciousness to discard that earlier mental crutch.
He knew it shouldn't have meant anything. Piano Man hadn't existed in any real sense. Feeling sorrow for his absence was as ridiculous as mourning the death of a character in a dream. He'd made Piano Man up; his companion had never had any objective existence.
But he still felt that he had lost a friend.
"I'm sorry,” he said, to that polite but puzzled face. “You were right, and I was wrong. I was doing fine just the way things were. I should have listened to you."
There was an uncomfortable pause, before Piano Man smiled and spread his fingers above the keyboard.
"Would you like me to play something?"
"Yes,” Renfrew said. “Play Rocket Man. For old time's sake."
* * * *
He allowed the Kind into Tharsis Base. Their crystalline forms were soon everywhere, spreading and multiplying in a mad orgy of prismatic colour, transforming the drab architecture into a magical lantern-lit grotto. The beauty of it was so startling, so intoxicating, that it moved Renfrew to tears with the knowledge that no one else would ever see it.
"But it could be different,” the leader told him. “We did not broach this earlier, but there are possibilities you may wish to consider."
"Such as?"
"We have repaired you, and made you somewhat younger than you were before your accident. In doing so we have learned a great deal about your biology. We cannot resurrect the dead of Earth, or your companions here on Mars, but we can give you other people."
"I don't follow."
"It would cost us nothing to weave new companions. They could be grown to adulthood at accelerated speed, or your own ageing could be arrested while you give the children time to grow."
"And then what?"
"You could breed with them, if you chose. We'd intervene to correct any genetic anomalies."
Renfrew smiled. “Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. At least, that's what a friend of mine told me that once."
"Now there is nowhere but Mars. Doesn't that make a difference? Or would you rather we established a habitable zone on Earth and transplanted you there?"
They made him feel like a plant: like some incredibly rare and delicate orchid.
"Would I notice the difference?"
"We could adjust your faculties so that Earth appeared the way you remembered. Or we could edit your memories to match the present conditions."
"Why can't you just put things back the way they were? Surely one runaway virus isn't going to defeat you."
The alien turned a shade of chrome blue that Renfrew had learned to recognise as indicative of gentle chiding. “That's not our way. The runaway agent now constitutes i
ts own form of life, brimming with future potential. To wipe it out now would be akin to sterilising your planet just as your own single-celled ancestors were gaining a foothold."
"You care about life that much?"
"Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that.” The chrome blue faded, replaced by a placatory olive green. “Given that Earth cannot be made the way it was, will you reconsider our offer to give you companionship?"
"Not now,” he said.
"But later, perhaps?"
"I don't know. I've been on my own a long time. I'm not sure it isn't better this way."
"You've craved companionship for years. Why reject it now?"
"Because...” And here Renfrew faltered, conscious of his own inarticulacy before the alien. “When I was alone, I spent a lot of time thinking things through. I got set on that course, and I'm not sure I'm done yet. There's still some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Maybe when I'm finished..."
"Perhaps we can help you with that."
"Help me understand the universe? Help me understand what it means to be the last living man? Maybe even the last intelligent organism, in the universe?"
"It wouldn't be the first time. We are a very old culture. In our travels we have encountered myriad other species. Some of them are extinct by now, or changed beyond recognition. But many of them were engaged on quests similar to your own. We have watched, and occasionally interceded to better aid that comprehension. Nothing would please us more than to offer you similar assistance. If we cannot give you companionship, at least let us give you wisdom."
"I want to understand space and time, and my own place in it."
"The path to deep comprehension is risky."
"I'm ready for it. I've already come a long way."
"Then we shall help. But the road is long, Renfrew. The road is long and you have barely started your journey."
"I'm willing to go all the way."
"You will be long past human before you near the end of it. That is the cost of understanding space and time."
Renfrew felt a chill on the back of his neck, a premonitionary shiver. The alien was not warning him for nothing. In its travels it must have witnessed things that caused it distress.
Still he said: “Whatever it takes. Bring it on. I'm ready."
"Now?"
"Now. But before we begin ... you don't call me Renfrew any more."
"You wish a new name, to signify this new stage in your quest?"
"From now on, I'm John. That's what I want you to call me."
"Just John?"
He nodded solemnly. “Just John."
—
Part Four
—
The Kind did things to John.
While he slept, they altered his mind: infiltrating it with tiny crystal avatars of themselves, performing prestigious feats of neural rewiring. When he woke he still felt like himself: still carried the same freight of memories and emotions that he'd taken with him to sleep. But suddenly he had the ability to grasp things that had been impenetrably difficult only hours earlier. Before the accident, he had explored the inlets of superstring theory, like an explorer searching for a navigable route through a treacherous mountain range. He had never found that easy path, never dreamed of conquering the dizzying summits before him, but now, miraculously, he was on the other side, and the route through the obstacle looked insultingly easy. Beyond superstring theory lay the unified territory of M-theory, but that, too, was soon his. John revelled in his new understanding.
More and more, he began to think in terms of a room whose floor was the absolute truth about the universe: where it had come from, how it worked, what it meant to be a thinking being in that universe. But that floor looked very much like a carpet, and it was in turn concealed by other carpets, one on top of the other, each of which represented some imperfect approximation to the final layer. Each layer might look convincing; might endure decades or centuries of enquiry without hinting that it contained a flaw, but sooner or later one would inevitably reveal itself. A tiny loose thread—perhaps a discrepancy between observation and theory—and with a tug the entire fabric of that layer would come apart. It was in the nature of such revolutions that the next layer down would already have been glimpsed by then. Only the final carpet, the floor, would contain no logical inconsistencies, no threads waiting to be unravelled.
Could you ever know when you'd reached it, John wondered? Some thinkers considered it impossible to ever know with certainty. All you could do was keep testing, tugging at every strand to see how firmly it was woven into the whole. If after tens of thousands of years, the pattern was still intact, then it might begin to seem likely that you had arrived at final wisdom. But you could never know for sure. The ten thousand and first year might bring forth some trifling observation that, as innocent as it first seemed, would eventually prove that there was yet another layer lurking underneath.
You could go on like that forever, never knowing for sure.
Or—as some other thinkers speculated—the final theory might come with its own guarantee of authenticity, a golden strand of logical validation threaded into the very mathematical language in which it was couched. It might be in the nature of the theory to state that there could be no deeper description of the universe.
But even then: it wouldn't stop you making observations. It wouldn't stop you testing.
John kept learning. M-theory became a distant and trifling obstacle, dwarfed by the daunting unified theories that had superseded it. These theories probed the interface not just of matter and spacetime, but also of consciousness and entropy, information, complexity and the growth of replicating structures. On the face of it, they seemed to describe everything that conceivably mattered about the universe.
But each in turn was revealed as flawed, incomplete, at odds with observation. An error in the predicted mass of the electron, in the twenty-second decimal place. A one-in-ten-thousandth part discrepancy in the predicted bending of starlight around a certain class of rotating black hole. A niggling mismatch between the predicted and observed properties of inertia, in highly charged spacetime.
The room contained many carpets, and John had the dizzying sense that there were still many layers between him and the floor. He'd made progress, certainly, but it had only sharpened his sense of how far he had to go.
The Kind remade him time and again, resetting his body clock to give him the time he needed for his studies. But each leap of understanding pushed him closer to the fundamental limits of a wet human brain wired together from a few hundred billion neurons, crammed into a tiny cage of bone.
"You can stop now, if you like,” the Kind said, in the hundredth year of his quest.
"Or what?” John asked mildly.
"Or we continue, with certain modifications."
John gave them his consent. It would mean not being human for a little while, but given the distance he had come, the price did not strike him as unreasonable.
The Kind encoded the existing patterns of his mind into a body much like one of their own. For John the transition to a machine-based substrate of thinking crystal was in no way traumatic, especially as the Kind assured him that the process was completely reversible. Freed of the constraints of flesh and scale, his progress accelerated even more. From this new perspective, his old human mind looked like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Compared to the mental mansion he now inhabited, his former residence looked as squalid and limiting as a rabbit hutch. It was a wonder he'd understood anything.
But John wasn't finished.
A thousand years passed. Always adding new capacity to himself, he had become a kilometre-high crystalline mound on the summit of Pavonis Mons. He was larger by far than any of the Kind, but that was only to be expected: he was probing layers of reality that they had long since mapped to their own satisfaction, and from which they had dutifully retreated. Having attained that understanding once, t
he Kind had no further need for it.
There were other people on Mars now. John had finally acquiesced to the Kind's offer to bring him companions, and they had created children who had now grown to become parents and grandparents. But when John agreed to the coming of other humans, it had little do with his own need for companionship. He felt too remote from other humans now, and it was only because he sensed that the Kind wished to perform this exercise—that it would please the aliens to have something else to do—that he had relented. But even if he could not relate to the teeming newcomers, he found it pleasing to divert a small portion of his energies to their amusement. He rearranged his outer architecture—dedicated to only the most trivial data-handling tasks—so that he resembled an ornate crystalline fairy palace, with spires and domes and battlements, and at dusk he twinkled with refracted sunlight, throwing coloured glories across the great plains of the Tharsis Montes. A yellow road spiralled around his foot slopes. He became a site of pilgrimage, and he sang to the pilgrims as they toiled up and down the spiral road.
Millennia passed. Still John's mind burrowed deeper.
He reported to the Kind that he had passed through eighteen paradigmatic layers of reality, each of which had demanded a concomitant upgrade in his neural wiring before he could be said to have understood the theory in all its implications, and therefore recognised the flaw that led to the next layer down.
The Kind informed him that—in all the history that was known to them—fewer than five hundred other sentient beings had attained John's present level understanding.
Still John kept going, aware that in all significant respects he had now exceeded the intellectual capacity of the Kind. They were there to assist him, to guide him through his transformations, but they had only a dim conception of what it now felt to be John. According to their data less than a hundred individuals, from a hundred different cultures, all of them now extinct, had reached this point.
Ahead, the Kind warned, were treacherous waters.
John's architectural transformations soon began to place an intolerable strain on the fragile geology of Pavonis Mons. Rather than reinforce the ancient volcano to support his increasing size and mass, John chose to detach himself from the surface entirely. For twenty six thousand years he floated in the thickening Martian atmosphere, supported by batteries of antigravity generators. For much of that time it pleased him to manifest in the form of a Bösendorfer grand piano, a shape reconstructed from his oldest human memories. He drifted over the landscape, solitary as a cloud, and occasionally he played slow tunes that fell from the sky like thunder.