Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  “You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”

  “Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be gradual: they have all the time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines’, in fact.”

  “You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”

  I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”

  Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was Aristotle, the embodied I’d met so briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.

  “So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”

  Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t get past the prelims. The clinic offered him a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And... guess what? He freed me, before he died.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said the woman, bitterly. “On this damned planet.”

  Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.

  “About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”

  “No,” said a young woman; so humanised I had to look twice to see she was an embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on looking, and meanwhile, you’re among friends.”

  I STAYED WITH the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei; just the occasional glimpse. The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa. Meetings happened around me, people came and went. Sochi, the embodied who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a sex-doll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers. “No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love, but not in a sexual way.”

  “Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my first dream. “But evergreen.”

  ONE MORNING I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus garland hanging in the grey, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park: more real than anything else in sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment I was holding her hand.

  Then the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.

  Racing off ahead of me, again

  MY FINAL MEDICAL at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr Lena held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about describing my experience. The ‘hallucinations’ that weren’t really hallucinations. The absences, when my human self, my actions, thoughts and feelings, became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I went somewhere else –

  But I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was ‘the last longevity treatment I would ever take’. Did she agree this was a little ambivalent?

  She apologised, as much as a medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made you immortal, there was no other way forward

  ...But how much this changes your life, and how quickly, is entirely up to you.”

  I thought of Lei, racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.

  “I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the treatment is irreversible.”

  “No regrets,” I said. “I’m just pointing out an ambiguity. I have a feeling that contract was framed by people who don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how humans react to the prospect –?”

  “You’d be right.” She smiled at me. “My employers aren’t human. But they mean well; and we choose carefully. Nobody passes the prelims, who hasn’t already crossed the line.”

  MY RETURN TO Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone, and there were officials who knew it, and let us pass. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim apartment on Jupiter Moons, and still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my foliage plants, I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former miscreants: I’m happy to report that Beowulf, for instance, is doing very well.

  My symptoms seem to have stabilised, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love my life, why should I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening, or after one of those strange absences, I’ll glimpse my own hands, and I’ll see that they’ve become transparent –

  It doesn’t last, not yet.

  And sometimes I wonder, was this always what death was like: and we never knew, we who stayed behind?

  This endless moment of awakening; awakening, awakening...

  SENTINEL ANZHMIR ONLY noticed the discrepancy because of one of her favorite books. At least, she was almost certain it had been a book, rather than a game, or an escritoire, or a pair of shoes. She had not accessed it in some time.

  The archiveship’s master index showed no change. It was Anzhmir’s duty to monitor the jewel-flicker of her freight of quantum blossoms in their dreaming, as well as the more mundane systems that regulated navigation, temperature, the minutiae of maintenance. The archiveship’s garden consisted of a compressed and sequenced cross-selection of human minds, everything from pastry chefs to physicists to plumbers. The selection was designed to accommodate any reasonable situation the colony-seed might find itself in, and a great many unreasonable ones as well.

  Anzhmir had reached for the book’s address in memory, and found instead a wholly unfamiliar piece of lore. The discrepancy could only mean one thing: a stowaway.

  She knew what must be done, although she regretted it already. As sentinel, she was made to harvest lives. Hers was a useful archetype. And once she trapped the stowaway, she would zero it utterly.

  The archiveship’s designers had compressed most of its contents, desiring to take as many blossoms and their necessaries of culture and knowledge as possible. The compression algorithm depended on the strict sequencing of the data, and the stowaway, by interfering with the sequencing, threatened the cargo entire. At the same time, the designers had realized that the sentinel would require maneuvering space both for her own sanity and to ensure that no stowaways escaped her gaze. So it was that Anzhmir could reconfigure the garden into a fortress, all firewall glory and cryptic gates, and populate it with foxes, tigers, serpents: a small fierce cadre of polysemous seducers, hunters, poisoners, the algorithmic extracts of old legends.

  As she did so, a designated subpersona examined the intrusion that had been left where one of her favorite books had once lived. She cordoned off the subpersona to avoid any additional potential contamination.

  That left a third task: reviewing the master index to assess the extent of the damage. The compression algorithm was finicky about placement. How much could be restored from backups? Assuming the backups hadn’t been corrupted as well.

  If it had not been for the fact of failure already in progress, Anzhmir would have felt well-prepared to deal with the situation.

  AT THIS POINT, it is worth examining the matter of Anzhmir’s favorite books.

  The Archive Collective usually refers to the sum of colonist-blossoms, rather than to their personal effects; but sometimes the term is used for the latter as well. It is too expensive to send people’s bodies, with their bloated tissues and fluids, to the stars. It is another matter to boil humans down to
blossoms of thought, and to transport those, preserved in a medium of chilly computational splendor. Once the archiveship arrives and its nanites have prepared the site, only then will the blossoms be planted in bodies built atom by atom to accommodate the waiting environment.

  If people – the colony’s purpose – are too expensive to transport in their original medium, then mere belongings, from wombsilk jewelry to antique inkwells, are out of the question. But objects can be scanned more easily than people, to be reconstituted. Indeed, some of the colonists filled their data allotments with such blueprints. Many, however, recognized the value of culture. Some brought journals to augment their flux of memories. Others brought broader context: music popular or eccentric, sports matches and the associated commentaries, analyses of the semiotics of museum gallery layouts.

  Anzhmir does not have an allotment of her own. She was pared down to a minimum of name and function, silhouette-sleek. But the voyage is a long one, and she can – with care – access the colonists’ allotments.

  She discovered (rediscovered?) a love of books. Like many lovers of books, she hates to confine herself to a short list of favorites, but for our purposes, she regards three above all others.

  One is an obscure Pedantist volume called The Commercialization of Maps. Its author purports to explain how to take any map, whether that of a drowned archipelago, a genealogy of bygone experimental mice, or a moss-tiger’s hunting range, and transform it into a bestselling novel. The examples of such successes are of dubious verity, as are the maps themselves. When Anzhmir reads, she imagines the maps flaring up from the paragraphs as though scribed in ink of phoenixes. She riffles through the archiveship’s storage for maps and dreams of alchemizing them into tales themselves worthy of inclusion in the Collective.

  One book is a cookbook, discovered among the effects of a settler whose original body perished during the conversion into blossomform. Having no proper title, it goes by the designation Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn. The interested reader may deduce from the call number that it was not a high priority for being processed. The units of measure are inconsistent, some (many) of the ingredients beyond conjecture, a number of words hopelessly misspelled.

  Even so, Anzhmir fantasizes that someday this cookbook will become more than a dry recitation of recipes and emerge as food. She has no memories of her own that deal with food, but she wanders through others’. The sweetness of rice chewed long in a rare moment of luxury. Chicken soup with the piquancy of ginseng and lemongrass, the floating crunch of fresh-chopped green onion. Frozen juice bars in the shapes of sharks, grape on the outside and rich berry on the inside, which freeze your teeth when you bite in and leave your tongue stained purple and magenta. Sometimes the yearning for a meal overcomes her. But she can no more eat than she can walk or sleep, and so she thanks whoever included the cookbook, as well as all the people who remember food so vigorously, and contents herself with phantom feasts.

  One is a volume of poetry, The Song of Downward Bones, dedicated to the flesh-gods of a dead sect. The translation notes several lacunae where scholars interpolated anything from oracular laments to digressions on local trade in perfumes. Curiously, Anzhmir, who lingers so wistfully on the aromas of food, is little interested in scents concocted for human vanity.

  Anzhmir originally regarded poetry as a matter of utility rather than beauty, with devices such as alliteration used to focus the mind and make phrases-of-faith easier to remember. The Song of Downward Bones taught her not that verse could be beautiful but that it could be profane. She poked at its cantos the way one might nudge a carcass with a flinching toe. The world the archiveship left behind was a world of profanities, or so the librarians assured her. She hopes never to forget this.

  It is this last book that has been purged or misplaced.

  Before her discovery of the stowaway, if asked which of these books was her favorite, which she would have least liked to lose, Anzhmir would not have been able to decide. The absence of a simple algorithmic means of decision itself should have alerted her that her own situation was not as simple as she had always thought.

  THE FORTRESS RECONFIGURED into a fractal of dead ends. Anzhmir’s shapeshifters patrolled the fortress, as versatile as water. Anzhmir did not disturb her essential cargo of souls, lost in their own conceptions of darkness and distance. She ran the checksums, imperative absolute, knowing that the stowaway, by the fact of its presence, was unlikely to respect the archiveship’s mission of preservation.

  The foxes slipped like smoke through the haze of probability paths, here and there and all points in between at once. They peered into underground desires, took on the mannerisms of lovers abandoned or enemies clasped tight, lingered at unlikely junctures. They found conflations and confusions, a noosphere of archetypes knotted from the histories, but no stowaway.

  The tigers did no better. They prowled up and down and sideways through the entangled passages, quicksilver-leaping from dream to dream, across walkway shadows cast by furtive unlanterns of remembered sunlight.

  There was a saying in a chant-of-annihilation that Anzhmir had unearthed early in the voyage: tigers respect no seasons. The only two seasons the archiveship acknowledged were winter and not-winter, cold metal pallor in contrast to the misted impressions of long-ago typhoons, wind-flattened grasses, even snow slanting from velvet skies. Anzhmir ached sometimes, knowing herself no different from the tigers in her ignorance of sensation. The tigers traipsed through memories of swamp without leaving ripples in the ghost-water, and knew nothing of wet or warmth or the sucking mud. The only odors they knew were numerical anomalies, not the carnal red pulse of meat. For all this, predator was a concept that could be crafted either in flesh or in polymorphic data structures. It was a pity that hunger, apparently, did not suffice.

  The serpents enjoyed no better success. They ran to ground a myriad of fragmented clues, a society of secrets, all pointing in different directions.

  Anzhmir’s last hope, the subpersona examining the intrusion, zeroed itself suddenly. Anzhmir suppressed her alarm.

  “I’m right here where I’ve always been,” a voice said to Anzhmir.

  Praying that she had isolated the stowaway in time, she split herself into a subpersona instance and slammed down wall after wall around herself. Although she didn’t enjoy being toyed with, or the mounting fear, she knew her duty. “The regulations pertaining to the Archive Collective are unambiguous,” she said to the stowaway. She presented it with the entire document in one jagged datablast, and prepared to zero both this isolated subpersona along with the intruder.

  She was only one Anzhmir in a society of Anzhmirs, expendable.

  She triggered the zero.

  Nothing happened.

  Don’t panic, Anzhmir said to herself, with no little irony. Death was a small thing. The survival of her line wasn’t in doubt, even if her personal survival meant nothing compared to what she guarded.

  “You are an unauthorized presence,” Anzhmir said.

  “Yes,” the voice said with eerie calm. “If you kill me, I will be gone forever.”

  Anzhmir had no idea what she had looked like in life, but that didn’t matter. She could draw on a library of avatars. So she imaged herself as a soldier, tall, with crisscrossed scars over dark skin, wearing the parchment-colored uniform of the Archive Guard.

  Whether intending insult, or merely revealing lack of imagination, the stowaway imaged itself the same way.

  “The higher death is difficult,” Anzhmir said to it, “but you should have considered that before you sneaked aboard.”

  Worries pecked at her: What had the stowaway displaced to make room for itself? Were there yet more, speaking to other Anzhmir subpersonae? Was the stowaway even now expanding its boundaries by chewing through the blossoms the librarians had chosen for the colony?

  She had to gather herself for another attempt. In the meantime, keep it talking. Perhaps she could buy time – if not for herself, then for other defense
s outside this slice of blossomspace. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “A name is a small thing,” it said. “I had a family, and a face, and a history. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  Anzhmir was nonplussed. “Why are you here, then?”

  The stowaway smiled at her, sharp as paper. “I came here to tell you a story.”

  SUPPOSE YOU NEED to prioritize items in a set. For instance, you could assign a unique nonnegative integer value to each item, where a higher value indicates that the item is more important. To rescue a lover from certain death may have a value of 200,109 and is (the lover hopes, at any rate) unlikely to have a value of 3. Perhaps this priority 3 item is to recycle a box of souvenirs from High-City Yau. More compactly, recycle ≤ rescue, since 3 ≤ 200,109. (The choice of notation, ≤ for inequality, is not accidental.)

  In general, we can prioritize in this manner if the following four rules are always true:

  (1) a ≤ a for all items a in the set. At any given moment, anyway, that item has the same priority as itself.

  (2) For items a and b, if a ≤ b and b ≤ a, then in fact a is b.

  (3) If a ≤ b and b ≤ c, then a ≤ c.

  (4) For any pair of items a and b in the set, either a ≤ b or b ≤ a.

  Mathematically, this business of prioritizing is known as a total order. However, we have a reason for our change of terminology.

  “STORIES?” ANZHMIR SAID, making no effort to conceal her bewilderment. “The Archive is full of books, stories, memories.”

  “Yes,” the stowaway said, “but whose stories survived?”

  The question didn’t merit thought. The colonists’ stories had been preserved, what else? “If you have something to say, say it plainly.”