Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

  Harry cut in, "Michael, we're in the middle of a storm of messages. I'm surprised the hull of the dome hasn't burned off under comm-laser fire... I think you'll have to deal with this. All the ships within a thousand miles are aware we're moving, and a dozen different authorities want to know what the hell we're doing."

  "Can any of them stop us before we reach the Interface?"

  Harry considered. "Probably not. The Spline, even disabled as it is, is so damn big it would have to be blown out of the sky to be stopped. And there's no armor in range heavy enough to do that."

  "Okay. Ignore them."

  "And we're getting messages from the earth-craft," Harry reported. "Also inquiring politely as to what we think we're doing."

  Shira's hands twisted together. "You must listen to them, Michael."

  "Answer me honestly, Shira. Can the Friends do anything to stop us?"

  Her mouth worked and her eyes seemed heavy, as if she could barely restrain hysterical tears; and Michael felt an absurd, irrational urge to comfort her. "No," she said at last, quietly. "Not physically, no. But—"

  "Then ignore them too." Michael thought it over. "In fact, Harry, I want you to disable the whole damn comms panel... Any equipment the Spline is carrying too. Permanently; I want you to trash it. Can you do that?"

  Again a short hesitation. "Sure, Michael," Harry said uncertainly. "But — are you sure that's such a good idea?"

  "Where we're going we're not going to need it," Michael said. "It's just a damn distraction. In — " He studied the zenith. "What, forty minutes?"

  "Thirty-eight," Harry said gloomily.

  "—we're going to enter the Interface. And we're going to close it. And there's nothing more anybody can say that will make a piece of difference to that."

  "I'm not going to argue," Harry urged, "but — Michael — what about Miriam?"

  "Miriam's a distraction," Michael said firmly. "Come on, Harry; do it. I need your support."

  There was a silence of a few seconds. Then: "Done," Harry said. "We're all alone, Michael."

  "You are a fool," Shira told Michael coldly.

  Michael sighed and tried to regain a comfortable posture in his couch. "It's not the first time I've been called that."

  "Might be the last, though," Parz said dryly.

  "You think you are solving the problem, with one bold, audacious stroke," Shira said, her water-blue eyes fixed on Michael's face. "You think you are fearless, in the face of unknown dangers — an encounter with the future, even with death. But you are not fearless. You are afraid. You fear even words. You fear the words of your contemporaries — how many lectures have I endured on how important it was that we should allow you into our confidence... that we should share the immense problems with which we grappled? And now you — as arrogant as you are foolish — turn your back even on your own kind. You fear the words of the Friends themselves — even of me — you fear the logic, the truth in our convictions."

  Michael massaged the bridge of his nose, wishing he didn't feel so damned tired. "Quite a speech," he said.

  She drew her back straight. "And you fear yourself. For fear of your own weakness of resolve, you dare not even consider the possibility of consulting the one closest to you, Miriam, who is less than a light-second away. You would rather, as you put it, 'trash' your comms equipment than—"

  "Enough," Michael snapped.

  She drew back a little at the sharpness of his tone, but she held her ground; pale eyes glittered from her fleshless face.

  Michael said, "To hell with any of that. It's academic, Shira. The rules have changed; the outside universe might as well not exist as far as what happens to this ship from now on; we've established that. There's only the four of us now — you, me, Parz, and Harry—"

  "—and several hundred drones," Harry put in uncertainly. "Who I'm having a certain amount of difficulty controlling—"

  Michael ignored him. "Just the four of us, Shira, in this bubble of air and warmth. And the only way this ship is going to get turned aside is if you — you — convince me, and the others, that your Project is worth the incalculable risk it entails." He studied her, trying to gauge her reaction. "Well? you have thirty-eight minutes."

  "Thirty-six," Harry said.

  Shira closed her eyes and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "All right," she said. She crossed the deck to her chair, her gait stiff and ungainly, and sat down.

  Michael, watching her, felt himself come alive with anticipation, rejuvenated by the prospect of having his questions answered at last.

  * * *

  Shira talked to them of Eugene Wigner, and of the von Neumann catastrophe.

  Like the alive-dead condition of Schrödinger's cat, events remained in a state of unreality until observed by a conscious entity. But each act of observation merely added another layer of potentiality to the core events, itself unrealized until observed in turn.

  The chains of quantum functions, in Wigner's view, extended to infinity in an unending chain, an infinite regress.

  "Thus, the paradox of Wigner's friend," Shira said.

  Michael shook his head impatiently. "But this is pure philosophical debate," he said. "Wigner himself believed that the regress was not infinite... that the chain of wave functions terminates as soon as a conscious mind makes an observation."

  "That is one view," Shira said quietly. "But there are others..."

  Shira described the participatory universe.

  Life — intelligent life — was, under this hypothesis, essential for the very existence of the universe. Imagine a myriad box-cat-friend-Wigner chains of quantum functions, all extending through time, without end. "Constantly," Shira said, "life — consciousness — is calling the universe into existence by the very act of observing it."

  Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being.

  And if this was true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organize data — all data, everywhere — to observe and actualize all events. For without actualization there could be no reality.

  Arising from a million chance beginnings, like the stirring of the chemical soup of Earth's ancient seas, life had spread — was continuing to spread — and to observe, to gather and record data using every resource available.

  "We live in an era somewhere near the start of the contact between species, on an interstellar scale," Shira said. "There is war, death, destruction. Genocide. But one can, from a godlike perspective, regard it all as interfacing — as a sharing, a pooling, of information.

  "Ultimately, surely, the squabbling species of our day will resolve their childish differences — differences of special prejudice, of narrow interests, of inadequate perception and move together, perhaps under the leadership of the Xeelee, toward the ultimate goal of life: the gathering and recording of all data, the observation and invocation of the universe itself."

  More and more resources would be devoted to this goal — not just in extent, as life spread from its myriad points of origin, but in depth and scope. At last all the energy sources available for exploitation, from the gravitational potential of galactic superclusters down to the zero-point energy inherent in space itself, would be suborned to the great project of consciousness.

  Shira described the future of the universe.

  In a few billion years — a blink of cosmic time — Earth's Sun would leave the main sequence of stars, its outer layers ballooning, swallowing the remains of the planets. Humanity would move on, of course, abandoning the old in favor of the new. More stars would form, to replace those that had failed and died... but the formation rate of new stars was already declining exponentially, with a half-life of a few billion years.

  After about a thousand billion years, no more stars would form. The darkened galaxies would continue to turn, but chance collisions and close encounters would take their cumulative toll. Planets would "evaporate" from their parent suns, and s
tars would evaporate from their galaxies. Those stars remaining in the time-ravaged star systems would lose energy, steadily, by gravitational radiation, and coalesce at last into immense, galactic-scale black holes.

  And those holes themselves would coalesce, into holes on the scales of galactic clusters and superclusters; from all across the universe the timelines would converge, merging at last into the great singularities.

  But life would prevail, said Shira, continuing to exploit with ever-increasing efficiency the universe's residual sources of energy. Such as the dim shining of the star-corpses, kept at a few degrees above absolute zero by the slow decay of protons.

  And there would still be work to be done.

  Black hole evaporation would continue, with the eventual shrinking and disappearance of event horizons even on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies; and naked singularities would emerge into the spreading sweep of spacetime.

  Perhaps the universe could not exist beyond the formation of a naked singularity. Perhaps the formation of such a flaw would cause the cessation of time and space, the ending of being.

  "And perhaps," Shira said, "life's purpose, in the later stages of the evolution of the universe, is to manipulate event horizons in order to prevent the formation of naked singularities."

  "Ah." Parz smiled. "Another elegant idea. So our descendants might be entrained to work as Cosmic Censors."

  "Or as Cosmic Saviors," Michael said dryly.

  Harry asked, sounding awed, "How do you manipulate event horizons?"

  "No doubt there are lots of ways," Michael said. "But even now we can imagine some fairly crude methods. Such as forcing black holes to merge before they get a chance to evaporate."

  "The Wigner paradox is inescapable," Shira said. The chains of unresolved quantum states would build on and on, growing like flowers, extending into the future, until the observations of the cosmos-spanning minds to come rested on aeon-thick layers of history, studded with the fossils of ancient events. "At last," Shira said, her voice steady and oddly flat, "life will cover the universe, still observing, still building the regressing chains of quantum functions. Life will manipulate the dynamical evolution of the cosmos as a whole. One can anticipate the pooled resources of life exploiting even the last energy resource, the sheer energy of the expansion of spacetime itself...

  "Consciousness must exist as long as the cosmos itself — for without observation there can be no actualization, no existence — and further, consciousness must become coextensive with the cosmos, in order that all events may be observed."

  Parz laughed softly, wondering. "What a vision. Girl, how old are you? You sound a thousand years old."

  But, Shira went on, the chains of quantum functions would finally merge, culminate in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.

  "And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer," Shira said quietly. "And the last Observation will be made—"

  "Yes," Parz said, "and so collapsing all the chains of quantum functions, right back through time — through the wreckage of the galaxies, down to the present and on into history, past Wigner, his friend, the cat and its box — what a charming notion this is—"

  "Retrospectively, the history of the universe will be actualized," Shira said. "But it cannot be realized until the final Observation." For the first time since resuming her seat she turned to Michael. "Do you understand the implications of this, Michael Poole?"

  He frowned. "These ideas are staggering, of course. But you've gone one step further. Haven't you, Shira? There's still another hypothesis you've made."

  "I... Yes." She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. "It is impossible for us to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history."

  "No," Michael said. "I think you believe that the Ultimate Observer will be able to influence the actualization. Don't you? You believe that the Observer will have the power to study all the nearly infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in the regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer will select, actualize a history that is — what?"

  "Which is simply the most aesthetically pleasing, perhaps," Parz said in his dry, aged way.

  "Which maximizes the potential of being," Shira said. "Or so we believe. Which makes the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain, and death." She lifted her head abruptly; the light from the data panel before her struck shadows in her face, and Michael was moved by the contrast between the skeletal gauntness of the girl's intense face and the beauty — the power, the wistfulness — of her concepts.

  Harry said, his voice heavy with wonder. "A god at the end of time. Is it possible?"

  Michael found he wanted to reach the girl, and he tried to put tenderness into his voice. "I understand you now, I think," he said. "You believe that none of this — our situation here, the Qax Occupation of Earth, the Qax time invasion — is real. It's all transitory, in a sense; we are simply forced to endure the motion of our consciousness along one of the chains of quantum functions that you believe will be collapsed, discarded, by your Ultimate Observer, in favor of—"

  "Heaven," Harry said.

  "No, nothing so crude," Michael said. He tried to imagine it, to look beyond the words. "Harry, if she's right, the ultimate state — the final mode of being of the cosmos — will consist of global and local optimization. Of the maximizing of potential, everywhere and at every moment, from the beginning of time." Shining, Shira had said. Yes, shining would surely be a good word for such an existence... Michael closed his eyes and tried to evoke such a mode; he imagined this shoddy reality burning away to reveal the pure, clear light of the underlying optimal state.

  Tears prickled gently at his closed eyes. If one were vouchsafed a glimpse of such a state, he thought, then surely one would, on being dragged back to the mire of this unrealized chain of being, go insane.

  If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense — so uncaring of their everyday lives, about the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shoddy prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior world lines.

  And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives — the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy — and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity that resided inside this fragile girl — and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy.

  She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.

  "All right, Shira," he said tenderly. "Thank you for telling me so much."

  Parz sighed, almost wistfully; his small, closed face showed a refined distress. "But she hasn't yet told us all of it. Have you, girl?" With an edge in his voice, he went on, "I mean, if you truly believe such a wondrous vision — that the history we have lived through, the present and future we must endure, are merely prototypes for some vast, perfect version that will one day be imposed on us from the end of time — then what is the Project all about? Why do you need to do anything to change your condition in the here-and-now? Why not simply endure this pain, let it end, and wait for it all to be put right at the end of things?"

  She shook her head. "In my time, humans are helplessly subjugated by the Qax. We were able to assemble the resources for our rebellion — but it was only the fortuitous arrival of your ship from the past that gave us the opportunity to do so.

  "Such a rebellion could never happen again.

  "Michael Poole, we believe the Qax Occupation will result, at last, in the decline of man. The Qax — inadvertently, perhaps — will destroy humanity. And thereby they will terminate all possible timelines in which humanity survives the Occ
upation era, joins the greater, maturing community of species that is to come, and adds to the wisdom of those mighty races at the end of time. The Qax will stop the transmission of any data about what humans were and might have been into the future. This is a crime on the largest of scales — and would be worth opposing even if we were not of the species affected...

  "But we are. And we believe we have to thwart the Qax, to safeguard the future role of humanity."

  Poole pulled his lip. "Jasoft, what do you make of this diagnosis?"

  Parz spread his hands. "She may be right. The Qax of my era weren't planning for our destruction before this disastrous sequence of events, ironically initiated by the Friends themselves — we've been too useful, economically. But perhaps in the end, we could not have survived an extended subjugation...

  "And, looking ahead, we know that Shira's prediction of the Qax's enmity must come true, but in ways she could not anticipate. The human Jim Bolder will cause the destruction of the Qax home world, drive them to diaspora. After this, it seems, the elimination of humanity will become a racial goal for the Qax."

  Poole nodded; he'd studied Shira's reactions throughout this discourse, but her face was blank, unreacting, blandly pretty. She's not listening, he realized. Perhaps she can't.

  "Very well," Parz said. "Then, Shira, tell us how turning Jupiter into a black hole will help you achieve your aims. Is the singularity to be some form of superweapon?"

  "No," Shira said calmly. "Such is not our intention. Not directly."

  "No," said Michael, staring at the girl. "You're not weapons manufacturers, or warriors, are you? I think you see yourself as part of the great upward streaming of life, toward this marvelous cosmic future you've described. I think you want to preserve something. Information of some kind. And send it beyond the current perilous era into this distant, glorious future, when those wise Observers of the universe will pick up your message and understand its true meaning."

  Parz was staring at him, baffled.

  Michael said, "Jasoft, I think they are turning Jupiter into a vast — time capsule. They're constructing a black hole; a black hole that will evaporate in — what? Ten to power forty years from now? Jupiter will be like a vast tomb, timed to open. A naked singularity will be exposed. These cosmic engineers, these tinkerers with the dynamical evolution of the universe, will come to investigate; to extinguish the peril exposed to the universe and its future/past."