3x = 1.
Turns out human minds—all self-aware beings, so far as we can guess—have modular mathematics at their foundation. Every individual is a one-way operation.
When all is said and done, you can't write us out as an algorithm.
That's basically why, if I have kids, I stop being a time traveler. And when you stop being a time traveler, that means you've never been a time traveler. And if you are a time traveler who has gone to a certain period—
Poof. You're gone.
Along with everything you've done or have not done.
So you see why time travelers might be a trifle meticulous about their condoms.
Out my office window, the project station is rotating away from galactic-out, and toward the black heart of it all. Sagittarius A.
Galactic core view means it's almost time for lunch. I order up a Greek salad and—what the hell—ask for it to be delivered from this little restaurant I know on Alpha C when—
Uh oh.
Two slouchy officials from the fitters union show up without an appointment. The slouch posture is ubiquitous among fitters—you learn to lean or you lose your head in the wormholes—and if these two didn't possess such a slouch, they'd have to affect it in order to get elected. Slouch One, I have never met. Looks like some kind of lawyer. Slouch Two is Reberk Dakuba, the union president himself.
"Hello, Reb, what can I do for you?"
Reb shuffles, glances away. This is a pose. I notice the shark-white glint of his eye, the way he rubs his hands together as if he's drying them off for proper handling of a knife. "We've decided to sue, Will," he tells me. "I'm sorry to be the one to break the news."
I don't give him the pleasure of an angry reaction. "And I'm sorry to hear it," I say.
"If the suit doesn't work, I've got cross-grain authorization from servers, freemen and the cached fitters deposit to—well, to call a strike, Will."
Which would be a disaster of major proportion and would bring cathedral construction to a halt—perhaps for decades. Both of us know it. But Reb has some desperate fitters out there, and he might be willing to risk it. After all, he's one of the desperate himself. You see, he's missing a real personality.
"Is there anything I can do or say to change your mind?"
"Tell me what's going to happen."
"You know I can't do that, Reb. That kind of knowledge got obliterated when they sent me back."
"Then tell the company to give us our memories. With interest."
"I sympathize with your concerns, Reb," I say. "You and I are basically in the same boat."
He nods. This is not our first meeting. Not by a long shot. And even he doesn't know about some of them.
"I was hoping the cathedral board would consider our final offer to settle," Reb says. "I think it's time to take it to them."
"Come on in," I say. "Lay it out for me, and I'll be happy to put it before them."
I mentally (and actually) shift a couple of meetings to tomorrow and next week respectively in order take this conference.
Reb is not exaggerating about the missing memories. Nor the emotional turmoil that goes with it. The Loyal Order of Fitters, Miners, Network Engineers, Space-time Mechanics and Roustabouts—the fitters union—is facing a disaster with its pension fund. When the first generation of fitters got translated into their archetypes and were sent over the event horizon, their old particulars were banked. Thing is, you can't just store up a copy of a personality, step out of it, and then step back in when you're ready to go back to individual existence. Neither person nor archetype remain compatible.
So lives were loaned out to be lived by others. A win-win solution, it seemed at the time. Then, when the fitters were done with their K+ indenture agreement and were re-instantiated as their old selves again, each worker was supposed to receive a richer life as a result. Most did. Their individuality had been loaned out to various artificial intelligences that need such qualities in order to function correctly, and were returned fully endowed with the emotional intelligence that comes from 1,000 years of thinking, doing and feeling.
But for about twenty percent of the fitters, things didn't work out that way. Someone at the savings bank had had the bright idea to gamble on riskier loans shooting for a bigger R.O.I. One in five of these had failed spectacularly. Either the personalities didn't mesh with the A.I., or the A.I. itself was operating in a hazardous environment, couldn't make regular backups, and suffered periodic crashes. Whatever the case, the entire fund of emotional development was lost, together with any memories. And when the archetype was reinstated with his or her personal data, what you had was a soul without any individuality to give it root. Not a pleasant situation.
So now there are still about 10,000 fitters who remain stuck as "types," as they are called, upon retirement, who can't go back to being the person they were—or even being a real person at all.
Okay, maybe this doesn't sound so bad in the abstract—to be condemned to basically a demigod status for the second half of your life. It's not like you lose all reason and become a moron. In fact, you're much, much smarter. But, first of all, it's sheer hell on relationships. Families fall apart. Reb's had. And second, human life for a "type," as they are called, can be boring as hell, especially when you can barely remember who you were before—before you spent 1,000 years shifting around planets, stars and space-time itself with the force of your mind.
So Reb, as a good president ought, is trying to spin the problem as somehow management's fault. On the other hand, it was his own flunky brother-in-law on the bank board who approved the bad loans.
So we talk. And resolve to differ. I'll take the proposal to the board.
I could go on about my day. You get the idea.
These are legacy issues and ultimately resolvable disputes. Tough stuff, but not insoluble. The part of the job where I tie up loose ends. Topographically, from the perspective of the past and present, that's precisely what the entire project is about, too: creating a knot, a simple overhand loop, to keep all the meaning, all the teleological direction, humanity has pumped into our surroundings from unraveling like a cheap suit. Sure, it's not something our cave-bound ancestors could've accomplished—it's wheels within wheels, webs of oaths and promises anchored in the deep past stretching to today and beyond, where you touch one part, the other parts move. But, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it's algorithms. Methodology. And we humans are masters of method. In fact, we're tying the knot even as we speak. And that's what makes my afternoons more interesting, you might say.
I spend them on site.
Oh, it's still meetings and more meetings, don't get me wrong. But these sessions are with my team leaders and contractors. Project reports. Completion estimates. And me overseeing it all, juggling contractors, material, what has to get done when before something else—the backbone of construction projects—hell, since Roman times. This is the part I love.
The cathedral looks kind of like an egg.
Okay, an egg several thousand light-years across. Impressed upon the multi-dimensional surface of the event horizon of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, like a tattoo inked by two million stars worth of quantum uncertainty, two-tenths of one percent of the material galaxy itself. We took it, hauled it here, and we're not putting it back. By any measure, a major undertaking.
Anyway, from the outside, it does look like an egg.
Within the egg, within the cathedral, the laws of nature don't apply. Or, rather, they apply selectively. Phenomenology surrenders to teleology. The is to the ought. Within, it's impossible to hurt innocent children, no matter how you try to recruit them for sex, throw them in gulags for choosing their families over the state, seduce and destroy them with false prophesies and visions, rape them behind the altar, enslave them for work on collective farms, eat them. It's impossible to throw a rock and hit somebody. All the holocausts are redeemed, like so many coupons, so many savings accounts come due. All the h
urricanes and earthquakes and extinction events we have had to endure as a species are cashed in for dividends and interest. Within the cathedral, truth trumps power. Right makes might.
Okay, so what's the interior really look like, feel like?
Come on. You know I can't tell you that. I'd have to show you.
But I'll try.
Spacious. Complex. By definition. Imagine a map that is more intricate than the thing it represents. Can't? That's the cathedral. When you first arrive, it still looks like a cathedral, a building, but that's just the introductory experience. You begin to notice that things are. . . not what they seem.
Every door, every window, every portico, every niche, nook and cranny opens up into something that is larger than the room you came from before. It is a place that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
It's beautiful. It sparkles with a thousand dewdrops, each one a world in itself that you can enter. There's a sound. A bit like rushing water. A bit like wind. Only later do you realize this is the air itself, the song of worlds suspended, dancing like motes in sunlight, rippling against one another like crystalline bubbles. You breathe them in.
And the scent. New. Fresh. But infinite and intricate. The atmosphere alive with possibilities.
And hell, we're just done with the basement.
Big problem. The egg, the cathedral, is fundamentally incompatible with the universe as we know it. It wants to splinter off and form its own pocket universe.
The egg wants to hatch.
That's where my real job lies.
And that's where my future wife comes into the picture. The one I'll marry after Rebecca dies.
Her name is Lu. She's quality control. Allegedly. Whatever she is or will be, she's hard to take my eyes off of. Ur-bronze of skin. Dark-eyed. My total physical type. And there are other compatibilities.
Let's just say she and I have a lot in common.
"We have concerns about the subbasement template," Lu tells me, no introduction, no 'how-do-you-do' provided. Where did she come from? How did she get into my office? Easy. She's like the sphere descending into Flatland in that book: it shows up suddenly from the third dimension, like a finger dipped through a pond's surface.
Like I said, she and I are a lot alike. Lu is a time traveler. But the body she inhabits is from farther up-time than mine. Stronger. Faster. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.
And able to out-think me five ways to Sunday on most days.
"Which one?" I ask. The cathedral has at least four basements that I know of. My predecessor as chief architect had a thing for them. Contemplating those myriad twisty corridors may have been what finally drove him to insanity. On the other hand, it may have just been the drinking.
"All of them," Lu answered. "There's a discord with the unborn conditionals that's grown into a detectable resonance. Justice for the unborn has become underdetermined in regards to born justice. The models don't mesh, and we think this may be a major factor that leads to the hatch."
The hatch. Our bête noire.
"Are you sure," I reply. "Doesn't exactly sound like impending doom. Could take a few million years to manifest. . ." My first reaction to irritation is facetiousness. Also my second. And third. Normally I put a sock in it as best I can, but what's a wife for if not to hear your internal dialog?
"A million years is a drop in the bucket and a blink of the eye," says Lu. "As you well know."
"Do you have a modification ticket for me, then?"
Lu hesitates. Fixes me in her sight. Something unusual to this. I've been standing, and I sit down on the edge of my desk. Grip its underside.
"This one is a simple fix," she says. Almost off-handedly. Almost casually. Almost. "We're going to leave it up to you."
So—this is a bit of a stunner. Template mods normally came with a full work order from on high. Pages and pages of instructions. Because who can argue with the future? I mean, by definition they've been there and done that.
"Okay," I say. "Can you be a little more specific?"
Another slight hesitation. I gripped the underside of the desk tighter.
"It involves Rebecca. Your wife, Rebecca."
What?
"What?"
"William, I tried to prepare you," said Lu. "Rebecca has become a strong underdetermination attractor. In fact, we think this entire template problem has something to do with her."
"What the hell are you talking about, Lu. She's just some woman."
"I know that. But the equations don't lie. Events are shifting here, and the butterfly effect—well, uncertainty is giving way to instability, and it all seems to lead back to her. Like I said, underdetermination. As if many roads could lead to the same future. Which, as you know, means none of them could."
"And that means what?" I ask.
"Disaster, Will," Lu says. "For the entire project. A hatch event."
"Wait a minute! You told me she's going to die. That this disease, whatever she's got, is inevitable. You never said she was a danger to the project."
Lu is silent for a moment. A placid emptiness passes over her face. This is the look she gets when she is off on a quantum decision tree spree, considering the billions upon billions of responses she might give. Then the smile. The knowing smile that curls across her perfect lips.
"Look, it's difficult to explain without compromising your situation," Lu replied. "But I'll answer your questions if I can."
Suddenly, I'm scared shitless. There's only one question that matters, after all.
"What is it you want me to do?"
Lu stepped toward me. Her face is placid, but there is a tear in her eye. A tear that contains whole star clusters of experience. Eons.
The suffering and anguish of all possible worlds.
"William, you have to kill her." Lu stretches her arms out to me.
In her right hand is a gun.
It's a Hauser 98 semi. A weapon so advanced in its coding as to seem magically ensorcelled with noxious spells, even to one such as I. Lethal in all possible worlds. You get shot with a Hauser, you're never coming back.
I'm shaking. "Why ask me? She's doing a pretty good job of killing herself."
"Not enough," Lu says. "You have to do it tonight."
"No." It's a squeak. Talk about weakly underdetermined. I know what I'm up against. Lu is merely a front. For humanity itself. Or what's left of it.
Lu shakes her head sadly. Another tear. Another possible world crumbles to ashes.
"You know you're going to."
I'd like to say I didn't make love to Lu. I'd like to say I didn't fuck her.
I did both. Simultaneously. Apart. Her skin glowed beneath my fingers. Her lips touched mine like those butterfly wings that flapped during the Jurassic—and doomed the dinosaurs.
And then we fell into the present tense.
She pushes me down, strips me naked. Climbs on top and pulls me inside herself. Moves with the beat of sunlight through leaves on a planet that had ceased to exist a thousand centuries before she was born.
Then she draws me into the future. Makes me want to be there with her. To love. Hope. Take revenge against a universe that wants to stamp us out. Find my antidote in her.
And I turn her over, push her to the ground, the lush Persian rug on my office floor. Part her impossibly beautiful legs.
All this can be yours.
Is yours.
I tell myself.
The future is rosy.
My future wife is not really a woman in the traditional sense. Or, rather, she's all woman. She's the consensus of what humanity will become. And I—perhaps I am not such a simple architect myself. I have a confession to make.
It's not what you think. That I am a time traveler is no big secret. Everyone knows. I showed up the day the former chief architect committed suicide. He'd killed himself in a particularly nasty way—with the same sort of mod-p bullet that's used in the Hauser. Information can neither be created nor destroyed. If
you know what you're doing, you can pull a password from a cadaver. But information can be password protected for all eternity.
When you're hit with a mod-p slug, you can't download to the cache. You just—
die.
That's the kind of gun the poor slob had put to his head. And he'd taken all his personal keys with him .
So they—meaning the Board, meaning the Consortium, meaning the human political structure in the entire galaxy—were locked out. Out of the galactic core project. Out of the cathedral.
But happy day!
I show up with the code, time traveler that I am. I can restart the project.
On one little condition.
The future wants a say in the Cathedral of Justice. We have legitimate claim to legacy projects just as much as the past and the present.
We want our justice, too.
And what might that justice consist of? Let's just say that from a couple of billion years perspective, you might come to view justice as more of a means than an end. That justice might come to be considered anything that enables you to survive.
At five minutes to midnight on the last night of the universe, Fermi's Law has become Fermi's Fuck-up.
We've got no help up there at the end of time. Nobody to turn to.
All sentient beings disappear completely. Utterly. We, sentience itself, leave behind absolutely no trace of our passing. May as well never have been. It's happened countless times. It's happened to everybody.
Where did they all go?
To heaven, of course. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. Who wouldn't want to be there when the shit hits the fan and the fan sputters to a halt? An event horizon is eternal, even if the universe that contains it is not. Everybody figures this out sooner or later. They collect all their baggage (hence the lack of EM signals across the heavens), turn out the lights, close the door—
Goodbye cruel world.
But somewhere, some time, a long, long way down the continuum, in the light of the last dying star in the last cinder of a galaxy—something very odd happened. Will happen.
We, meaning just us humans, fell from grace.
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