by Drew Ford
Trees themselves come to an end and crumble away; huge, solid brown-and-red domes balloon on the plain, spread thick shell-leaves like opening cabbages, push long shoots through their crowns. The shoots tower above the domes and bloom with millions of tiny gray and pink flowers.
Watching all our work and plans being destroyed, the seven tributaries within our soma offer dismayed hypotheses: this is a malfunction, the conservation and compression engines have failed, and all knowledge is being acted out uselessly; no, it is some new gambit of the Endtime Work Coordinator, an emergency project; on the contrary, it is a political difficulty, lack of communication between the Coordinator and the Libraries, and it will all be over soon . . .
We watch shoots topple with horrendous snaps and groans, domes collapse in brown puffs of corruption.
The scape begins anew.
More hours pass, and still no communication with any other social=minds. We fear our Library itself has been destroyed; what other explanation for our abandonment? We huddle on our promontory, seeing patterns but no sense. Each generation of creativity brings something different, something that eventually fails or is rejected.
Today, large-scale vegetation is the subject of interest. The next day, vegetation is ignored for a rush of tiny biologies, but there is no change visible from where We stand, our soma still and watchful on its eight sturdy legs. We shuffle our claws to avoid a carpet of reddish growth surmounting the rise. By nightfall, we see, the mad scape could claim this part of the hill and we will have to move.
The sun approaches zenith. All shadows vanish. Its violet magnificence humbles us, a feeling we are not used to. We are from the great social=minds of the Library; humility and awe come from our isolation and concern. Not for a billion years have any of our tributaries felt so removed from useful enterprise. If this is the Endtime overtaking us, overcoming all our efforts, so be it. We feel resolve, pride at what we have managed to accomplish.
Then, we receive a simple message. The meeting with the students will take place. The Berkus will find us and explain. But We are not told when.
Something has gone very wrong when students should dictate to their teachers, and should put so many tributaries through this kind of travail.
The concept of mutiny is studied by all the tributaries within the soma. It does not explain much. New hypotheses occupy our thinking. Perhaps the new matter of which all things are now made has itself gone wrong, destabilizing our worlds and interrupting the consolidation of knowledge; that would explain the scape’s ferment and our isolation. It might explain unstable and improper thought processes. Or, the students have allowed some activity on School World to run wild; error.
The scape pushes palace-like glaciers over its surface, gouging itself in painful ecstasy: change, change, birth and decay, all in a single day, but slower than the rush of forests and living things. We might be able to remain on the promontory.
Why are We treated so?
We keep to the open, holding our ground, clearly visible, concerned but unafraid. We are of older stuff. Teachers have always been of older stuff.
Could We have been party to some mis-instruction, to cause such a disaster? What have We taught that might push our students into manic creation and destruction? We search all records, all memories, contained within the small soma. The full memories of our seven tributaries have not of course been transferred into the extension; it was to be a temporary assignment, and besides, the records would not fit. The lack of capacity hinders our thinking, and we find no satisfying answers.
One of our tributaries has brought along some personal records. It has a long-shot hypothesis and suggests that an ancient prior self be activated to provide an objective judgment engine. There are two reasons: the stronger is that this ancient self once, long ago, had a connection with a tributary making up the Endtime Work Coordinator. If the problem is political, perhaps the self’s memories can give us deeper insight. The second and weaker reason: truly, despite our complexity and advancement, perhaps we have missed something important. Perhaps this earlier, more primitive self will see what we have missed.
There is indeed so little time; isolated as we are from a greater river of being, a river that might no longer exist, we might be the last fragment of social=mind to have any chance of combating planet-wide madness.
There is barely enough room to bring the individual out of compression. It sits beside the tributaries in the thought plenum, in distress and not functional. What it perceives it does not understand.
Our questions are met with protests and more questions.
The Engine
I come awake, aware. I sense a later and very different awareness, part of a larger group. My thoughts spin with faces to which I try to apply names, but my memory falters. These fade and are replaced by gentle calls for attention, new and very strange sensations.
I label the sensations around me: other humans, but not in human bodies. They seem to act together while having separate voices. I call the larger group the We-ness, not me, and yet it is in some way accessible, as if part of my mind and memory.
I do not think that I have died, that I am dead. But the quality of my thought has changed. I have no body, no sensations of liquid pumping and breath flowing in and out.
Isolated, confused, I squat behind the We-ness’s center of observation, catching glimpses of a chaotic, high-speed landscape. Are they watching some entertainment?
I worry that I am in a hospital, in recovery, forced to consort with other patients who cannot or will not speak with me. I try to recollect my last meaningful memories. I remember a face again and give it a name and relation: Elisaveta, my wife, standing beside me as I lie on a narrow bed. Machines bend over me. I remember nothing after that.
But I am not in a hospital, not now.
Voices speak to me and I begin to understand some of what they say. The voices of the We-ness are stronger, more complex and richer, than anything I have ever experienced.
I do not hear them.
I have no ears.
“You’ve been stored inactive for a very long time,” the We-ness tells me. It is (or they are) a tight-packed galaxy of thoughts, few of them making any sense at all.
Then I know.
I have awakened in the future. Thinking has changed.
“I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who you are . . .”
“We are joined from seven tributaries, some of whom once had existence as individual biological beings. You are an ancient self of one of us.”
“Oh,” I say. The word seems wrong without lips or throat. I will not use it again.
“We’re facing great problems. You’ll provide unique insights.” The voice expresses overtones of fatherliness and concern.
I do not believe it. Blackness paints me.
“I’m hungry but I can’t feel my body. Where am I? I’m afraid. I miss . . . my family.”
“There is no body, no need for hunger, no need for food. Your family—our family—no longer lives.”
“How did I get here?”
“You were stored before a major medical reconstruction, to prevent total loss. Your stored self was kept as a kind of an historical record, as a memento.”
I don’t remember any of that, but then, how could I? I remember signing contracts to allow such a thing. I remember thinking about the possibility I would awake in the future. But I did not die! “How long has it been?”
“Twelve billion two hundred and seventy-nine million years.”
Had the We-ness said “ten thousand years” or even “two hundred years,” I might feel some visceral reaction. All I know is that such an enormous length of time is beyond geological. It is cosmological. I do not believe in it.
I glimpse the landscape again, glaciers slipping down mountain slopes, clouds pregnant with winter building gray and orange in the stinging glare of a huge setting sun. The sun is all wrong—too bright, too violet. It resembles a dividing cell, all extrusions and blebs
and long ribbons of streaming hair. It could be Medusa, one of the Gorgon sisters.
The edges of the glaciers calve pillars of white ice that topple and shatter across hills and valleys. I have awakened in the middle of an ice age. But it is fast, too fast.
Nothing makes sense.
“Is all of me here?” I ask. Perhaps, lacking a whole mind, I am delusional.
“The most important part of you is here. We would like to ask you some questions. Do you recognize any of the following faces, voices, thought patterns, styles?”
Disturbing synesthesia—bright sounds, loud colors, dull electric smells—fill my senses and I close them out as best I can. “No! That isn’t right. Please, no questions until I know what’s happened. No! That hurts!”
The We-ness prepares to turn me off, to shut me down. I am warned that I will again become inactive. Just before I wink out, I feel a cold blast of air crest the promontory on which the We-ness, and I, sit. Glaciers now blanket the hills and valleys. The We-ness flexes eight fluid red legs, pulling them from quick-freezing mud.
The sun still has not set.
Thousands of years in a day.
I am given sleep as blank as death, but not so final.
* * *
We gather as one and consider the problem of the faulty interface. “This is too early a self. It doesn’t understand our way of thinking,” one tributary says. “We must adapt to it.”
The tributary whose prior self this was volunteers to begin restructuring.
“There is so little time,” says another, who now expresses strong disagreement with the plan to resurrect. “Are we truly agreed this is best?”
We threaten to fragment as two of the seven tributaries vehemently object. But solidarity holds. All tributaries flow again to renewed agreement. We start the construction of an effective interface, which first requires deeper understanding of the nature of the ancient self.
This takes some more precious time. The glacial cold nearly kills us. The soma changes its fluid nature by linking liquid water with long-chain and even more slippery molecules, highly resistant to freezing.
“Do the students know We’re here, that We watch?” asks a tributary.
“They must . . .” says another. “They express a willingness to meet with us.”
“Perhaps they lie, and they mean to destroy this soma, and us with it. There will be no meeting.”
Dull sadness.
We restructure the ancient self, wrap it in our new interface, build a new plenary face to hold us all on equal ground, and call it up again, saying,
Vasily
* * *
I know the name, recognize the fatherly voice, feel a new clarity. I wish I could forget the first abortive attempt to live again, but my memory is perfect from the point of first rebirth on. I will forget nothing.
“Vasily, your descendant self does not remember you. It has purged older memories many times since your existence; even so, We recognize some similarities between your patterns. Birth patterns are strong and seldom completely erased. Are you comfortable now?”
I think of a simple place where I can sit. I want wood paneling and furniture and a fireplace, but I am not skilled; all I can manage is a small gray cubicle with a window on one side. In the wall is a hole through which the voices come. I imagine I am hearing them through flesh ears, and a kind of body forms within the cubicle. This body is my security. “I’m still afraid. I know—there’s no danger.”
“There is danger, but We do not yet know how significant the danger is.”
Significant carries an explosion of information. If their original selves still exist elsewhere, in a social=mind adjunct to a Library, then all that might be lost will be immediate memories. A social=mind, I understand, is made up of fewer than ten thousand tributaries. A Library typically contains a trillion or more social=minds.
“I’ve been dead for billions of years,” I say, hoping to address my future self. “But you’ve lived on—you’re immortal.”
“We do not measure life or time as you do. Continuity of memory is fragmentary in our lives, across eons. But continuity of access to the Library—and access to records of past selves—does confer a kind of immortality. If that has ended, We are completely mortal.”
“I must be so primitive,” I say, my fear oddly fading now. This is a situation I can understand—life or death. I feel more solid within my cubicle. “How can I be of any use?”
“You are primitive in the sense of firstness. That is why you have been activated. Through your life experience, you may have a deeper understanding of what led to our situation. Argument, rebellion, desperation . . . These things are difficult for us to deal with.”
Again, I don’t believe them. From what I can tell, this group of minds has a depth and strength and complexity that makes me feel less than a child . . . perhaps less than a bacterium. What can I do except cooperate? I have nowhere else to go . . .
For billions of years . . . inactive. Not precisely death.
I remember that I was once a teacher.
Elisaveta had been my student before she became my wife.
The We-ness wants me to teach it something, to do something for it. But first, it has to teach me history.
“Tell me what’s happened,” I say.
The Libraries
In the beginning, human intelligences arose, and all were alone. That lasted for tens of thousands of years. Soon after understanding the nature of thought and mind, intelligences came together to create group minds, all in one. Much of the human race linked in an intimacy deeper than sex. Or unlinked to pursue goals as quasi-individuals; the choices were many, the limitations few. (This all began a few decades after your storage.) Within a century, the human race abandoned biological limitations, in favor of the social=mind. Social=minds linked to form Libraries, at the top of the hierarchy.
The Libraries expanded, searching around star after star for other intelligent life. They found life—millions upon millions of worlds, each rare as a diamond among the trillions of barren star systems, but none with intelligent beings. Gradually, across millions of years, the Libraries realized that they were the All of intelligent thought.
We had simply exchanged one kind of loneliness for a greater and more final isolation. There were no companion intelligences, only those derived from humanity . . .
As the human Libraries spread and connections between them became more tenuous—some communications taking thousands of years to be completed—many social=minds re-individuated, assuming lesser degrees of togetherness and intimacy. Even in large Libraries, individuation became a crucial kind of relaxation and holiday. The old ways reasserted.
Being human, however, some clung to old ways, or attempted to enforce new ones, with greater or lesser tenacity. Some asserted moral imperative. Madness spread as large groups removed all the barriers of individuation, in reaction to what they perceived as a dangerous atavism—the “lure of the singular.”
These “uncelled” or completely communal Libraries, with their slow, united consciousness, proved burdensome and soon vanished—within half a million years. They lacked the range and versatility of the “celled” Libraries.
But conflicts between differing philosophies of social=mind structure continued. There were wars.
Even in wars the passions were not sated; for something more frightening had been discovered than loneliness: the continuity of error and cruelty. After tens of millions of years of steady growth and peace, the renewed paroxysms dismayed us. No matter how learned or advanced a social=mind became, it could, in desperation or in certain moments of development, perform acts analogous to the errors of ancient, individuated societies. It could kill other social=minds, or sever the activities of many of its own tributaries. It could frustrate the fulfillment of other minds. It could experience something like rage, but removed from the passions of the body: rage cold and precise and long-lived, terrible in its persuasiveness, dreadful in its consequences. E
ven worse, it could experience indifference.
* * *
I tumble through these records, unable to comprehend the scale of what I see. Our galaxy was linked star to star with webworks of transferred energy and information; but large sectors of the galaxy were darkened by massive conflict, and millions of stars turned off, shut down.
This was war.
At the scale of individual humans, planets seemed to revert to ancient Edens, devoid of artifice or instrumentality; but the trees and animals themselves carried myriads of tiny machines, and the ground beneath them was an immense thinking system, down to the core . . .
Other worlds, and other structures between worlds, seemed as abstract and meaningless as the wanderings of a stray brush on canvas.
The Proof
One great social=mind, retreating from the ferment of the Libraries, formulated the rules of advanced meta-biology, and found them precisely analogous to those governing planet-bound ecosystems: competition, victory through survival, evolution and reproduction. It proved that error and pain and destruction are essential to any change—but more importantly, to any growth.
The great social=mind carried out complex experiments simulating millions of different ordering systems, and in every single case, the rise of complexity (and ultimately intelligence) led to the wanton destruction of prior forms. Using these experiments to define axioms, what began as a scientific proof ended as a rigorous mathematical proof:
There can be no ultimate ethical advancement in this universe.
The indifference of the universe—reality’s grim and mindless harshness—is multiplied by the necessity that old order, prior thoughts and lives, must be extinguished to make way for new.
After checking its work many times, the great social=mind wiped its stores and erased its infrastructure in, on, and around seven worlds and the two stars, leaving behind only the formulation and the Proof.