by Greg Egan
It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving ... including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs’ failings.
Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it, you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it.
Yatima said numbly, “You were smarter than that. Stronger than that.” But when Inoshiro was wounded by Lacerta, what hadn’t ve done that might have made a difference? That might have spared ver the need for the kind of anesthetic that dissolved everything ve’d once been?
Inoshiro laughed. “So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?”
“What you are now —” Ve couldn’t say it.
What you are now is not Inoshiro.
Yatima stood motionless beside ver, sick with grief, angry and helpless. Ve was not in the fleshers’ world anymore; there was no nanoware bullet ve could fire into this imaginary body. Inoshiro had made vis choice, destroying vis old self and creating a new one to follow the ancient meme’s dictates, and no one else had the right to question this, let alone the power to reverse it.
Yatima reached out to the scape and crumpled the satellite into a twisted ball of metal floating between them, leaving nothing but the Earth and the stars. Then ve reached out again and grabbed the sky, inverting it and compressing it into a luminous sphere sitting in vis hand.
“You can still leave Konishi.” Yatima made the sphere emit the address of the portal to Carter-Zimmerman, and held it out to Inoshiro. “Whatever you’ve done, you still have that choice.”
Inoshiro said gently, “It’s not for me, Orphan. I wish you well, but I’ve seen enough.”
Ve vanished.
Yatima floated in the darkness for a long time, mourning Lacerta’s last victim.
Then ve sent the handful of stars speeding away across the emptiness of space, and followed them.
The conceptory observed the orphan moving through the portal, leaving Konishi polis behind. With access to public data, it knew of the orphan’s recent experiences; it also knew that another Konishi citizen had shared them, and had not made the same choice. The conceptory wasn’t interested in scattering Konishi shapers far and wide, like replicating genes; its goal was the efficient use of polis resources for the enrichment of the polis itself.
There was no way to prove causality, no way to be certain that any of the orphan’s mutant shapers really were to blame. But the conceptory was programmed to err on the side of caution. It marked the old, unmutated values for the orphan’s altered fields as the only valid codes, discarding all alternatives as dangerous and wasteful, never to be tried again.
* * *
Part Three
« ^ »
Paolo said decisively, “What comes next is the Forge. You helped design it, didn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I played a minor role.”
Paolo grinned. “Success has a thousand parents, but failure is an orphan.”
Yatima rolled vis eyes. “The Forge was not a failure. But the Transmuters won’t want to hear about my towering contribution to analytic methods in relativistic electron plasma modeling.”
“No? Well, I was never an insider at all, so whatever we tell them will have to come from you.”
Yatima thought it over. “I knew the two people who really mattered.” Ve smiled. “You could say it’s a love story.”
“Blanca and Gabriel?”
“Maybe I should have said ‘triangle.’”
Paolo was baffled. “Who else was involved?”
“I never met her myself. But I think you can guess who I mean.”
* * *
7
–
Kozuch’s Legacy
« ^ »
Carter-Zimmerman polis, Earth
24 667 274 153 236 CST
10 December 3015, 3:49:10.390 UT
Gabriel asked the Carter-Zimmerman library to show him every scheme on record for building a traversable wormhole. The problem had been studied long before the necessary technology was remotely within reach, both as an exercise in theoretical physics and as an attempt to map out the possibilities for future civilizations. It had seemed like an act of ingratitude, as well as a waste of resources, to discard the fruits of all this ancient labor and start again from scratch, so Gabriel had volunteered to sort through all the methods and machines advocated in the past and select the ten most promising candidates for detailed feasibility studies.
The library promptly constructed an indexscape with 3,017 different blueprints, laid out in a conceptual evolutionary tree which stretched across the scape’s imaginary vacuum for hundreds of kilodelta. Gabriel was taken aback for a moment; he’d been aware of the numbers, but the visible history of the subject was still an intimidating sight. People had been contemplating wormhole travel for almost a millennium; longer, counting the early designs based on classical General Relativity, but it was with the advent of Kozuch Theory that the field had truly flourished.
In Kozuch Theory, wormholes were everything. Even the vacuum was a froth of short-lived wormholes when examined at the Planck-Wheeler length of ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five meters. As early as 1955, John Wheeler had suggested that the apparently smooth space-time of General Relativity would turn out to be a tangled maze of quantum wormholes at this scale, but it was another idea of Wheeler’s — finally made to work, with spectacular success, by Renata Kozuch a hundred years later — that had transformed these wormholes from arcane curiosities far beyond the limits of detection into the most important structures in physics. The elementary particles themselves were the mouths of wormholes. Electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, W-Z bosons, gravitons, and gluons were all just the mouths of longer-lived versions of the fleeting wormholes of the vacuum.
Kozuch had labored for more than twenty years to refine this hypothesis, drawing together tantalizing but partial results from dozens of other specialties, cannibalizing everything from Penrose spin networks to the compactified extra dimensions of string theory. By including six sub-microscopic dimensions along with the usual four of space-time, she had shown how wormholes with different topologies could account for the properties of all the known particles. No one had directly observed a Kozuch-Wheeler wormhole, but after surviving a millennium of experimental tests the model was widely accepted, not as the best tool for most practical calculations, but as the definitive expression of the underlying order of the physical world.
Gabriel had learned Kozuch Theory in the womb, and it had always seemed to him to be the deepest, clearest picture of reality available. The mass of a particle was a consequence of the disruption it caused to a certain class of vacuum wormholes: those with virtual gravitons at both ends. Disturbing the usual pattern of connections between these wormholes made space-time effectively curved, much as a change in the weave of a basket could force the surface to bend by bringing parallel threads together. It also created a few loose threads: other wormholes squeezed out of the vacuum by the “tighter weave” wherever space-time was curved, giving rise to both Hawking radiation from black holes and the even fainter Unruh radiation of ordinary objects.
Charge, color, and flavor arose from similar effects, but with virtual photons, gluons, and W-Z bosons as the mouths of the vacuum wormholes involved, and the six rolled-up dimensions, to which gravitons were impervious, now playing a crucial role. Spin measured the presence of a certain kind of extra-dimensional twist in the wormhole mouth; each half-twist contributed half a unit of spin. Fermions, particles such as electrons with an odd number of half-twists, had wormholes which could themselves become twisted like ribbons; if an electron was rotated 360 degrees, its wormhole would gain or lose a definite twist, wi
th measurable consequences. Bosons, such as photons, had full twists in their wormhole mouths, but a 360-degree rotation left them unchanged because the kinks in their wormholes canceled themselves out. A single boson could be “self-linked,” the only opening into a wormhole which looped back on itself, or any number of identical bosons could share a wormhole. Fermions were always joined in even numbers; the simplest case was a particle at one end of the wormhole, with its antiparticle at the other.
Under the extreme space-time curvature of the early universe, countless vacuum wormholes had been “squeezed from the weave” to take on a more tangible existence. Most had formed particle-antiparticle pairs like electrons and positrons, but more rarely they’d created less symmetric combinations, such as an electron at one end of the wormhole with a three-pronged branching into a triplet of quarks, making up a proton, at the other.
This was the origin of all matter. By sheer chance, the vacuum had shed slightly more electron-proton wormholes than their antimatter equivalent, positrons linked to antiprotons, before expanding and cooling to the point where particle production ceased. Without that tiny random excess, every last electron and proton would have been annihilated by a matching antiparticle, and there would have been nothing in the universe but the microwave background, reverberating through empty space.
Kozuch herself had pointed out in 2059 that if this version of Big Bang cosmology was correct, it meant that every surviving electron was linked to a proton, somewhere. Brand new wormholes with known endpoints could be manufactured at will, simply by creating pairs of electrons and positrons, but existing wormholes already crisscrossed interstellar space. After twenty billion years drifting through an evolving and expanding universe, many particles torn from the vacuum side-by-side would have ended up thousands of light years apart. Chances were, every grain of sand, every drop of water on Earth, contained gateways to each of the hundreds of billions of stats in the galaxy, and some that reached far beyond.
The catch was: nothing in the universe could pass through the wormhole mouth of an elementary particle. All the known particles possessed a single quantum unit of surface area, and the probability of any of them passing through another’s wormhole was precisely zero.
This problem was not insurmountable. When an electron and a positron collided, their wormholes were spliced together end-to-end, making the two colliding mouths vanish. In that case two gamma-ray photons were produced, but if the wormholes could be spliced, not electron-end to positron-end but electron-end to electron-end, the energy normally lost as gamma rays would be trapped, and would go into making the new, spliced wormhole wider.
Achieving this union would require concentrating a modest amount of energy — two gigajoules, enough to melt a six-ton block of ice — into a volume as much smaller than that ice block as an atom was smaller than the observable universe. Wormholes produced by electron-electron splicing would be traversable only by fundamental particles, but splicing together a few billion of them would further widen the resulting wormhole, rather than lengthening it, enabling a moderately sophisticated nanomachine to pass through.
Gabriel had heard it rumored that the gleisners had considered the wormhole option, but elected to put it aside for the next few millennia. Building conventional interstellar spacecraft must have seemed trivial compared to the kind of technology it would take to tear open the portals to the stars scattered at their feet.
Still, with 3,017 designs to choose from there had to be one within Carter-Zimmerman’s reach, even if it took a thousand years to bring to fruition. Gabriel was undaunted by the time scale; he had long hoped for a grand scheme like this to make sense of his longevity. Without a purpose that spanned the centuries, he could only drift between interests and aesthetics, friends and lovers, triumphs and disappointments. He could only live a new life every gigatau or two, until there was no difference between his continued existence and his replacement by someone new.
Full of hope, he moved across the scape toward the first blueprint.
* * *
8
–
Short Cuts
« ^ »
Carter-Zimmerman polis, Earth
51 479 998 754 659 CST
7 August 3865, 14:52:31.813 UT
Blanca floated through the latest world ve’d grown from a novel symmetry group and a handful of recursion formulae. Giant inverted pyramids floated above ver, sprouting luminous outgrowths like rococo chandeliers. Feathery planar crystals swirled and grew around ver, then began to collide and merge into strange new objects, random acts of origami performed with diamond and emerald films. Below ver, a vast terrain of mountains and canyons was eroding in fast motion, carved by a blizzard of diffusion laws into glistening green and blue mesas, impossible overhangs, towering stratified sculptures veined with minerals unknown to chemistry.
In Konishi, ve would probably have called this “mathematics.” In C-Z, it was necessary to call it “art,” since anything else suggested a virtual universe in direct competition with the real one. Blanca had been dismayed to see the other polises sink back into complacency after the initial shock of carnevale, but ve still chafed against C-Z’s growing orthodoxy when it proclaimed that to explore any system of rules that failed to illuminate the physics of reality amounted to pernicious solipsism. The beauty of the physical world had nothing to do with its power to harm — that was just the dogma of the dead statics in another guise — and everything to do with the simplicity and consistency of its laws. Blanca was unimpressed by claims that C-Z’s physicists and engineers toiled only in the service of protecting the Coalition from the next dangerous cosmic surprise. It was the elegance of Kozuch Theory and the grandeur of the Forge itself that had kept them going; if either the guiding principles or the design had been the slightest bit uglier, they would have packed it in long ago.
Gabriel appeared beside ver, his fur dusted immediately with tiny crystals. Blanca reached over and brushed his shoulders affectionately; he responded by pressing a hand into the darkness of vis chest, inducing a gentle warmth throughout the whole invaded space. The places where Blanca’s icon seemed to lose its tangible boundary were the most sensitive by far; they could be touched in three dimensions.
“We’ve had a neutralization in one ring.” Gabriel seemed pleased, but nothing in his voice or gestalt betrayed the fact that the whole Forge group had been working toward this moment for the last eight centuries. Blanca nodded slightly, a gesture packed with warmth that only vis lover could have decoded.
Gabriel said, “Will you rush with me? Until confirmation?” He sounded slightly guilty to be asking.
The news would have just reached Earth that a positron in one of the Forge’s magnetic storage rings had lost its charge and escaped into the surrounding laser trap, 65 hours ago. But it would take almost three more hours — ten megatau — for the crucial matching result from the second ring at the opposite end of the accelerator to arrive. Gabriel had lived through every similar delay tau-by-tau until now, patiently accepting the glacial slowness of manipulating matter on the hundred-terameter scale, but Blanca had certainly never seen it as some great moral principle.
“Why not?” They held hands in a cobalt blue snowdrift while their exoselves synched and slowed; the scape was synched directly to Blanca’s mind, so it appeared to carry on at the same rate.
Ve watched Gabriel’s face as they waited, cheating the time by a mere factor of a million instead of jumping the gap in a single bound. Even if it wasn’t a moral issue, relating to the physical world could be a delicate balancing act. Should you dart from significant event to significant event, creating a life devoid of everything else? Probably not — but exactly how much subjective time should you endure between the moments you were, in all honesty, desperately waiting for? Gabriel had passed the time at the standard Coalition rate, mostly by immersing himself in elaborate schemes for the eventual deployment of the wormholes, in between his sparse contacts with the machinery of the Forge as
it was constructed and tested. But he’d almost run out of future to plan; the last Blanca had heard, he’d mapped out a detailed strategy for the — careful, non-exponential — exploration of the entire universe. Local wormholes probably didn’t lead everywhere, since the mouths could only have traveled a certain distance since the time they were formed, but the closed, finite universe ought to be covered by a patchwork of overlapping connected domains, and even if the solar system’s own wormholes reached no further than a few hundred million light years, there’d be wormholes in the galaxies at that distance which would reach as far again.
Gabriel’s mildly preoccupied expression changed to one of satisfaction, though nothing as dramatic as relief. “The other ring’s confirmed. We’ve grabbed both ends.”
Blanca swung his arm, dislodging a flurry of blue crystals from his fur. “Congratulations.” If the second neutralized positron had slipped out into space, it would have been impossible to find. With luck, they’d soon confirm that photons could pass through the wormhole, but a bombardment of either tiny mouth would only produce a trickle from the other.
Gabriel mused, “I keep wondering if we could have failed. I mean ... we made a few mistakes in the design that we only discovered centuries later. And we hit those chaotic modes in the electron beams where the simulations broke down, so we had to map the whole state space empirically and find a way through by trial-and-error. We did a hundred thousand small things wrong, wasting time, making it harder. But could we ever have failed completely, beyond recovery? Beyond repair?”
“Isn’t that question slightly premature?” Blanca inclined vis head skeptically. “Assuming this isn’t a false alarm, you’ve just linked the two ends of the Forge. That’s a start, but you’re not quite staring down the tunnel to Procyon yet.”