Far futures, p.3
Far Futures, page 3
Data clouds swirl and spread tendrils high over the plain. The single somas march between our legs, cleaning unwanted debris from the black domes. Within the domes, all history. We could reach down and crush one with the claws on a single leg, but that would slow Endtime Work and waste available energy.
We are proud of our stray thinking. It shows that We are still human, still linked directly to the past. We are proud that We can ignore improper impulses.
We are teachers. All teachers must be linked with the past, to understand and explain it. Teachers must understand error; the past is rich with pain and error.
We await the Berkus.
Too much time passes. The world turns away from the sun and night falls. Centuries of Library time pass, but we try to be patient and think in the flow of external time. Some of our tributaries express a desire to taste the domes, but there is no real need, and would also waste available energy.
With night, more data fills the skies from the other systems, condenses, and rains down, covering us with a thick sheen. Soppers clean our carapace again. All around, the domes grow richer, absorbing history. We see, in the distance, a night interpreter striding on giant disjointed legs between the domes. It eats the domes and returns white mounds of discard. All the domes must be interpreted to see if any of the history should be carried by the final Endtime self.
The final self will cross the Between, order held in perfect inaction, until the Between has experienced sufficient rest and boredom. It will cross that point when time and space become granular and nonlinear, when the unconserved energy of expansion, absorbed at the minute level of the quantum foam, begins to disturb the metric. The metric becomes noisy and irregular, and all extension evaporates. The universe has no width, no time, and all is back at the beginning.
The final self will survive, knitting itself into the smallest interstices, armored against the fantastic pressures of a universe’s deathsound. The quantum foam will give up its noise and new universes will bubble forth and evolve. One will transcend. The transcendent reality will absorb the final self, which will seed it. From the compression should arise new intelligent beings.
It is an important thing, and all teachers approve. The past should cover the new, forever. It is our way to immortality.
Our tributaries express some concern. We are, to be sure, not on a vital mission, but the Berkus is very late.
Something has gone wrong. We investigate our links and find them cut. Transponders do not reply.
The ground beneath our soma trembles. Hastily, the soma retreats from the Plain of History. It stands by a low hill, trying to keep steady on its eight red legs. The clouds over the plain turn green and ragged. The single somas scuttle between vibrating hemispheres, confused.
We cannot communicate with our social=mind or Library. No other Libraries respond. Alarmed, We appeal to the School World Student Committee, then point our thoughts up to the Endtime Work Coordinator, but they do not answer, either.
The endless kilometers of low black hemispheres chum as if stirred by a huge stick. Cracks appear, and from the cracks, thick red drops; the drops crystallize in high, tall prisms. Many of the prisms shatter and turn to dead white powder. We realize with great concern that we are seeing the internal stored data of the planet itself. This is a reserve record of all Library knowledge, held condensed; the School World contains selected records from the dead Libraries, more information than any single Library could absorb in a billion years. The knowledge shoots through the disrupted ground in crimson fountains, wasted. Our soma retreats deeper into the hills.
Nobody answers our emergency signal.
Nobody will speak to us, anywhere.
More days pass. We are still cut off from the Library. Isolated, We are limited only to what the soma can perceive, and that makes no sense at all.
We have climbed a promontory overlooking what was once the Great Plain of History. Where once our students worked to condense and select those parts of the past that would survive the Endtime, the hideous leaking of reserve knowledge has slowed and an equally hideous round of what seems to be amateurish student exercises work themselves in rapid time.
Madness covers the plain. The hemispheres have all disintegrated, and the single somas and interpreters have vanished.
Now, everywhere on the plain, green and red and purple forests grow and die in seconds; new trees push through the dead snags of the old. New lands of tree invade from the west and push aside their predecessors. Climate itself accelerates: the skies grow heavy with cataracting clouds made of water and rain falls in sinuous sheets. Steam twists and pullulates; the ground becomes hot with change.
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 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 toppled with horrendous snaps and groans, domes collapsing with 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, 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, that 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 were 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 misinstruction, 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 planetwide 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 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 collect my last meaningful memories. I remember a face again and give it a name and relation: Elisaveta, my wife, standing over 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 and I can’t feel my body. I’m afraid. Where am I? I miss . . . my family.”
“There is no body, no need for hunger, no need for food. Your family—our family—no longer lives, unless they have been stored elsewhere.”
“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 historical record and 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 geological, 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, violet, it resembles a dividing cell, all extrusions and blebs, with long ribbons and streaming hair. It looks like a Gorgon to me.
The faces of the glaciers break, sending showers and pillars of white ice over gray-shaded hills and valleys. I have awakened in the middle of an ice age. But it is too fast. Nothing makes sense.
“Am I all here?” I ask. Perhaps I am delusional.
“What is important from you is here. We would like to ask you questions now. Do you recognize any of the following faces/voices/thought patterns/styles?”
Disturbing synesthesia—bright sounds, loud colors, dull electric smells—fills my senses and I close it 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 shut me down. I am told that I will become inactive again.
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 completely cover 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 time.
We have plenty of time. Hours, days, with no communication.
The glacial cold nearly kills us where we stand. 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, but We recognize some similarities even so 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 land 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.
