by Ian Douglas
Gray—or, rather, the immensely powerful group mind that he had become—experienced the history of the Rosette entity in a blur of images, each of which became fixed within his memory, each itself unfolding as though Gray’s mind had become a hyperdimensional construct.
And perhaps it had. Perhaps hyperdimensionality was necessary to grasp the scope of this thing.
The Rosette entity had existed in an entirely different universe, possibly for many, many slow-passing eons. Where the universe Gray knew had been in existence for 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of just 59 million years, the universe of the Consciousness had been in existence for nearly 18 billion years.
And it was approaching the moment when it would end in what human cosmologists called a big rip.
About 70 percent of what was in the universe was so-called dark energy, an unseen repulsive force emanating from the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. As the universe continued to expand out from its big bang origins, more and more vacuum existed to emit more and more dark energy. Cosmologists had suggested as far back as the late twentieth century that, ultimately, the totality of existence would be literally torn apart as dark energy overcame gravity at smaller and smaller scales and, eventually, overcame even the forces that bound together first atoms and then subatomic nuclei.
The long-prophesied heat death of the universe 10100 years hence seemed a warm and fuzzy ending of existence compared to that. How long the universe had left depended on the ratio of the pressure of dark energy to its density, a mathematical term called w. With any value less than -1, w would inevitably grow to infinity, at which point everything in the universe would fly apart, right down to the subatomic particles that made up matter.
It would happen in stages. As gravity was overcome by w, the Milky Way galaxy would disintegrate into its component stars nearly 33 million years before the final moment. Planets would be ripped from their stars two months before the end, while the sun would come apart twenty-eight minutes before the end.
Earth itself would be shredded into rubble, then into atomic flotsam fourteen minutes before the end, with individual atoms across creation ripping themselves apart an instant before time itself stopped.
And that, evidently, would be the fate of the Consciousness’s universe as well, another bubble floating in the infinite vastness of the Cosmic Bulk. Every universe, it seemed, came into existence with its own big bang, expanded as it aged, and then, with the finality of a bubble popping, winked out.
The Consciousness had entered this universe seeking escape from its own, following the pull of gravity that alone spilled across the boundaries between the universes, creating the illusory phenomenon humans referred to as dark matter.
The Consciousness had been aware for some billions of years that its own universe would vanish—the popping of a soap bubble—in the relatively near future, “relatively near,” of course, referring to events on a cosmic time line that measured time in gigayears.
There was some uncertainty here in the memories Gray was able to access; parts of the Consciousness still thought in terms of a heat death to their universe many, many billions of years hence, when the relentless drain of entropy leached the last useable energy from the last bit of matter. Other, more realistic, portions of the Consciousness had finally won out; if the Consciousness was to endure, it would have to seek a haven in a neighboring universe. The big rip, it seemed, was an ending too horrible and too near to contemplate in its fullness, even by much of the group Mind that was the Consciousness.
As the Consciousness entered the new universe, quite a few lesser beings trailed in its wake—the Remnant and the Survivors and many tens of thousands of others, organic beings and electronic uploads and modes of intelligence far more difficult to describe or understand, beings that had contributed to the Consciousness eons before, and which trailed after the Consciousness now seeking . . . something. Unity. Notice. Perhaps even absolution. . . .
And as Gray/the Bright Light thought about the Survivors, the Consciousness became aware of them as well. It had left its beginnings so far behind, buried in the dark of the passing eons.
But the memories were there, deeply buried . . . hidden.
It reached out . . . unfolded . . . and became Whole.
VFA-211, Headhunters
BT-1
Omega Centauri
2150 hours, TFT (subjective)
Meier held his Starblade steady as it hurtled past Bravo Tango One. The intense bombardment by the human fleet had left vast areas of its surface cratered, torn, and in some spots even molten, but signals across the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio to short X-ray, showed that the artificial planet was still alive.
The illusion of life was enhanced by a shimmering cloud of light that had appeared moments before. The cloud had emerged from nothing, grown stronger, and wrapped itself around the scarred globe of BT-1.
Combat Command had ordered all units to cease fire moments before. There was nothing Meier could do but watch . . . and wonder what the hell was going on down there.
TC/USNA CVS America
BT-1
Omega Centauri
2150 hours, TFT (subjective)
Gray fell through auroral light. Bright Light was merging with the radiance of the Consciousness, light merging, minds merging, as the heavens unfolded around them in hyperdimensional geometries.
Without words, the Consciousness presented its own history, a history stretching back many billions of years. The Consciousness truly was godlike in its scope and power, and in its ability to analyze closely anything from individual atoms to the far-flung vastness of intergalactic space.
How it had managed to forget so much seemed odd at first . . . but even the Consciousness had limits to its processing power.
It had ascended through a long series of technological singularities, transforming each time. With each step, it had achieved greater control over its Reality, greater power to shape its surroundings, greater intelligence with which to contemplate its own searing, agonizing loneliness.
The organic species out of which it had emerged gigayears in the past had tagged along in its shadow, ignored, eventually forgotten, tended by emulated fragments of Mind that were neither conscious nor Conscious. There now were very few left. Individual Survivors and the Remnant and all of the rest were for all intents and purposes immortal, but more and more of them had simply lost any interest in living.
Their god had forsaken them.
Gray felt a piercing sympathy for the beings, whose continued evolution had been stopped cold simply by being in proximity to an intelligence they could never fully grasp. He felt sympathy for the Consciousness itself, supremely powerful, yet deaf and blind to its own past and the miracle of its own existence.
As Gray/Bright Light learned about the Consciousness, the Consciousness learned about humans, and, through them, about the universe within which it had so recently emerged.
It saw the Sh’daar . . . and the blue giant moving toward the gateway between times.
It saw light and hard radiation stabbing out from the center of the Black Rosette.
It saw the doom blossoming from the Rosette, imperiling life throughout this galaxy.
It moved. . . .
VFA-96, Black Demons
The Black Rosette
0235 hours, TFT
“Pull back!” Mackey’s voice yelled. “Everybody pull back!”
The remaining Black Demons accelerated hard, boosting out from a Black Rosette suddenly transformed into searing violet light. The radiation flux from the structure was staggering, a vicious mix of ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma. The beam was pure, hot plasma—the atmosphere of a star squeezed down into a volume of space a few tens of thousands of kilometers across.
Hot plasma expanded into the whirling ring of black holes. Those singularities sucked down much of the influx of matter . . . but in seconds each black hole was sending out paired beams of excess matter. Six quasars—quasi-stel
lar objects—burned now where black holes had orbited an instant before. Their velocity, some 8 percent of c, skewed those beams across space in wild, sweeping stabs of light.
Gregory was so busy juggling his Starblade’s attitude that he didn’t see the ship’s arrival.
Ship? He didn’t know what else to call it . . . though it was the size of Earth’s moon and radiating so brightly that the brilliance of six quasars paled in comparison. A tiny, intense pinpoint of radiant energy, it dropped toward the dazzling maw of the Rosette, seeming to absorb the hypernovae’s searing torrents of energy.
Filters in the Starblade’s optics stopped down the intensity of light coming from the Rosette. Through them, Gregory could just make out the structure of that . . . ship against the glare. It appeared to be unfolding endlessly . . . somehow becoming larger while remaining the same size. Dimensions shifted . . . blurred . . . opened. . . .
And the radiation storm ceased.
USNA Lovejoy
Thorne TRGA
N’gai Cloud, Omega T-0.876gy
0235 hours, TFT
“There it goes,” Captain Singh said. “Look! The Six Suns are exploding as well!”
Harriet McKennon floated beside the ship’s captain in the Lovejoy’s observation lounge, transfixed by the spectacle. “It’s . . . beautiful!”
“And deadly,” Singh added. “Within a couple of centuries, there will be no life left within this cluster at all.”
Released by its gravitic tug hours before, the giant, blue-white star had continued hurtling into the central volume circumscribed by the Six Suns. It had vanished into that maw moments before, but now it was erupting back into the N’gai Cluster, a hypernova of staggering force and brilliance.
A fast-expanding cloud of white-hot plasma had emerged, spreading out until it entangled the six rotating stars in its dazzling web; fed by the surge of stellar material, the Six Suns were growing more brilliant by the moment. They were also shrinking, collapsing down into minute points of intense gravitation.
Black holes . . .
“So this is how the Black Rosette formed,” McKennon said. “The suns all went supernova at the same moment and collapsed into black holes!”
“We need to get out of here,” Singh told her, “or the blast front is going to catch us!”
The TRGA cylinder, named Thorne after a twentieth-century theoretical physicist who’d helped define the nature of black holes, spun silently in space a few kilometers from the Lovejoy.
“It’s still hours away!” McKennon protested. “We need to stay and see—”
But Singh had already engaged the ship’s drives.
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
0245 hours, TFT
Clear of the Rosetter’s time-twisting field, America drifted toward the Black Rosette. The light hadn’t reached the star carrier yet, would not for several more hours, but Gray had seen the detonation from the vantage point of the Bright Light hive mind. Images clear in the Mind of the Consciousness as it had shifted to the Rosette had been burned into the memories of all of the Bright Light participants.
Bright Light had dissolved at the instant when the Consciousness had shifted across space to the Rosette. Gray had awakened back in his office, strapped to his couch. Parts of the Bright Light Mind lingered in his mind, however, like the evaporating shreds of a dream. Even so, his mind—as opposed to Mind—was working far faster and deeper than it did normally.
In his mind, he could still see the Consciousness—an amorphous cloud of light—and, beyond, the intensely glaring pinpoint that was the mysterious new ship from elsewhere.
Gray could tell immediately what it was . . . where it had come from. It was obvious. . . .
The Harvesters had arrived.
He could hear the conversation inside his head as the Consciousness merged with a Harvester Mind.
Where are you from? What are you?
We utilize a number of hot, blue stars throughout this galaxy. What are you?
A refugee . . . from a different reality. My universe is about to disintegrate.
This is not a good destination for you. Others are here . . . biological organisms. Precursor intellects. They deserve their own chance at transendency.
I am only now realizing this.
Another Reality awaits.
Will I be alone? . . .
No. Other transcendent species have been going there for billions of years. They will help you . . . adjust.
Show me.
And the bright star vanished, along with the softer glow of the Intelligence.
“What the hell did we just see?”
It was Laurie Taggart on the Guadalcanal, pulling alongside. She had not been within the matrix of human minds that was Bright Light, yet she had seen the same thing as he. How was that even possible?
“A god,” he told her, “on its way to becoming an even greater god.”
And for several moments, through their in-heads, they shared a Mind-bending sense of awe. . . .
Epilogue
18 March 2426
Orbital Heaven Hotel
Quito Synchorbital
0015 hours, TFT
Laurie Taggart and Trevor “Sandy” Gray floated in the zero-G encounter suite, naked, still held together in a close embrace by the soft bungee cords that kept their bodies from sliding apart. The dead hand of Newton was very much in evidence in . . . intimate trysts, such as this one, where every action had an opposite but equal reaction. Constellations of sweat droplets surrounded their glistening bodies.
“I love you,” she whispered in his ear.
“I love you,” he replied. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Make babies?” she asked.
“Maybe . . . in time.”
Earth was visible through the large bulkhead display, the entire visible hemisphere lost in night . . . but with the cities picked out in the golden gleam of artificial lights.
The fleet had returned home, all save a dozen ships establishing peaceful contact with the new alien species in Bravo Romeo One and a hundred other artificial habitats that had followed the Consciousness in from . . . elsewhere. In time, they would disperse throughout the Omega Centauri Cluster and perhaps beyond, establishing lives and civilizations of their own.
They were, Gray thought, having some difficulties with this whole idea of an existence without their god.
“Should we raise our kids in the AAC Church?” he asked, teasing.
“No!” Then, more softly, “No. Not that.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize . . .”
“I’ve given up on the Ancient Alien Creationists,” she told him. “You were right. What we’ve seen, what you’ve told me about . . . Ancient Aliens are like the Olympian gods of old Greece. Way, way too human.”
“Well, the good news is that humans are going to walk that path too.”
“You mean with the Consciousness?”
“Of course. And the ur-Sh’daar. And all the myriad rest.”
“I’m not sure I can get used to the idea,” she told him, holding him close. “Millions upon millions of races, of species, and over billions of years they all took technology as far as they could, then transcended.”
“Schjaa Hok,” Gray said, agreeing with her. “The ultimate answer to Fermi’s paradox.”
“Not all of them transcend, though,” she said.
“No, not all. One of the key features of intelligence is its orneriness. There’re always going to be some Refusers, Survivors, a Remnant . . .”
“Did the Sh’daar make it safely to our galaxy?” she wondered.
“I think so. In fact, I know so.”
“What do you know?”
“For a few moments, there, I was . . . intelligent. I mean really, really intelligent. I . . . understood things I couldn’t before.”
“Such as?”
“The TRGAs . . . the galactic network of TRGAs, I should say . . . the Sh’da
ar built them. It would have been hundreds of millions of years ago, but they created that network. Had to be. There was a TRGA parked inside the N’gai Cluster.”
“Why didn’t they use it to escape the hypernovae?”
“A lot of them did. Others made the voyage out with gravitic drives, FTL . . . probably so that they could set up TRGAs along the way. Ha! Maybe some of them came back through time and built Thorne to connect it to the Milky Way. I don’t know. But I find it interesting that throughout the Sh’daar War, we were using the Sh’daar transportation network. And they must have used it to travel to our time and recruit modern species, like the Turusch and the Agletsch.” He frowned. “Time travel gives me a headache.”
“So . . . what happens when Humankind ascends?” she asked him.
“Well . . . I become intelligent again. I don’t like being stupid.”
“You’re not stupid!”
“Feels like it. I can barely remember what it was like . . . like waking from a dream.”
“I doubt that humans will ascend anytime soon,” she told him. “We have a long time of being stupid in front of us.”
“I can live with that.” He reached around her, pulling her even closer than the bungees allowed. “C’mere, you.”
And for a long time, conversation ended.
And Gray . . . ascended.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is one of the many pseudonyms for writer William H. Keith, New York Times bestselling author of the popular military science fiction series The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy, The Inheritance Trilogy, The Star Corpsman series, The Andromedan Dark series, and The Star Carrier series. A former naval corpsman, he lives in Pennsylvania.
www.whkeith.com
