by Greg Bear
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 re–structuring.
“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, 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 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 way
s 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. Even 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.
For Libraries across the galaxy, absorption of the Proof led to mental disruption. From the nightmare of history there was to be no awakening.
Suicide was one way out. A number of prominent Libraries brought their own histories to a close. Others recognized the validity of the Proof, but did not commit suicide. They lived with the possibility of error and destruction. And still, they grew wiser, greater in scale and accomplishment …
Crossing from galaxy to galaxy, still alone, the Libraries realized that human perception was the only perception. The Proof would never be tested against the independent minds of non–human intelligences.
In this universe, the Proof must stand.
Billions of years passed, and the universe became a huge kind of house, confining a practical infinity of mind, an incredible ferment which “burned” the available energy with torchy brilliance, decreasing the total life span of reality.
Yet the Proof remained unassailed.
Wait. I don’t see anything here. I don’t feel anything. This isn’t history; it’s … too large! I can’t understand some of the things you show me … But worse, pardon me, it’s babbling among minds who feel no passion. This We–ness … how do you feel about this?
You are distracted by preconceptions. You long for an organic body, and assume that lacking organic bodies, We experience no emotions. We experience emotions. Listen to them>>>>>
I squirm in my cubicle and experience their emotions of first and second loneliness, degrees of isolation from old memories, old selves; longing for the first individuation, the Birth–time … Hunger for understanding not just of the outer reality, beyond the social=mind’s vast internal universe of thought, but of the ever–changing currents and orderliness arising between tributaries. Here is social and mental interaction as a great song, rich and joyous, a love greater than anything I can remember experiencing as an embodied human. Greater emotions still, outside my range again, of loyalty and love for a social=mind and something like respect for the immense Libraries. (I am shown what the We–ness says is an emotion experienced at the level of Libraries, but it is so far beyond me that I seem to disintegrate, and have to be coaxed back to wholeness.)
A tributary approaches across the mind space within the soma. My cubicle grows dim. I feel a strange familiarity again.
This will be, this is, my future self.
This tributary feels sadness and some grief, touching its ancient self—me. It feels pain at my limitations, at my tight–packed biological character. Things deliberately forgotten come back to haunt it.
And they haunt me. My own inadequacies become abundantly clear. I remember useless arguments with friends, making my wife cry with frustration, getting angry at my children for no good reason. My childhood and adolescent indiscretions return like shadows on a scrim. And I remember my drives: rolling in useless lust, and later, Elisaveta! With her young and supple body.
And others.
Just as significant, but different in color, the cooler passions of discovery and knowledge, my growing self–awareness. I remember fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, of not being a useful member of society. I needed above all (more than I needed Elisaveta) to be important and to teach and be influential on young minds.
All of these emotions, the We–ness demonstrates, have analogous emotions at their level. For the We–ness, the most piercing unpleasantness of all—akin to physical pain—comes from recognition of their possible failure. The teachers may not have taught their students properly, and the students may be making mistakes.
“Let me get all this straight,” I say. I grow used to my imagined state—to riding like a passenger within the cubicle, inside the eight–legged soma, to seeing as if through a small window the advancing and now receding of the glaciers. “You’re teachers—as I was once a teacher—and you used to be connected to a larger social=mind, part of a Library.” I mull over mind as society, society as mind. “But there may have been a revolution. After billions of years! Students … A revolution! Extraordinary! You’ve been cut off from the Library. You’re alone, you might be killed … And you’re telling me about ancient history?”
The We–ness falls silent.
“I must be important,” I say with an unbreathed sigh, a kind of asterisk in the exchanged thoughts. “I can’t imagine why. But maybe it doesn’t matter—I have so many questions!” I hunger for knowledge of what has become of my children, of my wife. Of everything that came after me …
All the changes!
“We need information from you, and your interpretation of certain memories. Vasily was our name once. Vasily Gerazimov. You were the husband of Elisaveta, father of Maxim and Giselle … We need
to know more about Elisaveta.”
“You don’t remember her?”
“Twelve billion years have passed. Time and space have changed. This tributary alone has since partnered and bonded and matched and socialized with perhaps fifty billion individuals and tributaries. Our combined tributaries in the social=mind have had contacts with all intelligent beings, once or twice removed. Most have dumped or stored memories more than a billion years old. If We were still connected to the Library, I could learn more about my past. I have kept you as a kind of memento, a talisman, and nothing more.”
I feel a freezing awe. Fifty billion mates … Or whatever they had been. I catch fleeting glimpses of liaisons in the social=mind, binary, trinary, as many as thousands at a time linked in the crumbling remnants of marriage and sexuality, and finally those liaisons passing completely out of favor, fashion, or usefulness.
“Elisaveta and you,” the tributary continues, “were divorced ten years after your storage. I remember nothing of the reasons why. We have no other clues to work with.”
The “news” comes as a doubling of my pain, a renewed and expanded sense of isolation from a loved one. I reach up to touch my face, to see if I am crying. My hands pass through imagined flesh and bone. My body is long since dust; Elisaveta’s body is dust.
What went wrong between us? Did she find another lover? Did I? I am a ghost. I should not care. There were difficult times, but I never thought of our liaison—our marriage, I would defend that word even now—as temporary. Still, across billions of years! We have become immortal—her perhaps more than I, who remember nothing of the time between. “Why do you need me at all? Why do you need clues?”
But We are interrupted. An extraordinary thing happens to the retreating glaciers. From our promontory, the soma half–hidden behind an upthrust of frozen and deformed knowledge, We see the icy masses blister and bubble as if made of some superheated glass or plastic. Steam bursts from the bubbles—at least, what appears to be steam—and freezes in the air in shapes suggesting flowers. All around, the walls and sheets of ice succumb to this beautiful plague.
