Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  Route One, Seraphim version: “If we can return to our origin, shake off all human languages and cultures, and align our minds with the minds of the Architects, then they will help us free ourselves from our bodies and become like them: pure intelligences, pure information, roaming Everywhere and Always in the dimension of the eternal.”

  Thus it is that the idea of escaping death, by begging the gods to return and bestow their favors, becomes yet another planet’s biggest, best-dressed, and most profitable industry. The enterprise often has doubters, dissidents, sects, and schisms, but its appeal is maintained by the undeniable fact that occasionally the gods really do visit, really are both familiar and magnificent, really do offer their hand to all, or many, or a carefully selected few.

  Telltale wrinkles in the Field.

  People used to worry about radio. What if it’s like a lighthouse beacon, they said, advertising our presence to every species in the universe? And what if just one of those species has a starship, and a taste for fresh meat? But radio waves travel at the speed of light, which seems fast only if you’ve not grasped the scale of space. Our century-plus of twangy music, light comedy, and bad news has still only spread across the tiniest smear of the Milky Way. Compared to our galaxy, let alone the rest, that bubble of noise with its hundred light-year radius is a fly on a blanket.

  Those sci-fi doomsters were worrying about the wrong thing. Our ancestors had already let the cat out of the bag long, long before, had raised the flag without ever intending to, by becoming conscious. And, because the Murakami Field is quantum-entangled, the news of our primitive and partial awakening had no need to travel. Entanglement is so strange, so outrageous, that Einstein hated it, refused to believe in it, called it “spooky action at a distance.” But he wasn’t just wrong about it being impossible. He was wrong about distance too. Those first subtle wrinkles we caused in the Field didn’t propagate, like gravity waves on the dark, silent pond of space. They were just everywhere, instantly. And everywhere was good enough, for the Architects, since everywhere was already their home.

  They took a keen interest in us, oh goodness yes, as they had done before in so many cases. They were concerned that we develop just right, and stay on the right path, and grow up, but not too much. And when the time was right to encourage the higher stages of development, all they had to do was gather their energies and at least partly re-embody. Then our amazed ancestors saw, and believed, and fell terrified-and-grateful to their knees.

  They were watching over us long before that, of course, even in the most distant prehuman past—seven million years ago, for example, in the Tibesti Mountains of central North Africa, when our monkey-like ancestor Sahelanthropus tchadensis was gibbering and shrieking and somehow getting by among the wheezing volcanic cones. Five million years later, the Architects became more interested when they observed Homo erectus using reed mats as fishing platforms, and being swept by accident across the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb Strait from Africa to what is now Yemen.

  Homo erectus was the first of our kind out of Africa; over the generations, they spread thousands of miles, fissioning into many new species. The ones they left, bewildered on that beach in the Horn of Africa, also fissioned into new species. And the Architects had become more curious yet by the time one of those, Homo heidelbergensis, made its own accidental migrations, across the same water, a million years later.

  The descendants of that second, larger-brained migration became (among many other species) Homo neanderthalensis, while the descendants they left behind became the most gracile, least hairy, most talkative member of the whole family, Homo sapiens.

  And eventually—about 80,000 BCE, after the Architects had begun their first active interference, their first experimental tweaking on both continents—Homo sapiens made it across to Eurasia.

  That was when the Architects began to show themselves—so beautiful, so persuasive!—and whisper promises and suggestions, and generally put out the party invitation, and the whole surviving family began to drift, as if hypnotized, toward the appointed venue. Not just Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, but also ancestral representatives of the Floresian “hobbits,” the I’iwa, the Denisovans, the Red Deer Cave people, and many subtypes for which we have no name because they are unknown, lost to memory—hidden from sight on history’s receding, fog-bound coast.

  The “Neanderthals” were really several distinct species at that time. The Denisovans also, and the Altai Denisovans of Central Asia were perhaps the most successful group. Cold-winter hunters several thousand strong, they’d spread themselves across a brutal mountain landscape half the size of Europe. But, like the I’iwa, they were hiders; also, their newly acquired thirst for ritual, and belief in an afterlife, made them burn their dead and deposit the ashes in lakes, so only a few accidental bones survived to be discovered one day and puzzled over by plaid-shirted creatures called Paleontologists, in a single cave in a place called Russia.

  Most of the other species also left no trace, keeping to themselves in remote places: islands, mountains, deserts, caves. So it was an unprecedented gathering when the most distant clans came together for the first time, from all across the Eurasian continent and its archipelagos—a giant triangle stretching from the southern tip of Spain to the jungles of Southeast Asia and north to the volcanic wonderland of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Architects had decided that some of these species might at last be ready. One never could be sure. One had to try them out, and see how they developed when placed under the appropriate suggestions and constraints, and discover by trial and error whether the subject could be rendered sufficiently obedient, the final product sufficiently nourishing. And so the great migration began—“a huge, multispecies experiment,” as Maynard Jones had said to Morag, just before his fatal interaction with an I’iwa spear.

  The “laboratory” for this experiment was a spectacularly beautiful and symmetrical peak almost four miles high. Jungle-coated, with a cap of snow and ice: beautiful, yes, but those converging on it, strangely compelled, found in themselves no impulse to admire it, or even name it. The mountain was—to hazard a translation of long-vanished languages, or to borrow from the I’iwa’s formulation, which survived—the Place of Origin.

  Some of the closer groups had already interacted with each other, fought, interbred. Others, isolated for millennia, were amazed to meet creatures so obviously similar yet so obviously different from themselves. But there was remarkably little fighting. The pull of the mountain was too strong.

  The ones who would become the I’iwa were darker and hairier then—not as distinctive as they would become in the aftermath, when the remnant populations had dispersed in all directions and the I’iwa themselves, having survived the trek south along the sterile, ash-smothered archipelago, somehow managed to island-hop across the pumice-choked shallows of the Banda Sea to New Guinea, where they evolved into permanent cave dwellers. But the I’iwa still looked striking, to some of the other groups, and they in turn were surprised by the diversity of types, and languages, and the ever-increasing density of population as they left their original home to the north and came closer to the glittering cone that called so insistently to them.

  Around the base of the mountain, the jungles were pristine, dense, and almost uninhabited. But soon the trees began to be cleared; more and more of the native animals were trapped and eaten; fires killed more forest, and more animals, and some of the humans too. Without knowing it, the million minds that had gathered there were destroying the environment on which their bodies depended; they were in danger of precipitating an ecological catastrophe and hastening their own destruction, as the Greenland Vikings would do, or the Polynesians on Rapa Nui, or the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. But they didn’t have to worry—there was no time for that catastrophe. There was only time for the Architects to appear, and impose their language wherever it could be imposed, seeking out especially those individuals whose mental talents were best suited to leading, persuading, frightening, and maintaining
discipline.

  And then, boom.

  Only a little judicious meddling, until then; a few sporadic manifestations were all that the Architects could manage. But the Mount Toba event, in 70,000 BCE, was the first great intervention, the first great harvest—and it was nearly a disaster, because it threw the planet’s climate into a tailspin and herded many species, including Homo sapiens, to the extreme brink of extinction. But it also cemented humanity’s relationship with the gods by making clear at last the idea that mortality was terrifying and could with the help of the gods be vanquished. That, in turn, set in motion the Great Leap Forward: language, religion, hierarchy, and all the other trappings of what we call civilization—that most useful mechanism of self-enslavement—which the surviving populations, confused and easy to fool, would come to think of as their own invention.

  The original Babel was Toba in Indonesia, long before the Bronze Age Babel that was Thera in the Mediterranean, long before the Babel of Genesis that was in Mesopotamian Babylon.

  In our beginning is our end. In our end is our beginning.

  CHAPTER 9

  FERMI’S PARASITES

  Religious civilizations, driven by a desire to appease the gods or become their equals, can endure and flourish almost indefinitely, sustained by the fact that when many ask, at least some are taken. Some of these civilizations have lasted for thousands of years, here on Earth. Some have lasted for millions of years, or tens of millions, in other corners of the endless teeming elsewhere. They can be astonishingly resilient, even in the face of all the angry, ignorant, murderous squabbling about what it means.

  Sooner or later, though, most religious civilizations undergo what you might call a cultural mutation. (An irony of history: squabbling about the nature and purposes of the gods is almost always one cause of the mutation.) Disagreements about the gods, and centuries-old unanswered questions, lead to violence and cruelty, but also to sharpened analytical tools. Critical thinking arises. Independent inquiry, skepticism, philosophy, science. Eventually, the womb of time brings forth the clever, ugly, truculent, unplanned love-child of all these things, which is technology.

  Technology offers civilizations new dreams. The dream of mastering and subduing the environment. The dream of colonizing the dark frontier of space in shining silver cigars. The dream of living forever, by replacing mere hapless bodies that stink and rot with endlessly self-repairing machines.

  These dreams undermine the old religious dreams. And finally the civilizations that discover the quantum nature of space-time—and think that that’s all there is—wake up at last to the most seductive new dream of all.

  Why merely worship and hope? Why wait around meekly, aching for the gods to come back as promised and bestow their favors? Why bother to work at being whatever it is the priests have spent all these centuries claiming the gods want us to be? Now at last we have everything we need in our own hands. Now we can grab the bull of fate by its solid gold horns, and vault onto its back, like Minoan acrobats, and become gods. Surely, the technologists cry, we can now project ourselves into eternity—paint ourselves onto the wall of a digital heaven—by turning our selves, our consciousness, the little glint of eternity within us, into pure, unencumbered, unembodied information?

  A last big surprise is now in store for these technologically advanced civilizations, tinkering with their new quantum gizmos and beginning to grasp the possibilities. It’s a surprise that delights some, terrifies others, and leaves others merely bewildered: almost at the point of being forgotten, abandoned, no longer considered either plausible or necessary, the absent gods return.

  “Why now?” some people ask—especially the monotheists and the atheists, and that, in an advanced civilization’s dying moments, tends to be almost everyone. Why at this moment would multiple immaterial beings, vastly powerful and looking rather like us, drip down from the skies and offer to take us up with them into the infinitely spacious rent-free apartments of heaven? It’s an event so shocking to modern sensibilities, so wholly astonishing, that there’s a kind of planetwide psychic dislocation.

  In the face of it, typically only a few rare minds are flooded with the dark light of truth. “Aha, yes,” someone like Iona Maclean will say. “Yes. So that’s it. Now I understand.” But by then it’s too late. You see, at this point, poised on the lip of the infinite, these advanced technological civilizations do a strange thing.

  (“Invariably,” one is tempted to add. But that, although close to the truth, would cause us to miss something. So let’s say “almost invariably.”)

  At the height of their hope, and the height of their starriest and most thrilling ambition—and usually before anyone like Iona has had a chance to explain what’s really going on—these civilizations almost invariably vanish.

  While recovering under the care of the I’iwa, Daniel pieced back together many incidents and conversations from the past—some of them real, others strangely invented. Like dreams, the invented ones contained inconsistencies, impossibilities, but still seemed to reach out to him with a meaning in their hands.

  A conversation between his parents, for example, in the park near their house. “Spare some pity for the Architects, Bill,” Iona is saying. “They made a terrible mistake, the exact mistake humanity is blindly feeling its way toward right now. Clever little überchimps that we are, all dazzled by our computers.”

  “But think of what the Architects have already done, if you’re right,” his father says. “Not to us, I mean. To all the other sentient species.” And he pats their big black Newfoundland on its head.

  (The Newfoundland is called Rosetta, and doesn’t exist. They talked about getting a dog, but never did. That’s how Daniel knows this is not a real memory—that, and the fact that he suspects Iona never shared her key insight with Bill, because he wouldn’t have taken it seriously.)

  Iona leans against the edge of a picnic table and looks at her husband. “The Architects had no choice. They needed to get back what they’d thrown away. They didn’t want our intelligence, or our ability to reason. They wanted our feelings. The raw experiences. The what-it-feels-like.”

  “But why do they need our experiences?”

  “I’m still working on that,” she says, “but I think the outline is pretty clear. Suppose they retained full personal consciousness, as no doubt they intended. That’s the whole point of immortality, right—I want me to keep existing. In that case, they’d never need anything from us, or be the slightest bit interested in us. They could experience anything they wanted, I suppose, forever. But if, on the other hand, they became absolutely pure intelligences, without any of the feelings and emotions that depend on having a body, well, in that case they wouldn’t have any use for us either.”

  “You’re saying that, because they do have a use for us, a need for us, they must be somewhere in between?”

  “Julius said something about them straining to become individual again. What I’m saying is that they retained a memory or instinct about what they lost. They need to feed off our consciousness for long enough to stage a comeback.”

  Bill kneels down, nose to nose with the drooling, pink-tongued, fictional animal. “What an irony, that the ‘gods’ turn out to be parasites. The hungriest, neediest, most destructive beings in the universe. And always that element of risk. Because an easy species to develop, and exploit, will be precisely the kind to run out of control. Develop independent languages. Discover technology. Discover how to beat the Architects at their own game.”

  One of the nonfictional memories was the first time he’d discussed anything serious with his new philosophically minded, tech-nerd, language-prodigy German friend. It happened as they were walking back toward the Eislers’ house, not long after the family had arrived in Seattle from Munich. Winter, it must have been, nearly a year before: clear, after a week of rain, but already dark at six in the evening. Cassiopeia was high in the east over the Cascades, with the fiery yellow bull’s-eye of Aldebaran rising behind i
t. The brief thrill, or scare, about Zeta Langley S-8A (An inhabitable planet? Or an already-inhabited planet?) was still in the future, but NASA had just announced “clear evidence” of ancient bacterial life near the Martian South Pole. MABEL (the Martian Autonomous Biological Exploration Lab—oh, how they love their acronyms) had carefully split open some rocks, like the good geologist she was, and sent back photographs. Under maximum magnification they were a grainy blur, and no amount of pixel-massage could make them look much of anything to the unaided eye, except maybe a parking lot snapped from space. But the guys with the PhDs in exobiology, who had taken one look and immediately wet their Lands’ End chinos, added helpful little arrows to the pictures they released, along with some polysyllabic text about nucleated microstructures, so pretty much everyone came to believe, for a week or two, in what was being hyped as “the most extraordinary discovery of all time.”

  Daniel was surprised to find that Rosko didn’t share in the general sense of wonder and delight. “It’s the most depressing news we’ve ever received,” he said, brushing blond curls out of his eyes, and he seemed genuinely shocked by it, genuinely cast down. “I mean, it’s not as bad as ‘Asteroid Strike Tomorrow—Eat Dessert Now.’ But it’s close.”

  “Are you kidding?” Daniel said. “If there’s life on Mars, even bacterial life, then it’s probably all over the place. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Have you heard of the Fermi paradox?”

  Yes, he’d heard: Iona had brought it up, for reasons he couldn’t follow, in a dinner-table argument with Bill about religion. “That’s the thing like, if the universe is so big, and has so many planets, where are the visitors?”

  “Not just millions of planets, but millions of planets that have been around for billions of years longer than Earth. Which means anyone on those has had plenty of time to evolve into a galaxy-spanning civilization. But there’s not a whisper. The question is, why—and finding bacteria on Mars totally changes the calculation.”