Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  “I don’t see the connection. If there really are guys from Andromeda cruising around with a six-pack of Coors Light in the Galactic Invader, maybe they’re just not interested in us. Or they are, but we can’t see them because they have like-wow cloaking technology.”

  “There are lots of explanations for the silence, Daniel. That last one’s called Enclosure—the higher civilization, or perhaps it’s the Council of Higher Civilizations, has decided to watch us while remaining unobserved. So we think we live in an open, empty universe, but that’s an illusion. We’re really more like ants in an ant farm, or salmon in a pen. We lack the mentality even to be aware of the farmers, except perhaps that we catch a glimpse of them here and there. Which could explain why so many people believe in gods and demons.”

  “I still don’t get what that has to do with bacteria on Mars.”

  “The most depressing version of the Enclosure theory is what you might call the Imprisonment and Execution theory. Instead of just observing the lesser civilizations, the Galactic Alpha-Guys are waiting for some crucial point of development and then systematically killing those civilizations off. Bacteria on Mars shows that definitely something is killing them off.”

  “No. It shows the opposite! It shows there’s life everywhere.”

  Rosko gave him a patient look and put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen. First, suppose for a minute that even primitive life is rare. Just doesn’t get going often, even at the level of bacteria.”

  “OK.”

  “In that case, advanced civilizations are going to be even more rare, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But NASA’s now saying that primitive life evolved independently on both Earth and Mars. That’s a rate of one hundred percent on the only two planets where we’ve ever looked. So either that’s a fantastic coincidence—”

  “Or it must be super-common.”

  “Exactly. And that’s the problem. Bacteria on Mars, as well as on Earth, proves that life gets going more or less everywhere. So evolution gets going more or less everywhere. So explaining the Big Silence just became impossible—except on the assumption that life also gets killed off everywhere before it reaches, you know, the Star Trek phase. No boldly going anywhere, Mr. Sulu, because all life is doomed to extinction before it reaches the level of interstellar travel. Maybe all advanced civilizations poison themselves. Maybe they’re eliminated by the guys on the Galactic Pest Control Committee. Doesn’t matter that we don’t know what does the killing: what we know is, it happens. That’s the happy news from Houston. In a statistical nutshell.”

  Months later, when Morag was in Seattle after Iona’s death, the subject came up again. It was Rosko’s first face-to-face experience of how smart she was, and he absolutely loved it.

  “Oh sure, Rosko, I see the logic, no problem. Every single example we have, when advanced human societies meet less-advanced ones, it’s genocide. So, if the aliens are out there, and they’re smart enough to get here, we’re probably toast. Or steak. But I’m not convinced. Why would they bother with us?”

  “Same thing,” he said. “Slaves. Resources.”

  But she shook her head. “I don’t buy that. A guy with a gun does bad things to the native population because he wants their land, or their stuff, or them. But we’re talking about greenbloods who’ve figured out interstellar travel. In pure miles per hour, that puts them much, much farther ahead of us than we are from the invention of the wheel.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ll be motivated any different.”

  “Aye, it does, though. Suppose I live in a cave, and it’s a cold winter, so I use my most advanced tech, which is an ax made from a deer’s jawbone, to chop me a pile of firewood. Then I hear a rumor that Daniel lives in a cave just over the hill, and he’s big and strong, so naturally I worry that he might come along and throw rocks at me and steal my firewood.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But suppose Daniel doesn’t live over the hill. He lives ten thousand miles away. And he has all the warmth he’ll ever need, because his cave has triple glazing, a smart thermostat, and limitless free heat powered by solar roof tiles. Now—should I still worry he’s going to steal my firewood?”

  “You’re saying that people who are really advanced just won’t bother with us.”

  “They might study us. But they won’t need what we have. I mean, the really gruesome scenario is they want to eat us. But why would they? We fear being eaten because we’re defenseless mammals who evolved around things with big teeth. But it’s not believable that a species can hack interstellar travel and not also synthesize the protein they need.”

  Rosko had been silenced, for a moment, and nodded appreciatively. “I like the way your mind works,” he said. “The only exception to your theory would be if we have something they can’t fabricate.”

  “Aye, but what would that be?”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

  A catastrophe’s job is to come out of nowhere. A catastrophe’s job is to hit you when you least expect it, and then hit you again once you’re down. A catastrophe’s job is to be crueler and nastier than you’d bothered to imagine.

  Everything is fine, everything is normal. Maybe there’s a tremor or a rumble, or a vague sense of unease in the air, but it’s not something you much notice, or attach any meaning to, because after all it’s an ordinary Wednesday morning and hey, everything is fine, everything is normal. Then, too quickly for you to draw breath, much less shout a warning or plan a retreat, comes the unforgiving plunge from light into darkness, from warmth into agonizing cold, from the mild boredom of the everyday into paralyzing terror.

  Wars and earthquakes.

  Economic crises and plagues.

  The overnight rise of the Nazis, in the most civilized nation on Earth, and the overnight collapse of the Greenland ice cap, decades before the models predicted it.

  The slip-and-fall from your bike—right in front of a speeding car.

  Rosko Eisler’s parents becoming cold and odd and withdrawn, openly reading Anabasis and saying, “We just want to understand what’s going on, that’s all.” And then one day not being there: no note, not a word of farewell to their only child, just the red book with its promise of infinity, open on the kitchen table right next to the half-finished toast and the house keys.

  The French mathematician René Thom was fascinated by this idea that normality could end without first giving people a decent warning—that Alice could just fall down the rabbit hole. He came up with an elegant model, catastrophe theory, described by a smooth plane with two key features. There’s a flattish area, with an imperceptibly subtle downward slope. And there’s a point at which the angle of the slope unexpectedly and rapidly increases, so that all in a moment the curve becomes steep, then vertical, then curls back under itself, forming an overhanging ledge. This is the ledge from which ordinary life, mouth open in surprise, hurtles to its death.

  The funny thing about Thom’s graph is that there isn’t any identifiable point of no return, no line on the ground, no Rubicon. The curve is there from the beginning, and it continues to change shape in a perfectly smooth way. But the rate of curvature is accelerating, and the rate of acceleration is accelerating, and the mind can’t keep up with that. So we’ll let the historians of the future waste their time in futile debate over whether the decisive moment in our civilization’s rupturing was the simultaneous disappearance of more than six hundred people from three different towns in Portugal; or the riot in Nairobi, at which half a million Seraphim marched and thousands were slaughtered with automatic weapons by panicked police; or the Mauna Loa event, which—apart from everything else—revealed the split between the official Seraphim leadership and the many, like Amira Ardalan, who claimed (as Julius Quinn had once claimed), to have returned on a mission after a conversation with the Architects; or the declaration of martial law, amid much violence, in supposedly democratic India; or the mysterious ailment affect
ing half the world’s satellites and much of the Internet.

  Maybe none of these. Maybe it was the more general recognition that this was, for want of a better description, the first global civil war.

  Your typical civil wars involve people killing their neighbors, and being killed by them, because of religion, skin, or politics. But the two sides in this conflict—those who believed that the coming of the Architects was the great end point or pinnacle of humanity’s history, and those who didn’t know what was going on, but were terrified—lived in every city on Earth, every community, every household. Sunni versus Shia? Catholic versus Protestant? Arab versus Jew? None of it mattered anymore. Nor Russian versus Ukrainian, nor black versus white, nor rich versus poor. There was something bigger to worry about.

  A few countries retained their outward stability, because the Seraphim were nothing but a despised, feared, and enthusiastically repressed minority—Australia, for example, or some of the northern European countries, from which the Architects’ converts were emigrating to the Epicenters (and to a growing number of unofficial sites) in their hundreds of thousands. Other countries were pretty stable for a different reason: in Russia, southern Africa, and much of Latin America, the Seraphim had become so well established in government and the military that they had simply taken over.

  Memo from the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland: WE DON’T SEE HOW THIS GLOBAL DEGRADATION OF THE INTERNET IS POSSIBLE, GIVEN HOW DECENTRALIZED IT IS. STILL WORKING ON THAT. BUT WE THINK THE INSTABILITIES AT SOME OF THE MAJOR NODES CAN BE TRACED TO HACKERS IN RUSSIA.

  Memo from the Ministry of State Security in Beijing: TO AGREE WITH OUR AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS ABOUT ANYTHING IS LIKE BEING FORCED TO EAT, WITH CHOPSTICKS, THE SPICED VOMIT OF A DYING CAT. BUT IN THIS CASE WE AGREE WITH THEM.

  Second memo from the NSA: BUT IS THE PROBLEM BEING CAUSED BY ELEMENTS OF RUSSIA’S UNIQUELY SOPHISTICATED CYBER-CRIMINAL CLASS? OR IS THE GOVERNMENT ITSELF INVOLVED?

  Memo from “The Doughnut”—Government Communications Headquarters, Cheltenham, England: FRANKLY, CHAPS, YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT. AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL, NOT ONLY RUSSIA’S ENTIRE STATE SECURITY APPARATUS, BUT ALSO ITS CENTER FOR ADVANCED COMPUTATION IN NIZHNY NOVGOROD, ARE NOW IN THE HANDS OF THE SERAPHIM. TWO AND TWO STILL MAKE FOUR, DON’T YOU THINK?

  Second memo from MSS in Beijing: YOU ARE AS RELIABLE IN YOUR ARITHMETIC AS YOU ARE UNRELIABLE IN EVERYTHING ELSE. AND THIS RAISES THE QUESTION—

  Second memo from The Doughnut: YES. HOW DO WE KNOW THIS HAS NOT ALREADY HAPPENED TO YOU?

  Third memo from MSS in Beijing: OR YOU?

  Final memo from the NSA: TSTNGK, TSTNGK, TSTNGK. THRRR SMS 2 BBBBB S)THK WRNG WT RRRR CNTRL CMMNCTN INFRA INFRAK INFRASXXTRKTR. PLYZ KN A E I O U

  At first it was rumor upon rumor upon rumor. Later, few ways even to spread a rumor. First, the cell networks fizzled. Then the GPS satellites pinged a last farewell. Finally, a day came when every Google search in the world—for anything, from anywhere—led not to errors, as had become common, but to the machines from which the searches had been entered displaying the message NOW IS THE TIME: PREPARE YOUR MIND FOR ETERNITY. And then wiping themselves clean to the last byte.

  Communication, around the world, had been reduced to a few guys in basements with ham radios. And most of them lasted less than a week before being tracked down by friendly visitors with sincere smiles, white scarves, and gasoline.

  For the Seraphim faithful, these events were blessings of course, sure signs that the world was on the right path. And for other people they might have been mere inconveniences, if they could have been treated as inconveniences, but instead they tipped the world over into total panic.

  Things were worst in the countries where power was most evenly divided. In Japan, for example, there were dozens of homemade Anabasis events, dozens of major riots, and “heroic” (or “suicidal”) attempts to rescue Fuji and other sacred places from the control of the Seraphim. Here, though, more than anywhere, it was the Traditionals—mostly Buddhists, in this case—who proved most effective in mobilizing opposition.

  In the US, also, religious fundamentalists of the old evangelical school were a much stronger inoculation against Seraphim influence than any secular institution. But the government was divided at every level, and the military was divided too. Not only could nobody say with confidence what was going on with the satellites, and the Internet, but the president’s advisors issued just one too many assurances—while there was still a channel through which to issue assurances—that basic military communications systems were just fine.

  The deepening sense of crisis was, for the Seraphim-curious, just the encouragement they needed to believe what Zachary Ash repeatedly said: “The time has come to leave. We prepare our minds now, because the time has come for us to be liberated at last from the tyranny of death—the tyranny of time itself.” The great migration had begun. Millions of people were on the move, drawn like moths to a flame: from the Russian north to its volcanic Far East; from the northern European plain to the mountains of Italy and Turkey; from both west and central Africa to Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Rift Valley; in the Americas, from the flatter lands in the east to the bright-white peaks that stretched almost unbroken from Alaska’s Brooks Range to the Torres del Paine.

  PART III: ANABASIS

  CHAPTER 11

  THREE FISH AND A GODDESS

  They’d barely crossed into the northern hemisphere when Lorna caught a large striped fish. It lay wheezing on the deck, as amazed as they were, before Kit stepped forward to do the killing.

  A fish shouldn’t look at you and wag its tail, but it did, and even its expression reminded her of Dog. “Please not look at me like that,” she said. “You are beautiful nice fish. But I cannot be so much the sentiments right now.” She was holding a small red-handled emergency hatchet to one side, as if concerned that the victim would see it.

  Daniel gutted and cleaned it expertly. The flesh was thick and firm, and it would have been delicious, Morag thought, if the old Daniel with the high-end cooking skills had baked it Mediterranean style, maybe with tomatoes and fennel and served over polenta—preferably at Bill and Iona’s house in Seattle, in that other, vanished life. But they were on a half-wrecked boat in the middle of nowhere. They had no supplies, not even a salt shaker. And the chunks that came off the Esperanza’s rusting deck-rail minibarbecue were so solid, and so overdone, that Hope had to find a serrated kitchen knife before they could reduce them to bite-sized pieces. They’d gone from white to gray, and had the mouthfeel of oiled rubber. “Well,” Lorna said philosophically, “be grateful fer th’ protein, aye? Nice colorful Mr. Fishie may taste like hell’s own shite, but he’s keepin’ us one day further from starvin’.”

  Morag was still seasick. She refused the fish, then Lorna insisted, so she choked down a couple of bites. Ten minutes later she was throwing up over the rail again. Daniel had begun to experience his own nausea; neither the taste of the fish nor the motion of the waves bothered him, but he’d been at the helm nonstop and was starting to worry that he might pass out where he stood. He’d been thinking Hope could help him sail the boat, but evidently Tomás had been the one with all the skills. Hope agreed to do whatever Daniel asked, but in a vague and distracted way, and she did even the most basic things all wrong. When he put her at the wheel, she gripped it as if she were drowning, but ignored the compass and couldn’t maintain a bearing for five minutes.

  Luckily, Kit learned more from him in two hours than Hope had picked up from Tomás in years. By lunchtime on the second day—two crackers each, one small cube of Spam each, a half cup of water each—he felt it was safe to leave her at the wheel and catch some desperately needed rest. Morag was cross-legged on the deck, close to Kit, eyes averted from the water. Before going below, he gave her his chunky black diver’s watch. “Two hours OK?”

  “Is not problem, Daniel,” Kit said. “Sleep.”

  “Wake me in two hours anyway. Sooner if the weather changes, or th
e boat feels different, or you need anything. OK?”

  Morag nodded. Kit gave him an ironic little salute, putting the tips of two fingers against her damaged eye. “Is not problem, Commander. Lieutenant Cerenkov takes steering. Majka keeps company. And you get sleep—which is like you are needing pretty fucking bad I think.”

  Yes. He staggered down to the main cabin. Hope was sitting next to Tomás, who was either asleep or unconscious. She wasn’t looking at him; she was staring blankly at her hands, which clutched a red copy of Julius Quinn’s Anabasis. Lorna was taking Tomás’s pulse for about the hundredth time. She looked up.

  “Kit got the helm then? Good. You need rest, Daniel Calder. Nurse’s orders. Lie down.”

  It was hot, and the sweet, sickly odor from Tomás was overpowering, but Daniel was too tired to care. He grabbed a small pillow and lay down on the narrow banquette opposite them, curling his knees up so that he could fit. Was it really OK to leave Kit up there? Would worrying about it prevent him from sleeping? Apparently not: in three breaths, he was dreamless and snoring.

  Kit stood silent at the wheel, listening to Morag talk about the caves, and Daniel, and the Number. The horizon was clear in every direction, under a linen sky. Esperanza continued on her bearing, just west of north, rock steady at five knots, even as the surface of the sea began to roughen a little. Down below, Hope worried silently about whether she and Tomás would make it to Fuji, and have their rendezvous with the Architects, while Lorna thought silently about Jimmy, and about how she had to be strong for both Morag’s sake and her own, though her heart had been ripped in half. And Daniel, lulled by the sound of the water passing by just a couple of feet from his head, had just come to the deepest possible point in the sleep cycle, a place of desperately needed healing and rest, when Tomás, three feet away, erupted out of his torpor into delirium.