Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  Destruction for all of us? Or destruction for most of us, and immortality for a few? That is our choice.

  Help, if you can, before it is too late. And remember: just one immortal will live longer, and experience more, than all the people who have ever lived.

  It took Morag two minutes to read and memorize the whole thing, but she read it again, more slowly, just to give herself time to think.

  “I still can’t believe it. The lack of fight, you know? Humanity’s doomed, but we can build a digital ark. Babblers like me and Rosko—and Mrs. Chaudry’s grandchildren—can hop aboard, and it’s Next Stop Eternity. What are we, the chosen ones, supposed to say to the other eight billion? ‘Bye-bye, sorry you can’t come too, have a nice death’? Excuse my language, but like, totally fuck this shite. She’s wrong, and it’s not happening. I’m not going to stand around and wait for all the people I love to be sucked dry by extraterrestrial leeches. Besides, as far as we know—Daniel, help me out here.”

  Daniel had been crouched at one corner of the big table, still as Balakrishnan’s statue of Gilgamesh, eye level with the machine. Not that he was even slightly interested in the device itself—he left that kind of thing to Rosko. But particular objects, especially unfamiliar ones, were meditation tools: they helped him listen clearly to his own mind. Especially the images that came to him, still almost at random, that were fragments of Iona, or fragments of the future, or both. He looked at each of them in turn.

  “Uma Chaudry is right about the threat,” he said. “Every single event, every single new mind they take up, is increasing their power. And they’re using it to re-embody, which makes it even easier for them to control people, and they won’t stop until they’re done with us. Things are going to happen fast now. But her solution is—”

  “Impossible,” Murakami said.

  He nodded. “She hasn’t fully understood what happened to the Architects. She still thinks they achieved individual immortality. You know, my mother was the first person to see that we would have to destroy them, but she also pitied them. We’ve spent thousands of years wanting to achieve what they achieved. The Seraphim think they can do it, and Chaudry’s Route Two people think some Babblers can do it. But what the Architects achieved is a disaster. Morag’s right: what we really want is not to become like them, but to undo them. And we can. Their power comes from their ability to control our language. Genesis chapter eleven, verse seven. Morag?”

  “‘Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’”

  Daniel drew himself up to his full height. “And the true message of Babel is that now our job is to go up, and put the language of the gods through the shredder.”

  Uma Chaudry’s message had come with a dozen massive attachments—thousands of pages of documentation that amounted to a blueprint for Erwin. People had been banging their heads for years against the fact that quantum-entangled particles weren’t stable. That was why quantum computers were a cool idea in theory and almost useless in practice. But Chaudry’s team in Bangalore, building in part on Mayo’s insights, had solved the key problems. Rosko explained that he and Murakami had built the machine in the hope that the Phaistos data—exactly what Daniel and Kit had taken with them to New Guinea—might finally yield something worthwhile.

  “You were five thousand digits short,” Daniel said.

  “Yes. We were guessing that the Phaistos data alone would be enough, if we just had a powerful-enough number cruncher. I’d probably have given up, if I’d known we were still missing something fundamental.”

  “Wait,” Kit said. “If Chaudry woman sends these plans to you, she must be building exact same machine. And still waiting for guys in khaki to deliver Morag to India in string bag or something.”

  “We think she sent the documentation to dozens of groups,” Rosko said. “But remember, she’s trying to complete the Route Two project. Actual uploading. Actual Anabasis. Turning someone into an Architect. And for that you need three things. The Number, the computer with which to factor the Number, and also a brave volunteer—”

  “Or grandchild,” Morag said.

  “—willing to undergo a quantum-level brain scan. And we’re not trying to do that. We only need to interfere with what the Architects are doing.”

  “Rosko,” Morag said. “If this pile of junk really works—”

  “It’ll slice that Number of yours into its prime factors and apply the result directly to the database we already built from the Disks. And Archimedes will jump out of his grave shouting, ‘Eureka!’ We’re just finishing the job he started.”

  “Well then, come on. Let’s bloody finish it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  . . . BUT BY CODE

  Beyond Erwin, under a tool rack at the far end, there was an old brown armchair. On the armchair were a pair of pliers, part of a broken lamp, and the hose for a vacuum cleaner. Morag moved the junk onto the floor and brushed some dust off the seat, but just as she was about to sit down, Kit slipped in behind her. “You sit here on floor, Majka. Back against chair. So I can rub neck. Will help you relax—you are tense like wire or something.”

  It was true—she was tense like wire or something. But that wasn’t because she doubted her ability to perform the conjuring trick that was about to be demanded of her. She was thinking about whether the trick, once performed, would get them the desired result. She tried to distract herself, and the others, by making light of the whole situation:

  “I wish we were trying to defeat a regular villain. You know, one of those cliché masterminds in a five-star underground lair in a white suit, with a twitch in one eye and an evil cat. ‘Welcome, welcome, Ms. Chen, have a seat. My name is Dr. Turd, mwa-ha.’ A guy who was merely cruel, greedy, and average to clever. I could run circles around someone like that.”

  “You are afraid?” Kit asked; she sounded afraid.

  Morag squeezed her leg and smiled. “Me? Of the Architects? No. I’m just really, really pissed off with them. I want revenge—for Iona, for all those other people, for the I’iwa—and I’m going to get it.”

  Sakura rolled an office chair over to one of the benches, pulled a wireless keypad toward her, and sat poised over it. She looked like a one-handed pianist with a one-octave slice from a piano keyboard.

  “I’ll do it in groups of five,” Morag said. “Stop me if I go too fast.” She leaned forward, wrapped her arms around her knees, and began to deliver the groups of digits in quick bright bursts, like gunfire, with pauses in between. “Four-four-oh-five-seven. Nine-three-six-oh-eight.” Into each pause, Sakura dropped a whispered repetition, barely audible, as she rattled the numbers down into the machine.

  Daniel looked at his watch. Each group of five digits was taking a shade less than four seconds to make its journey from Morag’s memory to the machine’s. It seemed quick, but there were over a thousand groups: the entire Number would take an hour to enter, and almost as long to check. For the first few minutes, everyone else looked on, enjoying their own astonishment that Morag was capable of what she was doing. But eventually Natazscha and Lorna drifted back upstairs so that they could talk, or maybe work out how to feed eight people out of nothing, and Rosko and Murakami continued to mutter to each other as they triple-checked Erwin’s connections. Kit continued to knead rhythmically at Morag’s upper vertebrae.

  When Morag was done, she and Sakura took a brief break for water, then Sakura read the groups again, off the screen, while Morag leaned her head back, her eyes closed, using Kit’s feet as a headrest.

  Sakura repeated the final groups, slowing down on the last few digits to emphasize that the job was finished. Morag sat up a little, and stayed almost motionless for a full minute, her lips moving slightly. At last she opened her eyes, blinked as if waking from a trance, and stretched out her arms, yawning.

  “I need sleep,” she said. “I really need sleep. But I just can’t do sleep at the moment.” And then, as if it were an afterthought: �
�The Number’s correct.”

  Sakura looked at Kit. “Your girlfriend’s a genius,” she said.

  Kit wrinkled her lips. “That word, Majka doesn’t like. Genius is, you make special deep discovery. Galileo. Darwin. Maybe Murakami.” (There was a laugh from the other end of the room.) “Anyway, so Majka is not genius. Just kind of a freak actually.”

  “I just have unusual wiring,” Morag said primly. “Like that thing on the bench.”

  “Speaking of Erwin,” Rosko said. “Our quantum mechanical friend is ready.” He put his hand on Sakura’s shoulder. “The software’s all set. Just hit ‘Enter.’ It’s as simple as that.”

  “Wait,” Kit said, and she ran up the stairs to find Lorna and Natazscha, so that they could come down and share in the great event.

  “OK,” Sakura said. With great ceremony, she tapped the “Enter” key. Then she peered at the screen in front of her and tapped again. “Nothing happened.”

  Rosko had his nose less than a foot from one of the monitors. “Yes it did. See this number in the corner? Thirty-four milliseconds. Erwin’s already done.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Morag said. “The Institute’s mainframe could have worked nights and weekends and not completed this in ten million years.”

  “It really is done. Just taking our regular processors a while to cough up the result in readable form.”

  The screen had gone completely black again, but a dense mass of small white digits began to amass at the bottom, like accumulating snow. As it grew, a faint line became visible—it was really two columns. The word VERIFIED appeared twice, and a set of lists began to appear: matching triplets of numbers, syllables from the Architects’ chants, and combinations of symbols from the Disks.

  “Two numbers, Morag,” Rosko said. “And ‘verified’ means they’re prime factors.”

  Morag went to stand by him and look over his shoulder. “What’s it doing now?”

  “The analytical part of the program has taken over. It’s a version of the stuff Iona wrote for Bill. Already using the numbers as a key. Unpacking the structure, so that we can get at the underlying units of meaning. When it’s finished, there’s another routine I can run on the regular machine that’ll construct the, uh, the little surprise I’ve designed.”

  Because their heads were close together, nobody else heard her mutter in his ear, “Don’t open the champagne yet. Now comes the hard part.”

  It was several hours later before Rosko and Morag were alone and he could ask what she’d meant.

  “You’re not sure you can do it, then?” He wanted to say: Not sure you can do it fast enough?—but there was no point in making the stress more acute than it was already.

  She gave him her most serious, concentrated look. “Get my head around how to deliver a message fluently in an alien language? Course I can do it. This is the task I was made for, Rosko. That’s not what I meant.”

  “So you meant that it’s not learning the message that’s the problem, but—”

  He couldn’t even bring himself to say it. She had to finish the sentence for him. “But how to deliver it? No. Not even that, Rosko. I know exactly what has to be done to deliver this message, and I’m OK with that. I—well, sure, it totally and utterly sucks. But I’ve accepted that it’s what I have to do. It has to be someone who can go to them, and fool them long enough for Anabasis to occur.”

  “So as to smuggle in our gift. Are we sure there’s no other way?”

  “We’re sure. And if I believed in fate, I’d say this is why I was put here.”

  “So, if you’ve accepted that, then—”

  “The hard part is, I won’t be able to tell the others. No one else can get a hint of this. We tell them something that we hope even Murakami will believe, and I go. I can’t say anything, not a hint, especially not to my mother, or Daniel, or Kit. They would try to stop me. They wouldn’t see reason.”

  As if to change the subject, she took his hand in hers and squeezed gently, then got out her tablet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Transferring a text file to you. It’s our story. Mine and Daniel’s, mainly—a record of everything I know and everything we tried to do. I wrote most of it on the ship. It tells how Quinn wrote Anabasis and founded the Seraphim. The Mysteries. Iona understanding that the Architects were the answer to the Fermi paradox. Mayo and Route Two. What happened on Ararat. What Balakrishnan told me, and what we found in New Guinea, and why we think that might be the key that unlocks these intergalactic shite-merchants.”

  “You should add what Murakami told us. And the fact that we had to build Erwin.”

  “You add that. Be my guest. Read it, and add anything you like.”

  “But who’s it for?”

  “The future. Shul-hura’s warning to the future was found by us. This is mine. At one point, I thought you and I could sit down together and drink too much coffee and translate it into every language we know. Arabic, Mandarin, Russian—the works. We’ve got, what, a couple dozen between us? But there isn’t time for that.”

  “You’re going to feed it to Bill’s translation software.”

  “No. You are.”

  “And then what?”

  “Preserve it. Spread it around, somehow. Talk to Natazscha about helping you use Iona’s DNA encoder. I don’t know. Just make sure there are so many copies it can never be destroyed.”

  “In case—”

  “In case I fail. In case none of us survives, and there’s no one left to tell the story.”

  He looked at her with a strange longing, she thought. Like a boy who wanted to kiss her but couldn’t summon the courage. How odd that they’d done so little to discuss the plan directly. That fact helped her to see, as if from a great distance, why he’d been attracted to her—why, in some alternate universe, she’d have been attracted to him. Sure, they were both language freaks, Babblers, but it wasn’t that. In some deeper way, their minds worked alike: it was as if they had some buried cultural memory about their role, their duty to others, and the need to put aside all personal feelings and make the sacrifices that the task required.

  He swallowed hard. “It’ll be difficult to get there,” he said. “And dangerous. I’ll come with you as far as I can.”

  He was well on the way to being in love with her.

  It made the whole situation almost unbearably cruel.

  Especially the fact that he was forced to lie to her like this.

  CHAPTER 16

  CATASTROPHE THEORY

  After Mauna Loa, the leaders of the Seraphim hadn’t quite known what to think; later, when the end came with such blazing swiftness, there was no time to think.

  Weren’t they doing the right thing? Their efforts to free people from distraction, by washing away all human attachments, cultures, languages even, had gone better than they could have expected. And even Mauna Loa seemed like a cloud with a silver lining, unplanned as it was. A puzzling hiccup in the smoothness of their preparations. Once they’d worked out how to throw the off switch on nearly all the world’s communications, it seemed barely relevant. And yet their technical successes merely accelerated the trend that Mauna Loa had revealed: the enthusiasm of the converted was powerful, and chaotic, and uncontrollable.

  All over the world, events were taking place that would have been too small to make the news, if there had still been such a thing as news. Ten people, on some homebuilt structure in Accra or Tehran. Fifty, on a hilltop in Poland or Puerto Rico. Five hundred—that would certainly have been a big deal, once—on a mountaintop in Colombia, or Malawi, or Sri Lanka, or Kyrgyzstan. They were acts of folly, of desperation; surely they were not, according to Quinn’s Anabasis, what the Architects had ordained?

  But the next series of truly large events came swiftly, and all of them were outside the channels of official planning and control.

  Beautifully conical Kronotsky, in Russia, managed to attract a significant crowd despite its remoteness, and the event there was compa
rable in scale to a medium-sized nuclear weapon. On the other side of the world, in Tanzania, the sacred mountain of Ol Doinyo Lengai was close to the tourist centers of the Serengeti, and only a hundred and twenty miles from Nairobi; three days after Kronotsky, it put on an even larger display. After that, vast new crowds surged toward other peaks. And even that was just the pregame show.

  One moon-decorated dawn, almost a third of Iceland’s population gathered on and around Hekla under an unnaturally darkening sky. Most of them didn’t even know that long, low Hekla had already been the site of one of history’s great eruptions, three millennia earlier. They’d been drawn there not by ancient history but by the same nameless compulsion that had drawn so many species to Toba, and so many different ancient peoples to Thera; more specifically, they had been drawn there by the desire to follow and hear a wonderful new leader among them: Ólafur Laxness.

  Ólafur’s wife was with him. Before the chanting started, she stood on a platform, eyes bright, and testified to a miracle. Ólafur had indeed traveled to Ararat, the only person from his country to do so. He had been presumed dead—in fact, he had been at the summit there when the Architects came to take him by the hand. But he was one of the most honored, she said: he had been asked to return. Glowing with the force of his new discovery, he had dissolved all her doubts, and those of their friends, as he described to them his personal experience of the eternal. “Ok-RU-ven, Ko-GU-dza, Mon-UX-mon,” the crowds roared, the air around them thickening and trembling as he stepped in front of the microphones.

  In Bill Calder’s still-abandoned study, in the old house in Seattle, small spiders now made trails in the dust. The Seraphim leaders, Babblers every one, would have been surprised and shocked if they could have entered that room and read the clue to these events that lay there on a stack of books next to a coffee mug.

  The mug was cracked, but the quotation on it was still legible: “‘Science progresses one funeral at a time’—Max Planck.” (Iona had given it to him as a joke. And maybe a warning.) The other object, a palm-sized chunk of clay, had a larger crack, so you’d have found it only partly legible, even with a good understanding of Shul-hura’s Akkadian. But Bill’s attempt at a translation was scribbled in pencil on a slip of paper beneath it: