Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  We’re on the edge of the North Cascades, somewhere east of Stehekin. Not far from where the Mount Rainier and Mount Baker blast zones intersect. Seventy or eighty miles from here, the remains of Seattle’s taller corporate towers probably loom like chunks of honeycomb out of the ash. No way to tell whether any visible sign survives—travel in that direction is physically almost impossible. Too dangerous anyway—too many “rovers,” as we heard one solitary, half-starved, half-coherent traveler call them. Well-armed groups, ornery and desperate, scavenging and imposing their will. We found an abandoned camp a few days ago. There was a circle of stones, nicely constructed, containing the remains of a cooking fire. We poked in the ashes and found human remains. We keep moving.

  Morag is angry with me, and with herself, for not getting back to the others. She can’t stop talking about Lorna and Kit. Did they survive? Could they have survived? Were they sheltered enough? If they survived the blasts, is there any way to stay alive out there? How far were Brunhilde and her crew able to get? “I wonder what the conditions are really like out there,” she says. Out there, on the extreme edge of the continent, and she points to the faint outline of untouched, still-pristine Mount Olympus.

  That’s why she resisted moving farther east, at first. She didn’t want to leave the area in case somehow we could get information. But all we know is that if any of them did make it, we won’t hear of them by trying to find them directly. What we need, what we hope for, is a pocket of safe community in the east. Somewhere that people might be pooling skills and information, sharing rather than stealing, getting radios to work. What we need, aside from warmth and food and a doctor, is something that looks like a reseeding of normal life.

  If you’re a shipwrecked sailor, dying of thirst on some desert island, you write your story down, seal it away in a floating ship of glass, trust it to the ocean currents. Why? So that you can die thinking about how one day, far in the future maybe, your words will be read, your story told. It’s a thin slice of not-dying. Sure, it’s wrapped up with an even wilder hope, which is that a miracle will happen: you’ll be rescued, handed a skinful of water, and carried safely home.

  We have one technical advantage over shipwrecked sailors. Dad’s translation software turned Morag’s mythos—our story—into more than fifty languages: German, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic, sure, but also Malayalam, Yoruba, Hmong, Tagalog, Sinhalese, Yupik, Khmer, Warlpiri. Sanskrit and Old Elamite too, because they were in there: fat lot of good that’ll be. I asked Morag how good she thought the translations would be. For the major languages, she thought “not brilliant”; for the minor ones, “pretty crap.” But she pointed out that they’d all be intelligible, they were all together, and it was a decent-sized chunk of text. “That’s more than enough for any future linguist. Piece of cake compared to the Rosetta stone.”

  In one way, it’s less good than the Rosetta stone. The cool idea was to resurrect the machinery Mom’s company developed, encode the texts into strands of DNA, insert that into a common bacterium, then release a few billion and let them spread. Failing that, Natazscha said, they could get back into the Institute’s fabrication shop and etch the translations onto ceramic glass plates—which, she said, would survive anything.

  Tech dreams. There was no time for any of it, and we ended up with something less durable than stone or clay. Paper. Acid-free archival, sure. Vacuum sealed in triple layers of plastic. Locked in a supposedly waterproof steel safe. Well buried now too, that’s for certain—we didn’t plan that part, but Mount Rainier did the work for us. They’ll be good for a century or three, I guess.

  Perhaps none of this matters, because no sentient creature will ever need to find our story, in any language. That could just be true, if Rosko’s gift shredded the language of the parasite-gods not just here but everywhere. In that case, the populated sky—the ten thousand civilizations, the great planetary leagues and galaxy-spanning federations and lonely outposts we dreamed about in our stories, but which were never real because they were never allowed to flourish—can come into being at last.

  Such optimism, I know.

  We need optimism now. We can’t know for sure how much damage Rosko was really able to do, so we can’t know whether their capacity to prey on other minds has been compromised forever, or whether they’re merely damaged, and will find a way to regroup, recover, feed again. So when I imagine a future in which the universe teems with life as it should, free of the Architects, I’m just trying to look on the bright side.

  But something makes me good at looking on the bright side: my mother’s voice, which I still hear from time to time in moments of stillness.

  The future isn’t closed, Daniel. It’s open. It’s endless. For the living, anyway. For the living, the future is infinite.

  “D’you think he succeeded?” Morag asks me.

  “Do I think the Architects are finally gone? Permanently beaten? I don’t know. I think they’ve retreated. But finished and done with? Maybe you and I are never going to know the answer to that. We can only hope.”

  She looked up at me with that hardest, most penetrating, most Morag-defining look. And then smiled. “I think Rosko knows. That’s good enough.”

  The ash isn’t bad out here, mostly. On some of the eastern slopes, the forest isn’t too badly damaged, and provides some shelter. I’ve even been able to try my luck at the most ancient local tech, like stripping cedar bark. I wove a so-so windbreak, and even constructed a primitive fish trap. Verdict so far: the ancient people of these forests had a degree of patience we’ve long since lost. And the fish are laughing at me—or else they’re all dead.

  The western slopes are a different story. Many of them were stripped horizontal even where they didn’t burn. The trunks of Doug firs lie across each other in heaps, at all angles, like the columns of an abandoned temple. Worst luck, they were growing so recently that even the conveniently shattered chunks of a cedar, the size and color of salmon, were too wet to burn. I’ve been rooting around amid the downed branches, looking for stuff that dried in the fires without burning. Some luck there, but the work’s covered me head to toe in greasy, tar-colored soot. Apparently I have two pale rings around my eyes. “You look like a coal miner,” Morag says.

  She’s a hundred feet below me now, filling a plastic milk jug in a stream that’s moving fast enough not to have frozen. I’m on guard duty, in case of mountain lions or bears. A week ago, near where I sort-of-crashed and sort-of-landed the plane, we found a cabin. It had been surrounded by burning forest but had somehow survived, merely scorched. Inside we found the corpses of a woman, a child, three cats. All of them had been dried to fruit leather by the heat. I was done looking in about ten seconds, and wanted to leave them in peace and move on. But Morag had found a crawl space at the back and was rooting through it—the right thing to do, given how short we were of the basic things we needed to stay alive.

  Garden tools. Antique cross-country skis. A stuffed bear bigger than the child we’d found. Boxes of old cooking magazines that were full of bizarrely ordinary advertisements for cars, gadgets, golf resorts. I felt like the magazine was a sick joke: Look at all the shiny things there used to be! It made me wonder if I’d ever again stand in a kitchen, with a range and pots and electric light, and cook dinner for someone. A real future out there—or nothing but brutality and grim survival now?

  Tossed it away, got up off my knees. That’s when I saw an oiled cloth at the back, bound with twine. Inside it, a .22 rifle and a couple of dozen loose rounds. It’s not much better than a toy, a noisemaker. But we’ve seen a mountain lion, and way too much bear scat, so it feels good to have a weapon. It might scare something off.

  From the lower peaks around here we can see the sharp, distinctive peak of Mount Shuksan, on the Canadian border, which survived the destruction of its neighbor, Mount Baker. Much farther away to the south, just visible sometimes through the haze, is the still-smoldering ruin of Rainier. To the west, though, in the direction of home, the
re’s nothing to pick out. It’s like staring at a wall until your eyes play tricks: a desert of uniform gray. When I look that way, I feel like my heart has been cut out. It must be hard enough to live in exile, in a foreign country, knowing that for some reason you can never go home. But the reason I’ll never go home is that home no longer exists.

  As we tidied up the camp and I shouldered the pack, I asked Morag about the message she’d added to the end of her story—the mythos, as she put it.

  “Most of the text is a warning, D. A major downer, actually. I wanted to find a way of ending with something more positive. I kind of made it from both of us—I hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t mind. Whatever Morag wanted to say, I was fine with that. “So what was the message?”

  She closed her eyes and recited her words to me—from memory, of course. And this is what she said, what we said, to readers not yet born:

  My name is Morag Chen. I, and my brother Daniel Calder, offer you greetings from the past. We can’t know when, or where, or in what language you’ll read our story, and our warning. Depending on how much time has passed between the writing and the reading, it may be that your own language is one we don’t know, because it doesn’t yet exist. (That thought is a happy one: a language that still lies sleeping under the blanket of the future, waiting to be woken by a new community’s breath!)

  We who come before you wish you health, and safety. We also wish you many, many languages. And if by chance you are visited by the Architects, with their beautiful promises about simplification, obedience, and the “perfection” of eternity, we wish you victory over those temptations.

  Above all, though—since consciousness is the greatest gift, and since consciousness and eternity don’t play well together—we wish you that second-greatest yet most despised of gifts. Call it what you will: Embodiment. Selfhood. The knowledge of the flow of time. Mortality.

  One of our philosophers says: we should not live as animals, and we can’t live as gods. So be strong, and allow yourself to be the better thing that lies between. And then, as another of our writers says, may you live all the days of your life.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION

  No doubt it was an eccentric decision to include these notes in a novel. But they reflect my conviction that fictional worlds are more interesting when their border with our own is porous, and the exact line disputed.

  As with The Fire Seekers and Ghosts in the Machine, I don’t recommend you read straight through this—just browse the headings and dip into whatever looks interesting. You’ll find all the notes for the trilogy, including some extra material, at my website, www.richardfarr.net.

  PROLOGUE

  Eighty billion people

  It’s a persistent urban legend that more people are alive today than have existed in the rest of human history. Not even close. The world population is still between seven and eight billion, and probably ten to fifteen times that number have lived in the roughly two thousand centuries since our species first emerged. See Carl Haub’s 2011 update to the article “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” published by the Population Reference Bureau: www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx.

  “The undiscovered country”

  In his famous “To be, or not to be?” speech, Hamlet describes death as “the undiscovered country, from whose borne [or bourn] no traveller returns” (act 3, scene 1).

  Time, experience, and the perhaps-not-illusory self

  My real target here isn’t the gurus of “live in the moment,” but a too-fashionable philosophical theory that there really is only “the moment.” According to this theory, called the bundle theory, the underlying self—the thing that’s really you, and that binds experiences together across time by doing the experiencing—is an illusion.

  Most people are aware of the bundle theory of the self from Buddhism; its influence in Western thought seems to have got going in the eighteenth century, perhaps due to the great Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume becoming one of the first Europeans to be influenced by Buddhism. (For the fascinating story of how that might have happened, which was only recently unearthed by psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, search online for Gopnik Hume Buddhism.)

  Hume is one of my intellectual and personal heroes. He was a genuinely profound thinker, one of the true greats, and also a writer of superb clarity, grace, and wit. In addition, he seems to have had the rare knack of being happy, and his many friends rated him both one of the wisest and one of the most likeable human beings they’d ever met—though some people found it offensive that a skeptic about Christian doctrine was not terrified of going to hell. My own point of disagreement with Hume is a different one: I follow his near-contemporary Bishop Berkeley, and more recent philosophers such as E. J. Lowe, in not finding his bundle theory persuasive. To simplify a complicated issue: If our experiences are “only” a bundle, what’s doing the bundling? If you look closely at what Hume says, he seems to keep accidentally admitting that this is a weakness in the exotic theory he was attracted to.

  “Preserving an exact record of what the Architects had done to them”

  The idea that the I’iwa could maintain accurate historical records over huge spans of time may seem fantastical. But recent evidence suggests that something far more fantastical is true: even preliterate cultures can sometimes preserve accurate records without change over many millennia.

  Between eighteen thousand and seven thousand years ago, retreating glacial ice caused the global sea level to rise more than three hundred feet. The rising water shrank all the world’s coastlines, and separated the continent of Sahul into the much-reduced islands of Australia and New Guinea. In 2016, geographer Patrick Nunn and linguist Nicholas Reid published a paper analyzing twenty-one traditional stories from around Australia’s coast. Passed down orally for as much as four hundred generations, they seem to preserve accurate eyewitness accounts of these changes. Spencer Gulf, near Adelaide, is recalled as a valley with a chain of lakes and good hunting; near Cairns, far to the north, stories refer to a river that entered the sea at a point near what is now Fitzroy Island. These are accurately preserved memories of landscapes that ceased to exist between ten thousand and almost thirteen thousand years ago.

  Our prejudice that oral cultures must inevitably garble their history may be a case of postliterate people like us passing judgment on cognitive skills we no longer have. Check out Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, one of the earliest sources for the humbling idea that new technologies (like, say, writing) mainly have the effect of making us stupid.

  “The individual stars don’t collide, but . . .”

  Colliding galaxies are some of the most beautiful and magnificent sights in the universe. Do yourself a favor: skip that next cat video and search for Colliding Galaxies (Images). Hard-core nerds may want to check out the Java applet Galaxy Crash, put together by astronomers at Case Western Reserve. Yes, you really can waste a whole afternoon making your own galaxies and smashing them into each other!

  Necker cube

  Morag is no doubt just about to compare the Necker cube with a better example: the duck-rabbit, a drawing in which the eye and beak of a duck “flips” and looks more like the eye and ears of a rabbit.

  In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the duck-rabbit to illustrate the distinction between “just seeing” (in this sense, when we look at the drawing, we just see dark marks on a pale background) and “seeing as” (in which we see the lines as a drawing of a duck, and then as a drawing of a rabbit). Generally speaking, his point is that we only see as. Right now, for example, I can sort of pretend to myself that all I see in front of me is a pattern of dark squares on a silvery background; in reality, however much I insist that these are just patterns of light, I can’t help but see them as my keyboard. And how could it be otherwise? A visual stimulus that I just see, without seeing as anything, is by definition an un
intelligible visual experience: it’s not seeing any thing.

  That this is how perception works may be an important clue to what language does: not just (or perhaps not even primarily) communicate How I believe X (objectively) is, but also communicate What experiencing X reminds me of, or feels like.

  Quantum computing, cyber-warfare, and weirder stuff

  What makes quantum computers so special—or how special they really are—is a matter of debate. But it’s possible they would be much faster than any “classical” (i.e., regular, nonquantum) computer at many tasks, and capable of certain kinds of calculation that are essentially impossible on a classical computer. As suggested by the story, and in the notes in Ghosts in the Machine, much of modern life depends on the security of Internet encryption protocols. Most of those protocols depend on the fact that it’s effectively impossible to compute the prime factors of very large numbers. But with a quantum computer, prime factorization would potentially be easy.

  That’s what really does have the world’s governments in a tizzy. But Oxford physicist and quantum computation pioneer David Deutsch has drawn a much more startling conclusion from the same facts.

  For a sufficiently large number, it appears that even a conventional computer as big as the universe would not be big enough to derive the prime factors in a reasonable amount of time: in fact, the universe itself, conceived of as a giant computer, doesn’t have enough information content to do the job. But something called Shor’s algorithm suggests that a quantum computer could do the calculation, and reasonably quickly. This raises the following question: Where—in what location in physical space—is this calculation happening? It not only can’t be happening inside the machine on the lab bench; it can’t be happening inside this universe. Deutsch says the only possible answer—the only possible physical explanation of why such quantum calculations work—must be that we and our quantum computer exist in one of a beyond-astronomical number of parallel universes. Many of these universes are almost (but not quite) identical to this one. And the quantum computer is like a computer with parallel processors—except that it’s using parallel universes (trillions and trillions of them) to run our calculation.