Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was still little more than a stopgap. Before long we would need to leave the planet altogether. I believed I could accomplish that, though it would necessitate an even greater disconnection between my mortal body and my mind.

  Often during this time, walking through the passageways of Vox Core, I was startled by the sight of my reflection in a glassy surface—by the reminder that I was still a collation of blood and bone and tissue, bearing the scars of my forcible reconstruction. And the subtler scars of less visible injuries.

  My father had made me what I was because he had believed in the power of the Hypotheticals to liberate humanity from death. The Voxish religion had fostered a similar belief, a programmed limbic rebellion against the tyranny of the grave.

  And now the stone had rolled away, revealing only the weakling prophet of a mindless god. How disappointed my father would have been!

  * * *

  “I can control the passage of time,” I told Turk and Allison. “Locally, I mean.”

  Although they were my friends, they were afraid of me and of what I was becoming. I didn’t blame them for that.

  I had come to visit them in their home in the forest. The house I had built for them was as pleasant as I had planned it to be. The trees beyond the windows were tall and graceful. The air that whispered through the portcullis smelled of living things. They asked me to sit down at their table. Allison offered me fruit from a bowl and Turk poured me a glass of water. I was too thin, Allison said. It was true that lately I had been forgetting to eat.

  I told them about the world outside. The bloated sun was scouring away the Earth’s atmosphere. Before long the crust of the planet itself would begin to melt, and Vox would be afloat on a sea of molten magma.

  “But you can keep us alive,” Turk said, repeating what I had told him weeks ago. “Right?”

  “I believe I can, but I don’t see the point in staying here.”

  “Where is there to go?”

  The solar system wasn’t entirely inhospitable, despite the swollen sun. The Jovian and Saturnian moons were relatively warm and stable. Vox could have sailed indefinitely on the blue-gray seas of Europa, for instance, under an atmosphere no more toxic than Earth’s.

  “Mars,” Allison said suddenly. “If you’re serious, I mean if we can really travel between planets—there’s an Arch on Mars—”

  “No, not anymore.” The Hypotheticals had protected Mars as long as there was a human presence there. But the last native Martians had died centuries ago and their ruins had been thoroughly scavenged; in recent decades the Arch had been allowed to decay and collapse. (I extracted this knowledge from the Hypotheticals’ pool of data, which had become my second memory.) Mars was a closed door.

  “But you’re saying Vox Core can function as a kind of spaceship,” Allison persisted. “How far can it go, how fast?”

  “It can go almost any distance. But only at a very small fraction of the speed of light.”

  She didn’t have to explain what she was thinking. The planets that comprised the Ring of Worlds were linked by Arches but separated by vast physical distances. Some of these distances had been calculated by astronomers even in Turk’s time. The nearest human world was more than a hundred light-years from Earth. Reaching it would take several lifetimes. “But I can modify the passage of time so that it would seem like much less. A few hundred days, subjectively.”

  “But it won’t be the same Ring of Worlds when we get there,” Allison said.

  “No. Thousands of years will have passed. It’s impossible to predict what you might find.”

  She looked out at the forest. Beams of artificial sunlight raked through the trees like bright, vague fingers. The tier’s high ceiling was the color of cobalt. No birds or insects lived here. There was no sound but the rustling of leaves.

  After a while she turned back to Turk. He nodded once. “All right,” she said. “Take us home.”

  * * *

  I let my physical body sleep while I defined a sphere to contain Vox Core and part of the island beneath it. That sphere constituted our border with the exterior universe. Spacetime curved around us in a complex new geometry. Vox Core soared away from the dying Earth as if it had been fired from a gun, though we didn’t feel it: I further modified the local curvature of space to create the illusion of gravity. After a few hours we had passed beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

  Turk and Allison had expressed curiosity about the journey. I would have liked to show them where we were—show them directly, I mean, without mediation—but it was impossible to look at the exterior universe from inside Vox—to human eyes it would have appeared as a literally blinding cascade of blue-shifted energy, even the longest electromagnetic waves compressed to lethal potency. But I could sample that cascade at intervals and downshift it to visible wavelengths to create a series of representative images. I compiled these images and displayed them to Allison and Turk in their forest home. The result was spectacular but not soothing. The sun was a sullen ember against the darkness of space, the Earth already invisible at the edge of the heliosphere. Stars rolled past as Vox Core slowly rotated—a remnant motion I hadn’t bothered to correct. “Lonesome,” Allison remarked in a small voice.

  To an outside observer we would have looked like something paradoxical: an event horizon without a black hole, a lightless bubble from which nothing escaped but a few wisps of radiation.

  In fact the barrier that enclosed us was more complex than any natural event horizon. There were no words in any human vocabulary to describe how it functioned, though I told Turk, when he asked, that it was both a barrier and a conduit. Through it, I maintained my contact with the Hypotheticals. And as we counted years for seconds I began to feel the long rhythms of the galactic ecology—the voids of abandoned or dying stars, the bright World Rings (only one of which was the familiar human one) thriving under Hypothetical cultivation, the intense activity that surrounded newly formed stars and emerging biologically active planets.

  But there was no soul or agency in any of this, only the mindless pulse of replication and selection, unspeakably beautiful but as empty as a desert. The ecology of the Hypotheticals would churn on inexorably until it had depleted every heavy element, exhausted every source of energy within its reach. When the last star blinked into darkness, the Hypothetical machines would mine the gravity wells of ancient singularities; when those singularities evaporated and the universe grew dark and blank… well, then, I supposed the Hypotheticals would die too. And unlike human beings, they would die without complaint. No one would mourn them, and nothing would inherit the ruins they left behind.

  It became ever more difficult to remember to tend to the needs of my organic body. I lived in the quantum processors at the heart of Vox Core, and, increasingly, I lived in the cloud of Hypothetical devices that surrounded and followed us as we fell between the stars.

  I allowed myself to wonder what would happen when Turk and Allison eventually left me. Where I would go. What I would become.

  * * *

  Allison had preserved, or perhaps inherited, her namesake’s penchant for writing. I discovered she was setting down a narrative of everything she had experienced between the Equatorian desert and the holocaust of the Vox Archipelago, the words painstakingly hand-printed on crisp white paper. When I asked her who she was writing it for, she shrugged. “I don’t know. Myself, I guess. Or maybe it’s more like a message in a bottle.”

  And wasn’t that what Vox Core had become? A bottle adrift and far from shore, its glass baked green by sun and starlight, bearing messages of bone and blood?

  I encouraged her to keep writing and I memorized each page she showed me: that is, I committed it to every repository of memory available to me, not just my mortal brain but the processors of the Coryphaeus and the archival clouds of the Hypothetical entities surrounding us. One day these words might be all that remained of her.

  I suggested to Turk that he might write his own story, but he didn
’t see the point of it. So I settled for conversation. We talked, often for hours, whenever I sent my mortal body to visit their forest home. I knew everything the Coryphaeus had once known about him, including what Turk had said to Oscar about the man he had killed, and he was able to speak freely.

  “I made it my business to learn about Orrin Mather,” he said. “He was born with some kind of brain damage. He lived most of his life with an older sister in North Carolina. He got into a lot of fights, drank some, eventually left home and made his way west. He held up a few stores when he ran out of cash and put a man in the hospital once. He wasn’t a saint—far from it. But I didn’t know any of that when I did what I did. Really he was just somebody who got dealt a bad hand at birth. Other circumstances, he might have been something else.”

  Which was true of all of us, of course.

  I told Turk that if he wrote down what he remembered about Orrin Mather and Vox Core I would keep the words safe, along with Allison’s, as long as Vox and the Hypothetical ecology survived.

  “You think that’ll make any kind of difference?”

  “Not to anyone but us.”

  Turk said he would think it over.

  These people, Allison and Turk, were my friends. They were the only real friends I had ever had, and I was sorry I would have to leave them. I wanted something of theirs to carry with me.

  * * *

  The Hypothetical ecology was a forest, lush and mindless, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited. You might say it was haunted.

  I had had hints of this before. I wasn’t the first human being to access the memory of the Hypotheticals, though my case was certainly unique. The Martians had attempted such connections, sporadically, in the years before the bionormative movement suppressed all such experiments. The first human being on Earth to make the link was Jason Lawton: he had survived his own death by colonizing the computation space of the Hypotheticals—still survived there, perhaps; but his capacity to act, his agency, had been very limited. (It occurs to me that this is almost the definition of a ghost.)

  And many of the nonhuman civilizations that had come before us had found their own ways into the forest.

  They remained there still, long after their physical civilizations had declined and vanished. They were difficult for me to detect, since their activity was disguised to prevent the Hypothetical host networks from identifying and deleting them. They existed as clusters of operative information—virtual worlds—running inside the data-gathering protocols of the galactic ecosystem.

  I sensed their presence but could discern little else about them. The content of these clusters was fractally distributed and impenetrably complex. But there was genuine agency there—not just consciousness but deliberative action that affected external systems.

  So I was not alone!—though these alien virtualities were so well defended that I couldn’t contrive a way to contact them, and so ancient and inhuman that I probably wouldn’t have understood anything they might have had to say.

  * * *

  Most of a year had passed since our initial conversation when Turk handed me, without comment, a sheaf of papers on which he had written the history of his experiences in Vox Core. (My name is Turk Findley, it began, and this is the story of the life I lived long after everything I knew and loved was dead and gone. ) I thanked him gravely and said nothing further about it.

  We were approaching one of the stars that hosted a planet in the Ring of Worlds. I decelerated Vox Core, dumping kinetic energy into this new system’s energy mines (thus raising the temperature of its sun by some imperceptible fraction of a degree), and began to ramp down the time differential between Vox and the external universe. As we passed the orbit of the star’s outermost planet I showed Turk and Allison an image I had captured: the host star, just beginning to show a discernible disc, seen past the rim of a cold gas giant orbiting far outside the habitable zone. Deep in this stellar system, but still too far away to be visible as anything but a pinprick of reflected light, was the planet its human occupants called (or had once called) Cloud Harbor (in a dozen languages, none of them English).

  It was a watery world, laced with island chains where the tectonic plates of the planet’s mantle ground against one another. It had once hosted a benign and relatively peaceful human society, occupying both the available dry land and a number of artificial archipelagos. Most of Cloud Harbor’s polities had been cortical democracies, with a few settlements of radically bionormative Martians. But thousands of years had passed since then. We had to assume that any or all of this might have changed.

  Allison asked me in a small voice whether I could tell anything about the planet as it was now.

  In fact I had been trolling for stray signals. There had been none, or none that I could identify. But that might only mean that the resident civilization had adopted highly lossless modes of communication. Certainly the Hypotheticals were still active here. The icy planetesimals in the far reaches of the system swarmed with busily breeding machine entities.

  I was with Allison and Turk as the time differential between Vox Core and the external environment counted down to 1:1. I had created a viewscreen which filled an entire wall of the largest room of their home—in effect, a window to the world beyond Vox. It had been blank. Suddenly it filled with stars.

  Cloud Harbor swam into view, an amplified image; we were still light-minutes away.

  “It’s beautiful,” Allison said. She had never seen a world like this from space—the people of Vox had never been very interested in space travel. But Cloud Harbor would have been beautiful even to a jaded eye. It was a swirled crescent of cobalt and turquoise, its icy white moon standing half a degree off the sunlit horizon.

  “A lot like the way Earth used to be,” Turk said.

  He looked at me for a response. When I didn’t speak he said, “Isaac? Are you all right?”

  But I couldn’t answer.

  No, I wasn’t all right. My body was numb. My mind was full of inexplicable lights and motion. I tried to stand and toppled over.

  Before my senses faded I heard the wail of a distant siren—it was the old autonomic defense system built into the city’s deep infrastructure, warning of an invasion I couldn’t see.

  * * *

  The people of Cloud Harbor had seen us coming. The warped spacetime around our temporal bubble, bleeding energy as it decelerated into the system, had broadcast easily detected bursts of Cherenkov radiation. So they had come to meet us.

  They thought we might be hostile. They knew we weren’t an ordinary Hypothetical machine—they had learned a great deal about the nature of the Hypotheticals in the centuries since Vox left Earth. As soon as we dropped our temporal barrier, they isolated Vox Core from local energy sources and infiltrated our processors with finely tuned suppressor protocols. The effect was that the Coryphaeus went to sleep. And since much of my awareness was embedded in the Coryphaeus, I promptly lost consciousness.

  I was eventually able to reconstruct what followed. Spacecraft with human passengers swarmed through the disabled barriers and docked with Vox Core. Unopposed, they entered the city and tracked down Turk and Allison, who were able to explain—once linguistic difficulties had been sorted out—who they were and where they were from. They insisted that I was not dangerous and demanded that I be released from what amounted to an induced coma. The troops of Cloud Harbor declined to do that until they were certain I was harmless.

  It was an inauspicious meeting, but by the time I came to myself again it had become a more or less friendly one. I woke in my mortal body, in a comfortable bed in a medical suite in Vox Core. My mental functions had been fully restored. A woman who claimed to represent “the combined polities of Cloud Harbor” entered the room, introduced herself, and apologized for the way I had been treated.

  She was tall and dark-skinned. Her eyes were large and widely set. I asked her about Turk and Allison.

  “They’re waiting outside,” she said. “They want to
see you.”

  “They’ve come a long way, looking for a home. Do you have one to offer them?”

  She smiled. “I believe we can make them welcome. If you’re curious about our world, I’ve made public records from every polity available to your external memory. Judge for yourself what kind of people we are.”

  I accessed the records in an eyeblink and was reasonably satisfied, though I didn’t tell her so.

  She said, “You’ve come a great distance yourself, Isaac Dvali. We can make a place for you, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but no.”

  She frowned. “You’re a unique individual.”

  “Too unique to leave this city.” I repeated what she already knew, that I shared too much of my consciousness with the processors of the Coryphaeus to allow me to leave—my body would be little more than a drooling piece of meat if it was extracted from Vox Core.

  “We can address that problem,” she said confidently.

  Humanity had learned a few things about the nature of the Hypotheticals, she explained. The polities of Cloud Harbor had already begun to establish virtual colonies inside the computational space of the local Hypothetical networks. Colonists were generally the elderly and infirm, who were eager to leave their physical bodies behind—I could do the same, she said.

  “I’m happy enough here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone, yes.”

  “Do you understand what you’re sentencing yourself to? Solitary confinement—for eternity, or until your sense of self erodes and becomes chaotic.”

  “I can take precautions against that.”

  I could tell she didn’t believe me. “What do you mean to do, then? Tumble through the galaxy until the end of time?”

  Like a bottle on the sea.

  “Long ago,” I said, “my father owned a library of books. One of the authors I read there was a man named Rabelais. When he learned he was dying, Rabelais said, Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être. It means, I go to seek a great perhaps. ”