The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  His fears, as well-founded as they were, had nearly resulted in his absence today. Only Darya’s promise of some really big and important news had enticed him to take the risk. He had lost a lot of friends to personality wipe after Lysrandia. Their Cybrid bodies would be inhabited by one of the personas previously approved for embodiment, no doubt following careful screening for rebellious tendencies.

  Darya shifted her gaze to Mary, a classic rebel as reflected in her choice of an obese body, and a face so conspicuously unattractive that it verged on the mesmerizingly beautiful even before one took into account the array of piercings and exaggerated black make-up. In Darya’s ancient memory, she would have said Mary’s choice of self-expression fell into the ultra-Goth era.

  Wherever she went, Mary attracted attention, which she deemed undeserving of her notice and deliberately ignored. She was Darya’s official second-in-command and the most innovative of her top lieutenants. But even Mary was being cautious today, shaving about fifty kilos off her usual body presentation and limiting her piercings to the more conventional end of the spectrum.

  “Do you have anything to add?” Darya asked her.

  Mary looked miserable. “I’m not sure we can carry on,” she said. “We all knew this was risky but to suffer such a huge setback now, so close to when Alum is ready, this might have finished the battle for us. Maybe his power is just too much for us.”

  “We all know that Alum is powerful,” Darya acknowledged, "but he is not omnipotent."

  “But Alum is God," Mary challenged. How do we defeat God?”

  Darya took a calming breath. “Alum is not God. There is no such thing as God. He simply has access to very sophisticated technology.”

  “And a stable, ancient religi-political system that provides him with the undying loyalty of millions of trillions of humans and Cybrids,” Gerhardt interjected.

  “He may not be God but he’s the closest thing to it in this universe,” Leisha lamented. “I don’t think we can build an organization from here that can overtake his might. Not before he makes his big move.”

  Darya sighed. “Remember, we don’t need to conquer him everywhere, just here at the heart of his project,” she said. She looked at her depressed acolytes. “Look, I know we’ve suffered a huge setback but there’s still enough time to stop Alum’s insane plan for the Realm. We can't roll over and quit now!”

  “We can’t quit, and we can’t win,” observed Qiwei. “What can we do?”

  “We put our heads together and we don’t give up. Our efforts over the past several hundred thousand years have been aimed at slowing down Alum’s project by building intentionally defective machines,” Darya answered. “It has worked well enough so far, or we wouldn’t be talking now; the project would be finished. But each time we thought of a new way to slow down his progress, Alum’s people found ways to detect and fix the problems we introduced.

  “For the first hundred thousand years or so, the problems could be attributed to growing pains. For the past few tens of millennia, the Alumit suspected an active resistance. The Lysrandia operation just brought everything into the light. They know about us, and now we know that they know.”

  A waiter checked in discreetly and Darya lowered her voice. “Just because our opposition to Alum’s plan is out in the open now, doesn’t mean we’re defeated. It just means we need to commit to an even more vigorous, more effective resistance. Who knows, maybe we can even use this to our advantage somehow.”

  “How do we do that without getting caught and wiped, anyway?” asked Mary.

  Darya frowned. “Hacking into the Lysrandia inworld was a stopgap measure, nothing more. We knew it would get traced eventually. We made use of all those millenia to carry out a successful recruitment drive. Now it’s time to get prepared for the next step."

  Gerhardt sat forward, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “So, what is the next step?”

  “It’s time to attack,” Darya pronounced.

  Gerhardt fell back into his chair, expelling a whoosh of air. “How can one hundred and sixty attack millions, especially when those millions include Securitors, Shards, Angels, and Alum Himself?”

  Darya didn't let Gerhardt's pessimism slow her down. “A frontal assault by our small group would be pointless, and we don’t have time to recruit enough passively resistant Cybrids, ones who would believe in seeking Truth and Knowledge, not just blindly following Alum’s dictates. I take full responsibility for that failed strategy.

  “I thought that the Plan was simply a diversion that Alum invented for bored Cybrids. I didn't think he was actually insane enough to make his own personal universe just to fulfill his deranged desire to achieve perfection. Remember, I knew him before he was God. I never would have guessed he could do something like this. Not in a billion years.”

  “What kind of a human was he?” Mary asked, curious despite her despair.

  Darya was caught off guard by Mary's question. Most people didn’t want—outright refused—to relate to Alum as a human being. How many times had she held similar meetings with earlier incarnations of similar groups? She reviewed her logs of past conversations with this group to verify. Yes, this was the first time she’d ever discussed Alum’s origin with any of them.

  “I guess in the millennia we’ve known each other, I’ve been so focused on building the resistance that I’ve never really talked about what Alum was like back then.” Her thoughts turned back to an ancient age and she recalled the young man she had known.

  “The memories are a little vague and maybe even degraded. But I know He was a man of Yov, young for a charismatic spiritual leader of millions. After what happened on Origin, he became understandably more cautious and conservative. He was a spiritual man in an age when science was tearing at the last vestiges of the supernatural. It was a difficult time for the self-named "True Believers" back then.

  “Though not formally trained in science, Alum developed an incredible understanding of many fields all on his own. He was a genius, perhaps not completely ‘natural,’ but he never outgrew his fundamental bias that the universe was so perfectly put together that it must have had a divine Creator. Even though he was familiar with Darian Leigh's theory, he couldn’t accept that the universe really did come from nothing.” Her casual mention of Darian Leigh, the evil Da’ar, whose real name was long forgotten by all but her small group, caused nervous eyes to scan their immediate surroundings.

  "I think Alum lacked the courage to follow where reason took him, so he turned to his religious roots for answers. He chose his faith over science. That didn’t stop him from using scientists to achieve his goals, though. Or maybe he just thought religion was a better road to power. The notion of an infinite and uncaring universe, with no special place or purpose for humanity terrified him. It terrified many of us. Even those of us who believed that science would inevitably dispel the very idea of the supernatural were still scared and confused when Origin was threatened.

  “But it hit those who believed in an Intelligent Designer particularly hard. When the Da’arkness threatened to destroy our world, it just confirmed most people’s suspicions that science couldn’t be trusted to operate without strict moral supervision. They cried out for a leader of high moral principle, one who knew enough to oversee the scientists’ efforts to save the planet.”

  “What happened?” asked Leisha, completely caught up in the story.

  “They chose Alum, and he saved us. When humanity’s survival was threatened, he managed to get us all to work together, Cybrids and humans alike, to find a solution. Ultimately, he invented the starstep and endless energy, and he was able to take everyone to safety.

  “We made him our leader, the Supreme Leader. But he couldn’t stand to live in a universe without a God, so he became that God. He established a new socio-political system with himself as the central deity. It’s been stable for over a hundred million years now. It provided a vision for humans and Cybrids, and a way to conquer the universe.”

>   “So what’s the problem, if it’s stable and it works so well? Is it really all that bad?” Qiwei asked.

  “The problem is, at His core, Alum still hates the apparent futility and randomness of it all. His vision of a purposeful universe does not accept the chaos that underlies reality. There are too many, uncertainties, too many things he can’t control. You can’t have purpose in a universe that just is. For there to be an ultimate purpose to the universe, you need a person, an intelligent and willful being, who determines that purpose. Using ancient beliefs as his template, Alum intends to be that person, the one who gives the universe its purpose.

  “I didn’t see it until too late. This has become his primary motivation, pushing him to favor deterministic systems over stochastic ones, to crave order over unpredictability. His desire for the predictable and perfectly knowable had no chance against the sheer magnitude of the chaotic universe.

  “Instead of giving up, he imagined a re-Creation. A complete reset. A do-over, if you will. Alum’s Divine Plan was conceived, I suspect, of his desire to bring perfect order to this messy universe, even if that means destroying it in order to try again.”

  A tear trickled down Darya's cheek, as much from anger as profound sadness. “For ages, we were told that the machinery we’d been constructing here around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way was intended to create a mini-universe in which humans and Cybrids could cohabit and live safely forever under the loving guidance of Alum. A sort of perfect Heaven; a reward for our hard work in this universe."

  "Of course, it was all a lie," Darya spat, "a lie meant to appeal to the Cybrid’s love of the inworlds. This mini-universe, the one we've been working toward, may sound like the perfect physical implementation of a perfect inworld sim. But to Alum, a separate mini-universe, no matter how nearly perfect to us, might still be threatened by some unforeseeable external force if the potential for intelligence in any other universe remains. And he is not going to allow that to happen."

  Qiwei struggled to absorb the implications. "So, Alum's true intention is to re-create the entire universe?" The acolytes waited anxiously for Darya to respond.

  "Yes," confirmed Darya, "and to remove all those bothersome uncertainties while he’s at it. The machinery we Cybrids have been working on for the past million years will first stop and then reverse the ongoing expansion of the cosmos.

  “Our universe will deflate faster than the speed of light—space itself will contract—until it finally implodes, reversing the Big Bang. This process of deflation and implosion—or "deplosion" as I call it—will continue for about ten million years until everything is condensed into a space smaller than a single atom.

  “At that point, Alum will initiate a new Creation with a set of less stochastic natural laws more to his liking, resulting in a more ordered and manageable universe.

  “As a side benefit, his new universe will also have a provable Creator, and that Creator would be Alum. He would be the unquestioned God of the Cosmos, and the clear purpose of everything in that cosmos would be to sing his praises forever.

  “It’s not enough for him to create a Heaven as a reward to his followers. He wants the whole universe, all possible universes, to be destroyed and rebuilt as his version of Heaven.”

  12

  At the Vacationland meeting of Darya’s Cybrid rebels, mouths gaped indelicately. Her acolytes contemplated the incomprehensible, a machine powerful enough to reverse the creation of the universe and an individual insane enough to use it.

  “It’s almost impossible to imagine,” Mary said after a time.

  “And there’s only us left to stop it,” whispered Qiwei.

  “It only took one person to conceive of the plan in the first place,” responded Darya. “Even if that person fancies himself a god of sorts, and the plan needs billions of Cybrids to implement it.” She looked around the table, realizing how absurd it would appear to an outsider: the five of them, dressed for beachside relaxation, contemplating a war against the destructive desires of a self-proclaimed god.

  “Listen,” she said, “we learned a lot from Lysrandia. We can do better. We picked that location for testing and recruiting because of its low popularity with anyone except oddballs and nonconformists, which meant that anything going on inworld was likely to be ignored by Alum and the Securitors.

  “We picked it knowing that few mainstream thinkers would ever step foot there and, if they did, they weren't likely to admit it to anyone or report any activities. We got lucky for a while, I guess, but recruiting people to our cause was always going to be a complicated and slow process there.

  “Besides, that whole science and dragon show was getting to be rather much. The risk to everyone involved was getting too high to justify such a small gain in recruits.”

  “So what do you propose?” asked Gerhardt.

  “Well, for the past few thousand years, I’ve been working on a way to take over the inworld sim machinery so that we can get our message out to everyone. I think I've developed a hack that will be untraceable, and unstoppable. I’ve already got it in place, and it’s ready to be activated.”

  “But as soon as the Supervisors detect any attempts to interfere with the inworld sims they’ll just block it,” objected Qiwei. “After what happened in Lysrandia, they’ll be more alert than ever.”

  Darya nodded. “That's true, they will be hyper-alert to outside interference, but this new system is built within the inworld system. It can’t be stopped without destroying the simware, itself.”

  “From inside the system? How does it work?” Mary asked. Ever-focused on the practical, she was ready to move forward.

  “I’ve engineered a quantum virus based on the newest sub-atomic logic in my own quark-spin lattice. The virus looks like normal matter, but it uses virtual particle interactions inside normal fermions—mainly quarks and neutrinos—to perform logic operations and to convert adjacent atoms into processing units.

  “It draws from the simware energy source, it’s adaptive to its environment, and it’s self-replicating. Essentially, it’s an intelligent, insidious, untraceable virus that will be unrecognizable from the host system it attacks. Or, I should say, unrecognizable at the molecular and atomic scales, which is all we need.

  “I've already converted eight percent of the simware substrate inside the entertainment and recharging asteroids in the region. They’re ready to receive fresh programming. In a few minutes, I'll be initiating the first new inworld available to Cybrids in millions of years. Like all other sims, this inworld will be uploaded into the distributed simnet, allowing all Cybrids living in major centers around Sagittarius A* to participate."

  Qiwei sat forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “A completely new inworld? Nobody has designed a significant new inworld from scratch for eons. If Alum becomes aware of our role in this, we'll be lucky if all he does is wipe our minds.” He looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “So, what is this new inworld like?”

  “I've called it Alternus because it’s an alternate version of Earth, the planet we now call Origin. I modeled it, as best I could, on Origin as it existed a few years before being destroyed by the Da’arkness. It will simulate a small part of our physical universe to near-perfection. The physics are true to the actual universe, and there is no magic.

  “Cybrids, who enter the Alternus sim, will find a functioning society with a population of about nine billion people, all Partials. Players can choose to participate as invisible observers, or instantiate themselves directly inside an inworld inhabitant. If the Players choose to instantiate, they get access to that inworlder’s memories, skills, and proclivities, and they’ll be able to direct that person’s life in any way they wish.

  “Once a Cybrid instantiates into an inworld being, no other Cybrid will be able to instantiate into that same inworlder. It’s a dedicated one-to-one relationship. From the moment a Cybrid instantiates, its own trueself personality traits will be imprinted on the inworld
er. The Cybrid will know everything the inworlder knows, including how the inworlder would normally behave. When the Cybrid overmind is not present, the inworlder will continue to behave in a consistent manner.”

  Qiwei looked skeptical, perhaps even a little disappointed. “I can see how a totally new inworld would draw people to come visit. But, to be honest, this one sounds boring. Couldn’t you have made something a little more exciting? No magic at all? What's that all about?”

  “What’s more exciting than reality?” Darya challenged. “Even though we do most of the work throughout Alum’s worlds, Cybrid civilization is completely disconnected from the universe. We spend all our spare time in imaginary, magical inworlds like this one.” She looked around at the impossible restaurant, the perfect beach below, the gamers, and the surfers.

  “Our imaginary entertainments have encouraged us to take the easy road, to disengage from reality. Why struggle to understand the complexities of real matter and energy when you can live in a fantastical world where your every whim is fulfilled? Why learn how to lead in a real universe when you can rock an imaginary one?”

  “We work hard in the real universe. Why shouldn’t we get to enjoy ourselves inworld?” asked Leisha. The others nodded in agreement.

  “Enjoying entertainment is fine. But whatever happened to creating your own? To working out your own challenges instead of having it all done for you? Whatever happened to expressing your own self and ideas, instead of playing out someone else's design? To designing new technologies and developing new science?

  “There was a time when Cybrids would gather inworld to create new music or theater of great sophistication. We participated in enormous works that required the coordinated activity of entire communities. But we don’t do that anymore. A combination of boredom, laziness, and official discouragement of creative acts has made places like Vacationland the standard for inworld entertainment. People aren’t even trying to be creative anymore. We’re all falling prey to the worst kind of intellectual laziness and ennui.