Null-A Continuum

by John C. Wright

  That was why the Ydd had reacted so violently when Gosseyn had oriented toward a particle when first they’d met: Gosseyn had been unintentionally beginning the process of universe-creation, using the Ydd body as a raw material.

  Gosseyn saw he had insufficient mass. Selecting the spark farthest futureward of his time location, he similarized his body to that spot, while maintaining his attunement to the sparks already located. He repeated the process several times, gathering more particles. He used several different techniques to try to decrease the subjective amount of time the particle-gathering process would occupy.

  He did it again. And again. After a day or two of his own subjective time, he had covered only 210 trillion millennia of time-distance and had gathered nine times 1057 atoms. About enough to make ten solar systems.

  He stopped. The sheer magnitude of the task was overwhelming. It would require billions of years of subjective time to gather enough mass-energy for what he had in mind.

  What was his error?

  Gosseyn wondered what categorical assumption he was making about the nature of time and space that caused him to perceive the non-being of the pre-universe in this fashion.

  His brain had been evolved inside the context of the continuum. Even in this nothingness, he still thought of himself as possessing a body extended in three dimensions of space, a linear dimension of time. But these perceptions were false-to-facts.

  Gosseyn told himself that he was actually perceiving the essential nothing. A paradox, because non-being had no properties and nothing to perceive. Therefore … what was he looking at?

  If time and space were merely categories of perception, here he must assume that all the particles of the Ydd body were “actually” in one moment of time, one point in space, and had no separate identity. Which meant that they were merely not interacting because of an error of reference: a manipulation of perception similar to what the Follower had done to allow himself to affect his environment without being affected by his environment. A trick, a misperception.

  Of course! Foolish not to have seen it before. From the Ydd’s own point of view, all the mass of its body must be within the same frame of reference. Which meant there had to be a control system, a set of references to which all particles oriented, even if they were not oriented to each other. And since each particle separately must contain within it some memory of that reference …

  Leej. She was the key to all this. She had occupied all the time-segments of the Ydd, living through the slow eons while it rose to power and degenerated.

  The groups of cells in his brain that the Absolute Intelligence had used to channel its attack against the Ydd had been based on her link with him. All the information about the Ydd that Gosseyn’s secondary brain had been memorizing and passing along to the Sphere system had that property in common: That cell cluster and no other had been used.

  Gosseyn similarized all the pearly points of light he had memorized so far into one selected point of time and space. There was a flare of light in the darkness. As each particle became excited, Gosseyn used his tertiary brain to detect evidences of corresponding excitement in the surrounding shadow-stuff. Each particle was connected to at least three others, and he need only similarize those others into the same orientation to bring them into the same frame of reference.

  The particles of the Ydd body suddenly grew aware of each other. And the Ydd woke up.

  Gosseyn saw it drain off part of its substance to create the energy bolt to slay him.

  Gosseyn imprinted a meaning on a cluster of attention-centers within the creature’s vast body before it could complete its murderous action.

  The meaning was: “I know your secret.”

  That halted the mad thing in midstroke.

  Prove this claim to our satisfaction. The voice of the Ydd, far from being the overpowering mental shout it had once been, was a weak whisper.

  “It is self-awareness you fear. Your mind is composed of thousands and millions of captive minds, which you scavenged out of the dying mental architecture of the Absolute Intelligence at the end of time. You imposed a series of thought-forms on each captive mind, rendering it identical to you in purpose and structure. The imposition is in the form of censorship, an inhibition on thought-flow from one brain segment to another. What else could it be? If you permitted yourself total truth, total awareness, you would revert to the Absolute Intelligence again, an entity implacably opposed to you and your futile desire to preserve yourself even at the cost of your own sanity. Am I right?”

  You are right.

  The words crept into his mind with a sense of infinite sorrow and weariness.

  Gosseyn said, “From my frame of reference, you are already dead, and our battle is concluded. Your life has been meaningless. However, you and you alone stand in the position, you alone possess the control over the raw materials in your body, you alone have the mass-energy needed, to give your death a meaning.”

  Is there to be no hope for me? I was to be the ultimate intellect of all timelines, the final product of mental evolution in the universe.

  Gosseyn reminded himself of the worlds and plenums casually murdered by this mad being in its pointless quest for secrecy and endlessness. With a deliberate effort, he held pity away and spoke the final words.

  “Ydd! I have enough lines of reference to particles in your body mass to trigger the condition myself. But it would be better for you to do it. Perhaps another version of yourself will arise in the next universe: You can console yourself with that. But your constituent mind-segments must be placed in communication with each other. All parts of you must be oriented into the same frame of reference. You can do it, or I can do it, but it must be done.”

  Almost before he finished framing the thought, it was done.

  The particles of the Ydd body, without any gap of time-process, altered their awareness of each other, so that all things were now occupying one microsecond of time, one cubic angstrom of space.

  The complexity of Ydd thought vanished as all parts of its more-than-universe-sized quantum-particle brain collapsed into one particle, heavier than the universe, smaller than the core of an atom.

  Gosseyn grew aware of a hunger of the supermassive particle. It needed … identity. The hunger manifested itself as a type of gravity warp that threatened to pull all of Gosseyn’s body mass into the midst of the superparticle. He was about to be destroyed, and uselessly. Gosseyn simply did not have enough information in his brain and body to offer the creation particle a meaningful set of information-relationships to something as massive or complex as a universe.

  Or did he?

  ONCE again, Gosseyn stimulated that deeply buried nerve path, the one that connected him to Leej and, through her, to the far future of a universe that, from his frame of reference, no longer existed. He then used his tertiary brain to make himself out-of-phase with the attunement, but he brought the supermassive cosmic particle into attunement.

  The one particle grew … aware … of a universe of information.

  And it reacted in its mindless energy-fashion to become one with it.

  Gosseyn used the Follower’s space-deception technique to impose a frame of reference on the resulting explosion of matter and energy, time and space: He decided he was 10150 light-years away.

  From that immense distance, he saw and survived the Big Bang.

  Light filled the darkness.

  40

  Space is a categorical perception of extension, and time of duration. General Relativity, the earliest of non-Aristotelian scientific systems, demonstrated that these categories are partial misperceptions of an underlying single entity: space-time.

  Gosseyn was still aware of the tug on his body, the hunger of the creation particle, even as that particle expanded to create space-time and fill it. The early epochs of time, from Gosseyn’s point of view, blinked past before Gosseyn could react. The universe was a darkened mass of extremely widespread black-hole galaxies. Gosseyn realized that his
shadow-body was still a thin line, one atom in cross section, occupying trillions of years. To him, the lifespan of the luminous age of the universe was too brief to see.

  But Gosseyn’s secondary and tertiary brains, still attuned to the creation particle, were aware in a general way of the interior conditions of the universe. The new universe was feeding off the information-flow of the old. The old, established pattern was a habit of behavior that the new followed: a path of least resistance. The created atoms did in this universe what the memory-path of the old atoms in the old universe laid out.

  But, like all energy-relationships, it was not instantaneous, not perfect. The early sections of the universe were much as before. But the later sections of time-space were still being formed. The creation particle was reacting to the information content of the remembered universe sequentially. Gosseyn beheld the timelines of the new universe stretching toward the remote future like the streams of some river, filling a dry bed after a flood…. Gosseyn saw an opportunity.

  Most segments of the universe were insulated in a sheath of shadow-stuff, a negative energy barrier that prevented similarity connections from being formed in between two different points in time. This was the antitime-travel boundary Gosseyn had been told about. New parallel universes could only be split off or grafted back into the main universe at points where the time-boundary was broken.

  The solution was simple. To prevent the Ydd madness from destroying this new universe, all he had to do was introduce a new set of information forms into the hunger of the creation particle.

  Gosseyn formed a similarity connection between a section of the universe where time-travel was impossible and the as-yet-unformed potentials of the growing timeline. He shifted, as it were, the streambed into which the time energy was flowing. The blind hunger of the creation particle, of course, reacted automatically to the pattern Gosseyn imprinted on the ylem: The final ages of the universe, after the Absolute Intelligence began to degenerate into insanity, were now ones where the Ydd entity was trapped in its own period of time. Gosseyn erected a barrier to time-travel around those final eons.

  And the universe winked out.

  THE horror of that was so great that Gosseyn had to spend many minutes returning to the cortical-thalamic pause, for an utter despair threatened to overwhelm him.

  His well-intentioned meddling had just destroyed not merely everything and everyone but any possibility that there ever had been anything or ever would be anyone.

  The cause-and-effect relation had been severed. If the Ydd could not time-travel, it could not move its gigantic body into the neutral-time condition and that mass would not be available to create the new universe and had never been available.

  The raw material of the Ydd body was gone: There was nothing from which to make a new universe. The mass of Gosseyn’s body, even if converted instantly to energy, was woefully insufficient.

  And that was all there was. Nothing else existed or ever would exist.

  He had destroyed all.

  AGAIN, Gosseyn reminded himself sharply that reality, even this nothingness-reality outside of time, could not be perfectly apprehended by his senses. What assumption was he making?

  First, he was assuming causality. How could he have wiped out the Ydd without wiping himself out? He probed his own shadow-form with his tertiary brain. There: The nerve path he had used to similarize the information patterns of the old universe into the raw energy of the new, that nerve path was still oriented to a point of reference elsewhere. The Absolute Intelligence had established an attunement link to maintain Gosseyn’s existence, even if normal laws of cause and effect were abridged. In other words, that superbeing had seen to it that Gosseyn could not wipe himself out with a time paradox.

  Second, he was assuming time itself. Gosseyn kept thinking of his current condition as “outside of time.” But this was a meaningless phrase, actually. No condition could accurately be called inside or outside the universe. The universe was what was. This condition was a state of perception where particles did not react as if they were within the context of time. But that set of reactions was artificial, produced by Gosseyn’s nervous system.

  Leej had once used her prediction power to bypass time-space in a “past” direction. Here past and future were arbitrary. Gosseyn could replay the scene. He need only find a previous version of his body in his memory and similarize his current brain information into his past brain.

  He returned to a previous point in his memory.

  THIS time, Gosseyn allowed the new universe to create itself following the information-imprint of the old universe. When it was completed, the dark spot at the utmost end of the universe sent out streamers of energy, formed connections with previous periods of time. The spots where those energy flows touched were jarred, and new branches of time-stuff erupted into being, branches and myriads of temporary false cosmoses.

  The Ydd entity surged into the non-spatial environment and attacked Gosseyn. As before, the Ydd mind-groups burned away parts of their own thinking substance to create a stream of particles to annihilate him, seeking the frames of reference where the atoms of his body were scattered. Gosseyn found that his trillion-year-wide perception merely allowed him to withdraw his one-atomthin substance from any perceptual sets that included the Ydd.

  He hid.

  From Gosseyn’s point of view, it was only a moment, although to the Ydd centuries passed, when the Ydd gave up the hunt for him and turned to other matters.

  Over the next few hundreds of thousands of years, the Ydd manipulated the early universe, attempting to create a timeline satisfactory to its self-contradictory needs. The time-structure grew more and more unstable as additional branches of time-stuff were thrown out and reabsorbed, and time paradoxes like hurricanes began to contort the structure. Time-streams flowed backward, destroying their parent streams, and the universal energy was bled into the surrounding non-space, the illusion of cause and effect breaking.

  The Ydd introduced enough shadow-substance into the early universe to wipe out mankind, which in turn, wiped out the Ydd and removed the cause of the shadow-substance.

  The primal creation particle could not follow the information forms of an illogical universe, and … abruptly … the sum of all mass in the universe was withdrawn from every point in time back to the origin.

  Gosseyn, from 10150 light-years away, stared at the bright, hard point of the pre-universe with dismay. Now what?

  BY the time all life and matter-energy became involved in the Absolute Intelligence, it was too late. The levels of logic would prevent the superbeing of the dark universe from finding and destroying every submind or stray thought that might one day turn into the Ydd. Attempts to fight the Ydd meant the Absolute Intelligence had to edit its own memory, create gaps in the history and records of the future beings, to prevent those future beings from destroying the past.

  But such surgery on its own cosmos-sized brain must be aiding the degeneration. The deliberate damage to the mental faculties, if anything, was surely helping to cause the psychosis of the Ydd.

  The continuum was not sane. An insane continuum would always destroy itself. But the Ydd could not be destroyed, could not be edited from the time-stream, because the Ydd were an integral part of the universe, a necessary step to create the next universe.

  The universe had to be given, in its fundamental makeup, the ability to create itself, but this by definition also gave it the power to destroy itself.

  Gosseyn asked himself one last time what false assumption he was making.

  41

  The adjustment of the mind to the needs and conditions of reality has both an intellectual and emotional component. The adjustment of the intellect to reality is science; the adjustment of the emotions is sanity.

  Gilbert Gosseyn was standing on what seemed an endless metal plane. Above, a nearby sun shed a blaze of harsh light over the scene and, in the darkness to each side, the stars. The shadows were jagged and harsh, the metal blin
dingly bright, denoting airlessness. The weight was roughly three times his Earth-normal. He assumed the machine on which he stood was slightly smaller than Jupiter but much more dense. Gosseyn could detect millions of distorter circuits in operation in the core of the machine underfoot, connecting it to similar planet-sized machines both at the galactic core and scattered throughout the arms and orbiting subgalaxies.

  It only required a few moments for the three smoky shadow-beings to approach him. The three communicated by the simple method of similarizing thought-forms directly into his nervous system.

  The Shadow Man of Three Million A.D. hovering to the left sent: “Why are you here?”

  Gosseyn explained, “I am gathering volunteers. The problem of the universe cannot be solved from outside the universe, by direct manipulation. Instead, countermeasures natural to the interior structure of the cosmos must be created, here, at the earliest period in the universe.”

  The middle one radiated an expression of humor. “Early? We are the last civilization of men.”

  Gosseyn said, “Not so. You are not on the verge of discovering time-travel, as your sciences predict. Instead, you should use your great scientific and technical accomplishments to help construct a series of Stabilization Spheres to hinder the flow of information-energy between time periods. Your role is not to create the first time-traveling civilization, but to thwart it.”

  The one on the right sent: “We have, for a long time, suspected the stability of the universe was artificial, as our standard model cannot account for the absence of particle degradation, given the Hubble rate of expansion. It is our race that will prevent the downfall of the continuum?”

  “In part. Your descendants will make the arrangements to transport the Stability Spheres to various points in the early universe. Also, the planet Corthid will soon arrive near this galaxy….” Gosseyn gave the vector coordinates in terms of the degree of redshift from the wavelengths of several distant quasars. This established the point where Corthid would appear, as well as velocity and direction of motion. “The population of Corthid must be trained in your space-deception techniques, to enable them to survive the shadow-condition. When they return to their own period in history, they will be able to spread this technique to the other civilized worlds, and render inconsequential the shadow-weapon of the Ydd….”