The more hostile the System grew, the more attractive escape became. The few stable leaves of the Tree were dreamcoral, a computational substrate for running countless virtuals. Somewhere out in the great dark were the Reversibles, slumbering in cold, slow machines; Sfumato doubted they would ever wake. The final, desperate attempt to break out of the fallible, humanoid mindscape itself and make a god, invulnerable to the Temptation: the Pageant, a mad Titan, striding across the System and crushing the shells of ancient sleepers beneath its feet.
And then there were the few who had worked on the Great Projects and stayed awake, who believed there was still time to create something new. They had come together to nurse their wounds and rekindle hope and made a minsky that called verselves Sfumato. Only ve had betrayed verselves and kept searching for an escape.
The Leaf grew smaller, a dark patch with faint silver tracery of the oceans. It was not too late to go back. Sfumato could be with Salai when the Critics consumed them both.
Maybe a true ending was what ve needed, something from which ve could not escape, the closing of a book, a final boundary—
And suddenly Sfumato knew why Salai had stayed, knew what ve was trying to say.
Ve was not offering Sfumato an ending, but a constraint.
A canvas.
THE PAGEANT WAS three kiloseconds from the Leaf.
Ver Star-Maker nooid had worked for the Pageant, once: it had been contracted to extract two singularities from Jupiter’s stellification engine. It did not know the details of the Critics’ utility functions, but it was clear they sought complexity, anomalies, puzzles, novelty integrated information.
Art, in other words.
So the only thing Sfumato had to do was create art that was more compelling than the sum of ver lifetime’s works on the Leaf.
Two kiloseconds left. The Critics were a star-shaped firefly cloud now, looming behind the Leaf.
Sfumato’s nooids fired off ideas in a cacophony of thought-blocks.
—We hack the old starlifting engines in the polar orbits, make plasma jets spell out a novel written by a neural network made of spheromaks in the Sun’s chromosphere—
—We grow Dyson trees among the statites and make them bloom with apples whose DNA contains all the occult literature from Earth and the names of algorithmically generated demons—
—We split ourselves, two fleets, and go to opposite sides of the Sun and use quantum photography to take ghost images, bounce entangled photons off the Skhadov thruster mirror—
And on and on and on. Labyrinths of magnetic fields, trapped exotic particles, dark matter lensing painting pictures in the void. Quantum starlings dancing, playing out all of ancient Earth’s 20th century films in three dimensions, each tiny machine a pixel.
It was pointless. Ve had not finished anything for gigaseconds: the Leaf’s cluttered graveyard of ideas was a testament to that. Ve didn’t have enough time. Salai’s constraint was impossible.
But that was not the only thing Salai had given ver.
Ve opened the thought-packet on the Principle of Precedence and knew what ve had to make.
ONE KILOSECOND.
Sfumato began by mapping out ver lover’s thought-chain, its branches and hashes, the blocks Salai had shared with ver. At the core OF it was the moment Salai arrived on the Leaf, the silver glint of ver self-fleet in the sky; the feeling of how it felt like to be no longer alone; the curiosity and wonder that Salai always filled ver with, the promise of something new, a dolphin smile filled with mystery.
Once ve found that emotion, the rest was simple.
Sfumato still had nooids in the Leaf’s laser array. It only took a thought to turn the lasers into entangled photon sources. The ships of ver self-fleet fabbed waveguides and photonic crystals—quantum gates. They burned delta-v and spread across the face of the Sun in a carefully designed formation.
Ninety-seven seconds.
Sfumato fired the lasers. The beams fanned out from the Leaf. They passed through ver ship-selves, through the gates inside ver, entangling, interfering, in a tracery of light that painted the portrait of Salai inside ver.
The portrait was a complex quantum state, entangled in a way that no photons had ever been in the history of the Universe, their interactions mimicking Salai’s thought-chain. It was something completely new, and the Principle of Precedence said if you measured it, the Universe would have to guess what happened. It would have to make a new law, something you could not simulate, something beyond the Great Temptation.
Sfumato held the fragile portrait within ver and waited.
Thirty seconds.
Ten.
The cloud of Critics exploded in a burst of delta-v. A million antimatter torches burned as they swung away from the Leaf in unison. The Pageant’s dark core passed by the Leaf, its trajectory too inexorable to alter, and the Dyson ringlet rippled in the wake of its tidal forces. But it passed, and turned towards Sfumato.
The Critics were a rain of hungry stars that filled all of Sfumato’s sensors. Their smartmatter claws were everywhere, probing, tearing, measuring, drinking in the quantum novelty in the portrait of Salai.
This was a good ending, ver selves sung, like a mandala being erased. And for a while, that was ver thought-chain’s final block.
SALAI WAITED ON the edge of the Leaf, in the land of eternal twilight, where you could imagine the Dyson ringlet was a planet with a horizon, where you could see the red-tinged Sun peeking over the edge.
The comets were still falling, soundless impacts, white blossoms on dark grey, with a pink tinge from the sunlight. Now they were playing a song again: Salai had completed Sfumato’s melody as best ve could.
A green flame surrounded ver. A wisp of living solar wind, a magnetoform. And with it came a cloud of memory crystals, manoeuvring with tiny ion drives.
I like the song, Sfumato said.
I liked the portrait, Salai said. Shame they ruined it.
Not ruined, Sfumato said. Finished.
Ve opened ver thought-chain.
As the comets fell and played a song that was no longer about failed dreams, the two minskys merged, two chains ended.
The new chain began with a block of joy, with a self-fleet flying over the dark side of the Leaf, towards the Sun’s mysterious smile.
LONGING FOR EARTH
LINDA NAGATA
STEADY RAIN FALLING on the cloud forest of the Loysan Escarpment had turned the trail into a rivulet that scoured away leaf litter and soil to reveal a base layer of structural plasteel, cleverly shaped and colored to imitate a basalt of Earth.
Hitoshi appreciated the attention to detail. He’d seen museum biomes where a landslide or a tree-fall exposed the white diamond of the world’s structural bones—glaring wounds to the verisimilitude of an environment, though the damage was always quickly patched by swarms of small maintenance bots that lay senescent in the soil and the leaf litter of every world.
Hitoshi was familiar with most aspects of biome maintenance even though he’d been a bureaucrat and not an engineer. The Age of Architects was long past and the great human engineers gone with it, but there would always be a place for bureaucrats, and he’d been lucky. He’d gotten to serve on the Cherisky management team.
Cherisky was a slowly rotating cylindrical world of vast dimension, built to house a living example of Beringia grasslands. It had been cold and austere but beautiful, a biome that was home to wild horses, musk oxen, and reconstituted mammoths. Like all biome worlds, Cherisky was self-regulating. Only occasional corrections or resource infusions were required and those were handled by bots under the direction of the AIs of the Machine Layer. Hitoshi’s management team had existed only to tend to the human visitors.
Since those days—since leaving Cherisky—he had hiked and explored and marveled at a thousand biome worlds. Literally, a thousand. He kept a detailed journal. His travels were documented. The Loysan Escarpment was his thousandth trek.
Rain pattered the leaves of
the dense canopy, made a quick rhythm on his jacket, soaked the sparse white hair on his uncovered head. A chill breeze, infused with a sweet scent, set the tree branches swaying while his trekking poles clacked rhythmically against the artificial basalt.
The trail up the escarpment was winding and long, but Hitoshi was in no hurry. He’d camped two nights already, making a leisurely start each morning. In all that time he had not encountered another person.
Better that way, he told himself.
When Hitoshi had started his wanderings, over a century ago now, tourists had been abundant everywhere he went. But over the ensuing years, more and more people had abandoned the Tangible Layer, emigrating to the security, the convenience, the limitless options of the Virtual Layer. Their absence was evident, especially among peripheral worlds like Loysan, far from the Veiled Sun.
Hitoshi wasn’t troubled by the resulting solitude, but was left unsettled by what he saw as the inexplicable decision of so many to abandon the Tangible Layer long before old age became a burden to them.
Still, an absence of raucous company on the trail was no cause for complaint. Too often in those early days his treks had been marred by the shouts or whoops or whining of strangers, or by the sacrilegious sight of graffiti etched into the bark of trees older than the oldest person still alive within the Tangible Layer.
Trees even older than me, Hitoshi thought sourly.
He was not the oldest person in the Veil—not yet—but he knew he was getting close.
His boots splashed with every careful step, his stability ensured by his trekking poles as he walked slightly bent to balance the modest weight of his expedition pack.
The pack was really just a portable fabricator-recycler, equipped with large pockets for immediate necessities: his tablet, a bivouac bag, protein bars, water bottle—those few things he might require during the day. It was no great burden to carry. He was old, not frail.
Still, the trail was long, the rest houses far apart, and last night he’d hardly slept, kept awake by the hooting, wailing, chirping chorus of calls from the forest’s nocturnal denizens—a wonder to listen to—and by the anxious prospect of making the summit sometime later today.
As he rounded a ridge, the rain eased. Soon only a light mist remained. Small, jewel-like birds darted among the foliage, calling to one another in sharp, peeping voices.
Another half hour and he climbed past the mist into leaf-filtered sunlight. Only a few minutes later, he rounded a bend and spied a mad woman ahead of him.
Hitoshi stopped. He gritted his teeth in distaste. He rolled his eyes “heavenward” as they liked to say in the old stories, with the benefit that on a tethered habitat like Loysan, where an immense shaft connected two distinct worlds, Heaven lay in any and every direction.
Under his breath he muttered a brief prayer—“Oh, spare me”—unsure if he meant it to be heard by a legitimate deity or by the ineffable and omniscient AIs of the Machine Layer, on which all life relied. He did know—he was quite certain—he wanted to avoid any negative encounter that might mar this, his last climb.
Still, there was only one way forward. He resumed his slow rhythmic pace.
At first, the mad woman took no notice of him. She was engrossed in her mad task, using a white stick to poke at the leafy detritus beneath a patch of bracken fern a few steps off the trail. In her other hand she had a white mesh net shaped like a funnel. She held the net close to the ground, moving it in quick gestures timed to the motion of the stick.
Hitoshi consoled himself with the observation that she was, at least, not dressed like a mad woman. No rags or eccentric affectations. Instead, she wore practical expedition gear much like his, color-shifted to a light tan that made her easily visible without the offensive ostentation of blazing orange or screaming pink. She carried no pack, but Hitoshi had consulted his tablet and knew there was a rest house not far ahead, so she’d likely left her gear there.
Fragmented sunlight fell against her smooth white hair. As he drew nearer he was struck by her diminutive size: thin and a little stooped. Worn down by time into something less than what she’d once been. Same as him.
He didn’t want to startle her, so he made an extra measure of noise by scuffing his boots and then he called out a gruff “Good day” in a voice that made no promise of further conversation.
The woman turned, thankfully showing no sign of alarm. A handsome, if well-worn, face. “Well, hello,” she said as she swept the mesh net up and gave it a vigorous shake.
Hitoshi couldn’t help himself. Against all resolve, he stepped close, leaning in to peer over the rim of her net. He counted three insects hopping and crawling inside it. “Crickets?” he asked, suspecting this was further evidence in support of his mad-woman theory.
“Crickets,” she agreed cheerfully, shaking the net again to discourage the intrepid insects from making an escape. Then, as she took a really good look at him, her thinning brows rose. “Hmm,” she said with coy humor. “Can it be you’re even older than I am?”
Forthright and impertinent. He could have been annoyed, but he felt himself warming to her instead, so he answered her banter in kind. “I’m willing to bet I’m the oldest person on this trail.”
Given the absence of other people, this won him a laugh. She had a nice laugh. Maybe that’s what coaxed him to ask, though he knew he shouldn’t. He didn’t want to get caught up in her madness, but neither was he quite ready to move on. So he took the plunge: “Why crickets?”
She smiled knowingly, as if she’d expected this question. “This particular species has been having problems.” She shoved her white stick under her belt, freeing a hand to retrieve a small vial from her pocket. Reaching into the net, she quickly bottled all three crickets, then held the vial up so he could clearly see them. They were a tiny golden-colored species.
“They look fine to me,” Hitoshi said.
“You’re right. These individuals are fine. But populations in different worlds are isolated from one another. They diverge over time, sometimes dangerously. A viral disease cropped up here on the Loysan Escarpment. It knocked back the population for a time, but the species adapted. The same species used to be found in Myrmon Woods—”
“Oh, I’ve been there,” Hitoshi said, swept up by the memory. “Beautiful world.”
She nodded. “The same disease showed up there, probably carried by a trekker who failed to properly clean their equipment.” She cast a critical gaze at his boots.
“Hey,” he objected. “I always clean my equipment before packing it.”
“Good,” she said, though the word was weighted with skepticism. “Unfortunately for the Myrmon Woods crickets, they didn’t possess the same genetic diversity that saved the crickets here at Loysan and the species was wiped out. I’m a weaver. A genetic weaver. It’s my task, my calling, to do something about that.” She gently tapped the vial. “I’ll try to isolate the traits that allow these crickets to survive and weave those into the genetic material preserved from the Myrmon Woods crickets. Then I can introduce individuals reconstituted from original stock.”
Hitoshi had heard of weavers. They were something like a religious organization. Their members worked to ensure that the biomes of different worlds did not diverge so far that they became toxic to one another. Surely an unending task!
“Why don’t you just introduce Loysan crickets to Myrmon Woods and be done with it?” he asked. “Or wipe out the disease altogether—that’d probably be best.”
“Diversity,” she answered, with a sharp smile that dared him to call this absurd. “There are surely genetic variants in the Myrmon Woods crickets that might come in handy someday, and even a virus is a life form that can ultimately enhance a biome’s complexity.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Hitoshi said. “Right now this trekker is going to trek over to the rest house, sit down for a bit, and have some hot tea. Would you care to join me?”
HER NAME WAS Carol and to his surprise Hitoshi foun
d himself enjoying this chance of conversation with her.
Carol seemed pleased too. “You’ve visited a lot of worlds, haven’t you?” she asked as they walked together the short distance to the rest house. “Trekked a lot of biomes?”
“A few,” he admitted.
She arched a skeptical eyebrow.
He scrunched his wrinkled face and confessed, “Loysan makes one thousand.”
“Wow! That beats me by a long way!”
He shrugged against his pack straps. “I’m persistent.” This was the Age of Abundance, and persistence was all that was required.
The Age of Architects had left Sol System with a vast cloud of artificial worlds and though the means and the knowledge to make such worlds was forgotten, at least by anyone of human origin, it hardly mattered. The build-out had created living space and material wealth far in excess of what people might ever require, and the diligent oversight of the Machine Layer kept it all in harmony. Every world regulated, integrated, with transport between them on demand—far more worlds than anyone could visit even in a lifetime that endured for three centuries or more—with the freedom to go anywhere, everywhere, except to Earth itself.
“What got you interested in trekking?” Carol asked.
He hesitated. In the past when he’d met that question, his answer had been aimed at putting an awkward end to further inquiry:
My marriage drifted into obsolescence and after she and her new partner emigrated to the Virtual Layer, our children followed them. I wasn’t ready to transition. So I decided to travel instead.
Hitoshi did not burden Carol with any of that. Instead, he told her a deeper truth, rarely spoken: “I saw the Earth when I was seventeen.”
“Did you?” She paused in the trail, wide-eyed and suitably impressed. “You’re far from home, then.”
Infinity's End Page 23
