by Ian Douglas
I watched it happen, felt the numbers opening, blossoming like flowers. . . .
The universe is all I experience.
“But . . . there are parts of the universe that are outside of your experience.”
Where had that insight come from? It felt like I was being swept along with the river of mathematical understanding.
Truth . . .
Fear . . .
Save us!
“Save you from what?”
From . . . ending. . . .
And I saw in my mind’s eye a new scene, a familiar scene overlying the red-violet and the streaming stars . . . Kari and me standing side by side on Haldane’s mess deck, a few other Marines in the background, lost in the spectacular viewall image of GJ 1214 as we hurtled in past the mottled red star. Ahead, we saw Abyssworld, half ice, half boiling, red-illumined sea and hemisphere-sized storm, and streaming out behind it into the blackness of space, the faint, hazy wisp of cometary tail as the star blasted water vapor off from the planet’s atmosphere.
And that image connected with an inner, nested set of data, an older set of data, and I relived in vivid detail a scene experienced and saved weeks earlier.
It was a memory . . . a memory of the docuinteractive. . . .
The model of Abyss Deep floating above Murdock’s hand developed a faint, ghostly tail streaming away from the daylight side. “In many ways,” he continued, “Abyssworld is similar to a comet . . . a very large comet with a tail of hot gasses blowing away from the local star.”
“That can’t be a stable configuration,” I said. “It’s losing so much mass that the whole planet is going to boil away.”
“Correct. We believe Abyssworld formed much farther out in the planetary system, then migrated inward as a result of gravitational interactions with the two outer gas giants. We don’t have a solid dating system with which to work, but it’s possible that the planet began losing significant mass as much as five billion years ago, when it would have been perhaps six times the diameter it is now.
“Abyssworld is now losing mass, which has the advantage of bleeding away excess heat. Within another billion years, though, this ongoing loss of mass will significantly reduce the planet’s size, until the entire world ocean has boiled away. At that point, Abyssworld will be dead.”
I saw Abyssworld hanging in space, its tail streaming away into darkness, its star boiling its oceans.
A dying world.
A cry for help.
Save us.
Overlying the images drawn from my own memory were other images, other sensations, and an impression that I was this world, the Deep of this world, far below in chill and unending Night. Increasingly, powerfully, I was aware of the world below, a world I experienced through the senses of myriad swarming entities hundreds of meters long.
Cuttlewhales, everywhere cuttlewhales, sinuous and ropy and as minute as teeming bacteria compared to the sheer bulk and volume that was me. The cuttlewhales, I realized, were literally parts of myself born from frigid, gelatinous ice, deliberately teased from the organic ice to serve as senses allowing me to access the cosmos, the totality of my underwater existence. I saw . . . mountains, smoothly rounded, compressed under vast pressure, translucent, glowing, layer upon mist-veiled layer, like an impossibly beautiful nebula hanging in the Void. I saw the streams of shining stars, sensed again the sheer depth and vastness of that scale . . . a mountain, a world of moving light, and realized that what I was seeing was not a hallucination born of stress or fear or lack of sleep or incipient schizophrenia, but the heart of the world, this world, itself alive and vibrant.
My perception rose from the translucent mountains of light and inner stars, accelerating, rushing up into blackness.
And eventually, blackness gave way to red-violet light, to unfamiliar hues and an intense, almost painful glare of sky. I emerged, and found myself surrounded by a distorted image that could only be the surface of GJ 1214 I as seen through the weird eyes of a cuttlewhale, a world of red water and orange mist and mountains of cracked and broken ice calving into the sea. A scene divided into six overlapping segments in a circle, and which seemed to show me the seascape ahead and the icescape behind and the sky above and the water below all at the same time.
My head ached trying to grasp it all.
I was the cuttlewhale, moving in sinuous ripples across a wind-lashed sea, moving out into open water farther and farther from the ice, as the wind grew stronger and the water grew hotter, as the bloated red sun with its spot-mottled face and magnetically twisted prominences rose higher and yet higher into the sky, searing the surface with unendurable heat.
The cuttlewhales rose in vast numbers from the safe, cool comfort of their genesis in the Deep, emerged into a fury of heat and near-vacuum, and observed as their bodies gradually scaled and crumbled away. And as the first melted, more came . . . and more.
And then the others came, a ship of strange, hard ice hovering in the sky, and creatures, other intelligences, moving on the ice.
I felt pain as the beings used weapons of directed energy against the cuttlewhales.
And the cuttlewhales responded in kind . . . and I realized that from their scale, the cuttlewhales literally could not tell the difference between Gykr and human.
Imagine a world.
The world is 34,160 kilometers in diameter, or 2.678 times the width of the Earth. At the center of this world is a solid core 12,000 kilometers—give or take a few hundred—across, very close to the size of the Earth. Likely, the structure is similar—a hot, innermost sphere of molten iron enveloped in a plastic mantle, the whole sheathed over by a thin crust of solid rock.
And above that crust, a liquid ocean 11,000 kilometers deep.
The top thousand kilometers of that ocean is liquid water. Below that depth, though, between liquid and rock, those insane pressures keep piling up and up and up, one full atmosphere every ten meters, and the water is compressed and congealed into something like slush, an amorphous exotic ice exhibiting Debye relaxation and odd electrical effects, a matrix of gelatinous fluid shot through with other forms of exotic ice, and veins and streaks and currents of heavy metals upwelling from the solid, hot planetary crust far, far below.
An organic exotic ice, amorphous and shot through with contaminants, a dirty ice that has evolved and developed over the eons to become . . . a brain.
A very, very large brain.
The adult human brain has a volume, very roughly and on average, of 1,200 cubic centimeters. Twelve hundred ccs of neurons and glia and distinct organs like the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hippocampus, of cortex and neocortex, of tectum and tegmentum, of dendrites and synapses. Twelve hundred ccs of quivering jelly containing, roughly, 100 trillion—that’s 1014—neural connections.
The brain of the Abyss Deep had a volume of over 900,000 cubic kilometers. Make that 1023 cubic centimeters . . . or about 700 quintillion times larger than the brain of a mere human like myself. A single brain . . .
If its NCE, its Neural Connection Equivalence, was on anything like a human scale in terms of packaging, it contained 1020 more synapses than a human, something like 1034 neural connections in all . . .
What the hell did that mean in terms of relative intelligence? If humans had 10 percent or so more synaptic connections than the Gykr, which made them a bit slower on the uptake than we were, what did that say for a comparison between my intelligence, say, and that of the Abyss Deep?
In my mind, the word Deep had just shifted in meaning, from a general term for the extreme depths of the Abyssworld to the living being itself that by volume made up 76 percent of that entire planet.
Vast . . . mysterious . . . unimaginably ancient. And unimaginably smart, a truly superhuman intelligence that embraced an entire world.
And it was terrified of dying.
I am the Abyssworld Deep. . . .
Is Dr. Murdock correct? The Voice thundered in my mind. Is my world doomed, the ocean within which I exist to
boil away so soon?
“Well, your world will dry up eventually,” I said. “But that will still take a billion years, at least. Probably more.” I couldn’t be sure of the exact figure, and it might be considerably less—a few hundred million years? But still, geological ages . . . eons. . . .
I could feel it rummaging through my in-head RAM, possibly trying to judge what I meant by the term years.
I have existed for a billion years already. . . .
I felt . . . dizzy. In shock. As though my brain was muzzily firing on only a fraction of its usual go-juice. A being—a potentially immortal being—a billion years old, and as far beyond me in terms of neural processing power as I am above a single specimen of Staphylococcus aureus.
Was communication even possible, I wondered, with a being, with an intellect that vast and that powerful? Most of the intelligent species we’ve encountered so far—plus most of those explored through the agency of the Encyclopedia Galactica—are, like the Gykr and the M’nangat and the Qesh and the Durga, all at very roughly the same level of intelligence, of consciousness, and of innate mental ability. There were a few oddballs out there that were tough to evaluate—the Durga were a great example, with such an alien worldview that we hadn’t learned how to really communicate with them in almost a century.
An ant runs across the bare toe of a human being, and causes the toe to twitch. Can that ant be said to be in communication with the human?
The Deep represented, I knew, an entirely different order of intelligence than the merely human. Could I truly be said to be in communication with it now? Or was I in contact with some minute subset of that near infinitely vaster brain . . . as the ant might be in communication with the nerve impulses that cause the skin of the human’s toe to flutter in response to its touch?
I found myself thinking of god.
Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by that word. For me, the word god had always been a place marker for a rather vague, cultural concept, for something much larger, more powerful, more intelligent than me.
Well, the Deep qualified on that count, didn’t it?
Okay . . . try this instead. There was the traditional, monotheistic Creator, the capital-G God, believed in by so many humans still as a kind of old, bearded father figure in the sky, all-seeing, omnipotent, omniscient, ruler of His cosmos . . . and yet according to human thought, straightjacketed by a peculiarly narrow mind, a human mind concerned with concepts like prayer and worship and the salvation or punishment of those humans who one way or another fail to meet His standards.
I had never been able to wrap my head around such a limited, pathetic notion of what a divine creator-being might truly be. Surely, that image of God had more in common with the Zeus of the ancient Greeks than with any purely spiritual reality.
In contrast, there were the multiple deities of Neopagans like my own family, of Wiccans and Dianics and the religious reconstructionists of Norse or Saxon or Greek traditions—idealized deities that were human, easygoing and undemanding, Earth-centered representations of fertility, sometimes contentious, often humorous, and perhaps best understood as the expressions or projections or facets of purely human psychologies. A popular theme in Neopagan religious thought was that we humans were evolving, through a succession of lifetimes, into gods ourselves.
And now I was facing within my own mind the physical reality of a deity utterly unlike either of those concepts, a physical being so far beyond me in mental scope and power that I would never, ever be able to fully grasp or comprehend it.
I felt . . . very small. Very slow. Very stupid. And very, very inconsequential.
Save us.
And it wanted my—our—help.
What, I wondered, did a brain 700 quintillion times larger than a human brain think about? How did it pass the eons?
What did it experience . . . especially when it evolved as a motionless layer ten thousand kilometers thick embracing the core of a world? The depths of the world Abyss didn’t exactly offer intellectual stimulation, did they? Very cold and very dark and eternally unchanging, save for upwelling currents carrying warmth from the core, and drifting flecks of life, and nothing, nothing more for age upon age upon measureless age.
What had stimulated that sentience?
Perhaps the Deep began as an . . . an awareness of change. Of plumes of heat bubbling up from cracks in the solid crust beneath it. Of the seep and flow of sulfur and metallic compounds emerging from volcanic vents and keeping the water above liquid.
Perhaps it had evolved ways to affect this leakage somehow. Like predators developing intelligence in order to better hunt their prey, the Deep had developed intelligence to manipulate its deepest surroundings, finding new sources of heat and developing them, expanding them, making use of them. Without being told, I was aware that the Deep must be a true thermovore, deriving sustenance directly from heat.
And after that . . .
Had the unending boredom of existence generated within the Deep an interest in, even a fascination for, mathematics? Surely, though, there had to be intelligence before the boredom, for the boredom to be realized. A non-sentient lump of ice could not be bored.
Why was the Deep super-intelligent?
Did there have to be a reason? I felt that I was on the right track about controlling its environment—that, after all, was a large part of what had led to human sentience. Perhaps, eons past, intelligence, sentience had appeared here on a very small scale . . . a simple curiosity about its surroundings, an awareness of cold and dark, and of plumes or currents of heat rising through its inner substance.
And that had led to trying to control those currents . . . the gods alone know how. Had the Deep learned to change, to control, those incredible pressures within itself? Or to use those pressures to redirect warm currents to where they needed to be?
Eventually, with the passage of enough time, perhaps that Mind had developed mathematics, simply as a means of measuring what it knew . . . depth, pressure, hot and cold, flow rate, distance.
How it might have progressed from there to Gödel encoding was utterly beyond me. Its understanding of mathematics would have started with counting, and counting would have led to arithmetical manipulations . . . and that to prime numbers, and that to factoring primes.
Could intelligence bootstrap itself from simple awareness of physical events to higher mathematics, simply through introspection, through self-aware mindfulness?
Given the slow passage of enough millennia, perhaps . . .
But now the universe of the Deep had suddenly expanded with the arrival of other intelligences from off world. It had for the first time seen the planet it inhabited from outside, heard the discussion of some of those alien intelligences, and realized that it was doomed.
The sheer injustice had me on the verge of sobbing . . . or was I picking up some sort of emotional leakage from the Deep? It was hard to tell, so closely entwined at that moment were its thoughts with mine. But a life form as intellectually capable, as smart as the Deep was completely helpless in the face of its world’s inevitable doomsday.
What could be done to help?
Not evacuation, certainly. There was no way to load the Deep from GJ 1214 I into a spaceship and carry it to some other world. You might as well think about moving the entire planet. . . .
And with that thought, I began to emerge from the dream.
“Doc? Hey, Doc? You okay?”
I opened my eyes. I was in one of the racks in the sunken base’s makeshift sick bay, staring at a dark and pressure-crumpled overhead. “W-what . . . ?”
It was Staff Sergeant Thomason . . . but he’d been left up on the surface, hadn’t he? What was he doing down here?
I sat up with a gasp. Gods . . . had that been real?
“Whoa, easy there, Doc. You’ve been out of it for the better part of a day!”
A day! “What . . . what happened? The brain . . . the Gykr . . .”
I knew I wasn’t making any
sense. I swung my legs off the bunk and leaned forward. I started to sag, dizzy, and Thomason caught me. “You stay put for a moment, Doc. Everything is okay. Everything is very okay.”
“No it’s not,” I told him, still muzzy. “We’ve got to save the whole fucking planet. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Okay, so I wasn’t thinking straight just then. But I meant well.
A few hours later, I was back on the surface, entering our dome and receiving rounds of congratulations from Marines and scientists alike. They seemed to be of the impression that I had somehow saved the expedition.
All four of the Gykr had reached the surface already. It turns out that the cuttlewhales had gotten involved—the cuttlewhale express, we were calling it. The Walsh would move out into open water, a cuttlewhale would move up behind it and swallow it down, and a short time later the sub would be released at its destination, alongside the sunken base or beside the new base at the surface. Over the course of an afternoon, the Walsh had transported all four Gykr, the four M’nangat, and twenty-some of the other survivors to the surface, and was now making her final trip.
But the big news was that when the Walsh surfaced with that very first Gykr, it was to the discovery that the Gykr starship had returned during our absence . . . and, as expected, had brought along some friends. Space around GJ 1214 I was now occupied by eight orbiting alien starships, and they’d come loaded for bear.
Or, in this case, human.
The base we’d nanufactured on the ice had been well hidden and remained undiscovered. But when Walsh had surfaced, the Gykr aboard had immediately contacted his friends. He’d been released at the edge of the ice, and a ship had arrived shortly afterward to pick him up.
That Gykr, though, had become a Chosen during the ascent; he’d been the only Gykr aboard, after all, and apparently it was being alone that triggered the greater sense of independence, the ability to give orders, among Gykr individuals. And apparently that Gykr Chosen had been impressed enough with the agreement I’d hammered out with them that he’d told his friends . . . and they’d been impressed as well. They’d not even demanded—as our informal treaty had stated—that they take over control of the rescue. They simply constructed a surface base of their own, and then watched closely as Walsh continued to shuttle personnel up and down.
