Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Yet soon there came a time when he was too large even for the atmosphere. The heat dissipation from his mental processes was starting to have an adverse effect on the global climate.

  It was time to leave.

  In space he grew prolifically for fifteen million years. Hot blue stars formed, lived and died while he gnawed away at the edges of certain intractables. Human civilisations buzzed around him like flies. Among them, he knew, were individuals who were engaged in something like the same quest for understanding. He wished them well, but he had a head start none of them had a hope of ever overtaking. Over the years his density had increased, until he was now composed mostly of solid nuclear matter. Then he had evolved to substrates of pure quark matter. By then, his own gravity had become immense, and the Kind reinforced him with mighty spars of exotic matter, pilfered from the disused wormhole transit system of some long-vanished culture. A binary pulsar was harnessed to power him; titanic clockwork enslaved for the purposes of pure mentation.

  And still deeper John tunnelled.

  "I ... sense something,” he told the Kind one day.

  They asked him what, fearing his answer.

  "Something ahead of me,” he said. “A few layers down. I can't quite see it yet, but I'm pretty sure I can sense it."

  They asked him what it was like.

  "An ending,” John told them.

  "This is what we always knew would come to pass,” the Kind told him.

  They informed him that only seven other sentient beings had reached John's current state of enlightenment; none in the last three billion years. They also told him that to achieve enlightenment he would have to change again; become denser still, squeezed down into a thinking core that was only just capable of supporting itself against its own ferocious gravity.

  "You'll be unstable,” they told him. “Your very thought processes will tend to push you into your own critical radius."

  He knew what they meant, but he wanted to hear them spell it out. “And when that happens?"

  "You become a black hole. No force in the universe will be able to prevent your collapse. These are the treacherous waters we mentioned earlier."

  They said ‘earlier’ as if they meant ‘earlier this afternoon,’ rather than ‘earlier in the history of this universe.’ But John had long since accustomed himself to the awesome timescales of the Kind.

  "I still want you to do it. I've come too far to give up now."

  "As you wish."

  So they made him into a vast ring of hyperdense matter, poised on the edge of collapse. In his immense gravitational field, John's lightning thought processes grew sluggish. But his computational resources were now vast.

  Many times he orbited the galaxy.

  With each layer that he passed, he sensed the increasing presence of the ending; the final, rock-hard substrate of reality. He knew it was the floor, not another mirage-like illusion of finality. He was almost there now: his great quest was nearing its completion, and in a few thoughts—a few hours in the long afternoon of the universe—he would have arrived.

  Yet John called a halt to his thinking.

  "Is there a problem?” the Kind asked, solicitously.

  "I don't know. Maybe. I've been thinking about what you said before: about how my own thought processes might push me over the edge."

  "Yes,” the Kind said.

  "I'm wondering: what would that really mean?"

  "It would mean death. There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole."

  "You're right. That sounds an awfully lot like death to me."

  "Then perhaps you will consider stopping now, while there is still time. You have at least glimpsed the final layer. Is that not enough for you? You've come further than you could ever have dreamed when you embarked on this quest."

  "That's true."

  "Well, then. Let this be an end to it. Dwell not on what is left to be done, but, yes, on what you have already achieved."

  "I'd like to. But there's this nagging little thing I can't stop thinking about."

  "Please. To think about anything in your present state is not without risk."

  "I know. But I think this might be important. Do you think it's coincidence that I've reached this point in my quest, at the same time that I'm teetering on the edge of collapsing into myself?"

  "We confess we hadn't given the matter a great deal of thought, beyond the immediate practicalities."

  "Well, I have. And I've been thinking. Way back when, I read a theory about baby universes."

  "Continue...” the Kind said warily.

  "How they might be born inside black holes, where the ordinary rules of space and time break down. The idea being that when the singularity inside a black hole forms, it actually buds off a whole new universe, with its own subtly altered laws of physics. That's where the information goes: down the pipe, into the baby universe. We see no evidence of this on the outside—the expansion's in a direction we can't point; it isn't as if the new universe is expanding into our own like an explosion—but that doesn't mean it isn't happening every time a black hole forms somewhere in our universe. In fact, it's entirely possible that our universe might well have been budded off from someone else's black hole."

  "We are aware of this speculation. And your point being?"

  "Perhaps it isn't coincidence. Perhaps this is just the way it has to be. You cannot attain ultimate wisdom about the universe without reaching this point of gravitational collapse. And at the moment you do attain final understanding—when the last piece falls into place, when you finally glimpse that ultimate layer of reality—you slip over the edge, into irreversible collapse."

  "In other words, you die. As we warned."

  "But maybe not. After all, by that point you've become little more than pure information. What if you survive the transition through your own singularity, and slip through into the baby universe?"

  "To become smeared out and re-radiated as random noise, you mean?"

  "Actually, I had something else in mind. Who's to say that you don't end up encoding yourself into the very structure of that new universe?"

  "Who's to say that you do?"

  "I admit it's speculative. But there is something rather beautiful and symmetric about it, don't you think? In the universes where there is intelligent life, one or more sentient individuals will eventually ask the same questions I asked myself, and follow them through to this point of penultimate understanding. When they achieve enlightenment, they exceed the critical density and become baby universes in their own right. They become what they sought to understand."

  "You have no proof of this."

  "No, but I have one hell of a gut feeling. There is, of course, only one way to know for sure. At the moment of understanding, I'll know whether this happens or not."

  "And if it doesn't..."

  "I'll still have achieved my goal. I'll know that, even as I'm crushed out of existence. If, on the other hand, it does happen ... then I won't be crushed at all. My consciousness will continue, on the other side, embedded in the fabric of space and time itself.” John paused, for something had occurred to him. “I'll have become something very close to..."

  "Don't say it, please,” the Kind interjected.

  "All right, I won't. But you see now why I hesitate. This final step will take me as far from humanity as all the steps that have preceded it. It's not something I'm about to take lightly."

  "You shouldn't."

  "The others...” John began, before trailing off, aware of the fear and doubt in his voice. “What did they do, when they got this far? Did they hesitate? Did they just storm on through?"

  "Only three have preceded you, in all of recorded history. Two underwent gravitational collapse: we can show you the black holes they became, if you wish."

  "I'll pass. Tell me about the third."

  "The third chose a different path. He elected to split
his consciousness into two streams, by dividing and reallocating portions of his architecture. One component continued with the quest for ultimate understanding, while the other retreated, assuming a less-dense embodiment that carried no risk of collapse."

  "What happened to the component that continued?"

  "Again,” the Kind said, with the merest flicker of amusement at John's expense, “we'd be delighted to show you the results."

  "And the other half? How could he have preserved the understanding he'd achieved, if he backtracked to a simpler architecture?"

  "He couldn't. That's exactly the point."

  "I don't follow. Understanding required a certain level of complexity. He couldn't have retained that understanding, if he stripped himself back."

  "He didn't. He did, however, retain the memory of having understood. That, for him, was sufficient."

  "Just the memory?"

  "Precisely that. He'd glimpsed enlightenment. He didn't need to retain every detail of that glimpse to know he'd seen it."

  "But that's not understanding,” John said exasperatedly. “It's a crude approximation, like the postcard instead of the view."

  "Better than being crushed out of existence, though. The being under discussion seemed adequately content with the compromise."

  "And you think I will be, too?"

  "We think you should at least consider the possibility."

  "I will. But I'll need time to think about it."

  "How long?"

  "Just a bit."

  "All right,” the Kind said. “But just don't think too hard about it."

  * * * *

  It passed that, much less than a million years later, John announced to the Kind that he wished to follow the example of the third sentient being they had mentioned. He would partition his consciousness into two streams, one of which would continue towards final enlightenment, the other of which would assume a simpler and safer architecture, necessarily incapable of emulating his present degree of understanding. For John the process of dividing himself was as fraught and delicate as any of the transformations he had hitherto undergone. It required all of the skill of the Kind to affect the change in such a way as to allow the preservation of memories, even as his mind was whittled back to a mere sketch of itself. But by turns it was done, and the two Johns were both physically and mentally distinct: the one still poised on the edge of gravitational annihilation, only a thought away from transcendence, the other observing matters from a safe distance.

  So it was that Simple John witnessed the collapse and infall of his more complex self: an event as sudden and violent as any natural stellar catastrophe in recent galactic times. In that moment of understanding, he had pushed his own architecture to the limit. Somewhere in him, matter and energy collapsed to open a howling aperture to a new creation. He had reached the conclusion of his quest.

  In the last nanoseconds of his physical existence however—before he was sucked under the event horizon, beyond which no information could ever emerge—Complex John did at least manage to encode and transmit a parting wave of gravitational energy, a message to his other half.

  The content was very brief.

  It said only: “Now I get it."

  * * * *

  That might have been the end of it, but shortly afterwards Simple John took a decision that was to return him to his starting point. He carried now the memory of near-enlightenment, and the memory was—as the Kind had promised, despite John's natural scepticism—very nearly as illuminating as the thing itself. In some ways, perhaps, more so—it was small and polished and gemlike, and he could examine it from different angles; quite unlike the unwieldy immersiveness of the experience itself, from which the memory had been expertly distilled.

  But why, he wondered, stop there? If he could revert back to this simplified architecture and still retain the memory of what he had been before, why not take things further?

  Why not go all the way back?

  The descent from near-enlightenment was not a thing to be rushed, for at every stage—as his evolved faculties were stripped back and discarded—he had to be assured that the chain of memory remained unbroken. As he approached being human again, he knew on an intellectual level that what he now carried was not the memory of understanding, but the memory of a memory of a memory ... a pale, diminished, reflected thing, but no less authentic for that. It still felt genuine to John, and now—as they packed his wet, cellular mind back into the stifling cage of a Homo sapiens skull—that was all that truly mattered.

  And so it came time for him to return to Mars.

  Mars by then was a green and blue marble of a world much like old Earth. Despite the passage of time the rekindled human civilisation had spread no further than the solar system, and—since Earth was out of bounds—Mars remained its capital. Sixteen million people lived there now, many of them gathered into small communities scattered around the gentle foot slopes of Pavonis Mons. Deep inside Mars, a lattice of artificial black holes created a surface gravity indistinguishable from that of old Earth. Mammoth sunken buttresses kept the ancient landscape from falling in on itself. The seas were soupy with life; the atmosphere thick and warm, brimming with insects and birds.

  Certain things had been preserved since John's departure. The spiralling yellow road, for instance, still wormed its way to the summit of Pavonis Mons, and pilgrims made the long but hardly arduous ascent, pausing here and there at the many pennanted tea houses and hostels that lined the route. Though they belonged to different creeds, all remembered John in some form or another, and many of their creeds spoke of the day when he would come back to Mars. To this end, the smooth circular plateau at the top of the volcano had been kept clear, awaiting the day of John's return. Monks brushed the dust from it with great brooms. Pilgrims circled the plateau, but none ventured very far inwards from the edge.

  John, human again, dropped from the sky in a cradle of alien force. It was day, but no one witnessed his arrival. The Kind had arranged an invisibility barrier around him, so that from a distance he resembled only a pillar of warm air, causing the scene behind him to tremble slightly as in a mirage.

  "Are you sure you're ready for this?” the Kind asked. “You've been gone a long time. They may have some trouble dealing with your return."

  John adjusted the star-shaped spectacles he had selected for his return to Mars, settling them onto the small nub of his nose.

  "They'll get used to me sooner or later."

  "They'll expect words of wisdom. When they don't get any, they're likely to be disappointed. ‘I get it now’ isn't likely to pass muster."

  "They'll get over it."

  "You may wish to dispense some harmless platitudes: just enough to keep them guessing. We can suggest some, if you'd like: we've had considerable practise at this sort of thing."

  "I'll be fine. I'm just going to be straight with them. I came, I saw, I backed off. But I did see it, and I do remember seeing it. I think it all makes sense."

  "'I think it all makes sense',” the Kind repeated. “That's the best you're going to give them?"

  "It was my quest. I never said it had to measure up to anyone else's expectations.” John ran a hand over his scalp, flattening down his thin auburn thatch against the air currents in the invisibility field. He took a step forward, teetering on the huge red boots he had selected for his return. “How do I look, anyway?"

  "Not quite the way you started out. Is there any particular reason for the physiological changes, the costume?"

  John shrugged. “None in particular."

  "Fine, then. You'll knock them out. That is the appropriate turn of phrase, isn't it?"

  "It'll do. I guess this is it, then ... I step through here, and I'm back with people. Right?"

  "Right. You have plans, we take it?"

  "Nothing set in stone. See how things go, I thought. Maybe I'll settle down, maybe I won't. I've been on my own for a long time now: fitting back into human society isn't going to be a breeze
. Especially some weird, futuristic human society that half thinks I'm some kind of god."

  "You'll manage."

  John hesitated, ready to step through into daylight, into full visibility. “Thanks, anyway. For everything."

  "It was our pleasure."

  "What about you, now?"

  "We'll move on,” the Kind said. “Find someone else in need of help. Perhaps we'll swing by again, further down the line, see how you're all doing."

  "That would be nice."

  There was an awkward lull in the conversation.

  "John, there is one thing we need to tell you, before you go."

  He heard something in the Kind's tone that, in all their time together, was new to him.

  "What is it?"

  "We lied to you."

  He let out small, involuntary laugh: it was the last thing he had been expecting. He did not think the Kind had ever once spoken an untruth to him.

  "Tell me,” he said.

  "The third sentient being we spoke about ... the one that split itself into two consciousness streams?"

  John nodded. “What about it?"

  "It didn't exist. It was a story we made up, to persuade you to follow that course of action. In truth, you were the first to do such thing. No other entity had reached such a final stage of enlightenment without continuing on to final collapse."

  John absorbed that, then nodded slowly. “I see."

  "We hope you are not too angry with us."

  "Why did you lie?"

  "Because we had grown to like you. It was wrong ... the choice should have been yours, uncontaminated by our lies ... but without that example, we did not think you would have chosen the route you did. And then we would have lost you, and you would not be standing here, with the memories that you have."