The universe was not fourteen billion years old. It was infinitely old. It renewed itself in Big Crunch / Big Bang cycles over unimaginable stretches of time, but one thing was clear: the laws of physics in the previous universe were identical to those of this aeon. They never changed. In those infinite cycles, matter and energy combined and recombined, walking through all their possible permutations, yet always returning to start anew.
“Everything that ever walked down this road,” she said sadly, “has already done so—worse, everything that could walk this road already has, an infinite number of times. This cell, this amber light, and this conversation, and every variation and alternative to them, all have been before in infinite cycles and will return again, now and for eternity.”
Kamakie sat arms crossed, frowning at her. “But why did you care? I know why we cared. Whole religions were wiped out. Anyone whose sense of purpose required tomorrow to be different than today found themselves adrift. So”—he nodded at the door—“we get maximizers—whole peoples who’ve given up on any motive beyond immediate gratification. But you should have been immune. Your purpose was just to be.” His eyes widened as understanding dawned in him. “You’re saying it wasn’t?”
Eos clasped her hands together between her knees. “You thought it was. So did we. We’d never had to think about it, not in all the thousands of years we shone for our worlds. But then the News came and suddenly it was so clear: we hadn’t been made to merely exist, we’d been made to serve an ambition. Sure, we were confident—enough to face a future millions of years in the making!—but that was only because we assumed that your futures mattered—that even if we never changed, you had a destiny. I’d never even realized it but I always pictured myself handing you forward to that destiny, as a parent hands her child to the unknowns of life. The news wiped away that picture.
“So I stumbled. We all did—paused in our ageless dance, as if suddenly finding ourselves at the edge of the stage, about to go over. We began to wonder; to whisper, and then to argue, and then to fight. And finally . . .” She twisted her hands together again, unable to meet his eye.
“You were forsaken.”
* * * *
The door to their cell opened, revealing the maw of a corridor packed with churning smart matter. Kamakie reared back in terror, but Eos could see what the stuff was doing. “It’s okay,” she said, putting her hand on his thickly swathed arm. Within seconds, the motes, particles, smart bricks and threads wove themselves into an insulated, pressurized passageway. Eos and Kamakie were being invited out.
There was only one way to go; it led to a newly fabricated chamber deep in the city’s core. A dozen bristly sarcophagi ringed the room. The thousands of tubes and cables piercing one of the hibernation sheaths were retreating as it opened to reveal the sleeping form of a woman. Neither Eos nor Kamakie found this sight extraordinary at all; in lockstep time, this happened to everybody, once a month.
Two of the other sheaths were already empty, so Eos was not surprised when two men entered the chamber. They came in through separate entrances, which was necessary because each walked within a dense cloud of servitor bots, drones, and shifting utility fog. The bots and drones carried everything each man might need: mementos and tools, favorite furniture, bottles of fine wine, paintings, all presentable at a whim. Eos and Kamakie didn’t face people so much as explosions of private preference. Ego clouds.
She hid a smile as Kamakie leaned in to whisper, “Needless to say, they’re anti-virtuals.” No simulation for these people; they demanded all their experiences be genuine. And they demanded a lot.
The first was a bald self-labeled male human with bright teeth who unconsciously slapped at his arms now and then as if trying to wake them up. A virtual label over his head gave various names and addresses for him; his oldest dated address was Tamerlan.aetos.114.Sagitta.Principe. “Eos,” he said, in verbal, acoustic speech. “Finally.”
She could hear him communicating through quantum-encrypted back channels with the other man, which was not a surprise. This man, tall and lean behind clothing and veils that presented different impressions of him from moment to moment (fearsome warrior, clerk, king or boy), was labeled Tran.aetos.35.Sagitta.Eloquia. Various of his veils bowed to her, though she noted that behind them all, he did not. “The sun is our guest, Principe,” he said mildly, also acoustically. “And this one?” He shifted his attention to Kamakie.
Sensing Kamakie’s fear, Eos said, “This is a scavenger I enlisted to help me search for signs of life. He did his job well enough.” They turned their eyes back to her, and to reinforce their indifference to her fragile human companion, she bowed deeply. “I am honored to meet you both,” she said to the maximizers. “I have come to apologize for my actions.”
Principe’s eyes widened briefly, then he barked a laugh. “A bit late for that.”
Eloquia stepped forward hastily. “No, no, it’s not too late at all. You abandoned us, Eos. Our world froze. It’s true that all of that happened long before Principe and I were born, but we’ve lived our whole lives in the aftermath—walking in frozen forests, the ruins of broken cities. This world is a mausoleum.”
Eos hung her head. Kamakie was glaring at the maximizers. “I’ve brought back my light,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Principe started to speak but again Eloquia cut him off. “Bringing Sagitta back to life is a nice gesture, but clearly you know that it’s only a gesture. The problem is, Eos, how can we trust you? I mean, we understand you; you’re a maximizer, as any rational creature would have to be after hearing the news. Every possible version of you has existed and will exist again, and every possible version of this conversation and every emotion and meaning we could get out of it. So, why not make this version of yourself a happy one? You will, anyway, in some life. Why refrain from murder—even the murder of an entire planet—if that murder has happened an infinite number of times already and will repeat again to infinity? It doesn’t matter.”
He had broken away from his cloud of memorabilia and was pacing slowly in front of Eos, hands behind his back, throwing glances at her while he talked. “Of course you turned away from us. Why not? There were infinite times when you didn’t, and infinite times you did. Why not be one of those versions of yourself who maximized your own happiness? You’re not really doing it at the expense of anybody else.
“But here’s the thing.” He paused, frowning at her. “You’re unhappy now. You can’t shake your guilt, so you came to us to make amends. But what if you do shake it? What’s to stop you turning your light away from us again? Eos, it’s not a real apology if you can rescind it anytime you choose.”
Kamakie grabbed her arm. “Eos—”
“We all know how you can atone for your crime,” Eloquia continued. “You wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t known in your heart that you had to do it.
“Eos, give us control of your light. We can’t trust you, precisely because you’ve turned out to be just like us. Because you are like us, you’ll try to make yourself happy. And we both know there’s only one way to do that.”
Eos was silent. Kamakie stared at her in horror.
Eloquia turned away with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Go think about it. We have a city to waken.”
The floor swept Eos and Kamakie out of the chamber, and the doorway became a wall, leaving them with only one way to go: back to their cell.
* * * *
Kamakie paced angrily. “You can’t seriously mean to give them the keys to your mind? They’re solipsistic maniacs, all of them. That’s why we imprisoned them.”
Eos hunched near the heater, due maybe to some instinct for the comfort of fire she had inherited from her creators. In her mind echoed the riot of arguments among the suns. She remembered every meme and referent, even the occasional words they had exchanged. The News had been like a black hole they all circled, its pull inescapable.
“I came here to atone,” she said. “He’s r
ight. You can’t do that on your own terms.”
He pointed at the stone wall, which still smoked with thawing nitrogen. “But not theirs! If you want to give up control of your light, fine. But give it to the people who won’t waste it on some grand, suicidal orgy.”
She turned her face up to him. She’d been modifying that face, making tiny adjustments if Kamakie’s pupils dilated when he glanced at her. She was resculpting herself to become more pleasing for him—more attractive and trustworthy. She did that around any human, almost without being aware of it. She could see the impact her gaze had on him now, a reaction subtly different from the simple awe he’d radiated on their first meeting.
Kamakie knew something he wasn’t saying. As the only human stalking the melting hills of Sagitta, he was clearly no pilgrim. By his garb and accent, he was from the locksteps—a time-hopper of sorts, careering headlong into the future thirty or fifty or a hundred years at a time. She had seen no waking lockstep fortresses on this world, but they must be there somewhere.
She wanted to ask what he or his people would do with her keys if she gave them to him, but the maximizers would be listening. Kamakie had to know that as well; was that a look of understanding as he caught her eye?
She grimaced and looked down again. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “They have us trapped here, underground where I can’t communicate with my greater Self. They can overwhelm my defenses, given time, take this avatar apart, plunder my mind for the keys that will let them send back a decision—whether it’s mine or one they’ve chosen for me.”
“Do you think they’ll need to?” he asked bitterly. “You’ve heard the News, and you’ve already proved you agree with them about what it means. You have and haven’t given your keys to them, and you will and you won’t. Every possible choice you could make, you’ve already made and will make again. So, why not go with the easiest one this time around? The one that maximizes your own happiness?”
All the myriad ways opened out before her, as they did anytime she or her sisters had thought about the news. Eos could spawn thousands of simultaneous scenarios in her mind, watch them all unfold individually. Once, that had been a talent, a gift from her designers to aid her in making decisions. Now it was paralyzing. She would make every choice, so none was better than another. No good she might do could cancel the bad she’d already done and would do again. So why care?
Miserable, she sat in silence for a long time. Once the maximizers woke enough of their systems, they could overpower her; then she and Kamakie might be separated and she would never get another chance to ask him about himself. So, she took the risk and said, “Kamakie, what would you do if I gave you my key?”
He half-smiled. “I would just give it right back. It’s yours.”
Eos shook her head. “Eloquia’s right. I can’t be trusted with it anymore.”
She could see the muscles in his throat tighten. Kamakie wanted badly to tell her something, but he looked away. Eos nodded to herself.
“The rational actor chooses to maximize her own utility,” she said. “So, there’s only one logical choice, isn’t there?” She stared him down, a challenge for him to tell her what he was hiding. All she got back was a stricken expression.
Eos sighed. “I have my answer, then.”
* * * *
The maximizers were definitely listening. Just minutes after she said this, the door opened and the corridor built itself again outside.
When they entered the hibernaculum this time, it was to find four of the maximizers awake. The woman Eos had seen was now half-buried in her own garden, whose greenery and flowers hovered or stalked behind her on thin legs. She was clearly unhappy to be there. The fourth maximizer was genderless, this one dressed in a black sensory leotard and surrounded by virtual screens that cast shifting colors across its equine face. Its head wavered from side to side, eyes twitching from one input to another.
Eloquia bowed to Eos. “So, sun, have you made your choice?”
“First,” she said, “you have to promise not to harm this man nor any of his people. The locksteps and realtimers of Sagitta must be free.”
Principe slapped at his arms. “Impossible! They set us to sleep forever! That was mass murder. Do you expect us to forgive them for that?”
“Not to forgive,” she said. “To withhold your revenge.”
Principe sputtered, but the woman nodded, and after a moment, Eloquia did as well. “All right,” he said. “But we will awaken the rest of our own cities—and then they will decide, ultimately, what to do with this criminal’s people.” He glowered at Kamakie.
Eos remained silent, pretending to think about the offer. She had been transferring power and nanotech to Kamakie ever since they had returned to the cell—at first, to give him some defenses in case the maximizers separated them or tried to threaten him as leverage. As they walked here, she had decided to do more, and now needed time to finish wafting the invisibly tiny threads of smart matter over to, and into, his body.
She made the ancient emote of taking a deep breath, then said, “If you let this man go, I will give you my—”
“I have a question.”
It was Kamakie. Arms crossed, he was calmly watching the maximizers, waiting for them to heed him. Eloquia turned to him. “Yes?” he said, obviously annoyed but equally obviously willing to be polite now that Eos was about to capitulate.
“We live our lives over and over, true?” At Eloquia’s impatient nod, Kamakie rubbed his chin. “Yes, we have to, because over nearly infinite spans of time, all the particles of the universe must come back into the same configuration. Every single atom in our bodies is exactly where it was some impossible age ago, and behaving the same—and so on up to our cells, our neurons, our thoughts. If a different body had thoughts and experiences identical to mine throughout its entire life, wouldn’t that other self just be . . . me?”
“Your servant seems ignorant of simple truths,” said Principe. “He also doesn’t seem to know he’s interrupting you.”
“We accept that we also experience other lives almost exactly like this one,” Kamakie went on. “Some have just a few molecules out of place, tiny cascade differences in our neurotransmitters that cause us, just once in our lives, to make a different decision this time around. We also experience lives where the outside world diverges, even if only in the arrangement of the constellations or the frequency of the light on our skins. So, I have a question.
“When are the differences big enough that it’s no longer me having the experience?”
“Enough!” Eloquia appealed to Eos. “Please. We need your decision.”
“I have news,” said Kamakie loudly. “Fresh news, about the Return.”
No one in the chamber moved for a long moment. Eos sized up Kamakie. “That’s why you were walking alone on the ice. Something’s been learned about the cycles of eternity?”
Eloquia and the woman laughed, but the other two eyed one another uneasily. Eloquia dismissed the issue with a wave of his hand. “Oh, we know there’ve been experiments using instruments scattered over light years and taking millennia to complete. But what can they do other than refine the details of what we already know? Time is infinite, everything repeats, and—”
“—Not everything that can happen, will,” said Kamakie. Then he took a step back, as if shocked at his own pronouncement.
Still only looking to Eos, he said, “We’ve been gathering data for thousands of years, true. But not in vain. We learned something.
“All the particles in the universe mix and recombine, and it’s true that eventually all that’s happened has to happen again.”
“We know this,” drawled Eloquia.
“But the universe has no memory to avoid repeating itself before it’s run through every possible combination of events.” Kamakie walked up to Eloquia, spread his feet on the cold stone and smiled. His shoulders were squared in a way that surprised Eos. “It’s overwhelmingly likely that the sequence
will start over long before it explores every possibility. In other words, not everything that could occur will occur. Not everything that can happen will happen.”
Principe laughed and turned away. “So what?”
“So”—and now Kamakie rounded on Eos, like a prosecutor cross-examining a witness—“there is no past and future in which you make every choice you could today, Eos. This day may repeat across the ages, but you’ve never made every choice you could today, and you never will. And that means that whatever you decide to do now matters. It won’t be canceled by its opposite in some future version of today.”
Eloquia, Principe, and the other maximizers stood there, looking confused—and Eos was as well, for just a second. Then she understood and yelled, “Kamakie, run!”
He turned and sprinted for the entrance. “Get outside and look up!” she added; then Eos burst the confines of her human body, unreeling defensive and offensive systems as the maximizers’ guards closed on her.
Light and noise hammered from the direction Kamakie had run. She couldn’t follow him nor help anymore as the maximizers dove for cover, stray energies burst and evaporated their precious memorabilia, and the stone floor cracked and splintered beneath her.
* * * *
Eos found Kamakie waiting for her when she stepped through the postern gate two days later. Several maximizer war machines lurked near him, but their weapons were powered down.
The hills were dark. Framing Kamakie’s head was an infinite fog of stars in a transcendently black sky.
“They gave up,” she said to him. “Surely, you knew they would have to?”
“Hello to you too, Eos.” He stood, stretching. “Yes, I knew. Without your light, the world will freeze again. They can’t live without you, and they know it.” He gestured for her to walk with him; she fell in step, and he guided her to the right, up a harder slope than the one on which she’d dropped her doll. “They’ll have to go back into hibernation. But now they know the truth—the real News. I hope we can wake them and give them another chance someday.”
Cosmic Powers Page 18
