The Archytas

by Kinsella, Luke

  The copy of a woman known in the future as Grace eventually began walking, first toward the cluster of trees, then further, to where a small stream provided her clean drinking water. She looked for a house or building, but found no shelter.

  In all of her effort to find her purpose, it was here, this copy of her that would go on to serve it.

  As Grace began to build shelter from small branches that gathered on the ground, her importance started to unfold. The slight bulge in her belly, almost unnoticeable now, the future of everything balancing delicately on her decisions in a past so far removed from the present, a significance that would remain unknown to her forever. A woman who had just moments ago brushed her fingers against an invisible prism in a box, an event in history of such importance, an event that would start it all.

  88

  “Do you think she’ll make it?” asked Carter.

  “I hope so,” said Yudar, “I really do.”

  The two of them were standing in the kitchen. Three cards had passed, and the previous evening Grace had finally left with the devices Yudar had created, to sneak back into the city she had once escaped from, to free those enslaved by a false society.

  Carter’s vessel was ready too. Yudar had finished fixing up the ship, adding his enhancements, and it was ready to fly off Terra whenever Carter was ready to leave.

  “And how about you?” asked Yudar.

  “I’m not sure yet. I might go back to Fornax, if there’s anything left.”

  “Back to where we began,” said Yudar, “to our roots.”

  “I’ve never been. I came a long time after.”

  “I know,” said Yudar.

  “What was it like?”

  “It was beautiful, the perfect world.”

  “Did you leave anyone behind there too?”

  “No. Everyone left shortly after we decided to retire the planet, leave the constellation. Some joined us later, but everyone left eventually.”

  “I see,” said Carter. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “You are?” asked Yudar.

  “Yes. I feel that I am ready, finally ready to accept time. We live for far too long, Yudar. We shouldn’t exist for this long. We are full of information, ideas, and plans. It shouldn’t be like this. The other species at least expire, why are we so different?”

  “We do expire, just not in the same way. I always thought it was strange that we named it time, named it after the one dimension that does not affect our mortality. It is not time that ends us, it is choice, be it our own or another, accidental or deliberate. It has nothing to do with time.”

  “I guess you are right,” said Carter. “Still, I think I’m ready for it. The peace, at least.”

  “You are lucky,” said Yudar. “I do not think I will ever be ready.”

  “So, what will you do?”

  “I do not know. I wanted to check out that farm, where the first pigeon was created. I am interested in that. If it still exists.”

  “You really do have a thirst for knowledge.”

  Yudar laughed, “I suppose I do.”

  “I wanted to ask you, what happened to the rest of my unit?”

  “Oh that,” said Yudar. “They were never on the Archytas to begin with. I just told you that to keep you from going insane, gave you a reason to waste your days.”

  “I understand, and Maxwell?”

  “The information from the simulation dreams must have been too much for him, his mind could not process it all and, well, you know the rest...”

  There was a brief silence. Nothing left to say, perhaps.

  “I have one final question,” said Carter.

  “Sure, fire away.”

  “I asked you once before, but how old are you, Yudar?”

  “I do not know. It has been too long to count. I have memories though. Memories of a time that has not yet happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember things, things in my past, but they have not occurred in time yet. Memories of future events,” Yudar pointed to Carter’s carving of a circle on the table. He placed his finger between the beginning of time and the first life, “Memories from somewhere around here.”

  89

  Carter had everything he needed as the door to the ship slid closed. Packets of seeds for terraforming, just in case. A bulk of supplies, water, weapons, technologies. He could make a life in Fornax; decide if he liked it, before making any final decision to let time take him.

  Yudar watched from outside as Carter pushed the launch button and gave a final wave. Moments later, he was a small grey dot ascending through thick white clouds.

  Carter would finally get to experience the view of Terra, one of Yudar’s favourite views. This made him pleased as he turned around and headed toward the chain fence.

  Yudar walked intently, through a gap in the blanket that covered Outer-Utopia, and on to the other side. He walked along abandoned fields, a former battleground for the slaves of the capital. Discarded weapons scattered on the ground beneath the overgrowth, presumably amongst the decomposing bones of the dead.

  Memories of time when he first arrived on Terra came back to him. How he too nearly lost everything, in that underground chasm of sand. He wondered now if it was still in use, another loose end.

  After two days on foot, with rest, Yudar arrived at the family home of Geoff and Justin Jenkins. It was impossible to miss. In an area barren of vegetation, he could see one property with stalks of crops so high, a forest of sorts.

  He pushed through the dense verdure, an area of heavy moisture, like a self-contained rainforest, untouched for millions of years.

  Eventually, he found the house, forced his way through the wooden door, and went inside.

  The house was full of dust. A grey sheet painted across every surface and floor. He placed his hand over his mouth and began to explore. Two bedrooms laced with dirt, a small bathroom, an adequate kitchen, and a set of wooden steps leading below the farmhouse.

  He wandered down the steps and into the basement, to find a small laboratory.

  Objects were scattered around without order. There was no clear system as to the purpose of the place. He knew, from simulation dreams, that this was the origin of the first pigeon. It all began in this room.

  Yudar enjoyed the simple fact that he was inside the building; perhaps the last person here was the human version of Justin Jenkins. Nostalgia filled him. A silent nostalgia that made up a part of Yudar’s personality that he had always kept hidden. This was what he enjoyed. This was what he lived for.

  He looked around the room, opening up cupboards and drawers. He found thousands of hand drawn schematics. Numerous mechanical parts. Self-soldering gel, network probing kits, copper wiring, and toothed cylinders.

  He found maps, not of Terra, but of various distant planetary systems. He found books about space. Diagrams and mathematical equations, tetrahedrons and perpendicular planes. Books about physics and quantum cosmology.

  Yudar decided to read it all. Read everything. He sat in the basement of the Jenkins farmhouse for weeks. Assembled all notes. Organised all patterns. Arranged all theories. It was as though he was finishing what Justin Jenkins had started. An interrupted algorithm, an unsolved equation. Something beyond the intellectual capacity of anybody else other than that of a person with vast knowledge and understanding, a person such as Yudar.

  Eventually, he pieced it all together. It was the universe; the boy was trying to figure it out. What it was, what it was for, why sentience existed, why thoughts developed. The same ideas the copy of Justin had thrown around in the Somertri house, the same thoughts that Yudar had often contemplated.

  Yudar took a step back, and let out a long hard sigh as he let comprehension and completion wash over him. He understood everything now. He realised that the universe would turn on an endless loop that would begin and end at the exact same moment, revolutions of infinity, the same as the pigeons; just cogwheels and strings.

 
90

  The universe was breathing, the movement in itself was shifting at the subtlest of paces, like a set of lungs expanding and contracting, the delicate flow of spacetime dancing like a cloth. It continued for a while, the vast expanse of everything, moments lined up, and moments fallen in the past, a trail of dominos scattered on the ground serving a metaphorical recollection of the destruction, chaos, and loss that occurred whence sentience was birthed.

  Scanning the depths of space, and time, what was created and what for, it began to occur to the universe that perhaps all of this was for nothing. That a cosmological constant could contain a life that understood itself, will free from shackles of fated programming and design, but it was all design anyway, if it took a step back, beyond the contours of itself; where spacetime ended and nothing else began, the view from the outside in, impossibly beautiful, it imagined, but impossibly absent.

  It thought more about sentience, about how all that was created for not only them, those that existed, but also those that without existence would cause a cessation to its own being, and how such creation was wasted. And, what of the sentience? Biological or artificial, did it matter? It wondered. Was synthetic sentience enough of an excuse for its very self to exist, when all biological beings were gone? If so, then such fate was one of distress. Of course, the artificial intelligence could not have existed until after it was created, it knew that, but these steps toward such a creation being the last, those were wasted years, billions of them.

  On the nature of the universe, all things do end. The universe understood the concept; all would begin and all would end, and this had already been chosen too. The fact that itself, a non-sentient entity, had developed sentience, through others or through whatever else existed thanks to the creation of the situation of being, would always be a part of such creation, it thought, as it drifted through itself, observing the images existing on its vast fabric, understanding that all of this was probably a mistake.

  The universe focused on just one desolate pigeon, a bird floating alone in space, flapping its wings to the tune of emptiness, becoming the last clear image it saw, as it slowly began to collapse in on itself, at the subtlest of paces.