by Drew Ford
In those days before I was born, as smoke rose from the ovens, God did not hear the cries of His people.
And so it follows: No system will achieve perfect efficiency and self-sufficiency. Within all changing systems, accumulated error must be purged. For the good of the dynamic whole, systems must die. But efficient and beautiful systems will die as well.
I see the Proof’s abstraction of evil: a shark-like thing, to me, but no more than a very complex expression. In this shark there is history, and dumb organic pressure, and the accumulations of the past, and the shark does not discriminate, knows nothing of judgment or justice, will eat the promising and the strong, as well as birthing young. Waste, waste, an agony of waste, and over it all, not watching, the indifference of the real.
After what seems hours of study, of questions asked and answered, of new ways of thinking—re-education—I begin to feel the thoroughness of the Proof, and I feel a despair unlike anything in my embodied existence.
Where once there had been hope that intelligent organisms could see their way to just, beautiful, and efficient systems, in practice, without exception, they revert to the old rules.
Things have not and will never improve.
Heaven itself would be touched with evil—or stand still. But there is no heaven run by a just God. Nor can there be a just God. Perfect justice and beauty and evolution and change are incompatible.
Not the birth of my son and daughter, not the day of my marriage, not all my moments of joy can erase the horror of history. And the stretch of future histories, after my storage, shows even more horror, until I seem to swim in carnivorous, cybernivorous cruelty.
Connections
We survey the Berkus with growing concern. Here is not just frustration of our attempts to return to the Library, not just destruction of knowledge, but a flagrant and purposeless waste of precious resources. Why is it allowed?
Obviously, the Coordinator of the Endtime Work has given license, handed over this world, with such haste that We did not have time to withdraw. The Library has been forced away (or worse), and all transponders destroyed, leaving us alone on School World.
The ancient self, having touched on the Proof (absorbing no more than a fraction of its beauty), is wrapped in a dark shell of mood. This mood, basic and primal as it is, communicates to the tributaries. Again, after billions of years, We feel sadness at the inevitability of error and the impossibility of justice—and sadness at our own error. The Proof has always stood as a monument of pure thought—and a curse, even to We who affirm it.
The Berkus expands like a balloon. “There is going to be major work done here. You will have to move.”
“No,” the combined tributaries cry. “This is enough confusion and enough being shoved around.” Those words come from the ancient self.
The Berkus finds them amusing.
“Then you’ll stay here,” it says, “and be absorbed in the next round of experiment. You are teachers who have taught incorrectly. You deserve no better.”
* * *
I break free of the dark shell of mood, as the tributaries describe it, and now I seem to kick and push my way to a peak of attention, all without arms or legs.
“Where is the plan, the order? Where are your billions of years of superiority? How can this be happening?”
* * *
We pass on the cries of the ancient self. The Berkus hears the message.
“We are not familiar with this voice,” the student social=mind says.
“I judge you from the past!” the ancient self says. “You are all found wanting!”
“This is not the voice of a tributary, but of an individual,” the Berkus says. “The individual sounds uninformed.”
* * *
“I demand to speak with my wife!”
My demand gets no reaction for almost a second. Around me, the tributaries within the soma flow and rearrange, thinking in a way I cannot follow. They finally rise as a solid, seamless river of consent.
“We charge you with error,” they say to the Berkus. “We charge you with confirming the Proof you wish to negate.”
The Berkus considers, then backs away swiftly, beaming at us one final message: “There is an interesting rawness in your charge. You no longer think as outmoded teachers. A link with the Endtime Work Coordinator will be requested. Stand where you are. Our own work must continue.”
* * *
I feel a sense of relief around me. This is a breakthrough. I have a purpose! The Berkus retreats, leaving us on the promontory to observe. Where once, hours before, glaciers melted, the ground begins to churn, grow viscous, divide into fenced enclaves. Within the enclaves, green and gray shapes arise, sending forth clouds of steam. These enclaves surround the range of hills, surmount all but our promontory, and move off to the horizon on all sides, perhaps covering the entire School World.
In the center of each fenced area, a sphere forms, first as a white blister on the hardness, then as a pearl resting on the surface. The pearl lifts, suspended in air. The pearls begin to evolve in different ways, turning inward, doubling, tripling, flattening into disks, dividing at their centers to form toruses—a practical infinity of different forms.
The fecundity of idea startles me. Blastulas give rise to cell-like complexity, spikes twist into intricate knots, all the rules of ancient topological mathematics are demonstrated in seconds, and then violated as the spaces within the enclaves themselves change.
“What are they doing?” I ask, bewildered.
“A mad push of evolution,” my descendant self explains, “trying all combinations, starting from a simple beginning. This was once a common exercise, but not on such a vast scale. Not since the formulation of the Proof.”
“What do they want to learn?”
“If they can find one instance of evolution and change that involves only growth and development, not competition and destruction, then they will have falsified the Proof.”
“But the Proof is perfect,” I said. “It can’t be falsified . . .”
“So We have judged. The students incorrectly believe We are wrong.”
The field of creation becomes a vast fabric, each enclave contributing to a larger weave. What is being shown here could have occupied entire civilizations in my time: the dimensions of change, all possibilities of progressive growth.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“It’s futile,” my descendant self says, its tone bitter. I feel the emotion in its message as an aberration, and it immediately broadcasts shame to all of its fellows, and to me.
“Are you afraid they’ll show your teachings were wrong?” I ask.
“No,” my tributary says. “I am sorry that they will fail. Such a message to pass on to a young universe . . . That whatever our nature and design, however We develop, We are doomed to make errors and cause pain. Still, that is the truth, and it has never been refuted.”
“But even in my time, there was a solution,” I say.
They show mild curiosity. What could come from so far in the past that they hadn’t advanced upon, improved a billion times over, or discarded? I wonder why I have been activated at all . . .
But I persist. “From God’s perspective, destruction and pain and error may be part of the greater whole, a beauty from Its point of view. We only perceive them as evil because of our limited point of view.”
The tributaries allow a polite pause. My tributary explains, as gently as possible, “We have never encountered ultimate systems you call gods. Still, We are or have been very much like gods. As gods, all too often We have made horrible errors, and caused unending pain. Pain did not add to the beauty.”
I want to scream at them for their hubris, but it soon becomes apparent to me they are right. Their predecessors have reduced galaxies, scanned all histories, made the universe itself run faster with their productions and creations. They have advanced the Endtime by billions of years, and now prepare to seed a new universe across an inconceivable gap of da
rkness and immobility.
From my perspective, humans have certainly become god-like. But not just. And there are no others. Even in the diversity of the human diaspora across the galaxies, not once has the Proof been falsified.
And that is all it would have taken: one instance.
“Why did you bring me back, then?” I ask my descendant self in private conference.
It replies in kind:
“Your thought processes are not our own. You can be a judgment engine. You might give us insight into the reasoning of the students, and help explain to us their plunge into greater error. There must be some motive not immediately apparent, some fragment of personality and memory responsible for this. An ancient self of you and a tributary of the Endtime Work Coordinator were once intimately related—married as sexual partners. You did not stay married. That is division and dissent. And there is division and dissent between the Endtime Work Committee and the teachers. That much is apparent . . .”
Again I feel like clutching my hands to my face and screaming in frustration. Elisaveta—it must mean Elisaveta.
But we were not divorced . . . not when I was stored!
I sit in my imagined gray cubicle, my imagined body uncertain in its outline, and wish for a moment of complete privacy. They give it to me.
Tapering Time
The scape has progressed to a complexity beyond our ability to process. We stand on our promontory, surrounded by the field of enclaved experiments, each enclave containing a different evolved object, still furiously morphing. Some of the objects glow faintly as night sweeps across our part of the School World.
We are as useless and incompetent as the revived ancient self, now wrapped in its own shock and misery. Our tributaries have fallen silent. We wait for what will happen next, either in the scape, or in the promised contact with the Endtime Work Coordinator.
The ancient self rises from its misery and isolation. It joins our watchful silence, expectant. It has not completely lost hope. We have never had need of hope. Connected to the Library, fear became a distant and unimportant thing; hope, its opposite, equally distant and useless.
* * *
I have been musing over my last hazy memories of Elisaveta, of our children Maxim and Giselle—bits of conversation, physical features, smells . . . reliving long stretches with the help of memory recovery . . . watching seconds pass into minutes as if months pass into years.
Outside, time seems to move much more swiftly. The divisions between enclaves fall, and the uncounted experiments stand on the field, still evolving, but now allowed to interact. Tentatively, their evolution takes in the new possibility of motion.
I feel for the students, wish to be part of them. However wrong, this experiment is vital, idealistic. It smells of youthful naiveté. Because of my own rugged youth, raised in a nation running frantically from one historical extreme to another, born to parents who jumped like puppets between hope and despair, I have always felt uneasy in the face of idealism and naiveté.
Elisaveta was a naive idealist when I first met her. I tried to teach her, pass on my sophistication, my sense of better judgment.
The brightly colored, luminous objects hover over the plain, discovering new relations: a separate identity, a larger sense of space. The objects have reached a high level of complexity and order, but within a limited environment. If any have developed mind, they can now reach out and explore new objects.
First, the experiments shift a few centimeters this way or that, visible across the plain as a kind of restless, rolling motion. The plain becomes an ocean of gentle waves. Then, the experiments bump each other. Near our hill, some of the experiments circle and surround their companions, or just bump with greater and greater urgency. Extensions reach out, and We can see—it must be obvious to all—that mind does exist, and new senses are being created and explored.
If Elisaveta, whatever she has become, is in charge of this sea of experiments, then perhaps she is merely following an inclination she had billions of years before: when in doubt, when all else fails, punt.
This is a cosmological kind of punt, burning up available energy at a distressing rate . . .
Just like her, I think, and feel a warmth of connection with that ancient woman. But the woman divorced me. She found me wanting, later than my memories reach . . . And after all, what she has become is as little like the Elisaveta I knew as my descendant tributary is like me.
The dance on the plain becomes a frenzied blur of color. Snakes flow, sprout legs, wings beat the air. Animal relations, plant relations, new ecosystems . . . But these creatures have evolved not from the simplest beginnings, but from already elaborate sources. Each isolated experiment, already having achieved a focused complexity beyond anything I can understand, becomes a potential player in a new order of interaction.
What do the students—or Elisaveta—hope to accomplish in this peculiar variation on the old scheme?
I am so focused on the spectacle surrounding us that it takes a “nudge” from my descendant self to alert me to change in the sky. A liquid silvery ribbon pours from above, spreading over our heads into a flat, upside-down ocean of reflective cloud. The inverse ocean expands to the horizon, blocking all light from the new day.
Our soma rises expectantly on its eight legs. I feel the tributaries’ interest as a kind of heat through my cubicle, and for the moment, abandon the imagined environment.
Best to receive this new phenomenon directly.
A fringed curtain, like the edge of a shawl woven from threads of mercury, descends from the upside-down ocean, brushing across the land. The fringe crosses the plain of experiments without interfering, but surrounds our hill, screening our view. Light pulses from selected threads in the liquid weave.
The tributaries translate instantly.
“What do you want?” asks a clear, neutral voice. No character, no tone, no emotion. This is the Endtime Work Coordinator, or at least an extension of that powerful social=mind. It does not sound anything like Elisaveta. My hopes have been terribly naive.
After all this time and misery, the teachers’ reserve is admirable. I detect respect, but no awe; they are used to the nature of the Endtime Work Coordinator, largest of the social=minds not directly connected to a Library.
“We have been cut off, and We need to know why,” the tributaries say.
“Your work reached a conclusion,” the voice responds.
“Why were We not accorded the respect of being notified, or allowed to return to our Library?”
“Your Library has been terminated. We have concluded the active existence of all entities no longer directly connected with Endtime Work, to conserve available energy.”
“But you have let us live.”
“It would involve more energy to terminate existing extensions than to allow them to run down.”
The sheer coldness and precision of the voice chill me. The end of a Library is equivalent to the end of thousands of worlds full of individual intelligences.
Genocide. Error and destruction.
But my future self corrects me. “This is expediency,” it says in a private sending. “It is what We all expected would happen sooner or later. The manner seems irregular, but the latitude of the Endtime Work Coordinator is great.”
Still, the tributaries request a complete accounting of the decision. The Coordinator obliges.
A judgment arrives:
The teachers are irrelevant. Teaching of the Proof has been deemed useless; the Coordinator has decided—
I hear a different sort of voice, barely recognizable to me—Elisaveta—
“All affirmations of the Proof merely discourage our search for alternatives. The Proof has become a thought disease, a cultural tyranny. It blocks our discovery of another solution.”
A New Accounting
Our ancient self recognizes something in the message. What We have planned from near the beginning now bears fruit—the ancient self, functioning as an engine of judgmen
t and recognition, has found a key player in the decision to isolate us, and to terminate our Library.
“We detect the voice of a particular tributary,” We say to the Coordinator. “May We communicate with this tributary?”
“Do you have a valid reason?” the Coordinator asks.
“We must check for error.”
“Your talents are not recognized.”
“Still, the Coordinator might have erred, and as there is so little time, following the wrong course will be doubly tragic.”
The Coordinator reaches a decision after sufficient time to show a complete polling of all tributaries within its social=mind.
“An energy budget is established. Communication is allowed.”
We follow protocol billions of years old, but excise unnecessary ceremonies. We poll the student tributaries, searching for some flaw in reasoning, finding none.
Then We begin searching for our own justification. If We are about to die, lost in the last-second noise and event-clutter of a universe finally running down, We need to know where We have failed. If there is no failure—and if all this experimentation is simply a futile act—We might die less ignominiously. We search for the tributary familiar to the ancient self, hoping to find the personal connection that will reduce all our questions to one exchange.
Bright patches of light in the sky bloom, spread, and are quickly gathered and snuffed. The other suns and worlds are being converted and conserved.
We have minutes, perhaps only seconds.
We find the voice of descendant tributary Elisaveta.
* * *
There are immense deaths in the sky, and now all is going dark. There is only the one sun—turning in on itself, violet changing to deep orange—and the School World.
Four seconds. I have just four seconds . . . Endtime accelerates upon us. The student experiment has consumed so much energy. All other worlds have been terminated, all social=minds except the Endtime Coordinator’s and the final self . . . the seed that will cross the actionless Between.
I feel the tributaries frantically create an interface, make distant requests, then demands. They meet strong resistance from a tributary within the Endtime Work Coordinator. This much they convey to me . . . I sense weeks, months, years of negotiation, all passing in a second of more and more disjointed and uncertain real time.
