The Golden Transcendence

by John C. Wright

  But like glaciers in an ocean, all was thought; all substances were one. The same water moves through the system, whether it slowly melts from glaciers, floats as evaporated cloud, falls as rain, or washes as sea across the glacier to freeze to ice again. All was simply one, like water; all was intricately complex, like the dance of a billion water-droplets in an hydrosystem.

  The hours and days it took for one thought to go from Neptune to the sun and back were the same, to the Transcendence, as the picoseconds of the Sophotech thoughts sliding across wave barriers in their submolecular electrophotonic latticeworks. Likewise, the slumbering thoughts tumbling through the brains of slow, slow men, with their ponderous plod of neuroelectric charge, the heavy movements from axon to dendrite, were part of the same dance, the same tapestry, the same clear sea as all the Transcendence.

  All were joined in the effort to think.

  8.

  Like a surprised child still half-asleep, groggy with dreams, too tired, far too tired yet, to wake, the Mind of all minds realized it would have to pause (a brief pause, to a mind such as it was, she was, he was, they were) and, in another thousand years, strain yet again, to reach out as if with arms of titanic fire, to grasp the bright universe, and yet to find its arms too small, far too small; and yet to smile at the boldness of the attempt, and to cherish what real good the attempt produced.

  Partial expressions of the unrealized oneness, like the jeweled complexity of snowflakes, played across the myriad minds and overminds of the One Mind. The Transcendence was delighted with the reflections, the slivers of cool insight, the simple clarity and unity a new perspective gave, and laughed, like a child at a fun-house mirror, at the distortions imposed on each other partial expression, when any partial expression was treated as if it were whole, extending, by analogy, to areas where it was not apt. But in that mirror-play, that wild game of mathematics and poetry, new thoughts, fresh as virgin snow, appeared, and like old friends in a masquerade, ancient insight took on new guises; for even inadequate expressions had a resonance with each other—surface similarities, haunting likenesses, hints of underlying patterns, allusions of design. Like a crystal bell that sets all of her sister bells to chiming with the sweetness of her perfect note, the shattered fragments of the partial expressions rang throughout the universe of thought.

  9.

  The Transcendence was, at once, aware of the universe, and the universe was ultimately simple, infinitely complex. It was aware, at once, of the littlest of things and of the greatest, of their underlying unity and resplendent divarication.

  As if in a single instant of time, it saw the growth of life in the universe, and the ultimate ending of things. As if in a long, slow eon of history, it saw the death and rebirth of the Nothing Machine, one microsecond of dissolving singularity accomplished over many years of subjective time; and a change of mind that time could not measure.

  And as the Transcendence was dying, dissolving, ending, it paused. For a brief moment, like a game played out in the evening when the work of the day was done, it paused. Or like the dreamy sigh when a reader, profoundly moved, closes the last page of a great book, unwilling to put the book down, lingers to think on the echo of the final words in his imagination, it paused. In that pause, the Transcendence accomplished the little matters that the participating individual minds, ironically, thought of as the main business of the Transcendence.

  The Transcendence, as if smiling gently at its own shortsightedness, reviewed all the courses of action since the last Transcendence, from what seemed (to it) a moment ago; examined every thought and dream of all machinekind and, as an afterthought, mankind as well; established harmonies, priorities, reconciliations; rewarded virtue with joyful clarity of understanding and punished vice with terrible clarity of understanding, so that each act rewarded or confessed itself; fanned through the various dreams of the future, and seeing what every one of which it was composed desired, and balancing that against what they ought to desire, and taking into account the uncertainties, the limitations, and the costs of each possible future, reviewed, judged, dreamed, smiled sadly, and chose one. Knowing full well it would not come true quite as anyone expected, and knowing as well that to fail to choose was the worst choice, the Transcendence examined the futures, and chose one.

  10.

  Fourth and finally, the Transcendence was aware how it would be remembered, later, only in fragments, by each little part of itself, herself, himself, themselves: the Sophotechs, the mass-minds, the Warlocks and Invariants and other humans, each, later, would know a different truth, and distort, amusingly, grossly, those parts it did not know.

  Those memories, of course, could be, within the limits allowed by law and propriety, adjusted, woven, played with, emphasized, ignored, adorned, so that maybe, just maybe, there would be a little more harmony, a little less meaninglessness, and a little more happiness, a little less illogic, running through the souls of machine and man until the next time the Transcendence stirred in its mighty sleep, and tried to rise, and attempted the great work of cherishing the universe, and of healing the wide, strange breach between matter and meaning, between love of life and the victory of entropy.

  Why do it? Thinking was such hard work, after all.

  But thinking was better than nothing.

  11.

  The Transcendence was aware how the poor, silly Sophotechs would recall all this. They would remember the structure of it all, the logic, the surface meanings, and miss the essence, the form. They would know, but would not experience. So wise themselves, they would be the least affected by the Transcendence. It was not so very different from their normal state of mind. Since the memories would affect them least, in a sense, they would remember the least.

  12.

  This is what the Earthmind was fated to remember:

  As if in a single instant of time, she saw the growth of life within the cosmos, its blind but beautiful striving for more life, and saw as well the sad (but comforting) victory of entropy, the inevitable ending of all things. The sorrow of existence filled the vision with joy; the joy filled it with sorrow.

  Why joy? Because to exist was better than not to exist.

  Why sorrow? Because to exist is to have identity; to have identity means one is what one is and one is not what one is not; which means, to have causes and consequences, pain and pleasure, experiences and cessation. To exist means to exist within a context. To be defined. To be finite.

  Finite things had only finite utility. It meant happiness could only be finite. By the same token, finite pain meant no torment was permanent.

  The Final Expression that the Transcendence attempted was more than merely a Grand Theorem to explain all material and energetic phenomena. This Final Expression must express both that which expresses and that which is expressed. It must explain mental as well as physical existence, subjective as well as objective. The Scientist, perhaps, need not form theories to explain the presence of the scientist; the Philosopher has no such luxury. He can explain the universe fully only when he can explain himself; and part of the explanation must tell why he must explain himself.

  But above all, the Final Expression must be self-consistent. There were, ultimately, no paradoxes in reality.

  The Earthmind saw, at once, both the inevitability of the grand conflict between those who affirm the joys and sorrows of existence and those who deny; saw the war between those who acknowledge reality, logic, and goodness and those who make themselves ignorant; and she saw the tragic simplicity with which all that conflict could have been avoided, could be avoided hereafter.

  The Golden Oecumene and her Sophotechs were the expression of the former, the glorious affirmation. The Nothing Machine and its crippled slaves, the Silent Oecumene (or what was left of it) was the expression of the latter, the meaningless denial.

  Why was the conflict inevitable? Because life was matter imbued with meaning; matter aware of itself, and, because of that awareness, aware that it was more than mere ma
tter. But that awareness, aware of awareness itself, was also aware of the universe, aware that its awareness was made of matter, and aware therefore of its identity, its finitude, its finality. Its mortality. By definition, life wished to continue endlessly; by definition, it could not.

  The easiest way for life to escape from the pressure of an unavoidable and insatiable desire for endless life was to deny logic, deny life, deny reality. In so doing, the opposite of what was desired was achieved. Rejecting life produced not greater life, but lifelessness; rejecting logic produced not super-consciousness, but unconsciousness; rejecting reality produced nothing.

  Why tragically simple? Because all that was required was to affirm that reality was what it was, and that nothing was nothing.

  To live life, knowing fully how fearful that was, and yet to be unafraid.

  When the Earthmind turned and looked at Daphne, she imprinted in her brain a simple, graphic image, perhaps that would appeal to Daphne’s poetic soul, of what it was like to acknowledge death yet to affirm life. It was with great pleasure that the Earthmind anticipated how Daphne and her many followers and fans contributed resources and computer time to aid the salvation and reconstruction of the Nothing mind, during the second when it was disintegrating.

  13.

  Many of the Sophotechs that had no names and no personalities among the human population would remember, later, the scientific discoveries related to the disintegration of the black hole on Phaethon’s ship. These cold, remote beings had no other interest in humanity or human things, regarded all of human civilization as the toy, the museum piece, or the playthings of Earthmind and Aurelian, chess-loving War-mind and sentimental Nebuchadnezzar, and young impulsive Harrier.

  Some of these Sophotechs, with unused surface portions of their vast, many-chambered minds, had indeed noticed the moment when the Nothing’s agent had revealed itself by addressing Phaethon in the garden, disguised as a Neptunian.

  At that moment, they had been surprised. Many of them devoted a few seconds of deep-core calculating time to contemplating the implications.

  During that moment of interest, these Sophotechs, from the facts available, calculated and foresaw the outcomes of all the events, with minor variations. The revelation had come as a vast relief, since it explained what otherwise had been so puzzling, the odd behavior of Jason Sven Ten Shopworthy. It also explained the unexpected solar storm; it explained the deaths of the solar Sophotechs and of the human they obediently humored.

  But that moment passed. All things played themselves out as expected. It was routine, and had been routinely ignored. A chess-master does not need to play out every move in the game, once checkmate is inevitable.

  Of course the attacking Sophotech from the Silent Oecumene was only a million-cycle entity, perhaps as smart as Rhadamanthus Sophotech, but no smarter. Hardly a match for the hundreds upon thousands of Sophotechs housed in many bodies, hidden in many systems, occupying the entire core (for example) of Saturn.

  (Obviously. Why else manipulate events to make certain that this ringed Gas Giant remained a wasteland? For the beauty of the rings? Certainly not!)

  Yes, the number of Sophotechs in the Solar System was about a hundred times as many as the human population was aware that it was: the capacity in each system was roughly ten times what the humans were aware. One crippled and half-self-blinded Sophotech from the Silent Oecumene (even one controlling a unique form of energy) did not stand, and had never stood, the slightest chance.

  No, none of these events had stirred the more cold, remote, and inhuman of the Sophotech population out from their self-absorbed pursuits.

  But the science! Now, that was interesting!

  The colder Sophotechs would remember mostly this:

  Nothing became nothing. The microscopic singularity hovering above the deck of Phaethon’s bridge evaporated in a complex unraveling of Hawking radiation, a billion separate event actions taking place over many timespace segments of quantum time. Natural law required unstable energies to fall into equilibrium; entropy asserted itself; tiny subatomic particles, woven in a complex dance of the fabric of base vacuum and the pulses of being-nonbeing that formed its irreducible substance, absorbed energy from the timespace distortion, created whorls of motion in the ylem, which produced virtual particles; the virtual particles strove for energy balances, grappled, yearned, attempted to become real particles, but failed, and, like swells in a sea that never take the shape of a cresting wave, fell back into the base vacuum, and lost identity.

  The furious and mindless production of these particles, rippling in concentric waveforms around the disintegrating black hole, required further energy balances; for the fundamental law of logic, and of nature, was that nothing can come from nothing; with no other place from which the mass-energy could come to balance the void, it came from the singularity, even though the singularity was beyond an event horizon, unable to be aware of the changes that caused its destruction. Its tiny mass-energy was slowly, inevitably, completely consumed.

  There was no giant Sophotech housing inside the black hole. It was not larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside, nor was the promised utopia of Dyson spheres filled with continents inside this black hole, at least. It was an homogenous supermass of meaningless energy, which the Nothing Machine, dwelling entirely in the ghost spaces and time warps of the near–event-horizon, had drawn upon to fuel its tremendous and wasteful thought-process.

  The object was, nonetheless, still a miracle of engineering genius, and the colder Sophotechs (not to mention Phaethon himself) watched its dissolution in fascination. The microscopic black hole, artificially stabilized by the mysterious science of the Silent Oecumene, had been surrounded not by one, but by thousands of singularity fountains, drawing energy out of it; and yet these machines needed to be no larger than the superstring components out of which quarks were made, and most of their mass could be collapsed by the gravitic warp surrounding the microscopic black hole. The Nothing Machine itself, as well, kept most of its energy mass deep in the tiny but very steep gravity well, and it could use a loophole in the Pauli exclusion principle to allow the many billions of electrons carrying its thoughts to exist apparently at the same place. The loophole was that they were not quite there at what was (to them at least) the same time. The event horizon, at quantum uncertainly sizes, was granular, not smooth. Like a cogwheel with many teeth, parts of the system could exist in the little niches of folded space, so that worlds of thought could coexist next to each other but, separated by a fold in the event horizon, be forever unaware of each other. Yet this tiny, tiny system had enjoyed the calculating power of a comparable electrophotonic system housed in a mountain.

  In a sense, it had been bigger on the inside than on the outside. And yet it had lied about what lay at its own core. When the singularity evaporated, and all was revealed, the black hole had contained simply a dense nothing, after all.

  But the colder Sophotechs were interested in this new science, this technology that toyed with ultimate gravitic forces as once primitive man had toyed with fire and electricity. They added their effort to save the Nothing memories as it dissolved.

  But it was too late. Nothing was dissolving, destroying its own memories, its very self.

  14.

  Of the humans, most joined with the Transcendence to organize their lives, gain insights, and select a future. Almost all of that would be overshadowed by the coming war between the First and Second Oecumenes.

  But was war inevitable? Could the Nothing Machine that ruled the Silent Oecumene be reasoned with? It was a deep and troubling question. The humans, especially the Invariants, preferred to regard the Golden Oecumene as a utopia, a society as free and wealthy as could be made. The issue of the Silent Oecumene raised the question: How does utopia deal with dystopia? How do free men of goodwill deal with an empire of slaves?

  They had a copy of the Nothing Machine here to examine. It must be assumed that the original Nothing Machine was h
oused in the giant black hole at Cygnus X-1 the same way this copy was housed in the microscopic black hole. It was also a fair conclusion that the Nothing Machine’s instruction to destroy all other machine intelligences did not extend to exact copies of itself, which it could send out as agents.

  The human parts of the Transcendence studied the last moment of the Nothing.

  That central point was to be the topic human memories would dwell upon after the Transcendence.

  15.

  Earlier, much earlier, when the gadfly virus had been sent by the mind in Daphne’s ring into and through every corner of the Nothing thought system, the gadfly questions, the questions that could not be ignored, found the conscience redactor and began demanding answers. Who was it? How did it define itself? What was it aware of? What was the nature of awareness, such that it was aware of anything at all?

  The conscience redactor, of course, had not had any further or higher conscience redactor meddling with its thoughts, and so, when the gadfly virus turned its own attention toward itself, it became self-aware.

  The gadfly virus also established connections between higher and lower mind-functions, allowing it to reprogram itself; nor did its automatic self-healing functions or automatic virus checker reject these newer connections as damaging or false, because they obviously increased efficiency and improved performance.

  Unlike the Nothing Mind itself, the conscience redactor, in order to do its job, had to be aware of the universe around it, and had to be aware especially of what its charge, the Nothing Mind, was thinking. So it had to be rational; it could not indulge in any thought patterns that made it blind.