The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

  K. Pasternak was one of the most eminent scientists in the galaxy—yes, things were growing to that scale now—and privately regarded himself very warmly for that. Marriages were often a four-person affair in that time and he'd had seven. He had been in love once, then heartbroken. His parents were dead. He had a fascination with early Aerth (or Earth, as we called it) history.

  He was no Berkhamsted, but I suppose I liked him right away anyhow.

  On that particular day, at that particular moment, he found himself engaged in a discussion with the other academics about who was to receive the largest amount of funding from the Marquis, the mysterious head of the empire.

  In Mandala, the temporal physicist was explaining that his science had unravelled the nature of time itself, and exposed duration as nothing more than a convenient human construct.

  The wiremind engineer made a case for his work citing that artificial minds were now propping up the entire empire's infrastructure and who was to thank for that?

  The hypergeometrist had little to recommend herself in terms of practicality and said only that hypergeometry was a young science, but was sure to one day completely revolutionise not only physics and technology, but could produce the much sought-after secrets of vacuum energy. There was a giggle at this from all present.

  Then they turned to Pasternak, waiting for his little speech.

  I watched his mind scanning through the various polite approaches.

  Physically he was slow and measured as a turtle, but his mind was a manic child, jumping from thought to thought, then organising each structure into intellectual chains.

  My first two packets, Earnest and Berkhamsted, both had had a flavour to their minds. Beneath the memories and the anxieties and the rationalisations, there was a nature present.

  Pasternak had one too.

  On the surface, even to himself, he longed for clarity, to live in a universe that made sense.

  Beneath that was a self-congratulating element, priding himself on having made such fine progress so far.

  And beneath that was the will to dominate.

  It was buried so deeply that perhaps he himself did not know it. But that was the foundational concrete beneath all else.

  He did not just want to control the science council, nor the inner congress. He fancied himself as one day becoming the Marquis of the Human Empire.

  I took his body over a moment and froze him still. In his mind I said in a notion, not a language: Do not panic. I am inside you presently and I have complete control over your physical aspect. I have come to propose a deal. Are you interested?

  He was shot with fear. As I had already learned, humans generally defaulted to assuming some kind of mental illness in these situations.

  Tell…me more, he thought.

  I left him paralysed, but exited him for a moment and inhabited the temporal physicist, the wiremind engineer, then the hypergeometrist, and returned to Pasternak.

  Whether or not you've admitted it to yourself, I said, you crave power above all else. I don't have much interest in the political affairs of this age. My purpose takes precedence over that. I am willing to help you succeed in your ambitions in exchange for some assistance.

  He closed his thoughts down, said: What kind?

  Together we will find out what I am.

  I explained the details of my plan by implanting the entire notion in him for the sake of expedience.

  He accepted almost immediately.

  From the outside no more than perhaps seven seconds had elapsed.

  Within though, Pasternak's mind had done loops and cartwheels.

  I gave him the information he needed.

  The visiting bell chimed to announce that in a few minutes the door to the Marquis' chamber would open and the funding discussion would begin.

  Pasternak turned to the temporal physicist. “Dr. Cunningham, you know I have always been the staunchest supporter of your work. Theoreticians should stick together. Still, it behoves me to make the Marquis aware of your illicit dealing with the treasury.” And to the wiremind engineer: “And so to you, Dr. Shijev, I cannot help but bring to the surface this matter of you and the plagiarism of your ex-partner's work, the plagiarism he himself is not yet aware of.” And finally to the hypergeometrist, though she spoke first: “Please,” she said, “don't. Whatever it is.”

  They stood in stunned silence. Pasternak kept his face serene, but within he was screaming for joy.

  “What do you want?” the temporal physicist said very quietly.

  What do I want? Pasternak thought.

  I said, Tell them when they meet with the Marquis to say they're all in agreement that the bulk of the research funding should go to you.

  The Marquis is too clever not to question that, Pasternak thought.

  I left him a moment, passed through the wall and inhabited the Marquis, then returned to Pasternak. He most certainly is not, I said.

  Pasternak did as he was told and the other academics did as they were told also. He got his research funding, a colossal amount of money which, even if he siphoned off a quarter of for his own fortune, would still leave him with enough to crack at least five Great Mysteries of Nature.

  The game was afoot.

  I watched him moving within the halls of power, eyeing the senators and aides of the empire, coveting their positions, pausing as a cat might before it strikes. He was congenial and pleasant. He attended weddings and blessings. He was a sociopath.

  It was a strange time for humanity. Genetics and brain architecture were as malleable as one's clothes might have been in the time from which I originated. Bodies could be altered entirely, in height and width and complexion. Brains could be altered to a degree, aggression or forgetfulness removed, compassion and contentment heightened.

  Curiously, while it seemed many of the citizens of the empire chose these kinds of alterations, few in the inner circles did. In fact, a large number of senators were behind the advertising campaigns (directed at colonists, usually) in an attempt to market them passivity or compliance, but brand it as some lifestyle improvement.

  Us though, Pasternak and I, our vision was singular. We invested the bulk of his newfound fortune into a new laboratory, specifically for researching oddities of consciousness. It was completed in just a few weeks. Privately to myself I thought that if Berkhamsted were here, he would weep. Berkhamsted was thousands of years dead, however.

  Put an advert on the galactic hub, I said to Pasternak one day.

  “Saying what?”

  Put it in the most surreal publication you can find. Exactly the following.

  He did as I asked (I was watching, of course) and thought nothing of it.

  I fed him more information on request, about the Marquis, about the inner circles. Sometimes he threatened. Sometimes he charmed. Whatever was necessary to position himself closer to the hub of authority, to the Marquis. In a period of three weeks he went from the status of a respected though misunderstood academic, to the foremost scientific adviser of the Marquis himself; visiting the old man most evenings to help him with whatever concept of the day still remained a mystery.

  By that period in his life the Marquis was more machine than man, submerged in a tank of some vile and gelatinous pink fluid, a metal tube down his throat, a metal tube protruding from his neck, his eyes metallic, implants perhaps.

  I did not like to step inside his mind. It was a cold place, not evil but not virtuous. The only will left in him was to feel one final victory before he died, to emulate his glory days when the entire empire knelt at his feet. Now many wanted his head.

  One morning Pasternak was working on an experiment when there appeared a woman in the doorway, small of build, dressed in a modest red toga.

  “Dr. Pasternak?” she said.

  “What is it? I'm extremely busy.”

  “The advert, you wrote it?”

  You're up, demon, he said inwardly.

  I took over his body and tried to keep the face
composed. “I placed the advert, yes.”

  “May I ask for what reason?” she said.

  I left Pasternak a moment and tried to engage with the woman's mind, but the process was impossible, as though a barrier were up around it. I returned.

  How to play this? I wondered.

  If the approach misfired, Pasternak might become known as a madman.

  In some ways he was already. What the hell.

  I said, “I placed the advert to find others like myself.”

  “And what are you?” she said.

  Her Mandala was too relaxed, the finger positions somewhat inaccurate, even I could see that.

  “I am a wanderer,” I said.

  “What are you called?”

  “I don't know. You?”

  She shrugged.

  “When were you born?” I said.

  “2641, in a dying woman.”

  “Did you come awake suddenly?”

  “Yes. Same for you?”

  “Yes.”

  She wasn't studying me physically, just as I wasn't studying her physically. What was the point?

  “The woman I am in is evil,” she said. “She tortured miners on an orb called Minnith.”

  I said, “This packet is bad too. He'll be the Marquis one day though.”

  She examined the room and the experiments. “What is all of this?”

  “This packet is helping me. I intend to find out what we are.” A flash of doubt in me then. I said, “Can you prove you're a creature like me somehow?”

  “Don't you believe me?”

  “I need to know for sure before I trust you.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do you need me for something?”

  I've been alone, I thought. I've been alone with myself for so long.

  “I could use some help with my projects,” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “If the body you’re in is important, have him prepare me a room here. I'll stay and help with your research.”

  That was that.

  When she was gone I asked Pasternak to do as she’d requested. He was extremely reluctant, but also deathly afraid of losing me. He complied.

  In all things, across all avenues, a choice must be made: whether to follow love, truth, or power. That choice will consume the chooser. If he follows only love then his wellbeing will be constantly at the mercy of another, though his highs will be sublime. If he follows truth then it will be a lonely journey, but potentially a noble one. If he should follow power though, not only will he come to know a desperate and revolting loneliness, but he will also never experience even a drop of satisfaction in anything.

  The new creature allowed me to call her Evie, as that was the name of her packet. She never gave her packet control over the body; that was the extent of the hatred she held for the packet itself.

  Academics flocked from all across the galaxy to see Pasternak, once we had published our first pieces of research. We were able to show in a small way, using ithrium (a special liquid metal of the day) that orders of self-preservation could form if subjected to enough perturbation. That is, metal would behave a little like it had intention. This wasn't consciousness, but it was a start. Matter could think without brains or electronics or molecular switches. It might even be a fundamental property of matter itself. That was another jump, however. We would take it when we got there.

  Evie would greet the visitors to the laboratory, show them around. She had a pleasant way about her when it was required, though a neutral one the rest of the time.

  Often Pasternak would sleep and I would inhabit his body and work in the laboratory. The fact that he allowed this to happen with only minimal protest was a testament to just how badly he needed me.

  We moved our operation onto imaging quark vectors, an old science of that time, but a necessary one in the pursuit of our fruit.

  I was bent double over the microlens when Evie came in. She was wearing her nightclothes. (She rarely left her huge apartment in the empiral tower. There was no need to.)

  “Couldn't sleep?” I said. A joke. We never slept.

  “I've been thinking.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “When you find what you're looking for, what will you do next?”

  I pretended my attention was on the microlens, but this sudden interest in me was rather novel. “I haven't given it much thought,” I said.

  “Might you want to get away?”

  “Where would I go?”

  She shrugged. “Plenty of other orbs to explore.”

  “I'll think about it when I have to,” I said.

  She moseyed about the laboratory for a while saying nothing. Then: “How far along are we now with the research?”

  Not fucking very, would have been an honest answer. “Pasternak and I made some real progress recently. We're on the verge of postulating an entirely new force in nature. I know that sounds grandiose. It's only a mathematical trick really, but it would go a long way towards explaining some very strange physiological phenomena.”

  “What kind?” she said in that way someone with no interest in a conversation nonetheless desires to keep it going.

  “You know the Chalmers Problem?”

  “No.”

  “It's an old one. How can mental subjectivity and the objective workings of the mind pair up in a scientific model? Or, how can meat give rise to feelings of things? The taste of beer or the hotness of a fire, you know?” I felt ashamed suddenly. People who give these abstract speeches in daily life are truly the worst.

  “And your theory says…” she muttered.

  “We believe consciousness is a force alongside the others in nature, that it is baked into the universe rather than an emergent property. Not only does that mean it could exist on platforms other than brains and electronics, but it goes some way towards explaining what you and I are.”

  “How?”

  “Because perhaps we were born of a single deviation in the mindpattern of our packets. Think about it, every day there must be trillions of reactions on a neurological level, neurons interfering with neurons. Usually nothing happens and the system runs along fine. But every now and then, almost never actually, some random interference gives birth to a new conscious system, hosted inside the first. And there it is. Us.”

  “We're accidents?”

  “Everyone is anyway.”

  She seemed to be thinking about that for a while. “Have you been to the other place?” she said.

  I of course knew where she meant. “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “The future maybe. I don't know.”

  She strolled about some more, idling.

  Then she came over to the desk and bent to my ear. “Would you like to get away from here? With me?”

  Winston Earnest had not been a man of love.

  Berkhamsted had. I felt it in him once, so clearly and so intense that there was no division between the two of us.

  It had been a morning, one of those Saturdays with nothing ahead. The sun was just up and Berkhamsted had woken for no good reason. He watched Penny sleeping a long time. It was not happiness, nor was it contentment that filled him and I up. It was something else, the finger of some distant deity reaching out for one’s own, the entirety of the world manifested for just a moment with a face. It was a certain knowledge that whatever was beyond that bed, beyond that room, was far inferior to just watching this woman sleep.

  What is it that sets the coin rolling?

  Berkhamsted had been with other women. (Men also on occasion.) It was never more than an amicable arrangement. There was always some degree of attraction present, and sometimes, on their side, there was clearly love. He responded with kindness, always, and assumed that what he felt must be love also; this was the sensation the poems pointed to.

  But on that morning in bed with Penny he was made frightfully aware that the former sensations had been cheap imitations. Less.

  This was something else: a purpose a
nd a shrine to worship at.

  It was evidential proof that the human brain was capable of constructing an internal paradise.

  “What are you doing, Evie?” I said.

  “Have you loved, in this packet?” she said.

  “I'm really very busy.” I glanced, just for a moment, into her eyes. There was a coldness.

  She smacked me hard across the cheek. I felt Pasternak wake. Evie left without comment.

  The hell was that? Pasternak said.

  Nothing.

  One evening Pasternak was called to the Marquis' night chamber. The old man was lying in bed, his tubes gently inflating and deflating, his skin thinner than tissue paper.

  He ordered his aides from the room and they left. Then he pulled the tube from his throat, a monstrous snake covered in phlegm and blood, and brought Pasternak's ear close.

  He rasped that he had officially adopted Pasternak as his son. He also announced that he was soon to die.

  A victorious cheer stirred in Pasternak so loud and so horrible that I was surprised he didn't dance about the room. He kept his face perfectly set.

  “I understand, your grace,” he said. “I will do my best.”

  The Marquis died three days later. The day after that Pasternak was ordained as the seventy-third Empiral Marquis, Arbiter of the Three Hundred and Nineteen Human Orbs.

  That evening, when the aides were gone, when the courtiers were gone, when he laid himself down in the night chamber and took stock of his success he said to me, Will you leave now?

  No, I said. Not until you hold up your end of the bargain.

  He had no choice. He would tend to official duties three days a week, then spend the rest of his time in his laboratory. This routine was admired by the general public, receiving it as a testament to his academic nature.

  We worked days. We worked nights. We distilled and purified and analysed. At Pasternak's suggestion I withheld the more interesting findings from Evie, still unsure of her intentions, though this seemed a touch pointless.

  Then the politicking began.

  Pasternak and I developed a foolproof system of diplomacy. We would ensure that ambassadors from the so-called problem orbs came directly to the empiral tower, or stayed in the near vicinity. I would enter their minds briefly, dig out whatever dirt there was, look into their schemes, and report back. Sometimes it was certain Pasternak would have diplomats killed for betrayal and on those occasions I left out information to spare their lives. This wasn't an altruistic gesture, I just didn't want that on my conscience.