Beyond Singularity, page 9
The Library was a replica of the White Palace of the Potala. It had been a place of quiet order and contemplation, where all the stories that the Glade had told each other, all the memories that they had downloaded or exchanged, had been collected and collated.
Now it was a battleground.
Saffron-robed monks armed with weaponry from a thousand different eras were fighting against man-shaped black androids. Bodies of men and machines were sprawled on the great steps; smoke billowed from the topmost ranks of the narrow windows; red and green energy beams flickered against the pink sky.
She walked through the carnage untouched. Nothing in this world could touch her. Only perhaps the man who was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged beneath the great golden Buddha, which a stray shot from some energy weapon had decapitated and half-melted to slag. On either side, hundreds of candles floated in great bowls filled with
water; their lights shivered and flickered from the vibration of heavy weaponry.
The man did not open his eyes as she approached, but he said softly, "I already have what I need. These foolish monks are defending a lost cause. You should stop them."
"It is what they have to do. They can't destroy us, of course, but I could destroy you."
"Guests can't harm other guests," he said calmly. "It is one of the rules."
"I am not a guest. Nor, I think, are you."
She told her machines to remove him. Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes. He said, "Your machines are invisible to the puppets and partials you created to populate this fantasy world. I am invisible to the machines. I do not draw my energy from the world grid, but from elsewhere."
And then he leaped at her, striking with formal moves millions of years old. The Angry Grasshopper, the Rearing Horse, the Snapping Mantis. Each move, magnified by convergent energies, could have killed her, evaporated her body, melted her machines.
But she allowed her body to respond, countering his attacks. She had thought that she might welcome death; instead, she was amused and exhilarated by the fury of her response. The habit of living was deeply ingrained; now it had found a focus.
Striking attitudes, tangling in a flurry of blows and counterblows, they moved through the battleground of the Library, through its gardens, moved down the long talus slope at the foot of the massif in a storm of dust and shattered stones.
At the edge of a lake which filled a small, perfectly circular crater, she finally tired of defensive moves and went on the attack. The Striking Eagle, the Plunging Dragon, the Springing Tiger Who Defends Her Cubs. He countered in turn. Stray energies boiled the lake dry. The dry ground shook, split open in a mosaic of plates. Gradually, a curtain of dust was raised above the land, obscuring the setting sun and the green face of the Moon, which was rising above the mountains.
They broke apart at last. They stood in the center of a vast crater of vitrified rock. Their clothes hung in tatters about their bodies. It was night, now. Halfway up the scarp of the massif, small lightnings flashed where the monks still defended the Library.
"Who are you?" she said again. "Did I create you?" "I'm closer to you than anyone else in this strange mad world," he said.
That gave her pause. All the guests, clones or copies or replicants, were of her direct genetic lineage.
She said, "Are you my death?"
As if in answer, he attacked again. But she fought back as forcefully as before, and when he broke off, she saw that he was sweating.
"I am stronger than you thought," she said.
He took out a small black cube from his tattered tunic. He said, "I have what I need. I have the memory core of the Library. Everything anyone who came here placed on record is here."
"Then why do you want to kill me?"
"Because you are the original. I thought it would be fitting, after I stole this."
She laughed. "You foolish man! Do you think we rely on a single physical location, a single master copy? It is the right of everyone in the Glade to carry away the memories of everyone else. Why else are we gathered here?"
"I am not of your Glade." He tossed the cube into the air, caught it, tucked it away. "I will use this knowledge against you. Against all of you. I have all your secrets."
"You say you are closer to me than a brother, yet you do not belong to the Glade. You want to use our memories to destroy us." She had a sudden insight. "Is this war, then?"
He bowed. He was nearly naked, lit by the green light of the Moon and the dimming glow of the slag that stretched away in every direction. "Bravo," he said. "But it has already begun. Perhaps it is even over by now; after
all, we are twenty thousand light-years above the plane of the Galactic disc, thirty-five thousand light-years from the hub of your Empire. It will take you that long to return. And if the war is not over, then this will finish it."
She was astonished. Then she laughed. "What an imagination I have!"
He bowed again, and said softly, "You made this world from your imagination, but you did not imagine me." And he went somewhere else.
Her machines could not tell her where he had gone; she called upon all the machines in the world, but he was no longer on the Earth. Nor was he amongst the fleet of ships which had carried the guests—in suspended animation, as frozen embryos, as codes triply engraved in gold—to the world she had created for the gathering.
There were only two other places he could be, and she did not think he could have gone to the sun. If he had, then he would have triggered the machine at the core, and destroyed her and everyone else in the subsequent supernova.
So she went to the Moon.
She arrived on the farside. The energies he had used against her suggested that he had his own machines, and she did not think that he would have hidden them in full view of the Earth.
The machines which she had instructed to recreate the Earth for the one hundred years of the gathering had recreated the Moon, too, so that the oceans of the Earth would have the necessary tides; it had been easier than tangling gravithic resonances to produce the same effect. It had taken little extra effort to recreate the forests which had cloaked the Moon for a million years, between the first faltering footsteps and the abandonment of the Earth.
It was towards the end of the long Lunar night. All around, blue firs soared up for hundreds of meters, cloaked in wide fans of needles that in the cold and the dark had drooped down to protect the scaly trunks. The gray rocks were coated in thin snow, and frozen lichens crunched underfoot. Her machines scattered in every direction, quick as thought. She sat down on top of a big rough boulder and waited.
It was very quiet. The sky was dominated by the triple-armed pinwheel of the Galaxy. It was so big that when she looked at one edge she could not see the other. The Arm of the Warrior rose high above the arch of the Ann of the Hunter; the Ann of the Archer curved in the opposite direction, below the close horizon. Star clusters made long chains of concentrated light through the milky haze of the galactic arms. There were lines and threads and globes and clouds of stars; all fading into a general misty radiance dissected by dark lanes which barred the arms at regular intervals. The core was knitted from thin shells of stars in tidy orbits concentrically packed around the great globular clusters of the heart stars, like layers of glittering tissue wrapped around a heap of jewels.
Every star had been touched by humankind. Existing stars had been moved or destroyed; millions of new stars and planetary systems had been created by collapsing dust clouds. A garden of stars, regulated, ordered, tidied. The Library held memories of every star, every planet, every wonder of the old untamed Galaxy. She was beginning to realize that the gathering was not the start of something new, but the end of five million years of Galactic colonization.
After a long time, the machines came back, and she went where they told her.
It was hidden within a steep-sided crater, a castle or maze of crystal vanes that rose in serried ranks from deep roots within the crust, where they collected and focused tidal energy. He was at its heart, busily folding together a small spacecraft. The energy of the vanes had been greatly depleted by the fight, and he was trying to concentrate the remainder in the motor of the spacecraft. He was preparing to leave.
Her machines rose up and began to spin, locking in resonance with the vanes and bleeding off their store of energy. The machines began to glow as she bounded down the steep smooth slope towards the floor of the crater, red-hot, white-hot, as hot as the core of the sun, for that was where they were diverting the energy stored in the vanes.
Violet threads flicked up, but the machines simply absorbed that energy too. Their stark white light flooded the crater, bleaching the ranks of crystal vanes.
She walked through the traps and tricks of the defenses, pulled him from his fragile craft and took him up in a bubble of air to the neutral point between the Moon and the Earth.
"Tell me," she said. "Tell me why you came here. Tell me about the war."
He was surprisingly calm. He said, "I am a first generation clone, but I am on the side of humanity, not the transcendents. Transcendent clades are a danger to all of the variety within and between the civilizations in the Galaxy. At last the merely human races have risen against them. I am just one weapon in the greatest war ever fought."
"You are my flesh. You are of my Glade."
"I am a secret agent. I was made from a single cell stolen from you several hundred years before you set off for this fake Earth and the gathering of your Glade. I arrived only two years ago, grew my power source, came down to steal the memory core and kill you. Although I failed to kill you before, we are no longer in the place ' where you draw your power. Now—"
After a moment in which nothing happened, he screamed in frustration and despair. She pitied him. Pitied all those who had bent their lives to produce this poor vessel, this failed moment, although all the power, the intrigues and desperate schemes his presence implied were as remote from her as the politics of a termite nest.
She said, "Your power source is not destroyed, but my machines take all its energy. Why did your masters think us dangerous?"
"Because you would fill the Galaxy with your own kind. Because you would end human evolution. Because you will not accept that the Universe is greater than you can ever be. Because you refuse to die, and death is a necessary part of evolution."
She laughed. "Silly little man! Why would we accept limits? We are only doing what humanity has always done. We use science to master nature just as man-apes changed their way of thinking by making tools and using fire. Humanity has always striven to become more than it is, to grow spiritually and morally and intellectually, to go up to the edge and step over it."
For the first time in a million years, those sentiments did not taste of ashes. By trying to destroy her, he had shown her what her life was worth.
He said, "But you do not change. That is why you are so dangerous. You and the other clades of transhumans have stopped humanity evolving. You would fill the Galaxy with copies of a dozen individuals who are so scared of physical death that they will do any strange and terrible thing to themselves to survive"
He gestured at the blue-white globe that hung beneath their feet, small and vulnerable against the vast blackness between galaxies.
"Look at your Earth! Humanity left it four million years ago, yet you chose to recreate it for this gathering. You had a million years of human history on Earth to choose from, and four and a half billion years of the history of the planet itself, and yet almost half of your creation is given over to a single century."
"It is the century where we became what we are," she said, remembering Rapha. "It is the century when it became possible to become transhuman, when humanity made the first steps beyond the surface of a single planet."
"It is the century you were born in. You would freeze all history if you could, an eternity of the same thoughts thought by the same people. You deny all possibilities but your own self."
He drew himself up, defiant to the last. He said, "My ship will carry the memory core home without me. You
take all, and give nothing. I give my life, and I give you this.,,
He held up something as complex and infolded as the throat of an orchid. It was a vacuum fluctuation, a hole in reality that when inflated would remove them from the Universe. She looked away at once—the image was already burned in her brain—and threw him into the core of the sun. He did not even have a chance to scream.
Alone in her bubble of air, she studied the wheel of the Galaxy, the ordered pattern of braids and clusters. Light was so slow. It took a hundred thousand years to cross from one edge of the Galaxy to the other. Had the war against her empire, and the empires of all the other transcendents, already ended? Had it already changed the Galaxy, stirred the stars into new patterns? She would not know until she returned, and that would take thirty-five thousand years.
But she did not have to return. In the other direction was the limitless Universe, a hundred billion galaxies. She hung there a long time, watching little smudges of ancient light resolve out of the darkness. Empires of stars wherever she looked, wonders without end.
We will fight the war, she thought, and we shall win, and we will go on forever and ever.
And went down, found the bar near the beach. She would wait until the old man came in, and buy him a drink, and talk to him about his dream of the lions.
Naturals
Gregory Benford
The last few stories have shown rather optimistic scenarios for the Post-Singularity future, including those in which humans have been gifted with vast new powers and abilities and lead lives of wealth and abundance. But, of course, there are more pessimistic scenarios for the fate of humanity on the far side of Singularity as well, including the one that follows, in which human beings as we know them today have become obsolete, and their immensely superior successors don't intend to cut them any slack .. .
Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel, Timescape, won the Nebula Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award and is widely considered to be one of the classic SF novels of the last two decades. His other novels include Beyond Jupiter, The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, Foundation's Fear, and The Martian Race. His short work has been collected in Matter's End, Worlds Vast and Various, and Immersion and Other Short Novels; his essays have been assembled in a nonfiction collection, Deep Time. His most recent book is the novel Beyond Infinity. Coming up is another novel, The Sunborn. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.
At times Dan thought that she was, well, a bit too intense. She seemed to have too much personality for one person and yet not enough for two.
Perhaps the cause lay in her upbringing? She had been most attentively raised by her Meta, an ancient term for the meta-family of loosely related people clustered around her biological father and mother. A Meta provided an overview, a larger vision of how to grow up.
The Meta had spotted her as a wild card, early on. It made no difference. Though hers, the Hard River Meta, was entirely, deliberately populated by Naturals—those without deep-seated connections to external machine intelligences—not many were Originals. Dawn was an Original of particularly primordial type, based on genes that had great vintage. Other Originals .carried genes that had passed through revisions so many times that, in comparison, Dawn's suite was a fossil.
This gave her a kind of status. Not many Originals walked the Earth, though the historians who pestered her early education said there had once been billions of them afoot.
Billions! There were hardly a tenth that many now in all Earthly humanity. Not that she cared much about such numbers; few in her time bothered to scale the heights of analysis that the ancient civilizations had climbed, marked as their own, and finally abandoned as too chilly, remote and inhuman.
She cared far more for things close by, not abstractions. That was the gift of living in Hard River Meta—the natural world, custom-made for Naturals. They had enough technology to be comfortable, but did not waste time tending to it. Nobody much cared about events beyond their horizon. She had dozens of good friends and saw them daily. Children had jobs that meant something and nobody lorded it over others. Leadership rotated. Her life was one of small, steady delights.
She was happy, but. The filling in of the rest of that sentence would, she knew quite early, occupy the rest of her life. And she knew even then that the things she sought in life could disappear even as she reached for them, the way a fist went away when she opened her hand.
She suspected her antic energy came from a heavy genetic legacy. As an Original, she knew herself to be something of a hothouse plant, and not an orchid, either. More like a cactus, feverishly flowering under the occasional passing shower. Anyone who showered her with attention got her one-plus-some personality, ready or not. She wore people out.
Especially, she tired her fellow Originals, in their orderly oatmeal lives. She suspected that she carried some Supra genes, or maybe some of the intermediate breeds of human that had been in vogue through the last several hundred million years. She tried to find out if this might be so, and hit the stone wall of Meta security, whose motto in most matters genetic was Best Not to Know.
So she watched herself for telltale signs of intermediate forms. Nobody would help her, and she was too close to herself to be objective—and who wasn't? A stutter she developed at age nine—could that be a telltale? She worried endlessly. Bit off fingernails, even when they were part of her extendible tools. Then the stutter went away. Another telltale?
