Vortex (Spin Saga, #3)

by Robert Charles Wilson

But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.

Ten thousand years, more or less, is how long I was away from the world. That was a terrible thing to know, and for a span of time it was nearly all I knew.

Not a bad tune, but I couldn’t imagine how it had survived ten centuries. “How do you know it?”

Vox was a seagoing vessel—a ship, in the broadest sense—but it was much more than that word implies. Vox was an archipelago of floating islands, vastly larger than anything that had ever put to sea in my lifetime. It was a culture and a nation, a history and a religion. For nearly five hundred years it had sailed the oceans of the Ring of Worlds—Treya’s name for the planets that had been linked together by the Archways of the Hypotheticals.

I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. Everything known and familiar was gone.

I asked her again how she had come to know a ten-thousand-year-old popular song.

I held that thought for a moment, trying to keep it at a reassuring distance.

“Sane compared to what? Vox has been a functioning community for hundreds of years. It’s survived a lot of battles. It’s a limbic democracy modulated by the Network, and all this stuff about the Hypotheticals and Old Earth is written into the code.

She gave me a peculiar look. “Vox is a limbic democracy,” she said. “There’s only one conscience. It’s called the Coryphaeus. And it doesn’t give a shit how many Farmers die.”

“To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.

“The Hypotheticals don’t care about anything as trivially brief as a human life. It’s the Coryphaeus that interests them. When the Hypothetical machines reach Vox, they’ll absorb the Coryphaeus and dismantle Vox Core. Nothing human will survive.”

The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider. That conflict was being played out in the surveillance and infrastructure systems that bound together our lives and our technology; it was being played out in the limbic interfaces and private emotions of everyone who wore a node. “What makes it especially dangerous,” Isaac said, “is that we can’t predict the result. The most likely outcome is an asymptotic trend toward self-destructive behavior in both the organic and inanimate aspects of the system.” He added, “It’s already happening … more quickly than I anticipated.”

The nearest human world was more than a hundred light-years from Earth. Reaching it would take several lifetimes. “But I can modify the passage of time so that it would seem like much less. A few hundred days, subjectively.”

And many of the nonhuman civilizations that had come before us had found their own ways into the forest. They remained there still, long after their physical civilizations had declined and vanished. They were difficult for me to detect, since their activity was disguised to prevent the Hypothetical host networks from identifying and deleting them. They existed as clusters of operative information—virtual worlds—running inside the data-gathering protocols of the galactic ecosystem.

Humanity had learned a few things about the nature of the Hypotheticals, she explained. The polities of Cloud Harbor had already begun to establish virtual colonies inside the computational space of the local Hypothetical networks. Colonists were generally the elderly and infirm, who were eager to leave their physical bodies behind—I could do the same, she said.

I began to become aware of the galaxy as a whole form, not just a collation of stellar oases separated by light-years of emptiness. Hypothetical networks ran through it like fungal hyphae through a rotten tree. In my night vision I saw this activity as threads of multicolored light, revealing a complex and otherwise invisible galactic structure. Thriving world-rings stood out like the closed chains of carbon atoms in an organic molecule. Ancient, dead rings shimmered like pale ghosts as the Hypothetical machines associated with them died for lack of resources or scattered to nearby stellar nurseries.

The living galaxy pulsed with exhaustion and renewal.

And as the universe aged and expanded, other galaxies, already immensely distant, fled toward the limits of perceptibility. But even these faint, far structures had begun to reveal a hidden life of their own, emissions of stray signals suggesting they had evolved their own Hypothetical-like networks. They sang like unintelligible voices in the darkness, fading.

The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially. But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it. We emerged into a vast fractal space of many dimensions and discovered we were not alone there. Multidimensional structures hosted entities that had subsumed the four-dimensional space-time that once contained us. As old as we were, these entities were older. As large as we had become, they were larger. We passed among them unnoticed or ignored. From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

Deep in that cloud of unlived histories were unlived lives, infinitesimally small, buried in eons of time and light-centuries of space, unreal only because they had never been enacted or observed. I understood that it was within my power to touch them and thus to realize them. What followed, if I made such an intervention, would be a new and unpredictable tributary of time: not obliterating the old history but lying alongside it. The price would be my own awareness.

I could never enter that four-dimensional space-time. Any intervention I made would create a new history from that point forward … at the expense of my continued existence.

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.