Diaspora

by Greg Egan

The orphan hadn’t previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate. The citizen exclaimed angrily, ‘Don’t do that, idiot!’ ‘Hello!’ ‘No one will believe you if you claim to be me – least of all me. Understand?

Now that ve’d experienced Truth Mining for verself, Yatima could only agree. There was nothing in any scape or library file, any satellite feed or drone image, more beautiful than mathematics.

None of the polises’ founders had chosen to build predetermined stabilising mechanisms into their basic designs, though, lest the entire species ossify into tribes of self-perpetuating monomaniacs, parasitised by a handful of memes.

Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drives that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth – but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.

Inoshiro said, ‘So what’s the worst thing that could happen?’ Yatima replied without hesitation. ‘Quicksand. We both fall into quicksand, so we can’t even communicate with each other. We just float beneath the surface until our power runs out.’ Ve checked vis gleisner’s energy store, a sliver of magnetically suspended anticobalt. ‘In six thousand and thirty-seven years.’

Yatima tried to imagine an alien species with the retarded morality required for warfare and the technological prowess to manipulate neutron stars. It was a deeply unpleasant notion, but about as likely as the influenza virus inventing the H-bomb.

We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.’

No longer. Sunlight breaking through the clouds was a lie now. Every instinct that proclaimed that the future could be no worse than the worst of the past was obsolete.

There was no way to prove causality, no way to be certain that any of the orphan’s mutant shapers really were to blame. But the conceptory was programmed to err on the side of caution. It marked the old, unmutated values for the orphan’s altered fields as the only valid codes, discarding all alternatives as dangerous and wasteful, never to be tried again.

Working exclusively with electron-proton wormholes might have been simpler in theory, but new ones with known endpoints couldn’t be created at a useful rate under anything less than Big Bang conditions.

it was possible that all of Kozuch Theory’s successful predictions were due to nothing but the ‘mirroring’ of the logical structure of wormhole topology in another system altogether. The motion under gravity of an object dropped down a borehole passing through the centre of an asteroid obeyed essentially the same mathematics as the motion of an object tied to the free end of an idealised anchored spring – but pushing either model too far as a metaphor for the other generated nonsense.

If I’d taken that approach, by the time I worked my way up to matching the particle symmetries I would have found myself lumbered with twelve dimensions: six for each purpose. Which would have worked just as well, but it would have been twice as extravagant. And after the débâcle of string theory, it was hard enough selling anyone on six.’

Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

It was more of a ritual than an act of communication, but then, even with Elena he set up barriers. No one was totally honest with another person – unless the two of them intended to fuse permanently.

Karpal, point-like, grinned broadly.

If Beethoven deserved to endure, so did urination.

Orlando’s face lit up for a moment with the sheer pleasure of understanding. ‘So in three dimensions, a proton can’t ever make an electron crash, because the uncertainty principle is just as good as centrifugal force. But in five dimensions, that’s not good enough.’ He nodded slowly, as if coming to terms with the inevitability of it.