Diaspora

by Greg Egan

The real world was full of larger structures, smaller structures, simpler and more complex structures than the tiny portion comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored.

Like a punched card fed into a Jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.

A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to be reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen – two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public – and embedded them in the orphan’s cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to be counted.

The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations.

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Each outlook offered a slightly different package of values and aesthetics, often built up from the ancestral reasons-to-be-cheerful that still lingered to some degree in most citizens’ minds:Regularities and periodicities – rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence.

Only true statics, and a few of the more conservative exuberants, retained the ancestral genes for programmed death – and asking for a figure on accidental losses might have seemed insensitive.

‘Ten years? What would that seem like to you? A century?’ Yatima replied, ‘About eight millennia.’

Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense.

Orlando said, ‘I keep wanting to insist: “Ah, but you haven’t seen them with your own eyes!” Except . . . you have. In exactly the same way that you’ve seen anything at all.’ Liana leant on his shoulder and added teasingly, ‘Which is the same way anyone sees anything. Just because our own minds are being run a few centimetres away from our own cameras, that doesn’t make our experiences magically superior.’

One agronomist argued, through an interpreter:If space travel wasn’t just a fantasy for immature cultures, then where were all the aliens?

‘Do you think we’ll ever come back?’ Yatima thought about it, long and hard. Without the unrepeatable allure which had brought them here, would this place, and these friends, ever again be worth eight hundred times more than all the rest? ‘I doubt it.’

Once you’d seen Jupiter close up, first hand, you began to think of it more as a source of light pollution and electromagnetic noise than as an object of serious astronomical interest.

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.

but they view the possibility of atrocities as essential for virtue – what philosophers call “the Clockwork Orange fallacy”. So in their eyes, autonomy makes the polises a kind of amoral hell, masquerading as Eden.’

Twenty years ago, we thought the greatest risk to the Earth was an asteroid strike! We can’t be complacent just because we survived this, and the fleshers didn’t; Lacerta proves that we don’t know how the universe works – and it’s the things we don’t know that will kill us.

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving . . . including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs’ failings.

The elementary particles themselves were the mouths of wormholes. Electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, W-Z bosons, gravitons and gluons were all just the mouths of longer-lived versions of the fleeting wormholes of the vacuum.

Gabriel was undaunted by the time scale; he had long hoped for a grand scheme like this to make sense of his longevity. Without a purpose that spanned the centuries, he could only drift between interests and aesthetics, friends and lovers, triumphs and disappointments. He could only live a new life every gigatau or two, until there was no difference between his continued existence and his replacement by someone new.

Paolo thought: I’ve crossed twenty-seven light years in an instant. I’m orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I’ve sacrificed nothing – left nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too good.

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

we also need to speak to others who’ve faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.’

Hermann had been scanned in the twenty-first century, before Carter-Zimmerman even existed, but over the teratau he’d wiped most of his episodic memories and rewritten his personality a dozen times. He’d once told Paolo, ‘I think of myself as my own great-great-grandson. Death’s not so bad, if you do it incrementally. Ditto for immortality.’

He had gladly rid himself of the tedious business of defecation, but he was no more willing to give up the pleasure of emptying his bladder than he was willing to give up the possibility of sex. Both acts were entirely arbitrary, now that they were divorced from any biological imperative, but that only brought them closer to other meaningless pleasures, like music. If Beethoven deserved to endure, so did urination. He manipulated the stream into Lissajous figures as it vanished into the starry blackness beneath the jutting rock.

There were no spectacular new body plans or life cycles here, no strategies for feeding or reproduction that hadn’t been tried out back on Earth, but at a molecular level everything worked differently, and there was a vast labyrinth of utterly novel biochemical pathways to be mapped. Yet the Transmuters made it almost impossible to care. Their absence – or their perfect camouflage – monopolised everyone’s attention, transforming the intricate machinery of the biosphere into a very long footnote to a far more mesmerising blank page.

Orlando said drily, ‘Deuterium at six thousand times the normal abundance isn’t subtle. Water vapour weighing twenty per cent extra isn’t subtle. But particles that behave exactly like neutrons until you split them into two quantum states, rotate one by more than seven hundred and twenty degrees, then recombine them to check their relative phase? Somehow I think that might qualify.’

Yatima smiled serenely. ‘The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch.’

The most plausible scheme Yatima had heard so far involved encoding every polis’s data as a pattern of deep trenches on a planetary surface, and then building a vast army of non-sentient robots on a variety of scales, from nanoware up, so numerous that there was a chance that the relatively few survivors would be capable of reconstructing the polis.

Orlando braced himself. ‘Now show me U-star.’ His exoself responded to the command, spinning his eyeballs into hyperspheres, rebuilding his retinas as four-dimensional arrays, rewiring his visual cortex, boosting his neural model of the space around him to encompass five dimensions. As the world inside his head expanded, he cried out and closed his eyes, panic-stricken and vertiginous.

He glanced down at the bottom of the window. The most trivial details in a 5-scape could still be hypnotic; the tesseract of the window met the tesseract of the floor along, not a line, but a roughly cubical volume. That he could see this entire volume all at once almost made sense when he thought of it as the bottom hyperface of the transparent window, but when he realised that every point was shared by the front hyperface of the opaque floor, any lingering delusions of normality evaporated.

Elena asked the worm, ‘Who created you?’ ‘Another Contingency Handler.’ ‘And who created that?’ ‘Another Contingency Handler.’ ‘How many Contingency Handlers are there in this chain?’ ‘Nine thousand and seventeen.’ ‘And then what?’ The worm pondered the question. ‘You’re not interested in any level of non-sentient software, are you?’ Elena replied patiently, ‘We’re interested in everything, but first we’d like to know about the sentient beings who created the system that spawned you.’

But that small, shared region at the galactic core will still reach extreme temperatures before it pinches off to form a black hole.’ ‘How extreme?’ ‘Hot enough to break up nuclei within a radius of fifty thousand light years. Nothing in the galaxy will survive.’

Paolo knew that the Contingency Handler could feel no compassion for their plight; it could only utter the formalities programmed into it long ago, translated as best it could. But the message it conveyed still managed to bridge time, and scale, and cultures. It said, ‘Bring your people through. They’re welcome here. There’s room enough for everyone.’