Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

The border was only a few Planck-lengths deep, providing experimenters with a tool compared to which an atomic blade would look wider than a planetary system.

Transcendence was a content-free word left over from religion, but in some moribund planetary cultures it had come to refer to a mythical process of mental restructuring that would result in vastly greater intelligence and a boundless cornucopia of hazy superpowers – if only the details could be perfected, preferably by someone else. It was probably an appealing notion if you were so lazy that you’d never actually learnt anything about the universe you inhabited, and couldn’t quite conceive of putting in the effort to do so: this magical cargo of transmogrification was sure to come along eventually and render the need superfluous.

‘When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweetheart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principal bundles over the three-sphere. Ancient constructions, though I did rediscover them for myself.’ ‘How were they received?’ ‘She liked them so much, she extended them to larger spaces and gave me back the result.’

If you ever want a good laugh, you should try some of the pre-Qusp anti-AI propaganda. I once read a glorious tract which asserted that as soon as there was intelligence without bodies, its “unstoppable lust for processing power” would drive it to convert the whole Earth, and then the whole universe, into a perfectly efficient Planck-scale computer. Self-restraint? Nah, we’d never show that. Morality? What, without livers and gonads? Needing some actual reason to want to do this? Well … who could ever have too much processing power? ‘To which I can only reply: why haven’t you indolent fleshers transformed the whole galaxy into chocolate?’

You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground far more efficiently.

They convince themselves that they’re now facing the Virus That Ate Spacetime.

‘Microbiology? These organisms are a few hundred Planck lengths wide: about ten-to-the-minus-thirty-three metres. This is vendeko-biology.’