Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

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?

Life had still arisen here, thirty orders of magnitude up the length scale, as heroic and miraculous as some hardy plant on a frozen mountain peak,