Diaspora

by Greg Egan

functional equivalence,

Why should we sacrifice the opportunity for pleasure?”

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.

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. We’re fragmenting. We’re losing each other.”

Rome?

“We’re not here to kidnap people. Imagine how you’d feel, if some alien creature reached into the polis and dragged you away from everything you knew—” Inoshiro almost screamed with frustration. “No, you imagine how this flesher will feel, when vis skin’s burned so badly that the fluid beneath starts seeping out!”

“God is dead, but the platitudes linger.” Yatima couldn’t bring verself to ask whether torture and slavery also lingered, but Francesca seemed to read vis face, and added, “Including a lot of confused rhetoric about free will. Most statics aren’t violent, 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.”

Yatima felt an overpowering sense of hope. It was as if the Konishi mind seed still encoded the instinctive knowledge that, in time, the darkest stormclouds would always clear, the longest night would always yield to dawn, the harshest winter would always be tempered by spring. Every hardship the Earth forced upon its inhabitants was bounded, cyclic, survivable. Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.

And they’re not going to mess about with fusion drives like the gleisners. They’re going in style. They plan to build wormholes.”

The catch was: nothing in the universe could pass through the wormhole mouth of an elementary particle. All the known particles possessed a single quantum unit of surface area, and the probability of any of them passing through another’s wormhole was precisely zero. This problem was not insurmountable.

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’ … as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

The robots had been first to Alpha Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planet, but first life was Apollo to their Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.

Catalyzed chemistry’? Why isn’t anyone willing to say the word ‘life’?”

Taken together, the artifacts comprised a giant sculpture, spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions. The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.