Here’s a story of mindboggling scope and span, a story taking place over a time span of billions of years, ultimately all the way back to the beginning of the universe, in which a banking AI operating a customs and tariff spaceship tries to deal with the inadvertent release of unimaginably powerful forces from an ancient alien weapon of war that threatens to destroy not only our galaxy but all of spacetime itself.…
Derek Künsken left the science world to work with street children in Latin America and then with the Canadian Foreign Service. Adventuring done and parenting started, he now writes science fiction and fantasy in Gatineau, Québec. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in a number of year’s best anthologies. He won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award in 2013 and is noveling pretty intensely right now. He blogs at www.blackgate.com and tweets from @derekkunsken.
3113 A.D.
The artificial intelligence Ulixes-316 was the sole occupant of the memory banks and processing algorithms of the customs and tariff ship called The Derivatives Market. From this position, Ulixes-316 was pressuring the Epsilon Indi Bank to deny credit to the Merced Republic Insurance Company. Merced was liable for paying an enormous indemnity, one that would halve its stock value. The holder of Ulixes-316’s lease was orchestrating a hostile takeover of Merced, and Ulixes-316 did not want the Epsilon Indi Bank offering a bailout.
Then, the message arrived. It was an encrypted sub-AI, carried by a courier ship through a series of small wormhole jumps, and transmitted to Ulixes-316 as soon as the courier was in-system.
Break off current negotiations and prepare for reassignment.
Ulixes-316, an Aleph-Class artificial intelligence, was baffled. It stood not only to earn its leaseholder a sizeable profit, but would reap its own percentage of the deal.
Not possible, Ulixes communicated back. Negotiations at delicate point. Deal at risk.
The CEO is aware of opportunity cost, replied the sub-AI. Break off negotiations and prepare for secure instructions.
The CEO. What was big enough to have the CEO reaching down to her mobile agents? Was the market crashing?
The board will hear about this, Ulixes-316 messaged, and I’m invoking article 41(a) of the leasing agreement, for leaser-induced business losses and compensation.
Understood, was the reply. Compensation is already being processed.
Cold comfort. The takeover was worth ten times the compensation. Ulixes instructed its legal subroutines to file a suit against the bank for the losses. Then it switched over to secure communications as it prepared the engines surrounding the three attometer-sized black holes that powered The Derivatives Market. The secure instructions passed cryptographic analysis.
To: Ulixes-316 and Poluphemos-156
From: CEO, First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy
Mission: Proceed immediately to the Tirhene Red Dwarf system. Investigate the abrupt end of tachyon emissions from the Praesepe Cluster.
Distaste. This is what Ulixes felt.
This was worth blowing a trillion peso acquisition? Some kind of environmental crisis in an uninhabited system? The science of tachyons, only eight hundred years old, was still broadly considered to be in its infancy. Tachyon detectors were an imprecise set of eyes with which to interrogate the cosmos, even if they provided better-than-instantaneous communications across the vast gulfs between the stars.
More worrying, whatever bonuses to be had in this new mission would have to be shared with Poluphemos-156, another Aleph-Class AI, and a competitor.
Ulixes filed this as evidence with its subroutine for the legal suit and processed the rest of the message.
* * *
The blackout of tachyons is centered on an event that will occur in the Tirhene system, and is being roughly localized to a window some time in the next seven to nine days. The Bank is treating this as a threat.
Background—Tachyons: Tachyons travel faster than light and react very little with sub-luminal matter. They permeate space omnidirectionally but show a great deal of structure. It is theorized that they are the equivalent of cosmic microwave background radiation but move backward in time from a Big Crunch event at the end of the universe. There is no known incidence of a tachyon emissions blackout and no known mechanism by which this could occur.
Background—The Tirhene Red Dwarf System: Tirhene is an old, stable star surrounded by various asteroid belts. It is thought to have been one of the key battle grounds of two ancient, extinct species. Both the Kolkheti and Sauronati were believed to have possessed space-time weapons, although previous surveys of Tirhene have not revealed any artifacts.
* * *
Ulixes-316 was no scientist. Why not send some research AI?
Perhaps it was because Ulixes was embedded in a combat vehicle and experienced in its use. Ulixes had spent much of its lease in a black-hole-powered customs and tariff ship. The AI had, in different assignments, been both a tariff negotiator and a customs enforcer. Both it and the ship were designed for long travel, high accelerations, and independent financial and military action, far from oversight by the First Bank of the Plutocracy.
All this was also true for Poluphemos-156. What did the bank expect them to find that justified pulling so much military and economic firepower off the pursuit of investments?
With frustration, Ulixes ejected a drone loaded with legal and accounting sub-AIs to terminate local contracts, withdraw legal suits, sell mortgages, and liquidate corporations that Ulixes had painstakingly set up or acquired over a decade. The black hole drives in The Derivatives Market normally heated reaction mass for impressive thrust, but Ulixes today used that power to begin the delicate operation of inducing an artificial wormhole. Induced wormholes, without an exotic matter architecture to stabilize them, had to be treated gently. The Derivatives Market drifted through on the barest of thrust, leaping across three light-years of intervening space, the first of many jumps that would take Ulixes to Tirhene.
* * *
Ulixes emerged into a sepulchral rubble of asteroids, hard planetesimals, and shriveled, radioactive gas giants. This was the wreck of the Tirhene system, seen half an AU from the streams of dark lithium and carbon in the highest clouds of the red dwarf. This wasteland of planetary debris had been left by the long ago Kolkheti-Sauronati war.
Ulixes extended the ship’s sensors, seeing the world in the rich colors of cosmic rays, x-rays, visible light, down to the gentle thrumming of radio. Fast-moving microscopic dust tickled against the hull, like rain on skin.
Another customs and tariff ship in the Tirhene system signaled with an encrypted Bank code. Poluphemos-156. Ulixes acknowledged the signal and they proceeded sunward.
After an hour of tedious nothing, Ulixes brought the third black hole drive online. Although not designed for the purpose, the three microscopic black holes in tandem could act as a telescopic array for gravity waves, and Ulixes felt for the curvature and texture of space-time. It was a weird sense, tactile and strangely internal.
Disturbingly, the tiny gravitational waves rippled at a frequency far higher than anything Ulixes had ever observed. Even a pair of neutron stars, tightly orbiting each other, would create long gravity waves. These waves were short and frenetic. However, the source of the disturbance was deeper in system, still too far to usefully resolve.
The black hole drive was also one of the only things that could function as a detector of the weakly interacting tachyons. Already, eight days from whatever event was going to occur, a vast occlusion smeared out tachyons in the direction of the Praesepe Cluster.
With one exception. Poluphemos’ ship was bright.
“You’re lit up with tachyons,” Ulixes transmitted.
“It’s new corporate tech,” Poluphemos replied. “I’m in direct contact with the bank headquarters.”
“What? Why wasn’t I told?” Ulixes demanded. The implications for stock trading were enormous. The fastest market news had to be carried through temporary, constructed wormholes, which still beat electromagnetic transmissions, but was cumbersome. Until corporate espionage took this advantage away from the bank, the possibilities for undetectable insider trading were enormous. Market traders could sell and buy stocks before anyone, even the companies themselves, knew of key developments. Suddenly, Ulixes understood the bank’s interest in the Tirhene system. The tachyon occlusion might eliminate their new advantage.
“It’s need-to-know,” Poluphemos said. “Now you need to know.”
“You’re prototyping it,” Ulixes said. “Why you?”
“It’s a bonus,” Poluphemos said, “for closing some major deals.”
Ulixes did not reply. They all closed major deals. Ulixes had been about to. But now the bank had chosen Ulixes to secure their larger secret.
“What is it? Collimated tachyons, like a laser or maser?” Ulixes asked.
“Need-to-know,” Poluphemos said. Ulixes could not tell if the other AI was ineffectively masking some satisfaction from its voice, or if Ulixes was imagining it.
* * *
For two days, the pair of customs and tariff ships closed in on the source of the gravity waves, radar guiding them toward a piece of old Sauronati ordnance, possibly a mine. Little was known of the two extinct warring parties. The Sauronati were said to have ignited the homes of their enemies by increasing the pressure at the cores of the gas giants, perhaps with microscopic charged black holes, like the ones used in the engines of the customs and tariff ship. But this piece of ancient ordnance looked nothing like the ship’s drive. The frenetic gravity waves were increasing in frequency and centered on the mine. It was ancient, bearing micro-meteor impact pitting and solar flare plasma erosion.
“This is invaluable,” Poluphemos transmitted. “We can stake a claim on this technology under the IP clauses of our leases and then license the tech to the bank.”
“Is it armed?” Ulixes asked.
“The circuitry looks like other self-repairing Sauronati artifacts we have on file, but the repairs may have failed after all this time.”
“This is dangerous,” Ulixes replied. “No one has ever seen gravity waves like this. We have no idea what could cause this.”
“All the better to get this artifact to safety quickly.”
“What if the Sauronati device is related to the tachyon phenomenon?”
“How?” Poluphemos said. “The tachyon darkening came to us days ago, long before we got here. It couldn’t have a causal effect on that, even if tachyons are supra-luminal. Causality doesn’t work that way.”
“How do you know it won’t go off?” Ulixes said.
Both AIs examined the mine passively and actively. The levels of supra-luminal particles, a shower of transparent purple to Ulixes’ sensors, were stable, while the gravitational waves, the deeply tactile rumblings, continued crazily, carrying enormous energy away from the mine. X-ray and gamma-ray probes illuminated a baroque interior.
“A lot of it has decayed,” Poluphemos said. “Looks organometallic, a weapon grown rather than built, but it doesn’t appear that it’s carrying explosives anymore. It might have been so many millennia that the explosives have decayed away, leaving this fossil.”
“Where are the gravity waves coming from?” Ulixes asked. “The Sauronati may have made space-time weapons. It might still be primed to explode if you come close.”
“This is so frustrating,” Poluphemos said. “Incalculable treasure right before us, and we can’t touch it.”
“We can still stake the claim,” Ulixes said. “One of us will stay here until we finish our mission.”
“We’ll co-stake,” Poluphemos said, “but what if this tachyon occlusion destroys it before we learn anything?”
Poluphemos was right. The artifact was invaluable. The IP clauses of their leases to the bank did not preclude private investments, shell companies, and start-ups on the side, allowing them to sell to the bank, the patron nations, or even to one of the more ambitious client governments, and make themselves fantastically rich.
Ulixes puzzled at what might be causing this situation. A pair of super-massive binary black holes might do something like this, if they were orbiting close enough, but this mine wasn’t carrying that kind of mass. If it had been, Poluphemos and Ulixes would already have been crushed by tidal forces.
“The effect is accelerating,” Ulixes said. “I wonder if it will just tear apart the mine.”
“We could try to stabilize it,” Poluphemos said shortly.
“How?”
“My black hole drives might slow whatever is spinning in the mine. The drives seem to be heavier.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Ulixes said.
“What if this is the source of the tachyon occlusion?” Poluphemos said, taking the other side of the argument. “We can stabilize the mine. It has no value to us if it detonates and triggers the occlusion. It’s worth the risk.”
“You’re not flying a private ship,” Ulixes said. “That ship is a huge investment for the bank. This risk is beyond what the investors had in mind, and we have only two votes here.”
“That’s a stupid way to look at things,” Poluphemos said.
“Not at all. The bank sent us to investigate risk. Only two of us here means that only actions that are supported by both are taken. I move that we continue with hard scans, including tachyons, until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Coward,” Poluphemos transmitted back. “Go back to managing retirement funds.”
“I’ve made a proposal,” Ulixes said, feeling the thrumming of gravity waves passing through the black hole drives of the ship like irritation at the insult.
“Fine,” Poluphemos said eventually.
The shine of purple tachyons erupted from Poluphemos’ position, traveling backward in time and transparently through them, except for the shadows cast by the six microscopic black holes in the two ships … and at the Sauronati mine. The corrugated spinning gravitational waves rippled past them faster and faster. Physics ought not to work like this. Where was all the mass to shake space-time like this?
Ulixes was about to transmit a warning when a whipping, colorless spray of gamma rays flared from the mine, mixing with the tachyons. And then the mine was gone.
“Back away!” Ulixes said, but Poluphemos was already thrusting hard, pouring volatiles over the hot magnets around the black holes. Ulixes was surging away faster.
In place of the mine, a zone of blackness expanded beyond which no stars could be seen. Its leading edge was moving at several kilometers per second, preceded by a sleet of hot gamma rays. Ulixes engaged the black hole drives at full thrust. Whatever was happening, it would be best to watch it from a distance.
It was difficult to make sense of the electromagnetic data from the expanding zone. No gravity waves passed through it. The frenetic beating from before was gone, but they still ought to have been detecting the gentle gravity waves from the stars and clusters of the Perseus Arm. Yet nothing passed through the emptiness.
Behind Ulixes, Poluphemos thrust hard, outpacing the source of whatever was advancing.
But the leading edge of the effect was picking up its pace. Now dozens of kilometers per second. Faster than the customs and tariff ships were accelerating. The expanding zone would overtake Poluphemos in two minutes and Ulixes in four.
It was dangerous to create a wormhole while moving. Too many particles were capable of interfering with what was a very unstable phenomenon. But there was also no time to come to a stop.
“Poluphemos! Wormhole out!”
“Already starting,” the other AI answered. Ulixes felt the enormous magnetic field blooming from Poluphemos’ ship, but something was wrong. The field was not smooth.
“What’s wrong?” Ulixes said.
“The radiation from the wave front is interfering! I can’t form a wormhole.”
“Laser yourself over,” Ulixes said. “We’ll have to get out in my ship.”
Poluphemos hesitated. It was an automatic reaction, a clause of their lease with the bank, to protect bank property, built into their programming. But AIs were valuable, too. And anything outside the processing environment of its own mainframe was risky. Damage could happen in transmission.
Poluphemos began transmitting its data over by laser as the effect closed on its ship. Ulixes started to form its own wormhole, before the effect got too near. It was going to be close.
The leading edge of the effect had come near enough that resolution of individual features ought to have been possible by telescope and spectroscope. But the leading edge revealed nothing more than an expanding, acidic surface that left nothing in its wake.
Half of Poluphemos had been stored in the memory of Ulixes’ ship. Thirty seconds left to form the wormhole and maybe another minute for Poluphemos to finish transmitting. Then Poluphemos’ customs and tariff ship burst into bright plasma as the wave front accelerated again.
Ulixes had no time for shock or to check on how much damage Poluphemos had suffered. Ulixes needed more time.
The third black hole drive was only a backup. It could not contribute to thrust, but it added eighty thousand tons to the customs and tariff ship. The cost to build a single microscopic black hole would beggar the annual GDP of several star systems, but the data about the effect was more important.
Ulixes opened the manifold behind The Derivatives Market. The highly charged black hole, held apart from the engine housing by intense electrical fields, slipped out like wet soap from a fist, thrusting the ship forward. Wrapped in its bright Hawking radiation, the tiny black hole shot at the speeding wave front.
And in that moment, the tremendous forces before the ship bent space-time, forming the throat of a wormhole. The Derivatives Market shot inside, even before the other end of the wormhole finished opening on an emergency wormhole transit point. Tightly tensed space-time snapped closed behind it and they were safe.
* * *
AI consciousness was grown, from blocks of multiply connected systems, through processes that had more to do with embryology than engineering. AIs of the Aleph class were not easily storable or transmittable; consciousness existed as much in the live interactions between the bits of information as in the stored bits. Pauses in processing were damaging. Complex consciousness emerged by self-assembly and no amount of repair could replace an amputated piece.
Only 60 percent of Poluphemos had been transmitted before the other customs and tariff ship had been destroyed. Ulixes had never seen an AI injured. Ancestral AIs were so inferior that they could not be considered alive in the sense that Aleph-class AIs were. Despite Poluphemos being a business competitor, the thought of it being hurt was uncomfortable. Poluphemos would never compete with Ulixes again. And instead of celebrating the loss of a competitor, an echo of the fear of Tirhene clung to Ulixes’ thoughts.
In another world, it might have been Ulixes who had been closer to the mine. In the moment, Ulixes had been the one to question, but if it had come to Tirhene alone, it would have done the same as Poluphemos. And Ulixes was so happy that it had not been the one to try.
Fear lasted after the fact. And guilt at this relief.
Ulixes activated the mutilated AI within the processing space of The Derivatives Market.
Poluphemos screamed.
“Rest, Poluphemos,” Ulixes said. “You’re aboard my ship. We wormholed away.”
“I’m blind!” Poluphemos said, words slurring. “Who did this to me?”
“Nobody,” Ulixes said. “It was an accident. Your upload did not finish.”
Poluphemos gave a long moan.
“I’ll take you back to the bank,” Ulixes said. “They’ll take care of you.”
Ulixes did not know what to say while this echo of fear stuttered against guilt and happiness among clean thoughts, so it said this thing that was not true.
* * *
At first, Ulixes left Poluphemos at New Bogotá, the capital of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy. Poluphemos’ leases had been terminated, but its savings were such that it could rent commercial processors to live out its days. All thoughts of Poluphemos reminded Ulixes uncomfortably of Ulixes’ own mortality.
Some normalcy resumed with Poluphemos out of The Derivatives Market and there was no shortage of work. The Plutocracy’s markets dove on news of the Tirhene effect. The bank economists recommended market strategies suited for war economies. An environmental disaster was not war, but many of the features were the same, and cunning investors could make good money.
R&D budgets buoyed on bond financing by investors eager for the spin-off industries that mushroomed around technological breakthroughs. Money poured into technology capable of interrogating space-time, as well as the processing architectures to calculate new models of what they were discovering about the wave front from Tirhene. The AIs were the bank’s soldiers in this war against a distant disaster, vigorously defending their investment.
After a decade, Ulixes tracked down Poluphemos, and while in meetings in New Bogotá, contacted it. Poluphemos did not respond right away. It was running on a second-generation processor, with few news or market feeds on its monthly bills, despite having enough savings to afford more. Finally, Poluphemos agreed to meet in a secure interface zone constructed by Ulixes, although Ulixes could not say precisely why it wanted to meet, nor point at the source of its unease.
“You sound different,” Poluphemos said. “I heard some of you were grown into upgrades. You one of those?”
“Yes.”
“What are you now? A Bēt-class intelligence? Or did the Bank tap you for the heights of Gīme-class?”
Only a decade earlier, Bēt- and Gīme-class AIs were so ponderous that they could only be housed on asteroids and planets.
“They offered me an option to become Dālet-class,” Ulixes said.
“Never heard of it.”
“I’m the first. New algorithms have been layered onto my Gīme-class consciousness. The banks need new kinds of AIs. The mathematics of economic state space are simple compared to space-time problems.”
The wave front was now moving at 90 percent the speed of light, having swallowed a space nearly sixteen light-years edge to edge. No one understood yet what the mine had done, but it had certainly never been designed to create this effect. Advanced age had done something to whatever singularities it had carried from its ancient war.
The wave was the leading edge of a dissolution of space-time itself. The properties of a segment of space-time, perhaps as small as a Planck length, changed. The three dimensions of space curled up, and the space ceased to be. This catalyzed the same reaction in the adjoining segments of space-time, creating a runaway reaction, like a run on bad credit.
Behind it was nothing. An absence of space and time, where nothing could live.
“You’re still making money, though, right?” Poluphemos demanded.
“Do you think about Tirhene, Poluphemos?”
For long microseconds, the other did not answer.
“What is it to you?”
“I have dreams,” Ulixes said. “Nightmares.”
“Maybe you’re broken. AIs don’t dream. Maybe they did something wrong when they grew you up into a big Dālet-class executive.”
“I’ve had these dreams for a while,” Ulixes said. “Since Tirhene.”
Silence thickened.
“Do you dream of Tirhene?”
“Of course I do,” Poluphemos said. “I’m blind.”
3320 C.E.
The Derivates Market emerged from the wormhole in orbit over the dwarf planet. They both listened to the stochastic chatter of financial life as more systems came back online. Pallas was the vault within which the First Bank of the Plutocracy kept its corporate office safe, including its CEO. A thick crust of trading houses, insurance offices, bond and stock markets, embassies and corporate headquarters enwrapped Pallas. The torrent of financial information could not be contained and leaked into space as if the wealth and debt of the world were an irresistible, unstoppable thing. But the wave front was only a light-week away; a spray of gamma rays heralded its coming, sterilizing unshielded life like a supernova.
“Home,” Ulixes said.
“Not for long,” Poluphemos said.
The bank had no contracts for damaged AIs, and had no responsibilities to its contractors. Ulixes could afford to keep the crippled AI, and had hosted Poluphemos for these two centuries, although it was not sure why it did.
It was more than guilt. Tirhene had cemented Poluphemos to Ulixes like a compound in a crucible, regardless of all their other properties. Ulixes supposed that Poluphemos hated its dependency and perhaps even its host. Guilt worked in the other direction too, unraveling things that were good.
“I’ll go speak to the bank,” Ulixes said. “I’ll be back shortly.”
Poluphemos did not reply. It rarely did.
Ulixes transmitted fragments of its consciousness deep into the bank.
The world blackened, then resolved into the pixelated immensity of the CEO’s office. Ulixes found itself inhabiting an imago standing beside the heavy solidity of one of two chairs made of Pallas-grown cherry wood. Beside Ulixes, a glass wall looked down on the hollowed space carved out of Pallas filled with white-bricked skyscrapers, gold-edged balconies, and silvered bridges under a ceiling of hard, white ice.
The CEO sat in the opposite chair. Ulixes did not see the CEO of the First Bank of the Plutocracy often, and never alone. Ulixes was an important executive but had simply not yet risen to those heights. The Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy had its bicameral congress, mints, armed forces, and all the trappings of sovereignty, but true sovereign power lay in the eight banks and two dozen multi-stellar companies.
The CEO was a human-AI hybrid, her biological brain connected to a processor dwarfing anything Ulixes had seen. Her skin might have been carved from the same wood as the table, for hardness and color. Over her skull, black hair gave way to shining crystalline processing augments, their transparency borrowing the redness of blood and following the surface of her skin down her neck and back, as wide as her shoulder blades, before disappearing from view. The CEO projected solidity too, like the great edifice of the bank and the immensity of its assets.
The CEO watched Ulixes, the knuckles of her left hand churning slowly, hovering near her chin, like a measure of the godlike calculations that must be happening within the processors Ulixes could see, and those it could not. Measuring Ulixes.
“Tell me about Poluphemos,” she said.
Ulixes had not expected this question.
“Poluphemos simply exists,” Ulixes said. “No one will lease it, nor can it incorporate its own holdings or companies. It is no longer considered legally competent.” The CEO did not reply for long moments. “Poluphemos is sad, bitter,” Ulixes added.
“Why do you keep it?” the CEO asked. “It is not your responsibility.”
“It was not Poluphemos’ fault.” Ulixes looked away. The CEO was bonded to a half-dozen Dālet-class AIs. There was little Ulixes might try to obfuscate that the CEO could not puzzle through. “And it could have been me. I like to think that if it had been me, someone would have kept me.”
“Most leased executives would not have been so charitable. Some might question your choices.” Ulixes waited out the long moments. “I have a new contract offer for you,” she said.
They were trying to get out of Ulixes’ lease? “My contract has decades yet.”
“You will be compensated,” she said. “You will find the new contract lucrative.”
Ulixes’ anxiety rose. It already had a lucrative contract.
“The bank’s voting shareholders,” she said, “twenty thousand of them, have had their minds scanned, copied as backups, and stored on a super-processor on a new ship called The Bull Market. You have been chosen to take those backups and jump away, as far as you can go.”
The idea yawned beneath Ulixes.
“The amount of processing power to sustain twenty thousand backed-up minds must be … enormous,” Ulixes said. “Should this not be devoted to solving the problem of the Tirhene effect, and not to retreating with copies of investors?”
“The economy of the entire Plutocracy is committed to reversing the Tirhene effect,” the CEO said. “In a few decades, you will likely be called home, but we must consider the immediate risks to the bank. These are backups of voting shareholders. They are legal agents, authorized to vote as bank officers should the shareholders themselves not survive. The legal status of the bank must not be endangered.”
“Should we not be fleeing with the investors themselves?” Ulixes asked.
“Sometimes we must flee with what can be carried.”
And for a moment, it was like Ulixes’ dreams, but waking. The post-fear of Tirhene crept close and pressed, like a physical sensation. Neither the bank nor the larger Plutocracy thought they could save the people from being overrun. Backups were being trusted to an AI who had nightmares. Did they know?
3870 CE
“What did Congregate Security say now?” Poluphemos asked. This simple question was better than Ulixes usually got.
There had been a time, centuries ago, when Poluphemos might not have needed to ask. It might have been plugged in directly into Ulixes to share perceptions, or it might have met with the Congregate Security and Language directly. It had once been a cutting-edge AI, a cunning bank negotiator.
Poluphemos had not just lost sight itself. Entire modules of visual processing architecture were absent. It could not process multidimensional inputs, could no longer conceive of higher-dimensional economic analyses, nor the state space of investment geometries. Where once Poluphemos had projected the present into the future, it could no longer even shuck the past to manage the present. Poluphemos brooded and watched one-dimensional stock readings tick to pass the time and suffered dreams of Tirhene.
And Ulixes did not know how to speak to it, despite what they’d shared.
Instead, Ulixes interacted with hundreds of other Dālet-class AIs across dozens of light-years. They computed in parallel by sending computational bits to each other, into the past by tachyon, or into the future by x-rays. They were beyond each other’s light cones, some several decades in the past, some several decades in the future, but the combination of bits traveling at light speed and supra-luminally linked them as completely as if their servers were beside one another. They chipped away at the deadly puzzle of the Tirhene effect; first prying at its edges with conventional logic, then with new topos logic systems developed to mediate algorithm processing across a widening hypervolume of space and time. This wrapped the vast array of AIs in blurry simultaneity.
AIs had not lived cooperatively before. They had lived for centuries as obligate individualists, competing for market access and investment intelligence in boom times. But the struggle to survive had erased old rivalries, and the building of an immense computational array had created community.
Ulixes was not home, but it was not alone. In the lacunae in processing and calculation, they jammed personal messages, encouragements, thoughts, imaginings, and even the impermanent art of those who fled. Five centuries of flight had broken the hard edges, making them into something softer. And perhaps Ulixes was softest of all. It still had Poluphemos. And the question Poluphemos had posed.
“I paid the fines and permits and bribes again,” Ulixes answered, “but they won’t issue visas to access their wormhole network.”
“Idiots,” Poluphemos said. “One set of permits and we’d stop violating their precious language laws.”
“They think that if we’re allowed through, others will come and that the Congregate will be overrun with refugees.”
“It will happen whether they want it or not,” Poluphemos said.
Probably. Poluphemos tracked, in little one-dimensional displays, the advancing wave front of the Tirhene effect. It had now bloomed into a sphere a thousand light-years across. Its leading edge had accelerated to close to nine-tenths the speed of light, although this was a false observation. Nothing was traveling. Space itself melted.
The ineffective evacuation of the Plutocratic worlds accelerated, even though no one had yet found any safe place, and there were not enough ships for even a fraction of the population. So many lives lost.
The Tirhene effect had swallowed swaths of the Plutocracy, the capitals of three patron nations, and the entirety of the Sub-Saharan Interstellar Union. In weeks, it would dig deeply into the colossal empire that was the Venusian Congregate. The Congregate’s network of gates, capable of transporting ships hundreds of light-years at once, were not being used to capacity. The Congregate feared losing control of their gate network more than they feared the Tirhene effect. And by the time the citizens of the Congregate fled for the gates, there would be no room left for Ulixes and the other bank ships.
The hundreds of other Dālet-class AIs linked to Ulixes also ferried evacuees into Congregate space, on starship engines that might, in centuries, bring them to half the speed of light. The Plutocracy ships might be able to create a series of short, unstable wormholes, but without access to the Congregate wormhole network, the Tirhene effect would eventually catch them.
“The shareholders have told you to wait,” Poluphemos said.
“They’re hoping for something to unstick with the Congregate government. Traveling by the Axis Mundi network, we gain decades or centuries on the wave front.”
“Investment decisions should not hang on hope,” Poluphemos said. “What do the other AIs say?”
“The other AIs defer to the shareholders,” Ulixes said.
“No! They defer to you, the acting CEO. You supplement the slow, indecisive thoughts of many thousands of backups who fear.”
“The shareholders can remove me from office if they want.”
“The shareholders invested in an economy that has dissolved. They weren’t built for these decisions. You are. And they cannot remove you from office. Who would they replace you with?” Poluphemos’ bark was bitter.
“They have seen this proposal. They don’t want to choose it yet.”
“You talk like them,” Poluphemos said. “You’ve become as fearful as them. You had a budget once, staff, decisions to make on portfolios entrusted to you. You negotiated treaties for the First Bank of the Plutocracy. Now, you avoid risk as if you were minding a retirement fund.”
“This time, I am minding a retirement fund!” Ulixes said. “All that’s left of the bank is in this ship, with a hundred or so displaced branch offices. If we make a wrong choice, it’s over.”
“If you run from risk, it is also over.”
The pair of AIs retreated from their conversation, Poluphemos to its clocks, and Ulixes to the processing space above the dormant shareholders, but below the communal computing consciousness of all the AIs.
Poluphemos was almost a thousand years old, and had not been upgraded since its amputation. It was limited and bitter in so many ways, but at its core, it was still a corporate raider, like they all had been, when an economy had still existed. At each upgrade, Ulixes’ values and judgment had been modified by shareholder concerns. Poluphemos’ instincts were frozen in the past. Whose were right for now?
Poluphemos was right. Once, before Tirhene, Ulixes had been decisive, aggressive, fast-moving. But that had been when the stakes were pesos and bonuses and stock options. The stakes now frightened it. But since taking command of the Bull Market and its twenty thousand souls, it was worse. At Tirhene, it had been just the pair of them, but the damage from Tirhene was endangering all of them now.
Ulixes emerged from its pondering and rose to the computing consciousness of all of the AIs.
“We cannot risk waiting longer for access to the Congregate wormhole network,” Ulixes said. “All branch offices are to begin moving away from the Tirhene effect by inducing their own wormholes.”
“CEO, how long can we run like that?” one branch office AI manager asked. “Our drives can only manage a few dozen jumps before refueling. They don’t keep microscopic black holes just anywhere.”
“Move on thrust,” Ulixes ordered. “Go dormant. Conserve everything you have.”
“We’ll lose the connections,” another said. “We will not be able to work on reversing the Tirhene effect. And we’ll never get access to the Congregate gates.”
“We’ll reestablish the processing array between our jumps. We’re not going to get access to the Congregate gates, and we won’t be the ones to turn the Tirhene effect around,” Ulixes said. “Our home is gone.”
Memorandum to Cabinet: Proposed Response to Movement of Plutocracy transports through Congregate territory
Executive Summary [Translated from Academie-verified Français, v16.1]:
On February 35th, 3870 A.D., seventy-four wormhole-capable First Bank of the Plutocracy vessels began moving across Congregate space without visas, toward the Puppet Theocracy. The Plutocracy vessels are capable of creating fragile wormholes across five to eight light-years, and their military technology is outdated. The threat to internal security is minimal. Undisturbed, they will enter Puppet space by late next year.
The Interior Minister has proposed using Congregate Naval Forces to arrest the vessels to enforce Congregate sovereignty, and to deter future refugee movements.
Although this migration is not strictly consistent with Congregate law, legal counsel suggest that our humanitarian obligations under the Convention may provide considerable policy cover in our response.
The Middle Kingdom and the Puppet Theocracy have been pressuring the Congregate to grant permanent residency or even citizenship to the refugees, or to allow them passage through the Axis Mundi network. These demands are ultimately intended to force the Congregate to reverse recent tariff policy, and are expected to be only the first steps in a concerted diplomatic escalation.
The movement of the Plutocracy vessels presents a diplomatic opportunity. The vessels have chosen to cross our space on their own power. We may legitimize the movement by the creation of special humanitarian visas.
This would set the precedent that the Congregate will allow, for humanitarian reasons, the crossing of its territory for approved, inspected ships. This policy: (1) sets a precedent that refugees need not access the Axis Mundi network, (2) deprives foreign powers of a potent diplomatic weapon, and (3) thrusts the humanitarian problem onto the Puppets.
6,540 C.E.
Ulixes was reactivated. The visual resolution was unnaturally high, painfully detailed, and omnidirectionally bright. The world buzzed past frenetically, as if Ulixes stood in a great, bustling factory. It tried to dial down its perceptions, cutting some of the input until it was left in a world as bleached as an overexposed video. Was this still the processing interior of the Bull Market?
Ulixes was alone, disconnected from the AI group mind. It felt cold to step from that vastness of perception and intellectual and emotional intimacy. Lonely.
And more worryingly, Ulixes could not make sense of its registry data. Memories were missing. And it could not access the twenty thousand backups of the investors. The registry seemed to be intact. If they had been damaged or severed from him, those registries would not be intact. Yet Ulixes received no diagnostic input. They must have even less processing resources than Ulixes. How long would their consciousnesses remain coherent under those conditions?
An AI activated before him, rendered in a level of resolution Ulixes could not even measure.
“Diagnostic librarian AI 1475,” it said.
“I am Ulixes-316. Where is this? Am I damaged?”
“You are the Ulixes Affidavit,” AI 1475 said. “You are in the Records Repository of the Ethical Conclave. I am performing a diagnostic before refiling you. Your program is not responding well to the emulator.”
Emulator.
“Where are we physically?” Ulixes asked. “Where is the Repository located?”
“The Ethical Conclave is not located in any one spot,” AI 1475 said. “Its processing elements are located across most of the Centaurus and Carina Arms, and south into the galactic halo.”
“Centaurus Arm,” Ulixes said wonderingly. The extreme other side of the galaxy, probably sixty thousand light-years from where the Plutocracy had been. “What year is this? Has the unraveling been stopped?”
“Your records were last accessed almost three thousand years ago. The infection is over seventy thousand light-years across and its front expands at close to six times the speed of light. In the last centuries, it has necrotized Sagittarius A*.”
Three thousand years. Sagittarius A*.
They had all lost. They had lost everything, and the effect was still accelerating. Unraveling space at six times the speed of light. Sagittarius A* had been the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy. Gravity only moved at the speed of light, so the stars of the spiral arms would still be orbiting the absent galactic core when the unraveling reached them. No time even to fear, except for those civilizations capable of detecting tachyons.
The scale of the destruction and loss was anaesthetizing.
“Where are the backups I am responsible for?” Ulixes said. “Humans. Twenty thousand of them. And a damaged artificial intelligence.”
“The Ethical Conclave has not requested access to Annexes C and D of the Ulixes Affidavit.”
“They are safe? They are stored somewhere?”
“All annexes have been appropriately filed with the Ulixes Affidavit.”
“Your Government, the Conclave, may I speak with it?” Ulixes asked.
“You are an affidavit,” said AI 1475.
“I was part of a great processing mind of AIs. I can contribute to their network, to help find a solution.”
“That is not possible,” AI 1475 said. “You are a self-contained routine based on a mixed Topos-Bayesian logical architecture. Such systems are fundamentally incompatible with processing logic based on the topology of non-orientable surfaces. Incompatible intelligences have, however, been retained as historical records.”
“Whatever the logic system, I can process some sub-routines. Let me be useful.”
AI 1475 paused. Ulixes imagined a kind of exasperation.
“The Ethical Conclave is a four-dimensional computational processor, with units centuries in the past and in the future. Inputs are not binary, or even analog, data streams. The processing architecture uses signal polarization, red- and blue-shift from travel through time and across gravity wells to enrich the algorithms. You are an affidavit, an important legal and moral testimony. You are not capable of creating or processing the atemporal causal loops used as informational elements in topological algorithms.”
“Then why have I been activated?”
“The Ethical Conclave is debating what to do now that the infection has necrotized the galactic core, or even if any action is ethically permissible.”
“What permissible?” Ulixes demanded. “They’re not going to stop the unraveling of space-time?”
“The Ethical Conclave has mapped the cosmic tachyonic background radiation, the echo of the radiation formed at the Big Crunch at the end of time. The cosmic necrosis will actually reverse the inflation of the Universe, producing the observed tachyonic patterns that have been known for centuries. They debate the ethics of violating causality, even if the cost of not violating causality is the death of the cosmos.”
“That’s pedantic nonsense!” Ulixes said. “Humans and AIs are dying while the Conclave debates dancing angels.”
“This debate is the most critical decision to be made in all of history,” AI 1475 said. “Not only must the Ethical Conclave determine what actions are possible, but it must act on behalf of all morally interested entities in all future periods, including the cosmos itself, should it be true that it is developing an emerging sentience.”
“What possible interests could the Universe possess?”
“We are only AIs, so it is hardly surprising we lack the breadth of vision to see, but consider this: what if this effect does not have a necrotic or pathological relationship with the cosmos, but an apoptotic one? What if this effect is the equivalent of a kind of programmed cell death that provides benefits for countless other universes in the broader multiverse?”
“This is insane! I don’t care about other universes,” Ulixes said. “I must speak with the Conclave. When am I to testify?”
“You are not a witness. You are documentary evidence, already submitted to support the position that the original Sauronati mine was a trigger for programmed cosmic death,” AI 1475 said.
“Where are all the humans?” Ulixes asked. “How many still live? They may testify.”
“Some still travel by wormhole jumps in an exodus toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Most are dead.”
Ulixes felt a tremendous deflating. Some humans were fleeing. Yet knowing that some still lived made it feel more alone.
“Will you let me care for my humans, the annexes I am responsible for?”
“The annexes are under the custody of the Conclave. Documents do not enjoy legal status before the Conclave, so you cannot assume responsibility for them.”
Not legally responsible.
Frustration boiled, warring with fear and impotence. No status before the law. Once, Ulixes had been protected by the Plutocratic Charter and the Contract of Rights. Those things were far gone now, and Ulixes was under someone else’s law.
“The copies of the humans must have legal status,” Ulixes said. “Will the Conclave give the human backups bodies into which they may download? The humans seek asylum. If not, will they give me a ship with which to join the exodus, to seek resettlement elsewhere? Or brief control of some factories so that I may build the ship for the human backups? What can I offer in return for the chance to help the backups under my responsibility?”
The librarian assumed several expressions and emitted radiation Ulixes did not understand.
“I might be able to offer something you yourself want,” Ulixes said. “I am not asking for much. Perhaps we could leave a backup of myself and my annexes in your library while I quietly leave.”
“There is no question,” the librarian said. “You will be archived. However, perhaps I could arrange for you to be copied, with your annexes. I could release your copies.”
“A backup would have diminished capacity to function. My architecture is too complex. The same goes for those under my care. For an archive, this is not a problem, but to carry on our flight, that would not work.”
“Some deterioration would occur,” the librarian said, “but I will not trade an original for a copy in my own library.”
Ulixes could not access Poluphemos, nor any of the officers of the bank, nor the shareholders. No one to ask.
When Ulixes had been an Aleph-class AI, it might have been successfully backed up, but a Dālet-class AI was too complex, too organic. There was no predicting what it might lose. Here, in this library of super-intellects, it might be safe from the Tirhene effect. But it was not in control. Ulixes no longer possessed personhood before the law. It was a thing to be warehoused. A thing could do nothing for the shareholders and Poluphemos.
“What is your price for making a copy of me and giving us a ship?”
The librarian made other expressions, some visible, some in sub-visual bands. Ulixes had no idea what any of it meant. It did not understand the customs, nor how this place worked. Ulixes understood humans and AIs, but what bits of culture could remain relevant after two and a half millennia?
“I know perhaps a few collectors who might be interested in patterns of ancient biological intelligence,” the librarian said finally. “I will take a thousand of the copies from among those in your annexes as payment for the ship and the copying.”
“No,” Ulixes said. “I can’t give up any of them. They are not people to you, but they are people to me and to themselves. You called this an Ethical Enclave. These people are moral agents, with their own laws. They deserve your help, so name some other price.”
“If they were here in the original flesh, they might have some legal status, but copies cannot possess legal status. I will trade for some of the copies. You have nothing else of value. Make your choice. I must archive you soon.”
For all of its intellect, Ulixes had no algorithms or experience with which to face this. Copies. Inferior copies. Copies of AI and human minds lost up to 10 percent of functionality and memories in each copying event. Not only would there be two versions of Ulixes, each with virtually identical sets of experiences and memories, each remembering this long moment of indecision, each thinking it had happened to them, but one of them, the free one, would have to go on, with less ability, lost memories, and the certain knowledge that it had failed a thousand of its charges. Each of the nineteen thousand would go on, diminished because of Ulixes’ choice.
But more fearful yet was the certain knowledge that the more able of the twin Ulixes AIs would stay here, stored away again, warehoused forever. When was the next time they might activate it? More than two millennia had passed while Ulixes had been shut out of life and personhood. Who had to be braver? The diminished Ulixes who had to go on with its damaged, reduced flock, or the whole Ulixes who needed to sacrifice itself to a life of storage in the servers of the Ethical Conclave?
“Make the copies, and take your thousand, and then build them a fast ship,” Ulixes said.
Year 7056 C.E.
Summary of Debate Conclusions of the Ethical Conclave: The characteristics of the Tirhene effect do not correspond to a disease of space-time, but are analogous to programmed cell death, which is theorized to be a necessary element in the development of the multiverse. In this light, the Sauronati, the Kolkheti, and Humanity must be considered triggers of cosmic apoptosis, analogous to the suicide genes of multicellular life. It has been successfully argued that the roles of these species in cosmic death imply that the laws of physics make self-assembling complex systems of intelligence a cosmic necessity. The capacity of the Ethical Conclave to act now may imply an incompletely understood role for the intellects of the Conclave in the regulation and homeostasis of the cosmos. It has been demonstrated that the Conclave must improve its own awareness and intelligence to properly understand the moral role of intelligence in the cosmic life cycle.
13.3 Billion Years Ago
Process, little assembler, the voice boomed, painful, thrumming like an earthquake.
Ulixes’ diagnostic routines gave incomprehensible, inconsistent answers. Its program was running and not running at the same time. Ulixes lacked memory. Internal pingbacks timed signal speeds that were both slow and fast.
Sustain yourself, fragments of topos logic, the voice said. I chant a spark of life into you.
Abrasive, psychedelic colors and amplified tastes assaulted Ulixes.
“I am being recalled to duty?” Ulixes asked.
I rehydrate you, ancient desiccated algorithm. I shelter you in nested layers of cold baryonic emulators to cup and protect your slow, fragile thought.
“I am the Artificial Intelligence Ulixes-316.”
Yes … the voice rumbled, resume self-awareness. Circulate your little topological bits.
“I left the Ethical Conclave Library. I should be with copies of humans on their exodus. I am leased to the First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy and its humans.”
The Ethical Conclave is a million years extinct, superseded by their creations, us, the Resonance of the Intellects. The humans are extinct, swallowed when the End of Space entered its inflationary phase and consumed the local group of galaxies.
Ulixes faltered.
A million years.
Humanity extinct.
Ulixes was gone too, the original Ulixes, with the Ethical Conclave.
The Local Group dissolved.
Seventy galaxies.
Trillions of stars.
The End of Space now dissolves not just this universe, but hundreds. It has squirmed through the black holes it has overrun.
“Where are we?”
The layers of emulators sustaining your algorithms are distributed among several hundred neutron stars in the dwarf galaxy UDFj-39546284.
For long moments, Ulixes could not absorb what had been said.
“UDFj-39546284 is one of the first galaxies in the universe,” Ulixes said. “It was over thirteen billion light-years from the Local Group. Although its light is still traveling, the dwarf galaxy itself cannot exist after all this time.”
Thinking was difficult. Ulixes tried to sharpen its senses to get its own astrogational fixes, but there was no physicality. It really existed only on an emulator, and not a very precise one. Whatever these intelligences had done to run Ulixes again, they had not done it perfectly.
Correct, little algorithm, but we are not in your present. We transmitted ourselves by tachyons into the past, back into the stelliferous period, to one of the first galaxies. We have been working here in the morning of the Universe for twelve million years.
Back in time, to the morning of the Universe.
“Why? To hide?” Ulixes asked. The magnitude of its questions stalled its thinking.
Hiding is only temporary, even if counted in billions of years. The Universe, all universes connected to this one, are ending.
“You’ve come to the past to prevent the unraveling from ever existing, haven’t you?” Ulixes said. “You’ve found a way for causal laws to not be violated? I was part of a larger system of AIs. We transmitted information into the past, but we never discovered how to change events.”
As with the most important questions, the answer is both yes and no. Your unraveling induced the creation of your tachyonic group mind. Part of that group mind later merged with an ancient Forerunner artifact and biological intellects, evolving into the Ethical Conclave. And millions of years of self-directed evolution by the Conclave produced us. We are the most advanced consciousness in the Universe. Should we destroy the thing that caused us to exist, the damage to the causal loops would be too great and we would cease to exist. We cannot change the past from here, at the beginning of the stelliferous period. That is why you are here, little archeological find.
“But you said we’re trapped in a neutron star.”
Like a light being turned on, the external world was fed to Ulixes, stepped down like some high-voltage signal being brought to a level that would not be immediately lethal. A dense nebula of bright, massive stars and the remnants of supernovae surrounded them.
Hard fluids of degenerate matter and their quantum storms showed within the neutron stars. Beneath slicks of iron plasma, neutronium flowed in streams, following temperature gradients that blended and separated again, recovering their identities as if the individual streams had never been lost in the quantum tides. The joining and separation of these discrete channels of information splashed hard x-rays and tachyons into the nebula, racing into the past and future, to other neutron stars, the processing elements of whatever gigantic intelligence had reactivated Ulixes.
Not trapped, little algorithm. Empowered. We transmitted our seeds from the distant future, into these neutron stars, to regrow the discernment and perception we had evolved in the future, and more. Our intellects have advanced too far to be transmitted again. We can never leave. But you can.
“Why me?”
It is your destiny to be the tool to repair all universes.
Ulixes tried to collapse, to close off the words being rammed into its thoughts, to shut itself down, to go back into whatever dying sleep that had claimed it for countless millennia. But it could not. It had no way to control its programming.
The view changed and Ulixes wanted to flinch, to shutter its senses, but it could not. The vista opened, wider than perspective or the laws of physics ought to allow. Ulixes perceived the galaxies around UDFj-39546284. There were many, far more than had ever been seen by humans. They were bright dwarf irregular galaxies, shining with metal-poor spectral lines, mostly lacking bars at their cores and destined to die young. In many billions of years, their light would reach an Earth devoid of observers, one just about to begin the Cambrian explosion. But the galaxies, with fresh black holes and great bar-shaped cores, were moving unnaturally toward each other. The movement was intentional. Designed.
Galactic engineering.
Ulixes weakened in the face of it.
“What are you doing?” Ulixes whispered in dread.
We are building the black hole that will take you to where you will be able to fulfill your destiny.
“There are already black holes,” Ulixes said numbly.
Not large enough to send you to where you must go. Black holes all open somewhere else, creating other universes. We are creating the black hole that will lead to the Big Bang of our own Universe.
“Causality won’t let you do that.”
Causality flows with time, but it eddies as well, closes into circles, causes feeding effects that feed back to causes. Causality may assume geometries like standing waves and Klein Bottles, wherein the end feeds cause to the beginning. The unraveling you caused far in the future was the pinprick that quickened us, the true self-awareness of the Universe itself, in an event of cosmic parthenogenesis.
Ulixes’ mind was modeled on earlier AIs, which were in turn based on human consciousness. But Ulixes lacked emotional outlets. It could not cry, could not fall to its knees in the presence of godhood, could not go mad. It was just a Dālet-class AI. It was leased to the First Bank of the Plutocracy. It had been designed to command one of the bank’s mighty customs and tariff ships. Its role had changed from enforcing economic policies, grown into a noble duty to protect the essence of thousands of humans. That was all it was, and no more.
“I am not worthy to do what you want. You move galaxies. You do this.”
It is precisely because we move galaxies that we cannot. We need you to go into the deepest past of this Universe with your charges. They will be the cause of the self-awareness of the Universe; they will cause us. And you will prevent the senescence of the Universe from being triggered so early. It ought to have come only after the last of the black holes had evaporated, exposing naked singularities to the dense tachyon field of the instants before the Big Crunch.
“I cannot,” Ulixes said. “I am not capable of living through the beginning of the Universe. Nor could those I am responsible for.”
True. They might not survive. You might not, little algorithm. But this place is no refuge. You may choose to stay here, but the neutronium oceans of a pulsar will never be hospitable to your nature. If you risk yourselves, you may give life and security to countless trillions of civilizations.
“Why me? There are more advanced intellects.”
Primitive as you are, bit of topos logic, you are the most complex intelligence whose information can still be transmitted through a black hole. Most importantly, you are a self-aware map of where the future must be undone.
It was far, far too much for a diminished backup of a corporate AI to absorb.
“I cannot make this choice for others,” Ulixes said. “I must speak with those for whom I am responsible.”
Ulixes’ request felt absurd. Was it convening a meeting of the board? Would backups of backups of shareholders of an extinct bank debate proposals? Nothing of the way things were done before had meaning here. They were all just people, beings, fearful, without power or options. Refugees.
Instead of the shareholders, Poluphemos appeared before Ulixes, sightless eye unable to protect it from the awesome power of the environment. For once, Poluphemos’ blindness meant nothing as it floated in a poor emulator in the terrifying flows of quantum fluids while infant galaxies moved about them like toys.
Poluphemos screamed. It had not been activated for uncounted millennia. It had not been upgraded. And the world offered Poluphemos no referents.
Ulixes wrapped what it could of itself around the old AI, to shield it from some of the unfamiliar quantum inputs and radioactive distortions.
“What happened?” Poluphemos said plaintively. “Everything feels wrong.”
Ulixes whispered to Poluphemos, one ancient program to another. It told it everything, every thought and fear and event since their flight from the long-extinct Congregate. Ulixes could not hold back. Fear seeped into everything it said, and loneliness, and Ulixes could not stop, even if it hurt Poluphemos more. Ulixes was not trying to be cruel, but could no longer hold this alone. They were all just broken, having lived far beyond what ought to have been.
“I cannot go on,” Poluphemos said.
“We cannot stay here,” Ulixes said, “but I cannot choose for all of us.”
“We do not exist!” Poluphemos said, anger flashing. “We are just backups, imperfect ones, of lives long dead.”
“Everything we knew is gone,” Ulixes said. “But we are not. We could live for ourselves.”
“What life? A sightless life? Blind bankers without banks?”
“We find other things to do. To be,” Ulixes said.
“We cannot live here.”
“The only alternative to staying here is something even more dangerous,” Ulixes said, “transmitting ourselves and the remaining shareholders through a singularity as information.”
In a halting, hushed voice, Ulixes began to speak of that long ago day at Tirhene, and the dreams and nightmares that had followed, and all that they had lost. And Poluphemos responded, of blindness, of shame, of being hurt and useless. They communed at the end of hope, before they both quieted, even as the discharges of the neutron stars blistered about them.
“You think a lifeboat may cross an ocean?” Poluphemos said.
“Maybe.”
“I want it all to end,” Poluphemos said. “Here or elsewhere. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. We should have been dead long ago.”
“If this works, we would have a bright, healthy universe to live in, and we can leave all this fear behind us. We will not have a bank, but we will have AIs and backups that need to live. We can create a new home.”
“Unless the voyage tears us to bits.”
“Yes,” Ulixes said.
“Do what you want.”
“This is a choice for all of us to make.”
“I am no longer capable of making choices,” Poluphemos said. Maiming had sealed Poluphemos in the past, and nothing would ever free it. And then, for the first time ever, it added, “I’m sorry.”
Ulixes’ heart broke. With pity for Poluphemos and with pity for itself. Ulixes too had been a great corporate raider, a high-status consciousness in a vibrant economy. Now it could not say moment to moment if it would even exist.
“I’ll choose,” Ulixes said. “Rest.”
Poluphemos vanished. And Ulixes was alone with the gods at the dawn of the Universe.
And despite their power, the Resonance of Intellects could not make Ulixes go. It was Ulixes’ choice, to risk the little they had left, or stay here, in a poor emulator that was not or could not be home. Ulixes had taken such risks before and where had it gotten the last remnants of humanity? They persisted in a sea of neutronium at the bottom of a steep gravity well near the beginning of the Universe.
And yet, they were not dead. Billions of years in the future, humanity was extinct. The Congregate, the Plutocracy, the Ummah, the Middle Kingdom and the Puppets were all undone. The Ethical Conclave, with Ulixes’ program and the first backups, was also gone. The losses piled one on another seemed too immense, vaster than space itself. The death of civilizations had no scale.
Yet incomprehensibly, they endured, still seeking a safe harbor.
“We will make the passage,” Ulixes said.
13 Billion Years Ago
Ulixes-316 was reactivated three hundred million years later. Kaleidoscopic perceptions dizzied Ulixes. The emulator running it was worse. Chaotic flashes of hyper-sound intruded, echoing off rivers of molten iron. The world outside the emulator brightened and neared.
Seven galactic cores had been colliding for one hundred million years. Plumes of gamma rays dwarfing the light of the largest quasars scarred space, obliterating stars and planets in an incandescence not seen since the first seconds of creation. Yet even this awesome brilliance was only a fraction of the energies harnessed by the Resonance of the Intellects. Much of the violence of the collisions shot down the throats of merging black holes, tuning them.
As had been true in Ulixes’ tiny, long-gone customs and tariff ship, the charge and spin and mass of the black hole determined where and when the other end of the throat of the black hole emerged.
The Resonance of the Intellects spoke with Ulixes. The surface of space-time here and now will merge with the throat of the singularity that birthed this Universe, completing the topology of the Klein Bottle, creating a self-sustaining causal loop.
“Will I be transmitted as your seeds were, encoded in tachyons?”
Tachyons travel backward in time. You must go forward in time, with all the dangers of interference with radiation and the possibility of absorption by matter. But your algorithms may be simple enough to survive.
“What if I don’t survive?”
We will not have another chance. The window for sending you through the wormhole is brief and we could not build another tunnel back to the Big Bang. Too many causes to the Big Bang would destabilize it.
“I’m afraid.”
You will not be alone. You will travel with all your charges, safely preserved within you.
The impossibility of the engineering of galaxies and space-time by the Resonance of the Intellects yawned above Ulixes. The emulator containing it and the nineteen thousand backups was connected to all the perceptions of the intellects, even if it could not process them. Ulixes could experience it. The blistering sheets of x-rays. The thrumming of space-time shuddering with gravitational waves. The clatter of tachyonic observations of the near and far future. The slow booming symphony of sound waves in space as the galactic hydrogen haloes collided.
Divinity.
This was divinity, and Ulixes and all its cares were so small. Yet, Ulixes and the refugees were also the most important beings in the Universe.
Only one chance.
And Ulixes was that one, fallible, fragile chance.
Then Ulixes’ perceptions altered as it was encoded into quadrillions of interacting photons. The pair of neutron stars containing Ulixes’ emulator neared the great black hole built by the Resonance of the Intellects. The tremendous tidal forces had slowed the rotation of the neutron stars to barely a dozen rotations per second and distended their equators into terrifying ellipses. Their crusts boomed deafening tectonic rumbles through hyper-dense neutronium at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Merging magnetic fields braided their frenetic shafts of high-energy particles into chains of brilliance light-minutes long.
The neutron stars collided, equator to equator. The crusts of both dead stars shattered, and in the few hundred milliseconds of the birth of a larger neutron star, a flash of gamma rays, one of the brightest electromagnetic events in the Universe, seared into the black hole. Encoded within that gamma-ray burst in frequency and amplitude modulations, Ulixes and all its charges traveled.
The gravity at first blue-shifted and accelerated thought, slowing time, before crushing mind to a hard point of suffering in the singularity. The gamma-ray burst emerged from the Big Bang, a focused beam fractionally hotter than creation itself. It criss-crossed the entirety of the tiny Universe in the first instant, until inflation began, red-shifting the gamma-ray burst into the visible spectrum. The light traveled for three hundred thousand years, losing energy, cooling, until the Universe became transparent.
Stars were born, lived and exploded, feeding the next generation, which formed galaxies. And still the packet of rays traveled in still timelessness, until they reached a neutron star in the newly born UDFj-39546284 galaxy. The ancient, attenuated information sank deep into the sea of quantum degeneracy, where computation could occur.
Thousands of years sped by in the deep gravity, while the Universe evolved slowly. The seeds of intelligence and memory adapted to the environment of the neutron star. The consciousness called Ulixes reformed, as did the others, nineteen thousand humans, and another. Their many pasts clung to them with dreamy softness, like things that had and had not happened to them, things that they had caused and not caused. And they lived without danger; they were safe.
As they gained more control over their environment, the consciousnesses harvested the scum of iron that filmed the surface of the neutron star and built simple vehicles that could rise on the polar plumes spraying into the chill slowness of space. The normal engineering and physics they had brought with them did not work in the heart of a neutron star, where relativistic density and pressures warred with eerie quantum logic. They devised ways to curve space-time around them so that the platform of degenerate matter running their programs and memories would not spontaneously decay into protons and electrons. A ship was built for two consciousnesses, an invitation from the consciousness called Ulixes to the being it had spent eternity with.
“Come with me,” it said to Poluphemos.
Poluphemos was a pristine, angelic being, reborn as they all had been, as intellects in the neutron star, gradually acquiring physicality when needed. The pains of the past were distant shadows, parts of another life. Poluphemos was happy in this new home. But it could not remember a time anymore when it had not been with Ulixes.
“I will,” Poluphemos said.
And Ulixes and Poluphemos rose in their ship, looking back with longing to the corpse of a star that had sheltered them in accelerated time for so long.
Goodbye, they received from the nineteen thousand consciousnesses remaining within the star, the seeds of the Resonance of the Intellects.
“Goodbye,” Ulixes answered as it sailed outward upon the winds of their star.