Judgment Engine

“Judgement Engine” was first published in Japanese translation for inclusion in a magnificent boxed set published by Pioneer. The set, called Artificial Life (Insects), contains an art book with computer graphics concepts by Daizaburo Harada, a CD-ROM, and a paperback book with this story, essays, and interviews with me and with Ryuichi Sakamoto. It is the most sumptuous presentation yet for my fiction—truly a stunning piece of work.

About the same time, Gregory Benford, a longtime friend, invited me to submit an original story to an anthology he was editing, Far Futures, to be published by Tor Books. The Japanese edition presented no difficulties, and so I was able to market the story as an original publication twice, always a good thing, though rare in my experience.

Among the hardest science fiction stories to write are those set in the near future, and the very far future. The near future is difficult because it takes only a few years for the reader and history to catch up with the story; maintaining believability in such circumstances is difficult. A typical mistake is inventing too many new words and new things, thus: “In the year 1990, John Jones entered the living room of his beautiful mistress, Leonora. He rubbed the lumo-cig across his palm, took a deep inhale of the herbivorous tobacco, and switched on the Tri-D set to catch the morning Dicto-news.” Only rarely does society accept a new word for something familiar, however expanded its capabilities. Thus, a cellular phone is still a phone, not a trans-palmer. A 3D TV is probably still going to be a TV, not a Tri-D visionater. An electronic nose flute is still going to be—well, you get the idea.

The far future is difficult to describe because so much will have changed. Mainstream literature often claims that there are eternal human verities, immutable qualities that will last throughout all eternity. I have severe doubts about this. There is so much variation just in our time, around the globe, in these so-called basic verities that I can’t imagine them not changing in the thousands of years to come.

The problem for a modern reader is that a believable story of the far future may also be incomprehensible. (To wit: “Fergon grabbed his twad with something very like glee, and obnoxiously asserted his right to snorg and wippie in the middle of the info-stream.” Lewis Carroll, anyone?)

I’ve touched on the far future in a number of stories in this collection: “Hardfought,” “The Fall of the House of Escher,” and this one. Just to keep the attention of contemporary, mortal humans, I’ve stuck with a few of the eternal human verities in each of these tales.

I’m sure the real inhabitants of the distant future will forgive me. Or, to use their parlance, undergo complete snorgwhup and carn-symp on my case.

WE

Seven tributaries disengage from their social=mind and Library and travel by transponder to the School World. There they are loaded into a temporary soma, an older physical model with eight long, flexible red legs. Here the seven become We.

We have received routine orders from the Teacher Annex. We are to investigate student labor on the Great Plain of History, the largest physical feature on the School World. The students have been set to searching all past historical records, donated by the nine remaining Libraries. Student social=minds are sad; they will not mature before Endtime. They are the last new generation and their behavior is often aberrant. There may be room for error.

The soma sits in an enclosure. We become active and advance from the enclosure’s shadow into a light shower of data condensing from the absorbing clouds high above. We see radiation from the donating Libraries, still falling on School World from around the three remaining systems; We hear the lambda whine of storage in the many rows of black hemispheres perched on the plain; we feel a patter of drops on our black carapace.

We stand at the edge of the plain, near a range of bare brown and black hills left over from planetary reformation. The air is thick and cold. It smells sharply of rich data moisture, wasted on us; We do not have readers on our surface. The moisture dews up on the dark, hard ground under our feet, evaporates, and is reclaimed by translucent soppers. The soppers flit through the air, a tenth our size and delicate.

The hemispheres are maintained by single–tributary somas. They are tiny, marching along the rows by the hundreds of thousands.

The brilliant violet sun appears in the west, across the plain, surrounded by streamers of intense blue. The streamers curl like flowing hair. Sun and streamers cast multiple shadows from each black hemisphere. The sun attracts our attention. It is beautiful, not part of a Library simscape; this scape is real. It reminds us of approaching Endtime; the changes made to conserve and concentrate the last available energy have rendered the scape beautifully novel, unfamiliar to the natural birth algorithms of our tributaries.

The three systems are unlike anything that has ever been. They contain all remaining order and available energy. Drawn close together, surrounded by the permutation of local space and time, the three systems deceive the dead outer universe, already well into the dull inaction of the long Between. We are proud of the three systems. They took a hundred million years to construct, and a tenth of all remaining available energy. They were a gamble. Nine of thirty–seven major Libraries agreed to the gamble. The others spread themselves into the greater magnitudes of the Between, and died.

The gamble worked.

Our soma is efficient and pleasant to work with. All of our tributaries agree, older models of such equipment are better. We have an appointment with the representative of the School World students, student tributaries lodged in a newer model soma called a Berkus, after a social=mind on Second World, which designed it. A Berkus soma is not favored. It is noisy; perhaps more efficient, but brasher and less elegant. We agree it will be ugly.

Data clouds swirl and spread tendrils high over the plain. The single somas march between our legs, cleaning unwanted debris from the black domes. Within the domes, all history. We could reach down and crush one with the claws on a single leg, but that would slow Endtime Work and waste available energy. We are proud of such stray, antisocial thoughts, and more proud still that We can ignore them. They show that We are still human, still linked directly to the past.

We are teachers. All teachers must be linked with the past, to understand and explain. Teachers must understand error; the past is rich with pain and error.

We await the Berkus.

Too much time passes. The world turns away from the sun and night falls. Centuries of Library time pass, but We try to be patient and think in the flow of external time. Some of our tributaries express a desire to taste the domes, but there is no real need, and this would also waste available energy.

With night, more data fills the skies from the other systems, condenses, and rains down, covering us with a thick sheen. Soppers again clean our carapace. All around, the domes grow richer, absorbing history. We see, in the distance, a night interpreter striding on giant disjointed legs between the domes. It eats the domes and returns white mounds of discard. All the domes must be interpreted to see if any of the history should be carried by the final Endtime self.

The final self will cross the Between, order held in perfect inaction, until the Between has experienced sufficient rest and boredom. It will cross that point when time and space become granular and nonlinear, when the unconserved energy of expansion, absorbed at the minute level of the quantum foam, begins to disturb the metric. The metric becomes noisy and irregular, and all extension evaporates. The universe has no width, no time, and all is back at the beginning.

The final self will survive, knitting itself into the smallest interstices, armored against the fantastic pressures of a universe’s deathsound. The quantum foam will give up its noise and new universes will bubble forth and evolve. One will transcend. The transcendent reality will absorb the final self, which will seed it. From the compression should arise new intelligent beings.

It is an important thing, and all teachers approve. The past should cover the new, forever. It is our way to immortality.

Our tributaries express some concern. We are to be sure not on a vital mission, but the Berkus is very late. Something has gone wrong. We investigate our links and find them cut. Transponders do not reply.

The ground beneath our soma trembles. Hastily, the soma retreats from the plain of history. It stands by a low hill, trying to keep steady on its eight red legs. The clouds over the plain turn green and ragged. The single somas scuttle between vibrating hemispheres, confused.

We cannot communicate with our social=mind or Library. No other libraries respond. Alarmed, We appeal to the School World Student Committee, then point our thoughts up to the Endtime Work Coordinator, but they do not answer, either.

The endless kilometers of low black hemispheres churn as if stirred by a huge stick. Cracks appear, and from the cracks, thick red fluid drops; the drops crystallize into high, tall prisms. Many of the prisms shatter and turn to dead white powder.

We realize with great concern that We are seeing the internal stored data of the planet itself. This is a reserve record of all Library knowledge, held condensed; the School World contains selected records from the dead Libraries, more information than any single Library could absorb in a billion years. The knowledge shoots through the disrupted ground in crimson fountains, wasted.

Our soma retreats deeper into the hills.

Nobody answers our emergency signal.

Nobody will speak to us, anywhere.

More days pass. We are still cut off from the Library. Isolated, We are limited only to what the soma can perceive, and that makes no sense at all.

We have climbed a promontory overlooking what was once the Great Plain of History. Where once our students worked to condense and select those parts of the past that would survive the Endtime, the hideous leaking of reserve knowledge has slowed and an equally hideous round of what seems to be amateurish student exercises work themselves in rapid time.

Madness covers the plain. The hemispheres have all disintegrated, and the single somas and interpreters have vanished.

Now, everywhere on the plain, green and red and purple forests grow and die in seconds; new trees push through the dead snags of the old. New kinds of tree invade from the west and push aside their predecessors. Climate itself accelerates: the skies grew heavy with cataracting clouds made of water, and rain falls in sinuous sheets. Steam twists and pullulates. The ground becomes hot with change.

Trees themselves come to an end and crumble away; huge solid brown and red domes balloon on the plain, spread thick shell–leaves like opening cabbages, push long shoots through their crowns. The shoots tower above the domes and bloom with millions of tiny gray and pink flowers.

Watching all our work and plans destroyed, the seven tributaries within our soma offer dismayed hypotheses: this is a malfunction, the conservation and compression engines have failed and all knowledge is being acted out uselessly; no, it is some new gambit of the Endtime Work Coordinator, an emergency project; on the contrary, it is a political difficulty, lack of communication between the Coordinator and the Libraries, and it will all be over soon…

We watch shoots topple with horrendous snaps and groans, domes collapse in brown puffs of corruption.

The scape begins anew.

More hours pass, and still no communication with any other social=minds. We fear our Library itself has been destroyed; what other explanation for our abandonment? We huddle on our promontory, seeing patterns but no sense. Each generation of creativity brings something different, something that eventually fails or is rejected.

Today, large–scale vegetation is the subject of interest. The next day, vegetation is ignored for a rush of tiny biologies, no change visible from where We stand, our soma still and watchful on its eight sturdy legs. We shuffle our claws to avoid a carpet of reddish growth surmounting the rise. By nightfall, We see, the mad scape could claim this part of the hill and We will have to move.

The sun approaches zenith. All shadows vanish. Its violet magnificence humbles us, a feeling We are not used to. We are from the great social=minds of the Library; humility and awe come from our isolation and concern. Not for a billion years have any of our tributaries felt so removed from useful enterprise. If this is the Endtime overtaking us, overcoming all our efforts, so be it. We feel resolve, pride at what We have managed to accomplish.

Then, We receive a simple message. The meeting with the students will take place. The Berkus will find us and explain. But We are not told when.

Something has gone very wrong, that students should dictate to their teachers, and should put so many tributaries through this kind of travail.

The concept of mutiny is studied by all the tributaries within the soma. It does not explain much. New hypotheses occupy our thinking. Perhaps the new matter of which all things were now made has itself gone wrong, destabilizing our worlds and interrupting the consolidation of knowledge; that would explain the scape’s ferment and our isolation. It might explain unstable and improper thought processes. Or, the students have allowed some activity on School World to run wild; error.

The scape pushes palace–like glaciers over its surface, gouging itself in painful ecstasy: change, change, birth and decay, all in a single day, but slower than the rush of forests and living things. We might be able to remain on the promontory.

Why are We treated so?

We keep to the open, holding our ground, clearly visible, concerned but unafraid. We are of older stuff. Teachers have always been of older stuff.

Could We have been party to some mis–instruction, to cause such a disaster? What have We taught that might push our students into manic creation and destruction? We search all records, all memories, contained within the small soma. The full memories of our seven tributaries have not of course been transferred into the extension; it was to be a temporary assignment, and besides, the records would not fit. The lack of capacity hinders our thinking and We find no satisfying answers.

One of our tributaries has brought along some personal records. It has a long shot hypothesis and suggests that an ancient prior self be activated to provide an objective judgment engine. There are two reasons: the stronger is that this ancient self once, long ago, had a connection with a tributary making up the Endtime Work Coordinator. If the problem is political, perhaps the self’s memories can give us deeper insight. The second and weaker reason: truly, despite our complexity and advancement, perhaps We have missed something important. Perhaps this earlier, more primitive self will see what We have missed.

There is indeed so little time; isolated as We are from a greater river of being, a river that might no longer exist, We might be the last fragment of social=mind to have any chance of combating planet–wide madness.

There is barely enough room to bring the individual out of compression. It sits beside the tributaries in the thought plenum, in distress and not functional. What it perceives it does not understand.

Our questions are met with protests and more questions.

The Engine

I come awake, aware. I sense a later and very different awareness, part of a larger group. My thoughts spin with faces to which I try to apply names, but my memory falters. These fade and are replaced by gentle calls for attention, new and very strange sensations.

I label the sensations around me: other humans, but not in human bodies. They seem to act together while having separate voices. I call the larger group the We–ness, not me and yet in some way accessible, as if part of my mind and memory.

I do not think that I have died, that I am dead. But the quality of my thought has changed. I have no body, no sensations of liquid pumping and breath flowing in and out.

Isolated, confused, I squat behind the We–ness’s center of observation, catching glimpses of a chaotic, high–speed landscape. Are they watching some entertainment?

I worry that I am in a hospital, in recovery, forced to consort with other patients who cannot or will not speak with me. I try to collect my last meaningful memories. I remember a face again and give it a name and relation: Elisaveta, my wife, standing beside me as I lie on a narrow bed. Machines bend over me. I remember nothing after that.

But I am not in a hospital, not now.

Voices speak to me and I begin to understand some of what they say. The voices of the We–ness are stronger, more complex and richer, than anything I have ever experienced.

I do not hear them.

I have no ears.

“You’ve been stored inactive for a very long time,” the We–ness tells me. It is (or they are) a tight–packed galaxy of thoughts, few of them making any sense at all.

Then I know.

I have awakened in the future. Thinking has changed.

“I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who you are …”

“We are joined from seven tributaries, some of whom once had existence as individual biological beings. You are an ancient self of one of us.”

“Oh,” I say. The word seems wrong without lips or throat. I will not use it again.

“We’re facing great problems. You’ll provide unique insights.” The voice expresses overtones of fatherliness and concern.

I do not believe it. Blackness paints me.

“I’m hungry but I can’t feel my body. Where am I? I’m afraid. I miss … my family.”

“There is no body, no need for hunger, no need for food. Your family—our family—no longer lives.”

“How did I get here?”

“You were stored before a major medical reconstruction, to prevent total loss. Your stored self was kept as a kind of an historical record, as a memento.”

I don’t remember any of that, but then, how could I? I remember signing contracts to allow such a thing. I remember thinking about the possibility I would awake in the future. But I did not die! “How long has it been?”

“Twelve billion two hundred and seventy–nine million years.”

Had the We–ness said, Ten thousand years, or even two hundred years, I might feel some visceral reaction. All I know is that such an enormous length of time is beyond geological. It is cosmological. I do not believe in it.

I glimpse the landscape again, glaciers slipping down mountain slopes, clouds pregnant with winter building gray and orange in the stinging glare of a huge setting sun. The sun is all wrong—too bright, too violet. It resembles a dividing cell, all extrusions and blebs and long ribbons of streaming hair. It could be Medusa, one of the Gorgon sisters.

The edges of the glaciers calve pillars of white ice that topple and shatter across hills and valleys. I have awakened in the middle of an ice age. But it is fast, too fast.

Nothing makes sense.

“Is all of me here?” I ask. Perhaps, lacking a whole mind, I am delusional.

“The most important part of you is here. We would like to ask you some questions. Do you recognize any of the following faces/voices/thought patterns/styles?”

Disturbing synesthesia—bright sounds, loud colors, dull electric smells—fill my senses and I close them out as best I can. “No! That isn’t right. Please, no questions until I know what’s happened. No! That hurts!”

The We–ness prepares to turn me off, to shut me down. I am warned that I will again become inactive. Just before I wink out, I feel a cold blast of air crest the promontory on which the We–ness, and I, sit. Glaciers now blanket the hills and valleys. The We–ness flexes eight fluid red legs, pulling them from quick–freezing mud.

The sun still has not set.

Thousands of years in a day.

I am given sleep as blank as death, but not so final.

We gather as one and consider the problem of the faulty interface. “This is too early a self. It doesn’t understand our way of thinking,” one tributary says. “We must adapt to it.”

The tributary whose prior self this was volunteers to begin re–structuring.

“There is so little time,” says another, who now expresses strong disagreement with the plan to resurrect. “Are We truly agreed this is best?”

We threaten to fragment as two of the seven tributaries vehemently object. But solidarity holds. All tributaries flow again to renewed agreement. We start the construction of an effective interface, which first requires deeper understanding of the nature of the ancient self.

This takes some more precious time. The glacial cold nearly kills us. The soma changes its fluid nature by linking liquid water with long–chain and even more slippery molecules, highly resistant to freezing.

“Do the students know We’re here, that We watch?” asks a tributary.

“They must …” says another. “They express a willingness to meet with us.”

“Perhaps they lie, and they mean to destroy this soma, and us with it. There will be no meeting.”

Dull sadness.

We restructure the ancient self, wrap it in our new interface, build a new plenary face to hold us all on equal ground, and call it up again, saying,

Vasily

I know the name, recognize the fatherly voice, feel a new clarity. I wish I could forget the first abortive attempt to live again, but my memory is perfect from the point of first rebirth on. I will forget nothing.

“Vasily, your descendant self does not remember you. It has purged older memories many times since your existence, but We recognize some similarities even so between your patterns. Birth patterns are strong and seldom completely erased. Are you comfortable now?”

I think of a simple place where I can sit. I want wood paneling and furniture and a fireplace, but I am not skilled; all I can manage is a small gray cubicle with a window on one side. In the wall is a hole through which the voices come. I imagine I am hearing them through flesh ears, and a kind of body forms within the cubicle. This body is my security. “I’m still afraid. I know—there’s no danger.”

“There is danger, but We do not yet know how significant the danger is.”

Significant carries an explosion of information. If their original selves still exist elsewhere, in a social=mind adjunct to a Library, then all that might be lost will be immediate memories. A social=mind, I understand, is made up of fewer than ten thousand tributaries. A Library typically contains a trillion or more social minds.

“I’ve been dead for billions of years,” I say, hoping to address my future self. “But you’ve lived on—you’re immortal.”

“We do not measure life or time as you do. Continuity of memory is fragmentary in our lives, across eons. But continuity of access to the Library—and access to records of past selves—does confer a kind of immortality. If that has ended, We are completely mortal.”

“I must be so primitive,” I say, my fear oddly fading now. This is a situation I can understand—life or death. I feel more solid within my cubicle. “How can I be of any use?”

“You are primitive in the sense of firstness. That is why you have been activated. Through your life experience, you may have a deeper understanding of what led to our situation. Argument, rebellion, desperation … These things are difficult for us to deal with.”

Again, I don’t believe them. From what I can tell, this group of minds has a depth and strength and complexity that makes me feel less than a child … perhaps less than a bacterium. What can I do except cooperate? I have nowhere else to go…

For billions of years … inactive. Not precisely death.

I remember that I was once a teacher.

Elisaveta had been my student before she became my wife.

The We–ness wants me to teach it something, to do something for it. But first, it has to teach me history.

“Tell me what’s happened,” I say.

The Libraries

In the beginning, human intelligences arose, and all were alone. That lasted for tens of thousands of years. Soon after understanding the nature of thought and mind, intelligences came together to create group minds, all in one. Much of the human race linked in an intimacy deeper than sex. Or unlinked to pursue goals as quasi–individuals; the choices were many, the limitations few. (This all began a few decades after your storage.) Within a century, the human race abandoned biological limitations, in favor of the social=mind. Social=minds linked to form Libraries, at the top of the hierarchy.

The Libraries expanded, searching around star after star for other intelligent life. They found life—millions upon millions of worlds, each rare as a diamond among the trillions of barren star systems, but none with intelligent beings. Gradually, across millions of years, the Libraries realized that they were the All of intelligent thought.

We had simply exchanged one kind of loneliness for a greater and more final isolation. There were no companion intelligences, only those derived from humanity…

As the human Libraries spread and connections between them became more tenuous—some communications taking thousands of years to be completed—many social=minds re–individuated, assuming lesser degrees of togetherness and intimacy. Even in large Libraries, individuation became a crucial kind of relaxation and holiday. The old ways reasserted.

Being human, however, some clung to old ways, or attempted to enforce new ones, with greater or lesser tenacity. Some asserted moral imperative. Madness spread as large groups removed all the barriers of individuation, in reaction to what they perceived as a dangerous atavism—the “lure of the singular.”

These “uncelled” or completely communal Libraries, with their slow, united consciousness, proved burdensome and soon vanished—within half a million years. They lacked the range and versatility of the “celled” Libraries.

But conflicts between differing philosophies of social=mind structure continued. There were wars.

Even in wars the passions were not sated; for something more frightening had been discovered than loneliness: the continuity of error and cruelty. After tens of millions of years of steady growth and peace, the renewed paroxysms dismayed us. No matter how learned or advanced a social=mind became, it could, in desperation or in certain moments of development, perform acts analogous to the errors of ancient, individuated societies. It could kill other social=minds, or sever the activities of many of its own tributaries. It could frustrate the fulfillment of other minds. It could experience something like rage, but removed from the passions of the body: rage cold and precise and long–lived, terrible in its persuasiveness, dreadful in its consequences. Even worse, it could experience indifference.

I tumble through these records, unable to comprehend the scale of what I see. Our galaxy was linked star to star with webworks of transferred energy and information; but large sectors of the galaxy were darkened by massive conflict, and millions of stars turned off, shut down.

This was war.

At the scale of individual humans, planets seemed to revert to ancient Edens, devoid of artifice or instrumentality; but the trees and animals themselves carried myriads of tiny machines, and the ground beneath them was an immense thinking system, down to the core …

Other worlds, and other structures between worlds, seemed as abstract and meaningless as the wanderings of a stray brush on canvas.

The Proof

One great social=mind, retreating from the ferment of the Libraries, formulated the rules of advanced meta–biology, and found them precisely analogous to those governing planet–bound ecosystems: competition, victory through survival, evolution and reproduction. It proved that error and pain and destruction are essential to any change—but more importantly, to any growth.

The great social=mind carried out complex experiments simulating millions of different ordering systems, and in every single case, the rise of complexity (and ultimately intelligence) led to the wanton destruction of prior forms. Using these experiments to define axioms, what began as a scientific proof ended as a rigorous mathematical proof:

There can be no ultimate ethical advancement in this universe

The indifference of the universe—reality’s grim and mindless harshness—is multiplied by the necessity that old order, prior thoughts and lives, must be extinguished to make way for new.

After checking its work many times, the great social=mind wiped its stores and erased its infrastructure in, on and around seven worlds and the two stars, leaving behind only the formulation and the Proof.

For Libraries across the galaxy, absorption of the Proof led to mental disruption. From the nightmare of history there was to be no awakening.

Suicide was one way out. A number of prominent Libraries brought their own histories to a close. Others recognized the validity of the Proof, but did not commit suicide. They lived with the possibility of error and destruction. And still, they grew wiser, greater in scale and accomplishment …

Crossing from galaxy to galaxy, still alone, the Libraries realized that human perception was the only perception. The Proof would never be tested against the independent minds of non–human intelligences.

In this universe, the Proof must stand.

Billions of years passed, and the universe became a huge kind of house, confining a practical infinity of mind, an incredible ferment which “burned” the available energy with torchy brilliance, decreasing the total life span of reality.

Yet the Proof remained unassailed.

Wait. I don’t see anything here. I don’t feel anything. This isn’t history; it’s … too large! I can’t understand some of the things you show me … But worse, pardon me, it’s babbling among minds who feel no passion. This We–ness … how do you feel about this?

You are distracted by preconceptions. You long for an organic body, and assume that lacking organic bodies, We experience no emotions. We experience emotions. Listen to them>>>>>

I squirm in my cubicle and experience their emotions of first and second loneliness, degrees of isolation from old memories, old selves; longing for the first individuation, the Birth–time … Hunger for understanding not just of the outer reality, beyond the social=mind’s vast internal universe of thought, but of the ever–changing currents and orderliness arising between tributaries. Here is social and mental interaction as a great song, rich and joyous, a love greater than anything I can remember experiencing as an embodied human. Greater emotions still, outside my range again, of loyalty and love for a social=mind and something like respect for the immense Libraries. (I am shown what the We–ness says is an emotion experienced at the level of Libraries, but it is so far beyond me that I seem to disintegrate, and have to be coaxed back to wholeness.)

A tributary approaches across the mind space within the soma. My cubicle grows dim. I feel a strange familiarity again.

This will be, this is, my future self.

This tributary feels sadness and some grief, touching its ancient self—me. It feels pain at my limitations, at my tight–packed biological character. Things deliberately forgotten come back to haunt it.

And they haunt me. My own inadequacies become abundantly clear. I remember useless arguments with friends, making my wife cry with frustration, getting angry at my children for no good reason. My childhood and adolescent indiscretions return like shadows on a scrim. And I remember my drives: rolling in useless lust, and later, Elisaveta! With her young and supple body.

And others.

Just as significant, but different in color, the cooler passions of discovery and knowledge, my growing self–awareness. I remember fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, of not being a useful member of society. I needed above all (more than I needed Elisaveta) to be important and to teach and be influential on young minds.

All of these emotions, the We–ness demonstrates, have analogous emotions at their level. For the We–ness, the most piercing unpleasantness of all—akin to physical pain—comes from recognition of their possible failure. The teachers may not have taught their students properly, and the students may be making mistakes.

“Let me get all this straight,” I say. I grow used to my imagined state—to riding like a passenger within the cubicle, inside the eight–legged soma, to seeing as if through a small window the advancing and now receding of the glaciers. “You’re teachers—as I was once a teacher—and you used to be connected to a larger social=mind, part of a Library.” I mull over mind as society, society as mind. “But there may have been a revolution. After billions of years! Students … A revolution! Extraordinary! You’ve been cut off from the Library. You’re alone, you might be killed … And you’re telling me about ancient history?”

The We–ness falls silent.

“I must be important,” I say with an unbreathed sigh, a kind of asterisk in the exchanged thoughts. “I can’t imagine why. But maybe it doesn’t matter—I have so many questions!” I hunger for knowledge of what has become of my children, of my wife. Of everything that came after me …

All the changes!

“We need information from you, and your interpretation of certain memories. Vasily was our name once. Vasily Gerazimov. You were the husband of Elisaveta, father of Maxim and Giselle … We need to know more about Elisaveta.”

“You don’t remember her?”

“Twelve billion years have passed. Time and space have changed. This tributary alone has since partnered and bonded and matched and socialized with perhaps fifty billion individuals and tributaries. Our combined tributaries in the social=mind have had contacts with all intelligent beings, once or twice removed. Most have dumped or stored memories more than a billion years old. If We were still connected to the Library, I could learn more about my past. I have kept you as a kind of memento, a talisman, and nothing more.”

I feel a freezing awe. Fifty billion mates … Or whatever they had been. I catch fleeting glimpses of liaisons in the social=mind, binary, trinary, as many as thousands at a time linked in the crumbling remnants of marriage and sexuality, and finally those liaisons passing completely out of favor, fashion, or usefulness.

“Elisaveta and you,” the tributary continues, “were divorced ten years after your storage. I remember nothing of the reasons why. We have no other clues to work with.”

The “news” comes as a doubling of my pain, a renewed and expanded sense of isolation from a loved one. I reach up to touch my face, to see if I am crying. My hands pass through imagined flesh and bone. My body is long since dust; Elisaveta’s body is dust.

What went wrong between us? Did she find another lover? Did I? I am a ghost. I should not care. There were difficult times, but I never thought of our liaison—our marriage, I would defend that word even now—as temporary. Still, across billions of years! We have become immortal—her perhaps more than I, who remember nothing of the time between. “Why do you need me at all? Why do you need clues?”

But We are interrupted. An extraordinary thing happens to the retreating glaciers. From our promontory, the soma half–hidden behind an upthrust of frozen and deformed knowledge, We see the icy masses blister and bubble as if made of some superheated glass or plastic. Steam bursts from the bubbles—at least, what appears to be steam—and freezes in the air in shapes suggesting flowers. All around, the walls and sheets of ice succumb to this beautiful plague.

The We–ness understands it no more than I.

From the hill below come faint sounds and hints of radiation—gamma rays, beta particles, mesons, all clearly visible to the We–ness, and vaguely passed on to me as well.

“Something’s coming,” I say.

The Berkus advances in its unexpected cloud of production–destruction. There is something deeply wrong with it—it squanders too much available energy. Its very presence disrupts the new matter of which We are made.

Of the seven tributaries, four feel an emotion rooted in the deepest algorithms of their pasts: fear. Three have never known such bodily functions, have never known mortal and embodied individuation. They feel intellectual concern and a tinge of cosmic sadness, as if our end might be equated with the deaths of stars and galaxies. We keep to our purpose despite these ridiculous excursions, the increasing and disturbing signs of our disorder.

The Berkus advances up the hill.

I see through my window this monumental and absolutely horrifying creature, shining with a brightness comprised of the qualities of diamonds and polished silver, a scintillating insect pushing its sharply pointed feet into the thawing soil, steam rising all around. The legs hold together despite gaps where joints should be, gaps crossed only by something that produces hard radiation. Below the Berkus (so the We–ness calls it), the ground ripples as if School World has muscles and twitches, wanting to scratch.

The Berkus pauses and sizes up our much less powerful, much smaller soma with blasts of neutrons, flicked as casually as a flashlight beam. The material of our soma wilts and reforms beneath this withering barrage. The soma expresses distress—and inadvertently, the We–ness translates this distress to me as tremendous pain.

Within my confined mental space, I explode …

Again comes the blackness.

The Berkus decides it is not necessary to come any closer. That is fortunate for us and for our soma. Any lessening of the distance could prove fatal.

The Berkus communicates with pulsed light. “Why are you here?”

“We have been sent here to observe and report. We are cut off from the Library—”

“Your Library has fled,” the Berkus informs us. “It disagreed with the Endtime Work Coordinator.”

“We were told nothing of this.”

“It was not our responsibility. We did not know you would be here.”

The magnitude of this rudeness is difficult to envelope. We wonder how many tributaries the Berkus contains. We hypothesize that it might contain all of the students, the entire student social=mind, and this would explain its use of energy and change in design.

Our pitiful ancient individual flickers back into awareness and sits quietly, too stunned to protest.

“We do not understand the purpose of this creation and destruction,” We say. Our strategy is to avoid the student tributaries altogether now. Still, they might tell us more We need to know.

“It must be obvious to teachers,” the Berkus says. “By order of the Coordinator, We are rehearsing all possibilities of coherence, usurping stored knowledge down to the planetary core and converting it. There must be an escape from the Proof.”

“The Proof is an ancient discovery. It has never been shown to be wrong. What can it possibly mean to the Endtime Work?”

“It means a great deal,” the Berkus says.

“How many are you?”

The Berkus does not answer. All this has taken place in less than a millionth of a second. The Berkus’s incommunication lengthens into seconds, then minutes.

Around us, the glaciers crumple like mud caught in rushing water.

“Another closed path, of no value,” the Berkus finally says.

“We wish to understand your motivations. Why this concern with the Proof? And what does it have to do with the change you provoke, the destruction of School World’s knowledge?”

The Berkus rises on a tripod of three disjointed legs, waving its other legs in the air, a cartoon medallion so disturbing in design that We draw back a few meters. “The Proof is a cultural aberration,” it radiates fiercely, blasting our surface and making the mud around us bubble. “It is not fit to pass on to those who seed the next reality. You failed us. You showed no way beyond the Proof. The Endtime Work has begun, the final self chosen to fit through the narrow gap—”

I see all this through the We–ness as if I have been there, have lived it, and suddenly I know why I have been recalled, why the We–ness has shown me faces and patterns.

The universe, across more than twelve billion years, grows irretrievably old. From spanning the galaxies billions of years before, all life and intelligence—all arising from the sole intelligence in all the universe, humanity—have shrunk to a few star systems. These systems have been resuscitated and nurtured by concentrating the remaining available energy of thousands of dead galaxies.

And they are no longer natural star systems with planets—the bloated, coma–wrapped violet star rising at zenith is a congeries of plasma macromachines, controlling and conserving every gram of the natural matter remaining, harnessing every erg of available energy. These artificial suns pulse like massive living cells, shaped to be ultimately efficient and to squeeze every moment of active life over the time remaining. The planets themselves have been condensed, recarved, rearranged—and they too are composed of geological macromachines.

With some dread, I gather that the matter of which all these things are made is itself artificial, with redesigned component particles. The natural galaxies have died, reduced to a colorless murmur of useless heat, and the particles of all original creation—besides those marshaled and remade in these three close–packed systems—have dulled and slowed and unwound. Gravity itself has lost its bearings and become a chancy phenomenon, supplemented by new forces generated within the macromachine planets and suns. Nothing is what it seems, and nothing is what it had been when I lived.

The We–ness looks forward to less than four times ten to the fiftieth units of Planck time—roughly an old Earth year.

And in charge of it all, controlling the Endtime Work, a supremely confident social=mind composed of many “tributaries,” and among those gathered selves…

Someone very familiar to me indeed.

My wife.

“Where is she? Can I speak to her? What happened to her? Did she die, was she stored—did she live?”

The We–ness seems to vibrate both from my reaction to this information, and to the spite of the Berkus. I am assigned to a quiet place where I can watch and listen without bothering them.

I feel our soma, our insect–like body, dig into the loosening substance of the promontory.

“You taught us the Proof was absolute,” the Berkus says, “that throughout all time, in all circumstances, error and destruction and pain will accompany growth and creation, that the universe must remain indifferent and randomly hostile. We do not accept that.”

“But why dissolve links with the Library?” We cry, even as We shrink beneath the Berkus’s glare. The constantly reconstructed body of the Berkus channels and consumes energy with enormous waste, as if the students do not care, intent only on their frantic mission, whatever that might be … Reducing available active time by days for all of us—

I know why! I know the reason! I shout in the quiet place, but I am not heard, or not paid attention to.

“Why condemn us to a useless end in this chaos, this madness?” We ask.

“Because We must refute the Proof and there is so little useful time remaining. The final self must not be sent over carrying this burden of error.”

“Of sin!” I shout, still not heard. Proof of the validity of primordial sin—that everything living must eat, must destroy, must climb up the ladder on the backs of miserable victims. That all true creation involves death and pain; the universe is a charnel house.

I am fed and study the Proof. I try to encompass the principles and expressions, no longer given as words, but as multi–sense abstractions. In the Proof, miniature universes of discourse are created, manipulated, reduced to an expression, and discarded: the Proof is more complex than any single human life, or even the life of a species, and its logic is not familiar. The Proof is rooted in areas of mental experience I am not equipped to understand, but I receive glosses.

Law: Any dynamic system (I understand this as organism) has limited access to resources, and a limited time in which to achieve its goals. A multitude of instances are drawn from history, as well as from an artificial miniature universe. Other laws follow regarding behavior of systems within a flow of energy, but they are completely beyond me.

Observed Law: The goals of differing organisms, even of like variety, never completely coincide. History and the miniature universe teem with instances, and the Proof lifts these up for inspection at moments of divergence, demonstrating again and again this obvious point.

Then comes a roll of deductions, backed by examples too numerous for me to absorb:

And so it follows that for any complex of organisms, competition must arise for limited resources.

From this: some will succeed, some will fail, to acquire resources sufficient to live. Those who succeed, express themselves in later generations.

From this: New dynamic systems will arise to compete more efficiently.

From this: Competition and selection will give rise to *streamlined* organisms that are incapable of surviving even in the midst of plenty because they are not equipped with complete methods of absorbing resources. These will prey on complete organisms to acquire their resources.

And in return, the prey will acquire a reliance on the predators to hone their fitness.

From this: Other forms of *streamlining* will occur. Some of the resulting systems will become diseases and parasites, depending entirely on others for reproduction and fulfillment of basic goals.

From this: Ecosystems will arise, interdependent, locked in predator–prey, disease–host relationships.

I experience a multitude of rigorous experiments, unfolding like flowers.

And so it follows that in the course of competition, some forms will be outmoded and will pass away, and others will be preyed upon to extinction, without regard to their beauty, their adaptability to a wide range of possible conditions.

I sense here a kind of aesthetic judgment, above the fray: beautiful forms will die without being fully tested, their information lost, their opportunities limited.

And so it follows…

And so it follows…

The ecosystems increase in complexity, giving rise to organisms whose primary adaptation is perception and judgment, forming the abstract equivalents of societies, which interact through the exchange of resources and extensions of cultures and politics—models for more efficient organization. Still, change and evolution, failure and death, societies and cultures pass and are forgotten; whole classes of these larger systems suffer extinction, without being allowed fulfillment.

From history: Nations pray upon nations, and eat them alive, discarding them as burned husks.

Law: The universe is neutral; it will not care, nor will any ultimate dynamic system interfere…

In those days before I was born, as smoke rose from the ovens, God did not hear the cries of His people.

And so it follows: that no system will achieve perfect efficiency and self–sufficiency. Within all changing systems, accumulated error must be purged. For the good of the dynamic whole, systems must die. But efficient and beautiful systems will die as well.

I see the Proof’s abstraction of evil: a shark–like thing, to me, but no more than a very complex expression. In this shark there is history, and dumb organic pressure, and the accumulations of the past, and the shark does not discriminate, knows nothing of judgment or justice, will eat the promising and the strong as well as birthing young. Waste, waste, an agony of waste, and over it all, not watching, the indifference of the real.

After what seems hours of study, of questions asked and answered, new ways of thinking acquired—re–education—I begin to feel the thoroughness of the Proof, and I feel a despair unlike anything in my embodied existence.

Where once there had been hope that intelligent organisms could see their way to just, beautiful and efficient systems, in practice, without exception, they revert to the old rules.

Things have not and will never improve.

Heaven itself would be touched with evil—or stand still. But there is no heaven run by a just God. Nor can there be a just God. Perfect justice and beauty and evolution and change are incompatible.

Not the birth of my son and daughter, not the day of my marriage, not all my moments of joy can erase the horror of history. And the stretch of future histories, after my storage, shows even more horror, until I seem to swim in carnivorous, cybernivorous cruelty.

Connections

We survey the Berkus with growing concern. Here is not just frustration of our attempts to return to the Library, not just destruction of knowledge, but a flagrant and purposeless waste of precious resources. Why is it allowed?

Obviously, the Coordinator of the Endtime Work has given license, handed over this world, with such haste that We did not have time to withdraw. The Library has been forced away (or worse), and all transponders destroyed, leaving us alone on School World.

The ancient self, having touched on the Proof (absorbing no more than a fraction of its beauty) is wrapped in a dark shell of mood. This mood, basic and primal as it is, communicates to the tributaries. Again, after billions of years, We feel sadness at the inevitability of error and the impossibility of justice—and sadness at our own error. The Proof has always stood as a monument of pure thought—and a curse, even to We who affirm it.

The Berkus expands like a balloon. “There is going to be major work done here. You will have to move.”

“No,” the combined tributaries cry. “This is enough confusion and enough being shoved around.” Those words come from the ancient self.

The Berkus finds them amusing.

“Then you’ll stay here,” it says, “and be absorbed in the next round of experiment. You are teachers who have taught incorrectly. You deserve no better.”

I break free of the dark shell of mood, as the tributaries describe it, and now I seem to kick and push my way to a peak of attention, all without arms or legs.

“Where is the plan, the order? Where are your billions of years of superiority? How can this be happening?”

We pass on the cries of the ancient self. The Berkus hears the message.

“We are not familiar with this voice,” the student social=mind says.

“I judge you from the past!” the ancient self says. “You are all found wanting!”

“This is not the voice of a tributary, but of an individual,” the Berkus says. “The individual sounds uninformed.”

“I demand to speak with my wife!”

My demand gets no reaction for almost a second. Around me, the tributaries within the soma flow and rearrange, thinking in a way I cannot follow. They finally rise as a solid, seamless river of consent.

“We charge you with error,” they say to the Berkus. “We charge you with confirming the Proof you wish to negate.”

The Berkus considers, then backs away swiftly, beaming at us one final message: “There is an interesting rawness in your charge. You no longer think as outmoded teachers. A link with the Endtime Work Coordinator will be requested. Stand where you are. Our own work must continue.”

I feel a sense of relief around me. This is a breakthrough. I have a purpose! The Berkus retreats, leaving us on the promontory to observe. Where once, hours before, glaciers melted, the ground begins to churn, grow viscous, divide into fenced enclaves. Within the enclaves, green and gray shapes arise, sending forth clouds of steam. These enclaves surround the range of hills, surmount all but our promontory, and move off to the horizon on all sides, perhaps covering the entire School World.

In the center of each fenced area, a sphere forms first as a white blister on the hardness, then a pearl resting on the surface. The pearl lifts, suspended in air. Each pearl begins to evolve in a different way, turning inward, doubling, tripling, flattening into disks, centers dividing to form toruses; a practical infinity of different forms.

The fecundity of idea startles me. Blastulas give rise to cell–like complexity, spikes twist into intricate knots, all the rules of ancient topological mathematics are demonstrated in seconds, and then violated as the spaces within the enclaves themselves change.

“What are they doing?” I ask, bewildered.

“A mad push of evolution,” my descendant self explains, “trying all combinations starting from a simple beginning. This was once a common exercise, but not on such a vast scale. Not since the formulation of the Proof.”

“What do they want to learn?”

“If they can find one instance of evolution and change that involves only growth and development, not competition and destruction, then they will have falsified the Proof.”

“But the Proof is perfect,” I said. “It can’t be falsified …”

“So we have judged. The students incorrectly believe we are wrong.”

The field of creation becomes a vast fabric, each enclave contributing to a larger weave. What is being shown here could have occupied entire civilizations in my time: the dimensions of change, all possibilities of progressive growth.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“It’s futile,” my descendant self says, its tone bitter. I feel the emotion in its message as an aberration, and it immediately broadcasts shame to all of its fellows, and to me.

“Are you afraid they’ll show your teachings were wrong?” I asked.

“No,” my tributary says. “I am sorry that they will fail. Such a message to pass on to a young universe … That whatever our nature and design, however we develop, we are doomed to make errors and cause pain. Still, that is the truth, and it has never been refuted.”

“But even in my time, there was a solution,” I say.

They show mild curiosity. What could come from so far in the past, that they hadn’t advanced upon it, improved it, a billion times over, or discarded it? I wonder why I have been activated at all…

But I persist. “From God’s perspective, destruction and pain and error may be part of the greater whole, a beauty from its point of view. We only perceive it as evil because of our limited point of view.”

The tributaries allow a polite pause. My tributary explains, as gently as possible, “We have never encountered ultimate systems you call gods. Still, We are or have been very much like gods. As gods, all too often we have made horrible errors, and caused unending pain. Pain did not add to the beauty.”

I want to scream at them for their hubris, but it soon becomes apparent to me, they are right. Their predecessors have reduced galaxies, scanned all histories, made the universe itself run faster with their productions and creations. They have advanced the Endtime by billions of years, and now prepare to seed a new universe across an inconceivable gap of darkness and immobility.

From my perspective, humans have certainly become god–like. But not just. And there are no others. Even in the diversity of the human Diaspora across the galaxies, not once has the Proof been falsified.

And that is all it would have taken: one instance.

“Why did you bring me back, then?” I ask my descendant self in private conference.

It replies in kind:

“Your thought processes are not our own. You can be a judgment engine. You might give us insight into the reasoning of the students, and help explain to us their plunge into greater error. There must be some motive not immediately apparent, some fragment of personality and memory responsible for this. An ancient self of a tributary of the Endtime Work Coordinator, and you, were once intimately related—married as sexual partners. You did not stay married. That is division and dissent. And there is division and dissent between the Endtime Work Committee and the teachers. That much is apparent . . .”

Again I feel like clutching my hands to my face and screaming in frustration. Elisaveta—it must mean Elisaveta.

But we were not divorced … not when I was stored!

I sit in my imagined gray cubicle, my imagined body uncertain in its outline, and wish for a moment of complete privacy. They give it to me.

Tapering Time

The scape has progressed to a complexity beyond our ability to process. We stand on our promontory, surrounded by the field of enclaved experiments, each enclave containing a different evolved object, still furiously morphing. Some of the objects glow faintly as night sweeps across our part of the School World.

We are as useless and incompetent as the revived ancient self, now wrapped in its own shock and misery. Our tributaries have fallen silent. We wait for what will happen next, either in the scape, or in the promised contact with the Endtime Work Coordinator.

The ancient self rises from its misery and isolation. It joins our watchful silence, expectant. It has not completely lost hope. We have never had need of hope. Connected to the Library, fear became a distant and unimportant thing; hope, its opposite, equally distant and not useful.

I have been musing over my last hazy memories of Elisaveta, of our children Maxim and Giselle—bits of conversation, physical features, smells … Reliving long stretches with the help of memory recovery … watching seconds pass into minutes as if months pass into years.

Outside, time seems to move much more swiftly. The divisions between enclaves fall and the uncounted experiments stand on the field, still evolving, but now allowed to interact. Tentatively, their evolution takes in the new possibility of motion.

I feel for the students, wish to be part of them. However wrong, this experiment is vital, idealistic. It smells of youthful naiveté. Because of my own rugged youth, raised in a nation running frantically from one historical extreme to another, born to parents who jumped like puppets between hope and despair, I have always felt uneasy in the face of idealism and naiveté.

Elisaveta was a naive idealist when I first met her. I tried to teach her, pass on my sophistication, my sense of better judgment.

The brightly colored, luminous objects hover on the plain, discovering new relations: a separate identity, a larger sense of space. The objects have reached a high level of complexity and order, but within a limited environment. If any have developed mind, they can now reach out and explore new objects.

First, the experiments shift a few centimeters this way or that, visible across the plain as kind of restless, rolling motion. The plain becomes an ocean of gentle waves. Then, the experiments bump each other. Near our hill, some of the experiments circle and surround their companions, or just bump with greater and greater urgency. Extensions reach out, and we can see—it must be obvious to all—that mind does exist, and new senses are being created and explored.

If Elisaveta, whatever she has become, is in charge of this sea of experiments, then perhaps she is merely following an inclination she had billions of years before: when in doubt, when all else fails, punt.

This is a cosmological kind of punt, burning up available energy at a distressing rate…

Just like her, I think, and feel a warmth of connection with that ancient woman. But the woman divorced me. She found me wanting, later than my memories reach … And after all, what she has become is as little like the Elisaveta I knew as my descendant tributary is like me.

The dance on the plain becomes a frenzied blur of color. Snakes flow, sprout legs, wings beat the air. Animal relations, plant relations, new ecosystems … But these creatures have evolved not from the simplest beginnings, but from already elaborate sources. Each isolated experiment, already having achieved a focused complexity beyond anything I can understand, becomes a potential player in a new order of interaction.

What do the students—or Elisaveta—hope to accomplish in this peculiar variation on the old scheme?

I am so focused on the spectacle surrounding us that it takes a “nudge” from my descendant self to alert me to change in the sky. A liquid silvery ribbon pours from above, spreading over our heads into a flat, upside–down ocean of reflective cloud. The inverse ocean expands to the horizon, blocking all light from the new day.

Our soma rises expectantly on its eight legs. I feel the tributaries’ interest as a kind of heat through my cubicle, and for the moment, abandon the imagined environment.

Best to receive this new phenomenon directly.

A fringed curtain, like the edge of a shawl woven from threads of mercury, descends from the upside-down ocean, brushing across the land. The fringe crosses the plain of experiments without interfering, but surrounds our hill, screening our view. Light pulses from selected threads in the liquid weave.

The tributaries translate instantly.

“What do you want?” asks a clear, neutral voice. No character, no tone, no emotion. This is the Endtime Work Coordinator, or at least an extension of that powerful social=mind. It does not sound anything like Elisaveta. My hopes have been terribly naive.

After all this time and misery, the teachers’ reserve is admirable. I detect respect, but no awe; they are used to the nature of the Endtime Work Coordinator, largest of the social=minds not directly connected to a Library.

“We have been cut off, and We need to know why,” the tributaries say.

“Your work reached a conclusion,” the voice responds.

“Why were We not accorded the respect of being notified, or allowed to return to our Library?”

“Your Library has been terminated. We have concluded the active existence of all entities no longer directly connected with Endtime Work, to conserve available energy.”

“But you have let us live.”

“It would involve more energy to terminate existing extensions than to allow them to run down.”

The sheer coldness and precision of the voice chill me. The end of a Library is equivalent to the end of thousands of worlds full of individual intelligences.

Genocide. Error and destruction.

But my future self corrects me. “This is expediency,” it says in a private sending. “It is what We all expected would happen sooner or later. The manner seems irregular, but the latitude of the Endtime Work Coordinator is great.”

Still, the tributaries request a complete accounting of the decision. The Coordinator obliges.

A judgment arrives:

The Teachers are irrelevant. Teaching of the Proof has been deemed useless; the Coordinator has decided—

I hear a different sort of voice, barely recognizable to me—Elisaveta—

“All affirmations of the Proof merely discourage our search for alternatives. The Proof has become a thought disease, a cultural tyranny. It blocks our discovery of another solution.”

A New Accounting

Our ancient self recognizes something in the message. What We have planned from near the beginning now bears fruit—the ancient self, functioning as an engine of judgment and recognition, has found a key player in the decision to isolate us, and to terminate our Library.

“We detect the voice of a particular tributary,” We say to the Coordinator. “May We communicate with this tributary?”

“Do you have a valid reason?” the Coordinator asks.

“We must check for error.”

“Your talents are not recognized.”

“Still, the Coordinator might have erred, and as there is so little time, following the wrong course will be doubly tragic.”

The Coordinator reaches a decision after sufficient time to show a complete polling of all tributaries within its social=mind.

“An energy budget is established. Communication is allowed.”

We follow protocol billions of years old, but excise unnecessary ceremonies. We poll the student tributaries, searching for some flaw in reasoning, finding none.

Then We begin searching for our own justification. If We are about to die, lost in the last–second noise and event–clutter of a universe finally running down, We need to know where We have failed. If there is no failure—and if all this experimentation is simply a futile act, We might die less ignominiously. We search for the tributary familiar to the ancient self, hoping to find the personal connection that will reduce all our questions to one exchange.

Bright patches of light in the sky bloom, spread, and are quickly gathered and snuffed. The other suns and worlds are being converted and conserved.

We have minutes, perhaps only seconds.

We find the voice, descendant tributary of Elisaveta.

There are immense deaths in the sky, and now all is going dark. There is only the one sun, turning in on itself, violet shading to deep orange, and the School World.

Four seconds. I have just four seconds … Endtime accelerates upon us. The student experiment has consumed so much energy. All other worlds have been terminated, all social=minds except the Endtime Coordinator’s and the final self … The seed that will cross the actionless Between.

I feel the tributaries frantically create an interface, make distant requests, then demands. They meet strong resistance from a tributary within the Endtime Work Coordinator. This much they convey to me … I sense weeks, months, years of negotiation, all passing in a second of more and more disjointed and uncertain real time.

As the last energy of the universe is spent, as all potential and all kinesis bottom out at a useless average, the fractions of seconds become clipped, their qualities altered. Time advances with an irregular jerk, truly like an off–center wheel.

Agreement is reached. Law and persuasion even now have some force.

“Vasily. I haven’t thought about you in ever so long.”

“Elisaveta, is that you?”

I cannot see her. I sense a total lack of emotion in her words. And why not?

“Not your Elisaveta, Vasily. But I hold her memories and some of her patterns.”

“You’ve been alive for billions of years?”

I receive a condensed impression of a hundred million sisters, all related to Elisaveta, stored at different times like a huge library of past selves. The final tributary she has become, now an important part of the Coordinator, refers to her past selves much as a grown woman might open childhood diaries. The past selves are kept informed, to the extent that being informed does not alter their essential natures.

How differently my own descendant self behaves, sealing away a small part of the past as a reminder, but never consulting it. How perverse for a mind that reveres the past! Perhaps what it reveres is form, not actuality…

“Why do you want to speak with me?” Elisaveta asks. Which Elisaveta, from which time, I cannot tell right away.

“I think … they seem to think it’s important. A disagreement, something that went wrong.”

“They are seeking justification through you, a self stored billions of years ago. They want to be told that their final efforts have meaning. How like the Vasily I knew.”

“It’s not my doing! I’ve been inactive … Were we divorced?”

“Yes.” Sudden realization changes the tone of this Elisaveta’s voice. “You were stored before we divorced?”

“Yes! How long after … were you stored?”

“A century, maybe more,” she answers. With some wonder, she says, “Who could have known we would live forever?”

“When I saw you last, we loved each other. We had children …”

“They died with the Libraries,” she says.

I do not feel physical grief, the body’s component of sadness and rage at loss, but the news rocks me, even so. I retreat to my gray cubicle. What happened to my children, in my time? What did they become to me, and I to them? Did they have children, grandchildren, and after our divorce, did they respect me enough to let me visit my grandchildren… ? But it’s all lost now, and if they kept records of their ancient selves—records of what had truly been my children—that is gone, too.

My children! They have survived all this time, and yet I have missed them.

They are dead.

Elisaveta regards my grief with some wonder, and finds it sympathetic. I feel her warm to me slightly. “They weren’t really our children any longer, Vasily. They became something quite other, as have you and I. But this you—you’ve been kept like a butterfly in a collection. How sad.”

She seeks me out and takes on a bodily form. It is not the shape of the Elisaveta I knew. She once built a biomechanical body to carry her thoughts. This is the self–image she carries now, of a mind within a primitive, woman–shaped soma.

“What happened to us?” I ask, my agony apparent to her, to all who listen.

“Is it that important to you?”

“Can you explain any of this?” I ask. I want to bury myself in her bosom, to hug her. I am so lost and afraid I feel like a child, and yet my pride keeps me together.

“I was your student, Vasily. Remember? You browbeat me into marrying you. You poured learning into my ear day and night, even when we made love. You were so full of knowledge. You spoke nine languages. You knew all there was to know about Schopenhauer and Hegel and Marx and Wittgenstein. You did not listen to what was important to me.”

I want to draw back; it is impossible to cringe. This I recognize. This I remember. But the Elisaveta I knew had come to accept me, my faults and my learning, joyously; had encouraged me to open up with her. I had taught her a great deal.

“You gave me absolutely no room to grow, Vasily.”

The enormous triviality of this conversation, at the end of time, strikes me and I want to laugh out loud. Not possible. I stare at this monstrous Elisaveta, so bitter and different … And now, to me, shaded by her indifference.

“I feel like I’ve been half a dozen men, and we’ve all loved you badly,” I say, hoping to sting her.

“No. Only one. You became angry when I disagreed with you. I asked for more freedom to explore … You said there was really little left to explore. Even in the last half of the twenty–first century, Vasily, you said we had found all there was to find, and everything thereafter would be mere details. When I had my second child, it began. I saw you through the eyes of my infant daughter, saw what you would do to her, and I began to grow apart from you. We separated, then divorced, and it was for the best. For me, at any rate; I can’t say that you ever understood.”

We seem to stand in that gray cubicle, that comfortable simplicity with which I surrounded myself when first awakened.

Elisaveta, taller, stronger, face more seasoned, stares at me with infinitely more experience. I am outmatched.

Her expression softens. “But you didn’t deserve this, Vasily. You mustn’t blame me for what your tributary has done.”

“I am not he … It. It is not me. And you are not the Elisaveta I know!”

“You wanted to keep me forever the student you first met in your classroom. Do you see how futile that is now?”

“Then what can we love? What is there left to attach to?”

She shrugs. “It doesn’t much matter, does it? There’s no more time left to love or not to love. And love has become a vastly different thing.”

“We reach this peak . . . of intelligence, of accomplishment, immortality …”

“Wait.” Elisaveta frowns and tilts her head, as if listening; lifts her finger in question and listens again to voices I do not hear. “I begin to understand your confusion,” she says.

“What?”

“This is not a peak, Vasily. This is a backwater. We are simply all that’s left after a long, dreadful attenuation. The greater, more subtle galaxies of Libraries ended themselves a hundred million years ago.”

“Suicide?”

“They saw the very end we contemplate now. They decided that if our kind of life had no hope of escaping the Proof—the Proof these teachers helped fix in all our thoughts—than it was best not to send a part of ourselves into the next universe. We are what’s left of those who disagreed …”

“My tributary did not tell me this.”

“Hiding the truth from yourself even now.”

I hold my hands out to her, hoping for pity, but this Elisaveta has long since abandoned pity. I desperately need to activate some fragment of love within her. “I am so lost …”

“We are all lost, Vasily. There is only one hope.”

She turns and opens a broad door on one side of my cubicle, where I originally placed the window to the outside. “If we succeed at this,” she says, “then we are better than those great souls. If we fail, they were right … Better that nothing from our reality crosses the Between.”

I admire her for her knowledge, then, for being kept so well informed. But I resent that she has advanced beyond me, has no need for me.

The tributaries watch with interest, like voyeurs.

(“Perhaps there is a chance.” My descendant self speaks in a private sending.)

“I see why you divorced me,” I say sullenly.

“You were a tyrant and a bully. When you were stored—before your heart replacement, I remember now … When you were stored, you and I had not yet grown so far apart. We would. It was inevitable.”

“The Proof is very convincing,” I tell Elisaveta. “Perhaps this is futile.”

“You simply have no say, Vasily. The effort is being made.”

I have touched her, but it is not pity I arouse, and certainly not love.

It is disgust.

Through the window, Elisaveta and I see a portion of the plain. On it, the experiments have congealed into a hundred, a thousand, smooth, slowly pulsing shapes. Above them all looms the shadow of the Coordinator. I feel a bridge being made, links being established. I sense panic in my descendant self, who works without the knowledge of the other tributaries.

Then I am asked: “Will you become part of the experiment?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You are the judgment engine.”

“Now I must go,” Elisaveta says. “We will all die soon. Neither you nor I are in the final self. No part of the teachers, or the Coordinator, will cross the Between.”

“All futile, then,” I say.

“Why so, Vasily? When I was young, you told me that change was an evil force, and that you longed for an eternal college, where all learning could be examined at leisure, without pressure. You’ve found that. Your tributary self has had billions of years to study the unchanging truths. And to infuse them into new tributaries. You’ve had your heaven, and I’ve had mine. Away from you, among those who nurture and respect.”

I am left with nothing to say. Then, unexpectedly, the figure of Elisaveta reaches out with a nonexistent hand and touches my unreal cheek. For a moment, between us, there is something like the contact of flesh to flesh. I feel her fingers. She feels my cheek. Despite her words, the love has not died completely.

She fades from the cubicle. I rush to the window, to see if I can make out the Coordinator, but the shadow, the mercury–liquid cloud, has already vanished.

“They will fail,” the We–ness says. It surrounds me with its mind, its persuasion, greater in scale than a human of my time to an ant. “This shows the origin of their folly. We have justified our existence.”

(You can still cross. There is still a connection between you. You can judge the experiment, go with the Endtime Work Coordinator.)

I watch the plain, the joined shapes, extraordinarily beautiful, like condensed cities or civilizations or entire histories.

The sunlight dims, light rays jerk in our sight, in our fading scales of time.

(Will you go?)

“She doesn’t need me …” I want to go with Elisaveta. I want to reach out to her and shout, “I see! I understand!” But there is still sadness and self–pity. I am, after all, too small for her.

(You may go. Persuade. Carry us with you.)

And billions of years too late—

Shards of Seconds

We know now that the error lies in the distant past, a tendency of the Coordinator, who has gathered tributaries of like character. As did the teachers. The past still dominates, and there is satisfaction in knowing We, at least, have not committed any errors, have not fallen into folly.

We observe the end with interest. Soon, there will be no change. In that, there is some cause for exultation. Truly, We are tired.

On the bubbling remains of the School World, the students in their Berkus continue to the last instant with the experiment, and We watch from the cracked and cooling hill.

Something huge and blue and with many strange calm aspects rises from the field of experiments. It does not remind us of anything We have seen before.

It is new.

The Coordinator returns, embraces it, draws it away.

(“She does not tell the truth. Parts of the Endtime Coordinator must cross with the final self. This is your last chance. Go to her and reconcile. Carry our thoughts with you.”)

I feel a love for her greater than anything I could have felt before. I hate my descendant self, I hate the teachers and their gray spirits, depth upon depth of ashes out of the past. They want to use me to perpetuate all that matters to them.

I ache to reclaim what has been lost, to try to make up for the past.

The Coordinator withdraws from School World, taking with it the results of the student experiment. Do they have what they want—something worthy of being passed on? It would be wonderful to know … I could die contented, knowing the Proof has been shattered. I could cross over, ask…

But I will not pollute her with me any more.

“No.”

The last thousandths of the last second fall like broken crystals.

(The connection is broken. You have failed.)

My tributary self, disappointed, quietly suggests I might be happier if I am deactivated.

Curiously, to the last, he clings to his imagined cubicle window. He cries his last words where there is no voice, no sound, no one to listen but us:

“Elisaveta! YES! YES!”

The last of the ancient self is packed, mercifully, into oblivion. We will not subject him to the Endtime. We have pity.

We are left to our thoughts. The force that replaces gravity now spasms. The metric is very noisy. Length and duration become so grainy that thinking is difficult.

One tributary works to solve an ancient and obscure problem. Another studies the Proof one last time, savoring its formal beauty. Another considers ancient relations.

Our end, our own oblivion, the Between, will not be so horrible. There are worse things. Much