Morgan’s Arrival
The fleet was still two AUs out from the neutron star when Ainsley appeared, velocity matching perfectly so that the elegant white ship held position a thousand kilometres from the Morgan. The duty crew on the bridge had no warning; there wasn’t a single sensor on any ship in the fleet that had detected the giveaway gravitational waves that theoretically should have been coming from Ainsley’s drive as the ship approached.
‘A stealthed gravitonic drive,’ Yirella muttered as she clambered out of bed. ‘Who knew?’ The alerts zipping into her databud had woken her after only a couple of hours’ sleep. She’d gone to bed expecting to be well awake and refreshed when they finished their deceleration manoeuvre an estimated million kilometres outside the neutron star’s unnatural ring. So far contact had been limited: a few messages from the fleet when they were a lightmonth out, announcing they were coming – in peace. A brief: We know, you are welcome, in reply. And details – what orbit to go into, contact protocols; the neutron star inhabitants were organizing a reception congress to discuss ‘unified intent’. All reasonably predictable, if a little stark. There were no images of them or their habitats, no explanations of what the thermally active ring particles were.
Then right at the end came the only question the neutron star inhabitants asked: Is Yirella with you?
That was embarrassing.
In a pleasing way.
Dellian was sitting up beside her, a befuddled expression on his face as he scratched his neck, then his arm. Yawned.
‘Your other boyfriend’s back, then,’ he mumbled as he considered the data rolling through his optik.
Yirella resisted a sigh of exasperation. He was never going to let that go. She’d tried to explain to him that giving the seedships independence and freedom was her idea, her gamble, her responsibility. And she was only too aware, had she confided in him what she’d done, that burden of knowing would’ve chewed him up. Yes, it should have been a formal proposition to council, duly debated and voted on. Except it would have been voted down. Kenelm’s reaction alone proved that, and sie wasn’t the only one with that view on her utter irresponsibility. So every time she tried to mollify Del it came across as petulant and self-serving, which had to stop. She was confident he would ultimately forgive her, or at least stop snarking, given enough time – say, a couple of centuries.
‘So it would seem,’ she replied.
‘What now?’
‘Nothing. I expect Ainsley is just confirming we’re not a disguised Olyix attack.’
‘What about us making sure this isn’t an Olyix ambush?’
She pressed her teeth together, refusing to show him how that riled her. ‘Good call. Cinrea is on watch. I’ll tell hir.’
‘Don’t suppose I’m needed.’
‘Did the bridge call for you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s good, then; they don’t think we’re about to be shot at.’ She quickly put a tunic on and left the cabin. When the door shut, Dellian had rolled over to face the wall, his eyes closed.
‘Saints,’ she hissed quietly.
A white icon slipped into her optic. ‘Trouble in paradise?’ Ainsley asked.
‘And you can go to hell, too,’ she snapped at him.
His chortle was immensely annoying. ‘It’s good to see you. Genuinely. How was the flight?’
‘Eventful.’ She told him about Kenelm, and the group of Utopial devotees Emilja and Soćko had gathered to steer exodus generations.
‘Well, we did think it would be something like that, didn’t we?’ Ainsley said. ‘Two thousand years of political fraudulence, though; gotta admit, that’s impressive. My father used to tell me that when he was a kid, change – in culture and technology – was so endemic that people were complaining no one had a job for life any more. I wonder if Dad would approve of this particular reincarnation of sinecure.’
Yirella smiled. ‘I thought politics was a calling, not a job.’
‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’
‘So what in the sweet Saints have people built here? They changed the star’s rotation rate!’
‘Yeah. How better to announce to the whole galaxy: Here we are. This civilization got very smart, and . . . libertarian isn’t the word, and post-scarcity communism doesn’t fit, either; I’m not quite sure how to describe their politics. Put it this way: they were very argumentative once they started to think properly for themselves. But they did agree to majority consensus. It brought a tear to my eye.’
‘So are they going to fight the Olyix?’
‘You’ll see. It’s quite a congress they’re putting together for you.’
‘They, uh, asked about me.’
‘Ah, yeah, about that; I may have pushed your role in our little conspiracy to facilitate their society.’
‘Oh, Saints.’
‘Don’t go all morose on me. It’ll work in your favour.’
‘You think?’
‘I predict. But then, predicting is how I made my fortune when I was human.’
‘I checked. You inherited a fortune.’
‘I inherited a small fortune, and turned it into the greatest accumulation of wealth in history.’
‘Yeah, almost as big as your ego. So what next?’
‘You finish decelerating, they send a portal over to the Morgan. You all go through to the congress. Simple.’
‘Nah, nothing ever is. Not in these times.’
*
As the fleet approached its negotiated parking orbit a million kilometres out from the ring, the Morgan’s sensors started to capture the warm particles in high resolution. Yirella, Ellici and Wim formed one analysis team, gathering in a small conference room to pore over the images and data tables compiled by the genten. The room’s walls were all but invisible behind the thick hologram projections – a perspective that seemed to place them at the heart of the little system, sitting on the surface of the neutron star itself.
‘There’s some standardization,’ Wim observed. ‘There are thousands of particles that have a similar size and mass; we’ve given them a preliminary type classification. Not that it matters, because they all have exactly the same external skin – that copper colour. So we don’t know what any of them actually are.’
‘And there’s nothing under a kilometre,’ Yirella said. ‘But their thermal emission ratio is fairly constant across the types.’ She studied close-up images of what looked like asteroids but seemed sculpted from polished copper. Their surfaces moved, though – slowly, the bulges and dints undulating with a lethargic arrhythmia. As she watched the time-lapse images she had a disturbing flashback to a biology lecture featuring a foetal sac with a teratological embryo shifting around inside.
The thought was deeply uncomfortable, so she gave up and called Ainsley. ‘What the hell are those things?’
‘Habitats, ships, factories, stores of processed materials, labs, experiments, sensors; everything you’d expect from an advanced civilization.’
‘But they all have the same surface.’
‘It’s a development on the mirrorfabrik shielding you use,’ Ainsley said. ‘The cloak protects them from the neutron star radiation. It’s useful for defence, too.’
‘That’s odd,’ Ellici said as she pulled up more detailed sensor data. ‘Really odd. The neutron star has an unsymmetrical gravity field.’
‘How can that be?’ Wim mused. ‘There’s no theory that can account for uneven mass distribution inside a star, let alone a neutron star.’
‘It’s got to be those inner stations,’ Ellici said. ‘The hundred and fifty big ones. Their gravitational emissions are off the scale. They must be affecting it.’
‘We saw what the Resolution ships could do at the Vayan ambush,’ Yirella said. ‘This could be a similar emission. Some kind of directional gravity beam?’
‘If enough of them pull at the neutron star’s surface, they might create a wave in the outer crust; it’s only ions and electrons down to about four hundred metres.’
‘Love the way you call it “only”,’ Wim said.
‘But susceptible to external forces,’ Yirella countered. ‘I wonder if we can get an accurate surface map? See if there are physical waves splashing around down there.’
‘They wouldn’t be big,’ Wim said. ‘The neutron star’s only twenty-one kilometres in diameter, so a wave would be maybe a couple of millimetres high. Probably less.’
‘We’re missing the main point,’ Ellici said. ‘Why?’
‘Because they can?’
‘Because they’re weaponizing neutronium would be my guess. Remember, Ainsley has some kind of super-dense weapons we haven’t seen in action yet.’
‘And here we are in orbit around two point three solar masses of neutronium,’ Yirella said. ‘Matter that’s just as dense as you can get. Weaponize that, and the Olyix will be in serious trouble.’
‘Anyone would be,’ Wim said. ‘That’s a take-over-the-galaxy weapon.’
‘I disagree,’ Yirella said. ‘It’s a terrify-the-galaxy weapon, yes, but you can only destroy one thing with it. That doesn’t compel people to submit, just to run away.’
‘Or die.’
‘Good job they’re on our side, then,’ Ellici said.
Yirella grinned over at her friend. ‘There’s one thing missing from this ring – from the whole system, actually.’
‘Which is?’
‘The seedships.’
‘Then where are they?’ Wim said, frowning.
‘Inside the museum particle?’ Ellici suggested.
‘Surplus to requirements,’ Wim said. ‘Plus the ring orbit is uncomfortably close to the neutron star. The radiation down there is dangerous. If we didn’t have mirrorfabrik shells, the fleet wouldn’t be in this parking orbit. We’d be a lot further out.’
‘The seedships were obsolete,’ Yirella said. ‘They didn’t bother maintaining them. Simplest solution applies.’
‘Interesting insight into their psychology, then,’ Ellici said. ‘Human cultures normally display a reverence for the past. You know there was a protective dome built over the Apollo lunar module at Tranquillity to preserve Armstrong and Aldrin’s footprints from overeager tourists.’
‘That probably died the day the Olyix super-nuked Theophilus crater. It was a miracle they didn’t crack the whole moon open with that one.’
‘Most likely,’ Wim said testily. ‘Your point?’
‘This is the first human civilization we know about that has no past, no heritage,’ Yirella said. ‘I deliberately chose not to burden them with expectations and traditions. Their value system is going to be different from ours. And Ainsley told me they were . . . argumentative at first.’
‘That indicated they took time establishing the boundaries and behaviour profiles that parents normally instil in children. But of course they had to determine those for themselves. So yeah, they’ll probably look at things differently. From a strictly logical point of view, the past is really dead to them, an irrelevance.’
‘Sentimentality is an inbuilt human trait,’ Wim said.
‘Is it?’
‘Don’t start bringing up nature versus nurture, not here. Please.’
‘Their society, particularly the individuals themselves, aren’t old enough to have experienced death from old age, not yet,’ Yirella said. ‘They have never known that kind of loss. That must impact their outlook.’
‘Saints, what have you created?’
‘I have no idea,’ she said, and grinned. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it.’
*
A small spherical craft with the ubiquitous copper skin flew out of the ring to the Morgan, accelerating and decelerating at twenty gees. When it had manoeuvred into the starship’s largest airlock, it opened up to present a single portal, three metres in diameter. Alexandre was standing in front of it, at the head of a delegation of senior officers and fleet captains. They could glimpse a verdant green landscape framed by the glowing blue rim – one that seemed to be mostly rainforest. A human figure walked through.
Yirella couldn’t stop her lips twitching as she regarded the neutron star human in fascination. The visitor was an easy three metres tall, and she thought probably omnia; something about the sharp facial features elicited the instinctual assumption. Gender – if there was one – was hard to determine, what with the colourful ribbons of cloth that were wound spiral-style around its body – and which seemed to be moving as if still being wound. It was a perception issue, as if her eyes couldn’t quite resolve the subtle motion. The bands of colour were also travelling along the fabric in the opposite direction to the – apparent – physical motion. Then there were the visitor’s eyes, which were pale golden orbs, not at all biological. Also unusual was their skin, which was black but not as dark as her own, and had a kind of indigo mottling as if some reptilian DNA had somehow seeped in. The whole reptile theory was enhanced by the tail, over a metre long and sinuous, with strong muscle bands swishing it from side to side in a controlled pendulum motion that suggested it was anything but vestigial.
Dellian leant in towards her and whispered: ‘Is that how you designed them?’
‘No. The initiators were set to produce standard binary humans. There’s been plenty of body modification going on here.’
‘Free to do what they like, huh?’
Yirella was about to give him a really glance when the exotic visitor turned to face Alexandre, who was beginning hir official welcome speech. The cloth strips on its back parted to flow around five metallic sockets protruding from the spine. Yirella couldn’t figure those out at all; they were quite brutalist, given the technology level on show in the ring.
‘I am Immanueel,’ the visitor said in a high voice that hinted at amusement. ‘I thank you for your greeting. This is a momentous occasion for us.’ Immanueel began to look around at the people lined up behind Alexandre, searching – then drew a breath and walked straight to Yirella. Everyone parted to give them a clear path.
Yirella wasn’t used to looking up at people. Of all Immanueel’s modified aspects, she found their height the most unsettling.
‘The genesis human,’ Immanueel said reverentially, and bowed. ‘I am honoured. You created us unbound – the greatest gift sentience can be given. We thank you for our lives and freedom.’
Yirella opened Ainsley’s white icon. ‘What in the Saints have you done?’
A mocking chortle came back at her. ‘Everyone needs a creation myth. Don’t blow it. Messiah.’
‘Oh, crap.’ She composed a gracious smile for Immanueel. ‘It is I who am flattered by this encounter. This ring and what you have done to the neutron star is extraordinarily impressive. You must be rightly proud of your accomplishments.’
‘Thank you. We have built a habitat suitable for you. The congress of determination can be held as soon as you are ready.’
Yirella glanced over at Alexandre, who seemed more entertained than upset that Immanueel was treating her as if she was in charge. ‘I believe we are ready now,’ she said politely.
Immanueel turned and gestured at the portal – a pose Yirella associated with a medieval courtier ushering their royal charge. ‘Then I would be delighted if you would accompany me.’
‘Of course.’ There was the tiniest spectre of doubt itching away in her mind, that this might be some luxurious trap – which made her annoyed with herself. This is what happens when you’re brought up to believe everything outside the fence is your enemy.
*
The habitat that the portal led to might have had a terrestrial environment, but visually Yirella found it disorienting. She’d been expecting to come out in one of the many larger cylindrical particles that the fleet’s sensors had found in the ring. But Immanueel had said: We built a habitat for you.
Should’ve paid attention.
The portal opened onto a wide plaza of stone slabs. Their surface was infused with lichen blooms, while moss was packed tight in the cracks. They looked old, as if they’d been laid many decades ago, if not longer. But then, ordinarily, she would have thought the thick woodland of bald cypress and oak trees surrounding the plaza must have been well over a century old, given their size. Whatever fast-grow genetic tweaks had been made to their seeds had produced an authentically ancient-looking biosphere. We could have done with that on Vayan.
On the other side of the plaza from the portal was a disc-shaped building, suspended thirty metres off the ground on fluted columns. The supports were twirled by wisteria trunks almost as thick as the nearby trees. They swamped the building, decorating it in deep violet flower clusters so that only the disc’s window band rim was visible. It left her with the impression of something sacred that had been abandoned to nature, like one of old Earth’s pre-industrial temples.
Finally, her subconscious hauled her gaze up beyond the tree canopy so she was looking along the bulk of the habitat. A frown crept onto her face. The cylinder bent along its length – a long curve that put the endcaps out of direct sight. So . . . considerably longer than any of those cylinders the fleet had categorized orbiting the neutron star. It took a moment for her to work out what was wrong with what she was seeing. She was standing on the floor of a cylinder with a landscape curving above her in defiance of any planetary geography, its apex hidden behind an axial strand of glaring light. It was the typical layout of big human habitats like Sisaket, which they’d left behind at the start of the FinalStrike flight. Such habitats rotated around their long axis to provide Coriolis gravity on the floor of the shell – except this wasn’t a simple cylindrical geometry. Instead she was standing inside a tube that circled around on itself to form a toroid, so it couldn’t be rotating around the axial sun tube.
‘Saints alive,’ she muttered. This is an artificial gravity field. ‘You can manipulate gravity,’ she said to Immanueel.
‘Yes.’
‘Again: impressive.’
‘I would say thank you, but it is you we should be thanking.’
‘How do you see that?’
‘We exist because of you. If we have built something that impresses you, I am pleased. You are the root from which all we are has grown.’
Yirella just knew she’d be blushing. ‘Ah, right.’
She searched around for other neutron star inhabitants, but the only people on the plaza were ones from the fleet still coming through the portal. ‘Where is your delegation?’ she asked.
Immanueel tipped their head to one side in a distinctly avian motion. ‘I’m sorry. This physical aspect of mine will be present for the congress. Further attendance of my faction colleagues will be through their direct data aspect involvement. Apart from Ainsley; he has manifested as an android.’
‘He has?’
‘Yes.’ Immanueel performed another elaborate gesture, indicating the elevated disc building. ‘If you would join us?’
Together, they walked across the plaza towards the lofty braids of wisteria trunks and Yirella realized she’d misjudged the size. The disc was a lot bigger than she’d thought: a hundred and fifty metres in diameter at least.
‘What is this place?’
‘It is your Hospitality House.’
‘I love the flowers.’
‘Thank you. We timed the blossom season for this moment.’
She saw the blue glow of a portal rim just behind the pillar. They stepped through together, coming out in the centre of the building. It was a single big hall, twenty metres high, walled by the curving rim of windows. Right at the centre was a thick multifaceted crystalline pillar, flared at the base and ceiling. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a real diamond; the pristine gleam certainly laid a claim to authenticity. Each of the facets shone with a prismatic lustre that was slowly fluctuating, as if tiny things were moving inside, distorting the light.
‘My colleagues’ aspects,’ Immanueel said formally. ‘Most of them are at analytic.’
Yirella inclined her head to the pillar. ‘I’m delighted to meet you.’
As one, every point of light swung to rose-gold, flooding the spacious hall with a glorious twilight haze. Yirella smiled politely. She was sure she was misinterpreting some of Immanueel’s conversation. When she glanced around, she registered the vaguely puzzled expressions marring Dellian and Alexandre’s faces. ‘And by analytic, you mean?’
‘Ah. The mode my colleagues utilize to encompass this congress will scrutinize and deliberate. When we elevated ourselves out of our birthform, we redistributed our mentality across several physical repositories. Today, each individual currently resident in the ring is a unified corpus. This biophysical body is only one part of me.’
To her mind it sounded like heresy, but she asked it anyway. ‘Like an Olyix quint?’
The pillar flickered excitedly with opalescent light.
‘A not dissimilar analogy,’ Immanueel conceded. ‘Except that once we matured, we chose to amplify our minds; our corpus are a great deal more than simple backup, which is the basis behind the quint model. My mind, for example, is perfectly interfaced with a quantum processing network as well as biological components that are subject to neurochemical and hormonal distortions. This way, I retain a complete human emotional response to my environment as well as uplifting my intellectual capacity and thoughtspeed. A different set of neurological segments amplify intuition, or whimsy. I consider that aspect to be the most connected with the birthform mind. I still dream, Yirella.’
The smile she gave Immanueel was tainted by sadness. ‘And which corpus component holds your soul?’
Immanueel clapped in admiration. ‘An excellent question. You are truly the genesis human Ainsley spoke of. It is a question that would no doubt delight the ancient Greek philosophers.’
‘And you?’
‘The soul is an abstract. It is everywhere and nowhere within the corpus. It is nothing and everything.’
‘The one flaw in rationality, yet also the path to greatness.’
‘Exactly. Our humanity, the same as yours.’
‘Completely different.’
‘I confess I was worried about meeting you, Yirella. There is a saying from old Earth: Never meet your idol. But you are everything I envisaged you would be.’
‘You haven’t had to argue with her yet,’ Dellian said in a low voice. ‘Let me know how much admiration you have left after that happens.’
Yirella gave his grinning face the finger.
‘Ah, the genesis human’s boyfriend,’ Immanueel said.
‘Has a name,’ Yirella admonished.
‘Never could be assed to learn it,’ a familiar voice announced loudly.
She turned to see a pearl-white human male striding across the floor. She knew he was male because he was naked – and anatomically correct. His facial features were easily identifiable. ‘Hello, Ainsley.’
‘Hey there, kid. Good to see you, in the flesh.’
‘The initiator couldn’t do clothes?’
‘Never had you down as a prude.’
‘Okay: The initiator couldn’t do colour?’ The android’s whiteness was absolute – eyes, hair strands, the inside of his mouth. Everything was just the same plastic material.
‘I’m being economical. Just because we’re post-scarcity doesn’t mean we should be profligate.’
‘Couldn’t be assed, then?’
‘Fucking A.’
Yirella didn’t know if she should be laughing or sneering at Ainsley’s android avatar, yet somehow she wasn’t surprised by it. ‘So what now?’
‘Congress!’ He winked, a disturbing pucker on his perfectly smooth face.
Dellian smirked.
‘Oh, Saints save us,’ Yirella groaned. She saw there were eighteen captains in the big hall. ‘Shall we begin?’ she asked Alexandre.
‘I think so, yes.’ Sie bowed slightly to Immanueel. ‘I hope you will be patient with us. Not everyone here is as fast as Yirella.’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I’d like to start by thanking you for this reception. You said you built this habitat for us?’
‘Yes. I’m pleased you like it. It took us six weeks to mature it.’
Alexandre drew a breath ready for hir next question, but Yirella held a hand up.
‘We’re not at your level, are we?’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
She closed her eyes, focusing on what she’d seen and heard. ‘Natural gravity is a product of spacetime curvature.’
‘Yes?’
‘But you have full mastery of it. This habitat is proof of that.’
‘We do.’
‘So you can create wormholes, for which you’d have to manipulate negative energy?’
‘Yes.’
‘The same technology as the Olyix. So, you have a phenomenal amount of control over the fabric of spacetime.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Seasons. You said you timed the seasons so the wisteria would be in flower for today. That means this is an enclave, but the opposite of the Olyix one.’
‘Huh?’ Dellian grunted.
‘Now I am the one impressed,’ Immanueel said.
She turned to Del. ‘This is and is not a new habitat, depending on your observer viewpoint. It was built a short while ago, then Immanueel’s people changed the internal time flow. Inside the Olyix enclave, time flows slowly relative to an external observer, allowing them to travel to the end of the universe without suffering too much ageing and entropy. In here, time flows quickly relative to that same observer. So those trees in the forest are genuinely hundreds of years old.’
‘Fuck the Saints,’ Dellian muttered.
‘Which must take a phenomenal amount of power?’ Yirella looked expectantly at Immanueel.
‘We derive it directly from the neutron star.’
‘Wow.’
‘If we are to successfully negate the Olyix enclave, we knew we had to understand the mechanism that creates and maintains it. It was one of our first accomplishments after we extended our minds.’
Dellian looked around at the crews from the fleet. ‘Anyone still think Yirella did the wrong thing?’
Ainsley’s white hand slapped him on the shoulders. ‘My man!’
‘All right, Dellian,’ Alexandre said. ‘Let’s try and be constructive here, shall we?’
There were tiers of heavy wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle, all facing the crystal pillar. Yirella got the impression they were all handmade – and if not, someone had made a big effort to design tiny differences into the carved oak.
Immanueel sat in front of the twinkling pillar on the largest chair; its bifurcated backrest was obviously intended to accommodate a tail. The captains and crew from the fleet found themselves spaces in the rows of chairs facing their host. Yirella wound up in the front, sitting between Ainsley and Alexandre, with Dellian on the seat behind her. She knew from his buttoned-down expression that he was stifling a laugh.
‘What?’ she asked from the side of her mouth.
‘We’re in the court of the elven king now,’ he replied.
When she glanced forwards again, she had to agree. Immanueel’s size made for an imposing figure, and their chair could easily be a throne. Looked at without modern filters, the baroque rustic hall with its weight of new ages bestowed the setting a convincingly regal appearance: the benign monarch granting loyal courtiers an audience.
Some of them with regicide and revolution on their minds. She saw Kenelm three rows back, hir disapproval unconstrained as sie scrutinized the hall’s gently domed ceiling.
‘If I may, I will start with a brief history,’ Immanueel said. ‘We initiated our transition up from baseline human form five years after we were birthed out of the seedship biologic initiators, some fifty-five years ago in Earth standard years – normal spacetime existence. Yet we are not a monoculture. Many of us chose neural expansion in tandem with corpus elaboration; others did not. Some, like myself, decided to wait here and meet you for the sole purpose of travelling together to the Olyix enclave and instigating FinalStrike.’
Yirella shot Alexandre a surprised glance, which seemed to be mirrored on hir expression.
‘As such,’ Immanueel continued, ‘we have devoted ourselves to developing what Ainsley insists on calling weapons hardware.’
‘So you are going to help take on the Olyix enclave?’ Alexandre asked.
‘Indeed, yes. I hold the view that the Olyix cannot go unchallenged – especially in view of their impact on human history.’ Behind Immanueel, the pillar underwent a burst of shimmering colours.
‘Can I ask how many of you hold that view?’ Wim queried. ‘In fact, how many of you are there?’
‘That last question is now unanswerable,’ Immanueel said. ‘Many of us have already left; they have already begun to expand and populate their own domains.’
‘Who left?’
‘They are called the egress faction; they refute the notion of interspecies conflict. They rightly regarded it as immature and irrelevant to high-scale evolutionites such as ourselves. We do not need to fight; we are able simply to rise above such animal-origin situations. It is our belief the Olyix do not have the ability to capture and cocoon us. However, since we began to change this star’s rotation speed, the Olyix will inevitably arrive here at some point. Therefore the egress faction departed, travelling to other stars where they will establish themselves in new spacetime-extrinsic domains.’
‘You mean enclaves?’ Yirella said.
‘I expect some egressor domains will incorporate alternative time-speeds relative to universal spacetime, yes.’
‘Sanctuary,’ Dellian exclaimed.
‘New sanctuaries,’ Immanueel corrected. ‘We have no knowledge of the Sanctuary that Factory humans and the Katos went on to establish.’
‘How many of this egress faction left?’ Yirella asked.
‘Fifty-seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-two,’ Immanueel replied. ‘Each of them established a squadron of powerful battle cruisers in case they encountered a Resolution ship before they could inaugurate their domain.’
‘I’m sorry? Each of them?’ Yirella’s question kicked off a lot of murmuring in the audience behind her.
‘Yes.’
‘You mean they all went their individual way?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Of course. We are all individuals. That is the freedom you gave us. Everybody here is independent, and nobody is answerable to another. It is the final liberation. Thanks to you, genesis human.’
She could well imagine the expression on Kenelm’s face.
‘Wait,’ Tilliana said. ‘You told us all these egress people are now expanding their population?’
‘Correct. Although individual, we retain our social nature. Everyone who left here has or will found their own society.’
‘At fifty-seven thousand different stars?’
‘Yes. To begin with, anyway. Stars are needed as a power source for spacetime-extrinsic domains. I expect they will simply take gas giants out of orbit and convert their mass to energy once they have constructed the appropriate structures.’
Like everyone in the hall, Yirella was silent for a moment as she tried to appreciate the implication of what Immanueel had just told them. ‘So who remained?’ she finally asked. ‘Apart from yourself.’
‘We call ourselves the history faction.’
‘Okay. So how many of you are there in this history faction?’
‘Three thousand five hundred and seventeen.’ Their hand waved leisurely at the crystal pillar, which briefly flared a twilight amber.
The hall was silent again. ‘Three and a half thousand?’
‘Yes. That number troubles you? You consider it to be low? Do not worry, I assure you we have the ability to destroy the Olyix enclave.’
Yirella couldn’t make herself look at the Ainsley android. Her body had chilled too much to do anything but stare at Immanueel on their not-throne. Very carefully, she said: ‘The seedships were tasked with growing a base population of a hundred thousand humans in biologic initiators. You have been here for sixty years now. I’d like to know what happened to everyone who isn’t egress or history.’
‘I see you are concerned,’ Immanueel said. ‘Not all of the original hundred thousand elected to a corpus elaboration. Call them naturalists. They remained in their original bodyform. Many even refused neurological enhancement.’
‘People like us, then?’ Dellian said.
‘Indeed.’
‘So where are they now?’ Yirella asked.
‘Those who were birthed here are now dead.’
‘What?’
‘Do not be alarmed. They all died from old age. Many underwent multiple cellular replacement treatments – rejuvenation, if you like – during their life. The eldest was just short of four thousand years old when she finally passed. It was a moving ceremony. Every corpus who was here at the time attended in a biophysical body to honour her.’
Yirella let the air out of her body in a long breath. I need time to adapt to the possibilities that are open here, to make them part of my instincts.
‘The naturalists must have had children,’ Wim said.
‘They did,’ Immanueel said enthusiastically. ‘There were eighteen separate domains built to house them, each with a slightly different social structure. Some more . . . successful than others.’ For once, Immanueel’s serene composure flickered. ‘George Santayana was correct: those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. But all who were birthed here eventually adapted and prospered. The domains containing their societies were taken away by the egress faction, where they will be protected and nurtured once time is restarted within them.’
‘Four thousand years,’ Wim mused. ‘What were their populations when they left?’
‘Uncertain. Those of us who are corpus don’t like to interfere with naturalists. But it would be several million in each domain. Some had started to develop sub-domains.’
‘What sort of lives did they have? What did they do?’
‘There are recordings of their existence available for you to review should you wish to indulge your curiosity.’
‘Thank you. I would be interested.’
‘So now you must start to decide,’ Immanueel said. ‘I will be travelling to the Olyix enclave along with the rest of the history faction to launch our FinalStrike. Are you going to accompany us?’
‘Is there any point?’ Dellian asked. He shrugged. ‘I mean, it sounds like each of you is at least as powerful as Ainsley. What the hell can we contribute? Saints, I don’t get why you even bothered waiting for us.’
‘In terms of warships and weapons, we believe we have the resources to tackle the Olyix directly, thus completing the goal that Ainsley and Emilja set all those years ago. Once the enclave is breached, we need to locate the Salvation of Life and all the other arkships that store human cocoons – a not inconsiderable task, which by necessity will be conducted in an active war zone. Which leaves us with the question of your participation. You have committed yourselves to liberating natural humans from the Olyix, and those in the original Morgan squads have combat experience inside an Olyix vessel. We wished to honour your commitment by inviting you to join us. After all you have endured, we sincerely believed you deserved the chance to contribute to FinalStrike should you so choose. And, of course, we desired to meet the genesis human.’
Yirella was conscious that everyone was glancing at her again. Her cheeks grew warm from the blood rising in them.
As if sie’d sensed her discomfort, Alexandre said: ‘Immanueel, thank you for explaining everything to us. We do have a lot to talk about.’
‘Of course. Please feel free to use this domain to relax in. The facilities are the best we can produce, and, I expect, a welcome change from the life-support sections of your ships. If you require anything, simply use your databud to order it.’
Everyone rose to their feet like a young Immerle estate class dismissed from a lecture. Chairs scraped along the floor; everyone was speaking at once.
Yirella walked over to Immanueel as they stood up. ‘We need to talk,’ she said.
*
In her mind, Yirella envisaged the two of them strolling along one of the gravel paths that wound between the torus domain’s old bald cypress trees, with startled birds flying between the high branches, chirping indignantly at the intrusion. Instead Immanueel led her to a portal across the floor of the hall.
She walked through into a weird hemispherical chamber twenty metres across, with metallic imperial-purple walls that could have been components of a machine – that, or they were inside a nest burrowed into a scrapheap. The strange geometrical protuberances had deep cracks between them – an effect that arched right overhead to the apex. Light came from a multitude of small sparks that slid slowly along the bottom of the cracks in an eternal progression, going nowhere.
‘What is this place?’ she asked. The floor was so smooth she was worried she’d skid across it if she started walking. There was no colour beneath her feet, as if a hologram were stuck in neutral, giving the impression she was standing on the glass lid of an exceptionally deep well shaft.
‘My centrex,’ Immanueel replied.
‘Uh?’
‘Home. I wish us to be friends, or at least form a strong alliance. I believe inviting someone to your residence has a strong significance in your culture?’
‘It does. Did. An invitation to share was a large social force on old Earth, but those were different times. Post-scarcity changed the social implication. However, the custom remains – which is rather sweet. But you know this. I gave you all the records you access.’
‘Indeed.’
‘So if you are corpus, physically distributed across many elements –’ she gestured around extravagantly at the machine rilievo that made up the wall – ‘is this them?’
‘Some, yes.’
‘Okay, I have to ask: Why genesis human?’
‘It offends you?’
‘No. It spikes my curiosity, although I know Ainsley is responsible. I regard him as somewhat eccentric, especially for an AI – or whatever he actually is. He’s more than a genten, but less than human, despite how fast and smart he is.’
‘He described himself thusly to us, too. Smart, but without imagination. That seems to be an intrinsic part of the human soul, if not its very heart.’
‘Don’t go all romantic on me now. Intuition, imagination, impulse; they’re all part of random biochemical interactions in our neural structure.’
‘Indeed. But never really imitated outside a biological brain. However many random factors an artificial mind can generate, it cannot be truly imaginative. The idea for us came from you, not him, did it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘So simply calling you originator, or first mother, or similar, didn’t seem to convey the grandeur of what you did. In a very real sense, Yirella, you created us.’
‘Okay. I guess I can live with it.’
‘It pains us that your value is not fully recognized among your peers. You should be leading the fleet.’
‘Us? Is the whole history faction listening in?’
‘Not so much that as they are attuned to my conversation with you.’
‘But only with a small part of their consciousness, right? An aspect?’
‘Correct.’
‘Do you really need us to come with you to the enclave?’
‘Our FinalStrike can be conducted without you. Of course it can. However, your squads are ideally suited for the task. They will make a genuine contribution.’
‘Closure,’ she said wonderingly. ‘You’re offering us closure.’
‘Indeed.’
‘I’m concerned about throwing the squads into combat inside the enclave. No matter how advanced you are, and how many aspects you bring, the Olyix are equally formidable.’
‘You are correct. Even we cannot offer certainty.’
‘You must have some idea what’s in there. You build your domains on the same principle.’
‘The principles of quantum temporal mechanics that create and sustain the Olyix enclave, yes, we know them. Its internal nature, no. This is what humans have always dreaded . . .’
‘The other.’
‘Indeed. Olyix thought processes are genuinely alien. We can produce guesses at how the inside of the enclave is structured – logical guesses. But we can’t actually know.’
‘And once you do, you have to formulate a plan immediately.’
‘It gets worse.’
‘No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.’
‘Exactly. An active combat environment is perpetually fluid. It needs a commander who can make choices. You, perhaps, could contribute.’ Immanueel bent forwards, spine curving so their tail stood up in a fashion that Yirella found oddly disturbing. They leant against the wall, pressing hard against the asymmetric contours. The shiny purple components began to move around their body, creating an alcove that fitted like a glove. Nozzles clicked smoothly into the sockets down Immanueel’s spine, incorporating them into the wall’s constitution.
‘No thank you,’ she said, ‘Tilliana, Ellici, and the other tactical teams might provide you with an alternative viewpoint if we come across something unexpected, but I really don’t do well in high-stress situations.’
‘I understand, and even sympathize. We will not call upon you for instant opinions, but we would welcome your participation in overall strategy preparation.’ With their motionless body embraced by the centrex, Immanueel’s voice became omnidirectional.
‘Well, at least you didn’t say you’d be honoured.’
‘Nonetheless, you know we would be. It would be fitting for you to accompany us; that way you may witness your triumph. You are the architect of the true FinalStrike, Yirella. Forgive the presumption, but given that the enclave is forty thousand lightyears away, if you don’t come with us, you will never know the outcome. That is not what you want.’
‘Oh, Saints!’
‘May they rest in peace.’
‘You’re right, of course. All the original Morgan squads are hungry for payback. After all, it’s what us poor binaries were born for. Even I have trouble shaking my conditioning.’
‘Life is to be rejoiced. The reason for birth, good or bad, should not be part of its consideration.’
‘You really are different.’ Yirella started to walk around the centrex, hunting for a pattern in the shapes and flow of lights that made up its curving sides. ‘But I’m glad you and the other history faction corpus members think we should make the effort to liberate our species.’
‘Not just ours. If the Neána are correct, the Olyix hold many races hostage for their god.’
‘Ah. Now there we have the puzzle at the heart of this problem.’
‘The God at the End of Time.’
‘Yes.’ She turned from examining a silhouette that was like an elongated combustion chamber ribbed with slim heat fins. It took a moment for her eyes to find Immanueel’s body on the wall. The mottled black and blue of their skin was changing colour, deepening towards the imperial purple sported by the rest of the shapes. ‘Before he left to escort the seedships, I asked Ainsley to make a request of whatever society arose here.’ She cocked her head to one side, regarding the chameleon body with detached interest. ‘Did you build it?’
‘Yes. We built your tachyon detector.’
‘And? Does it work?’
‘Theoretically, yes.’
‘Theoretically?’
‘It has not detected any tachyons.’
‘I’m seriously hoping that’s because there are none directed at this star.’
‘So are we. The proof will come, of course, when we deploy it at the reception point.’
‘Yes.’
‘I feel obliged to point out there are problems with this path you wish to take.’
‘Such as?’
‘We believe we understand why you want it. We cannot concur your idea will work.’
‘I heard that message when I was inside Dellian’s brain; the Olyix neurovirus implanted it deep and hard. In fact, it was close to being the core of the neurovirus, because it justifies what they have done. Bring me all of your life, bring me all of your light. Together we will see the universe reborn out of us. It really did come from somewhere in the future. So if the tachyon beam is travelling back from that point to where and whenever in history the Olyix picked it up, it should also exist in this time. In fact, it should exist in every time before the moment it was sent.’
‘And as it travels faster than light, it creates a constant shockwave of Cherenkov radiation as it cuts through spacetime.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Which I’m hoping will allow the detector to track where it will come from.’
‘We understand your reasoning, but first we have to confirm the location of the reception point – information that is presumably available to whatever onemind rules the Olyix enclave. Yet even if we manage to extract that data, we are then left with the task of determining the spatial location of the receiver point when the message first reached it. If the Olyix received it a million years ago, that reception point will have moved a phenomenal distance over the intervening time. Everything in the universe is in motion relative to everything else. This neutron star is currently orbiting at two hundred kilometres per second in its journey around the galactic core. On top of that you have this galaxy’s relative speed to the local supercluster, and then the great attractor mass on top of that – and those are only two factors to be taken into account. Frankly, the further in the past the message was received, the less chance we have of finding the course of the message in our current time.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But with the proper knowledge, it will be possible to intercept it, right?’
‘Theoretically what you want to achieve is possible, but there are considerable practical problems.’
‘Ten thousand years ago the Olyix invaded Earth, and our ancestors set out to find them and bring our people home. And now here we are, you and me, finally getting close to achieving that goal. So surmounting considerable problems seems to be what humans are getting really quite good at.’
‘And what happens – what is your endgame – if you find the message tachyon stream?’
‘Go to the source – in this time.’
‘Again, we anticipated this would be your strategy. You think that by eliminating the source – a planet, a star system, a species – in the present, the message will never be sent from the future. The Olyix will not become religious fanatics, and Earth and all the other worlds will not be invaded.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what of paradox?’
‘That level of quantum temporal cosmology is beyond me,’ Yirella admitted. ‘All I can focus on is that Saints-damned tachyon message that is changing the past – our present – by setting the Olyix crusade loose on the galaxy. Therefore if we can eliminate, here in our present, whatever civilization, species or young god that sends it, then it will not be sent.’
‘Your logic is impeccable. But what about causality? Everything we know about causality dictates that time travel should not be possible.’
‘You are speaking of linear time.’
‘Of course. Our perceptions only enable us to see time as linear. But the very nature of linear time implies that – from an external observer viewpoint – the history of the entire universe from creation to heat death exists in a static form, allowing us – consciousness – to perceive time moving in only one direction. Ergo, the universe’s entirety – both space and time – was created as a complete whole. Which argues that change is not possible.’
‘Except that our perceptions must be wrong, because time travel has occurred,’ she countered. ‘The God at the End of Time sent a message from the future. And you have to concede that this timeline must be different from the one that existed before the message changed the behaviour of the Olyix.’
‘Ah. Well, the very concept of timelines implies a multiverse. One theory – and one that we corpus favour – has it that instituting a causality violation such as time travel is an anomaly that creates a new universe. Meaning, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, that death happens in a new universe – one where your future self does not yet exist and now never will. A universe in which you are now an interloper – but also one in which you will never have a double. However, if you were able somehow to travel back to your original universe, your grandfather would still be alive there.’
Yirella pursed her lips. ‘Time travellers are gods? Interesting.’
‘More like the builders of time machines are gods. On every occasion the time machine is used – for every tachyon message that is sent through time, or every time someone goes back to kill their grandfather or a tyrant – that act creates a new copy of the universe that branches off from the original.’
‘Meaning every alternate universe is the product of a time machine. But they’re still a perfect copy of the “original” universe up until that point just before the split?’
‘Yes.’
‘So the tachyon message the Olyix detected didn’t actually come from this universe?’
‘In the anomaly-creation theory, yes.’
‘So the God at the End of Time exists only in certain universes, whose history played out in specific ways?’
‘Possibly. But if we take as our assumption that the message was sent from the time of the heat death of the original universe – when the god perceived a condition it needed to address – then this makes our present the desired outcome of this new reality.’
‘Meaning that the God at the End of Time likewise exists – or will come to exist – in this reality, because this is its desired outcome. So the physical conditions for the God at the End of Time to come into existence are present in this universe, right here, right now. Its birth star is real. If we destroy the place it comes from here in the present, then it will never be born, and won’t send a message – which creates another copy universe. The cycle ends, and the paradox loop is broken.’
‘That is our reasoning, which is why we built the detector for you. We do not necessarily think your strategy will work, but we cannot ignore the possibility that it might.’
‘Thank you. I guess that makes the whole universe Schrödinger’s cat. We don’t know the outcome until we open the box, and even then we won’t know because opening the box from the inside means we cease to be the observer.’
‘Correct. Clearly some form of time travel or manipulation is possible; the message proves that. But have you considered the implication of classic temporal theory being correct? That there is only one universe and it is possible to alter the timeline? If so, there will be a considerable price for your strategy of resetting the timeline.’
‘Yes. I cease to exist. As do you, and everyone else alive here and now. In a multiverse, there will still be some universe in which we all exist, but if not, generations blink out as if they never existed.’
‘Not quite.’
Yirella’s eyes narrowed as she studied the imprecise profile of Immanueel’s body, which was almost indistinguishable from any other section of wall now. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘To negate the evolution of the God at the End of Time will mean the message will never be sent, and subsequentially the Olyix will not commence their abominable crusade. They will not invade Earth. The history of the last ten thousand years will be very different.’
‘Yes, it’ll save us from this whole disaster. That’s the whole point. And if I can’t do that – if your time-travel-is-creationism theory is right – it’ll mean ending the cycle of new universes created by the god’s tachyon message, in which every one contains the same Olyix threat. That alone makes the effort worthwhile.’
‘But my dear genesis human, although the Olyix invasion was an unmitigated disaster for us here and now, the vast majority of Earth’s population is still alive in cocoon form, and our Final-Strike mission will, we hope, result in us reinstating them in their bodies. Not only that, but with the technology available now, a high percentage of them will never have to endure the low socioeconomic index lives they were living up to the point of the invasion. Records indicate that out of the nine billion living on Earth at the time the Salvation of Life arrived, four billion were significantly disadvantaged by the Universal culture’s economic structure that was prominent in that era. They would never have risen out of that. Now, our initiators and gentens can provide a post-scarcity environment for everyone, and medical science can prolong the life of baseline human bodies indefinitely, as well as opening the opportunity to elaborate up to corpus level.’
‘Are you seriously suggesting to me that the Olyix invasion was a good thing for us?’
‘It depends on your perspective. For those who fled Earth and the settled worlds in their exodus habitats, it was a catastrophic time when their lives were disrupted forever. Subsequently they spent the rest of their days fleeing in dread across the galaxy – an era of such profound experience it has shaped the psychology of every generation world since, producing a tainted legacy, with yourself and the squads as the ultimate outcome. But now the era of the exodus flights is over, one way or another. Some of the exodus, whom we should honour for their incredible commitment, strove to provide future generations with a chance at freedom. Some – billions more – fell to subsequent Olyix capture along the expansion wavefront. Were you to consider this whole epoch from the perspective of a low-income, low-satisfaction Earth resident in 2204, then if FinalStrike is ultimately successful, their view would be very different to yours. Imagine: there was a frightening disconnect in their life, and then they wake up thousands of years later in what equates to a billionaire’s paradise where they can do or be anything. Now ask yourself: does the human race have a net gain from you changing the timeline to one where the Olyix invasion does not happen? And in doing so, becoming unborn yourself, along with everybody born from the day the Salvation of Life arrived at Sol onwards? Others will be born instead, of course, but all those lives will not only no longer exist, they never will have existed.’
‘Fuck the Saints,’ Yirella exclaimed.
‘That is a true paradox,’ Immanueel said in a sympathetic voice.
‘But you think causality precludes a classic-theory reset of the timeline, and that by eliminating the possibility of the God at the End of Time, all I’ll be doing is preventing this current cycle from repeating?’
‘It is a complete unknown. And will probably remain so. The observer – you – cannot observe what will happen to themselves within a paradox. And all time travel is a paradox of one kind or another.’
‘I really need to think about this.’
‘Of course. And there is a third option. Some of our more – shall we say – unconventional theorists posit that temporal loops can only be triggered by an extrinsic factor.’
‘Extrinsic?’
‘The trigger originates from outside this universe.’
‘You mean, when a time machine creates a new branch?’
‘No. Completely outside spacetime, no matter if our existence is within a universe or multiverse.’
‘Fuck the Saints!’
‘It is a theory that permits any and every causality violation you may want to consider.’
‘Are you seriously saying the God at the End of Time doesn’t come from this reality?’
‘It is a theory – unprovable until tested. If correct, it would mean destroying the message’s origin world in the present is impossible, for that origin world is not even a part of our reality.’
‘So what do I do?’ she asked, despairing.
‘Nothing. If it is an extrinsic factor, nothing we do will have any effect. If we live in a multiverse where any attempt to modify our timeline simply creates a new different timeline, nothing in our past will change. And if we do live in a pre-ordained simultaneous totality-existence universe, your decision, whatever it is, will make no difference, because it has already been made and taken effect; there is no such thing as change. In each case, all you can do is simply enjoy the life you currently experience.’
‘Saints, I’m not enjoying this experience, trust me.’
‘Yes. And yet from what Ainsley has told us, and what I myself have observed, you have and enjoy Dellian, do you not?’
She didn’t trust herself to answer. Instead she nodded ruefully. ‘Some kind of time travel is possible. The message proves that, right? I don’t think worrying about the possibility of resetting myself out of existence is a reason for inaction. After all, I have lived here and now; that cannot be taken away. It’s only the universe that will forget me, not me myself. So if I consider the enormity of what’s in play . . . I think that the god’s decision to send the message to the Olyix was the original decision, and our actions are determined by it. In that I have no choice. Therefore –’ She took a breath. ‘I want us to bring the tachyon detector to the enclave. If we can work out where the Olyix were when the message was received, that’s when we make the ultimate decision: Do we go after the God at the End of Time?’
‘Your first decision – and the one we were fully expecting you to make. Very well, genesis human, we will bring the tachyon detector with us.’