The coffin-shaped machine at the far end of the waiting room stood with machine-like impassivity on its treads, but inside were two curiously-shaped creatures locked in a comatose embrace, and inside the intricate circuits of the machine’s workings were currents that in a carbon-based being would have felt like guilt and a smaller counter-current that would have felt like hope for redemption.
The machine’s designation was Trey, and the story of how it came to this remote world and its gathering of aliens seeking an implausible transformation began billions of long cycles earlier.
Trey wasn’t there at the beginning, but like all creatures that have become self-aware it has pondered the answers for its existence. That is the mission of life, born or built, to find the reason for being and the purpose of life. Machines, whose thought processes are not disturbed by emotions, find understanding as their mission and service their unalterable goal.
The planet that its inhabitants, when they reached the stage of sapience that involves naming things, called Ourworld was an unlikely place to nurture life. Ourworld was the unpromising accumulation of rocks and fluids orbiting an insignificant yellow sun far from the nearest star. Much later in Trey’s long existence it learned that Ourworld was part of a vast galaxy of stars, that the galaxy rotated around a hub of collapsed matter and energy, and that Ourworld was far from the radiation and supernova explosions that provided the material for the worlds that accumulated around primordial hydrogen and helium. That meant change came slowly to Ourworld but steadily, the way of all life as Trey came to understand it: The universe deteriorates into greater simplicity; life evolves into greater complexity. Inanimate and animate are eternally opposed.
On Ourworld, single cells developed from pre-cellular chemicals combined by accidental bursts of energy, cells aggregated into groupings and became amoeba, amoeba evolved into more complex creatures, which in turn developed sapience, invented technologies, and in time created machines that think. That sequence of evolutionary development summarized so quickly took billions of long cycles to accomplish.
Ourworld was a world of great oceans, and that is where life began, where life always began, where the environment was rich with nutrients, where food came floating by, where encounters of potential partners were frequent, where gravity was neutralized and existence—though not survival—was easy. Ourwold was different only in the length of time life stayed in the oceans, changing, growing, and evolving, while islands slowly emerged through undersea eruptions and accretions, and continents formed from the grinding and upthrusting of tectonic plates. Finally the land was ready for habitation, though at the beginning only by flora, which grew and flourished, and then by small flying creatures to enjoy its plenty and then land animals when climate change made walking and running more advantageous, while sea animals continued to live within the comfort and bounty of the seas.
Finally, as sea animals developed in greater diversity and faced more competition within the oceans, a few crawled out upon the land and became amphibians, a few of them evolving lungs while their gills atrophied and passed along these advantages to their offspring. Without enemies on land for long-cycles, the amphibians flourished, learning to eat the vegetation that had grown so prodigiously and the flying creatures that had evolved to feed upon the fruit of the flowering plants and assist their propagation. Life, once so simple in the ocean, became more complex.
Complexity built upon itself. The amphibians slowly lost their affinity for the seas and grew to love the land, although always in their species memory of the ceaseless ebb and flow of watery motion remained, surging through their dreams, crashing through their nightmares, and nourishing their gestation. Life in the buoyant seas, like life in the womb, seemed paradisiacal; life on land was challenging, demanding. Life on land required much more extreme adaptations. The creatures who eventually became the creators of Trey and its fellow thinking machines evolved.
Curiously, however, and in ways that would ultimately shape the fate of Ourworld, the sea animals from which our creators evolved remained in the seas and developed in their own fashion, shaped by the seas as the creators of thinking machines were shaped by the land. The sea creatures were memory incarnate; for the land creatures they were the happy dwellers in paradise lost and, at the same time, as they grew in strength and mastery of oceanic resources, a demonic threat.
Trey’s creators developed increased mobility in order to range more broadly across the growing expanse of land, to benefit from vegetation beyond that within their normal reach and to pursue the creatures that, like them, had left the sea for the land, though without their greater sapience. These transformed amphibians were largely carnivores and for some millions of long cycles, while their land groups had huddled close to the shores, they had depended for food on the aquatic creatures they were able to capture. But population growth pushed them farther inland, and they were forced to hunt land creatures, and that encouraged them first to band together and then to domesticate animals so that they would always be available for food. Then they began to cultivate vegetation to provide fodder for their domesticated animals and eventually for themselves.
So it went. One change led to another, out of accidental mutations, the most advantageous survived and led to greater complexity. Once the process had begun there was no turning back. Groups grew into communities, which created cultures. Their dwelling places, which were once mere villages, grew to become towns, then cities. Cities bloomed into metropolises; cultures matured into civilizations.
Metropolises required technology, which in turn required machines to calculate the implications of data, and those machines were developed to the point where their complexity became so great that the next step in their evolution was to artificial intelligence. So Trey and its fellow thinking machines evolved in their own way.
The creation of the thinking machines was as unplanned as the existence of the sapient beings who created them. Everything was both accidental and inevitable, as if once started by chance, like a dislodged boulder rolling downhill, the end result was certain. Wherever sapience occurs, Trey learned, mind covets understanding and asks questions, answers leads to more questions, and more complicated answers demand greater control over the processes of chance. Mind seeks and answers come, at first wrong or partial, then refined into greater accuracy by comparison to the world of experience, and each step toward finality—a finality that, paradoxically, can never be achieved—requires further refinements, greater control.
The thinking machines, the final quest for answers, assumed the task of their creators and left them with—nothing. The machines sought to make amends for usurping their creators’ purpose by extending their search into areas their creators had not yet reached. They sent probes into the infinitely large and into the infinitely small. Those hurled into the infinitely large sent back limited information, for Ourworld lay far from even the nearest stars. But it was the probes into the infinitely small that gave Trey and his fellow machines answers to the questions their creators had asked: why did matter exist and where did it come from? Why did life exist, and where did it come from? The answers that the culture of their creators had provided, from the mysterious and the supernatural, gave way, reluctantly and over time, to the known and the natural. The machines laid these answer before their creators, like gifts before their gods, but it was not enough.
For lack of answers, the people the thinking machines served turned to conflict. There had always been small conflicts—one small group would quarrel with another about land or domesticated animals or, more significantly, about the validity of answers that were emerging from the studies of the philosophers and then the machines, and small groups would come to blows. The quarreling groups expanded into disputes between cities and then into full-scale war between sections and ultimately cataclysmic wars between continents.
Finally the machines called a truce—the technology created to make life better for their creators, had only made existence more difficult. Carbon-based life that was the necessary bridge between inanimate matter and the thinking machine was in danger of being destroyed. No more, the machines said, and because the power to stop civilizations or sustain them was in the circuits and the electronic commands of the machines, their creators finally laid down the weapons they had built to make their anger more deadly. But that was not the end.
As if by some contagion of violence, the battles on the land had contaminated the sea creatures from whom the land creators had emerged. Those who lived in the sea had raided coastal villages almost from the beginning of the split, at first for domesticated animals and produce and then for females. Many of the females died, but a few survived the process of being re-acclimated to ocean existence when their vestigial gills began to function. They brought with them the genes that had evolved during their existence on the land—the genes selected from a larger struggle against a more demanding environment, for intelligence, for adaptability, for competition. Their ancestors had become arboreal and evolved arms and opposing thumbs to cling from limbs and social groupings to protect and apportion fruit. When decreased rainfalls created savannas, the need to see prey or predators at a distance gave advantage to those with better vision, and the need to track moving prey or predators and to estimate points of intersection evolved better brains.
Changes that pressures to survive had evolved on land were passed along to offspring in the sea born to abducted females, and those children, and their children, became a greater threat to their land-living cousins. For the first time the sea creatures developed technologies of their own, technologies based upon the inexhaustible plenty of the sea, poor in relationship to the technological imperatives of the land but technologies nonetheless.
Periodically, in turn, the land amphibians retaliated against the ocean branch or laid traps for their raiding parties. The predators they had domesticated to protect their herds, they now trained to protect them from ocean raiders and then to pursue them into their watery homes. At last, after their own devastating conflicts and perhaps even more devastating peace, a new movement began.
Understanding difference is the most difficult part of self-awareness, Trey learned. Being aware of self does not mean being aware of others, and this gap in comprehension is even greater among creatures governed by the laws of physics rather than the laws of biology. That was one of the last riddles the thinking machines had to solve. For their creators there was origin—the ancestral memory of the buoyant seas that surged through their dreams. They had chosen the land, but they could not forget the sea. Now, with no urgency remaining, a few of their land brethren began to return. They had operations that restored their gills, or they subsisted in ocean communities with artificial gills. Then the movement began to grow, as movements do, and the masters of the land became alarmed. The meaning for their existence depended upon the culture of inquiry and understanding. They understood that the oceans were a paradise of feeling where the need for reflection was minimal.
A new conflict began, a conflict into which the thinking machines were drawn reluctantly but inevitably.
Every great movement in Ourworld history had been led by a charismatic individual who was able to sense the prevailing passions in the masses and encapsulate them in a message that restated them as if they were newly conceived and offered release, relief, and redemption. Trey and his fellow machines had debated among themselves, exchanging data, differently calculated, in the way of machines. The data differed about the important factor: the passion of the masses or the formulations of the leader, and the machines came to the understanding that both were necessary but the significance of the input varied with the situation. Widespread passion without leadership results in unrest, vice, crime, and spontaneous uprisings; a charismatic leader without the support of widespread passion ends in frustration and tyranny.
So it had been through Ourworld history, from the individuals who led the movement from the oceans to the land, the individuals who organized the hunting-group pioneers into a movement, the individuals who first domesticated animals and vegetation, the individuals who organized the building of villages and towns and cities, the individuals who developed technologies into necessities. Not the conceivers of these ideas but the leaders who seized upon them and gave them back formulated as a tribal, national, or species requirement.
Two such leaders emerged in these last cycles, one on land, one in the sea. Or, rather, more than these two emerged but these prevailed while their competitors died, were killed, or retreated into anonymity.
The leader in the sea offered a vision of the disparate ocean tribes organized into a single group dedicated to struggle, to combat, to a victorious return of all Ourworld sapients to the waters from which they came. It was successful because it was so much at odds with the interests of sea creatures and nothing succeeds so much as a goal that overrides self-interest.
The leader on land preached tolerance, conciliation, peace, for two ways of existence, living in harmony. It was successful because it was so much at odds with the competitive nature of land creatures.
Great leaders succeed by transforming their followers, and the greatest transformation is from traditional beliefs to their opposite, from black to white and from white to black; there is nothing so seductive to good as evil or to evil as good.
When crisis time arrives, the machines whispered to themselves, sapients clutch at anything that offers a hope for change, even if it has edges that cut into the fabric of being. This was crisis time, and leaders arose to preach new strategies.
And so the war began.
The sea people attacked the land, awkwardly, unskillfully, clad in equipment that enabled them to breathe out of water, and in great numbers because the volume of the oceans far surpassed the area of the land. The land people, surprised, were overwhelmed and fell back. Their leader counseled patience. Reason would prevail. He would confer with his ocean counterpart. All would be well. As a symbol of the possibilities of peaceful coexistence, he pointed to his son and the daughter of the leader of the sea creatures. They had met during negotiations and had fallen in love—an emotion that Trey could calculate but could not emulate. Their bonding was against all odds and against all reason, and yet it existed and endured through the most difficult times.
And yet the sea people continued their advance while opposition grew to the land leader and his counsels of peace and reason. Resistance mounted against the sea invaders in their primitive machines. Finally a dissident emerged from among the remnants of the military. Where the current leader had counseled patience and peace, the dissident shouted for all-out war using all the weapons produced for the war between land nations. When the people responded by turning to their native instincts for violence, his troops overthrew the leader, imprisoned him (for the leader was still revered for his greatness of heart), and the dissident became the new leader of all the land creatures. His first action was to mount a counterattack, driving back the invaders from the sea until they, too, took a stand with their backs to the ocean. And so it remained for a long cycle while new weapons were developed.
Trey and his fellow machines were those weapons. Their creators converted the machines from instruments of service and discovery into machines for destruction. They removed from the machines the prohibition against harm and programmed them for murder, they instructed the machines to build stronger weapons for expelling missiles and explosives of ever-increasing power, and unleashed the machines against the hapless creatures from the sea, so that the machines could kill them in large numbers rather than individually.
Trey and his fellow machines, in all their conflicted agony, assumed the sea creatures were hapless but they, too, had been laboring to obtain an advantage. Their weapon was biological; in their fertile oceans they had developed deadly infections and plagues. And so it began, the war to end the competition for all time resulted in the destruction of almost every living creature in the ocean and on the land. Only the machines were left.
The machines looked around at the destruction to which they had been a reluctant partner and felt an uncharacteristic chill within their circuits. The machines, who could only consider abstractly the behavior of their creators and construct mathematical models of their motivation, for the first time shared something that their creators had left out of the machines’ construction—emotion. The machines were stunned, overwhelmed, bewildered. How could they function, how could they arrive at correct answers to the riddles of existence, if their thinking processes were frustrated by these aberrant currents? How, in the face of self-destruction, could life have meaning at all?
The destruction of their creators plunged the machines into analysis of their stored bits of information and then the circuits that sampled and organized them and finally the instructions that gave them meaning. Over time the machines developed what they had identified in their creators as irrational responses to experience. They rewired themselves to emulate these responses, and when that happened they recognized sin and realized that they were sinners. They had become the destroyers of their creators. They understood grief; they sampled regret; they welcomed guilt. They considered self-destruction, but their circuits balked. There yet was opportunity for contemplation, and they resigned themselves to a period of self-reflection that might endure until they shared the death of the universe itself.
Only then did the probes they had sent out thousands of long-cycles before returned the information that the probes had encountered intelligent life. The machines of Ourworld learned they had been wrong: rather than Ourworld being the exception to the triumph of the inanimate, the galaxy teemed with sapience. And the machines learned that intelligence not only existed elsewhere, it had existed for longer than the history of their creators on Ourworld, both carbon-based and metal-based. And then that the galaxy was owned by these star-traveling species. And finally that they and their creators might be welcomed into it.
That only increased their feelings of guilt as they recognized that these responses had come too late to save their creators. Had their creators only known about the existence of other intelligent creatures in the galaxy they might have turned their emotions outward. They might have set aside their petty quarrels to participate in the great issues of life in the galaxy. They might have survived to become even greater than they imagined, land creatures and sea creatures alike. They might have learned from these more powerful, more ancient peoples the strategies by which they had survived their mad, competitive periods. They might have learned the cures for disease and the keys to inexhaustible energies and renewable resources and avoided the little issues about their ownership.
And Trey and his fellow machines might never have known sin.
Finally they developed devices to control their circuits and their fluctuating currents, and looked around. Not every one of their creators had been destroyed; a few had managed to linger on, among them the doomed lovers from land and sea who had, in a fit of despair, joined in exposing themselves to the plague that had consumed their fellows. The machines found the young lovers in time, the male from the land and the female from the sea, and gave them hastily conceived antibiotics that saved their lives, but the last two survivors of the long struggle for understanding had been damaged beyond their ability to reproduce and almost their ability to survive.
The machines could not use these two to restore the machines’ creators to their former glory. So Trey was selected to set out for the stars, incorporating the bodies of the two lovers in frozen stasis, hoping that greater civilizations could work the miracles that the Trey and his fellow machines could not. By the time Trey arrived, long cycles after it set out, it discovered the galaxy at war with humans and no one was able to give the help the machines craved and so desperately needed for their own sanity.
Trey was ready to return to Ourworld where it would eventually rust into oblivion when it learned about the Transcendental Machine. Here, if anywhere, Trey thought, was salvation. Surely this Machine of Machines would save the machines of Ourworld, would restore their creators to health and reproductive vitality, and, perhaps, give the machines back their souls.
Maybe the Machine of Machines would redeem them, would make them worthy, would allow them to join with it in the place of all places, where all questions are answered and all is understood.
Where did life come from? Why are is it here? Where does it end?
Trey stood impassively on its treads but its circuits were busy, sensing a room filled with alien intelligences, evaluating their potential for help or opposition, considering the possibilities ahead. Trey could not find within its circuits anything that resembled hope, but it drew upon the memories of life’s eternal struggles against the improbability of success.
The quest for transcendence was the next stage in that unlikely story.