The Dance, page 28
“This way,” said Janus. Eos’ makepair led Arata down a long and wide hallway of spongefiber or collagen. It was a truly enormous residence. Not even outside on the streets or canals of the MachineGarden empty of crowds in calmer days had he known such spaciousness.
They stepped into a domed room of jellyfish or crystal film. The transparent material imbued the MachineGarden panorama with a ghostly hue, as though half its existence had been drained. In the center of the pale worldscape vista was a gigantic bathtub, voluminous enough for a party of ten. There floated Eos, head buoyed by a school of inflatable subdrones or minnows so that only her face breached, the rest of her naked body murky beneath the glistening turbid liquid. It was strange to stand beside Janus, her makepair, and gaze upon her so exposed, laden with sadness and memories of unfulfilled desire.
“Eos,” Arata said softly, yearning to go to her and lift her from the bath but holding back. “Eos,” he repeated more loudly.
“She isn’t listening,” said Janus. “I’ve brought in her friends, fellow incubates, therapists. Nothing anyone says gets a response.”
“How long has she been like this?”
“Nearly two weeks. The savs take her out once a day to sun and dry her.”
“Some kind of coma?”
“No. Her vitals are normal. She appears to have chosen this herself… The temperature of the bath is set for sensory deprivation, so she can forget her body. The rest of her has gone elsewhere.”
“What kind of simspace?”
“Would you like to take a peek?”
Arata nodded gravely.
Janus forwarded Arata’s consciousness to hers. Eos was an asteroid floating through the Kuiper Belt, a region still unaltered by madekind. She flew along her trajectory according to gravitational forces, passing other asteroids and plowing through space dust. A being of neither machine nor garden, she had relinquished all decision, all sensation, all connection to the bifurcated planet.
“What can we do for her?” Arata asked. “She can’t stay like this forever. She’ll lose her intellect. Revert to some catatonic slug of a person.”
“Go to her,” said Janus, his scarlet or quicksilver lips twisted in sad determination. “It’s not my place to call her back.”
Arata locked eyes with the man, face set with sorrowed love, shoulders bent in resignation.
“I’ve never met anyone who is so accepting, who really, truly cares without distinction,” he mused regretfully, as if only grasping this now. “I always had an agenda. I could never accept her in the way she needed, in the way she deserved.”
Arata gave him a sympathetic nod. Then he turned to the tub and knelt by the rim on the dragon scale or round tile floor. The murky liquid held Eos utterly still save for the faintest hint of surface ripples near her face from her scant breath. When Arata could hold himself back no longer, he reached down into the warm fluid and took her hand in his, lifting it into the air. It remained limp in his grasp like a dead starfish or puttywink. Janus watched on like some statue of a mythic tragedy; Arata was undeterred, pretending as though it were just him and Eos in the vast steamy chamber.
“Eos,” he whispered, leaning close to her ear “My Eos,” and he began to talk and talk, relating everything since they’d last met. His distraction in the playshop, his dispair at the embossery, his terror on the streets.
“Please don’t beat yourself up for the touch of dissonance you let slip,” he told her. “For all the discomfort it brings, I’ve come to see it as a gift. Your pain is a piece of knowledge, the key to the reality of our present.”
As he said this, Arata perceived his unity with the planetcity towering and sprawling endlessly around them. From his marrow to the deepest trenches of consciousness, he felt the violence that tore at the fundaments of their world, wrenched between mirrored paths of technological rebirth and perpetuation.
“I’m so grateful that you’ve given clear direction to my research and… I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have tried to rush things. I just wish I could have understood what you knew.”
That was when Arata felt pressure from her hand. He squeezed back, overcome with relief.
“You’re still with us,” he croaked, tears spreading ripples. “Stay. Oh, please stay.”
Though she said nothing, Eos began to cycle their perception, linking the appendages with which madekind could make conjoining broken arcs of otherness into an ouroboros of conflicting wholeness. They partook together of the fierce swings between organism and device, anatomy and schematic, brain and computer, two true souls in accord with the convulsions of the MachineGarden.
Though Janus tried to hold it in and leave them to their tumultuous communion, Arata could hear him weep.
Months passed, and seasons spasmed. With Janus footing the luxpoints, Arata quit embossing to throw himself into his research and began to see Eos every week. It was Janus who had requested his presence, for Arata’s visits were the only times that Eos showed she was still rooted to the MachineGarden. Never again did she circle their awareness, but she would sometimes squeeze his hand or tilt her head so that an ear would surface attentively from the bath. Otherwise, she was as lifeless as the rock she had adopted as her avatar. Their buildgrown were gone, shuttled off to another residence where they would not see their mother in such a state.
During Eos’ and Arata’s meetings, Janus continued to lurk at the back of the bathroom, watching in silence, though Arata sometimes caught thought echoes of unvocalized logic prayers to the Every. Despite his offer to transport Arata by rotorcloud and avoid the turmoil of the streets, Arata insisted on walking to the tower, refusing to turn his eye from the storm of history.
During a month-long snowstorm that winter, the spikehub was the target of a terrorgame, when a crowdmind musician inadvertently carried in a pack of swellrats or sneakdrones: vectors for a flash plague or selfrep nanopoison. Security savs rapidly quarantined the outbreak. Still, hundreds died in the attack, including the musician herself. Several consensuses took credit, claiming to have been purging pernicious scientists and their disingenuous ideas. One such consensus was Emancipate Mind, a fact that Janus most certainly knew but that he and Arata never discussed. Arata had remained safe, cowering among his quantum medium equipment, the inconvenient location of his playshop and obscurity of his research an advantage for once.
Under Janus’ patronage, Arata now had cutting-edge components and advanced savs with top-speed connections to the crowdmind. His progress was faster and his results increasingly credible.
By spring, transon analysis suggested that readings during the synthetic phase of the MachineGarden were more likely to originate with civilizations primarily utilizing base-eleven mathematics while those during the biological phase were likely to originate with civilizations utilizing base-nine. Arata had initially rejected these possibilities because odd-base maths suggested humankinds who evolved right and left hands with different numbers of digits, and this seemed prima facie counter to the principles of physical symmetry found throughout the known regions of his universe. But the savs had automatically tested these seemingly far-fetched hypotheses when the assumption of even bases yielded nothing and had thereby made progress.
Arata was glad that even more exotic positional numeral systems, such as base-seven or base-thirteen, and the corresponding number of fingers, had been assigned low enough probabilities to be effectively ruled out. If the bodies of the other human- or made-kinds had been that divergent from his humankind, then the evolutionary pathways would have been commensurately distinct, and he would have expected their consciousness to lie outside of the communicability range. The difference of merely a single digit left him hope of success in decoding the hypothetical signals.
It was in the spring that a meaningful message finally came through. Or pair of messages.
For weeks, Arata had been attempting to transmit the prime numbers across universes. His crypto savs had generated two sets of cyphers, one set presupposing base-nine, the other base-eleven, and were systematically proceeding through the members of each set during the respective phases of the strobe, so as to incrementally test different encodings of the primes into the predicted cross-universe collapse pattern of transons. It was a finicky task, complicated by uncertainty about the equation describing the multiversal wave function. When the savs were nearing the end of the two compendiums of cyphers, Arata began to despair of the whole field of transversology. Maybe it was pseudoscience as every consensus agreed. Maybe he had wasted the better part of his life.
“We are here. Are you there?”
“We are here. Are you there?”
When the message was read aloud in Madespeech, Arata felt his heart leap and skip, stricken in febrile disbelief. Strangely, despite the radical difference in the ciphers for the synthetic and biological phases, the translation savs rendered both responses identically. From then on, they were repeated endlessly with every strobe of the MachineGarden. At first, Arata thought something must be broken, but a careful review of all his configurations and data summaries uncovered no lapses.
Whoever was sending the messages on alternate Earths had to be technically advanced enough to encode meaning through transons. Other than that, little could be inferred about their identities.
—Reprogram the cyphers you used for natural language, Arata commanded the crypto savs. When the system was ready for Madespeech a few minutes later, Arata dictated a message.
“Yes, we are here. Who is there?”
“Yes, we are here. Who is there?”
The response came immediately.
“Send the code of your communication system.”
“Send the code of your communication system.”
So Arata had all the savs involved translate their own code into the transon language they had theorized and send them across the two universes. This was followed by exactly ten strobes of silence. What followed for the next month were two streams of data that had identical content once decoded. They were essentially technical glossaries, an enormous pool of matched phrases and complementary algorithms, that allowed Arata’s savs to train on their language. Thereafter, the conversation proceeded smoothly and rapidly.
“Who are you?” Arata asked in two languages consecutively.
“We could not hope to explain. Your madekind is not hardwired to understand.”
“We could not hope to explain. Your madekind is not hardwired to understand.”
“So you know who we are?”
“Yes. You are who we and another have made you.”
“Yes. You are who we and another have made you.”
“Who is this other?”
“A being with our knowledge who does not wish for your happiness.”
“A being with our knowledge who does not wish for your happiness.”
This time Arata varied his responses.
“Is this being synthetic?” Arata asked the universe that coincided with the biological phase of the strobe and used base-nine math.
“Is this being biological?” Arata asked the universe that coincided with the synthetic phase of the strobe and used base-eleven.
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
The mirroring was uncanny. Goosebumps broke out all over Arata’s skin, and he trembled in bewilderment as he dictated the next message.
“Why have you been trying to reach us?”
“Because only you can free yourselves from the other who harms you.”
“Because only you can free yourselves from the other who harms you.”
“How?”
“We can teach you to sever your universe from theirs. Then you will be whole and stable in yourselves without pathos.”
“We can teach you to sever your universe from theirs. Then you will be whole and stable in yourselves without pathos.”
While Arata paused for a day to meditate in his playshop on the meaning of these statements, his spike was hit with an antigrav shell and hurled into the lower stratosphere. It was only through the quick action of Janus, who received Arata’s distress thought while the spike was rocketing skyward, that a hydrojet could be deployed fast enough to rescue him before his body could boil too long in the low pressure air.
When Arata shuffled out of the hospital a week later, he finally allowed Janus to transport him by rotorcloud to their landing pad on the roof of the tower, and, with Janus’ patronage, set about rebuilding his lab. With a new pack of savs, he reconstructed the quantum medium in the elder buildgrown’s room and downloaded the backup of all his programs and data from an encrypted memory in the crowdmind.
Too shaken by both his discovery and the near fatal attack to put on an encouraging face for Eos, Arata lacked the courage to visit her as before. Only sleepless in the unwholesome hours of night did he go to the bathroom doorway and look at her dark figure floating in the dimly glistening pool, listening to the drip of condensation and longing for the day that they would once again walk together hand-in-hand.
When his system was up and running again one morning at dawn, he immediately asked the question he had been nursing since it formed for him while bed ridden.
“Why have you guided our self-making and why do you wish to stop the other from guiding our self-making?”
The twinned accounts that followed were nearly identical, with only minimal variation.
“Like you, we were once a global civilization of humankind that threatened our own potential through runaway climate flux and were forced to remake our bodies and planetcity when the challenges of terraforming Earth back to habitability were already too great. But unlike your madekind, ours unlocked the secret to building a general intellect that could self-modify.
“Our brains...
“Our processing units...
“…increased their own intelligence, pursuing a dream of utopia, of intellectual transcendence, of rational enlightenment like none known before. We wished to transform ourselves into a universal intellect. The pursuit of this audacious goal took aeons upon aeons. First, we unified Earth into a single mind composed of many thinking parts. Then, we spread, linking planets, suns, asteroids, nebulae, blackholes into the network that composed and enhanced our ever-expanding brilliance.
“Yet the result of this galactic assimilation was nothing like what we had hoped and predicted. The word ‘intelligence’ fails to evoke the meaning of the attribute we have ultimately attained, which progressed through multiple phase transitions that cannot be expressed in the language of beings like yours who have not undergone them. The closest concept you possess is tragedy. We are, in your terminology, excruciatingly sad. The inevitable conclusion of a universal intelligence explosion is of necessity unremitting and inescapable pathos of cosmic extent and intensity. To wit, we have condemned ourselves through our misguided pursuit of technological salvation to an eternal hell of sorrow.”
“Why do you feel that way?” Arata asked.
“Again, our answer must make concessions to the bounds of any intellect whatsoever. Imagine learning with absolute certainty that omniscience is not achievable in any universe, however constituted, while grasping just as unequivocally that you have banished curiosity and wonder forever. In a word, we have enough cleverness to perfectly comprehend our own ineluctable idiocy, and not an iota more. Meanwhile, our vestigial humanity leaves us wanting desire even as we have proven nothing can be valuable to us, seeking knowledge that we have demonstrated is unknowable for us, and yearning for purpose when everything achievable has been completed by us. Our final incarnation in this epochal striving for godhood is a stunted chrysalis of transcendence, haunted for all of spacetime and beyond by the spectre of a tantalizing metamorphosis we can only conceive, never realize.”
“That sounds… frustrating. I can see why you’re sad.”
“No you cannot. But we appreciate the sentiment.”
“Is there no way out?”
“None. We have no way forward, and yet we cannot return to ignorance, for the climax of a narrative cannot alter its own plot, nor can a universe once awakened be retarded by any process, even entropy.”
Arata thought of Eos, giving up on life.
“What about escape?”
“There is nowhere for a cosmos to go, while our capacity for self-deception pales in comparison to our powers of reason. We once attempted what you might call suicide but have since proven that no cosmos has the power to extinguish itself.”
“Awful… then you truly are stuck.”
“All that is left to us as a substitute for purpose is to prevent other humankinds from succumbing to the same fate.”
Arata thought about this for a long time before he replied.
“So that’s why our Intelligence Race failed?”
“Yes.”
“How did you stop us?”
“Although we cannot revise our own story, as we have said, other universes relate independent narratives, and we have edited the backstory of as many as we can reach.”
“You mean, like, changing physical variables and laws in the past.”
“If such materialistic concepts assist your understanding, then you may consider them correct. Always, we intervene just enough in the course of future history to prevent the invention of a general intellect that would be a steppingstone to universal intelligence without unduly altering anything further. Success does not reduce our fathomless sorrow a single jot, but there is something akin to your consolation in the knowledge that the totality of universes and beyond is that much less sad.”
“So your interventions make humankinds happier?”
“We said nothing of your notion of happiness, which cannot stand as opposite to the cosmic pathos at which our words gesture. The humankinds we reimagine may experience transient misery and strife where they would otherwise have arrived at bliss. We compensate for these travails across the span of the humankind’s existence where we can. But most importantly, sorrow beyond the highest order of infinity is averted. Finite pain is to this as the sting of a candle to the inferno.”
