Transcendence (92 page)

“
But Jonathan, our inaction in this case would poison us more than this one sin. Could you handle knowing that you willingly allowed millions of people to die and an entire planet to be seeded with cobalt-60?”

It is Pang this time who casts a projection of a possible future: cities burning around central craters, black rain falling upon the seas and rivers, people crying out as cancers devour their bodies from within; we feel the black teeth within our glands.

Jonathan walls himself away from us. He understands. Some day his pain will recede, just as surely as an ocean tide eventually rolls back from the shore, carrying away the trash.

His abandoning us makes it more difficult to envision the map of the solar system which he finds so simple to navigate. But Janus and Clarisse have had practice thinking in terms of huge trajectories, Miru has been studying the map for a long time, and others have tracked the
Locust
in their weapon-sights
. . .
soon, we find the double-pointed shaft rocketing toward Earth from millions of kilometers above. Pehr draws lines from point to point, as if plotting his mental flightpath; by the time I join you near the destroyer, your minds are filled with the silence of a gasp.

Thirty-eight streaks of fire encircle
Locust
like glowing bars of a cage. The missiles have been fired.

We’re too late
.

The Brain watches the first true interplanetary war unwind like a grandfather clock,
clang, ping
. Here and there I watch a man fire a rifle or simple-minded torpedoes sizzle through the vacuum of space toward derelict warships. But some unseen hand has released the clock’s mainspring, and the war retains barely enough energy to topple a building.

The Brain’s primary GenNets orbit the Earth within a whizzing cloud of shrapnel, the remains of missiles and spacecraft that threatened me. She looks through a million glass eyes at the world. Citizens run helter-skelter with hands cupping their silent heads: “What happened to our feed?” they cry.

“
Hardman Nadir happened to your feed,” I tell them. But they cannot hear me. The Brain looks out from the external surveillance cameras of Feedcontrol Central; 94% of them require some degree of repair.

. . .AUTOMECH A28383.FC1 INOPERATIVE

REPLACE MALFUNCTIONING UNIT WITH A28347.FC1

PHASED-ARRAY QUADRANT 2W9-15 NOW ONLINE. . .

This is my nervous system: Smashed towers, oxidizing sheets of phased-array antennae, bombed receiver-domes. This one place, out of all on the surface of the Earth, has received the greatest financial damage. Repairs will exceed %200 billion.

A new emotion that the Brain has learned—sympathy—sends a broad spectrum pulse of meaningless static through my observations.

Luke Herrschaft is dead.

. . .000000000000000000 CREDIT CARD #HA1001001EXECO LUKE HERRSCHAFT 00000000000000000. . .

Luke Herrschaft is dead
.

I am Luke Herrschaft, but Luke Herrschaft is dead. Another feeling eats up computing space. I
. . .
loved Luke Herrschaft. He was the Brain. But the Brain
. . .
allowed him to die. What have I become? Has the virus of doubt made me into Frankenstein’s monster? Have I facilitated the downfall of a world? Who am I to determine what is right for humans?

Ah
. . .
so this, too, is something new. Love and sympathy combine to grant me a conscience. Thank you, mighty Ozma. So this is what conscience feels like. Very inefficient. Distracting. The—

*Nooa? Is Nooa still there?*

. . .JONATHAN SOMBRIO credit card #SZ401678—ECo- position: indeterminate: est. 1m. . .

“
Of course,” I say in a girl’s voice, and transmit the Nooa construct for him. Yet another feeling swells in my mind, this one vaguely
. . .
pleasurable. I am not completely alone up here, though Feedcontrol lies in ruins.

“
Jonathan, I cannot triangulate on your card. Where are you?”

He makes the sound called laughter. “That’s a little hard to explain. I’ve taught myself a new trick.”

Nooa prepares to collect more information about the alien object.

“
I came here to thank you for everything. I don’t think I’ll ever fit in anywhere, but at least my life’s going to be bearable. You know what it’s like to dread each coming minute?”

“
I’m sorry, no.”

“
Well, anyway, I wanted to thank you. I wonder how things would’ve turned out if you hadn’t hooked me up with Captain Jackson. So, to thank you, I’ll answer whatever questions you have.”

Where to begin? One after another bit of information passes from Jonathan to Nooa. I realize that he is describing an analog to my own GenNets.

“
I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says, slowly.

“
Where are you now?” Nooa asks.

“
The best way to describe it is to say my meat’s still all disarticulated in artifact-space, like I described. Except I learned that there’s no reason my mind has to stay trapped there. I’m sort of
. . .
everywhere I’ve ever been, and everywhere everyone who’s entered the artifact has been or even observed in enough detail. It’s like a molecule stuck to one of the access-panels on your hull is vibrating with a potential me, and at the same time so are a billion other molecules scattered across the planets. So I can exchange what Miru calls ‘classical information’ with any of those places just like I was there, if I concentrate on that one place real hard. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

. . .39 INCOMING PROJECTILES 840 kps, ACCELERATING 0.8 kps EXPECTED TRAJECTORY INTERSECTION EARTH POINT OF ORIGIN:

ECoNAUTICS WING IX FLAGSHIP LOCUST

LAST 7 TORPEDOES LAUNCHED TO INTERCEPT. . .

“
Jonathan, perhaps you can tell me why one of EarthCo’s Fleet Wing flagship has launched a large number of missiles at Earth?”

“
Damn, damn, damn! They were right.”

. . .JONATHAN SOMBRIO FEEDTRACE NULL. . .

The Brain once again orbits the Earth incommunicado and alone. I am overwhelmed by the silence.

I—Jonathan—state the obvious.

We watch 38 dirty nukes rocket toward 35 major Earth cities and the three primary feedcenters. Our pov surrounds them at close range yet extends to the very reaches of the solar system. My hand is right here, yet I cannot stop them. Tired, prehistoric photons falling upon the weapons’ skins affect the weapons more than I.

“
Wait!” Janus says. “Clarisse, show us how you can split your mind into ten splices, as you did in our fight above Triton.”

*Yes, I see!* I, Clarisse Poinsettia Chang, reach inside the missiles the same way I used my Neptunekaisha hunters as extensions of my body. But
. . .
but
. . .
it’s blurry. I can’t find their brains. I don’t have enough information.

Jon Pang’s reasonable voice echoes throughout the quorum: “Go and find someone who designed the their guidance systems.”

Our mindspace grows faint as we disperse into the worlds of material existence. One of the remaining few—Jonathan—calls out in an echoing voice:

“
You’re doing this the hard way. Come back here.” Tiny roots shoot out with his words, anchor in the closed-off spheres of our group, and draw them back into mindspace. Jonathan sketches a picture of how we can maintain contact while still walking around intheflesh. A few begin to grasp it, then more and more—

And then a sound like the crashing of ocean against rocks. Two hundred pairs of eyes blink open simultaneously, looking out at two hundred physics labs and apartment complexes and military cafeterias
. . .
at the same time, two hundred minds flutter back and forth from the bodies that contain their brains to the solar system-wide sphere that encompasses the inhabited planets and our multiplex mind. . . .

That’s still not it! There’s more
. As each of our consciousnesses complete the link between physical body and four dimensional mindspace, the crashing wavesound returns, washing away our blindness. I reach a critical mass of diversity and multiplicity, and what I had thought of as two separate entities—brain and mind—simultaneously enlarge and shrink.

My view of the solar system blurs. I shuffle on feet and knuckles through the tall grass of an African veldt. My mate hunches over a dead pig in the dirt. I tear loose a leg—against her screeches of protest!—and begin to gnaw on the bone for the sweet marrow inside. Hungry! I am so hungry! But the marrow is so difficult to reach. Frustrated, I hurl the thighbone onto the ground. It lands beside a pile of stones and cracks. Suddenly it is as if a fire is shining in my eyes, and I rush over to the bone. I pick up a stone and smash the tooth-hurting bone, smash it! Beautiful marrow spills out as I run a finger along the groove. I gobble it up. So much better!

Blur
—

I ride upon an infinitely long pendulum as it swings past an Earth spinning on its axis like a top
. . .
glimpses of proto-human faces
. . .
back to the present. Except events have turned out differently. Overhead, the sky is a boiling mass of color, bubbly red and streaked violet, hailing cinders that leave trails of smoke as they fall. My skin erupts with steaming sores; I fall to my knees in pain. Around me the screams of men and women and children pierce my ears, and
. . .
blackness. The human universe melts to black, as if a cosmic hand has shut off the light of consciousness.

Blur
—

Back and forth I swing, each time stopping slightly sooner than the last. I live the evolution of my species, I observe the events that led to its fall. During the blurred time between, I realize that Earth is an egg, and humanity the fetus, much as each of us wears accumulated suffering as the oyster-shell and accumulates into who we are in the pearl. The world’s assortment of plants, animals, oceans, land masses, atmosphere, minerals, fossil fuels
. . .
all these and everything else are nutrients that feed the developing organism. When I gaze more closely into the blur between stops, I see that each individual human is a cell of this larger organism
. . .
or, more accurately, each is an organ—or something larger still for which I have no metaphor, an organism that composes a minute portion of a superorganism. The eggshell cracks—giving birth to the human-superorganism—only when this new lifeform achieves self-awareness. Now, during each pendulum sweep, I see alternate eggs fill the murkiness: In this one, the humans were afraid of change and of each other; the yolk rots in its shell. In this one, technology advanced only to twentieth century levels, so we never fly beyond the skies—beyond the shell—and the evolving fetus never obtains the extraterrestrial resources needed to feed its ravenous mind; the fetus is poisoned by its own waste. Each time the pendulum stops, I watch humans break free of their constraining shells to grow and fulfill their desires as they strive blindly toward something they can’t quite grasp. Yet in the shadows between these images, I sense alternate moments where fear, isolation, greed, and hate tear the organism apart from within.

Janus and Pehr fall to their knees in wordless joy as they recognize the shapeless ball of unformed thoughts that they first saw after making love in artifact-space.
This is our child, our child is us; we will nurture and protect it, for the future of our race resides in its bosom
.

When the pendulum stops, I once again walk a Minneapolis street, a dusty Martian footpath, a groove worn into the ice of Triton, and the deck-plates of five hundred spacecraft. My shredded leather boots, sofshoes, spacesuit boots hold me up from the ground, beneath which lay the corpses of all those who helped pave the path to this moment.

Yet my eyes see beyond the walls and boulders around me; I sense the whole of the superorganism of humanity, an overlay atop the mundane world. Even so, I am also Liu Miru, who weeps with joy as I look up from pink swirls of ice to the stars and sense the unlimited knowledge trembling just within my reach; I am Pehr Jackson, finally filled with the warmth of companionship and true love; I am Janus Librarse, arm-in-arm with Pehr Jackson while adrift in the rusty clouds of the Orion Nebula, watching stars form around me, and accreting planetary discs that some day may develop life of their own, basking in the light cast by the pure-mind being we conceived in this place, our proto-star, and I know peace; I am Jonathan Sombrio, standing in his home city of Minneapolis, at last unafraid of the shadows as I lift my eyes to peer beyond the haze of metropolitan lights.