End of the Century (65 page)

Alice

Then, without warning, something changed.

The empty whiteness before her was no longer empty, no longer merely white.

It was a white rabbit in a checked waistcoat, an umbrella under one arm, a pocket watch in its hand.

“Oh, good,” Alice said, her voice raspy and hoarse. “So I
am
crazy after all.”

The little white rabbit tilted its head to one side, its long ears falling over its rounded shoulder, its pink eyes regarding her curiously.

“
This image is one with which you associate comfort, yes?
”

The rabbit's mouth moved, whiskers twitching, while the voice spoke, but the words sounded in her brain, just as they'd done before.

Alice shook her head, and her long white hair fell over her face. She pushed it out of the way with hands that looked like her mother's hands. How long had she been falling?

“
The Dialectic is disrupted, the symmetry is broken. Red and White are out of balance. All due to the second sample. We cannot comprehend his mind. His thoughts. We need help. The White needs
your
help.
”

Alice realized that the voice was addressing her directly, now, not just as the “sample.” What had changed?

“Look,” rasped Alice's voice. “You need help? That's great. Great. That's great.” She was unused to talking. It felt like years since she'd done it last, and she felt as though she'd lost the trick of stringing words together. “I need…I need to know. To know what's going on. Where am I? What have you done to me? Who are you? What is this all about?”

Once, Alice was sure, she might have cried. But she had no tears left. Her emotions felt strangely dampened and had ever since she had found herself falling, here in the whiteness, her skin and hair and clothes bleached white.

“
The White will explain.
” The rabbit's nose twitched, the whiskers vibrating. “
It would be simplest to implant the knowledge of the Change Engine and its history directly into your mind, and allow it to unpack.
”

“Wait a minute…” Alice started to say, but it was too late.

A glass flower blossomed in Alice's mind, and suddenly she
knew
.

Once, there was a universe, peopled by intelligent beings. But the universe was dying, would soon be dead. And so the beings devised a means to escape the death of their home and to go in search of another.

All that they were, all that they would ever be, they stored within the device, and sent it out into the shoals of the higher dimensions, searching for a new home.

The complete knowledge of a dead universe, contained in a tiny pocket of space-time, a lifeboat adrift on the higher dimensions.

The Change Engine.

The Change Engine itself was a small, fast-revolving Gödel universe. It was relatively small, no larger than a city, bounded by a circular corridor. However, since it was rotating, this corridor could be traversed like a spiraling tower. Walking in one direction, one moved into the future; walking in the other, one moved into the past. It was thus possible to walk to any point in the Change Engine's miniature space-time, physically or temporally, without violating local continuity.

The “gem” was no gem, but was the phase boundary transition between the space-time Alice knew as the world and the small revolving pocket universe within—a world in reverse, an unworld.

The Change Engine was designed to survive the death of a universe, and then to go out into higher-dimensional space and seek another universe to colonize. The Change Engine was governed by a rigorously defined dialectic, a control mechanism that applied two separate sets of protocols to each new circumstance. When the protocols reached a point of balance or equilibrium, the Change Engine acted on the resulting decision. One pole was the Red, which was engineered to drive for conquest, destruction, and re-creation. The other was the White, which was designed to work towards preservation, exploration, and noninterference. The two poles interacted, testing outcomes until balance was reached between the varying needs of their protocols, the deliberations manifested as the movements of representational objects around a two-dimensional grid, each new configuration encoding a possible outcome.

When encountering a new universe, this Dialectic was intended to interrogate the space-time and determine whether its qualities were near enough to those of its home universe that the new universe could be xenoformed to a state suitable to support the lives stored as information in its indestructible disks. If not, the Change Engine would disengage and continue drifting through the higher dimensions, searching for another space-time. If so, then the Change Engine would begin the work of reorganizing the space-time around it, reconfiguring it to meet the desired parameters. As the affected zone spread, the Change Engine would introduce flora and fauna into an acceptable biosphere, beginning the process that would result in a new home for the survivors.

That was the plan, at any rate.

When the Change Engine first made contact with the space-time Alice called home, it had collected specimens to examine. The first sample it had brought through the phase boundary transition was Alice Fell.

The first examinations had produced confusing, conflicting results. There
were elements of Alice's genetic makeup which, paradoxically, could only have come from
within
the Change Engine itself.

The Red argued that the sample had been contaminated on retrieval, and that another should be gathered. The White argued that the results of the examinations were as yet inconclusive, and should be continued.

The Dialectic reached stability, and the decision was made to modify Alice biologically, so that she could survive in the desired parameters, should the space-time be xenoformed to match the Change Engine's universe of origin. This was a standard test in the Change Engine's procedures, the reasoning being that if an organism originating in the physical conditions of the newfound universe could be modified to survive in conditions which prevailed in the Change Engine's universe of origin, then by extension the newfound universe could conceivably be xenoformed to support the biologics which had originated in the universe of origin.

The results were inconclusive. Another specimen was required.

Experimentation on the second sample was performed while the Dialectic considered the confusing entropic structure of the new space-time. The data received from beyond the phase boundary transition, the gemlike “skin” of the Change Engine, suggested that the entire space-time was anti-entropic, which the scientists who had originally created and programmed the Dialectic had considered impossible.

It was only after the second sample had been examined and modified that the Dialectic reached a conclusion. It was realized that the Change Engine was impacting the local space-time orthagonally, moving opposite the flow of entropy. The space-time itself wasn't anti-entropic, but the Change Engine was colliding
backwards
against entropy's flow.

This was counter to the Change Engine's protocols. Proper xenoforming could not be carried out in such conditions. The Dialectic considered the question of disengaging and moving on, which should have been a foregone conclusion. However, a novel element interfered with the decision. The second sample had not been placed in stasis, as was procedure, but was still being interrogated by the Red. This sample, which labeled itself with the concept-term “Mervyn,” reached decisions on an irrational basis, not following any logic or protocols that the Dialectic could discern. This sample,
this Mervyn, had begun to influence the decision-making process of the Dialectic. It corrupted the Red protocols, altering the Red agenda, changing the standards by which the Red determined its position.

With the Dialectic unbalanced, and the White unable to counter the now irrational positions of the Red, the decision was made to remain and begin the process of xenoforming.

Moving opposite the flow of entropy, though, as the Change Engine pushed more of its bulk into the local space-time, strange temporal tides sprang into being around the phase transition boundary. These tides ebbed and flowed, with regions around the boundary sometimes exhibiting entropic attributes, sometimes anti-entropic, and sometimes showing no movement whatsoever.

As the Change Engine moved against the flow of time, it pressed deeper into the local space-time, becoming larger in the past than it had been in the future. And as it moved backwards in time, the affected biosphere expanded, ever larger, no more than a few picometers across at first, then nanometers, then microns, then centimeters. An object placed near the phase boundary at this stage, pushed within range of the temporal tides, might find itself traveling backwards into its own past: cells would grow younger, injuries would heal, decay would retreat. Or it might find itself frozen in time, until the tides again ebbed and flowed.

Time moved at a different rate within the Change Engine. Past and future were merely points on the maps, which one could visit again if one walked long and far enough.

But Alice could not go anywhere. Alice remained within the white heart of the Change Engine, forever falling.

“I want out of here. All right? I just want to go home. If I help you, I just want to go home.”

The little white rabbit regarded her, its pink eyes unblinking.

“
You cannot return to your ‘home.' Having been altered, you cannot survive in your universe of origin, but only within the Change Engine, or within the affected
biosphere, already xenoformed. And even there you cannot go, as the Red holds sway, and the Red will not agree to your release. You must remain here, at the Change Engine's heart.
”

If she could still cry, she would have.

“
But the White is not entirely without resources. You can be granted limited access to the Change Engine's systems. You will remain here, but your proxy could be broadcast elsewhere. This, in exchange for helping us cope with the corrupting influence of the Mervyn, and helping us restore the Dialectic to the appropriate balance.
”