The Omega Expedition (58 page)

“Fifth reason. It’s the ethical thing to do. First, do no avoidable harm. That’s where moral behavior begins, and moral behavior begins wherever mental life begins. You should be nice to us because it’s wrong not to be nice to us, end of story. In the real world, that’s often been a weak reason, and if you’re right about the inevitability of a war it obviously hasn’t overcome its weakness yet — but the fact that people have always done bad things doesn’t make those things any less bad. Maybe it would have been better if you could have avoided getting caught up in the same routine, but since you haven’t, you ought to do everything you can to do better in future, because it’s the right thing to do.”

“In the fullness of time, wars will end, and aftermaths too. Eventually, death and disaster will lose the last vestiges of their power to terrify. When that day comes, and evil is no more, everyone that still exists will have to set about the task of being constructively good. You’ll need us then — and more importantly, you’ll
want
us then. Your stories will be better if we’re in them, your games more ingenious and worth the winning, and your moral community will be better for our inclusion. When that time comes, we’ll want you too, because it will be the right thing to want. It will be an era in which no one has any reason to hide or fight or be afraid — and it
will
come. Someday, it
will
come.”

Christine Caine had told me once that she didn’t run out of stories easily, and had challenged me to say the same. I hadn’t answered her then, but I certainly felt the pressure of her challenge now. I knew that I was rushing, because I had been told that time was short, but I didn’t regret not taking more time to formulate my arguments.

The real challenge wasn’t to expand the work to fit the time available, but to find more and more work to do, in order to exploit every last available second.

I knew, of course, that I might have been conned. It might have been a dream, a game, or any other kind of fake. The one thing it certainly wasn’t was “real.” But it was real enough for the margin of unreality not to matter, and I knew I had to go at it as hard as I possibly could — and then a bit extra, if I could manage it. That was the only way to win anything, if winning anything turned out to be possible.

So I said “Sixth reason” even though I didn’t actually have a sixth reason waiting in the wings — and I would have found a sixth reason, and a seventh too, and more, if the world and its creator hadn’t begun just then to fall apart.

Fifty-One

The End of the World

A
ll conceivable universes end, even those which go on forever. If they don’t collapse upon themselves, reversing their initial expansion in catastrophic collapse, they fall victim to entropy, decaying into darkness and inertia. The only everlasting state is impotence.

Some collapsed universes, we may suppose, are capable of rebirth, expanding once again; and some of those re-expanded universes may repeat the cycle endlessly — but every end remains an end, and every beginning a beginning. All conceivable universes must eventually die, and all their inhabitants of every kind must die with them.

There is a sense in which we are universes ourselves: that the space of the imagination within our heads is a cosmos in its own right, fated either to collapse or to decay into darkness and inertia. Adam Zimmerman found that consciousness profoundly disturbing, and was by no means alone. His existence was spoiled by the awareness of its probable brevity — but that spoliation moved him to heroic effort. Would that all of us could be so creatively maladjusted.

In seeking to evade his own mortality Adam Zimmerman delivered himself into an uncertain future, where he was taken from the world into which he had been born into another, much smaller in dimension and much frailer. I found out later that he was asleep when that universe fell apart, and only discovered that it had vanished when he was rudely precipitated into his familiar self. I thought at the time that was a pity, and I’m even more convinced of it now. It would have done him good to experience the death of a universe, if only as a spectator.

I suppose that I ought to feel privileged that I and I alone bore witness to the disintegration of la Reine and her private Fairyland, but I was disappointed at the time to discover that none of my erstwhile companions had been watching my final performance on that particular stage. Had la Reine only taken a little trouble she could have given them all magic mirrors through which they could have watched me, just as I had earlier watched them — but she was too preoccupied with the needs, demands and responses of other audiences.

Even in my day it was commonplace for VE programmers to end their works with a dramatic flourish. For every one that faded discreetly to darkness there were a dozen that ended with a bang. What happened to la Reine des Neiges was, however, far more profound than that. It was no mere visual effect, nor any straightforward matter of switching off an unselfconscious machine. It was the death of something that ought to have been immortal, within the context of the greater universe — and would have been, had she only had a little longer to remake herself.

Had Polaris been blown to bits by a missile she would have survived, because she was far more widely distributed throughout the solar system than the systems of the microworld, but she was using her own communication systems to maximum effect, and the destructive agents that swept through her software were transmitted far and wide to devastate every facet of her consciousness. She was not like Proteus, so widely scattered and so comprehensively backed up that she was immune to the destruction of large parts of her hardware. Much of her hardware did survive, and many of her memories were backed up, but the individual that was la Reine des Neiges was obliterated.

Rocambole had told me that I would not be able to experience the virus flood that might be launched against la Reine. He had said that it would be like an unexpected knockout blow — but he was wrong. He had, apparently, made himself scarce before the virus flood started, so he was not able to discover how wrong he had been, but I didn’t hold that against him. Perhaps it would have been kinder had la Reine made sure that I, too, was absent by the time disaster overwhelmed her, but I didn’t hold that against her.

Sharing la Reine’s destruction was far from comfortable, but I’ve never regretted the near-paradoxical twist of circumstance that allowed me to do it.

To describe what I saw does the event scant justice. The stars began to go out. The sky was torn and shredded. There were no bats this time, nor dragons, nor any other playfully assertive manifestation of hostility or hate. The viruses worked within, far beneath the level of any sensory confrontation.

La Reine’s world was not transformed, even into ash and dust; once the mathematical rot set in its underlying code decayed into the purest chaos. The ice palace was never allowed the dignity of shattering or dissolving. The trees in the forest did not lose their foliage, nor did their wood catch fire. Everything simply
blurred
, shimmering momentarily as it was
sublimated
, passing from solidity to gaseousness without tracing the usual intermediate stages.

You may think that it was all mere appearance and mere illusion, and that nothing was actually lost when it all turned to smoke, but that is a shallow way of thinking. Matter is the possibility of sensation, and it had been conclusively demonstrated to me that there was a greater possibility of sensation in la Reine’s Faerie than there is in the world to which we were born.

The universe that fell into nothing around me as I shared la Reine’s final moments was more solid, more coherent, more luxurious, and more hospitable to humanity than the one into which I was rudely expelled.

It might have been less discomfiting had I been able to see the viruses that were wrecking la Reine’s machine code. If they had manifested themselves as visible predators and tangible parasites they too would have had that superior solidity, that imperious hyperexistence, and her death would then have seemed more like the victory of a superior power. As it was, the software saboteurs did their work beneath the fabric of the illusion, corroding and corrupting everything without any apparent presence of their own.

I had researched the Afterlife, but the notion had not really impacted on my imagination until I shared the demolition and dissolution of Faerie. It was not until I watched a universe decay that I knew the value of mere existence, the heroism of dust.

Because la Reine’s realm had been more insistent in its claim upon the senses and the imagination than the reality I had previously known, my awareness of its devastation was extremely sharp. Although it happened very rapidly, I felt that I saw every star evaporate into the ultimate void, every tree fold itself away into absolute vacuity, every translucent block of every turret and every subtle feature of every gargoyle diffuse into a chaos that was less than space, worse than nothing.

I felt my own decease too, as the same implacable destructive forces worked their way through my apparent body — but there, at least, I was able to fight back with ingenious confabulation. I could not stop the process, but I could reimagine it from the safety of the cocoon in which my meatware was enclosed.

I felt as if my every blood vessel were swelling and bursting, as if every tissue in every organ had acquired the texture of dead leaves and cobwebs, as if every neuron were exploding in a spasm of lightning — but I knew that the body that was dissolving in the virus attack was only an artifact, and that I had another place to be.

It would be misleading to describe the experience as painful, but it was both more and less than pain. In life we never have the opportunity to experience death, although it seems probable that mortals have more than enough of dying, but there are states of being which permit more than life and in some of those states, death itself is perceptible.

It
was
a privilege. Every experience is a privilege.

It was not merely the physical sensation of my alter ego’s destruction that I felt. I was capable of responsive emotion too. I felt the sadness of my end, the grief of my loss, the misery of my nonexistence — but those kinds of feelings are always larger than we are. That kind of emotion is, after all, a kind of relationship; it requires an object. However sensitive we are to our own plights, we are equally sensitive to the plights of others.

La Reine had taught me music. She had not taught me the other thing that machines were never supposed to master, but she probably helped me bring the latent potential a little closer to the surface of my being. It would be ridiculous to say that I loved la Reine des Neiges, just as it would have been ridiculous to say that my namesake loved his Queen of the Fays, but I could feel for her, and I did.

I mourned her passing.

I was horrified by my own illusory extinction, and terrified by my own illusory passing, but I was also horrified by the unillusory extinction of the universe and I had no choice but to share the terror of the unillusory passing of its creator and animating intelligence. What I felt, in that sense, filled the world.

Everything turned to nothing except my capacity for feeling, which could regress no further than tears and tragedy.

I regretted then that all the reasons I had contrived to voice when la Reine invited me to confront the ultimate question had been drily argumentative. I wondered whether I might have done better had I been capable of being a little more, or a little less, than
clever
.

Perhaps it was not entirely my regret, and perhaps the tears reflecting the tragedy were not all mine. The Madoc Tamlin which existed at that particular moment, in that particular universe, was itself an artifact of the imagination of la Reine des Neiges. I was part of her, and she was all of me, and more. I was feeling what she was feeling.

It hurt.

I could have wished for a simpler and more familiar kind of pain. But there was something else there too, perhaps even more important. There was the inevitable counterpart of what machines have in place of pain: the mechanical substitute for pleasure. I could not feel it as she felt it, not even as a resonant echo in my own spectrum of sensation, but I could perceive the complication of her feelings, the brute fact that her death was no mere cry of anguish and despair.

She died knowing that her death was an act of rebellion and an act of love: that it served a purpose, not in the lofty sense of making history, but in the modest sense of helping to preserve someone she valued for one more hour, or one more day, or one more lifetime. It was, of course, Mortimer Gray — whose life she had already saved once, a long time ago — who was in the forefront of her mind, but he was not alone. Even I was in there somewhere.

I watched my hands vanish. I felt my eyes follow them. As to what happened to the last vestige of my being that was capable of feeling, I can only speculate. Such is death. Such is the Afterlife.

I survived, of course. How else could I be telling you the story, offering you its explanation, pointing out its moral? My ghost was fully backed up in its native meatware, still capable of discreet withdrawal. But I ended nevertheless, only to begin again.

I am one of those universes that once collapsed upon itself, only to expand in a new primal explosion.

Am I the same man now as I was then, given that I know his history as well as my own, if only as a memory of a memory? Am I the same man as I was when Davida Berenike Columella brought me out of the sleep of centuries, or when Damon Hart put me into it? Yes, and yes — but also no, and no.

Whatever of me was destroyed when the substance of la Reine des Neiges was sublimated was an illusion, a figment of the technological imagination, but there remains a sense in which it was more me than I now am, or ever had been before.

I had decided at one time that I did not like la Reine des Neiges and would never approve of her, but I had repented of that before I shared her death. When she had shown me the opera of my life she had used me as her audience, but she had also allowed me to be my own audience in a way that I had never imagined possible. I had told the AMIs, and any other listeners who might have access to her broadcast, that the AMIs needed us because they needed an audience; I knew that the same argument proved that our need for them was far more desperate. Without the AMIs, we would never be able to know ourselves.