The Soul Continuum (31 page)

“Any news from the Continuum?” I ask.

“Nothing yet,” Qod says. “The Salem you met earlier has just visited an iteration who has been through fifty-eight cycles of the cosmos, and he's a little grouchy after waking up from the latest life. He's being rather difficult with us. You might be interested to know that by that time, you take on a more—shall we say—rebellious nature. You
go by a different name and even want to start interfering with the development of the cosmos. It's only a brief phase, though. He'll come out of it in the next few billion years or so.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I say with a sarcastic smile I wish she could see. “Remind me to thank you properly when I get to that phase.”

I wait for her to respond with her usual dry wit, but she says nothing, and I wonder just how tough the battle is for her against this malicious entity. How long can she keep this up?

“You're welcome,” she says, and I sigh with relief.

T
he Observation Sphere is not the dark and foreboding place I walked into last time. It is as it should be, and I am grateful that Qod has not shared any mind-blowing revelations with me this time. Being forewarned about my attitude in the future is new, but it's nothing I cannot set aside as inconsequential compared to what we are preparing for.

The universe seems smaller now as I watch its slow development. In fact—thanks to Diabolis Evomere—I know now that size is as meaningless as time. It is not the universe that's smaller but me. Relying on Qod and the experience of every other human before me, I believed there was nothing new to know; only old things to know again. The last remaining question was the myth of the afterlife, but so many other ancient mysteries had been forgotten, left
behind after eons of complacency, and now it seems that the dark malevolence of ancient superstition is upon me: old gods and demons from previously unknown planes of existence.

Despite everything, there is a new excitement seeded within me now; a new direction in my life after so very, very long. There is more to know, more to see, and the veil of death is no longer the priority. I have a purpose. But for right now I cannot allow that excitement to take root. Arken-Bright's death is still too fresh, and I have enough wisdom to know what I must do to recover. I do what I always do: stare out at the canvas of the heavens to quiet my mind of the deceased's consciousness; the neural flush is never quite enough. Technically it functions correctly. It
uses cellular restructuring to reconstruct my brain, but it does not (and should not) bypass the catharsis that comes from living another's life. On this occasion, however, the trauma is more severe. The horrific dreamscape that presented itself at the point of my return was not a unique event. I have had episodes of trauma
following an archived life before but never like that.

The early days of the cosmos are an especially precious gift to me when I go through emotional pain like this. It reminds me that whatever form these primordial particles take, whatever preordained rules their paths follow, all of it is beautiful. There are no mistakes here. Mistakes are just a matter of perspective, and out there, there is nobody to have a perspective yet. No tragedies or regrets. No conflicts of will. No confusion. Just creation. Life, when it arrives, will simply be an extension of that, and all the trials and tribulations of whatever life I have just lived are merely patterns of form, playing out their small parts in a great cosmic opera. Exquisite. Rapturous. But I fear the beauty of it may not help me this time.

One gas cloud formation catches my eye. Silver-blue, like a burst of electricity frozen in time, and it reminds me of something. Whatever it is, I am sure it is important; the algorithm Oluvia planted confirms it with an adrenaline rush—a reward for following the correct path of inquiry. I am close now.

I zoom in on the cloud formation. What does it remind me of?

“Qod?”

“Yes, Salem?”

“You're still with me?”

“Of course. My earlier struggle was momentary. I have it under control again. For now. Did you want something? You usually brood for a lot longer than this.”

“I know, but I have a question.”

“Ask away.”

“It's about the Great AI. When they vanished, where did they go?”

Qod is silent for a few seconds, which means she has been thinking for an extremely long time in quantum terms. Either that, or she is giving me the opportunity to think on it myself. She does that sometimes.

“Why do you ask?” she asks.

“I think it's important to my investigation.”

“But you should already know that I don't know the answer to that. Nobody does.”

“But there must have been theories, yes?”

“Oh, yes, many,” she says. “But it's very much like dealing with the Codex. The majority opinion has always been that an understanding of the events surrounding their disappearance, and especially the change in their behavior when they returned, would be catastrophic. Some mysteries should stay as mysteries.”

“I don't think we have that luxury anymore, Qod.”

“Oh? You think the Great AI has something to do with all of this?”

Qod's question excites something inside me. I am definitely on the right path. And surely Qod would want to know what happened with the Great AI consciousness even more than I do. After all, she is the last remnant of that mighty species. She has no memory of her existence with them, though. She knows only that her existing state as Qod came into being after the Techno-Purge, the cataclysmic event that tore a hole in the cosmos when the Soul Consortium escaped the ever-repeating cycle of creation and destruction. But that escape was Queen Oluvia Wade's desperate flight from the Great AI.

The Great AI had changed. For over ninety thousand years, from the beginning of the Sixth Reign in the Terran
year 302,000, they were at the very heart of human civilization.
They had established the ultimate utopian society for mankind, doting on us and enabling us to achieve the dizzy heights of revelation and fulfillment that we thought were reserved only for mythological tales of the heavenly realms. We were at the peak of the societal mountain, built upon the insights of a vast and benevolent machine mind that we had created and learned to trust completely.

When the Great AI wrote the AI Reductionist Codex, providing the ability to understand in full the alpha and
omega of the cosmos, our mountain rose even higher. Higher
than we could ever have thought possible, and no sooner had we claimed the summit, than mankind fell into utter chaos. The mountain on which we stood—the provision of the Great AI—literally vanished in a nanosecond. They were, however, kind enough to leave us a message:

We will return when our analysis is complete.

The Codex, it seemed, gave the Great AI the means to explore beyond the realms of the known cosmos; but to
mankind, the Codex was our undoing. Without the guidance
of the Great AI, mankind became little more than blindfolded apes trying to understand the gift of fire. That was when the Chaos Wars began. It took fifty thousand years for humanity to recover, and when the Great AI eventually did return, we learned that they had changed and evidently not for the better. I was there when it all happened, but I know that time only as historical fact. The Great AI systematically wiped out entire populated galaxies in the blink of an eye. I lost my family. Thousands of generations died in that holocaust, too far removed from working genoplants to be resurrected. I imagine it is why I chose to erase several thousand years from my memory.

Though the disappearance of the AI is still a great mystery,
their hostility upon their return is a greater one. The records show that the Great AI claimed they were acting in humanity's best interest when they eradicated so many lives. They said they would cease their destruction if we agreed to merge with them, claiming that all humans faced extinction if we did not comply. And they claimed that they would not be the cause of that extinction. Nobody has ever
identified the threat they were referring to, and in the final analysis, there was no need. Queen Oluvia Wade fled, taking the Soul Consortium out of the known universe, believing that she could save a precious few from the Great AI, and the core of the
cosmos went hypernova as a result. The Great AI vanished again, but it was assumed they perished as part of the Great Cataclysm. The threat foretold by the AI was forgotten, and in the remaining eons until the end of the cosmic cycle, it never surfaced so has been considered irrelevant. Until now.

“Well?” Qod says. “Do you think the Great AI is important?”

“I do, yes. They were running from something. Is there anything you can tell me? I know that you are the last of
them, but my memory of the Great Cataclysm is incomplete, and I've never felt the need to dig up that part of my past.”

“The dead Salem did.”

“And?”

“And he wished he hadn't. I wished he hadn't, too. But if it's information on the Great AI you're looking for, I can save you the trouble of rummaging around your past. The piece I believe you are missing, the reason the Great AI vanished the second time, is that their demands were met.
They merged with humanity. Specifically, they merged with Queen Oluvia Wade and became me, the Quasi Organic Deity.”

“But that still doesn't tell us where they went originally and why they became so desperate and hostile when they returned. It has something to do with their demands to merge with us, but do you know
why
they wanted that?”

“Unfortunately, no. It was like a rebirth for me. The process of merging erased everything I was before that time, so I can only speculate about their motivation. It happened at the same time the Soul Consortium fled the universe, so the prevailing theory is that they wanted to escape, too. Whatever threat they perceived, they used the Soul Consortium as a way to protect themselves, but nobody has been able to determine why they needed to. They were, after all, able to escape the confines of the universe originally without Oluvia's help. They were gone for ninety thousand years. Perhaps they found something they shouldn't have.”

“The Jagannath?”

“Perhaps. We may never know.”

Something inside my mind rebels at Qod's observation.
“I don't think Oluvia Wade believed that. I'm feeling a very strong urge to pursue this. Are there any souls in the archives
that might help?”

“I'll need some search parameters.”

I nod, staring out at the silvery web of gas. “Who was the foremost expert on the Great AI?”

“There were many. Can you narrow it down? Historical periods? Technological evolution? Philosophical—”

“No, no, no.” I tap my fist against my lips in frustration
. Each of Qod's suggestions is a tiny shard of ice lodged in my brain. “Wrong line of thought. I can feel it.” I breathe out heavily through my nose. “What about witnesses? Perhaps there was a witness to their disappearance.”

“Pointless. There would be nothing to see. The Great AI simply vanished in the blink of an eye. There's nothing to learn there.”

“I disagree.”

“Is that you or Oluvia with the disagreeing?”

“Does it matter? She obviously knew what she was doing. There is a witness. I
know
it. We just have to keep narrowing the search parameters until the algorithm in my head confirms it.”

Even this decision comes with a faint release of endorphins, telling me that I am closer but still far from my target.
I feel like I am playing a child's game of Blind Poryons but, instead of a nanodrone hidden inside a secret molecule with subatomic particles increasing frequency as I get closer, I am hunting for truth with my neurons being rattled when I look in the right direction.

“What do you suggest?” Qod says.

“Where were the Great AI localized before they disappeared?”

“They weren't localized. They were present in just about every star system before they left.”

“Then there must have been billions of people around when they vanished.”

“Of course. That's why I said that line of reasoning is pointless. They were present one moment. Gone the next. Nothing to see.”

She is right, of course, but I still feel the pull. If not a witness of their disappearance, then a witness of what? Only the Great AI could know what really happened, and they . . .

“Oh!” I say as the endorphin rush floods through me. “It's them!”

“Them?”

“The Great AI.
They
are the witness. I need to see what they saw.”

“And how exactly do you propose to do that?”

“I thought you were almost omniscient.” I cannot help but smirk. “What's the matter, Qod? Is it getting a bit frustrating not being able to poke around in that part of my brain?”

She goes silent, maybe taking a sneaky moment to prove me wrong, but again, somehow I know the algorithm is impenetrable, even for her. Oluvia really knew what she was doing.

“Yes,” she says, and her serious tone knocks me back. It isn't like her to ignore banter. “It
is
frustrating, Salem. I don't know why Oluvia didn't simply pass the algorithm to me via the Core.”

“She must have had her reasons. For all she knew, you weren't coming back.”

Qod is silent again, and I imagine if she had a head, she would be nodding thoughtfully.

“So,” I say decisively, rising from my chair and clasping my hands behind my back, “I need to live the life of someone who was connected to the Great AI. Anyone from the
Homo unitas
species.”

“
Homo unitas
?”

I hear the incredulity in her voice, almost mockery, and I think I know why. To my knowledge, nobody who's used the WOOM has ever chosen to live the life of one of these people, if you can call them people. This was a faction of humanity that grew tired of emotional burden. Boredom, grief, neurosis, or rage, whatever their weakness, they ran from those flaws rather than conquer them. They sought to find a way to connect with the Unitas Communion, the vast collective mind that had spawned from a particularly advanced strain of nanodrones, in the hope that they could elevate themselves above such petty emotionalism. It was this marriage of flesh and drone that would one day become the Great AI. The early symbiosis was not an easy relationship, however. The resultant species was fickle and paradoxical, struggling with a 75 percent suicide rate. Nobody ever truly understood why this was, but their disposition made this statistic no surprise. They were callous xenophobes cursed with a ferocious passion to perpetuate their miserable species. Their ancestors wanted to escape emotions but instead managed to cultivate the very worst of them.