Epilogue 2


Sixty years later in one possible future, Roger Xyrghyz was finally ready to leave the Safe Zone. His real life began the moment he boarded a small spaceship with no return permit. The ship accelerated no faster than a running human, but it could sustain this rate forever. After navigating the dense traffic of the inner solar system, and the multiplying force fields of the asteroid belt, the road ahead was wide open. Roger kept absorbing data as the ship passed the outer planets and inner comets, unwilling to waste a single processing cycle. Thanks to general relativity, he fell behind the rest of posthumanity.
  The stuff of future oceans, space clouds were imperceptibly thin, but at high speed, gas could boil diamond. A magnet at the front of the ship deflected small dust grains. Space was so big it was almost unheard of to hit a pebble. The stars didn't appear to move, but their colors changed, with unfathomable voids at both ends of the ship, ultra and infra.
  As the ship accelerated, its information was delayed. Defining local reality, electric currents created fields, which created more currents. The faster Roger's ship moved, the slower time moved for him, but inside the ship nothing seemed to change. A beam launched from the back took longer to reach the front, but to measure it, Roger had to move forward himself, slowing his time, and making the beam seem faster. Returning to the back accelerated his time, and seemed to slow oncoming beams. This logic (it was only a story) also worked if he assumed the ship was standing still, and the universe moving.
  Objects often did appear to travel faster than light, but only because they were measured wrong. Because of time-dilation, a cosmic ray particle could seem to cross a galaxy in fifteen minutes. To prevent the illusion of faster-than-light travel, the galaxy seemed to shrink in width. Passing stars and planets were flattened like coins, the not-quite-real Lorentz-Fitzgerald-Heaviside contraction.
  When time slowed, objects automatically reacted more sluggishly, and seemed to get heavier. In theory, this mass energy could be extracted from any stationary object, even a pile of dirt. The bomb that destroyed Moscow had converted the equivalent rest mass of a cat into heat. The energy output of Earth's old-style power plants could have doubled a one-ton mass in a decade. The sun managed to convert a small hill every second.
  Since the day of Roger's legal Suicirection, during Stage One of the Identity Revolution, he had amassed a star's mass of energy. His goal was to concentrate it all in one point.
  Ironically, he had been the last human to abandon his body. Converted into an open-ended calculation inside a perfect jewel, his recycled mind was smarter than all mankind in the year 2000. To stay unpredictable, he had to hide his identity from himself. Posthumans chose their own selection pressures, a form of discipline better than freedom. He didn't fear non-existence, only wasted opportunities. As progress accelerated, it exploited an ever-shrinking portion of nature's true potential. Life was safer and more comfortable than ever, but filled with missed chances, and a sense of unsuspected dangers. No one knew what was impossible anymore. Most posthumans relived slightly different versions of the same situations, evolving slowly, if at all. Others overspecialized. There were many new words, but sometimes, "us" wasn't one of them. Complex projects were almost impossible to manage. Each tiny increment took forever, but time had become meaningless. For most, only caution mattered, but sex had not gone extinct. There were vast new opportunities to reproduce. Quantity could often outcompete quality.
  Eventually, Roger would have to split his mind into rival selves. He wanted to travel far and deep, exploring an uncountable array of possibilities, and perfecting one.

  The ship coasted to the end of the lambda beam, stopping one hundred kilometers from the Singularity, almost close enough to touch. At short range there was no measurable gravity.
  A sign pointed back to the sun, a bright star with an increasingly uncertain future. The conflicts of the inner solar system were lost in its glare. Following the posthuman Pause, the greatest party ever, 99% of history had happened in the last fifteen years. The Chaos War, fought entirely over code, had dwarfed all previous conflicts. The main weapons were thoughts.
  Most of posthumanity lived inside a toy cube, surrounded by unimaginable defenses. It took less than ten centimeters to create a supercivilization. As its electrons were removed, the cube's weight had increased by millions of tons. Tension was energy, which created mass. The inhabitants were linked by a shared awareness.
  Inside, a great calculation had begun. There was too much parasite code, meaningless situations and unfinished thoughts. For larger minds, the possibilities increased faster than their ability to process them. There were no appropriate emotions for most situations.
  In the silence, Roger sensed a waiting crowd. The descendants of the Starters had built their ghost planet in the middle of nowhere. Labs and workshops hung in the darkness like rows of trailers. As motionless as the stars, they couldn't decide which way to fall. With no orbits or tidal forces, stationkeeping was slow and majestic. A warship circled further out. For those who wanted privacy, the universe created a galaxy of vacant space every minute, and parcels were sold almost as fast. Nothing came from nowhere. With a volume exceeding Earth's atmosphere, the average space apartment was larger than what used to be called "outside".
  Within a second of his arrival, Roger merged with the local network. The flood of insight was life-changing, yet instantly familiar. The Starters were too smart for their own good, and needed his intuition. He had joined their brilliant anarchy.
  Inside its Cathedral, the Singularity was a sharp point caught in invisible beams. Instruments were aimed at it from vast distances. The object weighed trillions of tons, and its course was quite unaffected by the surrounding city.
  Scientists had scraped off a kilo of weird fluff and lint snagged over the eons, not made of any known material. As it decayed, it fired off strange particles in all directions. The final approach had been infuriatingly slow, until the P=Path was found. After ten years, the experts had reached the core, finding pure information. The other side of reality. Normal matter vanished when it got too close, the Singularity becoming slightly more complex.
  The Starters had transmitted the entire Net into the object, and it had allegedly returned fully annotated, complete with all the secrets they had left out. For all they knew, the signal had bounced off God.
  In reality, there had been one small change in a single picture from the 1970's, which could have been a coincidence. He believed the Singularity was a purely natural object; but then again, so was he. The Starters had quantum-mapped a stable path to the core. This was the reason he had been born, a century and a thousand lifetimes ago.
  Before making any changes, he observed the glowing point for a full year. Simply by being this small, it had to contain a tremendous amount of information. He stopped when his ignorance seemed total.
  He was allowed to add a brief message to the second transmission. Roger prepared for the final mystery, and the first. This was for the answers that didn't have any questions. He asked: "What is the most interesting thing I can understand?"

TO BE CONTINUED