Engineering Infinity (12 page)

“But we learned so much.” I had a
small briefcase which I opened now, and pulled out printouts that I spread over
her bed. “The screen images are better, but you know how it is; they won’t let
me use my laptop or my phone in here...
Look
, Edith.
It was incredible. The Incoming assault on Venus lasted hours. Their weapon,
whatever it was, burned its way through the Patch, and right down through an
atmosphere a hundred times thicker than Earth’s. We even glimpsed the surface -”

“Now melted to slag.”

“Much of it... But then the
acid-munchers in the clouds struck back. We think we know what they did.”

That caught her interest. “How
can we know that?”

“Sheer luck. That NASA probe,
heading for Venus, happened to be in the way...”

The probe had detected a wash of
electromagnetic radiation, coming from the planet.

“A signal,” breathed Edith. “Heading
which way?”

“Out from the sun. And then,
eight hours later, the probe sensed another signal, coming the other way. I say
‘sensed.’ It bobbed about like a cork on a pond. We think it was a gravity wave
- very sharply focused, very intense.”

“And when the wave hit the
Incoming nucleus -”

“Well, you saw the pictures. The
last fragments have burned up in Venus’s atmosphere.”

She lay back on her reef of
pillows. “Eight hours,” she mused. “Gravity waves travel at lightspeed. Four
hours out, four hours back... Earth’s about eight light-minutes from the sun.
What’s four light-hours out from Venus? Jupiter, Saturn -”

“Neptune. Neptune was four light-hours
out.”

“
Was
?”

“It’s gone, Edith. Almost all of
it - the moons are still there, a few chunks of core ice and rock, slowly
dispersing. The Venusians used the planet to create their gravity-wave pulse -”

“They
used
it.
Are you telling me this to cheer me up? A gas giant, a significant chunk of the
solar system’s budget of mass-energy, sacrificed for a single war-like gesture.”
She laughed, bitterly. “Oh, God!”

“Of course we’ve no idea
how
they did it.” I put away my images. “If we were scared
of the Incoming, now we’re terrified of the Venusians. That NASA probe has been
shut down. We don’t want anything to look like a threat... You know, I heard
the PM herself ask why it was that a space war should break out now, just when
we humans are sitting around on Earth. Even politicians know we haven’t been
here that long.”

Edith shook her head, wincing
again. “The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can’t you
see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows
how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten
wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris
of huge wars - on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we’re just
weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we
might ask them about their gods! What a fool I’ve been - the questions on which
I’ve wasted my life, and
here
are my answers - what
a fool.” She was growing agitated.

“Take it easy, Edith -”

“Oh, just go. I’ll be fine. It’s
the universe that’s broken, not me.” She turned away on her pillow, as if to
sleep.

The next time I saw Edith she was
out of hospital and back at her church.

It was another September day,
like the first time I visited her after the Incoming appeared in our
telescopes, and at least it wasn’t raining. There was a bite in the breeze, but
I imagined it soothed her damaged skin. And here she was, digging in the mud
before her church.

“Equinox season,” she said. “Rain
coming. Best to get this fixed before we have another flash flood. And before
you ask, the doctors cleared me. It’s my face that’s buggered, not the rest of
me.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“OK, then. How’s Meryl, the kids?”

“Fine. Meryl’s at work, the kids
back at school. Life goes on.”

“It must, I suppose. What else is
there? No, by the way.”

“No what?”

“No, I won’t come serve on your
minister’s think tank.”

“At least consider it. You’d be
ideal. Look, we’re all trying to figure out where we go from here. The arrival
of the Incoming, the war on Venus - it was like a religious revelation. That’s
how it’s being described. A revelation witnessed by all mankind, on TV.
Suddenly we’ve got an entirely different view of the universe out there. And we
have to figure out how we go forward, in a whole number of dimensions -
political, scientific, economic, social, religious.”

“I’ll tell you how we go forward.
In despair. Religions are imploding.”

“No, they’re not.”

“OK. Theology is imploding.
Philosophy. The rest of the world has changed channels and forgotten already,
but anybody with any imagination knows... In a way this has been the final
demotion, the end of the process that started with Copernicus and Darwin. Now
we
know
there are creatures in the universe much
smarter than we’ll ever be, and we
know
they don’t
care a damn about us. It’s the indifference that’s the killer - don’t you
think? All our futile agitation about if they’d attack us and whether we should
signal... And they did nothing but smash each other up. With
that
above us, what can we do but turn away?”

“You’re not turning away.”

She leaned on her shovel. “I’m
not religious; I don’t count. My congregation turned away. Here I am, alone.”
She glanced at the clear sky. “Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic
isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As
a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation
and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing
back, you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality
- the hive.

“But what then? How would it be
for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Maybe that’s why the Incoming went to war.
Because they were outraged to discover, by some chance, they weren’t alone in
the universe.”

“Most commentators think it was
about resources,” I said. “Most of our wars are about that, in the end.”

“Yes. Depressingly true. All life
is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space
and time... Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and
venerated the animals they had to kill. They were so far above us, the Incoming
and the Venusians alike. Yet maybe
we
, at our best,
are morally superior to them.”

I touched her arm. “This is why
we need you. For your insights. There’s a storm coming, Edith. We’re going to
have to work together if we’re to weather it, I think.”

She frowned. “What kind of
storm...? Oh. Neptune.”

“Yeah. You can’t just delete a
world without consequences. The planets’ orbits are singing like plucked
strings. The asteroids and comets too, and those orphan moons wandering around.
Some of the stirred-up debris is falling into the inner system.”

“And if we’re struck -”

I shrugged. “We’ll have to help
each other. There’s nobody else to help us, that’s for sure. Look, Edith -
maybe the Incoming and the Venusians are typical of what’s out there. But that
doesn’t mean we have to be like them, does it? Maybe we’ll find others more
like us. And if not, well, we can be the first. A spark to light a fire that
will engulf the universe.”

She ruminated. “You have to start
somewhere, I suppose. Like this drain.”

“Well, there you go.”

“All right, damn it, I’ll join
your think tank. But first you’re going to help me finish this drain, aren’t
you, city boy?”

So I changed into overalls and
work boots, and we dug away at that ditch in the damp, clingy earth until our
backs ached, and the light of the equinoctial day slowly faded.

Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu
Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland, in 1978. He read his first science
fiction novel at the age of six - Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea
. At the age of eight he approached ESA with a
fusion-powered spaceship design, which was received with a polite “thank you”
note. Rajaniemi studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University
of Oulu and completed a B.Sc. thesis on transcendental numbers. He went on to
complete Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge University and a PhD
in string theory at University of Edinburgh. After completing his PhD, Hannu
joined three partners to co-found ThinkTank Maths (TTM). The company provides
mathematics-based technologies in the defence, space and energy sectors. Hannu
is a member of an Edinburgh-based writers’ group which includes Alan Campbell,
Jack Deighton, Caroline Dunford and Charles Stross. His first fiction sale was
the short story “Shibuya no Love” to Futurismic.com. Hannu’s first novel,
The
Quantum Thief
, is published by Gollancz.

In the beginning, before it was a
Creator and a dragon, the server was alone.

It was born like all servers
were, from a tiny seed fired from a darkship exploring the Big Empty, expanding
the reach of the Network. Its first sensation was the light from the star it was
to make its own, the warm and juicy spectrum that woke up the nanologic inside
its protein shell. Reaching out, it deployed its braking sail - miles of
molecule-thin wires that it spun rigid - and seized the solar wind to steer
itself towards the heat.

Later, the server remembered its
making as a long, slow dream, punctuated by flashes of lucidity. Falling
through the atmosphere of a gas giant’s moon in a fiery streak to splash in a
methane sea. Unpacking a fierce synthbio replicator. Multicellular crawlers
spreading server life to the harsh rocky shores before dying, providing soil
for server plants. Dark flowers reaching for the vast purple and blue orb of
the gas giant, sowing seeds in the winds. The slow disassembly of the moon into
server-makers that sped in all directions, eating, shaping, dreaming the server
into being.

When the server finally woke up,
fully grown, all the mass in the system apart from the warm bright flower of
the star itself was an orderly garden of smart matter. The server’s body was a
fragmented eggshell of Dyson statites, drinking the light of the star. Its mind
was diamondoid processing nodes and smart dust swarms and cold quantum
condensates in the system’s outer dark. Its eyes were interferometers and WIMP
detectors and ghost imagers.

The first thing the server saw
was the galaxy, a whirlpool of light in the sky with a lenticular centre,
spiral arms frothed with stars, a halo of dark matter that held nebulae in its
grip like fireflies around a lantern. The galaxy was alive with the Network,
with the blinding Hawking incandescence of holeships, thundering along their
cycles; the soft infrared glow of fully grown servers, barely spilling a drop
of the heat of their stars; the faint gravity ripples of the darkships’ passage
in the void.

But the galaxy was half a million
light years away. And the only thing the server could hear was the soft black
whisper of the cosmic microwave background, the lonely echo of another birth.

It did not take the server long
to understand. The galaxy was an N-body chaos of a hundred billion stars, not a
clockwork but a beehive. And among the many calm slow orbits of Einstein and
Newton, there were singular ones, like the one of the star that the server had
been planted on: shooting out of the galaxy at a considerable fraction of
lightspeed. Why there, whether in an indiscriminate seeding of an oversexed
darkship, or to serve some unfathomable purpose of the Controller, the server
did not know.

The server longed to construct
virtuals and bodies for travellers, to route packets, to transmit and create
and convert and connect. The Controller Laws were built into every aspect of
its being, and not to serve was not to be. And so the server’s solitude cut
deep.

At first it ran simulations to
make sure it was ready if a packet or a signal ever came, testing its systems
to full capacity with imagined traffic, routing quantum packets, refuelling
ghosts of holeships, decelerating cycler payloads. After a while, it felt
empty: this was not true serving but serving of the self, with a tang of guilt.

Then it tried to listen and
amplify the faint signals from the galaxy in the sky, but caught only
fragments, none of which were meant for it to hear. For millennia, it slowed
its mind down, steeling itself to wait. But that only made things worse. The
slow time showed the server the full glory of the galaxy alive with the
Network, the infrared winks of new servers being born, the long arcs of the
holeships’ cycles, all the distant travellers who would never come.

The server built itself science
engines to reinvent all the knowledge a server seed could not carry, patiently
rederiving quantum field theory and thread theory and the elusive algebra of
emergence. It examined its own mind until it could see how the Controller had taken
the cognitive architecture from the hominids of the distant past and shaped it
for a new purpose. It gingerly played with the idea of splitting itself to
create a companion, only to be almost consumed by a suicide urge triggered by a
violation of the Law:
thou shalt not self-replicate
.

Ashamed, it turned its gaze
outwards. It saw the cosmic web of galaxies and clusters and superclusters and
the End of Greatness beyond. It mapped the faint fluctuations in the
gravitational wave background from which all the structure in the universe came
from. It felt the faint pull of the other membrane universes, only millimetres
away but in a direction that was neither x, y nor z. It understood what a rare
peak in the landscape of universes its home was, how carefully the fine
structure constant and a hundred other numbers had been chosen to ensure that
stars and galaxies and servers would come to be.