Vortex

  (I would of given you permission, Orrin had written, if you had asked, and Sandra accepted the implied rebuke.)

  “He says what I read was everything he ever wrote, except for a few pages he finished after he got to Laramie. He enclosed them with his letter. Look—I brought them with me.”

  You can keep these pages, Orrin had written. I don’t need them anymore. I believe I’m finished with all that business. Maybe you will understand it better than I do. It is all bewildering to me. To be honest I would rather just get on with things.

  She listened to the creek as it rippled through the grove. Today the creek was running shallow, as clean and bright as glass. She guessed this water would eventually wend its way into the Gulf—or evaporate, perhaps, to fall as rain in some cornfield in Iowa, as snow in some wintery northern town.

  The sum of all paths, Sandra thought.

  Then she took up the pages Orrin had sent her and began to read them aloud.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ISAAC’S STORY / ORRIN’S STORY / THE SUM OF ALL PATHS

  My name is Isaac Dvali, and this is what happened after the end of the world.

  * * *

  In the end, Vox was mine. Its people (whom I had hated) were dead (which I regretted), and there was no one left alive but Turk Findley and the impersona of Allison Pearl.

  Do you blame me for hating Vox?

  The people of Vox had resurrected me when all I wanted was to die. They had believed I was something more than human, when in fact I was something less. All I had ever received at their hands was pain and incomprehension.

  I had been among the Hypotheticals, my captors insisted, the Hypotheticals had “touched” me; but that wasn’t true. Because the Hypotheticals (as Vox imagined them) simply didn’t exist.

  My father had made me so that I could hear the Hypotheticals talking to themselves, the whispers they sent between stars and planets, and what I had learned was that the Hypotheticals were a process—an ecology, not an organism. I could have told my captors so … but it was a truth they would have rejected, and it would have changed nothing.

  * * *

  The Hypotheticals were already billions of years old when they first intervened in human history.

  They had originated with the first sentient biological civilizations to arise in the galaxy, long before the Earth and its sun condensed from interstellar dust. Like the first shoots rising from a wheat field in the spring, those forerunner civilizations were fragile, vulnerable, and alone. None of them survived the exhaustion and ecological collapse of their host planets.

  But before they died they launched fleets of self-replicating machines into interstellar space. The machines were designed to explore nearby stars and broadcast home whatever data they acquired, and they did that, patiently and faithfully, long after their creators had ceased to exist. They moved from star to star, competing for scarce heavy elements, exchanging behavioral templates and fractions of operating code, changing and evolving over time. They were, in a sense, intelligent, but they were never (and would never become) self-aware.

  What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

  * * *

  I hated the people of Vox—whom I could hate collectively, because they behaved collectively—for their deeply embedded limbic superstitions, and for calling me back from the indifference of death into the pain of my physical body. But I could not hate Turk Findley or the woman who had come to call herself Allison Pearl.

  Turk and Allison were broken and imperfect things—like me. Like me, they had been created or summoned by the will of Vox. And, like me, they proved to be something more and less than Vox had anticipated.

  I had first met Turk in the Equatorian desert, before he or I had passed through the temporal Arch. Out of ignorance or spite, and not quite by accident, Turk had once killed a man, and he had built a life on the foundation of that guilt. His best acts were acts of atonement. His failures he accepted as a kind of punishment. He craved a forgiveness he could never earn, and he was horrified when the Coryphaeus offered him that forgiveness. Accepting it would have dishonored the man Turk had killed (who was named Orrin Mather); and the people of Vox, by submerging all such feelings in their closed limbic collectivity, had made themselves monstrous in Turk’s eyes.

  Allison was a different case. She was a native of Vox whose artificial persona had allowed her a rare glimpse beyond the boundaries and limitations of her life. By adopting that persona as her own, she had successfully liberated herself from the Coryphaeus. The liberation had come at the expense of her family, her friends, and her faith.

  It was a bargain I understood very well.

  I wanted these two people to survive. That was why I abetted their escape. Even then, I had doubted they could successfully cross the failing Arch. But I made it possible for them to live a little longer, depending on how you measure time.

  * * *

  For more than a millennium the Hypothetical machines had been scouring the surface of the Earth, dismantling and interpreting and remembering the ruins of the civilization we had built on the planet that gave us birth.

  There was no conscious will behind this act of scavenging, no thought, no agency. It was simply behavior that had evolved over time, like photosynthesis. The devices Turk had confronted on the Antarctic plain had accumulated a rich storehouse of data. Earth’s tangible resources—rare elements that had been refined by human activity and concentrated in the wreckage of our cities—had already been extracted and transferred to orbit and beyond, where the space-faring elements of the Hypothetical ecology had feasted on them. The Hypotheticals were very nearly finished with the Earth.

  But their sensors (orbital arrays of devices no bigger than grains of dust, complexly networked) had detected Vox as soon as it crossed the Arch and directed ground-based scavengers toward it. What the Voxish prophecies had imagined as an apotheosis was just a mopping-up exercise: the last berry plucked from a barren, dying bush.

  The Hypotheticals arrived not long after Turk and Allison had fled, as a cloud of insect-sized disassemblers. They were sharp-toothed and efficient. They exuded complex catalysts that unzipped chemical bonds; they came through the melting walls like smoke, followed by the toxic external atmosphere. Gusts of poison blew down the corridors and walkways of Vox Core. This was a mercy, in a way—most of the citizens succumbed to asphyxiation before they could be devoured alive.

  Could I have saved them?

  I hated the people of Vox for compounding my suffering by resurrecting me, but I wouldn’t have wished such a fate on them. In fact I did what I could to protect them—which was nothing.

  I was lucky to be able to save myself.

  * * *

  Of course I was protected in the most basic sense. Like Turk, I had passed through the temporal Arch. For ten thousand years I had been a memory in the archival functions of the Hypotheticals, and they had re-created me in the Equatorian desert because that was the business of the temporal Arches: to faithfully reconstruct certain information-dense structures so that the data they contained could be used to correct errors that might have crept into local systems. It was a homeostatic mechanism, nothing more.

  The disassemblers wouldn’t touch my body because I had been tagged as useful. But that protection would be worthless if Vox dissolved into its component molecules. I needed to be able to exercise conscious control over what the machines were doing.

  My best opportunity lay with the Coryphaeus. The processors that constituted the Coryphaeus were heavily protected. Even the nuclear detonation that had brought down the Network had not destroyed these devices, only damaged their interface with the physical world. The disassemblers would surely devour them, but not until most of Vox Core had been pulled apart. Much of my consciousness was already embedded in these processors. Th
e same inhibitions that prevented the disassemblers from dismantling my body might extend to the Coryphaeus’s hardware, or could be made to—or so I hoped.

  The Network began to fail as the citizens of Vox died in significant numbers, and I exploited that terrible opportunity. I used dormant processors to analyze the signaling protocols of the Hypothetical machines. I linked those protocols and signaling mechanisms into the deeply nested feedback cycles of the Coryphaeus, allowing me some measure of control.

  And as Vox was sterilized of human life, the Coryphaeus became a chorus of one. I became the Coryphaeus.

  * * *

  Once I had decoded the procedural logic of the disassemblers, it became possible to feed them false recognition signals. They promptly abandoned the deconstruction of Vox Core. I used subtler and more potent instructions to reduce them to dormancy. They lost all organizing cohesion and fell from the air like dust.

  But it was too late for the inhabitants, and nearly too late for the upper levels of Vox Core, which had been eroded to a skeletal framework of girders and fractured cladding. I was able to reseal the inner portions of the city and repair the relatively minor damage to the engine decks, using a combination of robotic devices and co-opted disassembler flocks. I allowed the disassemblers to dispose of all human remains, leaving nothing half consumed.

  By the time I restored the city’s lights, the corridors and tiers and plains of the city were as empty as if they had never been inhabited. The air-circulation system eventually seined away any remaining dust.

  * * *

  But that wasn’t all I could do, I discovered.

  As I waited for Turk and Allison to return—as I hoped they would—I began to explore the newly porous borderland between the Coryphaeus and the Hypotheticals. Before long I was tapping into systems larger than the Earth itself. All Hypothetical devices were interconnected, in nested hierarchies that reached from tiny disassemblers to archival machine flocks in translunar orbit, energy-mining mechanisms in the heliosphere of the sun, signal transducers in the outer solar system, transducers circling nearby stars. All these I could now perceive and influence.

  I devised filters to compress this flood of information into intelligible packets, making the secrets of the Hypotheticals small enough that I could contain them. And making myself larger in the process.

  My physical body began to seem redundant, and I thought about allowing it to die. But I would need it, I thought, to interact with Turk and Allison, if and when they came back. What they found here would be difficult for them to accept, and what I planned to do next would be difficult to explain.

  * * *

  Over the course of their multibillion-year evolution the Hypotheticals had learned to exploit a capability they had never acquired for themselves: agency.

  Agency—that is, volitional action aimed at achieving conscious ends—had arisen only sporadically in the galaxy, mostly in the climax ecologies of biologically active planets orbiting hospitable stars. Species capable of agency seldom lasted longer than it took them to overload and overwhelm their planetary ecologies. They were, as the stars measure time, an unstable and ephemeral phenomenon.

  But it was just such a species that had created the self-reproducing machines that were the first progenitors of the Hypotheticals. And these blooms of organic sentience were unfailingly useful: they generated unusual information; they concentrated valuable resources in their ruins; often they launched new waves of replicators, which could be harvested or absorbed into larger networks.

  In time the Hypotheticals began to actively cultivate organic civilizations.

  There was no agency in this, only a blind acquisitiveness. The Hypotheticals evolved in ways that maximized their exploitation of sentient organisms. Early in the history of the galaxy, an organic civilization had constructed twin Arches in order to colonize the marginally habitable planet of a neighboring star—the species suffered decline and extinction soon after, but its technology was analyzed and adopted by the Hypotheticals. In the same way the Hypotheticals had learned to extract energy from stellar cores and gravity gradients, to manipulate atomic and molecular bonds, to order and stabilize the exchange of information over distances of hundreds of light years. Eventually the Hypotheticals had developed a means of extending the useful life of such species. If a fecund mother planet was suspended inside a temporal distortion while a system of Arches was put in place—as the Earth had been suspended during the Spin—that planet’s resource base could be expanded tenfold; its organic civilization would spill into new worlds and flourish on them, cycling through epochs of decline and expansion, reliably generating new and exploitable technologies.

  Such organic species remained mortal and eventually died, of course. All biological species did. But the harvest of ruins increased exponentially.

  * * *

  Allison and Turk arrived at Vox Core in the storms that followed the collapse of the Arch and the dismantling of the systems that had for so many years protected Earth from its ancient, dying sun.

  I welcomed them back and explained what had happened. I told them I could defend them even from the destruction of this superannuated planet—I had grown that powerful, and in a very short span of time.

  But they were shocked by the deaths that had taken place. For days they wandered the empty corridors of the city. The rooms they once shared had been carved away in the initial attack of the disassemblers; they could have chosen any of tens of thousands of abandoned suites and rooms in which to make a home, but Allison told me she was unnerved by everything the dead had left behind them … the unsorted possessions, the place settings abandoned on tables, the nurseries without children. The city was full of ghosts, she said.

  So I built them a new residence in a forested tier deep to starboard, using the city’s fleet of robotic constructors. I chose a location far from the public corridors, accessible by footpath. The tier’s artificial sunlight was bright and convincing, its ambient temperature consistently pleasant, its average humidity low. The recycling system stirred up gentle breezes every morning and evening, and rain fell every fifth day.

  They agreed to live there until they found a better home.

  * * *

  I believed there might be a better home for them, though not on Vox, and certainly not on Earth. But most of my attention was occupied with the business of keeping Vox Core intact in an increasingly harsh environment.

  At the equator of the Earth the oceans had begun to boil. Cyclonic winds scoured the lifeless continents, and the atmosphere grew thick with superheated water vapor. Monstrous surge tides threatened to force what remained of Vox into the rocky Antarctic shelf. And it would only get worse.

  I needed to manipulate very powerful Hypothetical technology, which meant extending and elaborating my control of it.

  I was able to call down from orbit a small fleet of nanoscale devices—versions of the disassemblers that had first swarmed us—to encase and protect Vox Core. Scalding waves crashed over the rocky part of the island and broke against the city’s jagged towers, but the city itself remained stable, temperate, and undisturbed. Preserving this equilibrium required gigajoules of energy, drawn directly from the heart of the sun.

  It was still little more than a stopgap. Before long we would need to leave the planet altogether. I believed I could accomplish that, though it would necessitate an even greater disconnection between my mortal body and my mind.

  Often during this time, walking through the passageways of Vox Core, I was startled by the sight of my reflection in a glassy surface—by the reminder that I was still a collation of blood and bone and tissue, bearing the scars of my forcible reconstruction. And the subtler scars of less visible injuries.

  My father had made me what I was because he had believed in the power of the Hypotheticals to liberate humanity from death. The Voxish religion had fostered a similar belief, a programmed limbic rebellion against the tyranny of the grave.

  And now the stone had rolled
away, revealing only the weakling prophet of a mindless god. How disappointed my father would have been!

  * * *

  “I can control the passage of time,” I told Turk and Allison. “Locally, I mean.”

  Although they were my friends, they were afraid of me and of what I was becoming. I didn’t blame them for that.

  I had come to visit them in their home in the forest. The house I had built for them was as pleasant as I had planned it to be. The trees beyond the windows were tall and graceful. The air that whispered through the portcullis smelled of living things. They asked me to sit down at their table. Allison offered me fruit from a bowl and Turk poured me a glass of water. I was too thin, Allison said. It was true that lately I had been forgetting to eat.

  I told them about the world outside. The bloated sun was scouring away the Earth’s atmosphere. Before long the crust of the planet itself would begin to melt, and Vox would be afloat on a sea of molten magma.

  “But you can keep us alive,” Turk said, repeating what I had told him weeks ago. “Right?”

  “I believe I can, but I don’t see the point in staying here.”

  “Where is there to go?”

  The solar system wasn’t entirely inhospitable, despite the swollen sun. The Jovian and Saturnian moons were relatively warm and stable. Vox could have sailed indefinitely on the blue-gray seas of Europa, for instance, under an atmosphere no more toxic than Earth’s.

  “Mars,” Allison said suddenly. “If you’re serious, I mean if we can really travel between planets—there’s an Arch on Mars—”