Darwinia (26 page)

But Sentience Itself was mortal, and so was the Milky Way Galaxy, and so was the universe at large! He uttered a few phrases about “particle decay” and “heat death” that I followed only vaguely. The sum of it was that
matter itself
would eventually die. With all the intelligence at their disposal, the noospheres devised a way to prolong their existence beyond that point. And they contrived to build an “Archive,” a sum of all sentient history, which could be consulted not only by the noospheres themselves but by similar entities embedded in other, inconceivably distant galaxies.

So one enemy was Time, and that enemy had been, if not conquered, at least rendered toothless.

The other enemy he called
psilife
, from the Greek letter psi, for “pseudo.”

Psilife was the ultimate result of attempts to mimic evolution in machines.

Machines, he said, could achieve consciousness, within certain limits. (I think he used these words — “consciousness” and “machines” — in a technical sense, but I didn’t press him.) Both organic and true machine consciousness utilized something he called “quantum indeterminacy,” whereas psilife was a kind of
mathematics
.

Psilife produced “system parasites,” or what he called — as nearly as I can repeat it — “mindless Algol Rhythms preying on complexity, inhabiting it and then devouring it.”

These Algol Rhythms did not hate sentient beings any more than the hunter wasp hates the tarantula in which it deposits its eggs. Psilife inhabited sentient “systems” and devoured sentience itself. It used communication and thought as a means of manufacturing copies of itself, which would copy themselves in turn, and so
ad infinitum
.

And psilife, thought not conventionally sentient and without individuality, could emulate these qualities — could act with a kind of concentrated if antlike intelligence, a blind cunning. Imagine if you can a vast
intelligence
utterly devoid of
understanding
.

Psilife had arisen at various times and places throughout the universe. It had threatened Sentience and had been beaten back, though not to extinction. The Archive was thought to be impermeable to penetration by psilife; the decay of conventional matter would mean the end as well of these virulent Algol Rhythms.

But that wasn’t the case.

The Archive was corrupted by psilife.

The Archive.

Caroline, what do you suppose would constitute the ultimate history, from a god’s-eye view?

Not someone’s
interpretation
of the past, however thoughtful and objective. Nor could it be the past
itself
, which is difficult to consult in any direct and simple fashion.

No, the ultimate practical history book would be history in a looking glass, the past re-created faithfully in some accessible way, to be opened like a book in all its original tongues and dialects; a faithful working model, but with all the empty spaces removed for the purpose of simplification, and accessible to Mind at Large in a fashion that wouldn’t alter or disturb the book itself.

The Archive was static, because history doesn’t change, but it was swept at long intervals by what the picket called a “Higgs field,” which he compared to a phonograph needle following the groove of a recording. The record doesn’t change, but a
dynamic
event — the music — is coaxed out of a fixed object.

In a sane world, of course, the music is identical each time the record is played. But what if you put a Mozart symphony on the phonograph and it turned into
Die Zauberflöte
halfway through?

Dazed as I was, I could see where this was headed.

The picket’s World War was the Mozart symphony. The conversion of Europe was
Die Zauberflöte
.

“You’re telling me we’re
inside
this Archive?”

He nodded calmly.

I shivered. “Does that mean — are you telling me that
I’m
a sort of history book — or a page, at least, or a paragraph?”

“You were meant to be,” he said.

This was an awful lot to absorb, of course, even in a receptive state. And, Caroline, when I think of you reading this… you must be certain I’ve gone mad.

And maybe you’re right. I would almost prefer to believe it myself. But I wonder whether this letter is really addressed to you… to
you
, I mean, to Caroline in Australia… or to that other Caroline, the Caroline whose image I carried into the wilderness, the Caroline who sustained me there.

Maybe she’s not altogether extinct, that Caroline. Maybe she’s reading over your shoulder.

Do you grasp the enormity of what this specter told me?

He suggested — in broad daylight and in the plainest language — that the world around me, the world you and I inhabit, is nothing more than a sustained illusion inside a machine at the end of time.

This went far beyond what I could easily accept, despite all my experience with Mssrs. Burroughs, Verne, and Wells.

“I can’t make it any more plain,” he said, “or ask you to do more than consider the possibility.”

It gets more complicated. When we were a “history book,” Caroline, every event, every action, was predetermined, a rote repetition of what had gone before — though of course there was no way we could have known that.

But psilife has injected “chaos” (his word) into the system — which is the equivalent of what the theologians call “free will”!

Which means, the picket said, that you and I and all the other sentient beings who had been “modeled” in the Archive have become independent, unpredictable moral entities —
real lives
, that is;
new
lives, which Sentience is sworn to protect!

The psilife invasion, in other words, has freed us from a machine-like existence… even though psilife means to hold us hostage and ultimately to exterminate us all.

(Tempting to think of these psilife entities as the Rebel Angels. They gave us status as moral creatures by bringing evil into the world — and must be fought to the death even though they freed us!)

We talked a while longer, as the last of the morning mist burned off and the day turned brighter. The picket grew more ghostly in the light of noon. He cast a shadow, but it wasn’t as dark as mine.

At last I asked him the most important question: why had he come here, and what did he want from me?

His answer was lengthy and disquieting.

He asked for my help.

I refused it.

Dr. Sullivan, when he argued with Preston Finch, would often quote Berkeley back at him. The words stuck with me. “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?”

Sometimes we do, though, Caroline. Sometimes we do wish to be deceived.

It might surprise you to know I’m going back to the Continent, probably to one of the Mediterranean settlements. Fayetteville or Oro Delta. The weather is warm there. The prospects are fresh.

But I mentioned that I have a favor to ask.

Your life in Australia is yours to pursue, Caroline. I know you carry a burden of unhappiness I was never able to lift from your shoulders. Maybe you found a way to lay that burden down for good and all. I hope so. I won’t question your decision and I won’t come after Lily uninvited.

But please — I beg this one favor of you — please don’t let Lily go on thinking I’m dead.

I’m sending this with a Mr. Barnes, who signed on with a Red Cross refugee transport bound for Sydney, on the understanding that he’ll forward it to any living relative of Lieutenant Colin Watson. I’ve instructed him to do nothing that would compromise the Lieutenant’s position vis-à-vis the military. Mr. Barnes seems trustworthy and discreet.

Also enclosed, my notes from the winter on the Continent. Think of them as letters I couldn’t send. Maybe when Lily’s older she’ll want to see them.

I know I’m not the husband you hoped for. I sincerely hope time and memory will be gentle to both of us.

I doubt we’ll meet again.

But please remember me to Lily. Maybe we’re all only phantoms in a machine. It’s an explanation Dr. Sullivan might have been interested to hear. But no matter what we are — we
are
. Lily is my daughter. I love her. That love is real, if nothing else. Please tell her so. Tell her I love her very much and always.

Always.

Always.

The seed-sentience Guilford Law dropped into the Archive on a nucleus of complex matter no larger than a grain of sand.

A steady rain of such grains fell into the Archive continuously. They were seed-sentiences drawn from every world, every species whose history was jeopardized by the psilife incursion. Each grain was in effect a weapon, stealthed against recognition and cued to interact with the Archive’s hermetic substructure in ways that would divert the attention of the enemy.

Battles raged at every point within the Archive. Subsentient Turing packets roamed freely, seeking out the algorithmic signature of psilife and interrupting its reproduction. Psilife nodes, in turn, mutated or disguised their reproductive codes. Predator packets flourished for a time, then died back as the invaders targeted and stalled their attack sequences. The war became an ecology.

Guilford’s role lay elsewhere. His autonomic systems tapped the functional architecture of the Archive and delivered him to the replica of the archaic Earth. He could not manifest himself as a phenomenological being — at least, not functionally, and not for long — but he could communicate directly with the replica Guilford Law.

What happened here was important. Psilife had radically altered the ontosphere that was the heart of the Archive. The scars of battle were everywhere.

The continent of Europe had been revised in a single stroke, overridden with a mutant history. Psilife had attempted to create an evolutionary sequence which would permit their entry into the ontosphere through the vehicle of subsentient insectile creatures.

The effort had met effective resistance. Their goal had been to transform the Earth entirely. They had converted only a fraction of it.

But the replica world was permanently changed. Lives which had been cut short — such as Guilford’s — warped into new, autonomous, wholly sentient shapes. Many of these were permeable conduits from the substructure of the Archive into its core ontology. Roads, that is, through which spirits — such as Guilford’s, or the parasitical nodes of psilife — might enter and alter the plenum of history.

The seed-consciousness which was Guilford Law felt rage at the damage already done. And fear: fear for the new seed-minds created by the psilife invasion, who might not be salvageable: who might face, in other words, the horror of utter extinction.

Entities who had been no more than reconstructions of the past had become hostages — vulnerable, perhaps doomed, if the psilife incursion into the ontosphere continued unresisted.

As a seed-sentience, isolated from his noosphere, Guilford could not hope to comprehend more than a fraction of the War. He wasn’t meant to. He had come, with others, for the sole purpose of intervening in the battle for the Earth.

He understood the Earth well enough.

In Europe, the psions had been bound (but only temporarily) in their abortive access point: a well, as it appeared in this plenum, linking the hidden structures of the Archive to the ontological Earth. The psions had used huge insectile creatures as their avatars, invested their means and motives in these animals, used them to build a crude stone city to protect their access point.

That city had fallen in an earlier battle. The passageway had been effectively sealed.

For now.

New activity had drawn him. The Higgs field, sweeping the Archive to create ontological time, clocked toward a new psilife diaspora. Another Armageddon. Another battle.

All this he sensed directly: the well, and his own avatar Guilford Law, the continent some called Darwinia; even the altered Martian landscape. Crises past and crises future.

He could not intervene, not directly. Nor could he simply capture and rule an avatar, as the psions did. He respected the moral independence of the seed-lives. He approached his avatar tentatively. He struggled to narrow himself to the avatar’s mental range… to become the purely mortal thing he had once been.

It was strange to rediscover that core of self, the chaotic bundle of fears and needs and aspirations that was the embryo of all sentience. Among his thoughts:

He was suffused with pity.

He entered the avatar’s perceptions as a phantom, which was all that he could manifest of himself in the Archive’s ontosphere. There is a battle coming, he told his avatar. You have a role to play. I need your help.

His avatar listened through Guilford’s plodding explanation. The words were clumsy, primitive, barely adequate.

And then his avatar refused him.

“I don’t care what you say.” The younger Guilford’s voice was frank and final. “I don’t know what you are or whether you’re telling the truth. What you’re describing, it’s medieval — ghosts and demons and monsters, like some tenth-century morality play.”

The infant sentience was bitter. He had been abandoned by his wife. He had seen far more than he could comprehend. He had watched his compatriots die.

The elder Guilford understood.

He remembered Belleau Wood and Bouresches. He remembered a wheat field red with poppies. He remembered Tom Compton, cut down by machine-gun fire. He remembered grief.