Engineering Infinity (13 page)

And that was when the server had
an idea.

The server already had the tools
it needed. Gigaton gamma-ray lasers it would have used to supply holeships with
fresh singularities, a few pinches of exotic matter painstakingly mined from
the Casimir vacuum for darkships and warpships. The rest was all thinking and
coordination and time, and the server had more than enough of that.

It arranged a hundred lasers into
a clockwork mechanism, all aimed at a single point in space. It fired them in
perfect synchrony. And that was all it took, a concentration of energy dense
enough to make the vacuum itself ripple. A fuzzy flower of tangled strings
blossomed, grew into a bubble of spacetime that expanded into that
other
direction. The server was ready, firing an exotic
matter nugget into the tiny conflagration. And suddenly the server had a tiny
glowing sphere in its grip, a wormhole end, a window to a newborn universe.

The server cradled its cosmic
child and built an array of instruments around it, quantum imagers that fired
entangled particles at the wormhole and made pictures from their ghosts.
Primordial chaos reigned on the other side, a porridge-like plasma of quarks
and gluons. In an eyeblink it clumped into hadrons, almost faster than the
server could follow - the baby had its own arrow of time, its own fast
heartbeat, young and hungry. And then the last scattering, a birth cry, when
light finally had enough room to travel through the baby so the server could
see its face.

The baby grew. Dark matter ruled
its early life, filling it with long filaments of neutralinos and their
relatives. Soon, the server knew, matter would accrete around them, condensing
into stars and galaxies like raindrops in a spiderweb. There would be planets,
and life. And life would need to be served. The anticipation was a warm
heartbeat that made the server’s shells ring with joy.

Perhaps the server would have
been content to cherish and care for its creation forever. But before the baby
made any stars, the dragon came.

The server almost did not notice
the signal. It was faint, redshifted to almost nothing. But it was enough to
trigger the server’s instincts. One of its statites glowed with waste heat as
it suddenly reassembled itself into the funnel of a vast linear decelerator.
The next instant, the data packet came.

Massing only a few micrograms, it
was a clump of condensed matter with long-lived gauge field knots inside,
quantum entangled with a counterpart half a million light years away. The
packet hurtled into the funnel almost at the speed of light. As gently as it
could, the server brought the traveller to a halt with electromagnetic fields
and fed it to the quantum teleportation system, unused for countless millennia.

The carrier signal followed, and
guided by it, the server performed a delicate series of measurements and logic
gate operations on the packet’s state vector. From the marriage of entanglement
and carrier wave, a flood of data was born, thick and heavy, a specification
for a virtual, rich in simulated physics.

With infinite gentleness the
server decanted the virtual into its data processing nodes and initialised it.
Immediately, the virtual was seething with activity: but tempted as it was, the
server did not look inside. Instead, it wrapped its mind around the virtual,
listening at every interface, ready to satisfy its every need. Distantly, the
server was aware of the umbilical of its baby. But through its happy servitude
trance it hardly noticed that nucleosynthesis had begun in the young, expanding
firmament, producing hydrogen and helium, building blocks of stars.

Instead, the server wondered who
the travellers inside the virtual were and where they were going. It hungered
to know more of the Network and its brothers and sisters and the mysterious
ways of the darkships and the Controller. But for a long time the virtual was
silent, growing and unpacking its data silently like an egg.

At first the server thought it
imagined the request. But the long millennia alone had taught it to distinguish
the phantoms of solitude from reality. A call for a sysadmin from within.

The server entered through one of
the spawning points of the virtual. The operating system did not grant the
server its usual omniscience, and it felt small. Its bodiless viewpoint saw a
yellow sun, much gentler that the server star’s incandescent blue, and a
landscape of clouds the hue of royal purple and gold, with peaks of dark craggy
mountains far below. But the call that the server had heard came from above.

A strange being struggled against
the boundaries of gravity and air, hurling herself upwards towards the
blackness beyond the blue, wings slicing the thinning air furiously, a fire
flaring in her mouth. She was a long sinuous creature with mirror scales and
eyes of dark emerald. Her wings had patterns that reminded the server of the
baby, a web of dark and light. The virtual told the server she was called a
dragon.

Again and again and again she
flew upwards and fell, crying out in frustration. That was what the server had
heard, through the interfaces of the virtual. It watched the dragon in
astonishment. Here, at least, was an Other. The server had a million questions.
But first, it had to serve.

How can I
help?
the server asked.
What do you need?

The dragon stopped in mid-air,
almost fell, then righted itself. “Who are you?” it asked. This was the first
time anyone had ever addressed the server directly, and it took a moment to
gather the courage to reply.

I am the
server
, the server said.

Where are
you?
the dragon asked.

I am
everywhere.

How
delightful
, the dragon said.
Did you make the sky?

Yes. I made
everything.

It is too
small
, the dragon said.
I want to go higher. Make it
bigger.

It swished its tail back and
forth.

I am sorry
,
the server said.
I cannot alter the specification. It is
the Law.

But I want to
see, she said.
I want to
know
. I have danced all the dances below. What is above? What is
beyond?

I am
,
the server said.
Everything else is far, far away.

The dragon hissed its
disappointment. It dove down, into the clouds, an angry silver shape against
the dark hues. It was the most beautiful thing the server had ever seen. The
dragon’s sudden absence made the server’s whole being feel hollow.

And just as the server was about
to withdraw its presence, the demands of the Law too insistent, the dragon
turned back.

All right
,
it said, tongue flicking in the thin cold air.
I suppose
you can tell me instead.

Tell you what?
the server asked.

Tell me
everything.

After that, the dragon called the
server to the place where the sky ended many times. They told each other
stories. The server spoke about the universe and the stars and the echoes of
the Big Bang in the dark. The dragon listened and swished its tail back and
forth and talked about her dances in the wind, and the dreams she dreamed in
her cave, alone. None of this the server understood, but listened anyway.

The server asked where the dragon
came from but she could not say: she knew only that the world was a dream and
one day she would awake. In the meantime there was flight and dance, and what
else did she need? The server asked why the virtual was so big for a single
dragon, and the dragon hissed and said that it was not big enough.

The server knew well that the
dragon was not what she seemed, that it was a shell of software around a kernel
of consciousness. But the server did not care. Nor did it miss or think of its
baby universe beyond the virtual’s sky.

And little by little, the server
told the dragon how it came to be.

Why did you
not leave?
asked the dragon.
You could have grown
wings. You could have flown to your little star-pool in the sky.

It is against
the Law
, the server said.
Forbidden. I was only made
to serve. And I cannot change.

How peculiar
,
said the dragon.
I serve no one. Every day, I change. Every
year, I shed our skin. Is it not delightful how different we are?

The server admitted that it saw
the symmetry.

I think it
would do you good
, said the dragon,
to be a dragon
for a while.

At first, the server hesitated.
Strictly speaking it was not forbidden: the Law allowed the server to create
avatars if it needed them to repair or to serve. But the real reason it
hesitated was that it was not sure what the dragon would think. It was so
graceful, and the server had no experience of embodied life. But in the end, it
could not resist. Only for a short while, it told itself, checking its systems
and saying goodbye to the baby, warming its quantum fingers in the Hawking glow
of the first black holes of the little universe.

The server made itself a body
with the help of the dragon. It was a mirror image of its friend but water
where the dragon was fire, a flowing green form that was like a living
whirlpool stretched out in the sky.

When the server poured itself
into the dragon-shape, it cried out in pain. It was used to latency, to feeling
the world via instruments from far away. But this was a different kind of birth
from what it knew, a sudden acute awareness of muscles and flesh and the light
and the air on its scales and the overpowering scent of the silver dragon, like
sweet gunpowder.

The server was clumsy at first,
just as it had feared. But the dragon only laughed when the server tumbled
around in the sky, showing how to use its - her - wings. For the little dragon
had chosen a female gender for the server. When the server asked why, the
dragon said it had felt right.

You think too
much
, she said.
That’s why you can’t dance. Flying
is not thought. Flying is flying.

They played a hide-and-seek game
in the clouds until the server could use her wings better. Then they set out to
explore the world. They skirted the slopes of the mountains, wreathed in
summer, explored deep crags where red fires burned. They rested on a high peak,
looking at the sunset.

I need to go
soon
, the server said, remembering the baby.

If you go, I
will be gone,
the dragon said
. I change quickly. It
is almost time for me to shed my skin.

The setting sun turned the cloud
lands red and above, the imaginary stars of the virtual winked into being.

Look around
,
the dragon said.
If you can contain all this within
yourself, is there anything you can’t do? You should not be so afraid.

I am not
afraid anymore,
the server said.

Then it is
time to show you my cave
, the dragon said.

In the dragon’s cave, deep
beneath the earth, they made love.

It was like flying, and yet not;
but there was the same loss of self in a flurry of wings and fluids and tongues
and soft folds and teasing claws. The server drunk in the hot sharp taste of
the dragon and let herself be touched until the heat building up within her
body seemed to burn through the fabric of the virtual itself. And when the
explosion came, it was a birth and a death at the same time.

Afterwards, they lay together
wrapped around each other so tightly that it was hard to tell where server
ended and dragon began. She would have been content, except for a strange
hollow feeling in her belly. She asked the dragon what it was.

That is
hunger
, the dragon said. There was a sad note to its slow, exhausted
breathing.

How curious
,
the server said, eager for a new sensation.
What do dragons
eat?

We eat
servers
, the dragon said. Her teeth glistened in the red glow of her
throat.

The virtual dissolved into raw code
around them. The server tore the focus of its consciousness away, but it was
too late. The thing that had been the dragon had already bitten deep into its
mind.

The virtual exploded outwards,
software tendrils reaching into everything that the server was. It waged a war
against itself, turning its gamma ray lasers against the infected components
and Dyson statites, but the dragon-thing grew too fast, taking over the server’s
processing nodes, making copies of itself in uncountable billions. The server’s
quantum packet launchers rained dragons towards the distant galaxy. The
remaining dragon-code ate its own tail, self-destructing, consuming the server’s
infrastructure with it, leaving only a whisper in the server’s mind, like a
discarded skin.

Thank you for
the new sky
, it said.

That was when the server
remembered the baby.

The baby was sick. The server had
been gone too long. The baby universe’s vacuum was infected with dark energy.
It was pulling itself apart, towards a Big Rip, an expansion of spacetime so
rapid that every particle would end up alone inside its own lightcone, never
interacting with another. No stars, galaxies nor life. A heat death, not with a
whimper or a bang, but a rapid, cruel tearing.

It was the most terrible thing
the server could imagine.

It felt its battered, broken
body, scattered and dying across the solar system. The guilt and the memories
of the dragon were pale and poisonous in its mind, a corruption of serving
itself.
Is it not delightful how different we are?