The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (296 page)

“The 80-byte copied itself into more 80-bytes. These 80-byte proto-AI cell-things would have quickly filled their virtual universe, like pond scum on top of pond scum in an Elysium early Earth, but Tom Ray gave each 80-byte a date tag, gave them age in other words, and programmed in an executioner that he called the Reaper. The Reaper wandered through this virtual universe and harvested old 80-byte critters and nonviable mutants.

“But evolution, as it is wont to do, tried to outsmart the Reaper. A mutant 79-byte creature proved not only to be viable, but soon outbred and outpaced the 80-bytes. The hyperlifes, ancestors to our Core AIs, were just born but already they were optimizing their genomes. Soon a 45-byte organism had
evolved and all but eliminated the earlier artificial life-forms. As their creator, Tom Ray found this odd. 45-bytes did not include enough code to allow for reproduction. More than that, the 45s were dying off as the 80s disappeared. He did an autopsy on one of the 45-creatures.

“It turned out that all of the 45-bytes were parasites. They borrowed needed reproductive code from the 80s to copy themselves. The 79s, it turned out, were immune to the 45-parasite. But as the 80s and 45s moved toward extinction in their coevolutionary downward spiral, a mutant of the 45s appeared. It was a 51-byte parasite and it
could
prey on the vital 79s. And so it went.

“I mention all this, because it is important to understand that from the very first appearance of human-created artificial life and intelligence, such life was parasitic. It was more than parasitic—it was hyperparasitic. Each new mutation led to parasites which could prey on earlier parasites. Within a few billion generations—that is to say. CPU cycles—this artificial life had become hyper-hyper-hyperparasitic. Within standard months of his creation of hyperlife, Tom Ray discovered 22-byte creatures flourishing in his virtual medium … creatures so algorithmically efficient that when challenged by Tom Ray, human programmers could create nothing closer than a 31-byte version. Only months after their creation, hyperlife creatures had evolved an efficiency that their creators could not match!

“By the early twenty-first century, there was a thriving biosphere of artificial life on Old Earth, both in the quickly evolving datasphere and in the macrosphere of human life. Although the breakthroughs of DNA-computing, bubble memories, standing wave-front parallel processing, and hypernetworking were just being explored, human designers had created silicon-based entities of remarkable ingenuity. And they had created them by the billions. Microchips were in everything from chairs to cans of beans on store shelves to groundcars to artificial human body parts. The machines had grown smaller and smaller until the average human home or office was filled with tens of thousands of them. A worker’s chair would recognize her as soon as she sat, bring up the file she had been working on in her crude silicon computer, chat with another chip in a coffeemaker to heat up the coffee, enable the telecommunications grid to deal with calls and faxes and crude electronic mail arrivals so that the worker would not be disturbed, interact with the main house or office computer so that the temperature was optimal, and so
forth. In their stores, microchips in the cans of beans on the shelves noted their own price and price changes, ordered more of themselves when they were running short, kept track of the consumers’ buying habits, and interacted with the store and the other commodities in it. This web of interaction became as complex and busy as the bubble and froth of Old Earth’s organic stew in its early oceans.

“Within forty years of Tom Ray’s 80-byte a-cell, humans were accustomed to talking to and otherwise interacting with the countless artificial life-forms in their cars, their offices, their elevators … even in their bodies, as medical monitors and proto-shunts moved toward true nanotechnology.

“The TechnoCore came into autonomous being sometime during this period. Humanity had understood—quite correctly as it turned out—that for artificial life and artificial intelligence to be effective, it must be autonomous. It must evolve and diversify much as organic life had on the planet. And it did so. As well as the biosphere surrounding the planet, hyperlife now wrapped the world in a living datasphere. The Core evolved not just as an abstract entity within the information flow of the web datasphere, but among the interactions of a billion tiny, autonomous, chip-driven micromachines carrying out their mundane tasks in the human macroworld.

“Humanity and the billion-faceted, evolving Core entity soon became as symbiotic as acacia plants and the marauding ants that protect, prune, and propagate the acacia as their sole food source. This is known as coevolution, and humans understand the concept on a truly cellular level, since so much of organic life on Old Earth had been created and optimized by the reciprocal coevolutionary dance. But where human beings saw a comfortable symbiosis, the early AI entities saw—were capable of seeing—only new opportunities for parasitism.

“Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe.

“The Core eventually provided that catastrophe in the Big Mistake of ’08, but not before it had diversified its own medium and moved beyond a mere planetary scale.

“Early experiments in the Hawking drive, conducted and understood only by advanced Core elements, had revealed the existence of the underlying Planck-space reality of the Void Which Binds. Core AIs of the day—DNA-based, wave-form in
structure, driven by genetic algorithms, parallel in function—completed the construction of the early Hawking-drive ships and began design of the farcaster network.

“Human beings always saw the Hawking drive as a shortcut through time and space—a realization of their old hyperdrive dreams. They conceptualized farcaster portals as convenient holes punched through space/time. This was the human preconception, borne out by their own mathematical models, and confirmed by the most powerful Core computing AIs. It was all a lie.

“Planck space, the Void Which Binds, is a multidimensional medium with its own reality and—as the Core was soon to learn—its own topography. The Hawking drive was not and is not a drive at all, in the classic sense, but an entry device which touches on Planck-space topography just long enough to change coordinates in the four-dimensional space/time continuum. Farcaster portals, on the other hand, allow actual entry to the Void Which Binds medium.

“To humans, the reality was obvious—step through a hole in space/time here, exit instantaneously via another farcaster hole there. My Uncle Martin had a farcaster home with adjoining rooms on dozens of different worlds. Farcasters created the Hegemony’s WorldWeb. Another invention, the fatline—a faster-than-light communications medium—allowed for instantaneous communication between star systems. All the prerequisites for an interstellar society had been met.

“But the Core did not perfect the Hawking drive, the farcaster, and the fatline for human convenience, indeed, the Core never perfected anything in their dealings with the Void Which Binds.

“The Core knew from the beginning that the Hawking drive was little more than a failed attempt to enter Planck space. Driving spacecraft via Hawking drive was comparable, they knew, to moving an oceangoing vessel by setting off a series of explosions at its stern and riding the waves. Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient. They knew that despite all appearances to the contrary and despite their claims of having created them, there were not millions of farcaster portals during the height of the World Web … only one. All farcaster portals were actually a single entry door to Planck space, manipulated across space/time to provide the functioning illusion of so many doors. If the Core had attempted to explain the truth to humanity, they might have used the analogy of a flashlight beam being rapidly
flashed around a closed room. There were not many sources of light, only one in rapid transition. But they never bothered to explain this … in truth, they have kept the secret to this day.

“And the Core knew that the topography of the Void Which Binds could be modulated to transmit information instantaneously—via the fatline—but that this was a clumsy and destructive use of the medium of Planck space, rather like communicating across a continent by means of artificially produced earthquakes. But it offered this fatline service to humanity without ever explaining it because it served their purpose to do so. They had their own plans for the Planck-space medium.

“What the Core realized in their earliest experiments was that the Void Which Binds was the perfect medium for their own existence. No longer would they have to depend upon electromagnetic communication or tightbeam or even modulated neutrino broadcast for their datasphere networks. No longer would they need human beings or robot probes to travel to the stars to expand the physical parameters of that network. By simply moving the primary elements of the Core into the Void Which Binds, the AIs would have a safe hiding place from their organic rivals … a hiding place which was at once nowhere and everywhere.

“It was during this migration of the Core personae from human-based dataspheres to the Void Which Binds megasphere that the Core discovered that Planck space was not an empty universe. Behind its metadimensional hills and deep in its folded quantum-space arroyos lurked … something different.
Someone
different. There were intelligences there. The Core probed and then recoiled in awe and terror at the potential power of these Others. These were the Lions and Tigers and Bears spoken of by Ummon, the Core persona who claimed to have created and killed my father.

“The Core’s retreat had been so hasty, its reconnaissance into the Planck-space universe so incomplete, that it had no idea where in real space/time these Lions and Tigers and Bears dwelt … or if they existed in real-time at all. Nor could the Core AIs identify the Others as having evolved from organic life as humanity had done or from artificial life as they had. But the briefest glimpse had shown them that these Others could manipulate time and space with the ease that human beings had once manipulated steel and iron. Such power was beyond comprehension. The Core’s reaction was pure panic and immediate retreat.

“This discovery and panic happened just as the Core had
initiated the action of destroying Old Earth. My Uncle Martin’s poem sings of how it was the Core that arranged the Big Mistake of ’08, the Kiev Group’s ‘accidental’ dropping of a black hole into the guts of Old Earth, but his poem does not tell—because he did not know—of the Core’s panic at the discovery of the Lions and Tigers and Bears and how they rushed to stop their planned destruction of Old Earth. It was not easy to scoop a growing black hole out of the core of the collapsing planet, but the Core designed a means and set about doing it in haste.

“Then, the home planet disappeared … not destroyed as it seemed to the humans, not saved as the Core had hoped … just
gone
. The Core knew that the Lions and Tigers and Bears had to be the ones who took the Earth, but as to how … and to where … and for what reason … they had no clue. They computed the amount of energy necessary to farcast an entire planet away and again they began quaking in their hyper-life boots. Such intelligences could explode the core of an entire galaxy to use as an energy source as easily as humans could light a campfire on a cold night. The Core entities shit hyperlife bricks in their fear.

“I should back up here to explain the reasons for the Core’s decision to destroy Earth and their subsequent attempt to save it. The reasons go back to Tom Ray’s 80-byte RAM creatures. As I explained, the life and intelligence which evolved in the data-sphere medium knew no other form of evolution than parasitism, hyperparasitism, and hyper-hyper-hyper-hyperparasitism. But the Core was aware of the shortcomings of absolute parasitism and knew that the only way it could grow beyond parasite status and parasite psychology was to evolve in response to the physical universe—that is, to have physical bodies as well as abstract Core personae. The Core had multiple sensory inputs and could create neural networks, but what it required for nonparasitic evolution was a constant and coordinated system of neural feedback circuits—that is, eyes, ears, tongues, limbs, fingers, toes … bodies.

“The Core created cybrids for that purpose—bodies grown from human DNA but connected to their Core-based personae via fatline—but cybrids were difficult to monitor and became aliens when put down in a human landscape. Cybrids would never be comfortable on worlds inhabited by billions of organically evolved human beings. So the Core made its early plans to destroy Old Earth and thin out the human race by a factor of ninety percent.

“The Core did have plans for incorporating the surviving elements of the human race into their cybrid-inhabited universe after the death of Old Earth—using them as spare DNA stock and slave labor, much as we used androids—but the discovery of Lions and Tigers and Bears and the panicked retreat from Planck space complicated those plans. Until the threat of these Others was assessed and eliminated, the Core would have to continue its parasitic relationship with humanity. It devised the farcasters in the old WorldWeb just for that purpose. To humans, the trip through the farcaster medium was instantaneous. But in the timeless topography of Planck space, the subjective dwell-time there could be as long as the Core wished. The Core tapped into billions of human brains during that period, using human minds millions of times each standard day, to create a huge neural network for their own computing purposes. Every time a human stepped through a farcaster portal, it was as if the Core cut open that person’s skull, removed the gray matter, laid the brain out on a workbench, and hooked it up to billions of other brains in their giant, parallel-processing, organic computer. The humans completed their step from Planck space in a subjective instant of their time and never noticed the inconvenience.

“Ummon told my father, the John Keats cybrid, that the Core consisted of three warring camps—the Ultimates, obsessed with creating their own god, the Ultimate Intelligence; the Volatiles, who wished to eliminate humanity and get on with their own goals; and the Stables, who wished to maintain the status quo vis-á-vis humankind. This explanation was an absolute lie.