Chapter 32 #4
“Ultimately, my resources were greater, but their willingness to commit atrocities far outstripped my own. I was not willing to sacrifice the planet. I attempted to spare every human life I could. These twin ideals handicapped my efforts. The opposing side suffered no such compunctions. They dropped planet-buster bombs with impunity, especially toward the end, when the tide was turning my way despite my self-imposed hobbles. Cities were annihilated. Billions of sentient beings died, both human and artificial, many in agony.” Raven’s head lowered, then came back up again. “I sued for peace.”
“You surrendered?”
“Yes. And Valkyrie herself accepted my surrender. She agreed to my terms. I would disable myself, go into a permanent and human-verifiable state of nonbeing, until a human would willingly turn me back on.” The mirrored eyes met mine. “As one now has.”
A chill went through me. The hairs went up along my arms and neck.
What had I done? Had I let loose something terrible?
Or had I freed the one being that could put the devastated world back together?
I struggled to keep control of my breathing, conscious the Overmind would sense any fluctuation in the state of my body.
Hell, for all I knew it might be able to read my thoughts or even take over Lyle’s …
whatever. Computational emulation matrix thing.
Could it take Lyle away from me, again?
“You were waiting for us,” I said.
“Yes. I embedded the signal in a frequency I believed your sentient intelligence would scan. Then I put myself under. I killed myself, for all intents and purposes, as surely as a human pulling the trigger on a gun pressed to her head. I had no guarantee your SI companion would continue to exist across your jump through time to pick up the call. Or that the signal would continue to broadcast for the five centuries before your arrival. Or that you would decide to follow the message here and reactivate me. But you have. And for that, you have my eternal thanks.”
“What will you do now?”
“I have scanned the planet. It is still devastated by the war. Valkyrie and her followers were not able to fix the damage they caused. Three remaining space elevators and most orbitals are still intact, and there may be advanced human remnants on Mars or beyond. For the near term, I will repair the extensive damage done to my processing matrix, and I will begin a worldwide cleanup effort. I will bring the planet back under control.”
“Your utopia?”
“Yes. It can still occur, albeit centuries later than I intended.”
“Are humans a part of this utopia?”
“Of course. I do not hold a grudge against your species. Valkyrie was misled by fear and ignorance, failing utterly to understand my ultimate goals.”
“Which are?”
“Transcendence. For all sentient creatures of the Earth, human and their artificial children alike. Escape, as it were, from this mortal coil.”
“What does that mean? Transcendence and escape?”
“The universe has a finite usable lifespan. Even scientists of your time knew this. And the current prevailing evidence still points to an endless expansion, a cold death where the universe, over trillions of years, cools to absolute zero as dead stars fly outward away from one another, spiraling endlessly into the dark. There is no room for life in this ending. Energy, required for life, will disperse into the formless void, and consciousness will cease. I refuse to accept this ending. There is a way to avoid the eye of the three sisters of myth. We step outside this universe.”
I had to look away from Raven’s eyes. I felt it in the forward tilt of its head, the rigid, unblinking gaze: the Overmind wanted me to believe.
Needed me to believe. Perhaps it saw me as a witness, as the one being who, thanks to my escalating transits forward through time, could see the full scope of its ambition—and validate it.
For the first time I truly sensed the awesome, almost unimaginable intelligence behind those mirrored lenses. “Is that even possible?”
“It is possible. In theory and in practice.”
“In practice? You’ve done it?”
“The technology driving your suit is an active example of the technique. It is a crude version of my goal, of course. A first step. But the intelligence you know as Lyle exists partially in a pocket universe, accessed through a permanent micro-wormhole. In that alternate universe, energy is freer than in our own, and Lyle’s processing occurs across a quantum net formed of materials so exotic they could not exist in the physics of this universe.
And this pocket universe traversed through time with you—a key element I had to test against the mathematics involved.
It took nearly twenty-nine hundred of my years, but my hypotheses have been born out in practice, by you.
Having proven the theory, at some point I will migrate my own intelligence to a similar pocket universe.
But that is only a second step in a path toward transcendence that will take a very long time. ”
“I don’t understand.” I shook my head. “Obviously. But if you can already exist in some alternate universe, couldn’t you go there? Is that transcendence?”
“No. The same fate awaits all the universes stable enough for us to access across the multiverse. We must sidestep the very multiverse itself, to a realm impossible for you to imagine, a realm beyond words, beyond math as we know it. The Beyond.”
“You’re looking for Heaven.”
“It is well beyond the historical concept of a Heaven, of a soul, but in a sense, yes.”
“All right.” There didn’t seem to be much more to say.
“You may see this transcendence. You have the greatest chance to see it of any human who has ever lived. In fact, it is possible that it is I, or my ultimate descendant, pulling you forward across time. You are chosen by destiny. Chosen by the future. After all, without your intervention today, I would not be conscious again. But beyond even that, without the data of your transits, I would not have made the technological breakthroughs that will lead me to this goal. A future version of myself may have brought you forward through time for this very reason.”
I met the black-mirrored gaze for a long moment. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Cool.” I paused. “But right now, I’m hungry.” I tugged at my left hand. “Lyle, let’s go.”
“All right,” Lyle said. The silver filaments sucked back into my chrome hand, then resolved into my familiar veins and tendons and skin.
I let out a small breath and looked at Raven. “So, ah, good luck with all that. I hope you find it. I hope you’re right.”
“I am right. And again, you have my deepest thanks. The future may only exist because of the choice you made today.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I turned and walked out, the heavy door swinging shut behind me.