Chapter 35 #2
When I finished, it was dark. I wasn’t hungry.
Thanks to the Consciousness I didn’t need to eat anymore.
I wasn’t stiff, but I stood and stretched anyway, just to feel it.
I sat on the driftwood and paged back to one part that stuck in my memory.
Most of what Lyle had written was rubbish.
Made-up pseudo-religious and quasi-philosophical rhetoric going in circles and echoing much of what I remembered from the brief dabbling I’d done with alternative religions in my twenties.
But a few passages stuck out. One contained what I thought Lily might have been paraphrasing to me, out in the desert after we had escaped the ruins of Fresno.
“A great Intelligence pulls the Traveler forward through time. The evidence is compelling. It can be nothing less. No accident, no quirk of quantum mechanics, could produce such a flawless and repeated result. And so I ask you: What of it? The Traveler is us. The Traveler is me; he is you. We are all Travelers in much the same way, are we not? An Intelligence unimaginably superior to our own, capable of manipulating the very laws of physics, of reaching across countless millennia, has plucked a single man from his own time and pulled him forward to his Destiny. The rest of us must face a slower path, but one which nevertheless draws each of us inevitably toward our own individual Destiny. The Traveler must find the courage, the tenacity, and the will to persevere—to find, or rather to make, the Destiny that this Intelligence draws him toward. And so, too, the rest of us must find our own courage and tenacity, to find—to create—meaning in our own lives.”
I set the white panel of glass on the piece of driftwood and walked to the dark waves. I stood and watched them roll in, lit a deep purple by a nearly full moon.
“Dad?” Lyle asked.
“Yeah, bud.”
“Are you all right?”
“I think so.” I turned and walked along the shoreline. I let the waves run over my boots, the material shrugging off the water.
“What did you think?” Lyle asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Maybe.” I kept walking. Lyle fell silent, waiting. I stopped at a half-circle cove and looked across the ocean. Moonlight shimmered and danced across glass-cut lines of waves. “Lyle?”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Can you prove this isn’t a delusion? That I’m not sitting in a padded cell right now, my arms wrapped around me in a straitjacket, talking to the air?”
Lyle was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t know if there is any incontrovertible proof, Dad. Especially if you discount or doubt the reality of your own senses.”
“I could be a brain in a vat, being fed fake stimuli. An experiment.”
“By an all-powerful demon, yes. The same could be said of me, of my own sentience. It could have been true of us before your jumps if you took it that far. Our reality is predicated on our perception. It could all be some clever virtuality.”
“I suppose.”
“Would it make any difference?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were insane, sitting in a padded cell, dreaming all this up. Or a brain in a vat, being fed fake electrical impulses to make you believe this is reality. Would it matter? It’s all the same, either way, isn’t it? The choices you make would be the same in any case.”
“Maybe.”
“Are you sure you’re all right, Dad?”
I laughed, a small sound lost in the surf. “Yep. As well as could possibly be expected, bud. Better, probably.” I took a breath. “I think I’ll get some sleep now.”
“Okay. Rest well, Dad.”
Lyle formed a comfortable bed of softened force fields for me on the beach, and I fell asleep listening to the waves.
I woke when the world slipped.
I stood up in a jungle. The sun was above the horizon, and moist air, heavy and warm, settled on my shoulders. Birds called all around me, and some animal, surprised by my sudden appearance, took off into the brush. “Lyle?”
“We’ve transited again.”
“Yeah. Where’d the beach go?”
“It is still there, about thirty meters west of your position.”
“It’s a lot warmer.”
“The ice age has long passed.”
“What year is it?”
“It is the year ninety-three thousand nine hundred and fifty-six CE.”
I nodded, licking my lips and gazing around at the towering, vine-covered trees looming overhead.
Almost 94,000 CE.
Just over three weeks earlier I’d gone out to dinner with Amy and Lyle.
A Saturday night out for the three of us.
We had Korean food at one of a handful of surprisingly good Korean places that encircled the university in downtown Madison.
I had bibimbap in a stone bowl. Amy ordered a dumpling soup, but she liked my bibimbap more, so I gave her most of it.
Lyle had veggie fried rice, the least spicy thing on the menu.
He only ate about half, so I ate the rest, and the unfairly maligned dumpling soup had gone home in a carry-out container to sit in the fridge.
We’d had fun. A quiet, unremarkable evening.
Three weeks ago. Ninety-two thousand years ago.
“Any signals?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
We flew. We went back to North America and out over the Atlantic to Europe.
We found a few more cities, although they were little more than rusting and crumbling skeletons of buildings emerging from hillsides or rising from forests.
“I wonder if they did it,” I murmured as we passed another set of ruins.
“Did it?”
“Transcended. As a species. Humans and AIs, together.”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope they did. Or found something better. Whatever the Consciousness was looking for.”
We kept going, arcing across northern Asia, down through the Middle East and over India. We stopped on a mountain in eastern China. There I sat and watched the stars until I fell asleep and woke again as the world slipped.
There were no electronic signals this time, either.
The stars looked different. We flew to North America again, mainly because I felt a bone-deep nostalgia for it despite the landscape looking almost nothing like what I remembered.
I walked along the California coastline, watching flocks of birds settle in the surf and take off again in great, spiraling flights.
Not a single parasail or hot dog vendor in sight.
“You said you had regrets, earlier,” I said. I walked along a bay containing the clearest water I’d ever seen, so crystalline I could see every fish beneath the shallow waves.
“I did. I do.”
“I wish I could take them away for you.”
“Thanks. But then I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
“I suppose.”
“And you, Dad? Do you have regrets?”
I was silent as I walked along the beach, watching the fish dance under the waves. I thought of my life, before this had all started. All the possible moments lost forever. I’d thought I’d had so much time. “Yes. I do. A very great many.”
And again, all too soon, the world slipped.
We stepped into another ice age. This time I stayed in the cold and the snow.
I found a cave along the glacier-covered coastline of Lake Michigan and built myself a fire out of branches Lyle helped me locate and dig out.
I didn’t need it for heat, not with the suit and my artificially enhanced physiology, but I liked the idea of it, there in the wilderness.
When the little fire was crackling and warming the cave, I had Lyle make me another tablet book out of the silicon in the dirt beneath the snow. I read the Word of the Traveler again.
“Socrates famously said an unexamined life is one not worth living,” Lyle wrote.
“One more pearl of wisdom among millions spoken and breathed and thought throughout human history. But what does it mean? And what does it mean to the Traveler? The Traveler’s life is one of constant motion, relentless forward progress through time and history, a witness to fragments and shards and hurried, barely understood visions of a reality we all take for granted.
On examination, it might seem shallow, superficial, even illusory, lacking the depth of context and the ability to build up knowledge of ‘the Real.’ But perhaps you need to ask yourself: Is your own life so different from the Traveler’s?
Have you ever taken the time to stop and breathe and look around, or are you, too, simply skipping ahead, day after day? ”
I fell asleep next to the fire. The world slipped again.
I walked across rolling grasslands. Huge herds of buffalo, or buffalo-like animals, regarded me without fear as they chewed the tough grass, large brown eyes dull, with barely a hint of curiosity. They’d never seen a human before.
“Around seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand CE,” Lyle said when I asked.
“I wonder what it would be like to go home, now, back to my time.” I reached one hand toward a nearby buffalo. It twitched, eyeing me, but let me touch it. Its muscular flank was warm and furry. They smelled terrible. “Having seen all I’ve seen.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Yeah.”
I kept walking.
The world slipped.
The Midwest was a jungle, dense and filled with life.
On a whim, I had Lyle take me above the rain clouds and into space.
I floated in orbit, looking at the curvature of the Earth, a blue-and-green pearl in the blackness of space.
I no longer feared leaving the atmosphere.
Lyle had proved he could protect me well enough, and for all I knew, I could survive in a vacuum on my own, thanks to the Consciousness’s gifts.
“Any signals?”
“No, Dad. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
And, strangely enough, it was.
I had Lyle take me to the Moon. I sat on the lip of a crater and read the Word again.
“All the world is context. Where the Traveler goes—when the Traveler goes—his viewpoint will be colored by the context of his time. What will be necessary for him to succeed in his great and mysterious Quest will be to overcome the limitations of his personal context. He must see around the filter his mind puts on things, or, rather, see the filter for what it is, accept that filter, and move beyond it. In this way, he faces the challenge we all face, every day of our lives. We all see the world a certain way. We filter it, subconsciously and consciously, applying shortcuts and stereotypes to make the strange and foreign into simple concepts we can grasp, at a basic level, with a minimum expenditure of effort. But down this shortsighted path we find only misunderstanding, bigotry, hatred, warfare, and death. As the Traveler makes his perilous way through time, he will need to overcome his own conceptualizations to truly understand, to truly see. And we, in turn, will need to do the same if we are to succeed in our own personal quests through time.”
I set aside the paper-thin tablet and watched the brilliant dots of distant stars.
Enough time had passed that the constellations had subtly changed as the solar system moved across the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
Some stars had inevitably vanished as well, evidence of their going nova or passing behind gas clouds or other phenomena reaching my eyes via the slow crawl of light through the immensity of space.
I wondered at the stars I could see. What other distant civilizations in orbit around those tiny lights might have arisen, peaked, and fallen in the seven hundred thousand years I had jumped over that morning.
The Earth rose over the ragged edge of the horizon, a half-lit sphere of blue and green and white against black. If I stretched my hand out, the Earth was about the size of a silver dollar, fitting between my thumb and forefinger. I could pluck it from space and slip it in my pocket.
I tried to see through my own filters, see around them. I sat in the pure silence of the vacuum, comfortable and at ease on the lip of a crater on the Moon, and I tried to understand.
Whatever it was I was supposed to see, to know, to grasp, was still beyond me.
I stayed on the Moon for the next jump forward.
As I had on Mars, I emerged where I’d left, a fractional instant of sideways movement later, my boots and the force fields surrounding them thumping into the undisturbed dust of the lunar surface.
I asked Lyle to take us back to Earth. Along the way I asked him what year it was, although I knew the math by heart.
I’d done the calculations over and over, especially in recent days as the numbers grew larger.
“It’s two point nine four million years CE. And thirty days since you began your journey.”
I didn’t say anything else all the way back to Earth. One month.
Three million years.