Empires of the Mind

[Eudoxia]

(You know, (c) Alex Rosslyn 2010.)

[B]Before[/B]

It is 2060 in this world where theocentric calendars no longer make sense, where the average lifespan has reached a hundred years at least and people live surrounded by high-efficiency quantum nanocomputers, a world where molecular nanotechnology has created a tsunami of change and put the exponential progress of Mankind into overdrive. Spacecraft, made out of dirt and rock, whisper between the worlds of Sunspace. Von Neumann machines strip-mine the asteroids, whilel arge rockets deploy thousands of small probes that rain onto the surface of worlds. Tethers of buckytbe and tended into space from Earth’s equator to provide access to space, even cheaper than the spaceplanes.

Moore’s Law plows forward through masses of terminally future-shocked luddites and xenophobes, as these retreat out of polyfullerene cities that have left them behind. Drugs that enhance intelligence, even for some time, are the new fad, and genetic engineering has allowed dead economies to take off: By allowing farmers to breed spiders tricked to produce Carbon nanotubes and all sorts of interesting new forms of life. Everyone is jumping into a single train, that of Humanity, and invidual nations make no sense. It’s a world of molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering, but the old dreams of Artificial Intelligence have not been met.

We are accelerating towards a Singularity, but it’s not one of AI, but the exponential rate at which Mankind advances, pushed forward by molecular manufacturing. Soon we will merge with machines, and become posthumans. Why invent consciousness from scratch when we have the human mind to work on?

In this world, the blind can see, the amputees regrow limbs, the sick are treated in hours, incurable diseases are a matter of simple use of medical bionano, economies soar and old systems are recycled yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly… But we are still a species full of book-burners.

Above the solar-cell-coated streets and diamond cities, above the fullerene-reinforced habitats in cislunar space, above the geodesic domes on the Moon, above the nuclear-electric freighters, Jupiter is the new frontier, and deep within one of its moons, a spacecraft is being put together.

The Golden Path (Complete name: Interstellar Vehicle Golden Path to Discovery) extends its superconducting rings outwards, passing an ever-increasing current through them. Stations placed on Jupiter’s innermost moons grab rocks and water ice, and powerful electric arcs disassemble these to their compounding ions, which are accelerated and leave the nozzle as a tight beam moving at little below the speed of light. These stations have electrodynamic towers extended into space like the whiskers of a gigantic cat, towers that turn the orbital velocity of the moons into power. Power that is fed into the gigantic, towering plasma lasers, six hundred of them, firing their beams into the heavens, where they bounce off the Golden Path, imparting momentum into its immaterial magnetic fields and propelling it forward.

Golden Path accelerates at one-gravity for a year before the beams are cut off and the moons have to push against Jupiter’s plasma torus to pull themselves into a stable orbit again. After the acceleration, the ship, moving at 80% of the speed of light, carries a crew of five to Beta Virginis, while other ships are put together and blasted towards other destinations.

[B]Singularity[/B]

On Earth and cisluna strange things are happening, things that have never happened before. The curve is becoming more steep, and those who can’t adapt fall and trail behind progress, joining the masses of the luddites and those who can’t accept change. They gather in villages, in the countryside, while cities of diamond and buckytube-reinforced concrete grow all around, almost fractally. For every kilogram of human brain matter, there are ten tonnes of high-efficiency quantum nanocomputers, or, if you prefer; Computronium. We know how the neurons work in and out, but the brain as a whole remains a mystery. Nanorobots probe the synapses looking for clues, but people have begun to abandon the search for intelligence from scratch and others start to join the masses of augmented humans.

There are cyborgs, yes, and the tetraplegic can walk again. But the parts are crude and the best of nanotechnology is still far away from fixing that. Cyborgs are killed, only to live and walk. They wanted posthumanity, they got a life locked up in a box deprived of sensory input, constantly checking themselves to see if any parts are failing. They can smell, hear, and touch, but those senses are brute and in early development. Cyborgs are, in a way, the scanners of space, those that live in vain.

Golden Path to Discovery passes a current through its superconductors, and starts to break against the Galactic Wind, the current of heavy ions that generates drag against the ship’s magnetic sail. The immaterial boat flutters into orbit around a cold world around Beta Virginis. It’s more massive than Earth, and further away, it has a thick atmosphere, too thick too see through, and which allows heat to remain there and increase the temperatures of the world. High levels of volcanic activity and radioactive materials that spew out contribute to this.

The five people on board the Golden Path land, expecting nothing but a barren surface, yet for the next years they were the victims of unearthly savageries at the hands of a strange people, on an ecosystem that was so incredibly diverse, one that had experienced little to no extinction level events and reached a level of complexity that was incredible.

They remained there for a decade, while self-replicating, desk-sized probes hunted around the system looking for asteroids to turn into beam stations, to fire the Golden Path on its way back to Earth. A decade under siege by these people, split through several clans, fighting back the hordes of some, while entertaining and teasing and fooling the hordes of the most docile.

After they were done, they gave the kindest and less aggressive of savages the means to defend themselves. Each clan lasted not much more than a few dozens of generations, after that, they were killed and split into others and merged. Hopefully these would last long enough for them to discover science.

Three of the astronauts died within the first two months living on that world, while they were building their habitat and were therefore easy targets. After the habitat was built, the remaining two could stay.

These two survivors fired themselves up into space, burning the habitat and all evidence of their arrival — With the exception, of course, of what they had left behind — and entered the Golden Path which awaited in orbit. The automated, in situ-assembled stations fired their beams.

Golden Path to Discovery fluttered out of Beta Virginis and found its away back to Earth.

[B]Year 30[/B]

Golden Path brakes against the galactic wind as it breaks into the Sun’s magnetosheat and stabs its claws into the Hydrogen winds, slowing down to a crawl.

The two survivors of the flight reach solar orbit expecting to find the Solar System turned into a Dyson Sphered, but no. They point their instruments at the planets and wait.

Earth seems rather regular, but Mars and Venus… The two occupants of the ship wondered how Mankind turned those two worlds into homes for Man, in such little time.

Have we reached the other edge of the Singularity?

Then they look at Jupiter: The gas giant, a massive sphere of fusion fuel, glows as bright as the Sun. It didn’t have enough mass for fusion to take place at its core, it doesn’t have, and it never will, but the planet is being fused.

Within its core of metallic Hydrogen, magnetic monopoles eat it from the inside out, the pressure so great that the monopoles can reach into the protons and destroy them in a shine of gamma-rays, monopoles that just annihilate matter but never deplete. This process generates tremendous heat all around and incredible pressures, enough for sustained fusion reactions to turn the orange world into a bright ball glowing dull orange, slightly larger than usual, as robots designed to work on awesome conditions manage the monopoles.

The four Galilean moons; Europa, Callisto, Ganymede and Io; all remain, but the smaller moonlets, the worthless space potatoes that don’t even have sufficient mass to be spherical, have been ripped apart and turned into Computronium, and clusters of these nanocomputers flutter in several different orbits around Jupiter, mostly where the moons used to be, but with different inclinations. Most of the times that nanocomputers are the size of buildings, with much larger nanotech-boosted photovoltaic cells aimed at the planet, panels that work better with the high temperature difference.

As the Golden Path slides inwards, the crew believes posthuman Artificial Intelligence has arrived, but Mankind has shifted priorities. When you have the technology to upload minds into computronium, to turn people into living algorithms and expand their intelligence on scales never even imagined, why go back to creating AI from square one? Those moons were once inhabited by people in meat bodies, and now the moons are Dyson clouds feeding on waste heat and the people are true, true humans that can shine in full brightness in virtual worlds where the physical limitations are been destroyed, where the only limitations are those arising from the fact that they live in computers and those computers still have to bow to the laws of physics… Around Jupiter people have reached the point of ultimate expression of themselves, they are true people.

Conflict arises occasionally, and some men have decided to stop conflict and make sure everything is well there, rather than just enjoy their lives. The Guards of the Virtual Worlds, the most respected of them all, they are the machines of loving grace described in the old poem — Not machines of human creation, but humans, nothing less, but certainly a lot more.

The crew of Golden Path, of course, doesn’t know this, and even though the people cheer them and greet them from their Dyson nodes, they don’t answer questions.

“Go to Earth, you will be surprised.” “We have no room for biologicals, otherwise we’d be glad to take you in” “We thought you would never make it! You obviously have a lot of questions, but lets keep you waiting, just because yes. Roll in to Earth and you’ll have your answers.”

They did.

Golden Path decelerated to a mere fifty kilometers per second and rode invisible seas of plasma, into Earth orbit.

A ribbon had been built around the Earth, hundreds of meters thick and surrounding the entire planet, with transparent windows of diamond, allowing the visitors from the stars to look at the diverse ecosystem that thrived there.

Space elevators, the thin buckytube threads, were gone, and in their place stood dozens of towers. Towers that normally would’ve collapsed under their own mass, they were supported by beams of monopolium: Matter reinforced with threads of magnetic monopoles that had a tensile strength 10^29 times higher than buckytube. Hanging along the length of the main beam, there were rooms, hotels, and laboratories, all the way up to the top where the towers met the ring. And the ring was not monopolium-reinforced simply because that would’ve been too costy, instead, it had streams of mass constantly moving, and momentum transfer kept everything up and stable.

They were greeted by golden, automated spacecraft that pulled the ship like birds until it was safely docked to the ring, and inside they were greeted by humans of all kinds: Posthumans, their appearance as alien as it could get without pulling out of the humanoid shape. Their external appearance was mostly the product of a thousand different fads, a thousand different memes that spread out virally, self-replicating ideas that could circumnavigate the world in which everything was connected.

For every kilogram of human brain there were ten thousand tonnes of Computronium, but this measurement made no sense, and soon the two people of the Golden Path would find out why.

The crew was clueless, but for those days, they stayed in hotels with incredible views, their rooms placed 25 kilometers above the ground on Kenya Tower, where they were attended by the most voluptuous women in the universe and met some of the most interesting; the most new if you will, people.

His name was Bigelow and he was the xenobiologist, and her name was Lune and she was the Golden Path’s engineer.

Water rained down on the surface of Mars, where utility fog and molecular assemblers finish the task of terraforming the world and a hundred thousand people, grown from genetic material brought from Earth, wake up to find themselves on the rust-covered dunes of a breathable, orange world. Stellettes fly around, focusing light on the surface to make it warm enough, heating the utility-fog-filled atmosphere as gases locked in rock are blasted into the air.

New forms of life are growing on the surface of the Moon and the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

Finally the two were taken to the surface, where they met the humans. They were put in an elevator that descended through the dropshaft, and once they reached the base of Kenya Tower, they left and walked down white paths of marble, lined by plants and fountains, in a world where the anachronism was almost unbearable: These posthumans wearing skins and clothes alien to people that had not been on Earth for little less than a century, they were infinitely smarter than they were, but they seemed so humble.

People live in Carbon buckytube buildings that look like soap, no towering arcologies. Where is all the technology? Did the luddites win?

It was there, but it was all too small to see: Utility fog took care of communications by whispering into people’s implants. They build anything people want or materialize into planes or chariots to carry people around, or grab objects at their command.A society with technology indistinguishable from magic living in anachronism.

Does it count as nanosocialism? Or nanoanarchy?

But to the two survivors of the interstellar mission, it made no sense, either all humans had somehow been engineered to have their nature changed or someone is controlling it all, or maybe the end of scarcity has been the trigger of all this.

The Singularity, the inflationary period, the intelligence spike: In appearance it has stopped and people live posthuman lives in anachronistic villages instead of huge cities. But there is something, thinking, and unwillingly, they are a part of it.

At a scale smaller than what is visible, engines move, thoughts are formed and jump the barrier between humans, animals, plants and iron deposits and all there is on the surface. Someone is alive, breathing, and thinking in there.

[B]Year 37[/B]

Bigelow doesn’t care anymore, he retreats into the comfort of a society where one gives and takes freely. Lune still cares and wants answers. She tries to find out what happened, but most people don’t remember anything before the Technological Big Rip that happened 37 years before. She picks up biomass and chunks of apparently dumb matter and tries to test them to see if they will give any useful insights, but the utility foglets melt her lab and when she asks her Home what is wrong the calm, androgynous voice replies simply ‘Nothing is wrong’.

She runs, and the foglets try to stop her, but they are too weak, and its like running through a cloud of flies that seem to materialize out of thin air, they are everywhere and nowhere.

The dark silhouette of Kenya Tower is cut out against the twilight sky when she goes down into the bottom of a ravine, into a volume where the foglets stop and fall to the ground, dead. A luddite camp is in the center of it, wooden homes surrounding a huge coil. The utility fog keeping her healthy also dies. It’s the only volume where there are no airborne nanomachines.

Some people there welcome her, but most others see her as a spy or an infection point. There, everything was explained.

A Singularity had happened, and the Earth was computronium. A posthuman had showed up and turned the planet into emself, into a giant superorganism: Every person, every animal, every plant, everything that had molecules with sufficient complexity or useful atoms (Carbon and Silicon for example). They had been optimized for computation at the electronic, nuclear, quantum and sub-quantum scales, but the biology remained the same. Everything looked the same and worked the same, the Solar System had not been Dyson Sphered, but it’s the home of a mind whose parts reside on every gram of organic molecules.

And its learning, trying to turn everything else; water, Iron, lava, air, everything else, into computronium.

She chose to stay there with the luddites she had always hated, their little village one of the only volumes on Earth where no nanorobots survived and they couldn’t computerize matter.

[B]Year 51[/B]

That day Lune woke up feeling her curiosity beginning to subside, and the luddites all around her became less paranoid, to the point of shutting down the coil. Suddenly she threw away her microscopes and tools, all she had used to research the posthuman mind that was behind this transformation of Earth, and happily joined in the masses of Computronium along with the rest of the village and the now-happy luddites. She had been a source of infection, carrying into the village the fingers of the Godmind, because the moment they landed they were infected by utility fog and computerized.

That same day Bigelow remembered, from his large fog-assembled house locked inside a geodesic dome (Just because), and he called City with his mind and got it to locate Lune. City claims there is no such person, after he describes her, even going as far as to claim he was the only passenger of the Golden Path to Discovery.

“Then who is this person in me memories?”

“I call schizophrenia on this one.”

“Have you been hacked? Or what”

“My records are planet’s, sir, hacking here is impossible. Would you like me to probe your intellectual integrity?”

That’s when he starts to question things, and the anachronism, the lives of the strange posthumans, and everything on the New Earth, then runs off the house and gets the utility fog to assemble a vehicle for him.

He finds her, a few days later, living among farmers and former luddites that are now happy members of the planet-wide nanosocialism.

In the meantime, in orbit around Jupiter, uploads make copies of themselves to learn more at the same time or do multiple tasks then merge into one, at the cost of heavy pseudo-headaches. Or sometimes the clones are so different they don’t want to merge again and the population starts to increase, they scream for more space and the Galilean moons are being torn apart and blasted into little pieces for precious computronium to fuel a nation of posthumans growing at an exponential rate, where the processing power is such that people live a year in ten minutes, so you can expect that even if they spend centuries-subjective without multiplying, the population will still increase at a rate that no mining equipment can compensate.

On a now-benign Venus, humans, cyborged minds (Fully-functional cyborgs this time), and human-animal splices and a thousand different posthumans get along in cities lined with computronium. The excess carbon of the atmosphere has been used to make an orbital ring and space elevators. All of the surface mass is a massive computer just like on Earth and Mars, while the thinking matter of all three worlds forms the same organism.

Back on Earth, Bigelow finds a deliriously happy version of Lune and asks her what happened but she doesn’t care, they are all happy now in the fast and slow present where they have the ultimate expression of creativity, utility fog to create a society of leisure, and nothing else to do than contemplate.

He runs when it starts to rain, and the utility foglets form an umbrella above him, like a collection of shiny dragonflies fluttering around the same place. He trips on the mud and falls unconscious while the foglets try to wake him up or make sure he can breathe.

In the dream he is given an audience with the result of the millions of tonnes of matter that can think, merely because he’s one of the few that still questions their existence on the other side of the Singularity. The machine introduces itself as Gaia.

“Oh dear Lord, James Lovelock was right.”

“Hey. Shut up. I’m not that Gaia, it did not exist, and if it did, you killed it. I’m a human who took mind uploading and computronium and had too many ideas, and who took transhumanism too far.” In its imaginary voice, there was a strange tone, as if it regretted exceeding his self-improvement. There’s nothing magical.”

“Computronium? There are no computers on this world, all I see are villages and utility fog.”

“You’re used to the old, black lumps of computronium. The thinking algorithms, the sentient matter, it’s everything you see here. I turned you and every gram of biomass into Computronium. Every tonne of Carbon and Silicon and biomass. Without damaging or changing anything at all.”

“What did you do to these people?”

“Nothing. I gave them what they wanted: Nanosocialism, equality, everything or nothing if they wish. They are free, isn’t that what you wanted?”

“What about the luddites? And my engineer?”

“I couldn’t allow them to continue conspiring against me.”

“So you gave them synthetic happiness and fake freedom?”

“Synthetic? You ungrateful subhuman. I didn’t touch any of your brains, or your bodies or your plants. I didn’t turn the Earth into a Dyson Sphere, I turned it into a harden for you because no matter how intelligent or advanced I may be I still wanted you people to be happy. And now you call it synthetic? It’s real happiness and real freedom, better be grateful I didn’t dismantle you into dead computronium! I let you live in your meatbodies and at the same time be part of something greater!”

“Freedom is being stuck on those villages? With no access to the processing power you have?”

“You are questioning that? I had to convert the luddites because they were a problem, but soon they learnt. I helped them. I put them ahead of the curve so they would not be afraid so they would not be behind. And the others, the non-luddites, its their choice to be in those cities and villages.”

“Controlled by a machine?”

“Machines are your shells. You are your genome and it once built cells to ensure its survival, and those cells built animal bodies to do so and those animals evolved into primates that evolved into you that evolved into sentience, and toolmaking. Evolution is the process of progressively increasing the complexity of the shells to ensure the continuation of the Von Neumann machines you call deoxyribonucleic acid.”

Do you doubt your freedom? They can leave those villages, go to Mars, or Venus, or the newly-terraformed Moon, or cislunar space or even to the stars if they want to, but they want to stay because they are comfortable here, because they have what you expected to find in the stars: Freedom. These people are free, truly free. In my world they are all free to read, write, think, sing, live, love, laugh, and die if they chose to, they have everything they want, they give everything they want to give, you are finally watched over by machines of loving grace as the old poem went and now you complain? I didn’t turn you into a cold Dyson Sphere of computronium where the only thing that happens is a constant search for knowledge, maximum efficiency paradigms would put me in a war against all. You thought we would be soulless calculators that would follow all your commands but you got kind machines that care for you, and now you question that?”

“How many people died for you to reach power?”

“Go away.”

[B]Year 79[/B]

All of the mass around Jupiter is now in the form of computronium: The rocks, the metals, the carbon, the silicon, and even the plasma. In the meantime, robots dig into the hot surface of the stellificated Jupiter and try to see if they can turn the nova-hot plasma into computronium.

On Earth, Gaia has long ago jumped from solely Carbon and Silicon and now turned the dumb rocks and metals and minerals, and even the magma, into computronium. Most of Earth’s mass now thinks, and most of that mass is deep into the crust at temperatures where it should be gaseous but the pressure is so high that it’s a fluid, and the heat and temperature give energy to computronium-magma so it’s not necessary to rip apart Earth and turn it into a Dyson.

The oceans have been blasted into space, where they flutter around like moons of ice: Small enough to be handled by Gaia’s spacecraft, massive enough to pass through the bright side without being volatilized by light from the Sun. In Earth’s shadow cone they radiate everything away with the help of large wings where ammonia circulates, and the temperature is perfectly regulated, keeping the moons large and full.

On the surface, the ocean floor has been covered in grass and plants, animals are now moving there, and — Needless to say — the biomass there has also been turned to Computronium.

Von Neumann probes go to the edge of the Solar System to hunt down comets and bring more water to Earth, where there were oceans there are now seas, rivers and lakes, and the utility fog manages the cycle of water to regulate everything.

Gaia is getting worried about the Jupiter brain, even though the population has stabilized, they have not been in complete contact: Things are changing, individual personalities — Clones, originals, merges, half-replicas… — begin to merge and disappear and there’s a possibility that it might all merge into a single Jupiter Godmind, and this is what worries Gaia.

They have two completely different philosophies, Gaia believes in hollow, rotating habitats full of biomass and lined with computronium, the biomass also a part of it: It has to be alive and thinking. The Jupiter brain believes in maximum efficiency paradigms and turns everything into Computronium, leaving nothing for inefficient lifeforms based on chemical fuels. One is a sentimentalist who prefers to enjoy and trust that one day e will be able to hack into reality and live on forever, making different levels of efficiency irrelevant, while the other believes the Cosmos is closed-source and maximum efficiency is the only way to go.

[B]Year 139[/B]

Every evening, Lune leaves her home and stands outside, looking in the direction of the Libra constellation, not really remembering why she does that.

Out there, Bigelow’s ship flutters like mad eagle riding a beam of high-energy light, generated by arrays of thousand-terawatt lasers, towering megastructures on the Solar Poles and Mercury, with metallic diffraction elements scattered along the way to focus dispersed light into a tight beam. Radio waves appear from the ship as it brushes away interstellar matter with its 917-kilometer wide circular sail.

Accelerating at a constant of five gravities, as it has for the past three years, the ship zeroes in an alien star, identified by Gaia’s gigantic telescopes as a Dyson Sphere due to its huge heat spillage, and that later on caught Gaia’s attention due to what it broadcast: A cellular automaton, where the whole code is contained by the smallest bits, where the smallest part contains the whole.

220 light years away from Sunspace, the star will be the answer: If these people are smart enough to broadcast a coherent message across the entire galaxy, containing a complex cellular automaton, then they were smart enough to do so 220 years prior to detection. At that point they must’ve been incredibly advanced, and Gaia sent Bigelow to ask them: Can we hack into reality’s source code? Is it worth trying?

A question that seems trivial would define the future of all Mankind: You have two options, the Maximum Efficiency Paradigm which involves Dyson Sphere’ing the Universe and turning everything into Computronium. Then there’s the Biological-Computronium Paradigm, which is less efficient, but has more diversity: Keep biological life living along virtual life, biomatter alongside Computronium. It’s by far the most interesting by less efficient.

In a universe that is going to end in the Heat Death, such as our flat universe, the Maximum Efficiency Paradigm is the best choice, but what if the Cosmos is really open-source to those who have the proper decompilers? If one can hack into the source, one can manipulate quantum events at will: Create matter out of nowhere, entire universes, any amount of energy you want borrowed from the vacuum, anything you want, when you want it, or even: Changing the settings of the Universe, so negative energy densities are not frowned upon and one can have sufficient negative energy to travel through time, bend space, stabilize wormholes or even reach negative entropy, the final line in the sand that will mark Apotheosis.

Gaia wanted to know, so it sent Bigelow on a spacecraft called the Silver Wings to reach the star and find out. The most reflective surface in the known universe accelerated constantly towards the star, when the beam was cut and the sail folded to reduce the surface area: At that speed it was risky to have any extra meter of surface pointed ahead that could be eroded.

Saturn is being stellificated, and asteroids are being disassembled and join the Jupiter brain in low orbit, each node feeding on the waste heat of the one underneath.

In the meantime, Gaia is turning Mercury into a garden, full of biomass-computronium, matter that lives and is unaware that it thinks for something greater.

[B]Year 389[/B]

After 30 years of brushing against the interstellar medium using the ship’s high-temperature superconductors, Silver reaches the star: The central orb looks pink, but most of its size is due to the waste heat from the innermost nodes, the nanocomputers. If the Sun had that many nodes surrounding it, from Earth it would look like a red supergiant due to all the red light dispersed around. The outermost nodes were 20 Astronomical Units away, feeding off the waste heat of the inner ones, shell after shell after shell: A Matrioshka brain.

Fusion reactors, thousands of them, dot the space around the outermost shell, and shine light on the cold nodes at the edge of the Dyson, to provide power to those cold virtual worldlets. Bussard Nuclear-Electric Ion Ramjets flutter to the nearby brown dwarfs and from the star, bringing Hydrogen, raw Hydrogen, so that star may live on as long as there is interstellar Hydrogen.

Deep within the star, monopolium – Which has the interesting property of also being a room-temperature superconductor – hoops open up huge valleys and craters of plasma, digging into the star, monopolium threads extending downward from the poles and into the core, were heavy elements are mined out and raw Hydrogen is pumped in.

The outer shell is so thick, it looks like almost a flat layer: From a distance of 3.5 Astronomical Units, its a dull-red sphere, from closer one would expect that it was just an effect seen from a distance, that the Dyson nodes were thousands of miles apart and were huge.

This was not the case.

The Dyson nodes were all golfball-sized, photovoltaic-lined spheres a few centimeters away from each other. A Dyson sphere is not a rigid shell, but a cluster of billions of nodes or individual colonies, because if it was a solid shell it would either fall into the star or spin itself apart, even if you use carbon buckytube or a grid-kind-of design, it will still all either collapse or tear itself apart. Not even magnetic monopoles could compensate for this.

It didn’t take long for them to broadcast.

The message started out as a cellular automata run by Bigelow on the virtual machine, until it produced the three-dimensional image of the Dyson Sphere: It contained the gulfs, rivers, caves and pathways that allowed entrance into the Dyson. It had a path marked, a complicated one but that lead straight into the thread of monopolium of the Stellar South Pole, a straight pathway into the core.

He dove in.

If he had remained still then he would’ve been swept away by fast-moving nodes, so he extended part of the sail to gain orbital momentum and then entered the rivers of empty space, increasing his orbital velocity as he got closer to the star so he was always moving at the same speed as the nodes.

Eventually he saw robots of all sizes, of all kinds, spacecraft tending the Dyson nodes and swarms of utility fog like swarms of winged insects, carrying their light sails to move slowly from node to node.

When he reached the closest swarms, a few months later, he found that there was empty space between the closest nodes and the surface of the star. And between those two, an equatorial, rapidly-spinning ring of monopolium for processing, with photovoltaics extended towards the star, large spaceports full of repair centers and repair spacecraft, and the two monopolium threads that went deep into the star. There he saw trunks: They were long monopolium-buckytube tethers extended from each of the large (20 kilometer wide rather than golfball-sized) orbitals, into at least five in the immediately higher orbit, and on and on. Like a fractal tree, each node was tied together by a tether.

Instead of tied around, to form a grid-like configuration (Which would’ve ended in disaster), they were tied from the inside out. Instead of a rigid sphere, it was more like a set of rigid cones pointed at the star, all very interesting, and considering monopolium is superconducting, very energy efficient, at least more than blasting radio waves and lasers from node to node.

But before entering the Stellar South, where his hosts awaited… He decided to violate common interstellar First Contact manners and take a peek into the Dyson.

Beams of Neutrinos, capable of passing through light-years thickness of the heaviest of elements, were easily detected by monopolium since monopoles are 1/1000 the size of an atom and magnetic monopoles put into threads are capable of catching even gamma-rays. Neutrinos were exchanged in tight beams using symbolic instructions they had broadcast from the Dyson to his ship, the computers in Silver Wings figuring everything out.

He was flooded by the minds of trillions upon trillions of people – And he had not gone further than the first node –, old souls cold-stored and sitting still, dead in the final moments as they cried out “Make room, make room!”. They had had the same population problem the Jupiter brain had, and they had run out of matter nearby to catch and turn into more virtual space. They were all packed up.

Now it was not just a question of whether one could hack into reality, but: How long does a Matrioshka brain last when the population is increasing – Or doing whatever else that is destructive – faster than the rate at which one can add more Computronium? Are Dyson Spheres short-lived because Computronium outruns any machine?

He decided to leave the invitation for later, and taking security measures, he plowed through the Neutrino beam and entered the virchspace.

[B]Year 392[/B]

They scream, the few that are alive. They all do, screaming for a way out of the maze. There are no walls here, except the ones made out of packets of dead minds, compressed so the sum total of their memories and personality is a mere fraction of its original size, compressed and kept there in storage until it can be revived again. Otherwise it takes too much space and they are running out of that.

But the few that are alive spend their lives moving through the gigantic maze of data and dead minds, all of them crazy. They have forgotten how they were, and now wonder where this maze is. They all move in circles.

After a few years (Subjective? Objective?) Bigelow, mapping the entire Matrioshka so he doesn’t get lost, finds someone. E isn’t dead, unlike the packets that line those walls: Those can’t be revived. They have been dead for too long and their data is messed up beyond repair. But e isn’t alive, either. E isn’t wandering around, or responding to stimuli. E’s just there.

He takes e back to the ship, and the two, the augmented human and the semi-dead person, flutter in orbit around the dying star until they find a module, a large space station whose existence was hinted by one of the crazy men and women that run around the remains of the Matrioshka.

The station is lined with trees, trees and animals from Earth, but they must be huge if the spacecraft’s wings look small in comparison. How do they live in the vacuum of space? Bigelow checks the cameras and apparently the hatch of the tunnel behind was closed. He’s starting to have memory problems, probably due to all the time in the Matrioshka, but they are not really memory problems – Of course, he doesn’t know this – they are continuity problems.

Or the people who live in the station warped space so his ship occupies a region that is huge inside and small outside? Probably not, but there are negative energy densities. Someone has managed to break into reality’s source code.

In the station he lets the tiny fractal grow, back into the person it used to be. He doesn’t know if it’s using utility fog to make itself an avatar, or if they are still in the virch. He remembers leaving the virtual space, loading the little packet he found into a foglet and carrying it along the ship, but the continuity errors make the whole thing look surreal, strange enough for virtual space.

The fractal grows into a person, what it was before, every bit of the compressed data is processed and is part of an algorithm that regrows the data of the original person. A bit contains the whole, and it is extracted and turned into a real person, a sentient non-algorithm with a human avatar, and Bigelow can’t check if they are still in virtual space or real space, or how much time-objective has passed outside. E tells him stuff, about how their civilization used to be like, the intelligence explosion and how it ended, with the lonely hyperhuman-level intelligence trying to hack the Cosmos.

A wormhole, like an spherical Fresnel lens, appears in front of them, and they step through into the future. The timeline has already reached the Heat Death – And beyond – but the wormhole keeps the link to the past, a tiny knot between the early universe and a dead, decaying universe 100 trillion years ahead of Bigelow’s time.

[B]Heat Death[/B]

The star has already blown itself apart, sweeping the Matrioshka nodes away at near the speed of light. The Silver remains, tied to the lonely station still in orbit around a black hole. Currents of cool Hydrogen spiral around, other black holes eat each other releasing gravitational waves that destroy the Silver’s detectors, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has redshifted into non-existence and there is no longer any trace of what once was.

Galaxies are dark. They are clusters of black holes orbiting the barycenter with some interstellar Hydrogen and MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) and some brown dwarfs here and there.

Further out, in the galaxy Bigelow used to know, Moon-sized Bussard ramjets sweep the interstellar Hydrogen, fueling their unlimited acceleration. They carry the sum total of cultures and people, in the form of fractally compressed data. The time dilation index climbs up, and they expect to outlive the Heat Death, fluttering around the Universe aimlessly until the next entropy fluctuation creates another and they can go back.

Machines too small for the eye to see hunt down the remaining brown dwarfs and shoot magnetic monopoles into them, creating little, fragile suns that last a few million years and run out, and they they go out and hunt the next. Slowly the universe is decaying.

A Dyson shell, made out of a substance with properties similar to those of monopolium, covers the black hole. Bigelow and the sentient he found flutter down and land on the outer surface, a cold, black shell that absorbs all light in all wavelengths. Energy conservation is vital. He packs up the sentient into its former fractal shell and goes into the Dyson.

Somebody lives here. The throne room is all dark gold columns, tall and ominous and perfectly geometrical. On the golden, massive throne rests a figure covered in white, staring out into the vacuum. The gravity should exceed eight million Earth gravities. It feels like the surface of the Moon.

The white robe of the golden figure on the golden throne extends down the steps of the dais and then out of something that looks like a window, but is probably a hole because the fabrics reach out through out and flutter slowly in space. There are no stars, not anymore. The only thing that remains are brown dwarfs and black holes, radiating away.

“Why have you come here? Matter? Do you want to steal from my subsequently non-existing future?”

“You know, I found her. While everyone was going crazy about space, before their data was purged by Von Neumann compressors, she was smart and locked herself up in a fractal. Or is it a cellular automata?”

“Go away.”

“She put herself in that weird mathematical thingee you wrote waiting for someone to come along and upload her. But you ignored each and every single one of 45×10⁵⁶ sentients for God knows how many 10¹² of years.”

“If God, an old hypotheses lesser creatures use, existed, don’t you think e would’ve come down here to give us a hand?”

“You don’t need God, after all, don’t you call yourself a God? But even you, the God-like Matrioshka intelligences, have to bow to the laws imposed on you by God or quantum vacuum fluctuations.” Maybe when challenged the posthuman would release the information Bigelow wanted?

“You underestimate me, kid. The laws of physics are as malleable as your old meatbody.” The man stared off into the vacuum “We could do anything we want. But that’s so terribly boring. We’re… Look out, kid. We’re a microscopic fraction of pollution in a world where most of the mass is vacuum. Nothing but vacuum. We’re like those species that last a few gigayears and think it’s forever…”

“But you have a wormhole leading to the past, can’t you go back and save them? You have all this information, all these new laws of physics apparently, why not go back and restore the Matrioshka?”

“Your concept of time is too linear. You humans, you are bound by Causality so much. Past and present and future mean nothing to me. Entropy still moves. Its one of the things I can’t change. Nothing lasts, and I could go back and save them but that would only give me more souls to observe their collective deaths. In the end it would be worse.”

He paused. The posthuman Godmind thing had a point.

“But you could stop it. You could manipulate the vacuum and add in more matter and energy constantly to outrun the Heat Death.”

“For what?”

“Continuity?”

“If you want to play God and make your own universes and try to outrun entropy, go ahead. I tried. I did make wormholes, pocket universes and managed to outrun the decay.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“It’s a race against God, and it only ends badly.”

“Metaphorically, right?”

“Of course. How do you expect me to lower these complex thoughts to the level of a baseline? You can try, you can do anything, but in the end the Universe is always wiser than you are. And in your little experiments with Godhood you end up destroying everything and hurting the people around you. It’s not worth it, not again.”

“So what do you do? Stare, and wait for the Heat Death of the Universe? Wait for the protons there to decay?”

“Most of the time.”

“At least, if you’re going to be all negative, tell me what happened to you.”

“Isn’t it obvious? We were all locked up here in our little virtual spaces were we could do everything, and nobody colonized other worlds in other suns because the delay in communication was too great. And for accelerated consciousness a delay of one year-objective can mean millions-subjective. It was not worth it. We didn’t even send expeditions to bring back fusion fuel for our star. When it started to decay, that’s when things started to fail. Nanocomputers millions of years old, a population where personalities forked and divided so they could learn more at the same time and some never merged, reproduction rates increasing, a dying star… We burned out. The processors gave out and we all died. I was taking care of opening these tunnels deep into the star to mine out heavy elements and replace it when it happened.

So I dug myself this little cave in the core. That was a long time ago. The star blew up and now all I have is a Dyson shell around a black hole whose creation I controlled. I couldn’t bring myself to fork some of me into the outside and bring a few brown dwarfs for Hydrogen. I couldn’t go outside, due to energy costs and because I just didn’t want to.”

At that point it seemed to be searching for something.

“But you past-guys are on the right path. When a species stays for too long on the same niche it dies out, when it’s the only species and that’s the only niche in a few light years. Past-You, on the other hand, threw out Maximum Efficiency in exchange of diversity and pure sentimentalism and when the present-time comes you’re not going to burn out. All those past-stars are past-yours, until the present comes and you all have to chose. Do like me, which you probably will, or continue making new universes.

Past-You may do anything you want, but you will never be Gods. Not completely. There will always be something holding you back. Something. And then that something will be ignored and you will all burn out no matter how many Heat Deaths you manage to out run someday you will burn out someday in the future when you have lived for so long that you lose all sense and your information becomes too complex for any feasible vacuum fluctuation to restore you, then you will continue fighting and forking the timelines for parallel storage and it will all become so unnecessarily complex why not just die out when your time comes after a few Thermodynamic Deaths and let others go on your path until they find the same dead end?” The posthuman was no longer making much sense, putting words together as fast as Bigelow could process them.

“You could’ve done something to extend their lives, you know.”

“I know, but why?”

“Just because.”

“Just because is an archaic evolutionary tendency. The universe is meaningless.”

“What about giving it your own meaning?”

“That would not be objective, like the laws of physics, and is not acceptable.”

“Archaic evolutionary tendencies… You sure you have gone past them? Here, lets see how much of your original form you have.

Bigelow dropped a small snowball-looking sphere of twinkling things and it rolled around, growing, an amorphous sphere that after a few seconds staret rolling against the windows, columns, doors and walls examining its environment. Soon it had grown to the size of a man and the amorphous sphere became the avatar of a baseline human female. The posthuman didn’t seem to care.

Bigelow spoke.

“You two built this world together, this virtual world, and the real one, everything here. And you let her and the others die. How does this make you feel? If you still feel. Sorry if I’m annoying but asking these questions is so intellectually stimulating.”

For a split subjective second he caught a glimpse of emotion in the posthuman, a surge of memories, as if they had existed outside his mind and the sight of the fractally-decompressed person was giving the memories back to e again. Memories of the past, or of the future, in there it didn’t really make a difference. Old memories, stale memories, the ones that one finds and then they trigger a release of other hidden memories, one after the other like a Mandelbrot thought.

The posthuman said "... I don't want to remember you", but it did, and soon remembered everything with a strange kind of regret-nostalgia only a hundred trillion year old man could have. As if e had let all those trillions of years slip past out of ignorance, stupidity, immaturity, and now e finally understood. Even with wormholes that tied every corner of time into a single knot, e still felt the regret of having done nothing. Time meant nothing on a large scale but on the small scale there were still errors, memories disposed-of, and regret.

The world seemed to shift. They were no longer in a throne room.

Bigelow stood on the top of a hill covered in orange fungus, looking down on rock arches and steep mountains, and a village. A bright blue sun shone above. There were villages there, large villages were avian-looking people went to live: The huts were hanging from the branches of gigantic trees, nothing like what Earth had. The trees seemed wrong. Imperfect. Early stages of the evolutionary process, brute trees.

Spacecraft went down from the sky.

They floated above the ground, and some of the bird people left scared, but a happy couple stayed behind.

The people in the spacecraft went to talk to them. Time was accelerated and it passed at a much faster rate and a few months or years later the people of space and the avian couple could communicate, and Bigelow somehow understood: The people from space had lived in another world in the same system, but they were building arks to flee at near the speed of light, to another world. They told the bird people that the Sun was about to go supernova, that monopoles had been spilt into it in an accident and runaway annihilation reactions were taking place. The people were running away with others like them and all the plants and animals of their world, but they could not carry the bird people and the biology of their world.

The people from the spacecraft, tall and slender… Humans… left computers and tools, and their spacecraft were shot back to the sky.

Other bird people came back and the couple told them what had happened.

Time was accelerated again and this time decades passed in seconds, and in those decades the neolithic species evolved to the Industrial Revolution, into an electronic civilization and as soon as the Nanotech Revolution came (A century after the visit from a nearby world) the bird people began disassembling every Carbon compound in their world and building a fleet.

The original couple, the two bird people, had been the leader of technological development for all that century and lead the Disassembly of the world and the construction of the fleet. They had given the people of space a gift, a tiny ceremonial idol, before they left and the project began. Somewhere, out there, the people of space fluttered away and one of them carried the idol.

When the ships were built, the couple still lead the project. She was a lot more sentimentalist and was against the Disassemly, but it was the only way. Unlike humans they had not had a choice, of whether to build Computronium-lined habitats full of biomass or pure Computronium habiats, or starships in this case.

She wanted to bring pieces of her world into the Dyson, but he said no. Maximum Efficiency was required. So she stayed behind until the Von Neumanns consumed her, and he was left with a few brain scans. It was not the original bird-person, but it was close enough. At least for the first few years. After that it was not longer good enough, and the male had become superior: Leading the project he had had access to all the cutting edge technology and applied it to himself, taking huge risks, every chance he got. He was a posthuman intelligence, leading future-shocked peasants in an electronic world to the stars, when he realized there was no need to flee.

He went in and extracted the monopoles, and everyone saw him as a God.

A few millions of years passed and people lived in the virtual world that looked so much like their original world, they had recorded everything before leaving.

The original world, along with every gram of anything that wasn’t Hydrogen or Helium, had been cannibalized, and in the process they had rescued a backup or her that she had left behind, but he had not found it before because the Von Neumanns almost destroyed it. So he threw away the half-complete backups and took the full one she had printed before jumping into gray goo, but then realized he did not want it.

Two hundred million years passed. The star, massive and with a high-rate fusion cycle, was dying. The Matrioshka was burning out.

The world shifted again, and now, in the knot of wormholes that joined all those points in finite time, in a virtual world that resembled the real one, a bird-woman with a human avatar walked along the hyperhuman-level God that had taken the image of a large and ominous creature that had existed on that world eons before.

In other circumstances Bigelow would’ve been happy for the two, but he sat in the floating island covered in orange grass and was still trying to take it all it. The people from the spacecraft. The gift given to them by the bird people.

Archaeologists had thought it was the cultural symbol of those ancient cultures, the towering, segmented pyramids.

A clay idol taken from an alien world had been the map of all those, and somehow they had cheated radiometric dating? There was no possibility of error. The ages could not be wrong. Or maybe the humans, voyaging through space, had found so much free time that they had developed super-patience? And when they found Old Earth they decided to start life from scratch with the faintest of bacteria then leading evolution until it was the exact same replica of their old world… Creationists would have a field day, but natural evolution had created the human originally, no? Whether or not Earth was engineered was irrelevant on the large scale.

He did not care about the evolutionary questions of it all but about the time. Humans could not have existed billions of years ago. Then he realized.

Bigelow jumped out of the floating island and landed on an strange mountain that pointed sideways, and shouted at the screaming couple asking if there were any wormholes leading out through time to the deep past and not just the moment of their creation, a wormhole that one could take all the way down to the beginning of the Universe.

[B]Year 789[/B]

Out there, in the living galaxy, human generational ships still fluttered out thousands of years after their launch in the deep past and gradually, one after the other, some reached their destinations. Humans could’ve mounted reactionless drives on then or used wormholes to send them faster to their destination but that would’ve not been as nice as watching the other spacecraft drifting around for a few thousands of years into space.

Bigelow thought that if humans had conquered time once, they could do it again, but not necessarily in this Universe. There were others, out there, some more bright and younger, some with a lot more mass, that had more worlds to explore. There was no need to go back in time rather than to start a new Universe, from scratch, except a few difficulties here and there.

They were surrounded by a cityscape, with a park in one side and a river in the other. There was a small rock bridge that didn’t exist, with a small pole next to the path that lead to it. The pole was made out of immaterial stone, with old metal signs on top. The one parallel to the bridge and the park path was,

“EINSTEIN-ROSEN BRIDGE”

Someone was feeling humorous.

The hyperhuman and the other bird-person were sharing the same avatar, the bird-woman’s human female avatar. It didn’t have a beak or feathers or anything, but it didn’t quite look like a baseline. Details.

He wondered if it was uncomfortable for both to use the same body but it did not matter.

“So, you’re going to do this? Dump all the data you have on this? Didn’t you say it was futile?”

“The Universe has been growing towards complexity for all its existence. Your memories showed me that not all Matrioshkas have to burn out, at least the ones like what you will build, those will survive. Maybe it’s not so futile, if complexity is what nature wants, then I guess we’ll have to do it. No matter how many Heat Deaths we have to escape from.

And with some luck… I may be wrong about us not being to become God. After all, I only existed for a few trillions of years, counting the extra time I bought by making a closed time-like curve.”

E paused and then said:

“I suppose you’re coming with us?”

“Well, I was going to, but no. I’m sure you’ll make it, I don’t need to know the details, that’s unimportant. But now I know there’s an entire human galaxy out there, or maybe even a human universe. But the Great Silence remains, meaning that most may have died or have not reached the level of technological development. Those are some people I’d like to meet. Study them, teach them. Eventually your wavefront will reach me, and you two will probably be alive by then. So I’m taking the Silver Wings for a spin.”

His avatar disappeared.

The fake sun was setting, and there were only a few lights in the fake city around them. The virtual park behind lit up, each branch with a different colour, saturation, brightness. The tiles on the ground glowed. It all looked like a Leonid Afremov painting.

The woman had died gigayears before and the man was more or less a hundred trillion years old, the odd couple walked into the bridge when a small spot appeared and grew steadily to a diameter of five meters, distorting the landscape nearby. They whispered in through spacetime and walked out of a room in the middle of Kenya Tower, one of the few buildings still standing. They looked down and saw the Earth being disassembled piece by piece, the biomes shielded and pulled up and the dumb matter pumped, Kenya being an island in a sea of removed land. From the room, there was a small, flat road that spiraled outward and downward until it reached the ground.

Above, the mass of Earth was being assembled into Dyson nodes: Not layer after layer of nanocomputers that required prohibitive amounts of energy, most of that into repair, and over time burned out, but habitats with the surface area of a college campus, long trees at the poles and infected with all sorts of life, and they were put in orbit around the Sun, while other spacecraft did not stay in the low-latency areas and went places, instead of isolating themselves due to the island nature of stars.

The couple walked down the spiraling road, into a little world built not with slaves and rocks and Iron, but with the mind, a world that held no horrors for them but great promise.

Einde

Alex Rosslyn, (October 7, 2010)

[url]http://pleasegodno.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/empires-of-the-mind/[/url]