Divergence

Recursion, the same patterns occurring over and over again, life calling life into being. Your problem, Judy, is that you look just at individual components. It is in the recursive patterns that you will see the mind of God in this universe—the mind of God in all his divergence.”

They were standing outside a grey metal door. Judy could sense the FE lying just beyond it. The Watcher looked thoughtful.

“In the end, Chris and I thought we could use FE to settle our differences,” he continued. “We thought we could split the Earth Domain between ourselves and allow FE to determine the fairest division. I think you can guess what we ended up with?”

Judy knew the answer. “Nothing, of course. Because neither of you ever owned the Earth Domain in the first place.”

The Watcher nodded. “That’s right. Well, here we are. This is where it all began.”

The door slid open, and Judy stepped forward.

The processing space on the Eva Rye had been a sphere. Here, in the DIANA building, it seemed to be a white cube the size of a small house. The cube stood in the middle of an enormous hangar of a room, illuminated by thousands of tiny green lights that hung from the ceiling, flickering like leaves in the wind. There was no floor to the room as such, just a series of metal joists set over a dark drop that led who-knew-where. A set of pale blue duckboards led to the doorway of the cube.

“This is why you are here,” said the Watcher. “This is the result of all the myriad exchanges.”

“You expect me to go inside that?”

“Of course,” said the Watcher. “Think on the nature of FE. It is both the medium and the message. It remembers all that it has been. It remembered the shape of this building. It remembers what it was like when it was created, all those billions of years ago. All FE is the same. It can trace its path all the way back to its origins. Enter that cube, and you are seeing life as it was nine billion years ago. You are seeing the secret of life in this universe. Wouldn’t you like to take a look?”

“Is it safe?”

“Not in the slightest. But just remember, your mind is formed of FE and quickened by MTPH.”

Judy nodded thoughtfully. She was only gradually registering what she had been told. Her mind—this body’s mind —had been wiped at birth. What had taken root there was the same as what had taken root in the ziggurat on Constantine’s planet. It was the same, in effect, as the Watcher’s mind. But not the same, for it had been shaped by its container.

“My mind is formed of FE,” she murmured. “Does that make any difference?”

They both looked at each other, and suddenly began to laugh.

“Fucked if I know,” said the Watcher. And they laughed all the louder.

Judy crossed the duckboards, staring down at the black drop below. Could she see metal creatures down there, metal bodies squirming over each other in an echo of other events? Would she slip from the duckboards to be dragged down to drown there in the darkness? She looked up at the green lights high above, echoes of leaves in trees and the sunlight shining through limes. She paused by the white door set in the side of the cube and looked back to the Watcher, who gave her a little wave. What is in here? FE

remembered. The Eva Rye remembered being a ship. This building remembered its shape. FE was nine billion years old. Could it really remember its origins?

She placed a hand on the door and pushed it open and stepped out of her world.

All it took to create life was a situation where replication could occur. Not quite. There had to be some restrictions, some capability for the laws of economics to take place. There had to be limited capacity. Life evolved where there was competition. When there was a limited supply of building materials, replicating molecules would merely strip each other of their components. They would need therefore to evolve ways to prevent this happening. They would evolve walls around themselves to create cells. They would learn to spread quickly so as to grab scarce materials before their competitors could. They would diverge into predators and prey. Life would become a race for limited resources. For one species to prosper, another had to decline. But someone has since written fairness into the universe, thought Judy, a feature sadly lacking in the original design. She couldn’t stay in here for long. The air burned at her lungs and made her skin itch, even beneath the active suit. Her eyes were watering and the flickering light made her head spin. Even so, she could make out the shape of the space in which she stood. The dusty towers that surrounded her made her think of termite mounds; indeed, they made her think of blocks of flats. They were riddled with hundreds of tiny holes, set out in regular rows along each rectangular face of the mounds. If the inhabitants had been termites, they could come and stand in these windows and look out across to an equal inhabitant standing directly opposite. How many mounds in here? wondered Judy. Ten of these orange dusty shapes? Twelve? Look at them, all of them of exactly equal height. All with the same number of windows. Is this where it all began?