Divergence

Did some evolutionarily stable strategy arise here, where the inhabitants found it advantageous to share everything equally? Each mound thus adding one level onto itself only when every other mound did the same. It wasn’t like that on Earth, where trees used to compete to reach the sunlight first. Did this equality arise here, or was it written here from another source?

The flickering light was making her feel badly disoriented. She could feel herself slowing down, losing interest even in the hacking cough that racked her body, and she recognized the signs of an approaching epileptic fit. It was time to get out of here. She took a last look around the orange dust and the towers, and then staggered backwards from this world out of time. She only just remembered…

…to keep her feet on the blue duckboards.

Constantine was waiting for her when she emerged, wiping his hands together as if cleaning them.

“Where is the Watcher?” asked Judy.

“Gone,” said Constantine. “He was just waiting for me to pass across the final confirmation of what I saw in the ziggurat. And he wanted to speak to me. I knew his wife once, for a brief time.”

“The Watcher had a wife?”

“It’s a long story.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died, I fear. You know the Watcher’s rule about digital life. You can’t barter with FE. Humans have only so much life and they can’t buy more.”

“He allowed his own wife to die?”

“The Watcher expanded her life span considerably, but in the end he was bound by FE. And that’s not all, because, despite everything, he tried to be a moral creature. He learned that from us. He learned everything about who he was by watching humans.”

“Where has he gone?”

“I don’t know. He was running on processing spaces here on Earth, and now he is not. Does that mean he is dead? If he is now running instead in a processing space one thousand light years away, does that mean he has resurrected himself, or just gone out of the room? I honestly don’t know.”

“Oh.”

Constantine helped her off from the duckboards and back into the corridor beyond. She leaned against the robot, feeling its cool metal skin. Everything seemed so silent now, such an anticlimax. She coughed again, spat yellow phlegm onto the floor. Phlegm from nine-billion-year-old dust?

“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing suddenly what she had done. “That was terribly rude of me.”

“That’s okay,” Constantine said.

She looked listlessly up and down the corridor, waiting for something to happen.

“It all seems so quiet now,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do. I’ve come all the way back here like I was supposed to.” She raised her voice. “Hey! Building! DIANA! What do you want me to do ?”

“Return to your room and await instructions.”

“But there are no more instructions coming,” Judy complained. “Don’t you realize that? DIANA is long gone.”

“Return to your room and await instructions.”

“Oh, what’s the use? Constantine, what am I supposed to do now?”

The robot tilted his head as if listening.

“Who are you speaking to?” asked Judy.

“Aleph,” Constantine said.