the atmosphere grew thick with superheated water vapor. Monstrous surge tides threatened to force what remained of Vox into the rocky Antarctic shelf. And it would only get worse.
I needed to manipulate very powerful Hypothetical technology, which meant extending and elaborating my control of it.
I was able to call down from orbit a small fleet of nanoscale devices—versions of the disassemblers that had first swarmed us—to encase and protect Vox Core. Scalding waves crashed over the rocky part of the island and broke against the city’s jagged towers, but the city itself remained stable, temperate, and undisturbed. Preserving this equilibrium required gigajoules of energy, drawn directly from the heart of the sun.
It was still little more than a stopgap. Before long we would need to leave the planet altogether. I believed I could accomplish that, though it would necessitate an even greater disconnection between my mortal body and my mind.
Often during this time, walking through the passageways of Vox Core, I was startled by the sight of my reflection in a glassy surface—by the reminder that I was still a collation of blood and bone and tissue, bearing the scars of my forcible reconstruction. And the subtler scars of less visible injuries.
My father had made me what I was because he had believed in the power of the Hypotheticals to liberate humanity from death. The Voxish religion had fostered a similar belief, a programmed limbic rebellion against the tyranny of the grave.
And now the stone had rolled away, revealing only the weakling prophet of a mindless god. How disappointed my father would have been!
“I can control the passage of time,” I told Turk and Allison. “Locally, I mean.”
Although they were my friends, they were afraid of me and of what I was becoming. I didn’t blame them for that.
I had come to visit them in their home in the forest. The house I had built for them was as pleasant as I had planned it to be. The trees beyond the windows were tall and graceful. The air that whispered through the portcullis smelled of living things. They asked me to sit down at their table. Allison offered me fruit from a bowl and Turk poured me a glass of water. I was too thin, Allison said. It was true that lately I had been forgetting to eat.
I told them about the world outside. The bloated sun was scouring away the Earth’s atmosphere. Before long the crust of the planet itself would begin to melt, and Vox would be afloat on a sea of molten magma.
“But you can keep us alive,” Turk said, repeating what I had told him weeks ago. “Right?”
“I believe I can, but I don’t see the point in staying here.”
“Where is there to go?”
The solar system wasn’t entirely inhospitable, despite the swollen sun. The Jovian and Saturnian moons were relatively warm and stable. Vox could have sailed indefinitely on the blue-gray seas of Europa, for instance, under an atmosphere no more toxic than Earth’s.
“Mars,” Allison said suddenly. “If you’re serious, I mean if we can really travel between planets—there’s an
“No, not anymore.” The Hypotheticals had protected Mars as long as there was a human presence there. But the last native Martians had died centuries ago and their ruins had been thoroughly scavenged; in recent decades the Arch had been allowed to decay and collapse. (I extracted this knowledge from the Hypotheticals’ pool of data, which had become my second memory.) Mars was a closed door.
“But you’re saying Vox Core can function as a kind of spaceship,” Allison persisted. “How far can it go, how fast?”
“It can go almost any distance. But only at a very small fraction of the speed of light.”
She didn’t have to explain what she was thinking. The planets that comprised the Ring of Worlds were linked by Arches but separated by vast physical distances. Some of these distances had been calculated by astronomers even in Turk’s time. The nearest human world was more than a hundred light-years from Earth. Reaching it would take several lifetimes. “But I can modify the passage of time so that it would seem like much less. A few hundred days, subjectively.”
“But it won’t be the same Ring of Worlds when we get there,” Allison said.
“No. Thousands of years will have passed. It’s impossible to predict what you might find.”
She looked out at the forest. Beams of artificial sunlight raked through the trees like bright, vague fingers. The tier’s high ceiling was the color of cobalt. No birds or insects lived here. There was no sound but the rustling of leaves.
After a while she turned back to Turk. He nodded once. “All right,” she said. “Take us home.”
I let my physical body sleep while I defined a sphere to contain Vox Core and part of the island beneath it. That sphere constituted our border with the exterior universe. Spacetime curved around us in a complex new geometry. Vox Core soared away from the dying Earth as if it had been fired from a gun, though we didn’t feel it: I further modified the local curvature of space to create the illusion of gravity. After a few hours we had passed beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
Turk and Allison had expressed curiosity about the journey. I would have liked to show them where we were—show them directly, I mean, without mediation—but it was impossible to look at the exterior universe from inside Vox—to human eyes it would have appeared as a literally blinding cascade of blue-shifted energy, even the longest electromagnetic waves compressed to lethal potency. But I could sample that cascade at intervals and downshift it to visible wavelengths to create a series of representative images. I compiled these images and displayed them to Allison and Turk in their forest home. The result was spectacular but not soothing. The sun was a sullen ember against the darkness of space, the Earth already invisible at the edge of the heliosphere. Stars rolled past as Vox Core slowly rotated—a remnant motion I hadn’t bothered to correct. “Lonesome,” Allison remarked in a small voice.
To an outside observer we would have looked like something paradoxical: an event horizon without a black hole, a lightless bubble from which nothing escaped but a few wisps of radiation.
In fact the barrier that enclosed us was more complex than any natural event horizon. There were no words in any human vocabulary to describe how it functioned, though I told Turk, when he asked, that it was both a barrier and a conduit. Through it, I maintained my contact with the Hypotheticals. And as we counted years for seconds I began to feel the long rhythms of the galactic ecology—the voids of abandoned or dying stars, the bright World Rings (only one of which was the familiar human one) thriving under Hypothetical cultivation, the intense activity that surrounded newly formed stars and emerging biologically active planets.
But there was no soul or agency in any of this, only the mindless pulse of replication and selection, unspeakably beautiful but as empty as a desert. The ecology of the Hypotheticals would churn on inexorably until it had depleted every heavy element, exhausted every source of energy within its reach. When the last star blinked into darkness, the Hypothetical machines would mine the gravity wells of ancient singularities; when those singularities evaporated and the universe grew dark and blank… well, then, I supposed the Hypotheticals would die too. And unlike human beings, they would die without complaint. No one would mourn them, and nothing would inherit the ruins they left behind.
It became ever more difficult to remember to tend to the needs of my organic body. I lived in the quantum processors at the heart of Vox Core, and, increasingly, I lived in the cloud of Hypothetical devices that surrounded and followed us as we fell between the stars.
I allowed myself to wonder what would happen when Turk and Allison eventually left me. Where I would go. What I would become.
Allison had preserved, or perhaps inherited, her namesake’s penchant for writing. I discovered she was setting down a narrative of everything she had experienced between the Equatorian desert and the holocaust of the
