Vox Archipelago, the words painstakingly hand-printed on crisp white paper. When I asked her who she was writing it for, she shrugged. “I don’t know. Myself, I guess. Or maybe it’s more like a message in a bottle.”
And wasn’t that what Vox Core had become? A bottle adrift and far from shore, its glass baked green by sun and starlight, bearing messages of bone and blood?
I encouraged her to keep writing and I memorized each page she showed me: that is, I committed it to every repository of memory available to me, not just my mortal brain but the processors of the Coryphaeus and the archival clouds of the Hypothetical entities surrounding us. One day these words might be all that remained of her.
I suggested to Turk that he might write his own story, but he didn’t see the point of it. So I settled for conversation. We talked, often for hours, whenever I sent my mortal body to visit their forest home. I knew everything the Coryphaeus had once known about him, including what Turk had said to Oscar about the man he had killed, and he was able to speak freely.
“I made it my business to learn about Orrin Mather,” he said. “He was born with some kind of brain damage. He lived most of his life with an older sister in North Carolina. He got into a lot of fights, drank some, eventually left home and made his way west. He held up a few stores when he ran out of cash and put a man in the hospital once. He wasn’t a saint—far from it. But I didn’t know any of that when I did what I did. Really he was just somebody who got dealt a bad hand at birth. Other circumstances, he might have been something else.”
Which was true of all of us, of course.
I told Turk that if he wrote down what he remembered about Orrin Mather and Vox Core I would keep the words safe, along with Allison’s, as long as Vox and the Hypothetical ecology survived.
“You think that’ll make any kind of difference?”
“Not to anyone but us.”
Turk said he would think it over.
These people, Allison and Turk, were my friends. They were the only real friends I had ever had, and I was sorry I would have to leave them. I wanted something of theirs to carry with me.
The Hypothetical ecology was a forest, lush and mindless, but that didn’t mean it was uninhabited. You might say it was haunted.
I had had hints of this before. I wasn’t the first human being to access the memory of the Hypotheticals, though my case was certainly unique. The Martians had attempted such connections, sporadically, in the years before the bionormative movement suppressed all such experiments. The first human being on Earth to make the link was Jason Lawton: he had survived his own death by colonizing the computation space of the Hypotheticals— still survived there, perhaps; but his capacity to act, his
And many of the nonhuman civilizations that had come before us had found their own ways into the forest.
They remained there still, long after their physical civilizations had declined and vanished. They were difficult for me to detect, since their activity was disguised to prevent the Hypothetical host networks from identifying and deleting them. They existed as clusters of operative information—virtual worlds—running inside the data-gathering protocols of the galactic ecosystem.
I sensed their presence but could discern little else about them. The content of these clusters was fractally distributed and impenetrably complex. But there was genuine agency there—not just consciousness but deliberative action that affected external systems.
So I was not alone!—though these alien virtualities were so well defended that I couldn’t contrive a way to contact them, and so ancient and inhuman that I probably wouldn’t have understood anything they might have had to say.
Most of a year had passed since our initial conversation when Turk handed me, without comment, a sheaf of papers on which he had written the history of his experiences in Vox Core. (
We were approaching one of the stars that hosted a planet in the Ring of Worlds. I decelerated Vox Core, dumping kinetic energy into this new system’s energy mines (thus raising the temperature of its sun by some imperceptible fraction of a degree), and began to ramp down the time differential between Vox and the external universe. As we passed the orbit of the star’s outermost planet I showed Turk and Allison an image I had captured: the host star, just beginning to show a discernible disc, seen past the rim of a cold gas giant orbiting far outside the habitable zone. Deep in this stellar system, but still too far away to be visible as anything but a pinprick of reflected light, was the planet its human occupants called (or had once called) Cloud Harbor (in a dozen languages, none of them English).
It was a watery world, laced with island chains where the tectonic plates of the planet’s mantle ground against one another. It had once hosted a benign and relatively peaceful human society, occupying both the available dry land and a number of artificial archipelagos. Most of Cloud Harbor’s polities had been cortical democracies, with a few settlements of radically bionormative Martians. But thousands of years had passed since then. We had to assume that any or all of this might have changed.
Allison asked me in a small voice whether I could tell anything about the planet as it was now.
In fact I had been trolling for stray signals. There had been none, or none that I could identify. But that might only mean that the resident civilization had adopted highly lossless modes of communication. Certainly the Hypotheticals were still active here. The icy planetesimals in the far reaches of the system swarmed with busily breeding machine entities.
I was with Allison and Turk as the time differential between Vox Core and the external environment counted down to 1:1. I had created a viewscreen which filled an entire wall of the largest room of their home—in effect, a window to the world beyond Vox. It had been blank. Suddenly it filled with stars.
Cloud Harbor swam into view, an amplified image; we were still light-minutes away.
“It’s beautiful,” Allison said. She had never seen a world like this from space—the people of Vox had never been very interested in space travel. But Cloud Harbor would have been beautiful even to a jaded eye. It was a swirled crescent of cobalt and turquoise, its icy white moon standing half a degree off the sunlit horizon.
“A lot like the way Earth used to be,” Turk said.
He looked at me for a response. When I didn’t speak he said, “Isaac? Are you all right?”
But I couldn’t answer.
No, I wasn’t all right. My body was numb. My mind was full of inexplicable lights and motion. I tried to stand and toppled over.
Before my senses faded I heard the wail of a distant siren—it was the old autonomic defense system built into the city’s deep infrastructure, warning of an invasion I couldn’t see.
The people of Cloud Harbor had seen us coming. The warped spacetime around our temporal bubble, bleeding energy as it decelerated into the system, had broadcast easily detected bursts of Cherenkov radiation. So they had come to meet us.
They thought we might be hostile. They knew we weren’t an ordinary Hypothetical machine—they had learned a great deal about the nature of the Hypotheticals in the centuries since Vox left Earth. As soon as we dropped our temporal barrier, they isolated Vox Core from local energy sources and infiltrated our processors with finely tuned suppressor protocols. The effect was that the Coryphaeus went to sleep. And since much of my awareness was embedded in the Coryphaeus, I promptly lost consciousness.
I was eventually able to reconstruct what followed. Spacecraft with human passengers swarmed through the