my inorganic arms and carried the corpse to a recycling station, feeding its useful proteins into the closed biochemical loops of Vox Core. I felt no remorse or grief, and why should I? I was what I had become. The fragile meat in which the message of myself had first traveled to the stars, the old somatic galaxy in its border of skin, I gladly fed to the city’s forests.
Vox Core wasn’t an entirely self-sufficient system. I was forced to harvest trace elements from stellar nebulae in order to replenish what couldn’t be recycled. Of course, in the long run, Vox Core was as mortal as all baryonic matter, even inside its temporal fortress. It was only a question of time.
I courted the end of all things.
Vox Core fell into a long elliptical orbit of the galactic core. I began to divide my awareness into saccades, moments of perception separated by long periods of inactivity, so that experiential time passed more quickly, even inside the temporal bubble surrounding Vox Core.
Entropy—in the form of broken chemical bonds, irreparable system failures, radioactive decay—gnawed at the city’s vitals. Blight and drought decimated the forests and rubble began to obstruct the public walkways. Maintenance robots expired for lack of maintenance. Atmospheric regulators—the city’s lungs—gasped and finally failed. The air of Vox Core would have been toxic, had there been anyone alive to breathe it.
The quantum processors of the Coryphaeus continued to function, protected by multiple redundancies. But that, too, was only temporary.
The universe grew colder. The galaxy’s stellar nurseries, the concentrations of dust and gas that gave birth to stars, had grown too thin to be fecund. Old stars guttered and died and were not replaced. The Hypothetical ecology retreated from this encroaching darkness to the galaxy’s dense core, harvesting the gravitational gradients of massive dark holes for energy.
And something else happened to the Hypothetical ecology as it sheltered in the galaxy’s still-beating heart: its information-processing mechanisms were co-opted and dominated by sentient species seeking to outlive their organic mortality. These rogue virtualities grew, encountered one another, and in some cases merged. (The human species was the source of one such sentient bloom, though its virtual descendents could hardly be called “human” in the classic sense.) Pools of post-mortal sentience began to cooperate in a collective decision-making process—a kind of cortical democracy, on a scale of light-years. The dying galaxy began to generate unitary thought.
None of these thoughts could be rendered in conventional language, though my larger self understood them, at least approximately.
I took a last walk in my robotic body through the ruins of Vox Core, its towers fractured and askew, its vast tiers dark or tremblingly half-lit. Vox had sailed the seas of several worlds, and was sailing now on the largest sea of all, but soon I would have to abandon it. I had already begun relocating my memories and identity to the cloud of Hypothetical nanodevices, which was linked in turn to the remaining Hypothetical networks, all powered by the dynamos of ancient singularities.
And even that last redoubt of order and meaning was doomed. Soon enough, the same phantom energy that had inflated the universe would unravel matter itself, leaving nothing but a dust of unbound subatomic particles. Then, I thought, the darkness would be absolute. And I could sleep.
But for now, Vox Core sailed on. Vacuum invaded its faltering defenses. Empty, it succumbed to emptiness. In the absence of induced gravity, its contents began to spill through breached walls into space.
Beyond it, outside of it, my somatic boundaries expanded disconcertingly.
The Hypothetical network grew denser and more complex as its virtual polities applied immense calculating power to the problem of survival. Gravitational anomalies suggested the existence of megastructures larger than the event horizon of the universe itself—shallow gradients of ghostly energy that might serve as a medium to carry organized intelligence out of the entropic desert. But how, and at what cost?
I didn’t participate in these debates. My own consciousness, though now totally incorporeal, was too limited to fully comprehend them. In any case the arguments could never have been rendered in words—the preamble to a single thought would have required thousands of volumes, a legion of interpreters, a vocabulary that had never existed.
The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially.
But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it.
We emerged into a vast fractal space of many dimensions and discovered we were not alone there. Multidimensional structures hosted entities that had subsumed the four-dimensional space-time that once contained us. As old as we were, these entities were older. As large as we had become, they were larger. We passed among them unnoticed or ignored.
From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.
Putting a message in a bottle and setting it adrift is a quixotic act, sublimely human. What would you write, if you wanted to write such a message? An equation? A confession? A poem?
This is my confession. This is my poem.
Deep in that cloud of unlived histories were unlived lives, infinitesimally small, buried in eons of time and light-centuries of space, unreal only because they had never been enacted or observed. I understood that it was within my power to touch them and thus to realize them. What followed, if I made such an intervention, would be a new and unpredictable tributary of time: not obliterating the old history but lying alongside it. The price would be my own awareness.
I could never
What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.
I wished I could say these things to Turk Findley.
I could have intervened in my own potential history, but I felt no urge or need to do so. I wanted my last act to be a gift, even if I couldn’t calculate its ultimate consequences.
Deep in the mirrored corridor of unenacted events, in a motel room on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, a woman performs a sexual act in exchange for a brown plastic vial containing what she believes to be a gram of methamphetamine. Her partner is an unemployed pneumatic drill operator on his way to California, where he has been offered a job in his cousin’s construction business. He doesn’t wear a condom when he penetrates the woman, and he drives away shortly after the act is consummated. The taste of meth he gave her when he rented
