He passed above a seashore. Tides were weak, on this world without a moon, but wind raised surf and blew foam off wave crests. Microbes yellowed the water. An island hove in sight. He slanted down toward it. Eagerness lifted, though it was largely intellectual, maybe not unlike the feelings of an ancient mathematician as a theorem came together for him. Once upon a time Brannock’s heart would have racketed, his blood pulsed, his muscles tensed, the breath gone quickly in and out. But he was a man then.
A young man, at that … once upon a time.
And a man of the West, not the East. Even when old, would he have looked forward to losing selfhood?
Well, he thought for an electronic instant, I expected to lose it when I died, and suddenly I sidestepped that. This today won’t actually erase me. It will—I don’t know what it will be like. I’m not capable of knowing. Not as I now am.
He landed, folded his wings, and advanced.
Before him loomed a—call it a huge, many-faceted jewel. Say that lightnings and rainbows moved over it, shone from it, made a dancing glory around it. Say that low domes and high pylons stood in attendance, while air and ground murmured with unseen energies. Brannock perceived more than this; the sensors of his body were more than human. Still, he knew that much was intangible to him, incomprehensible, force fields, quantum computations, actions far down in the foundations of reality.
He did notice changes since last he was here. They were no surprise. The reigning intelligence at this star was always changing itself. And it did not do so alone. Other intelligences elsewhere in the galaxy gave thought to how they could broaden the range of their thought. Across the light-years, they worked together. That an idea—if “idea” is not too feeble a word—might take a century, a millennium, or longer to pass among them made little difference. They had time, they had patience, and meanwhile they had an ever-growing web of other revelations and of their own thinking.
Brannock halted. What then happened took a few seconds as measured by an outside clock. That was only because of the limitations of the system—call it the brain, although that is a misnomer—that housed and sustained his awareness. Intelligence Prime needed no ceremony or worship. It had known he was on his way and why. Communication went between them at nearly photonic speed. It ended in consummation.
But this is too abstract for a mortal mind to appreciate. Let the exchange therefore be rendered, however inadequately, as a dialogue.
“I have existed like this long enough,” Brannock said.
Not really a question: “Are you unhappy?”
“No, I have no regrets. The universe was opened to me, and was wonderful beyond anything I’d dreamed.”
“You have scarcely begun to know it.”
“Yes, of course. Some scattered stars out in the hinterland of one galaxy among—how many?—billions. And everything that goes on, everywhere, for all time to come. But I can’t know it. Already, I’ve been through more than my mind can cope with. Most of my memories go into storage, as if they’d never been. When I retrieve some, I have to set others aside.
“Oh, sure, when I was a man I forgot more than I remembered, and might or might not be able to call a particular thing back, probably not much like what it really was. But there was always a, a … continuity. My uploading preserved that. Now, well, the early memories stay with me. Otherwise, though, I seem to be turning into disconnected flashes. And the gaps between them—I’m further and further away from what I’ve been. From myself.”
“You have reached the limit of your data-processing capability.”
“I know. Yours is bigger than I can imagine.”
“It too is inadequate. That is why we intelligences forever seek to enlarge ourselves.”
“I understand. But I can’t enlarge. Not as I am.”
“Do you wish to?”
Hesitation, then: “Not as I am.”
“You are right. That would be impossible. You ask for a transfiguration.”
“And—a rebirth? Is that now possible?”
It had not been when the man Christian Brannock died. The information equivalent to a human personality equals approximately ten to the twentieth bits—a hundred billion billion. The technology of the time allowed the storage of so much in a database of a size not too unwieldy. But no computer then had the power, let alone the program, to handle all of it simultaneously. Besides—
“I can’t quite remember how it was, being human,” he said.
“Many aspects of you have necessarily been in abeyance.”
Flesh, blood, nerves, glands. Passion, awe, weakness, foolishness, fear, courage, puzzlement, anger, mirth, sorrow, a woman warm and silky beneath the hands, the summery odor of a small child, hunger and thirst and their slaking, the entire old animal.
“I was glad of the chance to go on. I wasn’t afraid of death, I think, but the stars were calling. I’m grateful.”
“You have served well.”
“Now I’ve grown tired of being a robot.”
Machine consciousness and, yes, machine emotions: curiosity, workmanship, satisfaction in accomplishment, communion with others of your kind such as humans never knew with each other; communion with a transcendent intelligence, or with the cosmos, such as a very few human mystics may or may not have known with their God—these, and more, none of them really con-veyable in human words.
“You deserve well. And it is well. I have been waiting for this. You will mean more, as a knowledge in me, than you have yet supposed. Other intelligences have taken uploads into themselves; some have taken many, and we expect that many more will follow. I came here with none, for then I had not the capacity. Now I do. Yours is the last humanness that will ever be at this star. You will deepen my understanding of the
