Vacuum Diagrams

It was so fast she could feel it. It was like a ghastly reverse run of her accelerated childhood. She woke every day to a new diminution of her self. She had come to dread sleep, yet could not avoid it.

She couldn’t bear the indignity of it. Everybody else was immortal, and young; and the AS technology which had made them so was being used to kill Lieserl. She hated those who had put her in this position.

Her mother visited her for the last time, a few days before the download. Lieserl, through her ruined, rheumy old eyes, was barely able to recognize Phillida — this young, weeping woman, only a few months older than when she had held up her baby girl to the Sun.

Lieserl cursed her, sent her away.

At last she was taken, in her bed, to a downloading chamber at the heart of the habitat.

Do you remember, Lieserl? Was it — continuous?

“…No.”

It was a sensory explosion.

In an instant she was young again, with every sense alive and vivid. Her vision was sharp, her hearing impossibly precise. And slowly, slowly, she had become aware of new senses — senses beyond the human. She could see the dull infra-red glow of the bellies and heads of the people working around the shell of her own abandoned body, the sparkle of X-ray photons from the Solar photosphere as they leaked through the habitat’s shielding.

She’d retained her human memories, but they were qualitatively different from the experiences she was accumulating now. Limited, partial, subjective, imperfectly recorded: like fading paintings, she thought.

…Except, perhaps, for that single, golden, day at the beach.

She studied the husk of her body. It was almost visibly imploding now, empty…

“I remember,” she told Kevan Scholes. “Yes, I remember.”

Now the flux tube curved away to the right; and, in following it, she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighboring her own had become twisted into spirals too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.

Lieserl, what’s happening? We can see your trajectory’s altering, fast.

“I’m fine. I’ve got myself into a flux rope, that’s all…”

Lieserl, you should get out of there…

She let the tube sweep her around. “Why? This is fun.”

Maybe. But it isn’t a good idea for you to break the surface; we’re concerned about the stability of the wormhole —

Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. “Oh, damn it, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.”

We’re not done with the tests yet, Lieserl.

“What do you want me to do?”

One more…

“Just tell me.”

Run a full self-check, Lieserl. Just for a few minutes… drop the Virtual constructs.

She hesitated. “Why? The systems are obviously functioning to specification.”

Lieserl, you don’t need to make this difficult for me. Scholes sounded defensive. This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which —

“All right, damn it.”

She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive stab of will, let her Virtual image of herself — the illusion of a human body around her — crumble.

It was like waking from a dream: a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.

She considered herself.

The tetrahedral Interface of the wormhole was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing-hot gas of the convective zone poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh, almost obscuring the Interface itself. The Solar material was, she knew, being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; convection zone gases emerged, blazing, from the drifting tetrahedron, making it into a second, miniature Sun around which human habitats could cluster.

By pumping away the gas, and the heat it carried, the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive — with its precious, fragile cargo of datastores…

The stores which sustained the awareness of herself, Lieserl.

She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.

At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing. And overlaid on that was the logical structure of data storage and access paths which represented the components of her mind.

Good… good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data. How are you feeling?

“You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel—”

Enhanced…

No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone behind eyes made of jelly.

What made her conscious? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and what had happened in the past.

By any test, she was more conscious than any other human — because she had more of the machinery of consciousness.

She was supremely conscious — the most conscious human who had ever lived.

If, she thought uneasily, she was still human.

Good. Good. All right, Lieserl. We have work to do.

She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form. Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting… and yet, she thought, restrictive.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this last vestige of humanity. And then what?

Lieserl?

“I hear you.”

She turned her face towards the core.

“There is a purpose, Lieserl,” her mother said. “A justification. You aren’t simply an experiment. You have a mission.” She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. “Most of the people here, particularly the children, don’t know anything about you. They have jobs, goals — lives of their own to follow. But they’re here for you.

“Lieserl, your experiences have been designed — George and I were selected, even — to ensure that the first few days of your existence would imprint you with humanity.”

“The first few days?” Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming towards her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she was a counter on some immense, invisible chutes-and-ladders board.

“I don’t want this. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida.”

“No, Lieserl. You’re not free, I’m afraid; you never can be. You have a goal.”

“What goal?”

“Listen to me. The Sun gave us life. Without it — without the other stars — we couldn’t survive.

“We’re a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars — for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we’ve had — glimpses — of the future, the far distant future… disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that future — to work on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition…

“Lieserl, you’re one of those projects.”

“I don’t understand.”

Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.

“Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; something — or someone — is killing it.”

Phillida’s eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. “Don’t be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which I — and everyone else who has ever lived — can only dream.”

Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. “But you don’t envy me. Do you, Phillida?”

Phillida’s smile crumbled. “No,” she said quietly.

Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.

She cried out.

Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

The woman Lieserl — engineered, distorted, unhappy — receded from my view, her story incomplete.[4]

Humans diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. In the increasing fragmentation of mankind, the shock of the Poole wormhole incursion faded — despite the ominous warnings of Superet — and it remained a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.

Squeem ships burst into the System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn’t count, for instance. But eventually common ground was found.

The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system, which was beyond human understanding. They maintained an