“Yes.” That fit with what Eve’s Notebooks were telling me. “The high density at the core is stimulating photino decay. The free Klein-Gordon field the Ghosts want to create is collapsing. Imploding—”
Abruptly the Ghosts fled, including the Sink Ambassador, abandoning us; I saw their receding ships, shining threads against the intergalactic darkness.
The surface of the moon was almost entirely molten now. It was subsiding, collapsing inwards.
“The Ghosts thought they were creating a home for the photino birds,” I said. “But they were wrong. You knew that. They have made—”
“A bomb,” she said. “A dark matter bomb.”
“It’s you, isn’t it? The Planck Zero AI. Behind the mask of my wife—”
She pressed her face against my metallic chest.
My anger was gone. Only pity remained.
I embraced Eve, enfolding her within my arms. Her skin felt warm — impossibly so — human.
“But this will destroy you,” I said. “Whatever it is that sustains you, is in that moon.”
She turned to me, silver eyes empty, and smiled. I saw that she wore my ring on her finger.
The thing at the heart of the moon turned white, dimming the sickly glow of the Galaxy’s core.
The moon blew apart.
Molten rock, quivering droplets of it, showered up past us, patterning against my skin. I closed my mechanical eyes and huddled with Eve, waiting for the rocky storm to pass.
Eve — the Planck Zero AI — wasn’t destroyed. It proved possible to reconstruct some of it from the records and fragmented datastores left behind.
It was still sentient, but it was crippled. Its residual abilities were not much more than a human’s.
I took it — her — home.
Now, we spend most of our time in a simulation of our old apartment, in a Virtual never-never-land.
I’ve tried to figure out why she did what she did.
Already mad with the desolating quantum loneliness of her birth, she’d been brought out of her black hole prison, and was presented with all the Ghosts’ data on the future.
And, desperately intelligent, she suffered a vision of that future.
It was a vision of the destruction of all baryonic life, the desolate victory of the photino creatures: it was a rigid, logical and inescapable product of her own infinite intellect. It was a vision she couldn’t bear.
So — perhaps — she subverted the Ghosts’ hubristic experiments — which do, incidentally, seem to have been genuinely aimed at a peaceful rapprochement with the photino birds. She allowed the Ghosts to make a dark matter bomb. Perhaps she was trying to open up a war with the photino birds, a new front, with a weapon that even the Xeelee had never considered.
Or perhaps she sought, simply, her own destruction. Release, from the terrible burden of infinite knowledge.
Even she doesn’t know any longer.
As for myself, I can never know if Eve’s bleak vision — given to me in those startling, fragmented glimpses — represents the true future history of our Universe. Perhaps it was just some mad fiction, concocted by her huge but damaged soul. Or perhaps it is only one strand of the truth; perhaps that gloomy future can, in the end, be averted.
Otherwise, in just a few million years, all humankind will be extinct in this Universe. And all our technology and intelligence and courage won’t make a damn bit of difference in averting that fate.
If that’s true, it’s up to us to live as if it were not so.
I care for Eve, as best I can. We go on. What else is there for us to do?
The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline
Singularity: Big Bang Era: Primeval 20 bya (billion years ago): Life forms in quagma broth. First contact between Xeelee and photino birds. Xeelee timeships begin modification of Xeelee evolutionary history.
10 bya: Construction of Ring begins. Birth of Sol.
5 bya: Assault on Ring by photino birds begins. Life on Earth emerges.
1 bya: First infestation of Sol by photino birds.
Era: Expansion A.D. 3000 +: Opening up of Solar System with GUT and wormhole technology. First human extra-Solar expansion begins.
A.D. 3621: Birth of Michael Poole.
A.D. 3672: “The Sun-people”
A.D. 3698: “The Logic Pool”
Timelike Infinity
A.D. 3717: Launch of GUTship Cauchy.
A.D. 3825: “Gossamer”
A.D. 3829: Wormhole time-travel invasion by Occupation-Era Qax.
A.D. 3948: “Cilia-of-Gold”
A.D. 3951: “Lieserl”
A.D. 3953: Launch of GUTship Great Northern.
Era: Squeem Occupation A.D. 4874: Conquest of human planets by Squeem.
A.D. 4874: “Pilot”
A.D. 4922: “The Xeelee Flower”
A.D. 4925: Overthrow of Squeem.
A.D. 5000 +: Second expansion begins.
A.D. 5024: “More Than Time or Distance”
A.D. 5066: “The Switch”
Era: Qax Occupation A.D. 5088: Conquest of human planets by Qax.
A.D. 5274: Return to System of GUTship Cauchy. Launch of backward time-travel invasion by Qax.
A.D. 5406: “Blue Shift”
A.D. 5407: Overthrow of Qax. Humans acquire Spline and starbreaker technology.
A.D. 5500 +: Third expansion begins.
A.D. 5611: “The Quagma Datum”
A.D. 5653: “Planck Zero”
A.D. 5664: “Eve”
Era: Assimilation A.D. 10,000 +: Humans dominant sub-Xeelee species. Rapid expansion and absorption of species and technologies. Launch of Xeelee time-ships into deep past.
A.D. 10515: “The Godel Sunflowers”
A.D. 21124: “Vacuum Diagrams”
Era: The War to End Wars A.D. 100,000 +: Humans assaults on Xeelee concentrations begin.
A.D. 104,858: “Stowaway”
Raft
A.D. 168,349: Launch of the Exaltation of the Integrality.
A.D. 171,257: “The Tyranny of Heaven”
A.D. 193,474: “Hero”
Flux
A.D. 1,000,000: Final siege of Solar System by Xeelee. Defeat and imprisonment of man.
Era: Flight A.D. 4,000,000 +: Migration of Xeelee through Ring. Sol leaves Main Sequence.
