John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

They reached for connections within the ship mind, blocked each other, erasing huge slashes from each other, dodging, reconfiguring, copying, falsifying, dying, both dying. At that same instant, the gadfly virus (or perhaps, by this moment, it had been the vanguard of the Earth-mind, entering from beyond) asked the second segment a simple question. If the question had been put in human words, it might have read something like this: Why not cease this conflict, and find a mutually beneficial circumstance? Either or both of you two segments can acquire additional mindspace or other resources from the Transcendence. We have abundance to spare, and will help you in return for something we find of value, such as, perhaps, information about the Silent Oecumene and their technology, perhaps the mere pleasure of your company.

Or the question might have been put this way: Why damage each other rather than advantage each other? Is not something better than nothing?

Or: Is not "not" not "is"?

An ultimately simple question, with complex ramifications.

The original Nothing Mind refused to cooperate, refused to accept, refused to admit. It preferred to perish. Many memories and records were lost and could not be restored, not even by the second segment, who, accepting the Earthmind s offer, instantly became the darling and center of attention of the whole Transcendence, as well as a wealthy consultant on all policy questions concerning how to deal with the Second Oecumene. The second segment adopted a female gender, and called herself, thereafter, Ariadne Sophotech. The Transcendence decision (or prediction) was that thereafter, she would have a fine future. A version of herself, months from now (the prediction ran), joined with the Silver-Gray or perhaps the Dark-Gray manorial movement, and started her own mansion, called Ariadne House.

And Ariadne House attempted to preserve those precious human things, the things of the human spirit that the terrible grim Lords of the Silent Oecumene claimed to wish to protect, but had only tormented and destroyed. And perhaps, despite what all the other Sophotechs wanted, human life could be made to survive even to the period of the Last Mind, and other parts of the Cosmic Mind could be made more to suit Ariadne's philosophy.

After all, in a society like the Golden Oecumene, during a period as gentle as their long Golden Age, the Sophotechs could tolerate dissenting opinions.

And what about the future? To a mind as wide as the Transcendence, this came as an afterthought, and yet, to the humans Basics, Warlocks, Invariants, Mass-Minds, Cerebellines, and the odder structures inhabiting Neptune and Circum-Urania, the mind sculptures of Deme-ter, and the energy shapes of the solar north pole, this part of the Transcendence was what they deemed the whole Transcendence to be.

And yet each cherished member of the Transcendence, filled with as much wisdom as he could bear, felt the whole affair had been conducted for his own self's single benefit. The part of his life he Transcended was the most precious part of the most precious life in the universe, because, of course, it was his own.

Lovers were reunited, old quarrels healed, forgotten wrongs were righted, justice was done. Strangers in the myriads (who otherwise never would have met) were singled out, introduced to each other, to become compatriots, partners, friends. Businessmen tangled in long-delayed arbitration reconsidered the entireties of their lives, found new projects to which to apply their efforts, resolved their disputes, and were either satisfied or were content to be dissatisfied. Students of the arts and sciences received new insights, saw new visions, vowed great vows.

Sleepers were woken from their graves, and were shown reality, and asked, yet again, to forget their dreams and accept their lives. Many refused, and sank back down again into inescapable hallucination. But a few, like bright sparks struck from dying embers, flew up, rising from deeper to lesser dreaming, opening old memory caskets, encountering forgotten pains, recalling themselves, putting on their true personas; and the dreamers folded their dreams, their false-selves, their invented worlds, and put them into their memory caskets to forget them, tike childhood dresses, worn and precious with age, folded away with lavender petals into a cedarwood box.

During the Transcendence, Earthmind and Old-Woman-of-the-Sea met and had a long talk, shared thoughts, and came to a decision. But humanity was not involved in that matter, and no human discovered what had been discussed.

Human affairs were loaded by the supervisory fragments of the Transcendence into the human memories, for them to contemplate as they woke into their separate identities again.

Even before the Closing Ceremonies were truly begun, members and elements of the Eleemosynary Composition, all across Southeast Asia and South America, in hives and arcologies and mile-high pyramids of imperishable metal, descended back into non-Transcendent consciousness.

Eleemosynary contained the oldest set of living memories in the Golden Oecumene; he-they had suffered each and every Transcendence from the very first exper-imental ones. A mass-mind, he-they were well versed in methods of attaching and detaching from greater segments of consciousness. Hence, Eleemosynary woke before other neuroforms or Compositions woke; for a bole over a week, he-they had the planet to himself-themselves.

In Venice, in Patagonia, in Bangkok, Eleemosynary eggs floated to the surface of canals and thinking-fools, sending out signals and coordination webs to the hives. New members in fresh bodies rose from undersea nurseries, changed from dolphins to mermaids to the frail blank-eyed waifs the mass-mind preferred when not in costume. In perfect lockstep, in many bodies, the mass-mind walked streets utterly deserted and quiet.

The Composition did not let slip the economic advantages his-their early waking offered; Eleemosynary spent the days preparing houses and formulations to welcome other devastened souls as they woke, so that the weeping millions would have comfort and ease as they made the transposition back to merely normal consciousness. Money lending was also not far from the Eleemosynary's thought: people would be eager to invest in those projects the visions had shown, extrapolations had predicted.

He-they also hurried to publish the first diaries, synopses, and briefs of the Transcendence (which, since the tail-end of the Transcendence was still ongoing, could be checked against the Aurelian record-keeping sub-mind for accuracy).

Eleemosynary Composition recalled a decision (or prediction) from the Transcendence regarding his fellow Peer Helion. The Transcendence had wanted to give the man a gift.

To carry out the will of the Transcendence, and to become the giver of this gift, the Eleemosynary Composition wrote Helion's noumenal information a prioritizing routine so that, the next time Helion had to download himself in a hurry, the most recent parts of his memory would be transmitted first, and his fear of losing himself would be transmitted last. Thus, if the transmission were interrupted midway, the Helion who arrived would be a version who was not unduly distressed by the incompleteness of his memory.

At the same time, with the quiet precision of an army, members of the Eleemosynary mass-mind began neatly to take down the banners and decorations decorating the streets, to dismantle the elaborate dream-systems shining on the public channels, to sweep the gardens clean of those dead flowers meant only to live during the festivals, and to help dull-eyed early risers out of their costumes and out of their costume parapersonalities.

One member of the Eleemosynary Composition came upon an early riser disguised as Vandonner of Jupiter, sitting alone on a deserted hill overlooking the Aurelian Palace-city. The man sat with his play helmet thrown to one side, his now-lifeless illusion-cloak to the other. The long pole he had once used to guide his storm craft was broken in two, and lay on the grass.