Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“It is the final stage of Redemption, its ultimate logic. We call it the Cleansing. It is not that mankind will cease to exist,” said Leropa quietly. “It never will have existed. And it could be arranged quite easily. Remember, the Transcendence can restore the dead to life, with a mere gesture. This final solution is almost elegant. Economical.”

A cold anger burned in Alia. “Is this where the logic of love has led the Transcendence — to love mankind so much that it must be eliminated?”

“This is only a possibility,” Leropa said. “But in what is to come, you must always remember that this dark possibility is there — if Michael Poole fails.”

She raised her hand, curling fragile fingers. And Alia imagined consequences flowing from that gesture, flowing out across space and time, to the far future and into the deepest past. Leropa was a small, hunched-over woman in a worn, shabby robe, shuffling through the debris of an immense ruin. And yet she held the fate of all mankind in her bony fingers.

The first shock of Transcendence is -

I can’t say. The words don’t exist in my head. What is it like, then?

It is like stepping off a cliff. Or it is like suddenly plunging into a shocking new medium, like ice-cold water. Or it is like the instant your first child is born, and you hold him in your arms, and you know your life isn’t your own anymore, and never will be again.

It is like waking up.

When I looked back on my entire life up to this point, it was as if I had been dreaming. I saw all my perceptions of the world, and even my experiences of my inner world, for the partial fantasies that they truly were. But I knew that if I ever got out of this strange state of new consciousness, it would be this that seemed like a dream. But I felt oddly confident, even though I knew I had come to a place beyond my comprehension. I could cope with this, I thought.

But where had I come to? If I had awoken from the dream of human existence, if I had truly opened my eyes for the first time — what did I see?

For now, nothing. It was not as if I had my eyes closed, but more as if I had my gaze averted, my head full of thoughts of other things. I couldn’t see anything because I wasn’t looking; it was a matter of will. But it was waiting for me.

I lifted my metaphoric head. I focused my metaphoric eyes. And I saw -

Light. It flooded into my mind, brilliant, searing hot. All my brief confidence disappeared immediately. I was nothing but a mote of awareness, scorched, shriveled, blasted away. I tried to scream.

The light faded. I was back in my state of unseeing again.

“I know what you would have said if one of your junior engineers, or your students at Cornell, had gone plunging in like that.” The voice, gentle, dry, came out of nowhere, with no source. I wasn’t hearing it, I couldn’t turn my head toward it. Yet it was there even so, a voice in a dream.

“Morag?”

“Alia,” she said, a gentle regret shading her tone. “I am Alia. I am here with you, to help you.”

“I’m glad,” I said fervently. “So tell me what I’d have said.”

“You’d say, Walk before you run. ”

“Quite right, too. Is this the Transcendence, Alia?”

“What did you see?”

“It was like looking into the sun. It burned me out.”

“I blame myself,” she said. “When I was first immersed in the Transcendence, I had had months of training — of mental discipline, and of development of various faculties. Also I have half a million years’ evolutionary advantage over you, Michael. No offense. And I found it overwhelming, that first time. For you it is all but impossible.”

“So teach me how to walk, Alia.”

“One step at a time.”

I felt a gentle pressure, as if a hand had cupped my chin to lift my head, as if I were a child. Metaphor, metaphor. But metaphors are fine if they help you understand.

“Look now.”

I saw a black sky full of stars, all around me, above and below. It was as if I was a stranded astronaut taken far from Earth and left drifting in space. I had no sense of vertigo, though; perhaps that had been edited out. The stars were scattered deep through three dimensions, but they were all a uniform color, a kind of yellow-white. I began to make out patterns, groupings, tentative constellations.

“Stars. But they aren’t stars, are they? Just another metaphor.”

“A metaphor for what?”

It was obvious. “The Transcendents. The individuals who contribute to this group mind. Like us.”

“Like me,” Alia said. “Not quite like you.”

“Am I not a star?” I felt unreasonably disappointed. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But a special sort of star.”

The stars began to drift around me. Now they were like fish in some vast dark aquarium. The patterns they made became clearer, swoops and whirls and sketches of light. And each of them was a mind, I marveled.

I knew the principle. The Transcendence was not a simple pooling of minds but a dynamic network, of which these stars were the nodes. The greater awareness of the Transcendence itself was an emergent property of the network, arising from the community of minds, yet not overwhelming them individually. It had something in common with an anthill, I thought — or even uncle George’s strange Coalescence.

So much for theory. I wanted to see the Transcendence itself. I looked up.

I saw more stars, swarms of them flocking in patterns that elaborated scale upon scale, rising up as far as I could see. And at the very limit of my vision the shifting constellations seemed to merge into a mist, and then a bright point. That ultimate unity was the consciousness of the Transcendence itself, arising out of the interactions of the community of star-minds on which it was based.

When I looked around I could see the same point-like unity whichever way I looked. An impossible geometry, of course, but a neat metaphor.

At Alia’s subtle nudging, I widened my perceptual field further.

Moving through the flocks of stars were darker shapes, more elusive. Sometimes the stars would settle on their velvet surfaces, and I would make out the glimmer of an outline, a complex morphology. But then the stars would rise up again like startled birds, and the form would be lost.

“These are the structures of the mind of the Transcendence,” Alia said. “Ideas. Beliefs. Understandings. And memories — many, many memories.”

I saw one form that was a little different from the rest — compact, almost glimmering, like a multifaceted jewel, but of jet-black. It was like a bit of polished coal. “What’s that? ”

Alia sounded as if she was smiling. “Take a look.”

I didn’t know how to. But even as I framed the desire I felt myself falling toward the jewel-like knot of knowledge.

I felt a surge of new understanding — a moment of insight, like a breakthrough after years of study in some arcane subject, or the sudden clarification when the solution of a puzzle becomes obvious. This glimmering knot of understanding contained all of physics — and I saw it all. I enjoyed a deep understanding of the fabric of the cosmos, from the minuscule symmetries of the fundamental objects from which space and time were ultimately constructed, all the way to the jewel-like geometry of the universe as a whole, folded over on itself in higher dimensions — although now I saw that those two poles of structure, large and small, were in fact one, as if all of reality were folded together again on some more abstract scale.

But even as I wallowed in this joyous understanding, a part of me noticed features a physicist of the twenty-first century would have recognized — even an engineer like me. Our basic map of the universe’s composition was here, the proportions of dark energy, dark matter, baryonic matter, as determined by our space telescopes; and I made out the familiar milestones of the universe’s evolution out of the initial singularity, through stages of expansion and cooling, all the way to the matter-dominated age that had given rise to humans. Some of our theories to explain this universal structure had contained glimmerings of truth after all, I realized. They were all partial, all gropings in the dark, each tentative explanation like the light scattered from one facet of this ultimate jewel of understanding. And yet we got some of it right, I thought with a surge of pride, we primitives on our single, muddy, messed-up little world.