Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Shelley asked, “So what are we waiting for?”

“For Gea’s response.”

I glanced at Shelley, who shrugged. I said, “Vander, are you kidding? You have to wait around until she feels like coming online?”

He looked faintly embarrassed, and he tousled his mop of blue hair. “Gea is, umm, contrary sometimes. There’s a basic contradiction in her existence which torments her, I think. You see, she’s a climate modeler. She knows that heat dumped into the environment worsens the problems the climate faces. But she knows that when she runs, her hardware stratum itself generates a lot of heat. You see the paradox? And therefore—”

Shelley said, “You have to coax her to come online, and as soon as she gets the chance she turns herself off again for fear of making the problems worse. Do I have that right?” She stared at me, and we both burst out laughing.

Vander seemed mortally offended. “Believe me, in the brief fractions she is online she can achieve far more than most minds on the planet, artificial or otherwise—”

The light on the wall flashed red.

Vander whooped and punched the air. “There she is!” He tapped his ear.

Shelley asked, “Is that her? What’s she saying to you?”

He glanced at me. “It’s not me she wants to talk to. Michael Poole — it’s you.” He actually looked jealous.

With a faint horror-movie creak, the door to the little partitioned booth swung open.

Reath set up a low tent alongside his shuttle. Servitor machines brought out seats, and bowls of food and drink.

They sat in the shade: Reath, servant of the Commonwealth, the three Campocs as stolid and alike as the enigmatic statues that lay in the dirt, and Alia and her mind-neutered sister. Alia tried to feed Drea, but the Campocs’ control remained too tight to allow it.

And they talked about the Transcendence of Mankind.

Bale said, “We all do it, you know. Witnessing. Every human in the Commonwealth is a Witness; every child is given a subject, somebody from the past to study. Everybody. This is the law, the mandate of the Transcendence.”

This was a commonplace. “And? So what?”

Bale said heavily, “Have you never wondered why the Transcendence wants us all to peer into the past, Alia?”

She looked uncertainly at Reath, who returned her gaze calmly. She said, “Studying the past helps me understand the present. Michael Poole helps me understand myself—”

Denh guffawed. “You think the Witnessing program — the huge expense of giving every kid in the Galaxy a Witnessing tank — is all for the benefit of you, of us?”

Seer said, “Nothing the Transcendence does is for your benefit, but for its own. You must always remember that.”

Alia frowned. “All right. So why is the Transcendence so interested in the Witnessing?”

“Because,” Bale said, “the Transcendence is tortured by regret.”

The Transcendence was at a cusp in its destiny, they told Alia.

Coalescing out of a gathering of humans, it already soared far above the capabilities, even the imaginations, of its constituent members. This was an extraordinary moment in the evolution of life itself, so it was believed, as the Transcendence looked forward to the possibilities of an unlimited future, to infinity and eternity.

Soon, in any meaningful sense, the Transcendence would become a god.

But not yet. In these final brief moments, the Transcendents were still human. And they were not content.

All this was an abstraction to Alia, a matter of theology. The Transcendence itself was still only dimly glimpsed in her imagination, despite her training with Reath. What could a god want? …

The Campocs thought they knew.

The Transcendence understood the cause of its own anguish very well. It was the past. Of the trillions who had lived, most humans’ lives had been dominated by pain and fear, their only saving grace being that they had been short. But the past was the root from which the mighty tree of the present had grown. So how then could the Transcendence give itself up to the bliss of an unlimited future, while its base was stained with the blood of all those near who went before, and had lived and died in misery? Somehow the past had to be redeemed, for if not the goal of perfect Transcendence could never be reached; there would always be a deep flaw beneath the shining surface, a worm in the apple.

And so, under great programs administered by the Commonwealth’s Colleges of Redemption, every human child was made a Witness, as Alia had always studied the life of Michael Poole. You were assigned one character, one life thread drawn from the tapestry of the past, perfectly imaged with unimaginable technology. Any and every life was available to be remembered in this way — and not just the significant and famous, like Poole. Every last one of them needed to be treasured, and remembered. Every one.

Alia shook her head. “I never thought it through. To catalog the whole of the past, to make everybody a Witness — and to Witness everybody —”

Despite the tension of the situation Reath smiled. “We humans have always been bureaucrats. And the Transcendence must be supreme in this aspect of our nature, as it is in everything else!”

But it was expensive. Though it was far from complete, soon the Redemption program, in all its manifestations, was absorbing a significant portion of the energy budget of the Transcendence itself, and so of the combined powers of mankind.

Bale was watching her carefully. “And that’s what we’re worried about.” He stood up. “I will show you something. Come, we will walk to the statues. Your sister will be safe here, I promise.”

Alia glanced at Reath, who shrugged, out of control of events once more. Drea just sat passively. Reluctantly Alia pushed back her chair.

They returned to the fallen statues. Once more Alia stood before that monumental face.

Bale stepped forward. He bent and gathered up some of the strange bluish sand she had noticed piled by the mouth of the statue, and dug out a little more from its eye socket. “Alia, do you know what this is?”

“Sand,” she said bluntly.

He shook his head. “No. This is breath. And these are tears.”

The fallen forms were more than statues. They were humans.

In the age of Bifurcation that had followed the triumph of the Exultants, most post-human forms had been more or less similar to the basic human stock — like the heavy-gravity forms of the Rustball, or the aquatic creatures of the water-world, even Alia’s own low-gravity design. And rarely had the bounds of carbon-water chemistry been broken.

But in some places even those basic parameters had been ignored.

“Silicon isn’t an ideal information storage medium,” Bale said. “Not as good as carbon molecules. But in its crystalline form you can make complex structures, store as much data as you like. There are ways to copy the lattice structure, so you can reproduce; there can be divergent forms, mutations — evolution. Of course while we breathe out carbon dioxide such creatures would breathe out silicon dioxide — sand.”

Silicon chemistry was not as favorable a substrate for life as carbon. The properties of silicon compounds did not allow for as much complexity of molecular structure as carbon; and silicon did not bond so conveniently into forms that, like carbon dioxide, could be carried in the air or dissolved in the sea. That was why silicon-based life tended not to emerge even in places where there was far more silicon lying around than carbon, such as the crust of the Earth. But in some places, by chance, it did arise, such as here on Baynix II, the Dirtball.