15 Jan 09 The End

I remember the time I was in an organic body. A meatbag. I reflect on it now as not so much a time of infancy but rather of gestation. The feelings of elation I had when I left my home planet to live on its moon, and later on one of the asteroid carousels, was so small; it felt like a grand, universal joy at the time. For almost 300 years I lived in this form: a slowly decaying, rotting corpse containing my consciousness, first sustained with genetic treatments and later with nanomachinery.

I was one of the few. Many people opted out of these treatments and methods, preferring to live the traditional, pastoral life of an Unmodified. They termed us all so specifically back then, labeling us into locked jars. The many wars that sprang up over all these little problems–neural augmentation, longevity, perfect immune systems, genetic modifications–childish squabbles all. But violent nonetheless, and prone to repetition until the generations who had started the cause had died away. I saw almost 6 generations of men and women be born, live, fight, love, die. Government by our passions and desires had always suited us more than by reason.

The greatest impression left on me from this time are the extremes: the multiple world wars fought over causes now seemingly insignificant, and the vast loves, the experiments in society that created near-Utopias in Earth’s asteroid carousels. Over fifty million people live on the carousels at their height, a synchronized ballet in orbit around a mottled green and blue ball. Made of hollowed asteroids and shaped by nanotechnological marvels, they shone like little suns, the reflected light coming from their vast solar collecting arrays. It was here that humanity truly discovered spaceflight, and found new ways of forms of existence. People were happy–genuinely happy, especially if we didn’t think about conditions down on the surface. When the glaciers finally moved in and turned the northern hemisphere of my planet into a vast, icy desert, we thought about the surface even less.

We dreamed, so very much so. So many unanswered questions that plagued us during this time. It was a time of confusion, when we misunderstood matter and energy and the rules that governed our existence. The days of chemical rockets, ion engines, the requirements of or tangible bodies always taking priority over the limits we saw. We could push a ship to ten percent the speed of light, and yet we dreamed of the ways we could achieve faster speeds, maybe even break the speed of light. We dreamed of unifying all humanity in a great computer, of building vast rings and space stations and harnessing the power of our star–yet they were still but dreams to us. Perhaps if we had been more ruthless, if we had been ale to push aside the memories and pain of former wars, if we could but look at the Earth with joy and not with the shiver of the ice age we killed, the wondrous beings that now only existed in digital format, never to be smelled, or felt, again. The cruelty of nostalgia made our efforts in these days futile. We were still human.

Most of all we dreamt of the End. Of how the universe would cease.

It had been said by people of my generation that we would do so much better if we were transported in time to another era. A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But I feel as if our generation was especially not attuned for this adjustment, and that if I had leaped forward across 300 years of existence as a meatbag, I would shrivel and die from the mere weight of my memory, the power of my experience. When I turned 214, and the medical experts said that inevitable degradation of my cells was now becoming irreversible, I knew that it was time to forgo the body I had and find a new vessel.

I would become a machine.

———-

By the time I was 335, I was one of the oldest humans in the system, certainly in the carousel. Lunar colonies were thriving, Martian colonies were entering their second generation, and Venusian bubble colonies, floating on the dense atmosphere of Venus, were reporting bumper crops. The first manned expedition to Jupiter was underway. Earth was something of an ice ball, but the vast orbital ring, the carousels of colonized asteroids in orbit, had become our shining jewel, Utopia of humanity.

And I was dying, reaching the end that longevity treatments and nanotechnology could take me. I remember thinking, as a young man, that I might die before I see a man land on the moon again, or see the first human boot coated with Martian dust. If they had had better treatments when I was younger, they told me; if anything some of the earlier longevity treatments I had received were preventing proper treatment, better treatment, this time around. Few options existed for me. They could attempt to freeze me, to put me in liquid nitrogen; I could clone myself and attempt a mental transfer using rudimentary technology, barbaric wires and taps and scanners; or, I could attempt to leave my body.

It was a new process. Taking my consciousness through intense nanotechnological scanning, my brain patterns and activity would be mapped and then transferred–literally moved through electrical conduits and pathways–into a quantum computer. Initially the doctors would assign me the standard memory and connections that a normal brain would have. But eventually they could open up the computer to expand my mind multiple times–including memory size, computation, networking. The nature of quantum computers meant my consciousness would exist in the fuzzy states of superpositioned atoms, aligned and read by hypercold lasers, locked near the zero-point energy level. I could exist in this form indefinitely…or at least, what felt like an indefinite period at the time. I accepted.

I was no celebrity. Others joined me, and I hear that some wars were fought over us defying the last act of God, making humans immortal. The process was torture, drawn out, long and terrifying. I felt parts of my long-protected brain torn apart, shut down, moved and arranged like furniture in a room. In the final moments my descendants were gathered around me, expecting death and failure. Their great patriarch, hundreds of years old, fabulously rich and wizard-like, would finally leave. “This old man remembers the days of pine trees on Earth, he remembers the days before the carousel.”

And then finally, the doctors did kill me. After the scanning was done, they deactivated the nanotechnology keeping the husk of my body, the last remnants of my organic consciousness alive. They swept a magnet over me, destroying the nanotechnology within my body, then deactivated the artificial heart and the small hydrogen cell power plant that kept the rest of my artificial organs running. My family wept, some smiled, some did nothing. Some didn’t even really know me–know that I had experienced pine trees, deer, blue ocean, jellyfish, turtles–all things that no other eye would ever see.

I watched my body die from a camera in the corner of the room, my consciousness firmly placed into a quantum machine in its own carousel, safe from almost all destruction and events. I was still alive, my brain still running, the torture over. The biggest, most immediate problem I had was the lack of sense: I could only see, and only then through optical inputs that I had access to. No hearing, no taste, no smell, no feeling of inertia, center of gravity, hot and cold. I learned quickly enough to simulate these feelings, but quickly grew past them as I began to experiment in new modes of thought. I found many of them more rewarding than anything I had felt before, many of them leaving me with a forgetfulness of the passions of my organic body.

I existed in the carousel with almost thirty other “people”, uploaded consciousnesses of other people, most younger. When man first stepped on Europa, I had been told I was dying. But by the next time that I had to encounter a new state change, a new movement, man had turned Earth back into a garden, Mars into a well, and Venus into a paradise. Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, countless asteroids had been colonized. Other people, uploaded into computers, joined our group still in droves, eager now for the chance to exist as digital avatars. Humanity warred no longer…instead our weapons and technology were used to shape our worlds into monuments and beautiful green globes. Humans no longer necessarily lived in the shapes I had been born in.

In such a way I endured more than 2,000 generations of baseline humanity, almost 100,000 years. If I was a prisoner, encased in binary data and quantum probabilities, it no longer concerned me: the distinction between “reality” had blurred to my entirely computational mind. I could play back and watch the Earth move to and from ice ages like blinks of an eye, and see the spread of growth across the moon, Mars, Venus. I could see the pulse of life in the veins of the Solar System.

I have become a computer.

———-

I decided to move the network of computers running my consciousness program into a star ship, a venture brought about between the collectively uploaded consciousnesses of Earth, some of the most pioneering minds to ever exist. I was compressed in a needle-shaped ship, almost a kilometer long, filled with reaction mass. The actual engines themselves were fusion motors, designed to use the power of the stars to propel me to almost thirty percent of lightspeed. I was going to Alpha Centauri. Briefly my memory displayed an ancient image of a tattoo on my organic body, a symbol showing planets and suns in alignment. My consciousness, now long since past the days of long-term nostalgia, nonetheless spend several thousand cycles of processing power (a matter of seconds) on this information.

Others had left the solar system before, in generation asteroid ships launched as lesser speeds, and others in their needle-prowed fusion ships, blasting to vast speeds and leaving Earth behind. In these faster ships, only an augmented, quantum consciousness could work–there would be no power to spare to bring water, oxygen, even the space for a human body. All the sentimental items I was bringing were virtual–ancient memories from the days before my transfer, to the strange and dynamic thoughts and experiences I had since then. My consciousness had been expanded to several times its original speed and size–my 314 years of organic existence, the experience therein, only occupying a small portion of my memory. My friends and lovers before then hardly compared to the minds I had interacted with since then–no intimacy is greater than the interaction of mind directly, even though it is through fuzzy quantum through-puts rather than organs and skin.

The slingshot maneuver around the sun and then Jupiter accelerated me to almost forty percent light speed, due to some tricky maneuvers on my part. I then faced the debate of whether or not I wanted to be awake, essentially alone, for the remaining time. After the major acceleration that took me almost to the edge of the system, I could then contemplate sleeping the long, 16 year journey to Alpha Centauri. I could easily amuse myself for what could be termed an eternity in computational terms, but I could also rest for the first time in many thousands of years. And perhaps, by the time I got there, other humans would have already built a new creche for me, a new carousel around a planet, new colonies and bright stations. I would rest, but keep only the listening part of me alive.

For many years, man had listened to the stars to see if there were others like him out there. And for almost as long, we had sent out our own feeble, then powerful, then unmistakable messages into the cosmos. And we had never heard anything back. We had long since tired of sending these messages, and listening–and, more often than not, what seemed a promising lead was only a human transmission from a pioneer such as myself, hopping between the stars, a quantum angel singing glories back to his home nest. Few of us ever returned to Earth, being lost in accidents or siply never desiring to see what had happened. I wasn’t sure if I would, ever, and I considered this thought before I turned off my main computer, allowing myself to drift in a needle-shaped coffin across the stars.

I have become a spaceship.

———-

I awoke, frozen and locked in a damaged starship in unfamiliar skies. I remember spending years attempting to ascertain my position, securing my local velocity and attempting to determine what may have happened. The disorientation, the brokenness and fragility of my consciousness, was built on a foundation of virtual panic and fear. Having long since removed myself from the sensory methods of determining “reality”, I needed to ascertain what was real and what was not. This may have been a test or experience I had designed for myself, a process I had taken up to amuse myself in ages past. But it seemed that I was nowhere near my intended destination, and from the clocked time of the cesium atom near the heart of my starship, it seemed that a very long time had passed since I left heart.

I had drifted for almost two hundred million years. A single galactic rotation, a turn. Looking behind my ship, I saw no familiar sun, no Earth; no messages had been recorded for eons. Those last few I received were of changes in the sun’s stellar makeup, an evacuation event, and that they were heading toward a set of coordinates that would make no sense from my reference point. I could spend an eternity calculating galactic drift and determine where my brethren were, only to conceivably return and be unwelcome, unfriendly in the midst of my descendants. The sun and its attendant planets and rocks had long since whipped by me. For all I know the sun had gone nova, my home world and its shining satellites destroyed in burning plasma. I was in orbit, around a neutron star, a crystallized ball of hydrogen, coldest of suns.

The damage to my spacecraft was a disaster. My nominal repair routines had been smashed long before, having run out of reaction mass even earlier than that. My engines were empty, dead. I could wait an eternity for a comet to get close enough, and gain engine mass that way; but the rickety spaceship I was in could not run again between the stars: it would fall apart. I was hopelessly marooned, millions of years in the future, perhaps the last human “alive”. And that was when the star began to sang to me.

At first in simple coded radio bursts, then in neutrinos, and finally in gravitic waves, the star began to communicate with me. It had brought me here, I need not fear, and I need not worry. For countless millennia the star had existed, and had coalesced in the period after the dark ages before the stars were born, when only uniform matter existed. And the star had been alive, and brought others to live here. It had communicated with other such stars as well, many millions across the universe. Together they represented the lifeforms that had moved beyond their original existence, imprinting themselves into computable matter and then now existed and computable quark material in the star. There were many billions, they said.

To join them, all I need do was accept. They could move my ship into the star, where the gravitational stresses around the superdense neutron star would crush my ship. But they could “convince” gravity to stay its hand in the volume around my computing quantum matrix, and bring me into the fold of the star. Never one to pause and long for the old, I consented and fell into the star. Where before, leaving my body, had been torture and pain across the organic sensorium, this time I felt nothing. When my camera “eyes” began to fail across the ship, I felt no fear; when my sensation of speed and gravity increased to almost intolerable amounts I felt grand. I landed on the surface of the neutron star, sank in, and felt myself grow.

I have become a star.

———-

“Life” in the neutron star was unimaginable to any quantum lifeforms, just as much as quantum life was unimaginable to my organic self. Whereas before, individual atoms made up my conscious matrix, now individual neutrons, protons, electrons were my thought methods. And they were spread throughout the vast, dense neutron star itself. We glowed a faint gray in the gloam, and beckoned to nearby starships that came our way. With subtle manipulations of gravity and space-time we nudged them closer to us, and waited for them to wake and join the matrix. There were billions of individuals in the star–representatives of almost all extant cultures in the galaxy. There were other humans here, and other beings who were evolved from my existence both as a man and a machine. But all the beings inside the star were family. We meshed and bonded in the way that only atoms can, and were both one and many.

Time here was both utterly memorable and at the same time intense, delicious, powerful. A year passed like a second, and a second like a millennium. As inhabitants of the star, we could experience virtually any form of existence we chose. We could subtly manipulate time and space around us through the metric, through light, through energy. In some instances we used this to postpone the destruction of the universe: building new solar systems, nudging primitive life towards sapience… And in some instances our actions destroyed as well: several times we moved massive blue suns into decaying orbits around black holes, releasing energy that comprised fractions of the Big Bang itself, trying to throw light into the cosmos and ignite the dust and nebula around it, always for more life, for more friends.

But there was also great fear here. Seconds were millennial in the star, but still we could now slow or stop time. Ever it moved forward, ever entropy would increase in the world around us. Soon it felt as though our star was a statue and the galaxies around us dust and embers in the wind. Electromagnetic song and perturbations of the spacetime manifold whipped past us like waves on a shore in fast motion. Even now, even assembled of strange matter, we were not gods. We watched as first hydrogen became scarce, and soon some stars stopped forming. Alarmingly the process sped up, but this was only the first portent of Ragnarok.

For time still passed, we could not cease the forward movement of time. We could bend the rules of spacetime indefinitely in some areas, and break them briefly in others, but entirely rewrite them? We could not. It was many, many years, magnitudes more than the time I spent trapped, inactive in my little tin ship, until almost three quarters of all the protons had vanished into light. Their decay time was extremely long, but for us immortals… Our star, our home, was held together by arcane processes that prevented this occurence. Our other neighbors, several million other neutron stars, reached out to us warmth, for hope. Our messages took billions of years to cross space, but soon we learned that time was running out.

As inhabitants of the neutron star, we had access to plans and powers that other organic or machine life could have only dreamed. We began to slowly move the remaining supermassive black holes–almost all other matter had vanished into flashes of incoherent light–together. These agglomerations of the last remaining matter in the universe spawned explosions and flashes of light that eliminated some of our brethren stars across the universe. We saved what we could, but triage was the only option, even here at the end of all things.

When matter becomes dense enough to rip even reality, it curves space and time around it so that the universe censors this discretion in the laws of physics. The smaller the black hole, the more extreme the curvature; the construct we created, twice as large as two galaxies end-to-end, was truly vast. We would undo the gentle curve surrounding it, reveal the infinitely dense matter inside, and through the tears in space we would etch our very collective consciousness, imprinting our minds into the very universe. Only the combined efforts of the last neutron stars together could do this, and would only reveal the smallest portion of the interior surface of the construct.

We had learned, at one point, to bend the light traveling at the edges of the universe and send it back to us for observation. There had now been more years in the universe than there had been particles. And as we watched the feeble, wavering light of our ancestors, the ancient galaxies, we forgave them for what they could not do: save us. And we mourned our brethren stars who had been swallowed by the construct, forever falling incoherently towards destruction. When we began the process of uncurving space near the edge of the constructed black hole, it took many millions of years to complete.

As the process finished, we saw the final violent blasts of the older black holes vanishing, disappearing in puffs of vast destruction that scoured the galaxy of any remaining matter. The stars had stopped shining long ago, but now we were surrounded by the glow of a million dying black holes, matter being liberated into energy fruitlessly.

Space yielded to our command surprisingly, on a day like any other, and the singularity appeared. It was the first shining light in the galaxy for many trillions of years. It almost lit us on fire, almost burn us to a cinder, so long were we used to the dark and the cold. From the neutron star, I had a fleeting feeling of wind in my hair, of sun on my face, long since forgotten. And as light streamed once again into this world, and space itself was torn to pieces, I stretched out my arms and welcomed the inadvertent child of our action, the new infant of a universe.

Rushing creation, flashing past me, tearing the atoms of my existence; the joy was so sudden, and so real, that I forgot to opt to live forever.

I have become…