06 Feb 10 The Traveler

Her final trips back on Earth had been nearly perfunctory. Diving into the ruins of Kerguelen, dinner at an old-style restaurant, hang gliding over the Mediterranean dunes; they had been fun with the people she had considered friends. They all seemed to think she was a little crazy heading out to the Traveler, but they took her goodbye-parties in stride. For her, it seemed strangely hilarious to watch her friends enjoy their last moments with her. Soon she would be centuries downstream, and the bodies of their grandchildren decomposed to dust.

But her resolve had nearly wavered when they left Earth, she and three other people. They had stared at her, thinking her tears indecent and her lunatic shouts unheard as she looked at Earth from orbit from the first time. Instead of the blue-green marble that she had seen from birth in the Net and elsewhere, Earth was a muddy-grey-brown color. The grey seas, lower and shallower than at any time in Earth’s history, lapped against the silver, hexagonally mapped glaciers at the poles, covering most of Northern Europe and the Atlantic. The brown, industrial wastelands of the abandoned temperate cities and old coastal towns spoke of times when the cities thrived and glittered. The numerous craters across North America; the vast geometric shapes of the floating Pacific cities. It was ugly, and hideous, and she wept.

They flew past the dead carousels and satellites in low Earth orbit. Once, there had been a vast chain of wealthy, ingenious habitats that floated over the Earth. Republics and democracies birthed in micro-gravity, science and technology and socio-political systems flourished in the Kerguelen way. Now they reeked of stale nanotech and their ship kept a wide berth, avoiding the littered pathway that the habitats would take. She felt them eye her unscrupulously, ancient intelligences from the late 2nd millennium that were said to still keep watch on the Earth, those who had not left ages ago, after the second Traveler came.

The moon was a junkyard. Everything covered in the static, dusty rego that came in from the outside. Everywhere she touched, she sat, she looked, she could see streaks and marks of the stuff. She had boarded the transport that would take her out beyond the orbit of Neptune, feeling gutted and empty. The transport was massive, capable of carrying at least a hundred in what must have been luxury once; now it seemed boring, just boring. The weeks passed in silence and contemplation. She decided she would read about the Traveler once again, lines she had likely read a thousand times before.

The ship was in deceleration phase now, permitting her to to walk upright without problems. It looked at her in an indifferent way, barely brighter than the other stars that littered the field. A sudden flash near the edge of the view–looking at it, she saw a slowly rotating rock, a grayish lump which had caught the wan light just right. They would be arriving soon. She turned away, and she left and walked back to her room, deeper in the transport. Her room, which smelled of old spices and stale sweat from hundreds of previous passengers, of antiquity and modernity, held her few belongings: clothes, shoes, some food and her book. She sat down on her bed and opened the book; the blank pages seemed to flow as though water was inside the pages, and then she entered the blissful state of the Net.

∞

The Travelers were sentient lifeforms, as far as humans could tell. Their ways were ancient, lost to the dawn of time. They claimed to have come from outside the galaxy, from places far away, billions of years ago, in the millions. They migrated across the stars in their youth to all the solar systems in the galaxy. But long ago, something had changed within them. They had stopped their explorations and instead settled upon the old routes they loved the most. They brought themselves to only the hundred-so places that they remembered best, occasionally breeding with another Traveler if their routes crossed once in a million years. But even their children had a kind of languor, a slow growing and no feeling of need, of impetus, to see the rest of the universe themselves.

The cultures they visited wondered. Were the Travelers sick? We they dying? It was known it was spreading, and within half a billion years, all the Travelers were sick, and they stuck to their routes as routinely as clockwork. The other cultures in the galaxy did not bother with the Travelers–they represented no new technologies, and nothing unique. Often, the story of the Travelers were confined to the beginning of a culture’s starfaring experience, as the Travelers were usually the first to arrive. For Earth and its humans, the first Traveler had come when Hammurabi was writing his code; and the Traveler only looked briefly at the small planet of Earth, perhaps wistfully, before it left. No one on Earth noticed.

The second Traveler, a different one than the first, had visited almost a milennium and a half ago. Technically, it was not the first ‘alien’ that humans had met, for many stories of the adventures of those brave quantum-computer travelers had reached Earth, many of them having met, and communed with, cultures both less and more advanced than humans. But the Travelers were unique, and had never been heard of before. Man regularly made scientific expeditions to the Oort cloud, and soon, many had converged upon this Traveler. They learned, and careers and papers and manuscripts were written about the Traveler. Without knowing, it had become a celebrity.

The third had come at a time of war, at the end of the Great Golden Age of Earth. Two nations, spread across multiple planets, were engaged in warfare throughout the solar system. This Traveler, again a different one, stayed only briefly. Only a few humans, in ragtag vessels, went to board and join its cosmic migration. As it left, a holocaust of millions was underway on Jupiter’s moon of Europa. When the war ended and the dead had been buried and cities rebuilt, but perhaps with less conviction than before, few noted that another Traveler had come and gone.

This was now the fourth time that the Travelers had visited.

∞

She paused. The writings of that second visit, of the many learned minds that had first seen the gigantic Traveler in the dark at the edges of the solar system, had inflamed her. Believed to be an enlightened sentient being, a work of art by giants unknown and revered as a god and feared as a demon, the second Traveler had been a firestorm at a time when Earth’s creativity was at no lack. In many respects, the Travelers were a symbol of a kind of technology that man could never achieve–and that only made them more wondrous.

She had first seen an old, restored film of the Travelers when she was young. The scientific film was full of annotations on the restoration and recovery of the film, which she ignored and wiped clean at the first sight of the thing. She spent no less than a year dedicated to learning all she could of the Travelers. Her friends–some of whom were not corporeal these days–had become slightly worried about her excess. While unusual, this sort of fascination with the Travelers had happened before, with obvious consequences. But they laughed it off when she rejoined their company, and only occasionally had to shut her up when she went to far discussing the Traveler.

One night, they had been eating an alcoholic gel on a floating raft above a restored section of the Great Plains. Some herbivorous creature below them–genetic constructs called “buffalo” looked up languidly at the floating rafts of drugged-out and boozed-out kids. Some of her friends, at the other end of the raft, were engaged through their books in a kind of game; she sat slurping the gel with two other friends, one male and one neuter, enjoying the quiet broken only by laughter of other young people.

“I heard on the Net today that a QM caught a Traveler heading to Earth. On a trajectory from Sirius.”

Below, the buffalo ate the green grass, swishing their tails at the small flies that pestered their matted, muddy fur. She looked up from her cup, curiously, at her friend.

The neuter, whose name she had forgotten, was slouched in his chair, its red dreadlocks bound and coming down its shoulders. It wore a close-fitting gold suit, which pressed against his flat chest and crotch. While she had no issues with neuters, and none of her friends did, it claimed occasionally that there were enclaves still on Earth and in the solar system that would kill him on sight, for religious and philosophical reasons. “I wonder if its carrying anything from the colonies there. I heard that there was a row between the human colony and the colony the Ateliers had there.”

“I’ve heard that too. The Ateliers were wiped out by the humans there. I’ve heard they’ve tried to cover it up. Who was the QM, and why are they still this close to Earth, anyway?”

QMs, quantum minds, were those intrepid individuals (who numbered under a thousand, in total) who had long abandoned their bodies as housing for their consciousness. Now, they utilized the fuzzy-quantum-computing state to house their increasingly transformed minds.

She interrupted them. “Is it the same Traveler, one that has already visited Earth?”

But they did not answer her question; instead she had opened herself up as prey to their jokes and jibes on her Travelers’ obsession. As they drank the night away, in the glacier-bordered expanse of the Great Plains, the sun went down and the dark returned, showing the night sky. Strewn with stars and rubble from the habitats, she sat back, watching them spin, and decided she would go to the Traveler, and surrender her life for the great migration.

∞

The transport was approaching the Traveler. A Traveler never stopped, only slowly skirting the farthest reaches of the gravity well of the sun they were visiting. She was in the observation lounge, looking at it. The pale sun was casting its rays on the curved, shining blue surface of the Traveler. For all the aliens and cultures that man had met, the Traveler was incredibly unique.

End to end, it was nearly 5,000 kilometers long. It was in the shape of an elongated bottle; the fat end pulled in on itself and smoothly pierced the top of the bottle, curving into a needle-like point before stretching back down and into itself.. Ancient records called it a Klein bottle, a type of higher dimensional model. The surface was made of a glassy, solid substance that had never been replicated or broken, but ancient accretions of extraterrestrial lichen and bacterial colonies littered its surface. Areas where the microbial creatures fought each other or had been burned away marked the borders of their miniature conflict.

For centuries now, man had utilized reactionless drives that could push a vessel close to the speed of light, but it was a complete mystery how that concept could be applied to a vessel as large as the Traveler. Within months, the Traveler would be within a whisper of light-speed, all the light around it compressed into a single point in front of it. Vast amounts of energy, invisible to the human eye, would be pouring out the end of the Traveler, leaving a wake behind it that some cultures followed, light snail-paths between the stars. Travelers never came close to the stars they were visiting, as their mass had the potential to disrupt planets, comets, even some gas giants. Their disturbances could spring new life into being…or crush it carelessly. So they avoided suns, sticking to the cool spaces between the stars, only basking in their glow from a distance.

As their transport approached the Traveler, she felt excitement return to her body, and an almost feverish forgetfulness of her episode around Earth.

∞
The second Traveler, that great celebrity, had been very willing to communicate with mankind and illustrate its past and its history. Few had listened.

Some revered the creature as a god, an enigma made flesh in the universe. Some said that the laws of the universe broke down at the curves of the Traveler, and that all creation could come from its engines. The power it wielded would save the universe from the great proton collapse, millions of trillions of years into the future. The Travelers would save life.

Some likened the creature to a devil, having heard stories of rogue Travelers that flew around suns and into the depths of gas giants. Their passing was marked not so much with collisions and crashes but rather with the gravitational loopings and swingings as planets adjusted to the presence of the Traveler’s gravitational field. Some considered the Travelers to be blundering fools, who wreaked havoc on the precious orbits of planetary systems.

What the Traveler had said was that all were welcome to join it. No food, no clothes, no weapons, no supplies were needed. All you need do was enter the Traveler, where an occupant would be joined with the countless other minds that were present on its journey. Some of these conscious entities thought in modes completely opposite from humans; some of them were multiple consciousnesses, bound up in chaotic connections. Some were strange fusions of machine and beast, warlike entities from forgotten conflicts. Some were religious pilgrims, trying to find their angels and devils between the raw, singing stars.

Man would be yet another passenger to its timeworn manifest.

∞

They were now so close that one half of the entire sky was filled with the iridescent blue surface of the Traveler. Gleams of light of man’s off-yellow sun struck the hull and barely moved for their proximity to the great vessel. Today, she would board and join the Traveler on its great migration.

Already the transport felt its great gravity, the tug of the gigantic Traveler. The Traveler did not possess any sort of actual internal structure (at least, one that had been seen by organic eyes), but it did have a sort of landing or docking port, a depression in one side. Sheltered by an overhand on the vast surface of the Traveler, small ships could come to land and then, join with the Traveler. This particular transport had been around for the last visit, and likely, it was sufficiently engineered to stay for the next.

The landing bay, if it could be called one, was open to vacuum and littered with various mechanical debris, much of it sloped against the far side of the depression. Metal, organic, and strange glassy constructions all lay about, destroyed ships and craft that had come to the Traveler with no minder to take care afterward. The rigors of traveling near light-speed had irradiated and torn apart the vessels, now left like remnants of high-altitude climbers, their bodies covered in the slow snows at the heights.

She left the transport wearing as nano-vacuum suit, a flexible liquid covering that would protect her for the few hours. While the scant other visitors headed towards one end of the depression, she walked towards the other, towards the debris and the remains of spaceships.

Here and there she saw some whole craft: a starcraft shaped like an elongated needle, with tapered engines: a quantum-mind craft of the late 2nd millennium. She saw a collapsed structure that looked like a vast, chemical compound; an Atelier flock ship, each compartment of the vessel housing one part of the hive mind of the Atelier creature. Indeed this Traveler had come from Sirius, as these newest craft fit the last news of who had been living around the binary star system there.

What caught her attention was the desiccated, burnt corpse of what once may have been a living, organic star ship. Hide, rougher than steel, had been pinioned between dark black bones. A type of orifice, the sloppy liquids inside long having boiled away, trailed some shriveled tubes and appendages outward. What sort of creature had come to the Traveler on this living vessel? Or was the vessel itself the visitor? Perhaps it had removed its own brain from its body, as the quantum-mind craft occupant would have had to, to join with the Traveler?

She looked back to the other end of the depression. The transport would soon be leaving, waiting these last few minutes for those people who would change their minds or faint with terror at the action of joining with the Traveler. It seemed she almost teleported to the other end of the depression-so deeply was she wrapped in her thoughts and the very experience of walking on the Traveler-that when she looked up and saw the entrance to the Traveler, she was taken aback.

It was almost nondescript. It was a simple, curved hole in the side of the Traveler. The walls of the Traveler were peeled back, into the inside of the vessel, in a sort of stretched toroidal way. It was pitch black inside, and all around the hole were various accretions, thicker here than elsewhere, of microbial life.

She was staring at the door, wondering about how no hand had ever sculpted this gateway, and was broken from her revery by what appeared to be a woman. She came over to her, and fell to her knees, clearly in distress. Another person, a friend or relative, came and stood behind her, watching. Her suit automatically opened a channel.

“Please…please I beg you…take me back home, take me back to Earth…” the woman sobbed through the channel.

The person behind her chimed in. “I apologize for our intrusion. I shall take her back to the transport.”

“It’s fine. What is problem? Did you not come out here to join the Traveler?”

The woman looked up at her, her eyes wide through the shifting surface of her nano-vacuum suit. “I did…I did. But can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel how wrong it is? This thing…whatever it is, it’s not good for us. It’s not good for any of us! It’s not what we were promised!”

The woman was pawing at her suit, scrabbling through the blunt edges of her nanosuit. There was no chance of her damaging her suit, but she stepped away nonetheless. She felt disgust at the woman’s reaction, almost felt like it would infect her in a way.

She looked back at the empty doorway to the Traveler. As she looked down on the woman, now on hands and knees, shaking her head and wracked with sobs, an image flashed in her mind of the blue-and-green marble of Earth. No, she thought, it’s more like this-and instead the image of the marred Earth, with grey glaciers and oceans, scarred brown landscapes and faint geometric forms, replaced it.

She turned away from the woman and walked into the doorway.

∞
She almost felt a slight repulsion as she stepped through, and suddenly she was surrounded by blackness. Pure darkness, as though she were at the bottom of a mine. She thought to look down and ensure her suit was still secure, but she did not feel any more sensation of up and down, side to side. No suit in a vacuum?!–but the panic did not come. Instead, she felt a kind of flat peace as she lay in the deep darkness.

She was not sure how she could define it, lacking true senses (and understanding that she did lack them, at the same time), but she felt someone else with her. She felt as though she was standing next to a glacier suddenly, but unlike the ones on Earth. Where the glaciers on Earth had been bound with the nano-wires and meshes to prevent their continual growth, this one felt raw, powerful, unbridled. It felt as though she was standing next to a consciousness that was styled like a wall of jagged ice, slowly moving, slowly crawling.

In the darkness, the first few stars began to light up. Curious points of light, they shone and dazzled. And instead of looking at the starfield, she looked and understood each individual star, the whole trillions upon trillions of them, and knowing them and knowing their history and their occupants. There aren’t enough cells in the brain to know every star in the sky, she told herself, and that was when the glacier spoke.

“But you can simulate the feeling of omniscience.”

It seemed ages before she replied. “Are you the Traveler?”

“We are the Traveler.”

The panic would not come. “What do you mean?”

And then knowledge crashed down on her. It felt almost as though the glacier was flowing through her, giving her images, memories, sounds, colors, some of which humans had no right to experience. She saw husks of weapon systems that were measured in astronomical units, saw the bridges between moons, saw tendrils of shaped star-matter. She felt a billion other minds, caught in the glacier, in the netting of the Traveler.

She saw her own body, as it stepped through the portal into the inside of the Traveler, pass through a kind of gravity matrix. Saw the information of her consciousness seep from her body into the strange, foamy innards of the Traveler. She saw machinery inside the Traveler-herself–that could only have been manufactured in the edges of black holes, on the surfaces of neutron stars. She saw the mappings of the extant cultures of the galaxies, their strings of conflicts and collusions.

She reeled. Subjective decades passed in contemplation and understanding, and without her noticing the star of her homeworld whisked away behind her in a storm of relativity. She learned of the history of the Travelers, and how the were shepherds of intelligence between the stars. Built as automatons for carrying cultures, starfaring museums, the Travelers sought out individuals in the galaxy and carried them as constructs within its computational core. And in the future, when the time came, the lives and cultures and worlds of the past would be saved, to be remembered.

But those within the Traveler were not simply captured in stasis, to sit in glass cages. Those within the Traveler became it, melding their consciousnesses into new forms, experiencing the knowledge and history of the Traveler, and when meeting another Traveler, joining in the breeding of knowledge and experience.

And she understood, then, that the Travelers were not sick. They were not dying. They simply did not want to leave what had once been her-the Traveler’s-ancestral homes.

∞
“The woman-the crying woman, on the day I joined–did she come along, as well?”