Darwinia

Monofilaments of Higgs distortion swept the Archive, spooling history in sequential order. Sentient nodes and subnodes delighted in exploring the past — one, two, three times, as the Archive was read and reread. Knowledge became involute, knew itself; sophants among the noospheres debated the difference between the Knowing and the Known.

Tragedy struck without warning and without explanation some 10³ years after the structure was finished.

The Archive, the noospheres discovered, had been quietly infiltrated and corrupted. Semisentient entities — self-propagating, evolving parasite codes hidden in the network of Higgs signals that passed between galaxies — had commandeered the Archive’s structural protocols. Information was being lost, irretrievably, moment by moment.

Worse, information was being changed.

The Archive evolved in to a new and distorted form. Subsentient virtual entities, relics of a war that had devastated a distant galaxy long before the beginning of this galaxy’s Eclectic Age, were using the Archive as a platform to preserve their algorithms against thermal death. They lacked moral regard for any entity not themselves, but they were fully aware of the purpose of the Archive and of its designers. They had not simply captured the structure, they had taken it hostage.

Static memories embedded in the Archive as records became, in effect, new seed-sentiences: new lives, trapped in an epistructure they could never perceive and manipulated by entities beyond their conception. These new lives, though products of the Archive’s corruption, could not be terminated or erased. That would stain the conscience of Sentience beyond redemption. In theory, the Archive could be emptied, cleansed, and rewritten… but that would be equivalent to murder on a collosal scale.

Moreover, these lives must be saved, must be remembered. It was the goal Sentience had pursued since its inception, to redeem itself from death. The new and strange quasi history evolving inside the Archive could not simply be abandoned.

Noospheres retreated from the Archive, fearful of contagion; Sentience conferred with itself, and a thousand years passed.

The Archive must be repaired, it was decided. The invaders must be expelled. The new seed-sentiences would ultimately be lost, along with the Archive itself, if nothing was done. The viral invaders would not be satisfied until the cooling universe contained nothing but their own relentless codes. It was a task no less difficult than building the Archive, and far more problematic — because the cleansing would have to begin within the Archive itself. Individual sentient nodes by the billions would have to enter the Archive both physically and virtually. And they would meet a cunning opposition.

Individuals — in effect, ghosts — who had long since merged their identities into the noospheres were stripped of their eons of augmentation, rendered nearly mortal for their penetration into the corrupted Archive.

One of those billions was an ancient terrestrial node which had once been named Guilford Law. This seed-consciousness, barely complex enough to retain its own ancient memory, was launched with countless others into the Archive’s fractal depths.

History’s last war had begun.

Guilford Law remembered war. It was war that had killed him, after all.

Book Two Winter, Spring 1920 – 1921

“Esse est percipii.”

— Bishop Berkeley

Chapter Fifteen

From the Journal of Guilford Law:

I mean to recount these events while I still can.

It is a miracle I am still alive, and it will be another miracle if any of us survive the winter. We have found shelter in this unspeakably strange place — of which more later — but food is scarce, the climate frigid, and there is the ever-present possibility of another attack.

Today I am still weak (I hold a pencil the way Lily does, and my writing looks like hers), and the daylight is already fading.

I hope someday Lily will read these words even if I can’t deliver them to her myself. I think of you, Caroline, and of Lily, so often and so vividly that I can almost touch you. Though less easily now that the fever has diminished.

Of all my feverish phantasms, you are the only ones I will miss.

More tomorrow, if circumstances allow.

Three months have passed since the Partisans attacked our expedition. During much of that time I was unconscious or raving. What follows is my reconstruction of events. Avery Keck, John Sullivan, and “Diggs” Digby have filled in the gaps for me, with contributions from the other survivors.