Darwinia

But Sentience Itself was mortal, and so was the Milky Way Galaxy, and so was the universe at large! He uttered a few phrases about “particle decay” and “heat death” that I followed only vaguely. The sum of it was that matter itself would eventually die. With all the intelligence at their disposal, the noospheres devised a way to prolong their existence beyond that point. And they contrived to build an “Archive,” a sum of all sentient history, which could be consulted not only by the noospheres themselves but by similar entities embedded in other, inconceivably distant galaxies.

So one enemy was Time, and that enemy had been, if not conquered, at least rendered toothless.

The other enemy he called psilife, from the Greek letter psi, for “pseudo.”

Psilife was the ultimate result of attempts to mimic evolution in machines.

Machines, he said, could achieve consciousness, within certain limits. (I think he used these words — “consciousness” and “machines” — in a technical sense, but I didn’t press him.) Both organic and true machine consciousness utilized something he called “quantum indeterminacy,” whereas psilife was a kind of mathematics.

Psilife produced “system parasites,” or what he called — as nearly as I can repeat it — “mindless Algol Rhythms preying on complexity, inhabiting it and then devouring it.”

These Algol Rhythms did not hate sentient beings any more than the hunter wasp hates the tarantula in which it deposits its eggs. Psilife inhabited sentient “systems” and devoured sentience itself. It used communication and thought as a means of manufacturing copies of itself, which would copy themselves in turn, and so ad infinitum.

And psilife, thought not conventionally sentient and without individuality, could emulate these qualities — could act with a kind of concentrated if antlike intelligence, a blind cunning. Imagine if you can a vast intelligence utterly devoid of understanding.

Psilife had arisen at various times and places throughout the universe. It had threatened Sentience and had been beaten back, though not to extinction. The Archive was thought to be impermeable to penetration by psilife; the decay of conventional matter would mean the end as well of these virulent Algol Rhythms.

But that wasn’t the case.

The Archive was corrupted by psilife.

The Archive.

Caroline, what do you suppose would constitute the ultimate history, from a god’s-eye view?

Not someone’s interpretation of the past, however thoughtful and objective. Nor could it be the past itself, which is difficult to consult in any direct and simple fashion.

No, the ultimate practical history book would be history in a looking glass, the past re-created faithfully in some accessible way, to be opened like a book in all its original tongues and dialects; a faithful working model, but with all the empty spaces removed for the purpose of simplification, and accessible to Mind at Large in a fashion that wouldn’t alter or disturb the book itself.

The Archive was static, because history doesn’t change, but it was swept at long intervals by what the picket called a “Higgs field,” which he compared to a phonograph needle following the groove of a recording. The record doesn’t change, but a dynamic event — the music — is coaxed out of a fixed object.

In a sane world, of course, the music is identical each time the record is played. But what if you put a Mozart symphony on the phonograph and it turned into Die Zauberflöte halfway through?

Dazed as I was, I could see where this was headed.

The picket’s World War was the Mozart symphony. The conversion of Europe was Die Zauberflöte.

“You’re telling me we’re inside this Archive?”

He nodded calmly.

I shivered. “Does that mean — are you telling me that I’m a sort of history book — or a page, at least, or a paragraph?”

“You were meant to be,” he said.

This was an awful lot to absorb, of course, even in a receptive state. And, Caroline, when I think of you reading this… you must be certain I’ve gone mad.

And maybe you’re right. I would almost prefer to believe it myself. But I wonder whether this letter is really addressed to you… to you, I mean, to Caroline in Australia… or to that other Caroline, the Caroline whose image I carried into the wilderness, the Caroline who sustained me there.

Maybe she’s not altogether extinct, that Caroline. Maybe she’s reading over your shoulder.

Do you grasp the enormity of what this specter told me?

He suggested — in broad daylight and in the plainest language — that the world around me, the world you and I inhabit, is nothing more than a sustained illusion inside a machine at the end of time.

This went far beyond what I could easily accept, despite all my experience with Mssrs. Burroughs, Verne, and Wells.

“I can’t make it any more plain,” he said, “or ask you to do more than consider the possibility.”