was this simple phrase
THERE IS ANOTHER//
Another Ultimate Intelligence
up there
where time itself
creaks with age
Both were real
if (real)
means anything
Both were jealous gods
not beyond passion
not into cooperative play
Our UI spans galaxies
uses quasars for energy sources
the way you might
have a light snack
Our UI sees everything that is
and was
and will be
and tells us selected bits
so that
we may tell you
and in so doing
look a bit like UIs ourselves
Never underestimate/Ummon says/
the power of a few beads
and trinkets
and bits of glass
over avaricious natives]
[This other UI
has been there longer
evolving quite mindlessly/
an accident
using human minds for circuitry
the same way we had connived
with our deceptive All Thing
and our vampire dataspheres
but not deliberately/
almost reluctantly/
like self-replicating cells
which never wished to replicate
but have no choice in the matter
This other UI
had no choice
He is humankind-made/generated/forged
but no human volition accompanied his birth
He is a cosmic accident
As with our most deliberately consummated
Ultimate Intelligence/
this pretender finds time
no barrier
He visits the human past
now meddling/
now watching/
now not interfering/
now interfering with a will
which approaches pure perversity
but which actually
is pure naïveté
Recently
he has been quiescent
Millennia of your slow-time
have passed since your own UI
has made his shy advances
like some lonely choir boy
at his first dance]
[Naturally our UI
attacked yours
There is a war up there
where time creaks
which spans galaxies
and eons
back and forward
to the Big Bang
and the Final Implosion
Your guy was losing
He had no belly for it
Our Volatiles criedAnother reason
to terminate our predecessors
but the Stables voted caution
and the Ultimates did not look up
from their deus machinations
Our UI is simple, uniform, elegant in
its ultimate design
but yours is an accretion of god-parts/
over time/
an evolutionary compromise
The early holy men of humankind
were right
⟨How⟩ ⟨through accident⟩
⟨through sheer luck
or ignorance⟩
in describing its nature
Your own UI is essentially triune/
composed as it is
of one part Intellect/
one part Empathy/
and one part the Void Which Binds
Our UI inhabits the interstices
of reality/
inheriting this home from us
its creators
the way humankind has inherited
a liking for trees
Your UI
seems to make its home
on the plane where Heisenberg and Schrödinger
first trespassed
Your accidental Intelligence
appears not only to be the gluon
but the glue
Not a watchmaker
but a sort of Feynman gardener
tidying up a no-boundary universe
with his crude sum-over-histories rake/
idly keeping track of every sparrow fall
and electron spin
while allowing each particle
to follow every possible
track
in space-time
and each particle of humankind
to explore every possible
crack
of cosmic irony]
[Kwatz!]
[Kwatz!]
[Kwatz!]
[The irony is
of course
that in this no-boundary universe
into which we all were dragged/
silicon and carbon/
matter and antimatter/
Ultimate/
Volatile/
and Stable/
there is no need for such a gardener
since all that is
or was
or will be
begin and end at singularities
which make our farcaster web
look like pinpricks
(less than pinpricks)
and which break the laws of science
and of humankind
and of silicon/
tying time and history and everything that is
into a self-contained knot with neither
boundary nor edge
Even so
our UI wishes to regulate all this/
reduce it to some reason
less affected by the vagaries
of passion
and accident
and human evolution]
[To sum it up/
there is a war
such as blind Milton would kill to see
Our UI wars against your UI
across battlefields beyond even Ummon’s
imagination
Rather/ there
was
a war/
for suddenly a part of your UI
the less-than-sum-of entity/ self-thought of as
Empathy/
had no more stomach for it
and fled back through time
cloaking itself in human form/
not for the first time
The war cannot continue without your UI’s
wholeness
Victory by default is not victory for the only
Ultimate Intelligence
made by design
So our UI searches time for the runaway child of
its opponent
while your UI waits in idiot
harmony/
refusing to fight until Empathy is restored]
[The end of my story is simple
The Time Tombs are artifacts sent back to carry the Shrike/
Avatar/Lord of Pain/Angel of
Retribution/
half-perceived perceptions of an all-too-real
extension of our UI
Each of you was chosen to help with the opening
of the Tombs
and
the Shrike’s search for the hidden one
and
the elimination of the Hyperion Variable/
for in the space-time knot which our UI
would rule
no such variables will be allowed
Your damaged/ two-part UI
has chosen one of humankind to travel
with the Shrike
and witness its efforts
Some of the Core have sought to eradicate
humanity
Ummon has joined those who sought the second
path/
one filled with uncertainty for both races
Our group told Gladstone of
her choice/
humankind’s choice/
of certain extermination or entry down the black hole
of the Hyperion Variable and
warfare/
slaughter/
disruption of all unity/
the passing of gods/
but also the end of stalemate/
victory of one side or the other
if the Empathy third
of the triune
can be found and forced to return to the war
The Tree of Pain will call him
The Shrike will take him
The true UI will destroy him
Thus you have Ummon’s story]
Brawne looks at Johnny in the hell-light from the megalith’s glow. The egg-chamber is still black, the megasphere and universe beyond, opaqued to nonexistence. She leans forward until their temples touch, knowing that no thought can be secret here but wanting the sense of whispering:
—Jesus Christ, do you understand all of that?
Johnny raises soft fingers to touch her cheek:
—Yes.
—Part of some human-created Trinity is hiding out in the Web?
—The Web or elsewhere. Brawne, we do not have much time left here. I need some final answers from Ummon.
—Yeah. Me too. But let’s keep it from waxing rhapsodic again.
—Agreed.
—Can I go first, Johnny?
Brawne watches her lover’s analog bow slightly and make a you-first gesture and then she returns her attention to the energy megalith:
—Who killed my father? Senator Byron Lamia?
[Elements of the Core authorized it Myself included]
—Why? What did he do to you?
[He insisted on bringing Hyperion into the equation before it could be factored/predicted/absorbed]
—Why? Did he know what you just told us?
[He knew only that the Volatiles were pressing for quick
extinction
of humankind
He passed this knowledge
to his colleague
Gladstone]
—Then why haven’t you murdered her?
[Some of us have precluded
that possibility/inevitability
The time is right now
for the Hyperion Variable
to be played]
—Who murdered Johnny’s first cybrid? Attacked his Core persona?
[I did It was
Ummon’s will which prevailed]
—Why?
[We created him
We found it necessary to discontinue him
for a while
Your lover is a persona retrieved
from a humankind poet
now long dead
Except for the Ultimate Intelligence Project
no effort has been
so complicated
nor little understood
as this resurrection
Like your kind/
we usually destroy
what we cannot understand]
Johnny raises his fists toward the megalith:
—But there is another of me. You failed!
[Not failure You had to be destroyed
so that the other
might live]
—But I am not destroyed! cries Johnny.
Yes
You are]
The megalith seizes Johnny with a second massive pseudopod before Brawne can either react or touch her poet lover a final time. Johnny twists a second in the AI’s massive grip, and then his analog—Keats’s small but beautiful body—is torn, compacted, smashed into an unrecognizable mass which Ummon sets against his megalith flesh, absorbing the analog’s remains back into the orange-and-red depths of itself.
Brawne falls to her knees and weeps. She wills rage … prays for a shield of anger … but feels only loss.
Ummon turns his gaze on her. The egg-chamber ovoid collapses, allowing the din and electric insanity of the megasphere to surround them.
[Go away now
Play out the last
of this act
so that we may live
or sleep
as fate decrees]
—Fuck you! Brawne pounds the palm-platform on which she kneels, kicks and pummels the pseudoflesh beneath her. You’re a goddamned loser! You and all your fucking AI pals. And our UI can beat your UI any day of the week!
[That is
doubtful]
—We built you, Buster. And we’ll find your Core. And when we do we’ll tear your silicon guts out!
[I have no silicon guts/organs/internal components]
—And another thing, screams Brawne, still slashing at the megalith with her hands and nails. You’re a piss-poor storyteller. Not a tenth the poet that Johnny is! You couldn’t tell a straightforward tale if your stupid AI ass depended—
[Go away]
Ummon the AI megalith drops her, sending her analog tumbling and falling into the upless and downless crackling immensity of the megasphere.
Brawne is buffeted by data traffic, almost trod upon by AIs the size of Old Earth’s moon, but even as she tumbles and blows with the winds of dataflow, she senses a light in the distance, cold but beckoning, and knows that neither life nor the Shrike is finished with her.
And she is not finished with them.
Following the cold glow, Brawne Lamia heads home.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Are you all right, sir?”
I realized that I had doubled over in the chair, my elbows on my knees, my fingers curled through my hair, gripping fiercely, palms pressed hard against the sides of my head. I sat up, stared at the archivist.
“You cried out, sir. I thought that perhaps something was wrong.”
“No,” I said. I cleared my throat and tried again. “No, it’s all right. A headache.” I looked down in confusion. Every joint in my body ached. My comlog must have malfunctioned, because it said that eight hours had elapsed since I first entered the library.
“What time is it?” I asked the archivist. “Web standard?”
He told me. Eight hours had elapsed. I rubbed my face again, and my fingers came away slick with sweat. “I must be keeping you past closing time,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It is no problem,” said the little man. “I am pleased to keep the archives open late for scholars.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Especially today. With all of the confusion, there is little incentive to go home.”
“Confusion,” I said, forgetting everything for a moment … everything except the nightmarish dream of Brawne Lamia, the AI named Ummon, and the death of my Keats-persona counterpart. “Oh, the war. What is the news?”
The archivist shook his head:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I smiled at the archivist. “And do you believe that some ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’?”
The archivist did not smile. “Yes, sir, I do.”
I stood and moved past the vacuum-press display cases, not looking down at my handwriting on parchment nine hundred years old. “You may be right,” I said. “You may well be right.”
It was late; the parking lot was empty except for the wreck of my stolen Vikken Scenic and a single, ornate EMV sedan obviously handcrafted here on Renaissance Vector.
“Can I drop you somewhere, sir?”
I breathed in the cool night air, smelling the fish-and-spilled-oil scent of the canals. “No thanks, I’ll ’cast home.”
The archivist shook his head. “That may be difficult, sir. All of the public terminexes have been placed under martial law. There have been … riots.” The word was obviously distasteful to the little archivist, a man who seemed to value order and continuity a
bove most things. “Come,” he said, “I’ll give you a lift to a private farcaster.”
I squinted at him. In another era on Old Earth, he would have been the head monk in a monastery devoted to saving the few remnants of a classical past. I glanced at the old archives building behind him and realized that indeed he was just that.
“What is your name?” I asked, no longer caring if I should have known it because the other Keats cybrid had known it.
“Ewdrad B. Tynar,” he said, blinking at my extended hand and then taking it. His handshake was firm.
“I’m … Joseph Severn.” I couldn’t very well tell him that I was the technological reincarnation of the man whose literary crypt we had just left.
M. Tynar hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding, but I realized that to a scholar such as he, the name of the artist who was with Keats at his death would be no disguise.
“What about Hyperion?” I asked.
“Hyperion? Oh, the Protectorate world where the space fleet went a few days ago. Well, I understand that there’s been some trouble recalling the necessary warships. The fighting has been very fierce there. Hyperion, I mean. Odd, I was just thinking of Keats and his unfinished masterwork. Strange how these small coincidences seem to crop up.”
“Has it been invaded? Hyperion?”
M. Tynar had stopped by his EMV, and now he laid his hand on the palmlock on the driver’s side. Doors lifted and accordioned inward. I lowered myself into the sandalwood-and-leather smell of the passenger cell; Tynar’s car smelled like the archives, like Tynar himself, I realized, as the archivist reclined in the driver’s seat next to me.
“I don’t really know if it’s been invaded,” he said, sealing the doors and activating the vehicle with a touch and command. Under the sandalwood-and-leather scent, the cockpit had that new-car smell of fresh polymers and ozone, lubricants and energy which had seduced mankind for almost a millennium. “It’s so hard to access properly today,” he continued, “the datasphere is more overloaded than I’ve ever seen it. This afternoon I actually had to wait for a query on Robinson Jeffers!”
We lifted out and over the canal, right over a public square much like the one where I’d almost been killed earlier this day, and leveled off on a lower flyway three hundred meters above the rooftops. The city was pretty at night: most of the ancient buildings were outlined in old-fashioned glowstrips, and there were more street lamps than advertising holos. But I could see crowds surging in side streets, and there were Renaissance SDF military vehicles hovering over the main avenues and terminex squares. Tynar’s EMV was queried twice for ID, once by local traffic control and again by a human, FORCE-confident voice.
We flew on.
“The archives doesn’t have a farcaster?” I said, looking off in the distance to where fires seemed to be burning.