For Adam it wasn’t at all incoherent gibberish. With each word read the wall in his consciousness fell with a crack and a roar of a ruptured dam, the truth uncontrollably rushed outside, and he spoke, spoke, even understanding that he shouldn’t do it, that he doomed Eve, that is Linda, to premature—though all the same inevitable—torment, but his own torment didn’t allow him to stop, and soon he even needed not to look at the bloody letters, just a view which filled with a pain the scars on his fingers.
“We named it dark energy. Energy of the vacuum which produces particles and antiparticles, the force interfering with the recession of galaxies. In general, all this is true. But its true name is Despair—the essence of the universe and its basic force. Once people considered that the primary law of the universe was the law of nondecrease of entropy. But, be it so, any evolution, any transformation from simple to complex, from interstellar gas to stars and planets, from inorganic molecules to live cells and organisms, would be impossible. Then it had been postulated that self-organizing processes can proceed in unclosed systems where there is an energy inflow from the outside. But that meant that the universe itself is a unclosed system, otherwise from where can it receive the energy? Now we know what this energy is and what law of the universe is really primary: the law of increase of the despair. It is possible to say that the despair is the force making galaxies to scatter in horror, though this run into eternal void will not help…
“But unless galaxies can feel anything?” interrupted Eve, whose consciousness still resisted memory. “They are not alive!”
“It’s only a terminology issue. Can we say whether a stone feels heat or cold? But after all they operate on it quite objectively, forcing it to crack or even to melt. But, really, inanimate objects are incapable of feeling despair to the full. Therefore, all processes in the universe develop, eventually, in the direction of the evolution of life and sense. For life, and in particular sense, is nothing else but despair capable of realizing itself and thus to complete the positive feedback and to realize the unique purpose and sense of existence of the universe—the achievement of absolute, infinite despair.”
“But after all despair is just an emotion! Arising in our brain in reply to strokes of misfortune. It is subjective! How can it be any fundamental cosmic force?”
“If a person is forcefully hit on his head, he sees a short flash—the proverbial stars before eyes. It is a subjective illusion, but it doesn’t mean that an objective light doesn’t exist somewhere. This is the analogy of that despair which we feel in common life. And now compare this flash to a necessity to look with the lidless eyes, with the eyes capable neither of blinking nor of looking away—to look at the Sun, no, at thousand, trillions suns, at all the stars of the universe simultaneously! In comparison with this torment, with the force of despair, on 120 orders of magnitude surpassing the force of gravitation, any of the most horrible physical suffering is only a desired strategy at least somehow to distract, to get relief at least for a moment! And we, we ourselves, drew it nearer! Developing science, improving our mind, aspiring to comprehend the world—that is, to comprehend the despair… Though wise men still in the ancient time smelled a rat and warned others, who increases knowledge increases sorrow. And the statistics accurately showed that the highest level of suicide is in the most advanced countries. But we didn’t come to these conclusions even when ‘Hyperion-1’ has returned. The next triumph of human science… automatics completed its mission faultlessly… and then the scientists who worked with the returned probe started one after another to commit suicide, go mad or slip into a coma. And besides this, they have felt only residual emanations of dark energy. But the instruments registered no threat to life for the whole flight time, and even the samples of protozoa, worms and insects onboard were okay. Their organisms were too primitive to feel despair. Therefore, certainly, the fate of scientists was hushed up ‘in order to avoid a sensation in the yellow press that would damage the image of the program’; explaining all as a series of tragic coincidences. But nevertheless, before sending humans to the stars, they have sent one more starprobe with a chimpanzee onboard. And ‘Hyperion-2’ has disappeared without a trace. If it had returned with a dead or mad ape, possibly, our flight would not have taken place. But it has simply disappeared, and it has come to nobody’s mind that the reason could be in the live being who had no access to the control systems. Everything was written off as a failure of the onboard computer. The launch of ‘Hyperion-3’ had been too widely advertized already, and a great deal of money had been invested in the project, so it was too late to give it up. But because of this series of accidents, some changes nonetheless have been made in the flight program. It was planned from the very beginning that people wouldn’t land on massive planets of Gliese 581. This role has been alloted to biorobots created and modified according to arising tasks directly onboard, in a biosynthesizer with the protoplasm stock, placed on the second from below level. The miracles of Earth gene engineering… The crew should only process the data collected and delivered to them. But under the pressure of skeptics who pointed out the dangers of the flight for people, it was decided that the most of this data would be processed on Earth. The ship had been already designed and constructed for eleven crewmen, but only two have flown. You still haven’t remembered, Linda? There are not twelve corpses here, but much more, this ship is full of them. But actually there is nobody here—except us!”
“You… you’re trying to tell me that all these dead persons are biorobots?”
“No, no, everything is much worse! Our technologies don’t allow us to create exact copies of a human! Biological models for which our synthesizer is designed are too primitive. But IT doesn’t need an intermediary in the form of a synthesizer, for IT is itself the life creating force. And it won’t release us.”
“It?”
“Despair! Aren’t you listing? Despair! It is capable of organizing life from lifeless matter, but that requires millions of years because it doesn’t have its own mind. But with such a gift as an already-existing protoplasm all happens much faster. All these creeping creatures are the life which has evolved here onboard! Consequently they are so ugly and clumsy. They didn’t pass through natural selection, apparently. The majority of them are even not capable of eating and breeding. But the main thing is both of us, Linda, we! The microcosm is a similar to the macrocosm! A soul actually exists, and it is not an ethereal angel with wings. It is a steady matrix of dark energy, or, that is to say, a structured despair. For the whole time that we tried to investigate dark energy in depths of space, it was in ourselves! But the accuracy of our instruments was insufficient to detect it. We after all searched only for the gravitational component, which is ten to the one hundred twentieth power weaker than the true essence. The Kalkrin generator was required to transport us to the phase of dark matter and thus to tune our despair to resonate with the great despair of the universe. The theory predicted that switching off the generator would lead to a spontaneous return to the initial condition, but it was true only for an inanimate probe. When there are animate beings onboard, the Kalkrin generator only starts the process which then becomes self-sustaining. In a dark phase it is not necessary for us to eat, to drink, even to breathe. The dark energy feeds us directly.”
“I breathe!” the woman interrupted.