“So their children gain all knowledge the moment they’re born?”
“Children?” The captain laughed again. “They don’t have any children.”
“So where are the kids?”
“Did I mention that families vanished long ago?”
“You mean, they’re the last generation?”
“‘Generation’ doesn’t exist as a concept anymore.”
The ambassador’s amazement turned to befuddlement, but she strove to understand. And she did, a little. “You mean they live forever?”
“When a bodily organ fails, it’s replaced with a new one. When the brain fails, its information is copied out and into a transplant. After several centuries of these replacements, memory is all that’s left of an individual. Who’s to say whether they’re young or elderly? Maybe they think of themselves as old, and that’s why they haven’t come to meet us. Of course, they can have children if they desire, by cloning or in the old-fashioned way. But few do. This generation’s survived for more than three hundred years and will continue to do so. Can you imagine how this determines the form of their society? The knowledge, beauty, and longevity we dreamed of is easily attainable in this age.”
“It sounds like the ideal society. What else do they desire but can’t attain?”
“Nothing. But precisely because they have it all they have lost everything. It’s hard for us to understand, but to them it’s a real concern. This is far from an ideal society.”
The ambassador’s confusion turned to contemplation. The six suns were heading west and soon dipped below the horizon. When only two remained, Venus rose, and then rays of the true sun’s dawn spread from the east. Its gentle light gave the ambassador a smidgen of comfort; some things, at least, were unchanging in the universe.
“Five hundred years isn’t all that long. Why have things changed so much?” she asked, as much to the whole world as to the captain.
“The acceleration of human progress. Compare our fifty years of progress to the previous five centuries. It’s been another five centuries, which might as well be fifty millennia. Do you still think migrants can adapt?”
“And what’s the end point of this acceleration?” the ambassador asked, eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no answer to that question in the sum total of human knowledge you possess?”
“The strongest feeling I’ve gotten from my time in this age is that we’re beyond the time when knowledge can explain everything.”
“We’ll continue onward!” the ambassador decided. “Take that chip with you, as well as their device for importing knowledge into the brain.”
The ambassador saw Hua again before entering the haze of supersleep, only a glance after 620 years, a captivating, heartbreaking glance, but it anchored her to home within the lonely flow of time. She dreamed of a cloud of dust drifting over the crystal ground—was this the form his bones now took?
THE TREK
Outside of perception, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and time slipped past in the outside world.
… 620 years… 650 years… 700 years… 750 years… 800 years… 850 years… 900 years… 950 years… 1,000 years.
STOP 3: THE INVISIBLE AGE
The sealed door to the freezer rumbled open and for a third time the ambassador approached the threshold of an unknown age. This time she had mentally prepared herself for a brand-new era, but she discovered that the changes weren’t as great as she had imagined.
The crystal carpet that blanketed the ground was still present and six suns still shone in the sky. But the impression given by this world was entirely different from the Lobby Age. First of all, the crystal carpet seemed dead; although there was still light in the depths, it was far dimmer, and footsteps no longer tinkled on its surface, nor did gorgeous patterns appear. Four of the six suns had gone dim, the dull red they emitted serving only to mark their position but doing nothing to light the world below. The most conspicuous change was the dust. A thin layer covered all the crystal. The sky wasn’t spotless, but held gray clouds, and the horizon was no longer a ruled line. It all contributed to a feeling that the previous age’s lobby had gone vacant, and the natural world outside had begun to invade.
“Both worlds refuse to take migrants,” the advance-team captain said.
“Both worlds?”
“The visible and invisible worlds. The visible world is the one we know, different though it may be. People like us, even if most of them are no longer primarily formed of organic material.”
“There’s no one to be seen on the plain, just like last time,” the ambassador said, straining to look.
“People haven’t needed to walk on the ground for several hundred years. See—” The captain pointed at a place in the air, where, through the dust and clouds, the ambassador saw indistinct flying objects, little more than a cluster of black dots at this distance. “—those could be planes or people. Any machine might be someone’s body. A ship in the ocean, for instance, could be a body, and the computer memory directing it might be a copy of a human brain. People generally have several bodies, one of which is like ours. And that one, although it’s the most fragile, is the most important, perhaps due to a sort of nostalgia.”
“Are we dreaming?” the ambassador murmured.
“Compared to this visible world, the invisible world is the real dream.”
“I’ve got an idea of what that might be. People don’t even use machines for bodies.”
“Right. The invisible world is stored in a supercomputer, and each individual is a program.”
The captain pointed ahead to a peak, glittering metallic blue in the sunlight, that stood alone on the horizon. “That’s a continent in the invisible world. Do you remember those little quantum memory chips from last time? It’s an entire mountain of them. You can imagine, or maybe you can’t, the capacity of that computer.”
“What sort of life is it on the inside, when people are nothing more than a collection of quantum impulses?”
“That’s why you can do whatever you please, and create whatever you desire. You can build an empire of a hundred billion people and reign as king, or you could experience a thousand different romances, or fight in ten thousand wars and die a hundred thousand times. Everyone is master of their personal world, and more powerful than a god. You could even create your own universe with billions of galaxies containing billions of planets, each that can be whatever different world you desire, or that you dare not desire. Don’t worry about not having the time to experience it all. At the computer’s speed, centuries pass every second. On the inside, the only limit is your imagination. In the invisible world, imagination and reality are the same thing. When something appears in your imagination, it becomes reality. Of course, as you said, reality in quantum memory is a collection of impulses. The people of this age are gradually transitioning to the invisible world, and more of them now live there than in the visible world. Even though a copy of the brain can be in both worlds, the invisible world is like a drug. No one wants to come back once they’ve experienced life there. Our world with its cares is like hell for them. The invisible world has the upper hand and is gradually assuming control of the whole world.”