The others seem to know. Maybe the sun god has delivered them from slavery or maybe it's just fried their brains, but something's changed for them. Maybe it's me. Maybe all the edits that customized me for deep space and deep time have—desensitized me, somehow. Maybe spore implants put out some kind of unique interference that jams the signal.
Kai was right. This is a fucking waste.
Autonomy's afterburners kick in. Acceleration presses me into my seat. The sun still writhes and blinds on all sides (although the horizon curves now, as we climb on a homeward course). Under other circumstances the sight would terrify and inspire; but now when I avert my eyes it's not in awe, but disappointment. My gaze drops to the back of my left hand, bound at the wrist, clenched reflexively around the tip of the armrest. Even my endocrine system is unimpressed; of the 864 pores visible there, only 106 are actively sweating. You'd think that scraping the side of a sun would provoke a bit more—
Hold on…
I can't be seeing this. Human eyes don't have the rez. And yet—this is not a hallucination. Each pore, each duct, each fine fuzzy body hair is exactly where it belongs. I can confirm the location of each via independent lines of reasoning.
A phrase pops into my head: Data visualization.
I'm not seeing this. I'm inferring it: Deep parts of the brain, their computations too vast to fit into any conscious scratchpad, are passing notes under the table. They’ve turned my visual cortex into a cheat sheet. I can see the microscopic stubble of the seat cover. I see the wings of butterflies fluttering in the solar corona, hear every heartbeat in this capsule.
I see a universe of spiderwebs, everything connected to everything else. I see the future choking on an ever-increasing tangle of interaction and constraint. I look back and see those strands attenuating behind me: light cone shrinking, cause decoupling from effect, every collapsed probability wave recovering its potential way back when anything was possible.
I step back, step outside, and take it all in.
I see chaos without form and void. I see ignition.
I see Planck time emerge from the aftermath.
I watch the electronuclear force collapse into a litter of building blocks: gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces strong and weak. I see the amplituhedron assemble itself from closed doors and roads not taken. So much potential lost there, so many gates slammed shut in a single picosecond. The laws of physics congeal and countless degrees of freedom disappear forever. The future is a straitjacket: every flip of an electron cinches the straps a little more, every decision to go here instead of there culls the remaining options.
I see the tangled threads of my own future, increasingly constrained, converging on a common point. I can't see it from here, but it doesn't really matter. The threads are enough. They stretch out over eons.
I never really believed it before.
The others sob, cry out in rapture, bite down on chattering teeth. I laugh aloud. I have never been so full of hope, of certainty, as I am now. I unclench my hands from around the armrests, turn them palms-up.
The scars have vanished from my wrists.
I'm born again.
***
"You do understand: it has to be your choice."
I was four when I heard that for the first time. I didn't even have my inlays yet, none of us did; they had to gather us together in the same place and talk to us in groups, like we were in some old-time schoolhouse from another century.
They showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines, the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of Human effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings, which made us feel a little better but didn't really change anything.
"We were running out of time," our tutor said—our very first tutor, and to this day I can't remember her name although I do remember that one of her eyes was blue and the other amber. "We saw it coming but we didn't really believe it." She introduced us to the rudiments of the Hawking Manifesto, to the concept of the Great Filter, to all those ominous harbingers that hung against the background of Human history like some increasing and overdue debt. Year after year the interest compounded, the bill was coming due, we were speeding at a brick wall but nobody seemed to be able to slow us down so what was the point of talking about it?
Until the first Hawking Hoop. Until that first hydrogen ion got from here to there without ever passing it through the space between. Until the discovery of nonrelativistic wormholes lit the faint hope that a few of us might yet reach other nests out there, yet unfouled.
"But it won't work," I blurted, and our tutor turned to me and said "Why's that, Sunday?"
If I had been a little older, a little faster even, I could have rattled off the reasons: because it didn't matter how quickly they grew us up and shipped us out, it didn't matter that our escape hatches could bridge lightyears in an instant. We were still here, and it would take centuries to get anywhere else, and even magic bridges need something to anchor them at both ends. Everything we'd just learned about our own kind—all the species wiped out, all the tipping points passed, all the half-assed half-solutions that never seemed to stick past a single election cycle—none of it left any hope for a global initiative spanning thousands of years. We just weren't up for it.
But they hadn't made us smarter; they'd only sped us up. My overclocked little brain may have been running at twice its chronological age, but how much can even an eight-year-old grasp about the willful blindness of a whole species? I knew the gut truth of it but I didn't know the words. So all I could do was say again, stupidly, "It's too late. We're, like you said. Out of time…"
Nobody said anything for a bit. Kai shot me a dirty look. But when our tutor spoke again, there was no reproach in her voice: "We're not doing this for us, Sunday."
She turned to the whole group. "That's why we're not building the Nexus on Earth, or even near it. We're building it so far out in space so it can outlast whatever we do to ourselves. So it can be—waiting, for whoever comes after.
"We don't know what we'll be in a thousand years, or a million. We could bomb ourselves into oblivion the day after tomorrow. We're like that. But you can't lose hope because we're like this too, we can reach for the stars. And even if we fall into savagery overnight, we'll have centuries to climb back up before you check in on us again. So maybe one time you'll build a gate and nothing will come through—but the next time, or the time after, you'll get to meet angels. You never know—but you can see the future, every last one of you. You can see how it all turns out. If you want.
"It's your decision."
We turned then at the sound of two hands clapping. A man stood in the doorway, stoop-shouldered, eyes mournful as a basset hound's above the incongruous smile on his face. Our tutor flushed the tiniest bit at his applause, lifted an arm in acknowledgement. "I'd like you all to meet Dr. Sawada. You'll be getting to know him very well over the next few years. If you could follow him now, he has some things he'd like to show you."
We stood, and began to collect our stuff.
"And ten thousand years from now—"