“…Come back,” Geador said.
Her defiance was dissipating.
She understood nothing about herself. But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to be unhappy.
There wasn’t anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn’t that the purpose of existence?
So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.
The universe would grow far older before she woke again.
“…Flee! Faster! As fast as you can…!”
There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.
And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.
One of those flecks was Anlic.
In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.
Transient identities clustered around her. “What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed.” They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.
The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?
She looked back.
There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.
It was a structure that spanned the universe.
She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.
But — she found, when she looked into her soul — her questions remained unanswered.
She called out: “Geador?”
A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.
“…You are Anlic.”
“Geador?”
“I have Geador’s memories.”
That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.
“We are in danger, Anlic. You must come.”
She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. “Is that Mine One?”
“No,” he said sadly. “Mine One was long ago, child.”
“How long ago?”
“Time is nested…”
From this vantage, the era of man’s first black hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself — the star-burning dawn — was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang.
“What is happening here, Geador?”
“There is no time — ”
“Tell me.”
The universe had ballooned, fueled by time, and its physical processes had proceeded relentlessly.
Just as each galaxy’s stars had dissipated, leaving a rump that had collapsed into a central black hole, so clusters of galaxies had broken up, and the remnants fell inward to cluster-scale holes. And the clusters in turn collapsed into supercluster-scale holes — the largest black holes to have formed naturally, with masses of a hundred trillion stars.
These were the cold hearths around which mankind now huddled.
“But,” said Geador, “the supercluster holes are evaporating away — dissipating in a quantum whisper, like all black holes. The smallest holes, of stellar mass, vanished when the universe was a fraction of its present age. Now the largest natural holes, of supercluster mass, are close to exhaustion as well. And so we must farm them.
“Look at the City.” He meant the universe-spanning net, the rippling surfaces within.
The City was a netted sphere. It contained giant black holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They had been deliberately assembled. And they were merging, in a hierarchy of more and more massive holes. Life could subsist on the struts of the City, feeding off the last trickle of free energy.
Mankind was moving supercluster black holes, coalescing them in hierarchies all over the reachable universe, seeking to extend their lifetimes. It was a great challenge.
Too great.
Sombrely, Geador showed her more.
The network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense object had punched out from the inside, ripping and twisting the struts. The tips of the broken struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network, as if burning. Beyond the damaged network she could see the giant coalescing holes, their horizons distorted, great frozen waves of infalling matter visible in their cold surfaces.
This was an age of war: an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. Great rivers of mind were guttering, drying.
“This is the Conflux. How can there be war?”
Geador said, “We are managing the last energy sources of all. We have responsibility for the whole of the future. With such responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict.” She sensed his gentle, bitter humor. “We have come far since the Afterglow, Anlic. But in some ways we have much in common with the brawling argumentative apes of that brief time.”
“Apes…? Why am I here, Geador?”
“You’re an eddy in the Conflux. We all wake up from time to time. It’s just an accident. Don’t trouble, Anlic. You are not alone. You have us.”
Deliberately she moved away from him. “But I am not like you,” she said bleakly. “I do not recall the Afterglow. I don’t know where I came from.”