The cephalopod hab dwindled in the softscreen image, turning, receding.
“So where is everybody?” Malenfant snapped.
Cornelius turned to him, looking lost. “You’re not listening. There is no more. When proton decay cuts in, nothing is left: no dead stars, no rogue asteroids like Cruithne, no cold planets, no geodesic empires. This far downstream, all the ordinary matter has disappeared, the last black holes evaporated. The universe has swollen, its material stretched unimaginably thin.
“Even if the black hole farmers had tried to gather more material to replace what decayed away, they would have been beaten by the time scales. Matter was decaying faster than it could be gathered and used to record information, thoughts, life. And when their structure failed, the last black hole must have evaporated.” He looked misty. “Of course they must have tried. Fought to the last. It must have been magnificent.”
Emma studied Malenfant. “You’re disappointed. But we’ve seen so much time. So much room for life—”
“But,” Malenfant said, “I hoped for eternity.”
Cornelius sighed. “The universe will presumably expand forever, on to infinity. But we know of no physical processes that will occur beyond this point.”
Emma said, “And all life, of any form, is extinct. Right?”
“Yes.”
“In that case,” Emma said softly, “who is Sheena talking to?”
Sheena was blurred with distance now, her habitat a golden planet only dimly visible in the light of the robot’s failing lamps. Maybe Emma’s imagination was projecting something on her, like the face of the man in the Moon.
But still—
“I’m sure I can see her signing,” she said.
“My God,” Malenfant said. “You’re right.”
Emma frowned. “There must be someone here. Because the portal’s here. And it called to us — right? — through a relay of portals, upstream through the zoom factors, to the present. Maybe it called to Sheena, and brought her here.”
“She’s right,” Cornelius said, wondering. “Of course she’s right. There has to be an entity here, a community, manipulating the neutrino bath and sending signals to the past.”
“So where are they getting the energy from, to compute, to think?”
Cornelius looked uncomfortable; obsessively he worked his softscreen, scrolling through lists of references. “It’s very speculative. But it’s possible you could sustain computation without expending energy. We have theoretical models…
“What actually uses up energy during computation is discarding information. If you add two numbers, for instance, clearing out the original numbers from your memory store eats up energy. But if your computation is logically reversible — if you never discard information — you can drive down your processing costs to arbitrarily small values.”
“There has to be a catch,” Malenfant said. “Or somebody would have patented it.”
Cornelius nodded. “We don’t know any way of interacting with the outside universe without incurring a loss. No way of inputting or outputting data. If you want to remain lossless, you have to seal yourself off, in a kind of substrate. But then, nothing significant is going to change, ever again. So what is the use of perception?”
“Then what’s left?”
“Memory. Reflection. There is no fresh data. But there may be no end to the richness of understanding.”
Malenfant said, “If these ultimate downstreamers are locked into the substrate, how can Sheena talk to them?”
“Sheena is a refugee from the deepest past,” Cornelius said. “Perhaps they feel she is worth the expenditure of some of their carefully hoarded energy. They must be vast,” he said dreamily. “The last remnant particles orbit light-years apart. A single mind might span the size of a Galaxy, vast and slow as an empire. But nothing can hurt them now. They are beyond gravity’s reach, at last immune to the Heat Death.”
Emma said, “And these are our ultimate children? These wispy ghosts? The manipulation of structures spanning the universe, the endless contest of ingenuity versus entropy — was
it all for this?”
“That’s the deal,” Cornelius said harshly. “What else is there?”
“Purpose,” Emma said simply. “We’re losing her.”
Sheena was drifting out of the picture.
Cornelius tapped his console. “The firefly is nearly out of attitude-control gas.”
Every few minutes the beach ball drifted through the frame of the softscreen as the firefly’s helpless roll carried it around. The image was dim, blurred, at the extreme range of the failing camera. Emma took to standing close to the softscreen frame, staring at the squid’s image, trying to read any last signs.
It’s like a wake, she thought.
“We have to consider our next step,” Cornelius murmured.
Malenfant frowned. “What next step?”
“Look at the image. Look at it. We’ve found an artifact, a non-terrestrial artifact, on that asteroid. Exactly where the down-streamers pointed us. And they used it to teach us about the future: the trillions upon trillions of years that await us, if we can only find a way around the Carter catastrophe, which must be possible. My God, think of it. We caught the barest glimpse today, a flyby of the future. What if we established monitoring stations in each of those downstream islands? Think of what we’d achieve, what we’d see.
“We have to retrieve that artifact. If we can’t get it off the asteroid, we have to study it in situ. Malenfant, we have to send people to Cruithne. And we must show this to Michael.”
A look of unaccountable fear crossed Malenfant’s face.
In the softscreen Sheena was a blurred patch of light, shadows moving across her sides. Sheena signed once more — Emma struggled to see — and then the screen turned a neutral gray.
“It’s over,” Cornelius said. “The firefly’s dead. And so is Sheena.”
“No,” Emma said. “No, I don’t think so.”
Somehow, she knew, the Sheena understood what was happening to her. For the last thing Sheena had said, the last thing Emma could recognize before the image failed, was a question.
Will I dream?
Maura Della:
Open journal. October 22,2011.
I’ve never forgotten the first time I flew the length of Africa. The huge empty deserts, the mindless blankets of green life, the scattered humans clinging to coasts and river valleys.
I’m a city girl. I used to think the human world was the whole world. That African experience knocked a hole in my confidence of the power of humans, of us, to change things, to build, to survive. The truth is that humans have barely made an impression on Earth — and Earth itself is a mote in a hostile universe. This shaped my thinking. If humanity’s hold on Earth is precarious, then, damn it, we have to work to make it less so.
It’s only a generation since we’ve been able to see the whole Earth. And now, it seems, we can see the whole future, and what we must do to survive. And I hope we can cope.
I admit, though, I found the whole thing depressing.
It is of course the logical conclusion of my own ambition, which is that, on the whole, the human race should seek not to destroy itself — in fact, that it is our destiny to take over from the blind forces of inanimate matter and guide the future of the cosmos.
It’s just it never occurred to me before that, in the end, all there will be out there to conquer is rabble, the cooling rains of the universe.