“It is working,” the Ghost said. “The photinos are coalescing. Soon, the equilibrium oscillations will be induced…”
A trickle of data started whispering in my head. Interpolations and feedback from my datastores, Eve’s Notebooks. Shadowy Virtuals glimmered around me: schematics of the moon, the photino star the Ghosts were building, little charts of growth rates, density-time fluctuations.
There was something odd. The projections of the soliton star’s formation — based on human mathematics — didn’t match up with what the Ghost had told me…
But I was still preoccupied with my hardening suspicions. I thought about prophecy.
Humans had built Michael Poole’s wormhole, and benefited from the fragments of data it had delivered: data from the ends of time. Perhaps the Ghosts, and other races, had achieved similar glimpses of the future.
But all such glimpses are fragmentary and incomplete.
Prophecy is possible using scientific laws, where sufficiently simple events are concerned: the eclipse of a sun, or the return of a long-period comet. And prophecy based in the more complex human arena has been used, after a fashion, for most of humanity’s recorded history. My Notebooks told me about actuarial tables, devices for predicting death rates, that even predated human spaceflight. The more computing power is available, the more detailed a prophecy is possible.
To spin out a future vision as detailed and granular as the one I’d been vouchsafed by Eve must have required computing power an order of magnitude more powerful than anything available to humanity.
Or to the Ghosts.
All at once the Ghosts were rich in processing power.
Suddenly, I saw it.
“You let it out,” I accused the Ambassador.
“Jack Raoul—”
“You let it out. The Planck Zero AI. You released it.”
“It proved possible to accelerate the production of Hawking radiation, the natural evaporation of the black hole within which the AI was contained, which—”
“Lethe. That AI was insane. You Ghosts may have destroyed us all. Ambassador, I’m going to file a full report about this. I’m going to get this operation shut down, and have human monitors placed in every Ghost research establishment from now on.”
“The AI is a powerful resource. Jack Raoul, we face cosmic obliteration. Even the Xeelee cannot shelter us. Surely the risk was justified. And as to the project, it is too advanced for—”
I was aware of agitation among the flock of watching Ghosts. They started withdrawing further from the moon.
An internal warning started to sound in my head. The Notebooks had come up with something they didn’t like. More Virtual schematics, primary-color projections, started filling up my vision.
The vents dug into the moon had started to glow, dull red. I saw molten rock bubble at the edge of one pit, its lip slumping into the cylindrical tunnel below. It was as if a fire burned in the moon’s core; light poured out into space, illuminating the construction debris which clustered around the moon, and glimmering off the hides of the watching Ghosts, turning them to beads of fire.
In the moon’s surrounding veil of dark matter mist, I saw shadowy shapes hurtle, agitated, birdlike.
…And Eve was beside me now. She was Ghost-transformed as I was, her long-boned face easily recognizable under the chrome.
She watched the metamorphosing moon, its fiery glow reflecting from her silvered eyes.
The Sink Ambassador twisted in alarm, its hide glowing red, chattering on many frequencies to its fellows.
“It isn’t stable. The photino star. Is it, Eve?”
“No,” she said dreamily, not taking her eyes off the moon. “The density of photinos is too high.”
“Yes.” That fit with what Eve’s Notebooks were telling me. “The high density at the core is stimulating photino decay. The free Klein-Gordon field the Ghosts want to create is collapsing. Imploding—”
Abruptly the Ghosts fled, including the Sink Ambassador, abandoning us; I saw their receding ships, shining threads against the intergalactic darkness.
The surface of the moon was almost entirely molten now. It was subsiding, collapsing inwards.
“The Ghosts thought they were creating a home for the photino birds,” I said. “But they were wrong. You knew that. They have made—”
“A bomb,” she said. “A dark matter bomb.”
“It’s you, isn’t it? The Planck Zero AI. Behind the mask of my wife—”
She pressed her face against my metallic chest.
My anger was gone. Only pity remained.
I embraced Eve, enfolding her within my arms. Her skin felt warm — impossibly so — human.
“But this will destroy you,” I said. “Whatever it is that sustains you, is in that moon.”
She turned to me, silver eyes empty, and smiled. I saw that she wore my ring on her finger.
The thing at the heart of the moon turned white, dimming the sickly glow of the Galaxy’s core.
The moon blew apart.
Molten rock, quivering droplets of it, showered up past us, patterning against my skin. I closed my mechanical eyes and huddled with Eve, waiting for the rocky storm to pass.
Eve — the Planck Zero AI — wasn’t destroyed. It proved possible to reconstruct some of it from the records and fragmented datastores left behind.
It was still sentient, but it was crippled. Its residual abilities were not much more than a human’s.
I took it — her — home.
Now, we spend most of our time in a simulation of our old apartment, in a Virtual never-never-land.
I’ve tried to figure out why she did what she did.
Already mad with the desolating quantum loneliness of her birth, she’d been brought out of her black hole prison, and was presented with all the Ghosts’ data on the future.
And, desperately intelligent, she suffered a vision of that future.
It was a vision of the destruction of all baryonic life, the desolate victory of the photino creatures: it was a rigid, logical and inescapable product of her own infinite intellect. It was a vision she couldn’t bear.
So — perhaps — she subverted the Ghosts’ hubristic experiments — which do, incidentally, seem to have been genuinely aimed at a peaceful rapprochement with the photino birds. She allowed the Ghosts to make a dark matter bomb. Perhaps she was trying to open up a war with the photino birds, a new front, with a weapon that even the Xeelee had never considered.
Or perhaps she sought, simply, her own destruction. Release, from the terrible burden of infinite knowledge.
Even she doesn’t know any longer.
As for myself, I can never know if Eve’s bleak vision — given to me in those startling, fragmented glimpses — represents the true future history of our Universe. Perhaps it was just some mad fiction, concocted by her huge but damaged soul. Or perhaps it is only one strand of the truth; perhaps that gloomy future can, in the end, be averted.
Otherwise, in just a few million years, all humankind will be extinct in this Universe. And all our technology and intelligence and courage won’t make a damn bit of difference in averting that fate.
If that’s true, it’s up to us to live as if it were not so.
I care for Eve, as best I can. We go on. What else is there for us to do?