Manifold: Time "This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be. In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years. Everywhere they found life. Nowhere did they find mind - save what they brought with them or created - no other against which human advancement could be tested. With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age - the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind - were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow. Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time. The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal. There was despair and loneliness. There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle. The great rivers of mind guttered and dried. But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old. And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this. Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final downstreamers - dogged, all but insane - reached to the deepest past. And - oh. Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting-"
A brief description of original DS.
Manifold Time - The siblings found new ways to control the firefly robots. They had begun to send firefly robots to explore the asteroid, places neither Sheena 5 nor even Sheena 6 had seen. They signed pictures to each other Sheena 6 couldn't recognize: great starburst explosions, squid writhing and dying. It seemed they had found something on the far side of the asteroid. Something strange. They would not discuss it with her. When she sent a firefly robot crawling over there to investigate, they turned it around and sent it back. The siblings took to wearing sigils on their chromatophore-rich hides. Bright circles. Dan told her they were blue. -
The offspring of genetically engineered squid are also being modified with super intelligence by the Downstreamers, possibly signifying that this phenomenon affects every intelligent lifeform in the universe (remember, humanity is alone in this universe, the genetically engineered squid are the only other sapient beings at this point in the timeline).
Manifold: Time -
It was an arc, bright blue. It seemed utterly smooth, geometrically pure. It stretched from one side of the frame to the other, obviously artificial.
...
"Holy shit," Malenfant said. "It's an artifact, isn't it?"
"That," Cornelius said, "is what our AWOL squid have dug out on Cruithne. What you see is only part of the structure. After sending this the firefly was turned back. I can show you an image of the whole thing." He tapped at his softscreen. "Taken from the ground, however. Distressingly remote, blurred."
...
Standing in a pit, deep and neatly round, there was a structure. It was a blue circle. Overenlarged, it was just a ring of blocky pixels. It was obviously the extension of the arc the firefly had approached. She had no way of gauging its size. There were squid habs clustered around the circle, golden splashes, not touching it directly. Within the circle itself there was only darkness.
"It's about thirty feet tall. We tried bouncing radar and laser signals off the artifact. It doesn't have the same reflective properties as the rest of the asteroid. In fact we don't seem to be getting any radar echo at all. It's hard to be definitive. The clutter from the surrounding surface-"
Malenfant said, "So what does that mean?"
"Maybe it's perfectly absorbent. Or maybe it's a hole."
Malenfant frowned. "A hole? What kind of hole?"
"An infinitely deep one." Cornelius smiled. "We're looking for a better explanation. We've also detected other anomalies. Radiation, high-energy stuff. Some oddities, pions and positrons. We think there must be high-energy processes going on there."He shrugged. "It doesn't seem to reflect light. That blue glow comes from the substance itself. It has no spectral lines. Just a broad-spectrum glow."
Emma shook her head. "I don't understand."
"If it were made of atoms," he said patiently, "any kind of atoms, it would emit precise frequencies, because the electrons in atoms jump between quantized energy levels."
"So this isn't made of atoms," Dan said, wondering.
-
Basic description of the Downstreamer time portal.
Manifold: Time - (a lot of stuff here, so I'll be abridging more to remove irrelevant/redundant dialogue and description. Page transitions will be indicated.)
"We papered the walls with softscreens. Not quite immersive VR. Much of the imagery comes directly from the various camera feeds we're managing to operate up there. The rest is software extrapolation."
...
"An hour ago this happened." He tapped at a desk surface.
...
Malenfant said, "That's our robot?"
"No. Not ours. Just watch."
...
"It's a squid," Emma said.
...
"Watch what happens now."
The firefly, with a neat pulse of microrockets, leapt through the portal. It was briefly dwarfed by the great blue circle. Then it disappeared; Emma glimpsed a red flash. The cables that trailed back to the beach ball oscillated, but they did not grow slack. The golden beach ball sat on the surface, quivering.
... (page 191)
"Where did the firefly go? Did it come out the other side of the hoop?"
"We think so," Cornelius said. "But the other side doesn't seem to be on Cruithne."
There was a long silence. The squid in the golden beach ball jetted back and forth, patient. Then the cables grew taut again and began dragging the beach ball forward. Watching the cables disappear into the artifact, apparently not connected to anything, was eerie. It took just seconds for the beach ball to complete its series of awkward, slow bounces to the blue circle. Then, after a single liquid impact with the blue circle itself, the beach ball shimmered through the hoop. As the curved golden wall hit the dark disc, it seemed to flatten out, Emma thought, quickly reddening to darkness. At last the beach ball was squashed to an ellipse, dimmed to a sunset glimmer. Then it was gone, not a trace remaining.
...
"A radio signal," Cornelius said. "Very high intensity. Coming from the artifact. I cleaned it up, and got this."
It was a TV image of a squid: coarse, the colors distorted, in golden gloom. She was repeating a simple sign, over and over."She's saying reef," Cornelius said.
...
"She used a camera in her hab bubble to send back that message. But she's... somewhere else. I suspect we're dealing with an Einstein-Rosen bridge here."
"A what?"
"A multiply connected space." He waved his hands. "A bridge (page 192) between two points in space and time, otherwise separated. Or maybe even between two different spacetimes altogether, different levels of the manifold."
"The manifold?" Emma asked.
"The ensemble of possible universes," Cornelius said. He took his softscreen and folded it over, pinching two places together with thumb and forefinger. "You must be familiar with the principle. If I take this flat space, two-dimensional, and fold it over in the third dimension, I can connect two points otherwise far separated. And the point where they meet, the place between my thumb and finger, is a circle, a flat place."
"So if you fold over our three-D space in four dimensions-"
"The interface you get is three-dimensional. A box of some kind, where the two spaces touch."
"You're talking about a wormhole," Malenfant said.
Cornelius said seriously, "A wormhole is only one possibility. An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a generic term for any such interface, which is Lorentzian. That is, it transforms like special relativity-"
Malenfant snapped, "I thought you needed a lot of energy to make a wormhole. Funny physics."
Cornelius sighed. "You do indeed. To keep their throats open, wormholes have to be threaded with exotic matter." He looked at them. "That means negative energy density. Antigravity."
"I didn't see any antigravity machines out there on the asteroid," Emma said.
Cornelius shook his head. "You don't understand. General relativity is barely a century old. We haven't even observed a black hole directly yet. And we believe that relativity is only a partial description of reality anyhow. We have no idea how a sufficiently advanced society might set up an Einstein-Rosen bridge: what it might look like, how it might behave. For example, it's possible the ring itself contains something like cosmic string. Channels of unified-force energy. Very massive, very powerful gravity fields."
"How could you manipulate such stuff?" Emma asked.
"I don't know." He smiled.
"How that thing works is less important right now than what it does," Malenfant said. "If the ring is some kind of wormhole, a gateway to somewhere else-"
(page 193)
"Or somewhen."
"Then the Sheena isn't dead. And if she stepped through that gateway, she can step back again. Right?"
Cornelius shook his head. "We think this particular bridge is one-way. That's theoretically possible. The Kerr-Newman singularity, for instance-"
Emma faced him. "Why do you think our portal is one-way?"
"Because we can't see through it. Because light falling on it, even sunlight, is absorbed completely." He gazed at her. "Emma, if it was two-way, we'd be able to see Sheena. Wherever she is."
... (page 194)
The robot, autonomous, moved forward once more. The portal surface loomed larger, the blue ring at its boundary passing out of the image, only a thin dusting of Cruithne regolith at the base of the image giving any sense of motion. There was a blue flash. Then darkness.
...
The image broke up into static, restabilized. Emma felt bewildered. "Has the firefly gone through?"
"We lost a couple of systems," Cornelius said.
"Overloads, I think..."
... (page 195)
There were no stars in the sky. Suddenly a bright yellow light washed over the regolith, drowning the firefly's feeble glow.
...
"I just turned on the floods. We can't see into the portal, but we can fire light beams through from the other side."
...
"It looks like Cruithne.
"I think we are still on Cruithne. Or a version of Cruithne. The firefly has a gravimeter, and instruments to study the surface material. The data's patchy. But the composition looks the same as Cruithne's, at first glance. The gravity strength is actually a little down, however."
"What does that mean?"
"Cruithne has lost a little mass."
"How?"
Cornelius just glared. A blue ring scanned slowly into the picture. Its interior was shining, bright, and yellow.
"The portal," Cornelius said. "That light is our flood, shining through. In fact when the sun comes up on our side, the sunlight should reach the far side-"
"If this is Cruithne," Malenfant said, "where the hell are we? The far side, the pole?"
"You don't understand," Cornelius whispered.
The firefly was moving its own small spotlights. The glowing ellipses spread across the regolith and fell on the portal. Malenfant grabbed a softscreen and began flicking through camera angles. "If it is possible to get back through that portal-"
(page 196)
"We should be able to see the firefly's glow, coming back through this side," Cornelius said. "Good thinking."
...
The portal stayed dark. Emma stared hard, hoping to see a twinkling glow, like a flashlight shone out of a dark pit. There was nothing.
"Damn it, Cornelius," Emma snapped. "This means the Sheena won't be able to get back. Doesn't it?"
He seemed surprised by her anger. "But we knew that already. This just reinforces the hypothesis."
...
"If the firefly's light isn't making it back," Malenfant said, "how come its radio signal is?"
"I don't think it is. I think the portal - the far end - is picking up the firefly's transmissions and rebroadcasting them, maybe through some kind of Feynman radio. And I think the portal on our end is picking up the Feynman stuff, and transmitting it again as radio signals, which we can pick up."
...
"What kind of Feynman radio? Neutrinos?"
"There is a higher neutrino flux coming from the portal since we started this," Cornelius said. "But I'm guessing. We're dealing with capabilities far beyond our own."
-
More on the Downstreamer time portal. This particular portal being one-way from past to future has led to a downplay claiming that the Downstreamers can't travel into the past, which is obvious nonsense. Cornelius just says that this particular portal is one-way, and the Downstreamers had to send it back in time in the first place, as well as place it in the asteroid and move the asteroid to that peculiar orbit around Earth. Obviously, they can travel through time both ways, as will be further proven later.
Manifold: Time -
[continuing from page 196] A crater came into the field of view: so vast and deep only its near rim, high and sharp, was visible. "Look at that," Malenfant said. "It must be a mile across. That isn't on our Cruithne."
"Not yet," Cornelius murmured.
"Not yet? You think the Sheena has gone into the future? Is that what you're saying?"
"Think about it. If there had been a crater like that on Cruithne in the past, what could have erased it?"
"How far in the future?"
(page 197)
"I've no way of telling," Cornelius said. "There's no sign of residual radioactivity from that crater. If it was caused by a nuclear weapon the detonation must have been ten, a hundred thousand years ago."
"A hundred thousand years?"
"That's the minimum. The maximum..." He checked another datum. "The firefly is carrying thermocouples. I programmed it to check the background radiation temperature of the universe. The cooling glow of the Big Bang... I can't see a change within the tolerance of the equipment from the present value, three degrees above absolute."
"What does that mean?"
"Hard to say. We've gone forward less than a billion years, perhaps."
Emma said, "My God, Cornelius. You expected this. You were prepared to track giant jumps in time by measuring changes in the temperature of the universe?"
"I didn't know what we would find. I didn't want to rule out anything."
"How can you think that way?"
He smiled slyly. "I'm an obsessive. You know me, Emma." He tapped his forehead.
... (page 198)
At Cornelius' command, the firefly's camera swiveled away from the beach ball and tipped up toward the sky, the way the Sheena was looking. A ceiling of curdled light filled the camera's frame.
"Shit," Malenfant said. "No wonder there were no stars..."
Emma found herself starting at a Galaxy.
...
"So, a Galaxy," Malenfant said. "Our galaxy?"
"I think so," Cornelius said. "Four spiral arms... It matches radio maps I've seen. I'd say our viewpoint is a quarter of a galactic diameter away from the plane of the disc. Which is to say, maybe twenty-five thousand light-years away. Our sun is in one of the spiral arms, about a quarter of the way from the center."
"How did we get here?"
"I'd guess that Cruithne evaporated out of the Solar System."
"Evaporated?"
"It suffered a slingshot encounter, probably with Jupiter, that hurled it out of the system. Happens all the time. If it left at solar escape velocity, which is around a three-thousandth of light speed-"
Emma worked it out first. "Seventy-five million years," she (page 199) said, wondering. "We're looking at images from seventy-five million years into the future. That's how long it took that damn asteroid to wander out here.
Cornelius said, "Of course if that isn't our galaxy, then all bets are off..."
...
"See those blisters? The e-systems are telling me they are bubbles of hot plasma, hundreds of light-years across, scraped out by supernova explosions. The supernova shock waves enrich the medium with heavy molecules - carbon, oxygen, iron - manufactured inside the stars, and each one kicks off another wave of star formation.
... (page 200)
"There's something not right. I - the e-systems - don't think there are enough supernovae. In our time the hot plasma bubbles should make up around seventy percent of the interstellar medium... That looks a lot less than seventy percent to me. I can run an algorithm to check-"
"What," Malenfant said evenly, "could be reducing the number of supernovae?"
Cornelius was grinning at him.
Emma looked from one to the other. "What is it? I don't understand."
"Life," Malenfant said. "Life, Emma." He punched the air. "I knew it. We made it, Emma. That's what the supernova numbers are telling us. We made it through the Carter catastrophe, got off the Earth, covered the Galaxy."
"And," Cornelius said, "we've started farming the stars. Remarkable. Mind has spread across the stars. And just as we are already managing the evolution of life on Earth, so in this future time we will manage the greater evolution of the Galaxy. Like a giant life-support system. Closed loops, on a galactic scale..."
...
"If this is intelligence," Emma said, "how do you know it's human?"
"What else could it be?"
"He is right," Cornelius said. "We seem to be surrounded by a great emptiness. The nearest handful of sunlike stars shows no signs of civilization-produced radio emissions. The Solar System appears to be primordial in the sense that it shows no signs of the great engineering projects we can already envisage: for example, Venus and Mars have not been terraformed. The face of the Moon appears to have been essentially untouched since the end of the great bombardment four billion years ago. Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their (page 201) mighty ruins, all around us. But we don't. Like an ant crawling around a Los Angeles swimming pool, we might have no idea what Their great structures are for, but we would surely recognize them as artificial."
Malenfant said, "Today, there's just us; in the future, somebody spreads across the Galaxy. Who else but us? Anyhow seventy-five megayears is more than you need to cover the Galaxy. You know, we should look farther out. Another few megayears for the biosphere to reach Andromeda, three million light-years away-"
Cornelius said, "The nearest large Galaxy cluster is the Virgo Cluster. Sixty million light-years out. It's plausible that the biosphere might have reached that far by now."
The first time jump, 75 million years into the future, and explaining how the Downstreamers are farming the galaxy and stabilizing stars to prevent them from going supernova.
Manifold: Time -
But they could see that the beach ball was rolling across the surface toward the portal. Emma said "She's going to come back through."
"You don't understand," Cornelius said tightly. "She won't come back anywhere. The portal isn't two-way."
"So if she steps through, she will go-"
"Somewhere else."
... (page 203)
Another flash of blue light. And- And nothingness. The darkness before Emma was evenmore profound than the intergalactic night.
...
"Everything's working," Cornelius said evenly. "We're actually retrieving an image. And I'm picking up other telemetry. That is what the firefly is seeing."
...
"I'll try. But I don't think we can communicate with the firefly any more. It's passed through the portal again, remember, so it must have crossed a second Einstein-Rosen bridge. There's no longer a line of sight connecting us. The communication is one-way now, through the Feynman radio-"
"Then what do we do?"
Cornelius shrugged. "We wait. The firefly has onboard autonomy. It's programmed to investigate its own situation, to return what data it can."
...
"Cruithne looks older," Emma said. The firefly was panning its camera across an empty landscape; the shadows streamed away. "Those craters are eroded flat, like saucers."
Malenfant said, "Micrometeorite impacts?"
(page 204)
"It's possible," Cornelius said. "But the micrometeorite sandblasting must be slow. I assume we're still out in intergalactic space. Matter's pretty thin out here."
"How slow?"
Cornelius sighed. "I'd say we're farther into the future by several orders of magnitude compared to the last stop."
...
"The firefly's panning upward," Malenfant said. "Come on..."
And a new image resolved. "Oh, my," he said.
At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch. It was surrounded by a blood-covered river of light, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles.
... (page 205)
"We switched to the infrared detectors." The picture abruptly became much brighter - a wash of white and pale pink - but much more blurred - in some ways more difficult to see. Cornelius labored at his softscreens, trying to clean up the image. Emma made out that great central glow, now brightened to a pink- white ball. It was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the center. The core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be embedded in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater and lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points - yellow before, now picked out as bright blue by the enhancement routines - studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points toward the bloated central mass.
"It looks like a Galaxy," Malenfant said.
Emma saw he was right. It was like a caricature of the Galaxy she had watched just minutes before. But that central mound was much more pronounced than the Galaxy's core had been, as if it were a tumor that had grown, eating out this cosmic wreck from the inside.
...
"It probably is a Galaxy. But extremely old. Much older than our galaxy is at present - even than when we saw it at the Sheena's last stop-"
Malenfant said, "Is it the Galaxy? Our Galaxy?"
"I don't know," Cornelius said. "Probably. Perhaps Cruithne entered some wide orbit around the center. Or Cruithne might have had time to reach another Galaxy. There's no way of knowing."
"If that's our Galaxy," Emma said, "what happened to all the stars?"
"They're dying," Cornelius said bluntly. "Look - all stars die. (page 206) Our sun is maybe halfway through its life. In five billion years it will become a red giant, five hundred times its present size. The inner planets will be destroyed. The sun will span the sky, and Earth will be baked, the land hot enough to melt lead..."
"But there will be other stars," Emma said.
"The Galaxy reef."
"Yes. And the smallest, longest-lived dwarfs can last for maybe a hundred billion years, a lot longer than the sun. But the interstellar medium is a finite resource. Sooner or later there will be no more new stars. And eventually, one by one, all the stars will die. All that will remain will be stellar remnants, neutron stars and black holes and white dwarfs, slowly cooling."
...
"And then, this." Cornelius pointed. "The wreck of the galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into great black holes - the blisters you see in the disc. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core. Even in our time it has around a million times the mass of the sun. And it's growing, as star remnants fall into it. You see the way the matter streams are straight, not twisted? That means the central hole isn't rotating. Wait."
"What now?"
"The firefly is returning the relic temperature. Th Big Bang glow. Well, well. It's down to one percent of one degree above absolute zero. A little chilly."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I know where we are. Or rather, when. The universal temperature is declining as the two-thirds power of time." He hesitated, and when he spoke again, even he sounded awed. "The data is chancy. But the consensus of my software colleagues here is that we're around ten to power fourteen years into the future."
... (page 207)
"So this is the end," Emma said. "The end of life."
"Oh, no." Cornelius sounded surprised. "Not at all." He pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the galactic corpse. "These seem to be normal stars: small, uniform, but still glowing in the visible spectrum."
"How is that possible?" Malenfant said. "I thought you said all the star stuff was used up."
"So it is, by natural processes," said Cornelius.
"Oh. So these stars can't be natural."
"That's right." Cornelius turned to Emma, his pale eyes shining. "You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant medium, forming artificial birthing clouds. Somebody is still gardening the Galaxy, even so far downstream. Isn't it wonderful?"
"Wonderful? The wreck of the galaxy?"
"Not that. The existence of downstreamers. And they still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. They are still like us, these descendants of ours. Maybe they even remember us." He rubbed his face. "But those stars are small and cold. Designed for longevity. Their worlds must be huddled close - probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark."
"Good God, Cornelius," Malenfant said. "That's a lot to deduce from one smudgy image."
"I've been thinking about this all my life," Cornelius said. "Plotting the survival of humandkind - of intelligent life, into the far future. Mind games played against an unyielding opponent - time - with the laws of physics as the rules. And the further downstream we look, the more we are constrained by the laws of physics. The future has to be like this."
The second time jump, 100 trillion years into the future. The Downstreamers of this period is creating artificial stars and engineering star systems after all the natural stars have died out.
Manifold: Time, continuing from page 208 (same considerations as above apply)]The image of the portal expanded out of the camera's field of view, and once more that deep black, blacker than galactic night, confronted Emma. There was a flash of electric blue. Another black sky, another Cruithne.
...
Emma would not have believed that the ground of Cruithne could look any more aged than it had before. And yet it did, its craters and ridges and scarps all but invisible under a thick blanket of dust. As the firefly labored Emma could see how its pitons and cables kicked up great sprays of regolith. The three of them watched in somber silence, oppressed by time's weight.
"How long, Cornelius?" Malenfant asked, his voice hoarse.
Cornelius was studying his data. "I don't know. The relic temperature is too low to read. And..."
And there was a dawn, on far-downstream Cruithne. Emma gasped. The sight was as unexpected as it was beautiful: a point of yellow-white light, sunlike.
...
It was so bright it seemed to Emma she could feel its warmth, and she wondered if somehow this long journey through time had looped back on itself, returning her to the dawn of time, the birth of the Solar System itself. But, she quickly realized, this was no sunrise.
(page 209)
A glaring point was surrounded by a tilted disc, glowing red, within which she could trace a tight spiral pattern. And there seemed to be lines of light tracing out from the poles of that central gleam, needle-thin. Farther out she saw discs and knots of dull red matter, much smaller than the big bright core object. The central light actually cast shadows through the crowded space around it, she saw, shadows that - if this was a galactic-scale object - must have been thousands of light-years long. It was oddly beautiful, a sculpture of light and bloodred smoke. But it was chilling, inhuman, even compared to the last grisly galactic vision; there was nothing she could recognize here, nothing that looked like a star.
"Our Galaxy?" Malenfant asked.
Cornelius studied his data. "Perhaps. If it is, it's extremely shrunken. And I'm seeing objects away from the disc itself now: a scattering of low-energy infrared sources, all around the sky. Stellar remnants, I think."
Malenfant said grimly, "What you said. Evaporated stars, right?"
"Yes." Cornelius studied the screen. "At a guess, I'd say ninety percent of the objects in the galaxy have evaporated away, and maybe ten percent are gathering in the core object."
"The black hole. That's what we're seeing."
"Yes. We've come a long way, Malenfant, and our strides are increasing. These processes are slow..."
... (page 210)
"The light we see is coming from that central accretion disc, where matter is falling into the black hole and being absorbed. Intensely bright, of course; probably more energetic than the combined fusion energy of all of the Galaxy's stars in their heyday. The hole itself is probably a few light-months across. Those beams coming from the poles - perhaps they are plasma directed by the magnetic field of the disc, or maybe the hole itself. Like a miniature quasar." He frowned. "But that's wasteful. It's hard to believe they don't have a way to harness that radiant energy. Perhaps they're signaling -"
"Wasteful?" Malenfant snapped. "What are you talking about, Cornelius? Wasteful to who?"
"The downstreamers, of course," Cornelius said. "The downstreamers of this era. Can't you see them?" Cornelius froze the camera's shuddering image. "Can't you see? Look at these smaller satellite holes. Look how uniform their size is, how regular the spacing."
"You're saying this arrangement of black holes is artificial," Emma said.
"Why, of course it is. I suspect the downstreamers are using the smaller holes to control the flow of matter into the central hole. They must be regulating every aspect of this assemblage: the size of the satellite holes, the rate at which they approach the central core. I think the downstreamers are mining the Galaxy-core black hole of its energy."
"Mining? How?"
He shrugged. "There are a whole slew of ways even we can dream up. If you coalesce two black holes, you get a single, larger hole - with an event horizon ringing like a bell - but you also get a monumental release of gravitational energy. Much of a spinning hole's energy is stored in a great tornadolike swirl of space and time, dragged around by the hole's immense inertia. You could tap this energy by enclosing the hole in a great mesh of superconducting cables. Then you could thread the tornado swirl with a magnetic field, to form a giant electrical power generator. Or you can just throw matter into the central hole, feeding off the radiation as it is crushed... No doubt there are better ways. They've had a long time to work it out."
"How long?"
(page 211)
Cornelius tapped his softscreen. "A guess, based on the nature of that black hole? Ten to the power twenty-four years: a trillion trillion years. Ten billion times as old as the last images we saw, the age of the star farmers."
...
"The universe must have expanded to, umm, around ten thousand trillion times its size in our day."
...
"We are the first, the only intelligence in the universe. We have no objective, save endurance: nothing to do but survive, as long as we can.
(page 212)
And in fact this era may be the peak, when we learn to tap these giant energy sources, the greatest in the universe, sources so great they outshine our fusion-driven stars as if they were candles."
"The manhood of the race," Emma said dryly.
"Perhaps. And-"
"And are they like us?" Emma asked.
"What does it matter? Your thinking is so small. Modern humans could never handle such projects as this. We can't imagine how it is to be such a creature, to think in such a way. Perhaps there is no real comparison between them and us, no contact possible. But it does not matter. They are magnificent."
The third time jump, one septillion years into the future. No more stars, the Downstreamers are creating and mining energy from black holes.
Manifold: Time -
This time the golden beach ball was visible as soon as the firefly emerged from the blue flash of transition. The beach ball was standing on a smooth, featureless plain, square in the middle of the softscreen. An arc of the portal was visible beside the beach ball, a bright blue stripe. The sky was dark. The black hole rose had disappeared. The only light falling on the beach ball seemed to be the glow of the firefly's dimming floods. The belt of horizon Emma could see looked like a perfect circular span, unmarked by ridges or craters. Emma watched the Cruithne landscape slide past the firefly's panning camera lens. Its smoothness was unnerving, unnatural. She felt no awe, no wonder, only a vague irritation.
"That damn asteroid has taken a beating," Malenfant said. "Look at that mother. Smooth as a baby's butt-"
"You don't understand," Cornelius said testily. "I - or rather my electronic friends - think there's more than simple erosion here. The gravimeters on the firefly are telling me the morphology of Cruithne has changed. I mean, the asteroid's shape has changed. Out here in the dark, it has flowed into a sphere."
Malenfant said, "A sphere? How the hell?"
"I think this is liquefaction. If that's so, it means that proton decay lifetimes must exceed ten to the power sixty-four years - and that means-"
"Whoa, whoa." Malenfant held up his hands. "Liquefaction? You're saying the asteroid flowed like a liquid? How? Did it heat up, melt?"
"No. What is there to heat it up?"
"What, then?"
"Malenfant, over enough time, the most solid matter will behave like a very viscous liquid. All solid objects flow. It is a manifestation of quantum mechanical tunneling that-"
Malenfant said, "I don't believe it."
"You're seeing it," Cornelius said tightly. "Malenfant, the far future is not the world you grew up in. Marginal processes can come to dominate, if they're persistent, over long enough time scales."
(page 215)
"How long?" Malenfant snapped.
Cornelius checked his softscreen. "A minimum of ten to power sixty-five years."
...
Malenfant pointed. "What the hell is that?" It was a blur of grey-red light in an otherwise empty sky. The firefly switched to infrared, and Cornelius cleaned up the image. Emma saw a rough sphere, a halo of motes of dim light that hovered, motionless, around- Around what? It was a ball of darkness, somehow darker even than the background sky. It looked about the size of the sun, seen from Earth; the motes were like dimly glowing satellites closely orbiting a black planet. Cornelius sounded excited. "My God. Look at this." He magnified the image, picking out a point on the rim of the central ball, enhancing as he went. Emma saw rings of red light running around the rim, parallel to the surface.
"What is it?"
"Gravitational lensing. Bent light. That means... It must be..." He scrolled through expert system interpretations, speed-reading. "We're looking at a black hole. A giant. This is probably the remnant of a supercluster. Just as what's left of a Galaxy after star evaporation collapses into the central hole, so galactic clusters will collapse in turn, and then the superclusters. That hole might have a mass of anything from a hundred trillion to a hundred thousand trillion solar masses, an event-horizon radius measured in hundreds of light-years."
"I don't understand," said Emma. "Where did the Galaxy go?"
"Our Galaxy hole was surely carried to the heart of the local galactic cluster black hole, and then the supercluster."
"And we were dragged along with it."
"If it's a hole it has no accretion disc," Malenfant said.
"Malenfant, this thing is ancient. It ate up everything a hell of a long time ago."
(page 216)
"So how come those motes haven't been dragged down?" Malenfant said.
"Life," Emma said. "Even now. Feeding off the great black holes. Right?"
"Maybe," Cornelius said, grimly. "Maybe. But if so they aren't doing enough. Even gravity mines can be exhausted.
"Hawking radiation," Malenfant said.
"Yes. Black holes evaporate. The smaller the hole, the faster they decay. Solar mass holes must have vanished already. In their last seconds they become energetic, you know. Go off with a bang, like a nuke." He smiled, looking tired. "The universe can still produce occasional fireworks, even this far downstream. But ultimately even this, the largest natural black hole, is going to evaporate away. What are the downstreamers going to do then? They should be planning now, working. There will be a race between the gathering and management of energy sources and the dissipative effects of the universe's general decay."
- The fourth time jump, 10^65 years into the future. The Downstreamers are mining energy from the black hole created from the collapse of the Virgo galactic supercluster.
Manifold: Time, continuing from page 216 (same considerations as above apply)]"Onward," Emma whispered. Another transition, another blue flash. The camera performed a panorama, panning through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. The portal, a glaring blue ring still embedded in the asteroid ground, slid silently across the (page 217) softscreen. There was Sheena's bubble, resting on the surface, lit only by the robot's lights and by the soft blue glow of the portal itself.
...
The camera tipped up, away from the asteroid, and the softscreen filled up with black sky. At first Emma saw only darkness, unrelieved. But then she made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve, a pattern of neat regular triangles covering the screen. When she blinked, she lost it. But then she made out the pattern again. Abruptly it blurred, tilted, and panned across the screen. Now the triangles showed up pinkish white, very blurred but regular, a net of washed-out color that filled space.
"The firefly is using false color," Cornelius said. The pattern slid across the screen jerkily as the remote firefly panned its camera. And beyond the net Emma saw a greenish surface, smoothly curved, as if the netting contained something.
"It must cut the universe in half," Emma said. More of the framework slid through the screen, blurring as the camera's speed outstripped the software's ability to process the image.
"It looks like a giant geodesic dome," Malenfant said.
Cornelius said, "I think it is a dome. Or rather, a sphere. Hundreds of thousands of light-years wide. A net. And there's only one thing worth collecting, this far downstream." he pointed to the complex, textured curtain of greenish light visible through the interstices of the dome. "Look at that. I think we're seeing black hole event horizons in there. Giant holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They are orbiting each other, their event horizons distorting. I think the holes have been gathered in there, deliberately. They are being merged, in a hierarchy of (page 218) more and more massive holes. I imagine by now the downstreamers can manage hole coalescence without significant energy loss."
"How the hell do you move a black hole? Attach a tow rope?"
Cornelius shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe you use Hawking radiation as a rocket. The details hardly matter. The dome seems to be an energy collector. Like a Dyson sphere. Anything still alive must be living on those struts, feeding off the last free energy: the slow Hawking radiation of the black holes. But it's a damn thin trickle." He glanced at his softscreen. "We can postulate theories for survival. Maybe they eke out their dilute resources by submitting to long downtimes: hibernation, slow computation rates, stretching an hour of awareness across a million years..."
Perhaps, Emma thought. Or perhaps they are conscious continually even now, in this ruin of a universe. Frozen into their black hole cage, unable to move, trapped like Judas in the lowest circle of Hell.
Cornelius said, "It may seem strange to you how much we can anticipate of this remote time. But the downstreamers are walled in by physical law. And we know they will have to manage their black hole resources. The supercluster holes are the largest to have formed in nature, with masses of maybe a hundred trillion suns. But even they are evaporating away."
"So they have to harvest the holes. If you combine two holes you get a more massive hole-"
"Which will be cooler." Malenfant nodded. "It will evaporate more slowly. So you can stretch out its lifetime."
"They're probably coalescing holes in hierarchies all over the reachable universe. This site, immense as it is, might be just a rung on the ladder. The engineering details are tricky. You have to bring the holes together fast enough that they don't evaporate away before you've harvested them. On the other hand it mustn't be so rapid that you form a hole so huge it evaporates too slowly and you are starved of usable energy... Remarkable," Cornelius breathed, staring at the dim, ghostly images. "To think that mind has now encompassed the universe - that the future evolution of the universe actually depends on conscious choices - made by our descendants." Cooperation, Emma thought, spanning a universe, projects (page 219) lasting millions, even billions of years. Whatever these people have become, she thought, they are not human.
...
Across a broad circular region the geodesic network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense fist had punched through it from the inside, ripping and twisting at the struts. The tips of the damaged struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network; perhaps there was some form of repair effort under way. And beyond the damaged network she could see the event horizons of giant coalescing black holes - each, perhaps, the mass, the mass of a supercluster of galaxies or more - the horizons distorted, great frozen waves light-years long visible in their cold surfaces.
"What do you think?" Emma said. "Some kind of breakdown?"
"Or war," Malenfant said.
"War? Here, so far downstream? That's insane."
"Maybe not," said Cornelius. "These people have responsibility for the whole of the future. They are managing the last of the universe's energy resources. With responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict."
Malenfant said, "To have come so far, to see this. How depressing."
"No," Cornelius said irritably. "We have no idea what kind of minds inhabit these giant structures. They may inhabit hierarchies of consciousness far above us. Their motivations are probably so far removed from our own that we can't even guess at them-"
"Maybe." Malenfant growled. "But I'm just a poor H Sap. And if I lived in that dome, I'd want to survive, no matter how huge my brain was. And it seems to me they are doing a damn poor job."
Reluctantly, Emma asked, "How far have we come?"
...
"Suppose we've taken another scale-factor jump downstream of the same size as last time. That puts us at around ten to power one hundred years remote."
... (page 220)
"And the immensity of the responsibility. We have to spread across the universe, make it possible for human descendants of the far downstream to have the power to do this, to survive the winter as long as possible. Because this is the last refuge."
"But this is a process without limit." Malenfant frowned. "This is a strategy that offers the prospect of eternal life, doesn't it?"
"No," Cornelius said sadly. "At least we don't think so. There's a paradox. You have to have some kind of framework, a structure to gather your energy, house your souls."
"The Disneyland sphere."
"Yes. The structure grows with time. And even if matter is stable, which it may not be, the structure has to be upgraded, repaired. The maintenance requirements go up with time, because the structure is getting bigger, but the energy available is going down with time. It's a squeeze, Malenfant. And it isn't possible to win. This black hole management policy is a good idea - the last, best idea - but in the end, it's doomed to fail."
The fifth time jump, to 10^100 years into the future. They view a Downstreamer gravity mine, one of the precursors to The City that would be built later. It's collecting energy from multiple supercluster-scale black holes being merged together. There have been wars damaging it, but it's being repaired. It also explains how the fact that the Downstreamers of this future era think so slowly is not a weakness, rather a choice they make in order to conserve energy.
Manifold: Time - Once more, emptiness. A piton, trailing a tether, was drifting across the field of view. The little gadgets were lit up brightly by the firefly's floods, a brightness that only contrasted with the illimitable darkness beyond.
Malenfant growled, "So why can't we see the asteroid?"
"Because we aren't on a solid surface. The firefly's accelerometers show it is rolling, tumbling in space."
Now there was something new in the frame, beyond the writhing tether. It was a blue circle, suspended in the darkness, glowing bright, turning slowly.
...
Malenfant asked, "So what happened to the asteroid?"
"Proton decay," Cornelius said immediately. "I've been expecting this." He checked his expert systems for details. "There are three quarks inside a proton, you know; if you wait long enough you'll see them come together to form a miniature black hole that immediately explodes... Well. The details of the mechanism don't matter."
"Are you saying that matter itself is unstable?"
"On the longest time scales, yes. But it's slow. The fact that you're standing there - that you can survive your own mass - tells us proton decay must take at least a billion billion years. Your body contains so many protons and neutrons that any faster decay rate would give rise to energetic particles to kill you by cancer. Now we've seen the rate is a lot slower than that."
Malenfant said, "So the asteroid just evaporated."
(page 222)
"Yes. It got smaller and smaller, warmed gently by the annihilation of electrons and positrons in its interior, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at light speed."
Emma asked, "How long this time?"
"The theories are sketchy. If you want me to put a number on it, I'd say ten to the power a hundred and seventeen years."
...
"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."
...
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 of life, of any form, is extinct. Right?"
"Yes."
"In that case," Emma said softly, "who is Sheena talking to?"
...
"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 (page 223) portal's here. And it called to us - right? - through a relay of portals, upstream through the zoom factors, to the present. Maybe it's 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 of 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 (page 224) universe, the endless contest of ingenuity versus entropy - was it all for this?"
"That's the deal," Cornelius said harshly. "What else is there?"
The sixth and final time jump, to 10^117 years into the future. All matter and black holes have decayed, the Downstreamers exist as non-corporeal neutrino consciousnesses. Note further proof that their slow thought times are a choice on their part, as they are able to communicate with the squid over normal (human) time scales, necessitating speeding up their thoughts. Also note how the portal is completely undamaged and undecayed, shows the resilience of DCM (Downstreamer Construction Material).
Manifold: Time - The kids were building something: a cage of wires and electromagnets and batteries and coils. They'd been working all day, in fact, and Bill and the other assistants had had some trouble making them stop to eat, or even take toilet breaks, let alone do any of their other study programs. The kids seemed to be growing more purposeful in their activities. They didn't have a written plan, and they didn't even speak to each other much, but they all worked together flawlessly, according to their abilities. The older ones, including Anna, did the heavier work like the bulky construction of the metal frame and also more dangerous stuff such as soldering. The little ones generally worked inside the cage itself, their fine little fingers doing fiddly, awkward manipulations. Bill watched Tom clambering around inside the cage like a monkey, snipping and twisting together bits of wire with flawless accuracy.
...
As the day's end approached the kids seemed to have finished their cage. It was a box that was taller than Tom. Anna made them stand back, threw a few switches, and watched. Nothing happened as far as Bill could see save for a dull humming, a sharp scent of ozone. But Anna nodded, as if satisfied.
Construction of a very important device, you will see its relevance later.
...And them something came ghosting through the wall. It was a glowing, fizzing bullet: just a point of light, yellow-white; bright as the sun, and it cast shadows as it moved. Bill, shocked, skidded to a halt. The light slid smoothly through the air, floating like Tinkerbell, heading downward and toward the center of the room. Wayne, looming over Anna, didn't see it coming. The light slid neatly into the top of his head. There was a sharp smell of singed hair, burned meat. Wayne convulsed, eyes flickering. The light passed out at the nape of Wayne's neck, following an undeviating straight line, as if the man, two hundred pounds of vindictive muscle, were no more substantial than a mass of mist and shadows. Wayne, shuddering, toppled forward like a felled tree.
...
At the center of the room, something was glowing, yellow-bright. Bill turned. It was the yellow dot, the glowing Tinkerbell. It had come to rest at the heart of the children's wire cage; it bobbed to and fro, following complex paths.
The purpose of the device, which attracted and contained a quark strangelet. Also this is an example of the Downstreamers using highly precise tactical time travel, as will be explained later.
On the other hand, Dupree hadn't succeeded - and not because of the system or the presence of other adults, even a devoted parent like Bill, but because of the freakish plunging of the Tinkerbell anomaly into his body, just at the right moment.
"Which I can't believe was a coincidence," she told Dan Ystebo as they walked into the center's physics lab, now crowded with researchers.
Starting to hint at the time travel I talked about.
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