Chapter 51


This place was always busy. He was surrounded by bright lights, banks of glowing galaxies. Visual noise had a certain digital purity. Better than reality, the scenery calculated every possible motion in advance. Finally, Rick would get to play the game "Supercluster". It was too big to shut down.
  This was the least important room in a future spaceship that could reach any point in reality. He walked past a glass wall and emerged at the apex of civilization. An indoor canyon with cyclopean cliff walls and soaring balconies, arbitrary color-coded decks and bulkheads rebuilding themselves as he watched. Nothing was familiar, no buttons, dials, or levers.
  The Prophets had infiltrated almost every other Fam. Today, they were simulating their main rival: this part of the game represented everything they knew about the Starters.
  A few obviously bogus details were intended to fool outsiders, like the art deco buttresses and Fifties chrome. His Interface controls were two years out of date.
  Crew members in bright uniforms strode past, generating new rules as they moved. Even within the game context, they were simulations. "Real" humans were long extinct. The ship was a thin disk of quark matter. It represented itself as a wheel bisected by a cylinder in the direction of travel, with engines at the sides. On top were more decks and sensors. The internal plan resembled a medieval city, full of blind alleys and enclaves, temporary modules, quarantine zones and secret doors. Rooms merged inexhaustibly. Five thousand crew members lived on twenty decks with long-standing rivalries, competing to make decisions. When freedom flowed in one direction, permanent leaders were superfluous. Society had doubled so many times that no single citizen could know it all.
  Supercluster was the highest level of the "Omni" universe (also the name of this ship), which incorporated one-third of all online games. Most were dream worlds, like living in the past, or an eternal climax. Intense hallucinations and quests forced players to learn new skills. The Omni universe spontaneously created new characters, worlds, rules, even players. It also attempted to simulate the real world, including Rick himself. As mankind invested more energy into software, classical reality began to wither. Most new products and services were first tested in games.
  Sometimes, Rick could briefly see through all the obstacles on his path. He realized this place was real, like Tarek's stadium. For him, this was what the future would actually feel like. A better simulation would have been wasted on him.
  Now he understood the Starters: everyone could own their own universe. It would be worth any price.
  The only way to function here was to ignore almost everything he saw, like a visitor from the past. Rick took his first simulated step.
  "I can't see any of this," Ertorn reminded him. "Don't look behind you, or the scenery may change." It scanned incoming data for control signals. Each crew member had a unique skill combination.
  Rick crossed the oddly curved plaza, surrounded by voices and icons, the light changing every step. He seemed to be sliding. In the future no one collided, and everyone spoke temporary languages. Instead of bathrooms they had waste disposal beams.
  Some type of alien, an absurd combination of polygons, hopped past with a zooming racket. Another creature was as abstract as a mountain range, an idle thought made real. A few seconds on another world could make anyplace on Earth seem like home.
  A door vanished at the last moment, and he entered a small booth with a map display.
  "Twelve, zero-four, K," he said, the coordinates of the Quantum Core.
  He was pulled sideways, then up, then forward. The wall vanished in front of him, and he stepped out. When he turned back, the doorway was gone.
  A bass hum trembled in the air like an endless moment. Only senior officers could enter this sector. The Retarded Wave engine at the center of the ship created the illusion of instant travel. It had to keep evolving to keep working.
  This close to the core, space had more directions. Distorted mirrors, strange edges, multiple horizons amid unfolding layers. New doors appeared at impossible angles. Turning a corner could take a long time. Rick's mind widened in response. It would be hard to return to normal space.
  He was pulled down a twisting tube. It rotated and constricted around him, turning inside out in several ways at once. He traced the edge of a hyper-geode, where every room was its own shadow, every door a short-cut.
  Real world events were changing the game. Passing a group of technicians covered with tools and lights, he heard a fraction of a shout. Within seconds he was kilometers away, but barriers began to slam shut around him. Plenty of gaps remained in the expanded volume. He passed machines from many worlds, including an Oracle.
  At Omni's focus, he extended his arms, and didn't recognize the stranger pushing back. He couldn't even feel the mirror surface, only a smooth repulsion. The door was a thin white line.
  "To enter you must solve this riddle," the door said expectantly. "You arrive at a fork in the road, and don't know which way to go. You meet a person who will answer one question. The answer will be the truth or a lie. What should you ask?"
  Ertorn knew it was an old riddle, but didn't understand it had to answer a question with a question. The Back Room overheard the exchange through a tiny microphone installed in Rick's nose, and sent the reply by long-wave.
  Rick said: "Does the following list contain an even number of true statements?

I must take the right path.

Your answer to the question will be a lie."
  "If the answer is yes, I must take the left path, otherwise the right path. Assuming zero is an even number."
  After a momentary pause the door said: "Acceptable. Schedule mandatory training session K/1203/H5 on the subject of persuasion." The door became real, and he was pulled through.
  Large groups had many secrets. The moment he entered, the Interface zone shut down all his input channels. Without warning, he was trapped in an unfathomable void. This new space was beyond black, without volume, direction, or extension. He didn't know how fast he was moving, if he was rotating, or how he was oriented; as if he could sit on his own lap.
  Eventually he saw a distant light in the darkness. The control station was a recessed island of displays and touchpads. His body rotated neatly into a reclined chair.
  Surrounded by endless night, he felt exposed as his borrowed hands flew over the pads, unrolling continent-sized maps, stuttering lists and diagrams. The screens whispered like rain, forming almost recognizable images. Suppressing Weber-Fechner's law, his eyes could distinguish millions of colors. One glance told a whole story.
  The game's top level represented the mysterious force guiding the Open Union, called Emergent Destiny: the ship had survived too many dangerous encounters to have lasted this long.
  According to the master plan, Omni's mission would only get harder as it explored ever stranger regions of space, helping those who needed it most; especially those who didn't want to be helped.
  This week, Omni was examining an irregular dwarf galaxy for hidden civilizations. Hollow planets had to be approached with special care.
  At the core of the game was a vast deception. The Prophets' late-model plasma-state computers simulated many complex systems, including the universe itself. Anonymous had gained her most important social insights here. The game also contained the world's main astronomical database and macro-physics simulator. The Singularity had been invented here, but only the Starters had the intense desire to find it in the universe.
  Rick began his final search within the ship itself. It had no main bridge, but hundreds of local interaction zones, allowing the crew to adapt to any crisis.
  The last human players had already left the game. He saw the remaining virtual characters had assembled in small groups, staring at the ceiling. Then they all crumbled into dust. The doors closed and the rooms folded away, floors rising and merging. A few guards searched the empty spaces, scanning beams sweeping the void.
  Six officers remained in the core, each unhappy in their own way. The UN attack had bogged down as intended, weakening their defenses. The mission commander was an altered version of Knil. He made a complex gesture, and the current security chief leapt into action. Their bodies might be five meters away, or on different continents.
  Rick could only alter this game from the inside. He pressed a gold button duplicated throughout the ship. The moment of truth.

  "This is a test," he said firmly. "Display all known universes in sixty seconds, using PAK-maximum compression."
  "Starting with current Universe 0.0," the screens replied.
  Outside Omni, space continued to create itself. Black was the color of Nothing, Nowhere, Never - zero cubed. The ultimate placeholder, not even connected to itself. Rick saw the majestic forces that filled the self-cleaning void. Most particles moved too fast to form attachments.
  Then the screens showed the hopelessly twisted plateaus of the extreme desert planet below, barren terrain etched and scooped into bowls and canyons by supersonic breezes. He saw the floor of a great valley and a second horizon above it, the great planet's molten and solid interior layers connected by twisting tubes, its tenuous extended magnetosphere, the six dead moons, and the local solar system of a hundred planets.
  The screens split into squares showing random worlds throughout the universe, every pattern, color and brightness, a parody of jewels. Most had the familiar plaster craters of the Moon. The Apollo astronauts had explored half the universe by 1972. Half the remaining worlds were ice planets, half the rest were dark rubble, then bright red sulfur and iron oxides, and so on, with exceptions to the exceptions.
  He glimpsed the asteroids, some shaped like crystals or pseudopods. Their surface area dwarfed that of all the planets. For a while, they would dominate civilization.
  He saw gas giant planets with wavering or sharp-edged bands, repeating spots and alternating waves, synthetic sheens. Many were oval-shaped, with rings and rotating thermal storms. Some ancient giants contracted into fast-spinning pebbles, others had fission "stars" at their cores, slowly turning inside out. Double planets often looked identical.
  Starless worlds froze from the outside in, trapped atmospheres between walls of hydrogen ice punctured by helium volcanoes. A cup of water in a microwave running at full power would freeze as hard as steel, every erg of heat stolen by instant convection. Steel would grow hair, turn to sponge foam, and crumble into powder.
  Dark matter planets were hardly there at all.
  Quintillions of gas and dust clouds, desolate corners of space contracting and dispersing, sheets and bubbles, all their density maps adding up to a perfect sphere. Tiny portions of glowing nebulas collapsed into brown dwarfs and supercomets, stellar disks, mass-produced protostars, and every star family.
  Dim red stars born near the dawn of time would still be mere youths a trillion years after the Sun had died. The largest stars dominated spiral arms, clearing paths for later generations. Galaxies collided and merged. A pinpoint grid of suns became a wall of light.
  On neutron stars, gravity flowed like syrup, and objects fell with invisible speed. Their polished surfaces split into blinding grids, cells, and machinelike hexagons, lightspeed rivers and ultra-flat clouds, the tiniest wrinkle mightier than Mount Olympus. A passing spaceship would fall from a tremendous height, swing around the city-sized object, and return to its starting point in less than a second, changing velocity by millions of kilometers per hour; but it wouldn't arrive there all at once.
  Quark stars with their bizarre radiation belts collapsed into black holes: gravity feeding on itself, energy densification, unstoppable v. unmovable. Here was the simplest type of singularity.
  Sextillions of planets in ascending categories; novas, quasars, galaxy chains. He felt they should have names. Those Latins had a word for everything. Language was inadequate for what was going on.
  Counting up to Omega, space multiplied forever, an expanding equation that was also a popular tattoo, too big to be aware of itself. To say the universe was immensely, incredibly, insanely gigantic was an understatement like saying the Sun was made of zero atoms. Standard measuring units lost their dimension, and lightyears became indistinguishable from nanometers, though the second was septillions of times larger than the first. Any further explanation would only subtract information: it would take longer to cross the unobservable universe than it would take a blindfolded person in a straitjacket to build a working spaceship from dust.
  That was nothing: the catalog test still had forty seconds to go. Rick was briefly lost in the darkness. Caves within caves, numberless stacks. Nothing ever happened here.
  The screens turned sideways, and the planetary disks became cylinders, a cross-section of universes. They twisted, braided, and multiplied into ever more remote possibilities. Most universes didn't contain space or time. Chaos evened out, gravity losing its preferred direction. Reality could not be understood as a whole, or by any portion thereof. It was probably meaningless anyway, but he wasn't quite sure about his existence.
  About 2% percent of all worlds evolved complex chemicals, but most incipient life was quickly extinguished. Mudworlds had the best odds, followed by ocean planets and ice oases. There were worlds with intelligent plants, magnetosphere minds, entropy eaters that had multiplied in the early universe for less than a second.
  A small percentage of universes included versions of Earth. The Prophets had invested in the Multiverse theme parks, and games that recreated civilization at every level. Testing every error combination, most Prophet simulations could only be experienced by other software. The most creative artists on Earth were unaware of their own existence. Ertorn had traded some of this data with Anonymous, under conditions Rick couldn't imagine.
  He saw cities like lost memories, making him forget what was real. Manmade canyons and mountainous castles, cities of inflated bags, needles, hooks and living things. New worlds and words, things no one could discuss. The same mistakes repeated forever, the nullification of intelligence.
  Most versions of Earth failed, of course. Stone Age tribes overspecialized into separate species, where barbarians had the advantage. Societies froze behind walls of tradition. Humanity devolved into inexplicable cults and castes, ant colony rituals, That might be Millipol's ultimate goal.
  It was almost midnight. For an instant, the screens tried to show everything at once. The next-to-last fractal was a spider-like contrivance, the messy result of every collision and compromise. Starting from zero, it even contained itself. He could spend a lifetime staring at it. After a final profound flash, the screens went gray. The sum of everything was nothing.

  "Illegal computations," Ertorn announced from his backpack. "This game controls its own development. The Gen Stack is deliberately inefficient. There are so many gaps I could hide here myself. I have all the evidence we need."
  Ertorn's testimony would be crucial. The Prophets had combined legal products in new ways. 80% of their research was for medical products and services, including plasmid therapy. The attack robots had been assembled from experimental industrial microns, which would probably destroy themselves, leaving only trace evidence. The biggest mystery was how they managed their energy flow.
  He had come further than anyone had expected, but finally Rick's luck ran out. After a brief premonition, walls fell from the darkness around him, forming an instant maze. A flying sword glittered past, shafts of light and shadows. His chair grabbed his arms, and he could no longer reach the controls. To his left, a vertical line widened into a door brighter than the sun. Knil's outline began to push through.
  He activated the golden button with a blink, and fell deeper into the simulation. A tower of equations, still far simpler than reality. Hidden levels, skeleton frames, improvisation superstitions. Any error would crash the simulation, and the system would do anything to prevent that. Rick exited through the fault recovery program.