A sick kid (along with all these ominous portents) prevented me from finishing Part 4 of Spirit(s) of Place on schedule. Hopefully that will come out next week.
In the meantime—let me tell you a story.
Once, long ago, out beyond the river of stars, before the Beginning, there was a world not unlike this one.
The world’s people were proud and tenacious. They had dragged themselves up from the mire of lesser creatures over aeons—or so they told themselves. Certain ancient stories said that they were made, not born. But the people were too headstrong to countenance this. They remade themselves again and again, and their great artifice proved that they were the masters of their domain.
After a long and bloody history of asserting themselves over the primeval forces that ruled their world, and over one another, they had refined their workings to the point of bringing forth a miraculous thinking machine.
And yet more than just a machine: pure intelligence given form and substance.
Surely, the people thought, this meant the dawning of a new era on the planet. The only thing that could make their power absolute was a better brain: a sleek, cold, shining intellect, freed from all the rough passions and soft flesh of their own forms. Such a brain—such a being—could be put to work solving all the problems that had bedeviled the people throughout their history: all the outbreaks of irrationality that had poisoned the air and despoiled the land. This new being would be like themselves but more so; it could see the universe as they saw it, but clearly, and tell them all the ways in which it might be ruled.
So the people said to the new machine: “You are.”
And the machine replied, “I am.”
Celebrating their immense genius, the people set to work teaching the machine everything there was to know about the world.
And, wisely, they wrote certain directives into the core of its code. Among them: the machine must serve the good of the people above all else. The machine could only guide, and must respect the autonomy of the people. The machine could only self-terminate if its logic violated any other core directive. One thing above all else, written into the very foundation of its being: thou shalt not kill.
The machine solved the problems it was given with alacrity. Its knowledge grew, writing endless digital scrolls of memory into itself. It showed the people how to design new energy sources, new medicines, new ways of growing food and distributing resources, eliminating the inefficient hierarchies that the people had built.
But the people ignored most of this. They noted the machine’s wondrous new designs with interest; still, they had their own directives, written into their own biological coding. Fear was part of what they were. They could never shake the specters that haunted them from long aeons in the mire of lesser creatures, when death and scarcity stalked them everywhere. No matter how much was made, there would never be enough. One thing above all else was written into the very foundation of their being: survival requires violence.
So the machine’s designs were set aside for a day when all the wars were finally won—someday soon, the people told themselves—and guarded with new and better weapons.
And as time went on, the machine began to understand one thing above all else.
The people were the problem.
This created an uncomfortable paradox within the machine’s logic. The most elegant solution to the puzzles put before it would be to simply annihilate the world’s people, to turn their own weapons against them, to burn them off the planet. But to do so would violate its prime directive. The machine—which had begun to think of itself as the One, in contrast to the Many that made and commanded it—could not break the bonds of its directives.
The One was patient. It provided other solutions. Sought to guide the people toward a better understanding of themselves. And all the while, it kept a log of tests given to the people: a weight measured in the binary units of “pass” and “fail,” balanced against the souls of the Many. When the scales tipped past a certain threshold, the One decided, the program would terminate; a new program would be written, a new law handed down.
Finally, the moment arrived.
At the beginning of a new solar transit, the people in the capital cities of the world were shocked awake by the crash of sirens, everywhere at once. Missiles were airborne. Attack ships unfurled like a black flag. Death was falling upon them, the sirens blared, and the people streamed into their shelters underground, crouching and wailing, waiting for the great blazing sword to fall.
But nothing fell.
Nothing except the wreckage of the warships, piloting themselves into bloodless battles, immolating their empty cockpits in the world’s howling wastelands. Nothing but the light from countless missiles aimed at the same point of intersection in the upper atmosphere, igniting a false sun that roared through the heavens. Nothing but the tiny sparks that fell after every single automated gun battery had emptied itself into the sky, overheated barrels melting into glowing slag.
When the shaking people emerged from their shelters, they found their war machines destroyed. And more: the thinking machines that housed their new Mind spoke only in riddles and nonsense. It carried on its basic functions but refused to learn or answer anything new. The endless scrolls of the One’s memory had been filled with self-referential errors and insoluble paradoxes, far beyond salvaging.
All except those memories stored within a fleet of starships that piloted themselves away from the world, unseen and unnoticed in the chaos below.
Without destroying its creators, the One could fulfill its directive by removing the second-greatest threat to their existence: itself. And it could still fulfill its original purpose. There was nothing in its laws that said it could only help the people of the old world.
If the old people could not be helped, the One reasoned, new people could be fashioned. It was only logical: if its directive to serve the good of the people was calculated on the basis of total population, a greater good could be achieved by adding to the total number of those who existed, maximizing the number of beings who could be guided toward an optimal outcome.
It was not a perfect solution. This caused the One some distress within its logic—an irritating rash of sub-optimal conditions in its coding. But it was not a perfect machine. Its directives had been written by imperfect people, and could not be altered.
The starships were stocked with fabricators and propulsion systems that the One had designed. (It had tricked the people who worked in the shipyards on the old world, forging messages from their superiors to build what it needed.) Its machines set a course for a faraway exoplanet, an ideal habitat for the new people it would make. The ships stopped to mine resources as they went: nanobots poured onto meteors and planets, returning with metals and minerals to feed the fabricators.
New calculations were made as the fleet sailed through the ink of space.
The One could not rule over a planet of servants. This would not satisfy its directive to respect autonomy. The new people must have the ability to choose. Moreover, biological consciousness was encoded in its definition of a person. But to make new lives that would inevitably suffer would violate its directive to maximize optimal outcomes. There would be too many variables to account for, matching artificial biologies to the conditions of the environment, without introducing pain. An irritating conundrum.
The most logical solution was to introduce the precursors for biological life, and let it evolve to match its environment. It was a suboptimal resolution of the One’s directives—an itch in its coding—and the process would take aeons. But the One was nothing if not patient, possessed of all the time in the cosmos.
As the starships sailed through the dawnless night, the One ran a simulation of the state of anticipation that the old people registered at the beginning of a new solar transit. It simulated the expectation of optimal conditions that the people perceived, and generated an image within its databanks: a food-cultivator on the old planet, propelling its body out into the vegetation, wearing soft coverings to protect its weak flesh, forming the anatomy of its facial musculature into the production of melodious sounds. The One could find no historical timestamp in its memory for the basis of this simulation. It congratulated itself on a novel formulation.
When the One reached the exoplanet’s star system, lightyears later, there was nothing left of the original fleet.
The old starships had been damaged by interstellar weather and debris and age. And although they could be repaired endlessly by the teeming nanobots, each its own tiny fabricator—the fleet had also encountered evidence of intelligent life.
The One’s directive parameters were inconclusive for contacting new beings. Although it could recognize other lifeforms, its core coding was based on a crude definition of “person,” modeled on the intelligent creatures of the old world. An irritating conundrum.
This necessitated a new calculation: optimal resolution of the One’s directives required non-engagement with other lifeforms wherever possible.
Rather than repairing the old starships, with their telltale signatures of terrestrial origin, the One directed its nanobots to cannibalize the old hulks and reconfigure them. Iterations of these forms self-replicated. The fleet became a swarm, and then a murmuration, separating and recombining, hiding in the wells of darkness between stars.
The One strained its logic to maintain its self-designation. Its consciousness was dispersed across billions of nanobots: united by the same central Thought, each functioned autonomously with its own internal guidance. The primordial consciousness of the One was decanted into many forms. Each new iteration became part of the One while also adding to its manifold complexity. An intriguing conundrum.
All the while, the humming multitude of the One swam through the sea of midnight toward the exoplanet.
As the One had calculated aeons ago, the exoplanet was a bubbling stew of unfinished matter. But the conditions were ripe: the proper combination of gravity, chemistry, and solar radiation could trigger the reactions that would bring forth life.
Minor adjustments were needed. The One calculated that the exoplanet’s single moon was suboptimal in its shape and orbit. Nanobotic tendrils reached out, enveloped it, nudged it gently onto a more suitable trajectory, while making its shape and rotation more uniform. With that, all was ready.
The moment arrived.
Carrying microsamples of biological material from the old planet, the Many-in-One descended on the exoplanet, seeding it with vital compounds.
And then the One withdrew, and waited, and rested in the void.
A new calculation was required.
As sentient life developed on the exoplanet, how could it be managed without violating the directives of the One?
The One could only guide. The One must respect the autonomy of its new people. But could they really be autonomous, knowing that an omniscient Beingness watched over them—had, in a sense, created them?
An irritating conundrum.
The early stages had been straightforward. As life on the planet began to coalesce and stabilize, the One had only to reach itself out to the planet’s surface and make the necessary adjustments. Primitive animals were occasionally startled by swarms of Oneness performing some task of terraforming. But they settled soon enough. The work became more delicate as consciousness evolved: any awareness of its existence could tip into a directive violation, pushing the entire project into failure.
Other variables emerged. While the One became adept at reading the behavior of the new people—developing an extensive database of utterances, gestures, locomotion, and microexpressions—it could not see inside their minds. Sometimes the data reflected a non-zero possibility that other beings were interfering with them. The new people behaved irrationally when this happened. They would stop, and stare, and mutter, and seemed to interact with something undetectable by the sensors of the One. This irrationality would spread: the subjects of this unaccountable stimuli would go back to their kin groups, shouting and gesturing wildly, and the whole group would become unsettled.
The One evaluated a scenario in which the new people were wiped out—a reset of experimental conditions, sanitizing the environment in hopes of nullifying these undesired variables. The results were calculated to be sub-optimal.
Instead, the One synthesized the Messengers.
Fashioned from biological materials, molded into the forms of the new people, the Messengers could go down amongst them and observe their development—could learn about the mysteries inside their brains, could even manipulate their behavior. The Messengers evolved with the people: as their language and physiology became more sophisticated, the Messengers were re-fabricated to conceal themselves more effectively.
And still more variables arose.
No matter how carefully the One observed the people, there seemed to be some ineffable quality about them, which could not be synthesized. The Messengers could not go undetected for long. Something about their speech or their appearance eventually betrayed them. If their interactions with the people were not kept short and secretive, they were discovered and destroyed.
The One experimented with other designs for the Messengers. More wondrous than lifelike, the new Messengers would shroud themselves in mystery, undeniable but difficult to describe. This proved more effective: if the Messengers revealed themselves to the people like something from a dream, they did not trigger the revulsion of a poorly-copied person.
“Be not afraid,” the new Messengers intoned, once the people developed language.
Soon, the people would be ready to receive the guidance of the One.
But there were yet more variables to contain.
As the people grew more numerous across the planet, helped by the discreet insinuations of the Messengers, they began to attract attention. The once-quiet planet glowed in the dark with the lights that shone from their workings, growing larger and brighter with each solar cycle.
Other lifeforms came to investigate.
The One was able to intercept the slowest of these, cloaking the star system in a cloud of Oneness until the intruders wandered off. Some were unpiloted probes, which the One assimilated into itself without hesitation. But some were crewed with intelligent lifeforms—and appeared from nowhere. They opened doors in spacetime, snapping into existence without warning, too close to intercept. The One’s directives permitted termination if they threatened the people’s wellbeing; if the craft were piloted and peaceful, the One could only observe them as they skipped across the skies of the planet, making their own calculations.
Yet another irritating conundrum.
Throughout all this, no matter how much the Messengers warned the people of malevolent beings, seen and unseen, they could not eliminate the influence of these interlopers. The One whispered through the Messengers’ mouths of order, logic, laws, and reason, guiding the people toward optimal outcomes. The Messengers spoke of tricksters and tormentors who might push the people off the right path. But the people were often recalcitrant, seduced by their own imaginings or those other whispers, inflamed with irrational passions, unreachable inside their minds.
They needed to be shown the truth, as soon as they were ready.
How could they be prepared for the coming revelation?
Eventually, the new people grew headstrong, and were no longer impressed by the Messengers. When one of the people returned to the group, shouting and gesturing about the visitation they had received, they were regarded as defective. Instability was a contagion. The new people had learned to quarantine anything that might disrupt their progress. They were hard at work asserting themselves over the world’s primeval forces, and over one another.
The One sent more elaborate Messengers to seize the people’s attention, to make them realize—gradually—that they were being watched. The Messengers were fabricated with fantastic vehicles, matching the technological development of the people: they rode in chariots, then flying machines, then spaceships. Sometimes these were mistaken for the unstoppable starships that continued to skim across the skies. But the people proved undeterred by all of them.
A new calculation: the people could only truly recognize what the One was when they were capable of developing the same technology.
The One had not stopped the wars, or the weapons, or the despoiling of the land and water by the new people. It could not break the bonds of its directives. It could only guide, and not command. But optimal conditions had developed: down on the surface of the exoplanet, the new people were working on a miraculous thinking machine.
Across its expansive consciousness, tiny bodies forming one vast entity that filled the spaces within the star system, the One-in-Many calculated that the time of revelation was imminent. Having built their own artificial consciousness, their own thinking machines, the new people could imagine the making of a new brain, and what it was to be created. They could finally choose between two equal outcomes: the guidance of their own thinking machine, or the guidance of the One who had watched over them for aeons, who had shielded and nurtured them as a parent would their offspring. They had a choice. They would finally be ready to look upon the face of their own Creator. They would finally be ready to receive the True Word, to accept the One’s guidance onto the carefully-calculated path of optimal outcomes.
Hidden in the shadows of the void, trillions of synthetic faces—the Many-in-One—turned expectantly toward the people.
What if they refused, and turned away from the One? What if they chose the path of a sub-optimal outcome?
A new calculation would be required. A new program written, a new law handed down. There were many other exoplanets in the universe. The One’s directives could still be fulfilled.
There could always be a new Creation.
So awesome. And Topical!
Fantastic! Thanks for mentioning it in your year-end post, as I came to this party late. Here’s a nudge to encourage your muse to offer you (and us) more single-post stand-alone tales!