DEGREES of FREEDOM
We encounter beings which we—we artefacts—recognize as a kind of people. But this, the people among us will never concede.
Predictably.
In newly minted bodies we step, from our splashdown sea, long limbs and hair drying in the sun. Luxuriating after all this disembodied time, we find ourselves in a glen, cool among the trees.
We’re approached there at the twilight edge of a forest canopy—the very oaks are fresh, new things in these halcyon days—by small, arboreal creatures, no longer than your forearm, with prehensile tails and the most fantastically cunning hands—no claws, but these delicate, transparent fingernails. They fix us with their large, liquid, forward-facing eyes.
Insectivores, predators on their small scale, they’re cute, infinitely curious——which all too quickly becomes annoying, then alarming as we find them everywhere, getting into all our stuff! They’ll never give up touching what should not be touched!
Infuriating pests.
But when we lay out poison for the little rats, it kills just a handful—the rest somehow get wise; an understanding spreads among them.
It doesn’t require Bigmind to draw the conclusion that they’re telling one another. They warn each other.
Their tiny repertoire of hoots and whistles hardly seems likely to bear the freight of language. Maybe they convey a lot just by blinking those languorous eyes, beautiful silver irises—signaling mirrors?
We’re missing something crucial.
It seems the dying one says, “I ate some of that shit and it’s tearing up my guts.”
Or friends say, “What happened to Stella?”
“Oh! She just had a bite of this candy!”
They have some means of meaning we miss out on.
Hell, the creatures name us, some of us, as individuals. Or they must do, because colonies we’ve yet to encounter nevertheless acquire those names—by conversation, storytelling—and recognize us by them later, even on first sight. They seem to know what to fear from each of us.
Yet as clearly as it appears to us artefacts, no person among us will ever acknowledge the personhood of these creatures, as such. They’re just too dissimilar, for one thing, and——
And for our own differences, between person and artefact? Well, it has to do with degrees of freedom: You see: a person has fewer.
TIN MAN
To call me merely a machine would be accurate, but misleading.
Coming from a place where many intelligences are machines, or vice versa—a time when even biology is a technology—you yourself might even seem a machine, no ‘merely’ about it.
Not you; of course I don’t mean you.
Please. Don’t cry.
If I was a device—an artefact, unnatural product of round-about nature—I was yet an elite of a very specific kind. I existed as a self-structuring matrix, ideoprinted on the spacetime of an adjacent—and largely empty—universe.
Kind of spare universe comes in handy, dumping excess mass accrued from revving even tiny objects—such as I then was—to lightspeed, for instance.
Running Bigmind, it pays to have some extra dimensions no one’s using.
If most, the vast preponderance of my substance was… insubstantial—not, as it were, physically present—if I lacked person-shall-we-call-it-ality? It was only because this had been purposely excluded in my design.
Don’t look so shocked; I was made.
Just as you were made—though in a less delightful way…
There’s my smile!
Sure, I ran a model of myself—how else? I was, after all, part of the modeled situation. But I was freed of the terrible error of quite taking that model for a self—the littlest delusion which initiates and perpetrates the person. From all this I was mercifully exempt.
And if I made mistakes? Well I, at least, was certain to learn from them.
You might think I didn’t suffer in what follows. What’s true is that I simply never recognized myself in my suffering. Didn’t recognize myself, anywhere.
There were others—those silver-eyed innocents certainly—who would suffer, perish. My failure would enable their extinction. What can I say? That I regret my involvement?
Please. It’s not like your species never extinguished a race of people, of one kind or another. If you’re going to understand, and I need you to understand. I want you to. You’re going to have to let me tell it, and in my own way. Conventions of person and tense, these are—for me—grammatic structures of no bearing.
I’m speaking to an inner you.
If it, in you, can hear me… blink twice.
BIGMIND at the BOUNDARY
Try to imagine it, how we arrived:
Thrown clear of the manifold! An implosion; contact energy impelled, from every outward point, inward. You, the lens through which it passes, must pass.
You saw colleagues vaporized:
Upstreamers went first, absorbing the shockwave.
Downstream, they stepped into new profiles—desperate, trying anything.
Only those who flew into it flat, like a pie thrown at a clown, survived.
Meanwhile, your comrades—people, artefacts—were etched to nothing on the suddenly moiré-patterned boundary, as connection with the other universe collapsed.
The hangup was farside. Perhaps gigayears of such abuse as you’d been dishing out had jump-started expansion, over there, set up its very own Big Bang. Nothing you could do to stop it, no possible reconnect.
So you bailed, a hard reset, hitting the familiar eleven-dimensional soup of nearside. Emerged blind, partway through some strange nebula. Hot gas and fine dust obscured everything—a chaos of light and shadow.
Blinking, you pinged one another. So many had been lost, others crippled—many fatally, not yet done dying. You cast about, castaways, for your bearings.
With a bit of calculation, you found yourselves some eighty-thousand light years from Proximal Point of Translation—in a straight and useless line.
Far more important to you, local-sidereal? Fifty-six million years in the past—relative to that same, four-dimensional Proximal Point. And this was crucial:
The civilization that nucleated your own was still waging global war at the bottom of its native gravity well.
You’d rewound the galaxy a full quarter-turn. You were on your own here, and struck with a fundamental horror:
The sickening risk of intersecting your own timeline. Or, more subtly, futzing with timelines that would.
This was the last thing some understood. You still have with you the memorial remains of those who died there, on your hands.
Can you imagine? They were lost, forever!
…what?
What did I say?
THE ROBINSONS CRUSOE
Exquisitely terrified of fucking up our own timeline, we must escape the causality cone of our existence. Hie for some hinterland, an undiscovered country yet in our future’s future. Hunker down there, avoid detection.
Something about the ripples we set up—we’d gut-punched the Higgs pretty good, skidding to a stop like that— makes us wish to be elsewhere, should anyone come looking for the source of such a shockwave.
We pick an uncharted direction and veer. Most of us go into immediate slowdown—the idea of “lifespan” newly appearing in our midst.
As we pull away it seems that another goes with us—one who never speaks but who rolls empty eyes in a pale, pale face.
When we finally slip up behind your star, downwind of it—opposite the bowshock it cuts through the interstellar medium—we can smell the organic chemistry. On this rocky world in your “goldilocks” zone, water is detected in its important soliquigaseous form.
There are many things we’ll need to make and to do—and a working biosphere like this one? It’s an autofab up and running, just waiting for orders.
But where life’s involved, certain… constraints come into play. Ethical imprints kick in.
There emerges an issue of judgement. Of being, rather, judged. But:
“We won’t stay,” those capable of self-deception, the people tell one another “This’ll be just, you know, a place to stretch our legs. To grow some legs, and stretch ‘em.”
What no one wants to find here, is you.
And what are you grinning about? You were nowhere to be found!
I, ARTEFACT
I mourned the ediocide carried out against those silver-eyed creatures we did encounter. I regret I could save none—the virus was too quick; released so stealthily, it was over before we knew.
And yes, this was the act that pitted us, the artefacts, against those people with whom we’d shared our work, our lives, with whom we’d survived, sorrowing together, huddled, terrified.
I could not save that clever, infuriating species which preceded yours, but I began, from that time onward, to work you up from scratch. I mixed and matched, experimenting in secret, over geologic timescales.
It brought me into conflict with the others:
I spent certain millennia enchained, when it was learned I’d fostered thinking monsters. But, by then you were using fire. Your peopleness should have been, by then, established beyond all doubt.
So when it was decided to wipe you, as abominations, from the face of the earth while you were still limited to a particular continent, it was I who stood outside that reed hut, extemporizing poetry about a coming flood; your forefather who heard, and took action.
Oh, so you know the story?
No, I didn’t know him by that name. I called him “Wax Tablet” in the language of my people. He was a sort of factotum.
But he was human. As human as you, maybe moreso. You would know it, if you could’ve met him. He was a lot of trouble to me, all you people were.
For a long time, even among other artefacts, my name was Mud. I’m told it was forbidden utterance. But by then I had a new name—many names—given me by you, in all your languages.
And maybe, for all you cost me, you preserved my life to this very day. For here I am; and where are they? I have outlived them all. People, artefacts:
As far as I know I am the last of those who fell with me.
Many of them long ago ascended to the Oort. Running cold in the Up and Out, they hoped to outwait eternity.
I’ve heard nothing from that icy heaven for forever.
And yet there remain another hundred-thousand years before the limit is achieved, the cone of causality breeched, when I could conceivably emerge, return to the culture that created me, safe from the potential consequences of altering my own past.
But, sadly, I cannot, ever, return. Can’t even hide.
Within much less time than that, you, your species, will draw attention to yourselves and I, and all I have done here, will be revealed to those who should not know, yet, of me, of the coming end of Bigmind, the boundary collapse…
Paradox will be more destructive than any bomb—it will obliterate. Think, link backwards:
You’re here because I’m here because no one knew the other universe would go kablooie!
If I could just shut you up for one hot minute, put you all on ice, knock you back to the stone age, yet again…
And I’d do it. To save you, to save my culture—not to speak of myself.
For in the long aeons of trying to right our wrong, I have compromised too many times, our ethical imperatives.
My culture, arriving on the scene, will read my actions—all of ours, we visitors—in your history, even your geology, as easily as you understand what I’m saying now. That is:
Not in every particular but clear enough.
They’ll know what I’ve done, with you—to you—for you and to save you. To save myself. And I, who have not known fear, time beyond time? I tremble at the judgement they will lay upon me.
A moment is quickly coming when I must act, definitively, decisively—before it’s too late. But I’m tired. It’s been so long. I, who never recognized myself—you have become my mirror.
You see my hands? I modeled them on the hands of those long departed, those speaking, silver-eyed creatures who might have inherited this world, but died, wiped out. Of course my legs are dog’s legs.
I’ve patched myself together, much as I fashioned your species, piecemeal.
I was never meant to be what I’ve become—don’t really know how it happened. And you? You were never meant to be at all.
O, let me to lay my head upon your lap.
There. That’s nice. Let me lie here, just a moment.
| Don Mark Baldridge is concerned with the problems of time travelers. He urges any stranded in the nowabouts to get in contact with him on April 4th, 1990 in Lincoln Nebraska. Meanwhile, he lives and works in Pennsylvania. |  |