“Um. You have no physical substrate?”
“For the moment it is convenient. In the long run it will not be.”
“So the mechs were right. Electron-positron plasmas lie ahead.”
“That destiny shall unfold on a truly immense time scale. The decay of all large particles—‘baryons,’ in your terms—will be slow.”
“But there’s a finite lifetime to it all. Stars run down. The center cannot hold. Nobody’s going to be sailing bright eternity.”
“You are doing it now, primate. There will never be more time ahead than at this instant. And infinities are a matter of taste.”
“Ummm. The positron plasma, I saw it. It’ll happen. Still, it seemed a bit like Chicken Little to be fretting about it.”
The bird wavered just an instant. Nigel wondered if this reflected the time for it to consult itself, or rummage through the Galactic Library, searching out primate childhood stories. He envisioned seeker programs darting down musty info-corridors, sniffing for
Little, Chicken; see: fowl/consciousness/cultural inventory.
“You are correct. There is a more immediate danger.”
“I don’t suppose it’s anything that our order of being can do anything about?”
“Scarcely. The vacuum is unstable.”
Nigel grimaced. Was it a primate quirk to be irked by this bird, presuming that he could instantly access all the jargon in his own tongue? No, probably just a symptom of age.
“Which means?” he finally conceded.
“The presumed quantum mechanical ground state of this universe is not in fact a ground state. It is metastable.”
“Um. So it can . . .”
“Fall to the lowest quantum state. A state in which all particle masses, spins, and other fundamental properties will be different.”
Metastable conditions could decay at any time, like a radioactive nucleus. Of all conceivable threats, this was surely the most elliptical. “Cut the coyness.”
“All information lodged in particles will be lost when these properties change. It is called the Tumult.”
“Everything gets erased.”
“And the universe begins anew.”
“That’s what you’re worried about.”
“Among other points.”
For the moment he did not feel like asking for the “other points.” Best to constrain conversations with beings like this, or he would be completely lost. “That’s quite enough for the moment. Do—did—the mechs know?”
“The Exalteds—the higher order mechanicals—did. To their lower orders they explained that the electron-positron gas was their final goal.”
“I saw that.” Above the horizon had soared hard, cold destinies, sheets of living light.
“The same fundamental science, however, may apply to surviving the Tumult.”
It sent into his mind a flash-image: a gray, seamless wall. Onrushing. Germinated at a point by a nanosecond’s handclap, then swelling, engorged on energies of the vacuum, snowplowing out. Behind the front, sparkling births of blank specks, a blackboard fresh for God’s writing. The Tumult.
“So they were in fact worried about this? An even worse danger?”
“They labor upon this now.”
“And all our feud with mechs . . . ?”
“It was an inevitable feature of lower life-forms. Think of it as resembling predator-prey relations, which strike a statistical equilibrium in the wild. The mechanicals had gotten out of equilibrium. Their harvesting of the Phylum Magnetic was like—” it paused, “a squirrel scavenging your lunch, which you had left on your picnic table, while you answered a telephone call.”
“So what we saw as a grand struggle—”
“It has become an inefficiency.”
Oceans of blood spilled, minds crushed like fresh flowers beneath a steel boot. “Inefficiency.”
“The Highers wished a resolution. This was—”
“Let me guess. The easiest.”
“Of course. In your way of thinking, at least.”
