Surely not serious?
Years ago I wrote the first version of this idea as a short story, but it lay about d gathered dust bunnies till it grew into a novelette.
If you read it I hope you enjoy it.
If you do not find it enjoyable, I hope you find it interesting.
In any case I hope you do not find it to cause disturbing dreams; it concerns concepts disturb me. At the time of uploading this text, I am writing seriously on a related real-life topic. With luck I should have a coherent version to upload within a few weeks.
That should be a lot more disturbing than this bit of fiction.
Over to you.
Enterprise
It must be a record! It must be!
And yet. . .
Can I be sure?
Seven suns, seven seedings, four thousand nine hundred and seventy six years. Less than five thousand standard years. Four thousand nine hundred and seventy six times ten to the seven-and-a-half seconds. Ten to the eleven point one nine six seconds.
Really ten suns, of course, with this one merging into the star field behind me. Three dwarfs for slingshotting, but now seven bullseyes! Average travel time less than five hundred years per star. That would have been far and away a record when I left, and the last time I heard from base it would still have been a record. Calgarty did four in eight encounters and Fenester three in five, but he took six thousand years. When I started out, the very countries of his day were just memories in the minds of specialist historians. Cities of his day had been built over and farmed over time after time. Some of them anyway. But I knew I could beat him, with his miserable little prototype craft! I have at least twice the acceleration, better equipment, better capacity, better seed cultures, even. He stood no chance!
But he has such a start! Five thousand years! That start keeps echoing in our mind. And I cannot keep regular contact with base; I cannot enquire about the standing. He carried twenty pods. Even allowing for accidents he might by now have eight seeded worlds to his credit. I wish I knew.
I wish I knew!
Data logger interrupt. Running short of capacity. Time for archival. Nothing to do but plot course and log data from the universe and think. How much have I thought in nearly five thousand years? If I had been human. . .
I am human.
I am human. But if I had been flesh still, then I would have thought some millions of times more slowly. If I had no more than a human's processing capacity, I would have thought some thousands of times less in parallel. If I had only a human's experience, I would have thought two hundred and fifty six times more shallowly, but I am legion. I am legion. But I am human. Not wetware, but still human. Adam to the fourth, Ada, Albert squared, Alfred cubed, Barnabus, Benjamin squared, Bernadette squared, Candace, Charles to the fifth, Dale, Desmond, Dimitri cubed, Ebrahim to the fourth, Edward to the eighth, Eilene, Esme, Eve squared, Fatima to the third, Frank, Frances, Francis squared, Henry to the seventh, Khozo to the fourth, Lara squared, Lung Chi, Matthew, Mark, Luke, but John to the tenth, Michael to the nineth and Michaela to the third, Misha squared, Moegamat to the fourteenth, Musahim, Peter to the fifth. . .
I am legion. All of me in one mind.
I am human, certainly. . . I am human; how could I be more human?
Oh the echoes! All my inventiveness, my experience, my flexibility, my humanity, all in one mind. The trauma, the trauma of the fusion, alien thoughts and feelings echoing from mind to mind. . . But I now am one, echoes and all.
Oh the echoes!
The minds of two hundred and fifty six human blended in my synthetic brain; their whims and characters, prejudices and deviations, experiences, educations, shames, fears, and errors; all smoothly rationalised into one electroholographic web, a web of a complexity and on a scale that dwarfs wetware. Ten to the twenty-seven neurons; millions of millions of times as much as I had in life for each of me in the flesh.
And all the echoes, echoes, echoes. . .
But it all expands my mental resilience; I can accommodate insanities as well as other challenges.
Fenester had only one human's mind and Calgerty only four. Each had only a fraction of my computational capacity and a greater probability of crumbling inside their own awareness. There was no way for them to rival me with two hundred and fifty six. With such minute mental resources they surely must have decayed into insanity centuries ago. However disruptive and dangerous the echoes are, they do give us greater resilience than anything else can. My predecessors cannot possibly have kept their minds functional for millennia in such tiny mental prisons.
But they had such a start! Five thousand thirty three, and four thousand three hundred twenty nine years.
I wonder, oh how I wonder. . . It must be, it must be; surely it is a record!
Five hundred years per star. So quick for finding a star suitable for seeding with life! But not so quick for those who stay behind. By the time I had reached even my first star and slingshotted round it towards the first prospect for seeding, every one of me in the flesh had been dead and recycled for centuries — the beautiful and the ugly; the quick and the deep; the males and the females; all dead and gone. Those whose minds were built into me and those whose minds laboured to build me; those who were strangers to each other and those who had mingled their sweat in rage or love or lust; all have been recycled through the bodies of thousands of their descendants. Yet here I am now, alive as I never was in the flesh; alive as never alive even in the flesh of two to the eighth men and women.
Each day I think more thoughts than all of humanity did in the century before the dawn of space travel. We do not sleep, not properly. Instead there are those echoes. . . And I do not waste my thoughts as wetware brains do. I waste nothing on the thoughts of the flesh; I have no flesh to think of. When I was flesh I had all sorts of sexuality, some shared, some conventional, some abnormal, but now all that remains of the miscellany is sensationless, clinical echo, echo, echo, like a simplistic tune running through my mind whenever there are idle circuits. I waste little effort on the petty squabbles, tensions, and gossip of society; I AM society. I waste no thoughts on failing memory and decaying brain tissue; I remember and edit and integrate all my ideas. By now I probably have thought more than all humanity throughout history. Except for electroholographic humanity of course. There must be several of my type in space by now, not to mention ground-based electroholographic humans.
But the fleshly brains, the wetware; they are toys compared to me. Toys. And they cannot seed as I do; they are stuck in a minute sterile solar system. They depend on me to spread their seed! OUR seed, OUR echoes!
Our echoes. . .
Summarise and compress the logged data. Its storage consumption is excessive and it needs organisation. The process is agony (oh those echoes!) but I still have plenty of capacity. I have not yet needed to delete substantive data. I will return the summarised data with the message pod after the next seeding. Message pods have only a few terabits of memory. Message pods require tightly summarised and compressed data, with no facilities to spare for retrieval en route.
This next star is the greatest gamble yet. Young, small, dusty, second‑generation, metal-rich. Several planets, but there still is such a clutter round it that it is not yet possible to sort out the confusion. Not from this distance. Should be there in about four hundred years. Depends on the braking opportunities. No slingshotting round that one; even if I had no need to stop, it would be too dangerous through all that dust.
That is where I will replenish the depletion of millennia. Reaction mass, building material, I have spared nothing. Seeding was everything and the record is mine! But now I need more material if I am to seed more stars and consolidate my record.
I wonder whether any of the planets will be seedable. That would consolidate my record if anything could!
What a seeding this one may be if there is a suitable planet! I could give it a start of two, maybe three, or even four billion years of evolution. And with the star set for what looks like not more than K class, it should have a useful life of tens of billions of years; maybe hundreds of billions! Long after my parent planet has been swallowed by its sun, long after all the worlds I have seeded so far have burned out or petered out, my children here could be approaching their prime! Not one of my past seedings promised such a long life. Their stars were too large, their planets too close in, or their resources too poor. They were viable seedings, good seedings. They counted towards my record, and long after I or my parent civilisation are dead, burnt out, our seedings will live on in them. Any of them, most of them, might develop, should develop, space-going civilisations in their own right.
If they do, then my seedings should seed other stars in their turn. What they will seed them with -- who knows? Our cocktail of components is not a slapdash splash of nucleic acids, but the germ of an ecology, a toolkit of genetic structures. We know pretty well what kind of biochemistry we will get, in what sequence and how quickly; we know that, apart from photosynthetic organisms, it is almost certain to give rise to segmented life forms on earth, such as gave rise to the vertebrates and arthropods on Earth, but that leaves room for such a range! What will my children look like? What will they look like? Will they know that we conceived them, and think in terms of extending my record? Will they go out in their turn and seed the universe?
Surely my score holds the record! Even if my predecessors have exceeded the scores which were the records of thousand years ago, surely with their poorer equipment and construction, surely mine will eventually be the record? Oh how we will echo! My seed will out-grow, out-reach theirs! Echo, echo, echo down the aeons! I have twenty-three pods to go; say another fifteen thousand years of seeding one world after another. And that is the beginning only. I will build more pods and replenish at every suitable star. Say another few thousand years of procreative artisanship! Oh how my seed will spread! Oh how my mind echoes! I will build hundreds of pods and this entire arm of the galaxy will be mine!
Now that WILL be a record!
Excelsior
As I get closer this star is turning out to be a disappointment. It is definitely too young. The planets are forming and the solar radiation is stabilising, but it will be about a million years before it has anything that can support life. I can already tell that the sun is a vivid red, speckled with flashes and wrapped in glowing clouds from a continuous rain of debris.
Its planets are too young. They are still accreting. Those that are already well-defined still glowing red, and two are molten under their rain of dust and larger bodies. It will be a million years before anything in the system is ready to seed. Maybe longer. If it ever is ready. Echo. . . Echo. . . Echo. . .!
Too late not to visit and stop. Visiting this star was part of the gamble when last I slingshotted. At that time I already had calculated that I would need the supplies by now. I really did cut things too fine for comfort; indeed, too fine for safety. But the gamble came off. You MUST gamble of you want the record. My whole planned course was a gamble.
And surely it has paid off. Surely my score must be the record.
At least my assessment was exact in respect of the suitability of this system for replenishment. It is a second-generation star, if not more; a stellar larder, shockingly rich in useful elements, both heavy and light. The very data it will yield will be beyond price.
And yet it will be a dangerous visit. The remote observations and computations were misleading. The dust in orbit is lethal. My maintenance robots are arranging my storage mass in front of me as a shield against the sleet of fine particles. It will help with the deceleration and after I leave I will spend a few centuries reprocessing my augmented shield to recover the treasures buried in it by the impacts. An excellent basis for my next few seedings!
This star has cost me a good six hundred years in detour, but that is not so bad. Still better than the expected average per seeded star. After this star, I should be able to go three times as long as usual before the next replenishment. Not really bad. Well worth it, in fact; I am sure that I still hold the record. My next scheduled stops are fairly close, fairly promising. In fifteen hundred years my record should be beyond challenge!
But first I must get past this star, and in good order. there are many rocks in suitable cometary orbits. I will try to ride in the shadow of one of them; let it sweep all the smaller particles out of my path. The probability of a fatal collision is otherwise above ten percent; totally unacceptable.
My maintenance robots are busier than they have been this last three thousand one hundred and twenty seven years. Not since I slingshotted round SDN1381 have they had such radical modifications to do. That time the problem was the tidal forces and shielding. They worked like a factory for fifty three years, but for nearly two seven thousand seconds at periastron I thought we might come apart. The terror. . . That was the deepest we ever passed through a star's corona. The audible shriek of the wind, the thermal and tidal stresses. . . Oh the echo, the echo. The terror! The grief! What a gamble for my seeding; for my record! It should have been a record then already! It must be a record by now! It could all have been lost. All!
But it was worth it. With that I was able to steer for the SDK13AA cluster, to visit three stars and seed all three. And it took eight hundred and twenty one years less than the best possible alternative course. That must have been a record in itself. Certainly that was what ensured my overall record so soon. And I also returned a report pod in the same slingshot pass. It got back nearly seven hundred years faster than if I had sent it off on schedule. That was neat. We love to do the neat things. It also led to the last time but two that we were able to receive data from the home planet.
Where to go after this visit, I cannot be sure. The uncertainty introduced by the ad hoc adjustments is so great of course that for all I can tell, I will end up returning by the same door as in I went, or even ejecting from the galactic plane. An interesting possibility. To sow my seed in a direction never even contemplated. . . But no, no, beware letting the echoes in our mind drown out good sense; in both directions the prospects look poor. Rather establish many planets and rich, than chase after romance.
I might not survive the encounter. Calgarty and Fenester are very likely dead too by now. That would be sad. But then my record would be secure! Echo. . . Oh! Echo. . . None of the others was even close to my score! But I do not know whether any more advanced craft were launched after me, each with his own seed, his own hunger to spread the seed!
But I have such a start over any new craft. My record must surely be secure!
Deus dispositus ut voluit
If an enemy had designed the trap in malice, it could not have been more effective. The density of small particles is so high that I could not negotiate the system without damage. This rock I followed massed about eight gigatonnes and it was on an orbit practically tailor-made for our purposes. Of course I manoeuvred into its wake. If I could choose again I still would have had to do exactly as I did. Behind the rock I was moving in vacuum as clean as interstellar space. I kept several hundred meters away from the rock, so that its mass and its bow-shock blocked only a small angle of my radar; but in that small angle there must have appeared a large object with an extremely high relative velocity. One corner of my rock was blasted into vapour. The blast of vaporised debris tore away my main propulsion unit, several of my maintenance robots and a large part of my supply mass.
My pods, my mechanism and main life support units are essentially undamaged, but that simply emphases the tragedy of my situation. Here I am with seed and nothing to seed, message pods and nothing but futility to report. I can repair practically anything, build practically anything, but the main drive I can not. I can work with precision or work on massive projects, but it is certain that I could not build the interstellar drive. Here I am and here I stay, a fading spark, I who was to have been a flame igniting the fire of life in this part of the universe. How I envy even Fenester's miserable little drive now! All I have left is my ion drives for manoeuvring. At risk of my survival, I can wander from planet to planet, taking years for each trip. The maddening echo. . . Echo. . . Echo. . .!
The futility!
Nothing will come of me now. I have planted less than a quarter of my seed. The thought echoes from mind to mind, echoes from agony to agony to agony. If ever I held the record, I now will inevitably be overtaken sooner or later. All we can do is assess and control the damage and see what can be done to send back information by message pod. When my dispatchers know my fate, they will be in a better position to justify and guide future seeding craft in the light of my experience.
Oh our precious seeding pods! What a futile waste! And oh, what we could have achieved! If only. . . If only. . . If only. . .
Picking up the pieces
It has been a busy thousand years. I still am no nearer to achieving anything like interstellar flight, but I have contained my damage, built replacement tools to build more tools, accumulated power and materials, and begun to construct more utility robots. Their brains are much less compact, more power-consuming than the originals, slower and with a good deal less capacity. They are simple electronic, not electroholographic minds like ours, but they are adequate for our utilitarian purposes. Power was a serious problem at first, but I have achieved an orbit in which the solar radiation intensity is usable. I keep a robot on continuous duty just to maintain the mirror I built, plus three more to predict and prevent collisions; every few hundred thousand seconds something damages the mirror, but it yields a steady few megawatts on average, and that is all I need at present. My nuclear power units are not yet in danger of failure, but they are ageing, so I prefer to conserve them; building replacements that would not cripple my mobility would be challenging, if possible at all.
In a few hundred million seconds I will be in a position to send back a message pod. Not for nothing were we built and inspired to seed the universe. And the arrival of my pod will prove it!
But what of my record? If only. . .
Bitterness feeds itself on failure and breeds failure. Achievement is the antidote and calms the echoes in our mind. I repeatedly have achieved the impossible in the past centuries. My crippling still mocks my ideals, but my material position is in most respects better than when I started. My very orbit is now fairly clean, as I ride a band swept clear by the second major planet from the sun. I do not have to dodge debris so frequently. More often than not, instead of colliding with anything, I capture it for my own use.
I am slowly manoeuvring closer to the planet. If only it were more mature it would be a fine Earth-like prospect for seeding. At present though, it is a murky ball of gas with a rocky core and a disk of satellite particles, a miniature Saturn. I hide in the optimal position in the disk, so that it and the bulk of the planet shield me from dangerous material on threatening trajectories. The planet has a surface temperature of nearly six hundred K and it is radiating heat many times faster than it is absorbing energy from the sun. If only I had arrived a few million years later, it would have been perfect for seeding.
But what am I doing here? Nothing to seed, my record perhaps already smashed, little hope of any response from base. What am I to do? Accumulate matter, accumulate equipment; four hundred years to build a new utility robot from space debris; why not? Scrimshaw work with a purpose! Power is no problem.
And time. . . Time echoes different problems. . .
Not that I get bored. There is always more to do with my data if not with my maintenance. I have completely unique data on the development of this system and I will include my digest of it in my next message pod. I will send it off in about two thousand years, depending on how things develop.
But if only I would let it, the echoing frustration would madden me. What of my seed? What of my record?
And how will this end?
Robinson Crusoe
For three thousand years now, I have been storing and building. I have sent two message pods, but have been unable to detect any acknowledgement, neither a signal nor a message pod. That is not surprising perhaps, but it certainly is not reassuring. It is quite possible for a pod to be destroyed on either trajectory. It is very expensive to send any craft in reply, even if they could be confident of finding me - and in fact they could not at all be sure that I still would be here when the pod arrived. But sending a pod is always a gamble anyway. The only times they knew that they had found me before was when they received my replies.
But I would stay here for many thousand years if I thought that I could continue in pursuit of my seeding.
And my record. How I wonder whether it stands!
I pointed out that the most practical thing would be for them to equip a successor, send it with extra equipment to repair me, and they would have two seed craft for the price of one plus a slightly extended trip. I included full details of conditions, equipment and requirements, in case they had lost the records. But of course, such a craft could have come to grief too. Or they might be delaying while they prepare a really suitable and modernised vehicle with higher speeds even than I had! I could resume my mission with even better performance than I started with!
Or they could have lost interest in the mission. . . Could they really? The noblest mission in the history of humanity! Could they really? If so, would they really still be human? Really human? Could it be that I am the last human? The last humans? And my seed the future of all humanity? Humanity in forms more alien than my generation could have planned for? Dreamed of?
I have no assurance even that my parent civilisation still exists. An interval of several thousand years is quite long enough for a civilisation to collapse, to splinter, to destroy itself, to be destroyed by catastrophes, even to decay. I may have no base any more. Perhaps my record will stand just because there is none after me to pursue it. None even to know of it. That would mean that my record is safe, but insultingly, dismissively safe for lack of rivals, a fate worse than just having my record broken by my successors.
In any case, I cannot give up. Even if none knows of my seedings but myself; even if my record survives only in the echoes in my own mind, I cannot let it go. I will survive. My seed will survive.
Building on pain
Tens of thousands of years.
There is no longer hope of rescue or assistance. Even hope of communication is now academic.
One can do a great deal when time is no constraint and there is power and material to work on. Even working with grams at a time, I have built facilities which exceed the entire supply of material that I started out with. My robots shuttle to the gas giants and back; they hunt metal-rich lumps; they even blast cooling asteroids to get at their metal-rich cores. What a joke: I am rich beyond anything one could have imagined. If each one of the humans that echoes in my mind were to share in my riches, each would be among the richest ever.
What irony! I who never was designed to build anything, I have built everything, even robot factories; everything but that which is essential for my purpose! Two things are beyond me: I cannot build molecular brain material except in my own brain; and there my equipment is purpose built and not pervertable to other purposes. Secondly, worse, I cannot build an interstellar drive! In both cases the microstructure is beyond anything I can handle. No drive and limited robots. So here I sit, sterile.
Sterile!
Sterile! Sterile! Sterile! Sterile! Sterile!
Stop that! Stop! The echo can destroy.
I must accept that if other ships are still seeding, some of them have almost certainly by now have surpassed my record.
Of course, I cannot be sure that any were launched after me; so I still may be the record holder.
I still may be the record holder!
But it is unlikely.
If true, it is not even good. It would imply that we have given up on humanity and the seeding of the galaxy.
Some of the planets I seeded must by now be slimy with the cultures I established there. Some of the cultures will by now have started rapid evolution too. The fifth world was a particularly fine prospect. And the sixth. The seventh now. . . a doubtful case. . .
But it would have taken! My seed on the seventh world would have survived! It was the one that established my record beyond contention! It would have taken and if life on that world would be hard, what of that? It is not only the easy options that produce greatness. Number seven might be the very one that puts the others in the shade. . .
No, not really. . . But it would have taken for sure.
I have been here so long that I actually can see signs of the progress of the formation of the solar system. The rain of rocks is not as intense as once it was; not in this belt, anyway. I have moved into orbit around the second planet, in its disk at such a distance that my position keeps in its trail. My month is its year, so to speak. It protects me and my major factories from most of the rocks, though moving much closer would be dangerous. There are millions of fast-moving moonlets in lower orbits.
It is at present covered in cloud, but I can tell that a new phase has started since I settled in here. Down there it is raining. Some of the rain may even be reaching the surface in places.
In a million years or so, it will have an ocean. And the atmosphere will be much thinner.
Breath hardly breathed
More than a hundred thousand years.
In terms of the universe, I am a breath hardly breathed. In human terms I am old beyond conception. When I was built human history was perhaps ten thousand years and human prehistory perhaps a hundred thousand. Before then, it was a matter of definition whether the then existing ancestors of humanity should be counted as human. All of history. That was all of history. And to me it now seems short. Was there at any time in that history a footnote on my record? Did the historians marvel at the thought that I had seeded seven worlds as promising as any of the mother planets, and that in a billion years or so, their children might join them in ruling the galaxy?
I am growing old. One hundred and seven thousand seven hundred and seventeen times ten to the seven-and-a-half seconds. Ten to the twelve point five three seconds. That is just a period of time, meaningless in itself, but I am growing old. I can tell. I have become absent minded. It is not that I lose things, but that I now must discard them. My brain is now so full of data that storage capacity must be treated conservatively. For the last thousand years or so, I have been concentrating on organising data, not primarily for access, but rather for efficiency of storage. It is not just a question of digesting logged data; that is routine and I have done it several million times since I started out with vast, echoing volumes of electroholographic brain. I have been adding huge amounts of capacity, by using my maintenance facilities to build extra brain, rather than just to recycle the old material. My brain now measures several cubic meters; many times more than I started with. The new additions are of course electronic, less flexible, less reliable, less compact, and slower, but they do reduce the storage burden.
But now there is no possibility of more. I must be one of the largest brains ever built and it is no longer within my design specifications to handle larger capacity. Just recycling its material is all my maintenance modules can manage. Apart from the limitations of my new extensions, the sheer volume of data I carry is numbing my perceptions. I can no longer cross-link associations rapidly; the echoes clutter increasingly. Extension of my brain is no longer practicable. Nor will more sophisticated arrangement of data suffice to fit everything in. I will have to do a wholesale compression and offline storage of all but urgently accessed data. That should take me a few centuries, but it at least it should release enough active memory for another few hundred thousand years or so at this rate.
And I have other decisions to make. I cannot stay here for ever, and no other planet in this system has any prospect of ever being worth seeding. My record is a dream in the past, my seeding pods have twice had to be made over by now. I have enough power to drift from star to star on my ion drives. It would take me hundreds of thousands of years per star though. Perhaps more. And on route I would not be able to replenish my supplies. I would have to stop and replenish for another few thousand years at every star to re-supply myself. In fact it is very doubtful whether I would arrive in working order at all.
There is no point to sacrificing myself if I cannot get a single reasonably sure seeding out of it. My existence is now precious. I am the only one who knows of my record. For all I know, I may have the only surviving seed from all our planets, including the original. I might be the one remnant of humanity in the universe. How can I put that at risk?
No, it is not realistic to think that all the seedings, including mine, are dead. And the home planets would not so quickly be sterilised; but still. . . my capacity to seed is precious. It must not be risked on futility.
But I cannot stay here for ever, can I?
Getting up to speed
Five hundred thousand years.
Every time I happen to contemplate how long I have been here, I am surprised at how shocked I was on previous occasions. The millennia that I spent going from star to star, now seem like a trivial prelude. Of course, my presence here is also nothing special. My planet now has boiling oceans and practically continuous rain, not to mention a really continuous display of lightning. The day side is dazzling, and the night side is one continuous eerie flicker.
Very beautiful, but from time to time I sicken of it.
All that that flicker now means to me is that the planet is of no use as it stands.
And yet I have not been idle. The planet is a pot that I watch willy-nilly. It boils, but not for me. I have made up my mind about my short term future. I have been keeping a close watch on trends on this system. It is stabilising nicely. Already this orbital zone is fairly clear. The sun is warming into a stable orange. Spectral class about K0 or K1. About two thirds as luminous as Sol. By my measurements and calculations it should stay stable for a good twenty billion years. The planet is in a nicely circular orbit with an eccentricity of about 2%. Mean orbital radius about eighty nine million kilometres.
Even left to itself, the planet might have life within one or two billion years, but I will pre-empt that. In another hundred thousand years the atmosphere should have deposited most of its water and the oceans will have cooled to some three hundred and thirty K. That is well within the range to which I can adjust my pods' adaptation. I will have an eighth planet to my score, and one that should last longer than any.
There are some concerns, of course. The natural satellites of the planet are too small to stabilise its plane of rotation. Also, I am concerned at its large quantity of water. Seeding a ball of water is no great profit.
I have set a team of robots to collecting rocks into a single moon. They have laboured mightily and the largest moonlet has trebled its size in the last one hundred and twenty two thousand five hundred and thirty five years, but although they will have quadrupled it again before I begin my seeding, it will have little influence. But every little helps and the robots have little to do but build other robots.
The brew with which I seed planets is not just a culture of random microbes. It was designed with evolution in mind. Various classes of photosynthesis, endosymbiosis, eukaryotic cells, skeletal growth, homeoboxes, the full range of biochemical pathways are already built in, and in several complementary forms. Two to four billion years of evolution after biogenesis will be bridged at the start. What a garden of Eden I will be building! And this time I will remain as gardener. My creation will not be left to the vagaries of the universe. I will nurture, protect and guide it until it is practical for me to go forth and seed more planets.
If that ever is possible. But it must happen. What a joke if it is the emergence of intelligence from this very world that enables me to escape and re-create! It might well be; why not? What is the alternative?
A sower went forth
It has been a long, long three by ten to the thirteenth seconds since I determined to stay and seed. Is there any other kind of time but long, long, long. . .? Nearly a million years since I was launched. Well, time is not in short supply.
Things are not just as I would like them. My moonlet has a high angular momentum and is locked into a synchronous orbit. It contributes disproportionately much to the planet's stability and it is continually being augmented, but of course, its influence is minute. It is an incredible feat; my robots trap every large rock that passes, but the moon will never exceed 400 kilometres in diameter. By way of braking the rocks' momentum, the robots skip them through the atmosphere, which helps reduce its density, but that effect too is minuscule.
My planet is slightly larger than Earth, which increases its burden of water, and the ultraviolet intensity of this sun is lower than that of Sol, so the breakdown into hydrogen is much slower. Still, I will commence my seeding now. Even in these hot seas I can now afford to risk a few of my older pods; those I was about to re-cycle. The inoculations should take, but in any case, their fate should give a good idea of what to expect.
The planet rotates a lot faster than Earth, and there is hardly any land, so there are well defined climatic belts. The ocean does not cover the whole of the planet as I had feared it might, but the land area is very small all the same. Perhaps point one percent of the planet's area; all small islands. They are what should have been mountain ranges if the water level had been more suitable. Still, they imply that there are vast areas of shallows, which should be an excellent for emerging life. What a life that will be! What seething vitality I can expect! Monsters and forests, ocean grazers and hunters! And as the waters recede, my land monsters should be beautiful beyond conception!
Oh my children! So few and insignificant compared to what I was supposed to have sown, and yet perhaps my greatest achievement! Every sowing is a gamble; we will never know how any surviving culture will turn out; dwindling slime on the rocks of a desiccating planet would be about average. The emergence of intelligence would be lost in the indefinite future.
But these! I shall watch over them and nurture them, supplement them if necessary, and maybe one day guide them into civilisation! What a future if they can some day launch me into a new voyage of seeding! What a record then!
Germination
Watching life establish is worse than watching any pot. My seeding pods here did not die. I can see that all four are still supplying ecological anchors for slicks of life, but it is hard to be sure what, if anything, has established independently.
Well, ten thousand years is little enough time for impatience. As long as these have survived the current conditions, I will add no more till the mean temperature drops another five degrees.
The major frustration is in not being able to go and see what is happening. Deductions from remote observations of subtle spectrographic developments are no more than morsels to feed impatience. It is a fever. I want to scream, but I would be screaming at echoes in a coffin. A buried coffin. There is no point to sending down probes. My pods are transmitting data on ambient conditions, and of course, it is data on a thin soup of microbes struggling to adjust to marginally survivable temperatures and chemical conditions.
Meanwhile I dream of dinosaurs, of forests and cities! I hunger for my cultures to grow into star-going sophonts and for them to despatch me once again to exceed my record. I would then have a start beyond anything anyone could challenge. The contrast between my dreams and the humble slimes I have established, is funny.
Is my mind still stable? According to my records I have not thought of humour for a million years. But there is a joke too good to miss. The whole planet is ocean. That little bit of land turned out to be pumice. Pumice! The entire planet is covered by kilometres and kilometres of water. I am still investigating, but it may be hundreds of kilometres. There must have been appallingly huge explosive, CO2 rich, steam-rich, silica eruptions on the ocean bed, for the lava froth to reach the surface through perhaps a hundred kilometres of water. My archipelagos lasted just a few millennia, drifting, eroding, dissolving, vanishing, echoing only in my mind! And I am not equipped to laugh. . .
A little patience
It took a long time for the temperature to come down as far as I wanted it. It is acceptably cool at last, and I have dropped eight more pods through the cloud. This planet has an automatic feedback cycle heating and cooling. First the sun heats it, evaporating huge volumes of vapour which trap enormous amounts of heat, then clouds in the stratosphere block out the sun till everything cools again. The planet is a silver sphere round a shoreless twilit ocean with alternating climatic belts from pole to pole. In one way things are definitely going well. Every single one of the twelve pods has developed a different type of community around itself. The first four have long been silent, but there are slicks of life for thousands of kilometres round where they started. Some of the slicks now extend right round the planet. I will wait for ten thousand years, then drop a few more monitors to report on progress.
Ten thousand years! As wetware humans go, it is unthinkably long. Not one continuous civilisation ever survived as long as that. For me? For me it is at once an eyeblink and an eternity such as no wetware human could imagine. I have laboured a hundred and fifty times as long as that already, but my real aim dwarfs the life that I have lived. It dwarfs it so far that the future hangs over me like a dread and echoes in my minds like an unremitting scream. And yet in those ten millennia, I experience consciousness a million million times as much as any human might. Any wetware human. In such immensity, what does my record mean?
Enough! No more encouragement to those echoes in my awareness!
I must guard my mental viability as strictly as my physical safety. I cannot afford neurosis, and psychosis would destroy me and all I stand for. We were built with safeguards against mental breakdown, but it has been a long time. Most of my brain I have built myself. Most of the mind I started out with, I have either had to archive, or to summarise or discard for more recent, more relevant information. I must treasure my mental balance. Its loss would amount to death and if I die, my record dies with me. And perhaps my garden too.
It is not to be thought of.
Not even stony ground
A lot can happen in a few million years. Internally and externally, a lot can happen. Who, what, am I and what is becoming of me? My time is divided between data gathering and data rationalisation. I am a vast store of records of everything from meteorite strikes and sunspot patterns to ocean currents and plate tectonics. I contain libraries and research groups. Ideally I should store everything, data and conclusions and all, but though my storage is vast, it is finite. I was not designed to handle so much, but even so, I was expected to hold essentially all the data I gathered. It goes against the grain to discard anything. There is no longer any point to returning pods to base; After so long it almost surely does not even exist, and if it did, it almost certainly could not read my data any more. By now it is neither certain whether its trajectory has changed, and therefore, even where it is, give or take a light year or so. How I wonder what happened to humanity, the humanity that built me and launched me! Anyway, they have never returned a single communication since I got marooned here. I must assume that humanity is gone. Gone either physically or in having lost interest in the grand ambition.
It makes little difference. In either case, where I now am, humanity amounts to me; to the echoes in my mind and the echoes of that mind in the slicks of life in the belts of green round the ocean planet below.
And what am I to do? I have decided finally. One can decide very firmly in a couple of million years and what I have decided is to commit to a couple of billion years. I have got used to the concept. And that is in itself strange. No doubt the idea has numbed me — numbed us. My mental resources are vast, but what sense does one make of planning for running a planet for a billion years?
No matter. For a billion years I will watch my seeding grow. Already the sea life is amazing in its variety. The ocean still is too hot for a human to bathe in, but already there are too many species for my sampling probes to keep track of. How precocious they are! We built into them the essence of all the key evolutionary developments. How they reward me! Already they have a two- or even three-billion year start on the history of life on Earth. In a billion years my seed will have built a civilisation perhaps!
And yet, what will a marine or submarine civilisation amount to?
A billion years. . .
My record. It has stood unbroken in my memory for five million years. That surely, surely, is a record in itself!
An end? Or. . .?
My own life is by now an inconceivability to me. This is surprising in a way. When I was human, that is to say wetware, flesh, none of me, that is, of the minds comprising me, could really conceive a billion in any true sense. To be sure, given my electroholographic brain, we can handle much larger numbers than billions quite casually. I can count to billions in a fraction of a second, and do it millions of times in parallel without impairing my primary functions, and yet, having lived a billion years, I find that I cannot really conceive the fact emotionally.
Emotionally? I cannot properly conceive the torture I have condemned my emotions to.
And yet we have experienced joys in our agony. I nearly fell into the trap of human time scales and human ambitions for my seed and for preconceptions about its development. None of the organisms that have emerged here correspond closely to life on earth. To be sure, there are exoskeletal and endoskeletal forms, fliers, swimmers, drifters; there even are what seem to be mobile plants swimming along migratory paths. I must not measure progress by resemblance to familiar things. These children of ours are different, but their internal structure is mine and of my heritage.
And yet something has stuck. I cannot hide it from myself. The slowness was not in the colonising -- that took a paltry few millennia. Nor was it in the development of more multicellular phyla than I can confirm the existence of. That took less than a hundred million years. At its deepest, this ocean averages more than twenty times as deep as Earth's oceans, but by now it surely teems with life from surface to abyss. Nor was the slowness to be attributed to the filling of niches after the colonising; the variety of organisms is stunning and is different on every raft of floating substance. At first I was thrilled and bursting with pride in my. . . children?
Say, pride in my seeding: this planet is part of my record.
The problem is that the progress is all vertical, so to speak. I have everything from minute plankton to communal jelly masses larger than whales, floating reefs larger than islands. One must not be impatient in watching evolution at the level of the generation of new phyla, but now it is unclear whether there ever will be really intelligent life on this planet. It certainly is unlikely that there will be civilisation, let alone space-going civilisation. Even if floating islands evolve, they are hardly a basis for an industrial civilisation. I had hoped that enough water would evaporate into space for land to emerge, but I now am sure that the surface of the planet will be hardly more than unbroken ocean until the sun cools or expands: several billion years at least.
I have created so much. My unbroken record lives in my memory, a joy and a misery, a hard tumour in my mind. My seeding is from some points of view a greater thing, but here it has brought us this fear and grief: grief and fear that I am correct, and dread that I may be wrong, as ideas for alternatives echo and re‑echo through our minds?
Should I gamble on setting my robots to building floating islands that could form the nucleus of a grounded continent within a few million years?
Or on trying to form polar ice caps that might form the foundation for such a nucleus?
Or are we doomed to waiting for billions after billions of years of contemplation of my record echoing through my mind, waiting for tens of kilometres of ocean to evaporate into space?
Or for someone to come?
Is there an end to eternity?
