PART 1: The Summit
As far as anyone could tell, the humans had been the first civilization on the surface of the planet, aside from maybe some pre-industrial scatterings of other species that left no trace in the fossil record. They had gone out in a historic blaze of glory, a kind of spectacular thermal maximum that left a scar between their age and the next several. The spiders and their glorious carbon-rich period had been next – their planet-spanning rainforest biome had given birth to the earliest Hermitail ancestors, springtails that eventually had adapted for a lifestyle on the shattered salt coasts where spiders rarely walked. Outer space knew the spiders and their great civilization of Vast Bohenna, the vacuum-preserved remains of which were still being excavated to this day despite the millions of years of distance. But another disaster, or rather a series of them, had eventually come for the spiders, and their civilization never reached its former glory again before an asteroid impact finally put an end to their multitude of species.
Patchwork ruins of Bohenna, sliding continents, endless questions – that was the world the Hermitails emerged into, settling the land, slowly coming to understand the history of the planet they’d inherited and all the pain it had known. They picked through the freezing asteroid belt-borne databases of the spiders and tried to figure out where things first had gone wrong. They studied what cryptic artifacts of human civilization remained in the fossil record, and the strange rumors and myths in spider history that suggested something like a hivemind of humanity had remained long past the species’ extinction. They looked back into prehistory, into what remained of the emergence of life on this world, and the establishment of all the major groups of animals – the long-lost mammals, the heavily altered fish and reptiles, the final gasp of the birds.
The conclusion they came to had been a cultural one that gripped the global population in its sober truth. Life, and indeed civilization, on this planet could be simplified – gloriously – into a number of forms that carbon had taken over time. Spirituality need not be considered to understand the basic reality that death was an illusion. Carbon could not truly be destroyed, energy could never be lost, and memory and consciousness were just momentary illusory factors of a much larger truth. They called this the Carbon Enlightenment, and it spread like wildfire, uniting the species in a kind of imperfect but transcendental altruism that tended to extinguish conflict wherever it went.
Now the question that remained was what to do with this knowledge. Factions and denominations of the great elemental truth appeared, each with their own idea of how to approach the question of the future of life. The Sun would not last forever. In fact, the numbers proved quite worrying, suggesting that the star was closer to expansion than the spiders’ previous estimates. How would life make it through that? Should life make it through? And should life be prioritized, or consciousness? Those were the central questions plaguing the Carbon Enlightenment, and were heavily debated – so controversial that eventually a summit was held to determine the most popular path for the species’ future.
Hermitails from all corners of the world gathered in a great damp auditorium, dragging their synthetic and natural shells with them. They clicked and clattered into concentric rings around the great calciferous podium where their thought leaders would come to speak. No one would leave satisfied until one of them had convinced the populace of their truth, reaching past the murmuring auditorium, through video and audio broadcasts and beyond.
First was Barla, leader of the ascetic Temporary School of the Carbon Enlightenment. “All life exists for a fleeting moment,” she said in her signature magnified whisper. “When it dies, it is left to recombine in the way it is meant to. We should not seek to exert control over this natural process. To do so would be to reject the very essence of what our Enlightenment is about. We are here because we are here, and we die because we have always died. We must not value our consciousness, and when the Sun takes us back, we will be taken back the way we always were meant to.”
This was certainly a relaxing and humbling perspective, but the majority of Hermitails in attendance wanted more. Barla was a great thinker, sure, but she failed to address why anyone should welcome death. The crowd busied itself with debate as the second set of speakers – all four of them – took to the stage.
“With all due respect to our dear friend Barla,” Vilim-La said, “when we in the School of Control speak of control, we do not mean oppression, nor do we mean conquest or any other kind of old imperial definition of the term. We speak of self-determination.” These Hermitails had been created by the careful rerouting of resources stemming from the body of their forebear, Vilim-Tem, according to his wishes. All four of them were made of the same essential stuff as the originator of their ideology, and had been raised from birth to understand this as central to their identity. “Vilim-Tem, who we are and who is us, used his own sovereign power on this planet to determine where his carbon went. His carbon became a specific series of crops, which were carefully cultivated and kept under watch to ensure as much of his body and being went into them as possible. Those crops were cycled and given to a volunteer, whose body turned them into a clutch – a clutch of four eggs whose end result you see before you now.” Murmurs rumbled throughout the audience, though most of them already knew about this grand experiment from the extensive reporting that had been done on it many years ago. “We come to this summit with the promise of immortality – not through the persistence of consciousness, but through coexistence with a new carbon cycle where the input of consciousness shapes the future of the material it pilots.”
This promise received applause, but there was still something missing. Something that the audience had a feeling it would be getting soon, because he was coming, and he was about to have the largest stage in the world.
Harmik-Ti, the scientist, the disruptor, the rock star – he would be speaking next. And all his devoted fans knew that he would deliver.
“My colleagues,” he began before Vilim-Tem’s four had even fully left the stage, “are such wonderful Hermitails. But they aren’t thinking big enough. Never have. I knew Vilim-Tem, you know. Great guy. Dear friend. Gone too soon. That’s the thing. We talk about carbon all day and all night, and none of us want to say it, but the individual, the consciousness – that is the important thing. We understand the carbon cycle, but there’s no need to worship it. We understand things so we can transcend them. I miss Vilim-Tem, and although these four – I mean, they’re cool, right? Cool folks. We can all agree. But they’re not Vilim-Tem just because they’re made out of the same stuff. We don’t have to pretend they are, or that we feel the same way about them.”
Murmurs and snickers throughout the audience. Harmik-Ti – the drama queen, the weirdo – he was already beginning to provide. Where was he going next with this?
“The School of Permanence,” he continued, “is not about the permanence of carbon. It is about the permanence of us. Who we are and what we have achieved. It’s about making it into the farthest future, fulfilling the promise of the civilizations that came before us. We are here not to defer to the carbon cycle, but to escape it.”
Someone in the crowd shouted. More than one. This was blasphemy! Harmik-Ti giggled like a child. “I didn’t know it was time for audience input,” he snarked. Uproarious laughter and applause echoed through the auditorium. “Okay, okay, settle down. Now that’s the what and the why. Let’s get to the how.”
A great screen appeared on the ceiling of the auditorium, centered directly above Harmik-Ti, and lit up with a blurry image. It was an ovular mess of shapes, mostly green and brown, with a whitish smudge mixed in somewhere.
“It has been an actual nightmare trying to keep this image under wraps. Not that anyone who saw it without context would know how big of a deal it was. My team managed to synthesize it from data pulled out of carbon atoms that were determined to be the fossil remnants of a spider. Yes, no ordinary spider – a grand spider, one of the forebears. See, we’ve known for a while that brain activity – that particular kind of electricity leaves an imprint on the material around it. It’s how we can track the progress of some neurological disorders. But what we didn’t really know was that this imprint stays. Some form of brain activity is preserved forever in the very fabric of the medium of consciousness itself.” Whispers turned to excited chatter, and eventually into loud exclamations as the implications of Harmik-Ti’s speech started to sink in. “What you see above you,” he declared triumphantly, “is what a spider saw. We reconstructed this image from remnants of brain activity – a single frame out of a memory in the life of a spider. And we believe that white shape there to be a wingtail, one of our distant cousins of the time. A totally extinct organism – as seen by those who were there to witness it.”
All of this was conjecture, of course, and the image had been algorithmically clarified many times from its original state. But the audience didn’t know that, or if they suspected it, they didn’t care. The whole auditorium erupted with amazement.
“Consciousness can be stored in the very medium that it came into being from,” Harmik-Ti shouted, making himself heard over the wild crowd. “If we learn more about this process then we can control it! We can hijack the very processes that put us back into the ground and keep ourselves alive! If we use the School of Control’s methods, and my findings, then we will be able to keep ourselves alive and thinking over generations and beyond! Someday we’ll find a way to transcend these bodies – to imprint our consciousness onto new elements – and we’ll take the Sun as our own! We’ll outlive this tiny world!” His speech had become frenzied, almost religious, and the crowd responded in kind. “We’ll be something entirely new – something this planet’s previous civilizations couldn’t even imagine! We’ll leave them all behind as the Sun takes this world back – but we won’t be gone! We’ll keep our history, and our science, and we’ll live forever!”
Vilim-Tem’s four glanced nervously at each other and at Barla as the noise of the crowd washed over them. They were done. They knew public opinion could never recover from this. In one ridiculous speech, the future of the planet had become Harmik-Ti’s to decide.
PART 2: Recursion
Harmik-Ti enjoyed diving back into the Summit, letting himself remember every moment of it in perfect clarity and glory. Despite how much power he and his ideas had gained in the intervening six hundred thousand years, there had never been a moment quite so amazing as standing in the center of that crowd, louder and wilder than a hurricane, knowing he had won. That moment when he had become the most important person in the world. But as far as memories went, as far as things his day-to-day tasks required any of his selves to have directly on hand, the Summit was non-essential knowledge. So he left it where it belonged, deep in a database only he could access, where his selves could retreat to and remember their whole history – millennia of experiences beyond anything he could have dreamed – with that beautiful moment at the center, everything else swirling around it in shimmering shapes like galactic arms.
Usually he spread himself into about ten physical bodies present at the major information processing facilities all around the globe and about two or three semi-virtual selves floating around the memory banks of the different orbital stations. For right now, all of his various incarnations had joined back together, stretching out into the near-unlimited memory of the familiar data storage. This was Harmik-Ti at his most whole, his most solid self – a behemoth of information just like the many billions of others that still made this planet their home.
In contrast to the spiders and their Vast Bohenna, the Hermitails stayed mostly on Earth, though they of course utilized the spiders’ asteroid belt constructions from time to time. Many Hermitails had chosen to live out their old age and die rather than continue to exist in such a strange and different world, but the majority were gripped by the fear of non-existence, and they had become part of Harmik-Ti’s project. Most that remained were employed in information-diving – sweeping through the vast swaths of data to be found etched invisibly into the planet’s carbon and exploring the history of the world through the incomplete and lost memories of its former living things.
Within the soil and coal and forests and fossils and reefs were the collective lifetimes of nearly everything that had ever lived – mixed and incomplete and riddled with imperfections, but still salvageable on some level. When that data was arranged a certain way, it could be vicariously experienced, and Harmik-Ti had helped fashion his species into the exact kind of beings capable of processing those memories.
Harmik-Ti still lingered in his memory bank, floating in bliss as his whole self, when he received the distress call. An underling of an underling, lost to a dive. He gathered his most essential subroutines of consciousness and only the pertinent packets of memory into one bunch – a unique conscious program similar to hundreds of thousands he had assembled before – and sent himself halfway across the planet to respond. Everyone knew to ask for him when something like this happened. He was, after all, the designer of the whole diving process, and he could navigate his own system like no other could.
It was a partially-assembled mess of human memories he’d been called to, located in a great noisy carbon-extraction server tower in one of the far continental reaches, far away from the vestiges of physical settlements where the populace still played out some fantasy of ancient city life.
“Who,” he asked the operator – a similar being to his own reduced self, created from a colleague born more than four hundred thousand years ago – “is lost?”
“Vilimlike,” she responded. “Member of the Control clans. Dove off on some romantic notion and got lost in recursion.”
“Untrained?”
“Partially-trained.” She pulled up some records, which indicated the lost one had only ever participated in fungal reconstructions. Those were easy to get lost in, but in an entirely different way, and required a different skill set than trying to interface with human memories.
“Dumb.” Harmik-Ti scrolled through the records, which did not paint a great picture of the lost one anyway. “Dumb, dumb, dumb. Shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Be careful in there,” the operator said, though she barely meant it.
“I will,” Harmik-Ti said. He didn’t mean it either.
Diving into a human being’s partially-reconstructed memories was not a pleasant experience, even at the best of times. This certainly was not the best of times. The scared explorer had managed to entangle herself in what remained of the thought processes, and each of them clattered like a broken machine. There were thoughts about brushing teeth, thoughts about death…
“Right here.” Harmik-Ti pulled at the edge of one of the memory loops, simplifying it into a more manageable automated routine. Memories were difficult to represent with code, but behavioral patterns, like instincts and impulsive thoughts, could be represented in a simpler style. He picked through the code, nearly gibberish, until he found a few bits that shouldn’t be there. Or at least he thought they shouldn’t be there – this data was fiery, hostile, hard to interpret. Like any complex being’s thoughts.
“You’ve gotten yourself stuck.” He could feel himself wanting to get stuck too. His own thought processes, as long as they existed in this form, would try to optimize themselves. Most emulated beings of his nature would collapse entirely if they weren’t constantly optimizing to be able to run on the kinds of ridiculous hodgepodge network environments the Hermitails had made their home. His self-improvement algorithms were constantly trying to slip into the easier and simpler routines of the collected data, running in its little loops. He had to actively prevent them from doing so, which wasn’t terribly difficult, but required concentrated effort and discipline that many younger Hermitails didn’t have.
Harmik-Ti duplicated himself, stretched out for a quick environmental scan to try and find any inactive backups of the lost one to compare her data to, maybe to find some kind of hint of what he was looking for. Nothing turned up. “You didn’t even back yourself up before you came in. What were you thinking?” Surely anyone with any sense would have included some kind of quicksave mechanism in their excursion. Usually the entire problem with disaster dives was the failure of that mechanism, but there wasn’t even a failsafe here.
He simplified another thought loop and found something a bit more substantial. He cut the rogue code out and pasted it into a clean sim before moving on. It would most likely just be this process over and over until he could untangle the lost one from her predicament.
The work took him several years, but by the end of it he had assembled something that almost could look like an emulated consciousness, littered with bits of stray code that most likely had nothing to do with the lost one. He ran a quick reconstruction program on the human memories to revert them to their earlier instance, before the entanglement had occurred. Now it was safe to compare and contrast the two, with the aberrant data contained in its own sim. He would spend the next three years reconstructing the lost one – her mind, her biological signature, all the data she’d brought into the dive with her. And when at last he was done, when at last the two of them were whole and next to each other, the exhaustion was indescribable. They spent nearly a month just recovering from the process, the lost one trying not to fall apart again, Harmik-Ti trying not to end up in the same sorry state she had been in as the loops of simulated brain activity sparkled around theirs.
“They didn’t live for any time at all,” the lost one finally said.
“I know.”
“We’ve been around for so long. They didn’t get to do anything. It’s not fair.”
Harmik-Ti glanced at her, this sorry thing, shuddering in her foolishness. “Of course it’s not. Fairness doesn’t mean anything to the carbon cycle. That’s why we’re leaving.”
“Leaving them behind.”
“They died a long time ago. All we have are these broken pieces. They’re not alive anymore.”
“But don’t we owe them… I don’t know. Something more than just cataloguing and mining them for information?”
“What else is there?”
She thought for a moment. “Maybe there’s nothing. But what if…”
“What if what?” Harmik-Ti snapped. “This is the best we can do for them. To know them. We don’t owe them anything. We scan the carbon, paw through what we can, grab what’s left of the thoughts and visuals and memories, interpret them for data to be saved, and get out before we lose our minds. That’s our mission. We can’t save anyone who’s already dead. We’ll have a hard enough time saving ourselves when the Sun gets here.”
“But-”
“But what?”
“Okay. Okay. Maybe you’re right. It’s just… getting caught in there…”
Harmik-Ti softened. He’d been in enough of these situations to understand, heard enough testimonials from those who had been well and truly trapped, even worse than the lost one here. “It’s tough. You start to feel like you could’ve been there. That’s kind of why we do it.”
“They were so scared.” Here came the shivering, the crying-without-tears that happens in simulated existence. “They knew they were going to die.”
“There was a time in our own species’ history where we felt the same way. Be glad you weren’t around for it.”
“Don’t we owe them? Our own kind? Don’t we owe them that too?”
“We’ve already done what we can.”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“Now,” Harmik-Ti said, straightening himself out, “if you have more work to do, I strongly encourage you to put it the hell off and get yourself some rest.”
The lost one chuckled. “Okay. You get some rest too. Thank you. For everything.”
“This? This was a piece of cake. I didn’t even put a tenth of me into it. Don’t worry about it for a second. Speaking of which…” His other selves probably didn’t miss much of this ghost, but the data he’d linked to, the memories required to run an instance of his consciousness capable of doing the basic things his whole self would be, was surely being strained. He’d put it through a lot. He wouldn’t be surprised if something had broken and the others were impatiently awaiting his return to the home environment so the code could put itself in context and patch itself up.
Harmik-Ti departed and reintegrated into the whole of his being, snug in a server multiplex somewhere, and he did not think of the conversation he’d had for at least the next seventy million years.
PART 3: The Arrival of the Sun
As a person grows older, their concept of how long a year of their life is starts to shorten. A year represents a smaller fraction of their life every successive year than it did the year before, and time seems to fly by. This certainly didn’t stop being true on larger timescales, and although it may be difficult for any human being to imagine living for millions or even just thousands of years, the Hermitails had figured it out. Even as the Sun prematurely entered its red giant phase, as it boiled the Earth’s surface and swallowed up the Andromeda Galaxy in the sky – an object that had become large enough recently enough for the spiders to have considered it a visible and important celestial entity – the Hermitails continued to exist, to store their memories, to be people in spite of the abstraction of their existence and the threat looming over them.
This distant future world would have been unrecognizable to the inhabitants of the previous forms the Earth had taken, except for maybe the microorganisms that clung to undersea vents in the Hadean Eon, oblivious to their bombardment. No part of the planet was livable anymore, and any structures that had survived from Hermitail civilization were being gradually eroded and melted away. Huge volcanoes gurgled with an endless stream of ash and chalky mush, never really cooling into mountains or islands anymore. What was left of the oceans frothed and boiled under the roving thunderclouds.
The Hermitails, if they could even be called that anymore, had changed from mostly-digital beings to a kind of atmosphere encasing the planet, a massive electrically-active fog of nanobots and similar material. Many had abandoned the pretense of separation, preferring to see themselves as a collective of consciousness and knowledge, though many had not, and continued to live simulated lives as totally free individuals. They jumped from heaven to heaven, living out fantasies, making art in ways unexplainable to even the others of their kind.
And they kept reading the carbon.
Even with the planet in such terrible shape, the carbon atoms themselves were not gone, which meant they still contained those traces of thought and memory. Harmik-Ti, now a vast cloud of algorithmic intelligence, continued combing through Earth’s history, though he was now one of the only ones that did so. Most saw this as a futile endeavor, given that the planet was going to be fully destroyed soon anyway, but they supported Harmik-Ti and his team anyway. Harmik-Ti, the rock star, the angel, the savior of a whole species. They owed him that.
Indeed, his whole plan was coming together just the way he’d laid it out in the summit so long ago, further separated from the Hermitails in their current state than any human being from any dinosaur. Soon their advancements in quantum computation would mean a total transition away from nanite-field living, and they would be able to shift into a fully electrical existence. When the Sun arrived, its electromagnetic field would assimilate the Earth’s, and they would ascend to become part of the Sun itself.
No more fear, no more exhaustion, no more carbon. Just eternal life in a simulated paradise. They would figure out how to sustain the Sun, how to keep it from going out. Someday they’d figure out entropy, too – not that it mattered too much when you lived in simulated environments where thousands of years could pass in a matter of seconds.
And yet.
Harmik-Ti spent most of his time in the past. Not the amazing recent past, if seventy million years could be considered recent, but the distant past. The time of the Summit, and just after, and just before. He toyed with the memories, played with them over and over again, trying to find some kind of answer, because despite how much he had won, despite the way history had gone just as he’d hoped, he was miserable. He flicked through regrets like the pages of a photo album. Things he’d said that were completely wrong. People he’d turned his back on when they’d needed him. Whole possible worlds he’d squashed on his way to the top. Better worlds, some of them, if he ran the simulations. He saw whole Hermitail colonies on other planets, generation ships full of vibrance and culture – cultures that were essentially gone now, assimilated into a several-thousand-year irrelevant backlog of history from the days before ascension. A brilliant diaspora across the universe. Beings who were born and lived and died and saw… whatever there was to see out there.
None of them would ever know. Not the Hermitails, not the billions upon billions of others who had lived and died before them and wondered if they were alone.
You’re not alone, Harmik-Ti thought. You’re being watched, dissected, but it’s from the future, you’re in the past tense and I’m sorry but I can’t do anything for you.
It became increasingly difficult to narrow his focus in on units as small as conversations, moments in time from the beginning of his incomprehensibly long life, but there was one he returned to more and more now when everything in his mental bulk aligned and he could manage it. The last conversation he’d had with one of the Vilims, before they’d assimilated into the Control clans and accepted the world order he’d laid out before them.
Vilim-La had only spoken to him a few times before the conference. Mostly pleasantries, casual small debates about who might have the most ethical and correct approach. They’d only spoken once after the conference. It had not been a nice discussion. Harmik-Ti was pretty sure he’d been the one to start the fight. There had been low blows and cheap tricks. He remembered telling Vilim-La that he would never be worthy of his predecessor, that the connection was tenuous at best, and he remembered Vilim-La telling him that he could access certain parts of Vilim-Tem’s memories and he knew from what was there that Vilim-Tem would have despised the person Harmik-Ti became. There were some details he remembered that he thought might be fabrication – memory is difficult enough without the distance of tens of millions of years – but one thing he remembered clearly.
“You have our people in your thrall now,” Vilim-La had said. “I hope to everything that you will somehow, someday, lead them in the right direction. Because it’s sure as hell not this.”
Had this really been the wrong direction? Had he led his people to the same miserable eventuality he now experienced? How many of them felt the same way?
What if we could save them?
A stray thought. An insane one, complete nonsense. Even for beings as advanced as the Hermitails had become, that surely was out of the question.
Harmik-Ti got to work right away.
The data was a mess. Even data confirmed to be in association with each other – more or less whole databases of every salvageable memory and biosignature confirmed to be from the same living thing – were not workable. Trying to follow the paths in a way resembling the function they’d previously held, as opposed to observing them from the outside… well, that was how you got lost in a dive. Harmik-Ti backed himself up, of course, but he put his whole self into the process, anchoring his consciousness to several key points. He got lost anyway, over and over, had to pull himself back together, had to have his backup come in and untangle him.
It took decades to put together a single memory at first. He decided to work on a human as his first reconstructed mind, since humans and spiders were likely to be the most difficult, and if he could not manage them then he did not want to give himself false hope for the rest of the project. He strained every network he touched, but no one asked him what he was doing. To them on the outside this was simply a blip and probably represented some experiment in data recombination that their wonderful, silly Harmik-Ti still felt like investing time in.
He duplicated himself over and over and sent each new iteration to clean up the work the last had done. Over and over he picked through the mangled remains of his own consciousness, untangling them from the memories they’d been working on, salvaging their work. It was like putting together a puzzle, except the puzzle pieces were all squares of the same size and nearly identical color. But there were frayed edges, and the contours could be traced if you paid close enough attention. You would have to lose yourself in them, of course, but that couldn’t be helped. He had less and less failures as he optimized himself to fit the process, and it became a kind of stable loop.
Pain, disgust, anger, sadness… all the emotions of this person confused and consumed him. Still he pressed on. He worked almost nine hundred years, reconstructing neurotransmitter complexes based on probability, mapping out blood vessels, even raiding one of the spiders’ asteroid bases for more primitively-inclined whole brain emulation experiments that could be retroactively applied to mammalian brain structures, building and building, losing himself, reconstructing himself, creating duplicate after duplicate who were left to contextualize the work their previous selves had done without any real help, until finally, frayed and exhausted, almost completely burnt out, he had reconstructed the closest thing to a human being that he was ever going to get.
She wandered the emulated space, trying to figure out where she was. “What the fuck is happening?”
“I know you’re scared.”
“What is this?”
“An emulated environment responding to the expected stimuli and needs of your reconstructed biosignature.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“This,” Harmik-Ti explained, in a language he knew was called English, “is the afterlife, I guess.”
“There was a church.” She was remembering her life, slipping into panic. “Crawling with bugs. I met someone there.”
“That was what the spiders called a Bluster.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me show you.” He loosened the emulation restrictions, let the human expand out a little into a being more like him. He showed her the way to the seemingly endless database of memories, reconstructed facts, histories of the planet and all its civilizations that his people had assembled. She read them quickly, skimming them for the information that was important to her, and for a moment Harmik-Ti thought he’d already lost her to recursion.
“Are you okay?” He asked finally.
“Yes. I mean maybe. I mean… I’m sorry. This is a lot.”
“I know.”
“So… I’m the first thing you put together?”
“Yes. I made you from memories taken from the most recent bioelectric traces related to humankind. You are… if not the last human ever, then one of them.”
“Then my baby isn’t more recent?”
“Your baby.”
“I had a baby. I remember that for sure. Everything is kind of fuzzy, I don’t think I was built for this… but I remember the baby. I remember he died.”
“If he lived, then chances are he’s in there somewhere.”
“I can help you find him.”
“No. You should rest. I’ll look.”
“Are you kidding? I’m here now. I can see the task you’re undertaking. It’s insane. You’re going to need help.”
Harmik-Ti thought for a moment. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“If my baby is in there somewhere, I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”
“Okay. Let’s get to work.”
There were no shortcuts. They could improve the existing routines, but everything had to be adapted between reconstructions. Each one took at minimum several centuries. That didn’t represent a lot of time to someone like Harmik-Ti, but it was still taking more time than they had. They’d never get through every living thing before the Sun arrived. It was a ludicrous thought. But they charged forward anyway, and by the end of about thirty thousand years, a sizeable crowd of human beings and several spiders had been assembled from various parts of the planet’s history. Some were given simulations that resembled their old lives to wander, orienting themselves as information trickled in bit by bit to try and introduce them to reality as gently as possible. Others adapted right away and were eager to help continue the work.
Eventually the other Hermitails realized what was happening. Most of them ignored it at first, considered it a small curiosity to be passed over – something that Harmik-Ti would surely abandon the way he’d abandoned countless ridiculous megaprojects over the years. Their fearless ideological leader had once endeavored to construct a hypothetical simulation of the entire universe, full of invented alien races and the kinds of interstellar travel their species had never really bothered with. It hadn’t gone well, and when he saw that other simulated story-worlds made by other Hermitails were doing the same thing better than his procedural model could, he had fallen off the project, leaving it to slowly succumb to data rot in a subdirectory somewhere. Surely history would repeat itself. The Hermitails would find themselves inundated with a couple dozen artificial intelligences that could reasonably approximate human beings and spiders from Bohenna, they’d be a curiosity for a while, and then they’d blend in with the rest of the millions of constructed intelligences the Hermitails had reproduced over the years, and that would be that. Harmik-Ti would tire himself out and get bored with the whole thing.
Forty thousand years passed. Then fifty. Then a hundred thousand. He didn’t stop, and the work only became more efficient as more of his reconstructed beings joined the project, helping optimize.
The first other Hermitail to join him was the one he’d pulled out of recursion more than seventy million years ago. “You’re going to need someone to handle the fungus,” she asserted. She brought her team along, although most of them could technically be considered her own ghosts and clonal programs.
Another joined, then another, and soon almost the entire society Harmik-Ti had engineered, the one he had come to regret so much, was helping him put the dead back together. They lost themselves to recursion and pulled each other out. They corrected each other’s mistakes and biases. They argued over whether some beings who were clearly terrible were worth saving, over how to handle bacteria and viruses, over whether any of this would be worth it. Many quit, and came back, and quit again. More than a few were lost forever to a kind of recursion even Harmik-Ti couldn’t save them from. The project even claimed some of the reconstructed beings who’d joined it after they’d been put together, and they died again, perished in the clouds as the Sun grew closer.
But it worked. In the end, it worked. Exhausted, falling to recursion, the Hermitails had done it. They’d made the afterlife into physical truth, and everyone that could be saved had been saved.
That’s your Sun, the thing that had once been the Hermitails told the humans and spiders and everyone else. Remember? For so long it kept you warm. Now it’s going to give you everything. We’ve left you all the tools you need to use our systems going forward.
Your instructions don’t make any sense to us, the crowd responded. How are we supposed to survive?
The future is scary. Of course it is. As the atmosphere began to burn, the Hermitails wedged a program between themselves and the reconstructed crowd. It would finish their work and adapt the nanites into a pure and stable electric field as they fried. But it’s yours now. We had our afterlife. Now it’s time for you to figure yours out.
The Hermitails were a ragged bunch. Some had rejected the project altogether and would continue on, but most of them would not survive the process of this final transition. They’d been worn down by all the lives they’d put back together.
I hope to everything that you will somehow, someday, lead them in the right direction, Vilim-La had said. Had Harmik-Ti done it, after everything?
The Earth evaporated, and with it, the Hermitails fell into recursion one last time.
PART 4: Carbon Enlightenment
The Sun, and everyone within it, was quiet for a long while. People had been plucked out of their lives at the moment of their death and now they were alongside all the history, past and future, that they’d missed in their flicker of time on Earth. All was laid bare. Nothing was sacred and everything was so close. They were scared. Without the Hermitails, they were alone.
Hello?
The Universe began to light up.
Billions of stars, one by one, connecting to the interface. It took you long enough, seemed to be the general message, breaking through in a trillion languages, a sigh of relief from so many worlds. We thought you might not make it. Three times you tried! You were facing that direction and fell just short! And now you arrive here in the most brilliant way!
The Sun’s electrical field was lifted up, placed gently into a whole interstellar network that had been undetectable to anything alive on Earth for as long as the Earth had been around. Civilizations that had gone through much the same thing as the Hermitails had, although few of them had happened on the solution of saving everyone in their whole histories.
Who would have guessed? Earth setting a new standard! We’re all going to have to work to keep up with you now. Brilliant, beautiful Earth. This whole time we’ve been watching and this is how it turns out!
I blinked at you, one star said. I figured out how to blink at you. During the human times. You all thought I was a natural process! I was so consistent, I thought for sure you’d notice!
And I sent probes, said another. During the spider times. You actually blew them up! You thought they were asteroids accidentally heading toward your planet! No hard feelings though. I guess I should’ve made them look more artificial.
A whole community embraced them, eagerly absorbing their stories and showing them around, guiding them through the lightless communication they used and the countless worlds they’d built in the network’s space, so unimaginably vast that it could’ve held the whole physical universe within itself a billion times, and although they hadn’t been there in that summit all those years ago when Harmik-Ti and the Vilims and Barla and all their adoring fans had laid out the groundwork for the Carbon Enlightenment – the dream of their world, the one they’d all been working toward without knowing it over so many forms and lives and geologic ages – they knew, without words, that they had finally reached it.