The We-ness wants me to teach it something, to do something for it. But first, it has to teach me history.

  “Tell me what’s happened,” I say.

  The Libraries

  In the beginning, human intelligences arose, and all were alone. That lasted for ten of thousands of years. Soon after understanding the nature of thought and mind, intelligences came together to create group minds, all in one. Much of the human race linked in an intimacy deeper than sex. Or unlinked to pursue goals as quasi individuals; the choices were many, the limitations few. (This all began a few decades after your storage.) Within a century, the human race abandoned biological limitations, in favor of the social=mind. Social=minds linked to form Libraries, at the top of the hierarchy.

  The Libraries expanded, searching around star after star for other intelligent life. They found life—millions upon millions of worlds, each rare as a diamond among the trillions of barren star systems, but none with intelligent beings. Gradually, across millions of years, the Libraries realized that they were the All of intelligent thought.

  We had simply exchanged one kind of loneliness for a greater and more final isolation. There were no companion intelligences, only those derived from humanity . . .

  As the human Libraries spread and connections between them became more tenuous—some communications taking thousands of years to be completed—many social=minds reindividuated, assuming lesser degrees of togetherness and intimacy. Even in large Libraries, individuation became a crucial kind of relaxation and holiday. The old ways reasserted.

  Being human, however, some clung to old ways, or attempted to enforce new ones, with greater or lesser tenacity. Some asserted moral imperative. Madness spread as large groups removed all the barriers of individuation, in reaction to what they perceived as a dangerous atavism—the “lure of the singular.”

  These “uncelled” or completely communal Libraries, with their slow, united consciousness, proved burdensome and soon vanished— within half a million years. They lacked the range and versatility of the “celled” Libraries.

  But conflicts between differing philosophies of social=mind structure continued. There were wars.

  Even in wars the passions were not sated, for something more frightening had been discovered than loneliness: the continuity of error and cruelty.

  After tens of millions of years of steady growth and peace, the renewed paroxysms dismayed us.

  No matter how learned or advanced a social=mind became, it could, in desperation or in certain moments of development, perform acts analogous to the errors of ancient individuated societies. It could kill other social=minds, or sever the activities of many of its own tributaries. It could frustrate the fulfillment of other minds. It could experience something like rage, but removed from the passions of the body: rage cold and precise and long-lived, terrible in its persuasiveness, dreadful in its consequences. Even worse, it could experience indifference.

  I tumble through these records, unable to comprehend the scale of what I see. Our galaxy was linked star to star with webworks of transferred energy and information; parts of the galaxy darkened with massive conflict, millions of stars shut off. This was war.

  At human scale, planets seemed to have reverted to ancient Edens, devoid of artifice or instrumentality; but the trees and animals themselves carried myriads of tiny machines, and the ground beneath them was an immense thinking system, down to the core . . . Other worlds, and other structures between worlds, seemed as abstract and meaningless as the wanderings of a stray brush on canvas.

  The Proof

  One great social=mind, retreating far from the ferment of the Libraries, formulated the rules of advanced metabiology, and found them precisely analogous to those governing planetbound ecosystems: competition, victory through survival, evolution and reproduction. It proved that error and pain and destruction are essential to any change—but, more important, to any growth.

  The great social=mind carried out complex experiments simulating millions of different ordering systems, and in every single case, the rise of complexity (and ultimately intelligence) led to the wanton destruction of prior forms. Using these experiments to define axioms, what began as a scientific proof ended as a rigorous mathematical proof: there can be no ultimate ethical advancement in this universe, in systems governed by time and subject to change. The indifference of the universe—reality’s grim and mindless harshness—is multiplied by the necessity that old order, prior thoughts and lives, must be extinguished to make way for new.

  After checking its work many times, the great social=mind wiped its stores and erased its infrastructure in, on, and around seven worlds and the two stars, leaving behind only the formulation and the Proof.

  For Libraries across the galaxy, absorption of the Proof led to mental disruption. From the nightmare of history there was to be no awakening.

  Suicide was one way out. A number of prominent Libraries brought their own histories to a close.

  Others recognized the validity of the Proof, but did not commit suicide. They lived with the possibility of error and destruction. And still, they grew wiser, greater in scale and accomplishment . . .

  Crossing from galaxy to galaxy, still alone, the Libraries realized that human perception was the only perception. The Proof would never be tested against the independent minds of nonhuman intelligences. In this universe, the Proof must stand.

  Billions of years passed, and the universe became a huge kind of house, confining a practical infinity of mind, an incredible ferment that “burned” the available energy with torchy brilliance, decreasing the total life span of reality.

  Yet the Proof remained unassailed.

  Wait. I don’t see anything here. I don’t feel anything. This isn’t history; it’s . . . too large! I can’t understand some of the things you show me . . . But worse, pardon me, it’s babbling among minds who feel no passion. This We-ness . . . how do you feel about this?

  You are distracted by preconceptions. You long for an organic body, and assume that lacking organic bodies, We experience no emotions. We experience emotions. Listen to them>>>>>

  I squirm in my cubicle and experience their emotions of first and second loneliness, degrees of isolation from old memories, old selves; longing for the first individuation, the Birthtime . . . hunger for understanding not just of the outer reality, beyond the social=mind’s vast internal universe of thought, but of the ever-changing currents and orderliness arising between tributaries. Here is social and mental interaction as a great song, rich and joyous, a love greater than anything I can remember experiencing as an embodied human. Greater emotions still, outside my range again, of loyalty and love for a social=mind and something like respect for the immense Libraries. (I am shown what the We-ness says is an emotion experienced at the level of Libraries, but it is so far beyond me that I seem to disintegrate, and have to be coaxed back to wholeness.)

  A tributary approaches across the mind space within the soma. My cubicle grows dim. I feel a strange familiarity again; this will be, is, my future self.

  This tributary feels sadness and some grief, touching its ancient self-me. It feels pain at my limitations, at my tight-packed biological character. Things deliberately forgotten come back to haunt it.

  And they haunt me. My own inadequacies become abundantiy clear. I remember useless arguments with friends, making my wife cry with frustration, getting angry at my children for no good reason. My childhood and adolescent indiscretions return like shadows on a scrim. And I remember my drives: rolling in useless lust, and later, Elisaveta! With her young and supple body; and others. Just as significant, but different in color, the cooler passions of discovery and knowledge, my growing self-awareness. I remember fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, of not being a useful member of society. I needed above all (more than I needed Elisaveta) to be important and to teach and be influential on young minds.

  All of these emotions, the We-ness demonstrates, have analogous emotions at their level. For the We-ness, the most piercing unpleasantness of all—akin to physical pain—comes from recognition of their possible failure. The teachers may not have taught their students properly, and the students may be making mistakes.

  “Let me get all this straight,” I say. I grow used to my imagined state—to riding like a passenger within the cubicle, inside the eightlegged soma, to seeing as if through a small window the advancing and now receding of the glaciers. “You’re teachers—as I was once a teacher—and you used to be connected to a larger social=mind, part of a Library.” I mull over mind as society, society as mind. “But there may have been a revolution. After billions of years! Students . . . A revolution! Extraordinary!

  “You’ve been cut off from the Library. You’re alone, you might be killed . . . and you’re telling me about ancient history?”

  The We-ness falls silent.

  “I must be important,” I say with an unbreathed sigh, a kind of asterisk in the exchanged thoughts. “I can’t imagine why. But maybe it doesn’t matter—I have so many questions!” I hunger for knowledge of what has become of my children, of my wife. Of everything that came after me . . . All the changes!

  “We need information from you, and your interpretation of certain memories. Vasily was our name once. Vasily Gerazimov. You were the husband of Elisaveta, father of Maxim and Giselle. We need to know more about Elisaveta.”

  “You don’t remember her?”

  “Twelve billion years have passed. Time and space have changed. This tributary alone has partnered and bonded and matched and socialized with perhaps fifty billion individuals and tributaries since. Our combined tributaries in the social=mind have had contacts with all intelligent beings, once or twice removed. Most have dumped or stored memories more than a billion years old. If We were still connected to the Library, I could learn more about my past. I have kept you as a kind of memento, a talisman, and nothing more.”

  I feel a freezing awe. Fifty billion mates . . . or whatever they had been. I catch fleeting glimpses of liaisons in the social=mind, binary, tri-nary, as many as thousands at a time linked in the crumbling remnants of marriage and sexuality, and finally those liaisons passing completely out of favor, fashion, usefiilness.

  “Elisaveta and you,” the tributary continues, “were divorced ten years after your storage. I remember nothing of the reasons why. We have no other clues to work with.”

  The “news” comes as a doubling of my pain, a renewed and expanded sense of isolation from a loved one. I reach up to touch my face, to see if I am crying. My hands pass through imagined flesh and bone. My body is long since dust; Elisaveta’s body is dust. What went wrong between us? Did she find another lover? Did I? I am a ghost. I should not care. There were difficult times, but I never thought of our liaison— our marriage, I would defend that word even now—as temporary. Still, across billions of years! We have become immortal—she perhaps more than I, who remember nothing of the time between. “Why do you need me at all? Why do you need clues?”

  But we are interrupted. An extraordinary thing happens to the retreating glaciers. From our promontory, the soma half-hidden behind an upthrust of frozen and deformed knowledge, we see the icy masses blister and bubble, as if made of some superheated glass or plastic. Steam bursts from the bubbles—at least, what I assume to be steam—and freezes in the air in shapes suggesting flowers. All around, the walls and sheets of ice succumb to this beautiful plague.

  The We-ness understands it no more than I.

  From the hill below come faint sounds and hints of radiation— gamma rays, beta particles, mesons, all clearly visible to the We-ness, and vaguely passed on to me as well.

  “Something’s coming,” I say.

  The Berkus advances in its unexpected cloud of production-destruction. There is something deeply wrong with it—it squanders too much available energy. Its very presence disrupts the new matter of which We are made.

  Of the seven tributaries, four feel an emotion rooted in the deepest algorithms of their pasts: fear. Three have never known such bodily functions, have never known mortal and embodied individuation. They feel intellectual concern and a tinge of cosmic sadness, as if our end might be equated with the past death of the natural stars and galaxies. We keep to our purpose despite these ridiculous excursions, signs of our disorder.

  The Berkus advances up the hill.

  I see through my window this monumental and absolutely horrifying creature, shining with a brightness comprised of the qualities of diamonds and polished silver, a scintillating insect pushing its sharply pointed feet into the thawing soil, steam rising all around. The legs hold together despite gaps where joints should be, gaps crossed only by something that produces hard radiation. Below the Berkus (so the We-ness calls it), the ground ripples as if School World has muscles and twitches, wanting to scratch.

  The Berkus pauses and sizes up our much less powerful, much smaller soma with blasts of neutrons, flicked as casually as a flashlight beam. The material of our soma wilts and reforms beneath this withering barrage. The soma expresses distress—and inadvertently, the We-ness translates this distress to me as tremendous pain.

  I explode within my confined mental space. Again comes the blackness.

  The Berkus decides it is not necessary to come any closer. That is fortunate for us, and for our soma. Any lessening of the distance between us would prove fatal.

  The Berkus communicates with pulsed light. “Why are you here?”

  “We have been sent here to observe and report. We are cut off from the Library—”

  “Your Library has fled,” the Berkus informs us. “It disagreed with the Endtime Work Coordinator.”

  “We were told nothing of this.”

  “It was not our responsibility. We did not know you would be here.” The magnitude of this rudeness is difficult to envelope. We wonder how many tributaries the Berkus contains. We hypothesize that it might contain all of the students, the entire student social=mind, and this would explain its use of energy and change in design.

  Our pitiful ancient individual flickers back into awareness and sits quietly, too stunned to protest.

  “We do not understand the purpose of this creation and destruction,” We say. Our strategy is to avoid the student tributaries altogether now. Still, they might tell us more We need to know.

  “It must be obvious to teachers,” the Berkus says. “By order of the Coordinator, We are rehearsing all possibilities of order, usurping stored knowledge down to the planetary core and converting it. There must be an escape from the Proof.”

  “The Proof is an ancient discovery. It has never been shown to be wrong. What can it possibly mean to the Endtime Work?”

  “It means a great deal,” the Berkus says.

  “How many are you?”

  The Berkus does not answer. All this has taken place in less than a millionth of a second. The Berkus’s incommunication lengthens into seconds, then minutes. Around us, the glaciers crumple like mud caught in rushing water.

  “Another closed path, of no value,” the Berkus finally says.

  “We wish to understand your motivations.”

  “We have no need of you now.”

  “Why this concern with the Proof? And what does it have to do with the change you provoke, the destruction of School World’s knowledge?” The Berkus rises on a tripod of three disjointed legs, waving its other legs in the air, a cartoon medallion so disturbing in design that We draw back a few meters.

  “The Proof is a cultural aberration,” it radiates fiercely, blasting our surface and making the mud around us bubble. “It is not fit to pass on to those who seed the next reality. You failed us. You showed no way beyond the Proof. The Endtime Work has begun, the final self chosen to fit through the narrow gap—”

  I see all this through the We-ness as if I have been there, have lived it, and suddenly I know why I have been recalled, why the We-ness has shown me faces and patterns.

  The universe, across more than twelve billion years, grows irretrievably old. From spanning the galaxies billions of years before, all life and intelligence—all arising from the sole intelligence in all the universe, humanity—have shrunk to a few star systems. These systems have been resuscitated and nurtured by concentrating the remaining available energy of thousands of dead galaxies. And they are no longer natural star systems with planets—the bloated coma-wrapped violet star rising at zenith over us is a congeries of plasma macromachines, controlling and conserving every gram of the natural matter remaining, every erg of available energy. These artificial suns pulse like massive living cells, shaped to be ultimately efficient and to squeeze every moment of active life over time remaining. The planets themselves have been condensed, recarved, rearranged, and they too are composed of geological macromachines. With some dread, I gather that the matter of which all these things are made is itself artificial, with redesigned component particles.

  The natural galaxies have died, reduced to a colorless murmur of useless heat, and all the particles of all original creation—besides what have been marshaled and remade in these three close-packed systems— have dulled and slowed and unwound. Gravity itself has lost its bearings and become a chancy phenomenon, supplemented by new forces generated within the macromachine planets and suns.

  Nothing is what it seems, and nothing is what it had been when I lived.

  Available energy is strictly limited. The We-ness looks forward to less than four times ten to the fiftieth units of Planck time—roughly an old Earth year.

  And in charge of it all, controlling the Endtime Work, a supremely confident social=mind composed of many “tributaries,” and among those gathered selves . . .

  Someone very familiar to me indeed. My wife.

  “Where is she? Can I speak to her? What happened to her—did she die, was she stored, did she live?”

  The We-ness seems to vibrate both from my reaction to this information, and to the spite of the Berkus. I am assigned to a quiet place, where I can watch and listen without bothering them. I feel our soma, our insectlike body, dig into the loosening substance of the promontory.