Part 1: The beginning
It took them a surprisingly long time to figure out that they were living in a universe that was just one bubble in a vast surging cosmic ocean filled with other bubble universes. But in a few hundred years after this discovery, it became commonplace knowledge and found its way into the textbooks of their kindergarten students. Terms such as multiverse, metaverse, megaverse rapidly gained currency among the children of their species. Parallel dimensions, doppelganger particles, holographic realities, and hyperspace became an integral part of the primary school science curriculum in schools all over their home planet.
But it all went back to the beginning. Their beginning—which, for the longest time, they thought was the only beginning. In the beginning was simplicity. In the first hundredth of a second after we engendered their universe into existence, their space, time, and matter took on properties very different from ours. Of course, little did they realise that they owed their existence to us. Without us, there would have been no beginning.
*** *** ***
When she was 12, Tyra impressed everyone around her with her phenomenal mathematical abilities. With little formal training from her teachers, who were, in fact, half in awe of her, she wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers. Her teachers looked at the pages of mathematical scribbling and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. One astute teacher decided that it might be worthwhile popping over to the nearby Ithaca Metropolitan University and have the thing looked at by someone in the Mathematics faculty. No one believed that those intricate calculations could have come from the brain of a child. After that, the word prodigy was bandied about loosely when they referred to her.
As she grew up in the 1950s, she had little to complain about. As part of the post-world-war-two baby boomer generation, she had had a lavish and privileged lifestyle and lacked nothing. Suffice it to say she was not just born with a silver spoon, but with a veritably royal set of argent cutlery. Her father had made it big in the banking industry. He was one of the lucky few who hadn’t suffered crippling losses during the great crash of 1929 and in the period of depression that followed. He was one of those high-flying, jet-setting, quick-thinking executives who hired and fired people at the drop of a hat. He signed fat cheques and nursed plump bank accounts in Switzerland, Monaco, and the Canary islands. He owned enough shares to buy a small country and spent more time on his phone and the family jet than he did at home. His sharp suits and bouffant moustache didn’t make him the best father in town; but what he lacked for in paternal affection he made up with an extravagant allowance. This he showered upon Tyra with scarce a thought. Diamond rings as birthday presents and crystal glass as Christmas gifts were commonplace—even if they were delivered by the company secretary.
However, diamonds and pearls were of little interest to Tyra. She only cared for the wonder and magic of mathematics and science. While her teenage friends were out listening to phonograph records of the Beatles and jukebox songs of the Everly Brothers or popping cans of beer in the latest Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertibles and making out at the local drive-in cinema, she was either in the town library or in her bedroom at home pouring over some obscure book on Boolean Algebra or Infinitesimal Calculus. She was captivated by thoughts of infinity and higher dimensions. She puzzled over the meaning of the universe and was lost in wonder at its size. She pondered on Olber’s paradox and on chaos theory. She wondered about Mandelbrot’s fractals and its ramification for the universe. In short, she had a consummate love for knowledge and an abiding passion to discover the true nature of her world and the universe.
*** *** ***
The first hundredth of a second after we generated their universe and actualised their space it was much too hot for them to exist—a hundred thousand million degrees Celsius was hotter than the core of any of the stars that would form in the aeons to come. Of course, they naively called it the Big Bang event—a misnomer, if ever there was one, because the explosion took place in darkness and it was silent. Trust us, we were there.
Those early seconds were a time of unity. All the four fundamental forces of their universe were uniform and combined. We planned it that way. But then came chaos and upheaval. We predicted it, of course. We knew it would happen—had to happen. The race of electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, were in equal number to start off with. But in the first few fractions of a second of their existence the positrons were wiped out, annihilated in a series of cataclysmic quantum events. We were beyond pity or remorse or gladness. For, that sort of violence was beyond us. We had left that far behind during our long and tortuous evolutionary journey to higher consciousness through the faded niches and lost aeons of deep time.
*** *** ***
As she stepped confidently into her college years, Tyra began to grow increasingly interested in the nature and properties of light.
In the narrow confines of her undergrad dorms on the campus of the Ithaca Metropolitan University, Tyra would have long conversations on the subject with Jenna, an English Major student who was more interested in representations of the Androgyne in 20th century Literature than she was in particle physics and quantum theory. However, her short association with Tyra gave her cause every now and again to stop and wonder about the big questions of the universe.
“Tyra,” Jenna enquired, with a distant look on her face. “You’re always going on about light, but what exactly is it?”
It was late at night—well past midnight. The intoxicated sounds of a sorority party in full swing rang down the corridors. Tyra, who was busy reading the latest issue of Scientific Inquirer on the top bunk bed, looked down at Jenna, who was sitting by a narrow escritoire working on—judging by the collection of reference books strewn around her—what seemed to be an essay deconstructing the postcolonial nature of poetry.
“Light is simply electromagnetic radiation,” Jenna said matter-of-factly.
“Tyra, that’s absolutely gobbledygook to me. That’s like me saying to you, ‘The primary theme of post-modern pre-deconstructive textual theory is driven by the difference between the tenuous grasp of the aesthetic self that the metaphysical poets had and the neo-romantic bards of the early 19th century who had to choose between realism and textual nonconceptual theory.’ It goes straight over your head—and mine too, for that matter. Like the poet Byron said, ‘I wish you would explain your explanation’.”
Tyra took the mild chastisement in good spirit. She realised not everyone had as keen a grasp on the finer points of science that she had. “Ok, look at it this way: light is a type of energy that has both wave nature and particle nature. It’s made up of up packets of energy called photons.”
“Oh, ok, I get that. Is there anything more to it?”
“Well,” said Tyra, “There’s visible light that you can see—the spectrum of rainbow colours. But there’s a whole range of light that we can’t see. Light with high energy is called gamma- and X-rays. Light with low energy is called infrared waves and radio waves…”
“Wait, hold on a second there!” exclaimed Jenna. “Are you saying radio waves are light?”
“Yes, they’re light with a lower energy and longer wavelength than visible energy.”
“So, in a way, when we use radio waves to communicate with different parts of the world, we are actually using light?”
“That’s exactly right. In fact, we even use radio-wave and x-ray telescopes to see distant parts of our universe that are not accessible to us in the visible spectrum.”
“That’s incredible!” Jenna exclaimed and turned to her essay.
“There’s a lot more incredible about our universe if people only took the time to learn about it,” Tyra murmured under her breath, as she returned to her science magazine.
*** *** ***
We had our own nemesis in those early seconds. When the humans first detected their presence it was well into their twentieth century. They inferred it from their primitive mathematics and called them Neutrinos.
Three minutes after we generated their universe out of the pure energy that we had transferred from our spatial and temporal domain, the temperature had fallen to one thousand million degrees. Cool enough for the race of protons and neutrons to make their appearance. We had calculated that their universe would have 73 percent hydrogen and 27 percent helium at this point in time. Why? Well, because every universe we educed has been based on a different blue print. The cosmic constants that we had fine-tuned for this particular universe meant that there would be an abundance of hydrogen and helium. Also, it was the most efficient way for us to traverse from our spatial and temporal domains to this new universe.
*** *** ***
It was when Tyra was working on her PhD thesis about the properties of light and on variations of Young’s double-slit experiment that she was struck by the first adumbration of a thought that chilled her bones and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The Young’s double slit experiment, as every high school physics student knows, proves that light behaves as a particle and a wave. When it behaves as a particle you don’t get an interference pattern on a photographic screen and when it behaves like a wave you do get an interference pattern.
The problem that was troubling Tyra’s mind was that light changed its behaviour based on the observer. When there was an observer, it behaved as a particle and when there was no observer it behaved like a wave. It mattered not whether the observer was human or machine. Any attempt to definitively identify the behaviour of light immediately caused light to change its behaviour. This was not new, of course; it had been known and proven for many decades. No, it was the consequences of this that bothered her.
She decided to speak to her dissertation supervisor, Professor Hayden, about what was on her mind. Professor Hayden was one of those white-bearded bearded, avuncular old scientists who’ve almost become a cliché in the imagination of western society. He was as absentminded as you’d like when it came to matters of missing meetings, forgetting dinners, misplacing keys and being generally lost in thought. But place him in front of a blackboard with a piece of chalk and he’d churn out the most intricate and abstruse mathematical formulae and quantum equations that the human brain could devise.
When she stepped into his chambers it was a quarter past five in the evening. The amber light from the setting sun streamed in through the westward facing windows and illuminated shelves of books stacked from ground to ceiling. The professor had just finished reading the first draft of Tyra’s dissertation and was putting on his cardigan to leave for the day. He looked over his glasses and boomed, “Ah, Tyra! Just the person I was looking for. I’ve just gone through your dissertation, it needs ironing out in places and a few equations need to be tweaked, but on the whole, it looks a mighty fine piece of work”
Tyra stepped into the office and took a seat. She was slightly agitated by what was playing on her mind. “Professor Hayden, you know how Einstein had all of those thought experiments that served as a precursor to his equations and helped him understand the theory of Relativity?”
“Yes, Einstein was famous for his thought experiments. I particular like the one…”
“Sorry, Professor Hayden, I’m sorry to cut you off, but I have a thought experiment that has left me quite shaken and I’m wondering if you could shed some light on it.”
The Professor realised that he would have to wait for at least a few more minutes before Tyra would allow him to leave for the evening, so he returned to his desk and took a seat. “Tell me what’s on your mind, Tyra.”
Tyra composed herself and said slowly, “You know how light changes its behaviour when we observe it during the double-slit experiment—it stops behaving like a wave and starts behaving like a particle—almost as if it knows it is being observed?”
“Yes, that’s right, but that’s simply because the light either goes through one slit and behaves like a particle or both slits and behaves like a wave. Surely you’re not suggesting…”
Tyra cut him off in midsentence: “Imagine a distant and powerful cosmic explosion—a quasar or supernova, if you will. The light from the nova would have taken billions of years to reach our planet. Imagine an object with massive gravity like… like a black hole… or… or a galaxy or a giant star that sits directly between us and the path of the light from the nova. Now, if the star is at just the right position—and given the fact that there are more stars than there are grains of sand on our planet, this is entirely possible—then, the star, because of its gravity, could function as a giant lens. It would first split the light from the nova in two directions and then bend and focus the light towards us as it continues its journey to earth.”
“Yes,” nodded the professor, “that’s entirely possible. That’s called the gravitational lensing effect and is one of the predictions of Einstein’s theory of Relativity.”
“Now imagine that the light from the nova that’s been split and bent and focussed by the lensing effect of the star continues its journey to earth. Imagine we used a long-exposure photographic plate to develop a picture—what would we see?”
“My dear, it’s quite obvious, we’d see an interference pattern, because the light would act like a wave.”
“That’s right, but what if we then introduced a detector to tell us from which direction the photons of light arrive—what would happen then?”
For the first time that evening the good professor lost some of his self-assurance. He hesitated for a moment and said, “I think… I suppose… no, I know that the interference pattern would disappear if you added a detector to observe.”
“Do you see the point I’m trying to make, Professor Hayden?” Jenna said softly. “The decision of the photons of light from the nova to go one way round the star and behave like a particle, or to go both ways round the star and behave like a wave would have been taken billions of years ago. Long before humans even existed. How does our action of installing or not installing a detector change the behaviour of what these particles of light did billions of years ago? How do the particles of light know what we are doing—how can they possibly change their behaviour and undo or redo their actions that took place billions of years in the past?”
The professor was shaken to the core. “So what are you saying, Tyra?”
“I’m saying, what if light is reacting to us—what if light is consciously aware of our actions?”
*** *** ***
Part 2: The beginning of the end
Yes, we knew it would take several hundreds of thousands of years for the hydrogen and helium atoms to coalesce under gravity and form stars. And yes, we knew it would take hundreds of millions of years for the heavier elements of Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen to be released out of the innards of dying stars. And we certainly knew it would take even more aeons for these heavier elements to come together on their home planet to become constituent of the creatures that prefer to call themselves human. We knew it, because we’d seen it before in countless other bubble universes. We knew it, because we were part of the whole process—but not just a part, we were the process itself—even if it took millions of years.
For you must realise, time is of no consequence to us. We are beyond time. We exist in the now. Past and future are meaningless concepts to us. With the actualisation of this new universe we had transmogrified into a new unity—a new collective—a higher consciousness… Call us what you will, but know that we have no molecular or atomic mass—we are inside, outside, part of, and beyond the universe the humans used to think belonged only to them.
*** *** ***
In the intervening years since she received her doctorate and became a professor of quantum mechanics at the University of Maryland, Tyra continued to research into the mysteries of the cosmos, the properties of light and, the nature of reality.
Her father had passed away a few months after her thirty-second birthday and his entire fortune amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars passed on to Tyra. She found herself in possession of more wealth than she knew what to do with. But she had no interest in her father’s financial empire, and was content for the business to be run by a board of trustees. Money mattered little to her, except that it now opened new avenues of research for her to pursue. No longer was she tied to the purse strings of the university bursar. No longer did she have to listen to long spiels from the university dean about budget cuts and financial savings.
The first field she decided to explore was the links between human consciousness and the quantum world. Since her conversation with Professor Hayden that afternoon all those years ago, she’d become almost obsessed with the nature of time and the secret of consciousness. She wondered whether the human mind moved forward in time or whether time itself moves forward. Was her consciousness fixed, allowing her to perceive the past and future? Or was time fixed, allowing her consciousness to move from the past to the future? Was there one future or many? If time moved, then did it move at different speeds for different beings with different types of consciousness? As a physicist she knew what all her calculations told her: that the process of time is an illusion, that the past and the future are meaningless concepts at the subatomic level, and that events in the quantum world could take place without prior causation.
She wondered whether it might all be a product of her brain—that the passage of time was simply a mental delusion in the minds of a species that had evolved to survive on the planes of the Serengeti and not to contemplate the mysteries of quantum reality. When she felt dizzy she knew it wasn’t the universe that was spinning—the sensation of dizziness was in her head. Could it be that the feeling of the passage of time was similar? That it was some form of temporal giddiness in the brain? These thoughts and a million others plagued her night and day.
*** *** ***
We registered the development of organic and inorganic life on thousands of worlds in their universe. We weren’t responsible for them, mind you. We were merely passive observers. Once we had set the initial coordinates and constants of this particular universe and materialised here from our previous domain, we had no choice in the matter. Higher consciousness, material absolution, and temporal insulation demanded—nay, necessitated—impassive detachment.
Carbon-based life thrived in various parts of the universe. There were a few life forms based on silicon, nitrogen, and phosphorus too, but they were evolutionary dead ends. Many of them didn’t exist for more than a few billion years. Anaerobic life based on arsenic and selenium popped up in a few places too. Ammonia and methane proved useful solvents on many worlds, in addition to the ubiquitous combination of hydrogen and oxygen that the humans called water.
Life proved surprisingly resilient and flourished on asteroids, on comets, on the plasma atmosphere of stars, on the accretion discs of black holes, on cosmic dust in interstellar space… The explosion of life on this bubble universe was as high in intensity as in only a few hundred other universes that we had engendered and actualised.
DNA-based life rose only once. This took place on their home planet. Of course, RNA was the precursor—as were amino acids. But once the DNA molecule had formed there was no stopping it. The plethora of life on their home planet was rare not just in their universe but anywhere in the multiverse.
The blind processes of mutation and non-random natural selection came to a decisive turn with the arrival of modern man, or Homo sapiens, as the first of their kind came to be referred to by their primitive biologists.
Their wars, their violence, their follies, their conceit, their hubris, their hankering after material possession… we had seen these on countless worlds in countless universes. It is quite possible that before we self-deterministically evolved into our present non-corporal form we too might have been like them. But that would have been trillions of years in the past—a past—some past… or perhaps even some future—a time when the nature of matter, energy, space, force, and time had been or would be meaningless.
*** *** ***
Shortly after her 38th birthday, Tyra discovered she was dying of Leukaemia. She felt a pang of regret. Not because she was afraid of dying—not at all, she knew death was the same void from which she came before her birth. There would be no elated cavorting in heavenly fields; no redemption; no second chances. She knew death was definite and final. The feeling of regret she felt was because she knew she wouldn’t have time to learn anywhere nearly as much as she had wanted to. She felt a sense of deep dismay at the thought that all her research would remain unfinished. The only reason she wanted to live was to discover the answers to her most profound questions about life, the universe, and existence. And now, death, like an uncaring foster-parent, was leading her down the path of eternal oblivion.
But she didn’t despair. She counted her blessings. Being a scientist, she knew that of all the potential humans that could possibly exist she was fortunate to be alive—the number of people who could exist but don’t, outnumber the stars of this universe and any other universe. She saw herself for what she was: a lump of carbon, a speck of consciousness fortunate enough to experience emotions, feelings, and have cognisance of her surroundings for a few decades. Her time must come too, just like it did for every other living creature on the planet.
After the chemotherapy had wreaked havoc with her body and her strength, she wondered whether there was any alternative. She asked the most dangerous question of all: did she really have to die?
It was then that her thoughts first turned to the nascent and newly emerging field of cryonics. The company was called ‘Cryonics Immortal Inc.’ and was part of a multibillion cryogenics corporation. Their premise was that humans could be preserved at low temperatures and resuscitated at a future time when medical science had made sufficient advances.
After she met the director of Cryonics Immortal Inc. she was given the option of preserving only her brain—the logic being that future humans would be able to recreate all the other organs necessary—or she could take the option of preserving her entire body—but for nearly ten times the price.
Tyra left the office of the director and made her way back to her home in suburban Maryland. She made herself a cup of hot chocolate and sat on the armchair by the fireplace. The season of autumn was well advanced. The first sprinkling of snow could be seen on the lawns and on the trees. It was cold and she was lonely. All she wanted was answers to her deepest questions. Then she wouldn’t mind dying.
She thought about the options the director had given her. From her research and experiments into consciousness she knew that consciousness was intricately connected to the brain. Memory, personality, intelligence, sense of self, and personal identity were all connected to cellular structure, neural connections, and chemical interactions in the brain. If the brain could be cryonically frozen, then surely there was no reason why this enterprise might not succeed—far-fetched as it might initially seem.
However, she wasn’t so sure about the director’s assessment that she wouldn’t need the rest of her body to be frozen. She knew that the brain had neural maps of the world around it. But its frame of reference was the internal map of the body in which it is placed. This gives the brain the stability it needs to maintain the continuity of self from day to day.
She knew from the latest journals on the subject that the brain stem was crucial for the life regulation systems of the body. It was the connection between the spinal cord and the rest of the higher brain—a bridge between body and mind. Yes, the cortex and frontal lobes were crucial for higher thought, but any damage to the brain stem and it could result in a coma and a loss of consciousness that is usually permanent. This meant the person would lose all knowledge of their existence. The rest of the brain may work fine, producing thoughts and dreams, but without the brainstem’s access to feedback from the rest of the body the higher brain would have no sense of self.
What scared her most about the cryonics procedure was the idea of being trapped in a frozen capsule and being conscious the whole time.
In the end, she decided to use a sizeable chunk of her personal fortune and have her entire body cryonically frozen.
At 10:40am on 17 August 1986, Tyra went into cardiac arrest. At 10:51am, her lungs collapsed. The staff at Maryland General Hospital did their best to revive her. At 11:01am she was pronounced clinically dead. Within minutes, the emergency staff from Cryonics Immortal, who had been on stand-by the whole time, took over. The first thing they did was to inject her with cryoprotectants made of glycerine and propylene glycol, a kind of antifreeze that would protect biological tissue during the deep freeze process by increasing the solute levels in the cells.
Her body was cooled and she was put on cardiopulmonary support, though no attempt was made to revive her. All the water in her body was replaced by the cryprotectant solution to ensure that ice crystals didn’t form in her cells. She was then transported to her cryonic pod and frozen to -200 degrees Celsius. The cryoprotectants in her body began to harden like glass. This was the best the cryonicists could do for her. The lid of the cryonics pod was lowered and sealed. Tyra was left in frozen darkness—alone—with nothing, perhaps, except her thoughts.
*** *** ***
Part 3: The end
We should have known what was bound to happen once their primitive scientists definitively confirmed the discovery of what they called the Higgs Boson at their CERN lab in their year 2021 AD. We observed it all—were even present at the site of the experiment—intimately involved in the whole process—participants, if you will, in the very experiment that would ultimately bring about our downfall countless aeons later.
In those early days, the race of humans themselves had no clue about the monumental nature of this discovery—coming, as it did, shortly after their discovery of neutrinos that travelled faster than light. The end was already written on the wall. They had knowledge of the two tools they needed to ensure our ultimate annihilation. We should have done something to save ourselves. But trillions of years of existence in untold numbers of universes had made us complacent, if it was even possible for us to feel that or anything. We were content to observe, to be in the now. Past and future had meant nothing to us. But all that was to change forever.
*** *** ***
Tyra remained interred in her cryonic pod for 80 years. During that time the world breezed along. There was no major war between the world’s superpowers—the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction ensured that that didn’t happen. But numerous proxy wars were fought between the satellite nation-states that paid obeisance to the big powers. Microsoft and Apple merged with Google to have complete domination over the internet, social media, and worldwide computing systems. The world hit peak oil in 2020. By 2035 the price of oil hit $2,500 a barrel. This caused worldwide recession, economic chaos, and political upheaval. The consequence was that the shadowy figures of the banking industry sought to reshape the prevailing political structure: The world was divided into seven unions: The American Alliance, the European Authority, The African Union, The Arab League, The Austro-Asian Group, United Greater China, and the Russia-Mongol Federation. The central banking systems were consolidated into two major controlling authorities and the World Council that had replaced the United Nation now consisted of seven world presidents—one from each union.
Computing power and information processing systems surged ahead with blinding speed. Moore’s law, which predicted a doubling of computing power every two years, was relegated to the rubbish heap. With the advent of quantum computers, traditional transistors proved to be as primitive as the abacus. The new computing used quantum states and properties such as atomic spin to store data. Quantum entanglement meant that data could be stored not in bits but in qubits. Memory storage went from the laughable terabytes of the early twenty-first century to the trillions upon trillions of brontobytes of holographic storage by the mid-21st century. To get a scale of the storage, the entire data on the internet in the first decade of the 21st century and all the books of all the libraries in the world and all the dvds ever made before 2010, would not constitute even one brontobyte.
By 2050, Shell and Exon-Mobil were the last two oil giants left. But they were giants that were tottering at the edge of an inevitable abyss. The European Authority was the first union to be fully reliant on hydro-ion energy. In most parts of the world, electricity was a thing of the past within a decade. The first stirring of clean, unlimited, and renewable energy was already being experienced by humankind.
If the world lost its first country, the Maldives, to climate change in 2044, it gained a new continent. The first colonisers arrived on the dry shores of Antarctica by 2052. Soon three of the busiest cities in the world were located on the west coast of the erstwhile frozen continent. Siberia became the bread basket of the world. 200 million refugees from Bangladesh poured into Myanmar, India, Nepal, and Bhutan when 80% of their nation was submerged in the cataclysmic floods and tidal waves of the mid-twenty first century. These countries had no option but to accept the refugees as they were all part of the Austro-Asian group.
In the year 2066, Cryonics Immortal Inc was made an offer by the Global Life Corporation to acquire 100% stake in the company. The board of directors at Cryonics Immortal recommended that the shareholders of the company accept the offer.
With this takeover, the Global Life Corporation became one of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. Cryonics had become a major fad. Every Hollywood star and pop celebrity had reserved a cryonic pod for themselves. Politicians, new age gurus, models, and even your average businessman, had all bought into the idea of future resurrection—even though medical science had extended the human lifespan to 170 years on average.
The upshot of this huge demand for cryonic preservation meant that the Global Life Corporation had lots of rivals in the business. To keep one step ahead of the competition they invested heavily in preserving their cryonic pods in space—as added insurance against earthquakes, tidal waves, meteor strikes, and other natural disasters.
The terms of Tyra’s contract with Cryonic Immortal Inc. ensured that she would be eligible for all future upgrades to the company systems. The Global Life Corporation decided to honour all agreements made before the takeover. Consequently, Tyra’s pod was moved for the first time in 80 years.
Along with 10 million other pods, she was placed in a massive silvery black cube made of titanium–thelacyte alloy. Its burnished shimmering hue gave it an almost extra-terrestrial appearance. The cube was launched into space and kept at a geosynchronous orbit around the dark side of the moon. There, in her frozen pod, Tyra reposed in silence and waited. For 1100 years she waited.
*** *** ***
Our collective mind and non-corporal form had taken trillions of years of evolution in distant and divergent spatial and temporal domains. It all seems like a distant dream within a dream now. Our transcendence over matter and time was driven by the need for a pure existence—indestructible, non-judgemental, and non-interfering. If we were capable of wishing for anything, we wished to simply observe.
*** *** ***
Tyra was revived at 12:17pm on 3rd January in the year 3112 C.E. Her mental processes were sluggish, her eyesight weak, her limbs stiff. She spent several days in a hallucinatory haze. For all intents, she seemed to be alone. On the fifth morning of her resurrection she woke up feeling back to normal. Her room was bathed in a soft violet glow. White translucent walls surrounded her. The walls looked like they were made of misty air, but they were solid to the touch. She saw a round window that was, in fact, a porthole. She walked towards it and gasped to see the countless stars strewn across the black velvet background. In the distance she saw a dull brownish-red planet. She wondered if she was truly alive. Had she never died—or did she come back from the dead? She had no time to answer these questions. There was a soft hum that seemed to indicate it was some sort of doorbell. She didn’t know how to react. The hum sounded again.
“Yes,” Tyra called out.
“May I come in?” came a voice that sounded human but had an ineffable synthetic timbre to it.
A section of the translucent white wall shimmered, a beam of light shone, and a portal opened up. The entity that entered looked superficially human. But he was certainly more cybernetic than human.
“What on earth are you?” exclaimed Tyra.
“Hello, Tyra. I’m sorry to startle you. I know we must seem very strange to you.”
“Are you human? What year is this? Am I alive?” Tyra managed to gasp out.
“The year is 3112 C.E. You’ve been in suspended animation for over 1,100 years. Yes, you are alive. I am a subspecies of humans. We are Homo sapiens machina—the dominant sub species that chose to integrate with machine technology through genetic engineering and cybernetic implants. The hallmark of our subspecies is the ability to link our minds directly with the central quantum mainframe located at Loris headquarters on Mars.”
“You say you’re the dominant subspecies. Who are the others?”
“They are the humans back on earth who’ve chosen to resist genetic modification and cybernetic integration. They are the Homo sapiens vulgaris—or, the common humans, as we like to call them.”
“Would I be classified as Homo sapiens vulgaris?” Tyra asked.
“Yes; unless you chose to integrate. It is painless and will take less than two weeks for full modification and integration. Would you like to get started now?”
“No, of course not!” exclaimed Tyra. “I mean, I’ve been dead for over a millennium, I need some time to discover what’s happened in the intervening years. I’d like to know your name for starters.”
“Yes. You are right, of course. My name is Krynos. I will be your guide for the next few days. If you have any questions you may ask me.”
Over the next few days Tyra asked Krynos questions about all that had happened in the intervening millennium on her planet. He filled her in as briefly as he could on the political and economic changes that took place; on the computing and technological revolutions; on the biological and psychological upheavals her species had gone through… But what she was most interested in was the discoveries made in the field of science. Her passion for scientific knowledge had not diminished with the passage of time.
Krynos was a patient interlocutor. He answered all her questions as succinctly as he could, with a subtle sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye that she wouldn’t have thought a cybernetic hybrid would be capable of.
Of all the things Krynos told her, Tyra was most amazed to discover the existence of many universes. Nothing in her mid-twentieth century experience had prepared her for such a staggering re-evaluation of her place in the cosmos.
“It’s too bad we live in this universe when there are trillions of others to choose from if we could,” Tyra said. “It’s a bit galling to think we might not be living in the best possible universe and there may be other universes and other realities where life may be more fulfilling.”
“It isn’t just this world, my dear. The misery, the pain, the survival of the fittest, the thieving, lying, and aggression… it’s the same everywhere across this universe. It’s a dog eat dog universe we live in.”
“But there are other universe out there, you say?”
“Oh yes, there are countless billions of other universes. In the infinite multiverse, we live—to use an analogy from the twentieth century—in a North Korean universe, where life is brutish, painful, and short. There are enlightened universes out there where all life is peaceful and photonic.”
“What do you mean ‘photonic’?”
“I mean beings made of light.”
Tyra looked at him dumbfounded. Her heart raced. She thought back to the conversation she had had with Professor Hayden all those centuries ago. “But what do they look like?”
“They look like… well, like light. In the early part of the 28th century we discovered that all photons of light are sentient. We call them Cognisant Electromagnetic Radiation—or CERs for short. Because they are not organic they don’t need to hunt or kill or inflict pain to survive. They don’t decay into old age and wither and die. Because they are made of photons they live for ever.”
“And how many of them are there?”
“Photons are everywhere – they exist as radiation and heat, in bulbs, stars, in the inside of atoms, they are the carriers of electromagnetic force… to give you an idea of scale—there are over a billion photons for every electron. Each second, your average light bulb releases 2.5 x 1920 photons every second! Think of the number of photons in the rest of the universe.”
“I don’t believe that,” Tyra said, in disbelief. How can you have beings made of light? How can light be conscious!” She was absolutely overwhelmed by this information.
“You could well ask how you can have beings made of matter,” Krynos replied, matter-of-factly. There are creatures made of matter like you and me. There are other creatures made of anti-matter. The beings I’m talking about are made of photons of light.”
“But… but, how can they live for ever?”
“Because they are photons of light they travel at the speed of light. You probably should know this since you used to be a physicist—even though much of what you used to believe is outdated—but the faster you travel the slower time flows—until you reach the speed of light, when time stops. So, for these photonic entities every second is eternal, relatively speaking.”
“They can never die?”
“Well, there have been a few CERs that interact with regular matter in different dimensions—this slows them down and could possibly cause their demise. But our scientists have discovered that they have a real problem with Bose-Einstein condensates.”
“Bose-Einstein condensates,” Tyra repeated flatly.
“Yes, you should know this. Einstein and Bose produced the equations in your own century. You know how you have states of matter like solid, liquid, and gas? Well, there are other states of matter; and a Bose-Einstein condensate is one such state of matter. You get it when atoms are cooled to within a billionth of absolute zero and packed closely together. The atoms then lose their individuality.”
“So what happens to these CERs that interact with Bose-Einstein condensates?”
“For one, they lose a lot of their speed. They no longer travel at the speed of light. Time slows down—dramatically. They lose energy. They become weak. They lose direction in the multiverse and become disorientated.”
“You keep mentioning multiverses,” Tyra complained. “I can’t claim to even begin to understand what that means. I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Well, our universe is everything—absolutely everything that exists, that can be seen and measured by us in… well, in our universe. Our universe has certain values for the speed of light, the mass of protons, the charge of electrons, the speed at which our universe is expanding…”
“Because of the Big Bang?” Tyra interjected, relieved that some things she knew were still valid.
“Yes. The consequence of spatial expansion is that there are regions so far away, so mind-bogglingly distant that no light and no information of any kind can reach us. Those regions are forever out of bounds to us—even with infinite time and unlimited technology. It’s outside our cosmic horizon, which is about fourteen billion light years away. The region of space we can see and measure is our universe. Creatures and worlds outside this are as lost to us as we are to them. The realm they can see and measure is their universe. There are countless such regions—each isolated—each a different universe—each another universe in a large spatial expanse that you could call the multiverse.”
“Is that the extent of the universe?” asked Tyra, out of her depth.
“Oh no, we’re just getting started. That’s just the multiverse that we are part of. Our multiverse is just a drop in a cosmic monsoon. There are innumerable other multiverses with island universes that have different cosmological constants—all part of a megaverse. Each of those universes and multiverses has different properties for the matter, forces, and energies to be found there. These are radically different places with different kinds of matter and different kinds of beings.”
“What next? Is that it?” Tyra asked, her mind deluged under this flood of information.
“Then there’s the issue of parallel universes.”
“Parallel universes?”
“Yes. Parallel universes and parallel parallel universes.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it has everything to do with the fundamental particles of matter—which are not really particles, but infinitesimally small one-dimensional strings with different vibrational patterns that generate all the different types of quantum matter and determine their mass and electric charge and so on. But these strings can vibrate on different dimensional planes—practically, an infinity of different planes. In other words, we are literally bathed in an infinity of other worlds and universes at every point around us but we can’t see or experience them because the strings that make up our world don’t interact on the same dimensions as the strings that make up those universes.”
“But these are just tiny right?”
“Well, most strings are tiny. But those strings suffused with enough energy can be quite large and create brane universe like ours.”
“What’s a brane?” Tyra asked, feeling hopelessly out of touch.
“It’s short for membrane. We and everything in our universe occupy a membrane—think of it as a slice of bread. But you are literally occupying the same space as several other large brane universes—other slices of bread. But we don’t interact because we can only experience our familiar three dimensions. The larger dimensions are closed to us because the strings of that dimension don’t interact with the strings of our dimensions. But these higher dimensions together with our dimensions form the very substratum of space. You and I are in it, on it, and surrounded by it.”
“So, are you saying there are other worlds and other universes right at the tip of my finger?”
“At the tip of your finger—at the tip of your nose—at the top of your head—at the bottom of your elbow—everywhere… worlds upon worlds would tumble out of the dimensional treasure chest if we had the wherewithal to discover them. But unfortunately, we are stuck in the three spatial dimensions of our universe.”
“But it all seems so wasteful, so extravagant!”
“What does?” Krynos asked, with a puzzled look in his artificial eye.
“All these universes; what’s the point of so many universes?”
“You might as well ask what’s the point of so many grains of sand; universes aren’t about you; they don’t care whether you think they’re extravagant or not. In the grand scheme of things mankind is practically insignificant.”
*** *** ***
All we ever wanted was just to exist… to be. There are those of us who cross the event horizon of any number of black holes and escape into another reality at singularity. But they still exist. If we could feel anything, we would have felt panic when the race of humans began to first upload their consciousness into quantum computers. But time didn’t seem of the essence—because we had no conception of time.
*** *** ***
Tyra chose to move along with the progress that science had made. She was not a Luddite or a technophobe. She knew the obvious advantages in perceiving the world that came with cybernetic enhancement. For one, it allowed her to live forever.
She made her final decision to evolve into the sub species Homo sapiens machina when she realised that the scientists were making rapid advances in the field of quantum computers.
Neuroscientists of the 31st century were discovering that the complex electromagnetic pattern generated as a consequence of neural processes in the brain encoded information on thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. And these electromagnetic patterns consisted of nothing but bosons. It was the genius of a group of brilliant young physicists at Loris headquarters on Mars who discovered that these bosons were, in fact, virtual photons. They posited that since the entire universe is teeming with virtual photons then the universe itself must be on some level conscious; that perhaps the universe was a giant brain with functions far beyond our understanding.
With the help of powerful quantum computers generating equations that converted the findings of postmillennial neuroscience into pure mathematics, scientists of the 31st century were able to merge it with the mathematics of quantum physics. The result was a quantum mechanical interpretation of consciousness. There was even an elegant equation that united space, time, matter, energy, force, and consciousness.
*** *** ***
The end was inevitable when the species that was once Homo sapiens machina had evolved into Homo caelestis and discovered that space and information were one and the same. Their primitive scientist, who went by the bizarre name Stephen Hawking, had proven aeons ago that the entropy of a black hole was the same as the number of Planck-sized grids on the surface of a black hole. Those primitive humans realised that subatomic matter was the same as information. That was how they built the first generation of their quantum computers. They discovered that when they crammed too much matter into a finite space they could create a black hole; in other words they discovered that when they maxed out the information storage capacity of a region in space they could create tiny black holes. But because they had control over what matter went into the formation of a black hole they had control over the information content of that system.
The next generation of quantum computers were operated from within artificially created black holes and could communicate with matter in other dimensions and had access to information in parallel universes. This would have a direct bearing on our existence—it was only a matter of time;—their time. For us, time meant nothing.
*** *** ***
Three millennia later, circa the year 6014, Tyra, like almost all humans, decided to upload her entire consciousness into quantum computers. In effect, her human mind resided at the subatomic level. Because of quantum entanglement and wave function probability, her mind was everywhere in the universe. With the advent of the next generation of black hole quantum computers her mind had access to other dimensions and to parallel dimensions.
Science had found a way that allowed her mind to be one with the entire multiverse for all eternity.
*** *** ***
Epilogue
Date: The year 2 trillion trillion C.E.
I am perhaps the last few of my kind. The rest of us have been wiped out.
The events of the last two trillion trillion years played out as they should have. Perhaps we were to blame as we were the ones who had generated this universe according to specifications that we thought would be suitable to us. But, it was not meant to be.
The home planet of the deadly species once known as humans, survived many cataclysmic events in the centuries following the first uploading of consciousness into quantum computers. There were numerous floods; devastating solar flares and ion storms; at least three asteroid collisions that could have proved fatal if not for the ingenuity of those early humans; repeated reversals in their planet’s magnetic polarity; recurring ice ages during which the entire planet was sheathed under kilometres of ice; and massive shifts in the plate tectonics. Over the course of hundreds of millennia, their continents coalesced to form a new supercontinent they called Pangeaultima. Their continent of Africa crashed into Europe over millions of years. The Mediterranean lands were pushed up to form the highest mountain ranges in the history of their planet. The subcontinent of India shifted its northerly progression and the Himalayas sank into a shallow sea. The American continents moved towards the new supercontinent of Eurafricasia. Antarctica moved northward and reverted to being completely free of ice. All this played out over hundreds of millions of years.
New species of insects and animals unlike anything seen before flourished and went extinct as they always did. Cybernetic organisms created by the early humans took their own evolutionary path. Some adapted and formed hybrids with biological organisms.
Somehow, their home planet survived the nova event of its sun that took place 5 billion years after the invention of their first quantum computers. The temperatures had been rising steadily on their planet as their bloated red giant sun was in its death throes. The lands were dried and desiccated, devoid of any water. Temperatures of two thousand degrees Celsius on the side facing the sun were the norm. When their sun went nova, the planet was flung out of orbit. Deep in the rocky fissures, heated by the earth’s core, only microbes and bacteria were left on their home planet as it wandered in isolation through the depths of interstellar space.
Shortly after their sun’s nova event, the Andromeda galaxy that had been moving steadily and inexorably closer with each passing day, crashed into their Milky Way. Like ghostly discs, the two galaxies passed through each other and danced the dance of gravity. Over millions of years, they twirled and pirouetted slowly round each other. Finally, they coalesced to form a new galaxy, and the supermassive black holes at the centre of each old galaxy combined to form one colossal gargantuan black hole.
But by then, the species once known as humans had long since left their own world and, with their powerful quantum brains and virtual bodies, had colonised intergalactic space.
Now, two trillion trillion years hence, there is nothing to see. The darkness is absolute. The resoluteness with which space expanded was unstoppable. First, galaxies disappeared over the cosmic horizon. No light from them could ever reach any observer in any given position. Those galaxies were lost forever. Then, the stars within each galaxy drifted away from each other and passed over and beyond the cosmic horizon. As the hundreds of billions of years marched on, even the atoms and molecules that made up each star and planet began to disintegrate and drift away. Now, there is nothing solid left. As we speak, individual atoms that once made up planets and comets are drifting away from each other, moving over and beyond the cosmic horizon. Proton decay of all matter is well on its way.
Soon, all matter will evaporate into radiation. Soon, there will be no evidence left that this universe even existed.
But not everything has disappeared. The species once known as humans had long foreseen the slow spatial expansion and the gradual entropic heat death of their universe. For millions of years their quantum computers worked on a way of sustaining their collective mind and preserving their once-human consciousness.
The universe may have disappeared but they are still here. They would not fade away. Nestled deep in the infinitesimally small curled up dimensions of the very fabric of space itself, they still existed.
For this is no longer the Age of Light. Photons like us were once mighty particles that had dominated universes piled on universes. But we finally met our antiparticle. The multiverse is dominated by a new force. The Age of Light is dead. The Age of Man is upon us. It is the era of the Human Quantum Particle.
