Poseidon's Wake

Believe me, Kanu—the one thing you don’t do in emergencies is think things through. Thinking things through gets you a headstone and a nice epitaph. She thought things through. See how that worked out for her.

We have all made mistakes. The mark of intelligence is to learn from them, and not be bound by the errors of the past.

“And when do we abandon negotiation and start hitting each other with increasingly large sticks?” Ru said.

“Only when we’ve exhausted all the other options,” Vasin said.

The sense of squandered possibility, of better paths now lost to them all, filled him with a sudden rising sadness. He wondered if it was too late to make something better of their world.

If I’ve learned one thing in my long existence, it’s that hesitation gets you nowhere.

Oh, I’m not perfect—not by a long stretch. I just make the rest of you look bad.

“You’re taking this very well,” Goma said.

Eunice gave a semi-shrug. “Experience. You can fight the odds up to a point, but sooner or later you have to face reality. The universe doesn’t care about temper tantrums or pity.”

“They dug too far into physics and it bit them. Physics will do that. It’s an ungrateful piece of shit. It’s a fickle lover that will always betray you. It courts you, gives you rewards, coughs up little treats like fire and the wheel, telescopes and the secret of starflight, makes you think you’re worth it, that you’re the special one, that you really, really matter to it.…All the while it’s saving up this nasty little truth: that every thought, every deed, every hope you’ve ever held is futile. That the universe will end, and forget itself. That there is no such thing as meaning.…

“Do you believe it?” Goma asked.

“Of course I believe it. Physics doesn’t give a damn about how we feel. It doesn’t give a damn about a sleeping soundly in our beds, thinking we matter.”

You wish things were different from the way they are. That’s a refrain as old as time. I’ve lived a long and strange sort of life, Kanu, and I’ve known that feeling a few times. Generally it’s best to accept that things are exactly as bad as they look. At least that way you know it’s time to start digging your way out.

“I’d argue with you, but I suspect it would feel a bit like arguing with myself.”

“Futile?”

“Boring.”

“For all you know, no one even remembers what you did by now.”

“No one remembers anything, in the end.”

Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time.

“Now you’re scaring me.”

“If you were not scared, you don’t understand the situation.”

“Are you impressed?” Goma dared ask.

“I don’t really do impressed. But consider yourselves the recipients of grudging approval.”

There is a point to love, if love itself is remembered. There is a point to the creation of beauty, because beauty will endure. All words, all thoughts, have a chance of transcending death and time. There is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, no divine creator, no great will behind the universe, no meaning beyond that revealed by our senses and our intellects.

This is a hard thing to accept. Yet there is still a point to being alive, and that makes the acceptance bearable. But the universe withholds even this bleak consolation.

Within its deepest structure, written like a curse into the very mathematics out of which it is forged, the universe contains a suicidal imperative. Vacuum itself is poised in an unstable condition. Given time—and the one certainty is that there will always be time—the vacuum instability will tip the universe into a new state of being. In that instant of uncreation, all information encoded in the present universe will be erased.

No memory of anything will endure. No single experience of any living organism will be preserved. Nothing learned or discovered or made will survive. No art, no science, no history, no deed, no kindness, no fond thought, not a single moment of human happiness.

Nothing will last.

Nothing will matter.

Nothing has ever mattered.

Goma shook her head. “No. We don’t speak of souls. Not now, not ever. Souls aren’t real.”

“Patterns, then. Abstract structures of experience and reaction, making up a consistent, continuous human identity.”

“What could be colder than being made to feel the utter futility of existence? To know that not only is there no meaning to anything, but there never can be? That life itself is completely devoid of purpose? That nothing will be remembered? That despite our grandest efforts our boldest endeavours, nothing can or will ever be preserved? That the kindest acts are doomed to be forgotten, along with the cruelest? All loves, all hates erased from the record? Yes, what could be worse than that?”

“You tell me.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all in the whole of creation. And if death troubles me—which, I am pleased to say, it most certainly does—then the idea of not even being remembered, not even leaving the tiniest quantum ripple in the wake of the coming vacuum fluctuation…well, that is a great deal more than troubling. We live by our deeds, whether we are machines or people or elephants. And if our deeds are meaningless and forgotten what does that make us?”

“Nothing,” Kanu answered, fiercely enough that he spoke the word aloud. “Pointless interactions between matter and energy, doomed to be erased. That’s the message, Swift. That there’s no meaning. That we don’t matter.”

“No,” Swift answered with corresponding force. “We do matter. This truth does not rob us of meaning—it gives it back to us. It liberates us from the burden of posterity, from the burden of deluding ourselves that our acts have some chance of outlasting eternity. If we are kind to each other now, it’s not because we are hoping to be remembered well, to be lauded in some great accounting of things. It’s not because we want to be rewarded for our behaviour, or to be admired for the wonderful things we did during our brief span of existence. Exactly the opposite! Now that we know there is no chance of that, our deeds have no higher meaning than the context of the moment in which they occur. One decent deed, one kind gesture, enacted without thought of recompense or remembrance, performed in the full and certain knowledge that it will be forgotten, that it cannot be otherwise—that single deed refutes the entire message of the M-builders. They were wrong! There is no Terror, only enlightenment! Only liberation! And we will continue to refute their message with every gracious act, every decent thought, every human kindness—until the moment the vacuum rips.”

“Just a fancy speech, Swift. That’s all it is.”

“More than a speech, Kanu. A viable moral strategy for negating the M-builders’ nihilism. It’s a choice. A question of free will. Do you choose it, or reject it?”

“You weren’t there.”

“I didn’t have to be—I know my history.”

“History’s a stopped clock,” Eunice said. “It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much you can tell you.”

I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

I can’t stop being a rationalist just because it upsets some people.

It was a fault of the human condition—or perhaps a blessing—that there was no situation which did not eventually become the normal state of affairs.

“Clearly we missed something.”

“You have a fine talent for understatement.”

“Ideology is all there is.”

“Really? I would have thought there were many other human qualities worth considering. Fairness. Generosity. A sense of humour. A willingness to see the best in people, even those we do not automatically agree with.”

Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.

“There are no nasty surprises,” Swift said, “only degrees of unpreparedness.”

“I will say this, though—it’s a very odd thing not to be conscious. To be—to all intents and purposes—dead. Neither gathering nor generating information, as cold and changeless as eternity. How do you humans live with the thought of that hanging over every moment of your pitifully short existences?”

“We don’t,” Kanu said. “We just get on with it.”