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18

"I'm going to have Courtland change your tweaks," said Pablo, "because I want you to shut up for a while and listen.  You can talk all you want later."

"It's not as if you're giving me a choice."

"No."

Pablo looked abstracted for a moment, chatting with Courtland no doubt, and then looked at Aristide.

"To begin with," Pablo said. "I was bored."  He had returned to his chair, and leaned forward, his hands again laced around one knee.  "I had fame and honors, and enough money to be comfortable until such time as we all became so perfect we no longer needed money.  I had a woman I thought I loved.  But my life was random and pointless, with no surprises and no excitement, and the only adventures I allowed myself were those I intended ahead of time to write poetry about.  The Existential Crisis had set in with a vengeance.

"And so I calved myself off from you, booked passage for another star, and left you to your bland existence.  I took a duplicate of our girlfriend along with me.  Epsilon Eridani was a prime candidate for settlement—a young star with planets, and one that was surrounded by a cold dust cloud which, in the fullness of time, would have congealed into an inner solar system of rocky bodies much like Sol's own.  But we had plans for that dust cloud—what joy our little micro-machines would have, rounding up all that matter and turning it into a giant processor!

"Plus, of course, there was a chance we could find evidence of the Lost Expedition, the first group that had tried to settle the system, and who vanished eighteen years out.  With luck we could find what had happened to them, but without sharing the same fate.

"The unknown fate of the Lost Expedition provided an additional little charge of fear.  There was a possibility that we could all actually die!  Of course we were backed up at home, but any changes, any discoveries or excitements that happened to us on our journey would be lost forever. 

"There were other unknowns.  Details of our destination escaped us, partly because of the dust cloud and partly because the star, spinning furiously and in the turbulence of its early adolescence, had wild fluctuations in its energy output.  It was difficult to tell if intermittent dimming and flaring was caused by the interfering presence of planets and planetesimals, or by the stormy young star itself.

"Our ship was only slightly longer than the Santa Maria of Christóbal Colón, seemingly a frail bark for such a long journey across the ocean of night.  A hardened exoskeleton surrounded billions of processors, drawn through the heavens by thousands of square kilometers of sails filled with photons fired from lasers in Sol orbit.  On board we had a very smart AI called Doria, and forty million downloaded humans, volunteers, almost all of whom would remain inactive until being reassembled at our destination. 

"But not all.  Because the Eridanus system was not fully understood, it was decided that a terraforming team would remain awake for the duration of the trip, to make observations of our new home and to make final plans.  I volunteered—perhaps I hoped to be the first to discover the fate of the Lost Expedition.  At any rate, I was eminent enough so that the team welcomed me, even if privately they might have doubted my qualifications. 

"For those of us doomed to remain awake on the journey, no expense had been spared to divert us with virtual environments in which to live and interact.  From businesslike workrooms to game worlds to sybaritic pleasure-domes of the senses, we were embarrassed by the choices available.  We could have spent lifetimes exploring all those environments, and when that was done created our own to suit our own peculiar tastes.

"But I had not come to play in simulated worlds.  I had work and study to divert myself from such diversion.  I had a good grasp of astronomy from the days when I was demolishing most of the inner solar system, and likewise a knowledge of molecular machinery and terraforming; but the task ahead demanded up-to-the-instant information.  For this I turned to a virtual tutor, and to my fellow crew.

"The crew, it must be said, were a wild and wilful lot.  They had left their staid, everyday selves at home, and felt free to discover new instincts, new selves.  They were pioneers in the wilderness of the stars, and pioneering is an act of discovery.

"I was liberated as well.  I was free to break every chain, to explore every aspect of a new self.  And Daljit explored along with me.

"Daljit!  Do my eyes shine when I mention her name?  Is there a special smile on my face when I think of her?  I believe there must be.

"Your face is very solemn, my unwilling guest.  Perhaps inwardly you are laughing at me.  To me it matters not—I know your history, I have done my research.  There have been many women sharing your life.  Not counting casual encounters, you've had on average a new partner every seventeen years—over fourteen hundred years of that!—and Daljit did not last even the average number of years.

"Yet, between the stars, we found the passion that you could not.  We were free.  You were tied to Sol, and memories.

"(Do the women grow bored with you, I wonder?  For all the poetry and mock-swordfights, I fear you must be very dull.  Certainly I was, when I was you.)

"As for me, I learned again how to love.  You have had no one since Antonia, and I, since Antonia, have had only Daljit.  Here she has done some good work, proving Professor Chiau's Theory of Everything while trying to disprove it.  That was not what she did at Epsilon Eridani, but I digress . . . fondly, in all senses of the word.

"So—fondly—shall I describe her?  I would like you to see her.  The body in which she chose to incorporate—and her virtual avatar, most of the time—was cinnamon of skin, Titian of hair, with eyes the pale green of a cenote deep in the Central American rain forest.  She had the long, lean body of a pantheress combined with the mind of a Hawking.  To observe her stalking through the shimmering electronic corridors was to see an image of purpose married perfectly to flesh.  As for her temperament—well, she was as mutable as the ocean, tranquil as a warm swell beneath a tropical sun, or as fierce as a black squall in the dead of night.  Of the terraforming crew, she alone was not in search of a new self.  She became all selves.  One crossed her at one's peril.  She did not indulge one's native stupidity. 

"My comparison with Hawking, by the way, is not idle.  Her mind longed to embrace the universe.  Though the practical necessities of her mission diverted her, her primary interest was cosmology.  She grappled daily with Professor Chiau's vision of the universe.  Something in it stirred her, like my phantom touch on her fine dorsal hairs.  She sensed there was a flaw somewhere in those flawless figures. 

"On that long voyage we explored together the virtual, if sterile, spheres of the senses.  We became more than the sum of our parts, became a kind of mythic, dual entity.  The other crew sensed it.  We had become a kind of royalty.  When we kissed, it was an exchange of kingdoms.  When we raged, the castle trembled.

"And we longed for our incarnation.  Despite the fantastic variety and fluidity of our surroundings and selves, we soon hungered for the realm of the real.  (Is that too much alliteration?  You're the poet, you can twitch your nose at me if that's the case.)

"The voyage to Epsilon Eridani took twenty-three years.  We never found any trace of the Lost Expedition, but then the odds had never been good.  Probably they just ran smack into a brown dwarf or something.  Plenty of them out there.

"Once in the system, we eagerly began building our new paradise.  Most of our sails were cast loose and put into an orbit that kept them in the dust cloud.  Any dust that adhered to them was snagged by molecular machines and clumped together to form a body calculated to attract more dust unto itself.  The sails created nodules, the nodules then made meteors, the meteors built asteroids, and these formed planetoids. 

"In the meantime our own craft was zooming about the system with the little atomic-powered motor that had lain dormant through our long journey.  We sewed molecular machines throughout the dust cloud, then sat back and watched them work. 

"For a hundred and sixty-three years we labored!  Tens of thousands of human beings were awakened from their electronic slumbers to aid in the great work.  A great array of processors was constructed out of the matter we sifted from the cold dust, and the AI Doria moved his primary personality to his new home.  From the embrace of the planet once unimaginatively called c but now renamed Cimmeria, we wrested an Earth-sized moon, which we now terraformed as a test of our powers, a planet-sized experiment on which we seeded the flora and fauna which would populate the universe-to-be.  It served another purpose as well—to make a pleasant place for the planetary engineers to rest and recharge between labors.  It was this world, Pleasaunce, where we could safely incarnate, and where I first beheld Daljit in new, shining, glorious flesh, and walked with her over the green meadows and beneath the shade trees of our new creation.

"As for me, I incarnated in the form in which you see me now.  It was the form desired and partly designed by Daljit.  I wear this body now in her memory.

"In time a new pocket universe was spawned from the dark side of Doria, and named Riverside after the constellation in which we now dwelt, Eridanus the River.  Once created and seeded with life, millions now rose from the silver pools of creation, and took their place in the universe that had been spawned for their delectation and livelihood.  We, the creators, viewed the new arrivals with a certain condescension.  They had not labored to create this whole universe out of dust and photons and pieces of drifting sailcloth.  To these interstellar tourists, Riverside was a way-station—only to us was it a world, a world that we had simultaneously created and discovered.  We looked down on the others as gods look over mere mortals.

"As the pocket was created messages were sent to Sol alerting its billions that a new universe was ready to be populated.  Billions of new arrivals were expected in time—and now that we had the experience, we planned more AI arrays, more pocket universes, more astonishing acts of creation.

"Now that the primary work was done, Daljit returned to her primary interest.  She was interested in cosmology not only as a science but as an investigation into purpose.  For her, the universe was not simply a source of data from which to draw theories, but a grand curtain of stars behind which lurked the spectre of meaning. 

"She had taken the Existential Crisis to heart.  Our AIs could perform vast acts of calculation, but what was the calculation for?  We could create whole universes, but why?  We could create life, and duplicate ourselves to infinity, but what was the purpose of that?  If we didn't know the answers, then we were nothing more than automata, blindly following the imperatives of our biological programming.

"Daljit sensed a teleological truth lurking behind Professor Chiau's formula, and her instincts were good.  Because she had performed good work on the terraforming team, she was given permission to divert an amount of resources to her project.  Some of the little clumps of matter, still clotting in the cloud of dust, were to be re-created into detectors that would search the universe for traces of meaning.

"But the nanomachines that were turning wisps of dust into quantum processors did not know how to make the detectors she desired.  Daljit, uploaded into a ship the size of a teacup, flew to the outermost limits of the cloud to reprogram, or in many instances re-create, the micro-machines in order to make that which she desired. 

"For nearly two hundred years she had pondered the cosmos and made her plans.  So focused was her search that her questions were answered before she had even finished the reprogramming job.  With a mixture of utter triumph mixed with deep despair, she sent me the data she had harvested, along with her conclusions.

"My acknowledgment didn't have time to reach her before forty million died.

"On my return to Sol I was surprised and disgusted to learn that what occurred has entered the popular mind as the Big Belch.  I know that humanity is now distanced from true death; I know that they take such things lightly.  But even from our degraded contemporaries I would have expected more compassion for those who had led separate lives for nearly two hundred years, who had over a century of memories and passions and glories in their minds, minds now burned to dust.

"Thoughtless humanity, be thankful that Vindex does not choose to avenge this discourtesy!

"Forgive me—I will make an effort to collect myself.  I shall try not to shake any more fists under your nose.

"From this point I shall attempt a dispassionate, factual mode.  From the very beginning of our expedition we knew that Epsilon Eridani was unstable.  We knew the star's energy levels flared and faded unpredictably.  Our robust systems had been built with that in mind.  All data, including the instructions to rebuild every citizen, were stored with massive redundancy.

"What happened was not a nova.  Nothing so damaging as that.  It was a hiccup, a throat-clearing—or yes, a belch.  But still it was enough to overwhelm all our precautions.

"It was enough to fry Doria's processor array and destroy his brilliant mind.  The wormhole's controls and anchors were destroyed, and Riverside with them.  Though there is a small chance that the wormhole was destroyed before the pocket universe was cooked completely, at the very least the universe is now cut off from us, drifting in a microcosmos entirely its own.  Daljit in her little ship died as well, though I was not certain of this till years later.

"As for me, at the moment of catastrophe I was on our world of Pleasaunce, analyzing Daljit's data and waiting for her return.  It was night where I dwelt, and it was that fact that saved me when the sky brightened with starfire.  Everyone on the day side of the world died within seconds of the shock front hitting us, and most of those on the night side died within hours or days.

"In order to survive, we needed access to structures that would withstand the enormous surface storms that followed the flare, caused by the boiling away of a large part of the atmosphere, and the superheating of much of the rest.  It also helped if the structure had a self-contained air supply.

"Fortunately these were not entirely uncommon.  Pleasaunce had not always been as hospitable as it became later—once it had been a frozen moon pummeled by radiation and torn by tidal stresses, and we of the terraforming team had lived in strong, self-sealing structures.  Most of these remained, scattered here and there over the world.  It had not been worth our while to demolish or replace them.

"Those who could reach such a structure in time, lived.  Most of those who failed, died.

"None of the dead came back.  Our backups were in Riverside, on Doria's array, or by purest chance stored on the day side of Pleasaunce.  All were destroyed.  Thus did our redundant systems mock us.

"The survivors, a little over seven thousand souls, were devastated.  We had all lost friends and loved ones and hopes and, indeed, our entire civilization.  We were alone on a devastated world in a stellar system that had just declared itself permanently uninhabitable.  Many sank into despair, and the rest thought only of flight. 

"Our remaining resources were put into building a ship to take us back to Sol, and uploading ourselves into that ship.  The ship was built, the souls uploaded, and the ship spread its sails and left as fast as it possibly could.  Which was not fast, as we lacked the Sol-based lasers that had pushed us to relativistic velocities on our trip out.  The journey would take over two hundred years.  All were terrified that another flare would destroy the ship before it could escape the system.

"The unstable star was merciful, but not interstellar space.  Twenty-six years out, the starship joined the Lost Expedition, possibly due to the same cause.  I fear no one will ever know for certain.

"As for me, I remained behind on Pleasaunce.  I had calculated that Daljit might still live, at least in some form.  Her returning craft was not within the zone of total destruction.  It was possible that it had been damaged and would need time to mend itself, or would need to rendezvous with one of Daljit's distant sensing stations before it could effect repairs.  There was no one with the authority to order me to leave, and so I remained, the system's sole remaining citizen.

"When the others left, I set nanomachines loose over the entire surface of the planet, which turned most of its skin into receptors and processors—receptors to strain the aether for a signal from Daljit, processors to confirm the conclusions of that tragic, triumphant, completely outrageous last message that she had sent along with her data.

"While I labored in my shelter, every analysis of the data only validated my sad, dead darling's last thoughts.  Her name will now be invoked alongside those of the immortals, with Galileo and Newton and Einstein, with Isabel and Chiau.  Her instinct for the flaw in Chiau's argument was now confirmed. 

"Let me say that Daljit was not alone in finding Professor Chiau's theory unsatisfactory.  It was riddled with concepts that at first blush seemed clumsy: a structure built on the notion of unexplained 'universal constants' appeared, if nothing else, supremely lazy.  But Chiau's Theory of Everything withstood every test devised by the most subtle human and machine minds, and finally it was reluctantly concluded that universal constants were necessary because some things were actually, universally, constant.

"It took Daljit's genius to conclude that these constants were signs not only of fact, but of purpose.  They were intentional.

"Consider what happens when we create a pocket universe of our own.  We have to create a small sun that will act as if it were a large one, and on the outside of the spherical universe we have to keep the inhabitants' feet on the ground: tampering with the long-range and short-range components of  Yukawa gravity accomplishes both these aims.  In Midgarth, where technology is deliberately kept in the iron age, it is impossible to cause a fast enough chemical reaction to produce a successful explosion or industrial process. They are deliberately marooned in the Iron Age.

"Assume you were a native physicist of Midgarth, investigating the principles by which your world operates.  Assuming that with the primitive methods available, you could construct the equipment to make the measurements, you'd discover that gravity varied wildly depending on the distance from the sun, and that anything halfway between the sun and the ground below was barely affected by gravity at all.  If you were investigating the properties of heat, you'd discover that heat could rise up to a certain temperature, but would refuse to rise any higher. 

"If you were a scientist in Midgarth, you'd find that the universe was governed by certain arbitrary conditions that barely made sense at all.

"Ah—I see a light dawning in your eyes.  You know perfectly well where I'm going with this.

"Yes, both Professor Chiau and Daljit found the universe filled with illogical and annoying arbitrary conditions.  Universal constants, massive amounts of matter that we can't see but that nevertheless affect the matter that we can see, hidden energies ditto.  Chiau accepted all this with reluctance, but Daljit saw it as evidence that our grand, galaxy-filled universe was created in the same way as our little pocket universes, by deliberate intent.

"To prove her thesis she had to strain her detectors for those early nanoseconds of the Big Bang, in order to see the very moment when those arbitrary conditions were imposed on the dawning universe.  And she found them!

"The universe isn't a natural phenomenon at all.  It's artificial.  It's an artifact.

"Our sprawling universe is a sad, lumpish, illogical machine, poorly imagined and poorly built.  But at least, for whatever unimaginable reason, someone wanted the universe the way it is.

"That's not the case with us.  We, poor creatures, were never intended.  We're just accidents, byproducts of whatever experiment our founders projected.  We are implied people living in an implied space. 

"And that, my friend, is as far as meaning goes, and that's where our tragedy begins and ends."

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Framed