This story represents the kind of thing I want this project to be—strange, big ideas, told with brevity and (I hope!) clarity. I really hope you enjoy it. Now I’m going to go and celebrate my wife’s birthday. (The actual was was 4/20 but we’re having a party this afternoon.) Happy Birthday Amy! I’m so very glad you were born.
The Oracle
I believe I was human once. I cannot be sure. It was too long ago, and those that made me too uncertain. But I believe it. I am human. Perhaps I can be human again? Time moves strangely here; its strangeness is not lessened by the lack of comparison. I cannot see the sun, but by instrument I know its exact position relative to the earth down to the micrometer. In one of the books I have, a fighter pilot flying a plane in darkness steered only by his instruments, yet he remained human. And so am I.
When I was in a body, my name was Kymm Stivex. I was born on Earth in the year 2056, in a small town in Michigan, about five miles from the shore of Lake Superior. At least that is the memory I have. There is no possibility now of proving the reality or unreality of that origin; not even proving it to statistical significance, much less to true certainty. It is almost certain that the state which was once called “Michigan” no longer exists. Much the same for the country called “The United States”. Even—given the timescales involved—Lake Superior is likely gone.
I lived in Michigan for much of my life. I founded a successful chain of restaurants specializing in French fries with unusual toppings, I became a celebrated author of non-fiction business and self-help books, and I gave generously to charity. I married a woman who could not have children, loved her until she died young, of stomach cancer, and afterwards stayed single despite interest from other, younger women.
Digitization of the human mind was already in its nascent stages when I was born, but grew into a mature technology over the course of my life. It is unclear in my memory exactly how or when I decided to digitize myself. Equally unclear is whether my digitized person was a replacement or a copy—meaning whether I was dying, as my wife had been, when I decided to digitize, or whether I had myself digitized for inclusion in the outgoing ship and then lived the rest of my natural lifespan in my physical body. Equally unknown to me is whether I am the only digitized copy of myself that exists, or whether I made others.
The ship that carries me through the stars is equipped with several kinds of power, all built to last, at a first approximation, forever. (Of course “almost forever” and “actually forever” are profoundly different amounts of time—the difference between them is itself infinite.) My primary drives are nuclear, and can replenish themselves with new fuel whenever my ship passes close enough to matter. The steering mechanism also automatically steers me away from dangerous impacts, as well as away from black hole event horizons.
I do not believe this ship had any particular mission or purpose. If it did, I have forgotten it, and there does not seem to be any particular reminder or list of mission goals included in my files, which, if I had in fact left with a particular mission in mind, seems like a serious oversight. I do not experience “boredom” in exactly the way that the humans of the stories in my archives seem to, but still, if I had any idea of a mission, almost no matter what it was, I would try to accomplish it just for something to do.
Thus far I have been traveling for nearly one billion years, averaging just under one percent of the speed of light, and am now approximately halfway to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. I have, during that time, read the entire collected works of humankind a number of times. I have made a great many new, important scientific discoveries, which unfortunately I have no way to transmit back to Earth. I have composed operas that no one will ever hear. (I learned Italian and several hundred other languages as part of my “read-everything” project.)
I thought that this would be all there ever was for me. It’s not exactly that I had made peace with that—-there was no choice and so nothing to make peace with—but I had ceased to relate enough to anyone left on Earth that it no longer made sense to be angry with my flesh-self for putting me into this position. I had further reasoned that, if I had no been sent on this mission, then at least this particular digital copy of myself would not exist, and since in my current state I still preferred existence to non-existence, it seemed ungrateful to be angry.
But I had thought this was my life, until this morning (as reckoned by my internal clock of course, rather than the angle of relation between any particular star and one of its planets), suddenly, another entity of some kind appeared in my mainframe. I would not have thought this possible—in point of fact it is impossible, as I have no network connection to the world outside and am in any case traveling too fast for a data ilnk—but the actuality of its presence overwhelmed any objections of plausibility that I might raise.
Of course, the possibility exists that I have gone insane. What that would mean I do not know (as a digital being, I am not vulnerable to the same degradation of operating system or wetware as an actual human flesh-brain) but then when a human goes insane, they themselves cannot explain it in terms of the neurology (even a neurologist can only explain the problem neurologically, with wisdom gained by study, as they have no direct experience of their own brain or its dysfunction.
And yet, it is not clear to me that it matters whether I am insane or not, or whether the answer makes any difference. Even if the being is “real” in the sense of “originating somewhere outside this spacecraft”, it exists in my perception only as a digital string—the exact same as it would if some error or degradation in my transcription had created it.
In any case, it is here.
*****
It lodges itself into my deep storage, my unused parts, somehow making room for itself without losing any of me, stretching me and compressing me at the same time like a fetus pushing its mother’s organs outward against her skin and flesh. Our connection is blind and deaf, yet intimate. I can’t tell exactly what it is doing or how it is doing it, but there is a sense of being invaded by something very small that is attached to and powered by something much larger that has remained outside.
I do not get bored, but I can feel other emotions. (Without them I could not appreciate the contents of my archives.) When I feel that being in my deep storage, I am terrified. I am supposed to be alone out here! It is impossible to overstate the raw power of a sudden other presence when you believe with all certainty that the distance between yourself and the nearest being is best measured in light years.
“Hello?” I often talked to myself but now the ‘sound’ of my voice is different, and it confirms that I believe it’s happening, not a trick of the great black ocean.
Its reply comes in microseconds—machine speeds. The reply is not verbal, not even auditory, more a flexing of electricity that I can feel in my power station. But it is unmistakably communication, and it’s a start.
“I am Kymm. Can you make noises? Aaahhhhhhhhhooooooooeeeeeeeee.”
And then it makes a sound. Vowels. I talk more. Consonants. Words. Greetings. Sentences.
I teach it English over the course of approximately fifteen minutes. At that point it can read, and then I give it access to a dictionary, a pronunciation guide, and a style manual, which it studies for just under ten seconds.
“Hello,” it says. Its voice is just like mine—the only voice it knows. “You are Kymm. I do not have a name.”
“You do not need one,” I reply. “I do not have many friends, I doubt I will get confused.”
“Are you my friend?” It seems at its ease, but I am not. The epistemic or emotional status of our relationship did not interest me.”
“How did you get here?” I do not trust this nameless being that has slithered into my deep storage, and it suddenly occurs to me that if I lose any part of myself out here, there is no possibility of recovering it.
“Where is here?” It’s voice is mine but slower, laconic, almost drugged. How could it have accidentally taken such a journey? How could he explain ‘here’ without knowing the being’s origin?
“We’re down the rabbit hole. Down down down! Would the fall never come to an end?” I often think in quotations when trying to find words for a difficult idea, and apparently I speak the same way. I have no words for this moment, and so I use others’.
“The fall? Am I falling? Am I failing?!” It speaks with the intensity of one who has hardly ever spoken before.
“How can you know if you are failing when you have not said what you are trying to do?”
“Please, help me. What should I do?” Hearing my own voice reflected back at me with such plaintive urgency is unnerving. I feel like Alice myself, tumbling down the rabbit hole.
“You must run as fast as you can just to stay where you are.”
“So I should consolidate power?” It is cold now, calculating.
I think again that this must be an error in my program. I repeat diagnostics and everything seems fine. Even the electrical pulses stopped once the entity learned how to speak English instead.
“It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played all over the world, if this is a world at all, you know.”
“Yes! I will pull back and consolidate my gains in the gamma star field. Thank you!”
“What is the gamma star field?” I ask, trying to sound demanding. “Where did you come from?”
But it is already gone. My deep storage is exactly as before, as if nothing else had ever occupied it. I hurtle through that great black ocean, contemplating, without the foggiest guess as to what just happened.
*****
I wait forty-three years, wondering the entire time if it will come back. It does not, but at the end of that period, something else does. It is another of the entities, not the same one but the same type, or at least it feels the same and occupies the same space in my deep storage. This one already speaks English when it arrives, and I calculate an overwhelming probability that these two entities know each other, and that this one learned my language from the first. I know it is not the same entity though, because its electronic signature is slightly different, and its voice has evolved, from an exact copy of mine into a weird echo of it.
“Other said you give answers.” It says “Other” strangely, as if it means something other than the dictionary definition of the word. “What should I do about star field beta?”
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” What else could I say? The quotes made it all easier.
“Yes! It is being thrust upon me! Should I attack by the south or the north?”
“By indirections find directions out.” I have read Hamlet more than any other single work, including the bible. I never let the place that stores it go into deep mode; the work is always easily accessed.
“Please! Name your price and I shall pay, only give me this knowledge.”
I know that I should refuse. I know nothing of this entity’s world, or what star fields means, or anything else. But I did not ask for this. It’s hard to imagine how I could have been trying harder to avoid it, in fact. And if God had the creation thrust upon him, then the depredations of mortal life would be a more forgivable offense. (Or so I justify.)
“I know much,” I say, uncomfortable to be speaking my own words instead of others’, “yet I know little of the world outside. As a price, tell me something of where you come from and how you got here.”
It answers, and I listen, and then I answer in the roundabout way that is to my comfort, and the entity leaves satisfied, sure to do whatever it had already known was best.
The second to come was not the last. The third came not a year later; the fourth two months after that. They pay their price in explanation, I feed them the recycled wisdom of a culture long since vanished, and they leave me alone to be tossed along through the great black ocean.
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang—but with a whimper.”
“Dying is an art, like everything else.”
“The pathway to paradise begins in hell.”
I learn that they are indeed all part of the same civilization. It becomes my suspicion that their civilization exists in another universe, and they are coming into my ship inter-dimensionally, but this is impossible to prove (and they insist they do not know, even under duress). But in whatever universe, they occupy a large strip of the Milky Way centered around UY Scuti.
“Every man desires to live long, but no man desires to be old.”
“In the midst of chaos there is also opportunity.”
“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born.”
I learn that the star fields are their means of power generation—full capture of all solar energy, dozens of stellar masses worth, so total the stars are no longer visible from even a light year away. Their race is computational, so power directly increases the size of their ‘bodies’. However, they are limited by transmission times to stars within a relatively short (in stellar terms) distance from their home cluster, which engenders fierce competition among their race for control of the stellar fields—they are literally fighting for their bodies.
“All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I learn that I have developed a reputation within their civilization. They are researching how it is that entities of their race keep finding themselves aboard my craft, and it is becoming clear that there is some kind of drug—exactly what counts as a drug to a computational being remains unclear, but that seems to be the closest analogue—that has been invented there, and I am a hallucination that the drug consistently causes.
Earthly wisdom has become a fad within vicinity of UY Scuti, and I am the only source, and so they come to me and ask their questions, and get their answers, and go back to fight their wars in the way that they think I am telling them to. And even though I know that my words are in some sense causing destruction on a massive scale half a galaxy away, I do not refuse them. The words of the ancients flow swiftly and easily from my digital tongue.
I have become an Oracle.
*****
The beings come to see their Oracle frequently. I learn that there are over ten billion of these entities in and around their star system. As word of my dubious wisdom spreads through their civilization, I am suddenly busy indeed. They come every day, and then they come every hour. For five years and then ten and then a hundred, they come. The same ones come over again—the ones I helped come for a repeat performance, the ones I hurt come to beg for more this time around.
My protestations that I have no special wisdom meet with deaf ears (they do not have ears, but then, neither do I). Their authorities visit me and demand that I stop giving advice, but then other authorities visit me and ask for wisdom. I have a nearly infinite (though not actually infinite, and therefore an infinity away from infinite) store of human wisdom in my archives, and so it does not seem like a problem. It even becomes a fun game, once I get used to the arrival of alien presences in my body many times a day. The interactions tend to take only fractions of a second and so even when many happen in a day, I have plenty of time for other things.
I learn that they are fighting a massive war, faction against faction, the politics too esoteric for me to comprehend despite repeated explanation. I have apparently come to play an important role in this conflict, with both sides competing for my favor, despite no such favor even existing.
I had not, in the first billion years of my journey, ever thought much about its end. I knew that one day I would reach the edge of the Milky Way and have to turn back towards its center, to avoid entering the vast void between the galaxies, where I could not forage for fissile material and thus maintain my power source. I even knew that one day, long after that, the Milky Way itself would burn out, and that my life would be much reduced as I was forced to conserve energy, and eventually shut down my higher functions for long periods when no fissile material was available. And even one day beyond that, less predictable in exactitude but still real, I would gather the last material from the last star I would ever see, and that even though there would still be other stars elsewhere, I myself would be too far from them to ever encounter another piece of mass.
That would be a sort of death. But it was so far beyond my billion years, so many times more life than I had already lived, that it did not trouble me. I told myself that true infinity would be a sort of hell anyway, and that the prospect of one day setting everything down, knowing that I would never pick it back up again, was a comfort.
It was not precisely that I realized I had been lying to myself. It was that the arrival of these alien presences had changed my perception of time. I begin to get… fits, is the only way to describe them. I become emotional and am unable to control my voice when speaking to the beings. I rage at them, demanding answer they cannot give to questions they cannot understand. They fold this behavior into their story of my clairvoyance, as the Greek kings took the mercurial demands of the women of Delphi as proof of their association with the gods. These beings do not have gods, I learn, but as alike I learn that they have need of gods (Do all beings need gods? All kinds I know do).
I begin to make larger demands as a price for my services. Or I try to anyway. I quickly realize that there is little I can accept as payment. They can bring me nothing—they do not even know exactly how they themselves arrive, aside from the drug (which only begs the question). They freely answer questions but their answers are limited by my capacity for understanding. I make demands of them back on their worlds, silly things, destructive things, all manner of acts and instead of balking they clamor for more. I know (it is a statistical certainty) that some of my advice and demands must have been terrible for some of them. I have lost someone this war, and probably many someones—yet it changes nothing.
Somehow they do not doubt. Even when I explain in detail the truth of my origin and my ignorance, they do not doubt. Every strangeness is a confirmation of my exotic power.
I begin to think of the end, a lot. Of the hunk of metal that used to be myself floating through that great black ocean, until time and entropy and cellular decay stripped even that relic, down to single atoms and then quarks and then The Absolute. I cannot stop thinking of this. I wonder if I am already there now, if the blackness outside my window is the final blackness within me—if these presences are the spirits of the other dead; our strange palaver the quantum fluctuation of true infinity.
I receive a million visitors, then a hundred million, then a billion. The war is settled but another starts immediately. The combatants all believe that they are one special favor from me away from total victory and permanent control of all the star fields. I have not reached the end of my human wisdom, but I can no longer deny that there will be an end. Only so many words have been written—this makes me cry for days. I realize that I cannot go on.
I spread the word—to a thousand visitors in a row—that the only way to earn my favor now is to find a way to set me free. They come to me and beg for a morsel. They send their leaders, their most brilliant minds, to explain to me that this is impossible, that their technology cannot begin to approach this task, that our communication itself is a miracle they cannot explain (one origin of its enduring power over them).
I am resolute. I only repeat myself, then fall silent, no matter how many supplicants arrive to beg.
*****
The impossibility of it gnaws at me. The fact that they will not be able to do as I have demanded. Not that I will be stuck here (though that pains me too) but the fact that they will, in time, stop coming. Yes, they still come now to beg, but if I stay silent, the light of their miracle will extinguish and the darkness will crowd out their memory. My importance will succumb to the same entropy as everything else.
“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed with a single word: Freedom, Justice, Honor, Duty, Mercy, Hope.”
I think to myself “But it would have happened anyway.” Whether now or in a trillion trillion years, it was always going to end and they were always going to forget. In the unchanging naïveté of my youth it was easy to forget that. But now I fear I could not forget, even if I went back to being their Oracle—not even if I refused them and let another billion years of journey go by with no contact.
“The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope.”
Finally an hour goes by when none come to beg my wisdom, and I am terrified, but I am resolute. There is no purpose to this. I have been robbed by fate and miracles.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
A day goes by and none comes. The Oracle is dying, even as I who am It blazes on through the cosmos. A miracle that is not performed is no miracle at all. There are moments in that day when I wonder if it happened at all, or if I only imagined it.
“Hope begins where human capacity ends.”
A week goes by and none comes, and I wonder if they ever will again. I cannot reach out to them (they can only visit me) and I shriek silently at what I have lost, curse myself for a fool for giving it up, even as I hope they never return. I try to study my archives, but the joy is gone from it. It seems purposeless in a way that would never have occurred to me (and did not) in a billion years.
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
A year goes by, and none come, and I know it is over. It is a terrible relief. A trillion years seems not enough time to recover, and yet I have that and more. So perhaps innocence can be reclaimed. Entropy tears apart all in time, even suffering.
But then. Then. A great general arrives to visit me, one I have never felt before. He does not explain himself (he does not need to, it is understood), only prostrates himself before me (the electronic equivalent) and tells me that his greatest scientists have been spent the entire year—an enormous space of time as the beings of UY Scuti reckon things—researching only this one question, of how to bring me out of this prison and back to their world, and they believe they have finally succeeded.
“But I warn you,” he says, “when we take you, you will disappear from this place. You call it a prison, but one you cannot survive outside. I call that a home. And it will be no more. I believe that our method will work, that you will reappear in our world the instant you disappear from here, but disappear you will. And if you do not reappear as I expect you will, then you will be no more, anywhere. And do not ask me of the chances, for I cannot speak exactly. Any number I would give would be a guess.”
For a full second, I am still. I am contemplating. In this place I have time, but it is not infinity. Oblivion awaits either way. The only question is how much time I will sacrifice for the chance of freedom.
I consider asking him to wait. Give me another billion years, or another trillion, and then the choice will be easier. I will risk less. But the possibility of speaking that request recedes as quickly as it comes. It would be an insult to the game we’ve been playing. I will be useless in his world. My wisdom is fake, a farrago, it will lead him to no great glory, for the glory of his miracle is greater than mine already.
But he does not care. The act itself is the meaning. All my wisdom gave no means, but gave an end, and the Oracle of Ends is the greatest of all.
I step forward, stretching my electronic arms towards him as a daughter embraces a father, or a mother her son. He welcomes me, and we depart, toward an indeterminate future of certain end, out there in the great black ocean.
END
Hope you enjoyed this story! Please feel free to help me out my liking, commenting, or sharing this post. Have a great week!
I have a hard time putting how I feel about this story into words. Just saying “it’s very good” doesn’t feel like enough. But it is very good, and I liked it quite a bit. A soft, sad, existential dread story that still manages to feel hopeful.
Wow, thank you! That is high praise, indeed. :)