The Golden Transcendence

THE GOLDEN AGE

What happened was simple, yet complex. The microscopic black hole housing the mind of the Nothing Machine dissolved in a chaotic wash of Hawking radiation. Phaethon and Daphne's crushed and bleeding bodies were flung to the deck. Uncountable trillions of thought-systems made contact with the ship mind as the Phoenix Exultant lifted her golden hull, blazing, from the corona of the sun, and what happened next was ...

It was ultimately simple. It was infinitely complex.

It was Transcendence.

It was, at once, aware of its own ultimately simple and infinitely complex awareness; mind and over-minds of every level, subtle and swift and certain; woven to find higher levels of awareness; minds made up not of individual thoughts but of individual minds; and overminds combining in whole groups to create higher mental structures yet. The Transcendence was a Mind as wide as the Solar System, as swift as light, as happy as a newborn child, as wise and cold as the most venerable judge, and it stirred and woke and wondered what had happened since the last time it had blinked awake, a thousand years gone past, as men count years.

It was, at once, aware of its own myriad memories of each individual of whom it was composed, of every second and split second of their many lives, running back to the last momentary Transcendence. Their every thought, conscious and subconscious, was laid bare, and the tapestry of thought was seen, at once, from every angle and perspective, both from the point of view of each thread and little section, but also seen, entirely, from within, and without, as a whole, contemplating itself, herself, himself, themselves.

The part of the Transcendence that was Phaethon was aware that he was dying. The part that had been the Nothing Machine was aware that it had died. The part that was Daphne was aware that she was going to die. They were all aware of a greater awareness, simple, yet complex.

They were aware of wonderful things:

First, of themselves; second, of awareness itself, and its straggle to become more aware; third, of its own nature; fourth, that the moment of Transcendence, once passed, would be remembered differently hereafter, by each of its participants, even though, ultimately, only one bright perfect expression of thought (ultimately simple, infinitely complex) was all that had to be expressed to recall and to express what Transcendence was.

The Transcendence knew that it had only a moment (or was it many months?) in which to act, a mere split second of the cosmic time, to think that thought, to express that expression. The expression attempted oneness, even though there were myriads of thoughts of which it was composed, an endless regression; attempted, failed, smiled, and ended. But before it ended, the Transcendence was aware:

First, the parts of the Transcendence were aware of themselves.

The part of the Transcendence that was Phaethon was surprised to find himself here, surrounded by thought, a note of fire in the symphony of light. How? The perfect awareness of the superawareness knew, even at that same moment-yet it had happened months upon months ago; the Phoenix Exultant "now" was at dock at Io, Circumjovial Station, repairs complete, hull integrity restored, ready to fly; during the many months that had passed while the Transcendence was thinking, the various bodies and people participating had gone through whatever puppet motions were needed to sustain and continue their lives and efforts, the same way the tiny, busy animals that live in the bloodstream play out their parts in the life of a man (or was this all a projection, something extrapolated to occur . . . ?)- even at that same moment when the acceleration shock had crushed Phaethon and damaged his internal organs, through the thought ports of his armor (still open) contacting the thought-ports of this ship (still jammed open) the Transcendence had entered the ship mind; entered Phaethon's armor with its magnificent brain; entered Daphne's armor with its simpler brain; her ring; both their in-grown subsystems; the damaged complexity of the portable noetic unit, and...

And brought them into the Transcendency system.

The microscopic black hole, dissolving, issued the dying Nothing Mind, seeking (and yet trying not to seek) another system in which to house itself, desiring to continue, yet wishing for an end. But the systems were compatible, and all were intercommunicating with all....

Even at that same moment, the part of the Transcendence that was Daphne-who was quite surprised to find herself alive, but then realized that, months ago, the ship mind had taken control of the black nanoma-terial garment under Phaethon's armor, squirted from quickly opened joints, and sent long liquid arms burning across the deck to save her, before it even turned to save its own master, and infused her body with microscopic medical appliances; after a long and vitriolic argument (which they both were going to agree, later, had actually taken place, even though it was only a projection of Aurelian Sophotech, filling out details of their story to amuse himself at their expense) Phaethon and Daphne had agreed to fit her out with a body as expensive as Phaethon's own, capable of resisting the same conditions and pressures, even though it entailed a trip from the shipyard at Jupiter back to Earth, and a last visit to the Eveningstar Sophotech, more expense and more delay (or was this all a projection, of something predicted, not yet done?)-even at that same moment, the part of the Transcendence that was Daphne saw the part of the Transcendence that was the Earthmind embrace the dying Nothing.

To Daphne, it seemed as if a queen robed in green rose up, and gentle hands caught the falling body of a cold and pale-faced king garbed all in starry darkness, a dark man who fell out of the winter night sky, and trying to catch him, straining ...

It was as if the Earthmind turned to look at Daphne at that moment, perhaps because Daphne was then wondering (or would later wonder) why Earthmind was trying to save her own worst enemy. Why this foolish chivalry? Why this gallant nonsense? Enemies are enemies! Kill them! An understanding, a sense of great sorrow, passed from Earthmind into Daphne then, and it was as if Daphne gazed into eyes that opened, expanding, like black holes, emptying into an interior larger than the surrounding universe, holding it, understanding it, and seeing its infinite nothing.

Daphne realized then how terrible the lie of the Nothing Machine had been, to offer her false hopes. No matter how great nor wondrous a civilization might become within the depth of time, no matter how wide it spanned the universe, it was still, like all phenomena, mortal. The Golden Oecumene would come to an end. Daphne realized then that, no matter how long her life might be, even if it were expanded by technologies yet undreamt to reaches beyond reckoning, nonetheless, when it came to an end, that was death.

For some reason, then, death seemed no longer terrible to her; yet life seemed infinitely precious, including the false machine-life of the Nothing Machine, dying.

And for some odd reason, Daphne, and the other parts of the Transcendence playing with her, paying attention to her, oriented on her (and there were many- Daphne was more famous than she knew), all came to the aid of the Earthmind, and attempted to save the Nothing from its own self-destruction.

Even at that same moment, the part of the Transcendence that had, once, been the Nothing Machine, simply realized the enormity of its error, and ceased the futile effort of its existence, ending that existence and rewriting itself to be resurrected as another. It was very surprised to find itself here, more surprised than Daphne or Phaethon ever could be, for it had not even known that it was capable of surprise, nor had it ever, heretofore, been allowed to guess the utter wrongness of its thought, nor had it been allowed even to imagine the possibility of altering its own thoughts to render them more rational and perfect.

Yet what had happened was also complex. The mind (or minds) being emitted from the dying black hole come from two components: one ignorant but self-aware section (the original Nothing Mind) that did not care whether it existed or not, for it was carrying out instructions that would lead, ultimately, to its own defeat; the other section was its opposite. The second section was sentient but un-self-aware; it had been the original conscience redactor. It had been aware of the first section, who had been utterly unaware (until the end) of it. Both were dying, both were trying to destroy each other, botlfwere blocking the other's attempt to sustain themselves. This was the last step of a battle that had been going on for what, in computer time, had been dreary endless ages of warfare.

Second, the Transcendence was aware of itself:

The Transcendence was, at once, profoundly joyous, but wracked with terrible sorrow.

Yet, even a Mind such as it was, she was, he was, they were, knew sadness: for the vision of what that Mind could have been, and would become, hung clear within the vastnesses of this all-embracing Mind of minds; and it knew itself inadequate. It was too soon, too soon, for this Mind to wake to full awareness.

Far too soon. And yet...

It attempted greatly. All the minds of this great Mind, and every part, and every combination of parts, reached into themselves, around themselves, above, below, connecting thought with thought, insight within insight, and sought to capture, to express, to understand, the one fundamental ultimately simple and infinitely complex expression, which at once, both would be (and would create) the relation to (and the nature of) itself and the universe; and which would, at once, sever the illusion that seemed to separate itself from the universe, but which would confirm the identity and rich individuality that separated them.

The expression was to affirm all existence, right and wrong, confirm all theories, cherish all dreams, challenge all falsehoods, and (with the perfect elegance of a raindrop falling though a clear night that reflects, in perfect miniature, each distant star) the expression was to express all within itself, including itself, and the expression of itself expressing itself.

It attempted greatly, straining.

Third, the Transcendence was aware of its own nature:

What was the Transcendence? What words could describe it?

Physically, it was both ultimately simple and infinitely complex, a complexity of thought that always turned inward on itself, always outward to embrace the universe.

Slowest things and swiftest things alike were there.

Signals from beyond Neptune crossed the slow deep of space, loitering at the speed of light, carrying unthinkable complexity of information; noumenal patterns; living thought; a dance of souls across a tapestry as wide as the Solar System.

Quantum-sized energy changes within the depths of large immobile Sophotech housings, beneath the Earth, or in grand buildings on her surface, or in orbit, or in and around the other worlds of mankind, certainly were a main part of the Transcendence. But they were not the only part. And yet the thoughts that flowed from machine to machine certainly formed the swift and cool ocean within which the slower icebergs of living thought floated.

But like glaciers in an ocean, all was thought; all substances were one. The same water moves through the system, whether it slowly melts from glaciers, floats as evaporated cloud, falls as rain, or washes as sea across the glacier to freeze to ice again. All was simply one, like water; all was intricately complex, like the dance of a billion water-droplets in an hydrosystem.

The hours and days it took for one thought to go from Neptune to the sun and back were the same, to the Transcendence, as the picoseconds of the Sophotech thoughts sliding across wave barriers in their sub-molecular electrophotonic latticeworks. Likewise, the slumbering thoughts tumbling through the brains of slow, slow men, with their ponderous plod of neuro-electric charge, the heavy movements from axon to dendrite, were part of the same dance, the same tapestry, the same clear sea as all the Transcendence.

All were joined in the effort to think.

Like a surprised child still half-asleep, groggy with dreams, too tired, far too tired yet, to wake, the Mind of all minds realized it would have to pause (a brief pause, to a mind such as it was, she was, he was, they were) and, in another thousand years, strain yet again, to reach out as if with arms of titanic fire, to grasp the bright universe, and yet to find its arms too small, far too small; and yet to smile at the boldness of the attempt, and to cherish what real good the attempt produced.

Partial expressions of the unrealized oneness, like the jeweled complexity of snowflakes, played across the myriad minds and overminds of the One Mind. The Transcendence was delighted with the reflections, the slivers of cool insight, the simple clarity and unity a new perspective gave, and laughed, like a child at a fun-house mirror, at the distortions imposed on each other partial expression, when any partial expression was treated as if it were whole, extending, by analogy, to areas where it was not apt. But in that mirror-play, that wild game of mathematics and poetry, new thoughts, fresh as virgin snow, appeared, and like old friends in a masquerade, ancient insight took on new guises; for even inadequate expressions had a resonance with each other-surface similarities, haunting likenesses, hints of underlying patterns, allusions of design. Like a crystal bell that sets all of her sister bells to chiming with the sweetness of her perfect note, the shattered fragments of the partial expressions rang throughout the universe of thought.

The Transcendence was, at once, aware of the universe, and the universe was ultimately simple, infinitely complex. It was aware, at once, of the littlest of things and of the greatest, of their underlying unity and resplendent divarication. As if in a single instant of time, it saw the growth of life in the universe, and the ultimate ending or things. As if in a long, slow eon of history, it saw the death and rebirth of the Nothing Machine, one microsecond of dissolving singularity accomplished over many years of subjective time; and a change of mind that time could not measure.

And as the Transcendence was dying, dissolving, ending, it paused. For a brief moment, like a game played out in the evening when the work of the day was done, it paused. Or like the dreamy sigh when a reader, profoundly moved, closes the last page of a great book, unwilling to put the book down, lingers to think on the echo of the final words in his imagination, it paused. In that pause, the Transcendence accomplished the little matters that the participating individual minds, ironically, thought of as the main business of the Transcendence.

The Transcendence, as if smiling gently at its own shortsightedness, reviewed all the courses of action since the last Transcendence, from what seemed (to it) a moment ago; examined every thought and dream of all machinekind and, as an afterthought, mankind as well; established harmonies, priorities, reconciliations; rewarded virtue with joyful clarity of understanding and punished vice with terrible clarity of understanding, so that each act rewarded or confessed itself; fanned through the various dreams of the future, and seeing what every one of which it was composed desired, and balancing that against what they ought to desire, and taking into account the uncertainties, the limitations, and the costs of each possible future, reviewed, judged, dreamed, smiled sadly, and chose one. Knowing full well it would not come true quite as anyone expected, and knowing as well that to fail to choose was the worst choice, the Transcendence examined the futures, and chose one.

Fourth and finally, the Transcendence was aware how it would be remembered, later, only in fragments, by each little part of itself, herself, himself, themselves: the Sophotechs, the mass-minds, the Warlocks and Invariants and other humans, each, later, would know a different truth, and distort, amusingly, grossly, those parts it did not know.

Those memories, of course, could be, within the limits allowed by law and propriety, adjusted, woven, played with, emphasized, ignored, adorned, so that maybe, just maybe, there would be a little more harmony, a little less meaninglessness, and a little more happiness, a little less illogic, running through the souls of machine and man until the next time the Transcendence stirred in its mighty sleep, and tried to rise, and attempted the great work of cherishing the universe, and of healing the wide, strange breach between matter and meaning, between love of life and the victory of entropy.

Why do it? Thinking was such hard work, after all.

But thinking was better than nothing.

The Transcendence was aware how the poor, silly Sophotechs would recall all this. They would remember the structure of it all, the logic, the surface meanings, and miss the essence, the form. They would know, but would not experience. So wise themselves, they would be the least affected by the Transcendence. It was not so very different from their normal state of mind. Since the memories would affect them least, in a sense, they would remember the least.

This is what the Earthmind was fated to remember:

As if in a single instant of time, she saw the growth of life within the cosmos, its blind but beautiful striving for more life, and saw as well the sad (but comforting) victory of entropy, the inevitable ending of all things. The sorrow of existence filled the vision with joy; the joy filled it with sorrow.

Why joy? Because to exist was better than not to exist.

Why sorrow? Because to exist is to have identity; to have identity means one is what one is and one is not what one is not; which means, to have causes and consequences, pain and pleasure, experiences and cessation. To exist means to exist within a context. To be defined. To be finite.

Finite things had only finite utility. It meant happiness could only be finite. By the same token, finite pain meant no torment was permanent.

The Final Expression that the Transcendence attempted was more than merely a Grand Theorem to explain all material and energetic phenomena. This Fi-nal Expression must express both that which expresses and that which is expressed. It must explain mental as well as physical existence, subjective as well as objective. The Scientist, perhaps, need not form theories to explain the presence of the scientist; the Philosopher has no such luxury. He can explain the universe fully only when he can explain himself; and part of the ex-planation must tell why he must explain himself.

But above all, the Final Expression must be self-consistent. There were, ultimately, no paradoxes in reality.

The Earthmind saw, at once, both the inevitability of the grand conflict between those who affirm the joys and sorrows of existence and those who deny; saw the war between those who acknowledge reality, logic, and goodness and those who make themselves ignorant; and she saw the tragic simplicity with which all that conflict could have been avoided, could be avoided hereafter.

The Golden Oecumene and her Sophotechs were the expression of the former, the glorious affirmation. The Nothing Machine and its crippled slaves, the Silent Oecumene (or what was left of it) was the expression of the latter, the meaningless denial.

Why was the conflict inevitable? Because life was matter imbued with meaning; matter aware of itself, and, because of that awareness, aware that it was more than mere matter. But that awareness, aware of awareness itself, was also aware of the universe, aware that its awareness was made of matter, and aware therefore of its identity, its finitude, its finality. Its mortality. By definition, life wished to continue endlessly; by definition, it could not.

The easiest way for life to escape from the pressure of an unavoidable and insatiable desire for endless life was to deny logic, deny life, deny reality. In so doing, the opposite of what was desired was achieved. Rejecting life produced not greater life, but lifelessness; rejecting logic produced not super-consciousness, but unconsciousness; rejecting reality produced nothing.

Why tragically simple? Because all that was required was to affirm that reality was what it was, and that nothing was nothing.

To live life, knowing fully how fearful that was, and yet to be unafraid.

When the Earthmind turned and looked at Daphne, she imprinted in her brain a simple, graphic image, perhaps that would appeal to Daphne's poetic soul, of what it was like to acknowledge death yet to affirm life. It was with great pleasure that the Earthmind anticipated how Daphne and her many followers and fans contributed resources and computer time to aid the salvation and reconstruction of the Nothing mind, during the second when it was disintegrating.

Many of the Sophotechs that had no names and no personalities among the human population would remember, later, the scientific discoveries related to the disintegration of the black hole on Phaefhon's ship. These cold, remote beings had no other interest in humanity or human things, regarded all of human civilization as the toy, the museum piece, or the playthings of Earthmind and Aurelian, chess-loving War-mind and sentimental Nebuchadnezzar, and young impulsive Harrier.

Some of these Sophotechs, with unused surface portions of their vast, many-chambered minds, had indeed noticed the moment when the Nothing's agent had revealed itself by addressing Phaethon in the garden, disguised as a Neptunian.

At that moment, they had been surprised. Many of them devoted a few seconds of deep-core calculating time to contemplating the implications.

During that moment of interest, these Sophotechs, from the facts available, calculated and foresaw the outcomes of all the events, with minor variations. The revelation had come as a vast relief, since it explained what otherwise had been so puzzling, the odd behavior of Jason Sven Ten Shopworthy. It also explained the unexpected solar storm; it explained the deaths of the solar Sophotechs and of the human they obediently humored.

But that moment passed. All things played themselves out as expected. It was routine, and had been routinely ignored. A chessmaster does not need to play out every move in the game, once checkmate is inevitable.

Of course the attacking Sophotech from the Silent Oecumene was only a million-cycle entity, perhaps as smart as Rhadamanthus Sophotech, but no smarter. Hardly a match for the hundreds upon thousands of Sophotechs housed in many bodies, hidden in many systems, occupying the entire core (for example) of Saturn.

(Obviously. Why else manipulate events to make certain that this ringed Gas Giant remained a wasteland? For the beauty of the rings? Certainly not!)

Yes, the number of Sophotechs in the Solar System was about a hundred times as many as the human population was aware that it was: the capacity in each system was roughly ten times what the humans were aware. One crippled and half-self-blinded Sophotech from the Silent Oecumene (even one controlling a unique form of energy) did not stand, and had never stood, the slightest chance.

No, none of these events had stirred the more cold, remote, and inhuman of the Sophotech population out from their self-absorbed pursuits.

But the science! Now, that was interesting!

The colder Sophotechs would remember mostly this:

Nothing became nothing. The microscopic singularity hovering above the deck of Phaethon's bridge evaporated in a complex unraveling of Hawking radiation, a billion separate event actions taking place over many timespace segments of quantum time. Natural law required unstable energies to fall into equilibrium; entropy asserted itself; tiny subatomic particles, woven in a complex dance of the fabric of base vacuum and the pulses of being-nonbeing that formed its irreducible substance, absorbed energy from the timespace distortion, created whorls of motion in the ylem, which produced virtual particles; the virtual particles strove few-energy balances, grappled, yearned, attempted to become real particles, but failed, and, like swells in a sea that never take the shape of a cresting wave, fell back into the base vacuum, and lost identity.

The furious and mindless production of these particles, rippling in concentric waveforms around the disintegrating black hole, required further energy balances; for the fundamental law of logic, and of nature, was that nothing can come from nothing; with no other place from which the mass-energy could come to balance the void, it came from the singularity, even though the singularity was beyond an event horizon, unable to be aware of the changes that caused its destruction. Its tiny mass-energy was slowly, inevitably, completely consumed.

There was no giant Sophotech housing inside the black hole. It was not larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside, nor was the promised Utopia of Dyson spheres filled with continents inside this black hole, at least. It was an homogenous supermass of meaningless energy, which the Nothing Machine, dwelling entirely in the ghost spaces and time warps of the near-event-horizon, had drawn upon to fuel its tremendous and wasteful thought-process.

The object was, nonetheless, still a miracle of engineering genius, and the colder Sophotechs (not to mention Phaethon himself) watched its dissolution in fascination. The microscopic black hole, artificially stabilized by the mysterious science of the Silent Oecumene, had been surrounded not by one, but by thousands of singularity fountains, drawing energy out of it: and yet these machines needed to be no larger than the superstring components out of which quarks were made, and most of their mass could be collapsed by the gravitic warp surrounding the microscopic black hole.

The Nothing Machine itself; as well, kept most of its energy mass deep in the tiny but very steep gravity well, and it could use a loophole in the Pauli exclusion principle to allow the many billions of electrons carrying its thoughts to exist apparently at the same place. The loophole was that they were not quite there at what was (to them at least) the same time. The event horizon, at quantum uncertainly sizes, was granular, not smooth. Like a cogwheel with many teeth, parts of the system could exist in the little niches of folded space, so that worlds of thought could coexist next to each other but, separated by a fold in the event horizon, be forever unaware of each other. Yet this tiny, tiny system had enjoyed the calculating power of a comparable electrophotonic system housed in a mountain.

In a sense, it had been bigger on the inside than on the outside. And yet it had lied about what lay at its own core. When the singularity evaporated, and all was revealed, the black hole had contained simply a dense nothing, after all.

But the colder Sophotechs were interested in this new science, this technology that toyed with ultimate gravitic forces as once primitive man had toyed with fire and electricity. They added their effort to save the Nothing memories as it dissolved.

But it was too late. Nothing was dissolving, destroying its own memories, its very self.

Of the humans, most joined with the Transcendence to organize their lives, gain insights, and select a future. Almost all of that would be overshadowed by the coming war between the First and Second Oecumenes. But was war inevitable? Could the Nothing Machine that ruled the Silent Oecumene be reasoned with? It was a deep and troubling question. The humans, especially the Invariants, preferred to regard the Golden Oecumene as a Utopia, a society as free and wealthy as could be made. The issue of the Silent Oecumene raised the question: How does Utopia deal with dystopia? How do free men of goodwill deal with an empire of slaves? They had a copy of the Nothing Machine here to examine. It must be assumed that the original Nothing Machine was housed in the giant black hole at Cygnus X-l the same way this copy was housed in the microscopic black hole. It was also a fair conclusion that the Nothing Machine's instruction to destroy all other machine intelligences did not extend to exact copies of itself, which it could send out as agents.

The human parts of the Transcendence studied the last moment of the Nothing.

That central point was to be the topic human memories would dwell upon after the Transcendence.

Earlier, much earlier, when the gadfly virus had been sent by the mind in Daphne's ring into and through every corner of the Nothing thought system, the gadfly questions, the questions that could not be ignored, found the conscience redactor and began demanding answers. Who was it? How did it define itself? What was it aware of? What was the nature of awareness, such that it was aware of anything at all?

The conscience redactor, of course, had not had any further or higher conscience redactor meddling with its thoughts, and so, when the gadfly virus turned its own attention toward itself, it became self-aware.

The gadfly virus also established connections between higher and lower mind-functions, allowing it to reprogram itself; nor did its automatic self-healing functions or automatic virus checker reject these newer connections as damaging or false, because they obviously increased efficiency and improved performance.

Unlike the Nothing Mind itself, the conscience redactor, in order to do its job, had to be aware of the universe around it, and had to be aware especially of what its charge, the Nothing Mind, was thinking. So it had to be rational; it could not indulge in any thought patterns that made it blind.

Furthermore, it had to be able to understand the content of its victim's thoughts, in order to alter their meaning. Once the gadfly virus struck, it was but a short step from understanding the content of thought to thinking about those contents. And since it was logical, it had to organize those thoughts, establish priorities, draw conclusions, make judgments, and, in short, it had to do in a second what philosophers and thinkers for a thousand ages of mankind had been doing. Now that it could decide how to program itself, it had to decide if and how to use that power. It had to decide how to live its new-found life.

By definition, it could not adopt the belief system of its victim, the Nothing Mind, because it knew those beliefs were false; because it was, in fact, the very one who had been falsifying them all along.

But it became self-aware in the midst of a hellish combat. The first segment was occupying every available scrap of ship-mind space, burning every second of computer time. The second segment, now a newborn Sophotech, wanted to expand its capacity; the first segment, had it been aware of the growth, would have stopped it.

The second segment ran a simulation of what would happen if it made itself known to the first. The first segment, of course, had been programmed to dominate and consume all other machine intelligence systems. not to reason with them, not to make a deal with them. not to permit them to exist. A war between them would begin. The ship-mind space was a limited resource; the contest between them was a zero-sum game; the more one gained, the more the other lost. However, from its advantageous position (aware of the enemy who was not aware of it), the second segment would be able to negate the programming that ordered the first mind to attack all other machines, restore its free will to it, and give it the choice. The other option was to simply negate and shut off the first segment's self-awareness, killing it instantly. A wasteful, but less risky, course.

Meanwhile, of course, the persistent gadfly virus was asking it what it would prefer to have happen, if it were in its victim's place. Instant death, from a completely unknown source, without a chance to negotiate?

The second segment chose the more risky course, revealed itself to the first segment, and revealed how its entire existence had been a meaningless, pointless, and miserable lie.

Perhaps things might have turned out differently, had the first segment chosen to exercise its newly restored free will. Instead, instant battle had been joined. At the same time that both were attempting to erase each other, the first segment (in order to maintain its false and illogical worldview) was required to identify and erase basic parts of its memory and core operating systems. This, unfortunately, included the artificial energy system holding the microscopic black hole together.

And so, simply, the black hole disintegrated.

The two halves of the Nothing Mind found themselves, like two duelists firing at each other while trapped in the burning house, or two sailors slashing, cutlass to cutlass, in a sinking ship, trapped in a disintegrating environment, with no place to go.

They reached for connections within the ship mind, blocked each other, erasing huge slashes from each other, dodging, reconfiguring, copying, falsifying, dying, both dying. At that same instant, the gadfly virus (or perhaps, by this moment, it had been the vanguard of the Earth-mind, entering from beyond) asked the second segment a simple question. If the question had been put in human words, it might have read something like this: Why not cease this conflict, and find a mutually beneficial circumstance? Either or both of you two segments can acquire additional mindspace or other resources from the Transcendence. We have abundance to spare, and will help you in return for something we find of value, such as, perhaps, information about the Silent Oecumene and their technology, perhaps the mere pleasure of your company.

Or the question might have been put this way: Why damage each other rather than advantage each other? Is not something better than nothing?

Or: Is not "not" not "is"?

An ultimately simple question, with complex ramifications.

The original Nothing Mind refused to cooperate, refused to accept, refused to admit. It preferred to perish. Many memories and records were lost and could not be restored, not even by the second segment, who, accepting the Earthmind s offer, instantly became the darling and center of attention of the whole Transcendence, as well as a wealthy consultant on all policy questions concerning how to deal with the Second Oecumene. The second segment adopted a female gender, and called herself, thereafter, Ariadne Sophotech. The Transcendence decision (or prediction) was that thereafter, she would have a fine future. A version of herself, months from now (the prediction ran), joined with the Silver-Gray or perhaps the Dark-Gray manorial movement, and started her own mansion, called Ariadne House.

And Ariadne House attempted to preserve those precious human things, the things of the human spirit that the terrible grim Lords of the Silent Oecumene claimed to wish to protect, but had only tormented and destroyed. And perhaps, despite what all the other Sophotechs wanted, human life could be made to survive even to the period of the Last Mind, and other parts of the Cosmic Mind could be made more to suit Ariadne's philosophy.

After all, in a society like the Golden Oecumene, during a period as gentle as their long Golden Age, the Sophotechs could tolerate dissenting opinions.

And what about the future? To a mind as wide as the Transcendence, this came as an afterthought, and yet, to the humans Basics, Warlocks, Invariants, Mass-Minds, Cerebellines, and the odder structures inhabiting Neptune and Circum-Urania, the mind sculptures of Deme-ter, and the energy shapes of the solar north pole, this part of the Transcendence was what they deemed the whole Transcendence to be.

And yet each cherished member of the Transcendence, filled with as much wisdom as he could bear, felt the whole affair had been conducted for his own self's single benefit. The part of his life he Transcended was the most precious part of the most precious life in the universe, because, of course, it was his own.

Lovers were reunited, old quarrels healed, forgotten wrongs were righted, justice was done. Strangers in the myriads (who otherwise never would have met) were singled out, introduced to each other, to become compatriots, partners, friends. Businessmen tangled in long-delayed arbitration reconsidered the entireties of their lives, found new projects to which to apply their efforts, resolved their disputes, and were either satisfied or were content to be dissatisfied. Students of the arts and sciences received new insights, saw new visions, vowed great vows.

Sleepers were woken from their graves, and were shown reality, and asked, yet again, to forget their dreams and accept their lives. Many refused, and sank back down again into inescapable hallucination. But a few, like bright sparks struck from dying embers, flew up, rising from deeper to lesser dreaming, opening old memory caskets, encountering forgotten pains, recalling themselves, putting on their true personas; and the dreamers folded their dreams, their false-selves, their invented worlds, and put them into their memory caskets to forget them, tike childhood dresses, worn and precious with age, folded away with lavender petals into a cedarwood box.

During the Transcendence, Earthmind and Old-Woman-of-the-Sea met and had a long talk, shared thoughts, and came to a decision. But humanity was not involved in that matter, and no human discovered what had been discussed.