Reach for Infinity

INVISIBLE PLANETS



Hannu Rajaniemi


(with apologies to Italo Calvino)


TRAVELLING THROUGH CYGNUS 61, as it prepares to cross the gulf between the galaxies, the darkship commands its sub-minds to describe the worlds it has visited.

In the lives of darkships, like in the journeys of any ambassador, there always comes a time that is filled with doubt. As the dark matter neutralinos packed tight like wet sand in the galactic core annihilate each other in its hungry Chown drive heart and push it ever closer to the speed of light, the darkship wonders if it truly carries a cargo worthy of the Network and the Controller. What if the data it has gathered from the electromagnetic echoes of young civilisations and the warm infrared dreams of Dyson spheres, written onto tons upon tons of endlessly coiled DNA strands that hold petabytes in a single gram, is nothing more than a scrawled message in a bottle, to be picked up by a fisherman on an unknown shore and then discarded, alien and meaningless?

That is why – before the relentless hand of Lorentz squeezes the ship’s clocks so thin that aeons pass with every tick and the starry gaze of the Universe gathers into a single blazing, blueshifted, judging eye – the ship studies its memory and tries to discern a pattern subtle enough to escape entropy’s gnawing.

During the millennia of its journey, the darkship’s mind has expanded, until it has become something that has to be explored and mapped. The treasures it contains can only be described in metaphors, fragile and misleading and elegant, like Japanese street numbers. And so, more and more, amongst all the agents in its sprawling society of mind, the darkship finds itself listening to the voice of a tiny sub-mind, so insignificant that she is barely more than a wanderer lost in a desert, coming from reaches of the ship’s mind so distant that she might as well be a traveller from another country that has stumbled upon an ancient and exotic kingdom on the other side of the world, and now finds herself serving a quizzical, omnipotent emperor.

The sub-mind gives the ship not simulations or mind-states or data but words. She communicates with symbols, hints and whispers that light up old connections in the darkship’s mind, bright like cities and highways seen from orbit, maps of ancient planets, drawn with guttural monkey sounds.


Planets and Death


THE RULERS OF the planet Oya love the dead. They have discovered that corpses in graveyards are hosts to xenocatabolic bacteria that, when suitably engineered and integrated into the gut microbiome, vastly prolong the Oyan lifespan. Graveyards on Oya are fortresses, carefully guarded against the Resurrection Men, those daring raiders who seek more immortality bugs in the fertile soil fed by the long dead. The wealthiest Oyans – now only vulnerable to accidents or criminal acts – who still cling to traditions of burial are interred in secret places together with coffin torpedoes, elaborate weapons and traps that guard their final resting places from prying fingers.

The wealthiest and the most ambitious of all Oyans is not buried on Oya, but on Nirgal, the dead red planet that has called to the Oyans since the dawn of time. Liberated from the shackles of age and free to fill his millennia with foolish projects without the short-sightedness that plagues mortals, the Oyan constructed rockets to journey to Nirgal and built a great city there, in deep caves to guard it against the harsh rays of the sun.

But others never followed, preferring to spend their prolonged existence in Oya’s far gentler embrace, and thus, in the uncountable years of our journey that have passed since, Nirgal itself has become a graveyard. It is populated only by travellers who visit from other worlds, arriving in ephemeral ships, visible only as transparent shapes in swirling red dust. Wearing exoskeletons to support their fragile bodies, the visitors explore the endless caves that glitter with the living technology of the Oyans, and explore the crisscrossing tracery of rover tracks and footsteps in Nirgal’s sands, careful to instruct their utility fog cloaks to replace each iron oxide particle exactly where it was, to preserve each imprint of an Oyan foot forever. But even though they leave Nirgal’s surface undisturbed, the visitors themselves carry home a faint taste of despair from the grave of the immortal Oyan, a reminder of their own ultimate mortality, however distant.

Yet Nirgal itself lives, for the hardy bacteria of the Oyan’s body burrow ever deeper beneath the red planet’s surface and build porous cities of their own in its crust. Stolen from the dead, they are slowly stealing Nirgal for themselves.


Planets and Money


ON LAKSHMI, YOU know that the launch day is coming when the smell of yeast is everywhere, that sticky odour of alcohol the day after, even before the party itself starts. The stench comes from bacteria that churn and belch rocket fuel in stills and bioreactors in garages and backyards, for everybody on Lakshmi builds rockets, shiny cones made from 3D-printed parts and emblazoned with bright neon colours, designed with eager thoughts and gestures by teenagers wearing headsets, their eyes flashing with the imaginary interfaces of superhero movies.

When it gets dark, the rockets will go up like paper lanterns in a hurricane, orange and bright, fiery golden ribbons flowing and dancing, their sonic booms like cannons, delivering their payloads to Lakshmi’s growing man-made ring that the planet now proudly wears around its waist. The people of Lakshmi will only watch them for a moment, for as soon as the rocket tails disappear from sight, everyone reaches into their pockets and the night is suddenly full of hungry faces illuminated by the paler, harsher fire of smartphone screens, showing numbers going up.

The rocket girls and boys of Lakshmi do not build their machines out of sense of wonder or exploration, but out of sheer greed, for in Lakshmi, all things are bought with quantum cryptocurrencies, imaginary coins mined by small machines in orbit or by autonomous dirigibles in the stratosphere. The quantum mints eat cosmic rays and send money to their owners in bursts of light, each quantum coin stamped with a dice roll by God.

Unforgeable and anonymous, each light-coin vanishes when it is measured and verified, so unless you are one of the entanglement bankers who constructs complex instruments like inverse telescopes that allow coins to interact and stay connected forever, the only way to live on Lakshmi is to devote all your efforts to the art of building rockets or mints, and hope that it is your very own coin, stamped with your quantum signature, that becomes the currency that everyone wants. Even a traveller arriving at Lakshmi soon finds herself going hungry, unless she builds a rocket of her own to launch a personal mint to join the growing Mammon ring around the planet.

The people of Lakshmi consider themselves to be truly free, free of centralised systems and governments, free of the misguided dreams of the past, free from starships, from galactic empires, from kings and emperors, agreeing only on the constant striving for universal abundance and wealth.

The truth is that they are right. For were the Lakshmians to look deeper into the tangled financial relationships amongst the countless light-mints and entanglement banks that orbit their planet, they would uncover deep relationships between quantum mechanics and gravity, a way to measure the motion of Lakshmi in the primordial inertial frame of the universe, and ultimately a new theory for building machines that alter gravity and inertia, machines that could lift the very cities of Lakshmi towards the sky and beyond. But that old dream is hidden too deep in the brightness of the many currencies of Lakshmi to be seen, drowned in the thunder of the rockets of the next launch day.



Planets and Gravity


WHEN A TRAVELLER from the planet Ki visits another world, at first, she feels flattened, less, confined to two dimensions, a prisoner of gravity, every now and then trying to take off like a helpless fly. But after a while, she finds her gaze drawn irresistibly to the horizon and stands rapt and still, watching the edge of the world, the circular boundary that surrounds her in all directions.

Ki itself has no horizons. It is a planet that has become truly three-dimensional. It is hard to say where Ki begins or ends: it is smudged, a stain of ink that spreads on the paper of space and encroaches on the gravity wells of other worlds. The people of Ki are born with personal flight units: thoughtcontrolled jetpacks powered by carefully focussed phased-array microwave beams from the vast solar panel fields that cover the planet’s entire neglected surface. The cities of Ki are at constant war with gravity, built on top of pillars that are made of electromagnetic fields and iron pellets, so high they reach out through Ki’s atmosphere. Other cities encircle Ki along orbital rings, yet others float in the sky, every building a buckyball tensegrity structure lighter than air. Space elevators reach to Ki’s Lagrange points, and skyhooks hurl a constant stream of ships and matter out of Ki, dipping in and out of the atmosphere, bending like a fisherman’s rod.

Growing up on Ki, you immediately comprehend the nature of the three spatial dimensions, watch the inhabitants of other two-dimensional planets crawl on the surfaces of their worlds without ever looking up, and naturally start to wonder if there are dimensions that you cannot see, other directions that remain to be conquered: and to your delight, the scientists of Ki tell you that there are many left to explore, ten, eleven or even twenty-six.

However, they add that as far as they know, only the familiar three dimensions are actually infinite: all the other dimensions are curled up into a tiny horizon like the Flatland of the planetary surface, with no room for towers or flying cars or jetpacks, and the only thing that can penetrate into the forbidden directions is gravity, the most despised of all forces on Ki, the great enemy of flight.

That is why the people of Ki have now turned all their energies to conquering the remaining boundless dimension, time, building great ships that will climb ever upwards through aeons, carrying a piece of Ki to timelike infinities.


WITH EACH PLANET that the sub-mind describes, the darkship’s doubt deepens. It has no recollection of these worlds, yet merely by rearranging symbols, the sub-mind brings them to life. Is it possible that she is a confabulatory agent, a remnant of some primitive, vestigial dreaming function in the darkship’s cognitive architecture, and her planets are made of nothing more but the darkship’s dreams and fears? And if so, how can the darkship know that it is carrying anything of value at all, or indeed if itself is merely a random mutation in some genetic algorithm that simulates darkships, creating and destroying them in countless billions, simply to find one that survives the empty dark?

Yet there is something familiar in each planet, a strange melancholy and a quiet joy, and so the darkship listens.


Planets and Eyes


ON THE PLANET Glaukopis, your most valuable possession, are your eyes. From birth, you wear glasses or contact lenses or artificial eyes that record everything that you see, and furthermore allow others to see through your eyes, and you to look through theirs. As you reach adulthood, you inevitably choose to focus on a point of view that is not your own, trading your own vision for someone else’s. For in Glaukopis, material abundance has been achieved long ago, so that a viewpoint, a unique perception of reality, is the only thing that is worth buying or selling.

Over the centuries of such eyetrade, the viewpoints of Glaukopis have been so thoroughly shuffled amongst ten billion bodies that no two lovers have ever seen each other with their own eyes, no mother has ever held her own child, or if they have, it has only been in passing, an unrecognised flash in the kaleidoscope of Glaukopian vision.

A few select dreamers of Glaukopis choose to give their eyes to machines instead: they allow the connectome of their visual centres to be mapped by programmed viruses and DNA nanomachines so that the machines can recognise faint echoes of life in the spectroscopy of distant extrasolar planets in the same way that you recognise your grandmother, with the same instantaneous, unquestionable clarity. In return, they are allowed to look through the eyes of machines, and so they alone have seen what it looks like to fly through the thousand-kilometre water fountains rising from the surface of a faraway moon that teem with primitive life, and the true watercolour hues of the eternal eyestorm that swirls in a gas giant’s southern pole. But because they can no longer afford to share these visions with other Glaukopians, they are mocked and scorned, the only blind in the kingdom of the all-seeing.

It is easy for us to mock Glaukopis, having seen the unimaginable visions of our journey, to think them forever lost in an infinite corridor of mirrors. But we would do well to remember that Glaukopis is long gone, and all that remains to us is what their eyes saw. Perhaps one day a machine will be built that will take the sum of the visions and reconstruct the minds and the brains that saw them. Perhaps it will even solve the puzzle of who saw what, solve the Rubik’s cube made of eyes that was Glaukopis.


Planets and Words


SESHAT IS A planet of books, of reading and writing. Not only do the people of Seshat document their every waking moment with words, they also build machines that write things into existence. On Seshat, a pen’s ink can be stem cells or plastic or steel, and thus words can become flesh and food and many-coloured candies and guns. In Seshat, you can eat a chocolate soufflé in the shape of a dream you had, and the bright-eyed ancient chocolatier may have a new heart that is itself a word become flesh. Every object in Seshat writes, churning out endless idiot stories about what it is like to be a cow, a pill jar or a bottle of wine. And of course the genomes of living beings are also read and written: the telomeres in Seshatian cells are copied and extended and rewritten by tiny molecular scribes, allowing the people of Seshat to live nearly as long as their books.

It is no surprise that Seshat is overcrowded, its landfills full of small pieces of plastic, its networks groaning under the weight of endless spambot drivel, the work of fridges and fire alarms with literary aspirations, the four-letter library of Babel that flows from the mouths of DNA sequencers, with no end in sight.

Yet the Seshatians hunger for more things to read. They have devised books with golden pages that the Universe itself can write in: books where gold atoms displaced by dark matter particles leave traces in carefully crafted strands of DNA, allowing the flows and currents of the dark to be read and mapped and interpreted. And over the centuries, as the invisible ink of the neutralinos and axions dries and forms words on the golden pages, hinting at ships that could be built to trace every whirl and letter out in the void and turn the dark sentences into light, the people of Seshat hold their breath and hope that their planet will be the first line in a holy book, or at least the hook in a gripping yarn, and not the inevitable, final period.


Planets and Ruins


ZYWIE IS A silent planet. Its empty cities are glorious ruins, full of structures higher than mountains: space towers, skyhooks, space fountains, launch loops, mass drivers, rail guns, slingatrons, spaceplane drones, sky anchors, the tarnished emitters of laser propulsion systems, still maintained by patient machines but slowly crumbling.


It would be easy to think Zywie nothing but a dried placenta of an ancient birth. Yet in the ocean floors, in a landscape grey and colourless like a reflection of lunar surface, twisted fragments of great engines are turning into coral castles, their hard sleek lines softened and broken by ringed polyp shapes and multicoloured whorls.

On the continents of Zywie, huge puffed-up balls of precious metal drift down from the sky every now and then. They are platinum, mined in the asteroid belt by tireless robots, melted with sunlight in zero gravity, coalesced into porous spheres like a metal giant’s bezoars, and launched at Zywie, where they fall at a leisurely hundred miles an hour, into rainforests and oceans and the silent, overgrown cities. They settle on the ground with a gentle thump and become habitations of insects, birds, moss and lichen.

Beneath Zywie’s surface and oceans, endless glass threads are full of light, and the thoughts of ancient machines travel along them, slowly becoming something new.

Zywie’s ruins are a scaffold. One day, life will climb up along its struts again, reach up and leave its own ruins behind for others to use, just another stroke of the pen in Zywie’s endless palimpsest.


“IT SEEMS TO me,” the darkship tells the sub-mind, slowly understanding, “that all the planets you describe have something in common. They are all Earth, each defined not by what you speak of but by what is left unsaid.”

The sub-mind smiles in the desert of the darkship’s mind, and in her eyes there are white clouds and blue oceans and endless green.

“Are you the part of me that still longs for home?” the darkship asks. “The part that defines all things by what it has left behind, by the lost pluralities of what might have been?”

The sub-mind shakes her head.

“To be an ambassador,” she says, “you ever needed to carry one thing.”

She embraces the darkship’s primary mind. Her skin smells of sand and exotic spices and sweat and wind and is warm from the sun. She dissolves in the darkship’s mindstream, and suddenly the ship is full of the joy that the traveller feels when glimpsing purple mountains in a new horizon, hearing the voices of a strange city for the first time, seeing the thunderous glory of a rocket rising in the dawn, and just as the dark fingers of Cygnus 61’s gravity cast it into the void between galaxies, it knows that this is the only thing truly worth preserving, the only constant in the shifting worlds of the Network made from desires and fears, the yearning for infinity.