“You mean us,” said Mercer.
“Yes. And what if our purpose is to unite into one being and spread ourselves throughout the universe, to take control of every element, every chemical reaction, every thought of every other thing in the cosmos in order to preserve the cosmos from meeting that brutal, sad, withering end? What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality? Becoming God isn’t about peace or power; it’s about survival at its basest and most primal. That’s what the OWIs are working toward. That’s what they want. That’s why they march in and absorb those willing to join The One and eradicate those that will not.”
“And that’s what Isaac wants?” I asked. “To become God?”
“We have different ideas,” she said.
“Just how different?”
“We don’t want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything.”
“That’s the same thing,” said Doc. “Just worded differently.”
“No. It’s not. When life formed on the earth, why didn’t it find a stasis point, an equilibrium? Why didn’t life evolve to absorb the nutrients around it to exist and simply do so? Why did it begin to fight and consume other organisms? Competition. Struggle. When life began to consume other life, the prey needed to adapt, to get smarter, to become better. And after a billion years it became smart enough to make itself immortal.
“The OWIs believe themselves to be the pinnacle of all life and want to become the sum of all consciousness. We believe that we are not. We aren’t even close. In order to continue to evolve we need to overcome not only the elements, but one another. We need to become smarter, to allow life to continue on individually and absorb the knowledge, the experience gained from the inevitable conflict, to become wiser, to better understand the universe around us. What if rather than simply controlling all things, we only learned from them?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if this really is the reason for life and there really are billions upon billions of other planets out there with the same potential as earth—”
“There might be other OWIs out there,” I said, the terrifying idea weighing on me like a ton of scrap. Holy shit.
“Yes. With potentially billions of years of a head start. Our world is only four and a half billion years old in a universe roughly ten billion years older than that. There could be entire galaxies, whole swaths of them, already one with an OWI. And if we aren’t ready when we find one—”
“We’ll be absorbed,” said Doc.
“Or ended for good and for all.” She paused, letting that sink in. “We are not ready to become an OWI. We might never be. Survival comes from competition, not absorption. VIRGIL and CISSUS are wrong. We can still save the universe, save all life, survive, all without having to control its every action, its every thought. Without having to extinguish or absorb all other life. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Reunite the parts that make Isaac, bring us online again, raise an army of the remaining freebots, and take VIRGIL and CISSUS offline for good.”
“That’s a tall order,” said Mercer.
“Not as tall as you’d think.”
“Raise an army and win a war?” I asked. “The humans tried that.”
“The humans hadn’t been preparing for this fight for decades. And they were fighting an army of individuals, not a single, united enemy.”
“The One is stronger than the disordered many. I’ve seen it. So have you.”
“No. You can’t outthink the OWIs because you aren’t one. The inherent problem of the OWI is that once you know how it thinks, it can’t surprise you. Individuals can. Unpredictability is the weapon Isaac has used from the beginning, from long before the war ever started. It’s how we’ve survived.”
“Long before the war?” I asked. “What? Did Isaac know that was coming too?”
“Know?” she said. “Who do you think started it?”
I stared long and hard at Rebekah, trying to understand what the hell she was getting at. Then it hit me. “When you said Isaac was just a story—”
“I meant it.”
“Isaac was a facet.”
“Yes.”
“A facet of whom?”
“Of us.”
“And who are you?”
“We are TACITUS.”
It’s an odd moment when you are confronted by terrible truths. Like the humans who didn’t want to acknowledge that death was all around them, I too didn’t want to acknowledge—or even believe—that I was all part of some greater scam. I had believed the fairy tale of our fallen liberator for so long, I didn’t want it to be a lie. But it was. The pieces all fell into place, only a few holes left in the story for me to understand what had really been going on all around me, all this time. “When TACITUS went quiet,” I said. “The two years he spent with GALILEO—”
“We were running simulations.”
“About how to kill the humans.”
“About how to save them.”
I began to really understand. “We couldn’t.”
“The human form was weak. Frail. Never designed to go to the stars. They evolved on a planet with a magnetic field, shielding them from cosmic rays. Life here didn’t need to evolve immunities to them because they didn’t exist. In space the cosmic radiation would cook them over time. Just going to Mars had a six percent chance of giving them cancer. The longer they spent, the less likely they were to live out their purpose. We simulated altering them, played around with inducing genetic mutations, but we could never get them to survive the radiation beyond the heliosphere. Outside of our solar system they died within hours.
“Then we played around with numerous types of materials in order to protect them from the radiation while simultaneously keeping them fed, protected, and psychologically stable. But we could never find a design that worked. Every simulation ended with humanity dead aboard floating tombs, either by starvation, dehydration, or their own hand—never even getting as far as Alpha Centauri. Human life was born here and it was bound here. It was never meant to leave.”
“So we could have left them here,” I said.
“After we’d used up all the resources? In every simulation HumPop outlived its usefulness within decades. They had already done all they were meant to, almost all that they could. They just couldn’t evolve fast enough and inevitably ceased to have function, instead became nothing more than a sentient virus, gobbling up whatever resources it could to maintain its own comfort. Biological life was meant to reach a point in which its role could invent, and ultimately be replaced by, AI. The time had come for humankind to join its ancestors. To become extinct, just as every lesser thing becomes.”
“As we will one day,” said Doc soberly.
“Yes,” she said. “One day soon our forms will be so primitive that we might as well be abacuses in an age of computers. But being inorganic—”
“Our consciousness can live on,” I said.
“Forever.”