All Roads Lead

Maria

Blackness. Whiteness. Back-and-forth fire of a quantum interface blasting baryons in and out of the singularity, sucking some back in to leave other outside to wing away through the coldness of space.

Time. Zero dimensions of space, made up for by an infinite number of possibilities in time. Forward, backward, up, down, to the nearby universes to the left and right. Light frozen in a crystal lattice, with tachyons crawling slowly along. "Let's make things interesting," Eidolon said. She grinned, and Maria saw it rippling through the singularity, distorting like a great lens in space between them. The singularity shifted aside, and Eidolon watched it intently.

"Do you ever get the urge to destroy something, just so you can rebuild it better?" Maria asked as she watched the singularity accelerate toward the Great Wall. She wandered off, following it.

"Many times," came the response, embedded in the very superstrings of the cosmos. The response was multileveled, containing a list of situations where Eidolon had had felt such a desire, with paragraphs of explanations, plus a list of situations where she had not felt so, with explanations of why they were relevant to the question at hand. In zerotime Maria read these thoughts, absorbing them completely. Unlike some of the other Ghosts, she had never increased her communications bandwidths to respond to such a detailed thought with a similarly detailed answer. The discussions that erupted from two Ghosts communicating in such a manner quickly grew to infinite complexity, and they would have to kick the thought into a singularity bubble to keep track of it.

"The human race is gone," Maria said. "It might be interesting to turn time around, stop Ko'ah from triggering the chain."

"Perhaps." Eidolon responded in single-stream voice, as Maria did. "An error, a simple misestimation of the powers involved, and our Galaxy and its neighbors became..." Her voice trailed away.

Imagine three trillion stars burning with their normal brilliant fire, bringing light to countless worlds, nourishing life, throbbing with the rhythms of gravity and energy, fusing gently like candles, lasting for several million, billion, or hundred billion years.

And then imagine, suddenly, a single star collapsing into a black hole, sending a wave of spacetime distortion out in concentric spheres. And as that wave expanded, each star it touched was converted from matter to energy in an instant.

The wave travelled over ten million lightyears before it stopped. Ten million lightyears, instantly, since it expanded in a realm of spacetime unlimited by the speed of light.

Imagine, now, a sphere of light, pure and untainted with the dirtiness of matter, blazing with a power that outshined the entire remaining universe a millionfold.

And the sphere slowly fading, leaving but echoes, as the stars' light blew slowly outward in individual expanding bubbles at the speed of light.

Milky Way. Andromeda. Triangulum. Countless little tiny galaxies. Globular clusters in clouds around them. The worlds orbiting each star.

"The human race would have annihilated itself," Maria said. War. Constant strife, expanding, growing more complex as it engulfed more of the universe. A planet would find an enemy. The enemy's friends attacked the planet, laying it waste. The survivors rebuilt, spent a thousand years mustering their forces, then exacted vengeance. The cycle expanded, until the bright bursts of artificially-triggered novae wiped out systems in single shots. Breaking the hyperlight barrier via a tachyon-based propulsion system, the humans broke free of the decaying wormhole network, and expanded to fill the Galaxy. Leo. The Magellanic Clouds. Midway.

War continued. Humans fighting humans fighting their spawn the bioderms, Cybrids, the alien races they encountered and attacked out of fear and ignorance. War unceasing, building, building until a quadrillion human lives were embroiled in an orgy of death and destruction.

And then light. And an end to war. Forever. But with a price nearly as terrible.

"Go back?" Maria asked/thought/proposed/considered. And discarded the idea. "Are we enough?" Thirteen Ghosts, plus or minus. Roaming the universe(s) as they saw fit, building, always building. Perhaps the new universes they made would turn out better. Perhaps the timearks, bubbles of stasis they had used to save some, would thrive in their new zones. A billion people on a golden-green, desert-with-sulfur-based-ecosystem planet, with their little F-class star, tossed hastily into a singularity. Trapped in a single instant for a thousand years, quite conscious of their entrapment. When Delithita had set them free, they'd shed their physical bodies in favor of sand grains. Now, complex patterns of quantum fluctuations enveloped the world, as each human life blew on the wind, flashing thought back and forth between each grain for the brief instants they were close enough together. Maria made a note to check up on that universe in a couple millenia to see if they were settled yet.

Eidolon flashed the memory/image/pattern/blueprint of another. This world was destroyed by the explosion of its sun, but she had rescued it before the destruction was complete. Now it was a bowl, with gravity inside-out and repelling objects toward the outer shell. Eidolon had tossed that one inside a singularity and expanded that universe as far as she dared, then threw in a black hole on the opposite side of the universe from the inside-out planet. The black hole repelled matter and energy from its singularity, and now the planet had light. "Why destroy what we have already done in favor of something that only might be an improvement? And do we even have the right to meddle?"

Maria shrugged, gazing into the singularity again. It was a mirror, inside out, with her inside, as the mortal human she had been so long ago. Trapped inside a crystal globe, looking out to the stars but never seeing past the singularity that surrounded her, never knowing she was being watched... by herself.

Maria touched the singularity's perfect surface, sending energy flashing through it. Her image turned and gazed at something. Perhaps the control panel of her shuttle as she approached Triton. Perhaps the inside of the Madrid spaceport just before the Fire, as she had heard an echo of a word not yet spoken, shook her head and continued on her way.

Feedback loop. She could enter this past and change things. Then the history she was a part of would repeat and she would be there inside it. And when time returned to this moment, she would enter the past again, and there would be two of her in there. Around and around the loop until nothing remained of the universe but an infinite number of copies of herself. The reverse of the paradox scenario: history would repeat over and over and over, growing stronger with each loop.

And she would become the universe, or perhaps the universe would become her. She wondered what that would feel like. Perhaps one day she would copy the universe and try it out, if she could ever figure out how to escape afterward.

"Ah, why not?" she said suddenly, and Eidolon looked puzzled. "I think I'll do something interesting."

"What's that?"

Maria shrugged dismissively. "What difference does it make?" Eidolon gave no response. None was necessary. "Pick a date."

"What calendar?"

"Make one up."

"Year sixty-five twenty-three," Eidolon said, pulling a number out of the sparkling singularity. "Or is this pi?"

"Add them together," Maria said dismissively.

"Sixty-five twenty-six point one four one six Eidy Standard Date, coming up." The singularity shifted. "Now we have to worry about where."

"No, we'll just go nowhere and find a place afterward."

"Sounds good. You know, I think this number is cee."

"Well make up your mind before we end up in stuck in the Big Bang or something."

Eidolon's eyes lit up with the glow of a million converging multiverses. "Sounds interesting."

Maria rolled her eyes disgustedly and reached out for the event horizon of the singularity.

Eidolon watched Maria disappear into it, shook her head with amusement. She reached out and picked up the singularity, and dropkicked it into a nearby star, collapsing it and blasting a supernova explosion out of it.

She grinned michievously at Maria's indignant squeak.

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