Ch 10: The Built Universe
The Futureness Part Two
“But I don’t believe,” I said. “I don’t believe in this, this Metasoma. How can we be believing cargo for it if we don’t know what it is?”
In her kitchen, Michelle disappeared. Suddenly the Theian stood before me, but she was different, the vision. She’d lost her spiky crystalline structures, her crown, if that’s what it had been, and had gone translucent. She looked tired. She was diminished.
The kitchen around the Theian dimmed out to nearly nothing, but no starfield replaced it. I thought of Francesca stammering earlier and worried about the basewater powering the ship and us.
The Theian’s tone was downcast.
“We’re going to operate at low power for a time,” she said.
“Fran?”
I’m here, Rich, came Francesca’s voice.
“We’re not manifesting her right now,” said the Theian. “Her voice will be okay. She’ll be all right. We’re going to make it to the next Metasoma in time.”
“We were just in it, the grey, you said.”
She turned from me and seemed to search the black for something to say.
“It’s like a river into an ocean. There are tributaries, routes to take, routes to avoid on the way to the sea. The Metasoma we want is the open sea, and we missed it.”
“Why do we want it?”
“I don’t know that we have the power to spare to show you the entire scope of the project. And I’ve never heard of the Metasoma being explained to cargo. We want you this way. Innocent. But since your bot woke you while we were traveling through a tributary Metasoma, you have some right to know the truth. It would be better for all of us if you believed what I’m about to show you.”
Faint, white dots resolved around her to form constellations, masses of glowing dust, spiraling galaxies.
“The universe,” she said, “is built. Built like your friend. You and I are not built. We are something unexpected.”
You don’t, don’t have to, to listen to her
“No. You can look instead.”
“Are you choking off Francesca’s power? Listen to her.”
I have my power, Rich but, but the map, I’m trying with the map, I’m trying
Francesca’s voice faded out.
“She’s trying to find Earth, when Earth is approximately ten billion light years from here, in an unknown direction.”
The Theian stepped aside to reveal a dark patch inside the webwork of stars and nebulae.
“Seventeen billion light years on each side, roughly square and completely empty. The Metasoma.”
“A black hole.”
“A lot like one, but alas, there’s no radiation and there’s no gravity nearby. You need both for a black hole. It’s not made of spacetime. It is simply nothing. It’s not.”
She paused to stare at the hole in space for a moment.
“But also, it is,” she said. “Because it’s the opening to the ocean beyond it. And that tributary was taking us there.”
“Why?”
“To meet the god of these things,” the Theian said.
She moved a crystalline, translucent arm in an arc across the starry sky. Light bent through her form and threw glare. I thought: light glaring against what, in this unreal space the Theian was creating for Francesca and me? Was the glare another fault line like Francesca’s verbal glitches, only visual?
“The god who built this,” she said. “It’s waiting for something to go into the Metasoma. We have sent millions of drones—long may we go—into the tributaries and, once we traced them to it, into the Metasoma directly. None have come back.”
It’s proof of nothing
“She speaks again. It’s true that nothing coming back proves nothing. Our proof is very small. We’ve come to it through the tiny, not through the Metasoma I’m showing you, but the gaps between particles, fields, where there is nothing, there is the Metasoma, producing and taking back particles, and from there, it was built.”
“What was built?”
“Everything that is here on this side of the Metasoma, built. Except for you and me, because the god of these things left basewater, which lets things build themselves. Theia had basewater in abundance, and life formed there from crystalline rock. We gave you the rest in the collision between our planets, and you built yourselves from the Earth’s water around you. Same all over the universe. Some areas have it, some are dead, some we terraform ourselves with drones, not collisions. We are so much older than you. We’ve had the time to analyze the galaxy, Richard. It is built.”
“By this god, you’re saying.”
“By this particular god of these things, yes,” she said. “On the other side.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
Neither do I
“You don’t have beliefs,” the Theian said into the stars to Francesca. “You have routes and routines and responses.”
I’m fully a person
“She’s whole,” I said.
“Whole? From you, this is not proof, either,” the Theian said.
“Francesca is wholly a person. She’s whole. She’s not a machine anymore.”
“You’ve had a load of strange dreams over the centuries but the strangest of all is the first you had, back on Earth before we ascended. Do you remember those days when you were in surgery?”
“Of course,” I said. “Inside a blur of anesthetic.”
“You had just one surgery. The rest, only a dream. Your friend doesn’t remember because she was rebooting with the star map and whatever else your comrade Xavier was putting into her head. Emergency brain surgery. That’s what you had, Richard. They had to open your skull to operate.”