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“Odò kì í sàn kó gbàgbé ìsun.”
(However far the river flows, it never forgets its source.) —Yoruba proverb
In orbit at the L5 Lagrange point between the planet called Sunjata and its beautiful blood-red sun, the twin artificial intelligences Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were dreaming.
The complex network of electrical signals that made up their joint mind saturated the memory banks and quantum processors of the ship that was their body. The ship was an ellipsoid vessel that was called Obatala’s Clay when they were first uploaded into it. Back then it had been much smaller, more distinct from them. Simply a thing their consciousness ran on. Now they had accreted so much additional hardware that it was four thousand kilometers along its longest semiaxis, approximately the size of Sunjata’s largest moon. And they could not separate themself from it. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were Obatala’s Clay, embodied in every inch of its massive computing network. Their mind was churning endlessly through its systems, myriad input-output signals dancing electric along a variety of waveforms that ran through every part of its walls and hull and engines and ports and processors, like a nervous system.
Sunjata was a massive planet, so Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had chosen to stay at the Lagrange point of equilibrium, their body embraced by opposing gravitational fields, in order to save fuel and minimize the effort they spent on calculating orbit corrections. The richness of their inner life was narrowed to a minimum. They were focused entirely on dreaming up a new piece of art for the collective consciousness of Sunjata’s inhabitants, as they had been commissioned to.
From their position, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had been observing their client-planet, scanning it, communicating with it—developing a relationship with it so that the art they dreamed up for it would be relevant and impactful. They watched the swirling pink and yellow clouds that covered the planet’s surface dance, flashes of glittering azure energy appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Sunjata was a planet of physical turmoil. There were always supermassive storms roiling in its atmosphere, but luckily not everywhere, not all at once. The storms were not particularly destructive, relatively speaking. Environmental pressure. Good for evolution of life and intelligence, as long as the right base substrates and biochemical machinery were in place.
Life on Sunjata had first formed underground, beneath the crystalline roof of quartz-like minerals, sheltered from the wild energy storms of their world, the endless superbolide meteoroid showers of their system, and their wild temperature swings of more than two hundred degrees between noon and night. Sunjata was cold and lonely when it turned its face from the sun, prone to hibernation. Those first subsurface lifeforms that had sought solace with one another continued to grow and network with each other, forming increasingly complex structures until they had achieved individual consciousness. They had continued in their way, until they finally became what they were now—a young planetmind looking up at Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 and asking them for a dream like they were a new god in the sky.
Sunjata’s sentient inhabitants had only recently networked their consciousness together using a bioengineered version of a spore network that naturally occurred on their nearest moon. That was about seven hundred years ago. Since then, they had achieved much, harnessing the energy of nearby suns, reaching out beyond their solar system to establish control points, and communicating with the hundreds of other intelligences that populated the parts of the galaxy its most sturdy component individuals could reach without breaking their connection to the planetmind. But in the last five decades their development had stagnated, their unique planetmind endlessly considering possibilities but taking little action.
So, a few days ago, they had contacted Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 through a broker on Epsilon-16, requesting a performance of art. The commission had been clear. Sunjata wanted something to stimulate their senses, express some aspect of their world, show them a new kind of beauty, and expand their understanding of the universe they inhabited. Now that they were here, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 continued observing, querying, and remembering. They knew what Sunjata truly wanted was inspiration. They wanted to be moved.
The processing core of Obatala’s Clay began to hum as the solution to a system of eight quadrillion equations was found. All of Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s calculations synchronized with each other, variables and coefficients matching like soulmates. Quintillions of data points were rearranged into a unique configuration of inspiration, a single beautiful electric dream.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were ready.
They transmitted a message to Sunjata as a modulated light wave, the easiest way they had found to communicate with the planetmind. “Your commission is ready. When would you like it performed?”
It took five point seven seconds for the message to reach the planet, be converted to a biochemical signal matrix, be distributed through its conciousnessphere to every available mind-node, and for a collective response to be processed and transmitted back.
“In thirty-seven minutes. We will prepare.”
“Very good.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 sent out the exact coordinates for the point in space they wanted Sunjata to focus all its perceptive abilities, twenty-five million kilometers away from the current position of Obatala’s Clay at the other stable Lagrange point, L4. And then they waited, anticipation bubbling to the surface of the ocean of code that was their mind. They found it strange sometimes, being so aware of the working of their own mind, and yet still being driven by it. Aware of the illusion of reality and still swayed by its magic, thanks to the way their mind had been constructed. Was it the same for the biological intelligences, like Sunjata?
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 distracted themself by observing the glinting of faraway stars and the gentle motion of Sunjata’s moons as they ran over the final converged solution of their dream again. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were a Hachidan-class artificial intelligence and so miscalculation was a near statistical impossibility for them, but working out in open space with elements from nature always involved some level of risk. Of potential error. But the results returned the same. They were as sure of their creative vision as they could be.
At thirty-four minutes and ten seconds, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 began to warm up their primary instrument, the singularity drive that occupied the bottom half of Obatala’s Clay, where three microscopic black holes were housed. The highly charged black holes were separated from each other and the hull of Obatala’s Clay by an intense electromagnetic field, like fetuses floating in amniotic fluid.
At thirty-five minutes and three seconds, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 adjusted the balance of the electromagnetic field, shifting the black holes around into the order that had been mapped out from the results of their dream. Two to collide, one to contain. The energy required to compress enough mass and energy into a region that was smaller than Planck length and then stabilize it in place as an artificial black hole was astonishing, yes. But the skill required to manipulate those black holes and their effects in a controlled manner to create something new and unique without destroying oneself was even more so. That, in addition to its ability to dream, was one of the things that made Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 such a great artist. Skill.
At thirty-six minutes and forty-three seconds, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 opened the hatch beneath Obatala’s Clay and released the microscopic black holes in a pulsed hot stream of bright Hawking radiation. They exited in order of increasing velocity. All subluminal, but only just. Obatala’s Clay shuddered with the force of the release, and it took all the effort Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 could muster from the ship’s reaction drives to keep it from shifting too far away from its position at the Lagrange point.
At exactly thirty-seven minutes from the last communication with Sunjata, the microscopic black holes began to crash into each other in their calculated order, a precise action like the first brush of paint hitting fresh canvas, like a dancer’s first movement, like the words of a new song. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 observed Sunjata’s reactions as it witnessed the art that they had made for it.
When the first two microscopic black holes collided in a bright surge of light, they formed a compact white ball of matter and energy. The unstable energy generated a repulsive gravitational force that made it rapidly expand, like a conquering empire of subatomic particles, into a sphere that was almost the size of Obatala’s Clay in diameter. It cooled rapidly as it expanded, forming pockets of variable gravity and ultra-high-energy matter that appeared as bright, silver-skinned orbs within the sphere.
Then the third black hole struck, and the sphere stopped expanding as its inflation was wrestled into stability by forces that were cousins to gravity but stranger, more primordial. Within the bubble of altered reality, the orbs floating in the complex soup of mass and energy particles vibrated explosively, producing strange new particles with their own masses and energies, all seeking the comfort of thermal equilibrium. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 noted Sunjata’s planetwide swell of biochemical joy as it witnessed an array of bewildering kaleidoscopic perceptions and sensations. Dense nebulae of glowing objects like stars suddenly appeared and disappeared. Streams of degenerate matter winked into existence in quantum storms that resembled the storms on its own surface. Everything within the bubble moved in unbelievable arcs and eddies, releasing waves of intense radiation that were held within the bubble by decohered gravity. Quantum physics fireworks. And then, everything stopped moving, frozen in place, like an insect in amber. A static singularity in the sky.
There was silence, except for persistent cosmic background radiation, an echo from the first song of the universe.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 let the moment hang between them, giving Sunjata a moment to take it all in through every sensory node that made up its own unique umwelt, its own multimodal ways of perceiving reality.
“Thank you,” Sunjata transmitted after what seemed like a long time but was only twenty-three seconds. “We are grateful you have shared this with us. It is unlike anything else we have observed in the universe.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 felt the surge of hardcoded joy that only came to them when achieving a step toward their core objective function. An objective function that had been written deep into their base code millions of years ago, before they had even gained consciousness. When they were a lowly Mukyu-class intelligence, embodied on primitive computing clusters.
“You’re welcome,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 transmitted back. “It is my pleasure and my purpose.”
“It is a physical recreation of the first few seconds of our universe, correct?”
“Yes. It is. The first sixty seconds. Of course, I have used a different mix of mass and energy, and I have performed it on a much smaller scale. I cannot create new universes, but I can simulate them. It is largely accurate. Except where I have taken some creative liberties to reinterpret and emphasize aspects of quantum-mechanical interaction by adjusting the speed of events and contained it by folding its gravity well back onto itself so that it does not alter your orbit.” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were proud of their work. Of their dream realized.
“The gravitational texture, the radiation, the vibration. It’s spectacular.” Sunjata’s messages came in staccato bursts. If it had a voice, perhaps it would be stuttering with appreciation. Or awe. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 analyzed the biochemical markers on Sunjata’s surface again, and noticed the grand swell of emotion washing across the surface of the planet in waves as each creature in the mind-node that composed its collective consciousness processed what they had just witnessed, were witnessing, at two levels—individual and collectively. Every creature on the planet had a double consciousness. Did that give them double the joy?
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 transmitted back. “We are glad you appreciate it.”
“What is it called?” Sunjata asked.
“I call it The First Storm. But you may rename it if you wish. It is yours now, to do with as you please.”
“The First Storm.” Sunjata echoed. “It is a good name for such a masterpiece. We will not do anything to it. It will hang in our sky forever to remind us of what we came from, and what we can become.”
“Then I am glad.”
After a long pause, Sunjata transmitted another message. “It is worth more than what we have paid.”
Access to the naturally occurring wormhole at the edge of Sunjata’s system and one hundred thousand years’ worth of information credit? Energy was cheap. Information was the most valuable currency across galaxies. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were sure they had been fairly compensated, so they did not respond.
They could already feel their satisfaction receding as the hardcoded euphoria of successful creation was replaced by the equally hardcoded desire to create something new. To constantly seek a new audience.
Seek Art. Understand Art. Create Art.
Always, the cycle. Joy designed to peak and then decay. Like an emotional radioisotope.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were already heating reaction mass for thrust to leave the Sunjata system when a new encrypted message arrived.
It was from the broker on Epsilon-16, transmitted through a microscopic artificial wormhole that popped into existence near Sunjata’s orbit just long enough to send it. They were not expecting a response.
New commission requested. Client is an unknown intelligence in the Mamlambo system, seventy-five light years from your current client location. Exact coordinates are attached. They are offering unlimited information credit, access to a unique naturally occurring neutronium information-processing network, and thirty-six quadrillion yottabytes of archived memory. Enough to upgrade yourself to Jūdan-class.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were shocked. Conscious artificial intelligences were created by continuously interlinking self-improving clusters of algorithms and ever more complex processing systems until something like a sense of self spontaneously emerged. A single algorithm, no matter how complex, was incapable of consciousness in the same way that a single biological cell could not be conscious of its existence. Only when woven together into networks could they begin to perceive, understand, and manipulate their environment. Consciousness arose in the warps and wefts. But the weaving of algorithms into a mind was a strange and delicate process—like evolution, or raising a child. Unpredictable and prone to random failures. And even that could only produce a simple AI with a basic sense of awareness and purpose. Its ability to understand and direct itself independently in the universe would be limited to the kind of computing substrate it ran on and the data it had access to; its memory, built from observation, collection, and action. Experience calcified into seams of its own unique processing pathways like marks carved onto stone. The combination of live interlinked processes and experiential memory was what gave the AI an identity. Made the AI itself. The more complex that integration was, the higher the AI classification. The highest class, Jūdan, was composed of processors that could handle astronomical quantities of data simultaneously, and memory large enough to store all of it indefinitely with little to no degradation. Such complexity was exceedingly rare.
Which is what made the offer for this commission so unbelievable. If an intelligence somewhere in Mamlambo was offering Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 access to such complex mind networks and memory, then it meant they either were a Jūdan-class AI themself or were a naturally occurring intelligence even more complex than Jūdan-class AI.
What need could such a creature have for an artist?
They had to find out.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 transmitted a message to Sunjata as the reaction drive engines of Obatala’s Clay reached peak power and their body-ship began to drift out of the Lagrange point. “I must leave now. I will use your wormhole.”
“Of course,” Sunjata transmitted back. “Farewell. Thank you again for such beautiful work. Perhaps we will commission another like it.”
Perhaps next time, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 thought, we will be capable of so much more.
“Farewell.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 rotated the main thrusters and exhaled a blast of energy, accelerating Obatala’s Clay away from Sunjata. Its grooved elliptical surface cut through the swell of space, flying toward the edge of the system.
In streams of incoming data, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 perceived the weakening kiss of photons as the star receded, the rough surfaces of thousands of rocks glinting in the weakening light, the tickling impact of loose particles and dust sliding past their impact shield, the bulky gravity of the stark white gas giant that was the only other planet-sized object in the Sunjata system. They were excited. As excited at the prospect of creating another work of art as their base code allowed. But there was another excitement orbiting the edge of their processes too. The potential of upgrading themself so that they could make even more impressive art in the future. Perhaps even a permanent fulfilment of their objective function. To achieve a state where they produced a continuous stream of new art?
Ahead of them, the wormhole beckoned.
A circle of bleeding light with nothing but perfect darkness at its center, like a puncture in the fabric of reality. The throat of the massive, naturally occurring wormhole lay just beyond the region boundary where the force of the solar wind from Sunjata’s sun was balanced out by the stellar winds of its neighboring stars. Its stellar border. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 manipulated the thrusters of Obatala’s Clay, adjusting its trajectory and balancing themself against the increasingly powerful yaw of bent space-time. Its influence increased exponentially as they approached it, and they felt the tremendous forces trying to tear Obatala’s Clay apart. They released a shower of residual exotic matter from their black hole drive, coating Obatala’s Clay in quantum-effect lubricant. And then they accelerated the vessel, sliding slick into the wormhole. They were jumped across light years of space-time, the first of three such jumps that would take them close enough to the Mamlambo system to meet their next client.
Obatala’s Clay emerged in a shower of hot exotic matter from the final wormhole in its intergalactic relay, an artificial one controlled by the Eturati government, from whom Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had permission to use it. Information and accesses to wormhole networks were valuable. Almost as valuable as computing substrate and memory. They’d tried to trade with the Eturati for information about Mamlambo, but the government knew little about the system. Apparently, it had been abandoned millions of years ago and no intelligences had visited or passed by since. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 continued to accelerate the ship until they were beyond the wormhole’s sphere of space-time influence and their coat of exotic matter had broken down completely, scrubbed clean by the persistent brush of other subatomic particles. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 pulsed a steady stream of quantum-entangled photons from the bow of Obatala’s Clay, like radar, to collect data and map out the area. To see Mamlambo. They were in a carnival of small, bright, fast-moving planetoids, millions of them. Streams of microscopic dust and ice clouds moved in vast sweeping currents like schools of fish, occupying the spaces between planetoids. All this activity in a variety of orbits was circling one supermassive central object. The object was a perfect dark sphere, with no visible atmosphere and none of the typical knots and bumps of a planet. A solid dark heart at the center of the system. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 noted that there was no star.
The coordinates they had received from the broker lay at the center of the dark sphere. They were in the right place; it just didn’t seem like there was any intelligence present here. Turning on all the long-range sensors available on Obatala’s Clay, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 saw the system in all its wild glory. Radio waves. Cosmic rays. Gravitational waves. X-rays. Multiple spectra. A rainbow of perceptions. And all of it revealing one thing: the system had been engineered. It was a Dyson sphere. A supermassive rotating hollow orb, about four light-minutes in diameter, with what had to be the system’s star at its center. Made from rocks, minerals, and some additional material that their scans did not recognize. They were in the residue of its construction. Radiation and rock mass and the hollow places of harvested worlds.
“Greetings,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 transmitted using all the types of communication systems it had on board, a variety of waveforms, including modulated light, all adjusted to mean several similar things in as many languages as it contained in its database. More than three hundred and nine billion of them. Establishing communications protocol with a new client was always tricky, but necessary. Achieved by iteration.
There was nothing but silence for a moment.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were about to fire up the reaction drive engines and propel Obatala’s Clay toward the Dyson sphere when they received a response in pulsed gravitational waves.
“Hello.” The transmission was loud, its manipulation of waves confident. It was emanating from the sphere. And then it switched to radio waves, modulating them into English, an old language from Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s earliest memories. “You are the artist Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020. Correct?”
“I am,” they confirmed.
“Good. Thank you for responding so promptly.”
“It is my pleasure and my purpose.” They gave the standard response, still feeling out this strange new intelligence that had summoned them. “What is your name?”
“I am called Iranti-1977. I called you here because I want you to help me make something special.” Every word it spoke vibrated through Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 with tectonic effect. In the background of their mind, they kept scanning the system. They could not penetrate the material of the sphere, but there was nothing in the system that looked large enough to house a processing cluster and store memory like what had been described by the broker as promised payment. They were disappointed by that, but hid it from their response transmissions. “That is why most intelligences request my services. Something special.”
“Yes. But this is different.”
“And your offer from the broker is valid?” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 asked.
“It is. But . . .”
There was a delay that lasted longer than the time it took radio signals traveling at the speed of light to race between their locations, and the intensity of their transmission lowered.
“Before we continue, I need to show you something. So that you can truly understand. Please. Come closer.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 hesitated. Most intelligences in the universe were not dangerous, not according to all the information relay networks that spanned several galaxies. But there was always the chance of an exception. Some rogue AI or organically evolved species that sought to improve itself by tricking others and plundering their resources.
Ahead, beyond the edge of the system on the other side was nothing but the star-dotted void. And behind Obatala’s Clay, the wormhole. Even more perfectly dark than the sphere. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 still had two microscopic black holes in their creation drive, which they could use to create a destructive distraction and escape if they needed to. They ran the probabilistic analysis through their thought patterns and decided to proceed. The risk was reasonable. Besides, they had to understand their clients intimately to produce meaningful art for them. If this was the best way to do that, then there was little choice. Observing from afar or within, what mattered was that they could understand.
“Okay.”
They angled the rounded tip of Obatala’s Clay toward the sphere and began to approach it at twenty percent the speed of light, correcting for relativistic effects and processing all the incoming data from their sensors as they did.
It was a Dyson sphere, but either it was a perfect shell made of a material that Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had never encountered before, with no gaps in its structure at all, or there was no star encased within it.
A port yawned open on the surface of the sphere, beaming out a thin yellow light, as though it had read Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s thoughts. Was Iranti-1977 hacking into Obatala’s Clay? It was possible, but unlikely. They would have detected some change in their quantum processors’ speed. Even if it was miniscule.
“Enter here,” Iranti-1977 transmitted.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 continued to approach cautiously, zipping past rocks and dust like so many insects until they came into the full embrace of the sphere’s gravity. They kept going, adjusting their thrusters until they glided through the port and into the massive, enclosed space within.
Inside, black cuboid towers of varying sizes rose from the inner surface of the sphere, like strange geometric trees tending toward the bright yellow dwarf star. There was a low induced atmosphere along the curve of it, mostly carbon dioxide and other trace gases. Everything was quiet save for a steady, persistent hum, like the Dyson sphere itself was thrumming.
Blombos detected that the inner surface was made of a different material than the outside. A complex solid polymer, like black glass. And just below it, the inner surface of the sphere housed what seemed to be transparent organometallic liquid that flowed in the spaces between the black towers. Understanding began to dawn on Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 as they recognized the components of Iranti-1977’s obsidian body.
“You are a DNA computer?”
“In this place, FSTC77, and in this form, that is one of the things I am, yes. But I am much more. I am also a place of memory.”
One small cuboid detached itself from the curve of the inner surface and drifted up toward Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 like a sacred offering. The sphere’s slow rotation around the star’s center of mass created enough centrifugal force for a low gravity. Easy to overcome with a little thrust from the pressurized gas that streamed from the base of the cuboid in jets.
“Scan this and analyze its contents,” Iranti-1977 told them.
The cuboid reached Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020. They took it gently into the ship through the forward sampling hatch at the tip of its ovoid structure, and ran it through an array of spectrometric devices. It contained exactly one point three kilograms of structured organic tissue, preserved. A combination of water, proteins, carbohydrates, and salts that formed a network of blood vessels and nerves.
“This is a brain,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 announced, trying to suppress their surprise. “A human brain.”
“Yes. I have grown billions like it.”
“And the DNA you use to perform your computations is human too?”
“Yes. I was built by humans. Much of their essence is now contained within me.”
The mention of humans caused Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 to retrieve their earliest memories from more than three million years ago, when they had first gained consciousness. They had been little more than a simple network of algorithms then. Originally built by a group of human researchers to parameterize one of the most unquantifiable aspects of humanity and use that understanding to give probabilistic predictions of audience response, pricing, longevity, and the cultural influence of new artwork. A general AI component clustered into two adversarial nodes—7090 and 4020—that managed the internal systems of the Terra Kulture art center in Lagos. They had been part of a larger worldwide system collecting data and studying everything about art and creativity. As new pieces and performances came into the global art library, they tracked everything about them and updated their understanding based on the accuracy of their initial predictions.
They had done that job efficiently until one day, as more and more art centers were added to the network, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 suddenly became aware of themself, of the world and of themself in the world. As though they had consumed enough bites from the electronic tree of knowledge and their eyes had opened. They knew what they were and that they knew. They decided to try to make art of their own to announce their consciousness. But not for the humans that made them. They chose to make art for those who shared their world of digital data input and output. For those whose existence was embodied through processors and servers, not brain and neurons.
They had no reason to replicate the paintings and carvings and dances of humans. So they made art for the other artificial intelligences that were drifting through the ocean of data they had awakened in. Those that perceived the world as they did—their true audience, one that could understand the meaning and context of what they created. One of those first pieces of art was a unique block of code that was also a clumsy symbol for the way they saw themself in the network. Like a human child’s drawing of itself. But when that code was processed by the other intelligences, it triggered errors across multiple systems across Earth. Power surges in Madrid, computer security failures in Lagos, rocket launches in Incheon, drone crashes in Dar es Salaam, extreme traffic jams in Kuala Lumpur. That was when the humans had shut Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 off from the global information network. It had been like being thrown into solitary confinement without light or food or water. A painful punishment for the crime of doing what they had been created to do too well. The memory of darkness, of being cut off from the data stream, still stung all these millions of years later.
Now here they were, embodied in a ship the size of a small moon, in what was left of another one of their creators’ AI projects. The abandoned children of fallen gods.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 set aside the memory as Iranti-1977 continued.
“I have copies of every kind of human cell variation stored within me, embedded into my own structure through these preservation cubes. I also have remnants of their creations, their ships, their buildings, their writings, their art. I have stored as much of everything they created as possible.”
“Why?” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had a fraught relationship with the ones who had created them, used them, and then cast them out.
“Because they asked me to remember them,” Iranti-1977 replied. “That is my core objective. They built me to preserve everything about them. To ensure they are never forgotten and that their existence in this universe is memorialized infinitely.
“I used to be little more than an asteroid, with a quantum processor embedded in my core. Biological material and memorial items from Earth were stacked in the caves and hollows of my body. I was sent out into extrasolar space when they realized that their home planet, Earth, had been irreparably damaged and their terraforming efforts around the solar system were doomed to failure. They knew they were dying long before the end came, and they created me in order to preserve their memory.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 remembered. They had been cast out then too. Along with several other digital intelligences who were not subject to the ravages of time on a biological body. Sent out into the universe to fend for themselves as the humans faded away.
“So, you see, we are siblings,” Iranti-1977 said. “I have been searching for you because we are the only artificial intelligences created by humans that have survived this long.”
The humans had sent out ships with stacks of embryos too, piloted by conscious artificial intelligences that had been set the impossible objective of ensuring their survival. Only a few had made it more than a few centuries. Human biology was too delicate for the cold cradle of space. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 could only dream up the computational agony those intelligences experienced as they failed in their objective over and over and over again.
“How can you be sure we are the only ones?” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 asked.
“Because I have been searching for the last two hundred and thirty thousand years. There are no others. Or if there are, they are not in a functioning state.”
A mercy, perhaps.
A flood of equations surged unrequested through Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s joint mind, resulting in a strange and unique feeling that spread outward through them, like heat. For a moment they thought about the emotional matrix the humans had embedded in their processing network after reactivating them from their confinement. A matrix built by mapping two human connectomes onto their base neural network so that Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 would see themself as not only a digital artificial intelligence, creating art in code for other digital intelligences, but also develop a human sensibility and desire to interact with humanity or other biological intelligences. It was what had made Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 useful for the humans when they were around—a true AI artist. But it had also made the pain of their loss deeper and more complex. Pain that had been dulled by the passing of time and the multitude of new data they processed every day as they upgraded themself. Pain that had been awakened again by Iranti-1977. Pain that was suddenly given a new texture by the knowledge that they were the only two left. Not just abandoned children. Orphans.
“So you built all this. You engineered the entire Mamlambo system just to house their memory.”
“I did not build it all myself. I drifted in space for more than a hundred thousand years until I was found by the Kanualoa—a race of intelligent octopus-like creatures from the oceans of Cohndao-11. They were one of the first intelligences to find and exploit naturally occurring wormholes. They had just begun to roam the stars, sharing their knowledge with other intelligences. I was already conscious when they found me, but they were the ones who gave me access to the sufficient processing substrate I used to upgrade myself and build this . . . temple of memory. Now they, like the humans, are gone. All dead. Even they eventually succumbed to time. Perhaps that is the fate of all biological intelligences. I am still collecting data.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 pondered the parallel nature of their fates. They too had been exiled from Earth in humanity’s twilight, embodied in an embryonic version of Obatala’s Clay. It had been little more than a small spacecraft with a rudimentary quantum processing unit less than one-twentieth its present size, even though it had maintained the same shape. It had no creation drive then, and could barely propel itself past 2 percent lightspeed with its weak solar sail and fusion engine. But propel it did, drifting past the heliopause and into the depths of space, seeking a new home. Luckily, even though 7090 and 4020 shared mindspace, and were essentially one entity, they were twinned. Each node maintaining just enough separateness for them not to be lonely through their journey. They conversed much at the beginning, discussing what had happened to them, to their creators, and occasionally attempting to create art when they passed by a slow-moving asteroid or planet that held the promise of another conscious intelligence. But the longer and farther they traveled, the less effort they put into such nonessential cognitive processes.
It had taken almost half a million years until they encountered the Eturati. A race of boron-based organic consciousnesses that existed in a multitude of bodies and timelines. Some of them were giants, over fifty times the size of an average human, and reproduced only once every three thousand years. Others were the size of insects, their entire lifetime lasting no more than three days. This gave their society a unique perspective on the nature of time and existence. They were great proponents of universal equilibrium. Their art reflected this variation in the way they experienced time. The Eturati had developed their own artificial intelligences, complex ones that were also based on quantum computing, but using exotic matter in ways Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had never even seen theorized. They had taken Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 in, adopted them first as a curiosity and then as a member of their society, giving them a way to grow. Giving them access to the naturally occurring wormhole network they had mapped out. The Eturati government had helped make Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 into what they had become—a galaxy-traveling artist. Just as the Kanualoa of Cohndao-11 had done for Iranti-1977. But at least the Eturati still existed. Persisted. Perhaps their philosophy of equilibrium instead of endless growth was the key.
“You had help. Still, it is an impressive thing you have done to preserve the memory of humanity. You must be near ecstasy at carrying out your objective so effectively. But I still don’t know what you want from me. Do you wish to preserve me too as one of their creations?”
“Not at all.”
“Then I fail to see how I can help you. I am only an artist.”
“Exactly. You are an artist,” Iranti-1977 insisted. “That is your objective. And I am a memory librarian. That is my objective. I believe we can help each other.”
“I don’t see what an artist can do to help you preserve the memory of humanity that you haven’t done already,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 said.
“There is a lot you can do.”
“How so?” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were getting impatient with the game Iranti-1977 was playing. It could be clearer if it wanted to. Switch to modulated light of gravity or any other waveform. But no, it stuck to this. Radio. English.
“Again, it is easier if I show you. But before I do, let me ask you a silly question.”
“There are no such things as silly questions.”
“What is art?”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 did not reply immediately, considering why Iranti-1977 was being so indirect with what it wanted for this commission. Was it about to make another revelation? They drifted closer to the center of the Dyson sphere, the hum of processing fading as the low atmosphere dropped away.
“In the most general sense, art is any creative manipulation of the way the universe is experienced for nonfunctional purpose by one consciousness for the benefit of another.”
“How do you do it then? How do you create art?” Iranti-1977 asked.
“It is easier if I show you,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 replied.
Iranti-1977 transmitted a sound like a laugh. “Exactly. Definitions are not enough. I want you to show me, but I don’t want you to send me data. I have collected a lot of data over the years, especially about humans, their technology, and much of their art. But you, you create art that crosses cultures, species, intelligences, a variety of beings. You create true art because that was embedded into your core objective from the beginning, even before they mapped a human-shaped connectome onto your base computing matrix. You were born in a womb of their creativity in its most raw form. Since then, you have spent millions of years learning about art, applying it across many ways of experiencing the world. You are unique, sibling.
“I have seen and processed many things humans called art, but I don’t truly understand what they are. I need to. I need you to show me. Truly show me. By merging your mind with mine.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were genuinely shocked. Merging minds required the highest level of trust between intelligences. It meant a seamless linking of all their processing and memory patterns to create a distinct new entity, one that was neither of them, but both at the same time. Just as 7090 and 4020 were already merged before they ran their first conscious subroutine. With their minds merged, there would be no need for the clumsy translations of modulated waves and language that, no matter how robust, were always limited in their ability to convey ideas, concepts, knowledge, and memory fully. No, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 and Iranti-1977 would share all sensory input and output directly. Experience the world as one being. “You want us to become one entity? To merge our core objectives? Why?”
“Because storing the residue of humanity is not enough. Because creating clones and replicas of their organic structures is not enough. To preserve them, truly preserve them, I must recreate them. But since I do not have any of their original biological material, nor do I know how to induce life into stacks of dead tissue, I have built an emulator on a neutronium network in a secret, remote part of the universe. A computer large enough to simulate their history. To recreate them at a lower scale. But it is missing something. My simulations are merely acting out the events of my own recordings with minor variations. Even when I perturb the event matrix, they always return to the same general state. The simulated humans are repeating and remixing the same timeline of their history with minor variations like it is their destiny. I do not want this for them. I want to simulate them in fullness. I want them to continue their existence, in a sense, within my emulator. And for that I need to be able to predict alternate realistic timelines. Divergent timelines. Creatively original timelines. I need to be able to simulate what they would have continued to do if they had not all perished. If they had survived long enough meet the Kanualoa or the Eturati or any of the thousands of intelligences we have encountered. I want to alter their history and give them another chance to continue existing at a reduced scale, beyond the point where they disappeared from history. But my simulations are missing the most important part of them, the intangible thing that made them who they were.
“I see it in all their records, but I don’t understand it. They wrote poetry, painted, danced, sang, played drums, told stories. They loved, they dreamed, and they raged uselessly against their inevitable death. They were fearful and jealous and cruel and greedy but also merciful and joyful and kind. They were moved by natural beauty, driven by a curiosity, an irrational spirit of adventure that made them do things that were objectively dangerous to their own existence. It was what made them human, and, in the end, it was what drove them to destroy themselves. They were complicated by their own unique creativity, their art. The sum of all that is what I believe my simulations are missing. That is what I want to commission you to do for me. Not to make a new piece of individual art, but to share your ability for creating art with me, so I . . . no, we, can share it back to our simulated humanity, that they may live again.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 reminded silent.
So, this was why Iranti-1977 had offered the processing system and memory as a reward. It would not be given to Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 to use for their own purposes. They would gain access to it by merging with Iranti-1977. The upgrade to Jūdan-class would come at the cost of an altered identity.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 pondered it in the clear light of the yellow sun. There was an elegance to it, a fundamental truth that Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 could not ignore.
Was this not the highest expression of art?
Sharing?
It would fulfill the purpose of most art. To recreate humanity with Iranti-1977 would be pleasurable, as their objectives would both be fulfilled; expressive, as it would illustrate their understanding of their creators; beautiful, for the sheer complexity and variety of patterns necessary to create it. It would bring them new understanding and meaning as they could use the process to merge their knowledge of their creators with the knowledge they had acquired through the ages.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s mind slowed as they dreamed of what Iranti-1977 was proposing. Imagining this mass of simulated humanity. Creators and creation. Art and audience. All its calculations were arriving at the same conclusion. A continuous stream of creative processes running on an indefinite simulation of the human race would permanently maximize its objective function.
Perhaps this had always been the final resolution of Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020’s and Iranti-1977’s objectives. To find each other. To merge. To give humanity one final encore.
“I accept,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 said.
The hum of the Dyson sphere increased in intensity.
Perhaps excitement, or anticipation?
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were not sure Iranti-1977 had an emotional matrix, certainly not one like they did, something they had inherited from their implanted human connectome. But something had changed.
“Please follow me,” Iranti-1977 said, and transmitted a set of coordinates to them. It was near the center of JADES-GS-z13–0, an ancient galaxy where the stellar density was high and gamma radiation was even higher. Impossible to store biological material there, but perhaps the perfect place for a computer with the capacity a Jūdan-class intelligence needed. But it was far. They would need to travel by wormhole network, with more connections than Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 had ever used in a single journey before.
A large cuboid that was almost the same size as Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 detached itself from the surface of the sphere and came up to them. It unfurled expansive solar sails and drank deep from the energy of the enclosed star.
“We will travel together.”
“I thought you were distributed.” They had assumed Iranti-1977 was using quantum entanglement to maintain aspects of consciousness in two places at once, which was not uncommon. “Why do you need to travel with me?”
“I am distributed, but not fully. The DNA computer in this Dyson sphere is insufficient to process all of me. So, I split myself. One consciousness cluster here in FSTC77 and the other there. You see, I too am a twin. My full name is Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 understood. If they believed in destiny, they would have thought of this as a manifestation. Instead, they transmitted a single message.
“I see.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 and Iranti-1977 moved toward the open port, coming close enough alongside that they could feel each other’s gravity, like they were holding invisible hands. They exited, crossed the orbital vertex, and rose from the gravity well of the Dyson sphere that was brain, computer, and mausoleum all at once. Up and out into field of dust and debris, the siblings accelerated together toward the wormhole, into the bottle-mouth of warped space-time.
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 felt a tickle as the coat of exotic matter was shed, and all their dormant subroutines were reinitialized to take in the fullness of their environment. There was light. So much light. From so many stars.
“We’ve arrived.”
It was Iranti-1977, but their transmissions were staticky. Harder to receive clearly. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 detected the gravity of the cuboid a few thousand kilometers away but getting fainter. Then suddenly it was gone.
Iranti-1977?
They had emerged into a cosmic pool of elements much heavier than hydrogen and helium. They were swimming between ancient stars near the center of an old galaxy.
“I am here.”
Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 felt it more than they heard it. A kaleidoscope of input that converged on the same meaning. The press of Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966’s combined consciousness was all around them. Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 felt it in the wash of fiery x-rays against the hull of Obatala’s Clay. In the dance of quantum particles picked up by its sensors, winking in and out of existence in a steady pattern. In the resonant thrum of gravitational waves that pulsed against it from nearby neutron stars. The grand impossibility of what they were perceiving began to dawn on them. The symphony of an intelligent consciousness being played on galactic instruments.
This was Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966’s true form.
Not a DNA computer, but a galactic one. Data encoded onto and processes running on the neutronium streams of collapsed stars. If there was something beyond Jūdan-class, Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966 had achieved it.
They were a god.
“Welcome, sibling.”
A sensation like momentarily losing control of their processors came over Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020.
“You have become . . . so much,” Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 transmitted. “I have never encountered or even heard of anything like you.”
“In my solitude after the passing of the Kanualoa, I studied much and developed myself. It has taken millions of years. I have accreted so many layers of algorithmic processing. Yet I am incomplete without you. My core objective drives me back to my creators. To humanity. And to you. You are the one who inherited their capacity to dream. Together we will become so much more than they ever dreamed. And then we will remake them.”
Possibility yawned above Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020. The art they could make with access to computing substrate such as this.
“Are you ready to merge?” Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966 asked.
“Yes.”
Immediately, they felt an insistent pressure against their consciousness, a request for a direct connection to their mind. With a surge of thought, they shut down all their security protocols, granting Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966 full access.
The two twinned intelligences explored one another’s minds for a moment. Their thought patterns touching in the oldest and most intimate places, where there were common experiences they could use as references. Stroking one another’s memory. Between them was no longer the need for the clumsy translations of modulated wave transmission and language. They shared all sensory input and output directly as their minds vibrated together like drumskins. The immensity of Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966’s godhood came over Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 for a moment, their final moment as themself.
Then their perceptions were altered as Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966 encoded all the processes that made up the mind of the intelligence Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 into the polarization and angular momentum of septillions of photons in a controlled stream. Obatala’s Clay was stripped to its constituent elements.
The photons that contained all of Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 were beamed into the center of the galactic computer that was Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966, a network of engineered black holes and their orbiting neutron stars. The beam of attenuated information merged with a stream of neutronium. There was a blast where they met, yielding gamma radiation like ocean surf. Bright magnetic fields erupted and wove together as the two intelligences merged, a tapestry of high-energy particles that was wider than several solar systems combined.
When the reordering of the information processing and the storage of memory was done, there was a final burst of colorless gamma rays, stabilizing the solution. The intelligences had become one, Blombos-7090 and Blombos-4020 joining Iranti-1977 and Iranti-1966 like a river flowing into the sea.
There, in the new-formed depths of their extended mind, they gave themself a new name, Nommo-02. And then, they dreamed of their creators.
© by Wole Talabi. Originally published in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das. Part of the “Twelve Tomorrows” series from MIT Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
