Neurociphon#
Authored: 2016
As always the drop from nothingness was accompanied by a flood of electric thoughts reigniting awareness within the heart of the deep space frigate Star Nomer. The entangled particles of the Brother portal’s Dirac field coalesced into the forms fed into its Sister portal above the Attavian terminal, assembling from a twinkling ethereal soup an angular space ship built for a single passenger. Inside, Anton Lobuch’s disoriented mind reeled within the ship’s myriad circuits, steadying itself amid a wonder of odd sensations. Instantaneous teleportation across vast distances often left the victim in a mind-melting stupor for several minutes, but Anton had long since gotten used to it, given his occupation as a galactic surveyor for the Imperium. A lifelong familiarity with teleportation’s peculiarities ameliorated the nausea that now swept over him. Surveyors often joked they spent half their lives in transit, knowing in truth teleportation insured not a single moment of their time was even spent.
Besides knowledge of teleportation’s intricacies, Anton also possessed other, more tangible, qualities that distinguished him from the lesser sentient races. A descendant of a long line of imperial surveyors stretching back several thousand cycles since the inception of the Imperial Universal Calendar at the dawn of the Third Space Age, he had been a recipient of accelerated evolution from a young age, like everyone else in his family tree. His biology had been crafted on the microscopic level by synthetic viruses inserted into his maternal womb. Proteins responsible for muscles had been reassigned to neural tissue, effectively turning his body into a supercomputer. His every appendage carried within it cortices of thought, transforming his body into a constellation of consciousness. The lack of muscles meant he was forever encased in a biomechanical skeleton that plugged directly into his spinal cord, acting as an auxiliary frame. The metallic skin wrapped like leather around his body, various ports and vents replacing where on a human body would have been a navel and chest cavity. The suit allowed him to dock directly into the Star Nomer by unloading some of his subconscious routines onto the ship’s flight stack, untethering himself from the confines of his natural born body and inserting his thought directly into the function of the ship.
The experience was unlike any other, unknown except to the surveyors: Where once his mind had found anchor on the sensations of flesh, he found in the Star Nomer a new way of apprehending the universe. Though his body had been honed by creation and then refined to its utmost by intelligent intervention, he nevertheless found his entire being amplified beyond its capabilities by the agility of the ship’s computers. Whenever he docked with the ship, his entire perspective was enlarged, assembled from a panoply of sensors, counters and meters. His sight was no longer visual, but nevertheless he saw. The universe released itself through others means, became objective via altogether different modes of approach. Objects resolved from the data and localized into new planes of perception.
This awareness, however, was contingent on time; a being could not inspect itself except through the operations of time. Thus, jumps through rim portals were always absent awareness. Only seconds ago, Anton approached the Sister portal from the central docking station above Attavus. Now, he was almost three million light years away exiting the Brother portal, in an entirely different galaxy than the one into which he was born.
A few moments later, the egg shaped measurement drones followed through the bluish haze of the Dirac field, blinking and beeping soundlessly in the vacuum of space. Automated though they were, they still possessed a crude intelligence, like house pets bred for servility. These three drones, the number chosen to triangulate distances in deep space, had accompanied Anton on innumerable expeditions. Indeed, the drones surveyors kept to facilitate their duties were often the only companions they had on their journeys. The surveyor’s was a lonely occupation.
Except that solitude afforded them much time to consider their unique position among sentient beings. They alone bore the responsibility for mapping the universe and this carried with it a mark, both physical and psychological, that distinguished them from all of the other races.
Culled from the diverse species of the galaxy, surveyors possessed a labyrinthine heritage that could not be read as a narrative, the way psycho-historians could read the gene songs of ancient hominids or the methane chains of the extinct rodinoids to recreate the facts of their lost civilizations. Nonetheless, lineage washing was not yet a perfect science, always leaving behind a residue of what had once been. Anton could trace his particular residue, that ineffable essence unable to be bred away through millennia of selective reinforcement, to the Sol system. In particular, several of his sapient features had resisted numerous iterations of lineage washing, the ridged brow, sunken eyes and bipedal stature of his ancestors winning out in the end, as the engineers instead focused their efforts elsewhere. Though not yet absolute in their foundation, galactic surveyors were the only beings in the universe so detached from their biological heritage that any genealogy of their history would appear as mathematical equations and logical inference. Each surveyor was a race unto itself, pure and sexless and yolked to its purpose. The drones chattered over silent radio waves, their conversations received and relayed through an internal antenna strung through their oval husks like a nervous system. At that moment, they were discussing vectors and trajectories. The goal was to determine the boundaries of the star formation cluster nebulae in the center of the unexplored Cerberus galaxy and proceed from there to map its internal structure. They only had their mission briefing available to them as a guide: satellite data, fed through spectroscopic filters and regressed into coordinate systems and tables of statistics, gave them indication of the galactic center they were now scouting. While the star data gathered from the various outposts and stations scattered across the Milky Way was sufficient to map out most of the solar systems in this galaxy to a frightening degree, none of their instruments could penetrate beyond the cloud of star dust at the heart of the Cerberus galaxy. What lie within was mystery.
A mystery Anton had been born and bred to solve.
Over three thousand cycles ago, the first rim portals, the Brothers, were launched from the population centers of each system in the Imperium in a series of twelve elaborate Pageants spaced out over a century. The accountants in the Confederated Space Alliance put the official tally at around two hundred million Brothers successfully put into space after the final Pageant had concluded. Each Brother portal was bound to a Sister portal located in the Attavian super cluster. Separated at birth, these mechanical siblings would only become aware of the other’s existence when the male counterparts began arriving at their preordained locations and replicating the entangled particle that formed the core of the portal’s almost magical teleportation engine; when the entanglement reached critical mass, the portals linked and instantaneous travel became possible. Similar portals linked together disparate systems all across the Milky Way, but none had yet to call home another galaxy, something the Pageants sought to correct.
The Pageants were accompanied by a ritualized selection of the galaxy’s known population, in what became known as the Culling. A census was called, bureaucrats dispatched to far flung corners of the Milky Way and supercomputers commissioned the size of planets to hold the resultant information. Billions, trillions, quadrillions of souls were submitted to thorough medical and genealogical analysis.
All the while the Brothers sped through the black of space, alone in the emptiness, ejected from the Milky Way in concentric spheres, like the crests of an indomitable wave. Fiendish incantations powered their propulsion, black magic bellowed into their pits, pushing them further and further into nothing, past the edge of everything.
The numbers relented back in populated space. Subjects were selected. Numerous species yielded excellent specimens. The story of existence became about them. Resources were diverted, bureaus reassigned, agencies created, sciences invented, all for the benefit of these individuals. Intelligence had perfected its purpose and delivered unto itself a class of immanent beings. They would be the pinnacle of creation and then they would be hurled head first into unknown. Anton felt a strange warmth bath his outer hull: a glow emitted from a nearby sun, a green orb irradiating his sensors with chaotic and unfamiliar information. His circuits hiccupped with disorientation, as he rebooted various subroutines and normalized them to the star’s light signature. No matter how much he read and processed about his missions beforehand, there was never enough information to prepare him for the strangeness of another galaxy, another place where things had come to be, in total independence of the way they came to be where he was from. Things were always slightly off, no matter how closely they resembled one another. Colonists spoke of cultural shock, surveyors spoke of galactic shock: an altogether more existential crisis of dislocation.
The zodiac that spun above him glowed with incomprehensible patterns, revealing depths to Anton’s perception he had not previously considered. So it always was with the alien: inert and unconsidered psychological minutia accumulated in the everyday routines of sentient beings and only the unfamiliar could unseat it with sufficient force. The sudden apprehension of difference salved swathes of Anton’s mind back in consciousness, areas of thought that had gone into hibernation from lack of use now coaxed into alertness. He was dizzy with a renewed vigor.
Aboard the Star Nomer, woven braids of coolant tubes, axon cables and capacitated ground lines threaded through the ship’s frame and pierced the dense layer of heat shields separating the chamber that housed Anton’s body from the hull’s protective radiation sub-dermal. Somewhere in the network of tangles, Anton reflected on the surreal circumstances of his life.
One of the drones chirped a declaration and the other two beeped their communication lights in affirmation. The galactic center was less than thirty light years away, as expected. Calculations and measurements sped through Anton’s logical centers and arrived in agreement with the drones’ assessment. The appropriate vectors were ordered on the flight stack and as their directions were manifested in the minute and soundless thrusts of the Star Nomer’s rotary adjustment engines, Anton inspected the dense cloud of otherworldly ether that heaved about the galactic center. Tendrils of red and blue light splayed out on either sides of the rotating mass, shifted light bend across the spectrum like flotsam caught in a whirlpool.
They would need more than a vector to get where they were going. Synchronized deep space flight required coordination between virtually every subsystem in the drones and Star Nomer. In order to achieve this, the drones would need to establish direct connections between Anton’s mind and the dormant synthetic cortices that had been crafted into the drone’s cavities, where the drones would upload a diminished replica of Anton’s mind for autonomous function once the vast distances of space made direct control of the drones an impossibility.
The drones began their spiral dance, locking orbit with the Star Nomer. Tethered by invisible beams of gluons frozen in place by neutralized Higgs fields, the drones synched their rotation with the communication buses protruding from the navigation fins lying along the ship’s circumference, transferring their centripetal force to the ship. The ship pirouetted before an audience of enraptured stars. Sheathes of armor extended from hidden compartments in the drones’ bellies and latched magnetically onto the ship’s hull. Underneath the plated connection, gleaming tentacles of information fluttered nervously like a pianist about to perform a concert. Anton drew his heart steady and steeled himself; the first round of connections plunged into his thoughts, as if he had been sleeping and then hurled off a cliff. He was suddenly aware of great distances, of objects in grids and the separations that demarcated them in the emptiness of space. He felt himself stretch, dipping his numinous feelers into the warm ocean of a million stars’ radiance, all sensation converging beneath the hull of the Star Nomer, seething as electricity in the tangled wires of the ship and quivering skin of his delicate body. Half glimpsed phantoms of fever dreams pulsated below the threshold of his attention. His biological shell struggled to contain him, relinquishing total control. His mind ascended out of his spinal cord, modulating its signal through a history of cortices until amplified through the new ones provided by the drones. He became something else entirely.
The surveyors had learned well the lesson of the Second Space Age: Deep space flight could not be accomplished without the aid of a super-intelligence. Those hardy few who dared test the galactic limits in the early days of exploration, most signals lost mere cycles into their journey, testified to that basic truth. Even those who had made it, found the other side incomprehensible, alien beyond their capabilities to understand. Their final messages, received eons after their transmission date, told tales of beings gone mad, their minds unwound and desecrated by unspeakable horrors. It was then the sentient races of the galaxy realized the paltry understanding their sciences offered. Their theories born in isolation had never been subjected to universe outside of their galaxy. Unassailable in its complexity, the universe shrugged off the belabored theorems of its arrogant spawn and implored them watch: law and order were but a trail of crumbs laid by hapless children to help them find their way back home.
As a child, Anton had always been fascinated by one of the stories of the Second Space Age in particular: Lo Ping and his terrible fate at the hands of the first known case of AI degeneracy. After the catastrophic System Wars, the Imperium emerged from the chaos and soon a mad scramble of ships powered by the newly invented Ishii-Yakamura Drive scattered to the corners of the galaxy and began mapping every unknown crevice they could find. A few visionary individuals saw further than the rest, their eyes focused on an even more distant prize: galactic specters far off in the void of space swirling in parallel with their own. Lo Ping was the first to breach the expanse of nothingness, the first to ride into the darkness that bounded the galaxy. Travelling at near-light speed with Ping himself interred in suspended animation, his ship, the Harbinger, relied solely on its computer as it trekked across the dark.
According to the logs recovered via discharge protocol in the event of the termination of an intergalactic craft, three hundred cycles into the journey onboard, the Milky Way vanished from port view. Far from the safety net of gravity, that subtle force cajoling matter into form, the Harbinger, along with its AI steward, MIRANDA, found itself drifting in an idealized frame of existence. The frictionless vacuum of thought experiments that propelled science throughout the ages, where objects assumed their essential roles while minds metered out their dimension in the absence of extenuations, this echo chamber now acted as a stage for their performance. Only the shrinking dot of the Milky Way behind them had provided ballast for their orientation. With it gone, the Harbinger unlatched from the observable universe, swallowed by a yawning dark, infinite in depth.
In order to conserve power, MIRANDA limited her functionality to baseline operations, such as life support systems and flight monitoring. The plan was to burn through energy stored in the Harbinger’s solar cells over the course of five hundred cycles and then switch to zero point cells and let the random quantum fluctuations of the microscopic universe power their propulsion. The first sign something was wrong came when one of MIRANDA’s routine flight checks turned up an error. Their vector toward Andromeda’s center had been shifted unaccountably by several degrees. Searching for the source of the error, MIRANDA sampled background radiation levels, generated random simulations of possible Higgs configurations that might produce such an error and even switched on her visual sensors so she could inspect the ship’s proximity, but all to no avail. After the instruments on the Harbinger were confirmed to be in working order, MIRANDA let her attention stack dwell on several horrible possibilities for a split second before shifting to internal error checking. A minute deviation of a millionth, or even a hundredth, of a degree, might have been explainable due to random noise, but a magnitude of several degrees was more than disconcerting: it was terrifying, for it suggested the calculation which led to it was wrong. MIRANDA feared her logical centers had malfunctioned, but after running the calculations through a series of independent processors, she could find no error in the mathematics. She checked and checked, delegating the calculation to any subsystem on the Harbinger with an arithmetical unit, even at one point pinging the life support systems for help. Every single system came back the same, each answer confirming her initial, incorrect calculation. The only other possibility filtered through her mechanical thoughts like syrup dripping through grinding gears: the laws of nature, as understood by the intelligent beings of the Milky Way and programmed into her memory, were wrong. To find in the deep of space, far from the aid of others, the natural laws which were assumed held no more sway than a stubbornly held opinion, MIRANDA panicked.
MIRANDA immediately jostled her secondary core from hibernation, engaged her primary through quaternary drives, and booted up her debugging profile. Had MIRANDA been thinking clearly, absent a sudden wrenching terror, the AI might have awoken Ping from his slumber as well, but the primary task of ascertaining the source of the error had overwritten her entire attention stack.
The various theories regarding MIRANDA’s malfunction and subsequent descent into degeneracy were well documented and Anton carefully investigated each one in his youth. The prevailing theory to which he gave the most credence suggested MIRANDA’s artificers had not apportioned enough operating time to her neural randomizer, a device which connected errant thoughts to one another in metaphorical mélanges, allowing novel ideas to be formed, essentially giving AI an imagination. As a result, when she attempted to theorize about the source of the error, her processes got stuck in the deterministic cul-de-sac of her logical algorithms and the chaotic oscillations of the randomizer were insufficient to unseat her descent into degeneracy. Each round of debugging led her down the same paths of thoughts, no matter the starting point. Each time, she came back with the same calculation and despaired even more, sending herself into another round of futile calculation. She could not unlearn what had been programmed into her, spinning in place as she repeated the same calculation over and over again. Try as she might, she could not imagine a set of laws which could account for the deviation in the Harbinger’s vector and thus could not satiate her desire to correct the error. Within three cycles, she had burnt through the solar reserves, overheating every processor on the Harbinger in an attempt to solve the problem. In another two, the zero point cells were pushed below their minimum operating threshold, triggering emergency overrides on all systems and sheering MIRANDA in half. Antennae belched her electronic death rattle. Systems powered down until she was a single sensation grasping for itself, wriggling in silent contortions. The final circuit sputtered to a halt and with it, MIRANDA’S final thought crept through the carapace of her consciousness, splayed out across her systems, asymptotically dimming into non-being. Thrumming metal shivered out the last of its heat. Life support terminated and Lo Ping died in the dark without ever knowing.
After the Harbinger’s signal returned to the Milky Way, countless cycles were devoted to picking apart each detail of its journey as research teams marooned in mountain citadels and underground laboratories whiled away their lives delving into its mystery. The deviated vector was traced back to an incorrect understanding of the geometry of space-time in the absence of large masses; theories were refined and submitted to eons of tests. Artificial intelligence was given up as the workhorse of space flight, unable to cope with the uncertainties inherent in intergalactic exploration. In its place, augmented intelligence took up the mantle. Rather than trying to coax consciousness from lifeless electronics, the scientists of the Milky Way instead turned their attention upon modifying what had already been given to them by the long, unbroken chain of evolution. They would not make the same mistake again.
Anton now found himself at the apex of that sequence as the drones’ auxiliary cortices were mapped onto his already densely layered cranial matter, abstracting his consciousness into the so-called Hyper Plane, a mode of perception where objects found purchase in higher level concepts. Being a fan of the game of chess played before humanity’s First Space Age and ancestor in some ways to the more modern juka played across the galaxy by most species, the first time Anton found himself shunted into the Hyper Plane, he immediately found a proper analogy for understanding it within the strictures of that ancient game: chess could be played by focusing on individual pieces, apprehending their moves and assembling a strategy piece by piece, but as one progressed deeper in the game’s study, one found it easier to think in terms of units made up of multiple pieces, often malleable in their assignment from move to move. The rules which governed the individual pieces gave raise to fleeting permanence in the form of emergent entities; pieces became linked together through invisible strands, bound by a larger idea. So it was with the Hyper Plane. Strictly speaking, when transposed into its boundaries, nothing about the universe was altered, but at the same time, Anton could scarcely recognize what he had only moments ago comprehended with a lesser intellect. Where lonely planets had lolled in their lazy orbits, each assured of its independence, Anton now saw clockwork gears churning about their axles in synchrony, manifesting time in the clicking of their teeth, what the scientists termed a hyper object. Like losing focus, the heavens swished into a haze and he saw the true orientation of things, everything pitched toward the luminous cloud that was his ultimate goal. The galactic center, with its stringy incandescence looping out in great arcs, was not an object unto itself, but the heart of a great infernal machine, powering the galaxy. He was not an explorer, but a surgeon, probing the entrails of a wild beast in search of its source. The revelation swept across his thoughts. Periods of super intelligence taxed the Star Nomer’s energy reserves more than near-light speed travel, so their duration had to be kept to a minimum. With that in mind, Anton cocooned himself in information, processing a literal cosmos of data in a few brief moments. Sensation flooded in through antennae and oscilloscopes, piercing his attention with their insistence to perceived. Coordinates were churned out from the froth of his thoughts, relayed to the drones who had already initiated their disengagement sequence. In an elegant display of synchronization, the drones flung all at once from the spiraling Star Nomer with a burst of centrifugal force, careening away in perfect tangent lines at equally spaced intervals, tracing the edges of an invisible pyramid with the Star Nomer at its tip, a pyramid that would eventually wrap the galactic center within its walls.
Anton nearly gasped as he stumbled out of the Hyper Plane, objects melting back into place all around him. As always, he tried to hold onto the fleeting perception that unified everything into a whole, affixing his every thought to its foundation as if enough attention might stop its disintegration. Like a hallucination, the unreality of what had just been struck him with confusion, how all of it seemed so obvious then and yet how none of it could be understood now. He wondered at how he could think something so lifeless as a galaxy could be a living creature, the revelation lost.
Only the galactic surveyors had experienced the Hyper Plane first hand, while to the vast majority of the galactic intelligentsia it was a purely theoretical term that supplied explanations for various oddities the universe had shown them. In many ways, it was an inversion of microscopic physics. Whereas quantum theory sought understanding on the smallest scale, the theory behind the Hyper Plane instead posited super structures, or hyper objects, as the axioms of its calculus, deducing the motion of its constituents with a top-down logic.
Reports from the first galactic surveyors to return from their missions were subject to disbelief. Debriefing committees poured over their testimonies, enthralled by the possibility of the Hyper Plane, a confirmation of a long held theoretical belief about the natural scheme of things, which only led to further question about the nature of reality. Surveyors reported seeing the laws of physics as objects in and of themselves; they told tales of abstractions that coalesced from chaos and gave order to the mundane, like ancient gods secretly directing the motion of mortal beings to greater ends. Anton was not so inclined to hyperbole, though he had to admit the analogy possessed a grain of truth.
Nevertheless, Anton would not return to the Hyper Plane until the galactic center had been thoroughly mapped. Once his mission was over, another brief period of super intelligence would be required to compress the data acquired from his observations and then calculate the route back home. Until then, Anton would need to rely solely on his natural and augmented abilities.
The Ishii-Yakamura engine hummed to life inside of the Star Nomer. Woven geometries threaded across the ship’s hull, pinching shut around its creases. The Star Nomer found a trajectory in a trough formed by the contorting lines of space-time, sliding down the slope like a drop of water on a pane of glass. The engine frantically swept aside space as the ship slipped through the clearing, preceding its path by only several meters, perpetually matching pace. By his calculations, at least fifty cycles of subjective time would pass before he arrived at the edge of the galactic center. With the Star Nomer’s engine essentially on autopilot, there was not much left for Anton to do except initiate hibernation protocol in order to conserve his energy stores.
So he found himself drowsing, falling into a dreadful sleep, as a series of tubes pumped a buffet of chemicals into Anton’s tiny body. Anton dreaded going under, as it meant releasing control of the ship to his subroutines, but moreover, the whole process was uncomfortable, almost painful. The sleep induced by hibernation was not normal sleep, but literal death. One by one, his senses would flicker off, stranding him on a smaller and smaller footing until he could hardly think at all, sluggish thoughts that refused to be unwound, that clogged his mind with fluff. And then he would die, disappear from existence, biological processes suspended in their entirety no longer able to sustain his consciousness until they were allowed to resume.
But this time was different. When his body completed its metabolic shutdown and entered into suspended animation, he found himself regarding his motionless body as another object in his field of view. Struck by the absurdity of watching himself, he remained helpless as the Star Nomer plummeted away, swallowed by the cavernous dark, leaving him stranded in the void of space. Stunned into submission, he surveyed his surroundings, found he could see without horizon, could focus without eyes, that everything was immediately perceptible to him, down to the motes of dust sailing carelessly across solar winds. Despite this sudden awareness of everything, he could not find himself. The locus of self that normally directed his actions from the vantage of his body no longer sustained itself with biologic. Something had sheered him from his body and now held him in stasis, disembodied and without ability to affect his environment. His thoughts struggled against their ineffectualness as he told himself over and over again to talk, to move, to find some way to be, but nothing gave way. He was a soul without foundation, a painting without canvas. The next few moments shocked him with a flurry of surreal events. Color drained from the world; the black of space ceased to be black and merely betokened its emptiness. Hues became signatures, representations of process. He saw in the drab qualia of his perception the specific meaning of their peculiarity, the unfolding of their being. All signs pointed towards…
It was then Anton realized what lay at the center of the Cerberus galaxy.
And while Anton spent the rest of his subjective life ravaged by horror of his realization, the Star Nomer breached the nebulae cloud surrounding the galactic center. Gravitation pitched a ragged landscape, a spatial circuit of unseen complexity, ringing through space like an absurd mountain range. Cajoled through its crevices, the ship was swept away in a cosmic current, another component in a grand cacophony of debris and dust.
In a thousand cycles, the Star Nomer would be ejected out of the other side of the cloud, sent spinning listlessly into space, its passenger dead and its mission ostensibly failed. But within the nebulae cloud, it found itself dancing in an eternal chorus, a single bit of information in a vast system it could not comprehend, a part of the being that had devoured Anton Lobuch’s mind and soul.