The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [105]
The voice was amused: What delightful spirit in the face of eternity!
A structure that I assumed was my throat made a dry swallow, a faint, ectoplasmic clucking sound.
The voice said, My dear Mr Faraday. Guardian angel is close enough but in your case, I think you'd better think of me as a neurotransmitter. My job is to move you through Transition Space to the Storage Plenum.
Storage Plenum?
Sigh. The Afterlife, if you wish. Come along.
Afterlife? Oh, shit.
The voice made a cute little tee-hee-hee. It'll be all right, Mr Faraday. Really. We're terribly sorry for all the trouble we've caused.
We?
It said, Oh, dear. They didn't say you'd have so many questions! Tsk.
They?
One and the same, I'm afraid. I'm an element of the orphan cluster rescue array, a subset of the accidental entities study group, which is in turn attached to the disaster reversal special hierarchy. We adhere to an attractor in meme-set space which requires us to believe the pseudo-sentient biproducts of the disaster-set entity have a right to exist, even though they have no reality in the C11 plenum.
What the fuck are you talking about?
What Cn plenum?
Sigh. You are familiar with the concept that the universe exists as an eleven dimensional space?
The one where the extra dimensions are rolled up inside mass quanta, leaving behind just the three of space and one of time? More or less.
Well, that's not quite it but it's on the right track. Mr Faraday, the Cn plenum is a fully-packed array of Kaluza-Klein entities containing an infinite amount of energy. Perhaps the simplest way to visualize this space is to view it as random-access memory, whose base state is set to the value one. Assume that there are quantum uncertainty processes at work that sometimes reset an entity's value to zero. Then assume there is some kind of universal CPU whose instruction set allows it to perform certain operations on all entities of value zero. You could think of that as a solid-state universe and not be far wrong.
Isn't that what writers call bafflegab? And isn't this nothing more than a data dump?
The voice's amusement seemed lugubrious, to say the least. Oh, Mr Faraday. If that's your attitude, then what more can I say?
Who are you, why are we here, where are we going and what the hell happened?
Fair enough, Mr Faraday. I told you who I am, though I don't think you believe it. What happened? It's not so simple, but I'll see if I can simplify it. As you might imagine Cn space has something like evolution, and since its persistence time appears to be on the order of io52 years, there has been plenty of time for it to operate. Over the vigintillia, unimaginably complex entities have evolved.
How complex is that, asshole?
Tsk-tsk. Mr Faraday! Unimaginable to you. As I was saying- in time, these entities grew to understand the properties of the universe they inhabited, and to manipulate it for their own purposes, also unimaginable to you.
Then why tell me?
It sounded hurt: Because you asked, Mr Faraday. Now, if you'll just be patient? One day, a really long time ago, as you count such things, they discovered that they could create a subplenum with properties analogous to Cw, if C1Q space existed. All they had to do was create it, and then they would have access to a technology in some ways equivalent to your own data processing technology but infinitely more powerful.
I felt a horrid supposition. One that made me feel cheated indeed.
So you're going to tell me I'm nothing but a computer game? Well now there's an original idea!
Such palpable sarcasm, Mr Faraday! My word! No, nothing so tawdry as that. If it were, none of this would be happening, and you'd never know you were, ah, simulations, I suppose. Unfortunately, once the entities had their C1Q computers, they were able to work out the properties of the Cg plenum and deduce that they could use it for physical movement outside the laws of Cn. Star-ships, if you will. Time travel, etc. Magic.
How nice