The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [46]
Ten
Alchemy and the Afterlife
Although I was a stranger in the thirty-third century, I caught on fairly quickly to certain basic political issues once the principal arguments surrounding the concept of “macroconstruction” had been spelled out.
The human race would need the technics of transmutation soon enough. Fusers designed as power plants routinely turned hydrogen into helium, and could already work a few other finger exercises, but it would be necessary in the near future to make fusers of an altogether more ambitious kind: fusers that could do the kind of heavy-duty alchemy to which our modestly sized second-generation sun would never get around. All the heavy elements in the system were supernoval debris, and we would eventually need more: a lot more. Opinions apparently varied as to when “eventually” might be, but it wasn’t just the carriers of the old type-2 banner who wanted the project started now.
The prospect of manufacturing all the elements that had previously been made in the overfervent hearts of dying stars opened up a number of interesting questions. Where, for instance, was the raw material to come from? And where could the technics be safely tested? Conducting risky experiments in distant gas-giant-rich solar systems posed logistical problems, and couldn’t entirely avoid the safety issues associated with conducting them closer to home. A supposedly domesticated reaction that ran wild might be very problematic, even if it were several light-years away from the nearest substantial human settlement.
“I can see how that possibility would make people nervous,” I said, drily. “Maybe this is one technology that we can do without, for the time being — or maybe forever.”
I was told that there were others who thought a slow and steady schedule might be best, but that nobody believed that the problem could be put off indefinitely. If humankind’s descendants refused to enclose the sun that had given birth to the species they would have to enclose others instead, because they would have no alternative but to try out every possible means of defying the Afterlife.
I had to demand an explanation of that term, because it no longer meant anything that a man of the twenty-second century could have understood by it. It was explained to me, calmly and patiently, that some people preferred to call the Afterlife the Alkahest, or “the Universal Death,” while others — those with a more developed sense of irony, I supposed — were content to call it “the End of Evolution” or “Eternity’s Eve.”
Apparently, the galaxy was full of life, but it was mostly not the kind of life that existed on Earth, or the colony-worlds of Ararat —-which was known by its colonists as Tyre — and Maya. Nor was it the kind of life entertained by the so-called sludgeworlds which lurked in interstellar space. The vast bulk of the galaxy’s biomass consisted of a single all-devouring species of nanobacterium: a universal organic solvent that fed avidly upon all higher kinds of life, digesting individual organisms and entire biospheres with equal ease. It did not matter which replicator molecules they used, or how they organized their genomes; they were all grist to the implacable mill.
The Afterlife’s empire already extended three-quarters of the way from the center of the galaxy to the rim, and it was still expanding. Given time, it would conquer and possess the whole of the Milky Way, having gobbled up everything that complex organisms like us might consider “real” life.
Unless it could be stopped.
It might not arrive on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years — perhaps millions — but it would arrive, and there would be people of many posthuman kinds to witness its arrival. Natural attrition would probably have killed off nearly all the emortals of the fourth millennium, and nearly all their children too, but a few people alive now would surely live long enough to see