>>137325 (OP)
“I think this is, umm, a biography,” Nemoto said. “This whole vast show. The story of a race. They are trying to tell us what became of them.”
“A very human impulse,” said Mane.
Emma shrugged. “But why should they care what we think?”
Nemoto said, “Perhaps they were our descendants...”
...
For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the aging Galaxy had started to blizzard over her – even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it. But she remembered the last glimpse of all.
... It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed. But even now there was something rather than nothing. The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth...
...
“They made the manifold.”
“Who did?”
“The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes – an infinite number of universes. They made it all.” Nemoto shook her head. “Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it.”
...
Emma said carefully, “How did they do this, Nemoto?”
“The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast,” Manekato murmured.
Emma shook her head, irritated. “What does that mean?”
Nemoto said, “Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by space-time umbilicals through the singularities.”
“And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery-“
“We don’t know how they did it. But they changed the rules,” Nemoto said.
Emma said hesitantly, “So they found a way to create a lot more universes.”
Manekato said, “We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but an infinite number.” The bulky Daemon studied Emma’s face, seeking understanding.
“Infinity is significant, you see,” Nemoto said, too rapidly. “There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, all logically possible universes must exist. And therefore all logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible will happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind.”
“Why did they do this?”
“Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went – though perhaps they found life – they found no sign of mind, save for themselves.”
“And then the stars went out.”
“And then the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance... But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy-starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and – well, some of them rebelled.”
...
“So they rebelled. How?”
Nemoto sighed. “It’s all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma.”
“I was afraid it might be.”
Manekato said “Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future.”
...
“The Old Ones must have come to believe they had lived through the wrong history. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change – and the manifold was born.”
Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.
She said carefully, “I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind.”
“Yes,” Manekato said. “That is a partial understanding, but – yes.”
...
“But,” Emma said, “the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in the process. Didn’t they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knew about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed...”
“Perhaps not,” Manekato murmured. “It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition.”
“Do not ask how,” Nemoto said dryly. “Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good... mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Nemoto said, “We think that we, unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact.”
“It is clear,” Manekato said, “that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes.”
Nemoto said, “Many Earths. Many realities.”
“And in some of those realities,” Manekato said, “what you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way.”
“You mean, alien intelligences arose.”
“Yes.” Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. “But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, humans got wiped out – or never evolved in the first place. Every single time.”
“How come?”
Nemoto shrugged. “Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes – all of them deriving from the Big Whack – in which there was no life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other-“
“So that explains Fermi,” Emma said.
“Yes,” said Nemoto. “We see no aliens because we have been inserted into an empty universe. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish.”
“But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?”
“To express humanity,” Manekato said simply. “There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness.”
Emma frowned. “You make us sound like pets. Toys.”
...
“Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world.”
Emma said, “But I still don’t get it. Why would these superbeing Old Ones care so much about humanity?”
Nemoto frowned. “You haven’t understood anything, Emma. They were us. They were our descendants, our future. Homo sapiens sapiens, Emma. And their universe-spanning story is our own lost future history. We built the manifold. We – our children – are the Old Ones.”
Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe-making meddlers might have been – not godlike, unimaginable aliens – but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.