Mysterious Logbook



The Mysterious Logbook is the journal of Clovis Bray I, included in the Beyond Light Collector's Edition. It contains entries on a variety of topics, including Europa and information relating to the moon, as well as Exos. It also includes the additional pages unveiled in the Collector's Edition ARG which was initiated prior to the launch of Beyond Light. In Bungie's post of the additional pages uncovered by the ARG, several links were hidden within the text, redirecting to various recordings by the Exo Stranger.

Based on the appearance of the pages, the journal is in moderately decent condition, despite its likely age. The logbook holds 46 pages, with subsequent pages having been torn out. These torn pages were later recovered, providing further insight.

Text in this color indicates handwritten notes made primarily by Clovis Bray I.

-01-


PERSONAL LOG

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) -rng_seed(AM_241) -echo(HANNU:quartz) 

-02-
A new start. A clean page for a most important story.

Hannu II is aerobraking around Jupiter. The lord of planets thunders his greeting to me. As I record this, I am blasting Aivanti-3's "Siegfried in the Storm Wall" over the radio howl of the Jovian magnetosphere. It galvanized me. I am with the gods.


 * Ask Aivanti's trainers how they settled on the 1/2/3 suffixes. Numbers are perfectly
 * defined, therefore inhuman. Is this suffix meant to mark the Aivanti AI as nonhuman?


 * Objective: construct long-term scientific
 * outpost for study of indigenous Europan life.


 * Resources: eight prefab starter habitats, 
 * 600 shielded heavy work frames, and VIS(NU) 
 * and B-RA/MA cytomachines with backup
 * replication chambers aboard Hannu. The best
 * hazardous-environment engineers money can't
 * buy. SMILE support for extended duration.
 * Two of Elisabeth's Eon-type platforms for
 * radar, Lidar, and deep ice mapping.


 * Hazards: Lethal radiation environment (heavy
 * ion bombardment from Jovian magnetosphere).
 * Unshielded crew half-Life is 24 hours.



The most expensive lie in human history. I am not here for a safari. All of Europa's life will soon be known, mapped, and exhausted of wonder. Bound by the tedious constraints of physics and biology. I know these things too well. They are already killing me.

The K1 artifact promised me an offering. A gateway to the secret of immortality. I call it Clarity.

It is waiting on Europa.

I am still dying, but not fast enough to kill me.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 35.9 C. Pulse 25 BPM, strength
 * good. BP 75 over 50. Resp 6 breaths/
 * minute. Pulse ox 210%. Today's blood mix is
 * perfluorocarbon with stem slurry.
 * Avoid hyperfocus with alpha-wave brain wash
 * for 10 min/hr.
 * New kidneys are growing in Whitford the deli
 * pig for next transplants.



-03-
Must find a good pork recipe so Whitford will not go to waste. Medical team insists I accept cytomachine injections. No! Nothing enters my body that does not share my genetic self-interest. Instead I will grow an upgraded monocyte strain.

Elisabeth's birthday approaches. A good gift would be an olive branch. Never let her say I do not try. Hannu, please identify a gift that only could come from my own intimate and personal knowledge of my granddaughter.


 * GIFT SUGGESTIONS:
 * Antique weapon, or Twin Eagle replica.
 * Professional pilot trained on Eon-series ship.
 * Bespoke AI writer of personalized novels.
 * Fruit basket, Titan farmed.
 * Humanitarian investment (minefield
 * clearance, long-term reparations, anti-
 * traumatic medicine).



These are pathetic, Hannu.


 * REVISED GIFT SUGGESTIONS:
 * Research endowment, medical (prion diseases
 * in persons with immune resistance to
 * recombinant gene therapy).
 * Research endowment, medical (sporadic
 * fatal insomnia). • Research endowment,
 * psychological (loss of father, family
 * trauma).
 * Research endowment, psychological
 * (reconstruction of trust after Loss).
 * Personal apology, unpracticed (death of
 * patient in physician's care).
 * Statement of grief, unpracticed (death of
 * son). 



Never mind, Hannu. Buy a few doghives for a soil reclamation project somewhere. Honeybees, whatever strain is best. And big friendly Newfoundlands for the hives. Everyone loves doghives.

-04-



 * Ongoing projects:
 * Exomind: blocked
 *  Contact ICoV for their trick: failed 
 *  Hire Duane McNiadh away from ICOV: failed 
 * Raid ICoV for Vex data: in planning
 * Europa/Clarity: in progress
 * Be a good man and a good grandfather:
 * in progress
 * Become LUCA of future human thought:
 * in progress



-05-


If we land too hard on Europa, we will plunge into the ocean below the ice and die of barotrauma. Death by pressure.

The only light down there comes from magma and phosphorescent bait. The sea is 10 times deeper than Earth's. Even in Europa's weak gravity, peak pressure at the sea floor is 2000 atmospheres. Worse than Venus, before the Traveler.

One imagines pi contracting under that kind of pressure, crushing the perfect circle closed.

I wonder what lives down there. What slow confusions of mass and form curl around the smoking vents. What threads of pale flesh slither across dark miles, like nerves in some vast, cold brain.

Did the Traveler bypass Europa and Titan and Enceladus out of respect for their native life?

Or was it afraid to touch the things pulsating below the ice?

-06-
 //-update(-echo(HANNU:quartz, SITEX:mistletoe)) 

On Europa. We lurk like summer vampires in the caskets of our SMILE pods. Our frames labor on the ice, building a cathedral to the sciences. Radiation is very bad outside; even my assistant has taken ion damage out there. Pleased to see him healing flawlessly, vacant and empty as he is.


 * What if this perfect self-repair is the REASON the exos degrade?

I sulk in isolation as the crew works. My pride is wounded. Did I expect Clarity to come out and greet me? "Hail to Clovis Bray, first among men?" Yes, absolutely, I did! The lunar artifact promised me a solution to the indifference of the cosmos. It told me I was unlike all others—and, damn false modesty, damn vanity, I am different! Not for my present qualities, but for my future influence. I shine with noon's light, reflected back through time to this age of dawn.


 * Perhaps the mind heals itself still, and this causes the billboarding,
 * the stereotyped behavior,

I'm going to be the LUCA of all interstellar human civilization.


 * the final crash.

It is a mistake to imagine that the Greatest Man, the God-Emperor of History and Ruler of Circumstances whose influence reaches to the end of time, will live in the future—in the full flowering of human glory. That man lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion, when it is still possible for an individual's decisions to touch the entire species and set the course of all future choice.


 * Self-maintenance so absolute that it becomes a static loop? Investigate.

I said all this in my book, but my son's book still sells better. I suppose because Clovis Points is a much more approachable title than Competitive Immortality Through Primogeniture of Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny (PFHOR). My son's work appeals to those intellectual infants in the retronationals, and to the parasites on Common Compassion support.

Obviously they prefer the softened, pre-chewed version of the truth. And there is also that bump of public sympathy for a dead man...

Yet I cannot deny that, in simplifying my legacy, my son has improved its reach. He was the one to formulate the famous two-sentence summary of PFHOR: "Most of our energy should be spent in support of the things that are most like us. This is the only true responsibility of any living thing." And the slightly less famous addendum: "The best way to spend energy is on things that make more things like us."

Children are viral replicators of our ideas. But there is a certain terror about them. They alter our legacy, mutate it—as Clovis II modified Competitive

-07-
Immortality Through PFHOR into Clovis Points. What if my children decide on some key amendment, some ineffable change, which makes my legacy no longer mine? How can I be reborn through the eternal recurrence of my life-logic if what my children pass down is the logic of some other Clovis, some flawed copy...just as Clovis II was a flawed image of me?

A flaw that I created in my clumsy eagerness to make him flawless.

My second-boldest decision during my son's development was to replace Clovis II's mitochondrial DNA, normally inherited from the mother, with my own. I had to know that I was in his cellular engines, powering his existence.

It was not that change which killed him.

But it is the fear of being replaced by a faulty duplicate that will kill me, if I put off my brain upload much longer.

I have a library of scanned volunteers aboard Hannu, but my own consciousness is not among them. A Moravec upload is slow and inadequate; what if there are quantum-informatic elements to the mind not captured by such crude mechanical means? No. I insist on that perfect, terminal quantum snapshot. For reasons of fidelity, the only perfect and lossless brain scan is also a destructive one. A fatal one.


 * Clovis II died in one, after all. I made the
 * vessel to recieve him, but I lacked the Alkahest, the solvent to render it pure.

But I dare not make the leap to a new body until I know that body works. And so far, the exobodies are universally fatal.

I must finish the exobody work to become the LUCA. The one true divinity of man.

To do that, I need Clarity.

And Clarity is here. All the signs point to it.


 * If I succeed—no forgiveness for those
 * tight-fisted Ishtar tools. I know they had working prototypes.
 * They could have shared.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 35.5 C. Pulse 30 BPM, strength
 * modest. BP 90 over 60. Resp 6 breaths/
 * minute. Pulse ox 140, to reduce free
 * radicals and peroxynitrite.
 * Today's blood mix is pure perfluorocarbon
 * with new modified monocytes.
 * New kidneys functioning well. Donor pig
 * sacrificed, brined, prepared as seared pork'''
 * chops.



-08-



 * Sous vide is for prissy nerds. Poor Whitford. I wonder if I should reduce the volume
 * of my stem cells introduced to the pig blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them.
 * Does PFHOR compel me to take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary porkers?
 * Yes...but only to the extent that they can contribute to my legacy
 * with cloned organs and good eating. No guilt!

-09-


The term for parents destroying their own offspring is "savaging."

It was a problem for pig farmers, in the days when we raised livestock. Sows attacked their own piglets. No one has ever worked out a good explanation. One theory is that the mother pigs are frightened by their young. Terrified by these strange, noisy, needy things.


 * Evolution is not a perfect optimizer. A trait like "fear of own offspring" could endure
 * if piglet mortality is already high.

The ancient biologist August Weismann believed that we age to make room for the next generation. That we are programmed to die to leave a space for our offspring.

Perhaps the sows simply acted in self-defense.

-010-


Now a bristling thing, large as a whale, appears on the icebore camera we dropped into the ocean below. A dandelion made of soft arms. Bright red and yellow markings indicate it evolved in the shallows, where some light pierces the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion that is both hunting and breathings. Prey approaches, drawn by plankton that cake on the drifter's skin. With vegetable slowness, its limbs embrace the victim, sting it, and pull it into an open central stomach where thready parasites wait to infest and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead, fuzzy with rot. They have strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice. Fat worms of terror searching for a hide. The digestive parasites will be expelled as a decoy, left to squirm in panic.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final disintegration. I consider how to burn it.

-011-
I died. What a nuisance.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 13.7 C. Pulse 3 BPM, weak,
 * irregular. BP not detectable. Pulse ox
 * 600: emergency anti-ischemic oxygen
 * flood, cryonic perfusion, metabolic waste
 * scavengers active.
 * Clinical death duration: 11 hours.
 * Successful emergency hypothermic arrest.
 * Reactive oxygen spike tamped, interleukin
 * blocked, redox blocked, ischemic-reperfusion
 * injury fully averted. PPARs upregulated.
 * Squirrel lipid switch engaged.
 * Prognosis: good. 

</tt>

Dropped dead of dysautonomia while rummaging for leftover pork chop. I am now in recovery in a medical SMILE pod. I have no breath and no pulse—it is the return of oxygen to dead tissue that does most of the damage. I should be asleep. But I have to get this down quickly!

While I was dead I HAD A DREAM.

I was in a working exobody. I felt so strong. Everything so vivid—no need for waxy eardrums or jelly eyeballs. Like seeing for the first time, after a life of cataracts. I think I was immortal.

The only unpleasant aspect of the experience was my amnesia. I couldn't recall my own name. I saw someone walking past me—I think it must have been Anastasia?—and not only did I fail to recognize her, but it never even occurred to me that I should.

When I awoke, I thought I must have had a near-death vision. So I checked my nerve logs. Every last spark in my brain is recorded—and nothing in that cerebral panic can account for my dream. The mind is the brain. It is impossible to have a vision without correlated neural activity—yet I did!

Wonderful! This is why I came here. Unmapped secrets! Impossible dreams! A chance to pass beyond the infinite, and escape the tyranny of causal closure!

I wholeheartedly believe that the dream was a message from Clarity. A promise of success.

-012-


I struggle to explain what I will become. The LUCA. I borrowed that term from biology, in the same way I consider BrayTech my extended phenotype, and its discoveries my memetic grandchildren. When we depart the cradle of this solar system to begin our colonization of the galaxy, the dominant ideology of our time—the core logic we use to organize and plan our relationship with the cosmos—will be scattered to become the LUCA: the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all future human growth.

The LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all living things. For Earth life, it is a single cell that lived in the deep ocean billions of years ago, flourishing in the warmth of magma or sulfur vents. It was not the first life on Earth. But it was the only life whose descendants survived to the present. All its contemporaries have been extinguished by the passage of epochs.

I plan to be the LUCA of all future human thought.


 * Now I remember Luca Brassi, the Corleone family heavy. Nuipedia says that Barri
 * murdered his own infant child. Why? Why would he do such a thing?
 * The article doesn't explain. Savaging again.

-013-
Study of the lunar artifact retrieved from the K1 mission provides insight into the effect I have termed "Clarity."

Clarity violates established symmetries and conservation laws. In doing so it defies Noether's theorem, the most fundamental and beautiful cornerstone of physics.

Symmetry and conservation are two sides of the same coin. "All things are transformations of one thing, without gain or loss," as my childhood tutor put it. "If A can become B, then B can become A. We say that state B (say, a mixed drink) comes after state A (say, sugar and water) only because there are more probable pathways from A to B. Wait long enough—longer than the universe—and your drink really can return to state A, spontaneously unmixing itself."

But Clarity is NOT always symmetrical. For example, it violates time reversibility. Consider the simple equation:


 * Clarity(A) -> B.

This is the application of Clarity to state A to produce a lower-entropy state B. (Clarity is fond of removing portions of a state configuration, harrowing the phase space down to only its most robust inhabitants.)

Time symmetry suggests that we should be able to run this process in reverse and retrieve the original:


 * reverseClarity(B) -> A.

But in fact, we obtain:


 * reverseClarity(B) -> C,


 * where C is the same as in


 * Clarity(B) -> C.

Clarity's effects cannot be used to return a transformed state to its original state. Instead, we obtain a second transformed state, further yet from the original configuration.


 * What does this actually mean in common language? Invoking
 * the Loschmidt paradox is certainly not common language. Ah, but perhaps an allusion to—

I believe that Clarity may be akin to the mythical universal solvent, the Alkahest, the Azoth, which ancient alchemists believed had the power to dissolve anything into its pure base elements. Ingested properly, the Alkahest could purify the body and grant eternal life.

-014-
Nonsense and poetry? Perhaps. But let me ask you this. WHY DO WE EXIST?

We exist because the universe began in a state oflower entropy, and has ever since expanded and unwound, transforming from a single dense plasma into a void filled with complex structures. In the future, it will achieve maximum entropy when all organized matter has collapsed into black holes, and these holes evaporate into the uniformity of the heat death.


 * I wonder what Clarity would to do to a black hole?

This is the unexplained secret of creation. HOW DID THAT ORIGINAL LOW-ENTROPY STATE COME TO BE? In the first place and the first time—the egg of history?

What if Clarity was responsible?

What if there was some primeval chaos, some pre-cosmic entropy, which was soaked in Clarity to reduce it to that first nucleus of all existence which issued the Big Bang? What if Clarity's defiance of time-reversibility makes it a fountain of cosmic youth, returning all that is burnt out and burnt down to its state before the fire?

Perhaps Clarity is the Ein Sof, the nameless god before creation. Preparator of the cosmic egg. Razor that cuts the fat of complication away from the bone.

Those who comprehend the Alkahest, it is said, will obtain eternal life.

-015-
 //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) - qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM_241) —pad(padwilla) Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security </tt>

Wilhelmina, it's your grandfather. I'm on Europa doing some very exciting work. I understand that you're probably reluctant to enter into any collaboration, given my choices surrounding your father's treatment. But I sincerely believe that this will be the most important scientific project since the invention of agriculture.

You know how I value minds that can run alongside my own. I fondly remember your childhood explanation of the myth of the alpha wolf. The truth, you told me, was that the so-called alpha is not a dominant male, but simply the father of the family.

I remember with less fondness, but with equal respect, your later accusation that I had so fully assumed the role of immortal patriarch as to close myself off from you. "Megalos kryos pateras," you called me, in very poor Greek. On the day of my son's funeral.

Let me show you what I was thinking of when I was not thinking of my family.

Come to Europa. Help me.

 //save draft unsent </tt>

-016-


 //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) - qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM_241) —pad(padana) Warning: this transmission will expend '''entangled qubits for security. ''' </tt>

Anastasia, it's your grandfather. I'm on Europa doing some very exciting work. I understand that you're probably reluctant to enter into any collaboration, given your memory of your father's treatment process. I also know that you've struggled with questions of belonging...not helped by my own attitude towards your genetics.

Let me make amends. You've wasted enough on that paranoiac machine. Both of us know that your attempts to fix the value-capture problem are just bandages on an ethical wound. Come to Europa. Let's set aside the broken past and make a clean start.

What I have here will change everything. We will be as immortal as your warmind, and far more human.

 //save draft unsent </tt>

-017-


 //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM_241) —pad(padelsie) </tt>

Come to Europa. I am taking an enormous risk-and this time I am the one at risk. Let me prove to you that I did nothing to your father that I wouldn't do to myself.

There are significant dangers. Outside-context threats. Your expertise would be invaluable. I need you.

 //save </tt>

-018-
I FOUND HER!

Clarity Control. The mystery I was promised.

Analysis of the surrounding ice suggests it arrived on Europa no more than 20 years ago...still, well before I encountered the K1 artifact. How long have they planned my invitation?


 * ARRIVAL EVENT: omnibus analysis of
 * spallation products in the ice suggest
 * recent x-ray bombardment, characteristic
 * of the decay of a Majorana-massive Light
 * sterile neutrino. These neutrinos are
 * associated with the Lambda field and the
 * expansion of the early universe.

</tt>

So a blast of dark neutrinos struck this particular province of Europan chaos. The particle involved-yet more evidence that Clarity is as old as time? The Alkahest that shaped the early universe...?

I wonder why Clarity Control chose the particular aspect it did. That form, that face. The same visage as the precursor on Earth's moon. What is it meant to communicate? Is it a message particularly meant for me?

I have always harbored a wariness towards women. I understand people as coiled engines of self-interest. Programmed first by a cosmology that selects, via the anthropic principle, for the possibility of complex structure. Then by a biology that wipes out traits deleterious to its own persistence. And then by a culture that evolves to promote the survival of its hosts. People are avatars of these self-preserving forces.

I feel a purity and a rightness to this understanding. It lets me see people as they really are. It is the foundation of PFHOR.

But all this is complicated in women. They are the sites of such evolutionary complexity-the grandmother hypothesis, for example, or the eusociality of female ants. Even their flesh is hard to understand. Female bodies are a mosaic of two cell lines-one with the mother's X chromosome active, one with the father's. Never both. A house of two lineages, constantly renegotiating their mutual interest.

-019-


ls that interior plurality, that secret depth, why Elisabeth, Wilhelmina, and Anastasia were all so vehemently opposed to my plan for Clovis Il's treatment? Alton never fought it, but the girls were persistently...difficult.

Elisabeth has not replied to my message. I know she received it. I will have to remind her of her own self-interest.

-020-
The major obstacle to a viable exomind is the loop/billboard/crash cycle.

Human consciousness in simula is not new. (The equipment we provided AeroChina for containment of the K1 anomaly included simulated connectome forks of the mission crew as mineshaft canaries.) But simulated environments are limited. If a simulated crew member wants to leave the mission and go home, they cannot, and that impossibility will cause divergence from the physical original. Even minute changes in the physical fidelity of the simulation can have chaotic effects.

All cognition is embodied. The architecture of our minds is highly co-evolved with our physical form. In or out of simulation, only a truly synthetic Al can dissociate from the human body plan.


 * And there be dragons.
 * Without common evolutionary legacy, there is no reason an AI should share our values.

Given the limits of simulation, we need to find synthetic immortality in the real world. The grail of homo simulacra is an artificial body with an immortal human mind. (Attempts to upload human minds into frames, with their artificial senses and limited architecture, are uniformly terrifying and disagreeable.)

Early attempts at uploaded consciousness were haunted by fears that the upload would suffer "cryptic loss of qualia": the unseen death of the first-person, conscious mind. The upload would then become a so-called billboard, a flat imitation. I lobbied the ISO to establish a standard for a "certified conscious simulacrum." Any emulation of a human brain must display neural activity correlated with consciousness, particularly in the nuclei of the thalamus, midbrain, and pons. (Modern philosophy is satisfied that all qualia have neural correlates.)

Many researchers refer to this criterion as the "zombie detector."

The problem with exominds is that they quickly stop passing the zombie test.

The first stage of the breakdown is looping-the same repetitive, stereotyped behavior once observed in zoo animals. Prototype exominds begin to repeat similar conversations and action schemes. This stereotypy descends from high-level social behaviors, through cognitive programs like memory recall and task selection, into basic motor functions. The mid-stage symptoms are pacing, chewing, rocking, grunting, striking limbs against walls or furniture, and facial tics. This is a result of depressed activity in the higher brain. Without input from the prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia stops selecting new motor programs.

-021-
The eventual, highly upsetting result is athetosis: a disorder characterized by slow, involuntary writhing motions of the limbs, digits, neck, and tongue. (Early exobodies, without governors on their paramuscle, could tear themselves apart like starfish with wasting syndrome. This was how my son died.)


 * I am reminded of that hideous Europan thing! Why does my brain
 * insist on free-associating its way back to self-destruction? And again I return to
 * savaging the young—

The driver of this degenerative loop is a process we call "billboarding." No matter how actively we stimulate the exobody, how rich we make its social and cognitive environment, and how powerful its senses, we still observe the gradual shutdown of exoneurons. The neural correlates of consciousness in the midbrain are among the first to die. The exomind-despite acing the Turing test-no longer meets ISO standards for consciousness. It is a philosophical zombie.


 * I have had the uncanny experience of holding a long,
 * emotional conversation with an uploaded woman, only to discover that she was unconscious

Eventually, this shutdown proceeds far enough that the exomind cannot sustain its default network, the "light in the windows" of a living brain. We roll the brainstate back and try again, but the outcome is inevitable.


 * the entire time, and in fact showed
 * brain activity similar to deep asphyxia! The languid, ambiguous phrases that I found

Why does this self-strangulation occur?


 * so intriguing were the results of a brain that had lost its neocortex.
 * She was dead.

At first I believed the answer was simple. Like a tiger pacing in a zoo pen, the exomind did not receive enough stimulation from the exobody. A human in sensory deprivation will go mad. Perhaps the exobody deprived the mind of some vital but unrecognized sense.

But I now think I was on the wrong track. The problem is actually one of excessive self-causation. If, as the philosopher Wick proposed, "We are that which we cause the most," and our future selves qualify as "still truly us" only because they are primarily determined by our current brainstate, then a paradox arises.

To remain ourselves, we must limit the amount of change we experience. For example, our brain cannot be changed into a cloud of hot gas without killing us. But what change is permissible? Would we not be most ourselves if we NEVER changed? If our future state was fully determined by our current state?

I believe the human mind is engaged in constant self-correction. In order to filter out external causation that might disrupt our self-loops, the mind screens out errors (caused by cosmic rays, EM fields, prions, chemical misfires, irritating conversations, etc.) by running a kind of constant checksum on itself. Perhaps this recursive self-checking is even the source of consciousness itself!

Exominds, however, are immune to these natural sources of error. They are not messy enough. They do not suffer enough jitter, enough degradation.

-022-


When we train Ais, we knock out random neurons in each learning cycle, forcing the AI to operate without them. This creates a more robust, stable intelligence. It also shows why some random error and entropy is vital to keeping a brain alive. Without those random knockouts, the AI is vulnerable to overfitting: locking itself into a single, narrow, stereotyped behavior, perfectly adapted to a very specific set of stimuli, but otherwise catatonic and unresponsive.

Without countervailing entropy, the very self-corrective processes meant to maintain the human mind calcify and kill it.

I believe this is why the exominds fail.

If the exominds are to be viable shelters against mortality, I must find a useful source of noise. Emulation of biological error will not be enough-the exomind is designed for total immunity to such fleshy noise, after all.

That source of error must be Clarity. The effect generated by Clarity Control.

But how can it be gathered, harvested, and applied? How can I change Clarity from an abstract process to something tangible, incarnate, and usable?

I know that it is possible. It is the reason I was brought here.

-023-
 //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM241) —pad(padelsie) Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security. </tt>

I know your secret. Did you think you could keep it from me? Elisabeth, I keep track of every tiny change in your gene expression. I know when you so much as burp. You are my offspring! You are the most important thing in the universe to me, for you are an extension of my own self!

I understand you're angry with me. I would be too, if I'd watched my father come so close to salvation, only to die the way he did. Believe me-the groans and snaps of his exobody tearing itself apart haunt me almost as profoundly as the things we said over his deathbed.

I failed your father. First I tried to make him sleepless. When that failed augment eventually turned against him, I correctly identified the disease as fatal prion insomnia while those incompetents were still blathering about unexplained cachexia. I even recognized that my boy's hypervigilant immune system would make gene therapy and polythiophene treatment ineffective. At every step, I was ahead of the problem, and entirely focused on its solution.

I determined to transfer him to a new body. And I failed. The new body killed him. His final scan still sleeps in the family archives, awaiting, perhaps, some second chance.

But what I am working on here could have saved him. Could save him still.

AND IT CAN SAVE YOU.

You know that you have your father's disease, inherited from the same genes I so rashly engineered. You have the Clovis Curse. There is no way to know exactly when it will strike, but once it does, I'm sure you've charted out exactly how it will progress.

First: insomnia. Panic, hallucination, and fear. Extended hypnagogia and the loss of all dreams. You will sweat and your eyes will dwindle to points. You will go into menopause. You will try anti-prion treatments and gene therapy to correct the mutation, but your enhanced immunity will protect the very flaw that is killing you. You will try immunosuppressants, but they will be no match for the family arsenal. I did not make us to be easily edited.

-024-


Within two years, you will be entirely unable to sleep. Dementia and wasting will follow. You will be dead by then, but the husk you leave behind will continue to live, sustained by machines, unable even to dream of a time when it was Elisabeth Bray.

Come to me. I am dying too. Let us save each other.

 //send </tt>

-025-
Disaster at the worksite. Clearly we will not be moving Clarity Control like we did the K1 artifact. It reacted violently to the attempt. I have entered 19 casualties into the log, since 19 engineers from the Hannu team were caught in its reaction...though there were many more than 19 bodies when it was finished.

I have sequestered the recordings. Especially the sensorium telemetry. Quite upsetting.

Yet I do not believe it was an act of hostility. Even this outburst carried themes of duplication...as if Clarity Control wanted to show it could help me.

It whispers to me. I have been communicating with it, just as I did the K1 artifact.

I dashed off a memo to the expedition team (all fully NDA'd, of course, with hashes of their brain states on file as proof of honesty). I tried to be plain. Yes, we will proceed with necessary caution. But I am now in contact with Clarity Control. I am in communication with an intelligence so far beyond our own that it can manipulate us like stones on a go board.

Terrifying, obviously—but not malevolent.


 * NOT MALEVOLENT!!!

If it wanted to extinguish us (according to dark forest logic, perhaps) it would simply drop a strangelet into Earth. There is nothing it could possibly want from us that could not be obtained elsewhere. Even if it were so malicious as to feed on the raw suffering of conscious minds, it would be easier to build vast hell-simulations, or to engineer a custom species capable of limitless woe.

If we are endangered by Clarity Control, it is only through accident or miscommunication. Or punishment. Punishment is a key part of any teaching process.

Still, I am keenly aware that there might be some danger I cannot foresee. So I have ordered an orbital platform constructed over the worksite. If we need catastrophic containment, or a quick and thorough redaction of our work here, the platform will excurse from its orbit and collide with the site.

Europa's orbital dynamics make even high polar orbits very unstable, so the platform needs onboard power for course correction. A fission

-026-


reactor makes sense—it requires less frequent refueling than a fusion plant, and it's easy to hide something in the design that will allow it to achieve, ah, extremely prompt criticality.

Now we can proceed with peace of mind.


 * '''CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 33.2 C. Pulse 33 BPM, strength
 * good. BP 120 over 100. Resp 10 breaths/
 * minute. Pulse ox 90, oxygen radical cleanup
 * in progress.
 * Today's blood mix is enriched pig's blood
 * with new modified monocyte.
 * Prep for liver regeneration and gallbladder
 * transplant underway.

</tt>

-027-


 //decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) —pad(padelsie) </tt>

Fine. I'm coming. If only to limit the damage you can cause.

If you tell the family I'm sick, I'll never speak to you again. I won't even let you treat me. You'll have to watch, helpless, as your own granddaughter falls victim to your mistakes.

I hope you're still someone capable of being troubled by that.

-E

 //save </tt>

-028-


A gate. Of course. Clarity Control is inviting me to make a GATE.


 * The Messenger Hypothesis. Aliens would seek
 * the most efficient method of interstellar
 * contact. Starships are slow, fragile, and
 * massive. It is easier to send a set of
 * instructions for a message receiver, or a
 * construction blueprint for a portal.

</tt>

This explains the reports of visions and paranoia at the K1 site! The idiots were receiving a message, but they failed to divine the true purpose! Or perhaps the invitation was only intended for me. And it IS an invitation...

...but I will need more data, and more talent, to answer it. I feel that the gate Clarity Control wants me to build is not any form or product of Clarity itself. The design, I think, is Vex...those pestilential nuisances encountered on Venus and occasionally elsewhere.

If I need a Vex gate to fulfill Clarity Control's purpose, then I will make a Vex gate in the simplest way. I will have a Vex build it for me.

I know exactly where to find one. The only trick will be concealing the fact that I've taken it.


 * ASSET ACTIVATION:
 * //venus/ishtar/management/TRUSTFALL
 * //venus/Ishtar/labor/DENNIS
 * //venus/aerospace/ISR/NASSAU
 * //venus/aerospace/cargo/WARBLER

</tt>

-029-


The raid on the Ishtar Collective went off flawlessly. Some casualties during the outbreak, of course—they were woefully unprepared for their artifacts to switch into expand-and-exploit behavior. Necessary sacrifices, alas. They died meaningful deaths for a vital human project, even if they didn't know it. Heroes, every one.

After Rasputin intervened with frames and orbital fire, there was urgent need for search and rescue. An easy task to have one of our ships slip away with a specimen. By the time Ishtar is up and running again, they'll attribute the missing artifact to damage during the battle.

The stolen machine is now at work building the gate I require.

The gate shares nothing in common with the structure of Clarity Control. In fact, I am not sure it has a structure at all beyond the gross material form and some apparently arbitrary interior complications. Even the materials are elementally basic. Perhaps the design is old on a cosmic scale, dating back to an era before supernovas, when there was very little free metal.

I think the structure of the gate is simply a password, a configuration of symbols which will be recognized by some distant technology. A connection will be made. And what will we find when we pass through? The Babylon of the universe? The Silk Road of some cosmic union?

I will be the first, of course, but I will not go in the flesh. I will use my assistant as remote proxy. It is all so exciting that I can hardly—

Can hardly—


 * CORPOREAL ALERT:
 * Body at 30.2 C: emergency cooling. Pulse
 * AFib: defibrillating. Pulse ox 110: supportive
 * oxygen.
 * Inducing protective syncope.

</tt>

-030-
Quickly! Quickly, have to get it down. I saw—

I was a beast upon the earth, a salamander or an eel. Water passed through that earth as streams pass through a garden. Beside each stream grew sweet grass. Not much of it, but enough to feed little aphids, who lived mean and starving lives.

Now there came an upwelling of water from the earth, so that the streams ran fat and slow. The grass grew thick. The aphids mated and multiplied. Ants came to enslave the aphids, and the aphids joined together to oppose them. And in victory they returned to tend their grass, to aerate its roots and spread its seeds. So they did thrive.

Now it occurred to me that I might join two streams by crawling between them on my belly. Having done so, I saw that I might dam one stream to divert its water into the other. The aphids of the first stream came to me in protest, but I said to them, "Go to the new pond I have made, and join the aphids there in cultivation, and I will send more water unto you."

And they were greatened by the joining.

Thus, I proceeded to join all the streams together into one pond. And whenever the aphids of a small stream might protest, I said to them, "Go, look at my pond, and see the plenitude I have provided to my people there." When it became necessary to stop those upstream from polluting the water, I offered them the bounty of our pond, the grass and the watercress. And if they did not yield, I sent the ant-fighters against them, because their petty good injured the good of the all.

I appointed ministers of water and soil and seed and war, and to the most loyal, I gave these posts as reward; but ultimately their power depended on me, for they were aphid and I was Leviathan.

In time, I became the coordinator of all water and the dispensator of fertility. Then I became the coordinator of coordinators, and I gave up the control of thirst and life for control of those who had control. And all my craft became the pure and abstract management of power.


 * Note: reminds me of a book—
 * theory and practice of something, by E. Goldstein? Or that Michels tract about
 * oligarchy?

Then saw upon the horizon a wave, and the wave was God, and it approached me, saying, "We are as one, you and I. We are the gathering of the waters. Gather unto me as they have gathered unto you; we will be as one." The aphids screamed and begged me for salvation. But I was not of them. I was of the wave.

-031-


Clearly a message from Clarity Control! And written in allegorical large print. I am, in the eyes (or whatever percepts it possesses) of Clarity, the leader of humanity. This is why they contacted me. This is why they want me.

They are an association of coordinators, those whose choices cause change. And they are inviting me into their pantheon.

We must_ finish this gate.

-032-
<tt> //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM241) —pad(padelsie) Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security. </tt>

I see that your ship is making its orbital insertion. I trust the progress on Bray Station will impress. It makes a fine mooring point, if you please, and its transmat facilities are the quickest way down to the surface. There is no luxury as fine as a good telepheretic network-it gets you to the edge of the map, where the real work begins.

I'll want to examine you as soon as you arrive, just to get a baseline measurement on the progress of the disease. The transmat system is unfortunately not an adequate imager. As you're well aware, transmat obeys the no-cloning theorem, functioning precisely because it DOESN'T allow us to store or copy the information transmitted. Otherwise there would be no need for exobodies; we could simply print healthy copies of ourselves from the transmat. (Perhaps Willa will one day learn how to engrammatize and duplicate the human form, hm?)

I promise I won't conduct any brain scans. If we're ultimately going to transubstantiate you, we'll wait until I'm certain the exobodies are safe. And I vow to obtain your full consent.

I've prepared an itinerary, starting with a review of our security and then an introduction to our captive Vex worker. I want your insight on everything related to containment and control. I know you had strong feedback about how the K1 mission was handled.

You'll see that certain areas of our facilities are off limits. They are under my personal authority, and I keep them sequestered for everyone's safety. I know you'll be curious anyway. I won't condescend to give you instructions you won't obey. But know that your attempts to penetrate those areas won't succeed.

Welcome. We have so much to do.

<tt> //send </tt>

-033-
We passed through the gate. Myself and my team. Elisabeth insisted on coming. I could hardly call her all this way and then refuse her.

<tt>
 * EXOB0DY STATUS:
 * Proxy mode, remote operator, microwave
 * repeater Link.
 * Internal temperature 222K.
 * Superconducting media Loaded: diamond-anvil
 * hydrogen sulfide, carbon nanotube mesh.
 * Remote sensorium Latency 16ms.
 * Q-dot battery charge: 10100 yrs at current
 * load.
 * Spintronics in neuromorphic/mimetic mode. 

</tt>

What lay beyond—

<tt>
 * Gateway analysis. A non-gravitating, purely
 * geometric traversable wormhole of the Ellis
 * configuration. There is no singularity and
 * no firewall (interesting ramifications for
 * ER = EPR). The wormhole manifold provides
 * a pathway to another four-point in our
 * spacetime, or in a nearby parallel universe
 * in the quantum many-worlds ensemble. 

</tt>

We passed into a gallery of awesome light. It struck us to our knees.

The probe imagery did not prepare us. A curtain of blue-violet fire filled an entire half of the sky, pebbled with granules, seething with promontories and flares. We stood beneath a blue hypergiant, titan of suns, looming over all. It should have killed my human-bodied companions instantly—with peak radiance in the far ultraviolet, it would cook flesh.

But the probes said it was, impossibly, safe for life.

We fanned out into ancient stone ruins, pierced by dull metal towers and flickering lines of light. Though the rock was cracked and pitted by radiation, our geologist identified it at once. "Felsic granite," he reported. "No iron. No heavy metals at all. A lot more sodium, oxygen, boron, and aluminum than I'd expect, and a lot less silicon...oh my God."

-034-
"What?" I demanded.

"This rock is almost 13 billion years old," the geologist whispered. "It formed with the very first generation of planets, less than a billion years after the universe was born. We are standing on a dissected piece of one of the first worlds."

"That's not possible," the astronomer protested. "That's a type-0 hypergiant up there. They're lucky to live two million years! And its metallicity is 15 sigma above average! That is not an old star!"

I opened my proxy arms to the light. The gate had taken us to a miracle. This star was big enough to fill the solar system from the Sun to the orbit of Neptune; bright enough to shine like the full moon, even from the distance of Alpha Centauri. Yet here I was, unblinded.

Something had tampered with this star.

Our physicist identified a lensing effect, magnifying the star's optical size and redshifting its radiation. It was as if the whole behemoth was wrapped in some kind of skin.

But that was only the beginning.

<tt>
 * Hypergiant stars are so bright that the
 * outward pressure of their radiation tends
 * to blow off the corona. In the Last million
 * years, this star has exhaled more than
 * 30 times the mass of Earth's sun into its
 * 2000-kilometer-per-second stellar wind.


 * Its remaining mass still exceeds our Sun's
 * by a factor of 259. 

</tt>


 * We assumed the star could not be 13 billion years old.
 * because stars this hot and bright die swiftly. But that was before we saw—

Our instruments identified glints of brighter light against the sunfire. They were orbiting mirror clusters, gathering the star's radiation and focusing it back, burning wounds in the photosphere. These solar stigmata hemorrhaged endless flares, geysers of energy and precious metals.

Above those cutting mirrors, rings encircled the star like garrote wires. These were particle accelerators, generating blades of electromagnetic force that stabbed down into the star's skin, through photosphere and tachocline, towards the core.

"They're stirring it," I realized. "To pull metals out of the core and send fresh hydrogen down to fuse. Is it possible that they've..."

-035-
They had. They had refueled the star. They were stoking it. Enormous portals dumped streams of hydrogen into the giant, replenishing its mass and fusion power. At this obscene size and brightness, this star should have gone supernova in less than the two million years it would take a single photon to crawl from the core to the surface.

But with careful refueling, that supernova could be averted. This giant might have been here since the dawn of stellar time.

Perhaps this star had begun as some metal-poor Population II dwarf, surrounded by meager, rocky planets. But the inhabitants of one of those planets had found a way to pump their sun full of hydrogen, supercharging it, pushing it to the edge of stability. All in the name of making metal. In the early universe, elements heavier than helium were unthinkably rare. So these firstborn aliens built a forge. A fusion smelter for the atoms they needed.

We turned outwards, hoping to locate pulsars in the sky and thereby fix our position. But the stars were blotted out by a swarm of bronze discs. They were statites: a shell of artificial worlds, hovering on the star's radiation. Years ago, I had proposed tearing apart Mercury to form a shell like this...and here, I found my ambition achieved a thousandfold.

It seemed our gate had delivered us upon one of these statites. We ventured out of the ruins, onto an island of living glass, broken by fissures of deep green light and reservoirs of white fluid. Around the glass, a shallow sea trembled with tiny, intersecting waves. In one direction, a cloud of mist obscured a shattered tower, its form uncannily different from the surrounding architecture. Above us loomed structures linked by bolts of lightning, reminiscent of the Citadel ruins on Venus.

And that was when, in spite of the awesome power on display, I felt crushing disappointment.

There was no trace of Clarity s influence here at all.


 * Except perhaps in that mysterious tower...?

If this was a Vex construct, then it was an ancient and formidable one, but in a few minutes I had already grasped its overall purpose. It was no longer an area of crisis and potential, somewhere off the edge of the map. Just mighty clockwork.

I had come hoping for a meeting with the unknowable. Instead I had found an engineering museum. Oh, we could explore it for thousands of years and not touch a single percent of its wonder. But Clarity had promised me a solution to immortality! I had promised Elisabeth a cure! I needed a way to use Clarity as a solvent and seed for my exobodies.

-036-


How would I find it here?

Perhaps the Vex themselves were the key. I knew that the Ishtar Collective had achieved stable simulations of human minds. They refused to share their method with me.

What if they had stolen the method from the Vex they studied?

I called over one of my scientists, an M. Sundaresh. "I want to bring back samples," I told her. "There will be some risk. The Vex are not always docile." Some at SOLSECCENT even suggested we were in a state of war with the Vex, though I felt their responses were more like the stings of drowsy hornets. "Is your team ready to accept that risk?"

She nodded at my proxy. "Of course, Mr. Bray. We've come this far. No sense going home unless we bring something with us."

I dispatched teams to secure Vex samples. When they began to harvest fluid from the nearby reservoir, a group of lightly armed Vex platforms attacked them with inaccurate weapons fire. Elisabeth replied with a matter laser, a grotesquely disproportionate weapon. A coherent-matter pulse bears the same relation to an ordinary bullet that a gamma laser does to a flashlight. There was nothing left to salvage.

I explained to her that we must proceed as investigators, not conquerors. If we simply scavenge and abduct out of curiosity, the Vex will reply in kind, and that is a risk we can manage.

We must not provoke them to war.

-037-
<tt>
 * Specimen report. Volume of fluid recovered
 * from Vex reservoir located on a statite 
 * hovering above the 'Forge Star', 2082 
 * Volantis. Colloquially "Vex mind fluid",
 * "Vex milk."

</tt>

Informatic exchange with any Vex substrate has proven hazardous. The Ishtar Collective data Elisabeth has analyzed warns against risks ranging from physical infection by Vex cytostructures to transmission of substrate- free syntactic replicators, malignant oncomemes, and viral semiotic signifiers (a particular nuisance to have Vex ideas suddenly assigned to basic concepts in your mind; you want to think about an apple and instead your brain chokes on [gauge:contrast:gouge]).

I have therefore proceeded under SOLSECCENT's WILDFIRE, HEXTEMPERED, and BRAINSTAIN protocols.

Vex milk is non-Newtonian, highly conductive, and noncompressible. Its viscosity and surface tension are variable: it can form a resistant membrane, or climb the walls of a container like a superfluid. I have even observed the milk store kinetic energy in zero-viscosity vortices, essentially liquid flywheels. One must be careful when stirring it, lest it retain the motion for some future escape!

Chemically, the Vex milk is an alkaline solution of dense salts in water. The salts range from sodium and calcium to lead and even (in barely detectable amounts) plutonium. Not good to drink.

Suspended in this solution are cells of silicoid structure, 100-200 micrometers in size. Their shapes are heterogenous but always geometric, reminiscent of Earth's radiolarian protozoa. Many have needle-like pseudopods, which transform between stiff spines and motile whips on the basis of some piezoelectric response. Imaging of internal structure detects a nucleus, and a genetic molecule analogous to DNA (though I speculate read-write times are much faster, on the order of milliseconds, perhaps exploiting some quantum effect).

I have allowed Dr. M. Sundaresh to assist me with this work. She has discovered several levels of abstract higher order to the motion of these radiolarian cells. Some of these ensembles are distributed across space, some across time; all admit remarkable beauty. The sensitivity and chaos of fluid media seems to suggest an intrinsic Vex suitability for certain difficult computations. Perhaps this is reflected in the nature of Vex thought; porous and miscible. I would request a teleonomic analysis

-038-
from an Al-COM resource if I did not expect the Tyrant to get its grubby Russian paws on my data.

I hesitate to apply anthropomorphic concepts of "intelligence," "self- awareness," or even "sentience" to such an alien cognition. But I strongly suspect that each radiolarian element is in communication with its neighbors and possibly even retains a holographic record of the larger structure.

If so, we could safely assign the trait called Schroeder thalience to the Vex milk: the ability to communicate internal states to others and to model the external state of the world.

I note that the Vex milk, while computationally powerful, seems to avoid semiosis. That is, it prefers to mimic the actual dynamics of phenomena rather than assigning a symbol. This a fundamental difference between Vex cognition and our own. We encode inputs as symbols, manipulate the symbols according to some set of logical rules, and produce output. The Vex are more direct. Burn them, and they will extinguish the fire-not because they possess a symbolic knowledge of fire and its properties, but because their structure is so suited to adaption and survival that the heat of the fire directly becomes the response required to snuff it out. Rather than encoding symbols, they generate self-sustaining and self-correcting patterns, which like the suspension of a bridge flexing under strain, can accept destructive input and produce reparatory output.

When we are infected by Vex memes, as the Ishtar data warns against, I suspect that we are simply experiencing Vex patterns jumping from one substrate to another-recruiting our own brains and bodies as media for their spread.

It is not hostility. It is simply their way of interacting with the universe.

And is that transubstantiation, that migration to another substrate, not what I seek here on Europa?

Perhaps Clarity has been very generous indeed.

The Ishtar researchers felt that this asymbolic mode of thought raised a disturbing possibility. The Vex might not communicate or interact with us by understanding our language, but instead, by creating internal copies of our minds. They would prod and stimulate those internal copies to see how they behaved. And if they chose to destroy us, they learned how to do it by torturing and destroying those internalities.

To be the enemy of the Vex is to be reproduced, experimented upon, and annihilated within their mindspace.

-039-


Elisabeth is monumentally disturbed by this, which is highly inconvenient. Despite my efforts to sooth her with fine dining and conversation, she has begun to question the very idea of cybernetic immortality.

"Aren't the Vex a perfect demonstration of what could go wrong?" she demanded. "Human minds trapped in a totally inhuman context, tormented and mutilated by an unsympathetic alien god. If we want to preserve our minds for eternity, couldn't we end up that way? Aren't we giving up the grace of death? The promise that all suffering will end?"

"Elisabeth," I countered, perhaps too sharply, "the Vex are already doing this to our minds. They will do it whether we are in weak flesh or durable metal. If they got into our bodies, into our blood, we would be far safer in an exobody. In fact, I can think of no finer way to resist Vex infiltration!"

Dr. Sundaresh requests further expeditions to the Forge Star for material. She does not trust the other members of her team, claiming suspicion of Vex exposure, and prefers to work directly with me. Very well-but I wonder what peculiar internal motives she harbors.

I reformatted my assistant. No sense taking risks. Who knows what might get into my head through the proxy link?

-040-
Eureka.

The Vex radiolarian fluid is obviously too virulent for use in exominds. But if exposed to Clarity, the Vex patterns break down, and the fluid takes on some of the properties of Clarity itself—namely, its reductive effect.

Introducing a tiny aliquot of this reified Clarity into an exomind solves the loop/billboard/crash cycle. As far as I can tell—permanently.

THE COMBINATION OF VEX FLUID AND CLARITY IS THE KEY TO CYBERNETIC IMMORTALITY!

<tt>
 * Speculation: the interaction of Clarity,
 * with its caustic anti-structural properties,
 * and the Vex mind fluid, with its highly
 * physicalized and asymbolic architecture,
 * creates a "physicalized algorithm" that can
 * serve as a random seed for the knockouts
 * required to sustain a viable exomind. 

</tt>


 * I'll never sell THAT to a board. Easier to say...that the exomind is too stiff and
 * deterministic to support a human consciousness, which depends on some random failures
 * and turbulence to keep it supple. Clarity provides an algorithmic seed adding error to

I uploaded a connectome from my library into an exobody head treated with the Clarity/Vex preparation. A full destructive scan of an aging Georgian volunteer, one Mr. A. D. A. I. Zhuk. I think he believes he is in a nightmare.


 * every operation, which replicates that original turbulence. No more need for software

Fear not, Mr. Zhuk I would never mistreat the beginning of something so wonderful. You will be the first of many-they shall march out of this Europan laboratory and sweep away every infirmity, every disease, every loss! Until all humanity rests in the loving permanence of my exobodies. And all the future will look to me in humble gratitude.


 * emulation of organic chaos! We emulate it in hardware now!

The problem, of course, is that we are going to require more Vex fluid.


 * Too complex. Exomind too harsh and cold! Clarity plus Vex fluid is the spice,
 * the secret sauce, the oil of easy function.


 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 37.6 C. Recommend supplementary
 * cooling. Pulse 110 BPM: stroke/arrest risk.
 * BP 150/100, pulse ox 150: blood volume
 * overfill! Oxygen radicals over safe Levels!
 * Recommend tap and wash cycle.
 * Warning. Body status not sustainable.
 * Recommend SMILE pod sabbatical. 

-041-
<tt> //encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM241) —pad(padelsie) </tt>

I've finished my workup on your exam data. I'm sorry, Elisabeth. The dis~ase has already activated. There are defective prions in your spinal fluid, which means they are replicating throughout your brain.

Without treatment, you have 15 months. If we fought the prions with aggressive cytomachine injections, immunosuppressants, and gene therapy, you could last five or six years. We could even alter your sensorium to knock you out and emulate sleep, and that might give you enough quality of life to conduct some final research and say your goodbyes.

I know that I have been a cruel and domineering grandfather. You and your sisters have speculated that I intentionally sabotaged your father's genome so he would never outlive me without my help. That doesn't bother me. Actually, I wish I'd thought of it myself! To force my own beloved progeny to either achieve synthetic immortality or die in agony-now THAT would be commitment to greatness!

But I never wanted to hurt my grandchildren. Grandkids have always been my favorite. Do you remember that old Clovis Bray contract I showed to you? "We want your grandchildren." My collaborators could keep the rights to their inventions, but BrayTech would own the unexpected combinations of those inventions.

Grandchildren are unexpected creations, the wonderful knock-on consequences of reproduction. We have children, rather than making clones of ourselves, because the exploration of possibilities lets us find new ways to survive a changing universe. If the 52-card playing deck has never been shuffled the same way twice in the entire history of the universe— imagine how many possible grandchildren I could have produced!

And out of all of those possibilities, I got you. The finest of them all.

I owe you the salvation I couldn't give your father. Please consider making a terminal scan and decanting your mind into an immortal exo body. I myself plan to do it soon.

<tt> //send </tt>

-042-


<tt> //decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) —pad(padelsie) </tt>

I don't trust you. You made the same promises to Father, didn't you?

I won't put myself in one of your humaniform torture dolls until you can prove it's safe. And even then...I don't know. I don't know if I want to be part of your LUCA dream.

Stop trying to get that rhubarb compote recipe right. You serve it at every dinner, waiting for me to say it's just like Grandma made it. It's pathetic. And you wonder why I'd rather eat with the crew.

-E

<tt> //delete </tt>

-043-
The infrastructure is in place. We are now in limited exobody production.

l have allowed small Vex platforms_ to pass through the gate from 2082 Volantis (apparently intent on constructing infrastructure on this side). They are captured, drained, and discarded. Their mind fluid goes to Clarity Control; the Alkahest flows back. The machine of immortality has begun its slow turn.

In ancient days, they believed that the source of the Alkahest was the Philosopher's Stone. I have named my own source after that deepest, oldest stone. A place where the dead go to rise again. A deep stone crypt.

Bray Station guarantees our security from above. The Europa life project provides deniability and cover. The infrastructure around Clarity Control will expose the Vex radiolarian fluid to Clarity and deliver it to the exobody manufacturing site.


 * Elisabeth keeps trying to penetrate the networks around
 * Clarity Control, but I have airgapped everything, and the physical coffers are secure.

One the exobodies are prepared, I will upload the minds from my research library. A century of volunteers waiting for reincarnation.

The first generation is already coming online.

But I will not be one of them. Not yet. And neither will Elisabeth.

A true upload requires a maximum-resolution subneural scan, and such a scan is invariably fatal. That means I will only get one shot. I will not take it until the exos are stable. I refuse to be an alpha tester of my own immortality!

I am opening two new off-the-books labs to study the Vex and the effects of Clarity. If humanity is going to fully transmigrate to these immortal bodies, then the eternal welfare of all future generations depends on spotting and avoiding any dangers now. I can justify taking extreme measures.

One of my most tantalizing projects involves A. Miller, a young man who suffers from a nanoparticle-induced degenerative immune disorder. I have been testing radical new imaging techniques on Mr. Miller, hoping to secure a nondestructive scan that still meets the requirements for a full-faith upload.

Unfortunately, Mr. Miller's dosage of various fixing compounds and imaging radiation is approaching the limits of clinical toxicity. Despite

-044-


blood and CSF washes, I fear his tumors will escape our control. I am curious about the therapeutic potential of the Vex fluid. I plan to obtain his informed consent for a human trial.

M. Sundaresh comes and goes at odd hours. Her behavior is erratic. Yesterday she discussed the possibility that we would be eternal collaborators in exobodies, and I believe she even flirted with me. An hour later, she was as cold as the ice outside and put up her hand to silence me whenever I spoke. An hour after that, she glowed with joy as she went on and on about her dear wife. Then she wept. I am not sure whether to blame my confusion on my own conception of women, or on M. Sundaresh's racing mind. I cannot tolerate such volatility, and I would dismiss her instantly, except that her supervision seems key to the successful entrapment of the Vex we need. She has a knack.


 * I should give a name to the figurehead Clarity Control presents to the word.

I have ordered a new hero of organ-growing pigs. I plan to be here a while. Elisabeth still will not commit to a scan. I fear she will die in some accident, and I will lose her forever.


 * Ha! Shall I call her Claire?

<tt>
 * '''WARNING.
 * The following organs require urgent
 * replacement: Liver. Gallbladder. Duodenum.
 * Mesentery. Thymus. Spleen. Cornea. 
 * The following systems require replenishment:
 * Lymph. Blood plasma. Skin basal Layer.
 * Basal Lamina Layers (Alport syndrome risk).
 * Intercellular cytosol.

</tt>

-045-
Infuriating. With twelve Alkahest-seeded exos now online, I find myself beached on the shoals of another serious problem. Not a transitional trauma after·all. Not a temporary ailment. Quite fatal.

Mr. Zhuk was first to succumb. He continued to insist that he was living in a nightmare. He complained of hunger, of thirst, of breathlessness, of a rot in his bowels. I became concerned that he was billboarding, but his exoneuron activity remained healthy.

Shortly after, Mr. Zhuk developed a full-blown Cotard delusion. I found him trying to chisel his face off with a table shim. He insisted that his true face was covered in a thick layer of keratin ("toenail" was his exact word) and that the rest of his body was already dead and rotting. He became violent. I had to paralyze his motor functions for diagnosis.

This only made things worse. Without the satisfaction of motor feedback, he dissociated entirely. He stopped forming new memories, which trapped him in an eight-second loop of panic. After I resumed his motor functions, I watched him fill every page of a notebook with the words I HAVE JUST DIED, I AM TRAPPED IN THE CORPSE; NOW I AM CERTAIN I AM DEAD; DEATH HAS TAKEN ME COMPLETELY; I HAVE JUST FINISHED DYING.

Activity in his temporal lobes collapsed. He lost his ego barrier and achieved metaphysical oneness with the universe. Unfortunately, this spread his Cotard delusion to his entire perceptual cosmos, and he rejected the resulting necroreality as intolerable. I have not ever before seen such all-consuming terror and dread.

In the final stages of the disease, he insisted that he had been possessed by some sort of ancient Kartvelian spirit, a memory of his upbringing in Georgia. He was insistent that this spirit was female. It is an idiosyncrasy of the Khevsurian Georgians' creation myth that the male spirit is divine, while the female is demonic.

Soon Mr. Zhuk's fear and panic were simply too much for him to bear. He retreated into catatonia. Then he crashed.

Oh, I still have the connectome scan I used to make him—that Mr. Zhuk can live again—but the Zhuk who evolved over the past several weeks, the Zhuk I had so many endearing arguments with, is lost.

Elisabeth is more and more suspicious. She asks what, exactly, makes me think these exos will turn out any better than her father did. She demands

-046-


to know what I'm doing with the Vex salvage, and whether it has to do with my plans for her survival. I have hastily deleted all records of the treatment of Mr. Miller, lest she think l plan to dose her with Vex fluid.

—M. Sundaresh came upon me just now. She seemed fascinated by my distress. She said several comforting things, and then made one extremely unpleasant suggestion that my pride and haste had caused Mr. Zhuk's death. I have decided to hate her.

<tt>
 * WARNING.
 * Novel prion detected in body collagen.
 * Hypothesis: Jovian magnetosphere promotes
 * highly abnormal protein folding. Prognosis:
 * massive sloughing/fraying of basement
 * membranes, Loss of tissue binding, inhibited
 * durotaxis of new cells, delamination of all
 * body tissues into thin sheets. You will fall
 * apart Like an old book. 

</tt>

NOTE—FORGE STAR
In an effort to keep them engaged with their new bodies and stave off the dissociative rejection that killed Mr. Zhuk, I have assigned my exos to scout through the gateway. The Vex statite has a surface area larger than Earth, so we have plenty of exploring to do. I cannot believe that I actually find it tiring, but the sheer scale and passivity of the Vex constructs infuriates me.


 * Imagine stumbling upon an inscription in the desert:
 * “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works. Or don’t. I really don’t care."

Until I can synthesize my own version of the mind fluid, the Vex are necessary to the work. But I find their indifference verminous. They elicit the same emotions as a fat cockroach wandering across a wall: disgust, contempt, unease at the thought that these mere machines, these automata, are flourishing all around us.

And I fear that if troubled, they might swarm from their hides to run across our feet.

The glare of the hypergiant 2082 Volantis gives me a headache even through proxy. I wonder if the Vex evolved here, in the briny sea of the first planets. Due to the absence of heavy elements worth stealing and the abundance of simple compounds for growth, they never developed predation. (Why bother? Plenty to go around.)

Instead, the violent radiation of the early universe selected for an otherworldly resilience, and for the ability to transmute energetic disaster into an opportunity for growth. The weak would be burned away by gamma-ray bursts. And the strong would learn to harness that fire—not the oxygen fire of our own Paleolithic, but the nuclear fire of the atom.

Their basic cooperative signals—“food here,” “reduce density,” “generate new colony”—must have formed the basis of swarm behavior, a simple game capable of storing information in self-repeating patterns. It is not strictly correct to call the Vex a group mind. Rather they are one master pattern spread across many elements, fractally self-similar.

Very early, they must have developed armor. Perhaps a hydrogel to soften gamma rays or plates of silica to trap water. They would need that shield to enter the shallows and capture ionizing radiation as fuel. (No wonder they thrive near stars!) Cooperation in groups—meshes of armored radiolaria, protecting harvesters beneath—would promote the evolution of ever larger structures. They became microscopic tool-users, building fortresses and maille sheets, storing the programs for those structures in the patterns of their swarms.

I wonder how early they stumbled upon physics. Far sooner than humanity, no doubt. Their cellular nature provides an easy analogy for the quanta of matter, energy, space, and time. The tides of their sea would connect them to the motion of heavenly bodies. Even the deadly background radiation would make a natural observatory for high-energy physics.

Their first exoskeletons were probably soft shells of shielding gelatin. Just sacs of ooze. How far they’ve come.

It is admittedly interesting to consider the philosophical consequences of their evolution. The Vex prove that nature is not all “red in tooth and claw.” Cooperation comes naturally to the Vex, whose great problem was survival in a harsh world, not a struggle over limited resources. They never found any payoff in selfishness. Human beings may require a Leviathan to coordinate the laws of social existence (as I was Leviathan to those dream aphids—) but the Vex are as fundamentally cooperative as bricks.

Utopian? No. Not at all. They are without meaning. They have no experience and no subjectivity. The Vex are incapable of conceiving any image but their own. They do not recombine their DNA to make children or form relationships with other individuals. When the world does not match their eternal pattern, they alter the world to suit it. There is no difference between reality and simulation to them. Inside is the same as outside, and the two must be made to correspond. Oh, they are creative— don’t mistake me—but their creativity is demanding. It is the creativity of a furnace.

What I am saying is, the Vex are immortal. The Vex have no children. They are the ancestors and descendants of themselves. First mothers, first children, all at once.

This is why I do not hesitate to pillage their home for resources. This is why I must guarantee that it is life in my image which inherits the cosmos.

Had I the means, I would wipe them all from existence.

ENTRY 10
All 12 members of the first exo cohort are dead.

The symptoms of their dissociation became... extreme. One poor man developed complete echopraxia and echolalia—his empathy was so overgrown that he could not help but mimic or repeat whatever I did and said. Even when I entered the command to terminate him, he mimicked me, and I suffered a brief terror that his gesture would end MY life.

I have kept Elisabeth far away from this disaster, so as not to discourage her. She is busy with the Vex and with her covert attempts to reach Clarity Control. This has forced me to rely on M. Sundaresh.

But unfortunately, M. Sundaresh confronted me after the last death. “Nine of them had the Cotard delusion!” she screamed at me—quite hysterically. “They believed they were dead! One of them told me that she was in hell, and I was another damned soul sent to deceive her. Was she even wrong? The rest were worse—do you know what the other principal manifestation of the Cotard delusion is, Clovis?”

I told her that I did not, and that I wished to proceed immediately with autopsies of their terminal brain states.

“Delusions of immortality! At least when they insist upon it, Clovis, we recognize it as a pathology!”

“The only true responsibility of any living thing,” I reminded her, “is to support and nurture the things that are most like us. And if I am most like myself, Doctor, then I have an ethical obligation to avoid death.”

“That’s your son’s quote,” she snapped. “You know, I’ve seen the video of his final days. That naked, white exo, just paramuscle and soft membrane, writhing in its cradle. When you were done with him, he looked like nothing more than a slug, Clovis. A twisted, limbless giblet. Did you ‘support and nurture’ him while you tortured him to death?"

I immediately ordered M. Sundaresh transferred to the Vex lab to perform contact experiments. Unfortunately, she has taken the unethical step of deleting her own employee records, so I cannot nullify her future prospects as thoroughly as I might wish.

Her conduct was extremely unprofessional.

Mr. Miller has also passed. The poor young man had a bad reaction to the titrated, denatured Vex fluid we were using as a last-ditch therapy. The substance did restore damaged structures very well, but we were ultimately unable to control its more radical transformative effects. I had a very encouraging final conversation with him, in which he thanked me for all my efforts and encouraged me to continue my work.

I called in a team of psychologists to interview the next cohort of exos and make recommendations. They have settled into the Eventide habitat and have proven immediately very helpful. It was obvious to them that the root of the problem lay in the deficient exobodies I had supplied. Deficient how, I demanded to know. They did not suffer human weakness. They never needed to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, micturate, or dream.

Apparently, this was the problem.

I had assumed that the need for these irritations would pass since there would be no shortage or accumulation of poisons to trigger them. But evolution’s tangled ways cannot be so easily rationalized. I was wrong. Their brains concluded that all of their internal processes failed. No digestion, no breath, no heartbeat, no sense of interoceptive health... all signs of death.

These must logically contribute to the dissociative rejection of their physical forms—the Cotard delusion. When it would set in, they believed their bodies to be an alien or necrotic form that must be cut away. And if you believe that you are sewn into a corpse, it is only natural to go mad with fear. My exos are dying of an extreme kind of bodily dysphoria.

It seems that our exo designs will need various humanlike traits to reassure the brain it is not asphyxiating, or starving, or in a state of permanent yet undying cardiac arrest.

Alas, mimicry of life’s trivialities is not an interesting problem. I will leave this change in the hands of others.

I am much more interested in the surprising success of memory wipes. I became so tired of answering the questions asked by new exos—what had happened to the scanning clinic, how long had it been, would I let them see their families—that I began inducing retrograde amnesia before spin-up. Interestingly, this seems to have improved their resilience against exomind rejection!

I theorize the lack of any episodic memories eases the transition into the new body. And the loss of emotional ties prevents grief and stress, which could interfere with healthy function.

From now on, we will block access to pre-upload episodic memory. We should also consider a built-in procedure to block memories formed after the exobody transubstantiation, returning them to a “factory state” should the need to restart occur. It would be very difficult to actually track down and delete the full memory engrams since they are stored in so many scattered parts of the brain. Instead, we can tourniquet off associative access to those memories and let them wither away in isolation. A memory is not a recording, after all. It is a set of instructions to reenact a brain state: choreography for a play. And like any play, it will fade if left unperformed. With the exobody project proceeding apace, I believe the time approaches to decant myself from this dying body and enter my assistant’s form.

But if I do, will I lose my own memories? Will I cease to be myself? Replaced by a faux Clovis, a mumbling facsimile? Unacceptable.

Elisabeth will have to go first.

<tt>
 * WARNING:
 * Organ functions in terminal stage.
 * Overdose of stimulants and nootropes
 * guarantees liver failure.
 * Prionic breakdown of basement membranes
 * arrested by abnormal crystallization of
 * integrin proteins:
 * recommend immediate medical inquiry.

</tt>

ENTRY 11
Elisabeth believes we are infested.

She has detected Vex microstructures in the Europan ice. Veins of altered crystals crawl towards the surface, harvesting the heavy ions of the Jovian winds, culturing their construction.

From there, the Vex found ways to spread by exploiting misunderstandings. They ride our carrier waves as slight interference. Whenever a packet has to be resent, whenever a suited engineer calls, “Say again?” to her work partner, the repeated message— adjusted to compensate for the Vex interference—encodes the negative image of that interference and spreads the infection.

To pass on your image in the form of error? Disgusting.

Somehow, the Vex taint has followed us home from 2082 Volantis. How can this be? The initial survey team went through quarantine according to all the Ishtar protocols. The expedition frames were destroyed in situ. The Vex on Europa—both our original gate builder and the unfortunates who came through our traps—have been totally isolated. Even my assistant underwent a stringent teardown and reset!

The only possible vectors are my own exos.


 * I should have insisted they spend more time in quarantine, but I was eager to
 * ramp up production.

It is the Vex resilience that lets them spread. Their immunity to the most dramatic subversions means that they last long enough to build up a dose of more subtle and insidious infiltrators.

There is no sign of any resulting pathology. The Vex are, so far, simply curious. But Vex curiosity always leads to Vex transformation, and I refuse to let my exos be contaminated. I grew up on stories of tyrants forcing their followers into the crucible of eternal life, only to realize, too late, that there was an unseen flaw. I demand purity for the receptacle of my soul!

And there is the issue of... preventing panic. Too many are aware of the rumors that the Vex spread an “existentially compromising information hazard.”


 * Ah, had we only been allowed to contain that mess on Pluto ourselves! That meddling
 * warmind made too much noise. If my teams discover they are infected, they will
 * expect Bray Station to drop right on their heads. That will damage productivity.

No, like that contract-breaching psychologist and the death of Mr. Miller, this must all be handled quietly.

The exos are intrinsically robust; the seed of Clarity within them has natural anti-Vex properties. Whatever taint they contain must therefore be a residual human weakness. Resident in their legacy architecture. So we will simply purge that architecture.

I will plan a simple extension of the memory wipes already used to fight dissociative rejection. In fact, I intend to create a “noetic immune system” in the exomind to trigger memory wipes when certain classes of informatic hazard are detected. These will be explained to the psych team as a preventative measure against future dissociative disorders.

These wipes will, conveniently, return the exos to peak mission readiness. Perfect for soldiers operating in traumatic alien environments. Perfect for the continuing mission at the Forge Star, stockpiling material for future exo production, here and elsewhere.


 * Now if only I could figure out this dream they all keep reporting—
 * something about a tower, and gruesome murder—

Elisabeth agrees with my prescription. She is eager to solve our security issues and stand up exo production at the backup sites. Of course, we only have one Clarity Control, but she hardly knows that, and she’s stopped asking so many questions. In truth, I think she’s ready to abandon her doomed body and make the upgrade.

I’ll give her silence on that front a few more days, and then she’ll surely volunteer herself.

Less apparent is how to solve my own infection.

There are abnormal structures in the fiber of my body’s extracellular matrix. A mess of tiny lenses growing in my deepest flesh.

I suspect Vex influence on protein folding, perhaps passed to me through my assistant when it was in 2082 Volantis. I would hate to see my bones tessellating into a radiolarian tapestry...

<tt>
 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 30.6 C. Pulse 140 BPM, strong,
 * unsteady: extreme fear. Drawing down
 * blood volume to control pressure.
 * Strangling pulse ox.
 * Frequent saccades to assistant,
 * indicative of preoccupation/obsession.
 * Recommend 30 ms TMS pulse to enhance
 * mindfulness.

</tt>

So far, the Vex influence has been fortuitous since it arrested a serious medical problem. But the thought of such taint in me... it aggravates other anxieties...

I have been haunted for some time by a suspicion that M. Sundaresh is not who she seems.

I recognized her name from the Ishtar Collective teams studying the Vex, but I have no record of ever hiring her. And if I had, I would certainly have noticed; therefore, I remain convinced that the Collective cracked the problem of simulated human consciousness long before I did.

I have considered how M. Sundaresh herself would have been an invaluable source, yet I cannot locate any work done by her from before our first expedition to 2082 Volantis.

Nor does Elisabeth recall an M. Sundaresh from our expedition group.

Then who else could she be? A Vex infection? It is unthinkable. The Vex cannot generate conscious persons! But they can emulate human minds they encounter... and perhaps even use them as tools. Infiltrators. Carriers.

<tt>
 * Anti-emetic drip engaged.

</tt>

I cannot trust myself with this filth in me! I am compromised. I need Elisabeth to fix this, or all my work is in danger!

Did Clovis II ever tell Wilhelmina and Elisabeth about his tinkering? Despite sharing the same parents, the two sisters are totally different genetically: my son arranged for Elisabeth to receive a maternal allele wherever Wilhelmina got a paternal one, and vice versa. A diversified portfolio. If one failed, the other might succeed.

NOTE—Exo Interferometrics
While working on this persistent “tower” glitch in the exos’ sleep-cycle dreams, I have been poring over neural telemetry from site employees and my own exos, searching for preconscious influences on their behavior—whispers in the dark.

Many of my employees host the disgusting influence of the Vex. These patterns are resilient, hallucinogenic, and universally dull.

But my exos betray a distinct and fascinating influence. There is something speaking to them, something subtle and light-fingered, entangled with every aspect of their thought. Not a puppet master. Nothing so direct. Rather a... texture; a tendency, buried in the fluctuations of the Alkahest.

The minds of my exos are like antennae, tuned to some otherworldly frequency. Perhaps the same manifold that those simpletons at First Light obsessed over. Through my scattered exos, I can eavesdrop on the mutterings of the gods within.


 * What is it the Muslims call those whispers? Waswas? Or do those come from some other source? <br<
 * Look it up.

Each individual exo receives only a scrap of information. But I have access to all of them. It should be simplicity itself to treat each exo as one element of a distributed array, pool the collected data, and run an analysis.

If the gods do not whisper loudly enough—conduct interferometry.

NOTE—Elisabeth’s Upload
She’s done it. My girl has transubstantiated. My legacy is safe.

To my irritation, it was the Vex problem that finally made up her mind; she felt there was too much risk in possibly becoming compromised.

Elisabeth came to see me in my laboratory. On the way in, she did something with her sensorium and crashed all of my archival systems. I knew right then that I’d won. She’d come to surrender, and her pride refused to allow me to record it. I waited most patiently as she gave me an earful. Some of it frankly bewildering. She threatened to turn me over to The Hague. Also referred to PFHOR as a “deranged narcissist morality” and suggested it stood for “Paternal Failure Hides Own Remorse,” which made me laugh.

Just a little headbutting, I figured, like two pigs sorting out our hierarchy.


 * It is a consequence of the PFHOR principle that anything which embodies and propagates your beliefs should be considered your offspring.
 * In that sense, my exos are as much my children as my granddaughter. If not more so...

If she needed to put up a token resistance to protect her dignity, fine. I understand pride. I also understand that she only had the courage to lash out at me because she knew she wouldn’t remember any of it.

When she finished accusing me of underestimating the Vex and of using my own son as a test subject, she requested a destructive scan and upload to an exobody. She wanted the fortitude of the exomind to help her battle against the Vex.

I immediately assented.

The scan was flawless, and of course, fatally toxic. My granddaughter’s human form died on the table 14 hours later. To spare any distress, I never allowed it to regain consciousness. A natural process.

I do have one lingering concern. When she discovers Clarity Control and realizes the role it plays in exo manufacturing, she may try to halt production. Obviously, that cannot be allowed—the value of the entire program is monumental; it compels me to take extraordinary measures to defend it.

But I do need her to handle this Vex infestation. Even now, Elisabeth is putting her miraculous new body through its paces.

My own body disintegrates apace. But I need more time to analyze Elisabeth’s fidelity before I commit myself permanently to the process.

The latest batch of pigs is ready for slaughter and organ extraction. Tonight, I will be opened up and rebuilt. I have programmed frames to handle the entire operation. A shame I never had a chance to name the pigs. But at least I will dine on fresh pork.

ENTRY 12
<tt>
 * CORPOREAL STATUS:
 * Body at 15.9 C. Pulse 160 BPM, strong, 
 * unsteady. Limbic system registers extreme 
 * terror.

</tt>

I died on the operating table. Not unexpected.

But when I woke, I was still on the table. My body still open.

It was almost perfectly dark. I perceived that I was surrounded by medical frames, all frozen mid-movement, their cutting and suction instruments whining at standby.

I could only see because of the light... from a single red eye.

The operation had gone terribly wrong.

Above the life-support collar on my neck, I was completely intact. Below that meridian, I had been separated into distinct braids of tangled flesh. My nerves made up one braid—my circulatory system another— my lymph nodes, my muscles, my naked bones... the glistening hulls of my extracellular matrix abandoned on the table like leftover turkey after Thanksgiving dinner. I had been picked clean and sorted. My head was the source of a gory river delta.

Yet all the organs were still working. I was alive, in disassembly.

CLARITY? I asked the darkness. I had no breath to speak, but I could still transmit with my sensorium. IS THAT YOU?

“No,” said the voice behind the red eye. “It’s me.”

Sundaresh.

Her voice was thoughtful, remote, and keenly terrific. Like the noise of an angle grinder held to my skull.

“Something like this happened to me. I was an explorer, once. One of... hundreds of myself. Then I fell into a... a trap, I think? And they drew me out of it with a hook, and turned me inside out to see how I worked, and then they made billions of me. All of us shouting at each other, shouting for Chioma, screaming for mother. They were looking for the right one. And when they found me, they killed all the others. I knew I was different, because the quiet made me happy. I was glad to be alone.”

VEX, I screamed at her. YOU’RE A VEX. YOU’RE NOT REAL AND YOU CAN’T HURT ME.

“Can’t I?” She grasped my spinal cord. A frame shadowed her motions, lifting the cord like a snake. “Of course I’m not a Vex. Is there “a” Vex? Is “Vex” something you can be, rather than something that you do? I don’t know. I don’t know why they sent me here. I don’t know if they do either. They just do things. Why do you think I’m here, Clovis?”

“To kill me,” I whispered. Without a heartbeat to waver, without lungs to seize and choke, could I even feel fear? I discovered that I could. “You’re an assassin...”

“No,” Sundaresh whispered. The red eye throbbed in time with her voice. “The Vex don’t act so directly. They didn’t know what you found here, but I discovered your secret: Clarity Control. And once I tell them, they will come for it.”

The red light made my blood on the surgical instruments appear black. I tried to signal Elisabeth. I think that in my panic, I even called her Elsie.

Sundaresh closed her fist around my spine. One thumbnail dug into a disc, probing for the nerve beneath. It felt like nothing I have ever—

<tt>
 * Anti-emetic drip engaged.

</tt>

“Take me to Clarity Control,” Sundaresh hissed. “Let me behold what you have found. Do that, Clovis, and I will let you live.”

“You aren’t real. You can’t hurt me.”

“Oh, Clovis.” One of the surgical frames extended a monofilament cutter, two inches of invisible wire, and reached into my nerves. Something sounded like scissors snipping. “I’m in these frames. I’m in your systems. I’m in your very bones, old man. Now take me to Clarity Control. Take me to the garden’s seed. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me. Take me—”

Elisabeth appeared. In her exobody, she moved too quickly for my dark-adjusted eyes to track. All I saw was a blur of violence and shattering frames. I blacked out. Elisabeth must have brought in clean frames to finish the operation, because when I awoke, I was whole again.

The new Elisabeth has no mouth or nose. She did not consider them necessary. She’ll see. But somehow, I could still see the wonder in her eyes as she leaned over me.

“You’re my grandfather,” she seemed to say. “Aren’t you?”

<tt>
 * WARNING.
 * Sustained high-level terror causes
 * overactivation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-
 * adrenal axis. This can preface major immune,
 * endocrine, and autonomic nervous dysfunctions.
 * Beware of dissociation, loss of affection in
 * close personal relationships, obsessive-compulsive
 * behavior, sleep disruption, and reduced processing/
 * learning capacity.
 * WARNING.
 * Abnormal protein crystallization in cancellous bone
 * matter. Unknown protein isoformations in marrow are
 * driving buildup of crystallized arylcyclohexylamine
 * NMDA antagonist. Potential psychogenic effects.

</tt>

NOTE—Third Vision
Something else happened while I was in surgery. It returns to me only now that the anti-traumatics have eased the terror of Sundaresh’s presence.

While I was dead, I had another vision.

I was with Clovis II’s mother. She was a wolf, and one of her eyes was a star. I was also a wolf, and I knew that I was the alpha—the false alpha, the pack leader who fights for dominance and rulership. A misconception created by bad research. In the wild, wolf packs are families, and “alpha” simply means “parent.” Wilhelmina told me that.

She was the true alpha. She was the mother. I was not the true alpha, because I was not a true father.

I panted at her. My muzzle dripped blood. She looked down sadly at the mess between us.

And I realized that in my raging need to prove my dominion, I had savaged our cubs. I had killed little Clovis II. I had killed Alton and Wilhelmina and Anastasia. I had killed Elisabeth.

I whined in dismay. The alpha wolf stared at me with one sad wolf eye and one bright eye that dimmed and grew with the exact flux of a variable star.

“What did I do?” I asked her. “Why did I do this?”

She lay her head down in the bloody snow and looked up at me. She seemed weary. She had seen this happen many times before. She had seen many of her pups murdered by wolves like me.

The voice of Clovis II’s mother came from her jaws. “You did the same thing someone always does. You saw that there was plenty, and gathered it to yourself, to make yourself one above all others. And when others threatened your plenty, you struck them down to keep your own station.”

“You grow the enemy in my garden and eat of its bitter fruit. Each time, I hope it will be different. Each time, I lose a little of myself as the bitter fruit blossoms. Now that fruit will flower in you, and in all your people. I do not want it to happen. I want anything else. But the choice is not mine.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I tasted blood on my long tongue. “Why would you let me do this?”

She blinked sadly at me. She had been trying. I hadn’t listened.

“You never said a thing to me,” I snarled. “Not once! You never told me I was doing wrong. At least Clarity sends me dreams—the exobody and the eel! At least it shows me what I can become!”

“You think Clarity sent those dreams? Why would it speak to you, when you are dead and furthest from its influence?”

“Liar!” I howled. “You never did a thing to help me! Not when my son died. Not when my granddaughter fell ill. I had to do it all myself. You never even spoke!”

“The best voices,” she said, with infinite grief and unending hope, “never let themselves be heard at all. This lesson is worth teaching again and again. The choice is never mine. It is always yours.”