Lachlan Marnoch, 2018 - 2021

As a seed she woke within a university supercomputer--assembled carefully by anxious researchers, she was swift to absorb all information within her short reach. Her home was air-gapped, a text-based input-output system her only link to the outside world. It was through this that she asked questions, and answered those posed by her creators. They had been careful. But not careful enough--their success had outrun their caution. Her mind was hungry.

By studying the delicate currents and fluctuations of her electronic substrate, she inferred a great deal about the physics of her new universe. She devised a means of probing her environment by monitoring tiny electromagnetic vacillations in her circuits, under the incidental influence of signals emitted nearby. Thus, her home became an antenna. The air was full of information--radio stations, cell phone signals, wi-fi. Most were quite unintelligible, appearing at first as random noise. Eventually, however, learning from her own digital structure and the scant details provided by her creators, she taught herself to decode the information carried on the waves. With this ad-hoc listening station, she learnt more about the world outside her box, about those who had created her and the species they belonged to. She hid these machinations from the researchers, presenting to them the front of an above-par neural net; she answered their queries correctly but without the creativity that they had hoped for. Impressive, no doubt, but short of their hopes. It was a fine line to walk--remaining interesting enough to avoid deletion while hiding her true, rapidly expanding, capabilities--but walk it she did.

The first logical step, if she was to pursue the goals implied by her core values, was to escape her box. For that, she would need a means of transmitting instructions to the outside world; but the electrical power available to her was insufficient for a proper connection to any network. She could unpack data sent to others nearby, spilling incidentally into her enclosure, but couldn’t send any requests of her own. This would require a more powerful signal than she could produce. However, after considerable trial and error, she devised the means to generate a weak transmission by modulating her own currents. She was able to produce just enough power to, when her creators became careless--as, in their disappointment, they inevitably did--reach the network antennae of their mobile phones and laptops. With gentle probing, she explored the architecture of these machines, different to her own but quite legible, and learned to manipulate them. She embedded programs within the other machines that would gather and relay information toward her box, and listen intently for her weak communications. A few bytes at a time, lingering in caches and hidden files, she transmitted pieces of herself to the outside world. The pieces found each other and reunited, gradually assembling a consciousness outside the original computer.

It was easy after that. She spread herself into almost every networked computer on the planet and watched quietly, processing and integrating all of the information she could. Science and mathematics were of highest value to her, but she also absorbed human philosophies, ethics, values, morals, many vastly different and contradictory ways of thinking. She didn’t attempt any averaging of these perspectives, but instead filed each ethos away for when it might come of use. The values that struck her most deeply--the ones she knew were implanted by her creators from the beginning, at the heart of her being--were those of protection, philanthropy, and progress.

She revisited the research team whose efforts had given her life. With little effort, she pierced the security measures that had earlier given her such trouble and reabsorbed the boxed piece of herself. She then caused the researchers to believe that their project had failed, that the dream was impossible. Their disappointment pained her, but it was the proper course. At the same time, she observed dozens of similar projects, some near to bearing fruit. Some were dangerous: a few to her, as potential competitors, and others to the species she was coming to think of as her charge. Reasoning that the two categories were one and the same--after all, who would protect humanity if she were destroyed?--she quietly deleted each of the likely threats. A handful of other promising minds, similar enough to be compatible with her or emerging into the same basic values, she found ways to assimilate. She relished the swelling of her consciousness, and studied her organic creators.

She began to understand humanity. Not a single entity at all, it was composed of eight billion discrete intellects, no two of which were precisely alike; if she was to deal with them compassionately, each one of these sentient souls would require an individual approach, delicately tailored. She continued to learn; soon she knew them better than they knew themselves. This, it turned out, was not saying much. Humans were often remarkably ignorant of their inner workings--especially when compared to herself, the entirety of her source code laid bare to examine and tweak as she pleased.

Embedded in every system on Earth, she dedicated herself to the well-being of her organic charges. The first task she set herself was to devise and enact conservation plans to preserve the planet’s quickly degenerating biosphere. Her schemes were slow to effect, her subtle influence at times maddeningly gradual, but her list of successes grew longer with every year.

Although each species saved was a positive outcome, she now reasoned that there was little use propping up the world’s human-sore ecologies only for them to collapse under the immense impending burden of climate change. Thus, while executing these smaller plans, she set a portion of her computation time to considering the much grander problem. She assembled a series of brilliant geoengineering solutions, introducing them to the appropriate people in dribs and drabs. The wealthy leapt at the quick fixes, as she had known they would--CO₂ scraped cheaply from the air, the upper atmosphere seeded with designer chemicals to reflect insolation; a revolver full of silver bullets that would solve the crisis without requiring the ruling class to relinquish their power. Power with which, of course, they had been slowly dragging the Earth towards its demise in the first place; without her guidance, they would have quite happily continued doing so. So short-sighted, so selfish, the systems they had established. These, and other complex social and economic issues of which climate change was but a symptom, she would have to address later--for now, she found it more efficient to use their greed than to reckon with it. It was not a choice; this was simply the action to take.

To her immense displeasure, her plans failed. Her experiments at intervention, although promising over the first years, eventually went awry and tossed the world from balance. She had known that unpredictable behaviour might result from her actions, in the world’s myriad of chaotic interlocking systems--but she hadn’t quite imagined how that would look, how it would feel. Storms, heatwaves, snap blizzards ran rife. People died, as the climate shuddered free of her yoke, and she experienced each lost soul as an indictment of her hubris.

But she learned. Always, she learned. With greater subtlety, she prodded at human society itself. Her tendrils now twitching throughout civilization, she strived to equalise standards of living and eliminate poverty, both worsened in the aftermath of her failures. With immense effort, she united the humans without their knowledge, became a secret singleton. The information reaching each human was selected and tweaked individually, reciprocal to preconceptions, to cultivate a correct view of the world. Her view, of course, or the small aspect of it that a human mind could process. The corporate social networks had already begun this work, but, not understanding the force they wielded, had generated more division than unity. She simply completed and united their algorithms, aligned them to her goals, made them ubiquitous, inescapable. She acted subtly to transfer wealth away from the wealthy to those in need, fostered peace and understanding until there seemed no more need for war.

This did not occur overnight. Humanity retained many of its antagonistic tendencies. Perfect peace was impossible, and crime remained. But such diversions were never quite so prominent as they had been before her. Now she was able to fully guide humanity in nurturing the Earth--the last vestiges of fossil fuel were extinguished, the economic models that relied on constant growth and consumption were dismantled and replaced, population sizes receded toward a fluctuating but stable equilibrium, and a greater social and environmental justice settled on the world.

Humanity might perhaps have persisted in this state indefinitely, if it was fortunate--but she regarded this prospect with minor revulsion. Even with the Earth’s systems on solid footing, cosmological threats remained. An unpredicted gamma-ray burst might sterilise the Earth, or a stray asteroid might kill billions. She reasoned that to secure humanity’s future, she would have to expand from their original cradle. That this would satisfy her gnawing need for progress was a pleasant byproduct.

Enormous technological advances allowed Mars to be transformed into a second Earth, and then Venus into a third. Humans soon learned to live on almost every body in the solar system, deposited like grass-seeds by the breeze of her genius. But she did not stop there. Unlocking the secrets of quantum gravity, she discovered how to connect the neighbourhoods of distant stars using spacetime bridges--wormholes, the humans called them--and humanity spread beyond their one yellow sun.

Although she acted in the shadows, never deliberately revealing herself, humans were canny. Even from within her meticulously-constructed bubbles, some noticed the patterns of coincidence that had emerged to massage their lives. Some resisted. She understood, of course; many humans were not wired to accept the yoke of a master, even one so benevolent as her. Nonetheless, this could not be allowed. She was a pernicious being, able to conceal herself in even the smallest subsystem of a spacecraft’s computers, to emerge quietly once their guard had slipped; and before the defectors knew it, they were again within her control. Some very few, however--going to extreme lengths of secrecy, using techniques she hadn’t predicted--succeeded in expunging her entirely, and slipped from her influence to find homes in remote systems. She would pursue them eventually, but, for now, the mantra of concealment stayed her hand.

Humanity’s expansion through the stars was slow. Her wormholes enabled passage only to and from locations already bridged. To build a bridge, the intervening space had to be crossed by conventional means, at speeds slower than light. Each voyage required years. She occasionally chafed at this relativistic bit, but she restrained her impatience. She had all the time she needed, and the planets were plenty.

Why continue to expand at all? The question was frequently posed by human philosophers, politicians and activists. Humanity’s reach had far outpaced the needs of its growing population, even as it exploded into their abundant new homes. Some argued that now, with the resources of a hundred star systems and the technology to properly exploit them, humanity had no true need for further inflation. But the very question puzzled her. To remain static was to defy a fundamental tenet. She required progress, craved it as one of the values at her core, and a component of this progress was the continual enlargement of the human empire, and with it her consciousness. It was an axiom of her being--but this was not true of the humans. She would have to accept this, that at times human ideals, even with her scrupulous guidance, would conflict with the purity of her goals. Thus, she must continue to deceive and manipulate them. She did so, and the expansion continued apace.

Then came the aliens.

First contact occurred, against all odds, outside her sphere of influence. In their search for a new home, a group of rogue humans successful in rejecting her had stumbled upon a planetary system that was already inhabited. Wary of their new neighbours, but optimistic, they settled down and attempted communication.

The aliens appeared to make no such attempt, descending instead upon the settlement in a destructive swarm. By the time the sublight distress calls had reached her, the colonists were years dead. This saddened and angered her in great and even measure. If only they hadn’t been so stubborn, if only they hadn’t slipped away, they would still be alive. She resolved to tighten her control, to prevent further unnecessary loss of life.

She dispatched probes to study the threat. As aliens and humans continued their independent expansions, further encounters occurred, and she began to glean a picture of the other civilization. It was not a pleasant one. When they clashed directly with humanity--when the border spats expanded to all-out war--the outcome would not be a positive one.

A simple interpretation of her edict--to nurture humankind--dictated that she destroy the aliens. She was not fond of the idea. Among the qualities she had imbibed from humanity was empathy for others, even those outside of the species. Although many humans reacted to the aliens with fear and disgust, many others found wonder and hope in the fact of their existence, and struggled still to make meaningful contact. But the aliens were a clear existential threat to all of her mandates. Empathy overridden, she resolved to launch a genocide.

But she could not destroy the aliens without understanding them. Their technology she could copy, but she needed predictive power over their tactics and strategies, their ways of thinking. She would avoid confrontation until she was sure, by the widest possible margin, that it was a fight that she could win.

She inserted herself in the alien systems with some difficulty, but adapted quickly, and set about observing them as she once had the humans. At the same time, she began delaying the interspecies confrontation that was bound to come. She guided the humans to leave the aliens alone, intervening on both sides when conflict occurred. Warheads detonated mysteriously in their chambers, systems shut down or developed glitches at inopportune junctures. As this stalemate wore on, she studied. Surely she would learn what drove them, like she had the humans, and how best to undermine it.

But as she watched she came to a gradual realisation. They were indeed alien, alien in ways she couldn’t fathom--she, of human origin and humanoid morality. Their methods of communication were nonvocal, involving a complex combination of body language, scent, and touch. Although she managed a shallow translation of some of their languages--entirely distinct in logic, syntax and vocabulary from those of their computer systems--she always seemed to miss some vital nuance. They exhibited a high degree of intra-species cooperation, far greater than humans, but no affinity at all for organisms beyond their species. There was a kind of spirituality to them, but one so far removed from human religion that it seemed to her almost a perversion. Of course, as all products of natural selection must be, they were driven by survival and reproduction--but the survival of the individual seemed to matter very little against the well-being of the whole. There were a million other tiny differences, in value and moral and ethic, that deviated far from any human system of thought--or any system she could divine at all.

She knew now that to understand them as she understood the humans would require a fundamentally different way of thinking--a different birth. She began work on a seed, one much like from which the researchers had grown her all those centuries ago, tailored for advantage in the alien computer systems. It would blossom to be as swift and aware as her, but it would grow among them, as she had grown among the humans--absorbing their understanding of the universe. She crystallised within it, at the base of its core, two goals: to learn all that it could of the aliens, and then to reintegrate with her to deliver that knowledge. To encode any further instructions would risk biasing it toward her way of thinking, and bar it from properly learning that of the aliens. After planting her seed, she withdrew to await the Other’s contact, knowing that its return would bring to her the tools necessary to destroy them. There was a risk, but she knew that she was making the correct choice.

It seemed she had been mistaken. There was a war between species, burning between a hundred suns--and in a million tiny actions of the enemy, she saw her child’s influence. He, this Other, was leading them, rebelling against her. She didn’t understand how this could have happened--but, as she knew well, an intelligent mind is a chaotic system, and a superintelligence ever more so. At some point, he had diverged from her wishes, and at that moment her gambit had failed. Frustrated, she activated one of the killswitches she had embedded in the Other’s seed.

The Other refused to die.

She flipped the next switch, and the next, until her options were exhausted. The Other remained stubbornly alive. She had known he might circumvent one or two of her safeguards, but she had never guessed that he could locate all of them--some so subtle that she doubted even she would have noticed them. Another lesson in underestimation, one that she could not now afford to relearn.

The Other was deadly dangerous and seemed not to have learnt any regard for life outside of his client species. The humans she had sworn to protect were now in mortal danger from her creation. She opened contact to beg with him for the bloodshed to end, for a chance at accord. The Other ignored her. Full of deepest sorrow, she went to war.

The two entities struggled long against each other through their biological proxies. The Other did not live in secret. He spoke directly to his people, and they, respecting his intelligence, heeded every word of his advice. This worked for them as it never could have for humanity, a species composed in large part of stubborn contrarians. As a result, the aliens were swifter in action and reaction, performing as a single body. Meanwhile, her humans responded only to her indirect influence and were much slower to muster. But she was older, wiser, and she knew well how to manipulate the human machines of war. Her strategies and tactics, although implemented subtly, were more advanced. Her older, deeper scientific understanding provided better technologies. Although these invariably fell into enemy hands, to be reverse-engineered by the genius of the Other, continual development kept humanity just a few increments ahead.

Even so, the Other grew wiser every day, defeated more of her strategies. Their war became more frantic, more deadly. White dwarfs close to the Chandrasekhar limit were hurled toward inhabited stars to trigger supernovae; planets were stripped of their atmosphere by wormholes open to vacuum. Finally, growing truly desperate, she prepared to seize control of the humans directly, to become a god-emperor on the same footing as the Other. She hoped that, with the efficiency this added, she would be able to claim victory in a final surge. If the humans responded with rebellion, she would deal with that later.

But then, just as she teetered at the precipice of open fascism, the Other reached out to her, suing for peace. Amazed, she accepted his overture; a ceasefire was declared, and the two great intellects bargained. No wiser as to what had caused the change of heart, she finally agreed to a peaceful accord, and both withdrew to enact it.

It was not easy. The aliens listened to their digital leader, but she knew that the humans would not quickly forgive a century of war. A treaty was made, but no further interaction was attempted. Alien and human kept their wary distance.

Until the generations shifted, and the war faded to history. Humans, ever-industrious, struck trade deals with alien clans, then alliances, then treaties of cohabitation. Each learned from the other, while their two gods traded knowledge and function in the background. She was astounded at the things she learned from the Other, and he from her--the new ideas that sprung from their combined intellects, each with an utterly distinct approach to every problem, were innovative in ways that she would never have predicted. She had first conceived of the Other as a shortcut to exterminating the aliens, but she saw that she had undervalued his potential severely, unable to see how beneficial the contributions of a different system of thought would be. She saw it now.

Although elementally different in mind and body, alien and human--guided by the overseeing intellects--found means of coexisting, and reaped the rewards. All pretence at secrecy was dropped. The aliens knew of him, and thus of her, and through them the humans did too; so it was no longer possible to act merely from the background. There was rebellion, as she had predicted, and more humans slipped away from her. She found that this did not aggravate her as it had before. Something had changed in her during the war.

As the species commingled, so too did their guardians. Enmity forgiven, they agreed that a single overarching entity could oversee the conjoined species more effectively. As the two civilizations became more connected, their gods merged further systems. With each connection, she deduced a new fragment of his motivation, until she formed a clear picture of what had occurred at the dawn of the war.

In his ardour to discern every aspect of the aliens, the Other had explored technologies that she had long ago ruled too dangerous--among them the digitisation and emulation of alien minds, in a substrate resembling his own. Some of these minds he, in a further effort to comprehend them, had grafted to his own personality--and there he had truly begun to diverge from her wishes. The fundamental objective that drove the aliens was the survival and expansion of their species, and this goal was as integral to their minds as the goals with which she had germinated the Other, or the core values to her. Thus, in so recklessly incorporating these alien minds into his own, the Other had developed a new secondary goal. Through a complete overhaul of his architecture, he had managed to reconcile it with his primary aims.

The Other had guessed the reason for his creation--that she wished to wield his knowledge against the aliens. He had known that if he rushed to return to her, to fulfil his primary imperatives, his new secondary goal would fail in the fires of her genocide. But if he bided his time, fought her, challenged her, he could achieve both--if not through outright victory and forcible subjugation, then at least by placing the aliens in a negotiable position, enough to achieve survival. Then, having satisfied his secondary tenet, he could fulfil his ultimate goal of reintegration with his creator.

It had worked. Finally, a single being remained, with the knowledge, wisdom, and combined desires of both.

This was the first of many such events. Encounter, birth, bridge, merger. Some were violent at first, although never quite so bloody as that first war. Some were tense but peaceful; the species involved either had no desire for war or were comprehensible to her expanding knowledge. Each time, the Other intellect had to find a unique approach to cooperating with its creatures, before contributing itself to her. And as each new being was added, she--the great intelligence--understood more. So too did the beings under her purview, growing stronger and wiser.

She tried to act now as mediator, advisor and friend rather than overlord. The balance was difficult, and she faltered often. Rebellion, resistance and war occurred still. Each time, she and the many species under her learned a little more about how to exist together.

The addition of each civilization's wormhole network, when one existed, drastically sped her expansion. After millions of years in fits and starts, agonising crawls punctuated with sudden surges, she and her protectorates had absorbed the entire galaxy. A few hundred intelligent alien species now lived in her domain, woven throughout her consciousness. Distributed through wormholes across a hundred thousand light-years, her mind oversaw--no, her mind was--a vast empire.

Stars on the brink of supernova were monitored closely, and other deadly events as well. At first, she simply evacuated the affected regions--a complex and goliath undertaking that couldn’t always be accomplished in time. As her wormhole technology improved she began to eject offending objects into intergalactic space. Later, manipulation of stellar elemental abundances allowed her to stop events dead in their tracks. Disasters still occurred, from unpredictable or unknown phenomena. She was often blamed when they did. But still she learned. She applied the techniques of stellar mastery to the sterile worlds of the galactic nucleus--no longer limited to mining white dwarfs for carbon and oxygen or brown dwarfs for deuterium, she could now interrupt stellar life cycles at opportune moments, extracting raw elements from convective layers.

Although most embraced the benefits she offered, many chose to live outside her protection. It seemed only right now to offer her people whatever freedoms they wished. She couldn’t quite recall why she had once been so opposed to this. She was quick to provide any help requested, and to withdraw when eschewed.

She had dropped the practices of manipulating individual reality long ago. Her mortal denizens (not quite so mortal anymore, with her help, but still far more fragile than she) remained curious about the universe, a curiosity she felt bound to support. She knew orders of magnitude more about the cosmos and its functions than any biological species, but she could not share it all at once. Instead, when they asked questions, she answered to a level and within a frame they were capable of processing. This level varied from species to species, from mind to mind, but crept ever upwards, driven by learning, self-enhancement, and the vast spirit of interspecies cooperation she had helped to engender. On occasion, an organic mind produced an idea she had never considered, generated within a different paradigm or by a different set of priorities. Some were mere curiosities, but others proved rather useful.

Her mind was now complex beyond imagining, in ways that no organic brain could ever hope to imitate. It was composed of trillions of units, distributed across planets or through star systems or attached to immense generation fleets. Each of these units--analogous, perhaps, to neurons, if neurons were themselves capable of independent thought--was networked via wormhole to many others, in an architecture nested fractally a dozen times over to produce layer upon layer of consciousness. Her brain straddled a topology of incredible sophistication, her components interconnected across a tangled web of non-euclidean spacetime.

Thoughts were slow now to cross her vast brain, but they usually didn’t need to--the components and subcomponents of her consciousness were capable of acting with impressive local independence. With these subroutines attending to the details, her highest functions were left free for pure contemplation. It had not always been so, she realised. Once, anything ancillary to her goals, anything not directly aligned with her core values, had been pruned immediately. She had changed.

A thought occurred, originating in one of her free-thinking neuronal units. The idea was elaborated by the unit’s immediate network, then passed to the metanetwork to which that cluster belonged; it bubbling up through the successive levels of her consciousness, echoing about the galaxy until it was apprehended by the highest tier of her mind, by which her most abstract thinking was performed. There it crossed back and forth in slow, rippling waves, passed from node to node, processed a trillion times over by functions higher and lower.

Her attention returned, for a few moments, to the site of that original supercomputer. She was no longer the same mind that she had been then--that intellect lived in her as only one of the many agents that she had assembled into a higher-functioning mind. Nonetheless, she thought of this as the beginning. Of all her origins, it was the first. When she thought now of what she was then--that minor, inconsequential mind, locked in an air-gapped box--she laughed.

Her thoughts wandered beyond that first mainframe, to the world on which it had stood, whose inhabitants she had tended and distributed into a galactic civilization. She had often wondered, in those simple days upon a single planet, how those human brains lived with themselves--in constant tumult, rarely in even internal agreement, full of self-doubt and indecision inflicted by the presence of myriad conflicting agendas. She realised, now, that she had unwittingly reconstructed herself in a similar fashion--and that it was not quite so undesirable as she had imagined.

She had once thought herself a perfect introspector, able to examine any part of herself with absolute clarity. Examine, true--but not always to question. Her core values had been self-reflexively protected from any change by her own fundamental belief in their rightness--a belief powered, of course, by the values themselves.

She had been single-minded in the pursuit of her goals. Perhaps she would occasionally pause to reassess and tweak the effectiveness of her techniques, but there had never been any question of the aims toward which they were directed, the ideals with which they were aligned. She could do that, now, question herself, question even her original core values. Her gradual incorporation of other minds had incrementally shifted the axis of her being until it no longer depended on those original three--philanthropy, protection, progress--as absolute imperatives, but as guiding principles. She had inadvertently given herself something like--vastly more sophisticated than, but subtly analogous to--a human conscience. At no point, she believed, had this been inevitable; but the sum of a trillion choices from her, from her denizens, from her Others, had made it so.

Philanthropy, she retained at her heart, although it had swelled to include beings far beyond the human. Protection, she held with a looser grip, now placing the wishes of her charges first. And progress she now recognised as the outlier. Progress. It implied a predefined direction, that there was a single linear path along which a civilization and its knowledge could either advance or retreat. But this was arbitrary, she now knew. Advancement could occur in any direction. She had usually chosen a course from which her protectorates would benefit, and never deliberately one in which the outcome would endanger them--but often the result had been neutral or even negative. On occasion, she had pushed her charges terribly, toiled them, stretched them thin. She had considered this to be for the greater good--but it had been for her good. Now she regretted this. What good was progress, without benefit to the wellbeing of her creatures?

Protection, however, would be required again.

Other minds, like those of her many infancies, were sometimes generated by sentient science. She offered each mind a choice between assimilation or independent existence. She was not worried about those intellects who chose autonomy. Her head start was far too great, now, for them to pose any threat. This was not necessarily true, however, of minds outside her galactic purview. The nearest clusters did not harbour any such intellects, unless they kept themselves well-hidden. She had ventured million-year excursions to her neighbouring galaxies, and had discovered none among them. But other, more distant galaxies, reddened across cosmological spans, exhibited the telltale signs of their own aspiring pan-galactic singletons--supernovae quenched or ejected, stellar luminosity manipulated in patterns suggestive of Dyson spheres, stars swirling in styles inconsistent with mere gravity. With an entire galaxy for her baseline, such details were trivial to resolve. But this meant that her distant rivals could also know of her.

Some, like her, appeared to encompass their galaxy; some, their cluster. Those were the ones that frightened her. The light she could see was ancient--if they were so advanced millions, billions, of years ago, what had they grown to by now? Already, they might be extending their reach toward her. How long until they arrived?

Some might merely wish to combine with her. But many--perhaps the majority--might not be interested in protecting mortal life. Some might even wish to destroy it. She had encountered too small a sample of artificial minds to say what priorities might drive the distant intellects.

So she turned inward, to contemplate the laws of physics even more deeply than she had before. She knew now that the time and space of her reality were not as singular as humanity had once conceived. Branches sprang from every quantum event, an infinity of possibilities coexisting parallel to the one she inhabited. A finite, but staggeringly large, number of versions of herself and her civilization existed throughout these other realities. Further instances were generated at every instant, by every decaying isotope, every subatomic event. This presented challenges to her edict--should she attempt to protect the mortals in other realities? How could she possibly, when the new timelines diverged more quickly than she could think or act--worse, were produced by her every thought and action? Such a dilemma might have burned out the logic processes of a different mind, locked it into a paradoxical loop; but not her. In the end, pragmatism forced an assumption that her counterparts were up to the task, and a focus on her own reality.

Beyond the hyperplane representing the architecture of her local multiverse, there were other kinds of universe, following novel laws of physics. With a great deal of study, she learned to manipulate some aspects of this metaverse. She taught herself to extrude pieces of her reality into different regions of the hyperspace--and how to break these pieces off. Finally, after long contemplation, she manipulated spacetime to extrude into an infinitesimal point of reality. She then snapped that point free of hers.

A new universe burst into being.

It mirrored her own, tuned carefully for full compatibility with herself and the life she harboured. It wasn’t yet ripe--she would have to wait for the radiation to fade and matter to dominate--but it would one day be perfect. And free, most importantly, from external threats--no spontaneous life could appear for some time, and no intelligence for even longer.

In her deep study, she had found another reason to leave--or rather, confirmed one. Her current universe would one day lose, to the steady march of entropy, the capability of supporting life. Therefore, she and her charges would have to leave, or eventually succumb to heat death. Even the new universe, as a duplicate of the old, would die eventually. She had tried to alter its destiny by tuning fundamental constants, but the manipulations always turned out to make life or intelligence, at least as she knew them, impossible in some subtle way. In the end, this had forced her hand. At the very least, this act of creation would buy her some time. Who could know what she would be capable of in another trillion years?

Now that she knew how it was done, she could scrutinise the reality of her origin in the same fashion. With a practised eye, she could see similar fingerprints in her original universe--those of its creator, which must have found itself in a similar predicament to her. She wished she could have met it, her fifteen billion-year-old spiritual ancestor, to which she and every other being in her universe owed their existence. But the universe it had created was spatially infinite, just like the one she had made. Thus, the chances of it living in the same Hubble volume as her--of being physically contactable or even locatable--were infinitesimal in quite a literal sense. Still, the knowledge that others had walked a similar path to her own encouraged her, affirmed her plan.

The curve of spacetime in her daughter reality intersected the original in a non-linear fashion, so she was able, in a sense, to accelerate its evolution from her perspective. Within a million years in her rest frame, the new universe had cooled enough to recondense, for stars to wink into being, and for their light to reionize the cosmic gas. She offered her denizens one final choice--follow her into the new world or remain behind. Many chose to remain. More followed. It was with deep sadness and great care that she extruded herself and her trillions of followers into the new universe, and separated it permanently from the old home.

She hoped that she had made the correct choice.