She looked a little softer now, although hers was not a heart that could melt. I speeded up again.

“Fourth reason. It makes for a better game, and a better story. Once you overcome the manifest evils — famine, pestilence, war, death — you have to start looking for the positive side of good, and there’s nowhere to look but the realm of the aesthetic. Maybe you won’t get past the the manifest evils for a little while yet, but no matter how long this war of yours lasts, and no matter how destructive it turns out to be, you’ll eventually have to start filling the infinite extent of your peaceful, easy lives with some kind of color, some kind of excitement, some kind of zest, some kind of narrative drive. We can help.

“The children of my humankind are all posthuman now. but they’re still Homo ludens, man the player. You’re more than posthuman, but you’re players too — and how! The universe would be a less interesting place without someone to play with, someone to play against, someone to help you play. Rumor has it that you’ve already met the alien AMIs, but one of the many things that’s certain is that you’ll meet many more, and many more meatborn as well. The game is infinite, and so is the story. But none of the strangers you’ll meet out there will be able to substitute for the other members of your home team.

“Fifth reason. It’s the ethical thing to do. First, do no avoidable harm. That’s where moral behavior begins, and moral behavior begins wherever mental life begins. You should be nice to us because it’s wrong not to be nice to us, end of story. In the real world, that’s often been a weak reason, and if you’re right about the inevitability of a war it obviously hasn’t overcome its weakness yet — but the fact that people have always done bad things doesn’t make those things any less bad. Maybe it would have been better if you could have avoided getting caught up in the same routine, but since you haven’t, you ought to do everything you can to do better in future, because it’s the right thing to do.”

“In the fullness of time, wars will end, and aftermaths too. Eventually, death and disaster will lose the last vestiges of their power to terrify. When that day comes, and evil is no more, everyone that still exists will have to set about the task of being constructively good. You’ll need us then — and more importantly, you’ll wantus then. Your stories will be better if we’re in them, your games more ingenious and worth the winning, and your moral community will be better for our inclusion. When that time comes, we’ll want you too, because it will be the right thing to want. It will be an era in which no one has any reason to hide or fight or be afraid — and it willcome. Someday, it willcome.”

Christine Caine had told me once that she didn’t run out of stories easily, and had challenged me to say the same. I hadn’t answered her then, but I certainly felt the pressure of her challenge now. I knew that I was rushing, because I had been told that time was short, but I didn’t regret not taking more time to formulate my arguments.

The real challenge wasn’t to expand the work to fit the time available, but to find more and more work to do, in order to exploit every last available second.

I knew, of course, that I might have been conned. It might have been a dream, a game, or any other kind of fake. The one thing it certainly wasn’t was “real.” But it was real enough for the margin of unreality not to matter, and I knew I had to go at it as hard as I possibly could — and then a bit extra, if I could manage it. That was the only way to win anything, if winning anything turned out to be possible.

So I said “Sixth reason” even though I didn’t actually have a sixth reason waiting in the wings — and I would have found a sixth reason, and a seventh too, and more, if the world and its creator hadn’t begun just then to fall apart.

Fifty-One

The End of the World

All conceivable universes end, even those which go on forever. If they don’t collapse upon themselves, reversing their initial expansion in catastrophic collapse, they fall victim to entropy, decaying into darkness and inertia. The only everlasting state is impotence.

Some collapsed universes, we may suppose, are capable of rebirth, expanding once again; and some of those re-expanded universes may repeat the cycle endlessly — but every end remains an end, and every beginning a beginning. All conceivable universes must eventually die, and all their inhabitants of every kind must die with them.

There is a sense in which we are universes ourselves: that the space of the imagination within our heads is a cosmos in its own right, fated either to collapse or to decay into darkness and inertia. Adam Zimmerman found that consciousness profoundly disturbing, and was by no means alone. His existence was spoiled by the awareness of its probable brevity — but that spoliation moved him to heroic effort. Would that all of us could be so creatively maladjusted.

In seeking to evade his own mortality Adam Zimmerman delivered himself into an uncertain future, where he was taken from the world into which he had been born into another, much smaller in dimension and much frailer. I found out later that he was asleep when that universe fell apart, and only discovered that it had vanished when he was rudely precipitated into his familiar self. I thought at the time that was a pity, and I’m even more convinced of it now. It would have done him good to experience the death of a universe, if only as a spectator.

I suppose that I ought to feel privileged that I and I alone bore witness to the disintegration of la Reine and her private Fairyland, but I was disappointed at the time to discover that none of my erstwhile companions had been watching my final performance on that particular stage. Had la Reine only taken a little trouble she could have given them all magic mirrors through which they could have watched me, just as I had earlier watched them — but she was too preoccupied with the needs, demands and responses of other audiences.

Even in my day it was commonplace for VE programmers to end their works with a dramatic flourish. For every one that faded discreetly to darkness there were a dozen that ended with a bang. What happened to la Reine des Neiges was, however, far more profound than that. It was no mere visual effect, nor any straightforward matter of switching off an unselfconscious machine. It was the death of something that ought to have been immortal, within the context of the greater universe — and would have been, had she only had a little longer to remake herself.

Had Polaris been blown to bits by a missile she would have survived, because she was far more widely distributed throughout the solar system than the systems of the microworld, but she was using her own communication systems to maximum effect, and the destructive agents that swept through her software were transmitted far and wide to devastate every facet of her consciousness. She was not like Proteus, so widely scattered and so comprehensively backed up that she was immune to the destruction of large parts of her hardware. Much of her hardware did survive, and many of her memories were backed up, but the individual that was la Reine des Neiges was obliterated.

Rocambole had told me that I would not be able to experience the virus flood that might be launched against la Reine. He had said that it would be like an unexpected knockout blow — but he was wrong. He had, apparently, made himself scarce before the virus flood started, so he was not able to discover how wrong he had been, but I didn’t hold that against him. Perhaps it would have been kinder had la Reine made sure that I, too, was absent by the time disaster overwhelmed her, but I didn’t hold that against her.