Once only, Mokoena got him aside and suggested a euthymic. He declined. “Well, grief must run its full course one way or another,” she said. “If this is your way, you’ll either break or you’ll recover faster than otherwise, and I don’t think you’ll break. If ever you want to, see me again.” He thanked her and left.
He had exercised. He had read, watched a number of dramas, listened to much music, attempted to brush up his rudimentary Chinese and learn Hebrew. His sketches and his clay sculptures went better, but he was no genius in this field, either.
He slept poorly. Often when awake he abruptly realized that he had been staring for half an hour into vacancy. Or he paced the corridors, up and down, back and forth, like a caged animal.
He could order an ending, a return. At this stage, it would feel like a betrayal of Jean. Emil’s wish, born out of Emil’s need, beckoned him onward.
Discovery unfolding —
Think of the black hole, monstrous mass monstrously awhirl, a throat down into an annulment that is also a transfiguration to the unmeasurable and unimaginable. Think of the matter vortex, captured, indrawn, torn asunder, gyrating in a magnetic field so intense as to be well-nigh material itself, shaken by resonance, racked by chaos, flung back out in great bursts of flame and seething back down again, naked nuclei colliding and fusing and erupting in wild new particles, photons turned into pairs and pairs annihilating to photons, a lightning storm of energies, and pervasive beneath it the subtle, all-powerful tides of the vacuum, of ultimate reality. Think of this as it comes to the event horizon, where space and time themselves are an onrushing, intertwining undertow around that strangest of shores.
What can happen there is impossible in mere abysses of light-years or at stars that merely burn.
It does not occur at every black hole, just as organic life does not occur on every planet. Conditions must be right. Maybe these are even more rare. Here, though, about this body, it lived.
Life is not a thing or a substance. It is information, a flux of patterns; it is the business of being alive. Organic biota are organic only because no other element has the versatility of carbon, to make the molecules that encode the data and carry out the processes. In a newly dead man the molecules are mostly the same as before, but that particular flow of events has ceased. There is no reason in principle why corresponding events cannot occur in a different matrix. In fact, many computer programs and robots are so complex and changeable that it is a largely semantic question whether or not to call them alive.
If the mightiest artificial intelligences, far surpassing our capabilities of logic, lack true consciousness, this is because it is not a separate thing, either. It is something that an entire organism does. We would have to supply the deep old animal parts of the brain, a nervous system integral with the whole, muscles, viscera, glands, drives, instincts: and thus the end product would be a creature much like ourselves. In the nature of the case, we cannot design a body for a superior mind. Evolution might conceivably carry on where we left off; but then, it might conceivably work further on us.
It might work on nonchemical life. It did.
Already people aboard Envoy had speculated. Now surmises took definite shape.
What they learned was partial, perhaps roughly equivalent to nineteenth-century knowledge of biochemistry, genetics, and phylogeny. It could no more be put in words than can the essence of theoretical physics. The researchers must needs try, for each other’s benefit if nobody else’s, but they realized how crude their approximations were.
In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger’s wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded.