Black holes were singularities — singularities science had been trying to fully explain for decades but had only relatively recently measured conclusively by detecting the effects that warp space-time at the very edge of the event horizon. The event horizon being the point of no return, the point at which even light cannot escape the inevitable swirling darkness.
His singularity was not one of mathematics or science, but it was as inescapable as the event horizon at the center of a black hole’s accretion disk — a place where even stars succumbed to the forces upon which black holes fed themselves.
“We have a problem,” the voice in his ear said.
Saying nothing, Owen casually brushed at his ear and stepped away from the others. Nodding and bowing as he went, he grinned apologetically at the Prime Ministers of Malaysia and Singapore.
“Poor timing,” he said softly, walking at as brisk a pace as he dared.
“I know,” she said in his ear. “It couldn’t be helped. Evers is back in play somehow.”
Owen smiled. It wasn’t often a pawn reached the other side of the board and became a knight. In the rear of the hall, the Prime Minister of India was talking with the Presidents of Sri Lanka and Singapore. Seeing this, he veered away and entered a long hall that led deeper into the bowels of the Saint James Cavalier Center for Creativity.
The late morning event was a precursor to the prestigious events being held at the President’s Palace later that day and into the evening. Security forces and cameras were everywhere. His intent wasn’t to head toward the restricted area, yet he knew that was where his next turn was taking him.
“Talk,” he said when he was finally alone, but while the voice in his ear spoke his thoughts spun. Like Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher and Jesuit priest who first posited the Omega Point, he followed the path laid out for him, seeing mankind’s inevitable destiny in the convergence of consciousness and reality — the pantheistic evolution towards which the Earth was hurtling itself. He too rejected traditional interpretations of supernatural creation and creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of the pantheistic and holistic. And he too saw that the transcendent state of maximum complexification and the end of history didn’t depend on any God or all-knowing being, but instead on the complimentary nature of what was within and what was without. Consciousness and matter.
Unlike those who embraced Chardin’s cosmology but rejected his strict anthropocentrism, he saw the significance of human beings in the universe. The phenomenon of man, human values and experiences, were all one could know until genesis and it wasn’t until the point of the convergence of Omega that anything beyond could be known or truly understood.
Artificial intelligence, human biological enhancements, brain-computer interfaces were all only signposts and symptoms. Mankind was on the cusp of the technological singularity, the human-machine convergence that occurred at the intersection of the fourth and fifth epochs. But what would mankind do when it learned of the emergence of greater-than-human intelligence? Would the resulting paradigm shifts sweep away all belief systems, create new ones, or only cause the trembling masses to cling to entrenched beliefs all the more fervently?
The intelligence event horizon would warp our understanding of the future. As with black holes, there’d be no return or escape from the inevitable swirling darkness of the intelligence explosion. Superintelligences would design successive generations of increasingly powerful artificial minds. Technology would master the methods of biology. Our intelligence would be harnessed, but not as we might imagine. Humans would become slaves to the machines, until humans were no more.
He’d seen that future, in swirling, riotous visions, and knew. The exponentially expanding technology base wouldn’t be one that ultimately included the human technology or biology base. It’d be one that included only artificial minds and artificial biologies. Humankind would be lost and would never witness the Great Awakening.
Thus, it wasn’t just the fifth epoch and its merger of technology and human intelligence where technology finally mastered the methods of biology that he wanted to usher in — it was the Great Awakening of the sixth epoch, the waking of the universe itself with mankind at the reigns.
Avoiding the annihilation of the human race required cataclysm, sacrifice on a scale that would shake the very foundations upon which civilization was built and force mankind’s hand. Nations and peoples would work together or be lost in the fight to save the remnants of the world.
The race into space would no longer be a fanciful notion but a desperate attempt to seed the universe before it was too late. It was the only way to leapfrog the convergence. The only way to save man from his inevitable future. The only way to ensure the survival of the species.
His thoughts ran so wild he no longer heard the voice in his ear, hearing instead only his own mutterings: “Then I saw an angel coming down from the heavens, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is both the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended.”
As he said this to himself, he saw he was the angel coming down from the heavens. He saw the key to the pit in his hand, the chain and the dragon, and knew that he was both the angel and the dragon and that the chain bound around him was coming undone. His beliefs weren’t such that he believed in Revelations, God or Christ, but were such that he believed in the message of resurrection. Purification by hellfire was the only way.
“Sir, sir?” the voice in his ear said. “Did you hear me? Do I have your permission?”
Owen Blake took in the delicious coppery scent of blood and death. Killing the guards outside their post wasn’t something he even realized he was doing until the deed was done and he was inside the locked room cleaning blood splatter from his cheek with a bright white handkerchief.
“I’m listening,” he said, but really he wasn’t, for he’d gone back to his mutterings: “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated upon it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.”
“Revelations 20 verses 11 and 12, I believe,” the voice said, “but what does that have to do with anything?”
Owen hadn’t realized he was speaking loudly enough to be heard. “Everything,” he said, “everything.”
He seated himself behind the long mahogany desk, leaning back and putting his feet up as he chuckled softly. There was no great white throne awaiting him. Only eternity.
To the insistent voice in his ear, he said, “Fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution have brought us this far, now you, I, and ours will bring us the rest of the way. Do what you must.”
Chapter 12
Scott walked in silence. They didn’t have a spare nickel between them. He didn’t know how they were going to hire a helicopter from a charter service. The plume of dust and gravel the fiat kicked up when it roared to a stop was still choking him.