When it arrived, it was sorely disappointed. The planet teemed with life, but most of it was barely complex at all. Too thin a gruel for nourishment. Rare were the species with any promise, and rarer still the individuals with the mental complexity to survive bodily death. Feeble though these might be, the ancient consciousness had no choice but to stay and try to rebuild its disentropy.
#
Raymond
had a reputation. When people couldn’t make their electronics work, they called
on him. He was good with mechanical things, too, although there were fewer of
those around nowadays. “Gadgetman has spoken,” he liked to say after doing
successful battle with someone’s gear.
It was a mystery to
Raymond why he could do this. He had no formal training as an engineer or plant
operator. Some things just made a sort of elegant sense to him. Neither was it
a matter of intelligence. He straightforwardly figured out gadgets that
flummoxed their Ph.D.-holding owners.
Maybe it was his good
memory. He began a task by memorizing the controls or instructions. Then, he
rearranged them in his mind until he thought they would produce the result he
was after. Usually, he got it, if not on the first try, then after a few.
It made sense to
Raymond that his mind worked the same way in his job as a computer programmer. No
mathematics whiz, he understood only with difficulty the requests people
brought him. Still, he was the go-to man for intractable problems. If other
good programmers could make their machines cough up a correct answer, Raymond
made his do it in a fraction of the CPU cycles, sometimes a very small
fraction.
Raymond was well aware
that he never did this through mathematical insight, realizing some obscure
formula was equivalent to an equally obscure, different one. He just came up
with combinations of instructions no one else thought of. He could all but see
the data, down to ones and zeros, rearranging itself at his commands. He took
great pleasure in this, as if some whole other plane of existence honored him
by allowing his presence. Accurately or not, Raymond felt special.
The hungry disentropic
singularity thought Raymond was special, too, a prize worth waiting for. It
waited.
#
The singularity
announced its presence when Raymond was enjoying particularly pleasant,
half-waking dreams facilitated by some particularly excellent marijuana. “Demon
weed,” the dealer called it. And so it turned out to be.
Raymond had closed his
eyes when he couldn’t shake the feeling that his bedroom was actually the
inside of a 1963 Volkswagen bus. Also, the travel clock in its tan leather case
looked more and more like a turkey sausage slider. Bad enough the row of CD
cases on his shelf were clearly a set of teeth, unacceptable that they were
grinning at themselves in the mirror on the opposite wall. He gave himself over
to the images in his mind.
So, Raymond thought he
was hallucinating when something appeared that looked at once like a human face
and like a seething confusion of light and shadow. “Demon weed, indeed!” he
thought, and smiled. He couldn’t tell if its lips moved. The whole image pulsated.
“You are Raymond. You
are special.”
Raymond no sooner
thought, “Who are you?” than it answered. He was not surprised he didn’t need
to speak. It was all in his own mind anyway.
“I am a disentropic
singularity. You can call me Knot.”
Still amused rather
than alarmed, Raymond thought, “I know that’s with a K, so what’s a disentropic
singularity?”
“Like a black hole, but
disentropy instead of matter. Your primitive physics can’t explain it any
better.”
As luck, or something,
would have it, Raymond was prepared for this. He had been reading about black
holes. The mathematics were far out of his reach, but the idea fascinated him.
According to latitude
and longitude, the North and South Poles don’t exist. The longitude lines
converge to an indescribable point, a mathematical singularity. If you actually
go there, it’s no different from anywhere else. Well, maybe colder. The thing
is, the singularity is an artifact of the mathematics, not real at all.
Physicists call a black
hole a singularity, too, a point of zero size and infinite density. Some think
that’s a mathematical artifact as well, and a viable quantum theory of gravity
will make it go away. Reality or artifact, singularity is the term of choice.
Like the North and
South Poles, black holes are real, whatever they are. Gravitational wave
observations nailed that one. Einstein theorized that Newton’s equations didn’t
quite work if conditions got extreme enough, and he was right. If you cram too
much matter into too small a space, odd things happen.
“So, something that
enters you never escapes?”
“Very good! Once
formed, a singularity is eternal, unless a greater singularity engulfs it.”
“Let me guess. You
didn’t form in a supernova collapse.”
“Right again, Raymond. I
am disentropy, not matter. Every corporeal being dies. If its consciousness is
complex enough, a singularity forms. This happens even with some of your own
species, tiny though they are.”
“And then?”
“They persist, unless a
much greater singularity absorbs them.”
“Like you?”
No response.
“So, you feast on human
souls.”
“Your primitive
concepts and vocabulary might say that, but yes. And whales’, and apes’, and
elephants’. Even the occasional bird’s. Unsatisfying, but sufficient. Hardly a
feast. Someday, I will leave this place to seek fatter fare.”
Entropy is a measure of
disorder, randomness. More order equals less entropy. A future physicist will
discover the analogy. Great enough order in a small enough space forms a
singularity, just as matter forms a black hole. Pockets of order remain even
after the forces that created it disperse. When the physicist dies, it will be
her great fortune Knot has made good on that promise.
Before he could form
the question, “Why are you telling me this?” Raymond remembered Knot called him
special. Did Knot’s visage glow a little brighter?
“You are the choicest
morsel I have sensed in a long time, Raymond. When you die, I shall be waiting.
Already, I thrill at the prospect. You humans go on about becoming part of
something larger than yourselves. And you will, Raymond, you will.
“I leave you now, but
never think me gone. I am very old. I can wait.”
Knot vanished. Raymond
slept. And forgot.
#
Raymond didn’t like
office parties. In fact, he seldom went to parties at all. The coin he traded
so successfully at his work had another side. Certain skills that seemed to
come naturally to most people just eluded him. What was it about small talk
that so entranced his fellow humans? He observed others hitting it off without
effort, as though they read each others’ minds and knew each others’ interests.
When Raymond tried this, he usually chose the wrong subjects, and conversations
faltered. He really wondered if others had an extra sense he lacked and felt
things he did not.
As best he remembered,
it had always been this way. He recalled a picture his parents took on his
seventh birthday. There were cake and ice cream and smiles, but no other
children, as none had been invited. He got on well enough with his classmates
at school, but socializing for its own sake hadn’t interested him. Adults
interested him because they knew things about the larger world, which he hoped
someday to inhabit.
As time passed, Raymond
began to consider his lack of social skills a handicap, and he set about
creating workarounds. These were not monkey-see, monkey-do, since he had no
clear idea what people were actually doing. They were more like monkey-see,
monkey-pass, devising imitations that passed for the real thing. He took pride
whenever these succeeded.
More recently, he
realized passing was a skill he could learn and practice. It was different from
programming and gadgeteering, but not completely unrelated. Instead of
instruction sets and users’ manuals, he studied behavior cues and facial
expressions. Patterns emerged. Practice made better, if not perfect. A new sort
of interface with the world formed, not unlike, he thought, the more familiar
plane of ones and zeros. He could all but feel his brain forming the countless
new synapses it needed so he could exercise his new abilities in real time. His
mind advanced boldly in complexity.
If Knot had possessed
lips, it would have licked them.
