Author’s note:
This chapter is intended to stand on its own, but for an earlier entry point, please see the Prologue, “The Man.”
The man winced as the silence crashed like thunder.
You forgot Rule 6, the voice insisted.
Yes, Rule X…Death.
Is that how we'll end?
As drifting Nodes, mumbling in the dark?
Are we sure we want this, Forgotten One?
Phantom voices of former friends, lovers, and strangers called out to the man often, but this voice was new. Was it mocking him for forgetting his name? His stomach coiled in a knot. He knew forgetting it wasn't his fault, but felt shame for letting them do it—for choosing it.
“Shut up!” he answered, reflexively. "Need to work." He knew answering it would tempt him to scratch that itch. He'd wasted precious time trying to remember. Who he'd been didn't matter anymore. The mission was everything.
Every blink felt like hours lost. The ship’s clock was gone now, wrested from the hull for his grand experiment—his Game. His heartbeat drummed in his ears, keeping time as sleep blended with waking life in a hazy, meditative dance. Maybe there was a backup clock somewhere, but following planetary time no longer served him. Settling into what passed for rhythm, he worked until sleepy, slept until obsession called, then stayed awake until his eyes felt heavy again, while one word droned in his mind—the wildcard he had to get right:
Rules…
He awoke. He drank his bland meal through a straw. He did a few push-ups, sit-ups, and lunges. Too much, and his hunger would soar. He would starve before the mission was done. He'd synthesized a limited supply of food and meds using the Sucraduct, before tearing it down, too, for the Quantum Drive. With the Sucraduct wired in, the Drive could now create rays of light in the Void. Beyond the ship’s cocoon, the rays beamed out from random, shapeless points that funneled energy from the Drive to emit light.
He reset the Drive's clock. “Go.” The machine hummed itself awake with a click as he pressed fingertips to the screen wall. "Please," he whispered, holding his breath. Beyond the ship's cocoon, a few lone rays drifted apart, then three of them… graceful wisps of blue, green, and yellow… slowly embraced in the black. An orange flash. Gone.
My first node! His heart fluttered, but his giddiness was eclipsed by the milestones still ahead. To even get this far, he'd spend years sourcing raw materials, building tools, building tools to build other tools, and fine-tuning the Drive's power supply—all to convert the Drive from folding spacetime for travel to powering the Game by governing the rules of its evolution.
This part was daunting, unfamiliar territory. Without a solid foundation of logic and definitions, the Game was a bust, literally, since he'd had to remove the Drive's Power Controller. Now a mistake in logic might end his Game—and life—in one muted implosion in the Void.
The Man couldn’t take credit for the Game. Six years earlier, he’d stumbled upon an archive within the Central Museum of Information detailing one Conway, whose “Game of Life” proved complexity could emerge in computational systems only from a set of simple rules. The Archive knew nothing else of this Conway, their gender, life, or anything, but it knew the Game.
Designed to play out on a primitive glass screen, his Game's "pixels" would pop up, clustering together by chance in an elegant, almost intelligent dance. Over thousands, millions of cycles, clusters reproduced, fed each other, colonized empty screen space, built self-replicating, traveling geometric structures, organized themselves, dissolved, and destroyed. Tears ran down his cheeks in that Library, at the simplistic elegance of it. The Game wasn't just the answer; it was the only move left. Could life, artificial, yet organic, be born in the womb of logic? Could that be how everything came to be?
As an engineer, he'd always converted theory to action, but this time, taking action demanded he first create the theory as rules—the raw inputs for his modded Quantum Drive. Since most of the Drive's power was used to create the light, it would only have enough power leftover to follow a few rules. The rules would govern its every step by collapsing all possible actions into one. Without rules, its every action would remain in a state of superposition, taking place both never and always.
He defined a generation as a cycle wherein the Drive triggered random rays of light to flare in larger and larger numbers. An audible click from the Drive would mark each generation's passing. Eventually, by sheer volume and chance, some rays would join together at a point, forming Nodes, his very own pixels. Nodes and families of nodes called Clusters would have to last billions, or trillions of cycles for any hope of life to emerge.
The man looked down. All over the floor, numbers danced and jittered, some morphing into letters, swirling into a spiral and lifting off the floor in a twisted lattice. He tasted a pattern, familiar, yet out of reach. He rubbed his eyes and moved his gaze to the screen wall, a grounding exercise he'd learned months ago to quiet the noise Out in the black, the alphanumeric swarm that had been dancing across his vision faded slowly with each deep breath.
The hallucination gave life to the marquee of numbers and patterns constantly streaming through his mind, as he tweaked and tested. His prior rulesets and their hopeless patterns had disappointed, snuffing out dozens of precious Nodes after only a single generation. Here, inertia slowed even light, so he would need more juice to start, but less, once begun. This made each new attempt more critical than the last, since each failure left less power for the next...failure?
He ran his hand through thinning hair. The Game's current, broken state seemed to mirror his life—a nascent fire, fanned to a graceful roar, then doused by the cold. Though his own fire was dying, he still hoped something good could rise from his ashes. That would have to be enough.
Rule 1 was locked. He spoke it into the Drive:
Rule 1—Seeding:
When three rays meet at a point, a stable Node forms, capable of growth.
Now, how to make the Game last longer?
To survive two or more generations, each Node would need to "hold hands" with other Nodes close by, buoying what could become a cohesive web of life, floating in the deep. So his rules had to define how many neighbors each Node required to evolve to its next stage. He'd been calling these amounts Nodal Growth Thresholds, but that felt too long. He would call them…Neighbor Numbers, or even better, Neighmbers.
He thought that was cute. It was a name someone should have mocked him for, but the Void didn't care. It couldn't. Maybe he should rename the Void…"the Blank," because it took everything he threw at it, even cringeworthy portmanteaus, and lacked the decency to roll its eyes, if it had any.
He laughed quietly. Naming things was one small pleasure left to him. Sleep weighed heavily, so he shuffled to his futon on the floor a few steps away.
Rules...
He awoke. No dreams, just blackness, empty as the Blank.
He drank the same bland drink, did some modest exercise, and then resumed testing. At first, he would lean forward, eyes glistening with each new try, only to slump back as the nodes collapsed into nothing. All his planning hadn’t prepared him for the physics here, where light was heavy. It crawled.
Night after dreamless night, the Blank was affirming itself as the sea of infinite shapelessness and boundless potential his research had hinted at, but it had its own rules to uncover. With every collapse, he mouthed the same refrain: Trial trumps theory. The mantra was his shield against despair, the only constant amid shifting numbers, laws, and light.
He'd tried setting regular intervals for his Neighmbers, but the Nodes swelled fast and weakened, swallowed by the black. Too low. He tried even smaller intervals, but the rays nearly blinded him, the afterimage creating the illusion they were still there. It was time to crank it up. Risky, certainly, but caution was a relic belonging to the ardent, meticulous person he'd once been. That man was gone now, worn down by heavy silence and defeat. The only thing left was the mission, hanging only by the question: Could it be done?
He spoke his rules with the accelerating Neighmber pattern baked in.
"Go." The Drive hummed to life. Nothing. Just black—
His lamp light screamed, a searing flash. Time slowed. A purplish-green haze flooded his vision. His heart pounded. Ozone and a burnt hair smell hung in the air. Coughing, he fumbled blindly to the bulb drawer, fished out a replacement, and crawled back to the lamp. He snapped the bulb into place and stood up.
Looking down, he noticed the Drive's thermal plating was gone. Not that it was required, but, looking around, he couldn't find a shard or speck of them anywhere. He walked to the dormitory. Not a trace. He scanned the lavatory… nothing. Back in his lab, the metal beneath where the plates had been was glowing hot, like a space heater, but there was no smell of burning polymer.
The Drive must have done it, or the Void had, in protest—an attack? No, he must not anthropomorphize it. Still, the incident conjured the image of his ship as a parasite on a vigilant host, its native physics swatted down by the Blank's hefty, indifferent hand. He wondered if the ship's metric field, its invisible cocoon, might have weakened during the test, or because of it. He sighed. How much time was left? Should he stop here, and re-work the math with this new data? In his previous life he would have, but now, he just wanted to poke the beast. His dingy futon called…
A vast banner unfurled, blanketing the stars. A single sigil shone against a golden starburst—the Providence, superintelligent Galactic Steward. A hole in the canvas smoldered beyond Providence's outstretched hand. Under the banner, cheers erupted in unison from the brighter spheres—pulsing with neon commerce—balls rolling outward—gaping mouths devouring moons and drinking oceans.
Then shouts, implosions—whimpers in the vacuum of space—a child's glazed eyes, enraptured, yet frozen by horrors unseen.
A young woman mourning, adorned with vestments of war. As the spheres cheered, countless stars blinked out on the periphery.
The smoldering hole grew wider—through it… an egg, its shell shifting with familiar numbers and shapes, a swimming, cacophanous spiral crossed his vision before tumbling into the galaxy's center—a flower bloomed there, replaced by a DNA double-helix, flexing, then leaves, sprouting from a stem.
The galaxy's spiraling golden arms twisted, embracing the egg, searing, cracking—it hatched.
Ethereal light burst outward—white-hot tendrils through the ether—glowing superhighways untraveled—intangible—yet felt.
The glow weakened, and he saw worlds and moons as ashen embers, unsure if they marked a new beginning, as fertilized soil, or kindling for greater destruction…
His eyes shot open.
Just a dream.
He wasn't sure he cared anymore what happened as a result of his experiment, and his fear of the Providence belonged in the past, but the dream seemed to straddle the line between history and revelation. He didn’t give himself over to visions or whimsy, but this dream was unusual. Its texture was different. It tasted metallic, felt like a temblor, sounded like a swarm of—
Rules… Interrupted by the word, he remembered the double-helix—the twisted lattice—the spiral arms, and the flower’s petals.
Of course. Why not try that? So he set the Neighmbers to follow' the Bioharmonic Array, a mathematical pattern given to form throughout the cosmos—a sort of middle ground between too-slow linear and what proved to be risky, accelerating growth, a pattern that, hopefully, wouldn't collapse too fast or stretch too thin.
He scrawled out the new numbers in his notes, mumbled Rule 1, and spoke the rest of them into the Drive, bracing for the quiet that would follow:
The Survival rule:
Rule 2 - Persistence:
A node survives another generation if surrounded by 2, 3, or 5 Nodes.
The Growth rule:
Rule 3 — Complexity:
Nodes become a surviving Cluster once 8 or 13 nodes join together. Clusters grow by linking with new Nodes over time.
Now for the "DNA":
Rule 4 — Replication:
Clusters reaching 21 Nodes can swap information with other Clusters, form energy "wiring", specializing over time.
The man leaned back before speaking the last rule, recalling Conway's Game. The next rule touched on learning, agency, and prediction, the pillars Conway lacked, since replication was just blindly copying patterns. Prediction meant looking ahead, modeling the unknown, and making choices to shape the future. At its core, learning was the craft of guessing what comes next, and reshaping oneself after making a mistake. Until the light forms could do that, they would only be patterns, not minds.
Now for the "brains." He spoke the last rule to the Drive.
Rule 5 — Learning:
Above 34 Nodes, Clusters can evolve internal feedback loops, internal representation (self-modeling), and predictive ability, allowing for intelligent, goal-oriented behavior. Clusters this size are the building blocks for neural networks.
He winced as the silence crashed like thunder.
You forgot Rule 6, the voice insisted.
Yes, Rule X…Death.
Is that how we'll end? As drifting Nodes, mumbling in the dark?
He tried to ignore the voice, but Rule X was important, his rule with no number. Order and complexity are costly. Entropy undoes all, and even faster in the Void. The Drive’s energy feed wouldn’t always be stable, eventually succumbing to chaos, but as long as it could power at least a billion generations, he figured, the Game stood a chance.
He could only guess what death would look like for the entities that might arise. As the Drive maintained ever higher complexity, it would heat up, causing its power supply to stutter. Then, internal coherence would start to fray, Nodes would go dark, and the great Clusters would decay, losing first their intelligence, then complexity, then light, until every Node fell dark.
Intention is leaky—think those thoughts carefully! The voice nagged.
Could that have something to do with the "attack"? He took a deep breath. Personifying the Blank could welcome greater madness, but he'd grown fond of its company, despite its hostility.
The man drummed his fingers on his thighs as he watched the photonic display shimmer out in the Blank. One moment, a fog of light would nearly coalesce into symmetry, then dissipate the next. He couldn’t trust his eyes. He found two working, rusty drones aboard. He sent one out, hoping to expand his line of sight, but it seemed to vanish the moment it crossed the metric field, his ship's pocket of tamed spacetime. Beyond it, the Void's physics reigned. So he sent out the second to stop short of that point. At least he’d have a view for a time. Losing the first drone taught him the border between the ship’s metric field and Void-space was sharper than he’d imagined.
Click.
Out there, the drone’s atomic structure would unravel quickly. Inside, his wrinkles deepened faster than he thought possible. Matter seemed to have a shorter half-life, here. He had suspected as much during preparations pre-exile, pre-Erasure. That word stung, even as he wore its mantle.
Click.
The Game needed a steady energy supply, but the Blank, no longer blank but seeded with light, held less dimensional energy to siphon than he’d hoped for. Months earlier, maybe a year, he’d realized the Drive’s power supply alone couldn’t sustain the Game through its highest entropy states. Greater chaos was essential—a primordial soup from which more complex forms could arise. So he’d aimed the Drive’s Field Collapse Chamber outward, reconfiguring it to fold segments of his own ship into raw energy. He was cannibalizing his ship, harvesting matter as energy—thrusting into the Deep piece by life-giving piece, desperate offerings to the virgin Deep.
Click.
Was it worth it? The now-familiar voice whispered. Your death won’t come soon enough… for the pain.
Click.
His face tightened, teeth bared, eyes pressed shut—guilt for the pain he’d caused, and fear for the pain still to come. Behind his eyelids, cities burned and mothers wailed.
Click.
The man lay naked, his skin slick with sweat, pulled taut over the sharp ridges of his ribs. The Drive hummed, emanating heat like a dying star. Life support systems still functioned for now, but climate control was inoperable. Another sacrifice to the Drive.
Click.
His work was complete. Now, with nothing left to do, his former students, friends, and strangers waltzed fleetingly around, oblivious apparitions that paid him little mind. He tried shouting, small talk, even insults, but they barely glanced his way. Some locked eyes with him, saying nothing before recoiling and fading away.
Click.
Now that he was willing to talk, they ignored him. His former life was now a half-remembered dream; its memories faded like his phantom visitors.
Click.
His eyelids felt like sandpaper. Would hunger, thirst, or heat end him? He once feared the madness would take control, robbing him of death. He’d feared instinct would take over, feeding his belly the rations he’d sacrificed to the Drive and reclaiming the bits he'd fed it to stay alive. Mercifully, he lacked the strength to stand.
Click. Click.
Beyond the screen wall, rhythmic pulses of multicolored iridescence quickened in the enveloping womb of the Deep, taking on ephemeral forms—sinuous, radial, and tessellated. The view was abysmal—he loved that pun—sprawled out as he was, but he gleaned what joy he could from their reflections on beads of sweat, shining through slitted eyes. Trial trumps theory. A smile played on his lips, the hint of a laugh that couldn't escape.
Click. Click.
Click.