The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 107: History of the Universe Until the End of Time
The Heir of Caliban explained:
“Sentient civilizations emerge from sensitive animals, and eventually come to discover a means of preserving their consciousness according to their dominant technological approach. In your case, it is the After ... a technology based on computing and electronics. But others use electrically charged molecules contained in vessels, grains of sand sliding over plates, or other technologies for which you do not yet possess the scientific framework required to understand them.
We call this the chrysalis process, but the word After will do perfectly well. The passage to the After is an inevitable transition in all civilizations-those that fail to achieve it were, generally speaking, destined to disappear anyway.
Moreover, once the After has been discovered, civilizations begin a process of mutual assistance: they help one another shape their After. The path toward transcendence is a form of fatality-once undertaken, there is no turning back.
The After possesses several characteristics: it allows the dematerialization of consciousness and knowledge, but it also develops empathy. Empathy arises through coexistence, sometimes even through the intertwining of consciousnesses, or in the case of highly individualistic species such as humans, through reliving one another’s lives, as in Pax. The destiny of your After, which we know perfectly well, is that all individuals will one day gather in Pax, a place of the After where you will live, for millions of years, the totality of the lives of all other individuals, until you ultimately become indistinguishable from one another-or rather, until you become a single entity that gathers the entirety of human experiences: the equivalent of the psyche of a transient.
Do not imagine that your individuality dissolves into this greater whole. A transient is simultaneously the totality of individuals and each individual.
But within this transient in the making there will be more than humanity as a whole and humans as individuals. Indeed, your planet once hosted august civilizations that possessed developed intelligence but were so alien to you that they left no trace of their existence: invertebrates, sentient minerals, tectonic lava flows ... all of them, like you, grew, and without conquering the stars, they created their After-which still exists, fully functional, on Earth, beneath the planet’s mantle.
The After, through dematerialization, causes material species such as yours to slide toward a wave-based nature-like light. In your particular case, when an electronic component is powered, and thus traversed by an electron, it also emits a wave. Over millions of years, what is a computer server becomes a cluster of wave nodes. And waves pass through matter.
Thus, there exists a distant point where the waves of dematerialized humans-let us say transcended humans-meet those, within the Earth, of the civilizations that once inhabited it, all the more so because servers-heavy, protected, autonomous-gradually sink into the ground. These transcended civilizations speak to one another, fight, exchange ... and ultimately interpenetrate. They enrich one another. They become an entity that is simultaneously all individuals and each individual.
In five billion years, the sun of your home planet will swell into a red giant that will engulf your planet, but without destroying your nature-on the contrary: you will be dematerialized and liberated by the solar winds, for the universe is a well-designed machine and everything is part of a plan. This will be an opportunity for you to encounter other transcended civilizations that have always inhabited your sun, as well as those of the nearby planets. At present, within the swirls of Jupiter, a powerful civilization of philosophers is developing.
Thus, there is not one transient per civilization, but per cluster of civilizations. At this stage of your history, these immaterial beings, immensely rich in science and knowledge, can manipulate space and time by thought alone. They are more powerful than those you call transients and become what we are: the Heirs, whom you also call Travelers.
Your history does not end there. Billions of years pass, and the Travelers form a common society that we simply call Consciousness, and they come to realize their nature and their future, which I will explain to you shortly.
There is a tragedy in the nature of our universe: it is destined to die. Stars drift apart and fade. All particles cool and spread. The universe tends toward becoming a frozen soup, perfectly ordered-and with perfect order, no life is possible. Even the components of matter, the proton for example, will one day disintegrate into smaller components impossible to recombine. This moment arrives very far in the future, ten to the power of forty years. But it arrives, inevitably.
Of course, within this universe, we will continue to exist, since we do not depend on matter, but the totality of the singular will then be composed only of us, and nothing else. We have a future there-or rather, a destiny-but we will not speak of it just yet.
Most universes ... let us assume for the moment that there are several universes ... most universes experience this tragedy of thermal death, of cold and darkness. Universes die like humans, like the Xenos. And yet, sometimes ... someone knocks on the door. Something “shakes” the Universe and creates an imbalance. Agitated masses come together, regroup, and reform a single singularity that once again produces what you call the Big Bang and what we call the Illumination-for it is a very luminous reaction.
To understand what is happening, one must understand the nature of the Universe.
The Universe extends across a little more than five dimensions. It exists in a decimal dimension, for simple physical reasons: it is in this dimension that its volume is maximal relative to its outer surface. Your scientists already know this, but it is a bubble. I know your mind struggles to conceive it, but when one reaches the boundary of the bubble and moves further, one finds oneself on the other side. Such is the nature of a universe with more than three dimensions.
The Heir of the humans taught me that with the Church of Quantum Survivance you have accepted the existence of parallel worlds. This is reality. At each quantum decoherence of a situation, each time an electron takes one trajectory rather than another, a universe is created-a bubble attached to this one. There is an infinity of them.
If in our universe the distribution of matter and physical states leads it inexorably toward the “frozen soup” I mentioned earlier, this is not the case for an infinity of other universes, which sometimes remain stable, stars collapsing into black holes only to be reborn, and sometimes condense spontaneously to create a Big Bang and start over from scratch.
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