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joshuazelinskyTo my children, I expect you'll get this letter when you are ready. How old that will be, I don't know. There will be other notes and letters from me, and I've included them below. All major terms are conceptually hyperlinked using my own knowledge as a base as well as the Collective Wiki; if something doesn't make sense, concentrate on the term. I don't know if you'll be used to that sort of interface by the time you get this letter; if not, it will be good practice. My apologies that this is not as organized as one would like; it is told from my perspective, with the details that seemed personally important to me.
This message summarizes the last few years of humanity's time on Earth, from my perspective; I wish you could have that of your other mother, Liz's perspective, but you'll learn soon about the sacrifice she made. Liz was, of course, always a better writer than I am, and you'll have to make do with my less organized prose.
As the 2040s dawned, we had mostly handled climate change, although not without some painful costs. We were dealing with other environmental problems, but they were small in comparison, and humanity had started to turn its attention collectively to understanding the universe around us to an extent never before seen. Aided by the first cybernetic implants for those willing to use them, humans were able to collaborate and communicate to an extent never before. A new age of peace, prosperity and science bloomed.
At this point, two discoveries happened, nearly simultaneously. Physicists discovered faster-than-light communication. At first, it was just an unexplained series of correlated anomalies in some of the data in the Extremely Large Collider; but as they examined it more, they realized it was actually consistent with some ideas about how to extend quantum mechanics from the complex numbers to quaternions. It was well known that this could in principle lead to FTL communication, so there was a lot of excitement. It wasn't long though before Scott Aaronson and one of his students, Jeremy Weisenstein proved that if the quaternionic amplitudes were appropriately restricted FTL communication is possible. At the same time, the theory eliminates other weirdnesses that might come from FTL, such as communicating with the past and sending messages before they are written. Liz had been good friends with Jeremy since graduate school, and they talked frequently about each other's research, so she could have told you more about this. Instead I'll just refer you to the other public files.
Jeremy and Scott got the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Jeremy also got the Fields Medal; Scott was by that point far too old for that. I only met Scott shortly after, at a party celebrating Jeremy's achievements thrown by some of his old friends; Scott seemed surprisingly unhappy about things; he had some natural intuition that things wouldn't work out well. In retrospect, his pessimism was warranted.
It's funny, I should be maybe upset with Jeremy and the physicists; if they hadn't discovered what they had, Liz might still be here, but I don't blame them too much. If it hadn't been for Jeremy, I would never have met Liz.
Back in grad school, Jeremy hosted a regular boardgame night for grad students to unwind. He had wanted to get a group together to play a new game; at the time, the game was a big deal since it was the first game designed by someone on Mars. Back then, there were all sorts of "the first X from Mars" and most of them have nothing else going for them other than that novelty. The game sucked; I don't even remember its genre or name now. But it sucked. Jeremy had once introduced me as Rachel-Who-Only-Enjoys-Five-Games, but it wasn't just my opinion, it was general consensus. I don't remember if we even finished playing it. After the game ended; people broke off into little groups doing other things.
I had been briefly introduced to Liz earlier that night; she was one of the new grad students, studying number theory. I was a neuroscience grad student at the time, having gone back to school after a little time in industry. To her, I must have seemed ancient. I ran into her in the kitchen as I was going in to get some more snacks. Somehow we got into a conversation about the ongoing California secessionist movement. That veered into other topics, and we just stayed there, mostly arguing. We didn't leave until all the other guests had left, and Jeremy came into the kitchen to tell us we had to go. Liz promptly asked me out for coffee. It wasn't clear to me at the time she meant it as a date, but I think it was clear to her. So, at least the physicists gave me that; and without Jeremy I'd never have had any of you.
The astronomers though, I don't owe anything. They made the second discovery. For a long time, people have been puzzled by the apparent absence of alien life, and people proposed all sorts of ideas to explain the Fermi paradox. One of the biggest pieces of evidence against alien life for a long-time had been the absence of megastructures, Dyson spheres built around stars, or other large-scale objects. Since the mid 2010s, astronomers had realized that one solution was white dwarfs. White dwarf stars are common and small. There are many advantages to building a Dyson sphere around a white dwarf, and they would be much harder to detect; if a civilization was interested in stealth that might even be an advantage.
By the 2040s, this was starting to look highly plausible. By 2050, astronomers had developed powerful enough techniques that they could start looking for signs of Dyson spheres around white dwarfs. And they found them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Other civilizations were out there. This didn't have an immediate impact on Liz or me; we talked about how much we could learn from them if we could communicate with them. I wanted to see brains that had evolved in completely different contexts than humans. Liz was hoping that that aliens might have theorems and branches of math that humans had never even thought of.
How to communicate with them was an immediate question. Quaternionic entanglement required that before one communicated, one had two particles physically near each other, and then brought apart. Worse, they could not themselves be brought apart quickly, or the entanglement effect would functionally break down; this was a consequence of the Aaronson-Weisenstein theorems; if one could move them apart quickly, one could play games which would allow one to violate causality, so that definitely couldn't happen.
The breakthrough was serendipity. A group of people had decided they wanted to be the first people to visit Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. Part of it was a corporate advertising gimmick, part was people with too much money who weren't quite bright enough to usefully contribute to society. But as part of their plan, they made an extremely extensive map of the planet, far more detailed than had been made previously, and they discovered four stations which were unambiguously artificial; the give away was that the structures had a hafnium alloy outside which could withstand extremely high temperatures.
It was around this time, that I was finishing my first post-doc and Liz was finishing up her PhD. Luckily for us, I had gotten a post-doc in Boston, the same city we had both done our graduate work, and so we had been together. Liz's research had been considered absolutely amazing, something to do with generalizing perfectoid spaces; people were calling her the next Peter Scholze. I didn't really understand it, but I was happy for her, and when she got an immediate offer for a tenure-track position at Harvard, we were happy to stick around.
It was about a year after that that the expedition to Mercury occurred. Now, instead of being a simple stunt, it was going to be an internationally sponsored expedition. The entire project had been put together with surprising haste. For the last year, humans had tried to send radio signals to the four stations, with no apparent response. Not everyone had agreed with that; there was a definite cause for worry that it might trigger some response we were not ready for, but the ease of sending the signals was so high that no one could prevent any interested amateur from trying to ping the stations. Now though, we were going to examine them in detail.
Jeremy at this point was something of a celebrity-physicist , and although it was wildly outside his area of expertise, that didn't stop the media for asking for his speculation on what the sites were. Oddly enough, it was a throwaway remark of his that turned out to be correct. He said to some news station "We don't really know much without actually going down there and looking. For all we know they could be advanced solar neutrino observatories." And that's exactly what they were. The stations were determined to be some ten-thousand years old, and were clearly very large-scale neutrino detectors. The xenoarchaeologists (a term that had previously existed but only now had real meaning) determined that three of the four stations were fully functioning, and one of them had apparent issues. They also detected signs of semi-regular maintenance. The designs suggested they were designed for species of a variety of different sizes, ranging from slightly smaller than a human up to slightly smaller than an elephant.
About a month after their preliminary report, humanity was trying to decide if they should try to use the stations to contact whoever had made them. The investigators had tentatively concluded that the station's quaternionic entanglement systems were still functioning. People worried about the consequences of contacting such an obviously more powerful species. Others argued that any species willing to put this much effort in to what was clearly a pure-science project would be at least as peaceful as humans had become in the last few decades.
Everyone took a side on the question. For once, Liz and I were in complete agreement; the knowledge we stood to gain was simply so great, it would be worth the risk. I don't know if she'd still think that, knowing what we know now.
Before people reached a consensus though, the point became moot. An alien ship appeared over Mercury. We later found out from the aliens that the human investigations had triggered two of the stations to run diagnostics and request repairs. They might not have prioritized repair, but two stations simultaneously requesting repairs had been abnormal, and then one of their techs went back through the old data and noticed that the stations had recorded the human radio signals sent earlier. By the time the aliens had organized enough to make the trip, they had examined enough of our radio signals, together with the fact that their stations had recorded and dutifully sent back years of human TV and other signals, that their language experts could speak passable English.
Their initial message was sent in English, Spanish and Chinese. They had begun to understand other languages, but with much smaller samples, they were uncertain enough that they chose not to use them. The message read:
"Greetings humans. It is always a joyous occasion to welcome another species of ensouled beings. We hope to see you one day join the the Galactic Federation. We look forward to learning much from you, and you from us. As your species says, we come in peace. "
When this was reported Liz and I were both near tears; of course she had to go and ruin the moment by turning to me and saying "Hey! We're supposed to the be the founders of the Federation. Haven't these guys watched any Star Trek?"
I think I may have punched her shoulder in response. Liz was definitely not the only one to have that thought, and for the next few months, that old television show became a popular topic for late-night comedians. Less attention was paid to what turned out to be the important part of the message.
As communication progressed, we found that the ship belonged to what was as close as a human could approximately pronounce, the Awnath, one of some eight hundred and fifty two species in a galactic federation. In the initial communications, they sent us a summary of their anatomy. The Awnath looked approximately like a six-limbed turtle, slightly smaller than a human, with a pair of highly versatile claws for the front limbs that functioned as hands. They had something approximating a face, with four eyes, each in a pair above and below their mouth. I was, of course, most interested in their brain, which turned out to be not in their head at all, but inside their main body. From the initial diagrams, I and other biologists were surprised at how small their brains were; we found out the reason for that later.
While the ship was an Awnath ship, only about 90% of the crew was Awnath, with a whole bunch of other species. While the Awnath had originated on a planet very similar to Earth both in terms of gravity and atmosphere, the ship had a variety of species with different environmental requirements and appearances. The Awnath themselves were apparently more interested than most species in the Federation in astronomy and other investigations of large-scale natural phenomena. Apparently we were the sixth species which had been discovered due to it investigating Awnath neutrino observatories.
Of course, one of the first questions the physicists had was how the Awnath ship had simply appeared. It turned out that the Federation had developed a wormhole system; but like the quaternionic entanglement, fundamental laws of physics prevented it from being used to engage in violations of causality. Establishing a wormhole required physically moving the mouth through normal space but once it was established, it could be used more or less routinely. The energy involved was enormous even for a highly advanced civilization, (in fact one of the known failure modes was if one accidentally got too close to violating causality for the entire thing to just turn into a black hole), so the vast majority of communication was done using quaternonic entanglement. For reasons that apparently the Awnath didn't fully understand, the quaternonic entanglement was not preserved when going through a wormhole, which lead to its own set of complications. The neutrino observatories had some capability for two-way quat communication, but that had limited bandwidth, and modifying it was going to be difficult. So until a ship was able to take the journey in conventional space at about a tenth of light speed, from the nearest destination, some 20 light years away, humans were going to have to communicate with the Federation primarily using wormholes.
Over the next two years, five more ships showed up; two were Awnath and three with more mixed crews. They contained visiting scientists, mathematicians, engineers as well as a trio of ambassadors from the Federation to negotiate a treaty with humanity with the long-term goal of joining the Federation. At this point, there were some disruptions and terrorist activity by some religious fanatics; some claimed that the aliens were demons, others had other worries. The real threat none of them had the imagination to see coming.
It was some of my own research that at some level was the ultimate trigger for all the problems. I was one of the first group of scientists selected to interface with the Federation delegates. Liz had also been selected to interface with their mathematicians, and so we both spent time on the most recent ship, which had moved to Earth orbit. There were enough different species in the delegation with different gravity and environmental constraints that it was generally easier to have the humans visit the ship than the reverse.
Liz and her colleagues determined that although the aliens were clearly more advanced than humans in a variety of areas of mathematics, in some particular areas, especially Liz's own area of algebraic number theory, humans had definitely made discoveries that were unknown to the Federation's mathematicians. It appeared that average human intelligence was slightly above that of most sapient species in the galaxy, and that the smartest, humans, like Liz and Jeremy, might be more intelligent than the smartest of any of the alien species. We didn't really understand the significance of that at first.
Meanwhile, I was trying to understand the Awnath biology. We had decided to focus on them simply because we had more of them available, and they had provided us with more information than others. There was another species, the Iglin, which resembled humans more closely; they were bipedal and had an approximately human face. While bipedalism was common among the Federation, a human-like face was substantially less so. Some of the Iglins had been selected by the Federation to visit precisely because of all the species, they most closely physically resembled us. But there weren't that many Iglin on the ships which had arrived, and most of them were dealing with things like serious negotiations and public relations. So we focused on the Awnath.
I was spending most of the time collaborating with Emmett, one of the Awnath biologists. We had called him Emmett because it was the closest approximation to his name we could easily pronounce; the Awnath had three different sexes, none of which which that closely approximated human sex notions, but Emmett was of the type closest to being male in some sense, and so that was the pronoun we used. I'll always remember Emmett fondly; he quickly picked up English, and it turned out that the Awnath had a sense of humor similar to humans, and he was very funny when he wanted to be. I didn't interact that much with the Iglins, but we quickly learned that despite their physical resemblance to humans their emotional makeup was much further from humans than that of the Awnath.
We started off at a very basic level, engaging in a cross comparison of human and Awnath biology. We both used DNA for genetic material; this wasn't universal among all species in the Federation, some used RNA, others used PNA, and others used molecules humans had not thought about at all. The Awnath had a single organ that functioned in a human what both kidneys and liver would function as in a terrestrial mammal. Most of the rest of their biology resembled that of an Earth mammal. Like humans, they were naturally omnivores.
It was when we started focusing on the neuroscience that things got interesting. The Awnath had an analog of neurons and an analog of glial cells. Human vision processing was substantially more complicated than that of the Awnath which was surprising given their four eyes to our two. At first we thought this was due in part to their functional colorblindness, but we determined that wasn't the case. Although they were from a human standpoint mostly color blind, seeing most of much of humans would label as blue and green as a single color, they could also see into the ultraviolet and infrared, and had a great deal of ability to distinguish color in the near red and infrared section. This focus on the infrared likely came from their evolution as a crepuscular species on a planet with a dimmer star than the sun.
In the translated diagrams they had outlining their brains, there were a series of collections of cells labeled "soul points." At first, I didn't pay careful attention to them; we had seen a few mentions of souls before, which we had mostly assumed were translation issues that would be eventually cleared up. There had been a brief confusion early on when amygdala had been translated literally into the primary Awnathi tongue and then Emmett had in English referred to it as the "almond in the brain." I assumed it was something similar. But when Emmett asked where in the human brain the soul points were located, that brought out attention. I'll include here that conversation as best as I can remember.
"What do you mean by soul points?" I asked him.
Emmett blinked both sets of eyes; a gesture I already learned to recognize as a sign of confusion or careful thought.
"The neural clusters where the soul connects." This sentence came not from Emmett's mouth, but from the electronic translator he had. He had learned passable English, but had taken the habit of using the translator when he was uncertain; I had told him that his English was generally as good or better than the translator, but I guess everyone is a creature of habit.
"Emmett," I said, "What do you mean by soul?"
"The soul. The part that makes ultimate decisions and sits without time."
"Is this a religious belief?"
Emmett brought forth his claws out in an animated way as he began to talk rapidly; he had once jokingly said that if he had been a human he would have been Italian. "This is not about religion. There are of course, religions which claim that the souls come from some deity or collection of deities, but the soul is very much science."
I blinked, unconsciously mirroring Emmett's earlier blink.
"Emmett, human science doesn't recognize a soul, or anything similar. We've never seen anything like what Earth religions call a soul."
"Interesting. We've encountered intelligent species before that don't have advanced neuroscience, so they didn't know about them, but I would have definitely guessed you would have found them by now."
"Are you saying that there are these soul points? Maybe we have seen them, but we didn't call them that." Working with aliens had seemed initially surreal, but even that had reached a degree of normality. This conversation seemed to feel more surreal than even the first conversations had been.
"The soul points are where the soul takes in information. Some species have just one type for both input and output from the soul. Others have separate segments for each. They can be detected because small packets of energy seem to appear and disappear from them, and they become much more active when one is making major decisions or decisions which have an ethical aspect."
"Emmett, I think we'd have detected something like that. Maybe we don't have them."
Emmett front claws flailed in a way which based I on what I had been told about his species indicated intense agitation, but I had never seen the actual behavior.
"Every intelligent species has them. Intelligence and self-awareness has to come from somewhere."
I frowned. "Humans have been arguing about this sort of idea for a very long time. It sounds like what you are talking about is a variation of what we call Cartesian dualism. But, when we first started doing neuroscience we looked for any signs of structures or evidence of anything like that. We never found any."
"Are you sure, Rachel?"
"Well, maybe not. It might be that the people first looking at brains were people who had already decided that that intuition is misguided."
We quickly summoned most of the other biologists both human and alien (we didn't need to immediately talk to the one's who studied Earth's non-human flora and fauna). We told them of the apparent discrepancy we had found; the human biologists reacted mostly with fascination and curiosity. The Awnath reacted as a mix, some were apparently very disturbed, others seemed almost serenely confident that we would find the relevant attachment points; they were probably just more obscure in human biology. Now that we knew to look for them, of course we'd find them.
As the news trickled down, neuroscientists around the world raced to locate the soul points. Liz and I meanwhile had returned Earthside to conceive the two of you. At that point, the technology had been recently developed enough that we didn't need donor sperm, we could use both of our eggs, and simply modify one of ours to turn it functionally into sperm. We did want potential boy children, and for those, Jeremy agreed to provide part of his Y chromosome.
Liz had initially considered bearing a child, but with the recent rise in uterine replicator technology, she and I had both agreed that would be more convenient; and if we needed to return to space, it would be safer for all concerned. The Awnaths claimed that their technology did an effective job at blocking radiation, but we didn't feel a need to risk it. We prepared a collection of frozen embryos for later use, especially since there had been some discussion of the Awnath inviting Liz to give some talks on one of their worlds. I don't know if this message is being read by Joey, Sarah or one of our later children.
At around this time, the first humans were invited to visit the Federation itself, and a small delegation of humans left on one of the ships.
A little over a year went by, and the sprint to find the soul points had turned into a marathon. The consensus was clear: anything like what the Awnath had was completely lacking in humans. We were from the standpoint of the Awnath, close to what some humans in the late 20th century called philosophical zombies. And this also explained our large brains compared to the other intelligent species: we didn't have any external processing or decision making. That also explained why it appeared that the most intelligent humans were in general smarter than aliens; we had more flexible brain power. As we realized the fundamental difference in our natures, the aliens' reactions were stark. The Iglin ambassadors withdrew, and many of the Awnath left. Those that stayed seemed mostly convinced that humans really did have souls, we just had them connected in some subtle way.
I was with Liz at our home watching over the uterine replicators with both Joey and Sarah. We had prepared the embryos over a year before, but hadn't decided to actually gestate them until then. We got a knock at our door. Our house was an old brownstone in Boston, but like most modernized homes, the house should have told us someone was at the door, and who it was.
I opened the door, and found out why it hadn't recognize the individual. Emmett wouldn't be in the database. Along with Emmett was another Awnath, who had been called Tina; she had worked with Liz. While Emmett's shell and greenish coloring was close to that of what one would expect from a large human turtle, Tina's ancestry was from the Northern continent on the Awnath home planet, and she had a dark blue mottled pattern common to her ancestry.
"May we come in?" asked Tina.
We let them in, and Liz rushed to get them food. We didn't have any Awnath specific food in the house, but they could eat a variety of foods that humans could eat. We had already found out they were particularly fond of cheesy foods, especially pizza; Awnath did nurse their young, but their milk did not contain any lactose. However, there were many fruits on their native planet which naturally produced lactose, so there was no equivalent of lactose-intolerance among their species. Liz, of course, had a lot of cheese in the house. She had always been fond of cheese; as your development progressed, she had used this is an excuse to announce that she was eating for more than just herself now. When I had pointed out to her that none of her calories were necessary since both fetuses were in uterine replicators she had replied that "I wouldn't know that, I'm a mathematician, you're the biologist."
Emmett and Tina gratefully sampled the cheese, but from what we had both learned of their body language, they were tense, and this wasn't really a social visit.
Liz, always the more blunt of the two of us, broke the question first. "So, why are you both here? I thought the consensus was that it made more sense to send humans up to you. And why didn't you call or send an email?"
Emmett and Tina glanced at each other, a surprisingly human gesture. That was when I noticed that neither of them had their translator packs. I remembered that the translator packs were programmed to record all conversations and to use those recordings to improve their algorithms.
Tina spoke first. "Something's happening, and whether or not you have souls, we think you are friends, and deserve to know."
Liz and I glanced at each other. That didn't sound good.
"The Federation has come to the conclusion that the humans are correct that they don't have souls, as such as it is meaningful for a being without a soul to be correct about anything. The idea of intelligent beings that lack souls is frightening and repugnant to every ensouled species."
At this, Tina made what seemed almost like an involuntary shudder.
"Without souls, humans are functionally automatons, and they have no natural moral compass beyond the one given to them by evolution."
Liz looked at Tina "Yes, so? We've known that for a long time, and we've done well for ourselves, despite that."
Tina shook her head in the negative, in a way that was clearly intended to imitate a human shake of the head. "If you lack souls, your behavior is unpredictable, you might go to war for simple convenience. Worse, from the standpoint of the ensouled, you lack moral agency or moral weight; there's no reason to give you any benefit of the doubt; if you die, you won't suffer, you'll just act like you are suffering."
We both looked at Tina and Emmett. "What are you saying?" I asked.
Emmett continued where Tina left off, "As far as we can tell, most of the humans who have visited Awnath are dead. Mostly dissected to confirm directly the lack of human soul points. The Federation is intending to send a battle fleet here to eliminate the human threat."
Liz gasped, and I put my hand protectively over the uterine replicator unit sitting in the room with us.
"Why are you telling us? And how do you know this?" asked Liz.
Tina looked at her, and Emmett looked at me. Tina replied "First, Because, whether you have true conscious awareness or not, you are friends, and we felt we owed you. And to the second question, they've alerted all Awnath and other non-humans in the system. The next two ships will leave with almost all of us, and we'll still take some humans with us in those two ships, to avoid suspicion."
Emmett looked up, "We have to return now. Officially this was a work visit. We could claim it was social, but the others will be immediately suspicious that anyone would be genuinely social with soulless beings."
We ushered them out, and did not know what to say. We contacted Jeremy, who had been apparently had a strange conversation with one his own Awnath contacts, and although they had not been as explicit as Emmett and Tina, they had caused him some concern. At this point, all three of us were sufficiently prominent, Jeremy especially, that it became not too difficult to directly contact the government and alert them.
The US government had at least been paying sufficient attention that they had seen some strange warning signs, as had some of the others in the Eight Eyes, but our message let them put together the final details. The question then became what to do about it.
Here again, the solution came down to Jeremy; he and some others had been studying the problem of why the quaternionicly entangled particles broke down when they went through a wormhole. They didn't fully understand the process, although he and some others had made some progress beyond the Awnath. But there was an important insight from their work which they had kept carefully quiet about. If one sent through properly calibrated quaternionicly entangled particles through a wormhole, it might be possible to destabilize it. In fact, some of their models predicted that it might create a gravitational cascade, destabilizing any other wormholes with entrances near where the initially destabilized wormhole existed. If there were enough others nearby, it might create an effect similar to a nuclear detonation where each fission event created more neutrons. Each wormhole destabilization would have the potential to create more destabilizations. We weren't certain how likely that would be; every wormhole was unique, with individual resonances created by the history of passing ships and from the gravity of nearby stars. But we had had now multiple years to study the specific wormhole next to Mercury. We could definitely at least collapse it.
And we knew the precise locations of most of the Federation wormhole network; many were for convenience close to each other, and the Mercury wormhole exited at a moderate sized hub. If we could blow-up that wormhole, sheer proximity would do what careful resonance structures would do to the Mercury wormhole. We maybe could take out a large fraction of the wormhole network in our part of the galaxy, hopefully buying time for humans to develop a military defense. This plan had one small bright side: we were reasonably confident that the vast majority of wormholes were far away enough from inhabited planets that alien casualties would be small.
When we found about this, Liz said that clearly the narrative was all wrong; the Federation was supposed to be the side saved by the technobabble. Then came the real difficulty; humans had not yet managed to make their own ships capable of using wormholes; we knew the basics of the technology, but the precision involved in the engineering was simply too great at our current tech base. Somehow, we were going to need to get the destabilizing particles on a ship going through the wormhole.
And here Liz volunteered, damn her. Before the consensus about human nature had developed, she had been invited to visit the nearest major Awnath colony world, where she was going to be the keynote speaker in a conference on human insights into algebraic number theory. That invitation had not been withdrawn. We had considered saying no, because it would be close to your births. Now, she said yes. Hidden in her luggage would be the most expensive and carefully designed 10 kg box ever made by human hands; and in it, in a carefully preserved ultracold chamber would be the quaternionicly entangled particles set to destablize the wormhole.
We knew when she left that she wasn't going to come back. According to all our models, the most likely result of the destablizer was that it would kill everyone going through the wormhole. Even if she somehow survived the experience and came out the other side, without a wormhole, she'd be trapped there. The nearest hub was a brown dwarf with a small station, but it was unlikely that any of the aliens would assist a soulless being, much less one who had probably just destroyed 5% to 10% of the galactic wormhole network.
Liz almost backed out. Not for me, or for our children, but because Tina was going to be leaving on the same ship she was, nominally for the conference. Liz wasn't sure she could kill her friend who had risked herself for her. But Liz decided she had to go through with it, for me, and for our children. She was the only human on the ship; and when we saw the flash of light as the wormhole disintegrated, I knew immediately that there was no chance she had survived. I wonder sometimes if Tina found Liz's presence suspicious, and if she suspected something of what Liz was going to do.
Our best estimate was that it would take about a century before any aliens reached Earth. Unfortunately, the chance that humanity would survive that event was low. So, we did what we could. We had already identified two not too distant uninhabited Earth-like worlds, and serious planning for colonization had started before we even came in contact with the aliens. So we constructed generation ships, so at least some humans would survive. We needed embryos, and young children for ships, as well as young people to be the first generation. I was already too old by the time the first ship was to launch, but you were young enough, and I was able to parlay Liz's sacrifice into sending both of you, and our embryos on the first ship. I didn't know if Earth would survive, but I was going to make sure that Liz's children at least made it somewhere, even on some distant world.
I have no doubt that someday, after they have destroyed Earth, you or your descendants will meet the ensouled again. They will not be kind; even if we were not soulless, they must remember the havoc we created. We bought ourselves time, but we didn't buy victory. It will be up to you, and those after you, to convince them that lacking souls doesn't mean lacking value.
I will never see you again, but have no doubt my children. We may lack souls. I may on some level be an automaton writing to a collection of automatons. But that doesn't make my love for you less real, and it doesn't make Liz's sacrifice any less noble. My mind may not be eternal; I may be a creature of flesh and blood, but my love for you is everlasting.
Your mother,
Rachel
This message summarizes the last few years of humanity's time on Earth, from my perspective; I wish you could have that of your other mother, Liz's perspective, but you'll learn soon about the sacrifice she made. Liz was, of course, always a better writer than I am, and you'll have to make do with my less organized prose.
As the 2040s dawned, we had mostly handled climate change, although not without some painful costs. We were dealing with other environmental problems, but they were small in comparison, and humanity had started to turn its attention collectively to understanding the universe around us to an extent never before seen. Aided by the first cybernetic implants for those willing to use them, humans were able to collaborate and communicate to an extent never before. A new age of peace, prosperity and science bloomed.
At this point, two discoveries happened, nearly simultaneously. Physicists discovered faster-than-light communication. At first, it was just an unexplained series of correlated anomalies in some of the data in the Extremely Large Collider; but as they examined it more, they realized it was actually consistent with some ideas about how to extend quantum mechanics from the complex numbers to quaternions. It was well known that this could in principle lead to FTL communication, so there was a lot of excitement. It wasn't long though before Scott Aaronson and one of his students, Jeremy Weisenstein proved that if the quaternionic amplitudes were appropriately restricted FTL communication is possible. At the same time, the theory eliminates other weirdnesses that might come from FTL, such as communicating with the past and sending messages before they are written. Liz had been good friends with Jeremy since graduate school, and they talked frequently about each other's research, so she could have told you more about this. Instead I'll just refer you to the other public files.
Jeremy and Scott got the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Jeremy also got the Fields Medal; Scott was by that point far too old for that. I only met Scott shortly after, at a party celebrating Jeremy's achievements thrown by some of his old friends; Scott seemed surprisingly unhappy about things; he had some natural intuition that things wouldn't work out well. In retrospect, his pessimism was warranted.
It's funny, I should be maybe upset with Jeremy and the physicists; if they hadn't discovered what they had, Liz might still be here, but I don't blame them too much. If it hadn't been for Jeremy, I would never have met Liz.
Back in grad school, Jeremy hosted a regular boardgame night for grad students to unwind. He had wanted to get a group together to play a new game; at the time, the game was a big deal since it was the first game designed by someone on Mars. Back then, there were all sorts of "the first X from Mars" and most of them have nothing else going for them other than that novelty. The game sucked; I don't even remember its genre or name now. But it sucked. Jeremy had once introduced me as Rachel-Who-Only-Enjoys-Five-Games, but it wasn't just my opinion, it was general consensus. I don't remember if we even finished playing it. After the game ended; people broke off into little groups doing other things.
I had been briefly introduced to Liz earlier that night; she was one of the new grad students, studying number theory. I was a neuroscience grad student at the time, having gone back to school after a little time in industry. To her, I must have seemed ancient. I ran into her in the kitchen as I was going in to get some more snacks. Somehow we got into a conversation about the ongoing California secessionist movement. That veered into other topics, and we just stayed there, mostly arguing. We didn't leave until all the other guests had left, and Jeremy came into the kitchen to tell us we had to go. Liz promptly asked me out for coffee. It wasn't clear to me at the time she meant it as a date, but I think it was clear to her. So, at least the physicists gave me that; and without Jeremy I'd never have had any of you.
The astronomers though, I don't owe anything. They made the second discovery. For a long time, people have been puzzled by the apparent absence of alien life, and people proposed all sorts of ideas to explain the Fermi paradox. One of the biggest pieces of evidence against alien life for a long-time had been the absence of megastructures, Dyson spheres built around stars, or other large-scale objects. Since the mid 2010s, astronomers had realized that one solution was white dwarfs. White dwarf stars are common and small. There are many advantages to building a Dyson sphere around a white dwarf, and they would be much harder to detect; if a civilization was interested in stealth that might even be an advantage.
By the 2040s, this was starting to look highly plausible. By 2050, astronomers had developed powerful enough techniques that they could start looking for signs of Dyson spheres around white dwarfs. And they found them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Other civilizations were out there. This didn't have an immediate impact on Liz or me; we talked about how much we could learn from them if we could communicate with them. I wanted to see brains that had evolved in completely different contexts than humans. Liz was hoping that that aliens might have theorems and branches of math that humans had never even thought of.
How to communicate with them was an immediate question. Quaternionic entanglement required that before one communicated, one had two particles physically near each other, and then brought apart. Worse, they could not themselves be brought apart quickly, or the entanglement effect would functionally break down; this was a consequence of the Aaronson-Weisenstein theorems; if one could move them apart quickly, one could play games which would allow one to violate causality, so that definitely couldn't happen.
The breakthrough was serendipity. A group of people had decided they wanted to be the first people to visit Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. Part of it was a corporate advertising gimmick, part was people with too much money who weren't quite bright enough to usefully contribute to society. But as part of their plan, they made an extremely extensive map of the planet, far more detailed than had been made previously, and they discovered four stations which were unambiguously artificial; the give away was that the structures had a hafnium alloy outside which could withstand extremely high temperatures.
It was around this time, that I was finishing my first post-doc and Liz was finishing up her PhD. Luckily for us, I had gotten a post-doc in Boston, the same city we had both done our graduate work, and so we had been together. Liz's research had been considered absolutely amazing, something to do with generalizing perfectoid spaces; people were calling her the next Peter Scholze. I didn't really understand it, but I was happy for her, and when she got an immediate offer for a tenure-track position at Harvard, we were happy to stick around.
It was about a year after that that the expedition to Mercury occurred. Now, instead of being a simple stunt, it was going to be an internationally sponsored expedition. The entire project had been put together with surprising haste. For the last year, humans had tried to send radio signals to the four stations, with no apparent response. Not everyone had agreed with that; there was a definite cause for worry that it might trigger some response we were not ready for, but the ease of sending the signals was so high that no one could prevent any interested amateur from trying to ping the stations. Now though, we were going to examine them in detail.
Jeremy at this point was something of a celebrity-physicist , and although it was wildly outside his area of expertise, that didn't stop the media for asking for his speculation on what the sites were. Oddly enough, it was a throwaway remark of his that turned out to be correct. He said to some news station "We don't really know much without actually going down there and looking. For all we know they could be advanced solar neutrino observatories." And that's exactly what they were. The stations were determined to be some ten-thousand years old, and were clearly very large-scale neutrino detectors. The xenoarchaeologists (a term that had previously existed but only now had real meaning) determined that three of the four stations were fully functioning, and one of them had apparent issues. They also detected signs of semi-regular maintenance. The designs suggested they were designed for species of a variety of different sizes, ranging from slightly smaller than a human up to slightly smaller than an elephant.
About a month after their preliminary report, humanity was trying to decide if they should try to use the stations to contact whoever had made them. The investigators had tentatively concluded that the station's quaternionic entanglement systems were still functioning. People worried about the consequences of contacting such an obviously more powerful species. Others argued that any species willing to put this much effort in to what was clearly a pure-science project would be at least as peaceful as humans had become in the last few decades.
Everyone took a side on the question. For once, Liz and I were in complete agreement; the knowledge we stood to gain was simply so great, it would be worth the risk. I don't know if she'd still think that, knowing what we know now.
Before people reached a consensus though, the point became moot. An alien ship appeared over Mercury. We later found out from the aliens that the human investigations had triggered two of the stations to run diagnostics and request repairs. They might not have prioritized repair, but two stations simultaneously requesting repairs had been abnormal, and then one of their techs went back through the old data and noticed that the stations had recorded the human radio signals sent earlier. By the time the aliens had organized enough to make the trip, they had examined enough of our radio signals, together with the fact that their stations had recorded and dutifully sent back years of human TV and other signals, that their language experts could speak passable English.
Their initial message was sent in English, Spanish and Chinese. They had begun to understand other languages, but with much smaller samples, they were uncertain enough that they chose not to use them. The message read:
"Greetings humans. It is always a joyous occasion to welcome another species of ensouled beings. We hope to see you one day join the the Galactic Federation. We look forward to learning much from you, and you from us. As your species says, we come in peace. "
When this was reported Liz and I were both near tears; of course she had to go and ruin the moment by turning to me and saying "Hey! We're supposed to the be the founders of the Federation. Haven't these guys watched any Star Trek?"
I think I may have punched her shoulder in response. Liz was definitely not the only one to have that thought, and for the next few months, that old television show became a popular topic for late-night comedians. Less attention was paid to what turned out to be the important part of the message.
As communication progressed, we found that the ship belonged to what was as close as a human could approximately pronounce, the Awnath, one of some eight hundred and fifty two species in a galactic federation. In the initial communications, they sent us a summary of their anatomy. The Awnath looked approximately like a six-limbed turtle, slightly smaller than a human, with a pair of highly versatile claws for the front limbs that functioned as hands. They had something approximating a face, with four eyes, each in a pair above and below their mouth. I was, of course, most interested in their brain, which turned out to be not in their head at all, but inside their main body. From the initial diagrams, I and other biologists were surprised at how small their brains were; we found out the reason for that later.
While the ship was an Awnath ship, only about 90% of the crew was Awnath, with a whole bunch of other species. While the Awnath had originated on a planet very similar to Earth both in terms of gravity and atmosphere, the ship had a variety of species with different environmental requirements and appearances. The Awnath themselves were apparently more interested than most species in the Federation in astronomy and other investigations of large-scale natural phenomena. Apparently we were the sixth species which had been discovered due to it investigating Awnath neutrino observatories.
Of course, one of the first questions the physicists had was how the Awnath ship had simply appeared. It turned out that the Federation had developed a wormhole system; but like the quaternionic entanglement, fundamental laws of physics prevented it from being used to engage in violations of causality. Establishing a wormhole required physically moving the mouth through normal space but once it was established, it could be used more or less routinely. The energy involved was enormous even for a highly advanced civilization, (in fact one of the known failure modes was if one accidentally got too close to violating causality for the entire thing to just turn into a black hole), so the vast majority of communication was done using quaternonic entanglement. For reasons that apparently the Awnath didn't fully understand, the quaternonic entanglement was not preserved when going through a wormhole, which lead to its own set of complications. The neutrino observatories had some capability for two-way quat communication, but that had limited bandwidth, and modifying it was going to be difficult. So until a ship was able to take the journey in conventional space at about a tenth of light speed, from the nearest destination, some 20 light years away, humans were going to have to communicate with the Federation primarily using wormholes.
Over the next two years, five more ships showed up; two were Awnath and three with more mixed crews. They contained visiting scientists, mathematicians, engineers as well as a trio of ambassadors from the Federation to negotiate a treaty with humanity with the long-term goal of joining the Federation. At this point, there were some disruptions and terrorist activity by some religious fanatics; some claimed that the aliens were demons, others had other worries. The real threat none of them had the imagination to see coming.
It was some of my own research that at some level was the ultimate trigger for all the problems. I was one of the first group of scientists selected to interface with the Federation delegates. Liz had also been selected to interface with their mathematicians, and so we both spent time on the most recent ship, which had moved to Earth orbit. There were enough different species in the delegation with different gravity and environmental constraints that it was generally easier to have the humans visit the ship than the reverse.
Liz and her colleagues determined that although the aliens were clearly more advanced than humans in a variety of areas of mathematics, in some particular areas, especially Liz's own area of algebraic number theory, humans had definitely made discoveries that were unknown to the Federation's mathematicians. It appeared that average human intelligence was slightly above that of most sapient species in the galaxy, and that the smartest, humans, like Liz and Jeremy, might be more intelligent than the smartest of any of the alien species. We didn't really understand the significance of that at first.
Meanwhile, I was trying to understand the Awnath biology. We had decided to focus on them simply because we had more of them available, and they had provided us with more information than others. There was another species, the Iglin, which resembled humans more closely; they were bipedal and had an approximately human face. While bipedalism was common among the Federation, a human-like face was substantially less so. Some of the Iglins had been selected by the Federation to visit precisely because of all the species, they most closely physically resembled us. But there weren't that many Iglin on the ships which had arrived, and most of them were dealing with things like serious negotiations and public relations. So we focused on the Awnath.
I was spending most of the time collaborating with Emmett, one of the Awnath biologists. We had called him Emmett because it was the closest approximation to his name we could easily pronounce; the Awnath had three different sexes, none of which which that closely approximated human sex notions, but Emmett was of the type closest to being male in some sense, and so that was the pronoun we used. I'll always remember Emmett fondly; he quickly picked up English, and it turned out that the Awnath had a sense of humor similar to humans, and he was very funny when he wanted to be. I didn't interact that much with the Iglins, but we quickly learned that despite their physical resemblance to humans their emotional makeup was much further from humans than that of the Awnath.
We started off at a very basic level, engaging in a cross comparison of human and Awnath biology. We both used DNA for genetic material; this wasn't universal among all species in the Federation, some used RNA, others used PNA, and others used molecules humans had not thought about at all. The Awnath had a single organ that functioned in a human what both kidneys and liver would function as in a terrestrial mammal. Most of the rest of their biology resembled that of an Earth mammal. Like humans, they were naturally omnivores.
It was when we started focusing on the neuroscience that things got interesting. The Awnath had an analog of neurons and an analog of glial cells. Human vision processing was substantially more complicated than that of the Awnath which was surprising given their four eyes to our two. At first we thought this was due in part to their functional colorblindness, but we determined that wasn't the case. Although they were from a human standpoint mostly color blind, seeing most of much of humans would label as blue and green as a single color, they could also see into the ultraviolet and infrared, and had a great deal of ability to distinguish color in the near red and infrared section. This focus on the infrared likely came from their evolution as a crepuscular species on a planet with a dimmer star than the sun.
In the translated diagrams they had outlining their brains, there were a series of collections of cells labeled "soul points." At first, I didn't pay careful attention to them; we had seen a few mentions of souls before, which we had mostly assumed were translation issues that would be eventually cleared up. There had been a brief confusion early on when amygdala had been translated literally into the primary Awnathi tongue and then Emmett had in English referred to it as the "almond in the brain." I assumed it was something similar. But when Emmett asked where in the human brain the soul points were located, that brought out attention. I'll include here that conversation as best as I can remember.
"What do you mean by soul points?" I asked him.
Emmett blinked both sets of eyes; a gesture I already learned to recognize as a sign of confusion or careful thought.
"The neural clusters where the soul connects." This sentence came not from Emmett's mouth, but from the electronic translator he had. He had learned passable English, but had taken the habit of using the translator when he was uncertain; I had told him that his English was generally as good or better than the translator, but I guess everyone is a creature of habit.
"Emmett," I said, "What do you mean by soul?"
"The soul. The part that makes ultimate decisions and sits without time."
"Is this a religious belief?"
Emmett brought forth his claws out in an animated way as he began to talk rapidly; he had once jokingly said that if he had been a human he would have been Italian. "This is not about religion. There are of course, religions which claim that the souls come from some deity or collection of deities, but the soul is very much science."
I blinked, unconsciously mirroring Emmett's earlier blink.
"Emmett, human science doesn't recognize a soul, or anything similar. We've never seen anything like what Earth religions call a soul."
"Interesting. We've encountered intelligent species before that don't have advanced neuroscience, so they didn't know about them, but I would have definitely guessed you would have found them by now."
"Are you saying that there are these soul points? Maybe we have seen them, but we didn't call them that." Working with aliens had seemed initially surreal, but even that had reached a degree of normality. This conversation seemed to feel more surreal than even the first conversations had been.
"The soul points are where the soul takes in information. Some species have just one type for both input and output from the soul. Others have separate segments for each. They can be detected because small packets of energy seem to appear and disappear from them, and they become much more active when one is making major decisions or decisions which have an ethical aspect."
"Emmett, I think we'd have detected something like that. Maybe we don't have them."
Emmett front claws flailed in a way which based I on what I had been told about his species indicated intense agitation, but I had never seen the actual behavior.
"Every intelligent species has them. Intelligence and self-awareness has to come from somewhere."
I frowned. "Humans have been arguing about this sort of idea for a very long time. It sounds like what you are talking about is a variation of what we call Cartesian dualism. But, when we first started doing neuroscience we looked for any signs of structures or evidence of anything like that. We never found any."
"Are you sure, Rachel?"
"Well, maybe not. It might be that the people first looking at brains were people who had already decided that that intuition is misguided."
We quickly summoned most of the other biologists both human and alien (we didn't need to immediately talk to the one's who studied Earth's non-human flora and fauna). We told them of the apparent discrepancy we had found; the human biologists reacted mostly with fascination and curiosity. The Awnath reacted as a mix, some were apparently very disturbed, others seemed almost serenely confident that we would find the relevant attachment points; they were probably just more obscure in human biology. Now that we knew to look for them, of course we'd find them.
As the news trickled down, neuroscientists around the world raced to locate the soul points. Liz and I meanwhile had returned Earthside to conceive the two of you. At that point, the technology had been recently developed enough that we didn't need donor sperm, we could use both of our eggs, and simply modify one of ours to turn it functionally into sperm. We did want potential boy children, and for those, Jeremy agreed to provide part of his Y chromosome.
Liz had initially considered bearing a child, but with the recent rise in uterine replicator technology, she and I had both agreed that would be more convenient; and if we needed to return to space, it would be safer for all concerned. The Awnaths claimed that their technology did an effective job at blocking radiation, but we didn't feel a need to risk it. We prepared a collection of frozen embryos for later use, especially since there had been some discussion of the Awnath inviting Liz to give some talks on one of their worlds. I don't know if this message is being read by Joey, Sarah or one of our later children.
At around this time, the first humans were invited to visit the Federation itself, and a small delegation of humans left on one of the ships.
A little over a year went by, and the sprint to find the soul points had turned into a marathon. The consensus was clear: anything like what the Awnath had was completely lacking in humans. We were from the standpoint of the Awnath, close to what some humans in the late 20th century called philosophical zombies. And this also explained our large brains compared to the other intelligent species: we didn't have any external processing or decision making. That also explained why it appeared that the most intelligent humans were in general smarter than aliens; we had more flexible brain power. As we realized the fundamental difference in our natures, the aliens' reactions were stark. The Iglin ambassadors withdrew, and many of the Awnath left. Those that stayed seemed mostly convinced that humans really did have souls, we just had them connected in some subtle way.
I was with Liz at our home watching over the uterine replicators with both Joey and Sarah. We had prepared the embryos over a year before, but hadn't decided to actually gestate them until then. We got a knock at our door. Our house was an old brownstone in Boston, but like most modernized homes, the house should have told us someone was at the door, and who it was.
I opened the door, and found out why it hadn't recognize the individual. Emmett wouldn't be in the database. Along with Emmett was another Awnath, who had been called Tina; she had worked with Liz. While Emmett's shell and greenish coloring was close to that of what one would expect from a large human turtle, Tina's ancestry was from the Northern continent on the Awnath home planet, and she had a dark blue mottled pattern common to her ancestry.
"May we come in?" asked Tina.
We let them in, and Liz rushed to get them food. We didn't have any Awnath specific food in the house, but they could eat a variety of foods that humans could eat. We had already found out they were particularly fond of cheesy foods, especially pizza; Awnath did nurse their young, but their milk did not contain any lactose. However, there were many fruits on their native planet which naturally produced lactose, so there was no equivalent of lactose-intolerance among their species. Liz, of course, had a lot of cheese in the house. She had always been fond of cheese; as your development progressed, she had used this is an excuse to announce that she was eating for more than just herself now. When I had pointed out to her that none of her calories were necessary since both fetuses were in uterine replicators she had replied that "I wouldn't know that, I'm a mathematician, you're the biologist."
Emmett and Tina gratefully sampled the cheese, but from what we had both learned of their body language, they were tense, and this wasn't really a social visit.
Liz, always the more blunt of the two of us, broke the question first. "So, why are you both here? I thought the consensus was that it made more sense to send humans up to you. And why didn't you call or send an email?"
Emmett and Tina glanced at each other, a surprisingly human gesture. That was when I noticed that neither of them had their translator packs. I remembered that the translator packs were programmed to record all conversations and to use those recordings to improve their algorithms.
Tina spoke first. "Something's happening, and whether or not you have souls, we think you are friends, and deserve to know."
Liz and I glanced at each other. That didn't sound good.
"The Federation has come to the conclusion that the humans are correct that they don't have souls, as such as it is meaningful for a being without a soul to be correct about anything. The idea of intelligent beings that lack souls is frightening and repugnant to every ensouled species."
At this, Tina made what seemed almost like an involuntary shudder.
"Without souls, humans are functionally automatons, and they have no natural moral compass beyond the one given to them by evolution."
Liz looked at Tina "Yes, so? We've known that for a long time, and we've done well for ourselves, despite that."
Tina shook her head in the negative, in a way that was clearly intended to imitate a human shake of the head. "If you lack souls, your behavior is unpredictable, you might go to war for simple convenience. Worse, from the standpoint of the ensouled, you lack moral agency or moral weight; there's no reason to give you any benefit of the doubt; if you die, you won't suffer, you'll just act like you are suffering."
We both looked at Tina and Emmett. "What are you saying?" I asked.
Emmett continued where Tina left off, "As far as we can tell, most of the humans who have visited Awnath are dead. Mostly dissected to confirm directly the lack of human soul points. The Federation is intending to send a battle fleet here to eliminate the human threat."
Liz gasped, and I put my hand protectively over the uterine replicator unit sitting in the room with us.
"Why are you telling us? And how do you know this?" asked Liz.
Tina looked at her, and Emmett looked at me. Tina replied "First, Because, whether you have true conscious awareness or not, you are friends, and we felt we owed you. And to the second question, they've alerted all Awnath and other non-humans in the system. The next two ships will leave with almost all of us, and we'll still take some humans with us in those two ships, to avoid suspicion."
Emmett looked up, "We have to return now. Officially this was a work visit. We could claim it was social, but the others will be immediately suspicious that anyone would be genuinely social with soulless beings."
We ushered them out, and did not know what to say. We contacted Jeremy, who had been apparently had a strange conversation with one his own Awnath contacts, and although they had not been as explicit as Emmett and Tina, they had caused him some concern. At this point, all three of us were sufficiently prominent, Jeremy especially, that it became not too difficult to directly contact the government and alert them.
The US government had at least been paying sufficient attention that they had seen some strange warning signs, as had some of the others in the Eight Eyes, but our message let them put together the final details. The question then became what to do about it.
Here again, the solution came down to Jeremy; he and some others had been studying the problem of why the quaternionicly entangled particles broke down when they went through a wormhole. They didn't fully understand the process, although he and some others had made some progress beyond the Awnath. But there was an important insight from their work which they had kept carefully quiet about. If one sent through properly calibrated quaternionicly entangled particles through a wormhole, it might be possible to destabilize it. In fact, some of their models predicted that it might create a gravitational cascade, destabilizing any other wormholes with entrances near where the initially destabilized wormhole existed. If there were enough others nearby, it might create an effect similar to a nuclear detonation where each fission event created more neutrons. Each wormhole destabilization would have the potential to create more destabilizations. We weren't certain how likely that would be; every wormhole was unique, with individual resonances created by the history of passing ships and from the gravity of nearby stars. But we had had now multiple years to study the specific wormhole next to Mercury. We could definitely at least collapse it.
And we knew the precise locations of most of the Federation wormhole network; many were for convenience close to each other, and the Mercury wormhole exited at a moderate sized hub. If we could blow-up that wormhole, sheer proximity would do what careful resonance structures would do to the Mercury wormhole. We maybe could take out a large fraction of the wormhole network in our part of the galaxy, hopefully buying time for humans to develop a military defense. This plan had one small bright side: we were reasonably confident that the vast majority of wormholes were far away enough from inhabited planets that alien casualties would be small.
When we found about this, Liz said that clearly the narrative was all wrong; the Federation was supposed to be the side saved by the technobabble. Then came the real difficulty; humans had not yet managed to make their own ships capable of using wormholes; we knew the basics of the technology, but the precision involved in the engineering was simply too great at our current tech base. Somehow, we were going to need to get the destabilizing particles on a ship going through the wormhole.
And here Liz volunteered, damn her. Before the consensus about human nature had developed, she had been invited to visit the nearest major Awnath colony world, where she was going to be the keynote speaker in a conference on human insights into algebraic number theory. That invitation had not been withdrawn. We had considered saying no, because it would be close to your births. Now, she said yes. Hidden in her luggage would be the most expensive and carefully designed 10 kg box ever made by human hands; and in it, in a carefully preserved ultracold chamber would be the quaternionicly entangled particles set to destablize the wormhole.
We knew when she left that she wasn't going to come back. According to all our models, the most likely result of the destablizer was that it would kill everyone going through the wormhole. Even if she somehow survived the experience and came out the other side, without a wormhole, she'd be trapped there. The nearest hub was a brown dwarf with a small station, but it was unlikely that any of the aliens would assist a soulless being, much less one who had probably just destroyed 5% to 10% of the galactic wormhole network.
Liz almost backed out. Not for me, or for our children, but because Tina was going to be leaving on the same ship she was, nominally for the conference. Liz wasn't sure she could kill her friend who had risked herself for her. But Liz decided she had to go through with it, for me, and for our children. She was the only human on the ship; and when we saw the flash of light as the wormhole disintegrated, I knew immediately that there was no chance she had survived. I wonder sometimes if Tina found Liz's presence suspicious, and if she suspected something of what Liz was going to do.
Our best estimate was that it would take about a century before any aliens reached Earth. Unfortunately, the chance that humanity would survive that event was low. So, we did what we could. We had already identified two not too distant uninhabited Earth-like worlds, and serious planning for colonization had started before we even came in contact with the aliens. So we constructed generation ships, so at least some humans would survive. We needed embryos, and young children for ships, as well as young people to be the first generation. I was already too old by the time the first ship was to launch, but you were young enough, and I was able to parlay Liz's sacrifice into sending both of you, and our embryos on the first ship. I didn't know if Earth would survive, but I was going to make sure that Liz's children at least made it somewhere, even on some distant world.
I have no doubt that someday, after they have destroyed Earth, you or your descendants will meet the ensouled again. They will not be kind; even if we were not soulless, they must remember the havoc we created. We bought ourselves time, but we didn't buy victory. It will be up to you, and those after you, to convince them that lacking souls doesn't mean lacking value.
I will never see you again, but have no doubt my children. We may lack souls. I may on some level be an automaton writing to a collection of automatons. But that doesn't make my love for you less real, and it doesn't make Liz's sacrifice any less noble. My mind may not be eternal; I may be a creature of flesh and blood, but my love for you is everlasting.
Your mother,
Rachel
