Eternity’s Twilight

The following is an excerpt from the memoirs of Captain George Randall, one of the many people Emperor Conrad sent out to search for the long-lost Nehemiah IV terraformation probe while the Exiles were still trapped on Arcadia. His memoirs were rediscovered in February of 2199 during the reconstruction of the galaxy.

Imagine traveling uncounted trillions of miles through galactic space to ask an immortal the secret to his longevity, only to find him dead by the time you finally got there. It happened to me and, let me tell you, it wasn’t fun.

The order to pay Jason Alton a visit was delivered on January 16, 1383 A.D. For the past six months we’d been exploring a previously uncharted section of the galaxy, looking for an ancient space probe named the Nehemiah IV. This probe was legendary: for the past thousand years it had been single-handedly transforming countless barren worlds into lush, green paradises complete with cities that were maintained by an army of intelligent droids. I wouldn’t have believed any purely automatic machine could do such a thing if I hadn’t seen the results for myself, and even then I still had a hard time with it. Those ancients really knew what they were doing, and I don’t wonder that the folks at Headquarters wanted to get their hands on that elusive probe – it’s really one of a kind.

Anyway, we had traced that wily probe from planet to planet and eventually discovered that it had left that segment of the galaxy centuries ago for a different one. When we sent in our report to Headquarters they told us that they’d take up the search from there and that we were to direct the Ares to the last known home of Jason Alton – a tiny, unnamed planet ten thousand light-years away. Headquarters had evidence that he was one of the folks who had received the life-extension treatment back in the last days of the ancients, and that he could still be alive. At any rate, they wanted us to question him and see if we couldn’t find out a few more details about living forever – something I wouldn’t mind knowing myself.

The existence of this life-extension treatment came as a big surprise to me, so as we started on our yearlong journey I quizzed Doc Martin on it. He’d heard of it, and he sat me down and explained it to me.

“Well, Randall, it’s like this. The ancients were pretty bright folks: they could handle atomics and matter/energy conversion as easy as anything, which is why they could alter planets at the drop of a hat. One of the other things they could do is build incredible, tiny machines – nanobots, we call ‘em, only what they built was a lot more sophisticated than what we can do. That’s to be expected; they built them for a thousand years and we’ve only had ‘em for a couple hundred.

“Anyway, one of the things they discovered around 400 A.D. – just before the galaxy collapsed, for reasons we still haven’t found – was how to take these tiny machines and put them inside a person and have them do a bit of maintenance work. The idea is that as the body aged the machines would reverse the aging process by fixing whatever was going wrong. If a sickness came along and the body couldn’t repair itself, the machines would kick in and take care of it. If the body got a severe injury somehow, the machines would do what they could to put the body back together.

“Now, this technique was supposedly developed at the very end of their civilization, and only a few people ever got it – all of whom, as far as we knew, were killed in the general collapse. After all, even the machines couldn’t help you if your planet got hit with an antimatter bomb or if your sun was detonated, and you know the chaos that occurred in the fall. To be honest, Randall, I never really believed that the whole thing was real; it’d be a pretty tough thing to do, and I didn’t think that even they could handle it.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” I told him. “Supposedly this Jason fellow got the treatment, and might still be around.”

Doc asked me if I knew anything about him, and I told him I didn’t; Headquarters hadn’t told us much – they never do. Since we had a long time until we arrived at his doorstep I asked Aaron to dig up what he could.

It took him longer than I thought to get results because Eliza, our artilect, was having a midlife crisis. It seems that when we stopped over at Perlandra Station to get some repairs done on the Ares before heading out again we were given the wrong parts and didn’t realize it until after we were long gone. As a result Eliza just wasn’t working right: her computational matrix was down and she was making about as much sense as a gibbering monkey. Aaron wasn’t sure if we could get anything out of her, but Renee – our resident matrix expert – was able to piece Eliza back together again. I was mighty glad: the last thing any starship captain wants is for the electronic brain that runs the entire ship to act like a lunatic – it’s very bad for morale.

Once Eliza was in good shape again Aaron got right to work. It was slow going: even though we could link into the central database at Headquarters in realtime via a tachyon beam, the database didn’t have the information locally and, since their database administrator had been fired in a round of budget cuts, we had to do the best we could and ended up running the query against the central data cores of several thousand planets. Trying to search the stored information of a thousand worlds is not for the faint of heart: it took four months to get back a result. We did get it back, though, and I think it was worth it – after all, what else is there to do on long trips?

Eliza told us that Jason Alton was a very wealthy man who was born in 396 A.D. – just about the time the galaxy was thrown into turmoil. He inherited his wealth from his father, who owned a major biochemical company and made his fortune through genetic repair techniques. It seems that Jason found out about this new miracle treatment through the connections he had with that company, and when he found out about it he wanted it – and he had the money and position to obtain it.

Jason saw that civilization was starting to collapse and, being a smart man, he gathered up his fortune, boarded his starship, and sailed out to a star far beyond the edge of civilization. He told the folks back home that he was going to build his own world, where he would have the replicators to build anything he wanted, the virtual reality equipment to take him anywhere he could imagine, and enough nanobots to extend his life indefinitely. He said he didn’t care what happened to the galaxy or who lived or died; he was going to live forever on his own planet and indulge in his every wish.

That was the idea, anyway, and after he left nothing else was ever heard of him. He had actually been forgotten about in the general chaos of the galactic collapse until some clerk at Headquarters came across his records – it seemed that his permit for the planet he was on had expired some upteen centuries ago and the computer wanted to send him a past-due notice.

It took us every bit of a full year to get there; we didn’t arrive on what we came to call Jason’s Planet until January 28, 1384 A.D. – and that was with Suzy, our antimatter engineer, tweaking the engines and giving us every joule of energy she could muster. Jason sure picked a distant spot to reside; it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to discover that we were the first folks to pay him a visit in a thousand years. The nearest civilized world was 58,700 trillion miles away, and not even the Nehemiah IV had ventured this far out; there was nothing out here but harsh suns and forbidding worlds. In all likelihood Jason Alton was the first person to ever enter this region of the galaxy – and, I bet, there wasn’t a person alive who envied his choice of neighborhood.

As we entered orbit around Jason’s Planet I wondered what a man ten centuries old would be like, and we quickly discovered the answer: he would be dead. We found his base on the planet without any trouble; it was the only base on the surprisingly forbidding planet. The landing party we sent down quickly found something else: his tomb.

We weren’t familiar with the language on the tombstone, but Eliza was: she discovered that (unsurprisingly) it was a dialect used a thousand years ago and quickly translated the inscription. The tombstone simply stated that Jason Alton died on April 19, 491 A.D. at the age of 95, and was placed in the tomb by one of his droids. No details concerning his death were provided, though, and that gave us a problem: why had he died?

The obvious thing to do was to exhume the body so Doc Martin could take a look at it, and we did that. We didn’t discover anything, though: the body had been there for about a thousand years and there really wasn’t much left of it. Doc said there was nothing to indicate how he had died, and if there were any nanobots in his bloodstream they were definitely gone by now. For all he knew the guy had simply died of old age and the whole nanobot thing was just a hoax.

I wanted to tell Headquarters what we’d found, but by this time we were way out of range: tachyon communicators only work so far, and it would take six long months of travel to be back in range. Doc Martin suggested that we just turn around and head back, and tell Headquarters that we did what we could and found him dead. I told Doc I wasn’t about to turn around; it took forever to get out here, and I wasn’t about to leave until I knew why Jason died. There was no way I was going to be sent back out here again to find out what happened; being cooped up in a small metal can for a year, with nothing outside but empty space and empty worlds for thousands of trillions of miles, can really get on your nerves. There was no chance I was going to leave this planet until I knew exactly how Jason Alton had died – and that was final.

Being the Captain I normally never left the ship, but in this case I thought that the situation could use a little hands-on treatment. With this in mind I had Eliza land the Ares outside Jason’s tomb and we all got to work. I told the crew that we weren’t going to leave this place until we knew why Jason had died, and I think everyone actually believed that I meant it.

Jason’s planet was not a friendly place: it was dry, barren, and dead. Really dead, in fact. There wasn’t enough atmosphere around this small piece of rock to fit into a teaspoon, and if there was any life around we sure couldn’t find it. Jason had obviously not terraformed it, which puzzled us until we found his virtual reality setup.

The base Jason had briefly called his home had the most sophisticated virtual reality equipment I have ever seen. It way outclassed anything we can produce today; it was the real thing from the ancients, and was obviously the best that money could buy. Eliza told us that the machinery and nanomachinery could do things that, well, just boggled my mind. If a thing could be imagined, this guy’s equipment could make it happen, and make it as real to Jason as if it really was real – and it had the most sophisticated artificial intellect anyone had ever heard of. I had a feeling it was second only to the software that ran that Nehemiah space probe we’d been hunting for.

We were a bit surprised to find that the base was so small; aside from some communications equipment, life support systems, the virtual reality center, and other things like that, there wasn’t much to the place. I was expecting a huge palace, but evidently Jason preferred virtual palaces to real ones. I didn’t blame him: with the equipment he had, virtual reality could appear every bit as real as the real thing – although just thinking about that gave the creeps.

All five of us pitched in to find out why Jason had died, and we had a hard time of it: none of us were even remotely familiar with the equipment we found on the base. Suzy spent her time working with the base power supply and trying to find out how it worked and if it could be started again. Renee worked with the base computer systems and tried to find out if there was a hidden part of the base we hadn’t discovered. Doc Martin went over Jason’s few personal effects and examined the few droids loitering around the place to see if they knew anything about Jason’s last days. As for me, I worked with Aaron to keep Eliza busy analyzing the data gathered by the crew and trying to figure out if we’d missed anything.

Renee was the one who found what we’d been missing: a lot of the decorative panels on the wall were actually computer panels, and they tied into a central database core buried deep under the planet’s surface. She told us that if we could get the computer started again and have Eliza translate the data in it we might be able to figure out what was going on. That sounded like a good idea to me, so I told everyone to get to work.

Three weeks went by without making any progress at all. The problem we ran into was that the base on Jason’s Planet didn’t have any power because the electrical generator was down, and we just could not find a way to get it started again. That generator was like nothing we had ever seen: Suzy couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, and Eliza couldn’t figure it out either. We didn’t know if we just weren’t starting it right or if it was damaged and needed to be repaired, but we did know that if it really was damaged we have no idea what was wrong.

We eventually decided to just forget about Jason’s electrical generator and connect the power grid at the base to the antimatter plant on the Ares. That wasn’t easy, though: the ancients used a bizarre set of electrical protocols and it took Eliza the better part of three days to design a converter that could translate our power into the frequencies expected by the equipment on the planet. It did the job, though: after Eliza had built the converter we installed it and the base powered right up on the first try. It was a serious drain on our power supply but we could handle it – for a while, at least.

Once Renee saw that we had a direct electrical link she began working with Aaron to create a data link between the Ares and Jason’s Planet, so that they could directly download all the information that was left in the planet’s datacore. I don’t know how they did it – artilect development just isn’t my field – but they did. Aaron was surprised to see that nearly all the data was still good, but Renee wasn’t: she said that the ancients knew how to make things that lasted forever; the Nehemiah IV was a testimony to that.

Now that everything was put together, all we had to do was wait for Eliza to translate everything. It was a good feeling.

What wasn’t a good feeling was finding out that, after Eliza was done, we still didn’t know what had happened. We found out that Jason had established the base and used the equipment – and boy, did he ever use it. He was physically healthy; judging from the biomonitors at the base, he did not age a day from the time he got to the planet until the day he died nearly forty years later. There were no natural disasters, there were no accidents, and there were no failures in the longevity system. The only thing Doc Martin could find was that his mind had decayed: mentally, Jason had gone downhill and emotionally, Jason had become a wreck. There was no cause of death listed in the records, but as near as Doc could figure out Jason had become so mentally and emotionally unbalanced that he simply died – or possibly committed suicide.

That didn’t really help me any, but Renee helped us out. “You know,” she told us, “that’s really about what you would expect to happen.”

“Eh?” I said.

Renee explained. “Think about who he was! He spent his entire life living for himself, and didn’t care in the least for anyone else. His only concern in life was to make sure he could satisfy his every last selfish whim. He was convinced that that if he just had everything he wanted he’d be happy.

“Lots of folks think that, but Jason was different: he could actually make it happen. He did have the means to fulfill his every wish, and I bet he eventually found that the things he thought would fulfill him didn’t. He thought that his personal genie here could fill the emptiness in his soul, and he found out that he was wrong.

“What Jason discovered is that he had nothing to live for: the emptiness inside him couldn’t be filled by anything his machines could manufacture. The lush palaces he built pleased him for a while, but they lost their charm as he found they couldn’t satisfy him. King Solomon went through the same thing: he gave in to his every desire and found them so empty that he came to hate his own life. Gardens and houses and wealth and fame cannot fill the soul: only Christ can do that.

“As the dreams Jason built failed to satisfy him, he went further and further to find something that would please him – just look at what he used his machines to build – and his soul grew darker and darker. I bet he eventually realized that he was truly lost: nothing he could find could make his life worth living. There was no way he could go back to the rest of civilization, for he knew that by this time it had all been destroyed.

“Someone once said that people have a hole in them that only God can fill. We’re designed to have a relationship with God, and nothing else can satisfy us the way that can. Jason tried to fill that hole with himself; it eventually pushed his sanity over the edge and he died.”

Since there was nothing else to do we simply packed up and left for home. We brought with us all the information we had downloaded from Jason’s datacore and Jason’s remains as well, just in case the folks back home could learn something from it that we didn’t. It was going to be a long journey home.