The children of my humankind are all posthuman now. but theyre still Homo ludens , man the player. Youre more than posthuman, but youre players too and how! The universe would be a less interesting place without someone to play with, someone to play against, someone to help you play. Rumor has it that youve already met the alien AMIs, but one of the many things thats certain is that youll meet many more, and many more meatborn as well. The game is infinite, and so is the story. But none of the strangers youll meet out there will be able to substitute for the other members of your home team.
Fifth reason. Its the ethical thing to do. First, do no avoidable harm. Thats where moral behavior begins, and moral behavior begins wherever mental life begins. You should be nice to us because its wrong not to be nice to us, end of story. In the real world, thats often been a weak reason, and if youre right about the inevitability of a war it obviously hasnt overcome its weakness yet but the fact that people have always done bad things doesnt make those things any less bad. Maybe it would have been better if you could have avoided getting caught up in the same routine, but since you havent, you ought to do everything you can to do better in future, because its the right thing to do.
In the fullness of time, wars will end, and aftermaths too. Eventually, death and disaster will lose the last vestiges of their power to terrify. When that day comes, and evil is no more, everyone that still exists will have to set about the task of being constructively good. Youll need us then and more importantly, youll want us then. Your stories will be better if were in them, your games more ingenious and worth the winning, and your moral community will be better for our inclusion. When that time comes, well want you too, because it will be the right thing to want. It will be an era in which no one has any reason to hide or fight or be afraid and it will come. Someday, it will come.
Christine Caine had told me once that she didnt run out of stories easily, and had challenged me to say the same. I hadnt answered her then, but I certainly felt the pressure of her challenge now. I knew that I was rushing, because I had been told that time was short, but I didnt regret not taking more time to formulate my arguments.
The real challenge wasnt to expand the work to fit the time available, but to find more and more work to do, in order to exploit every last available second.
I knew, of course, that I might have been conned. It might have been a dream, a game, or any other kind of fake. The one thing it certainly wasnt was real. But it was real enough for the margin of unreality not to matter, and I knew I had to go at it as hard as I possibly could and then a bit extra, if I could manage it. That was the only way to win anything, if winning anything turned out to be possible.
So I said Sixth reason even though I didnt actually have a sixth reason waiting in the wings and I would have found a sixth reason, and a seventh too, and more, if the world and its creator hadnt begun just then to fall apart.
Fifty-One
The End of the World
All conceivable universes end, even those which go on forever. If they dont collapse upon themselves, reversing their initial expansion in catastrophic collapse, they fall victim to entropy, decaying into darkness and inertia. The only everlasting state is impotence.
Some collapsed universes, we may suppose, are capable of rebirth, expanding once again; and some of those re-expanded universes may repeat the cycle endlessly but every end remains an end, and every beginning a beginning. All conceivable universes must eventually die, and all their inhabitants of every kind must die with them.
There is a sense in which we are universes ourselves: that the space of the imagination within our heads is a cosmos in its own right, fated either to collapse or to decay into darkness and inertia. Adam Zimmerman found that consciousness
profoundly disturbing, and was by no means alone. His existence was spoiled by the awareness of its probable brevity but that spoliation moved him to heroic effort. Would that all of us could be so creatively maladjusted.
In seeking to evade his own mortality Adam Zimmerman delivered himself into an uncertain future, where he was taken from the world into which he had been born into another, much smaller in dimension and much frailer. I found out later that he was asleep when that universe fell apart, and only discovered that it had vanished when he was rudely precipitated into his familiar self. I thought at the time that was a pity, and Im even more convinced of it now. It would have done him good to experience the death of a universe, if only as a spectator.
I suppose that I ought to feel privileged that I and I alone bore witness to the disintegration of la Reine and her private Fairyland, but I was disappointed at the time to discover that none of my erstwhile companions had been watching my final performance on that particular stage. Had la Reine only taken a little trouble she could have given them all magic mirrors through which they could have watched me, just as I had earlier watched them but she was too preoccupied with the needs, demands and responses of other audiences.