Apparently, the galaxy was full of life, but it was mostly not the kind of life that existed on Earth, or the colony-worlds of Ararat -which was known by its colonists as Tyre and Maya. Nor was it the kind of life entertained by the so-called sludgeworlds which lurked in interstellar space. The vast bulk of the galaxys biomass consisted of a single all-devouring species of nanobacterium: a universal organic solvent that fed avidly upon all higher kinds of life, digesting individual organisms and entire biospheres with equal ease. It did not matter which replicator molecules they used, or how they organized their genomes; they were all grist to the implacable mill.
The Afterlifes empire already extended three-quarters of the way from the center of the galaxy to the rim, and it was still expanding. Given time, it would conquer and possess the whole of the Milky Way, having gobbled up everything that complex organisms like us might consider real life.
Unless it could be stopped.
It might not arrive on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years perhaps millions but it would arrive, and there would be people of many posthuman kinds to witness its arrival. Natural attrition would probably have killed off nearly all the emortals of the fourth millennium, and nearly all their children too, but a few people alive now would surely live long enough to see the evil day.
I might live to see the evil day myself, I realized especially if I were to take up Christine Caines semi-serious suggestion that I become a perpetual SusAn-borne traveler in time, waking up for a brief while at intervals millennia apart, in order to display myself as a specimen of a species long extinct and unmourned.
Even a threat that lay a million years in the future had to be taken seriously by the kinds of posthumans that lived on Earth and in its neighborhood nowadays.
People gifted with potentially eternal life had more reason to fear the kind of Afterlife they had discovered than mere mortals had ever had for fearing those they
could only imagine. Their fear was, however, parent to a determination to avoid their apparent destiny. The AI mentor temporarily entrusted with my education explained, with polite meticulousness, that there were three possible strategies that an intelligent species could adopt in the face of such a threat: fight, flight, and concealment.
Obviously, the best chance of ultimate success lay in trying all three alternatives. Some of humankinds descendant populations would try their damnedest to find a kind of real life that could devour the devourer and win the galaxy for the cause of complexity. Some would set out to cross the inter-galactic gulf, in the hope that there might be somewhere to run to that could remain permanently untainted by the monster. And some would build shields bigger than worlds: hopefully incorruptible spheres that would close off the states and empires of their central suns, creating havens of safety or prisons, depending on ones point of view.
Transmutation was the key to the final strategy: not the traditional alchemical transmutation of lead into gold, but the kind of wholesale transmutation that supernovas wrought, spinning the whole rich spectrum of heavy elements out of the simpler ones that began to accumulate when hydrogen-to-helium torches finally grew dim. Maybe the people of the solar system could wait a little longer before pressing ahead with a project of that sort, but the ones who wanted to get it under way immediately certainly had an arguable case.
The argument already seemed to be fervent. Perhaps it was only the pressure of my paranoia, but I couldnt help wondering how long populations which believed themselves to be extremely well defended could refrain from letting fervor spill over into violence. In particular, there seemed to my untutored eye to be an unbridgeable ideological rift between the Earthbound the most cautious posthuman faction in the solar system and the colonists of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, whose reasons for wanting to domesticate pseudosupernoval processes of manufacture were many and various.
It seemed that I had arrived in turbulent times perhaps the most turbulent the children of humankind had encountered since the Crash and its Aftermath. I had lived my first thirty-nine years in a world that had seemed to be getting better all the time; I had returned to one that had known nothing but good times for centuries, and probably took its good fortune too much for granted.
After listening to my mentors account of the Afterlife and its significance as a factor in posthuman affairs I looked at the streets of the newly reborn North American city for a second time, in a subtly different mood. I looked at the virtual people in a different way, too. I soon moved on again, from one American city to another and then to the cities of the Old World which no longer seemed old at all, now that it had been rebuilt by degrees over centuries and millennia. I could see that all the cities were patchworks, which all seemed equally crazy to me except for the oldest of them all, Amundsen, which had housed the official world government for centuries.