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The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural
selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also
prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace
elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled,
dusky hue.
Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.
Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore's polished skin are limpets and
barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They
can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements --
wreckage and dust which can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering
storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere which stretches for
hundreds of cubic light years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.
All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.
Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the
fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others
term it the Labyrinth.
It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it
advertises its artificial insolence.
Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater
of All Things.
Intelligent machines would build atop this ferment a society we could scarcely fathom -- but we would
try. Much of the next novel I wrote, Furious Gulf was about that -- the gulf around a Mack hole, and the
gulf between intelligences born of different realms.
For years I had enjoyed long conversations with a friend, noted artificial intelligence theorist Marvin
Minsky, about the possible lines of evolution of purely machine intelligence. Marvin views our concern
with mortality and individualism as a feature of biological creatures, unnecessary among intelligences
which never had to pass through our Darwin-nowing filter.
If we can copy ourselves indefinitely, why worry about a particular copy? What kind of society would
emerge from such origins? What would it think of us -- we Naturals, still hobbled by biological destiny?
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A slowly emerging theme in the novels, then, was how intelligence depended on the "substrate," the
basic building blocks. Machines could embody intelligence, but their styles would be different.
Angular antennas reflect the bristling ultraviolet of the disk below. Shapes revolve. They live among
clouds of infalling mass -- swarthy, shredding under a hail of radiation: infrared spikes, cutting gamma
rays.
Among the dissolving clouds move silvery figures whose form alters to suit function. Liquid metal flows,
firms. A new tool extrudes: matted titanium. It works at a deposit of rich indium. Chewing digesting,
The harvesters swoop in long ellipses, high above the hard brilliance of the disk. As they swarm they
strike elaborate arrays, geometric matrices. Their volume-scavenging strategy is self-evolved, purely
practical, a simple algorithm. Yet it generates intricate patterns which unfurl and perform and then cuff up
again in artful, languorous beauty.
They have another, more profound function. Linked, they form a macro-antenna. In a single-voiced
chorus they relay complex trains of digital thought. Never do they participate in the cross-lacing streams
of careful deliberation, any more than molecules of air care for the sounds they transmit.
Across light-minutes the conversation billows and clashes and rings. A civilization blooms on the brink
of the deepest abyss in Creation.
By the time I reached the last volume, in 1992, I had spent over twenty years slowly building up my
ideas about machine intelligence, guided by friends like Marvin. I had also published several papers on
the galactic center, am working on a further model for the Snake, and still eagerly read each issue of
Astrophysical Journal for further clues.
Much remains to be found there. My nephew, now a doctoral student at Caltech, will make a thorough
map of the center in 1995, using a detector he built to view light wavelengths shorter than a millimeter
-he's caught the bug.
I finished the last novel, Sailing Bright Eternity, in summer 1994. It had been twenty-four years since I
started on the series and our view of the galactic center had changed enormously. Some parts of the first
two books, especially, are not representative of current thinking. Error goes with the territory.
I had taken many imaginative leaps in putting together a working "ecology" for the center, including truly
outre ideas, such as constructions made by forcing space-time itself into compressed forms, which in turn
act like mass itself: reversing Einstein's intuition, that matter curved space-time. All this was great fun,
requiring a lot of time to think. I let my subconscious do most of the work, if possible. It's an easier way
to write; but it stretches out projects, too. Occasionally I wanted to say to long-suffering readers, who
wrote in asking when the next volume would appear, "Sorry; I'm writing as fast as I
Doubtless there are many more surprises ahead. We're extending our gaze into ever more distant
frequencies, gaining better resolution, seeing liner detail. In peeling back the onion skins, we get closer to.
how galaxies work, how the vast outbursts of their centers affect life, and how the truly bright galactic
cores, quasars, work.
My own model is quite possibly completely wrong. It seems to explain some features (the filaments, the
Snake) but has trouble with the jets. Eventually, comparing radio maps over time, we might see flareups
and changes in the threads. Mine is strictly done in what I call the "cartoon approximation"--good enough
for a first cut, maybe, but doomed to fail somewhere.
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In any case, models are like matters of taste. Nobody expects a French impressionist painting to look
much like a real cow; it suggests ways of looking at cows.
Is there life at the center? Nobody knows, but nobody can rule it out. Only by thinking about
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