The Soul Star ⭐️ Algoritmo
Life 2.0
~ a million years ago ~
Algotodo’s first week on Algoritmo was a strange one, to say the least. He was the first being to appear on the surface of the planet, yet in the next several seconds he saw countless other beings pop into existence. Or re-existence.
Life 2.0. Any name would do, as long as it didn’t imply that Agoritmo was a Fifth Dimension. Which was of course his problem with the name Soul Star.
He had nothing against the idea of Heaven or some other Fifth Dimension in which the soul reclaimed its fallen body, or took on some other form. Yet if it did exist, why keep it a secret? Why not make it clear, as clear as math or physics, that there was a metaphysical dimension that we all can go to after we die? The psychopaths would have to pay attention then, and would think twice about torturing his cat or raping a stranger.
What was the danger in telling everyone about it? It didn’t need protecting, because it had its own invisible moral and inter-dimensional invincibility. It wasn’t like Algoritmo, a real-life fractal that could be tampered with or even destroyed.
Well, he reasoned, perhaps it remains hidden because there’s no connection between the first four dimensions and the fifth. Perhaps it has to be hidden. Yet one could still talk about it. One could still tell everyone that their finite lives could be infinite. In any case, there must be a connection between the fourth and fifth dimensions, otherwise how could a dying four-dimensional being connect to it, travel into it, make sense of it? The sad answer, Algotodo suspected, was that it seemed to be a hidden fifth dimension because we hoped for, we imagined it, yet it simply didn’t exist. He wished with all his being that he was wrong about this.
Despite such philosophical objections, the Seven Sages had taken the idea of a Fifth Dimension seriously. They had searched everywhere for proof of its existence, ignoring always the basic conundrum of the so-called existentialists: you can’t find a metaphysical realm of essence in a world of physical existence.
Although the sages never found a spiritual dimension, they never dismissed the idea either. The cosmos was a mysterious place, and they understood that if the depth of infractions was infinite, and if the depth of outer space was infinite, then there could be no final account of what might exist. That, at least, was the agnostic foundation of their communal existentialism.
So they sent their most battle-hardened warships beyond the starkest stretches of the Fallarian Void. The frigates ventured past worlds so frightening and lifeless (yet quietly breathing in the dark) that the sweat rolled down the necks of the warriors. And these were veteran warriors, who had faced with stoic calm the Blood Phantoms of the Yellow Sky.
They also sent their most finely-calibrated starcraft in the other direction, past the star-stalks that blossomed into the Void that stretched above Vicino Prossimo for trillions and trillions of parsecs, into the lightless space without end.
And yet they never found even the hint of a Stargate or Interdimensional Door that would take them somewhere else. As usual, the wondrous worm hole of science-fiction remained all fiction and no science.
The Sages had searched for a Fifth Dimension for two hundred years. But to the surprise of no one (except perhaps Algoancora) it was nowhere to be found. Perhaps they ought to have called Agoritmo The Planet of Consolation.
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Algotodo chuckled to himself when he heard that many Kraslikans talked about the Soul Star as if it was actually populated by spirits and as if it was an actual star. When the Seven Sages came up with the name, they assumed everyone understood that it was a poetic, symbolic name. But then again, how could the other Kraslikans know that Algoritmo was populated by fractals rather than souls, and that it was a planet rather than a star? Still, he couldn’t understand how they could actually think that it was a giant sun, burning at thousands of degrees and also home to trillions of spiritual beings.
In time he accepted the myth of the Soul Star with a good-humoured shrug. Even if God didn’t exist, and even if we were therefore obliged to create Him, the same could be said of the soul and the afterlife.
This reasoning didn’t make him feel particularly god-like, even though he was closer to a Creator God than any other known being in the Kraslika. The reason he was so humble about it was that the creation of a fractal afterlife was just a matter of time. He assumed that other afterlife stars or planets, or some other type of place, would be created, sooner or later.
Another reason he wasn’t so keen to be seen as the Creator was that it might come back to bite him, very hard. Some day people might point their finger at him, calling him an arrogant Pandora, with a bloody lid in his dripping fingers. If he had to be seen at all, he’d rather be seen as a benevolent Saint Peter handing out free keys to Heaven.
This was one of the reasons he was never seen at all, at least not as who he really was. To everyone he knew on Algoritmo he was Marcel, the mild-mannered professor of Ancient Languages.
His third scruple about being famous had less to do with the inevitability of other afterlife realms than with the nature of these realms. Therein lay the rub. Algoritmo might be used as a structural model for a very different kind of place. What if it were constructed by Demon Priests or some other race busy at their furnaces in the ravines of Fallar Prime or on the angry plains of The Yellow Sky? Or further afield, in the murky gulfs of the Fallarian Void, there where one could feel the presence of evil, but not know precisely where it came from?
The thing he feared the most was that some very clever species might not build a planet, but an Empire. They might not even consider the idea of isolation and near-invisibility, Algotodo’s version of a mystical nothingness that gave all. An infernal blacksmith might even invert the Algorithmian infraction, in order to multiply their size and power. Perhaps they would one day challenge the civilizations that had, over the course of the last three billion years, learned to get along.
Luckily the Vicinese had got to the afterlife idea first. And luckily, the Seven Sages were beings of science and light, driven by the desire to improve the lives of the sentient beings around them. And perhaps most luckily, they had developed (well, Algotodo developed) a cipher that hid the innermost algorithms that turned the complete individual into a fractal. The algorithms were thus impossible to decode. This cipher allowed the algorithms to operate, and yet it completely occluded the inner, finer workings of the transformation of living intelligence into artificial intelligence — a process so fine that the deceased person only noticed a little sound, a tick, that tik-tocked them from a dying body to a living, eternally-regenerating neural structure, cased smoothly within the same body they had in their previous lives.
(Well, the body was more or less the same, except certain species needed some modification to breath air, to navigate Algorithmian space and gravity, and to consume Aglorithmian food. People also got to choose the best version of their body, which meant that they generally chose their young adult physiology. Plastic surgery was, of course, available upon request. In the district of Canfranciso, you could even alter your sex slightly, swap hormones with friends, and use any change room you felt like.)
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Algotodo’s cipher also destroyed all traces of how the algorithms arrived at this artificial intelligence. It also destroyed all traces of how it might be checked, serviced, or tampered with it.
The only person who knew how the cipher worked was Algotodo. The other Six were all gone. They had travelled into oblivion, into the jaws of Death, the maw they had themselves laboured to hammer shut. In the worst of all possible timing, the regeneration of Algoritmo was completed several decades after the last of the Six were ground to smithereens between his gnashing teeth.
It was up to the last of the Seven to complete all they had worked on for five hundred years. It was for this that they called him Algotodo the Vicinese, the only person in the cosmos who could knit the algorithms into a grand totality, who could detonate the algonuclear bomb, and who could, like Moses, lead the people of the Kraslika into Eternity.
All of this sounded like an overblown story to Algotodo. For he hadn’t been able to bring to Algoritmo the very people who deserved to travel across the red sea of the radiation blast and through the desert of their imploded bodies. They, as much as he, deserved to enter the New Jerusalem, the City of Eternity. It ought to have been his dear friend Algoancora, for at least she believed in the afterlife. As it was, the fractal afterlife had been set in motion by a mighty Creator who didn’t believe in God.
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His loved ones and his dear friends were all gone now. Gone into the belly of the beast. Just like Mai. He, on the other hand, had made it not beyond that bourn beyond which no traveller returns, but around that bourn to a place where from now on all travellers would return.
They were gone, and he was intact, thinking, feeling, here on the paradisiacal planet they had contrived together. How he missed them. How he missed her.
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Next: ⭐️ Six and Seven
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