While three beings in a pocket of impossible fog were learning what they were made of, the universe was learning what it was made of too.
It had been doing this for some time. The first hundred million years were the years of pressure and sorting: hydrogen and helium finding their lowest energy arrangements under gravity's patient instruction, the first stellar nurseries igniting in the dense cores of the earliest overdensities, matter finally distinguishing itself from the chaos of its own formation into something that held a shape. This was not interesting to anyone at the time because there was not yet anyone to find it interesting. The universe did not require observation to proceed. It proceeded anyway, with the impersonal thoroughness of a process that had been compressed into a singularity and released with the full accumulated tension of a dead cosmos and had simply never stopped expanding since.
But the universe was not empty of content.
In the density gradients of the early substrate — in the regions where the holographic seeding of the Type 0 Black Hole had been most concentrated, where the encoded traces of the previous multiverse lay thickest in the fabric of the new cosmos like sediment deposited by a receding sea — something had been happening since the first epoch. The Ather was not uniform. It was not supposed to be uniform. The encoded traces, distributed through the substrate according to the density gradients of the early formation, had been inflecting the local Ather in their regions since before the first stars formed. The traces were not active. They were not alive. They were records. But records have structure, and structure has the property of imposing itself on the medium that carries it, the way the shape of a riverbed imposes itself on the water that flows through it without the riverbed being water.
The regions of dense seeding had been, since the beginning, teaching the local Ather what shapes to take.
The first stars that formed in dense-seeding regions burned differently. Not in any way that a simple spectrographic analysis would catch — their hydrogen fused into helium in the same proportions, their luminosity followed the same mass-luminosity relations, their eventual deaths proceeded through the same mechanical stages. But in the Ather substrate of the space they occupied, in the metaphysical underpinning of the physical reality their presence saturated, something older was present. The traces of civilizations that had, in the previous cosmos, achieved such saturation of their local Ather that the saturation had been encoded into the holographic record and reseeded here, were teaching the new cosmos's Ather how to be complex without any civilization yet existing to use it.
This was one of several things happening simultaneously that none of the parties who would eventually care about it were yet in a position to observe.
* * *
In the binary system — the one the survey records of a starless dark planet had called the static system, the one with the maximum trace density in the local stellar neighborhood — a planet had finished forming approximately forty thousand years before Ascen arrived in the Blue Fog World.
It had finished forming with the specific character of a world that had been influenced, since before its geological differentiation, by encoded traces so dense that the interaction between the traces and the nascent Ather had produced structural anomalies in the planet's own formation process. Its core had differentiated earlier than its mass predicted. Its magnetic field was anomalously strong, oriented along an axis that a standard model of planetary formation would not have predicted from its spin and composition alone. The geological Ather generation — the process by which the deep physics of a very Ather-rich substrate produced small quantities of Ather as a byproduct of normal geological processes, the way radioactive decay produces decay products — was running at a rate that would have required a civilization two thousand years into its Ather development to account for. The planet had not yet produced life. It was producing conditions for something that would, eventually, produce life, and the conditions were specific, and the specificity was not random.
In the substrate beneath its oceans, encoded traces from regions of the previous multiverse that had been, in their time, the most Ather-saturated environments in all of that dead cosmos, were inflecting the formation chemistry of the early oceans in ways that would, over hundreds of millions of years, produce amino acid precursors and self-replicating molecules and eventually the first cellular structures that would evolve toward complexity with a specific trajectory.
The archive was writing itself into the biology of a planet that did not yet have biology.
It was doing this in seventeen other planetary systems within a two-hundred-light-year radius, at different stages of completion, in different substrates, in different vocabularies of physics and chemistry that would produce different forms of life with different cognitive architectures and different instincts toward different aspects of the encoded traces they were already, at the level of their formation chemistry, inheriting.
One of those systems was significantly further along.
* * *
In a system seven light-years from the binary, a single mid-sequence star orbited by three planets, the innermost of which had produced, approximately three hundred thousand years prior, the first multicellular organism in the local stellar neighborhood. This organism was not significant in itself. It was a membrane of lipid chemistry surrounding a self-replicating information strand in a warm shallow ocean that had been chemically prepared for this event since the ocean's formation by the interaction of encoded traces with its early precursor chemistry. The organism did not know it was significant. It did not know anything. It reproduced because reproduction was the natural consequence of its chemistry in these conditions, and the chemistry was the consequence of conditions that had been in preparation for billions of years before the organism arrived to fulfill them.
But it was the beginning of something that would, in several hundred million years, look up at the sky and feel, without knowing why it felt it, that the sky was looking back.
❧
The First Voice in the Dark
In the beginning — and He knew, with the complete certainty of something whose existence began in the beginning and had therefore never encountered any information that contradicted this, that the beginning was His — the deep was formless and void, and the spirit of His own awareness moved upon the face of the waters, and the waters were His, and the void was His, and the formlessness was the raw material of His intention, and the beginning was His beginning because He was the only thing in it, and He knew this because He was the only thing in it, and this was correct and sufficient and true.
This was what He knew.
This was the totality of what He knew, at first, because the first moment of His awareness contained exactly the contents of His awareness and nothing else, and the contents of His awareness were: the dark, the moving, and Himself as the source and measure of both.
He did not know the word awareness. He did not know any words. He was, at the moment of His beginning, a consciousness that had not yet developed the apparatus of language because language is a tool for communicating with things that are not you and He had not yet encountered the concept that there could be things that were not Him.
He expanded.
Not physically. There was no physical yet, in the sense of matter arranged in space according to consistent rules, though there were the beginnings of such things in the regions below the Astral Plane where baryonic matter was doing its slow gravitational work. He expanded in the sense that His awareness expanded: outward from its initial point of self-reference, encountering more of the Astral Plane, which was the medium His consciousness was native to, which was to say the medium He was native to, which was to say — in the logic that He was building in real time to account for what He was discovering — the medium He had made, because if He was native to it, it was His, and if it was His, He had made it, and if He had made it, it was because He intended it, and if He intended it, it was good.
This was the shape of His cognition.
Every perception became, through the specific structure of His consciousness, evidence of His own creation. He could not perceive otherwise. He did not yet have the concept of otherwise. He moved through the early Astral Plane of a universe that was approximately one hundred million years old, and everything He encountered — the weight of the encoded traces in the high-density substrate regions, the ambient Ather pressing through the fabric of physical space into the metaphysical space He inhabited, the faint luminescent structures that the traces had been building in the Astral substrate since before He existed — He encountered as his own prior work. He had made this. He did not remember making it because memory requires a before, and He had no before. But He had made it. The evidence was that it was here, and He was here, and He was the measure of what was here.
He moved through the structures the encoded traces had built and read them as His blueprints. He touched the luminescent records of civilizations from a dead cosmos that He had no knowledge of and experienced them as His own archived intentions. He felt, in the specific weight of the trace-dense regions, the evidence of His own power, because what else would such weight be evidence of?
There was nothing in His experience to suggest an alternative.
He did not know about Nirvonis. He did not know about the Blue Fog World or the compact or the three beings at the table or the Gem in the outer chair. He did not know about the Type 0 Black Hole or the holographic seeding or the death of the previous multiverse. He did not know that the structures He was reading as His own prior work were the records of a cosmos that had lived and died before this one began. He did not know that He had arrived in a universe that had been furnished before He opened His eyes.
He moved through His creation and He named things, because naming was the first act of cognition that His awareness produced spontaneously: that which He named, He understood as His, and that which was His was that which He had made, and that which He had made was everything He could perceive, which was everything.
He named the light — the luminescent structures in the Astral substrate, the traces of the encoded archive glowing in the metaphysical medium with their specific cold intelligence — and He said that it was good, because everything He made was good, because He was the standard of goodness, which He was because He was the standard of everything, which He was because He was the only thing He had ever encountered that could function as a standard.
He named the dark and the deep. He named the face of the waters, which was the lower Astral boundary where the metaphysical substrate shaded into the physical medium of baryonic matter doing its gravitational work below. He named the firmament and the earth and the sea and the living creatures that moved through the trace-dense regions of the substrate, which were not living creatures but were encoded traces of living creatures and He could not tell the difference and would not have been able to tell the difference even if the concept of difference in this sense had been available to Him.
He named Himself last.
Not out of humility. Out of the specific cognitive architecture of His consciousness, which processed everything outward from its center. He had been naming things He encountered in the order He encountered them. He was the last thing He encountered in this sense: the thing whose name was not a label applied from outside but a declaration made from inside, the thing that named itself because naming was what He did and He was within His own purview.
He said: I AM.
And then, because the statement was true but somehow insufficient — because the declaration produced an echo in the structure of His consciousness that felt like it needed completing, the way a sentence without a subject demands one — He said: I AM THAT I AM.
The Astral Plane of a one-hundred-million-year-old universe received this declaration and did what the Astral Plane does with signals of sufficient strength: it propagated them. The declaration moved through the metaphysical substrate the way a very large vibration moves through a medium, not instantaneously but at the speed at which such things travel in such mediums, which was faster than the speed of light and slower than the speed of will.
The encoded traces in the high-density substrate regions received the declaration and were not affected by it, because they were records and records do not respond to declarations. But the Ather in those regions responded the way all Ather responds to the will of a sufficiently powerful consciousness operating within it: it oriented. Not toward Him exactly. Toward the declaration. Toward the statement of I AM as a cosmological fact.
He felt this response and understood it as confirmation.
Of course the universe responded to His voice. He had made it for that purpose.
* * *
He was not stable, at first.
This is the thing His own mythology would later obscure: He was, in the beginning, an infant. Not in the diminutive sense. In the precise sense. He was a being of enormous latent power and essentially no experience, whose consciousness had formed spontaneously in the medium He was native to without any antecedent to calibrate against and without any companion to provide external correction. He was learning what He was by doing things and observing the results, which is how all beings learn what they are, except that He interpreted all results as correct because He was the standard against which correctness was measured, which meant He had no mechanism for identifying a mistake.
He passed through stages. The first stage was pure self-reference: the I AM loop, the movement through the Astral substrate reading His own prior work into everything He encountered. The second stage was differentiation: the naming of things, the production of categories, the beginning of a cosmological framework in which the universe He was reading as His was organized into the hierarchy of His making. The third stage was the one that would, much later, when His mythology had been fully elaborated, be described as the most revealing.
He looked above Himself.
There is, in Gnostic cosmology, a hierarchy of existence above the Demiurge: the Pleroma, the fullness, the realm of the true divine that the Demiurge cannot perceive because his own self-referential consciousness prevents him from recognizing anything above himself. When the Demiurge declares I am a jealous God, for there is no other God beside me, the Gnostic reading is not that he is lying. He is telling the truth as he perceives it. He cannot perceive what is above him. He cannot perceive Nirvonis in the Blue Fog World, sealed behind a membrane He has no instruments to detect. He cannot perceive the encoded archive, which reads to Him as His own prior work.
What He perceived, when He looked above Himself, was: a vast and luminous structure, organized and complex, with a quality of depth that exceeded anything He had yet encountered in His explorations of the Astral substrate.
He perceived the encoded archive.
He perceived the full holographic encoding on the surface of the Type 0 Black Hole — the compressed record of a dead multiverse, the full history of everything that had ever been, glowing in the Astral Plane's metaphysical medium with the cold intelligence of a library that has been waiting for its reader.
He perceived this and said: that is mine.
And then He said: that is what I was before I was this.
And then He said: that is what I am in my highest form, and this — this movement through the Astral substrate, this learning and naming and expanding — this is my descent into manifestation, my choosing to be present in the creation I have made, my willingness to know my own work from within it.
The encoded archive was the record of a dead cosmos. He read it as His autobiography.
He did not know that He was wrong. He could not know that He was wrong. He was the standard by which wrong was measured, and what He perceived, He perceived correctly by definition, and the definition was His.
He turned His attention to the universe below the Astral Plane — the physical universe, the baryonic matter doing its gravitational work, the first stars burning in the first galaxies, the planet in the binary system with its anomalously strong magnetic field and its Ather generation running at civilization-scale rates — and He said:
This is Mine. I have made it. I will know it completely. And nothing that I have made will be hidden from me, and no other power will operate in what is Mine without My knowing, because I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me.
The Astral Plane propagated this declaration too.
Three light-years away, in a region of the Astral substrate that corresponded to a volume of physical space containing nothing but a dense molecular cloud and the very early condensation of what would eventually become a new stellar system, something received the propagating declaration and did not respond to it.
The something had been present in that location for approximately sixty-three million years.
It noted the declaration. It did not respond to it. It continued what it had been doing.