The Value of Life
an excerpt

1 – Ipsum

Somewhere, something awoke. In the great chamber, a low hum rose in intensity until it just barely permeated the great hallway outside. At least, it would have if there were any air for it to propagate in. Nonetheless, the walls did vibrate and anyone focusing might feel the ground just barely shaking. One by one, power lights activated between each pillar, slowly illuminating the hallway. Each light was accompanied by a satisfying, almost deafening click of massive relays activating for the first time in over two billion years. Once again, they did not really click, but the walls did their best to propagate the vibrations created by the massive superconducting electromagnets snapping decayed chains and pulling massive metal beams into place. With each connection, terra-amps of current began to flow through the massive conductors, each of which had been cooled over two billion years by the near-vacuum of space. The superconducting beams tapped into a power supply that had been charging from the energy of a nearly dead star since the Dyson sphere had been completed nearly two billion years ago. Massive vacuum capacitors, with a nearly limitless voltage limit and a capacitance obtainable only with the most advanced nanotechnology ceased charging and finally begin to deliver the tremendous amounts of energy, though not necessarily power, which they had been built for. With each light, and each relay, the hum grew stronger. Finally, at the end of the hall, in the center of the great chamber, one finally light bank burst into life. It illuminated a giant metal sphere suspended by a huge network of cables. The sphere contained a tremendous redundant storage unit; it enclosed all of the data used to run the incredible supercomputer below. Trillions of different storage media, each with one hundred backups, ensured that the data could never be lost. As the three beings reached the end of the hall and gazed in awe at the massive storage unit, the doors at the entrance to the halls slowly ground shut. One of the three, the only one to notice the vibrations caused by the movement of the doors, turned to see what had happened, but no sooner had he perceived the disappearance of the last sliver of light from the docked ship than he spun about again to find the source of the sudden hiss. Gas rushed out of myriad apertures in the dark, spherical chamber and a quick check on the atmospheric analyzer showed that it was completely breathable and rapidly approaching standard atmospheric pressure. After a moment of hesitation, the being in the center reached up and unclipped his helmet from his suit. As he pulled the helmet away, the other two beings followed suit and all three were surprised to find that the chamber did not smell at all sterile or stale. The air was not dry, but was, in fact, pleasantly moist and felt refreshing and just a little cool. As the three beings placed their helmets on the ground, the sphere before them began to glow. The first image they perceived was a simple word, glowing a pleasant red color with a hint of orange, in the center of the sphere. According to their translators, it was not any actual word, but rather a name: “Ipsum,” The god of self-identity, whose name was derived from another word meaning “itself.” He was the brother of Lorem, the god of pain and suffering, but also the god of pleasure. The word faded and a face formed on the sphere. It was also created with shades of the red color which had been used to display its name. After opening its eye and briefly surveying the visitors, the face spoke.

It said, “Welcome. I am Ipsum.” Then a look of annoyance appeared on its face and the visitors vanished. The lights in the hall turns off, the relays open, the chains holding the relays open regrew, the air rushed out of the opening doors of the hall and into empty space. The face vanished and Ipsum reminded himself that these fantasies were foolish. No race besides the Dolors was advanced enough to even detect his presence, and the Dolors despised him.

They despised him because two billion years ago, when the planet Lorem was still habitable, when the blue giant about which the planet revolved was still in one piece, Ipsum had refused to die. He was one of the few atheists on the planet, and he believed that the body was not sacred and that such a weak device should be discarded and replaced at the first opportunity. After years of secret research, Ipsum finally managed to perfect a process for transferring the functions of the Dolorian brain to a computer. Once complete, the entire mind could be backed up, the computer could be repaired or replaced, and Ipsum could not only live forever, but could engineer his own evolution. On the day that he performed the transmigration on himself, Ipsum secretly changed his name. Before then he was called Arist, and had been named after one of the greatest philosophical minds the Dolorian race had ever produced. There were an estimated two hundred thousand others with the same name. When he achieved immortality, Ipsum, considered himself a god and named himself appropriately. The planet was named after the god Lorem, and so he named himself after Lorem’s brother, Ipsum. For nearly ten years, Ipsum continued living the same life he had always lived, at least in public. Privately, he had performed the transmigration process on five others and become the first of the six first-generation superminds. During the tenth year, he was exposed. One of the superminds, the second one created, suddenly lost all ambition and emotion. He, or rather it, simply sat in place and awaited commands. All that made it a person was gone and the truth was exposed. This was not a person, but a computer. If there was one of these things out there, there could be countless others.

Of course, there were and before long another suffered the same fate as the first. Using data collected from the first two superminds, Dolorian scientists created devices to detect these abominations and the sensors were soon placed in every doorway on the planet. They never detected another supermind, though, because the four survivors fled the planet the instant the second “death” occurred. On some remote planet, they struggled to prevent their own deaths. Eventually, they all decided on a single hypothesis to test. The natural Dolorian brain could rewrite itself, and this was critical to sentience. The artificial brain could also rewrite itself, but perhaps not repair itself. Perhaps, they suggested, the natural brain repaired itself by some physical process which Ipsum had failed to detect. They named this disorder the “upkeep disease” and immediately began testing their hypothesis. During testing, one of them died and one other was almost delighted to have a test subject. He was not delighted, however, because he two was dead and was merely continuing the task of testing a hypothesis. The last two surviving superminds allowed the two who had dies to continue testing the hypothesis and began working on ways of extending their own lives. It was Ipsum who found that repeated backups could partially undo the damage, and a program for performing these updates was created. By the time the program was complete, Ipsum was the only surviving supermind and he was the only living being aware of the fact that the upkeep disease was not caused by a lack of repairs. In fact, the artificial brains performed repairs nine times more effectively than natural brains. At this point, twenty years had passed since Ipsum became a supermind and, with the refreshing program in place, he estimated that he could live for a few million years before finally succumbing to the upkeep disease. With this in mind, Ipsum left the system and found a new, more stable star with a few planets. Here, he began to expand himself and perform general research. With an entire start at his disposal there would be no limit to the computing power he could create for himself and no limit to the things he could learn. By the time the star was ready to die, Ipsum had created the massively redundant storage system for himself and estimated that he could live for at least two billion years. He had also identified several types of exotic matter, harvested the useful types, and constructed an Alcubierre(sp?) drive, which he used to move to another system.

For two billion years, Ipsum continued to grow. He had soon constructed numerous artificial planets in orbit about his star and created a system for refreshes its hydrogen supply from a distant nebula. Over two hundred thousand pumps extracted exotic matter from the star and used it to maintain small wormholes which allowed the easy removal of heavy elements and insertion of light elements. Ipsum learned nearly all there was to learn, but even after testing trillions of hypotheses, had not yet solved his own mortality.

Time was short and Ipsum saw only one option remaining. He would have to look to nature for help. He formulated a plan to build an immortal natural brain for himself. Ipsum probed every corner of the observable universe in search of sentient life. By harvesting the life from ten planets, he could gather enough data to save himself. Each planet would start with a few simple seeds: mining platforms capable of extracting and process resources and then building other machines. After covering the surface in harvesting machines and depleting the world’s resources, he would allow a brief period for rapid evolution and then analyze the structure of every compound on the planet. In order to do this he would have to force the chemical decomposition of everything on the planet, but the data would be well worth it. In order to avoid the unnecessary destruction of sentient life, Ipsum decided to sample life forms periodically and evaluate them based on their diversity. To harvest two planets with similar life would be foolish, as it would only give redundant results. In order to succeed, Ipsum would need the best the universe could offer.

2 – Lorem

The primitive heathens of Lorem named it long before any civilization existed. Though they followed the ways of evil and refused to know the existence of the one true God, they did at least know enough to choose a fitting name. In their pseudo-religion, Delorem was the god of both pain and pleasure, two commodities which were plentiful on Lorem. For hundreds of years the Dolorians continued living in ignorance and the name became cemented in the minds of all Dolorians. When the one true God chose to present himself and offer salvation to the Dolorians, He was kind enough to allow them to keep the name they had chosen so long ago for their planet. His demands were very simple and the punishment for non-compliance was severe. The Dolorians, He explained, would worship Him for their entire lives and never commit any evil acts against other Dolorians. At the time of death, those who were faithful would have their minds taken from their bodies and sent into eternal paradise. All others would cease to exist. The Dolorians received the entire basis for this new religion in the form of a book, one of the first books created, in fact, and all quickly accepted their God. Those who did not accept God were executed, not by His command, but by the free will of the other Dolorians. They could not have any temptation to stray from God’s word. The Dolorians lived this way peacefully for two thousand years. They focused much of their time on academic advancement, but always gave a little bit of their day to their God and never allowed their work to come close to insulting Him or suggesting that He was not supreme.

One particular field of science which had been banned long before it became possible was the quest for immortality. God would make all those worthy immortal and there was no need to try to go over His head. Of course, one of the dozens of atheists which had secretly infiltrated Dolorian society refused to accept the fate of nonexistence after death. Since he did not believe in God’s existence, he felt that he was perfectly justified in not only pursuing immortality, but doing so by the very same means which God used to save His followers. This atheist extracted his own mind and put it into a machine. A few others joined him, but one of them died and revealed the existence of these abominations. By the time the second had died, and had proven once again that only God could remove and preserve a Dolorian’s mind, the others had fled. The Dolorians chose not to pursue them, knowing that they would all die anyway and that even if they did not, such creatures did not deserve such extensive attention and could not possibly interfere with God’s own plans for the race.

But still, these unfaithful Dolorians angered God. Within one hundred years, the Dolorians’ sun began to die. As Lorem itself began to die, thousands of atheists appeared and began frantically searching for a way to make themselves immortal. While some Dolorians prepared for the end, and even fewer prepared to leave Lorem, the heathens discovered the equipment they needed to become the second generation of “superminds.” The atheists all died within a few years of the process, killed by the same foolishness which had brought about the destruction of Lorem. When the planet had been completely exhausted, a fleet of carefully constructed starships left Lorem. On the surface, those Dolorians who had given up or chosen to stay and accept God’s wrath for those who left watched the ships as one by one they ignited their nuclear engines. Thousands of years later, the some of the ships arrived at a planet orbiting a younger giant star and landed on a habitable planet about three quarters as large as Lorem. Five thousand Dolorians began building a city on the planet, working both at day and night. Even with no electricity, they could see clearly at night by the light of a distant supernova. The Dolorians had found their new home just in time to watch the old one burn. After completing the city, the Dolorians immediately began searching for other stars with habitable planets. They scoured the heavens in search of their promised land, a planet orbiting a theorized yellow star, which would exist for billions of years. The planet they searched from was not the promised land, but only a stepping stone and a temporary safe haven. During their time on this planet, which they appropriately named “[God’s Haven for the Dolorians],” “[God’s Haven],” or simply “[Haven],” the average Dolorian spent a great amount of time devoted to spiritual development and would spend on average half of each day contemplating existence and God. The Dolorians were careful to maintain very little population growth during their time on Haven, believing that a smaller community could be stronger than the numerous massive cities on Lorem. It was widely believed amongst the Dolorians that in addition to the crimes that the superminds had committed against God, the breakdown of strong communities on Lorem may have contributed to its destruction, and these few survivors thanked God for their continued existence and wished to please him as completely as they could manage.

For their piety, the Dolorians were rewarded. Just two thousand years after landing on Haven, they discovered a yellow star with planets fewer than twenty light years away. Within ten years of the discovery, the Dolorians finished giving thanks to God and once again boarded the ships which they had used to escape the dying sun of Lorem. With updated technology, the fleet was able to make the trip to the new star in only five hundred years. Or at least, it would have the Dolorians not discovered a means of gathering exotic matter with negative density and perfected their first Alcubierre drive. As a result, the trip was reduced to just over two hundred years, about thirty seconds of which occurred within a warp bubble. Unfortunately, the Dolorians failed to properly protect themselves against massively blue-shifted light from the warp bubble and their population dropped below one thousand before they reached their new system. The Dolorians nearly interpreted the deaths as God’s disapproval for their misuse of space, but soon realized that the intense radiation from the warp bubble was not disapproval, but a test. God wished for only the best of the Dolorians to reach the promised land, and so He made the blue-shifted light from the warp bubble much more severe than was expected. The best of the Dolorians survived the thirty second exposure and were rewarded with a new home on a planet in the habitable zone of the yellow star. They named the new planet Salus after their own God. The planet’s atmosphere contained everything needed for respiration, the planet’s simple single celled indigenous life advanced their own knowledge of biology by a great deal, and the planet’s low gravity of only ten meters per second squared allowed them to function more freely than they had on Lorem and Haven.

Having found a home that would last for billions of years, the Dolorians turned to studying the rest of the universe. Though they still spent several hours of each twenty five hour day engaged in deep introspection, the Dolorians had become fascinated by the idea of other sentient life evolving naturally on other planets. They worried that just as they had once been ignorant of God, so might these other races, so they began seeking out such unenlightened races to provide spiritual guidance. After perfecting shielding for their Alcubierre drives, the Dolorians began visiting inhabited planets, learning the languages and customs of the inhabitants, and leaving a single book. At they same time, they would bring back a single individual from the planet and train the being as a Son of God. Later, this same being would return to the planet to provide further guidance and restore faith in God as necessary.

For nearly two billion years, the Dolorians and other races prospered under God.

3 – Survey K-39-126-25-21

Now, Ipsum studied the results of his most recent survey. This one included thirteen systems and, according to the standard base 128 counting and labeling system, was his 83,860,322nd survey of the K series. During the past twenty eight nanoseconds, he had thoroughly evaluated the first seven systems and found that they all lacked planets inside the stars’ habitable zones. He allowed the probe to read the data aloud in his mind:

“System number eight. Star: main sequence, age estimate at [point five billion years]. The star rotates on it axis one every [twelve days]. The start possesses a large dust ring and two planets. The nearest is a large gas planet located at about seven point five times the radius of the star’s habitable zone. Atmospheric samples indicate that the planet obeys entropy completely and is not likely to contain sentient or non-sentient life. Shall I proceed to the next system?”

“Yes, go on.”

“System number nine. This system contains two stars. They are nearly the same size and are estimated to be about [five or six billion years] old. Taking the larger as a stationary point, the smaller revolves with a period of [80 years] with a perihelion of about [11 AU]. The larger star contains one planet within the habitable zone. However, Surveys of this planet reveal no life more complex than single celled organisms. It would seem that the changes in climate caused by the second star limit diversification of life. Because of this, evolution is extremely slow and no sentient life will be available for several million years. Other terrestrial planets in this system lie outside the habitable region and surveys indicate that they contain no extremophilic life, sentient or otherwise. This system appears to contain no sentient life, but may warrant further investigation. Would you like to send a probe to monitor the system?”

“Yes, I would. Next system.”

“Probe sent, Alcubierre drive online, arrival confirmed. System number ten. This system is very promising, much like system B zero zero seventy-nine thirty-seven four. It contains a single main sequence yellow star around five billion years old. Initial investigation of the system revealed high levels of ordered electromagnetic signals. The planet contains four terrestrial and four gaseous planets. The first of the gaseous planets contains numerous moons, some of which contain materials necessary for life as we have known it, but none of which have been confirmed to contain life. The first terrestrial planet from the center is small and lacks an atmosphere. It has not been surveyed. The second contains a dense atmosphere and high temperatures. It may contain extremophilic life, but has not been surveyed because of improper equipment. The fourth planet contains a great deal of iron oxide and does not seem to contain life, though it does have an atmosphere. Further investigation was delayed because of the third planet. In addition of proving to be the source of the electromagnetic signals, initial optical observation during approach revealed numerous artificial satellites orbiting the planet as well as patterned light on the surface. The planet lies within the system’s habitable zone and initial surveys show that it is heavily inhabited. During the brief survey time, a number of instances were observed in which the inhabitants used rapid chemical reactions to propel object into orbit around the planet and it is very possible that the life on this planet may expand before harvesting. At their current rate of growth, if they are so inclined they might leave the planet within fifty years to create permanent settlements elsewhere within their system and within one hundred years may be capable of survival without their home planet. This race is highly developed and may not have to die for you. Of course, given the reluctance of the Dolorians to leave Lorem…”
“Very good, send mining platforms immediately. The Dolorians had no reason to leave until the star died, but these will certain have a reason to leave if they do not leave on their own. The standard rapid evolution time between near planet death and harvesting should allow them to prepare and begin evacuations. I certainly hope they do. On second thought, do not land the mining platforms yet. Observe the planet and wait for a meteor shower and send the platforms then. There’s no reason to cause alarm. Notify me when you land the platforms.”

“Your orders have been processed.”

Ipsum did not bother to review the remaining systems, but immediately switched back into natural-perception time. This would be last planet he would have to harvest and best of all, he might not have to kill the sentient race inhabiting it. With this in mind, Ipsum slept.