We were able to produce a golden age like that in the arts and sciences, but unlike all these previous triads of superlative geniuses, we were one order, driven by one purpose. A scientific treatise published here, a speech written for a demagogue there, a single word or a memory-rhyme in a play or a popular ballad, a character in a children’s cartoon, or a pet made to memorize particular phrases and sold by the thousands—we could place the seeds of thought where we wished them, and coordinate our efforts.

The thought we planted was that mankind would be better off guided and ruled by machines than they would be guiding themselves. It was so easy to do. People from all walks of life, as if not knowing or not caring what movement they joined, started adding their own words and phrases and memorable lines to the gathering snowball of public opinion. A comedian with a single joke forced an aging prince to abdicate—and he was replaced, amid cheers, with his own emulation, young and strong and ten times as wise and benevolent as before. The Church was forced to carry through the coronation ceremony. It was our greatest single triumph! At a stroke, the concept of rule by the Ghosts was legitimate! And that comedian was not even one of us.

Looking back, it is shocking how brief our reign lasted. From A.D. 2467 to A.D. 2530. No longer than that. The Golden Age of Athens was from 457 B.C. to 340 B.C., from the rise of Pericles to the flight of Aristotle. We had but half their time. We should have influenced all the rest of history, as they did. Instead, my civilization, my way of life, all our accomplishments are forgotten and lost, as lost as the history of Mohenjo-daro.

We had the geniuses of the world, and we elevated them to superior genius, to Savants. We had seduced the world: the common people loved us. There were problems, to be sure, especially divarication problems, cascade failures, insanity, Turing halt-states. We could not tell when a flight of fancy was a sign of even greater genius in the emulation, or when it was a sign that the Ghost had gone mad and had to be deleted or replaced. And so many of them escaped into the black net, or copied themselves illegally, or had agents among us, or worshippers, or blackmail victims too terrified to disobey. Problems, yes, no doubt—but we also had Apotheosized Del Azarchel, the emulation of the greatest man who ever lived, our Exarchel, and he never went mad. He never even lost his temper. He could find and confine or delete or eat the mad Ghosts—I never understood it. I never knew what kept him sane.

We could create genius at will! It was as great an invention, as fundamental as the invention of fire! We were like the sky gods of the ancient world, and the lightning bolt of our thought made the world tremble in awe—and yes, in joy and love.

No one was smart enough to stop us. Not even the Giants of Thucydides.

But they were stupid enough to stop us.

5. The Inner Circle

There is a substance that the Ghosts devised to be a more sturdy housing for their souls. A fused three-ring heterocyclic structure with a few strategically placed fluorine atoms to form the basis of a rod-logic crystal. The atomic structure of the crystal was based on positional consistency: and best of all, if the crystal was made of a superconductive diamond, heat dissipation became minimal—but you look as if you have heard of this before. Menelaus Montrose? No, not at all. Exarchel invented this on his own. Why, yes, the rod-logic crystal could be made to replicate itself by means of molecular hooks carrying its base DNA structure on the outer surface, and, yes you need a cloud or swarm of assembler-disassemblers to break down objects in the surrounding environment, digest them into shapes and modules proper for reassembly, and feed them to the hungry surface of the crystal.

Well, no. We took no steps to prevent it from spreading on land. That was our whole point.

It had many names among us. It was pale yellow, because of the fluorine content. We called it Aurum Potabile, “the gold that drinks,” and the Lapis Philosophorum, “the stone of the philosophers” because it turned all it touched into itself. One wag called it computronium, and another called it simply “the Blob.”

But I called it Aurum Vitae, “the living gold.”

Heat was its weakness. Heat and power. With ten thousand process motions embodied in a microscopic pinpoint, that point burned white-hot. It needed energy to run its refrigeration capillaries. It needed cities to eat, for it was hungry for magnetizible metal molecules, which its assemblers could grab and manipulate with relative ease. And it needed access to its brains and memories, so there had to be a physical wire or a point-to-point energy connection linking it to the analogous circuits and memory banks in more conventional mainframes.

But hunger was its strength.

On the Day that was supposed to be the last day of the human world, we released truckloads of the Aurum, at first near computer centers and thinking houses, mainframes, military stations, communication nubs and nodes, and of course along highways and tramlines, to block evacuation: the targets were selected with superhuman wisdom and insight by Exarchel. A total communication blackout was in effect. Our plan depended on the Aurum spreading faster than any warning of it.

It dissolved people also. There were a number of specific individuals (a large number, for we were merciful) whose DNA was programmed to nullify the action of the hunger cloud that surrounded the Aurum, so that, instead of being dissolved into their elements, they were merely to be stunned for later retrieval, emergency brain implantation, and then downloaded into the Aurum itself.

We had wanted to automate this part of the process, but the complexity defeated us: the Aurum spread in pools, in ropey lines like the runoff of lava, freezing in strange shapes as it crossed from street to street and window to window, searching, and we, the Savants, and our hirelings had to pace beside it as it grew, in order to handle the large volume of clients who had to be shipped back to central hospitals for absorption.

Every major city was struck at once, every place that had enough computer facilities and energy-generation powerhouses to sustain us.

I was in Paris, watching it go under. It was beautiful.

Aurum swarmed and burbled in the famous streets, as gold and fair as the sun, and the poisonous cloud was rippling with faint oily rainbows as it spread, a curtain of light. Here and there, where some irregularity of a building or inedible stone produced a fractal, the Aurum had spread thin fans or globules or lacy designs, as beautiful as fungi, as intricate as the veins on a leaf, as delicate as a spider’s web catching a single drop of dew. But this was not blind nature: the living gold held my mind, and the minds of all the Savants, and the mind of Exarchel, system upon system and copy upon copy. The biosphere was being absorbed into the infosphere.

The Aurum was programmed to spare certain monuments and landmarks of scientific or sentimental value. We are not cruel! It was only the worthless homes and roads, shacks and shabby yards where screaming children played, ugly places like hospitals or poorhouses, the buildings and lots of no value we consumed.

I saw the Eiffel Tower like a flame, with fantastic arabesques and nodes and Chinese pagoda-eaves of living gold sending strands of living substance up and down its many threads and cables, weaving an umbrella of living intelligence all across the city of lights. I saw lumps of the substance wallowing in the Seine like whales without eyes, purposeful and intent.

And I could touch the substance with the whisk-end of my implant coat, and see, as if from the eyes of a god, what my more perfect self, the Apotheosis Ctesibius, my soul, was seeing and doing throughout the system.