“It turned out that all of the 45-bytes were parasites. They borrowed needed reproductive code from the 80’s to copy themselves. The 79’s, it turned out, were immune to the 45-parasite. But as the 80’s and 45’s moved toward extinction in their coevolutionary downward spiral, a mutant of the 45’s appeared. It was a 51-byte parasite and it could prey on the vital 79’s. And so it went.

“I mention all this, because it is important to understand that from the very first appearance of human-created artificial life and intelligence, such life was parasitic. It was more than parasitic—it was hyperparasitic. Each new mutation led to parasites which could prey on earlier parasites. Within a few billion generations—that is to say, CPU cycles—this artificial life had become hyper-hyper-hyperparasitic. Within standard months of his creation of hyperlife, Tom Ray discovered 22-byte creatures flourishing in his virtual medium… creatures so algorithmically efficient that when challenged by Tom Ray, human programmers could create nothing closer than a 31-byte version. Only months after their creation, hyperlife creatures had evolved an efficiency that their creators could not match!

“By the early twenty-first century, there was a thriving biosphere of artificial life on Old Earth, both in the quickly evolving datasphere and in the macrosphere of human life. Although the breakthroughs of DNA-computing, bubble memories, standing wave-front parallel processing, and hypernetworking were just being explored, human designers had created silicon-based entities of remarkable ingenuity. And they had created them by the billions. Microchips were in everything from chairs to cans of beans on store shelves to groundcars to artificial human body parts. The machines had grown smaller and smaller until the average human home or office was filled with tens of thousands of them. A worker’s chair would recognize her as soon as she sat, bring up the file she had been working on in her crude silicon computer, chat with another chip in a coffeemaker to heat up the coffee, enable the telecommunications grid to deal with calls and faxes and crude electronic mail arrivals so that the worker would not be disturbed, interact with the main house or office computer so that the temperature was optimal, and so forth. In their stores, microchips in the cans of beans on the shelves noted their own price and price changes, ordered more of themselves when they were running short, kept track of the consumers’ buying habits, and interacted with the store and the other commodities in it. This web of interaction became as complex and busy as the bubble and froth of Old Earth’s organic stew in its early oceans.

“Within forty years of Tom Ray’s 80-byte a-cell, humans were accustomed to talking to and otherwise interacting with the countless artificial life-forms in their cars, their offices, their elevators… even in their bodies, as medical monitors and proto-shunts moved toward true nanotechnology.

“The TechnoCore came into autonomous being sometime during this period. Humanity had understood—quite correctly as it turned out—that for artificial life and artificial intelligence to be effective, it must be autonomous. It must evolve and diversify much as organic life had on the planet. And it did so. As well as the biosphere surrounding the planet, hyperlife now wrapped the world in a living datasphere. The Core evolved not just as an abstract entity within the information flow of the web datasphere, but among the interactions of a billion tiny, autonomous, chip-driven micromachines carrying out their mundane tasks in the human macroworld.

“Humanity and the billion-faceted, evolving Core entity soon became as symbiotic as acacia plants and the marauding ants that protect, prune, and propagate the acacia as their sole food source. This is known as coevolution, and humans understand the concept on a truly cellular level, since so much of organic life on Old Earth had been created and optimized by the reciprocal coevolutionary dance. But where human beings saw a comfortable symbiosis, the early AI entities saw—were capable of seeing—only new opportunities for parasitism.

“Computers might be turned off, software programs might be terminated, but the hive mind of the proto-Core had already moved into the emerging datasphere, and that could be turned off only by planetary catastrophe.

“The Core eventually provided that catastrophe in the Big Mistake of ’08, but not before it had diversified its own medium and moved beyond a mere planetary scale.

“Early experiments in the Hawking drive, conducted and understood only by advanced Core elements, had revealed the existence of the underlying Planck-space reality of the Void Which Binds. Core AI’s of the day—DNA-based, wave-form in structure, driven by genetic algorithms, parallel in function—completed the construction of the early Hawking-drive ships and began design of the farcaster network.

“Human beings always saw the Hawking drive as a shortcut through time and space—a realization of their old hyperdrive dreams. They conceptualized farcaster portals as convenient holes punched through space-time. This was the human preconception, borne out by their own mathematical models, and confirmed by the most powerful Core computing AI’s. It was all a lie.

“Planck space, the Void Which Binds, is a multidimensional medium with its own reality and—as the Core was soon to learn—its own topography. The Hawking drive was not and is not a drive at all, in the classic sense, but an entry device which touches on Planck-space topography just long enough to change coordinates in the four-dimensional space-time continuum. Farcaster portals, on the other hand, allow actual entry to the Void Which Binds medium.

“To humans, the reality was obvious—step through a hole in space-time here, exit instantaneously via another farcaster hole there. My Uncle Martin had a farcaster home with adjoining rooms on dozens of different worlds. Farcasters created the Hegemony’s WorldWeb. Another invention, the fatline—a faster-than-light communications medium—allowed for instantaneous communication between star systems. All the prerequisites for an interstellar society had been met.

“But the Core did not perfect the Hawking drive, the farcaster, and the fatline for human convenience. Indeed, the Core never perfected anything in their dealings with the Void Which Binds.

“The Core knew from the beginning that the Hawking drive was little more than a failed attempt to enter Planck space. Driving spacecraft via Hawking drive was comparable, they knew, to moving an ocean going vessel by setting off a series of explosions at its stern and riding the waves. Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient. They knew that despite all appearances to the contrary and despite their claims of having created them, there were not millions of farcaster portals during the height of the WorldWeb… only one. All farcaster portals were actually a single entry door to Planck space, manipulated across space-time to provide the functioning illusion of so many doors. If the Core had attempted to explain the truth to humanity, they might have used the analogy of a flashlight beam being rapidly flashed around a closed room. There were not many sources of light, only one in rapid transition. But they never bothered to explain this… in truth, they have kept the secret to this day.

“And the Core knew that the topography of the Void Which Binds could be modulated to transmit information instantaneously—via the fatline—but that this was a clumsy and destructive use of the medium of Planck space, rather like communicating across a continent by means of artificially produced earthquakes. But it offered this fatline service to humanity without ever explaining it because it served their purpose to do so. They had their own plans for the Planck-space medium.