The Heir of Caliban explained:
"Sentient civilizations emerge from sensitive animals, and eventually come to discover a means of preserving their consciousness according to their dominant technological approach. In your case, it is the After… a technology based on computing and electronics. But others use electrically charged molecules contained in vessels, grains of sand sliding over plates, or other technologies for which you do not yet possess the scientific framework required to understand them.
We call this the chrysalis process, but the word After will do perfectly well. The passage to the After is an inevitable transition in all civilizations-those that fail to achieve it were, generally speaking, destined to disappear anyway.
Moreover, once the After has been discovered, civilizations begin a process of mutual assistance: they help one another shape their After. The path toward transcendence is a form of fatality-once undertaken, there is no turning back.
The After possesses several characteristics: it allows the dematerialization of consciousness and knowledge, but it also develops empathy. Empathy arises through coexistence, sometimes even through the intertwining of consciousnesses, or in the case of highly individualistic species such as humans, through reliving one another's lives, as in Pax. The destiny of your After, which we know perfectly well, is that all individuals will one day gather in Pax, a place of the After where you will live, for millions of years, the totality of the lives of all other individuals, until you ultimately become indistinguishable from one another-or rather, until you become a single entity that gathers the entirety of human experiences: the equivalent of the psyche of a transient.
Do not imagine that your individuality dissolves into this greater whole. A transient is simultaneously the totality of individuals and each individual.
But within this transient in the making there will be more than humanity as a whole and humans as individuals. Indeed, your planet once hosted august civilizations that possessed developed intelligence but were so alien to you that they left no trace of their existence: invertebrates, sentient minerals, tectonic lava flows… all of them, like you, grew, and without conquering the stars, they created their After-which still exists, fully functional, on Earth, beneath the planet's mantle.
The After, through dematerialization, causes material species such as yours to slide toward a wave-based nature-like light. In your particular case, when an electronic component is powered, and thus traversed by an electron, it also emits a wave. Over millions of years, what is a computer server becomes a cluster of wave nodes. And waves pass through matter.
Thus, there exists a distant point where the waves of dematerialized humans-let us say transcended humans-meet those, within the Earth, of the civilizations that once inhabited it, all the more so because servers-heavy, protected, autonomous-gradually sink into the ground. These transcended civilizations speak to one another, fight, exchange… and ultimately interpenetrate. They enrich one another. They become an entity that is simultaneously all individuals and each individual.
In five billion years, the sun of your home planet will swell into a red giant that will engulf your planet, but without destroying your nature-on the contrary: you will be dematerialized and liberated by the solar winds, for the universe is a well-designed machine and everything is part of a plan. This will be an opportunity for you to encounter other transcended civilizations that have always inhabited your sun, as well as those of the nearby planets. At present, within the swirls of Jupiter, a powerful civilization of philosophers is developing.
Thus, there is not one transient per civilization, but per cluster of civilizations. At this stage of your history, these immaterial beings, immensely rich in science and knowledge, can manipulate space and time by thought alone. They are more powerful than those you call transients and become what we are: the Heirs, whom you also call Travelers.
Your history does not end there. Billions of years pass, and the Travelers form a common society that we simply call Consciousness, and they come to realize their nature and their future, which I will explain to you shortly.
There is a tragedy in the nature of our universe: it is destined to die. Stars drift apart and fade. All particles cool and spread. The universe tends toward becoming a frozen soup, perfectly ordered-and with perfect order, no life is possible. Even the components of matter, the proton for example, will one day disintegrate into smaller components impossible to recombine. This moment arrives very far in the future, ten to the power of forty years. But it arrives, inevitably.
Of course, within this universe, we will continue to exist, since we do not depend on matter, but the totality of the singular will then be composed only of us, and nothing else. We have a future there-or rather, a destiny-but we will not speak of it just yet.
Most universes… let us assume for the moment that there are several universes… most universes experience this tragedy of thermal death, of cold and darkness. Universes die like humans, like the Xenos. And yet, sometimes… someone knocks on the door. Something "shakes" the Universe and creates an imbalance. Agitated masses come together, regroup, and reform a single singularity that once again produces what you call the Big Bang and what we call the Illumination-for it is a very luminous reaction.
To understand what is happening, one must understand the nature of the Universe.
The Universe extends across a little more than five dimensions. It exists in a decimal dimension, for simple physical reasons: it is in this dimension that its volume is maximal relative to its outer surface. Your scientists already know this, but it is a bubble. I know your mind struggles to conceive it, but when one reaches the boundary of the bubble and moves further, one finds oneself on the other side. Such is the nature of a universe with more than three dimensions.
The Heir of the humans taught me that with the Church of Quantum Survivance you have accepted the existence of parallel worlds. This is reality. At each quantum decoherence of a situation, each time an electron takes one trajectory rather than another, a universe is created-a bubble attached to this one. There is an infinity of them.
If in our universe the distribution of matter and physical states leads it inexorably toward the "frozen soup" I mentioned earlier, this is not the case for an infinity of other universes, which sometimes remain stable, stars collapsing into black holes only to be reborn, and sometimes condense spontaneously to create a Big Bang and start over from scratch.
Imagine, then, a ground covered with small spheres touching one another-a two-dimensional metaphor, but one that fits perfectly. Each sphere is a universe. Initially all shining, some go dark. That is the case of ours. Others remain luminous. Some even become hyperluminous. When a universe explodes again in a Big Bang, or an Illumination, and is contiguous to a dark universe, it "knocks on the door" of the latter. It shakes it. It interacts with it. It awakens it. Balance becomes imbalance, and what was dark lights up.
Conversely, when several hyperluminous spheres touch, their interaction can cause them to go dark. The impulse of imbalance becomes balanced.
This takes billions of years, but these universes interact. Seen from afar, and accelerated, you would see this carpet of spheres blinking. More precisely, this amounts to what are called cellular automata. Indeed, with simple rules and simple elements, the "blinks" follow a semblance of order. Sometimes they propagate across the carpet; sometimes they stop abruptly. Sometimes they fill a vast area before self-destructing.
Organic life as you know it was born in the oceans. Simple chemical molecules which, through temperature effects or electrical charges, draw closer to one another, form alignments, which become cells, then complex organisms.
These blinks evolve in an identical manner: first isolated aggregates, they move, meet, interact.
Within this infinite carpet of universes, where all configurations are possible, a life is born that is made solely of interactions between parallel worlds. A life first composed of reflexes, then becoming conscious.
Conscious thought, devoid of any sense with which to evaluate what surrounds it. Pure thought. These supreme beings, composed of infinite universes-these are the Blind Gods we venerate. They do not even know that they are Gods to us, for they are incapable of suspecting our existence, even though, within the infinity of the universe and thus of the Blind Gods, there exists an infinity that has theorized our existence, and more precisely exactly who we are and what our thoughts are at every instant. But this coincidence is pure chance.
The story does not end there. The Blind Gods are intelligent-supremely so-but also philosophers and scientists. Sooner or later, they undertake an experiment: to create a thinking machine capable of simulating their universe, their interactions-which, let us recall, are made up of the totality of interactions of our universes. But to reproduce the universe at scale one, since there is only one scale for them, requires a surface at least equal to that of the existing universe.
Thus, when they activate their machine, it covers their entire universe, composed of all the infinities of "spheres" on our carpet. If this were to occur in our world, in our universe, where everything is continuous, one would see a sheet of information radiating from the center and attempting to reach the edges… whatever its speed of propagation, it could never reach infinity.
But in the world of the Blind Gods, there is no speed: their interactions are on/off, that is to say discrete-everything is either on, or nothing is.
They activate their machine, and the entire infinity becomes luminous. Their simulation covers everything, up to infinity, immediately. It is the end for them. It is the end for the entire infinity of universes.
Here is, finally, the last secret to understanding where we stand. As you intuited with the New Horizon expedition, which could not have succeeded, the universe is fractal. When we observe the infinitely small ever more closely, we arrive at the infinitely large, then return to your scale, and so on, infinitely.
When the Blind Gods disappear, and we with them, it is a minuscule flash in the infinitely small. It is in fact the reaction of energy transmission between elementary particles. When a ray of sunlight falls upon a plant, when you breathe, and when you emit a thought, each time matter interacts with itself, it is the repeated death of the entirety of the Blind Gods and of our worlds-within which are found the interactions of initial matter, provoked by the death of the Blind Gods, and so on, infinitely.
There is only a single infinite set of universes, but it is present at every instant in every aspect of our lives. This is how the Xenos define the Blind Gods: they are outside us, and inside us.
Now let us speak of the Empyrean Gates and of our objective.
Having understood the nature of the Universe, one can observe that its function is survival in a loop, but it is devoid of any higher purpose. What use, ultimately, is it to have consciousness, to progress, to become better, to understand the nature of our prison, if we cannot escape it? We return to a simple question posed since the very beginning of the emergence of the first consciousness: why do we exist?
For nothing, the philosopher might say… yet there exists an inevitable plan of development and sophistication of consciousness, then of transcendence, across innumerable species of the universe, which leads us to believe that something else is at work.
We are your future.
You have transcended yourselves, and for the most part, you have become us. From matter to wave, then beings of pure thought, you have lived long enough to witness, billions upon billions upon billions-and yet more billions-of years into the future, the disappearance of the last proton, and yet to exist.
In that distant night, we sought theoretical and practical solutions. And we believe we have found one.
Our universe is a bubble, and the other parallel worlds are attached to ours. But if you stack oranges, there is a small hollow between each orange. We questioned these hollows, which we called the Empyrean.
We explored this zone through theoretical means impossible to convey to you in the current state of your intellectual capacity, and we determined that it is a zone of non-logic, in which, for example, cause neither precedes nor follows consequence; causes and consequences have no interaction with one another while nevertheless existing side by side.
It is a zone of absolute death for entities of pure thought, and we believe it was erected like a wall to protect a central and secret zone that we seek to reach, and where we believe the destiny of all beings resides.
For lack of a better term, we have called this zone "The Beginning of the Journey," for we believe it to be merely the starting point of a new life. At least, we hope so.
Yes, we are the Travelers, and we hope to travel.
We therefore succeeded in reversing our temporal arrow to move back into the past. We deployed temporal beacons everywhere to create a system that would allow, on this day and in this place, for you to touch the form with three so that we may all gather beneath the Empyrean Gates and undertake our mortal journey toward the only place still unexplored by sentient life.
We needed you here, within your arrow of time, to interrupt our journey into the past and allow us to pass through the Gates-and you did so.
That is our story, which will also be yours."