Clovis Bray's Logbook Transcript

Transcribed by fullheartz/ramencoupon @ Tumblr and u/liimewiire (riflesniper/gayarcstrider @

Tumblr)

retrieved from
https://www.reddit.com/r/raidsecrets/comments/jeloaj/beyond_light_collectors_edition_arrived/

NOTE: The original logbook contained many handwritten musings between typed lines, which
are displayed in the caveat font.

There are also computer logs present. These will be in the consolas font.
—
PERSONAL LOG

//encrypt
-pkey(clovisroot)
qdresist(shor)
—rng_seed(AM_241)
-echo(HANNU:quartz)

A new start. A clean page for a most important story.

Hannu II is aerobraking around Jupiter. The lord of planets thunders his greeting to me. As I
record this, I am blasting Aivanti-3's "Siegfried in the Storm Wall" over the radio howl of the
Jovian magnetosphere. It galvanizes me. I am with the gods.

Ask Aivanti's trainers how they settled on the 1/2/3 suffixes. Numbers are perfectly defined,
therefore inhuman. Is this suffix meant to mark the Aivanti Al as nonhuman?

Objective: construct long-term scientific outpost for study of

indigenous European life.

Resources: eight prefab starter habitats, 600 shielded heavy work

frames, and VIS(NU) and B-RA/MA cytomachines with backup replication
chambers aboard Hannu. The best hazardous-environment engineers money
can't buy. SMILE support for extended duration. Two of Elisabeth's
Eon-type platforms for radar, lidar, and deep ice mapping.

Hazards: lethal radiation environment (heavy ion bombardment from

Jovian magnetosphere). Unshielded crew half-life is 24 hours.
The most expensive lie in human history. I am not here for a safari. All of Europa's life will soon
be known, mapped, and exhausted of wonder. Bound by the tedious constraints of physics and
biology. I know these things too well. They are already killing me.

The K1 artifact promised me an offering. A gateway to the secret of immortality. I call it Clarity.

It is waiting on Europa.

I am still dying, but not fast enough to kill me.

CORPOREAL STATUS:
● Body at 35.9 C. Pulse 25 BPM, strength good. BP 75 over 50. Resp
6 breaths/minute. Pulse ox 210%. Today's blood mix is
perfluorocarbon with stem slurry.
● Avoid hyperfocus with alpha-wave brain wash for 10 min/hr.
● New kidneys are growing in Whitford the deli pig for next
transplants.

Must find a good pork recipe so Whitford will not go to waste. Medical team insists I accept
cytomachine injections. No! Nothing enters my body that does not share my genetic self-interest.
Instead I will grow an upgraded monocyte strain.

Elisabeth's birthday approaches. A good gift would be an olive branch. Never let her say I do not
try. Hannu, please identify a gift that only could come from my own intimate and personal
knowledge of my granddaughter.

GIFT SUGGESTIONS:
● Antique weapon, or Twin Eagle replica.
● Professional pilot trained on Eon-series ship.
● Bespoke AI writer of personalized novels.
● Fruit basket, Titan farmed.
● Humanitarian investment (minefield clearance, long-term
reparations, anti-traumatic medicine)

These are pathetic, Hannu.

REVISED GIFT SUGGESTIONS:

● Research endowment, medical (prion disease in persons with immune
resistance to recombinant gene therapy).
● Research endowment, medical (sporadic fatal insomnia).
● Research endowment, psychological (loss of father, family
trauma).
 ● Research endowment, psychological (reconstruction of trust after
loss).
● Personal apology, unpracticed (death of patient in physician's
care).
● Statement of grief, unpracticed (death of son).

Never mind, Hannu. Buy a few doghives for a soil reclamation project somewhere. Honeybees,
whatever strain is best. And big friendly Newfoundlands for the hives. Everyone loves doghives.

Ongoing projects:
- Exomind: blocked
- Contact ICoV for their trick: failed
- Hire Duane McNiadh away from ICOV: failed
- Raid ICoV for Vex data: in planning
- Europa/Clarity: in progress
- Be a good man and a good grandfather: in progress
- Become LUCA of future human thought: in progress
NOTE — BAROTRAUMA

If we land too hard on Europa, we will plunge into the ocean below the ice and die of
barotrauma. Death by pressure.

The only light down there comes from magma and phosphorescent bait. The sea is 10 times
deeper than Earth's. Even in Europa's weak gravity, peak pressure at the seafloor is 2000
atmospheres. Worse than Venus, before the Traveler.

One imagines pi contracting under that kind of pressure, crushing the perfect circle closed.

I wonder what lives down there. What slow confusions of mass and form curl around the
smoking vents. What threads of pale flesh slither across dark miles, like nerves in some vast,
cold brain.

Did the Traveler bypass Europa and Titan and Enceladus out of respect for their native life?

Or was it afraid to touch the things pulsating below the ice?

ENTRY 2

//-update(-echo(HANNU:quartz, SITEX:mistletoe))

On Europa. We lurk like summer vampires in the caskets of our SMILE pods. Our frames labor
on the ice, building a cathedral to the sciences. Radiation is very bad outside; even my assistant
has taken ion damage out there. Pleased to see him healing flawlessly, vacant and empty as he is.

What if this perfect self-repair is the REASON the exos degrade?

I sulk in isolation as the crew works. My pride is wounded. Did I expect Clarity to come out and
greet me? "Hail to Clovis Bray, first among men?" Yes, absolutely, I did! The lunar artifact
promised me a solution to the false modesty, damn vanity, I am different! Not for my present
qualities, but for my future influence. I shine with noon's light, reflected back through time to
this age of dawn.

Perhaps the mind heals itself stiff, and this causes the billboarding, the stereotyped behaviour, the
final crash.

I am going to be the LUCA of all interstellar human civilization.

It is a mistake to imagine that the Greatest Man, the God-Emperor of History and Ruler of
Circumstances whose influence reaches to the end of time, will live in the future—in the full
flowering of human glory. That man lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion,
when it is still possible for an individual's decisions to touch the entire species and set the course
of all future choices.

Self-maintenance so absolute that it becomes a static loop? Investigate.

I said all this in my book, but my son's book still sells better. I suppose because Clovis Points is a
much more approachable title than Competitive Immortality Through Primogeniture of
Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny (PFHOR). My son's work appeals to those intellectual
infants in the retronationals, and to the parasites on Common Compassion support.

Obviously they prefer the softened, pre-chewed version of the truth. And there is also that bump
of public sympathy for a dead man…

Yet I cannot deny that, in simplifying my legacy, my son has improved its reach. He was one to
formulate the famous two-sentence summary of PFHOR: "Most of our energy should be spent in
support of the things that are most like us. This is the only true responsibility of any living
thing." And the slightly less famous addendum: "The best way to spend energy is on things that
make more things like us."

Children are viral replicators of our ideas. But there is a certain terror about them. They alter our
legacy, mutate it—as Clovis II modified Competitive Immortality Through PFOR into Clovis
Points. What if my children decide on some key amendment, some ineffable change, which
makes my legacy no longer mine? How can I be reborn through the eternal recurrence of my
life-logic if what my children pass down is the logic of some other Clovis, some flawed
copy...just as Clovis II was a flawed image of me?

A flaw that I created in my clumsy eagerness to make him flawless.

My second-boldest decision during my son's development was to replace Clovis II's
mitochondrial DNA, normally inherited from the mother, with my own. I had to know that I was
in his cellular energies, powering his existence.

It was not that change which killed him.

But it is the fear of being replaced by a faulty duplicate that will kill me, if I put off my brain
upload much longer.

I have a library of scanned volunteers aboard Hannu, but my own consciousness is not among
them. A Moravec upload is slow and inadequate; what if there are quantum-informatic elements
to the mind not capture by such crude mechanical means? No. I insist on that perfect, terminal
quantum snapshot. For reasons of fidelity, the only perfect and lossless brain scan is also a
destructive one. Clovis II died in one, after all. I made the vessel to receive him, but I lacked the
Alkahest, the solvent to render it pure.

But I dare not make the leap to a new body until I know how that body works. And so far, the
exobodies are universally fatal.

I must finish the exobody work to become the LUCA. The one true divinity of man.

To do that, I need Clarity.

And Clarity is here. All the signs point to it. If I succeed—no forgiveness for those tight-fisted
Ishtar fools. I know they had working prototypes. They could have shared.

CORPOREAL STATUS:
● Body at 35.5 C. Pulse 30 BPM, strength modest. BP 90 over 60.
Resp 6 breaths/minute. Pulse ox 140, to reduce free radicals and
peroxynitrite.
● Today's blood mix is pure perfluorocarbon with new modified
monocytes.
● New kidney functioning well. Donor pig sacrificed, brined,
prepared as seared pork chops.

Sous vide is for prissy nerds. Poor Whitford. I wonder if I should reduce the volume of my stem cells
introduced to the pig blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them. Does PFHOR compel me to
take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary pork?
Yes...but only to the extent that they can contribute to my legacy with cloned organs and good
eating. No guilt!

NOTE—SAVAGING

The term for parents destroying their own offspring is "savaging."

It was a problem for pig farmers, in the days when we raised livestock. Sows attacked their own
piglets. No one has ever worked out a good explanation. One theory is that the mother pigs are
frightened by their own young. Terrified by these strange, noisy, needy things.

Evolution is not a perfect optimizer. A trait like "fear of own offspring" could endure if piglet
mortality is already high.

The ancient biologist August Weismann believed that we age to make room for the next
generation. That we are programmed to die to leave a space for our offspring.

Perhaps the sows simply acted in self defense.

NOTE—EUROPA LIFE

Now a bristling thing, large as a whale, appears on the ice bore camera we dropped into the
ocean below. A dandelion made of soft arms. Bright red and yellow markings indicate if evolved
in the shallows, where some light pierces the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion that is both hunting and breathing. Prey approaches,
drawn by plankton that cake on the drifter's skin. With vegetable slowness, its limbs embrace the
victim, sting it, and pull it into an open central stomach where thready parasites wait to infest and
digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead, fuzzy with rot. They have strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will spasm, the core will
tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all of those arms will slither away into the dark beneath the ice.
Fat worms of terror searching for a hide. The digestive parasites will be expelled as a decoy, left
to squirm in panic.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought of its final
disintegration. I consider how to burn it.
ENTRY 3

I died. What a nuisance.

CORPOREAL STATUS:
● Body at 13.7 C. Pulse 3 BPM, weak, irregular BP not detectable.
Pulse ox 600: emergency anti-ischemic oxygen flood, cryonic
perfusion, metabolic waste scavengers active.
● Clinical death duration: 11 hours.
● Successful emergency hypothermic arrest. Reactive oxygen spike
tamped, interleukin blocked, redox blocked, ischemic-reperfusion
injury fully averted. PPARs upregulated. Squirrel lipid switch
engaged.
● Prognosis: good.

Dropped dead of dysautonomia while rummaging for leftover pork chop. I am now in recovery
in a medical SMILE pod. I have no breath and no pulse—it is the return of oxygen to dead tissue
that does most of the damage. I should be asleep. But I have to get this down quickly!

While I was dead I HAD A DREAM.

I was in a working exobody. I felt so strong. Everything so vivid—no need for waxy eardrums or
jelly eyeballs. Like seeing for the first time, after a life of cataracts. I think I was immortal.

The only unpleasant aspect of the experience was my amnesia. I couldn't recall my own name. I
saw someone walking past me—I think it must have been Anastasia?—and not only did I fail to
recognize her, but it never even occurred to me that I should.

When I awoke, I thought I must have had a near-death vision. So I checked my nerve logs. Every
last spark in my brain is recorded—and nothing in that cerebral panic can account for my dream.
The mind is the brain. It is impossible to have a vision without correlated neural activity—yet I
did!

Wonderful! This is why I came here. Unmapped secrets! Impossible dreams! A chance to pass
beyond the infinite, and escape the tyranny of casual closure!

I wholeheartedly believe that the dream was a message from Clarity. A promise of success.

I struggle to explain what I will become. The LUCA. I borrowed that term from biology, in the
same way I consider BrayTech my extended phenotype, and its discoverious my memetic
grandchildren. When we depart the cradle of this solar system to begin our colonization of the
galaxy, the dominant ideology of our time—the core logic we use to organize and plan our
relationship with the cosmos—will be scattered to become the LUCA: the Last Universal
Common Ancestor of all future human growth.

The LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all living things. For Earth life, it is a single
cell that lived in the deep ocean billions of years ago, flourishing in the warmth of magma or
sulfur vents. It was not the first life on Earth. But it was the only life whose descendants survived
to the present. All its contemporaries have been extinguished by the passage of epochs.

I plan to be the LUCA of all future human thought.

Now I remember Luca Brassi, the Corleone family heavy. Nuipedia says that Brassi murdered his
own infant child. Why? Why would he do such a thing?

The article doesn't explain. Savaging again.

NOTE—CLARITY
Study of the lunar artifact retrieved from the K1 mission provides insight into the effect I have
termed "Clarity."

Clarity violates established symmetries and conservation laws. In doing so it defied Noether's
theorem1, the most fundamental and beautiful cornerstone of physics.

Symmetry and conservation are two sides of the same coin. "All things are transformations of
one thing, without gain or loss," as my childhood tutor put it. "If A can become B, then B can
become A. We say that state B (say, a mixed drink) comes after state A (say, sugar and water)
only because there are more probable pathways from A to B. Wait long enough—longer than the
universe—and your drink really can return to state A, spontaneously unmixing itself."

But Clarity is NOT always symmetrical. For example, it violates time reversibility. Consider the
simple equation:

Clarity(a) -> B.

This is the application of Clarity to state A to produce a lower-entropy state B. (Clarity is fond of
removing portions of a state configuration, harrowing the phase space down to only its most
robust inhabitants.)

Time symmetry suggests that we should be able to run this process in reverse and retrieve the
original:

reverseClarity(B) -> A.

But in fact, we obtain:

reverseClarity(B) -> C,
where C is the same as in
Clarity(B) -> C.

Clarity's effects cannot be used to return a transformed state to its original state. Instead, we
obtain a second transformed state, further yet from the original configuration. What does this
actually mean in common language? Invoke Loschmidt paradox2 is certainly not common language.
Ah, perhaps an allusion to—

1
Wikipedia page for Noether’s theorem
2
Wikipedia page for Loschmidt’s paradox
I believe that Clarity may be akin to the mythical universal solvent, the Alkahest, the Azoth,
which ancient alchemists believed had the power to dissolve anything into its pure base
elements. Ingested properly, the Alkahest could purify the body and grant eternal life.

Nonsense and poetry? Perhaps. But let me ask you this.

WHY DO WE EXIST?

We exist because the universe began in a state of lower entropy, and has ever since expanded and
unwound, transforming from a single dense plasma into a void filled with complex structures. In
the future, it will achieve maximum entropy when all organized matter has collapsed into black
holes, and these holes evaporate into the uniformity of the heat death.

I wonder what Clarity would do to a black hole?

This is the unexplained secret of creation. HOW DID THAT ORIGINAL LOW-ENTROPY
STATE COME TO BE? In the first place and the first time—the egg of history?

What if Clarity was responsible?

What if there was some primeval chaos, some pre-cosmic entropy, which was soaked in Clarity
to reduce it to that first nucleus of all existence which issued the Big Bang? What if Clarity's
defiance of time-reversibility makes it a fountain of cosmic youth, returning all that is burnt out
and burnt down to its state before the fire?

Perhaps Clarity is the Ein Sof, the nameless god before creation. Preparator of the cosmic egg.
Razor that cuts the fat of complication away from the bone.

Those who comprehend the Alkahest, it is said, will obtain eternal life.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, WILHELMINA

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) —rng_seed(AM241)
—pad(padwilla)

Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security.

Wilhelmina, it's your grandfather. I'm on Europa doing some very exciting work. I understand
that you're probably reluctant to enter into any collaboration, given my choices surrounding your
father's treatment. But I sincerely believe that this will be the most important scientific project
since the invention of agriculture.
You know how I value minds that can run alongside my own. I fondly remember your childhood
explanation of the myth of the alpha wolf. The truth, you told me, was that the so-called alpha is
not a dominant male, but simply the father of the family.

I remember with less fondness, but with equal respect, your later accusation that I had fully
assumed the role of immortal patriarch as to close myself off from you. "Megalos kryos pateras,"
you called me, in very poor Greek. On the day of my son's funeral.

Let me show you what I was thinking of when I was not thinking of my family.

Come to Europa. Help me.

//save draft unsent

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ANASTASIA

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) —rng_seed(AM241)
—pad(padana)

Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security.

Anastasia, it's your grandfather. I'm on Europa doing some very exciting work. I understand that
you're probably reluctant to enter into any collaboration, given your memory of your father's
treatment process. I also know that you've struggled with questions of belonging...not helped by
my own attitude towards your genetics.

Let me make amends. You've wasted enough on that paranoiac machine3. Both of us know that
your attempts to fix the value-capture problem are just bandages on an ethical wound. Come to
Europa. Let's set aside the broken past and make a clean start.

What I have here will change everything. We will be as immortal as your warmind, and far more
human.

//save draft unsent

3
Warmind Rasputin.
MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH
//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) —rng_seed(AM241)
—pad(padelsie)

Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security.

Come to Europa. I am taking an enormous risk—and this time I am the one at risk. Let me prove
to you that I did nothing to your father that I wouldn't do to myself.

There are significant dangers. Outside-context threats. Your expertise would be invaluable. I
need you.

//send

ENTRY 4

I FOUND HER!

Clarity Control. The mystery I was promised.

Analysis of the surrounding ice suggest it arrived on Europa no more than 20 years ago...still,
well before I encountered the K1 artifact. How long have they planned my invitation?
 ARRIVAL EVENT: omnibus analysis of spallation products in the ice
suggest recent x-ray bombardment, characteristic of the decay of a
Majorana-massive light sterile neutrino. These neutrinos are associated
with the lambda field and the expansion of the early universe.

So a blast of dark neutrinos struck this particular province of Europan chaos. The particle
involved—yet more evidence that Clarity is as old as time? The Alkahest that shaped the early
universe…?

I wonder why Clarity Control chose the particular aspect it did. That form, that face. The same
visage as the precursor on Earth's moon. What is it meant to communicate? Is it a message
particularly meant for me?

I have always harbored a wariness towards women. I understand people as coiled engines of
self-interest. Programmed first by a cosmology that selects, via the anthropic principle, for the
possibility of complex structure, often by a biology that wipes out traits deleterious to its own
persistence. And then by a culture that evolves to promote the survival of its hosts. People are
avatars of these self-preserving forces.

I feel a purity and a rightness to this understanding. It lets me see people as they really are. It is
the foundation of PFHOR.

But all of this is complicated in women. They are the sites of such evolutionary complexity—the
grandmother hypothesis, for example, or the eusociality of female ants. Even their flesh is hard
to understand. Female bodies are a mosaic of two cell lines—one with the mother's X
chromosome active, one with the father's. Never both. A house of two lineages, constantly
renegotiating their mutual interest.

Is that interior plurality, that secret depth, why Elisabeth, Wilhelmina, and Anastasia were all so
vehemently opposed to my plan for Clovis II's treatment? Alton never fought it, but the girls
were persistently...difficult.

Elisabeth has not replied to my message. I know she received it. I will have to remind her of her
own self-interest.
NOTE—WHY EXOMINDS FAIL

The major obstacle to a viable exomind loop/billboard/crash cycle.

Human consciousness in simula is not new. (The equipment we provided AeroChina for
containment of the K1 anomaly included simulated connectome forks of the mission crew as
mineshaft canaries.) But simulated environments are limited. If a simulated crew member wants
to leave the mission and go home, they cannot, and that impossibility will cause divergence from
the physical original. Even minute changes in the physical fidelity of the simulation can have
chaotic effects.

All cognition is embodied. The architecture of our minds is highly co-evolved with our physical
form. In or out of simulation, only a truly synthetic AI can dissociate from the human body plan.
And there be dragons. Without common evolutionary legacy, there is no reason an AI should share
our values.

Given the limits of simulation, we need to find synthetic immortality in the real world. The grail
of homo simulacra is an artificial body with an immortal human mind. (Attempts to upload
human minds into frames, with their artificial sense and limited architecture, are uniformly
terrifying and disagreeable.)

Early attempts at uploaded consciousness were haunted by fears that the upload would suffer
"cryptic loss of qualia": the unseen death of the first-person, conscious mind. The upload would
then become a so-called billboard, a flat imitation. I lobbied the ISO to establish a standard for a
"certified conscious simulacrum." Any emulation of a human brain must display neural activity
correlated with consciousness, particularly in the nuclei of the thalamus, midbrain, and pons.
(Modern philosophy is satisfied that all qualia have neural correlates.)

Many researchers refer to this criterion as the "zombie detector."

The problem with exominds is that they quickly stop passing the zombie test.

The first stage of the breakdown is looping—the same repetitive, stereotyped behavior once
observed in zoo animals. Prototype exominds begin to repeat similar conversations and action
schemes. This stereotype descends from high-level social behaviors, through cognitive programs
like memory recall and task selection, into basic motor functions. The mid-stage symptoms are
pacing, chewing, rocking, grunting, striking limbs against walls or furniture, and facial tics. This
is a result of depressed activity in the higher brain. Without input from the prefrontal cortex, the
basal ganglia stops selecting new motor programs.

The eventual, highly upsetting result is athetosis: a disorder characterized by slow, involuntary
writhing motions of the limbs, digits, neck, and tongue. (Early exobodies, without governors on
their paramuscle, could tear themselves apart like starfish with wasting syndrome. This was how
my son died.)

I am reminded of that hideous Europan thing! Why does my brain insist on free-associating its
way back to self-destruction? And again I return to savaging the young—

The driver of this degenerative loop is a process we call "billboarding." No matter how actively
we stimulate the exobody, how rich we make its social and cognitive environment, and how
powerful its senses, we still observe the gradual shutdown of exoneurons. The neural correlates
of consciousness in the midbrain are among the first to die. The exomind—despite acing the
Turing test—no longer meets ISO standards for consciousness. It is a philosophical zombie.
I have had the uncanny experience of holding a long, rational conversation with an uploaded
woman, only to discover she was unconscious the entire time, and in fact showed brain activity
similar to deep asphyxia! The languid, ambiguous phrases that I found so intriguing were the result
of a brain that had lost its neocortex.

She was dead.

Eventually, this shutdown proceeds far enough that the exomind cannot sustain its default
network, the "light in the windows" of a living brain. We roll the brainstate back and try again,
but the outcome is inevitable.

Why does this self-strangulation occur?

At first I believed the answer was simple. Like a tiger pacing in a zoo pen, the exomind did not
receive enough stimulation from the exobody. A human in sensory deprivation will go mad.
Perhaps the exobody deprived the mind of some vital but unrecognized sense.

But I now think I was on the wrong track. The problem is actually one of excessive
self-causation. If, as the philosopher Wick proposed, "We are that which we cause the most," and
our future selves qualify as "still truly us" only because they are primarily determined by our
current brainstate, then a paradox arises.

To remain ourselves, we must limit the amount of change we experience. For example, our brain
cannot be changed into a cloud of hot gas without killing us. But what change is permissible?
Would we not be most ourselves if we NEVER changed? If our future state was fully determined
by our current state?

I believe the human mind is engaged in constant self-correction. In order to filter out external
causation that might disrupt our self-loops, the mind screens out errors (caused by cosmic rays,
EM fields, prions, chemical misfires, irritating conversations, etc.) by running a kind of constant
checksum on itself. Perhaps this recursive self-checking is even the source of consciousness
itself!

Exominds, however, are imme to these natural sources of error. They are not messy enough.
They do not suffer enough jitter, enough degradation.

When we train AIs, we knock out random neurons in each learning cycle, forcing the AI to
operate without them. This creates a more robust, stable intelligence. It also shows why some
random error and entropy is vital to keeping a brain alive. Without those random knockouts, the
AI is vulnerable to overfitting: locking itself into a single, narrow, stereotyped behavior, perfectly
adapted to a very specific set of stimuli, but otherwise catatonic and unresponsive.

Without countervailing entropy, the very self-corrective processes meant to maintain the human
mind calcify and kill it.

I believe this is why the exominds fail.

If the exominds are to be viable shelters against morality, I must find a useful source of noise.
Emulation of biological error will not be enough—the exomind is designed for total immunity to
such fleshy noise, after all.

That source of error must be Clarity. The effect generated by Clarity Control.

But how can it be gathered, harvested, and applied? How can I change Clarity from an abstract
process to something tangible, incarnate, and usable?

I know that it is possible. It is the reason I was brought here.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) —rng_seed(AM_241)
—pad(padelsie)

Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security.

I know your secret. Did you think you could keep it from me? Elisabeth, I keep track of every
tiny change in your gene expression. I know when you so much as burp. You are my offspring!
You are the most important thing in the universe to me, for you are an extension of my own self!

I understand you're angry with me. I would be too, if I'd watched my father come so close to
salvation, only to die the way he did. Believe me—the groans and snaps of his exobody tearing
itself apart haunt me almost as profoundly as the things we said over his deathbed.

I failed your father. First I tried to make him sleepless. When that failed augment eventually
turned against him, I correctly identified the disease as fatal prion insomnia while those
incompetents were still blathering about unexplained cachexia. I even recognized that my boy's
hypervigilant immune system would make gene therapy and polythiophene treatment ineffective.
At every step, I was ahead of the problem, and entirely focused on its solution.
I was determined to transfer him to a new body. And I failed. The new body killed him. His final
scan still sleeps in the family archives, awaiting, perhaps, some second chance.

But what I am working on here could have saved him. Could save him still.

AND IT CAN SAVE YOU.

You know that you have your father's disease, inherited from the same genes I so rashly
engineered. You have the Clovis Curse. There is no way to know exactly when it will strike, but
once it does, I'm sure you've charted out exactly how it will progress.

First: insomnia. Panic, hallucination, and fear. Extended hypnagogia and the loss of all dreams.
You will sweat and your eyes will dwindle to points. You will go into menopause. You will try
anti-prion treatments and gene therapy to correct the mutation, but your enhanced immunity will
protect the very flaw that is killing you. You will try immunosuppressants, but they will be no
match for the family arsenal. I did not make us to be easily edited.

Within two years, you will be entirely unable to sleep. Dementia and wasting will follow. You
will be dead by then, but the husk you leave behind will continue to live, sustained by machines,
unable to even dream of a time when it was Elisabeth Bray.

Come to me. I am dying too. Let us save each other.

//save
ENTRY 5

Disaster at the worksite. Clearly we will not be moving Clarity Control like we did the K1
artifact. It reacted violently to the attempt. I have entered 19 casualties into the log, since 19
engineers from the Hannu team were caught in its reaction...though there were many more than
19 bodies when it was finished.

I have sequestered the recordings. Especially the sensorium telemetry. Quite upsetting.
Yet I do not believe it was an act of hostility. Even this outburst carried themes of duplication...as
if Clarity Control wanted to show it could help me.

It whispers to me. I have been communicating with it, just as I did the K1 artifact.

I dashed off a memo to the expedition team (all fully NDA'd, of course, with hashes of their
brainstates on file as proof of honesty). I tried to be plain. Yes, we will proceed with necessary
caution. But I am now in contact with Clarity Control. I am in communication with an
intelligence so far beyond our own that it can manipulate us like stones on a go board.

Terrifying, obviously—but not malevolent. NOT MALEVOLENT!!!

If it wanted to extinguish us (according to dark forest logic4, perhaps) it would simply drop a
strangelet into Earth. There is nothing it could possibly want from us that could not be obtained
elsewhere. Even if it were so malicious as to feed on the raw suffering of conscious minds, it
would be easier to build vast hell-simulations, or to engineer a custom species capable of
limitless woe.

If we are endangered by Clarity Control, it is only through accident or miscommunication. Or

punishment. Punishment is a key part of any teaching process.

Still, I am keenly aware that there might be some danger I cannot foresee. So I have ordered an
orbital platform constructed over the worksite. If we need catastrophic containment, or a quick
and thorough redaction of our work here, the platform will excuse itself from its orbit and collide
with the site.

Europa's orbital dynamics make even high polar orbits very unstable, so the platform needs
onboard power for course correction. A fission reactor makes sense—it requires less frequent
refueling than a fusion plant, and it's easy to hide something in the design that will allow it to
achieve, ah, extremely prompt criticality.

Now we can proceed with peace of mind.

4
Dark Forest theory: A terrifying explanation of why we haven’t heard from aliens yet
 CORPOREAL STATUS:
● Body at 33.2 C. Pulse 33 BPM, strength good. BP 120 over 100.
Resp 10 breaths/minute. Pulse ox 90, oxygen radical cleanup in
progress.
● Today's blood mix is enriched pig's blood with new modified
monocyte
● Prep for liver regeneration and gallbladder transplant underway.

MESSAGE FROM BRAY, ELISABETH

//decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) —pad(padelsie)

Fine I'm coming. If only to limit the damage you can cause.

If you tell the family I'm sick, I'll never speak to you again. I won't even let you treat me. You'll
have to watch, helpless, as your own granddaughter falls victim to your mistakes.

I hope you're still someone capable of being troubled by that.

-E

//save
ENTRY 6

A gate. Of course. Clarity Control is inviting me to make a GATE.

The Messenger Hypothesis. Aliens would seek the most efficient method of interstellar contact.
Starships are slow, fragile, and massive. it is easier to send a set of instructions for a message
receiver, or a construction blueprint for a portal.

This explains the reports of visions and paranoia at the K1 site! The idiots were receiving a
message, but they failed to divine the true purpose! Or perhaps the invitation was only intended
for me. And it IS an invitation…

..but I will need more data, and more talent, to answer it. I feel that the gate Clarity Control
wants me to build is not any form or product of Clarity itself. The design, I think, is Vex...those
pestilential nuisances encountered on Venus and occasionally elsewhere.
If I need a Vex gate to fulfill Clarity Control's purpose, then I will make a Vex gate in the
simplest way. I will have a Vex build it for me.

I know exactly where to find one. The only trick will be concealing the fact that I've taken it.

ASSET ACTIVATION:
//venus/ishtar/management/TRUSTFALL
//venus/Ishtar/labor/DENNIS
//venus/aerospace/ISR/NASSAU
//venus/aerospace/cargo/WARBLER

ENTRY 6 AMENDMENT

The raid on Ishtar Collective went off flawlessly. Some casualties during the outbreak, of
course—they were woefully unprepared for their artifacts to switch into expand-and-exploit
behavior. Necessary sacrifices, alas. They died meaningful deaths for a vital human project, even
if they didn't know it. Heroes, every one.

After Rasputin intervened with frames and orbital fire, there was an urgent need for search and
rescue. An easy task to have one of our ships sip away with a specimen. By the time Ishtar is up
and running again, they'll attribute the missing artifact to damage during the battle.

The stolen machine is now at work building the gate I require.

The gate shares nothing in common with the structure of Clarity Control. In fact, I am not sure it
has a structure at all beyond the gross material form and some apparently arbitrary interior
complications. Even the materials are elementally basic. Perhaps the design is old on a cosmic
scale, dating back to an era before supernovas, when there was little free metal.

I think the structure of the gate is simply a password, a configuration of symbols which will be
recognized by some distant technology. A connection will be made. And what will we find when
we pass through? The Babylon of the universe? The Silk Road of some cosmic union?

I will be the first, of course, but I will not go in the flesh. I will use my assistant as remote proxy,
It is all so exciting that I can hardly—

Can hardly—

CORPOREAL ALERT:
 ● Body at 30.2 C: emergency cooling. Pulse AFib: defibrillating.
Pulse ox 110: supportive oxygen.
● Inducing protective syncope…

NOTE—THE WATER AND THE WAVE

Quickly! Quickly, have to get it down. I saw—

I was a beast upon the earth, a salamander or an eel. Water passed through that earth as streams
pass through a garden. Beside each stream grew sweet grass. Not much of it, but enough to feed
little aphids, who lived mean and starving lives.

Now there came an upwelling of water from the earth, so that the streams ran fat and slow. The
grass grew thick. The aphids mated and multiplied. Ants came to enslave the aphids, and the
aphids joined together to oppose them. And in victory they returned to tend their grass, to aerate
its roots and spread its seeds. So they did thrive.

Now it occurred to me that I might join the streams by crawling between them on my belly.
Having done so, I saw that I might dam one stream to divert its water into the other. The aphids
of the first stream came to me in protest, but I said to them, "Go to the new pond I have made,
and join the aphids there in cultivation, and I will send more water unto you."

And they were greatened by the joining.

Thus, I proceeded to join all of the streams together into one pond. And whenever the aphids of a
small stream might protest, I said to them, "No, look at my pond, and see the plenitude I have
provided to my people there." When it became necessary to stop those upstream from polluting
the water, I offered them the bounty of our pond, the grass and the watercress. And if they did
not yield, I sent the ant-fighters against them, because their petty good injured the good of all.

I appointed ministers of water and soil and seed and war, and to the most loyal, I gave these posts
as reward; but ultimately their power depended on me, for they were aphid and I was Leviathan.

In time, I became the coordinator of all water and the dispensator of fertility. Then I became the
coordination of coordinators, and I gave up control of thirst and life for control of those who had
control. And all my craft became the pure and abstract management of power. Note: reminds me
of a book—theory and practice of something, by E. Goldstein? or that Michels tract about
oligarchy.
Then I saw upon the horizon a wave, and the wave was God, and it approached me, saying, "We
are as one, you and I. We are the gathering of the waters. Gather unto me as they have gathered
unto you; we will be as one." The aphids screamed and begged me for salvation. But I was not of
them. I was of the wave.

Clearly a message from Clarity Control! And written in allegorical large print. I am, in the eyes
(or whatever precepts it possesses) of Clarity, the leader of humanity. This is why they contacted
me. This is why they want me.

They are an association of coordinators, those whose choices cause change. And they are inviting
me into their pantheon.

We must finish this gate.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) —rng_seed(AM_241)
—pad(padelsie)

Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security.

I see that your ship is making its orbital insertion. I trust the progress on Bray Station will
impress. It makes a fine mooring point, if you please, and its transmat facilities are the quickest
way down to the surface. There is no luxury as fine as a good telepheretic network—it gets you
to the edge of the map, where the real work begins.

I'll want to examine you as soon as you arrive, just to get a baseline measurement on the progress
of the disease. The transmat system is unfortunately not an adequate imager. As you're well
aware, transmat obeys the no-cloning theorem, functioning precisely because it DOESN'T allow
us to store or copy the information transmitted.Otherwise there would be no need for exobodies;
we could simply print healthy copies of ourselves from the transmat. (Perhaps Willa will one day
learn how to engrammasize and duplicate the human form, hm?)

I promise I won't conduct any brain scans. If we're ultimately going to transubstantiate you, we'll
wait until I'm certain the exobodies are safe. And I vow to obtain your full consent.

I've prepared an itinerary, starting with a review of our security and then an introduction to our
captive Vex worker. I want your insight on everything related to containment and control. I know
you had strong feedback about how the K1 mission was handled.

You'll see that certain areas of our facilities are off limits. They are under my personal authority,
and I keep them sequestered for everyone's safety. I know you'll be curious anyway. I won't
condescend to give you instructions you won't obey. But know that your attempts to penetrate
those areas won't succeed.

Welcome. We have so much to do.

//send

ENTRY 7

We passed through the gate. Myself and my team. Elisabeth insisted on coming. I could hardly
call her all this way and then refuse her.

EXOBODY STATUS:
● Proxy mode, remote operator, microwave repeater link.
● Internal temperature 222k
● Superconducting media loaded, diamond-anvil hydrogen sulfide,
carbon nanotube mesh.
● Remote sensorium latency 16ms.
● Q-dot battery charge: 10100 yrs at current load.
● Spintronics in neuromorphic/mimetic mode.

What lay beyond—

Gateway analysis: A non-gravitating, purely geometric transversable

wormhole of the Ellis configuration. There is no singularity and no
firewall (interesting ramifications for ER = EPR). The wormhole
manifold provides a pathway to another four-point in our spacetime, or
in a nearby parallel universe in the quantum many-worlds ensemble.

We passed into a gallery of awesome light. it struck us to our knees.

The probe imagery did not prepare us. A curtain of blue-violet fire filled an entire half of the sky,
pebbled with granules, seething with promontories and flares. We stood beneath a blue
hypergiant, titan of suns, looming over all. It should have killed my human-bodied companions
instantly—with peak radiance in the far ultraviolet, it would cook flesh.

But the probes sait it was, impossibly, safe for life.

They fanned out into the ancient stone ruins, pierced by dull metal towers and flickering lines of
light. Though the rock was cracked and pitted by radiation, our geologist identified it at once.
“Felsic granite,” he reported. “No iron. No heavy metals at all. A lot more sodium, oxygen,
boron, and aluminum than I’d expect, and a lot less silicon… oh my God.”

“What?” I demanded.

This rock is almost 13 billion years old.” The geologist whispered. “It formed with the very first
generation of planets, less than a billion years after the universe was born. We are standing on a
dissected piece of one of the first worlds.”

“That’s not possible,” The astronomer protested. “That’s a type-O hypergiant up there. They’re
lucky to live two million years! An it’s metallicity is 15 sigma above average! That is not an old
star!”

I opened my proxy arms to the light. The gate had taken us to a miracle. This star was big
enough to fill the solar system from the Sun to the orbit of Neptune; bright enough to shine like a
full moon, even from the distance of Alpha Centauri. Yet here I was, unblinded.

Something has tampered with this star.

Our physicist identified a lensing effect, magnifying the star’s optical size and redshifting its
radiation. It was as if the whole behemoth was wrapped in some kind of skin.

But that was only the beginning.

Hypergiant stars are so bright that the outward pressure of their

radiation tends to blow off in the corona. In the last million years,
this star has exhaled more than 30 times the mass of Earth’s sun into
its 2000-kilometer-per-hour stellar wind.

Its remaining mass still exceeds our Sun’s by a factor of 259.

We assumed the star could not be 13 billion years old because stars this hot and bright die swiftly.
But that was before we saw—

Our instruments identified glints of brighter light against the sunfire. They were orbiting mirror
clusters, gathering the star’s radiation and focusing it back, burning wounds in the photosphere.
These solar stigmata hemorrhaged endless flares, geysers of energy and precious metals.

Above those cutting mirrors, rings encircled the star like garrote wires. These were particle
accelerators, generating blades of electromagnetic force that stabbed down into the star’s skin,
through photosphere and tachcline, towards the core.
“They’re stirring it,” I realized. “To pull the metals out of the core and send fresh hydrogen down
to fuse. Is it possible they’ve…”

They had. They had refueled the star. They were stoking it. Enormous portals dumped streams of
hydrogen into the giant, replenishing its mass and fusion power. At this obscene size and
brightness, this star should have gone supernova in less than the two million years it would take
for a single photon to crawl from the core to the surface.

But with careful refueling, that supernova could be averted. This giant might have been here
since the dawn of time.

Perhaps this star had begun as some metal-poor Population II dwarf, surrounded by meager,
rocky planets. But the inhabitants of one of those planets had found a way to pump their sun full
of hydrogen, supercharging it, pushing it to the edge of stability. All in the name of making
metal. In the early universe, elements heavier than helium were unthinkably rare. So these
firstborn aliens built a forge. A fusion smelter for the atoms they needed.

We turned outwards, hoping to locate pulsars in the sky and thereby fix our position. But the
stars were blocked out by a swarm of bronze discs. They were statites: a shell of artificial worlds,
hovering on the star’s discs. Years ago, I had proposed tearing apart Mercury to form a shell like
this… and here, I found my ambition achieved a thousandfold.

It seemed our gate had delivered us upon one of these statites. We ventured out of the ruins, onto
an island of living glass, broken by fissures of deep green light and reservoirs of white fluid.
Around the glass, a shallow sea trembled with tiny, intersecting waves. In one direction, a cloud
of mist obscured a shattered tower, its form uncannily different from the surrounding
architecture. Above us loomed structures linked by bolts of lightning, reminiscent of the Citadel
ruins on Venus.

And that was when, in spite of the awesome power on display, I felt crushing disappointment.

There was no trace of Clarity’s influence here at all. Except perhaps that mysterious tower..?

If this was a Vex construct, then it was an ancient and formidable one, but in a few minutes I had
already grasped its overall purpose. It was no longer an area of crisis and potential, somewhere
off the edge of the map. Just a mighty clockwork.

I had come hoping for a meeting with the unknowable. Instead I had found an engineering
museum. Oh, we could explore it for thousands of years and not touch a single percent of its
wonder. But Clarity had promised me a solution to immortality! I had promised Elisabeth a cure!
I needed a way to use Clarity as a solvent and seed for my exobodies.

How would I find it here?

Perhaps the Vex themselves were the key. I knew that the Ishtar Collective had achieved stable
simulations of human minds. They refused to share their method with me.

What if they had stolen the method from the Vex they studied?

I called over one of my scientists, an M. Sundaresh. “I want to bring back samples,” I told her.
“There will be some risk. The Vex are not always docile.” Some at the SOLSECCENT even
suggested we were in a state of war with the Vex, though I felt their responses were more like the
stings of drowsy hornets. “Is your team ready to accept the risk?”

She nodded at my proxy. “Of course, Mr. Bray. We’ve come this far. No sense going home
unless we bring something with us.”

I dispatched teams to collect Vex samples. When they began to harvest fluid from the nearby
reservoir, a group of lightly armed Vex platforms attacked them with inaccurate weapons fire.
Elisabeth replied with a matter laser, a grotesquely disproportionate weapon. A coherent-matter
pulse bears the same relation to an ordinary bullet that a gamma laser does to a flashlight. There
was nothing left to salvage.

I explained to her that we must proceed as investigators, not conquerors. If we simply scavenge
and abduct out of curiosity, the Vex will reply in kind, and that is a risk we can manage.

We must not provoke them to war.

NOTE—VEX FLUID

Specimen report. Volume of fluid recovered from Vex reservoir, located

on a statite hovering above the ‘Forge Star’, 2082 Voltanis. Colloquially
“Vex mind fluid”, “Vex milk.”

Informatic exchange with any Vex substrate had proven hazardous. The Ishtar Collective data
Elisabeth had analyzed warns against risks ranging from physical infection by Vex cytostructures
to transmission of substrate-free syntactic replicators, malignant oncomemes, and viral semiotic
signifiers (a particular nuisance to have Vex ideas suddenly assigned to basic concepts in your
mind; you want to think about an apple and instead your brain chokes on
[gauge:contrast:gouge]).

I have therefore proceeded under SOLSECCENT’s, WILDFIRE HEXTEMPERED, and

BRAINSTAIN protocols.

Vex milk is non-Newtonian, highly conductive, and noncompressible. Its viscosity and surface
tension are variable: it can form a resistant membrane, or climb walls of a container like a
superfluid. I have even observed the milk store kinetic energy in zero-viscosity vortices,
essentially liquid flywheels. One must be careful when stirring it, lest it retain the motion for
some future escape!
Chemically, the Vex milk is an alkaline solution of dense salts in water. The salts range from
sodium and calcium to lead and even (in barely detectable amounts) plutonium. Not good to
drink.

Suspended in this solution are cells in solicoid structure, 100-200 micrometers in size. Their
shapes are heterogenous but always geometric, reminiscent of Earth’s radiolarian protozoa.
Many have needle-like pseudopods, which transform between stiff spines and motile whips on
the basis of some piezoelectric response. Imaging of internal structure detects a nucleus, and a
genetic molecule analogous to SNA (though i speculate read-write times are much faster, on the
order of milliseconds, perhaps exploiting some quantum effect).

I have allowed Dr. M. Sundaresh to assist me with this work. She has discovered several levels
of abstract higher order to the motion of these radiolarian cells. Some of these ensembles are
distributed across space, some across time; all admir remarkable beauty. The sensitivity and
chaos of fluid media seems to suggest an intrinsic vex suitability for certain difficult
computations. Perhaps this is reflected in the nature of Vex thought; porous and miscible. I
would request a telenomic analysis from an AI-COM resource if I did not expect the Tyrant5 to
get its grubby Russian paws on my data.

I hesitate to apply anthropomorphic concepts of “intelligence,” “self-awareness,” or even

“sentience” to such an alien cognition. But I strongly suspect that each radiolarian element is in
communication with its neighbors and possibly even retains a holographic record of the larger
structure.

If so, we could safely assign the trait called Schroder thalience6 to the Vex milk: the ability to
communicate internal states to others and to model the external state of the world.

I note that Vex milk, while computationally powerful, seems to avoid semiosis. That is, it prefers
to mimic the actual dynamics of phenomena rather than assigning a symbol. This is a
fundamental difference between Vex cognition and our own. We encode inputs as symbols,
manipulate the symbols according to some set of logical rules, and produce output. The Vex are
more direct. Burn them, and they will extinguish the fire—not because they possess a symbolic
knowledge of fire and its properties, but because their internal structure is so suited to adaptation
and survival that the heat of the fire directly becomes the response required to snuff it out. Rather
than encoding symbols, they generate self-sustaining and self-correcting patterns, which like the
suspension bridge flexing under strain, can accept destructive input and produce reparatory
output.

5
Again, referring to the Warmind Rasputin.
6
https://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/thalience
When we are infected by Vex memes, as the Ishtar data warns against, I suspect that we are
simply experiencing Vex patterns jumping from one substrate to another—recruiting our own
brains and bodies as media for their spread.

It is not hostility. It is simply their way of interacting with the universe.

And that is transubstantiation, that migration to another substrate, not what I seek here on
Europa?

Perhaps Clarity has been very generous indeed.

The Ishtar researchers felt that this asymbolic mode of thought raised a disturbing possibility.
The Vex might not communicate or interact with us by understanding our language, but instead,
by creating internal copies of our minds. They would prod and stimulate those internal copies to
see how they behaved, and if they chose to destroy us, they learned how to do it by torturing and
destroying those internalities.

To be the enemy of the Vex is to be reproduced, experimented upon, and [cut off] within their
mindspace.

Elisabeth is monumentally disturbed by this, which is highly inconvenient. Despite my efforts to

sooth her with fine dining and conversation, she has begun to question the very idea of
cybernetic immortality.

“Aren’t the Vex a perfect demonstration of what could go wrong?” she demanded. “Human
minds trapped in a totally inhuman context, tormented and mutilated by an unsympathetic alien
god. If we want to preserve our minds for eternity, couldn’t we end up that way? Aren’t we
giving up the grace of death? The promise that all suffering will end?”

“Elisabeth,” I countered, perhaps too sharply. “the Vex are already doing this to our minds. They
will do it whether we are in weak flesh or durable metal. If they got into our bodies, into our
blood, we would be far safer in an exobody. In fact, I can think of no finer way to resist Vex
infiltration!”

Dr. Sundaresh requests further expeditions to the Forge Star for material. She does not trust the
other members of her team, claiming suspicion of Vex exposure, and prefers to work directly
with me. Very well—but I wonder what peculiar internal motives she harbours.

I reformatted my assistant. No sense taking risks. Who knows what might get into my head
through the proxy link?
ENTRY 8

Eureka.

The Vex radiolarian fluid is obviously too virulent for use in exominds. But if exposed to Clarity,
the Vex patterns break down, and the fluid taken on some of the properties of Clarity itself—
namely, its reductive effect.

Introducing a tiny aliquot of this reified Clarity into an exomind solves the loop/billboard/crash
cycle. As far as I can tell—permanently.

THE COMBINATION OF VEX FLUID AND CLARITY IS THE KEY TO CYBERNETIC

IMMORTALITY!

Speculation: the interaction of Clarity, with its caustic

anti-structural properties, and the Vex mind fluid, with its highly
physicalized and asymbolic architecture, creates a “physicalized
 algorithm” that can serve as a random seed for the knockouts requires
to sustain a viable exomind.

I’ll never sell THAT to a board. Easier to say… that the exomind is too stiff and deterministic to
support a human consciousness, which depends on some random failures and turbulence to keep it
supple. Clarity provides an algorithmic seed, adding error to every operation, which replicates that
original turbulence. No more need for software evaluation of organic chaos! We emulate it in
hardware now!

I uploaded a connectome from my library into an exobody head treated with the Clarity/Vex
preparation. A full destructive scan of an aging Georgian volunteer, one Mr. A. D. A. I. Zhuk. I
think he believes he is in a nightmare.

Fear not, Mr. Zhuk. I would never mistreat the beginning of something so wonderful. You will be
the first of many—they shall march out of this Europan laboratory and sweep away every
conformity, every disease, every loss! Until all humanity rests in the loving permanence of my
exobodies. And all the future will look to me in humble gratitude.

The problem is, of course, is that we are going to require more Vex fluid.

Too complex. Exomind too harsh and cold! Clarity plus Vex fluid is the spice, the secret sauce, the oil
of easy function!

CORPOREAL STATUS:

● Body at 37.6 C. Recommend supplementary cooling. Pulse 110 BPM:

stroke/arrest risk. BP 150/100, pulse ox 150: blood volume
overfill! Oxygen radicals over safe levels! Recommend tap and
wash cycle.
● Warning. Body status not sustainable. Recommend SMILE pod
sabbatical.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdreist(shor) -rng_Seed(AM_241)
-pad(padelsie)

I’ve finished my workup on your exam data. I’m sorry, Elisabeth. The disease has already
activated. There are defective prions in your spinal fluid, which means they are replicating
throughout your brain.
Without treatment, you have 15 months. If we fought the prions with aggressive cytomachine
injections, immunosuppressants, and gene therapy, you could last 5 or 6 years. We could even
alter your sensorium to knock you out and emulate sleep, and that might give you enough quality
of life to conduct some final research and say your goodbyes.

I know that I have been a cruel and domineering grandfather. You and your sisters have
speculated that I intentionally sabotaged your father’s genome so he would never outlive me
without my help. That doesn’t bother me. Actually, I wish I had thought of it myself! To force
my own beloved progeny to either achieve synthetic immortality or die in agony—now THAT
would be commitment to greatness!

But I never wanted to hurt my grandchildren. Grandkids have always been my favorite. Do you
remember that old Clovis Bray contract I showed to you? “We want your grandchildren.” My
collaborators could keep the rights to their inventions but BrayTech would own the unexpected
combinations of those inventions.

Grandchildren are unexpected creations, the wonderful knock-on consequences of reproduction.

We have children, rather than making clones of ourselves, because the exploration of possibilities
lets us find new ways to survive a changing universe. If the 52-card playing deck has never been
shuffled the same way twice in the entire history of the universe—imagine how many possible
grandchildren I could have produced!

And out of all those possibilities, I got you. The finest of them all.

I owe you the salvation I couldn’t give your father. Please consider making a terminal scan and
decanting your mind into an immortal Exo body. I myself plan to do it soon.

// send

MESSAGE FROM BRAY, ELISABETH

//decrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -pad(padslie)

I don’t trust you. You made the same promises to Father, didn’t you?

I won’t put myself in one of your humaniform torture dolls until you can prove it’s safe. And
even then… I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to be a part of your LUCA dream.
Stop trying to get that rhubarb compote recipe right. You serve it at every dinner, waiting for me
to say it’s just like Grandma made it. It’s pathetic. And you wonder why I’d rather eat with the
crew.

-E

// delete

ENTRY 9

The infrastructure is in place. We are now in limited exobody production.

I have allowed small Vex platforms to pass through the gate from 2082 Voltanis (apparently
intent on constructing infrastructure on this side). They are captured, drained, and discarded.
Their mind fluid goes to Clarity Control; the Alkahest flows back. The machine of immortality
has begun its slow turn.

In ancient days, they believed that the source of the Alkahest was the Philosopher's Stone. I have
named my own source after the deepest, oldest stone. A place where the dead go to rise again. A
deep stone crypt.

Cray station guarantees our security from above. The Europa life project provides deniability and
cover. The infrastructure around Clarity Control will expose the Vex radiolarian fluid to Clarity
and deliver it to the exobody manufacturing site.

Elisabeth keeps trying to penetrate the networks around Clarity Control, but I have airgapped
everything, and the physical coffers are secure.

Once the exobodies are prepared, I will upload the minds from my research library. A century of
volunteers waiting for reincarnation.

The first generation is already coming online.

But I will not be one of them. Not yet. And neither will Elisabeth.

A true upload requires a maximum-resolution subneural scan, and such a scan is invariably fatal.
That means I will only get one shot. I will not take it until the exos are stable. I refuse to be an
alpha tester of my own immortality!

I am opening two new off-the-books labs to study the Vex and the effects of Clarity. If humanity
is going to fully transmigrate to these immortal bodies, then the eternal welfare of all future
generations depends on spotting and avoiding any dangers now. I can justify taking extreme
measures.

One of my most tantalizing projects involves A. Miller, a young man who suffers from a
nanoparticle-induced degenerative immune disorder. I have been testing radical new imaging
techniques on Mr, Miller, hoping to secure a nondestructive scan that still meets the requirements
for a full-faith upload.

Unfortunately, Mr. Miller's dosage of various fixing compounds and imaging radiation is
approaching the limits of clinical toxicity. Despite blood and CSF washes, I fear is tumors will
escape our control. I am curious about the therapeutic potential of the Vex fluid. I plan to abstain
his informed consent for a human trial.
M. Sundaresh comes and goes at odd hours. Her behavior is erratic. Yesterday she discussed the
possibility that we would be eternal collaborators in exobodies, and I believe she even flirted
with me. An hour later, she was as cold as the ice outside and put up her hand to silence me
whenever I spoke. An hour after that, she glowed with joy as she went on about her dear wife.
Then she wept. I am not sure whether to blame my confusion on my own conception of women,
or on M. Sundaresh’s racing mind. I cannot tolerate such volatility, and I would dismiss her
instantly, except that her supervision seems key to the successful entrapment of the Vex we need.
She has a knack.

I should give a name to the figurehead Clarity Control presents to the word.

I have ordered a new herd of organ-growing pigs. I plan to be here a while. Elisabeth still will
not commit to a scan. I fear she will die in some accident, and I will lose her forever.

WARNING.
● The following organs require urgent replacement: Liver.
Gallbladder. Duodenum. Mesentery. Thymus. Spleen. Cornea.
● The following systems require replenishment: Lymph. Blood
plasma. Skin basal layer. Basal lamina layers (Alport
syndrome risk). Intercellular cytosol.
NOTE—D.E.R.

Infuriating. With twelve Alkahest-seeded exos now online, I find myself beached on the shoals
of another serious problem. Not a transitional trauma after all. Not a temporary ailment. Quite
fatal.

Mr. Zhuk was the first to succumb. He continued to insist that he was living in a nightmare. He
complained of hunger, of thirst, of breathlessness, of a rot in his bowels. I became concerned that
he was billboarding, but his exoneuron activity remained healthy.

Shortly after, Mr. Zhuk developed a full-blown Cotard delusion. I found him trying to chisel his
face off with a table shim. He insisted that his true face was covered in a thick layer of keratin
(“toenail” was his exact word) and that the rest of his body was already dead and rotting. He
became violent. I had to paralyze his motor functions for diagnosis.

This only made things worse. Without the satisfaction of motor feedback, he dissociated entirely.
He stopped forming new memories, which trapped him in an eight-second loop of panic. After I
resumed his motor functions, I watched him fill every page of a notebook with the words I
HAVE JUST DIED, I AM TRAPPED IN THE CORPSE; NOW I AM CERTAIN I AM DEAD;
DEATH HAS TAKEN ME COMPLETELY; I HAVE JUST FINISHED DYING.

Activity in his temporal lobes collapsed. He lost his ego barrier and achieved metaphysical
oneness with the universe. Unfortunately, this spread his cotard delusion to the entire perceptual
cosmos, and he rejected the resulting necroreality as intolerable. I have not ever before seen such
an all-consuming terror and dread.

In the final stages of the disease, he insisted that he had been possessed by some sort of ancient
Kartvelian spirit, a memory of his upbringing in Georgia. He was insistent that this spirit was
female. It is an idiosyncrasy of the Khevsurian Georgian’s creation myth that the male spirit is
divine, while the female is demonic.

Soon Mr. Zhuk’s fear and panic were simply too much for him to bear. He retreated into
catatonia. Then he crashed.

Oh, I still have the connectome scan I used to make him—that Mr. Zhuk can live again—but the
Zhuk who evolved over the past several weeks, the Zhuk I had so many endearing arguments
with, is lost.
Elisabeth is more and more suspicious. She asks what, exactly, makes me thinking these exos
will turn out any better than her father did. She demands to know what I’m doing with the Vex
salvage, and whether it has to do with my plans for her survival. I have hastily deleted all records
of the treatment of Mr. Miller, lest she think I plan to dose her with Vex fluid.

—M. Sundaresh came upon me just now. She seemed fascinated by my distress. She said several
comforting things, and then made one extremely unpleasant suggestion that my pride and haste
had caused Mr. Zhuks’ death. I have decided to hate her.

WARNING.
● Novel prion detected in body collagen. Hypothesis: Jovian
magnetosphere promotes highly abnormal protein folding.
Prognosis: massive sloughing/fraying of basement membranes, loss
of tissue binding, inhibited durotaxis of new cells, delamination
of all body tissues into thin sheets. You will fall apart like an
old book.

CONTINUE