Transcription notes:

A lot of lines in this log are notes hand-written between and around typed paragraphs. ​These
handwritten lines are completely italicized. ​It also includes statements from Clovis’s
computer/ship AI, which are bolded.

The log also includes a variety of diagrams and symbols, which are not included here.

ENTRY 1
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 i​ s aerobraking around Jupiter. The lord of planets thunders his greeting to me. As I
record this, I am blasting Aivanti-3's "Siegfriend 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 AI as nonhuman?

Objective: construct long-term scientific outpost for study of indigenous

Europan 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 diseases 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 sea floor 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 indifference of the cosmos. It told me I was unlike all
others--and, damn 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
behavior, 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 choice.

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 the
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 PFHOR 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 engines, 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 captured 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. A fatal 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 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 kidneys 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 big blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them.

Does PFHOR compel me to take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary porkers?

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 farmes, 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 of their 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 believes 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 icebore camera we dropped into the
ocean below. A dandelion made of soft arms. Bright red and yellow markings indicate it
evolved in the shallows, where some light pierces the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion that is both hunting a breathing. Prey
approaches, drawn by the 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 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. 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 causal 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 discoveries my memetic
grandchildren. When we depart the cradle of the 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 defies

Noether's theorem, 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 probably 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? Invoking the Loschmidt paradox is certainly not
common language. Ah, perhaps an allusion to--
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 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(AM_241) -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 mine. 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 so
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(AM_241) -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 machine. 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

MESSAGE TO BRAY, ELISABETH

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) -rng_seed(AM_241) -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 suggests 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. Then 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 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 responded 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 is the 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 senses 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 stereotypy 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 its 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, emotional
conversation with an uploaded woman, only to discover that 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 now I 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 immune 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 my 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 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 change.

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 even to dream of a time when it was Elisabeth Bray.

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

//send

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
encessary 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 logic, 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 excurse 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.

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 the 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 urgent need for search and
rescue. An easy task to have one of our ships slip 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 very 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 two streams by crawling between them on my bellow.
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 the streams together into one pond. And whenever the aphids of
a small stream might protest, I said to them, "Go 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 the 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 aphids and I was
Leviathan.

In time, I became the coordinator of all water and the dispensator of fertility. Then I became
the coordinator of coordinators, and I gave up the 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 percepts 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 engrammatize 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 traversable 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 said it was, impossibly, safe for life.
We fanned out into 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, 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 y​ ears! And its metallicity is 15 sigma above average. That is
​ n old star!"
not a

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 the full moon, even from the distance of Alpha Centauri. Yet here I was, unblinded.
Something had 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 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-second
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 garotte wires. These were particle
accelerators, generating blades of electromagnetic force that stabbed down into the star's
skin, through photosphere and tachocline, towards the core.

"They're stirring it," I realized. "To pull metals out of the core and send fresh hydrogen down
to fuse. Is it possible that 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 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 stellar 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 blotted out by a swarm of bronze discs. They were statites: a shell of artificial
worlds, hovering on the star's radiation. 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 in 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 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 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 that 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 secure 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 Volantis. Colloquially "Vex mind fluid", "Vex milk."

Informatic exchange with any Vex substrate has proven hazardous. The Ishtar Collective
data Elisabeth has 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 the 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 of silicoid 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 DNA (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 admit 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 though; porous
and miscible. I would request a teleonomic analysis from an AI-COM resource if I did not
expect the Tyrant 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 Schroeder thalience 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 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 structure is so suited to
adaption 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 of a bridge flexing under strain, can accept destructive
input and produce reparatory output.

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 is that 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 annihilated 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 harbors.

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 takes 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 required 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

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.

every operation, which replicates that original turbulence. No more need for software

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
infirmity, 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.

emulation of organic chaos! We emulate it in hardware now!

The problem, 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) -qdresist(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 five or six 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'd 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(padelsie)

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 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 Volantis (apparently
intent on constructing infrastructure on this side). They are captured, drained, and discarded.
Their mind fluid goes to Clarity Control; the Alkhaest 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 that deepest, oldest stone. A place where the dead go to
rise again. A deep stone crypt.

Bray 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 his tumors
will escape our control. I am curious about the therapeutic potential of the Vex fluid. I plan to
obtain 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
and 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.

Ha! Shall I call her Claire?

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 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 his entire
perceptual cosmos, and he rejected the resulting necroreality as intolerable. I have not ever
before seen such 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 Georgians' 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 think 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. Zhuk's 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.

Transcription ends here. The log has several more pages, all of which have been torn out.
We’ll probably find them in-game.