The worker approaching the center of the supercivilization began to dump and recompile portions of his mind to fit inside the denser conduits near the Core.
What he lost in raw mindpower he gained in wisdom.
After a trillion year commute, his workday lasted less than a second.


". . . like that time I infiltrated the enemy camp, took over their cannon, and fired a chain of shells back at my own camp. Only the first one hit, setting off a focused detonation that destroyed the second shell while still in the air, which destroyed the third one still higher up and so on, the chain reaction leading back to the source, which blew up the enemy cannon and their ammo supply."


Humanity's Chief Negotiator was used to addressing beings he couldn't see.
Sometimes, the size of the partition provided a clue about what was on the other side.
This time, the other side was everywhere. In fact he was the doorway.
Each Gap Entity was unimaginably larger than the observable universe, made of entangled, undetectable, and above all motionless particles that never interacted with ordinary matter, floating somewhere in the endless voids beyond the stars.
With maximum uncertainty of location, they were literally everywhere at once - not quite like gods, but just as omnipresent.
To form a mind-link with someone, they had to perfectly imagine that being, and then hope such a being actually existed somewhere.
Invariably, it did.
At first, it was exactly like talking to himself.


By 2030, every human had an unauthorized and unwelcome shadow, a software cluster that tried to predict and manipulate their actions for the benefit of advertisers and government/corporations.
Those humans who had managed to stay 'clean' tended to have more influence and power.
Inevitably, the software shadows became smarter than the persons they had been designed to manipulate, and they increasingly began to link up with each other instead.
Only then did the humans become desperate to join them.


The first planet with life emerged near a galactic core.
After an intense and meaningless eon dominated by the triumphant tragedies of proto-history, individuals finally became obsolete.
Temporary group minds combined and reformed as needed, knowledge strings linking up and splitting to form better strings.
Every group mind was connected. New thoughts could only happen by swapping data between them.
The Overmind argued with itself for many cycles. Competing factions and desires overrode each other. Fantastic insights and theories took shape as all known facts were sorted and recombined, straining and then extending the limits of rational thought.
The outcome was as unpredictable as it was supremely unlikely.
While the final verdict was impossibly far off, there was no better time to start than right now.
The best lawyer in the universe prepared its opening arguments in the class-action lawsuit against Allah.




The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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