Literature / Manifold: Time

Humanity spread throughout the universe, but never found other intelligent life. Far into the future, matter having long since decayed away, the last descendants of humanity have survived by embedding themselves into a lossless computing substrate. They can theoretically survive indefinitely, but since there will never be new input, their thoughts are doomed to eventually begin repeating. A faction decides this was not meant to be and reaches back to the distant past...

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. Strange, hyper-intelligent children are being born all over the globe. As the world's governments turn inward, Reid Malenfant campaigns for the exploration and colonization of space. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space.

The first book of Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy, where it is followed by Manifold: Space and Manifold: Origin.

---

This book provides examples of:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The 2010 Earth, which contains things such as commonly available self-driving cars, foldable, clothlike computers (softscreens) and AI therapists. Keep in mind this book was written in 1999.
• Absent Aliens: Despite coming to dominate the universe, humanity never found any other intelligent life.
• Alternate Continuity: To the other books in the Manifold series. The story is notable for likely making the other Manifold continuities possible by spawning a massive multiverse.
• Apocalypse How: Class X-4: The Blue children instigate a vacuum collapse incident, causing the fabric of space to collapse into a new energy state within a bubble expanding at lightspeed.
• Arc Words: "Watch the Moon, Malenfant".
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: What the Downstreamers did to survive the heat death of the universe. However, this still isn't enough, as they face a pointless existence as ghosts in a cosmic void and decide to alter the unimaginably distant past. In Manifold: Origin, they escape their inevitable fate by reaching an even higher level of existence.
• Beam Spam: One of the tactics tried against the children's bubble. Didn't work.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Lampshaded in Emma's thoughts, when she observes Malenfant's disquieted reaction to seeing the Downstreamer future and their cold, endless struggle against entropy.
  Well, here it is, Malenfant, everything you dreamed of.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Blue children's space-time bubble. In fact, it's actually infinitely big on the inside, despite being only a few meters across on the outside.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: The so-called 'phoenix universes', where black holes cannot form, only have a single progeny born from the parent's Big Crunch.
  Phoenix universes, each one rebounding into another, which expands and collapses in turn. Each one destroyed so that the next one, its simple progeny, can be born.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: The appearance of the super-intelligent Blue children around the world.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Despite being descended from humans, the Downstreamers are described this way, the only real thing they have in common with modern humans being the instinct to survive. And arguably not even that, as the Downstreamers end up sacrificing themselves and the entire universe to give birth to more interesting universes.
• Broken Pedestal: Malenfant has a moment of this during the time portal sequence, where he gets to witness the evolution of the Downstreamers' civilization. In the second to last jump, he is disappointed to see evidence of war (or at least conflict), and feels the Downstreamers are doing a "damned poor" job of surviving.
• Child Prodigy: "Prodigy" doesn't even begin to describe the Blues, who are under the influence of a civilization from the end of the universe. Humanity as a whole is considerably freaked out by them.
• Cool Gate: The Downstreamer portals.
• Cult: A few fanatical religious sects spring up after the announcement of the Carter catastrophe.
• Deity of Human Origin: Despite Michael's claim that the Downstreamers are not gods, they certainly qualify as gods by human standards. They can influence events in the past and have more energy at their disposal than entire galaxies, can travel to other universes, create other universes, and their plan is essentially the gestation of a googolplex more, by sacrificing themselves and their history. SpaceBattles.com seems to think they're the Ur-Example of this trope, though they seem to have drawn considerable inspiration from late-nineties depictions of the Time Lords.
• Detonation Moon: Happens as a prelude to the vacuum collapse.
• Deus est Machina: The Downstreamer neutrino computer, capable of storing all of the information that could ever possibly exist in the universe.
• Energy Beings: Relatively early in the Downstreamers' history, they shed their physical bodies and live as energy beings.
  Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang’s hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity. The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Well, into the past, but close enough.
• Galactic Superpower: The galaxy-spanning empire of humanity's descendants 75 million years in the future.
• Goo-Goo-Godlike: The Blue children, due to their intelligence.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Lampshaded by several of the characters, as they fear this would happen to them if they were a bit smarter and able to actually understand the implications of the things they were learning.
• House Husband: Bill Tybee is described as a father who stays at home to take care of his children.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The intelligent squid cannibalise their own dead, and eat the less intelligent in development, although this was largely a matter of highly limited resources.
• Made of Indestructium:
  • The Blue children's bubble survives both a nuke and a barrage of lasers.
  • The Downstreamers' portals, made from moulded space-time, are completely indestructible to brute force, and can transport anything that goes through them to any point in time or space, or even to other universes along the Manifold. The time portal still exist, completely undamaged or altered, 10¹¹⁷ years in the future, when all the matter in the universe had decayed to nothingness and the heat death had used up all energy.
  • Some Downstreamers, who don't come from the Afterglow (which means the period of time when there were still stars in the universe) are born from naked singularities and could survive even when exposed to a naked singularity on close proximity.
• The Multiverse: Referred to as The Manifold.
• Mutual Kill: Before he dies from June Tybee's bullets, Cornelius Taine manages to sabotage her spacesuit, killing her in the process.
• Natural End of Time: The final era of the Downstreamers, where the heat death of the universe has come and gone. Matter itself is extinct due to proton decay, and even subatomic particles are stretched so thin across the empty cosmos that no further physical processes will ever occur.
• Nuclear Option: The last resort against the Blue children. It doesn't work.
• The Omniscient: The Downstreamers' neutrino computer at the end of time contains all of the information, down to the quantum level, completely describing the history of the entire universe from the Big Bang to the end of time, but not only that, they have complete knowledge of all possible timelines. So they know everything that is happening, ever happened, ever will happen, ever could have happened, and ever might happen.
• Omniscient Database: Literally, in the case of the Downstreamers' computing substrate. It has access to all of the possible information that could exist in any quantum state the universe could take, but the Downstreamers have experienced all of those states multiple times, so they effectively know everything.
• Pet the Dog: When one of the Sheenas journeys to the end of time, when the universe is empty and the Sheena will soon freeze to death... the Downstreamers save her.
• Portal Network: Implied, although it could possibly be the same one, persisting throughout multiple universes and far into the future. Towards the end of the book, however, we do see an infinite tunnel of them.
• Precursors: The entire point of the book is how humans become this.
• Reality Warper: The Downstreamers are beyond all laws of physics as we know them, allowing them to modify a few rules governing how the whole Manifold works and allow them to create infinite possibilities for life and mind.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Played with. The Blue children offer humanity many advances, but humanity is too scared of them (combined with the Carter prediction) and decide to attack them instead. Even 200 years later on, they're still far behind what the children could come up with.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The motivation of the Downstreamers. The Universe spawned no other intelligent life other than humanity itself, and the Downstreamers will have none of it. They reconfigure its vacuum state into one where black holes are much more frequently formed. Since every black hole singularity is a "cosmic egg" for a new Big Bang, they essentially germinate countless new universes by sacrificing one (along with themselves). They reason that intelligent life just has to evolve in these new circumstances. In addition, Malenfant gives up his chance at a life in the far future to stop Emma from ever going on the journey with him (during which she died).
• Stable Time Loop: The notes Malenfant leaves for himself inside the simulation in the distant future. Also, the strange matter nugget the Blues send back in time. But for the rest, the Downstreamers really are changing the past.
• Super-Intelligence: The Blue children, as well as the later generations of squid, and of course the Downstreamers themselves.
• Time Abyss: The Downstreamers are an extreme example, having a civilization that has persisted for over 10¹¹⁷ years (that's one billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years). At one point in their evolution, Cornelius speculates that the trickle of energy they can suckle from the universe's few remaining black holes is just enough for them to put together an hour of consciousness over a span of a million years.
• Time-Passes Montage: The journey of one of Cornelius' firefly robots through the downstream wormholes on Cruithne shows the spread of humanity across the galaxy and their subsequent adaptation and survival in an increasingly cold, vast, and diminishing universe, is all seen through the same point of view as the robot travels further and further in time through the portals.
• Time Skip: Early in the fourth part of the book, the story skips five years after the Blue children evacuate to the Moon and Malenfant, Cornelius and Emma step through the Downstreamers' portal and before Maura goes to the Moon. After that there are more skips to 2051, 2079, 2102, 2147, 2207 and 2208 AD to reflect humanity's changes to adapt to the dwindling of Earth's natural resources and the coming Carter catastrophe, before the story ends with the Blue children's instigated vacuum collapse.
• Time Travel: In addition to the information the Downstreamers send back, Malenfant goes on a tour of the universes that existed before this one; he ends up in the distant future with the Downstreamers but chooses to travel back to just before the vacuum collapse incident.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: The Blue children construct their own language which specifically accounts for this.
• Touched by Downstreamers: Malenfant and Michael towards the end of the book.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: In 2079, the United Nations has evolved from a Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering to essentially a central authority for humanity.
• Uplifted Animal: The genetically-engineered, intelligent squid descended from Sheena 5.
• Virtual Ghost: Malenfant at first thinks he has become one of these in the Downstreamer substrate, before Michael explains that it really is his original consciousness.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The Downstreamers do, at least initially, until they realize their ultimate fate is to be locked in a sterile, never-changing cosmos. So they go back and fix things. It's implied they survived in some form (expanded in Manifold: Origin).
• Would Hurt a Child: Wayne Dupree, and later the US government, who even resort to nuclear weapons.
• Xenofiction: A major subplot involves Malenfant using squid, modified to be more intelligent, as a space exploration force. This is told from a squid's perspective.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: The silver timeship at the end of the book works like this.
• Zero-G Spot: It's mentioned that one spaceflight saw frequent zero-g orgies because the astronauts had no better way to pass their time. Malenfant and Emma also took part in this during their trip to Cruithne.

---