Free Transcendent by Stephen Baxter

neutrinos passed like ghosts through all normal forms of matter, the pulses washed through the stars and dust of the Galaxy and never occluded or dispersed, so you could pick up the clock’s chiming wherever you were. Once, it was said, human clocks had been devised to fit the natural rhythms of Earth, its days and years. Now humans had scattered over millions of disparate worlds, and so the Clock was calibrated to a standard human pulse rate. Thus a civilization that encompassed a Galaxy marched in step to the rhythms of a human heart.
    “And all of it,” Reath told her, “is driven by the Transcendence—a Commonwealth within the Commonwealth, a center within the center, the innermost heart of everything.”
    The Transcendence was the source of all authority. As far as she could make out, it was itself a meshing of minds, a titanic superhuman mass around which human affairs pivoted, much as the Galaxy itself wheeled about the unmovable black hole at its very center. But the Transcendence needed agencies to carry out its will in the human world: it was a god embedded in bureaucracy.
    The Commonwealth was more than a collection of dusty agencies, though, Reath said. The Commonwealth itself was an aspiration. As it worked on a Galactic scale, bit by bit, humans were drawn closer together, knit more integrally into the whole. Reath liked to say that whether you knew about it or not, if you were of human descent you were a citizen of the Commonwealth already. “And one day, it is hoped,” Reath said, “we will
all
be drawn in, not just into the Commonwealth, but even into the Transcendence itself—and then a new kind of human history will begin.”
    But if it was to achieve such aspirations, the Transcendence had to grow. It had to recruit. Astonishing as it seemed, the Transcendence needed people like Alia.
    If her ultimate goal was barely imaginable, Reath reassured her, the training would come in easy chunks. There were three formal stages, which he called Implications: the Implication of Indefinite Longevity, of Unmediated Communication, and of Emergent Consciousness. Needless to say she had little idea what any of these terms might actually mean, though they all sounded scary. But as well as the formal steps they would enjoy some “fun” together, Reath said: notably, travel to exotic worlds like this one.
    She wasn’t happy.
    It wasn’t the distances that troubled her. To a Skimmer, distance was supposed to be meaningless anyhow. No, it wasn’t the distance but the company she had to keep: her only companion, in his austere, joyless tube of a ship was the silent and watchful Reath.
    Reath wasn’t
bad
company, really. He was attentive to her needs, and tolerated her moods, and much of what he had to say was even interesting. But his face was blank, expressionless, as immobile as if the nerve ends had been cut. He was a walking, talking emblem of the great severance she had undergone, her separation from the
Nord,
her whole world, and her rejection by her parents in favor of a baby brother she did her level best not to hate.
    Reath had done her one great favor, though. He had allowed her to bring along her Witnessing tank.
    She could watch Michael Poole any way she pleased. The basic wormlike chain of images, from Poole’s birth to death, was a simple four-dimensional representation, an index. She could allow a scene from his life to unfold inside the tank, with Poole, his family and friends, enemies and strangers, like tiny actors. Or she could magnify it and immerse herself in the scene, an unseen witness.
    All of this was utterly authentic, so she understood, though she knew nothing of the technology involved: this wasn’t a reconstruction, this really was the life of Michael Poole as he had lived it, five thousand centuries ago, all of it from birth to death embedded deep in the irrevocable past, and locked up inside her tank for her benefit.
    Reath reminded her it was the obligation of every citizen to