Alia frowned. “All right. So why is the Transcendence so interested in the Witnessing?”
“Because,” Bale said, “the Transcendence is tortured by regret.”
The Transcendence was at a cusp in its destiny, they told Alia.
Coalescing out of a gathering of humans, it already soared far above the capabilities, even the imaginations, of its constituent members. This was an extraordinary moment in the evolution of life itself, so it was believed, as the Transcendence looked forward to the possibilities of an unlimited future, to infinity and eternity.
Soon, in any meaningful sense, the Transcendence would become a god.
But not yet. In these final brief moments, the Transcendents were still human. And they were not content.
All this was an abstraction to Alia, a matter of theology. The Transcendence itself was still only dimly glimpsed in her imagination, despite her training with Reath. What could a god want?…
The Campocs thought they knew.
The Transcendence understood the cause of its own anguish very well. It was the past. Of the trillions who had lived, most humans’ lives had been dominated by pain and fear, their only saving grace being that they had been short. But the past was the root from which the mighty tree of the present had grown. So how then could the Transcendence give itself up to the bliss of an unlimited future, while its base was stained with the blood of all those near who went before, and had lived and died in misery? Somehow the past had to be redeemed, for if not the goal of perfect Transcendence could never be reached; there would always be a deep flaw beneath the shining surface, a worm in the apple.
And so, under great programs administered by the Commonwealth’s Colleges of Redemption, every human child was made a Witness, as Alia had always studied the life of Michael Poole. You were assigned one character, one life thread drawn from the tapestry of the past, perfectly imaged with unimaginable technology. Any and every life was available to be remembered in this way—and not just the significant and famous, like Poole. Every last one of them needed to be treasured, and remembered. Every one.
Alia shook her head. “I never thought it through. To catalog the whole of the past, to make everybody a Witness—and to Witness everybody —”
-Transcendent, Ch. 22