The Anti Xeelee & The Last Entity

0:17 Hi guys, Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button. It's the best way to get the YouTube algorithm to take notice of my YouTube channel. Thanks so much, guys. At a certain scale, science fiction starts being about states of existence, intelligence stretched across cosmic time, purpose surviving longer than the species that created it, consciousness persisting into an era where the universe itself begins to fail.

0:47 The universe is vast, more vast than the human mind can conceive. And it is also old, impossibly old. The human race has existed for roughly 100,000 years, a blip when compared to the long history of the cosmos. In all that time, billions upon billions of years, what other life came into existence? Surely the first intelligent race didn't just form one hundred thousand years ago.

1:19 We can't possibly be the first. If so, who was? And what heights did their civilization rise to? And where are they now? The Zelie sequence by Stephen Baxter is a collection of science fiction books and short stories that follow the history of the cosmos, dominated by an elusive race of beings known as the Zili.

1:44 They are an ancient race, so advanced that mere scraps of their technology left behind, discarded by them, could change the trajectory of an entire species. For a more in-depth look at the Zili sequence, check out my ultimate timeline of the Zili sequence video. Unbeknownst to humanity, who only saw the Zealie as a threat and competitor, the Zealie had a great mission.

2:10 Humanity waged a war with the Zili that lasted a hundred thousand years. But in reality, humankind would prove to be no match for the great Zealie. In reality, the Zili fought a much greater war. A war for the fate of the universe itself, against entities made of dark matter. These entities formed at the beginning of the universe.

2:35 They lived within stars and consumed them from within. If these entities won against the Zili, the fate of the universe would be darkness. But the Zili had a plan, a plan spanning across time, forward and backwards. The anti-Zili was a constructed entity, a being created with the purpose of orchestrating the Zili's great works and seeing them through.

3:00 The anti-Zili was a vast and powerful mind. Call it the Anti-Zili. It was large, its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy. Nevertheless, the anti-Zili looked on its completed works and was satisfied. Its awareness spread across light years. The anti-Zili wasn't a weapon meant to be used against the dark matter entities.

3:31 It was made to complete a cosmic design. And in the final darkness, when all the Zealie have left the universe, it would be the final remnant of the great Zealie in this universe. Because in the end, the Zili cannot overcome the dark matter entities, they flee this universe. But the anti-Zili was not the last being in this cosmos.

3:58 Paul was a human consciousness carried all the way to the dying end of time, left to witness the ruins of creation even after the zili had gone. If the anti-Zili is the last great construct of the Zili, then Paul becomes something else entirely. The last witness. A human mind left to drift through the ruins at the end of time.

4:25 We talked about Paul more in depth in my ultimate timeline of the Zili sequence video. Essentially, Paul travels to the distant future, where he finds that the stars have died out at an accelerated rate due to the influence of the dark matter creatures. He encounters the anti-Zili, who removes him from his physical constraints, making him into a being of pure consciousness.

4:50 Paul himself witnesses the anti-Zili as it completes its final task, the task that will ensure the Zili's survival eternally. Now the anti-Zili turned to its last task. Seed pods, spinning cubes as large as worlds, were scattered everywhere in an orderly array, millions of them dispersed over the unraveling curve of space.

5:16 The anti-Zili ran metaphorical fingers over each of the pods and over what lay within. Beings with closed eyes, ships with folded wings, refined reflections of the anti-Zili itself. The work was good, and now it was ready. There was a discontinuity. All over the universe, pods vanished like soap bubbles.

5:40 The seed pods' long journey back through time had begun. They would emerge a mere hundred thousand years after the singularity itself. At the moment when the temperature of the cosmos had cooled significantly for matter and radiation to become decoupled, so that the infant universe became suddenly transparent, as if with a clash of symbols.

6:03 Then the creatures within would unfold their limbs, and the long project of the zili would begin. The great zili, realizing that they could not overcome the dark matter entities, engineered their own creation. The last task of the anti-Zili was to send seed pods of the Zili themselves back to the beginning of the universe.

6:28 The zili would always be there at the beginning of time to fight the dark matter entities. Eventually the project would lead to the development of the seed pods, the spawning of the anti-Zili itself, and so the circle would be closed. There was, of course, no paradox about this causal loop. Although, for amusement, the anti-zili had once studied a toy creature, a human from whose viewpoint such events had seemed not merely paradoxical, but impossible.

7:01 Something like a smile reflex spread through its awareness, and revived like an afterthought, the immense memory. The toy creature whispered once more into being, a faint coherence in the vacuum. With its task completed, the anti-Zele itself dissolves. This is witnessed by Paul. The dissolving of the anti-Zili distresses him as he is now alone.

7:25 He knows that the anti-Zealie had traveled back in time with the seed pods, separating into uncountable fragments of awareness. Paul wanders the quantum universe, unbounded by physics. In the end, when the universe is nearly entirely dark, he huddles around the last dwarf star as it fades, and the universe is lost to the dark matter entities, to the Fotino birds.

7:53 What I think is interesting here is that the anti-zeli is more like the final abstraction of civilization than anything else. It's not really an entity, and it's also not really a machine. Calling it a machine underserves what it really is. So much of science fiction is concerned with progress, ascent, expansion.

8:18 The idea that intelligence moves outward into greater freedom, greater power. But the anti-zili represents something a bit different. It is intelligence at the point where history has narrowed into pure necessity, where freedom has been burned away and only purpose remains. Because of this, the anti-Zili doesn't really feel like a being, it feels like the terminal expression of the Zili's will, their final embodiment, and their first embodiment in an even stranger sense, since it also traveled through time.

9:01 It is not lost on me that the zili constructed their own creator. If you've seen my video on constructed gods, then this fits right in with the concept. Science fiction as a vehicle to explore ideas surrounding God is extremely common. The anti-Zili guides the great works of the Zili, ensures their salvation, and brings them into existence at the end of time.

9:28 It is their God. Very similar idea to Three Body Problem. Hostile universe, aliens attempting to destroy humanity without a second thought. It's very possible that Luciushin even took ideas from this story. I've already covered it on this channel, and I'll link it in the description. To me ask, between Dune, the Three Body Problem, and the Hyperion Cantos, which universe is the scariest to you?

10:35 As for book recommendations, please do more works by Octavia Butler, like the Paternist series or Kindred. I absolutely will do more work by Octavia Butler, so thank you for the recommendation. And between the three of those, I think I would have to say I find Hyperion Cantos the scariest. Dune is not so much scary to me as it is just hostile and strange.

11:00 The three-body problem seems like a plausible reality, so it almost kind of feels like I already live in the three-body problem universe. But there's something about Hyperion that's very unsettling. The idea of something like the Shrike or the Time Tombs being sent back in time. The idea of the Diagonal Core is very terrifying to me.

11:22 There's something about the Hyperion universe that makes me think to myself, seems cool, but I really don't want to live there. Whereas with Three Body Problem, I already feel like the aliens are gonna destroy us soon anyway, so what's the difference? Matt Everett asks, Have you ever read anything by Margaret Atwood?

11:43 It's more dystopian than sci-fi, but I was super into her book, Oryx and Crake, as a teen, and I would love to hear your take on it. I haven't read much by Margaret Atwood. I have read The Handmaid's Tale, but that's about it. But thank you so much for the recommendation. I definitely will add it to the list.

12:01 And your second question was what was your favorite book series as a teen? As a teen is interesting because I was really, really refining my taste as a teen, but I was also reading a lot of different types of things. Like I started reading the Song of Ice and Fire books as a teen. Only a feast for crows was out at that point in time, and I kind of just devoured those books.

12:23 I really loved them. But I also loved various other things. I loved the Hunger Games books, they were really big when I was in high school. I absolutely consumed those books, I adored them. Haven't read any of the newer ones. And then there were, of course, the childhood books that I read as a kid and like read again over the course of my teenage years.

12:42 Like a series of unfortunate events was one of my favorites of all time. I read a lot of different things and loved a lot of different types of books. I even read a lot of Dan Brown books, you know, the Da Vinci Co. books. I loved those as a teenager. But then eventually, I guess I as I time went on, I started to refine my taste more and more.

13:00 And now I'm a big sci-fi nerd, but also still a big fantasy book nerd. I read a lot I I'm starting to read more fantasy books now after a while of being burnt out on fantasy. Like last year I read like all of the Wizard of Earth C books by Ursula Kayla Gwyn. And the last Patreon question comes from Sam H.

13:20 Have you played or heard of Dune Awakening? It has such a rich story, and I would recommend you exploring it. I have not played the game yet, but I do have a copy of it, so I might be loading that up here pretty soon. That's it for Patreon questions, guys. Thanks so much for listening. And thank you to all of my patrons.