Implied Spaces

Implied Spaces is a 2008 space opera novel by American author Walter Jon Williams. It explores themes of transhumanism, artificial intelligence and ontology.

Implied Spaces takes place approximately 1,500 to 2,000 years in the future. Humanity has entered a period of technological singularity fueled by a series of massive supercomputers orbiting the sun. These computers act as giant solar collectors and computational machine for running human society. While humanity numbers in the hundreds of billions, only perhaps a few million live in the solar system. Some have gone on slower than light journeys to establish colonies around other stars, such as Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani, a colony lost after a stellar event known as "The Big Belch".

Most humans live in artificially created pocket universes. These universes are connected to our own via wormholes maintained on the dark side of the eleven supercomputers orbiting the sun. These artificial universes can be designed to cater to individual populaces and some have different physical laws than our universe. These pocket universes include the technologically advanced world of Topaz, the medieval fantasy themed world of Midgarth, the hunter gatherer world Olduvia, and the aquatic paradise of Hawaiki, among many others.

Various advancements in biotechnology have effectively rendered mankind immortal. Humans no longer age normally, and even death has been overcome by means of resurrection facilities which will download a backed up copy of a personality into a reformed body. Genetic manipulation has allowed people to obtain designer bodies with different, even nonhuman, features.

The sole dark spot seems to be the long dormant fear of an episode from the distant past: the Control Alt Delete War. In this first truly worldwide war, a revolutionary political faction known as the Seraphim used a bio-engineered virus to attack humanity. Rather than killing its victims, this virus rewrote their brains so that they were loyal to the Seraphim. As other groups discovered this new weapon they re-engineered it for their own purposes, including one version of the virus which created "zombies", people with an uncontrollable violent rage toward others. While this technology was ultimately suppressed and all but the oldest humans seem to have put it behind them, it remains as a black spot on an otherwise perfect society.

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