"finitude withers to nothing in the face of infinity.”

The Transcendence the emergent gestalt of a Post-Human collective consciousness with billions of Post-Humans spread across the Milky Way galaxy in ~500,000 C.E.

The collective consciousness is made from individual Post-Humans but they is not overwhelmed by the greater whole and maintains their individuality.

Members of the Transcendence (called Transcendent) tend to subtly reflect its thoughts, feelings and doubts in their own thoughts, feelings and doubts.

The Transcendence is the end stage of humanity, the final form before it becomes a God of infinite capability. But in order to transcend the limitations of finite existence it needs to absorb every human consciousness past, as well as present. Doing so with all the suffering and misery of Humanity's long history would lead to it being an imperfect god which it views as unthinkable.

To this end it needs to Redeem Humanity of all its pain and suffering before it's transcendence.

The Transcendence has a perfect knowledge of Xeelee Sequence physics along with some fairly powerful reality warping abilities.

We should note that the Transcendence would need to preform The Redemption before it ascended in order not to be tainted.

This is mentioned several times throughout the story.

Also, while many of these things are talking about "plans". It would make absolutely zero narrative sense if they were lying to themselves (which is what they would have been needing to do) about their capabilities. The entire book's plot would have been pointless if that were the case. There also is a good reason why they did not follow through with any of the plans but that would be spoilers.

Theme.

Reality Warping

The Transcendence has three plans for Redemption (eliminating human suffering throughout all time),The Witnessing, The Restoration and The Cleansing.

The Witnessing/The Hypostatic Union

The first level of Witnessing is just witnessing all of human experience from an outside perspective.

The second level of Witnessing is Hypostatic Union.

• Hypostatic Union is not just watching the subject but experiencing everything they experience.

• This level of forms an endless recursion where person A witnesses person B, then person B needs to witness person A witnessing person B. But the Transcendence is not worried about that because while the problem is arbitrarily large it is still finite. Any finite problem is easy for a being of infinite capacity.

The Restoration

• This plan is to have merge every possible timeline into a single universe so that all any possible human will exist in this single universe regardless of logic.

  • This amount of humans mathematically is pretty much an arbitrarily large, but not infinite number

The Cleansing

• The Cleansing is much more simple than the Restoration. It is to erase all humans from existence so that Humanity never existed. Thus there never could be any human suffering in the first place.

  • Note: This would includes humans from their war with the Xeelee who were causally separated from the universe as part of their defenses.

Other Powers

• [Unmediated Communication/Immortality of Mind] Any member of the Transcendence can easily access the thoughts/experiences/memories of any Transcendent. And even if their physical body is destroyed their mind remains apart of the Transcendence.

• It is not limited by causality or consequence

• [Timeline Manipulation] The Transcendence can edit the past by manipulating the present then sending that effect so far into the future it wraps around into the past.

• [Time Travel] A Transcendent Elect gets sent 500,000 years into the past.

  • They also just as easily move into the future.

• [Telepathy] Through Hypostatic Union the Transcendence can go through the thoughts and experiences of anyone, even dead people.

• [Telepathy] They can also cause others to undergo Hypostatic Union.

• [Telepathy] Invades the minds of the all the Campocs (whom have a FTL thought sharing network thing) causing them pain.

• [Telepathy] The Transcendence should be able to isolate people from their sences like the Compocs which have a mental network where they share everything to every other Compoc (kind of like a nano-Transcendence).

• The Transcendence created a realm for itself not governed by time or space but by it's will.

  • This allows for FTL communication between members.

Intelligence/Knowledge

• The Transcendence has a complete understanding of Xeelee Sequence physics.

• They also have total knowledge of the universe's history and its current state.

• The Transcendence is described as a higher lifeform, for it to debate with a post-human would be like the post human arguing with a blade of grass.