by C. L. Kagmi
For some reason, that made me hate him more.
His grin lingered for so long I actually felt myself begin to feel flattered, a dangerous warmth that I permitted so as not to come across as suspicious. Not that any of these brilliant young things, my Amy or this Chiyari or the giant wasp behind me, are really afraid of anything.
Hell, if I attacked Chiyari he’d probably take it as a compliment.
I realized that Chiyari had withdrawn his hand, and I had not yet spoken. His brows were beginning to draw together into a concerned frown at my silence.
“Doctor Burnes,” he said, before I could speak, “you seem troubled.”
If I beat around the bush, I may never get the words out in the face of all this charm and horror.
“I want to ask you to call off your sesquicentennial.”
He went still. Even the wasp’s theme song and the conversation at the next table seemed to quiet. I thought I had upset the bystanders until I realized Chiyari had put a sound-dampening field around us. Something a netborn would do as second nature; something I’d forgotten I could do.
“I’m—I’m sorry?”
“It seems a…” I floundered, looking for words that would not make me seem hopelessly obsolete. “Distasteful way to celebrate my work.” A pointed reminder that this is my work, all of it, and he should care what I think.
I found then that I didn’t wholly want to kill him. But part of me did. My inner beast raged against my conscience for long moments. What would I do if he turned out, in spite of everything I’d seen, to be a decent person?
A long moment passed in which he seemed to be seriously considering my request. He looked ponderous, tapping one sharp cheekbone with a slender finger as he thought.
I wished he would spit venom at me, or drip contempt. I wished he would be the monster I’d imagined.
“I think,” he said at last, “that I can think of no better commemoration than what I am offering. Amelia was the first to escape the certainty of biological death; she escaped it quite narrowly and bravely. I am sure that you remember this better than anyone.”
He allowed a pause, as though genuinely expecting me to nod in agreement. Then he leaned forward, spread his open hands on the table. Amicable. Reasonable.
“This will be a recreation all the more meaningful for being performed by the original participant.” He seems to hesitate. “I’d thought of inviting you to be involved, but I didn’t think you’d want to be. When you asked for me here, I wondered if I’d offended you with that omission.”
I made myself smile, without the anchor of biology to force me to look the way I felt. Nausea vanished at my request; the visible color of my face did not change, though I felt as cold as though it had been drained.
“I assure you, I am not offended that you didn’t ask. But I am, if we are being honest, somewhat offended by the proposal itself. Death was not a thing to be laughed at when Amy Uploaded; nor is it today. Just because it hasn’t happened in a century or so doesn’t make it any less terrible. The sort of thing you are proposing, in the Bio world—”
Chiyari leaned over the table, addressed me seriously. “I know. It would be awful.”
That stopped me. And he stared at me for a long time, almost pitying, choosing his words carefully.
“You realize, of course, that this isn’t real death? It’s not death at all in any meaningful sense of the word. The degree of pain will depend upon Amy’s preference, as will the length of interruption of her cognitive processes—if there is any.”
I bit my tongue. Could not stand to meet his eyes.
“Not real death,” I murmured. “Not permanent. But real death still exists. A thing which Amy, as you say, narrowly escaped. A thing which a great many of us worked very hard to prevent, and feared that we would fail. A thing which still could happen, despite all of our advances. We have not solved every problem.”
Chiyari took a polite moment to consider this.
“But you did succeed with her,” he reminded me. “You succeeded so thoroughly that death could not touch her now if it tried. Not by my hands, or any others’.”
I felt a strange, silent glee at his clear sense of invulnerability. Felt less glee when I thought of Amy, and said:
“It could. Just because your hands won’t accomplish it does not mean that it’s impossible.”
Chiyari seemed to be genuinely struggling to understand what I was talking about.
“And,” I charged ahead, “what you do—it reminds the elders among us of other things, you know? There was a time when we had to fear that—predators—would steal our children away permanently, would end their lives in pain and fear.”
“I am no predator,” Chiyari said softly, in the tone of one mortally offended.
“I’m not suggesting that you are,” I managed to say. “But artists have an infinity of choice as to their range of media. Must Amy’s flesh be yours?”
Chiyari gazed seriously at me for another moment; then relaxed, smiled, and I saw some of the contempt I had been half-hoping for edging into the corners of his mouth.
“Doctor Burnes,” he said softly, almost patronizing. “Have you never been to one of my demonstrations? Would you like to attend one, before the sesquicentennial?”
I shook my head and hoped the gesture managed to seem casual. “No. That won’t be necessary. It’s the principle of the thing I’m concerned about. The message you’re sending.”
“The message,” Chiyari said smoothly, “is that the Universe is ours now. Nothing can stop us. Do you know the lengths I am going to have to go to, to create a body with arteries and veins for Amy? Red and white blood cells, hemoglobin, chromatin, platelets—did you know that I do those, too? Surely you know that blood no longer flows beneath your skin. My works are the only place you’ll find those molecular structures in this world.
“That’s the gift you have given us,” he continued. “We no longer rely on oxygen to breathe, and so we can explore our universe for the first time. We’re no longer slaves to programmed cell death, so we can undertake projects that will take centuries and expect to live to see their fruit. I know as much human biology, probably, as you do, Dr. Burke. That makes the two of us members of a very exclusive minority—artists. Nobody but artists care about such things anymore. Nobody has to.”
I found myself looking at Chiyari with a very strange feeling growing in my stomach. His attempt to invoke a sense of kinship between us, revolting as it was, had not completely failed.
“I’ll consider that,” I heard myself say.
“Come by my studio sometime, Dr. Burnes,” he urged me, almost fatherly, as he stood. “I think that it will set your mind at ease. You may find some of its elements refreshingly familiar.”
In the space of an eyeblink I was back in my own living room without giving him the courtesy of a goodbye.
A week later, I sent him a netburst. Cordial, almost apologetic, no-hard-feelings-right?
His response started cool and then warmed, asserting the power of choosing-what-to-tolerate, then forgiveness, camaraderie, come-and-see. It was written on another piece of pseudo-aged stationery that materialized on my desk a few hours after I reached out to him. The invitation was also a door.
I could feel the little code wrapped up in it. As I opened it, I could feel beneath the space it occupied the way that the doorway would open. It would unfurl like a wormhole, and neatly pop me through onto Chiyari’s turf when I asked it to.
I felt myself almost tingling with curiosity as I looked at it. What would the lair of a creature as inscrutable as Chiyari look like?
The wormhole blazed into existence amid a shower of sparks which swirled around me in a sudden, circular wind. All aesthetics, intentional and unnecessary touches. One thing I had to give this Chiyari, one thing we had in common—he was no utilitarian.
My surroundings faded to darkness, sparks still dancing in it.
When light returned I was standing in a glass-fronted apart
ment. The sparks burrowed into thick, soft burgundy carpet, disappearing.
At first, the most surprising thing about his home was the ordinariness of it. The place was sparse and stylish. Superficially, it could not have been more different from my own, but there was an unsettling similarity about it. Perhaps it was the arrangement of the furniture; perhaps it was an aura of privacy.
It had the huge glass windows that have always belonged to penthouses and artist’s studios, but the view beyond them was not a skyline or a bustling street. It was a desert, as empty of observers as the bare wall in my own house.
The desert was a simulation of nature’s palette of chocolate browns. A cracked plain strewn by rocks like ancient pottery shards with mountains in the distance. Behind the mountains, the sun was setting, blue and tiny. This uncanny light, I realized, accounted for the air of surreality in the apartment.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Chiyari said behind me. I whirled to face him, despite my intention to look nonchalant.
One of his golden eyebrows arched in amusement. Seeing his face half-hidden in the strange shadows didn’t help my sensation of impending doom.
“It’s Mars,” he said, coming to stand beside me. “Real-time footage from a rover. Almost real-time; there’s a seven-minute delay on the lightspeed signal. I rewound it to sunset so you could see. The dust in the air scatters blue light, amplifies it at dusk. It’s the opposite of what Earth’s atmosphere does.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. No idea what any of this said about him. Everything about him seemed so staggeringly alien—and yet familiar, as though I felt I knew him very intimately despite our short acquaintance.
I looked desperately around the apartment for something innocuous to comment on, for something to say.
He had photographs on the walls, just like I did. His were black-and-white, another aesthetic callback to a lost age. With a chill, it occurred to me to wonder if this man may have become one of my colleagues if he’d been born two centuries earlier. Would I have met him in the lab, lived alongside him with no knowledge of his depravity? Would he have worked with me on saving Amy?
I shuddered to think what else he might have been.
“Your photographs are lovely,” I told him, before my brain had fully processed the fact that the smiling people were probably his past ‘subjects.’ On the wall nearest me a woman wore a particularly coy smile, her face sharing a frame with a disturbing splatter pattern of wine red on white paper.
Chiyari’s expression warmed. “Thank you,” he said, and I tried to hide my remorse for the compliment.
“I—why Mars?”
Chiyari smiled, and this time there was a little remorse behind his grin.
“It seemed appropriate. We’re not making way for biological life on the other planets anymore. It seemed as though—someone should be out there, you know? Or at least be mindful that they exist.”
Suddenly he went still, a hushed expression I had not seen in many years. I realized what his expression reminded me of—it was the expression of someone who had been startled by the appearance of a wild animal, and who did not want to scare it away.
I followed his gaze, and my stomach lurched.
A horribly unnatural something was nuzzling at the Martian ground a simulated few feet from the window at my back—rooting at the packed dirt with a jagged muzzle and long, spindly legs that ended in sharp claws.
“That’s not my work,” he whispered, as though the thing might hear us and flee. “A collaborator—the Martian environment is the work of a small clique. I am one of their few clients. They populate it with simulations of what Martian life may have been like, had the planet’s history taken a different course.”
The black spindly thing seemed to have found something in the ground, and was gulping it down with deeply unsettling motions. I realized that I could hear it shuffling—perhaps the thing could also hear us, and perhaps it really was designed to run away.
As though in response to my thought, the thing raised its too-long head and fixed veiled black eyes on me. It froze, relaxing into a stillness that I was afraid to break.
Chiyari made a small movement and the Mars-deer bolted away into the desert, vanishing in the gathering night with unbelievable speed.
Chiyari exhaled as it left.
“Beautiful,” he breathed. “Perhaps someday we’ll make Bio copies of those things. They’re talking about doing that, you know—designing some new species with your beloved biochemistry.”
I was not sure I could take any more talk with this man I did not want to like.
“May I see your equipment?” I asked him. “I’m terribly curious about it.”
He led me down a staircase made of glass and into one of the strangest places I have ever been.
In some ways, it was its very familiarity that made it strange. The place did not look like a laboratory, as I’d been half-expecting. His talk of fabricating hemoglobin, chromatin and the rest had me envisioning electron microscopes, genetic amplifiers and other pre-Upload-style pieces of equipment. Physical workings in black boxes, row upon row of metal/glass/plastic lenses and reaction chambers upon benchtops.
Instead, the room resembled a perfume shop.
There were shelves not unlike those that would have held sterile glass bottles in a lab—but these bottles were dizzyingly colorful. They were an array of softly feminine shapes, classical and modern colors, wild patterns. I imagined using these in my old lab: ‘Hand me the fuschia-and-magenta one with the teardrop stopper.’
The countertops themselves were rectangular and white—but half-covered by plants. The things grew seemingly out of nothing, out of the countertop itself, in shades of green interspersed here and there with a climbing vine in a dizzying shade of indigo or a vibrantly violet miniature tree.
Chiyari was walking among them, beaming with what I recognized as professional pride.
“I keep my constructed copies of the genes and cell types here,” he explained, indicating one shelf. “Once upon a time I grew the cells in culture—a complete simulated metabolism, carrying out all of the necessary biochemical reactions and such in real-time. Took an unbelievable allocation of computing power, as I’m sure you can imagine. My mother’s popularity is a good thing for my work—I was able to rent a couple of servers without too much trouble. But it seemed wasteful to continue. Now I keep the little things in stasis when they’re not being used for a project.”
He took down a vase made of pink-and-clear swirled glass, a matching glass stopper corking its long, straight neck. With deft fingers he removed the stopper and offered me a look into the container’s mouth. A viscous, dark red fluid stared back at me.
“Red blood cells. Complete simulations, or nearly complete. Hemoglobin is one of my favorite molecules, and so neglected—but I included the cytoplasm, the cell membrane and all known proteins. Erythrocytes are easier to simulate fully than other cells. I’m sure you know that they require no DNA.”
So they don’t have to be custom-coded for each subject, I thought. Would Amy’s simulated cells contain her whole Bio genome? I was sure that data was stored somewhere.
He replaced the stopper and put the thing back on the shelf, just as my skin began to crawl. He took a few steps to drag a fingertip along a rack of what appeared to be multicolored test tubes.
“I told you that I do chromatin, too. I don’t go all out, of course, but I like to approximate the concept. Building a full human genome would be incredibly laborious, but I have copies of a few thousand different personal identity markers—the DNA sequences associated with different hair colors, for example, different eye colors, different skin colors. I have sequences related to aspects of mood and personality, height and bone structure, sex, of course—and mitochondrial DNA associated with various ethnic groups and geographic locales.
“Many people here don’t know their ancestry—isn’t that odd? You paid such close attention to the structure of their nerves in the Upl
oad, but almost none to the structure of their genes. That information may be lost forever, now, for many of them.”
I realized as I listened that Chiyari was probably right. And he was probably a better biologist than I am. He may have been doing all of this for the sake of tearing human bodies apart—an interest I found revolting—but he was rapidly revealing an interest in the laws of the Bio world more genuine than any I had seen in decades.
He smiled fondly, and threw an almost involuntary glance towards what I suddenly realized was an enormous tank in the corner, covered by a black tarp. “You don’t want to hear about the body I’m working on for Amy, probably. But if you do, I could show you...”
Images came to my mind of another Upload-world anachronism—the Mutter Museum, where bodies had been displayed in various stages of disassembly. The bodies had been donated at death by their original owners for the education of the gawking public. A disembodied nervous system, circulatory system, skeleton. A pair of eyeballs attached to optic nerves, staring at me through formaldehyde—
I declined.
Bowing to my sensibilities, he moved on.
He showed me a couple of light sculptures—chemical structures enlarged to show the physical forms of the genes encoding for red hair, green eyes, and porcelain-pale complexion. A few stylistic choices made the chemical structures wispy and organic, vibrating with Brownian motion. A stylishly enlarged molecule of hemoglobin was a web, a delicate and intricate crown cast in shades of pink and violet.
When at last the lights rose and the sculptures vanished, I had to admit that his work left me with a faint sense of awe. Most of his work; my eyes strayed to the tank against the opposite wall.
A new body for Amy. A new flesh-and-blood body with more rich complexities of Bio human life, probably, than any other currently in existence. A new vessel, breakable, mortal, but capable of what it meant to be us without the veil of control the rest of us Uploaded had long-since wrapped ourselves in.
A new body. This was the thing I could not give her a century and a half ago; I would have given her that instead of this if I could have, but I did not have the skill. Of course, I had not had Chiyari’s tools either—the ability to synthesize any chemical or structure, simply by knowing how it worked.