by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)
[I was afraid you might say that. Though to be fair, if our circumstances were reversed, I might feel the same.]
A coldness grips my heart. All I have to do is think about what I would do if our positions were reversed. My morph might be shaped like an anaconda, and Maxwell Montes might be the only feature on Venus named after a man rather than a woman or a goddess, but the biggest prick on Venus is clearly myself.
You’re going to lose the XP from this entirely if you leave me here.
[Check the integrity of your morph.]
I realize that the damage has been more extensive than I thought. The seals and gaskets are engineered with worse tolerance than I—we—had designed ahead of time. I won’t be able to survive indefinitely, even on the top of the mountain.
Of course he’s changed the plan on me. He’s going to leave me to die and then retrieve the cortical stack. It’s what I would have done if my fork got disobedient. It’s the damned pressure and heat. I’m not thinking things through.
I get the claws of my manipulators over my skull. If I can get to the cyber brain, maybe I can threaten to hold it hostage and force him to scramble to save me.
[Tsk-tsk. How can you know so little of yourself?]
My manipulators bump into the bulge of the farcaster, and my heart goes cold.
Damn you!
And as the explosion cuts the power to my manipulators while activating the farcaster, everything slows down, goes dark, approaches that suspended moment in a sea of flashing stars.
* * *
—
Octavia’s newest attraction is a theater—an old-fashioned theater that puts on real plays with real actors. It appears that transhumanity, like our human ancestors, still associates culture with age. Just like handmade clothes still fetch a premium over copies popping out of cornucopia machines, the theater charges admission prices many times the fee for the best XP casts, and still, it’s hard to get tickets.
Arthur is opening tonight. I manage to get one of the best seats from the scalpers. I’ve just ended my marriage with Casey, and I might as well let myself be seen by the best society on Octavia, to let everyone know that I am once again available.
I mingle at the preshow cocktail hour. Beautiful morphs surround me, presenting in every gender and subtype of beauty, all of them young, all of them lovely, as plastinated and ageless as myself. I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw a wrinkled face among the wealthy who live on Octavia. Our conversation, aided by our muses, flows as smoothly as the river of time. But all I feel is boredom, an unsatisfied yearning for authenticity.
It’s a silly reaction, I know. All morphs now are equally fake in the sense that they are the result of Art rather than Nature. It’s the ego that matters, only the ego.
But as I look into the eyes of each morph, there’s no recognition of a kindred spirit, no sense of anyone who truly understands themselves. We’re a society of twisted old cowardly souls hiding behind youthful masks, enacting a play for our own amusement. We do not understand what it means to take risks, to live with death.
An overwhelming sense of loneliness seizes me. I am the only real person in a world of dolls.
The light dims, and the actors take to the stage.
To my surprise, I find myself entranced by the play. The lack of audience participation and full sensory immersion—the way there would be in a vid or XP—somehow seems to enhance the experience. The novelty of the primitive format makes me sit up and pay attention, as do the crude, outdated emotions being portrayed.
Uther Pendragon stares at Igraine, and even without him saying anything, I understand what he’s thinking. There is a fire in his eyes whose meaning is unmistakable, even though an invisible wall of millennia, of art and life, divides the ancient king and me.
Gorlois of Tintagel, Duke of Cornwall and husband to Lady Igraine, looks from the king to his wife and then back again. A dark light appears in his eyes, an explosive anger suppressed by the weight of loyalty and obligation.
The woman sitting next to me leans over and whispers, “He should have just ordered a pleasure pod constructed to her exact appearance. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.”
I look at her. Her morph presents as someone in her early twenties, but the twinkle in her eyes tell me that a much older ego lies within. It’s a lovely morph, perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, just on the edge of being a sylph without the sense of plastic falsity.
“You presume that the king desires the lady solely because of her morph,” I say. “But what makes you think it isn’t about her spirit, her ego?”
She cocks her head, a smile curving up the corners of her mouth. “You believe love isn’t about the flesh?” A silvery pendant in the shape of a six-petaled flower dangling from a chain around her neck glitters in the light from the stage. My muse confirms my guess: the flower is a narcissus.
The flame of desire comes alight in me, stronger than it has been in a long time. It is a matter of instinct, an intuition of the authentic.
“I believe everything is experienced by the flesh,” I say. “Love, fear, joy, suffering. But the flesh serves the will of the ego.”
“A transubstantiation, then,” she says. “The ego converts the experiences of the flesh into understanding. One cannot live without the other.”
How right she is. How close to my own ruminations.
Lady Igraine laughs at some joke from her banquet companion and turns to glance at Uther Pendragon. She stops, her breath caught, and the lights shift until the other players, including Gorlois, her husband, fade into the darkness, leaving only the king and the lady at the center of the stage. The color of the lighting changes subtly until the lady’s face glows like a ripe apple seen through a veil.
“Such glamour,” I whisper. It is an effect more extraordinary than the sylphs sculpted by the best genetic artists.
She leans into my ear. “Do you know the root of the word glamour?” Her breath lightly tickles my cheek, and for a moment I forget about Lady Igraine.
“It’s grammar,” I say. “In medieval times the word referred to any kind of arcane learning and secret knowledge.”
“It’s a spell,” she says. “A spell the beloved casts over the lover.” She puts her hand over mine, boldly, confidently. It is as if she knows exactly what I am thinking, can diagram my reactions like a beginner’s composition. My desire grows more ardent.
“A spell of the ego,” I say. “Through the flesh but not of it.” She nods. “A secret knowledge that two people share. Lovers act as the mirrors for each other’s souls. Perhaps when you love someone, you hear an echo of your ego.”
In the ears of another, these words might have seemed slightly cynical, but I like their brutal honesty, a vision of love stripped of romance. As soon as I hear the metaphor, I realize that it has always lived in me, perhaps buried, waiting for this moment.
Onstage, Merlin waves his staff and Uther Pendragon spins in place. A mist rises and engulfs him. By the time the mist dissipates, the actor playing Gorlois is standing in his place. Merlin has placed a glamour on the king, made him take on the appearance of Lady Igraine’s husband so that he can rape her by deceit, to possess her in her impregnable castle.
“It’s a lovely resleeving,” she says, “from the age of magic.”
“A rather dirty trick,” I say. “And I suppose there truly is nothing new under the sun.”
Igraine comes to the door of her room and looks into the eyes of the man who appears as her husband. They embrace in a soul-searing kiss. “How can she not recognize her husband’s ego?” I ask. “If she truly loves him, she will know the duke is but an impostor in her husband’s sleeve.”
“Perhaps she isn’t truly deceived,” she says. “Rather, she wants to make love to another ego through her husband’s morph. What is the point of life except to g
ather more experiences and to understand yourself?” It’s lovely to be with someone so in tune with you that she says what you have in mind just a moment before you do.
* * *
—
We make love in every way possible, with the aid of pleasure pods and simulspaces and mesh implants and old-fashioned physical toys. We mindfuck until pain is pleasure and pleasure is ecstasy. She knows exactly what I like and I can tell exactly what will turn her on.
We are made for each other. It’s a cliché. That doesn’t make it untrue.
I decide that I must do something I’ve never done with any of my lovers: I will let her peek beneath the mask. What is the point of life except to gather more experiences?
“Let me show you the source of my wealth,” I tell her. Sure, working as a psychosurgeon on Octavia pays well, but not well enough to have all the experiences I crave.
* * *
—
“What exactly is it that you offer?” she asks. We are standing in an operating room at the back of my office: a suspended surgical platform, an ego bridge on its own separate power supply, an array of consoles and computers and top-of-the-line medical nanofabricators.
It looks just like the two other operating rooms I own, but no one ever comes into this one except special patients—clients, really—who are recommended to me by word of mouth.
Bureaucrats of the Morningstar Constellation, high-level executives at the hypercorps, aging bosses of criminal networks, or most common of all, just bored, wealthy individuals in search of what cannot be bought any other way—I’ve dealt with them all. All I care about is that they have the verified credits.
I tell my muse to set the room’s lighting for “consultation mode.” The walls fade away; the room darkens; she and I remain limned by a soft silvery glow. Around us are the emptiness of space and the distant pinpricks of stars—my design is intended to reinforce the idea of isolation and security from eavesdropping ears. Always take advantage of people’s instincts—evolution goes deeper than you think.
“Usually I ask the muses to edit the entoptics to blur out my face and the face of whoever else is in here with me,” I tell her.
“That’s a little paranoid,” she says.
“They don’t need to know what I look like, and I don’t want to know what they look like. It’s safer for both sides.”
“Now I’m really intrigued,” she says. She licks her lips in a gesture I’ve come to love, and one which I’ve come to imitate, as naturally as though I’ve always done it myself.
“Money is very nice, but what we do in here is illegal on most of the worlds of the inner system.”
She looks into my eyes and then deliberately scans the dim room that seems to float in space once more. Her gaze lingers on the hard contours of the ego bridge, on the invisible seams that will split apart when the petals of the mechanical lotus open to engulf a patient’s head like a lion’s maw.
I designed my ego bridge to have six petals modeled on the flower of the narcissus, the flower of the ego.
Her breath quickens; she has a guess. But there is a social taboo to what I do, a taboo that she dares not yet broach. I can almost see her thoughts racing through her mind—I understand her so well that it is uncanny. This must be the power of love, something I have not truly experienced until now.
“Like many of the very wealthy, you have everything,” I say. My voice is slow and soothing. It may sound like I’m speaking the way I counsel one of my clients, who often have to overcome the shame of what they’re about to request, but this is different. This is a speech from the heart, an unfolding of my real self like the opening of a flower. “We live in a true age of magic, when we have conquered death and aging and can fulfill all the desires of the flesh. Yet you want more out of life. You want something that they tell you you can’t have.”
Steadily she holds my gaze, encouraging me to continue. I do.
“You want to experience the thrill of approaching death, of facing terror, of staring oblivion in the face. You want to know your true self, which only death can reveal.”
She nods, almost imperceptibly.
I tell her about my life. I have hiked across the apocalyptic landscape of the Fallen Earth until dying of thirst; I have been ripped to pieces by nanoswarms gone wild; I have flown by neutron stars beyond a Pandora’s gate until the tidal forces tore me apart; I have swum in the oceans of Europa until my limbs froze and I sank into the bottomless abyss; I have melted into the lava flows of Io until my consciousness winked out like an ice chip. There is no method of death I have not experienced, no form of pain I have not personally endured.
I have gorged on pain and suffering. I have eaten my fill of death.
I know exactly what she wants. We are meant to gather all the experiences, to feed our ego with all that existence has to offer until we know ourselves better than any in the history of humanity and transhumanity.
“Experience playback is not enough. You’ve tried everything extreme and gruesome the market offers, and still they won’t do. The sensory impressions of another, no matter how vivid and detailed, are filtered through a different consciousness. The XP software has to translate the subtle differences between different minds so that by the time the experience is played back for you, the colors feel just a bit dull, the smells a bit stale, and the sensations slightly off.
“What you want is the experience of death itself, not a pale imitation.”
I hear a sharp intake of breath. Her head is still. I smile. As though looking into a mirror, she has recognized in me a kindred soul. Empathy is the best lubricant for the tongue.
“I’m terrified,” she blurts out. Now that she has started to speak, the words tumble over each other in a torrent. “I’ve thought about doing some of these crazy things you’ve mentioned, but I just can’t bring myself to go through with them. They say that backups and resleeving have eliminated the fear of death, but it’s not true. Not true.”
“It’s one thing to know that if you die in an accident, some version of you can be brought back,” I say. “But it’s entirely different to walk into death deliberately just for the experience.”
“Yes! And being restored from a backup isn’t the same thing—if I dive into the ocean of sparkling diamonds on Saturn and die, and the insurance policy kicks in to restore me from a backup, I will have gained nothing because the experience will have been lost. The backed-up-and-restored me still wouldn’t know what it’s like.”
“That’s right,” I say. “And if you sail through the swirling bands of Saturn as a synthmorph designed to survive the journey, you’ll feel nothing. It will be just like sitting in a submarine and looking at the darkness outside, but not being with the darkness.”
She nods vigorously. “I want to be of the world, but I also want to be safe.”
I want to weep with the joy of understanding. This same contradictory hunger has always motivated me: dying is the most exquisite experience for a satiated palate, a dish whose variety never stales; yet, I don’t want to die at all.
Time for me to shatter the taboo. “The only way to achieve what you want is to create an alpha fork of yourself and then make it die.”
She listens without any expression of shock. A promising sign.
“An alpha fork is you, and so what it experiences can be merged back into you without any translation. It will be a thousand times purer and more vivid than any XP.”
“If my fork must die,” she says, hesitating again, “how will I get to merge with her?”
I frown slightly at her usage of the incorrect pronoun but decide to let it go. “It—the fork—will be farcast back to you as close to the moment of death as possible. It’s tricky to get the timing right, but if we lose the fork, we can always try again. I’m very good at making alpha forks; I’ve had a lot of experience.”
S
he looks skeptical. “But if my fork knows that she’ll be farcast just before death, wouldn’t she be—”
“If the fork knows that it will be farcast,” I say, carefully enunciating the pronoun, “it will indeed take away from the experience. But it’s relatively easy to perform the minimal neural pruning to take away that knowledge.”
“So my fork will think she’s going to die—”
“That is how we make sure you get to savor the full range of your own terror, pain, despair, and thereby come to know yourself.”
She takes another deep breath. “But I don’t want to die, and neither will my fork. Do you have to tie my fork down and send her to death?”
“That will be very boring,” I tell her. “Much of what I provide is the experience of active struggle against great odds, an adventure that will allow you to know your own full potential. I have a great deal of experience in motivating forks to do what they’re supposed to do even though they don’t want to die. Trust me. Your fork will put on a good show for you.”
“You’re speaking of torture,” she says. “A fork is you, but also isn’t you. It is a person—”
“All flesh,” I say, “serves the ego.” I don’t get impatient with her qualms. I’ve experienced them myself. The strict regulation of forking and the taboo against the objectification of alpha forks are premised on the notion that such forks are independent egos with their own rights, but how can that be true when the fork is but an extension of a unified ego, an image seen in the mirror reflecting upon the glory of the original?
Silently I pray for her to understand, to see the vision of my grand task. It is lonely to not be able to share a beauty that has enthralled you, to be a single star shining in darkness, unconnected to the rest of the universe.
“But then…when you merge with the fork, won’t your fork hate you?”
“Of course!” I pull her to me. “But that is also part of it: to subdue that hatred and to incorporate it into yourself, to conquer that despair and the weakness within—I have killed myself hundreds of times and happily swallowed the dark knot of hatred. When you have overcome self-hatred, there is nothing in the world you dare not do. Ethics of a more primitive age are for lesser beings, while we should live as gods, containing multitudes!”