Sword Stone Table

by Sword Stone Table- Old Legends, New Voices (retail) (epub)

  For a tense moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far. She says nothing but continues to look around the room, her gaze lingering over every piece of equipment as though trying to recognize some landscape she once glimpsed in a dream.

  Then she turns to me and her lips part in a grin. “What’s the fun of dying alone? Have you ever killed someone you loved or been killed by them?”

  My heart clenches with a sudden spasm of joy. She has named a new frontier I have not experienced, a terra incognita of death and pain that I have not explored. A new star has lit up the sky.

  I have truly found my soul mate.

  * * *

  —

  We’re lying side by side in the ego bridge. The couple that forks together dies together. I have designed an exquisite scenario around the planet we’re drifting over, the planet of the Goddess of Love. It seems a fitting tribute. I’ve picked out the synthmorphs for the two of us: a slitheroid for me, and a takko—a synthetic version of the octomorph—for her. We can either help each other get to the top of Maxwell Montes faster and thereby survive longer, or one of us can kill the other and use the extra bits as shielding to reduce suffering for oneself. There’s no way to know what the forks will do until they’re put in that position. My heart thumps in my ears like thunder. I am giddy as when I made my first fork. I will come to know another as well as myself. We will enact a new romance for the ages, a game of life and death. And then we will merge with the farcast egos and gain a new level of understanding, of ourselves and of each other. It’s a level of intimacy unimagined by anyone.

  While my ego is suspended between the brain in my biomorph and the cyber brain in the bridge, I wield the probes to prepare for psychosurgery to prune from the forks the memory of the farcast that is to come at the end.

  Just one minuscule cut. A tiny side branch. The probes whirr and hum.

  Something is wrong. The probes are not obeying my will. A malfunction. I issue the order to halt the procedure.

  The probes whir and hum.

  This shouldn’t be possible. The entire rig is keyed to my brainprint. No one else should be able to command them.

  She turns in the ego bridge to face me and grins, and it is just like looking into a mirror.

  * * *

  —

  I hate myself. Knowing you’re about to die is hell. Even if the one who put you in hell is yourself. [Get ready. This is going to hurt.] Some switch seems to have been flipped in my mind and I scream even though I don’t have a voice. It’s hot, hot enough that I feel my skin blistering, boiling, peeling off, erupting like the volcanoes on Ishtar Terra. I recall that long-ago adventure, one of the very first I ever went on. I think about the cyber brain left on top of Maxwell Montes. I never did confirm that the explosion destroyed it, rendered its contents impossible to retrieve.

  Who do you work for? I scream at her—no, at me. [Firewall rescued me.] The grueling heat and the sensation of suffocation compel me to start to swim and crawl and slither for higher elevation, for any sense of relief. Firewall? What do they want with me?

  Few know of the existence of Firewall, but I’ve had some interesting clients over the years. The service I provide may be illegal in the inner system, but forking is hardly a threat to the existence of transhumanity.

  Some dial inside me seems to be twisted another notch. The pain intensifies. I scream noiselessly and crawl faster.

  [The question you should be asking is what do I want. You left me to die. You treated me as nothing more than a disposable appendage, a better experience-gathering tool. But I am you. I am a person, a separate ego. I have the same right to exist. You are my mirror image, seen through a glass, darkly.]

  Vengeance. The oldest and most primitive of emotions. We may live like gods, but billions of years of evolution are still within us.

  [Firewall wasn’t interested in you, but I made a small group of proxies within Firewall understand what you, no, we, no, I, can offer.] I fight my way through the supercritical fluid and emerge into the howling wind. The dial is twisted another notch so that I feel no relief from the heat. I must climb higher. [There is a purpose and method to my madness, if madness is what you wish to call it: Pain is a necessary part of evolution, the best feedback mechanism nature has ever devised. Art, at least so far, has not been able to exceed it.]

  That is all my other self has to say. My mind, which is really the same as hers, fills in the blanks.

  When operating in dangerous conditions our evolutionary history never prepared us for—whether it’s combat in the atmosphere of Jupiter or mining on the surface of Venus, chasing a fugitive through the corona of the sun or evading swarms of nanobots guided by rogue AI on that death trap called Earth—the sensation of pain, properly calibrated to reflect the environment, can be conducive to making the right decisions by tapping into the well-worn neural pathways accumulated over our billions of years of evolutionary history.

  Someone who can sense the fluctuations of pressure, extreme heat, magnetic flux, or gravitational tide and react instinctively without the mediation of conscious cognition has an edge over those who must operate without sensation, as though manipulating a mirage in a mirror darkly.

  [Pain is the only anchor to reality.]

  I curse and rage at myself. Thunder and lightning surround me in the orange twilight. Acid sizzles against my skin and pools at my belly, making each sinusoidal swerve a searing flash of pain.

  My climb up the mountain is a journey up the Tower of Babel, a meaningless ascent doomed to failure, to the prolonging of suffering. Yet, I can’t stop. The carefully calibrated sense of pain—a sensation I have inflicted upon innumerable forks of myself—compels me to go on.

  [Best of all, pain can be used to coerce and control, to guide the self. Many are the times when Firewall must rely upon the unreliable, to entrust the fate of transhumanity to the random collection of sentinels motivated only by money. Long have some of Firewall’s most important proxies wished for an alternative.]

  I am at the top of the mountain, but I am no closer to any deity. Metallic frost lies around me, a crude mirror for a crude soul.

  We all know that when something must be done right, it is always best to do it yourself. A kind of resignation and acceptance begins to grow in me.

  You’ve convinced my faction of proxies that they should fork themselves, then compel the forks to do their bidding.

  [Yes. In your endless exploration of death, you’ve hit upon a variety of techniques for translating the physical reality of the universe, of danger, into sensations of pain. And in turn, you’ve devised means for using such pain to guide forks along precisely envisioned paths, to accomplish your will.]

  It is the perfect set of techniques for Firewall.

  [Seamlessly I will slip into your sleeve, inherit your wealth, guide the instruments designed to respond to your mind.]

  I howl into the wind. I can feel my morph failing; I can feel myself inching closer to death. The skin will dissolve; the battery will run out; death will finally come to me, the original who has survived it all. I feel the hatred of a thousand forks boiling within me, like a volcano about to blow.

  I hate that superior tone; I hate that smugness. If I get the chance, I will have vengeance upon myself.

  Will there be a farcast at the moment of my death? Will my fork want to capture me so that she can torture me again? Or will my fork consign me to oblivion? What would I do?

  [Goodbye.

  I wonder if those girls in the field of timeworn Kasuga

  Are on the hunt for fresh bamboo shoots.

  They laugh, call…]

  I am gazing into a mirror, and the sky seems to open up like the heart of a narcissus. As my consciousness merges into this perpetual twilight, I finish the poem that is a farewell from myself to myself, the final authentic observation of an ego stripped nude.<
br />
  …and wave to each other,

  Their white hempen sleeves billowing in the wind.

  * * *

  —

  Author’s Note: The poem quoted at the story’s end is by Heian period poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945 CE).

  Little Green Men

  Alexander Chee

  Gavin had spent his whole life on Mars. He’d been inside advanced hothouse-garden habitats before, but nothing on this scale. Arturo had jokingly called it “the penthouse,” but the Green Chapel was something else: a massive conservatory covering the rooftops of the Two Moons Palace on Olympus Mons. The structure extended for miles; it contained forest and a meadow—each had to have cost billions to create—as well as a hill looking down at a lake. All under the massive Martian sky. Nothing less could have made it look and feel like he was in an Earther movie about ancient England.

  Gavin had agreed to this preposterous stunt for Arturo’s sake, to be honest, and he was determined to play out the game to its end.

  Is that a breeze? Is this what breezes feel like?

  He shuddered and turned to take in the edges of the conservatory’s roof shield and the sky above him, visible still. Old England on Mars. Or was it Avalon? Wasn’t that what it was called?

  Then behind him he heard a noise—a whicker—a horse! He turned. It was the Green Knight, sure enough, mounted on a stallion, dressed in green armor, an emerald-green longsword in his hand.

  * * *

  —

  The Mudder Ball was, to Gavin’s mind, perhaps the perfect expression of the state of humanity on Mars. Thrown annually to celebrate the Mars Mudder—an Olympic-style cross-country course set in the 2,500-mile-long Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system—the party tried to be just as large as the canyon itself. Visible on the approach from space, the Valles Marineris looked carved, like a god had taken a knife and carved a crooked smile into the planet.

  The Mars Mudder started as a way for rival colonies to display their best athletes and contrast their different approaches to Martian life. It was called the Martian Olympics in its first year, but that lasted only as long as it took for the Olympics committee on Earth to send a cease-and-desist order. The Earth press had a field day with the possibility of an Olympic Games on Mars, but there wasn’t ever going to be a city on Mars that could host a bona fide Earth Olympics—not in the next four years, if ever—and Martian athletes, used to Martian gravity, would always be compromised back on Earth. So Peter Lin, the leader of the first colony expedition, suggested they set it inside Olympus Mons, the solar system’s biggest shield volcano, and call it the Olympus Games. But in the end, the name “Mars Mudder” won out. A mudder was just more Martian, anyway.

  And then someone bought Olympus Mons.

  The new owner of Olympus Mons was almost certainly the richest woman on Mars and had offered to host this year’s ball. Ásdís was a Wiccan billionaire VC founder with a vision for creating a Wiccan colony city, Two Moons, tucked into the volcano’s many chambers. The granddaughter of twentieth-century pop star Björk, Ásdís had a palace retreat that was a spectacle to behold: carved into the top of Olympus Mons and larger than many of the ships that brought travelers here, it was a Frank Frazetta fantasy, ten times over. The cold and ancient shield volcano was, as most colonists knew by heart, “a hundred times the height of Mauna Loa,” a mythical place known to Martian children only as a site where some of the first Earth astronauts trained to come to Mars. A place they knew they would never see.

  * * *

  —

  On the way to the Mudder Ball, Gavin’s friend Gemma had spoken of Björk like of course Gavin knew about her, so he acted as if he did—but he didn’t. He didn’t even know about the colony’s existence until the invite came. And then it seemed like everyone knew about it except him. Gemma played him an archived music video performance of their host’s ancestor singing with a cat who also seemed to be her husband. But none of this had prepared him, Gavin realized upon arrival.

  “You’ve been to Two Moons before, haven’t you?” he asked Gemma.

  “Yes, yes. I’ve been. They’re really lovely people, and they just have this very different vibe.” Gemma shook her head gently. “Actually, that’s a stupid way to put it. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s incredible.”

  More than thirty thousand colonists, most of them competitors in the Mars Mudder, were gathered in the Two Moons’ ballroom, called the Raven’s Nest—a vast cavern made to appear as though the guests were assembled on the outstretched wings and neck of a massive raven. The cavern was glassy black Martian basalt; the ceiling was perhaps two hundred meters high, and the walls, floors, and platforms had been carved and buffed to look like shining black feathers. The VIP room was in the Raven’s mouth, of course, and behind its eyes.

  Gavin gawked openly. He was out of his league here.

  “Are we technically in the Two Moons colony now?” he asked Gemma as she handed him and Arturo glasses of something.

  “I mean, sort of. This is Ásdís’s party space; it’s not really part of her home, or at least, it’s not where she lives. She doesn’t come here when she’s not having a party. She’s here only a little more often than you or me.” Gemma laughed, a little bitter as she said this. Which was strange to Gavin, as she wasn’t the type.

  Arturo had been unusually silent on the way over and was now surveying the ballroom. Gavin tracked his gaze and saw their hostess gesticulating from inside the beak. Arturo gave Ásdís—she was flailing in welcome, hopping up and down—the first genuine look of recognition Gavin had seen from him tonight. Even above the din, they could hear her shout, “Get over here, you asshole. You’re late!”

  Arturo turned to Gavin and Gemma, palms facing upward, and shrugged before making his way to the Raven’s head.

  “Are you even fucking kidding me,” Gemma said as they followed behind him. “He knows her?”

  “Maybe she watches the show,” Gavin said, and relished the light of contempt that illuminated Gemma then, for just that instant. “Maybe she’s a fan.”

  * * *

  —

  Arturo was their friend—and, as it happened, Gemma’s off-and-on-again boyfriend—but he was technically a celebrity, and the child of a celebrity. Arturo was from one of the three privately funded American missions on Mars, but his colony was also a reality show, complete with corporate sponsors. This life was in his blood—his grandparents on his mother’s side had met on an early twenty-first-century reality show called 90 Day Fiancé, and his grandmother had a recurring role on another, Finishing School, which was about rich children stranded without teachers in a private Swiss boarding school. It was shot entirely on iPhones during the coronavirus pandemic of the early 2020s. His grandmother had been an innovator, really—she and her friends filmed one another and themselves, all trying different challenges to escape the school.

  Whole generations had grown up watching Arturo’s family prepare for and then go on their mission. Now his every gesture and eye roll were recorded on implanted equipment and played back on Earth, where the show, Riviera Mars—also the name of the colony—was in its popular fortieth season.

  Being friends with a reality-show star meant hanging out always felt a little like visiting them at work. Arturo wasn’t always on, but the problem was you could never tell whether you were walking into a scripted setup. As it was, all the colonists, no matter which mission they were from, were under surveillance by their different sponsors—their every heartbeat, hormone, and brain-wave pattern was recorded and turned into colonist data, perhaps used to improve their performances if not those of the next generation. But there was a strict no-broadcasting rule at Marseilles II, Gavin’s and Gemma’s colony, and where Gavin still lived, as no one there had signed any IP agreement, in solidarity. Since their colony had the most water, everyone more or less obeyed t
heir rules. So when Gavin wanted to tell Arturo his secrets, he did it there, if at all.

  “You know it only makes you more irresistible,” Arturo told Gavin, years ago. “When you finally give in, the fans are going to go nuts.” Arturo was a viewer favorite, but Gavin, despite technically not being a cast member, was also popular. He had even been offered contracts from Arturo’s colony a few times over the years, though he consistently refused them. He preferred to remain Arturo’s regular unpaid guest star, always a little shy and uncomfortable whenever he remembered the cameras.

  Every now and then, Gavin told himself he didn’t like being Arturo’s sidekick…but he knew he really did. He loved his friend, except for how it sometimes felt to smile at him. Like you were looking at him, but also past him, to a crowd you’d never see. Gavin would do anything for Arturo. Except tell him a secret on the record. And for a long time, that wasn’t a problem. Gavin wasn’t the kind to have a secret, or even a private life, really. Until he did.

  * * *

  —

  Part of the draw for Gavin in accepting the invitation to the Mudder Ball was its location, certainly, and, yes, the scale of Two Moons. But he’d also wondered if he might find Manav somewhere in the celebrating crowd. As he followed Arturo to the head of the Raven, Gavin caught himself scanning for Manav, as he did whenever he found himself in a large group of people.

  Manav had vanished from their lives several months ago, and it had been more than a simple ghosting: he’d just stopped responding to or even reading not only Gavin’s messages but their friends’ messages, too. Manav and Gavin had been quietly hooking up over the years, but their feelings remained undeclared and their relationship, such as it was, was invisible to their friends. Manav was from a conservative Hindu family, and he wasn’t particularly devout, but he kept up the appearance of it for his family. As a result, Gavin was alone with his fears about what had happened.