Existence

by David Brin

  The room was broad and well appointed, with plush furnishings that adapted to each user’s comfort preference. Programmable draperies were set to soothing patterns that rippled gently, like a freshwater brook. The farthest window was left open. Through it, Bin glimpsed the rest of Newer Newport—more than a hectare of sleek, multistoried luxury, perched on massive footings, firmly anchored over the spot where ancestral kings of Pulupau once had their palace.

  Some distance beyond, a series of other mammoth stilt-villages, each wildly different in style, followed the curve of a drowned atoll. Thielburg, Patria, Galt’s Gulch and several others with names that were even harder to remember. One of them, all stainless steel and glass, was dedicated to caring for aged aristocrats, immersing them in comfort and threevee experience, before freezing them for a nitrogen-chilled journey through time, aimed at repair and resurrection in a hundred years or so—to be young again, in tech-enhanced paradise.

  Another artificial islet, with polycarbonano architecture reminiscent of palm logs and thatch roofing, was set aside for the old royal family and a number of genuine Pulupauese. As legalistic insurance, no doubt. In case any nation or consortium should doubt the sovereign independence of this archipelago of wealth.

  Seasteading. Of course, Bin had heard of such places. Along the spectrum of human prosperity, these projects lay at the very opposite end from the shorestead that he had settled with Mei Ling in the garbage-strewn Huangpu. Here, and in a few dozen other locales, some of the world’s richest families had pooled funds to buy up small nations to call their own, escaping all obligation (especially taxes) owed to the continental states, with their teeming, populist masses. Yet, Bin could see a few traits shared in common by seastead and shorestead. Adaptation. Making the best of rising seas. Turning calamity into advantage.

  Three technical experts—a graceful Filipina who never removed her wraparound immersion goggles; an islander, possibly a native Pulupauan, who kept fingering his interactive crucifix; and an elderly Chinese gentleman, who spoke in the soft tones of a scholar—watched Peng Xiang Bin and Nguyen Ky gingerly replace the worldstone in its handcrafted cradle, surrounded by instruments and sleek, ailectronic displays.

  The ovoid had already started coming alive in response to Bin’s touch. As keeper of the worldstone, he alone could rouse the object to craft lustrous images—like a whole world or universe shining within an egglike capsule, less than half a meter long. Whatever the reason for his special knack, Bin was grateful for the honor, for the resulting employment, and for a chance to participate in matters far above his normal station of life. Though he missed Mei Ling and the baby.

  The now familiar entity Courier of Caution lurked—or seemed to—just within the pitted, ovoid curves, amid those swirling clouds. Courier’s ribbon eye stared outward, resembling Anna Arroyo’s unblinking goggles, while the creature’s diamond-shaped, four-lipped mouth pursed in a perpetual expression of uneasiness or disapproval.

  Bin carefully reattached a makeshift device at one end that compensated for some of the object’s surface damage, partly restoring a sonic connection. Of course, he had no idea how the mechanism—or anything else in the room—worked. But he kept trying to learn every procedure, if only so the others would consider him a colleague … and less an experimental subject.

  From their wary expressions, it might take some time.

  “Let us resume,” Dr. Nguyen said. “We were attempting to learn about the stone’s arrival on Earth. Here are the ideograms we want you to try next, please.” The small man laid a sheet of e-paper in front of Xiang Bin, bearing a series of characters. They looked complex and very old—even archaic.

  Fortunately, Bin did not have to hold the ovoid in his hands anymore. Just standing nearby seemed to suffice. Bringing his right index finger close—and sticking out his tongue a little in concentration—he copied the first symbol by tracing it across the surface of the worldstone. Inky brushstrokes seemed to follow his touch-path. Actually, it came out rather pretty. Calligraphy … one of the great Chinese art forms. Who figured I would have a knack for it?

  He managed the next figure more quickly. And a third one. Evidently, the ideograms were not in modern Chinese, but some older dialect and writing system—more pictographic and less formalized—from the warring states period that preceded the unification standards of great Chin, the first emperor. Fortunately, the implant in his eye went ahead and offered a translation, which he spoke aloud in modern Putonghua.

  “Date of arrival on Earth?”

  There were two projects going on at once. The first involved using ancient symbols to ask questions. But Dr. Nguyen also wanted to expose the entity to modern words. Ideally—if it truly was much smarter than an Earthly ai—it should learn the more recent version of Chinese, and other languages as well. Anyway, this would test the ovoid’s adaptability.

  After a brief pause, Courier appeared to lift one arm, weirdly double-elbowed, and knocked Bin’s ideograms away with a flick of one three-fingered hand, causing them to shatter and dissolve. The simulated alien proceeded to draw a series of new figures that jostled and arrayed themselves against the worldstone’s inner face. Bin also sensed the bulbous right end of the stone emit faint vibrations. Sophisticated detectors fed these to a computer, whose vaice then uttered enhanced sounds that Bin didn’t understand.

  Fortunately, Yang Shenxiu, the white-haired Chinese scholar, could. He tapped a uniscroll in front of him.

  “Yes, yes! So that is how those words used to be pronounced. Wonderful.”

  “And what do they mean, please?” demanded the Vietnamese mogul standing nearby.

  “Oh, he … the being who resides within … says that he cannot track the passage of time, since he slept for so long. But he will offer something that should be just as good.”

  Dr. Nguyen stepped closer. “And pray, what is that?”

  The alien brought its forearms together and then apart again. The ever-present clouds seemed to converge, bringing darkness upon a patch of the worldstone, till deep black reigned across the center. Bin caught a pointlike glitter … and another … then two more … and another pair …

  “Stars,” announced Anna Arroyo. “Six of them, arrayed in a rough hexagon … with a final one in the middle, slightly off center … I’m searching the online constellation catalogs … Damn. All present-day matches include some stars that are below seventh magnitude, so they’d have been invisible to people long ago. It’s unlikely…”

  “Please do not curse or blaspheme,” said the islander, Paul Menelaua. “Let’s recall that the topic at hand is time. Dates. When. Stars shift.” Still fondling the animatronic cross that hung from a chain around his neck, he added. “Try going retrograde…”

  The figure of Jesus seemed to squirm, a little, under his touch. Anna frowned at his terse rebuke, but she nodded. “I’m on it. Backsifting and doing a whole sky match-search in one hundred year intervals. This could take a while.”

  Bin grunted. Held back a moment. Then blurted:

  “Seven!”

  The scholar and the rich man turned to him. Bin had to swallow to gather courage, managing a low croak. “I … think the number of stars may … make this simpler.”

  “What do you mean, Peng Xiang Bin?” asked Dr. Nguyen.

  “I mean … maybe … you should try the Seven Maidens. You know. The…” He groped for a name.

  “Pleiades,” the scholar, Yang Shenxiu, finished for him, at about the same time as Bin’s aiware also supplied the name. “Yes, that would be a good guess.”

  The Filipina woman interrupted. “Got you. Scanning time-drift of just that one cluster, back … back … Yes! It’s a good match. The Pleiades-Subaru constellation, just under five thousand years ago. Wow.”

  “Well done.” Dr. Nguyen nodded. “I expected something like this. My young friend Xiang Bin, please tell us again about the box that formerly held the worldstone—what did the inscription say?’

  Bin recited from memory.<
br />
  “‘Unearthed in Harappa, 1926’…”

  He then spoke the second half with an involuntary shiver.

  “‘Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.’”

  “Harappa, yes,” Nguyen nodded, ignoring the other part. “A center of the Indus Valley culture … poor third sister during the earliest days of urban civilization, after Mesopotamia and Egypt.” He glanced at the scholar Yang Shenxiu, who continued.

  “Some think it was a stunted state—cramped, paranoid, and never fully literate. Others admired its level of primly regimented urban planning. We don’t really know what happened to the Indus civilization. Abandoned about 1700 B.C.E., they say. Possibly a great flood weakened both main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. By possible coincidence, several thousand li to the west, the great volcano at Thera may have—”

  Dr. Nguyen shook his head, and the elegant braids swished. “But this makes no sense! Why would it be speaking to us in archaic Chinese, a dialect from more than a millennium later? Harappa was buried under sand by then!”

  “Shall I try to ask, sir?” Bin took a step forward.

  The small man waved a hand in front of his face. “No. I am following a script of questions, prioritized by colleagues and associates around the world. We’ll keep to these points, then fill in gaps later. Go to the next set of characters, Xiang Bin, if you would please.”

  Bin felt gratified again by Dr. Nguyen’s unfailing politeness. The gentleman had been well brought up, for sure—skilled at how best to treat underlings. Perhaps I will get to work for him forever. Not a harsh fate to contemplate, so long as Mei Ling and the baby could join him soon.

  He meant to prove his value to this man. So, bending over the stone, Bin carefully sketched four more of the complicated ideograms that Professor Yang Shenxiu had provided, in a style from long ago. Dr. Nguyen’s consortium could not wait for their worldstone to learn modern Chinese. There wasn’t time. Not with the planet already in an uproar over mysterious sights and sounds that were being emitted by the so-called Havana Artifact—another alien emissary-stone that the American astronaut recently retrieved from high orbit. This stone in front of Bin offered a way to check—in secret—on tales being told by the other one in Washington.

  So far, they knew one thing. Courier did not seem to approve of the Havana Artifact. Shown images of the more famous object, Courier reacted with crouches and slashing motions, so clear and easily understood they might be universal across the cosmos. Elaborating upon an earlier warning of danger, the entity in Bin’s worldstone added another that was easy to translate.

  Liars!

  TORALYZER

  I should count my blessings.

  Crisped-by-flame, aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, I’d be dead in any previous era. I would be nonexistent, or else (slim agnostic chance) gone on to some posthumous reward.

  But this is my era, and I’ve been offered options that would seem miraculous to any of my ancestors. Starting with a chance to keep on practicing my trade, while this tormented-barbecued body lies entombed within a canister of life-sustaining gel. Is that worth a (more than a little) bit of ongoing agony? Getting to travel the world as a ghost-journalist e-porter, chatting up celebrighties, tracking rumors, stirring up smart-mobs (!), keeping busy.

  Some of you have asked about organ reconstruction. Skin grafts are an ongoing bone of contention between me and the docs—they hurt like hell. But with biojet printers to spray my very own restemmed cells onto layered scaffolds, all the simple, fibrous, and vasculated tissue can be grown—liver, spleen, and left lung—just like the vat-farmer raised that beeftish burger you had for lunch.

  There’s even talk of arm and leg transplants, if a reclam donor with my rare antigen type can be found. But I sense doubtful tones under their hopeful words, what with all the nerve damage I suffered. For certain I’ll never again have real eyes and ears. (It’s a wonder my skull protected what it did.)

  So what’s the point? Shall I regain mobility by want-controlling a robotic walker? One of those hissing, clanking things?

  Some of you ask: What about uploading? Heck, I already exist mostly in cyberspace. Why not just abandon this ruined body and go the rest of the way—taking my whole consciousness into the Net? Become one with my online avatars! That notion has always been 99 percent fiction and 1 percent science … till Marguerita deSilva and her followers began claiming that soon anybody will be able to become just like her pet, the god-rat Porfirio, thriving in virtual worlds that are vaster than anything “real.”

  And now there are the Artifact aliens, who seem to prove her right. If we choose to join their interstellar federation, will they show us how to upload ourselves into crystal worlds, as they did?

  Is there any way to tell if it’s worthwhile?

  Of course, there are other options for a person like me. Some of you say: “All problems will be solved in the due course of time.” So, might the world a century from now be able to fix me up? Repair my poor body to youthful vigor? And is that chance worth a risky journey through time?

  It’s illegal in most places to freeze a living person. The cryonics companies have to wait, rushing in to freeze you the moment doctors declare you are legally dead. But I’ve had offers from rich fans (no, I won’t tell) who say they’ll pay my way to San Sebastian, or Pulupau, or Friedmania or Rand’s Freehold, where local law doesn’t quibble such details. Heck, I’m now a heroine and historical figure! Won’t folks want to thaw my frozen corpsicle and heal me, in some marvelous future?

  Here’s a one-sentence sales pitch that one true believer sent me: “The cryonics long shot lets us see our pending brain death not as the solipsistic obliteration of our world but as a long sleep that precedes a very major surgery.”

  Hm, to sleep. Ah, but perchance to dream? That’s one possible rub.

  Worse, what if religious folk, like my parents, turn out to be right? That death is a spirit release. A door opening to something beyond? Might cryonic suspension simply quash and defer what would have been the soul’s reward? Replacing it with an icy nordic version of hell?

  Don’t everybody sneer till you’ve been in my position. There aren’t many pure atheists in gel tanks.

  35.

  SENSING DESTINY’S CALL

  The marchers were protesting something. That much Mei Ling could tell, even without virring. But what were they complaining about? Which issue concerned them, from a worldwide collection of grievances more numerous than stars?

  Carrying no placards or signs, and dressed in a wild brew of styles, the mostly youthful throng milled forward, in the general direction of the Shanghai Universe of Disney and the Monkey King. Each individual pretended to be minding his or her own business, chattering with companions, window-shopping, or just wandering amid a seemingly random throng of visitor-tourists. Cameras were all over the place of course, atop every lamppost and street sign or pixel-painted on every window rim. Yet nothing was going on that should attract undue attention from monitors of state security, or the local proctors of decent order.

  But there were coincidences too frequent to dismiss. For example, they all wore pixelated clothing that glittered and throbbed with ever-changing patterns. One girl had her tunic set to radiate a motif of waving pine trees. A boy’s abstract design featured undulating ocean waves. Only when, as Mei Ling watched, the two bumped briefly against each other, did the two image displays seem to merge and combine across their backs, lining up to convey what her eye—but possibly no ai—briefly recognized as a trio of symbols.

  SEEK URBAN SERENITY.

  The youths parted again, erasing that momentary coalescence of forest and sea. Perhaps the two of them had never met before that terse, choreographed rendezvous. They might not ever meet again. But soon, amid the throng, another seemingly chance encounter created a different, fleeting message that caught Mei Ling’s built-in, organic pattern recognition system, still more subtle than anything cybernetic, inherited from when her distant ancestors roamed the Afri
can tall grass, sifting for signs of prey. Or danger.

  RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP IS APPRECIATED.

  No doubt about it. That’s what the shimmer of fleeting characters said.

  Passersby and shoppers were turning to notice, nudging their neighbors and waggling their hands to toss virt-alerts down the street. Crowds of onlookers formed in time to catch the next flicker-pronouncement, as a fat man sidled next to a broad-shouldered woman with orange-striped hair. Their combined pixel-garments proclaimed—

  THE TANG EMPERORS ENCOURAGED CREATIVITY.

  Watching from a niche between a hair salon and a stall offering pungent chicktish meat, Mei Ling reflexively rocked the baby in his sling carrier, while wondering. Why did these young people go to such lengths to stay disconnected from their messages, preserving their ability to deny responsibility, when the meanings seemed so innocent? So harmless?

  Oh, she realized, the real essence must lie elsewhere. In vir-space.

  Mei Ling pulled out the set of cheap augmented reality spectacles that she had purchased from a vendor, just a little while ago. It seemed a reasonable use of cash, in an era when so much of the world lay beyond sight of normal eyes. Especially with Xiang Bin gone on his strange adventure beyond the sea. So long as he had a job, helping make that strange, demon-infested stone perform tricks for the penguin creature, she had money. Enough to pay off some repairs to their salvaged shorestead home and even take Xiao En on an early morning shopping expedition into the bustling city, where giant arcology pyramids loomed upward to block half the sky, proclaiming the greatness of the world’s new superpower.

  Mei Ling had chosen this time because such a large portion of the planet’s population was watching proceedings at the Artifact Conference in America that she figured the streets would be largely empty. But it turned out that the event was in recess for several hours, which meant people were pouring outdoors to do important shopping or business, or get a little air. It made the boulevards especially crowded—and ideal for this kind of youth demonstration.