Existence

by David Brin

  The high masters of China have Mei Ling and Xiao En in their hands. Or they could, at any time. I truly have no choice.

  In fact, why did I ever believe I had one?

  Bin shifted his weight in order to lean over and bring his own finger toward the slanted, algae-covered boards. Even as he drew a first character, the ai in his eye remonstrated.

  Don’t do this, Bin.

  There are other options.

  But he shook his head and grunted the code word they had taught him for clearing the irritation away. The artificial presence vanished from his right field of vision, allowing him to see clearly the figures that he drew through filmy scum. Fortunately, by now the explosions had faded again, letting him trace the strokes carefully.

  I’m just here to buy soy sauce.

  The soldier stared. From her befuddled look, Bin knew she must not be from China’s central coast, where that old joke still tugged reflex guffaws, even from coolies working on the New Great Wall. Well, humor had never been his thing. Bin moved his finger again and wrote:

  I will aid my nation.

  What must I do?

  An expression of satisfaction spread across the soldier’s face. Clearly, this was better fortune than she had figured on, only moments ago, when she jumped from a balcony of Newer Newport into the uncertain refuge of ocean-covered ruins. Perhaps, this little royal attic still had powerful qi.

  She started to write again, across the scummy, pitched ceiling.

  Very good. We have little time.…

  Bin agreed. Less than five minutes of highly compressed gas remained in his tiny air tank. That is, if he could trust the tiny clock in his goggle lens.

  Nearby … a submerged emergency shelter … where we’ll wait …

  The soldier stopped suddenly, as if her body froze, eyes masked in shadow. Then, as she turned like a marionette tugged by swirling currents, he saw them glint with fear.

  Bin swiveled quickly …

  … to see something very large, looming in the dormer opening. A slithering, snakelike shape—wider than a man—that wriggled upward, its head almost filling the slanted entrance. Robotic eyes began to glow, illuminating every crevice of the cavity. Evidently a powerful fighting machine, it seemed to examine both of them—not only with light, but also pulses of sonar that frisked their bodies like ungentle fingers of sound.

  A sharp spotlight swerved suddenly downward, at the soldier’s pistol sidearm, lying on a broken chunk of wood. Abruptly, a whiplike tendril emerged from its mouth and snatched up the weapon, swallowing it before either human could move. Then a booming voice filled the little hiding place, made only slightly murky by the watery echo chamber.

  “Come, Peng Xiang Bin,” the mechanical creature commanded, as it began to open its jaw wide. “Now. And bring the artifact.”

  Bin realized, with some horror, that the serpent-android wanted him to crawl inside, through that gaping mouth. He cringed back.

  Perhaps sensing his terrified reluctance, the robot spoke again.

  “It is safe to do this … and unsafe to refuse.”

  A threat, then. Bin had plenty of experience with those. Familiarity actually calmed his nerves a little, allowing him to examine the odds.

  Cornered, in a rickety sunken attic, with just a few minutes of air left, facing some sort of ai superbot … um do I have any choice?

  Yet, he could not move forward. So the serpaint made things clear. From one eye, it fired a narrow, brilliant beam of light that left steam bubbles along its path. By the time Bin turned to look, it had finished burning a pair of characters into one of the old roof beams of the Pulupauan royal palace.

  CHOOSE LIFE.

  He thought furiously. No doubt the machine could simply take the worldstone away from him, with one of those tendril things. So … it must realize … or its owners must … that the worldstone required Bin’s touch in order to come alight. Still, he extended a finger and palm-wrote for the creature to see.

  I am needed. It speaks only to me.

  The serpent-machine had no trouble parsing Bin’s handwriting. It nodded.

  “Agreed. Cooperation will be rewarded. But if I must take only the artifact, we will find a way.”

  A way. Bin could well imagine: Offer the stone new candidates for the role of chosen one. As many as it took. With Bin no longer alive.

  “Come now. There is little time.”

  Bin almost dug in his heels, right then. He was sick of people and things saying that to him. Only, after a moment’s stubborn fury, he managed to quash both irritation and fear. Lugging the heavy satchel, he shuffled a step closer, and another.

  Then he glanced back at the Chinese special forces soldier, who was still staring, wide-eyed. There was something in her expression, a pleading look.

  Bin stood in front of the sea monster. He put the satchel down in the muck and raised both hands to write on his palm again.

  What about her?

  The robot considered for a moment, then answered.

  “She knows nothing of my mission, owners, or destination. She may live.”

  Quiet thanks filled the woman’s eyes, fortifying Bin and putting firmness in his step, as he drew close. Though he could not keep from trembling, as he lifted the satchel containing the worldstone and laid it inside that gaping maw. Then, without its weight holding him down, he rotated horizontal and turned his body to start worming inside.

  It was the second strangest act he ever performed.

  The very strangest—and it puzzled him for the next hour—was what he did while crawling inside … when he slipped one hand under his belt, drawing out something filmy and almost translucent, tossing it backward to flutter out of the sea serpent’s jaw, drifting below where its eyes could see … but where the soldier could not help but notice.

  Yang Shenxiu gave it to me to protect from the attackers, and now I’m giving it to one of them. Does that even make sense?

  Yet, somehow, it felt right.

  TORALYZER

  The doctors want me to exercise. To inhabit my new body and get used to its senses. But I’m reluctant.

  Not because it hurts. It does, often intensely. But that’s not my reason. Pain doesn’t have the reflex power it used to possess. I’ve been through so much already, it’s become a familiar companion. I tend to view it as … data.

  Was that a terribly robotic thing for me to say? In keeping with the electromechanical fingers that I flex and the gel-eyes that track from the same sockets in my head, where once stared the brown irises I was born with? But no, I’m not revolted by any of that. Nor even to find myself now a compact cylinder, riding around on cyborg seg-wheels. The clanking-whirring aspect isn’t as bad as expected.

  I admit I was surprised, the first time I looked through these eyes at my new, mechanical hand, and saw what it was holding. That forty-thousand-year-old stone tool-core that Akinobu Sato gave me, back in Albuquerque. For some time I could only stare, as my new fingers flexed, squeezing the ancient artifact as—involuntarily—my other new hand came over to caress it. The touch sensations were a creepy mix of familiar and bizarre.

  Oh, it was good to feel an object again, though the sensory web feeding signals to my brain triggered accompanying glitters of synesthesia. Sparks seemed to follow, each time I stroked the ancient facets where some pre-ancient engineer once fashioned blades, using the highest tech of his age. Turning the stone over, I heard tinkling sounds, like distant, fairy bells, ill tuned, smelling of both soot and time.

  “Why did you give me this?” I asked the docs, who answered, in some puzzlement, that I had asked for the Pleistocene stone relic. Out of some unconscious sense of irony, perhaps? A juxtaposition of tool use, from man’s beginning and his end, like in that Kubrick film?

  I had no memory of the request.

  Oh, this whole process is fascinating. And I’m not ungrateful! Dr. Turgeson asked me, today, if I was glad I chose to participate in these experiments, rather than take the other option�
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  —diving into cryonic deep freeze, hoping to waken in a more advanced age with better medicine.

  Well, why not hang around here and now, when I’m appreciated and fully capable of staying in the game? With vision and mobility, I may yet have a career, dashing about the world, interviewing celebrighties who won’t be able to say no to the famous hero-reporter in her hard-cased segsuit and never-blinking cyberais. Anyway, who wants to bet on cryonic resurrection in some rosy future … with the artifact aliens saying there’s no tomorrow?

  That’s not the problem. Nor was I much upset the time Wesley came to visit, accompanied by his new wife. Their offer to do a group-thing was flattering. (My ovaries are one part of me that survived the explosion intact.) But I wasn’t interested.

  No. My complaint is just this. That I look forward to down time. To turning off the distracting new body and surrounding world. To dive back into the cyber belowverse for twenty hours out of twenty-four. Joining you, my real friends. My smart-mob comrades. My fellow citizen-soldiers. My hounds, sniffing and correlating and baying after the truth!

  So, what do you have for Mama today? What happened during the brief but tedious time I had to be away, dealing with the physical world?

  57.

  ISHMAEL

  The Basque Chimera.

  Mei Ling knew the words, of course. Everyone on Earth had heard the legend: How a brave maiden offered up her womb to carry the seed of a reborn race. A type of human that had gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

  When the virgin mother’s home—a research center in the Spanish Pyrenees—evaporated in a mushroom-shaped pillar of flame, millions reckoned it righteous punishment for many sins, like arrogance, pride, even bestiality.

  Tens of millions grieved.

  And hundreds of millions breathed sad sighs of release. While deploring violent murder, they felt relieved to see a tense matter put off for another generation.

  Mere tens of thousands clung to hope, nursing rumors that Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte still lived, that she had somehow escaped the fiery holocaust in Navarre, finding some place of refuge to birth her child. Even in faraway China, living atop a ramshackle shorestead beside the polluted Huangpu, with barely enough linkage to watch grainy, emo-dramas, Mei Ling had followed this story, so much like a tragic, romantic legend from the fabled days of Han.

  Now, with the real Madonna and child standing up to greet her, Mei Ling felt awkward and tongue-tied. Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte was shorter than expected, with dark, tightly curled hair, olive complexion, and a warm smile as she offered her right hand. Mei Ling briefly wondered if she was supposed to kiss it, as one did with royalty in some occidental movies of bygone days. But no, it became a handshake of the new style, as both women clasped each other’s forearms, more sanitary than pressing sweaty palms together.

  Agurne’s warm squeeze expressed comradeship. Solidarity. “I am so very glad to meet you,” she said in Beijing dialect with a thick foreign accent. As their hands parted company, “We have much to discuss. But first, please let me introduce my son. He has lately chosen for himself the name Hijobosque. Hijo, please say hello.”

  The boy looked ten years old or more, though less time than that had passed since pillars of flame heralded his birth in the forested hills of Auzoberri. Though modesty forbade her to stare, Mei Ling noted that his face bore no sign of the heavy brow ridges that appeared in most artist renderings, predicting the likely appearance of a—

  —she could not recall the name of the cave people who used to inhabit Europe and much of Asia, before the arrival of modern man. They had been thick-boned, short-legged, robustly built people … and those traits seemed to carry through in the boy, though not in any extreme way that shouted stranger! His posture was proudly erect and he seemed no hairier than any other man-child. Perhaps the bony eye-hoods were removed by doctors, to help him hide among regular humans.

  “Please call me Hijo,” he said in a voice that sounded both deeper and more constricted than normal, as if he were deliberately trying for a nasal twang. Or, perhaps he was just overstressing his tones, in speaking Mandarin Chinese.

  When Hijo shook hands with Mei Ling—the older way—Mei Ling felt almost sure there was something different in the way bone and muscle and sinew were put together. His gentle squeeze conveyed a sense of repressed strength. Lots of it.

  Nervously expecting him to say something profound, Mei Ling found Hijo’s next words comfortingly normal.

  “Baby,” he said, spreading open both hands. “Can I hold your baby? I promise to be careful.”

  Remembering that quiet strength, Mei Ling couldn’t help glancing at Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte, who merely smiled in a relaxed way. So did the strange little boy, Yi Ming, who had arranged this encounter, guiding Mei Ling through countless twisty passages beneath the Universe of Disney and the Monkey King. Lifting Xiao En out of his sling carrier, she set an example of holding him, then turned the infant in order to hand him over … watching.

  There was no cause for worry. Hijo hefted Xiao En with evident skill and ease … he must have handled babies before. And Xiao En chortled pleasure at having someone new to charm. In truth, he was getting so big, Mei Ling found it a relief to surrender the weight, for a time.

  Hijo made cooing sounds that drew from Xiao En a drooling, gap-tooth smile. Though they were strange to Mei Ling’s ear … as if two creatures were crooning in different parts of a forest, at the same time.

  Watching the two of them together, Mei Ling wondered how the Basque Chimera had been able to stay free for so long. The modern world’s overlapping cameras fed each other, reporting to smart daitabases. Sure, there had been efforts to conceal the boy’s differences—having undergone reconstructive surgery herself, Mei Ling recognized signs that Hijo’s nose had been altered and possibly even the slope of his forehead. But other things, like a pronounced bulging of the back of the skull, could not be disguised. Though, now that she thought about it …

  … Mei Ling glanced at Yi Ming and realized, some of the telltale traits were shared with millions of others walking around today. People with normal, human pedigrees.

  “Shall we sit?” Agurne invited Mei Ling to join her on a couch. Not far away stood one of the multi-access consoles where men and women—all of them clearly abnormal—had plugged and wired and harnessed themselves, grunting and twitching as complicated light-shows flashed from goggle-covered eyes.

  “I do not—” Mei Ling swallowed, trying for her best grammar. “I do not understand why I am thus honored.”

  Agurne laughed, a gentle sound.

  “Please. We both became pregnant and bore healthy sons under difficult circumstances. We both successfully fled the clutches of great powers. How is it any less of an honor for me to meet you?”

  Mei Ling found herself blushing. And she knew that made her scar tissue stand out, embarrassing her further.

  “How … may I be of service?” she half whispered.

  Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte inhaled deeply. Her eyes glittered with compassionate concern.

  “Normally, I would not be so rude. You have no reason to trust me. At the very least, we would talk a while. Get the measure of each other, one woman and mother to another. But there is so little time. May I go straight to the point?”

  “Please … please do.”

  Agurne motioned with one hand toward the janitorial smart-mob, harnessed into their multisensory portal stations. “All over the world, small groups like this one are joining forces, in an urgent quest for understanding. They can sense that something is happening. Something that cannot be entirely encompassed by words.”

  Mei Ling swallowed hard. She glanced at the boy who was now sitting on the floor, holding her son. Although he was turned partly away, Hijo seemed to sense her question.

  “Yes … I can feel it, too. I am helping. In fact, I have to get back to work, real soon.”

  Agurne smiled with adoring approval, then turned back to Mei Ling and continued.<
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  “I cannot explain what it is that they are doing, or claim to understand, except that it seems to be about destiny. Things and ideas and emotions that may determine the future of humanity, if Allah-of-all-names wills it.”

  Mei Ling could find no words, so she waited for the other woman to say more.

  “Do you know what many of these teams are doing right now?”

  Mei Ling shook her head. No.

  “They are searching for your husband. And the crystal he was last seen carrying into the sea.”

  She had known, of course, all along. Deep down. This could only be about the accursed Demon Stone. “I wish he never found the terrible thing.”

  “I understand. You have cause for bitterness. But do not judge too quickly. We don’t know what role it will play. But one thing is certain. Your husband will be safer if he and the stone can be drawn out of shadows. Into the light.”

  Mei Ling pondered this for long seconds.

  “Can that be done?”

  The other woman’s smile was rueful, apologetic.

  “I don’t know the details. They are searching for him by sifting the daita-sphere. A myriad corners and dimensions of the Great Mesh. The tides and currents and drifting aromas. Many things that are deeply hidden, encrypted and buried behind bulwarks of firewall isolation—these nevertheless leave spoors that can be detected, if only by the studious absence of mention.”

  Mei Ling blinked silently, wondering how this foreigner—born in New Guinea, raised on Fiji, and educated in Europe—became so articulate in Chinese. Better than me, she observed.

  “These are the sort of not-there traces that the Blessed Throwbacks sometimes can detect, invisible to the rest of us.”

  “But not to me!” inserted Hijo, who had laid Xiao En on a plush rug, and was playing a game of peekaboo, to the baby’s delight.

  “No. Not to you,” Agurne responded, indulgently.

  “In fact, I can tell that Mei Ling’s children will be special,” the Neanderthal boy added. “Even though I don’t know why. Nobody can know the future. But some things just leap out. They’re obvious.”