by Sarah Lahey
sort of famous.
MORI GLARES AT THE 3D printer. “Stupid fucking machine.” It has stopped working today, of all days, and Tech is not his forte. “Shit, it’s the galvanometer, totally stuffed.”
Wait, wait, no need to panic. He recalls they have spares. Yes, Quinn ordered them; they’re in a box under her desk. He could be lucky— there might be a spare galvanometer waiting for him in the next room. And if he’s not lucky, she can help fix . . . no, no, no, he shakes his head, not a good idea, she can’t do that. She must stay away from the Station and stay focused on the wedding. He can’t have her too close right now. Everything will be fine if he can keep her distracted for a few more hours. It’s not a good thing he’s done, he’s fully aware, but he has a recovery plan, a blue-sky plan, a win-win, solid-terra-firma plan. He’s calculated the best-case scenario: She never finds out what he’s done, and there’s absolutely no reason to ever tell her the truth. She remains blissfully unaware, it’s a beautiful day to get married, and there’s no need to spoil it. He’s also calculated the worst-case scenario: She finds out and she’s pissed off, no doubt about it—the G12 is her baby. But, he reasons, it’s also kind of his baby, and they’re about to be married and couples share. He can make a case; she’ll understand. She’ll forgive him. No, no, no, she’ll never forgive me. She must never find out.
He checks the time on one of his Bands: a hour until the in-law invasion. He needs an IV vitamin infusion. He had one yesterday, and he tells himself he’s not dependent, but he needs another to get through the morning. He’s a little behind and the in-law invasion is playing on his mind. Not that he’s worried—he knows he’s likable—it’s just that her mother is sort of famous, world famous. A polymath, a professor of physics, and a philosopher of science. Lise has four Science Medals and a Nobel Prize in mathematics. She’s written twenty-two books and published over five hundred papers and essays on science, philosophy, politics, and economics. He looked her up, of course, and read her latest paper on the nesting of empty sets of numbers. It stated that reality is based on mathematics, and mathematics is based on nothing. At least he thinks that is what it said. He read the abstract; the rest was some shit about a theory of existence, or consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, based on nothingness. It was all profoundly disheartening, and he couldn’t get his thought sequence around any of it. At least he can say he read it.
He tells himself to prioritize: first the infusion brew, then he’ll fix the printer—if the piece doesn’t fit, he’ll use the spare printer to print a new part for the primary printer. It’ll take a little longer, but it’s his best option. Next, he needs to finalize the menu for the wedding, then meet the in-laws, check the Cloud Ship, sort the admin forms, and review the maps and geothermal charts. There’s also a pile of shipping requests and permits for Antarctica to finalize—and then the G12 data. That’s important; he needs to do that before she’s up and around, before she gets to it first. He glances again at the time on his Band; it’s still early. He has hours and hours, plenty of time. No need to rush.
He thinks of the menu and sighs. It’s been an absolute nightmare navigating the dietary needs of his guests. He didn’t foresee the difficulty—they’re all humans, they eat to survive, and they should eat what’s offered, but they don’t and they won’t. He’s catered for vegans, flexitarians, medicinal soupers, and edible foragers. But the main concern is animal protein. Transhumans prefer their meat clean and cultivated in a lab, not roaming around on a grassy paddock. Serving rare Wagyu beef with wasabi vinegar is risky and he doesn’t want to offend his VIP guests, but the product has already been sourced, ordered, and slaughtered.
He cornered Quinn a few days ago and ran his predicament past her. She paused, considered his dilemma, then replied, “Fries. You should serve fries. People love them. And beer—beer’s the best. Steak, fries, and beer—it’s a classic combo, you can’t go wrong.”
This confused him. Was she not listening? Had she misunderstood the problem? He tackled her again from a different angle, explaining his Wagyu concern, but she held up her hand, the way she does when she’s working, indicating that she was not to be disturbed, so he backed away.
Today, confidence imbues him. Today, he’s about to be married to a younger woman, a smart woman who knows how Axions define cold dark matter, and her climate model, the G12—well, it’s like having a super power. Her mother’s profile is also a bonus; the elevated social circles of the scientific community can’t hurt his career. He smiles to himself, buoyed by his future prospects, and makes a final decision to go with the beef fillet. If the Transhumans complain, he’ll blame the caterers. Moving down the list, he rejects synthetically produced seafood—no sea urchins, oysters, smoked salmon, or abalone. Half the population are self-harvesting in their cool zones. Next, he runs a line thorough insect sprinkles, cornhusks, and algae—too prolific. The motto is, “Rare food in a rarefied setting.”
Mori met Quinn six months ago. She was pitching her software system, the G12, to his brother, Niels—founder and CEO of eMpower, the Tech giant that liberated personal data. In a world of rising sea levels and human displacement, Niels created a global system that divorced data from the server. It was a sublimely simple strategy: release private information from the one-sided, avaricious, and oppressive relationship with Comm companies, governments, Corps, and search engines that were overtly collecting, mining, and selling the information. For the first time in decades, individuals controlled their own data. Corps couldn’t access it, use it, steal it, sell it, or profit from it in any way, and Niels Eco became a champion of the people—a very wealthy champion of the people.
Niels loves Tech more than he loves people, and the G12 sparked his interest. A synthetic virus that synced with the Earth’s magnetic field, connecting to the planet’s biosphere in real time, it was a predictive weather modeling wonder capable of accurately forecasting temperatures, winds, and rain days in advance. Initially, though, he couldn’t see the point of the system. The population was over global warming; they’d reached peak indifference decades earlier. They didn’t need to be told it was hot and dry because it was hot and dry all the time. Quinn’s system was also designed for nephology, the study of clouds, and she was two decades too late. The last time Niels had seen a cloud, he’d been thirty-five and it was 2035. Now, the only place clouds hovered was over the Polar Regions, where it rained all day, every day.
Despite this, he was interested in the software and the Tech. Quinn’s pitch to him revealed nothing about the software or the Tech, however. He probed and quizzed but got nothing in return and began to lose interest. Quinn, knowing her pitch was going nowhere—it never did—decided to change tactics. She held Niels’s gaze across the room, smiled, and said, “Space weather. Solar flares.”
A single flare could wipe out communication systems across the planet—satellites, the New Internet of Things (NIoT), and GPS, all destroyed in seconds. The G12, Quinn said, was astoundingly accurate at detecting radiation waves. There was potentially Coin to be made.
Niels was potentially interested.
Niels introduced Mori to the young inventor, and he was thunderstruck. Seeing her dark hair tied in a tight ponytail, he wondered what it would look like loose, falling around her shoulders, cascading down her back. Her intellect and her loveliness were also coupled with a familiar surname, Buyers. Well, her mother was practically a celebrity.
Three
On a Theory of
Nothingness.
QUINN WAKES AND RISES from her grassy bed. The Research Station is a two-hour walk away; Lise will be waiting, and two hours is a long time for her to linger. They keep spare motorbikes in the nearby village of Grande Terre—old-style, retro machines with gears and manual steering and no self-balancing, auto-steer, or hands-free. Quinn’s father, Matt, taught her to ride when she was ten, but Mori is not as confident or as skilled a rider as her. On a straight, paved road he’ll stay upright, but tight turns and hill cli
mbs stump him. She suggested modifying a bike for him, fixing it to include auto-assist, but he’s a traditional male and would rather impale himself before that ever happened.
Kerguelen is in the Desolation Islands, one of the most isolated places on Earth—an archipelago of three hundred islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Two months ago, Quinn set up a Research Station near Grande Terre. The place is a culture shock, and the Island is three decades behind the rest of the world—all very Low-Tech, except for Quinn’s little corner, which is filled with scads of equipment: magnetometers, electric sensors, particle detectors. They arrived with a container of modular flat-packed systems that, with the push of a button, expanded into buildings ten times their size. The locals had never seen anything like it; to them it was revolution, some futuristic, science fiction, High-Tech scenario. (It wasn’t; it was just clever hinging and counterbalanced parts.)
Grande Terre is the only village on the Island, and the buildings are the regular sort: two hundred years old, made from rammed earth and clad in timber. There are some retail stores selling maintenance equipment, fishing supplies, and rubber boots and clothing for men and boys, but nothing for women. A few food outlets sell dried goods and grain alcohol. There are two thousand residents, three thousand rare but very cute curly-horned sheep, and no AIs. Not one. The entire Island is robot free. Like the mantra from an AI Detox Retreat: “Reevaluate your relationship with humans. Focus on the tenets of connecting with people, not machines.” Mori thinks it’s ridiculously archaic; life is so much easier with AI doing the heavy lifting. But AI irks Quinn—she finds them tedious, especially when affecting a persona of caring. (If they ask her, “How are you feeling?” or worse, “How are you really feeling?” she tells them to “fuck off.”) She’s not a staunch Humanist, but her father is a devotee of the movement and parental ideologies trickle down.
Quinn jumps on a bike and heads west, following the only road, which trails from the harbor through the village and ends at the Research Station. The buildings at either end of town are abandoned; the farther away the greater the state of disrepair, like a creeping decay, edging towards the center of town. The MedCentre was the first to close, then the two churches, one on either side of town, were boarded up after the RE Wars (Religious Wars or Regional Wars, depending on your cultural ideologies). East verses West may have defined the geographical scope of the Wars, which began after the economic collapse in 2036, but as far as Quinn is concerned, people were fighting over organized religion. Biased political policies united Church and State in the mid 2020s, creating laws and legislation favoring right-wing fundamentalist religious groups. By 2030, Church and State were using violent regulatory forces to uphold religious doctrines. After the RE Wars ended, churches and places of worship were closed. Religion is not banned outright, but worshiping in groups is closely monitored and outspoken religious doctrines and fundamentalism are not tolerated by Hexad, the International Unified Government formed after the RE Wars ended six years ago.
Twenty minutes later, Quinn pulls into the main complex building. She finds Lise resting on a lawn chair in the shade there, and she’s not alone, she’s brought a plus-one: Ada, her ex-partner. Quinn is shocked. She thought it was over, finally over, and the breakup, when it happened, was a relief.
In the beginning, it was a perfect match: two independent, attractive, and accomplished women, Ada happily domestic and Lise happily career driven, neither entrenched in the Humanist or Transhuman camp. The cracks appeared early, when Lise described their new swarm drones as silver-white, like cadmium, and Ada corrected, “Technically grey.” Quinn understood the verity, this was true, the drones were not silver-white like cadmium at all, they were a much darker mid-grey color, like zinc. Then Lise said the new window screens were charcoal, because darker colors clarify the view and she wanted to filter the light and see the streetscape below, and Ada corrected, “Ironstone, not charcoal.” Ironstone. Really? Quinn realized then they magnetically repelled each other.
They split a year ago. But here they are, the two of them together. Is this one last attempt to make it work, to see if they can feel, or find, this thing called love, this thing that humanity can’t live without? Surely not, thinks Quinn, Lise is too smart to do this again.
She dismounts from the bike and kisses her mother’s cheek. “Thanks for coming.” She lowers her voice. “Thought it was over.”
“It is, long story. She loves a destination wedding, and she wanted to see you married.”
“Yes, of course.”
Lise considers her daughter’s furrowed countenance. “Darling, you haven’t slept.”
“I’m fine. Work’s mad.”
Quinn has the same dark, wavy hair and grey-blue eyes as her mother, but Lise’s eyes are world-weary, softer and kinder, and she wears her hair blunt and short. Still, the older Quinn gets, the more she resembles her mother; glimpses of passing reflections are a constant reminder that they share their genome and DNA. Thirty years ago, when Quinn was a fetus, Lise’s cells crossed the placenta and entered her daughter’s bloodstream. Today, they’re still here, in her eyes, her hair, her heart. This sharing of themselves was mutual, and Quinn left embryonic stem cells inside her mother.
The pair have a similar habit of biting their thumbnails when studying calculus. Lise doesn’t cook, and neither does Quinn. Both favor automatic pencils, which leave satisfying, heavy marks on the pages of their notebooks. They love math, and science is their religion. But Lise wants to change the world. She sees it as her duty to challenge the status quo, to make a difference, to find a fairer way for people to live, and this is the focus of her life and her work. Quinn sees problems everywhere; she knows the world is a mess, there are big problems, but she feels they are too weighty for her to address and it’s not her responsibility to solve the dilemmas of humanity in the mid-twenty-first century. The focus of her life is to get through the day without imploding.
Ada steps forward and cups a hand around Quinn’s cheek. “Darling, good to see you,” she says, then spies Quinn’s hands, white and stiff, still cold from the jump. She takes them and rubs them between hers, bringing the blood back. “Child abuse.” She frowns. “Could have been so easily fixed.”
Raynaud’s syndrome affects the lineage of females in Quinn’s family. In cold weather or under stress, Quinn’s smaller arteries spasm and contract, cutting off circulation and blood supply to her extremities—hands, feet, ears, nose. The faulty DNA could have been snipped from her genome using CRISPR before she was born, but her parents knew what was coming. Having a genetic predisposition to the cold would be a useful survival mechanism for the future.
Ada is thin, with muscular shoulders and arms, but her defining feature is her thick eyebrows, which arch gracefully across her forehead, framing her sharp, penetrative eyes. Ada doesn’t fuss; she’s a direct talker. She also knows about fashion. Her belts match her shoes, she owns many pairs of shoes and matching belts, and she can tie a scarf fifteen different ways. Quinn finds these skills mysterious and appealing. Ada is fifteen years younger than Lise, the same age as Mori, and there is an alarming symmetry to this coincidence that Quinn has decided to ignore.
“Darling, this is Tig. He’s staying with me for a few weeks.” Lise introduces a strange figure standing in shadow.
Oh good lordt, she’s brought another plus one.
Tig leaves the shelter of the shade and ambles quickly toward Quinn. With each advancing stride of his, she takes a small step backward. He wears thick bionic glasses that bypass his visual system. As he scans the environment, the glasses feed information directly to his brain neurons. This is Old Tech; he sees maybe 500 million pixels, about half of what she sees. His body is a mix of human and artificial parts and his Tifoam skeleton is exposed along his right side, at the elbow and ankle joints. The skeleton is polyurethane impregnated with a titanium powder that mimics bone structure, allowing human cells to meld with it.
Cyborg. He must be over the line, and if no
t, then he’s close. Tig’s ratio of Tech to Hominoid parts is precariously high. The Authentic Human Alliance (AHA) has been petitioning fiercely for stricter classifications on what constitutes a human. The movement is small but gaining momentum with a core group of active lobbyists, all blessed with strong genetic codes and robust DNA. They say fusion with machine negates biology, giving an unfair evolutionary advantage to the individual. Their motto is, “We draw the line.” And they draw that line at 50 percent. Over the line, with more than 50 percent Tech, and you cannot call yourself “human.” They are machines, cyborgs, and should be excluded from some professions, not given a vote, and required to vacate a seat or a place in a queue for organisms with a higher ratio of organic parts. Transhumans and opponents of AHA say it’s new racism.
Tig doesn’t appear to have any obvious advantage, and she wonders why in the world he’s here with Lise. He’s too old to be an intern. Perhaps he’s a science project, and she’s funding some new Tech? He certainly needs it. Tig half nods, half smiles at her, comically awkward.
She smiles back then turns to her mother. “He could be renovated. A good Technician, some Coin, and you’d never know.”
“Know what?” But Lise knows exactly what her daughter means.
“Luggage, luggage. We have gifts.” Ada, artfully diverting their attention. A rolling luggagebot arrives at Quinn’s feet and falls open, exposing generous contents: coffee, mandarins, and wine. Rare commodities in a heat-soaked world.
Coffee plantations perished in the 2030s. The plants need gentle rainfall and mild temperatures, between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius, to thrive. A seesaw climate took its toll; the bushes stressed and the flowers fell before they turned to fruit. The sturdier plantations were finished off by mealy bugs and coffee berry borers, which love the heat. The prices went up and up, and the world turned to tea. Today, thousands of combinations and infusions keep the human population running. There are teas that wake, teas that sleep-induce, relax, and de-stress. Teas that inspire, hydrate, motivate, and invigorate. Teas that aid memory, promote weight loss, soothe mental health, and cure colds and sprained muscles. Served ice-cold or hot, mild or strong, the ritual of preparing and serving was usurped from Japanese culture and the infused brew is now a global obsession.