by Sarah Lahey
***
In Kerguelen, Lise’s sleep zone is a rudimentary, compact space with modular furniture. The bed rolls out from underneath the storage, and during the day a table folds from the wall and the space works as a dining and study area. It’s small but she’s is happy to have her own cabin and not share with Ada. Bringing her as a plus-one was a terrible idea, and she berates herself—what was she thinking? How did she let herself be coerced like this? Maim is the one who should be here with her, not Ada. But of course Maim couldn’t come, not in her position; it’s too difficult, too dangerous, for her to travel. They haven’t made their relationship public yet, but they will after the election, after Maim wins—Lise is sure she’ll win. Maim and her party may be the only hope the planet has.
Lise signals for her luggagebot to open. Carefully, she unpacks a long black evening gown and hangs it on the side of the storage unit. Then she takes a notebook and an automatic pencil, sits at the table, and begins making notations. She draws a distinctive V symbol on the page. Her Band hums; it’s Maim. She smiles and accepts the call.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hello, miss me?”
“It’s only been a day, but yes, what are you doing?”
“I’m in bed.”
“You’re on my side, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I’m wearing your clothes.”
“Ha, well you should be here with me, except there’s nothing to be here for. It’s off.”
“What do you mean, it’s off?”
“She called it off. There’s no wedding; she’s not in love.”
“Oh good lordt, and you’ve come all that way. Is she okay?”
“She’ll be fine. It was the right thing to do, and I’m glad I’m here. I needed to be here. And I might stick around for a few days. They’re going to Antarctica.” Lise draws a second V, alongside the first.
“That’s not a coincidence, is it?”
“No, it’s not. I had a breakthrough with the code, an epiphany of sorts.” Lise scribbles wiggly markings across the tops of her V’s. “It came to me in a dream. I fell asleep on the transporter and when I woke I knew what they were—the markings on the Disc, the correlation. I know what it is.” Pressing lightly, she traces over her V markings many times, her pen working back and forth. “It’s obvious now. It’s all come together, and with the right catalyst I can make it work.”
“Have you told Tig?”
“No, we’ve had no time alone and he’s acting very strange. He keeps staring at Quinn like a lost puppy, and it’s pissing her off.”
“Oh fuck, just make sure he’s taking his Meds. Have you given her the stone?”
A shadow passes under the door; someone is standing outside the cabin, listening to their conversation.
“Not yet. Listen I need to go, I’ll call you later.”
“I love you.”
“Me, too. And make the bed before you leave.”
Seven
Pink diamonds.
We’re entangled qubits.
MORI FLICKS THE OFFICE chair with his hand and watches it spin a few times before pausing the revolutions and taking a seat. That was unexpected. Abruptly, he stands and paces the room, back and forth, before returning to the chair, where he sits again. A bit of a surprise—he wasn’t expecting that. She’s not 100 percent sure; she’s only 80 percent. He grins. Only 80 percent. Eighty percent is great; of course, it is. He has nothing to worry about. It’s a glitch and she’ll come around. It’s too soon. She just needs more time, and the event, Dining in the Clouds—it’s overwhelming. He reprimands himself. He should have realized sooner; she’s young and everything is new, and she’s never traveled before, never even left Hobart. Her life skills are, well, they’re limited. What did Niels say? “Brains of a fifty-year-old, emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old.” Well, maybe he was right after all.
Niels. What’s he going to say about all this? Mori knows he won’t say, “I told you so”—the phrase is not in his repertoire. Niels has a multitude of despondent expressions that succinctly sum up his options on the human race. He already thinks Mori’s an idiot, and he knows he fucked up in Antarctica. Well, he doesn’t need to know about the wedding situation. She just needs time, that’s all, and Mori is prepared to wait. He’ll make an effort with the sex; he’s been lazy, he’ll concede that, forgetting to renew the subscription on his SelfMed, but he’ll sort it out and reinstall the program.
Okay, enough self-recrimination. This is not about him; it has nothing to do with him. She’s young and naïve and female; it’s to be expected. But, didn’t he handle it well? He chuckles. He got the cloud dress out of it. Smart thinking, bottom-up thinking, yes, that was a profit, a gain for him.
Now he needs to focus, synergize his brain, and carry out the final checks on the Cloud Ship. There’s time, he’s not behind, but the platform needs be raised so he can generate the effect: a giant cumulous cloud on a base of aerogel. Quinn suggested the base material and it’s perfect, 99 percent air and 1 percent silicon; guests will feel like they are walking on a cloud. Controlling the temperature and humidity will keep the cloud stable, and a combination of nuclear forces, which Quinn helped him correlate, will hold the effect together.
***
Later that afternoon, rested, perfectly punctual, and wearing a white cumulous cloud with white knee-length boots (to keep her feet warm five thousand meters above sea level), Quinn carefully steps into the first AirPod. The arrival is a significant part of the experience: guests will traverse solid terra firma to the ethereal beauty of the cumulous cloud in AirPods. After checking that her veil of mist is still intact, she rises into the sky and is dismayed to see that Mori’s cumulous cloud is not a perfect example; it’s too wispy and its cotton-like, cauliflower-shaped piles lack height and volume. It also arcs to the right, like a great white shark has taken an enormous bite from one side. But, she acknowledges, it’s a good effort, an adequate cloud, and it’s his first attempt; with practice, he’ll become more acquainted with the Tech.
On board, her task is to greet the guests, help them out of the Pods, make some small talk about the weather, and then point them toward the bar. If a longer conversation is required, she’ll start discussing electromagnetism and the combination of weak and strong nuclear forces holding the cloud together, and the guests will then seek solace in a cold beverage without her direction.
Before anyone else arrives, she skulls one drink for nerves. It will be her only one of the night; a sober cloud is more emotionally resilient than a drunk cloud. But she knows that later tonight, after this day over, after she gets down and kills the cloud dress, she’s going to drink more alcohol than she should.
The numbers on board multiply as the guests arrive, and soon a noisy din settles over the cloud. Exotic food circles the room: fertilized hens’ eggs with fennel pollen, snake hearts with truffle salt, large fish eyes with monstera deliciosa foam, bananas that taste like sumac, edible cutlery that tastes like saffron, edible plates that taste like tuna. One guest tries to eat her serviette, which isn’t edible, forcing Quinn to intervene, and a little tug-of-war ensues between them before Quinn firmly snatches it from her. There’s no wine; instead, an endless round of cocktails and spirits drifts past on levitating trays.
Lise, Ada, and Tig board. Tig is wearing longer pants and a black shirt with a gold-embroidered collar. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, the metal bangles nestled at his wrists and his titanium skeleton exposed at his elbow. It’s a bold move in a crowd like this; some guests won’t appreciate sharing their exclusive dining experience with a cyborg. He appears not to care, in fact he has a disdainful smirk on his face, which Quinn puts down to intellectual impediment.
The dress code is formal. Both Ada and Lise wear full-length evening gowns, one in red and the other black. A tight red choker encases Ada’s fine neck and Lise wears a single pink stone, the color of raspberries. Unpolished and rough-cut, it hangs on a thin silver thread around her neck. W
hen she and Ada see Quinn, they pull her to one side, look her over, the full head-to-toe examination, and then burst into laughter.
“Really?” Quinn asks. “Is it that bad? It wasn’t my idea, and it’s the least I could do. Is it too short?”
“Yes, but you’ve got good legs,” says Ada. “And those boots!”
“Darling, I have something for you.” Lise opens a small box. Inside is a crimson stone, a rough-cut pink diamond matching the one she’s wearing—a beautiful, rare, exquisite gem.
Overwhelmed, Quinn begins to protest.
“Nonsense,” says Lise, fastening the stone around her daughter’s neck. “Pink diamonds. We’re entangled qubits; always remember this.”
Their conversation is interrupted by a man wearing a Fourth Estate crest. The journalist is keen for an interview; 2050 is a Global Election year and Lise is politically active, a strong opponent of the high-profile New Federation Party and its leader, Dirac Devine. Lise is pro-science, and new scientific discoveries defy New Fed’s political agendas, which pine for past eras of hard right dominance and fundamentalist religious control over the population. A minority of economic elite finances the party, and they’re all anti-science.
Last week, Lise delivered a scathing speech on the party and its anti-science doctrines. It’s not surprising that Fourth Estate wants a follow-up remark.
“How does science fit into the political agenda of the mid-twenty-first century?” asks the journalist. The question drives to the heart of the political dissension between Lise and New Federation.
Lise smiles. “Let me be very clear. Science doesn’t fit into anything—science is fundamental to everything. It’s who we are. Now, let’s talk about my new book. I’m working on a mathematical algorithm to decode reality. You see, the world around us is an illusion, a fabrication of the brain. Put simply, there is no physical world—at least, not as we know it.”
“Yes, your latest book,” the journalist stammers, floundering. He projects a hologram onto his wrist and scrolls though his research. “It talks about . . . math, and algorithms, and the world being . . . an illusion.” He looks up at Lise, seeking confirmation. “That’s right isn’t it?”
Lise knits her brow. “Didn’t I just say that?”
“Yes. I think you did. Sorry, I do political rounds. I know next to nothing about science.”
“Then why don’t you ask me about my next book?”
“Okay, tell me something about your next book,” he says obligingly.
“Kind of you to ask. I’m investigating time travel. I’m sure we can go forward; that’s a given. It’s the past I’m interested in. Specifically, closed causal loops, like the Predestination Paradox—where an event in the past influences an event in the future.”
“The future sounds terrifying,” the journalist quips.
“No,” Lise says. “The future is easy; it’s the present that’s terrifying.”
The journalist departs, and Quinn turns to her mother. “Time travel. Really?”
“Yes. Really.” Lise smiles. “I’ve discovered a portal—a type of wormhole—and I know how to open it. I cracked the final piece of the code on my way here, while we were on the Transporter.”
Surely she’s kidding? “A time travel portal. Are you serious?”
“Do I look serious?”
“Yes. You look very serious, and it makes me very nervous.” Quinn shakes her head. “What are you going to do with your . . . time travel portal?”
“I’ve thought quite a lot about it. Time travel raises complex moral issues, and it throws the laws of cause and effect out the window. You see, going back in time could set up an Ontological Paradox, where you have no discernable origin—you just exist. It might make existence meaningless.”
“I thought it was already meaningless. Wasn’t that the point of your last book?”
“No. Existence has meaning—it just isn’t real. Anyway, it doesn’t sound like much fun, traveling back and forth in a loop—so easy to get stuck. I’m not sure I’ll use the portal.”
I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. “Good. I’m glad. Stay here in the ‘terrifying present’ with the rest of us.”
“I mean, I would use it if I absolutely had to. If it was an absolute necessity.”
“Absolutely necessities cover so many things,” Quinn muses. “Like, saving the planet, reversing climate change . . . that’s a given, right?”
“Fraught with danger. And we can still save the planet.”
“Okay, what about going back in time to meet Stephen Hawking?”
“Yes, that’s perfect. You could also use it to escape boring fools who try to eat their serviettes.”
“Agreed,” says Quinn.
Ada is engaged in conversation on the other side of the Ship. She waves at Lise to get her attention, and Lise casts a weary glance in her direction.
Ada points to her empty glass. Then she turns the glass upside down—there’s not a drop left in it. Apparently, she needs another drink, and she’d like Lise to fetch it for her.
Quinn turns back to her mother. “Or you could use the portal to escape annoying ex-lovers. Surely that’s an absolute necessity.”
“I think that goes without saying,” says Lise.
***
Two guests declined the invitation to the wedding in the clouds. Quinn’s father, Matt, didn’t even open the card. “Not my thing,” he said, and Quinn knew what he actually meant was, “It’s fucking ridiculous and it’s over the top.” She countered with the fact that it wasn’t her thing either; it was Mori’s thing.
“And the Coin? What’ll it cost?” he asked.
“Not sure, maybe a hundred.”
“Fuck!”
“Maybe not that much.”
He opted out. She understood. Matt lives an isolated, hermit-style, Low-Tech life in the forest. He likes to watch the sun come up and he likes to watch it go down, and some days that’s about as complex as his life gets. He’s a songwriter, but he calls himself a poet, an aging ex-rocker with existential angst. AI compose jingles and melodies and they play instruments with flawless precision, but they are feeble with lyrics and vain with rhyme. They don’t know what it’s like to lose your job to a machine or live in a world of ten billion people and still feel lonely. They don’t understand the effect of the incessant heat, and they can’t long for rain or a cool breeze. They can’t sing about breakups or the mother of your child leaving you for a woman. They can’t write anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-corporate choruses that students chant in the streets. In the years around the War, the sad years, Matt was in his element, at his peak.
Quinn thinks Matt would have liked Kerguelen, the harsh and isolated scenery. He would have admired the reserved population of farm-fishermen. He’s a signed-up Humanist; people, nature, the planet, these are the only things that matter to him. He has no time for High-Tech or Transhumans. To him the Earth is sacred, and he doesn’t see the logic in traveling to Titan. Humanists will never leave this planet and nothing will dissuade them, not scorching temperatures or rising sea levels. They believe they are connected to every rock, tree, and river, and if they left Earth they’d shrivel up and die. Transhumans, on the other hand, see no future on Earth; they see their future in the stars, in the universe. Mars didn’t work, but Titan waits for them.
The other significant guest not joining Quinn on the Cloud Ship is Jin, Quinn’s closest friend. Jin is her confidant, her go-to person when she needs to complain, or cry, or laugh. She’s her sometimes soul mate, her constant bullshit detector, her work alter ego and counterpart, and she’s a refreshingly contrary figure to Matt. Jin’s a pledged Transhuman who loves Tech, worships AI, and holds an obsessively optimistic view of the future. As a teenager, she pined for CRISPR gene editing to change her eye color to yellow, greenish-yellow, cat eyes. Her parents refused, but she eventually got her wish: her irises now glint a greenish-yellow hue—a side effect of the feline flu (FF) virus. Jin is currentl
y recovering from FF, her third bout, so she’s strictly grounded.
FF mutated from a cat virus. It started showing up a while back in people who’d had long exposures to felines. Extreme temperatures caused a switch in the feline gene trigger, and a once-benign virus mutated in the animal’s cell. The toxoplasmosis shifted to birds, then to small mammals, then to big mammals and humans. It thwarted the human immune system by entering the genome and killing off any immune cells that endangered it. In the early 2040s, 5 percent of the world’s population died during the pandemic. A DNA vaccine worked for a while, then the virus mutated, in some cases every day, so there was enormous variation between strains. A new strain meant a new vaccine, and it took years to get on top of the pandemic.
Eight
It’s not meant to be raining.
THE CLOUD SHIP IS at capacity. There are 256 people on board, or 257, counting Tig. But Quinn’s sure he’s over the line, so he doesn’t qualify. Now, the only one missing is Mori.
***
Mori is pleased with himself; a perfect run, no glitches. This time the tiger team reached new heights basking in the radiance of the lofty canopy. Comments on the menu are filtering down, and what a success. Quinn’s dress was a coup, and she wore it for him. She wore it because she loves him—she just doesn’t know it yet. Now he’s anxious to get up there and savor the accolades. Man of the moment. Tycoon of his time. Entrepreneur of his era. Yes, he needs to get up there, greet his guests, and bask in the glory of their comments. Of course, Lise will be there and he’ll have to navigate her surly persona; what an abrasive moo she turned out to be.
He ponders what Quinn has told her mother, what excuses she spieled to her. Did she tell her it was too soon and she was only 80 percent? Perhaps she said she changed her mind and left it at that. After all, it’s a private matter, between the two of them.