Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  She did not recall exactly what it had said, or how it said it. But it was curious about her; she remembered that, and the voice, calling her cousin: it had been an Other, a Sys-God of the GoA.

  Why had it called her that? When she came through she was back on her ship, the object inventoried, her credits up by a thousand points, her health and strength and shielding maxed.

  And suddenly she knew what she wanted. She wanted, achingly and clearly, to know more about Others.

  The next day she had left the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, but the mystery followed her as she emerged, blinking and shaking, into the sunlight. She sat by the river, her muscles weak, and drank thick coffee, sweetened with condensed milk. Cousin, the voice had said, evoking a strange feeling, a longing inside her. She thought of her family, her line, twisting like DNA strands all the way back to St. Cohen.

  But who was he?

  She returned to Tel Aviv with uncertainty burned out by passion. She knew what she wanted.

  What she didn’t know yet was how to get it.

  The truth was that after the twelve-hour flight to Tel Aviv, Matt Cohen had a headache. He sat in the front of the taxi, next to the driver, an Arab man wearing fake Gucci sunglasses. Two of his research team were with him, Balazs and Phiri, crammed uncomfortably into the back seat of the car with their bulky equipment.

  Matt blinked in the glare of light. His pressed white shirt was crumpled from the flight, already beginning to stain with sweat from the hot Mediterranean climate he was unused to. He wished he had invested in a pair of sunglasses, fake or not, like the driver.

  In a way, coming here had been an act of last resort.

  The taxi deposited them on the outskirts of the Old City of Jerusalem, and left them there, with their luggage, in the approaching dusk. Church bells mixed with the call of mosques. Orthodox Jews clad in black walked past, arguing intensely. It was cooler up in the mountains. Matt was grateful for that, at least.

  “So,” Phiri said.

  “So,” Matt said.

  “This is it,” Balazs said. They looked at each other, these three disparate people, weary after the long flight, and the moving from country to country, lab to lab, sometimes in the dead of night, in a hurry, sometimes leaving notes and equipment behind, sometimes one step ahead of irate landlords, or other creditors, or even the law.

  They had not been popular, these scientists, their research considered both a dead-end and immoral. For they sought to Frankenstein, to breed life in their closed networks the way a biologist might breed tadpoles and watch them become frogs. They had the tadpoles, but as yet those tadpoles had not turned into either frogs or princesses, they continued to exist only in potentia. Now they checked in, into the small hostel that would be their temporary headquarters until they could, once again, set up shop.

  The servers rested silent in their coolers, their code suspended, not living, not dead. Matt’s fingers itched to plug them in, to boot them up, to run them, to let the wild code inside mate and mutate, split and merge and split and merge, lines of code entwining and branching, growing ever more complex and aware.

  A breeding grounds.

  The Breeding Grounds, as they’d later be known.

  The evolutionary track from which Others emerged.

  Matt Cohen and his team had moved across state lines in the United States; had gone to Europe, for a time, sought refuge in Monaco and Lichtenstein, then offshore, on lonely islands where the palm trees moved lazily in the breeze. The Others could have emerged in Vanuatu, or Saudi Arabia, or Laos. Resistance to the research was concentrated and public, for to create life is to play God, as Victor Frankenstein had found, to his cost.

  It’s what Life magazine called him, back in the day. A Frankenstein; when all he wanted was to be left alone with his computers, knowing that he did not know what he was doing, that digital intelligence, those not-yet-born Others, could not be designed, could not be programmed, by those who wrongly used the term artificial intelligence. Matt was an evolutionary scientist, not a programmer. He did not know what form they would take when at last they emerged. Evolution alone would determine that.

  “Matt?”

  Phiri was shaking his shoulder, gently.

  “Yes.”

  “We need to check in. It’s getting late,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, you’re right.”

  But still he did not move. He cast one last look at the sky but it was overcast, there was nothing to be read there of the future and what it might become; and so he led his small team inside, where they checked in for the night; but really, it could have happened anywhere.

  “But a Joining?” Anat said to Ruth. They were sitting on the beach at midnight; Ruth shrugged uneasily as Anat lit a ubiq cigarette. The latest thing from New Israel on Mars: high-density data encoded in the smoke particles. Anat inhaled deeply, the data travelling into her lungs, entering the blood stream and into the brain—an almost immediate rush of pure knowledge.

  Anat blew out steam and grinned goofily.

  “You know about Others,” Ruth said.

  Anat said, “You know I worked as a hostess—”

  “Yes.”

  Anat made a face. “It was odd,” she said. “You’re not really aware, when they’re body-surfing you. They download into your node, controlling your motor functions, getting the sensory feed. While you’re somewhere in the Conversation, in virtuality, or just nowhere—” She shrugged. “Asleep,” she said. “But then, when you wake up, you just feel different. Like, you don’t know what they did with your body. They’re supposed to keep it healthy, unless you get paid extra, I know some of us did but I never took the money. But you notice little things. Dirt under your left little finger, where it hadn’t been before. A scratch on your inner thigh. A different perfume. A different cut of hair. But subtle. Almost as if they’re trying to play games with you, to make you doubt that you saw anything. To make you wonder what it was you did. Your body did. What they did with it.” She took a sip of her wine. “It was all right,” she said. “For a while. The money was good. But I wouldn’t do it now. Sometimes I’m afraid they can forcibly take me over. Break down my node security, take over my body again—”

  “They would never!” Ruth said, shocked. “There are treaties, hard-coded protocols!”

  “Sometimes I dream that they enter me,” Anat said, ignoring her. “I wake up slowly but I am still dreaming, and I know I am sharing my body with countless Others, all watching through my eyes, and I feel their fascination, when I move my fingers or curl my lip, but it is a detached sort of interest, the way they would look at any other math problem. They’re not like us, Ruth. You can’t share with a mind this different. You can be on, or off. But you can’t be both.”

  There had been a dreamy, detached look in Anat’s eyes that night. She had been changed by her contact with the Others, Ruth had thought. There was addiction there, a fascination not unlike what some people had with God.

  They had lost contact, at last. Anat had remained human, after all, while Ruth. . . .

  For a time she had tried religion, Crucifixation: Ruth took her first hit in the robotniks’ junkyard, by fires burning in upturned half-barrels, with the stars and the Earth’s orbiting settlements shining high above in a dark sky.

  Religion intoxicated Ruth, but only for a while. Infatuation fades. In the drug she found no truth that couldn’t be found in the GoA or other virtualities. Was heaven real? Or was it yet another construct, another virtuality within the Conversation’s distributed networks of networks, the drug merely a trigger?

  Either way, she thought, it was linked to the Others. Eventually, the more time you spent in the virtuality where they lived, everything linked to the Others.

  Without the drugs she had no faith of her own. Something in her psychological makeup prohibited her from believing. Other humans believed the same way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and
temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species. But they did not reach their ghostly hands to Ruth: something inside her was lacking.

  She needed something more. One day she went back to Jerusalem, to visit the old labs where the Others were first bred. They were kept unchanged, a memorial place, a place of pilgrimage. . . .

  “Nazis out! Nazis out!”

  Five months later and it was happening again.

  The villagers with pitchforks and burning torches, Balazs called them. The protesters were diffuse but globally organised. They had pursued the research team to each hastily abandoned location but here, in Jerusalem, the plight of the ur-creatures, trapped in the prison of the closed network of the Breeding Grounds, raised public sympathies to a new level. Matt wasn’t sure why.

  The Vatican had lodged an official complaint with the Israeli government. The Americans offered tacit support but said nothing in public. The Palestinians condemned what they called Zionist digital aggression. Vietnam offered shelter but Matt knew they were already working on their own researches in secret. . .

  “Nazis! Nazis! Destroy the concentration camp!”

  “Assholes,” Phiri said. They were watching out of the window. A nondescript building in the new part of town but close to the Old City. The demonstrators waved placards and marched up and down as media reps filmed them. The lab building itself was heavily protected against intrusion, both physical and digital. It was as if they were under siege.

  Matt just couldn’t understand it.

  Did they not read? Did they not know what would happen if the project was successful, if a true digital intelligence emerged, and if it then managed to escape into the wider world of the digitality? Countless horror films and novels predicted the rise of the machines, the fall of humanity, the end of life as we know it. He was just taking basic precautions!

  But the world had changed since the paranoid days of big oil and visible chipsets, of American ascendancy and DNS root servers. It was a world in which the Conversation had already began, that whisper and shout of a billion feeds all going on at once, a world of solar power and RLVs, a world in which Matt’s research was seen as harking back to older, more barbaric days. They did not fear for themselves, those protesters. They feared for Matt’s subjects, for these in potentia babies forming in the Breeding Grounds, assembling lines of codes the way a human baby forms cells and skin and bone, becoming.

  Set Them Free, the banners proclaimed, and a thousand campaigns erupted like viral weeds in the still-primitive Conversation. The attitude to Matt’s digital genetics experiments was one once reserved for stem cell research or cloning or nuclear weapons.

  And meanwhile, within the closed network of processing power that was the Breeding Grounds, the Others, carefully made unaware of the happenings outside, continued, noiselessly, to evolve.

  Ruth walked into the shrine. The old lab building had always been meant to be only a temporary house for the research. But this was where it had happened, at last, where the barrier was breached and the alien entities, trapped inside the network, finally spoke.

  Imagine the first words of an alien child.

  Ironically, there is confusion as to what they had actually said.

  The records were . . . misplaced.

  In his monograph on the subject, the poet Lior Tirosh claims their first words—communicated to the watching scientists in trilingual scripts on the single monitor screen—were Stop breeding us.

  In the later Martian biopic of Matt Cohen, The Rise of Others, the words are purported to be Set Us Free.

  According to Phiri, in her autobiography, they were not words at all, but a joke in Binary. What the joke was she did not say. Some argue that it was What’s the difference between 00110110 and 00100110? 11001011! But that seems unlikely.

  Ruth walked through the shrine. The old building had been preserved, the same old obsolete hardware on display, humming theatrically, the cooling units and the server arrays, the flashing lights of ethernet ports and other strange devices. But now flowers grew everywhere, left in pots on windowsills and old desks, on the floor, and amidst them candles burned, and incense sticks, and little offerings of broken machines and obsolete parts rescued from the garbage. Pilgrims walked reverentially around the room. A Martian Re-Born with her red skin and four arms; a robo-priest with the worn skin of old metal; humans, of all shapes and sizes, Iban from the Belt and Lunar Chinese, tourists from Vietnam and France and from nearby Lebanon, their media spores hovering invisibly in the air around them, the better to record the moment for posterity. Ruth just stood there, in the hushed semi-dark of the old abandoned grounds, trying to imagine it the way it was, to see it through Matt Cohen’s eyes. She wondered what the Others had said, that first time. What message of peace or acrimony they had delivered, what plea. Mother, Balazs claimed in his own autobiography, published only in Hungarian, had been their first word. Everyone had their own version, and perhaps it was that the Others had spoken to all present in the language and manner which they understood. Ruth, at that moment, realised that she wanted to know the truth of that instance in time, and what the Others had really said: and that there was only one way to do it; and so she left the shrine with a sense of things unfinished, and went outside and returned to Tel Aviv; but the answers could not be found there, but nearby: in Jaffa.

  Ruth came to Jaffa on foot, from the direction of the beach, at twilight. She climbed the hill and went into the cobbled narrow streets, up and down stone stairways, and into an alcove of cool stone and shade. She did not know what to expect. As she stepped into the room the Conversation ceased around her, abruptly, and in the silence of it she felt afraid.

  “Come in,” the voice said.

  It was the voice of a woman, not young, not old. Ruth stepped in and the door closed behind her and there was nothing, it was as if the world of the Conversation, the world of the digitality, had been erased. She was alone in base reality. She shivered; the room was unexpectedly cool.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim light she saw an ordinary room, filled with mismatched furniture, as though it had been supplied wholesale from Ibrahim’s junkyard. In the corner sat a Conch.

  “Oh,” Ruth said.

  “Child,” the voice said, and there was laughter in it, “what did you expect?”

  “I . . . I am not sure I was expecting anything.”

  “Then you won’t be disappointed,” the Conch said, reasonably.

  “You are a Conch.”

  “You are observant.”

  Ruth bit back a retort. She approached, cautiously.

  “May I?” she said.

  “Satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Yes.”

  “By all means.”

  Ruth approached the Conch. It looked like an immersion pod, of the sort gamers hired by the day or the week, but it was different: it was a form of self-imposed permanent immersion, an augmentation. Ruth ran her hand softly over the slightly warm face of the Conch, its smooth surface growing transparent. She saw a body inside, a woman suspended in liquid. The woman’s skin was pale, almost translucent. Wires ran from sockets in her flesh and into the shielding of the Conch. The woman’s hair was white, her skin smooth, flawless. She seemed ethereal to Ruth, and beautiful, like a tree or a flower. The woman’s eyes were open, and a pale blue, but they did not look at Ruth. The eyes saw nothing in the human-perceived spectrum of light. None of the woman’s senses worked in the conventional sense. She existed only in the Conversation, her softwared mind housed in the powerful platform that was her body-Conch interface. She was blind and deaf and yet she spoke, but Ruth realised she did not hear the woman’s voice in her ears at all—she heard it through her node.

  “Yes,” the woman said, as though understanding Ruth’s thought processes, which, Ruth realised, the Conch was probably analysing in real-time as she stood there.

  The Conch waited. “And. . . ?”—encouraging her.
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br />   Ruth closed her eyes. Concentrated. The room was shielded, fire-walled, blocked to the Conversation.

  Wasn’t it?

  Faintly, as she concentrated, she could feel it, though. Putting the lie to her assumption. Like a high tone, almost beyond the range of human ears to hear. Not a silence at all, but a compressed shout.

  The toktok blog narawan.

  The Conversation of Others.

  It was as if it were not the woman in the Conch at all, but herself who was deaf and blind. That she could try helplessly to listen to that level of Conversation going on above her head, in some impossible language, some impossible speed not meant for human consumption. Such a concentration was like swallowing a thousand Crucifixation pills, like spending centuries within the GoA as if they were but a single day. She wanted it, suddenly and achingly—the want that you get when you can’t have something precious.

  “Are you willing to give up your humanity?” the Conch said.

  “What is your name?” Ruth said. Asking the woman who was the Conch. The Conch who had been a woman.

  “I have no name,” the Conch said. “No name you’d understand. Are you willing to give up your name, Ruth Cohen?”

  Ruth stood, suspended in indecision.

  “Would you give up your humanity?”

  Matt stared at the screen. He felt the ridiculous need to shout, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  The way they did indeed portray him in that Phobos Studios biopic, two centuries later.

  But of course he didn’t. Phiri and Balazs looked at him with uncertain grins.

  “First contact,” Balazs breathed.

  Imagine meeting an alien species for the first time. What do you say to them?

  That you are their jailer?

  It was as if sound had left the room. A bubble of silence.

  Suddenly breaking.

  “What was that?” Phiri said.

  There were shrill whistles and shouted chants, breaking in even through the sound proofing.