by Hanuš Seiner
Had Bamobah felt like that when she glimpsed a glider in the sky, when she put on her watch, when medical probes from precious inert alloys touched her body while I waited outside?
* * *
One’s identity is a fragile thing. It starts forming deep in the prenatal development and gains its final shape, passing the barrier of consciousness, after several years’ life. It resembles a thin-walled glass bowl: you cannot easily break it in two pieces and seal them again without leaving scars.
The first attempts at writing a human mind into the metal microstructure had ended tragically. Not by death, but something very much resembling death. Yet it was still worth it for the steelworks to invest billions more into continuing research to finally learn this: if metallurgists return into their human bodies after shifts and bring their memories and experience from the ingot with them, they had to bring back and forth their identity, their primary self, unequipped by our evolution to be at two places at once and then be sealed back together.
“I assume you understand the principles of the realliance program,” Faíd said to me. “They prepare a very simplified microstructural being for you and allow you to copy your basic traits into it, just a weak imprint of your identity and a short request to be included in the realliance.”
Yes, I’d tried many times to imagine what it would be like when the steelworks connect me to the metallurgists’ interface. Would I follow Bamobah into the ingot? Actually not, just a shadow of myself would take the journey in there, resembling the shadow I knew as Bamobah, the shadow I clung to so desperately.
That’s what Faíd was saying in different words: “It will be mirroring of sorts – while your primary self will stay in the macroscopic world with the residual personality of your girlfriend, her primary would meet a being bearing a simplified version of your residual. Unless there are compatibility issues, which are quite common, the metallurgist will absorb this being and carry it with herself into her human brain. This prevents greater blurring of secondary memories about you. As the primary self of your lovely friend will continue regaining control over her physical body, she’ll be able to freely decide if she keeps those memories, while experiencing a mild realliance shock, or she filters them out.”
If I could fall in love with a shadow, could she? That was the most important question.
But you don’t say such questions out loud. “So how can you steer the process?”
“I?” Faíd acted his mix of indignant and amused surprise well. “I can’t. But you can. You lack training and experience, your imprint cannot stay in the ingot too long without the risk of damaging it by some ill-advised operation. That is why the microstructure they eventually prepare for you is very simple … and very flexible.”
He handed me a small envelope. When it landed in my palm, I felt something small and metallic in the corner.
“Something else can be covertly copied into the microstructure along with the fragments of your mind. A Trojan horse, if you want. It will adjust the realliance algorithms slightly, so that your friend would suddenly face a much more simple decision. Either she accepts you in the process, or refuses realliance altogether. Refuses to come back.”
“My god,” I breathed out. The envelope slid out of my sweating fingers.
“No one will ever know, I can assure you of that. It’s just that you’ll need to learn to live with a small lie. But you’ll live happily.”
Faíd wasn’t offering me nine point five percent. He was offering me a hundred.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep.
I listened to Bamobah’s soft breathing and the subdued sounds of the hotel. On this background, the creaking of a drawer of my nightstand being slowly pulled out sounded almost deafening. I waited a few seconds to see whether Bamobah would wake up, but when the rhythm of her breath didn’t change, I reached in the drawer for an envelope. The chip was still inside, a small hard clump of a malign tumor inside the pristine paper tissue.
All it would take was to put the chip under my tongue and let it grow into the lower palate. Like when you take a pill. A remedy for your trouble.
Faíd’s plan was good. He thoroughly erased all traces between me and him, and him and the steelworks. I could only speculate what path had led him toward me. Belief in the Cloud, however absurd at first sight, was shifting the bedrock of society, crawling through its subconscious. While the steelworks fed it, while they supported it by the occasional shrouded comments in the press, while they pretended to finance research on the phenomenon of the Cloud, the ingots where metallurgists had become trapped remained in the center of attention of cranks, obscure researchers and loonies. Including the very, very rich. An ingot could be worked normally, molded, sold, put in the accounting. But there was still a lot of space for shreds, allowed waste quotas, shavings. Trash containing tiny fragments of primaries quenched into stillness. Heaps of strange relics to whom some attributed even stranger features.
I wondered how Faíd picked the right clients in the piles of realliance program requests. Those easily manipulated, unscrupulous, who end up with an envelope in their hands. I must have been a sure bet. A naïve European journalist, a reporter who fell in love with a mysterious woman. In fact, I could have been suspicious: am I just pretending all of it to get inside the steelworks’ dirt to expose them in the press? I had to smile wryly at the thought. No, on the very contrary. I was an easy mark and Faíd recognized that.
The chip still lay in its envelope, but I already felt its pressure under my tongue. If you set the rules right, you can’t lose. My rules were set by Faíd and his by the cult of the Cloud. Both of us would win, no matter what. But Bamobah? Which Bamobah? The gentle, joyful, empathic woman I knew and loved, or the strange one who was supposed to get ahold of the body calmly breathing on the other bed, like some sort of a parasite?
“Cling to the concept of the Cloud,” Faíd told me before we parted ways, “don’t ever doubt it. Because you need a living woman beside you. And to live will be the same as to believe in the Cloud for your friend. Don’t let her doubt it for a second. Otherwise you’ll really lose her, and this time, I won’t be able to help you.”
Yes, I’ll have to believe in the Cloud. Not just because of Bamobah, but because of myself. I need to believe that metallurgists are everywhere around us, scattered throughout our technology, in the key parts of our civilizations.
Because otherwise what I’m contemplating is nothing but murder.
* * *
We are the Cloud. It’s difficult to imagine, until you experience it. But once you do, it’s impossible to conceive of anything else. Our hearts have stopped, quenching slowed them down a thousandfold. We haven’t yet had time to feel the pain of being shattered into so many pieces.
We are in the pistons of shock absorbers in subway cars’ chassis, and we pass through the darkness of the tunnels and the light of the stations faster than we can comprehend. With each braking, the warmth of the flying sparks brings us to life.
We are the vault of a bionic cranial prosthetic. We feel the warm flow of thoughts beneath ourselves, but the human life we’ve helped to save flies around like a mayfly flapping its wings. When the flapping stops, a few seconds of heat rouse us; we awaken in the hearth of a crematory, barely have time to try to catch our breath, and sink into the embrace of swirling hot ash.
We are the reinforcements of ceramic coating of a landing module. We wake and fall asleep with each orbit, slowly spiraling down. And then it comes. The atmosphere flares up around us and we feel the surge of energy, the speeding up of time. We feel the earth deep below and the vast emptiness above ourselves, and understand the importance of the job we were created for. Who can blame us that we chose this? Who cannot understand us? Who can judge us? It is difficult to imagine, but it is infinitely more difficult to imagine it could have ever been otherwise.
I have always thought that we were something more. That we are still human. That we still live in our warm organic bodies, in the residuals
of our minds. We have given up human feelings, yes, we have given up the solace of a certain death and given up our inner integrity, the feeling of self at one point of space and time. For each of these sacrifices, we draw one sign of a dislocation line on the wall, one symbol ┴, one austere syllable of the Cloud’s emblem. I thought that there is no way to sever the bond between us and them. I believed it. But now, when diffusion flows at grain boundaries tickle us like beads of sweat trickling down our back, when we smell the cinnamon scent of metastable phases, when flashes of reorienting Zener pairs glimmer before our eyes, when we probe the soft plasticity of deformation twins with our fingertips, when the spinodal curve vaults above us like a night sky studded with stars, now … I’m starting to have doubts.
About the Author and Translator
Hanuš Seiner is a Czech scientist and writer of SF short stories. He holds a PhD degree inapplied physics and is currently employed as an associate professor at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His research interests cover mainly mechanics of microstructures in advanced materials and laser-ultrasound experimental methods. Hanuš is married, has two kids, and lives in Pardubice,Czech Republic. Up to now, he has published more than 10 short stories, mostly combining elements of hard SF and space opera subgenres. His short storiesappeared in Czech and Slovak SF magazines (Ikarie, XB-1, Jupiter) and inanthologies (“Mlok” book series, “Terra Nullius”). The titular story “TerraNullius” by Hanuš is upcoming in Strange Horizons. You can sign up for email updates here.
Julie Nováková is a Czech author and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Fantasy Scroll and other magazines andanthologies; upcoming e.g. in Analog, GigaNotoSaurus and Persistent Visions.Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (“Terra Nullius”) and over thirty short stories and novelettes. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian and Estonian. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, the Aeronautilusaward for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novelof 2015. Julie is an evolutionary biologist by study and also takes a keeninterest in planetary science. She’s currently working on her first novel inEnglish. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hanuš Seiner
Art copyright © 2018 by Brent Hardy-Smith