Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods

by Paul Melko

  “But —”

  “But what?”

  “You’re not a new breed. You’re still human.”

  She stared at us with her fourteen green eyes. “I’m more than human, Apollo.”

  “So you can only have babies with a pod just like you, another of Dr. Thomasin’s septets. You can’t have babies with just anyone.”

  “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Don’t be silly! Procreation doesn’t have to follow love. I’ll have children for the sake of the species regardless of who I bond with,” Candace said.

  “Did Doctor Thomasin pick your mate yet?”

  “No. I guess not. Maybe.”

  She paused to think. This time we saw the interface cycle into the pack and another of the identical females take her place.

  Why is she doing that? Manuel asked.

  Identity crisis, Bola replied.

  “Even if he has,” the new face said, “that’s fine. Besides, any mate will have to be one that he made. No one else has succeeded in building a septet.”

  “So you don’t know other septets?” we asked.

  “No. Not really. But there are others like me, I guess. And I’d mate with whomever was necessary, to propagate the species.”

  “Pods aren’t a separate species. We’re all human beings,” we said.

  “Of course we’re a separate species!” she replied. “Pods are much better than singletons. It’s obvious. And I’m much better than a sextet or a quintet or a quartet.”

  “We’re all human,” we said again.

  “Well, you may be human, but I’m another species,” she said, walking off.

  I’ll say.

  *

  We rotated the eggs every day. We measured the humidity with a wet bulb. We determined temperature with sensors that logged to our desktop. The damn alarms kept failing and waking us in the middle of the night. We couldn’t just roll over and go back to sleep, since the ducklings might really be freezing to death. After fifteen days of incubation, we opened the vents on the incubators and lowered the temperature a half a degree.

  Mother Redd’s words had stung us, and we started keeping better records. We marked the eggs with their genome tag, at least the ones we could remember. We tracked temperature and humidity hourly and graphed the data.

  We watched the brood by the lake meticulously, though the pheromone sensors never picked up a whiff of chemical thought and our lab books were line after line of “No sign of consensus.”

  We avoided Candace when we could, which was tougher than it would seem on a farm of over a hundred hectares. Mother Redd had given her chores that seemed to overlap ours.

  Candace’s arguments, however, were something we couldn’t avoid. I found myself researching her ideas. She was wrong about a lot of things and right about a lot of things too.

  The classical definition of “species” still stated that pods were human. If Meda, Quant, or I had a child with an unmodified human, the child would be human. We weren’t a new species. However, we weren’t entirely standard human either. We had been modified by our predecessors to have pads on our palms that could transfer chemical memories among our podmates. We had glands at our necks to send pheromonal emotions and crude thoughts. We had enhanced olfactory capability to decode the scents. Unless closely inspected, we would not look any different than a human from a century ago.

  But the fact that we were a pod, that we functioned as a single being in the fabric of our society, indicated that we were a radically different type of social organization, created by our biological technology and artificially sustained. If there were no creche-system and no genetic modification of embryos to add pod traits, pod society would disappear in a few generations, replaced by normal humans. Candace was right; if the Overgovernment fell and society crumbled, then pods would fall apart. There would be no pods without constant social manipulation. We were the most advanced animal on the planet, but behind that façade was a framework of scaffolding and wires.

  There were three million pods in the world, which amounted to just over ten million people. Three decades ago, there had been over ten billion humans on the planet. The cataclysm was far from over. We pods had inherited the Earth, not because we were superior, but because we had failed to leave or die or advance with the rest of the Community. It was a fragile ecosystem we had inherited. Our own biology was fragile, and perhaps more desperate than we knew.

  We spoke to Mother Redd.

  “How stable is our society?” Meda asked one evening as we cleaned up after dinner. Candace was out turning her duck eggs.

  “We have a representative democracy implemented by consensus-formed legislation. It is more stable than most,” she said.

  “No. I mean biologically and societal. If we lost our scientific knowledge, what would happen?”

  One of Mother Redd stopped her drying to look at us, while the other two continued with the pots.

  “A sage question. I don’t know, but I expect that the next generation of humans would be normal. Perhaps we could form pods; perhaps the genetic changes we have implemented would breed true.”

  “Do we know if they will?”

  She smiled. “Perhaps you should do a literature search.”

  “I did! I couldn’t understand the results.” Biology wasn’t our strongest subject. Physics and math suited us.

  “Technology gives us our individuality. That is the problem. And given that, we will not willingly give up our individuality, we can’t see the path back,” Mother Redd said. “We have passed our own singularity, just as the Community did. And you have hit upon the greatest problem of our world. How do we propagate?”

  There were some who said the Exodus — the near instantaneous vanishing of all the billions of Community members — was a technological singularity, the transmogrification of normal humans to posthumans. Mother Redd was saying that the pod society had created its own parallel singularity, one we could not reverse without losing our identity.

  “Candace is the future, isn’t she?”

  “Maybe. Doctor Thomasin’s ideas are radical. Perhaps reproducing septets are the answer. There are others researching it, including ethicists.”

  “Why?”

  “If our society and our biology are unsound, we cannot allow it to advance.”

  “But —”

  Candace bounded in then, shouting, “One of my ducklings is hatching!”

  We all went out to watch the wet and lizard-like bird peck its way through the shell. Our mind was on Mother Redd’s words, and we kept touching hands, swapping thoughts, as we considered them. I realized then, as we watched the ducklings hatch, that there were those who were considering the elimination of pod society and biology as a desirable path into the future.

  *

  Doctor Thomasin visited again the next day. He was visiting every week now, examining Candace for hours. That evening, after he left, Candace hadn’t shown for dinner, so Mother Redd sent us up to fetch her.

  “Candace?” Meda called, as she knocked on the door.

  “She needs to check the temperature on the ducklings, too,” said Bola. We pretended we didn’t care about Candace’s project, but clearly we did.

  We just don’t want the ducklings to die!

  “Yes?” Her voice was soft, and male. When had her male component done anything but stay in the background?

  Meda pushed open the door.

  Candace was sprawled on the beds, her faces flushed, her shirts wet at the pits. The room reeked of heavy thinking.

  “Are you okay?”

  The male was the only one sitting. “We’ll be okay.”

  “It’s dinner time.”

  “We’re not feeling too well. I think we’ll pass.”

  One of the females opened her eyes.

  Didn’t she have green eyes before?

  Yes.

  “Do you want us to check on your ducklings?”

  “What ducklings?” she asked.

  “Your Science Fai
r project!”

  She grasped wrists, consensing.

  “Oh, right. Thanks.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  Maybe Doctor Thomasin gave her a vaccination.

  She’s old enough to make her own vaccinations.

  We ate quickly, then went out to the lab to feed and check Candace’s ducks. Ours were still a few days from hatching.

  Her ducks had a fine layer of down and weren’t too noisy nor too active, so the temperature was probably okay. We dipped bits of bread in water and dropped the food in the hutches.

  Don’t let them imprint on us.

  Why not? That would be funny.

  Because they wouldn’t survive in the wild if they did. They need to imprint on each other.

  Like we are.

  We shared a glance. We were indeed imprinted on each other.

  Two days later, our own eggs began to hatch. Twelve hatched that day, which wasn’t so bad. Twenty-five hatched the day after. Then fifty-some the day after that. We were too frazzled to notice when the last fifty hatched.

  The barn suddenly became a duck maternity ward, with assembly lines for soaked corn meal, temperature and humidity checks, and bedding manufacture.

  We quickly found that the chicken brooders we’d planned to use for the ducks were too small, and had to build half a dozen more out of plywood and chicken wire. We kept one as a spare so that we could move a clutch at a time to clean the brooders.

  “We should have kept better track of the gene sequences that we used,” Strom said. He was scooping duckling after duckling from one brooder to another. He held up one that had a lizard’s tail attached to its fluffy bottom.

  Bola looked into the emptied brooder and held his nose. We all felt his revulsion though we couldn’t actually smell what he smelled.

  “How long until they can forage on their own?”

  Six weeks.

  Not soon enough.

  *

  We had so many ducklings to take care of that we couldn’t spend a moment watching for pod-like behaviors. Candace, however, loved to stop by the barn and provide details of her latest experiment and success.

  “I separate one duckling,” she explained to us, “and feed it a bit of food. The other ducklings start quacking within seconds.”

  “They smell the food,” we said.

  “Maybe. But it also works for pain stimuli.”

  “Pain stimuli?”

  “Sure. When I pinch one of the ducklings, the others start making noise.”

  “You’re pinching your ducks?”

  “Just a gentle pinch. Besides, it’s for science!”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve got video of the process. It’s very compelling,” she said.

  “You’ll have a good presentation at the Science Fair then,” we said.

  “You have an awful lot of ducks.”

  We turned and stared at her, all six of us.

  “We know.”

  “This one has dalmatian spots.”

  “We know!”

  Her eyes are green again.

  She looks pale.

  “Are you still sick?”

  She swapped faces, something she did all the time now. “A little still. Allergies, maybe.”

  “What are allergies?”

  “Reactions to air-borne particles and pollen. It used to be very common. Doctor Thomasin thinks I have it, and it just manifested when I came to the farm.”

  “Hopefully he’ll fix that in the next batch of septets he cooks up,” Meda said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  As she walked away, Quant showed us memories of her when she first arrived. She’s grown fifteen centimeters in a month.

  Growth spurt.

  Bigger boobs. This was followed by a pheromone leer from Manuel.

  “Stop it.”

  There’s something wrong with her. Changing interfaces, allergies, forgetting things.

  The rest of my pod shrugged at me.

  What can we do?

  Talk to Mother Redd.

  We didn’t have time to ponder Candace’s allergies and growth chart, and we never talked with Mother Redd. The ducklings needed their food.

  *

  Two weeks later, we started letting the ducklings roam the farmyard for food.

  Look! They re-form into the same subgroups if we separate them!

  I didn’t understand until Bola shared his memory of what he saw. Bola’s specialty was spatial, and, in an instant, I saw how the nearly identical ducklings coalesced into groups when we removed them from the brooder.

  It could be the group they imprinted to.

  Perhaps imprinting is a crude form of pod-building.

  Strom scattered the ducklings and we watched them re-form into their subgroups. We marked a few of them with paint on their backs and did it again and again, showing how a single group of six re-formed every time.

  It seemed that we were on to something.

  Unfortunately, so were the six ducklings with the paint on their backs. They followed Strom wherever he went. When he broke them apart, they re-formed and headed straight back to his ankles.

  They’ve imprinted on you.

  “Didn’t they imprint on themselves already?” Strom asked as the ducklings clustered on his feet.

  Apparently not. Dad.

  Strom answered that with a sardonic smile.

  *

  Once we moved the ducklings to the lake, we actually had time to do our chores and study. One hundred and fifty ducks, less the six that would not leave Strom’s feet, made for a crowded, messy lake, and we still had to drag out bags of bread so the birds wouldn’t starve.

  Candace continued to have luck with her clutch of ducks, while we showed mannerisms that could easily be attributed to other ducklike behavior patterns.

  “This fair project is gonna suck,” Quant said. “We’ve got nothing.”

  Negative results are still results.

  “Negative results don’t get the blue ribbon.”

  Before we knew it, the Science Fair arrived and we drove over to the county fairgrounds with Mother Redd and Candace in the farm bus. We left the ducks, though Strom’s six quacked pitifully.

  “Can’t we take the aircar?” Meda asked. “And can’t we drive?”

  “No.”

  The county seat was a good 100 kilometers away, a mere hop in an aircar, but two hours in the old bus. It was a tight fit with three of us in it. We opened the windows, and that helped.

  In the three decades since the Exodus, there’d been little need for the roadway infrastructure. With the smaller global population, farms that had been critical to feed the masses had gone fallow. We passed orchards where the clear lines of trees were now the start of a chaotic forest, carefully tended hybrids gone wild. It was a bumpy ride, over a decaying road.

  “It’s hard to imagine what was here twenty years ago,” we said to Candace.

  She looked at us blank-eyed. “Yeah,” she said, though we didn’t think she knew what we’d said.

  “Are you nervous?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you want to borrow a brush?” we asked. Her hair was straggly.

  “I’m okay!” she shrilled. “Leave me alone.”

  Just nervous. We had butterflies too.

  “Sorry.”

  One of Mother Redd was driving, and the other two glanced at us. Manuel shrugged to show our confusion at Candace’s overreaction, and Mother Redd turned back to the road.

  Bola read the schedule for the Fair, while we watched the countryside.

  One hundred junior presentations.

  That was a lot. That was one for every student pod in the county. He read off some of the presentation titles.

  “Hyper-efficient Hydrogen Engines with Platinum Catalyst.”

  We did that in Third Class.

  “Vaccination Study for Rhinovirus AS234.”

  The cure for the uncommon co
ld, Strom sent.

  “Cold Fusion Yields in Superconducting Amalgams.”

  That’ll never work.

  Nothing with avian genetics except for us and Candace.

  “Harumph.”

  On our side of the bus, we passed a large tract of overgrown houses, small three-story homes, with just a few meters between them.

  “Look at those. So many people in such a small space.”

  Mother Redd said, “Each of those housed a family, just four or five people.” She must have smelled our puzzlement. “It’s hard to believe that the population of the Earth dropped by three orders of magnitude in the course of just a couple years. You two were born just after the most cataclysmic events in human history. Before the Exodus, pods and multi-humans comprised less than a tenth of a percent of humanity. Now we are the stewards of the entire world. It is a grave responsibility.”

  Quant slid across the aisle to catch a glimpse of the Ring. Candace flinched as Quant neared her, and glared at us. The sky was pale blue and cloudless, and there, arcing across its dome, was the Ring, the symbol of the Community and now a lifeless reminder of their former glory.

  “They failed,” said Candace, not her face, but the male. “They’re a dead-end.”

  “So are we,” Meda said. “According to your theories. We can’t breed true.”

  Don’t bait her, I sent. She’s not feeling well.

  Meda glared at me. “Sorry, Candace,” she said. “Do you want to talk . . . or something?”

  She didn’t turn; her eyes remained on the Ring.

  It isn’t worth trying, Manuel sent bitterly.

  I couldn’t really argue with him, and we turned away to watch the desolate countryside slip by.

  The Science Fair was held in a huge building that dated to the previous century. It was crowded, almost like school, pods shoulder to shoulder with other pods; it was nearly impossible to think with all the interference in the air.

  We found the junior pavilion, registered, and then wandered the Fair. Our presentation wasn’t until the afternoon, and Candace’s was right before ours.

  Stealing our thunder again.

  *

  The junior pavilion was packed at three o’clock that afternoon, and not just with us student pods. Mother Redd was there and so was Doctor Thomasin. We recognized several professors from the Institute, including Doctors Thackery and Charona.