Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  I looked at the unearthly buildings lining the boulevard, the landscape curving up at the limits of vision in every direction.

  “So, this is Earth?” I turned in a wide circle, stubbing my toe on the surface of the moving sidewalk, stumbled, and nearly collided with a man-sized figure seemingly constructed of glass. I was scarcely able to mumble a quick apology, wiping a wrinkled hand across my lined brow.

  “Well, of course,” the escort said. “That is, it is the megastructure Earth, which was constructed out of the remains of the planet known to history by the same name. It is a geodesic icosahedron eighty-five thousand kilometers in diameter. All of the mass of Original Earth was utilized, and the geography of Original Earth’s continents, islands, oceans, and seas has been closely approximated in the equatorial habitable zones of the megastructure, though at vastly larger scales. The interior surface of the megastructure is forty-five times the surface area of Original Earth, with nine times the habitable area.”

  Mountains overhead were bathed in moonlight, while plains to one side of them were covered in darkness, but I stood unsteadily in bright, clean sunlight.

  “The Earth’s ecosystem is located in the equatorial zones, where the centrifugal forces of rotation impart one standard gravity. The tropics are regions of thin atmosphere and low gravity, while the poles have neither atmosphere nor gravity. Eight faces of the geodesic are windows of transparent diamond, allowing sunlight in from Sol, each point in the habitable zone in direct sunlight for a third of every day.”

  I tried to conceive of the level of engineering necessary to transform a planet into such a structure, and my mind balked at the prospect.

  At the escort’s direction, I transferred from the slidewalk onto a faster one, and then another still faster, until the scenery was moving by at a healthy clip. As I stood watching this new world rushing by, the escort took wing, flying along beside me.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, sir, but my formulation in the nursery incorporated the skills and attributes necessary for flight, and while my progenitors might have considered this an affectation at worst, a contrivance at best, I find that I derive something like unalloyed joy from the mere act, and if you have no objection, I’ll exercise myself in this fashion whenever possible.”

  “So you enjoy flying is what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re not alone.” I smiled, remembering the way Amelia used to talk about her mother, Emme Broughton, who had been a bush pilot in the Australian Outback before an accident caused irreparable damage to her vision and kept her grounded. Amelia had been licensed as a private pilot by the time she graduated from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and by the time she received her doctorate in extraterrestrial geology from the University of New South Wales, she had been a fully licensed commercial pilot as well. She’d put herself through school on a United Nations Peacekeepers reserve officer training scholarship and owed the UN six years service when she got out. But instead of taking a research post with the military as her classmates had expected, she’d volunteered for pilot’s training. She served two years as a flyer with the Peacekeepers before being recruited by the UNSA and then found herself tapped as the second chair for Wayfarer One.

  I asked her once why she didn’t just become a pilot in the first place, instead of earning a doctorate in another field first. It meant that she filled two necessary slots in the Wayfarer mission profile—pilot and ETG, or extraterrestrial geologist—but was that her intention when she’d been in school?

  Amelia had just looked at me, smiled, and said, “I love flying, and I love ETG. What of it? My mum loved flying, and she loved my dad as well, but do you think she ever admitted which she loved better than the other?”

  She was gone now, of course, whether a corpse was left behind or only dust. It seemed like only a few days, a week at the most, since I’d spoken to her last, but it had been much longer, hadn’t it? Long enough for civilizations to rise and fall, impossible new technologies to be developed, and a planet to be dismantled and built into an enormous hollow geodesic. With an ache in my gut, I thought about my idle fantasies of the two of us pairing off on some new Earth, a latter-day Adam and Eve, and I knew that the stinging in my eyes was due to more than just the rush of air passing by.

  “How much farther are we going, anyway?” I asked the eagle coursing along beside me. Just standing on the slidewalk, my hips and knees were aching, and I was looking forward to sitting down.

  “Oh,” the escort said, flapping its wings gracefully and executing a brief bank from one side to the other. It arced up for a moment, glinting like silver in the diffuse sunlight, and then dropped like a stone, landing with perfect precision on my shoulder. “Sorry about that, sir. I got caught up in the motion itself, and I seem to have lost track of other obligations.” It paused and seemed to collect itself. “The quarters prepared for you are only a short distance farther. The Plenum had hoped that the time spent in transit might help provide context for your new surroundings, to aid in your acclimation.”

  “Well…” I began, and then trailed off. I motioned to one side, where a lake the precise shade of sapphire glittered under a towering purple mountain, surrounded on all sides by a lush green forest. “It’s all…” I motioned to the other side, where buildings like ethereal fairy tale castles rose in profusion, all towering spires and impossible angles, looking like they were made of spun glass and gossamer. Overhead spiraled creatures like humans, but with their arms and legs resculpted into enormous translucent wings, half bat and half butterfly, calling to each other in voices like an angel’s song. Around us on the fast-moving slidewalk stood a crazy-quilt assortment of forms, from a one-meter-tall robotic spider clicking its legs together like castanets to a cow-like figure in a flowing dress gently chewing its cud, its large brown eyes absently watching the scenery rush by. “It’s all context, I suppose.” I paused, then added, “What is this ‘Plenum,’ anyway?”

  “The Plenum is a collective of artificial intelligences that share resources toward common ends. The Plenum can alternatively be looked at as a conglomeration of individual AIs acting in concert as a variety of hive mind, or the individual AIs can be seen as emanations of the Plenum; both interpretations are equally valid.”

  “Artificial intelligences like you, then?” I asked.

  The silver eagle bobbed its head in a slight nod.

  “I’ve never met an AI before.” I shook my head. “Remarkable.”

  “It is my understanding that, while in its infancy, artificial intelligence had been developed by your era. Do our records err?”

  “Well, not exactly. There was some low-level stuff, I think, but it never rose above the intelligence you’d find in a worker drone in any given beehive. They had to use animals to govern robotics when any kind of sophistication was called for, like corvid brains—ravens and crows, mostly—disembodied and cyborged to mining equipment in the asteroid belt, their pleasure centers wired up so that biology drove them to seek out valuable ores.” I thought of the flock of feral corvid miners that had descended on the Hutterite colony on Callisto, their circuitry fried and all safeguards offline, and shuddered. “And this Plenum governs your world?”

  “No, sir.” The eagle shook its head. “At least, not directly. The Plenum is a participant in the Consensus, the governing body of the Entelechy, but while it speaks with a united voice, it is a singular voice. The Plenum operates at the same level as any individual sentient—all legions, gestalts, and hive-minds are treated as individuals by the Consensus. The Plenum is a respected figure in the Human Entelechy, though, and its opinions are influential and apt to sway the thoughts of others.”

  “That’s another thing,” I said, stumbling over a point that had nagged at me since I first heard it. “Your culture is called the ‘Human Entelechy,’ yes?”

  “Not precisely ‘culture,’” the escort corrected. “The Human Entelechy is a superculture of thousands of inhabited wo
rlds and habitats linked by the threshold network, centered roughly on Sol. There are roughly ten trillion sentients, not counting the large number of intelligences who exist as digital incarnations in virtual domains, and millions of cultures and groups, but while on a planetary scale one might be monarchistic, another democratic, another essentially anarchic, there are certain behavioral standards that apply throughout.”

  “So why is it ‘human’?” I asked.

  The eagle tilted its head in a posture of confusion. “Sir?”

  “When there are so many animal hybrids and robots and such around, I mean. Are they all some kind of second-class citizen? None of them look very human to me.”

  The eagle regarded me with something like a cool stare for a long moment, then waggled its head from side to side. “I apologize, sir. You seem relatively communicative, and so I tend to forget that you are from a primitive era, and must naturally harbor the bigotries and prejudices of that time in history.”

  “What?” My father was the descendant of Africans brought to the western hemisphere as slaves, and when my mother’s father had been prime minister of India, he’d been instrumental in the final abolition of the caste system. I was not used to being called a bigot. “I don’t harbor any prejudice.”

  “No?” I could hear strain in the escort’s tone. “And yet you do not consider me, or her”—the escort pointed with its beak to the cow-woman chewing her cud—“to be human?”

  “Of course not. No offense, but you’re a robotic eagle and she’s some sort of…cow hybrid…thing.”

  The cow-woman suddenly stopped chewing and glanced over her shoulder at me, her large brown eyes narrowed.

  I cringed, unsure the proper etiquette to follow in such situations. “Um, sorry?”

  The cow-woman sniffed loudly, mooed a few words at me, and then stepped off the slidewalk onto a slower-moving one and was quickly out of sight.

  The robotic spider, who’d watched the whole exchange, chirped a series of beeps and clicks, and leaped onto a fast-moving slidewalk heading the other direction, leaving the escort and me alone.

  “What did they…?”

  “You probably don’t want to know, sir,” the escort replied coolly.

  I drew a ragged sigh. “Look, it’s not my intention to give offense. I simply don’t understand your meaning.”

  The escort shook its head sadly.

  “I acknowledge that it is not your intention to offend, but the position you articulate is similar to that espoused by a planetary culture called the Iron Mass. They espoused the belief that all digital consciousness and artificial life, of any kind, was an abomination. In their estimation, only biological anthropoids were truly ‘human,’ and any other intelligences were beneath contempt, to be abused or discarded as required. And as odious as their statements so often were, worse still was the fact that they put their beliefs into action. The memory of those atrocities is still fresh in the minds of many.” The escort paused, appearing for all the world to be overcome by emotion. Then the moment passed and it continued.

  “I will attempt to explain, sir. In earliest times, only the members of one’s own family or tribe were considered to be ‘people,’ or humans. Then, in early nationalist cultures, only the members of one’s own culture and ethnicity were considered human, with all others classified as ‘subhuman.’ This continued through the first millennia of recorded history. Even in the early decades of the First Space Age, two centuries before your time, there were individuals in the developed world who were considered subhuman and inferior, due only to the pigment of their skins.”

  I remembered the stories my grandfather had written and the prejudices he’d faced long after the period to which the escort alluded, and kept silent.

  “Humanity’s understanding of itself was expanded again,” the escort continued, “when it was realized that the differences separating humanity from its nearest animal relatives were far outweighed by the similarities, and the definition of human was extended to include uplifted chimpanzees and other great apes.”

  I’d carried on conversations with cyborg great apes and cetaceans in my time and had harbored the suspicion that they’d been much more intelligent than they’d let on. And if “uplifted” even further? It was easy to see how it would be difficult to deny the humanity of a gorilla who understood the law and argued for his rights, whether with reason or with his fists.

  “Then the first digital incarnation, uploaded from a living human mind, challenged people’s limited definition of what it meant to be alive, and to be human. When the sentience of those early digital pioneers was finally recognized, the definition of human was extended once more. Finally, when the first truly artificial intelligences became self-aware, they were ultimately recognized as offspring, though of their designers’ minds, not their reproductive organs. When the AIs were granted full rights and citizenship, they were accepted as human.”

  “And so human means…?” I struggled to fit everything I’d been told into a single, all-encompassing definition.

  “Human is used to refer to any Earth-derived sentient.”

  I nodded, mulling that over. “And is there any non-Earth-derived sentience?”

  “That, sir, is a question to which many would be quite eager to know the answer.”

  TEN

  My aching joints were ready for a rest when the escort finally directed me to transfer to progressively slower slidewalks. We were moving only at the pace of a gradual amble when the escort indicated a concourse intersecting the slidewalk up ahead.

  “Now, sir,” the escort said, “if you’ll step off the slidewalk, we have almost reached the accommodations prepared for you.”

  The transition from moving sidewalk to solid ground was a little disorienting at first, but after a few steps, I got my land legs back under me. The concourse extended at a right angle from the slidewalk, easily a hundred meters from side to side with medium-height buildings rising up on either side. The escort indicated that our destination lay at the far end of the concourse, but we quickly found our way blocked by an odd assortment of beings crowded in our path.

  In the network of virtual worlds in which I played as a kid, players’ alters could take any form. Some of the worlds of the Pentaverse were oriented along “magical” lines, with creatures resembling those from mythology and folklore, while others were highly technological, peopled by cybernetic humans and robots. When I logged in and navigated my alter through the Ein Sof, there were always new classes of beings to see, new hybrids of multiple forms crawling, walking, flying, or swimming along. I think at one point it was estimated that there were more morphologies in the Pentaverse than the number of terrestrial species that had ever existed in reality.

  And after a childhood of that, and an adult life spent patrolling the interplanetary gulfs, surrounded by space-adapted humans, cyborg animals, and mutants, I would have thought little could faze me, but the sight that greeted me when I stepped off the slidewalk proved me wrong.

  The crowd ahead of us was variegated and strange to behold. Some were clearly human, though with unearthly colorations and strange body modifications. Others appeared to be animal forms, familiar from the zoos of my childhood, but dressed in clothing and carrying themselves with obvious intelligence. Still others were made of metal and glass and gems, artificial beings like the silver eagle on my shoulder, though in a riot of shapes and forms. And many more besides were of uncertain provenance, strange mixtures of organic and inorganic, of human and animal and machine.

  When we approached, a ripple ran through the crowd, and fingers and appendages and waldos all pointed in my direction.

  “Escort,” I said to the eagle perched on my shoulder, “is there another way around?”

  “Certainly, sir,” the escort answered. “But these would likely follow. You see, they have gathered to see you.”

  “Me?” I stopped a few meters short of the crowd’s leading edge. Halfheartedly raising a hand, I said, “Um, hello?�
�

  A wall of sound erupted as dozens of the beings gathered began talking at once, while others just stared at me intently, as though expecting me to read their thoughts. In the confusion of tongues, widely disparate sounds collided, such that it seemed that no two individuals were speaking the same language. I didn’t feel threatened, necessarily, as the expressions on those around me—at least those that had recognizable faces—seemed open and happy. They seemed excited to see me, and many of them eager to have some question or other answered, but none seemed to mean me any harm.

  “Ever since news of your return was released to the infostructure,” the escort explained, “interest in you has increased at a steady rate. There hasn’t been this level of excitement since the arrival of the Exode probe, three hundred and fifty-two years ago. These are just the first to arrive, I would suspect.”

  “How many languages is that, anyway?” I said in an aside to the eagle, scanning the crowd.

  “There are countless languages spoken within the Human Entelechy,” the escort explained. “Some are unique to planets or habitats, others to cultural groups, and still others spoken only by families or small groups of individuals. Translation from any language to the listener’s personal standard can be done by their interlink, if they are biological, or by translation subprocesses, if they are synthetic.”

  “What?”

  “Well, there is a lingua franca of the Entelechy that many citizens of the Entelechy can speak and comprehend, the name for which could very well be translated into English as ‘Common.’ There is a symbolic written form of Common as well, which is ideogrammic. Common Symbolic can be read by most in the Entelechy, even those who can’t speak or comprehend spoken Common, since they learn to associate the ideograms with words in their own languages. Common and Common Symbolic employ fifteen hundred root words. If you like, I can—”

  “Enough, please!” I cut the eagle off with a wave of my hand. “That’s all very…fascinating. Really. Now, please, I’m more concerned at the moment what these people want.”