Seeds of Change

by John Joseph Adams

  Mandala began writing on his clipboard. “He never told me. I was simply to fish you out of trouble, get you to remember this big idea, and then—” he paused to sign something with a flourish “—give you this.” He held out a prescription.

  Stephanie leaned over and took the slip of paper.

  “I’ll wait for two hours or so,” he said while standing.

  She looked up at him. “Wait for what?”

  “If you come back, I’m to reset you and put you back in your room. If you don’t return . . . well, then I’m to assume either you’ve begun the neurotech evolution, or that you’ve been deleted.”

  Stephanie got precariously to her feet. “But where am I going? And what is this?” She held up the prescription.

  “It’s a program that will direct you to Concinnity Corp’s server. With that in your hands, any door you open—” he gestured to those behind her “—will lead to your father’s office.”

  * * * *

  “THIS CAN’T BE happening,” Stephanie whispered to herself as she turned the doorknob. And she was right; it wasn’t physically happening.

  No oak door was swinging open before her. No ratty pine floor boards, buckled and warped by time, stretched below. No attic walls came together in an A-frame three feet above her head. No musty air, smelling of dust and sunshine, filled her nose.

  And yet with a few steps, she found herself standing in the attic of their old house on 14th Street in Monterey. All about her slouched stacks of medical journals. An empty dog bed huddled in the narrow eave space to her right. Before her stood her father’s old particleboard desk, its top a chaos of papers, pens, and thumbdrives. Behind and above the desk were two hinged windows opened to let in a breeze that smelled of the Pacific.

  The light pouring through the windows was not a blazing midsummer heat-ray, but a golden autumnal glow.

  Her father stood gazing out the windows. His eyes seemed unfocused, his expression calm. One hand was idly pinching his right earlobe—his habit when thinking.

  Stephanie felt as if she were standing absolutely still, absolutely silent. Even the blood in her veins seemed to have ceased. But she must have made some sound, for her father looked up with a start and then grinned.

  “Daddy,” she cried and rushed to him.

  She did not run on chemo-thin legs, nor did her hospital gown flap unsettlingly around her butt. She ran on the solid legs of a twelve-year-old. She wore blue jeans and a clean cotton t-shirt. And when her father picked her up and twirled her around, the glossy cascade of her raven hair flew up and then spilled down her shoulders.

  He laughed and spun her around again and called her pumpkin and set her down. She hugged his waist and mashed her face into his hip. He was wearing worn corduroy pants and an over-starched yellow button down. He smelled faintly of the Szechuan peppercorns he liked to cook with.

  “You’re back so soon,” he said with joy.

  She looked up at his face, which like hers had broad north Chinese cheekbones and scattered Irish freckles. “Daddy, what’s going on?”

  He enveloped her in his arms. “Oh, such a question, and harder to answer each time.” He lifted her onto his chair and squatted down next to her. “You’ve just come from Luis? From Dr. Mandala?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you’ve remembered your idea?”

  “But how is it my idea?”

  He smiled at her. “In the ten years before the government intervened, we could visit you in a virtual hospital. At first we just fretted about your future. But then you and Mom began to talk about her work. She must have spent years online with you.”

  Stephanie frowned. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  He sighed. “The government insisted on rather severe methods of memory removal in your case. They wanted to be sure you had no idea that you were uploaded. It’s awful to think of those years you spent with your mom being deleted.”

  “Years?” she said with a harsh laugh. “Yeah, right. Mom never visited when I was in the real hospital. She was always too busy starting her stupid company.”

  He nodded slowly. “I know, Pumpkin . . . that was her way of coping with your cancer. But after you were uploaded, Concinnity Corp took off. And she and I had more money and time than we knew what to do with. She spent her time online. You two got thick as thieves about her research. She gave you a better education in neurotech than Cal Tech could have. It got to the point where I couldn’t understand either one of you.” He smiled.

  Stephanie swallowed hard but there was a tightness that refused to leave her throat.

  Her father’s brown eyes watched her carefully. “The Anti-Singularity crowd started bubbling before you and your mom were done. So I stopped my work at the Concinnity Foundation and helped you two figure out how we could advance your work after the laws took effect.”

  The warmth of excitement again spread through Stephanie’s chest. “You mean they’re still trying to isolate human moral capability into neurotech?”

  “No, no,” he said with a smile so broad that she was afraid he might cry. “We already have.”

  Stephanie’s head bobbed backward. “Already finished? But how?”

  He stood and walked around his desk. She followed him with her eyes and saw that the attic had changed when she wasn’t looking.

  At the room’s end was the same wooden door that had always been there. But to its left stood a traditional round Chinese door that opened onto a Scholar’s Garden complete with reflecting pools, lily pads, and a soft gauze of rain.

  To the right of the ordinary door stood a broad rectangular entryway that led into a hallway with white walls and a polished pine floor.

  “Three choices,” her father said, nodding to each. “The ordinary door in the middle will lead you back to Dr. Mandala’s office and so to your room in the virtual SF Children’s Hospital. You won’t remember any of this, of course. And you’ll have to deal with an embodiment that thinks it’s been through chemotherapy.”

  Stephanie was shaking. “But I don’t want to go anywhere! And even if I did, why would I go back there?”

  He turned and winked at her. “Hard to imagine at this point, huh? But you’ve come to me sixteen times, and each time you’ve left through that door. You’ll understand in a moment.”

  He gestured to the round Chinese door on the left. “That door will take you to a super neuroprocessor your mother and I had hidden beneath a mountain in Nevada. They used to store atomic waste there, I think. If you walk through that door, you will become the only truly independent uploaded being yet to exist. You’ll have enough bandwidth to travel the Internet at lightspeed. More importantly, with the resources of Concinnity Corp at your fingers, you’ll be able to avoid government detection indefinitely.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “But I can’t go; I just got here. Besides, that sounds lonely.”

  “That’s what you always say,” her father said with a wistful laugh. “Your mother was against it, but I insisted. I want you to consider what life would be like in there. Lonely, yes, especially in the beginning. But you’d be able to read the Library of Congress in minutes. You could travel to endless virtual worlds and interact with the multitudes of minds in the real one. You’d be immortal, and with a little effort you could find endless adventure.”

  Stephanie wrinkled her nose. “It still sounds lonely. And, Dad, you’re not making any sense. I don’t want to go anywhere!”

  He held up a finger to stop her. “And the last door, pumpkin, you designed with your mother. It leads to a semi-private Concinnity server in Fresno. The server connects to a global network of other semi-private servers. None of the processors are large enough to hold your full mind. In fact, aside from the one we hid in Nevada—” he nodded toward the round door and the scholar’s garden beyond “—there are no private neuroprocessors large enough to hold you. Nor will any government permit one to be built. So, only in a public super processor, like the one you inhabit now, co
uld you survive. And of course parking yourself there means abiding by the Anti-Singularity Laws.”

  Stephanie felt her fingers go cold as she began to understand. “So I couldn’t go through the last door as a whole mind, could I?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’d have to be polished down into a fraction of a mind.”

  He went back to her and kissed her forehead. “Pumpkin, when I told you that we’d isolated human moral capability into neurotech—”

  “—you were talking about me,” she finished for him in a thin voice. She put her hand to her chest. “You need me to become the one from which all future moral organelles will evolve. You need me to become neurotech’s Mitochondrial Eve.”

  Her father closed his eyes and nodded very slightly.

  “It makes sense,” she said numbly. “I’m the only uploaded consciousness that’s stranded without a body. And I’ve existed for fifty years online. I’m already post-human, and all these years in the hospital . . . the studying and then the stripping down of memories . . . they’ve been a kind of . . . of . . . ”

  He was looking out the window. “You called it a winnowing. Every year in that hospital develops your understanding of unfairness, biology, and computer science. And yet, every year pulls a bit more of your memory and your identity away. You’re becoming younger and older at the same time.”

  “Is that why I keep choosing the middle door? To wash away my identity?” she asked and reached for his hand.

  He took it and gave it a squeeze. “At first, yes, you had to go back to the hospital. But eight years ago, you decided you were ready and you wrote this.” He tapped the glass snake bracelet on her arm. “If you walk through the last door, this program will polish you down and allow the Fresno processor to engulf you. The new morally-aware being created there will grow and multiply, eventually spreading to other servers across the world and beginning the neurotech evolution.”

  Stephanie used her free hand to turn the snake around her wrist. “It has to be me, doesn’t it? The anti-singularity types are watching every other uploaded consciousness.”

  “I’m afraid so, pumpkin,” her father said softly.

  She let go of his hands and pressed her palms against her eyes. It felt as if she were falling away from daylight, falling down an impossibly deep hole. “Can’t we find somebody else?” she heard herself ask. “I mean there has to be . . . maybe in some other country . . . it’s just that . . . ”

  When she dropped her hands, she found her vision blurred by tears. “I got my first chemo when I was twelve, Dad!”

  His face was a mask of pain. “I know, pumpkin,” he took her in his arms.

  “Why do I have to be the one to die? Why do I have to be swallowed by some computer?” She ground her teeth for a minute. “You know, maybe I don’t give a damn about conscious neurotech living in harmony with humans or some other bullshit.”

  “I know it’s horrible. I know,” her dad murmured.

  Suddenly Stephanie’s heart seemed to catch fire and hot tears dropped from her eyes. “No you don’t!” She pushed him away. “You don’t know anything.”

  She stood and looked for somewhere to go but saw only the small attic and the three doors. Something halfway between a scream and a growl escaped her throat and she stamped her foot. “I hate it!”

  She put her arms down on her father’s desk, then her head. “Why is it me who has to die for this stupid thing?”

  She stood and glared at her father. “Why do I have to die? I had my first chemo at twelve and lost all my hair before I was thirteen. I lived fifty years in a box. Mom was never around when I was alive, and then they stole all my memories of her visiting me when I was dead. Why ask me to die—”

  “—when you never got to live,” he finished for her.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but the strength of her anger dissolved and she fell into sorrow. The world went black.

  And then her father’s arms were around her and she held him and pushed her face into his chest and wept without reserve.

  “Why do I have to choose?” she asked when she could breathe again. “Can’t I stay here with you and Mom?”

  He pulled away from her and sat in his chair. “Pumpkin, there is no here,” he said softly. “This is only a memory. I’m only a shadow or a ghost. The best artificial intelligence money could buy, but still nothing more than a ghost.”

  She pulled her forearm across her nose. “You’re a demon,” she said and felt her face wrinkle again into tears. “You’re just a program. Just a fucking program.”

  She wept again, this time for her own loss, for all the pain she had known, and for all the joy she would never know. She wept for her father who had outlived his child and lost his wife to her science and her business, for her mother who had lost her daughter to glio-fucking-blastoma. She cried for her cancer-ravaged family.

  And throughout the squall of tears, her father’s demon held her and, gently rocking, said, “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry. Your mother and I died, too. I’m so sorry.”

  At last Stephanie reached that eerie calm that follows a soul-gutting cry. “Why didn’t you upload yourselves?” she asked in a nose-stuffed monotone.

  “There was room for only one of us in the Nevada processor,” her father answered. “And neither one of us fancied the idea of becoming the sole immortal mind in the world.”

  “I don’t fancy it either,” she said and then looked at him. “Part of me wants to go through the last door and become the next Eve, but I don’t because another part of me is so pissed off.”

  Her father nodded. “Understandably pissed off with cancer, with the doctors, with the government, and . . . ” He paused. “With your mother and me.”

  “How could I be angry with you guys when you did so much for me?”

  He shook his head. “We did our best. But we couldn’t save you. Somewhere in there, Stephanie, you’ll need to forgive us for not being able to save you from cancer.”

  “But that makes no sense. What is there to forgive if—”

  He interrupted her. “Your mom and I pulled every string we could to get you into the experimental nanomed immunotherapy, and it killed you.”

  Something inside Stephanie’s chest crumpled. He was right. The tears returned. Again he held her and again he whispered reassurances while rocking her. But she did not need to weep as long this time, and soon she let go and dried her face. She looked at him and said. “It’s hard to be angry when I know how hard you two tried.”

  He took her hands. “Maybe that’s why you keep going back to the hospital. Maybe it’s the only way you can feel that anger.”

  Stephanie thought of how she had treated Jani and the caustic things she had said or thought about the other doctors and nurses. She looked up again. “Maybe I’ve felt it enough?”

  He squeezed her hand and stood. “Let’s find out,” he said and led her to the last door. Stephanie’s glass snake bracelet became warm and began to slither around her wrist.

  “It took two hundred programmers five years to write me,” her father’s demon boasted. “I was the world’s most advanced AI. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to write a similar demon for your mother, but she did leave something behind. It’s the Fresno processor’s avatar. It can’t answer your questions, or learn anything new about you. But it can replay a recording we made for you.” He gestured through the last doorway to a brightly-lit hallway beyond.

  Stephanie remembered her mother as being tall and robust with a round face and long black hair. So she was surprised when a thin, stooped, and silver-haired woman appeared.

  “Stephanie,” her mother said, paused and then started again, “Daughter . . . ” She laughed nervously.

  Stephanie squeezed her father’s hand. Her mother had always been an awkward but intensely earnest person. It hurt to see that awkwardness again.

  “At the time of this recording, you have escaped the hospital twice. Your father and I can see the strugg
le that lies before you. When the time comes for you to choose among these doors, I want you to know I . . . that I don’t care which door you choose.” Her mother paused, started to say something then stopped.

  Stephanie gripped her father’s hand tighter.

  “It wasn’t until you were uploaded that I truly got to know you,” her mother said. “And it was in those years, studying and working together that I really . . . ” An awkward pause. “That was when I realized that I had not truly known you when you were alive, and it broke my heart that I couldn’t keep you longer.”

  Stephanie drew a long, quavering breath.

  “Let me tell you a story of our time together, then I’ll let you go, promise.” Nervous laughter. “It was when you would have been twenty-two. We were discussing neurotech and evolution when suddenly you looked at me and said ‘Mom, if you think about it, the endocytosis of a symbiont is the opposite of pregnancy.’ ”

  Her mother smiled and then said, “I almost laughed then, but you were so serious. And you explained it to me. And you were right.”

  Her mother daubed her eyes. “When you were first conceived, you grew inside of me. You were completely dependant on me, but then you developed and became more and more independent. Finally we who were one body became two different people. But with endosymbiosis, the opposite happens. Two organisms give up more and more of their identity so that they can better help each other. Then at last one envelops the other. They who were two become one.”

  Stephanie thought about what she must have looked like when she said this to her mother and then nodded.

  “I am sorry for the things you will never know,” her mother said. “I am sorry you will never have a daughter of your own. But the idea we discovered . . . well . . . whether or not you chose to become the next Eve, we now know it’s possible. It will happen someday, somewhere. And the world will be a better place for it. Glimpsing that in the future . . . it brought me more joy than anything else. I wanted you to know that before choosing.”

  The image of her mother started, obviously being prompted by whoever was operating the recording equipment. “Oh, oh. Yes. So, Stephanie, please know I love you, whatever choice you make.” With those final words, her mother opened her arms and then froze.