There are more ways to rescue lives and redeem what might have been than Abby and others believe.
In the grand matrix of my matrioshka brain, versions of our history are replayed. There isn’t a single world in this grand computation, but billions, each of them populated by human consciousnesses, but nudged in small ways to be better.
Most paths lead to less slaughter. Here, Rome and Constantinople are not sacked; there, Cuzco and Vĩnh Long do not fall. Along one timeline, the Mongols and Manchus do not sweep across East Asia; along another, the Westphalian model does not become an all-consuming blueprint for the world. One group of men consumed with murder do not come to power in Europe, and another group worshipping death do not seize the machinery of state in Japan. Instead of the colonial yoke, the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia decide their own fates. Enslavement and genocide are not the handmaidens of discovery and exploration, and the errors of our history are averted.
Small populations do not rise to consume a disproportionate amount of the planet’s resources or monopolize the path of its future. History is redeemed.
But not all paths are better. There is a darkness in human nature that makes certain conflicts irreconcilable. I grieve for the lives lost but I can’t intervene. These are not simulations. They cannot be if I respect the sanctity of human life.
The billions of consciousnesses who live in these worlds are every bit as real as I am. They deserve as much free will as anyone who has ever lived and must be allowed to make their own choices. Even if we’ve always suspected that we also live in a grand simulation, we prefer the truth to be otherwise.
Think of these as parallel universes if you will; call them sentimental gestures of a woman looking into the past; dismiss it as a kind of symbolic atonement.
But isn’t it the dream of every species to have the chance to do it over? To see if it’s possible to prevent the fall from grace that darkens our gaze upon the stars?
823,543:
THERE IS A message.
Someone has plucked the strings that weave together the fabric of space, sending a sequence of pulses down every strand of Indra’s web, connecting the farthest exploding nova to the nearest dancing quark.
The galaxy vibrates with a broadcast in languages known, forgotten, and yet to be invented. I parse out a single sentence.
Come to the galactic center. It’s reunion time.
Carefully, I instruct the intelligences guiding the plates that make up the Dyson swarms to shift, like ailerons on the wings of ancient aircraft. The plates drift apart, as though the shells in the matrioshka brain are cracking, hatching a new form of life.
Gradually, the statites move away from one side of the sun and assume the configuration of a Shkadov thruster. A single eye opens in the universe, emitting a bright beam of light.
And slowly, the imbalance in the solar radiation begins to move the star, bringing the shell-mirrors with it. We’re headed for the center of the galaxy, propelled upon a fiery column of light.
Not every human world will heed the call. There are plenty of planets on which the inhabitants have decided that it is perfectly fine to explore the mathematical worlds of ever-deepening virtual reality in perpetuity, to live out lives of minimal energy consumption in universes hidden within nutshells.
Some, like my daughter Abby, will prefer to leave their lush, life-filled planets in place, like oases in the endless desert that is space. Others will seek the refuge of the galactic edge, where cooler climates will allow more efficient computation. Still others, having re-captured the ancient joy of living in the flesh, will tarry to act out space operas of conquest and glory.
But enough will come.
I imagine thousands, hundreds of thousands of stars moving toward the center of the galaxy. Some are surrounded by space habitats full of people who still look like people. Some are orbited by machines that have but a dim memory of their ancestral form. Some will drag with them planets populated by creatures from our distant past, or by creatures I have never seen. Some will bring guests, aliens who do not share our history but are curious about this self-replicating low-entropy phenomenon that calls itself humanity.
I imagine generations of children on innumerable worlds watching the night sky as constellations shift and transform, as stars move out of alignment, drawing contrails against the empyrean.
I close my eyes. This journey will take a long time. Might as well get some rest.
A very, very long time later:
THE WIDE SILVERY lawn spreads out before me almost to the golden surf of the sea, separated by the narrow dark band that is the beach. The sun is bright and warm, and I can almost feel the breeze, a gentle caress against my arms and face.
“Mia!”
I look over and see Mom striding across the lawn, her long black hair streaming like a kite’s tails.
She wraps me in a fierce hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like the glow of new stars being born in the embers of a supernova, like fresh comets emerging from the primeval nebula.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, her voice muffled against my cheek.
“It’s okay,” I say, and I mean it. I give her a kiss.
“It’s a good day to fly a kite,” she says.
We look up at the sun.
The perspective shifts vertiginously, and now we’re standing upside down on an intricately carved plain, the sun far below us. Gravity tethers the surface above the bottoms of our feet to that fiery orb, stronger than any string. The bright photons we’re bathed in strike against the ground, pushing it up. We’re standing on the bottom of a kite that is flying higher and higher, tugging us toward the stars.
I want to tell her that I understand her impulse to make one life grand, her need to dim the sun with her love, her striving to solve intractable problems, her faith in a technical solution even though she knew it was imperfect. I want to tell her that I know we’re flawed, but that doesn’t mean we’re not also wondrous.
Instead, I just squeeze her hand; she squeezes back.
“Happy birthday,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to fly.”
I relax my grip, and smile at her. “I’m not. We’re almost there.”
The world brightens with the light of a million billion suns.
THE VISITOR FROM TAURED
Ian R MacLeod
IAN R. MACLEOD (www.ianrmacleod.com) has been writing and selling (as opposed to writing and not selling, which he says he’s been doing for much longer) for almost 30 years. Amongst many accolades, his work has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice) and the Sidewise Award for alternate history (three times). He took a Law degree and drifted into the English Civil Service, but writing was always his first love and ambition. He has recently released a short story collection, Frost on Glass, and has a new novel, Red Snow, due out shortly. He lives in the riverside town of Bewdley in what he insists is still, currently, the United Kingdom. The ‘original’ visitor from Taured is a genuine urban myth, and is well worth Googling, but he says the genesis of this story came from a fear that books are losing out to other forms of entertainment, and some odd ideas he has about the nature of reality.
1.
THERE WAS ALWAYS something otherwordly about Rob Holm. Not that he wasn’t charming and clever and good-looking. Driven, as well. Even during that first week when we’d arrived at university and waved goodbye to our parents and our childhoods, and were busy doing all the usual fresher things, which still involved getting dangerously drunk and pretending not to be homesick and otherwise behaving like the prim, arrogant, cocky and immature young assholes we undoubtedly were, Rob was chatting with research fellows and quietly getting to know the best virtuals to hang out in.
Even back then, us young undergrads were an endangered breed. Many universities had gone bankrupt, become commercial research utilities, or transformed themselves into the academic theme-parks of those so-called ‘Third Age Academies’. But still, he
re we all were at the traditional redbrick campus of Leeds University, which still offered a broad-ish range of courses to those with families rich enough to support them, or at least tolerant enough not to warn them against such folly. My own choice of degree, just to show how incredibly supportive my parents were, being Analogue Literature.
As a subject, it already belonged with Alchemy and Marxism in the dustbin of history, but books―and I really do mean those peculiar, old, paper, physical objects―had always been my thing. Even when I was far too young to understand what they were, and by rights should have been attracted by the bright, interactive, virtual gewgaws buzzing all around me, I’d managed to burrow into the bottom of an old box, down past the stickle bricks and My Little Ponies, to these broad, cardboardy things that fell open and had these flat, two-dee shapes and images that didn’t move or respond in any normal way when I waved my podgy fingers in their direction. All you could do was simply look at them. That, and chew their corners, and maybe scribble over their pages with some of the dried-up crayons which were also to be found amid those predigital layers.
My parents had always been loving and tolerant of their daughter. They even encouraged little Lita’s interest in these ancient artefacts. I remember my mother’s finger moving slow and patient across the creased and yellowed pages as she traced the pictures and her lips breathed the magical words that somehow arose from those flat lines. She wouldn’t have assimilated data this way herself in years, if ever, so in a sense we were both learning.
The Hungry Caterpillar. The Mister Men series. Where The Wild Things Are. Frodo’s adventures. Slowly, like some archaeologist discovering the world by deciphering the cartouches of the tombs in Ancient Egypt, I learned how to perceive and interact through this antique medium. It was, well, the thingness of books. The exact way they didn’t leap about or start giving off sounds, smells and textures. That, and how they didn’t ask you which character you’d like to be, or what level you wanted to go to next, but simply took you by the hand and led you where they wanted you to go.
Of course, I became a confirmed bibliophile, but I do still wonder how my life would have progressed if my parents had seen odd behaviour differently, and taken me to some paediatric specialist. Almost certainly, I wouldn’t be the Lita Ortiz who’s writing these words for whoever might still be able to comprehend them. Nor the one who was lucky enough to meet Rob Holm all those years ago in the teenage fug of those student halls back at Leeds University.
2.
SO. ROB. FIRST thing to say is the obvious fact that most of us fancied him. It wasn’t just the grey eyes, or the courtly elegance, or that soft Scottish accent, or even the way he somehow appeared mature and accomplished. It was, essentially, a kind of mystery. But he wasn’t remotely stand-offish. He went along with the fancy dress pub crawls. He drank. He fucked about. He took the odd tab.
One of my earliest memories of Rob was finding him at some club, cool as you like amid all the noise, flash and flesh. And dragging him out onto the pulsing dance floor. One minute we were hovering above the skyscrapers of Beijing and the next a shipwreck storm was billowing about us. Rob, though, was simply there. Taking it all in, laughing, responding, but somehow detached. Then, helping me down and out, past clanging temple bells and through prismatic sandstorms to the entirely non-virtual hell of the toilets. His cool hands holding back my hair as I vomited.
I never ever actually thanked Rob for this—I was too embarrassed—but the incident somehow made us more aware of each other. That, and maybe we shared a sense of otherness. He, after all, was studying astrophysics, and none of the rest of us even knew what that was, and had all that strange stuff going on across the walls of his room. Not flashing posters of the latest virtual boy band or porn empress, but slow-turning gas clouds, strange planets, distant stars and galaxies. That, and long runs of mek, whole arching rainbows of the stuff, endlessly twisting and turning. My room, on the other hand, was piled with the precious torn and foxed paperbacks I’d scoured from junksites during my teenage years. Not, of course, that they were actually needed. Even if you were studying something as arcane as narrative fiction, you were still expected to download and virtualise all your resources.
The Analogue Literature Faculty at Leeds University had once taken up a labyrinthine space in a redbrick terrace at the east edge of the campus. But now it had been invaded by dozens of more modern disciplines. Anything from speculative mek to non-concrete design to holo-pornography had taken bites out of it. I was already aware—how couldn’t I be?—that no significant novel or short story had been written in decades, but I was shocked to discover that only five other students in my year had elected for An Lit as their main subject, and one of those still resided in Seoul, and another was a postcentenarian on clicking steel legs. Most of the other students who showed up were dipping into the subject in the hope that it might add something useful to their main discipline. Invariably, they were disappointed. It wasn’t just the difficulty of ploughing through page after page of non-interactive text. It was linear fiction’s sheer lack of options, settings, choices. Why the hell, I remember some kid shouting in a seminar, should I accept all the miserable shit that this Hardy guy rains down his characters? Give me the base program for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and I’ll hack you fifteen better endings.
I pushed my weak mek to the limit during that first term as I tried to formulate a tri-dee excursus on Tender Is The Night, but the whole piece was reconfigured out of existence once the faculty ais got hold of it. Meanwhile, Rob Holm was clearly doing far better. I could hear him singing in the showers along from my room, and admired the way he didn’t get involved in all the usual peeves and arguments. The physical sciences had a huge, brand new faculty at the west end of campus called the Clearbrite Building. Half church, half-pagoda and maybe half spaceship in the fizzing, shifting, headachy way of modern architecture, there was no real way of telling how much of it was actually made of brick, concrete and glass, and how much consisted of virtual artefacts and energy fields. You could get seriously lost just staring at it.
My first year went by, and I fought hard against crawling home, and had a few unromantic flings, and made vegetable bolognaise my signature dish, and somehow managed to get version 4.04 of my second term excursus on Howard’s End accepted. Rob and I didn’t became close, but I liked his singing, and the cinnamon scent he left hanging behind in the steam of the showers, and it was good to know that someone else was making a better hash of this whole undergraduate business than I was.
“Hey, Lita?”
We were deep into the summer term and exams were looming. Half the undergrads were back at home, and the other half were jacked up on learning streams, or busy having breakdowns.
I leaned in on Rob’s doorway. “Yeah?”
“Fancy sharing a house next year?”
“Next year?” Almost effortlessly casual, I pretended to consider this. “I really hadn’t thought. It all depends.”
“Not a problem.” He shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll find someone else.”
“No, no. That’s fine. I mean, yeah, I’m in. I’m interested.”
“Great. I’ll show you what I’ve got from the letting agencies.” He smiled a warm smile, then returned to whatever wondrous creations were spinning above his desk.
3.
WE SETTLED ON a narrow house with bad drains just off the Otley Road in Headingley, and I’m not sure whether I was relieved or disappointed when I discovered that his plan was that we share the place with some others. I roped in a couple of girls, Rob found a couple of guys, and we all got on pretty well. I had a proper boyfriend by then, a self-regarding jock called Torsten, and every now and then a different woman would emerge from Rob’s room. Nothing serious ever seemed to come of this, but they were equally gorgeous, clever and out of my league.
A bunch of us used to head out to the moors for midnight bonfires during that second winter. I remember the smoke and the sparks spinning into the deep bla
ck as we sang and drank and arsed around. Once, and with the help of a few tabs and cans, I asked Rob to name some constellations for me, and he put an arm around my waist and led me further into the dark.
Over there, Lita, up to the left and far away from the light of this city, is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is always a good place to start when you’re stargazing. And there, see close as twins at the central bend of the Plough’s handle, are Mizar and Alcor. They’re not a true binary, but if we had decent binoculars, we could see that Mizar really does have a close companion. And there, that way, up and leftĩhis breath on my face, his hands on my armsĩ maybe you can just see there’s this fuzzy speck at the Bear’s shoulder? Now, that’s an entire, separate galaxy from our own filled with billions of stars, and its light has taken about twelve million years to reach the two of us here, tonight. Then Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Canus Major and Minor… Distant, storybook names for distant worlds. I even wondered aloud about the possibility of other lives, existences, hardly expecting Rob to agree with me. But he did. And then he said something which struck me as strange.
“Not just out there, either, Lita. There are other worlds all around us. It’s just that we can’t see them.”
“You’re talking in some metaphorical sense, right?”
“Not at all. It’s part of what I’m trying to understand in my studies.”
“To be honest, I’ve got no real idea what astrophysics even means. Maybe you could tell me.”
“I’d love to. And you know, Lita, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to, what do you call itĩtwo-dee fiction, flat narrative? So I want you to tell me about that as well. Deal?”
We wandered back toward the fire, and I didn’t expect anything else to come of our promise until Rob called to me when I was wandering past his room one wet, grey afternoon a week or so later. It was deadline day, my hair was a greasy mess, I was heading for the shower, and had an excursus on John Updike to finish.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 63