Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  To obtain a mandate to roll out a global solution, it was the U.S. government, the UN, and the Stewardship agencies whose endorsement we really needed, of course. But once again poor, deluded Ben Cushman, our bomber, had probably done us long-term good. I thought that among the commentators and opinion formers a consensus was emerging that regardless of the environmental arguments, to allow our project to fail now would be a betrayal of Barnette, and of the others who had died.

  That was all fine, but we still needed to make the case. And so we were starting to work with Gea’s sponsors toward a presentation to the UN. It would be given by Gea herself. Given the loss of Barnette, I couldn’t think of a better spokesperson for the cause. But it would be the first time an artificial sentience had addressed the UN General Assembly: quite an occasion. I wondered what form Gea would choose to incarnate herself. Presumably not my uncle George’s toy robot.

  “How about like Alia?” I said to Shelley, when she at last came on the line. I had downloaded a record of our exorcism to her. “Perhaps an apelike post-human form would be a fitting symbol. All our futures are in the balance, et cetera.”

  “Yes. And if things go wrong she could climb a pillar and swing out the window.” Shelley seemed to be multitasking: as she spoke to me she kept glancing aside, and I thought somebody just out of sight was passing her bits of paper as we spoke.

  Shelley had been at her desk since six. She had always had those enviable reserves of energy, but since the loss of Ruud Makaay a vast burden of responsibility had fallen on her, and the lines around her eyes were disturbingly dark. “Hey, Michael,” she said, “I don’t want to hang up on you but we’re kind of rapid-responding here. Is there anything else you need from me right now?”

  “I called to see what I could do for you.”

  She eyed me; for a moment I had her full attention. “Look, Michael, we’re trying to ramp up to a production facility. We’re at a level of detail you can’t much help with. There’s always Gea’s speech; you could work on that, if you’re kicking your heels. But you have other stuff to sort out, don’t you?”

  “You know me too well,” I groused.

  “Maybe. I know you’re sometimes tempted to hide, just as you’re trying to hide right now in work that you don’t need to be doing. But this Alia came for you, didn’t she? I think you’re going to have to face that, and resolve it somehow, before you can move on.”

  “I know.”

  “Then get off the line and do it. Talk to you later, bye.” She turned away. “Now, where the hell are the results of that last deconvolution—” The image blanked out.

  There was a call from John, waiting for my reply.

  Shelley was right, of course. I tapped the screen, took John’s call, and immersed myself once more in strangeness.

  John, Tom, and I gathered in another small office. As drab as everything else seemed to be in Deadhorse, it was empty save for a small conference table and chairs, and a few softscreens on the wall. John and Tom looked as washed-out as I felt.

  We were alone save for Gea, who trundled back and forth on the tabletop, spitting sparks. Gea was going to give us some preliminary results from her scanning of Alia’s manifestation.

  I spoke to John, who had called us together. “I take it you didn’t want Sonia here.”

  “Tom agrees. This is a family thing, Michael. It’s all about us, about Morag. She was your wife, Tom’s mother—”

  “Your lover.”

  His face hardened, but he didn’t look away; for better or worse that awful truth was becoming embedded in the fabric of our relationship. “I know the future is mixed up in all this. Alia.” He spoke the name like a curse. “But it’s about our lives, the three of us. So let’s try to start from that basis.”

  “And Rosa?”

  Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s keep it down to Earth, shall we?”

  Maybe he was right. Three Pooles was probably enough craziness for any one room. I turned to Gea. “So where do we start? What is Alia?”

  Gea rolled complacently. “First, she wasn’t a VR. No doubt she was a projection of some sort, as she tried to explain to us. But equally she was real, as real as you are, Michael. Her body responded to our attempts to scan it, with X-rays, MRI, thermal imagers, other technologies. She shed strands of hair! With that we were even able to perform a genomic analysis.”

  Gea said that Alia was human—almost.

  As Rosa had guessed, that apelike form appeared to be an adaptation to zero gravity. A starship on a long-duration voyage was in an evolutionary sense like an island on Earth, where stranded animals routinely become dwarfs to spread out a limited food supply among more individuals. So the crew found their children growing smaller. And, in low or zero gravity, as the generations ticked by the children’s forms had reverted to an ancient apelike plan, with more of a balance of length between arms and legs—a design more suitable for climbing.

  Surprisingly, Gea said, the basic body-plan changes seemed to be the result of natural selection rather than deliberate engineering. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but it seems there are some changes the genes find “easy” to make, such as relative growth rates, and faced with a challenging new environment, selection reaches for the easy options first. How strange, though, that these far-future people, projected into the unimaginable environment of space, had found their bodies reaching deep back in time for genetic memories of vanished African forest canopies.

  “There is also some redesign of the joints,” Gea said. “For instance it looks as if Alia, like a baboon, could dangle from one arm and turn, allowing the arm to turn a full rotation in its socket.” But such redesign seemed radical for a “mere” half-million years, Gea said; perhaps this was an expression of engineered genes.

  John grunted. “Next time you see her, throw her a banana and ask her to do some tricks.”

  “Shut up,” I said mildly.

  Gea talked us through more subtle changes, all of which pointed to an advancement over the Homo sapiens standard model circa the twenty-first century. The skeleton had been redesigned; Alia had more ribs than I did, perhaps to hold her organs in place more effectively, and so avoid hernias. Although she was designed for swinging around in weightlessness, Alia had thicker bones, vertebrae, discs in her back. She would be less prone to osteoporosis than I was, and would do a better job of functioning in high gravity, if she had to. Gea showed us images of a redesigned throat. Alia had no epiglottis, but there was a raised trachea, a kind of extension to her windpipe, so that food and drink could never get mixed up with the air she breathed; she was very unlikely to choke.

  There were detailed modifications to her eyes, too. The optic nerve seemed to be attached to the retina more firmly, so that there was less chance of suffering a detached retina, and there were rings of tiny muscles around Alia’s pupils. “She seems to have a zoom facility,” Gea said dryly.

  And Gea talked about Alia’s genome. Her existence was governed by DNA just as mine was, so we were both obviously products of the same lineage of life, both ultimately products of Earth. But Alia’s DNA showed divergences.

  “Some of these changes appear to be the result of genetic drift, of natu-ral selection,” Gea said. “But others appeared to be engineered. We can only guess at the purpose of most of this. It may be she has a general regenerative ability, for instance. Cut off a finger, and another will grow in its place.”

  John drew a softscreen toward him and made rapid notes. “Somebody ought to patent this stuff,” he said. “Just a thought.”

  Tom sneered. “Uncle, how crass to be thinking of commercial gain at a time like this.”

  John was unperturbed; he had endured such insults all his life. “Just doing my job. If there’s profit to be made, why not by us?”

  Gea moved on to still stranger aspects of Alia’s anatomy. Much of what she had described so far had been extrapolations of the human. But there were signs of much more peculiar developments. Gea had imaged hard, impenetrab
le knots in Alia’s bloodstream, motes that might have been technological, remote descendants of the nanomachines of our age, perhaps.

  And there even were traces of other life-forms in Alia’s body. For instance there was a kind of sheathing around portions of her nervous system, its function unknown—perhaps it was there for protection from deep-space radiation. It seemed obviously alive, and was based on an amino acid chemistry, just as Alia was. But it did not share Alia’s genome—indeed there was no trace of DNA to be found in it at all.

  “Alien life,” I said slowly. “Not from Earth, because not based on DNA. She has a kind of symbiosis with alien life-forms.”

  “So it seems.”

  For long heartbeats we sat there, trying to digest this latest bit of news. I think I was the most imaginative of the three of us, the most open-minded. But even I was struggling with this. Here was not just a woman from the future, here was ET—and not sitting in a flying saucer looking back at me, but wrapped around the neurons of this remote descendant.

  “All of this is evidence of advancement, in the broadest sense,” Gea said now. “Many past developments life’s capabilities have depended on symbiosis, the cooperation of one kind of life-form with another, or even the incorporation of one into the other.” Even complex cells were the result of one such merger, she said. Mitochondria, once independent creatures, were now used as miniature power plants within our own cells.

  “And so what might come next,” I said, trying to follow her chain of thought, “is more mergers. Of our bodies with machines, and biology with technology. Or of our Earth-derived life-forms with life from another biosphere altogether, alien life.”

  “Just as we see with Alia,” Gea said.

  John scowled at the little robot. “I don’t think I like you telling me I’m inferior to that monkey woman.”

  Gea said, “Then who would you like to tell you?”

  Tom grinned, and I suppressed a laugh.

  John leaned over the robot. “And what about you, sparky? If humanity is progressing onward and upward, what’s going to become of you?”

  “I suspect we artificial types will play our part in your development,” Gea said, as unfazed as ever. “We know that Alia is actually far more intelligent than any modern human being. With all respect. We have the evidence of her speech for that, her ‘true speech,’ the accelerated gabble we recorded from Morag. I strongly suspect that she is also more conscious than any human alive today, in the truest sense. She has a deeper mind, and surely a deeper sense of herself. Some humans fear that artificial minds will make humans obsolescent. But Alia shows us that humans will not become obsolescent, any time soon. So what has happened? Perhaps there has been a competition with the machines, a selection pressure to become smarter.”

  John said, “Or perhaps we just absorbed you. Perhaps you’re just another symbiote.”

  “Perhaps. But we may have chosen not to participate in such a symbiosis. After all that is the great benefit of sentience—choice. And if that’s so, who knows what our destiny may be?” And she rolled back and forth, a half-kilogram of painted tin.

  I spoke to Rosa later that day. She showed up in my hotel room, a small, dense, black figure. She listened patiently as I summarized what Gea had told us.

  “Even what Alia told us of cosmology made sense,” I said. “Or at least it didn’t contradict what we know.”

  I had been a cosmology fan all my life. I was encouraged by uncle George, who said I was lucky to be alive at a time when cosmology was moving out of the realm of philosophy and into hard science. There had been the emergence of quantum gravity, and the great astrophysical satellite studies of the first part of the century that had mapped the relics of universal birth in fine detail, all of which had enabled us to put together a firm biography of the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. Of course being a fan of all this stuff hadn’t helped me spot the approaching Higgs revolution, which had developed from all this.

  But as part of the new understanding, we knew the universe was finite.

  I said, “We haven’t mapped the topology of the universe yet—that is, its shape. But for sure, a finite, closed form of the kind Alia hinted at fits what we know.”

  “Perhaps that finiteness is necessary for the development of life, of mind, in some way,” Rosa mused. “If the universe were infinite, just dissipating into the dark, perhaps mind would simply fizzle out, too. Perhaps everything is connected.”

  “Maybe you should ask Alia about that.”

  “It’s you she’s interested in, not me,” Rosa said. “And what of the human future she sketched—all these ‘Expansions’ across the Galaxy?”

  “That seems all too plausible, too,” I said.

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “We humans seem to have been an unstable lot from the beginning. Unlike other animals, even our hominid forebears, we aren’t content simply to find a role in the ecology. And in the future, it seems, that same restlessness will drive us on beyond the Earth. We will encounter others out there, and those others will go the way of the mammoth and the Neandertal, their last relics incorporated into the very bodies of their destroyers.”

  “Umm,” I said. “Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?” This was an old conundrum, dating back nearly a century. The universe is so old that there has been time for it to be colonized many times over, before humans even evolved—so if extraterrestrial aliens exist, why don’t we see any sign of them? “One candidate solution is that there is a killer species out there, a voracious predator that swoops down and assimilates any culture foolish enough to attract the notice of the bad guys. It’s a chastening thought that some day we may be the predators; we may be the instigator of a Fermi Paradox of our own . . .”

  Rosa nodded. “But does it have to be that way? I grew up in a society which was quite different. The way we lived in the Order will always have its critics. But the Order was able to deliver very high population densities, very large numbers of human beings living orderly human lives, and all without harming anybody else. So I have firsthand experience of how humans can get along with each other without needing to trash the Galaxy to do it.”

  I guessed I knew far more about her Order than she could imagine. But I didn’t want her to know about George’s manuscript; he had made it clear he had never told her about it.

  “Rosa, you speculated about evolutionary purposes for ghosts, how maybe they evolved to help us through bottlenecks of the past. Are you disappointed that the visitations are just”—I shrugged—“technological after all?”

  She smiled. “It is never a good idea to be disappointed by the truth. And besides, maybe I did hit on a deeper meaning. Perhaps the visitations, the Witnesses, did somehow aid us through those bottleneck times, even if unwittingly. Perhaps humanity was able to survive, and grow to cover a Galaxy, precisely because the likes of Alia closed the time loops from past to future.”

  “That sounds like a time paradox.”

  “Alia is a traveler from the future. Her very presence here must be perturbing all our lives, already changing the future, and yet she is here even so. What can be more paradoxical than that?”

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t help us much right now, does it?” I got up and paced around the room, my thinking muddy, unsatisfactory. “The whole thing seems so old-fashioned. Welcome O Visitor from the Incredi-ble Year Five Hundred Thousand! . . . It’s a 1940s dream.” I suppose I was thinking of George again, the heaps of decaying science fiction novels he had given me.

  “Those dreams were a product of the age,” Rosa said. “The twentieth century was a time of cheap energy, of technological optimism. And so we dreamed expansive, progressive dreams. Now people turn inward. The children are taught to do so—all those introspection classes in the schools! We live in a time of constraint, when one dare not dream that things might be different, for any possibility of difference seems even worse than what we have.

  “But a deeper part of us knows that something is missing. We ar
e a species that has lived through immense calamities in the past—vast climatic upheavals, huge natural disasters, plagues and famines, the rise and fall of empires. We have been shaped by such events. Even if we don’t realize it, we yearn for the epic, the apocalyptic. And now the epic has found us. It has found you, Michael.” As always she spoke calmly, but her tone was warm.

  “You think I should call her back?”

  “Of course. What else is there to do? You must resolve this, Michael. But you must not be humble before her.”

  “Humble?”

  “She has come here for her own purposes, her own agenda, it seems. But we don’t have to accept that agenda. Perhaps even Alia has limits.

  “We know so much more now than I ever imagined we would learn, when I was a child in the 1960s. And Alia, with a half million years’ advantage over us, must know far more yet. But what of the deepest issues of all? Does she know why anything exists at all, rather than nothing? Before such questions, the details of cosmological unfoldings seem rather trivial, don’t you think? And if we can pose questions she can’t answer, perhaps Alia’s people are no smarter than we are, for all their redesigned rib cages and alien symbiotes.” Her eyes glittered, hard, knowing, skeptical.

  That night, alone in my room, I called her. It felt absurd to be sitting on my bed, calling the name of a creature who wouldn’t be born for half a million years until after my bones were dust, if she ever existed at all.

  Yet she came. There were no special effects, no flashes or bangs or swirls of light. One instant she wasn’t there, the next she was, a part of my reality as solid as the bed in my room, the table, the chairs. She looked out of place. With her slightly stooped stance and that long crimson fur hanging from her limbs, she did look like an escaped ape. But she smiled at me.