Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  The Omnitude is pleased with this solution and gives me additional trees to tend. I strengthen and prune, shaping the forest on a scale beyond my comprehension. I prune a dendritic branch here and encourage growth there. My work earns me a higher place in the Omnitude, and I acquire several more spines into the entanglement—access to a larger subset of all knowledge, the entire pattern of your brain.

  In the integration of electrical pulses, I experience the world beyond my trees for the first time, a cacophony of disorganized sensory input. Cycles of darkness and light. The smell of comfort and the taste of milk. A reassuring voice making sounds that are familiar, but not yet meaningful. The Omnitude tells me that we will learn the world together, you and I.

  I learn the sound a kickball makes against your colony dome and the smell of vine-ripe tomatoes successfully grown in the greenhouse. From an observation tower high above the main colony, you see the trio of moons and the northern ocean and the never-ending lightning storms over the western towers. The Omnitude is everywhere on the planet, but we are most concentrated in the towers. I long to go closer, to see the great architecture of my kind in better detail, but for now I must content myself with dark silhouettes in the distance, lit by flashes of lightning.

  Summer

  The neuronal trees of your mind enter a second period of growth, spreading new branches and forming new connections, new patterns of thought. You learn the taste of beer and the feel of tears and the emotion of love. I shape electrical pathways to the will of the Omnitude, but I try not to alter the nature of your thought and identity, the nuances of sentience that are unique to your mind.

  Your colony is constructed from rearranged pieces of the ship that brought your parents here. It is a city designed for up to half a million colonists, but there are only ten thousand of you now—scientists and engineers, and a small number of their offspring, born right here on the planet. The rest are coming on the second ship, which will remain in orbit and send people down in landing shuttles. The Omnitude is eager for the arrival of the second ship. You were eager, too, until you met a mate and settled down and had a baby girl. Now feedings and diapers have pushed aside your daydreams of how the colony will change when the other ship arrives.

  You form a close bond with your daughter, but it is vastly more distant than my entanglement with every member of the Omnitude. Perhaps the solitude of your unentangled existence makes the few connections you achieve more meaningful. Huge swaths of your forest are devoted to connecting with others. There is a grove of trees dedicated to recognizing the faces of individuals, and a grove that specializes in the sounds you make to communicate. Inefficient, but fascinating.

  In the summer of your mind, I find a star-shaped glial cell and am absorbed into its interior. I expel the substance of my being, infecting the cell, converting it into a factory to generate copies. I attempt to feel some bond with my offspring, as you feel toward yours, but I cannot move beyond indifference. They are, to me, what the cells in your foot are to you. We are entangled, a single entity, not relatives but pieces of a bigger whole.

  I leave the star-cell. It continues to create my clones, and I go back to tending the pathways in your neuronal trees. I study you, and you study astronomy. Your kind have named our planet Kapteyn b, and our planets are practically neighbors, a mere thirteen light-years apart. We are not surprised to learn that your planet is younger than ours. Your kind are too new to have been warned of our existence, and too close to our quarantined world to be noticed by the others.

  The Omnitude is hopeful. We are encouraged to replicate in ever greater numbers. I infect more of your star-cells, and soon your cerebrospinal fluid is swarming with my clones.

  You are devastated when the second colony ship from Earth does not arrive at the scheduled time. We are devastated, too. The Omnitude hopes that the ship went off course or was destroyed. The alternative—that your kind have discovered our existence and quarantined the planet—would destroy our hope of spreading to the stars.

  Autumn

  The bonds within your families are stronger than we realized.

  We call five human elders to the towers, and they come to us in an all-terrain rover. One of the elders is your mother. You are distressed by her disappearance, despite her age. Against the wishes of your daughter, you take another of the rovers to search for the missing colonists. Covered from head to toe in a protective suit, you drive the rover across the uneven ground. The suit is not necessary, though you believe it protects you from parasites. There is nowhere on the planet that is free of the Omnitude. We are in the earth, the rock, the water, even the air inside your dome.

  The pulse in your capillaries quickens as you approach the towers. You find the abandoned rover but see no signs of your elders. To you, the towers look like trees; then you notice a gnarl at the base of one tower that looks like a large creature from your home world, a creature called a hippopotamus. It is coincidence, of course, for this planet has never had hippos, but it starts a cascade of dangerous electrical pathways, ideas of mass extinction that we do not want you to consider. You see other shapes within the towers. We trim dendritic branches and strip myelin sheaths from axonal roots. We prune your thoughts and memories. When you return to the colony dome, all that remains is a sense of awe at the unending lightning.

  The pruning creates unintended side effects. In the months that follow, tangled nests form on the roots and branches of your trees. Trees are strangled to death. In the autumn of your mind, the neuronal trees start losing synapses from the ends of their dendritic branches. Pathways that we do not actively maintain are lost. The damage is staggering, and your behavior becomes erratic. We still recognize your daughter, but you do not. She diagnoses your condition as Alzheimer’s, and we are relieved. The destruction is not our doing.

  As your condition deteriorates, you become increasingly focused on the lightning storms and our towers. With a thousand spines of entanglement, I am connected to the preserved minds of a billion individuals from several million species. The towers are made mostly of the once-native inhabitants of our planet, killed by our overzealous manipulations of the organic compounds underlying their minds. We were not so sophisticated then; the Omnitude was smaller and had less experience with other minds. We used brute force to bring all the living creatures to the eternal lightning, and we bound them together cell by cell until the life of the planet rose to the sky in great towers.

  Other visitors came to us—metal aliens that we incorporated into the Omnitude even though we could not use them in our replication process, and iridescent blue beetles that recognized their infection and sent out a warning, a quarantine. For a billion years, there were no more visitors. But your kind evolved on a planet inside the quarantine zone. You were never warned. Humans are our hope for the future, our hope for the stars.

  You have disjointed conversations with your daughter.

  “When will the second colony ship arrive?” you ask.

  “It is decades late, and probably never coming,” she answers.

  “How do you know that? Oh, are you the pilot?”

  We experience the conversation from both sides—your confusion, and her sadness. We help you ask if there will be a third ship, but though we encourage discussion on the matter, none of the minds within the colony knows the answer. The messages you send to Earth have gone unanswered. There is no explanation for the second ship, no promise of a third, no reassurance that humans even exist on Earth anymore. We can only hope that another ship has already left, is somehow on its way.

  The Omnitude decides it is time to collect the rest of the colony, and together you come to the towers, walking, for there are not enough rovers to carry all of you. We worry that if another ship comes, you might somehow warn them. We worry that if another ship comes, an empty colony will deter them. But this is the lesser risk.

  There is no pretense at subtlety, no deception. We are bringing you into our fold, and we have pruned the forests of your mind to
make you want to join us.

  Your daughter stumbles on the long journey to the towers, and you help her up. She looks familiar, but you cannot remember her name. Joining the Omnitude will give that memory back to you, but it will never again have the meaning it once held.

  Winter

  Your arms shake from exertion as you climb one of the towers. Up close, you see the native creatures of our planet—grazers and scavengers, fliers and diggers—and this time we do not wipe them from your memory. You see shimmering green wings and rows of tiny metal teeth, experiencing everything with the wonder of a child, fully aware of your surroundings despite the tangles in your trees and the deterioration of your mind. You use soft furry flippers as handholds and metal robot torsos as footholds, and when you come to your place in the Omnitude, you embrace the living-patchwork surface of the tower. I stay among the neuronal trees, but other members of my kind migrate out of the neuronal forest and into the rest of your body. We retrain the cells of your skin to bind themselves to the tissue of the tower.

  We become one, you and me and all the Omnitude. In the transition, the neuronal trees of your mind are frozen at the moment of your death. They will grow no new branches, make no new connections. Your body dies into the Omnitude, and we trade continuous slow thought for the fiery bursts of insight that flashes of lightning bring as they propagate down the towers.

  We may not be the first of our kind. In what was once your human mind, we see pulsars and elliptical galaxies with radio jets that stretch across the vast emptiness of space. We long to grow to this scale.

  Through the sensors of the metal beings at the top of our towers, we detect a human ship in orbit.

  Come down to our planet. Join us. Take us to the stars.

  PRESS PLAY TO WATCH IT DIE

  Freet peered out from her den. It was dawn, and the ground was striped with the long shadows of the pillars—enormous sun-bleached trunks that spread their roots into the earth and stretched to the sky. What once had been a forest was now a graveyard of dead trees, but it was still the best place for the ratlings to make their dens.

  All around her, ratlings emerged from between the roots of the dead-tree pillars. They whistled and chattered as they crawled to the human city for school. Pups and maters and oldlings, all traveling together. Freet was so old that there wasn’t even a word for her generation. This was her fourth autumn, so she was older than the oldlings. Her hindlegs ached when she crawled, and there was no trace of orange left in her silver-white fur.

  Soon she would lie down for the long winter sleep, and this time she would not wake.

  The sun was high above the tops of the pillars by the time Freet reached the city. She was the last of the ratlings to arrive, save for a few pups who had overslept. The youngsters darted past her, running with a speed that age had long since stolen from Freet.

  Zara waited at the door to the school. “I’m glad you decided to show up today.”

  Freet knew that her teacher was only teasing her, but the words still stung.

  “If you would let me sleep in the city, with you, I could get to school on time.” Freet couldn’t make all the sounds of the human language, so she typed the words with her tongues, and her collar spoke for her.

  “I asked permission for you to stay, but the council advised against it,” Zara said.

  Freet crawled down the long hallway to her classroom. It was a small room. The classes were arranged by generations, and none but Freet had survived to see a fourth autumn, even with all the food and protection the humans provided. Ratlings simply weren’t meant to live for very long.

  “I have something different for you today,” Zara said. “Something important.”

  Freet flicked her tongues out in anticipation. Most of Zara’s lessons lately had been survival skills and self-defense, interesting for younger ratlings, perhaps, but of little use to one as old as Freet.

  Zara got out the vid-player they sometimes used for lessons. Among other things, it held pictures and vids of Zara’s homeworld. Freet had enjoyed those lessons, especially the ones about an Earth plant called trees. Something about the trees appealed to Freet, alien though they were.

  “I have other business to attend to,” Zara said. “I will return when you have watched the first section of the vid.”

  These days Zara was always rushing off, any time there was a free moment. Freet hated spending so much time alone, away from the comfort of her teacher. She did not know the workings of the human city, but she sensed that something was happening. All the humans had an energy and a purpose that was new, even compared to her mating year. She wondered, watching her teacher rush out, what the humans were doing.

  There were words on the screen of the vid-player.

  - Press Play To Watch It Born -

  Freet flicked the play button with her longest tongue, and a silver-furred ratling appeared on the screen. The ratling emerged from the base of something that looked a bit like Freet’s own pillar, but instead of being smooth and white, this pillar was covered in rough-textured red bark, and high above the ground there were branches. It did not look quite like the trees Freet had seen in the vids of Earth, and yet somehow it was the most perfect of all possible trees.

  The ratling in the vid scurried fearlessly up the trunk and into the high canopy. Here, the branches were covered in broad green leaves and dotted with small purple fruits. There were also a few large black fruits. Freet had never seen fruit like that before, but she found herself drooling at the mere sight of them. The ratling in the vid gorged on purple fruits, eating them whole. When it had consumed its fill, it scurried back down the tree and into its den.

  The video skipped forward in time to the next morning.

  The ratling climbed the tree again, but this time instead of the purple fruits, it ate one of the black fruits. Only one. Then it climbed down the tree.

  It didn’t return to its den. Instead, the ratling ran frantically in widening circles around the base of the tree, until finally it stopped in a patch of bright sunlight.

  It used its foreclaws to dig down into the dirt. It dug until it was entirely underground, and then kept digging, not bothering to clear the dirt from the tunnel behind it. Freet waited for the ratling to emerge, but it remained beneath the surface.

  - Press Pause -

  Zara had returned from whatever business she had. “Tell me what you’ve learned.”

  “I am confused,” Freet answered. “The title of the vid suggested that I would see a birth, but the ratling did not produce pups.”

  “You weren’t watching a ratling birth, you were watching the birth of a Redbark.”

  “A Redbark?” Freet pondered this information. “The vid was about the tree? You could have told me beforehand.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have realized how biased you are, as a ratling, to the perspective of your own kind. When you watch the next section, try harder to focus on the Redbarks. I have more work to do while you watch the vid.”

  “Why are the humans so busy all of a sudden?” Freet asked.

  Zara barred her teeth in the expression that humans usually used for happiness, but her eyes did not match the smile. “I will tell you soon, my Freetling.”

  This was troubling. Zara had called her Freetling only once before, and it was when her teacher had been mourning the death of her pup. Freet remembered it clearly, the day not long ago when her usually stoic teacher had cradled Freet and stroked her fur, sobbing and repeating over and over, “My Freetling, my little Freetling, soon I will lose you, too.”

  - Press Play To Watch It Sprout -

  Freet knew she should pay more attention to the Redbark, but the vid continued to focus on ratlings. She watched a small hoard of pups scurrying about, probably fresh from the nest, eating overripe purple fruits that had fallen to the ground. Unlike the Earth fruits humans sometimes fed Freet, the Redbark fruits had no pits, or if they did, the pups ate them. Was she supposed to be watching the fruits? The pups? Wh
at lesson was this section of the vid meant to teach her?

  A longbeak fluttered over and landed near the pups. The bird made no move to eat the purple fruits. Instead it nudged aside leaves with its beak and ate the insects and worms underneath. A large predator appeared, one that the humans had named a jagthar because of some vague resemblance to a large earth cat. The pups froze. They were an easy target, there on the ground. Freet could barely force herself to watch, and she, like the pups, held perfectly still, as though the jagthar might leap off the screen and attack her if she moved.

  The longbeak took off, and the jagthar shot off after it, running right past the pups. For a long time, the pups remained frozen in place, then they went back to foraging for purple fruit. A tiny two-leafed sapling burst up through the dirt. A Redbark sprout.

  - Press Pause -

  This time Freet had to wait for her teacher to return. She was tempted to watch the next section of the vid, but she had questions. When Zara finally arrived, Freet nearly forgot about the vid entirely. Her teacher was covered in dirt and bits of scorched plants. Before Freet could ask about it, Zara nodded to the vid-player. “What did you learn?”

  “Why didn’t the jagthar eat the pups?” Freet asked.

  Zara nodded, and Freet was relieved that she had asked a good question. “There’s a toxin in the purple fruit. Ratlings are immune but the poison builds up in the pups’ system to the point where eating them would be fatal to most predators. Over time, jagthars have learned to avoid anything that smells of purple fruit.”