It struck me then: the easiest way to find out would be to walk over there. ‘Over the hill’ was a vague enough direction, but surely I’d be able to find it. I grinned in the dusty darkness; legs, not Link. Was this what it meant to become human?
The Wombat was watching my grin, confused.
‘Which way are the houses?’ I asked him.
‘Follow smell.’
I gave up. A Wombat’s sense of smell was as much denied to me as Linkage.
I got to my feet and tried to resist brushing off the dust and Wombat hair. ‘I’d better be going,’ I said.
He stood up too, blinking at me in the torchlight. ‘Humanfriendfriendfriend,’ he said, and held out his paw.
I hesitated only a moment before I took it. I remembered other hesitations before someone had taken mine.
‘It was good to meet you,’ I said, and meant it. ‘I hope you’ll visit me again. I’ll try to get some carrots for you. Grow some carrots too.’
‘Carrotscarrotscarrotsfriend,’ he said, peering up at me with his tiny eyes.
Then I went back to my house.
Chapter 4
Iwas planting the vegetable garden when he arrived. The soil clung to my toes and fingers. It smelt fresher than I had expected; a rich smell, like chocolate. I had just scattered carrot seeds, found in a musty cupboard under the stairs (along with beetroot seeds and bean seeds and a dozen others), when a breaking twig made me lift my head.
The sun blazing through the trees blinded me at first. Against it, at the edge of my garden—what would become a garden—stood a man, gigantic in the distorting brilliance, with hair that flashed red and gold.
I blinked and he shrank to normal proportions, though still large; wide shouldered, blond haired, the same age as me and a thousand years younger. Human.
‘Hello,’ he said.
I nodded and stood up, rubbing my dirty palms against my jeans.
‘My name’s Neil. I live at Faith Hope and Charity. The Utopia over the hill,’ he added, when I didn’t respond.
His unspoken expectation, his friendly innocence, irritated me. I shrugged. ‘You know who I am?’
A hesitation. ‘Yes. I saw you on the vid.’
‘You have vids in your community?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ I informed him crisply. ‘Many Utopias refuse any form of modern technology at all.’
‘Oh.’ He seemed disquieted by the lecture, which was what I intended. ‘We don’t.’ He searched for a topic of conversation. ‘You’ve done that well,’ he said, nodding at the garden. ‘You must like gardening.’
‘I’ve never gardened before,’ I said.
‘But…’
‘I’ve designed Virtual gardens,’ I told him. ‘And any information I’ve scrolled I still have. They weren’t able to take that away from me. And believe me, that’s a lot of information. Now, how can I help you?’ I asked.
He looked even more crestfallen, like a puppy that had been slapped. ‘I wanted to welcome you.’
It was difficult to find a rude reply to this. ‘Thank you,’ I said at last.
‘This place…’ he waved his hand at the house, ‘it used to be part of our Utopia decades ago, before we built the houses near the new dam. Water’s a bit of a problem, but you should be all right if you keep the garden small.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘I left some supplies for you, milk and bread and stuff. I hope they were all right.’
‘They were fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll bring more. I brought the books up too…’
That stopped me. ‘You put the books there?’
He nodded shyly. ‘Samantha—a friend of mine—said you wouldn’t want books. But I thought you might.’
‘You mean that having had most of my brain, my life, my self shaved away, books might be a consolation?’
‘I…’ he hesitated. ‘I…I admired you on the vid. You had so much more courage than the others. There was a close up of you when they handed down the Proclamation. I felt…’
‘You felt we were twin souls? You felt like comforting me, keeping me safe. You felt like proposing marriage to me.’
‘I…’
‘Did you know that in the old days women who were condemned to hang used to receive marriage proposals? The ultimate helpless female. You can hang any fantasy on her you want to. Why not? She’ll be dead in a few days.’
‘It’s not like that, it wasn’t like that for me,’ he began, then stopped. ‘Did you get marriage proposals too?’
‘Yes.’ I wasn’t going to tell him how many. Besides, there had only been three. ‘All from total strangers. All I had to do was become human and they’d fold me in their arms.’
‘But you are human,’ he said stupidly.
I watched his face as I spoke. ‘Young man, since I was three years old and first learnt how to Link I have been thousands of years older than you. Older than recorded humanity, because unlike any generation before me I can—I was able—to journey through it all. Don’t fantasise that I’m your soulmate. Don’t ever think I am anything like you. I’m a forest, not a tree. Or I was, before they took it all away.’
I might have prepared the speech for just this moment. Probably unconsciously I had.
‘A forest,’ he said slowly. ‘Is that how you thought of yourselves?’
‘Oh, go away,’ I said tiredly.
When I looked up I saw that he had gone.
Chapter 5
Later, much later, I sat in the armchair they had provided for me in the living room that still smelt of the polish they had used, and stared out of the window at the garden.
The newly-dug soil was turning grey as it dried. Despite what I’d told the young man earlier, I hadn’t known that soil changed colour when it was exposed to air. Countless generations must have seen it happen, but had never felt it necessary to record it. Or if they had, I’d missed the reference. It wasn’t true, as I’d implied, that I’d experienced everything that had ever been thought or felt before. If that were so, I might have wondered what was the point of living?
I wondered if the garden would be enough to keep me in vegetables. Not that it mattered, really. If I were hungry I could order food, use my account that still sat there in the City; that the City would add to, out of its charity, as long as I lived and stayed in the Outlands.
And if I was lonely, I could turn human…
I shut that thought away.
The garden would take a good deal of work, of course, if it were to feed me. But what else had I to do with my time?
Perhaps I should grow flowers too.
Chapter 6
Most people are born human. I was not, though no one realised it at the time. Mel and Michael weren’t human either, nor were the other nine of us who were created at that time.
Most modifications, the sort that every child has, are minor. Harmful recessives are weeded out, the good points optimised, the idea simply being to give the newborn child the best use of its genetic potential.
Other modifications are exactly that: modifiers, changes.
Of course, any new change to the human norm has to be approved, and the approval process is far more rigorous than it was in the old days when any possible improvement on the human norm was acceptable, and a few fantasies as well. Nowadays you can’t go tumbling wild with a theory and put it into practice without a dozen subcommittees peering over your shoulder first.
The modification that turned me from a tree into part of the forest was a simple enough idea. A brain electro-wave enhancement that would allow us to Link to the Web more effectively.
Even back then, at the end of last century, researchers knew how to match human brain electro pulses to computer processes. At first they were simple on/off instructions, and then better enhancers allowed a more certain match of brain pulses and technology. You only had to think an instruction for your computer to follow it
.
Now most education and a good deal of social life are based on your ability to match your thoughts to the Network, from turning on a vid to Linking with your friends.
Some people Link better than others. Most people still shut their eyes to Link, and most have to subvocalise, or even speak aloud, even though the Network will respond to the energy level of a suitably clear thought.
Our modification simply amplified the minute electrical impulses of normal brains. The plan was for us to be able to Link even if we were far from a terminal and process data faster. As with all new modifications, our progress would be followed and assessed before any more embryos could be changed.
The modification was successful. Too successful. Improvements on an existing human attribute are legal. We were something more.
No one realised this at first, of course. In the beginning there was only excitement at our abilities. By the time I was nine and my parents dead in the second Bioplague (I was engineered against it) I, like the others, was able not only to Link fast and efficiently into any data web I chose, but to retain whatever I scrolled there.
More than that: whenever I was Linked to the Net I was also Linked to any of the others who were on the Net as well. Not just able to talk to them, but able to share their thoughts and, to a lesser extent, the information their minds had collected.
If I chose to think of Mel’s cosig I could be there in her consciousness with her as soon as she recognised my sig and Linked me in. At first it was a game. Increasingly it became the backbone of our lives.
I grieved for my parents, but their death made little physical difference in my life. I had already been moved to a separate creche with the others. I think it was Mel who coined the term ‘The Forest’. When you are Linked as closely as we all were it’s hard to say ‘it was her’, or ‘him’, or ‘me’.
We were The Forest. The rest of the world was the Trees, poor alone creatures limited by the speed of speech and physical location. We could think with the speed of hurtling electrons and join each other in the chase.
We were so close back then. That changed of course when we became teenagers—the excitement at being someone else became an even more emphatic desire to become an individual. But the feeling of…how can I express it to someone who’s never known it? Extension…the feeling of extension remained.
By fifteen we each began to specialise. Melanie chose genetics, Michael administration. I was a Virtual engineer, creating Realities with greater richness and variety than any artist before me. (Why be modest? No artist had ever had the material to work with that I did.)
A NewMod can’t have a child until their modification is formally approved. Approval usually takes thirty years or more—not a problem in the City, where most professionals don’t bear children till after their first regeneration.
It had never occurred to me that The Forest wouldn’t be automatically approved. Surely we were already too important to the City to Proclaim.
It never occurred to Melanie either. If Michael suspected problems he managed to hide it effectively from all of us, even when Melanie and Tom put in for Accelerated Approval (AccApp), so they could have a child.
‘I know we’re young,’ said Mel that night in the apartment we’d shared since we’d left the creche. ‘But when you think about it we know each other better than any Tree ever could.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Something was niggling at me. Something I couldn’t touch—which is why I was such a good designer, why my Realities really were real—because things did niggle at me. Gifts from my subconscious.
‘Besides,’ said Melanie, stretching happily to admire her new 3D nails (a gift from Tom—he specialised in biotechnics, had already revolutionised the City’s oxygen generation plant), ‘I bet admin is eager for more like us. You always get more from a second generation cross.’
Mel went to bed early. She’d been working on a map of pain perception, the object being to engineer a bioblock to bypass pain if necessary. It was a project that left her alternately hyper and exhausted.
I went to bed too, but I couldn’t sleep.
Something still niggled. I tried to tell myself that it was only my subconscious telling me that I would miss Melanie when she moved in with Tom. But you never really miss anyone when they’re The Forest. She would always be no more than a Link away.
I sat up in bed and thought the lights on. (I think best with lights on.) I began to scroll the Web, randomly at first, or what would seem random to someone less experienced than I.
Nothing. There was no hint at all that anyone distrusted our modification. There were no critical studies, no whisper at all of anyone unsure…
I came out of Link and lay there, looking at the ceiling. Melanie had a sky scene on hers, with clouds and birds, rainbows, randomly programmed. I preferred mine blank, for staring at. I had enough of reality at work.
It was then I realised what was wrong.
‘Melanie!’ I thought her cosig, not her name. ‘Wake up!’
Her body voice and her Link voice replied at the same time. Both were groggy with sleep. ‘Danny? What’s wrong?’
I switched to body mode. ‘Come into the living room,’ I called, as I left my bedroom. ‘We need to talk.’
‘Mmm?’ said Mel’s mind and body. Then the mind Link snapped, and Melanie wandered out in her pussycat pyjamas, her makeup still unprogrammed. ‘What is it?’ She flopped down onto the sofa beside me.
‘I’ve been scrolling. I wanted to see if there might be any objections to your Approval.’
Melanie stared. ‘But all of us keep a lookout for anything like that all the time. There’s never been anything! Not on the public Net, and not on the Genetic Net either.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course. I’m category B Genetic Access now, and Michael’s category A in admin. If there’d been anything one of us would have seen it.’
‘Michael. Maybe we should Link him in.’ I didn’t want to Link the others yet. Not till I was sure.
‘Danny! He’d have said something if there were anything to say! All of us would.’
‘Yes,’ I said absently. I was trying to Link Michael in, but only caught his message sig. I double-Linked his private code, the one that only The Forest knew.
No answer.
‘He’s asleep,’ said Mel in Link.
I answered in Link too. It would be easier to scroll this through to her in Link. ‘Mel, listen.’ (A double emotion attention stroke. There’s no equivalent in speech.) ‘There’s something wrong. There has to be. Look!’
I scrolled my last half hour’s data at her, quadruple rate. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘The Bioplague Two immunity data???’ Mel flashed back in query.
The Bioplague modification had been Approved the year before. It was engineering at its most basic. A simple mod to give immunity to one of the most common plagues of the Decline.
‘That’s right. What do you notice about it?’ (A microsecond mental affirmative and query.)
‘I don’t understand?’ said Mel (puzzled question emote—not even a microsecond for that one). ‘There’s nothing new here. Just the outline of the modifications and the objections and the reasons why they were overruled.’
‘Look at the objections!’ I said. ‘There’s megs of them.’
‘But you always find some objections,’ said Mel in voice mode now. ‘Even for something as obviously useful as plague immunity. There are always some crackpots who want to protest…’ her voice trailed off, leaving mental echoes behind.
I wiped the data from the Link and again shut off. I wanted no one overhearing this, neither Forest nor some casual Netsurfer passing by, nor some listener not so casual…
‘No one has objected to us at all,’ I said. ‘And we’re a far more radical mod than plague immunity.’
‘So they must have objected,’ said Mel slowly. ‘But it’s not on Public Access. Not on Genetic Access either, unless it’s top level.’
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‘Maybe Michael’s heard something on admin,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mel definitely. ‘He’d have told us.’
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to convince myself. ‘Michael’s ambitious but he’s still Forest. Of course he’d tell us.’
‘And anyway,’ said Mel, trying to convince herself as well. ‘Just because it’s classified doesn’t mean they won’t rule in our favour. I mean…we’re…we’re The Forest.’ Meaning, who would solve their problems for them if they didn’t have us? ‘Just look at what we’ve achieved for them in a few years.’
I don’t think it even occurred to us that night that we, too, thought in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. It’s easy to reassure yourself when all you’ve ever known is praise. We went to bed. I even slept.
When I woke up we’d been Proclaimed.
Chapter 7
It had grown dark. I stood up slowly and made my way from the living room into the kitchen. The eggs were finished, and the last of the bread. But there were the standard thirty-six kinds of protein in the freezer and…
Something rustled at the door. The Wombat, I thought, and waited for his now familiar scratch at the wood. None came.
I walked down the hall and opened the door. There was no one there. But on the doorstep was a basket, carefully woven in a blue-green pattern, with a rounded base like the one in the kitchen. A basket to enjoy using.
I lifted the cloth that covered it.
More bread, dusted with poppy seeds this time; another small basket of eggs, in varied shades of white and brown; lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber; a fat flask of cold milk; a flat green and yellow quiche in a wide pottery dish, still warm from the oven; half a dozen apples, striped red and green, of a sort I’d never seen before.
My hands shook as I took the basket indoors.
Chapter 8
The Utopia was larger than I expected.
It had rained the night before. Hard striving rain that tried to burrow through the roof above me. It was the first time in my life I had been conscious of uncontrolled weather around me, totally unresponsive to any human need. I slept badly, so it was late when I set out and the damp sucked back into the air and the breeze thick with the smell of wet gum leaves and old bark.
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