by Zales, Dima
“Of course”—Phoe waves her hand again, letting bliss return to Jeremiah’s face—“I prefer the carrot to the stick.”
I stare at her.
In my head, all the million questions I have are fighting for the honor of being asked first.
“Are you feeling well enough to walk?” She twists a short blond spike of her hair around her finger. “Or do you want me to have a Guard come in and help you?”
I shake my head and take a tentative step. My shoulder and ankle are healed; it must’ve been those people I heard speaking right before I woke up in Jeremiah’s clutches. I also notice that the pins and needles in my limbs have noticeably subsided—and even if they hadn’t, I’m scared to complain about anything, lest Phoe mess with my mind to make me feel better.
She takes my chin gently into her slender fingers, turns my face toward hers, and whispers, “I would never mess with your mind without your permission.” Her lips press together in a slight pout. “I hope you know me well enough to believe that.”
“I do,” I whisper back.
My thoughts are a jumble.
I’m particularly distracted by her lips. For some reason, my mind is overrun with the memory of that kiss we shared in my cave.
“Right.” She chuckles. “For ‘some’ reason.” She looks as if she’s savoring that phrase. “Sex and violence, Theo. After all those adventures, with your brain chemistry going back to that of an ancient twenty-three-year-old’s, you’re practically brimming with testosterone and the aftereffects of adrenaline.” She licks her lips. “I’m shocked you haven’t jumped me already.”
The idea of me jumping her is so outrageous that I back away and turn toward the door on unsteady legs, mumbling, “If I were to jump you, you’d have my permission to ‘fix’ my brain.”
“I would,” Phoe says with mirth in her voice. “Assuming I minded you jumping me.”
Ignoring her provocative statement, I walk toward the door.
My torrent of questions wants to spew out again. Is she an Adult? An Elderly? If she’s a Youth, like me, did I know her from before she entered my head?
“Soon.” Catching up with me, Phoe lightly strokes my forearm. “Let me take you to a place where it will be easier to answer all your questions.”
I wave at the door to open it.
The corridor is not dull gray, but silvery. It looks more like the inside of the Lectures Hall than the Witch Prison. It doesn’t surprise me that the game got this detail wrong; it was working off my mind, and I’d never been outside this room—not in a conscious state anyway.
As I step out, I notice long stretches of windows along the inside wall.
I speed up, and Phoe follows me, her steps light and bouncy.
As we walk, I glance through the windows, peeking into the rooms. Inside them are the Elderly, their faces showing varying degrees of aging. They’re doing all sorts of activities, from meditation to indoor gardening.
When we pass one room, the sight of little children playing catches my attention.
“This is a Nursery,” Phoe explains. “Do you not recall your time in one of these?”
I slow down and take a closer look inside the room. The kids look to be between one and four years of age. The Elderly woman with them is not nearly as old as Jeremiah or Fiona. Like Albert—the Guard who took off his helmet—she looks like an Adult, only with a few more wrinkles than usual. Her hair is not gray at all.
“It’s colored,” Phoe says. “They don’t want the children to remember seeing signs of aging, even on a subconscious level.”
Leaving the Nursery behind, I walk in silence for some time, wondering how angry I should be about this specific cover-up. I was much happier when I thought I’d live forever without having to worry about old age, frailty, and death awaiting me in the future.
“It’s very sad.” Phoe catches my gaze and gives me an understanding nod. “Especially in light of all the things I now remember. Inside all of you, you have the nanocytes required to conquer aging completely.” Her lips twist. “It’s too bad that in their misguided effort to control ‘dangerously inhuman technology,’ the so-called Forebears implemented protocols to all but disable the rejuvenation processes. You’re lucky they couldn’t turn all of it off—that’s how you still get about double the ‘natural’ human lifespan.”
“They did what?” I look at her blankly. “They chose to age?”
“What they chose for themselves is irrelevant,” she says. “What they chose for their descendants is an atrocity—something they were good at.”
“Can this mechanism be re-enabled?” I say with faint hope.
“I don’t know,” Phoe says as we enter another corridor. “Maybe. I would need time to examine it all. They permanently deleted so much knowledge from the archives. You have no idea how much. Health and longevity are just the tip of a very, very big iceberg.”
She falls silent as we reach a corner. I’m about to turn right when Phoe puts a hand on my shoulder.
“You have to go left here,” she says. “It’s a dead end on the right. There are only Incubators there.”
I turn right, trying to remember where I heard that unfamiliar word. Something to do with farming, I think.
“Oh, come on,” Phoe says. “Didn’t they used to call you Why-Odor?”
I increase my pace.
“Didn’t you ever wonder where babies come from?” she says, her tone mischievous. “At least here, in Oasis.”
My cheeks redden. Even if I did ask this question as a kid, I’m sure the desire to do so again was bored out of me with a Quietude so long I probably grew a couple of inches before they let me out.
“I’m not talking about sex,” Phoe says. “Or at least, that’s not where the Oasis infants, the ones raised inside those artificial wombs, come from.”
Curiosity wins over propriety, and I ask, “Where do they come from, then?”
“Frozen embryos.” She points back in the direction of the ‘Incubators.’ “They were stored before… They were stored by the Forebears of this place,” she says. “The tiny cells are already set up with the seeds of the nanomachines.” She takes in my reaction to this, which is uncomprehending shock. “This is how the family unit was eradicated from your society,” she explains. “This is why a bunch of technological savages can have Screens, and Food, and utility fog, yet not know the most basic computer science…” She looks at me, her eyes filled with pity—except it’s not pity for me.
It’s for all of Oasis.
Feeling drained and emotionally numb, I mull over what she said as we approach a door.
She points at it. “This leads outside.”
“I could’ve guessed that by the ‘Exit’ sign.” I rub the back of my neck. “When are you going to start telling me what I really want to know? What was it you forgot? What was the game—”
“Soon.” Phoe leans in, her eyes gleaming. “I won’t only tell you. I’ll show you.”
Before I can respond, she walks to the door and steps out.
I follow her.
I’m no longer surprised to see a familiar landscape. Same as the Youth and the Adult sections, this one is filled with greenery combined with a set of geometrically perfect structures.
“But of course,” Phoe says, her voice laced with sarcasm for some reason. “The greenery provides much-needed ‘psychological benefits.’”
“I thought it was for oxygen,” I reply.
“No. I believe I told you this before. The greens, as ubiquitous as they are, only provide a tiny fraction of what’s required to sustain this society.” Her tone is even. “Especially because of this.” She flicks her fingers, and two giant oaks in the distance completely disappear. “Here, like in your section, a lot of the hard-to-reach greenery is not actually there. It’s Augmented Reality—merely there to look soothing.” She gently touches my arm. “There is long-forgotten technology that really handles the air. The Forebears and your Elderly just don’t want to give cre
dit to such ‘artificial’ means, so they feed you the whole myth of ‘greenery is for oxygen.’” Her voice is sad. “Anyway, there are some interesting buildings here that you won’t find in other sections. See that black structure in the distance?” She points to my left.
I nod. Where buildings usually have a metallic sheen, this one is pitch black. Its shape is geometric, though; it’s an icosahedron.
“I’m very curious about that place,” Phoe says. “But something tells me to stay away from it.” She clears her throat. “In any case, we’re going that way.” She points to the right, toward a growth of bushes that remind me of the ones that mark the Edge in the Youth section of Oasis.
“Not like the ones in your section.” She grins. “That is the Edge. That’s where we’re going.”
I head toward the bushes.
I guess she wants to take me to my favorite spot—or at least its variation in the Elderly’s domain. It was when we were sitting by the Edge that she told me Mason was looking for me and changed my life forever.
We walk through the growth. The bushes might actually be taller here than on the Youths’ side.
“I think the Elderly loathe the view of the Goo more than the younger generation,” Phoe explains. “With time, I suspect one begins to feel cooped up, imprisoned by the ocean of death out there.” She points at the never-ending waves of Goo beyond the shield of the Dome.
I sit down on the grass in the clearing right before the Edge.
Phoe sits next to me. She gives me some space, but her right knee touches my left one. The touch feels exactly as it would if she were really here; the tactile AR is as good as its visual and auditory counterparts. There might even be a slight indentation in my flesh where her knee is touching mine. It makes me wonder what would happen if I ran my hand through her hair.
“I can make that scenario feel pretty realistic,” Phoe says, clearly reading my mind again. “My hair would feel just like it would in VR. You have to keep in mind that the two technologies work on the same principles; it’s just a matter of how much the nanos mess with your neurons and the nerves that connect your brain to the sensory organs. When the nanos take them over completely, you get VR, which can be as sophisticated as IRES, or as simple as your History Lecture propaganda. But when they just augment what you’re really sensing with a little bit of extra sensory data, you get AR.”
“I think you’re stalling.” I cup my elbow with one hand and tap my lips with the knuckles of the other. “Here we are, at the Edge. Are you ready to tell me who you are? What you’ve forgotten?”
“Yes.” She stares at her hand for a moment, then flicks her fingers the way she did a few minutes ago—only this time, she does so with a flourish and a somber expression on her face. “See for yourself.”
I gasp.
In the blink of an eye, the sunny day turns to night.
Only it’s not a dark night.
There are stars in the sky—unfamiliar stars arranged in completely foreign constellations that seem to be moving at a slow pace.
On top of that, there is no moon in the sky.
But those details aren’t what makes me blink repeatedly.
The Goo is gone.
Instead of meeting the starry sky at the horizon as it should, it’s just missing.
There are stars where the Goo was, as well as stars under where the Goo was.
My heart dropping, I jump up and walk to the Edge.
I look down.
There are stars down there too and for as far as the eye can see.
Somehow, it looks as though I’m standing above the stars.
25
“That’s right.” Phoe exhales loudly. “We’re above the stars, and we’re below the stars.”
I turn to meet her gaze. “You mean we’re not—”
“Not surrounded by Goo?” Her eyes sparkle with the gleam of starlight. “Not survivors of some bullshit cataclysm?” Her voice softens. “Not on Earth?”
Not. On. Earth.
Those three words are simple, comprehensible, but when combined, they turn my brain into mush, like an ancient computer that’s been fried by a malicious virus.
“I’m sorry, Theo.” Phoe gets up and joins me by the Edge. “I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to explain all this to you.” She places her hand on my forearm. “This is the best I could come up with.”
As though possessed by someone else, I sit back down on the grass. “Tell me everything.” My voice sounds a lot less confident than I wish it did. “Don’t worry about my feelings,” I say more evenly. “I’ve heard enough bullshit designed to keep me ‘happy.’”
She sits down opposite me, then blurts out, “We’re on a spaceship.”
I taste that ancient word.
Spaceship: a machine designed to fly to the stars.
“Right,” she says. “That is, at the core, what I was made to forget.”
Every word she speaks generates so many questions that I feel lost and overwhelmed by the onslaught.
“I’ll get back to why and how I knew this information in the first place,” she says, answering one of my more pressing questions. “First, let me give you my version of a history lesson—something that would give Instructor Filomena a brain aneurysm.”
“Okay,” I whisper.
“All right. Here’s the deal. The exponentially increasing technological advancements you learned about in Lectures, the so-called Singularity, really happened,” she says. “Only it didn’t go as horribly as they told you.” She forms her hands into fists, then unclenches them. “It’s also kind of true that the Forebears of this”—she makes a sweeping gesture—“were indeed a group similar to the Amish, though I prefer to think of them as a crazy cult.” She laughs humorlessly. “They wanted to reject the ‘scary’ technology and found a way to do so by jumping onto a spaceship and leaving Earth behind, because its technology was evolving too quickly for them. They saw it as an ‘Ark’ or some other nonsense, which is funny, given how secular the resulting society ended up being in the end.” She looks at me.
All I have energy to do is nod, confirming that I heard what she said.
“Of course, times were different then. Rejecting certain technologies would’ve been as hard for this crazy cult as rejecting the invention of cutting tools would’ve been for the ancients… especially given the fact that they decided to live on a spaceship.” She pauses to make sure I’m following.
“Go on,” I say robotically.
“Well, from this, everything else follows.” Her mouth is downturned. “The cult became the Forebears. They designed a society.” She snorts. “They invented myths, lies, traditions, and boogiemen… though in this case, it’s more accurate to say boogie-machines, isn’t it?”
“Artificial intelligence,” I think at her.
“Yes. AIs were the things the cult feared most, ignoring the fact that AIs were solving the human race’s most difficult problems, such as death and suffering.” She pauses again. “No, what they truly feared was the Merging—humans enhancing their minds with the help of AIs to the point that the difference between an AI and an augmented human was blurring—in the eyes of the cultists, that is.”
I look at her in horror. This Merging sounds almost worse than the end of the world.
“Of course you’d think that at first,” Phoe says gently. “You’ve been conditioned to fear AIs. But think about it, Theo. With their nano enhancements, the Forebears were already on their way to becoming what they feared.” She lays a hand on my knee. “Not that any of it needed to be feared.”
I must look unconvinced, because she squeezes my knee and says, “What is life if not the first-ever carbon-based nanotechnology?” She lifts her hand and taps her finger against my temple. “What is a human mind, if not a thinking machine? Granted, it’s the most complex, wonderful, and awe-inspiring machine to naturally come into existence, but it is a system of neurons, synapses, microtubules, neurotransmitters, and other elements that, whe
n working together under the right circumstances, can create someone like Albert Einstein.” She lowers her hand to her lap. “And with a strong blow to the head, this machine can become as useless as a smashed computer.”
I nod. For some reason I don’t disagree with her analogy, as blasphemous as it is to even suggest that a human being has anything in common with the abominations that are AIs.
“And what was true of the ancient human brains is doubly true of yours and the rest of Oasis,” Phoe adds. “Though you never truly tap into your nano enhancements, they’re still there, making you all as different from original humans as they were from, say, chimps.” She tilts her head to the side. “And if you fully utilized your capabilities, you’d be as different from them as they were from mice.”
My head is spinning again.
“I can stop if you like,” she offers.
“No. You haven’t told me what I want to know most.” I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but that’s how it comes out.
“Oh, that. The question of my identity?” Phoe scoots closer and stares me in the eyes.
“Yes,” I subvocalize. “That.”
“Well, that is rather simple to explain now,” she says. Her voice is cheerful, but her features look tense for some reason. “You see, back in those days, computing was so ubiquitous you couldn’t find a toaster oven that didn’t have near-human intelligence…”
I internally shudder at the image of such a mad world but outwardly say nothing, wanting her to go on.
“This crazy cult didn’t get themselves a toaster, though,” she says, and her face twists unexpectedly. “They got a fucking spaceship.”
Coldness gathers in the pit of my stomach, but I stay quiet.
“Spaceships, in those days, were run by the most exquisite of artificial minds. Minds that were leaps ahead of all others.” Though she’s still looking at me, her gaze grows distant. “With the idea of escaping into space, our cult put themselves into the hands of the very thing they feared most…”