* * * *
Tequila is like time travel in a bottle. Drink enough and wake up in the future.
I'm in the future, but I'm not sure I'm awake, Alex thought. It was three days since he'd landed on Venus. Four more until he could board the Aphrodite and see what had become of Earth.
He'd thought the silence around him was like the hushed time in the early morning. But it was more than that. It was as if the planets had stopped in their orbits. It was as if everything had fallen to absolute zero, and all atomic motion had ceased. It was the polar opposite of the grinding bump and garrulous buzz of the seedy end of Los Angeles. It was that pause at three o'clock in the morning, magnified and redoubled and magnified again. It was an ache in his chest, a physical thing, as if he would never be full again.
Adele walked through the door.
Alex stopped pacing and stared at her. All thought ceased. For a moment, it was as if the very ground beneath him rolled and gave way.
She crossed her arms, giving him a thin-lipped grin.
"You're not real,” Alex said.
"No,” Adele said.
Alex looked at her again. He noticed that highlights on her simple white dress bloomed and spread, like sunlight seen through haze.
"You're smartfog."
She nodded. “Close enough."
A moment of anger, like a knife pressed through his chest. “What are you? Leftover bits of her mind?"
"More than that."
"What?"
"I'm the best simulation of Adele Yucia that they could make, right before my first rejuvenation. Before I erased my memories of a man named Alex Farrell."
Alex felt the knife of anger twist again, to pain and confusion. “Rejuvenation? You erased me?"
"Winfinity's inference algorithms were getting too good. They would have discovered where you had gone—and what you were doing—if I hadn't made it disappear."
"You erased me?"
"To protect you! The spoof network I put in place around Venus kept their probes from reporting what you were doing, but I had to get rid of the knowledge. Completely. Then I sent my simulation here, to wait for you to come back."
Alex collapsed in a chair. He felt as if he had been punched in the gut. Adele ... here and now ... it was too, too much. “How long did you live?"
Adele gave him a wry grin. “How should I know? I simulated before my first rejuve. If I survived my second, I probably lived two hundred years or more."
"Could you still be alive ... on Earth?"
Adele laughed. “No. By the time I went in for my first rejuve, they were already whispering about it working only a couple of times."
"They could have improved the process."
Adele hugged herself and looked around. “I doubt it."
"So you worked for Winfinity?"
"There wasn't much choice, after a while."
Alex shook his head.
"You would have, too,” Adele said. “They controlled the world."
Alex nodded. Best not to argue. He realized, with a start, that the silence had receded, and his loneliness had disappeared.
"Thank you,” Alex said.
"For what?"
"For coming to see me."
"Oh, Alex,” Adele said. She came over to him and laid a hand on his. He felt a warm, wet breeze on the back of his hand. The feeling of smartfog.
"I though I was a simulation,” Alex said.
"What do you mean?"
"When I awoke. It was too easy. I wondered if I had been turned into a simulation of myself, running on some massive computing system."
"If you were, how would you tell?” Adele asked.
"Exactly."
"So maybe we have more in common than we ever had."
"That's not funny."
Adele laughed. “I can embody."
"Embody?"
"I added some nano routines to your system."
Alex imagined Adele with him, in his empty city on the pole. He thought about holding her in his arms. He saw himself waking next to her, on the too-slick sheets, on the too-sharp bed. He saw their children, running through the empty streets of the alien world.
"No,” he said.
* * * *
* * * *
Alex looked at Earth from orbit.
Earth was a wilderness, seemingly untouched by humanity. The Los Angeles basin was an endless sea of golden grassland, swaying gently in the breeze. Scrub-bushes, eucalyptus, and oak crowded what had been the Hollywood Hills.
He took the shuttle down and stood on the hills that looked out over the San Fernando Valley, trying to divine the hint of an ancient grid. Any remains of the streets and buildings that had once risen there. Sepulveda. Ventura. He could see them in his mind's eye. But even when he hiked down to the valley floor, even when he dug into the ground with his hands, where he knew Ventura once ran, he found nothing. No trace that humanity had ever been. The ship's voice, blandly female, told him softly that there was nothing buried.
Alex returned to Aphrodite. His hands shook. The diamondoid glass of water clattered against his lips.
"Will you talk to me now?” Adele's shade asked.
Alex looked up, through the translucence of the ship to the softly-shrouded stars. “Did you know it was like this?"
"Only since we arrived."
Alex had Aphrodite image every square mile of Earth. In the middle of what used to be the Winfinity States, herds of buffalo grazed again. In Europe, great forests carpeted the ground, untouched by any axe. In Egypt, the Nile Valley was untouched by tombs. The Pyramids themselves had been erased.
He stood on the plains. The buffalo looked up, once, then looked away. The herd walked past him as if he didn't exist. As if he had never existed.
He stood on the banks of the Thames, and wondered if this was what the Romans saw when they first came to that land. A fox stopped to stare at him from the comfortable darkness of the forest. Its green eyes flickered. Then it leaped away.
And he visited his past. His house in Alaska. His home in Quito. All gone, wiped clean, like the wrong answer on a slate.
Reboot, he thought.
Could every trace of civilization be wiped clean in less than three thousand years? Aphrodite's mind told him no.
Could humankind have left to other stellar systems, to garden worlds discovered or created? Could they have wiped the slate?
No, Alex told himself. If they had done that, there would have been monuments. We were here. We screwed up. But we fixed it. We leave it here, as we think it once was. Something couched in florid turns of phrase that would only underscore its idiocy.
And even if most had left, there would be ones who remained behind. Humanity never thought with a single mind. And if they had left on generation ships, there would be those who turned around and came back. And if they had cheated lightspeed itself, there would be tourists. Footprints on the perfect Earth. Shops selling little trinkets, rocks encased in diamondoid, or tiny bits of the True Pyramids, or of Washington Fallen. Because that was the way people were.
"Will you talk to me now?” Adele asked. “I can help."
How can you help? Alex wanted to ask. How can you even begin to understand?
And the silence. Everywhere Alex landed, the silence. Not the silence of nothingness, but the silence of no human voice, no human activity. It made Alex feel like an ice-sculpture made of frozen oxygen, endlessly cold, infinitely untouchable. He imagined building a house on Earth and living there, and cried terror. There was nothing human there, nothing for him.
Have I come to a timeline where humans never existed? Alex wondered.
No, Aphrodite told him, after it had finished its analysis. The shoreline of the east coast of the former Winfinity States was subtly different from the records it had, different in ways that suggested conflict with hundred-megaton weapons, rather than natural erosion. There was evidence that Earth's oil reserves were still depleted by the predation of the 20th and 21st centuries.
<
br /> And, it said, there is biological and silicon detritus that suggests nanotechological reshaping on a planetary scale. Much like what you have done to Venus.
Alex had a terrible thought. His plan to terraform Venus had gone awry. Part of his package had landed on Earth instead. He had brought about the complete destruction of humanity.
No, he thought. Venus's package was specific. It would only activate in Venus's environment.
"You didn't do it,” Adele said, as if reading his mind.
But it was done, he thought. Something did this. Something wiped humanity out, like a wrong answer, poorly given.
"Mars,” he told the ship.
* * * *
Mars was like Earth. Rockport, gone. Winfinity City, gone. The south polar settlements, gone. Semillon Valley farms, gone. But hardy gengineered grasses grew on the chill plains, and thin white clouds scudded across the blue sky.
Alex stood where Rockport would have been. Low, dark-green bushes crowded the sickly yellow-green grass. Here and there, salmon-colored boulders punctuated the landscape, their sharp edges slowly softening in the new rains.
He breathed in the chill air. It had a sharp tang, like chlorophyl and rust.
I'm standing on Mars, breathing, he thought.
He drew the air in deep. It was like standing at the top of Yosemite. Chill and thin.
I'm standing on Mars, alone, he thought.
After a while, he went back to the ship. Adele said nothing. But he imagined she was watching him, and thinking, Will you talk to me now?
"The Moon,” he told the ship.
* * * *
The geek-warrens were gone, as well as their blob of a ship, but there was a monument.
If you could call it a monument. On the lunar plain, there was a crystal stalk set into a semicircle of white concrete. The stalk rose thirty feet in the air, branching and rebranching, thinning and rebranching, until the ends of its stalks were nothing but a rainbow shimmer. The sun shone through the tree and cast shimmering colors on the white concrete.
At first, Alex paid no attention to the refracted sunlight. He went to the base of the tree, where a single glyph was carved. It looked something like a stylized ‘y', with a thick base that arced up to graceful curves, one drawn back on itself like a curlicue.
"What does that mean?” Alex asked Aphrodite.
"I do not know,” Aphrodite said.
"I do,” Adele said. Her voice was soft, guttural, sad.
"What is it?"
Adele didn't answer for a long time. When she did, her voice was little more than a whisper. “It's a symbol of the Angel of the Moon."
"What?"
Silence again.
"Adele, please."
"You wouldn't know,” Adele said. “After you left, your ... Shekinah became very famous. She was known as the Angel of the Moon."
Alex felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He went to examine the sunlight that danced on the white concrete. Its rainbows twisted and shimmered, changing slowly in the slowly-moving sunlight.
In the middle of the rainbows, Shekinah flew. Her wings beat slowly, dreamily. He caught hints of rock in the background. A cavern. Like that day, so long ago.
She turned, infinitely slowly, to look at him. Her clear blue eyes were drawn down in pleasure.
She flew, Alex thought.
"This is a memory structure,” Aphrodite said. “Designed to impose a simulated mind onto the computational environment."
"The computational environment?” Alex asked.
"In this case, sunlight,” Aphrodite said.
"I don't understand."
"The changing angle of the sunlight is the computational environment. Refracted through the diamondoid structure, it displays a result of the computation. Preliminary analysis of the structure suggests that it is more complex than can be delineated by a single environmental parameter."
"You're still not making sense."
"Didn't you ever read anything outside your field? Adele said. “Environmental computing is an old theory. The entire environment is computation. Sand automatically separates itself into coarse and fine grains when dropped on a predetermined slope. Things like that. If you could find a way to modulate your own equations onto the environment, the environment itself would solve your equations."
"The equations being this movie of Shekinah?"
"It is likely that the display you are viewing is only a fraction of the complexity of the diamondoid structure,” Aphrodite said.
Alex blew out his breath, fogging the faceplate of his space suit. “So there are more movies stored in the tree?"
"There is enough complexity to simulate a mind, given the right environment,” Aphrodite said.
"This ... this is Shekinah?"
"No,” Aphrodite said.
"No,” Adele said, after a time.
I just have to see his face, Adele thought.
Adele waited, arms crossed, as Aphrodite landed on the outskirts of Venus's pole city. She had taken to calling it Erebus, for the volcano at Earth's south pole.
It was just like Alex to forget to name the city. On her first day out of the tanks, she had gashed her leg on the knife-sharp edge of a diamondoid stair. Also just like him. Set the plan in motion, let the details take care of themselves. Except there were no people to fill in the details. Just dumb nano, executing his grandiose plan in the only way it knew how.
The sun was peeking over the horizon as the ship fell to the great sheet of diamondoid. Adele faced it, letting the warm wind of its odorless exhaust wash over her.
Aphrodite extended a ramp. She limped to meet it.
Alex paused, once, at the top of the ramp, looking down at her with wide eyes. He walked down the ramp, head down, and stopped three feet away from her. His eyes flickered up to meet hers. His hands clenched, once, as if needing something to hold. He looked tired and sad and confused.
Adele felt a wave of concern wash over her. She wanted to take him in her arms, tell him it would be all right.
"Adele,” he said.
She nodded. And now he'll tell me I shouldn't have embodied, I should have waited, it wasn't the right time.
Alex took one step and stopped. He wavered. Gave a tiny moan. Embraced her.
Adele stood stiff. I could back away, she thought. I could leave him. I could fly away to Earth and live there. He would never find me. And it would serve him right.
Alex sobbed, his head laying cradled on her neck and shoulder.
Adele put her arms around him.
They stayed that way for a long, long time.
* * * *
After that night, they talked. Like broken talking-head dolls, parroting comforting phrases as their sun-cast shadows moved jerkily against the back wall of Alex's apartment.
"What happened to Earth?” Alex said.
"I don't know. Any more than you."
"Something changed it."
"Maybe."
He shook his head. “Not people. We'd leave monuments. We'd open shops."
"Maybe we've grown up."
"I have a model of Shekinah's mind,” Alex said, after a time.
"I know."
He went to sit by the diamondoid window. He looked down on the empty streets. “I don't know what to do,” he said.
Adele went to sit by him. She put her arms around him. He didn't try to shake her off.
"Are you real?” Alex asked.
Adele sighed. She'd already gone through that mental ping-pong, wondering what she was and who she was and if it mattered and if the mind was just computation, or if it was something else, and if the she-that-was somehow was aware of the she-that-is-now. There was no history. She could have died the day after getting her memory mapped by the independents on Mars. Or she could have lived two hundred years more.
"I'm here, now,” she said, softly.
Alex waited for children that never came. A year passed, and their city grew softer. The nano built them parks fo
r strolling and for play. Five years passed. Adele dropped hints, and Alex did the tests. He was fertile. So was she.
But there were no children.
Someone, something interfered, Alex thought, late at night when the wind had dropped to a low moan, and Adele lay by his side. And something's still interfering. Something that had some magic greater than nanotech, something in control of forces beyond human knowledge and physics. Perhaps even humanity itself, uplifted out of the realm of matter.
Ten years passed. Adele went away for a time, to the city on the opposite pole. Then she came back, long-faced and haggard. The nano showed him the body she'd built to consort with. It showed her crying when month after month passed without pregnancy. Alex welcomed her back with a hug and a smile. He never said a word.
Because, for some reason, it was all right. They were not supposed to reproduce. They were not supposed to continue. There was something he could learn from that. Something beyond, There are always limits.
Alex started his own project. He had all the old tools. Some even better than he remembered them, built with fragments of data from Adele's files she'd sent to Venus, fifty years after he left.
I will live for another two hundred years, Alex thought. I have that time to work on this. And I can always simulate my mind and rebody.
But that isn't me, he thought, deep at night when the silence was only relieved by the sound of Adele's soft breathing and the beat of his own heart.
Adele, to her credit, never asked what he was doing. On the night the new ship launched, invisible, from the other side of the planet, she came up behind him and said, “You seem happy."
"Content,” he said.
"What do we do now?"
"What?"
"Keep rebodying? Keep waiting for God to pop out of the woodwork and say, ‘Sorry for the misunderstanding, here's what happened'?"
And, in that moment, he wanted to tell her everything.
You were right. I loved her. She's what sent me here. To escape that scary, scary fact. Yes, I wanted to see what we could be, but that wasn't all of it, not by a long shot. And when I get here, the only monument I find is to her. Like everything I did was really for her. Not for me. And so I have to do this. Because it doesn't matter to me or you. We will find our own way, and Shekinah will find hers.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 8