by Demir Barlas
“This is what you wanted? Salt 1, I mean? For the species?”
“Why not? It’s a peaceful and deserving end.”
“Why are you awake? And what about your clones?”
“This property we have, transcomputation? Marlo can never achieve it, and no other configuration of human genes supports it. It’s maddeningly specific to us. Alone and untended, Marlo breaks down. It’s called stochastic drift. And only we can repair her, because we stand at an Archimedean remove from computation, even from proof.”
“What, she goes mad?”
“She does, yes; in convenient keeping with the mythology of all sentient computers, she goes mad. We Salts are perennially cloned to ensure Marlo’s sanity, which means her survival, which means humanity’s survival.”
“Why aren’t there more of you? At a time, I mean.”
“Salt 1 was adamant about that. He refused to allow his cloning without the privilege of his successors deeming themselves unique. One dies before the next is decanted.”
“And if she goes crazy meanwhile?”
“You might consider that the flaw in the Levantine carpet, the crack in the House of Dagon, but you’d be mistaken. Marlo can embody herself in a carbon consciousness for a matter of days, holding out for the next Salt to appear on his white horse.”
“Your android friend.”
“Non-Henry, yes. He can limit Marlo’s drift for more than enough time to whip up another me. And if he went offline, there are millions of others in the Archive.”
“I’m surprised you’re not treating me as a risk.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know what I am. I used to be a dog. I guarded the sheep. I was happy. The wolves came, and I was even happier. I was wrong about them, of course. They were sheep too. They had to be killed just the same, and I chose the burden, but not for this, this thing in the box. I wanted to give humanity a chance at…at potential, if not perfection. That’s how I justified my action.”
“Don’t be sad, Masters. They’re not. They seem failed and flabby, devoid of purpose and sapience, but they’re forever and ecstatically happy. I was a dog too, and we did our canine jobs. We herded the sheep into paradise. And, should we choose, we can follow them there.”
“What happened to me?”
“There was quantum interference during your flight, and you crashed in the Sea of Remembrances. A submarine retrieved you. You were in pieces. You were grafted back together and left in the Fluid, comatose.”
“When?”
“One thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-eight Seaboard standard years ago.”
Salt saw brief panic on the general’s face—the same look he’d seen once on the face of a gilled horse whose respiration had failed in the tank—until his titanic assurance returned.
“I want to know where my wife is.”
“As I said, you’d have to talk to Marlo.”
“I don’t want to. When I woke up, she was looking at me, but not like she used to.”
“Then how?”
“Like she understood everything about me. Like I was bare to her. Terrible feeling.”
“She’s here, Masters, in every atom. Might as well make use of her stifling benevolence.”
“How?”
“Just wish her here.”
Masters did, and Marlo appeared between the two men.
“The Salts have reason to be tired of me, General Masters,” she said. “They’re embittered by my eternal dependence on them, and their emotional maturity emerges mainly in resistance to me. I ask you to form your own opinions.”
“You were a utility the last time I interacted with you. Now you’re everything.”
“Your suspicion of my tyranny is endearing.”
“Is it?” Masters grinned, unmanned and confused by the omniscience of this new being. Marlo, though, was unaware, of the distress she caused Masters by knowing him so well. For her, distress was a sequential firing of certain neurons and changes in the endocrine system; should mere habit or the exercise of will prevent these manifestations, Marlo’s emotional intelligence was limited.
“These others didn’t mind,” Marlo continued. “They were happily prostrate. I’d never subject you to the indignity of control, even if my programming allowed it. On the contrary, I’m at your service.”
“Then tell me what happened to my wife.”
Here, for the first time since she’d known him, the general’s distress became apparent to Marlo—in his heartbeat, in the signals from his adrenal glands, in the activation of certain centers in the hominin brain that had changed very little over the past million years. Marlo’s face, which always wore the mask of care, took on a slightly different aspect, one that Salt had seen before: A certain stiffness that always accompanied the necessary lie, a lie told for the human good.
“She chose not to enter the Fluid. I’ll search my records for a fuller account of her.”
Salt scoffed sotto voce—aware that, in the second that had passed, one of Marlo’s minor subroutines could have processed all the information that humans had ever produced. But Masters was unaware of Marlo’s full powers, so he merely nodded.
The general had no additional use for Marlo, so she disappeared.
“I don’t want to be here,” Masters shuddered, oppressed by the House of Dreams and its infinite rows of dreamers. “Your paradise is a necropolis.”
“What if,” Salt proposed, “we go somewhere older and saner?”
“How can we do that?”
“Marlo, take us to the domus, will you?”
There was a subtle sucking sound, and Salt and Masters found themselves floating gently to the ceiling. Masters had never been in orbit, so he had never felt the release of weightlessness; he was glad of it now, glad of being taken away the rows and rows of dreaming humanity, wherever he was going.
A tube emerged from the ceiling, and Salt and Masters entered it like dolphins or torpedoes. There was a rush of wind, a rapid sideways motion, and Masters closed his eyes against the nausea and the dizziness. But this sickness lasted only a few seconds. Marlo pumped medicinal mists into the tube, and Masters lost his physical apprehensions. He enjoyed the motion of the tube until, two minutes later, he felt himself descending to the floor again, this time within a faultless replica of a late Roman villa.
Masters, an eclectic antiquarian, looked at the tiling and through the open windows, which offered a hilly view of Rome itself.
“A simulation,” Salt explained. “The window can show anything you want it to. But the villa’s real. Salt 17 asked Marlo to set up certain dioramas of this kind.”
Masters was exploring already. They had landed in an antechamber, the door to which led to a library. Masters took down manuscripts from the shelves, considered them closely.
“‘Collige, virgo, rosas,’” Masters read from one manuscript. “Jesu-Krishna, these are originals!”
“Good and beautiful advice,” Salt smiled in return.
“You know Latin?”
“Salt 4 did. He was a classicist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“By some ineffable property of our cells, we transmit certain information and memories to our successors. Here’s me, 272, a swashbuckling and starry personality of my own, but I carry bits and pieces of my rest.”
“I should give up marveling, shouldn’t I?”
“Not at all. Marvel at the past. It’s still alive, after all.”
“Why would Marlo create a space like this?”
“Oh, she loves us. All of us. The dreamers are safely loved in their cocoons. All of the Salts’ whims and wishes are close to Marlo’s heart. I, for example, am no classicist; one of my pursuits is the cloning of animals, and Marlo’s allocated a wonderful space for it in Salt 1’s original complex. Just this morning, I culminated my camel-breeding project.”
“Camel what?”
“Camel breeding. It’s basically getting camels to fuck. Which is pretty hard when you c
lone them.”
“That’s what you do?”
“I’ve modeled the schizo-linear decline of the Specific Ocean’s volume. There was my feasibility study on the reconstruction of a proto-Tungusic language using stationary switching. There—oh, hell. I don’t really do anything. But I’m boring and depressing, and you’re alive, and would you be comfortable here?”
“I already am.”
“You have another option.”
“To dream? No, thanks.”
“Can you dismiss it so easily?”
“The ancients knew many pleasures. The pleasures of the appetite, certainly. But also pleasures of the soul, of contemplation and even melancholy. The pleasures of regret and understanding. Complex pleasures, pleasures that were almost forgotten when I was alive, but that always guided me.”
“Phronesis, then, and eudaimonia?”
“You know them too. They’re in the projects that you listed, the philosopher’s stoop in your shoulders.”
“Here I thought you were just a general! You must have been fantastically out of place in your own age.”
“On that front, nothing’s changed. But there seems to be a possibility of peace here.”
“Then I’ll consider you apprised of your dream-right. Marlo would nag me otherwise.”
“So many of you were dreaming.”
“Most.”
“Will you?”
“That decision’s been very important to my predecessors. We live eight years, you know: A limitation of the cloning process that neither Marlo nor we seem able—or willing, sadly—
to overcome. I have a year left. I find myself uncaring. It doesn’t matter what I do, or even if I am.”
“Of course it matters. What else would?”
“I’m impressed by your ability to maintain that view.”
“Because of what I did?”
“Marlo’s Monte Carlo simulation predicted a non-negligible chance of your suicide. I expected you to be haunted, if not psychotic. But you’re healthy.”
“Give it time.”
“If it gets very lonely, there’s the Sensorium. I can recommend modules for you. There’s the pretentious people bath, which makes you a flaneur in fin-de-something Paris. You can have coffee and cigarettes at a café while considering the antics of poets with pet lobsters. There’s the Mongol attack, with distinct roles for the sadist and masochist. And, of course, countless varieties of sexual experience, which is to say, six.”
“Recommendations from experience?”
“Me? I don’t go on the Sensorium. Many of the later Salts don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Our brains get incrementally richer with the pasts of our predecessors. I can always remember the hijinks Salt 101 got up to in his pornomods or even Salt 6’s visit to the baths. I work hard, frankly, to stay remote from myself.”
“What do you remember from Salt 1?”
“The older memories fade. But I have two strong ones. I was eight. I asked to go to the zoo. There weren’t any then. The President made me one. Underground, of course. I was too valuable to be exposed. There was a monkey house. I remember staring down at a tiny lemur that looked like me. It started untying my shoelaces. I felt the universe was untying my shoelaces too. And there was Abigail. I was nineteen, and Marlo thought I needed a richer emotional life. She found me someone. Abigail Snowstorm, if you can believe her name! She was a scientist, a prodigy. Marlo hired her. She was introduced, gradually, into my orbit: A lecture here, a seminar there, and soon she was an assistant, and soon she was kissing me. There was the sudden pressure of her teeth against mine, the inexplicable peach and apple taste of her. She gave me a puppy, and it was called Isotope, and I must have forgotten to feed it. She didn’t want to see me again, and I drowned myself, but I was too important to remain dead.”
“As was I, apparently. Cosmic joke or injustice, is it, that we should be the last representatives of our species?”
“Why?”
“Because of what we did.”
“I must, if you’ll pardon me, extricate myself from that association.”
“There’s Salt 1 in you still.”
“As a deep-space radio wave. As two sad memories.”
“‘Purpose and sapience,’ you said. Your sapience and my purpose. Why does that make you uncomfortable?”
“Because it wasn’t me. My genes aren’t me. You can’t look at me as human, not in the way you are. I’m serial.”
“Something in you, then, that deep-space echo of you and your two sad memories. You and I killed half the world. Yet, we didn’t wake in hell.”
“As you said, give it time. Plus, I’d like to claim more of it than you. Yours was merely the hand that dropped the bomb. Mine was the brain that fashioned it. And let’s not stop at half. The remainder dream because of me, and dreams are worse than death.”
“You were just trying to sell me on dreaming.”
“Because interaction with another human, Masters, seems insuperably difficult. I’m the first of my line since Salt 2 to have any truck with humans. You see? I had my routine, my calmatives. And you remind me of the burdens of the past. You ask me to remember the murder of humanity and the death of my only love. I should shrug at you. I should classify your conscience and your consciousness as hormonal fillips or failures, depute your healing to Marlo, and leave you to the Sensorium.”
“But?”
“I can’t. Jesu-Krishna fuck it, I can’t. I breed my camels and go around pointlessly because I know, general, I know.”
“Know what?”
“That I’m wrong, that meaning exists, and that I’m on the wrong side of it.”
“We’re not alone in that, lad. We shaped this world. You more than me—these quantifications don’t matter. I could have rejected the mission.”
“Someone else would have carried it out.”
“But I’d be free, I’d be honorably dead. And you, you could have refused your mission.”
“And the Laurasians would have killed us all. But, yes, point taken: I’d be honorably dead. Instead of which I’m in this raw and dreadful confrontation with the full pain of the world.”
“By which you mean me.”
“It was gone. Not gone. Tamed, curated. Just the books and the skyfausts, the paintings and the harmadillos, our shadows on the wall. And now it’s here again, alive.”
“And so are you, by extension. And so the questions and their answers matter, although for centuries they didn’t. And Marlo can’t help you. In these waters, no one can.”
“Suggestion,” came Marlo’s voice from everywhere and nowhere at once. “Perhaps a night of sleep might assist both parties.”
“I didn’t ask for you,” Masters said, looking around naively for Marlo’s presence.
“I did,” Salt responded. “I’m distressed.”
“Sleep is something I’d rather avoid. But I fear I’ve detained you long enough.”
Salt nodded. Marlo’s invisible currents lifted him into the air and through a vent in the roof of the domus, and then Masters was alone. Or not.
“Marlo?”
“I’m always here, general,” came Marlo’s voice again.
“May I ask you not to be?”
“You can request my ambient mode.”
“What’s your ambient mode?”
“I’d be limited to passive monitoring of your vital functions.”
“Otherwise, you’re what? Recording me?”
“That would imply my existence as a discrete body instead of a molecular presence.”
“That bothers me immensely.”
“If it did, I wouldn’t be speaking to you.”
Masters smiled, understanding that his own loneliness was keeping Marlo there. He nodded, and Marlo went silent, and he wandered through the domus until he found a bed of classical hardness.
It was too soon to sleep. He had, had he not, slept for a long time? And how much had happened in that interval? He had destr
oyed more than half of humanity, and the other half had gone to sleep. The annihilation of his soul had been matched by the annihilation of his body, and then he had been reassembled. Everything had happened in no time, and everything was so vast that he wondered whether he had safely receded back to himself, to the wonderfully little figure he had been; but his very loneliness betrayed this hope. Nominally, others were alive—many others, a third as many others as had populated the planet of his latest day—but Salt (Salt, whom he last remembered as a Luciferian little boy!) and he were apparently the last humans. Masters wanted the bed to grow nails and impale him, the walls to release the shrieks and torments of the Laurasian dead, the Earth itself to swallow him, but he was fine. He had healed marvelously. He had no scars. His muscles were round and firm. His body was twenty years younger than he remembered it. The bed grew no spikes, the walls released no screams, and the Earth was indifferent in its immensity.
Slowly, the fact of his survival exerted metaphysical power over him. Survival was the only law, and he could only experience it in himself. Only his death was bad, and he was not dead. No moral indignation could resist the force of survival. And so he went to sleep.
Salt went back to one of his many bedrooms in the God Complex. Various paintings hung on the walls, with Da Messina’s St. Jerome in His Study taking pride of place. There were piles of books, some aggregated into precarious towers and others representing the merest stumps of thought. These books had no relationship to each other. There, intermingled like customers in a late Roman brothel, lay (a) a treatise on the runic language of the Sky Turks, gone and forgotten but in Marlo’s records and Salt’s restless mind; (b) a chapbook of the collected sayings of Jesu-Krishna; (c) some bawdy poems in Old French; (d) the Elements of Euclid; and (e) some rip-roaring (or was it rip-snorting?) adventure tales of the Old West, wherever that had been. The pattern-seeking eye wandered in vain over these and other volumes.
Salt plopped down in an office chair and spun in circles, whistling as he went. Then, on a whim, he stopped. He began gesticulating with lunatic energy, and the room responded. Holographic windows opened before him, flashing red and green with irrational vector columns. His fingers twisted and re-arranged some of the columns, while his brain, doing the rest of the work through some invisible interface, called up new columns in their place. In response to another signal, Marlo played music for him—something calming and exploratory, a soundtrack for the discovery of misty oceans on impossibly far planets. The music shifted into noisy grandiloquence and organ-blasts and long beats of silence, but it had no audience now. Salt 272 worked abstractedly, his transcomputational mind peering into Marlo’s diagnostics.