by Demir Barlas
“I wouldn’t, no. Let me renew my apology.”
“Jesu-Krishna, you’re seven years old. And two thousand. And I’m a ghost in love with another.”
“Don’t be alarmed at madness,” Salt counseled. “That empowers it. You have to think in terms of tasks; little tasks just strong enough to keep the monster in the corner. Don’t look too closely at it, don’t try to destroy it. Manage it.”
“Manage it? We killed thirteen billion people.”
“And the last two billion depend on us.”
Ashamed to be exhorted by Salt and now his own discipline, Masters turned and continued his descent into the tunnel. Salt’s step seemed more resolute. He was emboldened, and, because he had a helmet-light and knowledge of his own, he overtook Masters and led the way himself. The remainder of the descent passed in silence.
Of course, Masters understood nothing of Salt’s qualities. Like most other humans, even intelligent ones, the general was congenitally alien to the flock of abstractions that underlie even the simplest technical talk. When Salt talked math, Masters’ brain instantly and protectively redirected itself to other facts, which became infinitely alluring in comparison. As a consequence, Masters had no good idea of what they were up to in the tunnel other than repairing Marlo. What this task might consist of, what its ganglia and sinews were, eluded him. He was a votary at the shoulder of a rainmaker as, in some inner chamber, Salt directed his helmet-light on a column that offered some new kind of access to Marlo, or some new cell, or something. At the moment, Masters had a strange resentment of reality, which failed to be his mistress. Whatever sadness inhabited and animated Salt—and it was a profound and powerful sadness—only bound him closer to reality. Masters, on the other hand, had been an atom in the hurricane of chance. He would have liked, this commander of men and machines, to have gone to the column itself and righted reality. But reality was alive to the ministrations of this very strange man before him, this man who seemed, in the shadow of the column, to be even slighter than himself. The salt of Salt inspired no confidence—not even in Masters, who knew him. Still, everything depended on him. Masters was about to position himself at an angle so that he could add his helmet’s light to the column, but there was no need. With an emphatic gesture, Salt had called up columns of bright vectors, flocks of fluctuating numbers, that provided sufficient light from themselves.
On these numbers, Salt went to work. Masters had seen Salt’s mental labor before, but the world and its value had been limited then. Having woken an alien, Masters had been rehumanized and reintegrated by Lily, and Lily came from Marlo, and Salt kept Marlo alive, and this columnar task, this magic of numbers before him, meant everything. For the first minute, Masters didn’t dare to move, but he had a false idea of transcomputation. Salt had disappeared so perfectly into the numbers, into himself, that he might have survived decapitation at this moment. Masters realized that he was free to move around the room to distract himself from tension. He breathed more easily now, hoping, more than observing, that Salt was making headway. Before long, the world would be healed, and they would be on the surface. Even the Laurasians so comprehensively slaughtered all those years ago would be at peace. Perhaps they had given their lives for the eternal happiness of these others, and there was some mathematics of happiness (didn’t Salt think so?) that justified the—
“No,” Salt concluded, slumping against the column and throwing off his helmet. The numbers had paused where they were, their light bathing the room in new hypotheses of hopelessness. “Won’t work. Not here.”
“Not here? Then where?”
“What’s left to try is a power cell from one of the old computrons.”
“Why aren’t we getting one?”
“There aren’t any here.”
“But you kept everything. The Archives. Samson was a computron. What about his cell?”
“In designing Marlo, I was inspired not by Samson’s architecture, but by PROBIT’s.”
“The Laurasian computron?”
“Well, the Laurasians came first. They were significantly ahead of us in computronic matters. Their power cell design was remarkable for its time.”
“Salt, when all of humanity depends on Marlo, one would expect more robust contingencies. You have one android to hold her overflow; one clone—sorry—to repair her; one backup cell!”
“Two of me wouldn’t do any good. We’re not additive. We’re isomorphic. Where one fails, so will the other.”
“There’s been no reason to expect failure. Why now? What’s changed? You must have some sense of it.”
“I’m not a party to my own thinking. When I transcompute, I vanish from myself.”
“Are you certain you haven’t failed before?”
“I’m certain. And I’m not failing now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a speculation.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a perturbation in Marlo that isn’t self-referential.”
“Keep thinking.”
“Ripples cast by another dynamic system…perhaps on a shared paramolecular frequency…or…”
Masters felt the satisfaction of tipping a boulder over a hall. He watched Salt continue to ruminate.
“…action at a distance…action at a distance on a retroactively entangled…oh, Jesu-Krishna!”
“You have it? What’s the answer?”
“The answer is that PROBIT’s awake. And the logic bomb I uploaded into him is leaking back into Marlo through a quantum back door.”
“We destroyed PROBIT.”
“Perhaps not all of him. If he functions—and he must—I’d need to find him, fix him. Far easier than fixing Marlo.”
“Fix him to fix her? Why not just blow him up, wherever he is?”
“Even if such a vulgar operation were possible, latency entanglement would continue long enough to destroy Marlo.”
“Then we find him.”
“And his cell.”
“How?”
“There might be satellites. I don’t know.”
“You—you, collectively—haven’t given much thought to running the world.”
“And you—you individually—seem obsessed with planning and contingencies and control.”
“My kind of thinking would have kept you from this outcome.”
“Your kind of thinking couldn’t have built this kind of world.”
“I don’t pretend to any technical expertise. I—someone like me—could have brought balance, that’s all. A practical bent that you and Marlo seem to lack. You never made sure of PROBIT, never kept a good eye on the world, didn’t even secure your existence here. I would have had this place flush with replacement power cells and multiple Non-Henrys and multiple Salts. I would have monitored everything outside the Shield. Hell, I would have colonized the moon.”
“And I, of course, would have functioned as your major-domo, the eunuch in charge of the palace.”
“Well—”
“This is my world. It was then; it is now; and it will be when Marlo’s functional again. I’m the turtle upholding the Earth.”
“Are you done?”
“Yes. I’m listening to you.”
“The power cell. Where might it be?”
“Immortal Base, probably. The first of the Laurasian repair and comms facilities.”
“We go there. We get cells. We bring them back.”
“Understood.”
“You fix Marlo. Marlo fixes Seaboard.”
“Fair enough.”
“I never heard of Immortal Base.”
“Generals needn’t know everything.”
“Can we get a drone out there?”
“There’s no machine intelligence without Marlo.”
“Central power sources?”
“Only Marlo. You’ll have fly us there. And I’ve never left Seaboard. No Salt has.”
“Are you agoraphobic?”
“We’ve passed all these lifetimes in
the same place. With the same mother, the same sights. In the same loneliness and labor.”
“You’ll have to function out there. Without your routines and points of reference. Without your mother. Damn it, you’re a man!”
“Am I?”
“Think of the tigers we hunted, the proofs we formulated, the machines we built. That was our work, Salt, the work of men.”
“I’m glad Marlo isn’t hearing this.”
“It’s no accident you made Marlo a woman. The world needs a mother. The world is a mother. The sky-gods, the bearded lawgivers, those were our jealous fantasies. But we have our own sources of pride. Life eludes us, love ignores us, hope forgets us. And yet—”
“You’re not making a good case for men.”
“We have our strength and our intelligence. The brute and the mathematician: Isn’t that who we are?”
“Yes, by jingo! We’re men. Let’s get going.”
They were halfway back to the surface when Salt asked an unexpected question.
“What’s love like?”
“Love?”
“Attachment, if you prefer. But in the reproductive-romantic-hedonic sense. The possession of it, not the qualia.”
“I understood your question.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m not the best person to answer.”
“You’re the only person to answer.”
“Don’t you remember from your own—your own—who was that girl with the ridiculous name?”
“Abigail Snowstorm. Those memories are getting weaker, and maybe I’ll be the last Salt to have them.”
“I don’t think you’re asking me what love is. Right? Because you’ll have read all about it, plumbed its hormonal basis. You’ll have surveilled and eavesdropped on it. You’ll have encountered it in the Sensorium. It’s an experience you understand. No description or narrative, no detail can help you there.”
“You see, to love—this is what I was thinking—you have to be a person, and there have to be other people. If you’re too many people, none of them complete, you can’t love. If there’s no one else—”
“No one chose to stay awake?”
“No one. I’m just as confused as Salt 2 was. He thought, as do I, that freaks and outliers can be happily relied upon—that there would always be cranks and relics, anachronists and bull-headed individualists, who would chose not to dream. We were wrong. All of humanity made the same decision at roughly the same time. No one chose to stay awake, and, consequently, there was no one to love.”
“And what of Abigail?”
“Some of the earlier Salts venerated her. For them, the memory of love was strong.”
“And for you?”
“I think love must be an anchor to the ocean-floor of humanity. I drift, you see. Not like Marlo. I drift from myself, though I was fully human once. Each of my iterations is more distant, more stylized, less vital. I’ve felt the need to feel something, to remember more clearly, but I can’t. The very last I have of Abigail is the feeling of that kiss. I’d read so much about kisses—but no one writes anything about the pressure of a woman’s teeth, the inward smell she seems to have. These few details plague me. And I see a face, Masters, sometimes. A woman’s face. No Abigail’s, not Marlo’s. An abstract face, the face of love or longing, a lonely and beautiful face.”
“The Spirit of Meaning, you called her.”
“Am I to die without knowing this face?”
“You’re not to die at all.”
“But the quantum storms.”
“I’ll apply my piloting, and you your brainpower, to solving the problems of navigation.”
“But their ergodicity—”
“I don’t care what that is. Apply yourself, Salt.”
“I will.”
“This is no camel-fucking exercise.”
“I know.”
Salt was sober and tractable when they reached the surface. He walked alongside Masters, either suppressing or having forgotten about the pain in his legs from so much walking; he offered a helpful inventory of the available skyfausts and their speeds; he recollected the probable location of the Laurasian facility where at least one computronic power cell lay dormant. Masters was amazed. Salt had the most impractical of men, but the exigencies of survival were calling order and organization out of him.
There was much to do still, and Masters wanted to be systematic, and he was aware that hungry men make bad decisions, and he proposed a luncheon.
They had come out of the tunnel in another part of the city, providentially close to the House of Dreams, so Salt led them through the northeast door. The scale of everything still amazed Masters. He had already been inside the House of Dreams, but the absence of a sky had kept him from appreciating the extent of its terrible majesty, Outside, the borders of the sun and sky magnified the building and its precincts. Masters forced himself to look at the door instead of up.
The entered the House of Dreams. The place was still humming, and Salt explained that the dreamers would probably outlast Marlo, should she fail, by a matter of days. They would die good deaths in their dreaming ecstasies, as they would merely be switched off. Masters, who had been concussed many times, remembered the singularly pleasant sensation of being turned off. The evil of death was only its anticipation.
Masters saw only the bricks in the wall that, hundreds of feet on either side of the hallway, betokened the resting places of the dreamers. The place was uniform to him, and he would not have known where to go. It was Salt who, undaunted by the scale of the necropolis, bent his steps to where they were needed. There were smaller hallways here and there, almost invisible between the bricks, and spatial distinctions that the general could not make led to something else, a little utility room.
The room had never been used. It had the look of millennial newness, like a tomb that had been sealed off some thousand years ago. Salt, despite never having been here, knew where to find a manual light switch and, more pertinently, where to find a hand-cranked food converter. Masters looked around the room, too amped to sit on one of the scattered armchairs. The grinding of the converter redirected his attention to Salt, who had been busy over a simple luncheon of instant simubeef and beetroot lemonade.
“I don’t want to eat here,” Masters said, so Salt shrugged and carried the food into the hallway.
“There’s military food,” Salt promised with his mouth full. The two men had been squatting in the middle of the hall, flanked by the rows of humanity they wished to save, each lost in his vision of the future. “Perma-packets and water pills. Small and dense. We can carry months of provender in our pockets. Not that we’d survive that long.”
“Can you estimate our chances?”
“I have seventeen distinct models. Marlo would have had trillions.”
“And?”
“Optimistically, one in five.”
“Not bad.”
“Not bad? You’re feverishly optimistic.”
“We see unlikelier things come to pass all the time.”
“Pity there isn’t enough time to retrain you as a mathematician. Have some more lemonade.”
“Is that what this is?”
“Jesu-Krishna, look at them,” Master said, looking at the bricks that lined the walls. “They don’t know how close they are to dying.”
“Neither do we, for that matter.”
“You said some of you have committed suicide?”
“Fifty-five of me.”
“Do you remember any of that?”
“Some,” Salt shrugged, swallowing a piece of fat. “There’s one in particular. It was the classicist Salt, the one who had the domus built—your residence. He wanted to die like a Roman. He put on a party. There were only two guests, of course. Non-Henry put on a toga. Marlo read from Cicero and Seneca. The Salt—Salt 4, I believe—had a great deal of wine and much of the ridiculous food that Romans loved.”
“They would have found our food just as strange, Jesu-Krishna bless
them. But what then?”
“He’d composed a Latin speech. He thanked Marlo for her motherhood and Non-Henry for his friendship. He stated that he was happy to leave the world while he could, under his own steam, without waiting like a pansy (his phrase) for his cells to wind down. He expressed some satisfaction at the brief lifespan of the Salts, which, according to him, was the spiritual key to transcomputation itself. At the end of it, he had a bath drawn. There were buckets of hot and cold water. Just down the hallway from what’s your library now, in the bathhouse. He eased himself into the tub there, and Non-Henry gave him a little silver knife, and he opened up his cephalic vein. I remember the life bleeding out of him. Pleasant warm feeling. Bodies are supposed to fight their deaths like mad, but ours like to let go. His last thought was of Abigail. She was stronger in his memory than she is in mine. I believe he really could taste her. The peaches and apples of her teeth were still so close to him in time! She was pressing into him, embossing the end of intelligence with the beginning of life.”
“And you’ve considered that yourself?”
“Death by that method? No. I have little truck with sharp things. Salt 4, being a classicist, had long read of knives and swords and daggers and things. I’m much more of a coward. I came up with a Monte Carlo gas. You set the time period in which you want to die—say, two weeks—and the gas releases itself unpredictably during that period. It could catch you anywhere. On the toilet, say. In the middle of a bite. In your sleep. I came up with it, but I haven’t used it, and I don’t think I will. Do you know, general, I want to be unique? It’s the ambition of every serial being. Possibly the bacteria want to be unique. But I know this: Of the Salts before me, all have either killed themselves or entered the House of Dreams. I want to merely die. I want to greet death calmly at the door. Or let me dance some steps with death. Let her take my hand. Oh, lead me up a little hill to watch the cities burn! I want to be more of myself, more than myself. I’m going to leave Seaboard now, and which Salt has done that? I’ve failed my very essence, my transcomputation, and which Salt has done that? I’ll die out there or in here, and which Salt has done that? No, by Jesu-Krishna’s balls, I won’t open my veins or enter the Fluid. I’m a man—you said so yourself. Then let me die a man!”