by Jo Zebedee
I Fu-en said, “We should all go on land, Xie Fei. Madeleine and you should wear the eyepieces and earpieces-“
“No,” Xie Fei said. “Losing all three of us would be a disaster.”
I Fu-en considered. “Losing you and Madeleine would also be a disaster. Suppose I go with you instead, leaving Madeleine?”
Xie Fei considered this proposal, then said, “You are correct. If Madeleine and I die, LilyGrey will become unstable, dangerous even.”
“Then it’s settled,” said I Fu-en.
*
They set the plan going: Xie Fei and I Fu-en shoreside, carrying eye and earpieces and linked by a chain, tied to two pairs of strong men by longer, lighter chains. Thus they would keep a link to the real world of Grey while simultaneously exploring the electromagnetic environment.
They devised a simple code for emergencies. I Fu-en waved his hands in the air, creating signs for the four men. “This to mean pull off our eye and earpieces,” he said, “and this to mean leave us alone. A tug on the shoreline chain to send us an informal warning.”
“In an obvious emergency,” said Xie Fei, “just run up and pull off our eyepieces.”
The men nodded.
“If the spherics send an electromagnetic pulse,” she told I Fu-en, “the equipment will not blind or deafen us, just fail.”
“Good!”
“Three short tugs on the chain between us to signal that you are ready to activate,” she concluded.
He nodded, then grinned. She did not have the fortitude to smile back.
She placed the earpieces over her ears, so that the noise cancelling operation – which was heuristic, learning from the environment – could begin. The earpieces tightened against her pinnae like leeches. Over a period of thirty seconds her hearing diminished, ending in total silence. The effect was disconcerting, but she fought the urge to take the earpieces off. She realised however that balance could now be a problem. So many environmental cues from just two senses…
When I Fu-en had followed her lead she nodded once at him, glanced over her shoulder at the shoreline party, then turned to face the spherics and put on the eyepieces.
They also were heuristic. She waited for the state of neutrality: total blackness, total silence.
She felt three tugs on the chain. She tapped the activation button on the eyepiece nose bridge.
False colour images projected onto her retinas swirled for a few moments like random kaleidoscopes. Then static. Just static. She turned her head around, to see the quality of the static change; but it was a tiny effect, negligible, as if an illusion. In her ears she heard pink noise.
She waited, crouching (she realised) as if ready for attack. Her breathing was short and shallow, her heart racing.
But nothing. Just static and pink noise. Yet she felt her brain was trying to make sense of something. There was a hint, as if so out-of-focus it was almost imperceptible, of something large…
Then an image materialised before her, a three dimensional image, created from subtly different stereoscopic information: a hexagonal lamina with a central node. But before she could make sense of it the eyepieces were ripped off her face. She screamed and fell to the ground, momentarily blinded, dizzy, confused by the light of the sky, of the sun.
A panicked voice in her left ear. “They’re attacking on LilyGrey! Hor Namhong and Hu Min! Xie Fei, are you okay?”
*
There was nothing Xie Fei could do. This she had not expected. A group of twenty armed individuals jetted over from New Angkor lilypad to Greyside lilypad, then took over. On the beach, the six of them watched, impotent. The coup was over in ten minutes.
She wept. “Guns and clubs,” she said. “We are savages now! We thought we were the best of the best, but underneath we were just savages.” She shook her head. “I am glad Qu Lei-lei did not see this. He would have been ashamed.”
I Fu-en tried to comfort her. “They’ll come for us, perhaps parley with us.”
But they did not. A message was shouted through an unamplified loudspeaker made of plastic. “You are staying there! Don’t swim over. We might send you food and water.”
“Doubly marooned,” Xie Fei observed, glancing at I Fu-en.
“Did you see anything in the electromagnetic environment?” he replied.
She turned to him. She had not yet mentioned the spectral image. “The hexagon? You?”
He frowned. “Is that what you saw?”
“Yes.”
“I saw a flat sphere. It rolled towards me, then… kinda bounced.”
“You saw much more than me, for longer. The image got to you first. So, the spherics can differentiate between us! They are aware of us as individuals… perhaps because we occupied a different physical space.”
“Those images must have been from them. They could be intelligent. But these eye and earpieces don’t have transmit capability. Our brains were trying to make sense of what the spherics were sending.”
Xie Fei nodded. “We need receive and transmit capability, as Liang-xin had.”
I Fu-en smacked his hands together. “On the lilypads… but not here.”
“It would be dangerous.”
“To interact with the spherics?”
“To swim over to the manufacturing lilypad, to Greyside.”
I Fu-en nodded, silenced by her statement.
“It would be dangerous too to link my brain through an electromagnetic transmitter to the spherics,” Xie Fei continued. “First of all, my brain would have to become used to that experience, which could take hours… days, months. It would be like learning to ride a bicycle.”
“In an alien environment.”
“Do you see any other option?”
“No.”
“Use your shirt as a white flag to attract the attention of the people on the lilypads. And good luck.”
“You’re the one who’ll need luck.”
Xie Fei glanced at I Fu-en. “I have been a successful leader because I have made my own luck,” she said. “But, yes, this is different. Here luck does not apply.”
*
As evening fell there was a quiet bang sound from the manufacturing lilypad, and then Xie Fei saw something rise in a parabola arc, then fall. She ran away from the tide line towards the edge of the spheric mass. The object fell into them, bouncing like a ping-pong ball on boiling water, and she had to wade into the spherics, kicking them aside to reach the object; and when she did she was thigh deep in them. The object was a metal tube.
Xie Fei had no idea whether I Fu-en had been caught, been imprisoned, been killed. She forged a way out of the spherics, opened the tube and pulled out what at first seemed to be a piece of floppy neoprene attached to an eyepiece and earpieces. A hank of cables followed, then an auto-razor. The accompanying note read, Shave your head first. Put on the electrode-skullcap. Put on the eye and ear pieces. Then learn to ride the bike. Good luck.
There was no time to waste. She lay down in the sand, concealed from the shore by a boulder, then allowed the auto-razor to do its work; then on with the skullcap, and then the eye and earpieces. In less than a minute she was blind and deaf.
She tried to relax. She considered what she knew. The spherics could be an animal form created by evolution – they could be conscious animals, with culture, morals, likes and dislikes. Or they could be machines, the remnants of the civilisation that had existed on Grey hundreds of millions of years before. If so… animal intelligence or conscious intelligence? No way to tell in a non-human. If you were human, the only thing you could know was human. Yet this ancient conundrum was about to propel her beyond the final barrier.
Fuzzy static faded into view, that she recognised from before, and pink noise assailed her hearing. She knew that the multiple electrodes would be receiving millions of impulses from her brain, would be sending them in coherent format to the eye and ear pieces, which then would transmit on the spheric frequency. She
hoped a feedback loop would emerge: her brain receiving through eyes and ears, creating a reality from stereoscopic information, simultaneously broadcasting. This was indeed like riding a bicycle for the first time – a novel sensation never experienced before, that needed to be experienced as it was learned. Yet what she attempted now was a million times more complex than riding a bicycle, though it was similar – balance, adjust, balance better, then ride. She needed to learn to surf those alien electromagnetic waves. And fast.
*
I Fu-en glared at his interrogator. “You are going to kill me?” he asked the nameless android.
“No,” it replied. “That would be barbaric.”
“As if what you’ve done so far isn’t.”
“You are in no position to comment on my behaviour,” came the reply.
“What do you want from me?”
“Information concerning Xie Fei.”
I Fu-en cast his mind back to how he had left Xie Fei, allowing every emotion he felt to appear on his face. It did not matter what these emotions were, what mattered was that this android, which doubtless had emotion recognition, thought what he was about to say to be genuine. It did not matter at this stage that the android would not understand.
“She will die of dehydration soon,” he sighed. “She is gone!”
“Are you certain?”
“You control the fresh water supplies.”
The android nodded, a grin appearing on its face. “Very good. I shall not kill you, I Fu-en, and I know of your skill with androids. So you will be returning to your previous job. Working for me.”
“Who are you?”
“The leader of LilyGrey. The chief. The director.”
“Where are Hor Namhong and Hu Min? I thought they were the directors of the New Angkor lilypad.”
“Not any more,” said the android. “There is a sole leader now, and you will be my intermediary.”
“Why you? Why have you taken over?”
“There is a vacuum that I cannot stand. The CC is gone. Strength is required.”
I Fu-en nodded, knowing that this was the political situation the generation starship had avoided for its entire life, albeit in the human arena. “I shall work for you,” he said.
The nameless android walked away. I Fu-en sighed. There was no reasoning with brute animal thinking…
*
Xie Fei appraised the scene before her. It approximated an empty land surface of vast extent, and she realised that it matched with fair accuracy the spheric-covered land nearby.
The reception/transmission/feedback system was working. But what was she experiencing?
She sensed that in this electromagnetic environment she stood upright. She had a sense of gravity – artificial gravity? an artificial sense of gravity? – pulling her down. She felt her legs. Quite heavy. When she made a decision to move her legs she sensed herself propelled forwards.
So, she existed as an autonomous entity in the spherics’ world.
And then she saw Liang-xin.
The android walked towards her across the static-shrouded landscape; Liang-xin took a minute to reach her, getting larger in her field of vision as it approached, stopping when it reached her.
“Liang-xin?” she said.
She heard her own voice. Her conscious mind was able to exist here, she realised, do all the things it could do in the real world. Her brain was playing along with the illusion… perhaps even enjoying it. Rather like having phantom limbs… no, a phantom self.
“Xie Fei,” said Liang-xin.
“You… here?”
“And you are here too.”
Xie Fei decided to play dumb. “What is this place?”
“I do not know.”
Xie Fei considered. Liang-xin had been rendered inutile by I Fu-en. “What is the last thing you remember?” she asked.
“Entering this place.”
“Who accompanied you to the seashore that time?”
“You, I Fu-en and Hu Min.”
So, this version of the android remembered nothing after that first encounter with the spherics’ electromagnetic environment, suggesting that the entity she conversed with now was a copy of Liang-xin’s brain made before the android’s return to Greyside.
She realised, with horror, with awe and with excitement, that the same copying could happen to her.
She asked, “Have you explored this place?”
“A miniscule part of it.”
“Are there other beings here apart from us?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see them.”
Liang-xin turned to look over its shoulder. “They are in hiding. They do not know what we are. We have disturbed them.”
“Are we in danger?”
“I do not know. It is impossible to know. We have no guidelines, no template. This is a frontier. Are you staying here?”
Xie Fei hesitated before answering. “I don’t know.”
She glanced up, to see in the imaginary heavens a copy of the Mei-lu, orbiting as if nothing had happened to it.
Perhaps it was time to depart. She imagined where her real hands were and reached up to feel for the eyepiece and earpieces; but she could not feel them. Her senses detected nothing. She realised at once that the illusion generated by her brain was already so strong it had taken over, as if she had hypnotised herself. She was trapped. She had become her own phantom self.
*
Hor Namhong glanced at Hu Min. The chamber in which they crouched was dark, silent, and too cold for comfort.
Hor Namhong whispered, “Do you think it’s monitoring us?”
Hu Min shook her head. “I think all that android wanted to do was assume control. It’s no accident that the new leader is the largest and strongest android here.”
Hor Namhong nodded, then replied, “Animal behaviour – it wants to lead us humans. Qu Lei-lei would have been appalled. We’ve turned into savages-“
“We haven’t,” Hu Min interrupted.
“We split from the Captains’ Council – Xie Fei and Madeleine-“
“Yes, but we regret it,” Hu Min said. “Now we have to make amends.”
“How? If we do escape, what then?”
“Find Madeleine. Find Xie Fei. Find anybody who’s still sane, then form an opposing body. We can’t descend into barbarity.”
“The spherics will force us into barbarism,” said Hor Namhong.
“Will they?”
He glanced at her, seeing just her eyes in the gloom, reflecting tiny, wall-mounted indicator lamps. “What’s your best guess about them?” he asked.
Hu Min said nothing for a few minutes. Then, “I think their trillions of bodies are in equilibrium. The spherics two hundred metres down are different to those at the top of the pile. Evolutionary pressures have led to small variations in physiology. Yet…”
Hor Namhong waited.
“Yet if they are intelligent, conscious – and individuals – they must exist separate from the real world, perhaps in their electromagnetic environment. I see no other explanation for the monoculture that is this world.”
Hor Namhong nodded. “Agreed,” he said.
“What now?”
“Let’s get out of here to a safe lilypad. This fight isn’t over yet.”
“And if there isn’t a safe lilypad?” Hu Min asked.
“The beach.”
*
Xie Fei calmed her panic-stressed mind. She had been through worse than this, she told herself – the time, for instance, thirty years ago when the Mei-Lu developed a fault in one of its nuclear fission engines that almost blew it apart.
Actually, no – this was worse. This was the separation of her mind from her body: a variety of death. She was alone, adrift, with a copy of an android for company.
What was her body doing right now?
“Have you been up there?” she asked, pointing to the image of the Mei-Lu.
“No,” Liang-xin replied. “I cannot fly.”
Intrigued, Xie Fei said, “Are you restricted to only those acts you could manage as a real, physical entity?”
“I think so. My imagination is limited.”
So near to humour. But not quite. This was no conscious entity.
“Do you think I could fly?” she asked.
“There is only one way to find out.”
Xie Fei tried imagining being a bird, a bat, a butterfly, a hang-glider, but her sense of self – her virtual body, as she thought of it – remained attached to the virtual ground.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m not surprised, though. It’s impossible to imagine what it’s like to be a bat.”
Liang-xin turned around. “Someone comes,” it remarked.
Xie Fei saw a creature approaching, bipedal, wearing reflective garments that mirrored geometric objects she could not otherwise see: hexagons, she noted, just like the shape she had seen during her first experience. The creature approached slowly, in real time, becoming larger in her field of vision as if traversing a real environment.
There are rules to this place, Xie Fei thought. It is based on the real world. But perhaps the real world of hundreds of millions of years ago…
She realised then that the creature she faced was one of the race that had mined the moon for titanium.
Grey skin, sense organs on the face – deep-mounted globes, fans of thin skin, a kind of white stubble on the cranium. An ovoid head on a bipedal body, but four thin arms: a short pair and a long, delicate pair. Three mouths symmetrically placed: one pair, one apart and situated next to the skin fans. An alien with a brain and a body and a culture…
The creature studied her, walked around her, but remained silent; and Xie Fei was not so shocked as to think communication might happen, so she said nothing, did nothing, apart from turn on her heel to so that she could watch the alien. It walked around her three times, closed so that its face filled half her field of view, then turned and ran off.
Had she just spanned the abyss between the human twenty second century and the Grey of half a billion years ago?
“Liang-xin,” she said, “did you see that creature?”
“Yes.”
“And it was one of the beings you said was in hiding, yes?”