The Sky Woman

by JD Moyer

  Trond gently lifted Car-En, and looked to Esper, for Trond did not know in which direction they were going.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Katja and Zoë stood on the white sand beach. The midday sun was blistering hot, but Zoë had promised that Katja’s pale skin would not burn. The other thing Zoë had promised – well, that was hard to believe. But anything was possible in this strange place.

  “Come, it’s safe,” said Zoë, walking toward the water. They had left their clothes under a palm tree. Katja’s leather breeches, boots, and woolen shirt made the larger pile; Zoë had been wearing only a light dress. Zoë was slighter than Katja, with small breasts, pale skin with a slight olive cast, and bony hips. Katja had felt self-conscious at first, but Zoë had matter-of-factly insisted on nudity, and showed little interest in Katja’s naked form. The hot sun felt good on her bare skin.

  Katja took a few steps into the water, wetting her feet and ankles. Zoë was already knee-deep, the gentle waves splashing against her thighs. The water was cooler than the air, but much warmer than the icy river Katja was used to.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Zoë asked. Katja nodded. “C’mon – I want to show you something.” Katja caught up to the hermit. Zoë took her hand, guiding her in. Soon the clear saltwater reached their midsections, and it became difficult to walk.

  “Now this will be hard, but just trust me, okay? Crouch down, open your eyes and mouth, and breathe in.”

  Before Katja could protest, Zoë sunk beneath the water. Still holding Katja’s hand, she gently tugged her down. Katja took a deep breath and bent her knees. She forced her eyes open, and while the salt briefly stung, the pain soon faded. Zoë was laughing with her mouth open. Katja let out half her breath, releasing a stream of bubbles to the surface. Zoë nodded encouragingly. Well, she could always stand up if she started to drown. She exhaled fully, then, against every instinct, inhaled. Her eyes went wide as the cool water filled her lungs. The sensation was strange and uncomfortable, but not painful. Her legs wanted to spring upward, but she willed herself to be still. Was she drowning? No. Somehow, her lungs were getting what they needed from the seawater. Katja opened her mouth and laughed silently, expelling water. Zoë grinned, squeezed her hand, and let go. Katja’s long, blond hair drifted in front of her face, and when she moved it aside she saw that Zoë had shot off like a fish, away from the beach. Katja followed, swimming slowly and awkwardly.

  Soon they left the cove, and though the water was still clear and shallow, here the ocean floor was populated by all sorts of strange creatures, some of which Zoë had described to Katja earlier. There were convoluted structures called coral: living rock formations swarming with colorful fish of all sizes. There were eels that shot back into their holes when approached, and creatures with five legs, and tiny blobs with many small tentacles, and oddities that Katja could not even begin to describe. Zoë pointed to a large green creature swimming above them. It had an oval shell and four flippers, and swam even more awkwardly than Katja.

  Zoë had said this place was modeled on somewhere called Palau, one of her favorite places to explore before she’d volunteered for the Crucible program.

  Zoë swam up to Katja, took her hand, and pointed down. Katja felt her feet moving together, and a ripple along her inner calves and thighs, and then an alarming sensation, as if her spine had suddenly descended all the way to her toes (except she could no longer feel her toes). Before her, the lower half of Zoë’s body had taken on the form of a silvery blue fish. Katja looked down – her own body had changed in the same way. She gave an experimental swish of her tail, and shot upward with such force that she shouted, silently, in surprise.

  Zoë led them to deeper water. Here, the ocean floor was still teeming with life, but more dimly lit. Katja quickly learned to use her fish’s tail, and without any trace of awkwardness, swam here and there in short bursts, exhilarated. Zoë followed, nearby, until Katja deserted her with a burst of speed. Arms tightly at her sides, she used only her powerful tail, and found that even the smallest movements could propel her forward with great velocity. She stole a glance back – Zoë was far behind. The ocean floor looked sparser; the large coral reefs were all behind them. There was something dark ahead.

  Katja looked down and was struck with vertigo. Below was a great black void; she had swum over some sheer cliff. Looking back she could see the wall, descending as steeply as any mountainside, from dimness, to darkness, to pure black. Terrified, she twisted about, and briefly lost her sense of up and down. Dark water, everywhere. Where was Zoë? She found the cliff again, and swam back to the edge. She was not falling, but felt as if she might. What lived in that blackness below? Her heart pounded. The heavy water in her lungs felt wrong.

  Something tapped her shoulder. She spun around and clawed at the water, but relaxed at the sight of Zoë’s calm expression. Her guide pointed back to the beach. Katja nodded, and they swam back to shore, languidly. As they neared the beach, Katja searched for ground with her tail, but instead touched the sand with her toes.

  * * *

  As the sun descended toward the ocean horizon, Katja helped Zoë gather wood and dried palm fronds. The hermit lit the fire with a match (another oddity to Katja), then ambled back down to the shore, where she speared a bright blue fish in the shallows. They sat on a driftwood log, bare feet in the warm sand, the fire contained by a circle of rocks. Zoë cleaned and gutted her catch efficiently, then carved out neat chunks of flesh with a short knife. “Sashimi,” she said, offering a piece of the translucent meat to Katja. “It’s good.” Reluctantly, Katja tried a piece, and found the meat salty and tender. “How did you like being a mermaid?” asked Zoë.

  “Is that what fish-women are called? Enjoyable, mostly.” Katja took another piece of fish. “But it makes this meal traitorous.” Zoë laughed. “You changed the top half of my body as well,” Katja said, more seriously.

  Zoë nodded. “I made your breasts smaller and narrowed your shoulders a little, so you could swim faster.”

  “How? Can you control everything in this world?”

  “There are some limitations, though they could probably be overcome with time and work. The mermaid is a ‘form-only’ invention. The musculature is real – or, rather, accurately simulated – and so are the various forms of tissue that make up the tail: the scales, the fin, and so on. But I haven’t attempted to create a genetically accurate race of mer-people. Reproduction would be tricky – where would the sex organs go? And I wouldn’t know where to begin in terms of creating a realistic culture for fantasy creatures. It’s not enough to just simulate the genes for an intelligent brain. You need a society if you want to create a new intelligent being. Fish and insects are easier to simulate – they don’t have much in the way of culture. But dealing with mammals, that’s trickier. There’s a pack of wild pigs in the jungle.” She pointed back at the palms. “For the first generation, I had to program a whole behavioral level before they could start teaching their young. It’s self-sustaining now, but I suspect somewhat stunted in terms of hog culture. They do pick up novel behaviors, so that’s good. They’re still learning, evolving culturally as well as genetically.”

  Katja understood little of this, but she thought she understood the main point. A baby would not grow into a man or a woman unless it was raised by people. If it was raised by wolves, it would become a wolf-creature, unable to speak in words, unable to understand village customs. Katja had heard of such a child.

  “So no new people? Have you been lonely?” asked Katja.

  “I prefer to be alone most of the time,” said Zoë. “But yes, I’ve been lonely. I’ve modified my own neurophysiology so that I don’t get depressed….” She laughed ruefully. “But I haven’t found a cure for loneliness.” She looked thoughtfully at Katja. “I know you don’t want to stay, but you’d be welcome to, you know. There are so many things I could show you.”

  Zoë passed Katj
a another piece of fish. “You are like a god here,” Katja said, after she had chewed and swallowed.

  “In some ways. I prefer to think of myself as a biological artist. If I could make people, then maybe I’d be a god. I’m safe at least – Raekae can’t touch me. I locked him out long ago. You know, when it comes down to it, he’s a hack. An amateur. I have access to Crucible subsystems he doesn’t even know about.”

  Zoë’s boast seemed prideful, but Katja had no reason to doubt her. She had directly experienced the hermit’s powers. “What about me?” she asked. “Am I safe?”

  “For the moment, until you’re virtualized, and your own brain tissue is remodeled in service of the Crucible.”

  “How long will that take?”

  Zoë shrugged. “I don’t know. The threads grow and learn quickly, but time passes more swiftly in the Crucible sim than in the real world, so that buys you a little time. A few days more – of subjective time – at least.”

  “You said you were working on something, a way that could…get me out. Get me home.”

  Zoë looked away and nodded.

  “How would it work?” asked Katja, tentatively. Something in Zoë’s manner made her feel as if she were treading on thin ice.

  “It would work by destroying everything,” said Zoë, gazing at the ocean. The sun was a glimmering orange orb, dipping into the reflective sea. Except that the sun was not real, any more than Katja had swum with a real fish’s tail. But the light on the glassy water looked real, and the powerful tail had felt real. “Why don’t you stay here with me?” Zoë asked.

  Zoë stood and wandered to the water’s edge. Katja followed and stood next to the hermit, a few paces away. She sensed that Zoë was distancing herself, but did not quite want to be alone.

  “I could give you any form you wanted,” said Zoë. “You could live as a bird, or a sea turtle, or even a mythical creature – a centaur or a dragon. You could live as a man or a woman.” She glanced at Katja. “You’re already beautiful, but you could be different if you wanted to. Like this.” Zoë transformed, slowly and gradually, into a tall, beautiful, black-skinned woman, with close-shorn, bright green hair, wearing a long, shimmering dress, silk encrusted with thousands of tiny sapphires. “Or this,” said the woman in a deep, sultry voice. The black woman crouched, and her face broadened, and fur emerged from her skin, and soon there was an enormous striped cat staring menacingly at her. Katja’s heart raced and the hairs on her neck stiffened.

  “Stop that,” Katja said. “It disturbs me. I know you can take any form. I did enjoy swimming as a fish-woman, but I want my real body back, the one that bleeds. Your offer does not interest me. Can you make Raekae return what he has stolen? Or should I take it back myself?”

  The great cat transformed back into Zoë. “Why do you want to go back? What waits for you there, in the real world? You’re powerless there, you know. You could get sick and die within a week. Or be murdered, or raped. Or watch your family die. Those horrors don’t exist here.”

  “I can take care of myself. And what waits for me? My brothers, Trond and Esper. My father and mother, Arik and Elke. My friend Jense. One day I will have a family of my own.”

  “I could give you a baby,” said Zoë. “I could give you a handsome man to make love to – you could have your pick from thousands.”

  “A man, or a body? I met Raekae’s father, you know. He was not a man – more like a ghost. Is that what you offer me? Could he be a father to my baby?”

  “No,” Zoë admitted, “but we could be mothers. It would be enough. You don’t really need an entire society – just loving parents.” This odd suggestion gave Katja pause for thought; for a moment, she gave her imagination to the possibility. What a strange family that would make. Two mothers, who could take any form (and maybe Katja would live as a man – she had often wondered what that might be like), and a baby who would grow up knowing only two people. None of them could be hurt, or die, and they would have endless worlds to explore.

  But what if things soured between herself and the hermit? Zoë seemed pleasant and trustworthy; unlike Henning, there was no wildness or danger roiling beneath. But even so, they had just met.

  On the other hand, at least Raekae did not control Zoë. Henning, Franz, and Stian – those three were puppets. Raekae could make them happy or fearful at will. He could probably annihilate them with a snap of his fingers.

  And it would be the same between Zoë and Katja, if she stayed. Zoë might be a kinder master, but she held all the power. Katja would never be able to learn to create creatures and worlds the way the hermit could, even with Zoë as a willing teacher. Well, maybe she could, with years of study. But from where Katja stood, on the imaginary sand, it seemed impossible. She could not even read.

  “What did you mean it would destroy everything?” asked Katja.

  Zoë sighed. Katja let the question hang in the air. Finally, the hermit answered. “The algorithm – it can’t run within BioSim or GeoSim, or even the underlying physics simulator. It’s deeper than that. It’s root level, bottom-layer – it can only interact directly with the Crucible’s quantum core. Does that make any sense?”

  Katja shook her head.

  “Well, if I run the algorithm, it will erase and overwrite everything. All of this” – she gestured at the ocean, then back to the jungle – “will disappear. I will disappear. So will Raekae, and everything he has built, and Raekae’s father. Erased.”

  “What about Henning? And Franz and Stian?” Katja asked.

  “Gone. Extinguished.”

  “Killed?”

  “Effectively, but they wouldn’t experiencing dying.” Zoë scratched her head. “Or would they? I don’t really know. I suppose I would find out.”

  “And what about me?”

  “If the threads haven’t taken over your central nervous system, well…your brain would probably still be intact. It’s the cold I’m worried about. Erasing data on a quantum system creates a huge amount of negative entropy. There would be an extreme cooling effect, starting at the core and radiating out through the threads, probably destroying them. I don’t know if your body could survive it. You’d be in a coma; you’d be blind and deaf; you wouldn’t be able to feel anything; you wouldn’t have any motor skills. That’s what the threading system prioritizes – input and output. Your autonomic system is probably still functioning, so hopefully you’d keep breathing.”

  Katja recoiled, horrified. “It sounds worse than death.”

  “You might recover,” said Zoë. “For days, the cold would slow your physiology to a crawl. You’d be in deep freeze, essentially. Then, as the algorithm kicked in, the core would warm up. Your body might even expel the Crucible core – it doesn’t go very deep. It lodges in the lining of the esophagus, growing the threads first back toward the spine, then up and down the spinal column. If you survived the cold phase and didn’t die of exposure, then gradually your nerves might regenerate. The inactive threads would be gradually reabsorbed into your own tissues.”

  “Wherever my body is, I would lie there, helpless? Spring nights are cold – I would freeze to death. Or starve.”

  “Possibly. Though death by dehydration is much more likely. But if someone found you, and you received medical attention during the cooling period…well, like I said, you’d probably die. But with a bit of luck, there’s a chance you’d survive.”

  Katja sat on the sand. The moon had risen; it was nearly full. She wondered what moon her brothers saw. The same? Zoë had said that time passed differently here.

  “You give me a hard choice, hermit.”

  “I know,” said Zoë, sympathetically. “I wish I had more to offer. But really, the choice isn’t yours. It’s mine.”

  “Then what will you decide? Will you kill us all? What would you gain?”

  “Nothing, really. Except knowing that I’d created a univ
erse from scratch. That’s what the algorithm does. It creates a new universe. It will recreate our universe, in fact, with the starting values I use, the Planck constant and…well, it would begin much as our own universe began. I’d want to know it would be a place where matter was stable, a place where stars and planets would form, a place that could support life, and eventually consciousness. A few billion qubits isn’t really enough – it may take hundreds of years in real time just for plasma cooling to occur. And as more complex interactive networks evolve – biology, and hopefully, consciousness, thoughts and feelings – the simulation will slow down further. But subjective time, if there are any beings to perceive it, will remain the same.

  “For years I’ve wondered how to model the emergence of a new evolutionary layer. How does the molecular layer emerge from the atomic? How does the biological layer emerge from the molecular? And so on, up the Chain of Being, from biological to somatic, from somatic to social, from social to memetic, et cetera. I could tell you precisely how each layer emerges, in specific terms. The covalent bond – atoms sharing electron pairs – that enables the evolution of various molecules throughout the universe. Nucleotide sequences – RNA and DNA are the Terran forms – enable genetic evolution, the biological layer of reality. But how do you model the emergence of a new information layer – a new, higher-level network of agents – in general terms?

  “Well, you can’t. It’s a trap, to think that way. You can’t model separate layers of reality and then try to glue them together, or tell a story that connects them. NENT3 attempts to do that, but it doesn’t provide an algorithm. It’s only descriptive.

  “Everything is just one thing. From a ripple in the fabric of reality, you can initiate an unfolding that gradually generates multiple layers: space-time, from which energy-matter emerges, which eventually condenses into galaxies filled with star systems, and so forth. But you need to start at the bottom.