Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  “And if a carrot?”

  “Christ, where to start?”

  “Precisely, Ronald, where would you start?”

  “Feed the starving, provide clean water, sanitation, medicine. Shelter.”

  “All the things we could do, but lack the will in doing so.”

  Ronald stared for a long moment, and then he nodded. “Yes, I see that. I see it. Carrot or stick? We won’t know, can’t know. Not yet. Because the next move is supposed to be ours.”

  “And how well has the present power structure handled such acts of salvation?” Hamish asked. “How generous has the One Percent been in redistributing its wealth? Sam warns us of propaganda, of a counter-movement against what is happening. What is the likelihood of the power-brokers willfully sacrificing the lives of a million or two starving peasants, in order to enflame the general population against this alien intervention?”

  Flinching, Ron sat back. “Hamish, you’re a cynical man.”

  “Ronald, I have spent thirty-six years in the medical profession, a profession firmly trapped in the back pocket of Big Pharma. It is no stretch for me to imagine the worst possible scenario. People get used, my friend. Lives expended. The machine’s primary function is to feed itself. What is the present statistic? Sixty-four people now own half the world’s wealth?”

  “If the aliens are waiting for us to do right by those displaced refugees, we’re going to disappoint them. Thus, up next, another stick.”

  “Or not,” Hamish said. “Since they must have been monitoring us, they surely know how things will work out. The question is, do they care about the lives that will be lost, especially when those lives serve as a justification for global rejection of their presence?”

  “So they’ll just sit back and watch us dig an even deeper hole of culpability? That’s … cold.”

  “Not nearly as cold as our deliberate exploitation of human suffering.”

  “Don’t throw me into that crowd! How many writers will you find among those sixty-four gazillionaires?”

  Hamish shrugged again, but said nothing.

  After a long moment, Ronald said, “Got any coffee? I shouldn’t drive right now.”

  “Of course. I can also call you a cab.”

  “Great. Okay, Hamish, you’ve made your point. I’ll contact as many writing colleagues as I can. I’ll spread the word. No guarantees, but we have one thing going for us—a lot of those writers are fucking smart people. They’ve probably thought things through a lot farther and a lot better than we’ve managed here today.”

  “Good. The world needs them, and it needs them now.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Every fiction author knows that wish-fulfillment is a dangerous thing. Being the hero of your own story sounds great, but in an honest tale, hell is just around the corner.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  “You washed my clothes.”

  “Organic contamination has been removed while you slept, yes.” Sam sat up on the bed. “Sleep’s coming way too easily right now,” she said. “You must be drugging me somehow. Some kind of aerosol mist? Something in the food you’ve been providing? Come on, Adam, fess up.”

  At the far end of the room a chair and the small table that preceded the arrival of her meals had reappeared, on which waited an urn of coffee and a plain white cup and saucer and spoon, along with a sugar bowl and small pitcher of cream. And her pack of cigarettes and lighter.

  There was a slight delay before Adam replied, during which she arose, naked, and walked over to the table.

  “You are nearing an age in which your homeostatic mechanisms begin to lose their efficacy—”

  “Really?” she cut in as she sat and poured some coffee. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “I believe that to be sarcasm.”

  Sam lit a cigarette, then collected up the cup and sipped coffee as she studied the image of the Earth on the wall to her right.

  “In any case,” Adam resumed after a moment, “I have introduced to your internal system a tailored nano-suite. All major endocrine functions are now optimal, organs restored to various levels of health, and system-wide telomere maintenance and regulation is now in effect.”

  Sam slowly set the cup back down, no longer paying any attention to the blue, white, and brown world on the screen.

  “I am detecting an increase in heart-rate and concomitant rise in blood-pressure.”

  “You should have asked me first,” Sam said. She flicked ash and took a deep drag on the cigarette. Gusted out smoke. “‘Various levels of health’ you said. Which is why I’m not coughing right now, or feeling sick from the nicotine.”

  “Correct. Fortunately, volatiles, free radicals, toxic gases, and minerals are all used as fuel by the nano-suite. As are the fillings in your teeth, but this latter effect is gradual as the replacement of enamel is a slow process.”

  “Really? Well, tell that nano-suite to leave the nicotine and caffeine alone, or I won’t be a happy camper.”

  “This was anticipated, particularly since nicotine is an effective cognitive enhancer and presumably this is useful.”

  “Adam, have you dosed just me?”

  “For the moment. We have not reached that stage yet on the planet below.”

  “And will you? Reach that stage?”

  “There are stages for the Intervention Protocol, but the specifics must be considered protean. We are in the early phase of engagement at the moment. That said, your personal health was deemed essential if you are to act as facilitator between us and humans.”

  “Adam, you really call what you’re doing to us down there an ‘engagement’? Pushing us around like puppets is not engagement.”

  “Shall I reheat the coffee in your cup?”

  “No.”

  “My reply to your observation will be extensive.”

  “Finally!” She stood. “All right, then, hot it up, darling, while I get dressed. Oh, and I want some toast. Lightly buttered. Sourdough, but sliced thin—none of that two-inch-thick crap that keeps making my jaw pop.”

  “Your mandibular joints will not dislocate anymore.”

  She walked over to where her clothes were left neatly folded on a shelf that projected from the wall near her bed. “Oh, right. And this is why I just realized that I don’t need my reading glasses, isn’t it?” She began dressing.

  “Focal correction is regulated through corrective volume pressure adjustments and restored flexibility to the lenses’ associated muscles.”

  “Okay, got it. You fixed my vision, but you forgot to add the lasers and internal targeting system.”

  “Do you wish to have a cape and close-fitting multicolored costume as well, Samantha?”

  “Ah! The AI’s got a sense of humor.” Sam returned to the table and her coffee and, now, breakfast.

  Adam began. “The relationship between your species and other species on your world is also an engagement. The control and regulation of domestic livestock, poultry, and innumerous plants, all invoke a presumptive exchange, wherein your species elevates its own particular needs over that of the aforementioned species. The nature of this engagement extends to virtually all other life-forms on your world, from animals to be hunted, pests to be eradicated, weeds to be poisoned, insects to be exterminated, and bacteria to be expunged.”

  “What you’re describing all serves our daily sustenance,” Sam replied. “Basic needs and the organization required to manage and control them. There’s no getting around it.”

  “Agreed, to a point. But where is your consideration of these other life-forms, particularly in terms of their attendant suffering?”

  “Hold on,” Sam said around a mouthful of toast, “are you trying to tell me that other civilizations out there don’t possess the same basic needs of sustenance?”

  “Not at all. For most, successful expansion among naturally predatory species into space is quickly followed by a paradigm shift. This relates, of course, to an end to scarcity, since the technology requi
red for interstellar travel is concomitant with technologies involving atomic and molecular reassembly. In any case,” Adam went on before Sam could get a word in, “the alteration of the mind-set is without doubt the most profound event in sentient evolution.”

  “You said ‘some’ predatory species just then.”

  “Yes. Alas, there are other forms of predation, but that topic, while imminent, must await certain impending events. Now, to return to my question and the situation here on Earth. Where is your consideration of these other native life-forms, particularly in terms of their attendant suffering?”

  Sam sighed. “Granted,” she said, “agribusiness is lagging behind when it comes to humane care. But surely even you can see that the tide has been turning.”

  “What delays the turning of that tide, Samantha? If one cannot help but be cognizant that other life-forms do indeed suffer, why have wholesale changes not already occurred?”

  “Because efficiency is good for business.”

  “And efficiency, in this context, extends to more than just a predictable and bounteous supply of basic necessities, correct? Efficiency, in this context, also requires a cognitive shift in thinking. By reducing domestic life-forms to units for consumption, organized and valued on the basis of weight, quality, variety, and so on, the notion of suffering is sidestepped. Not simply the suffering experienced by these domesticated life-forms, but also the suffering experienced by non-domesticated life-forms as a consequence of, say, land clearance, wetland drainage, and deforestation.”

  “Well, that’s capitalism for you,” Sam said, shrugging. “Economics is the altering of language from the holistic to the specific for the purpose of applying a value system to shit we don’t really own, only pretend to. Land, water, animals, plants, each other, our labor, our interests, our likes, wants, needs …” She selected a second piece of toast and studied it for a moment. “Any human population reaches a threshold where organizing everything into categories is the only way to manage the complexities of civilization. I bet your three alien species did exactly the same.”

  “We were speaking of engagement, were we not?”

  “So you’re applying the same presumptive relationship with us as we do with cows, sheep, and pigs. Given what you’ve done to Earth, I’d say that’s pretty accurate. What disturbs me is, well, you see, we kill and eat cows, sheep, and pigs.”

  “While endeavoring to not think of their suffering.”

  “Making you no better than us.” She let the piece of toast drop back onto its delicate plate. “I am still undecided, you know. About speaking on your behalf.”

  “Yes, and clearly I have not yet provided you with enough information on the nature of our Intervention.”

  “Let’s just say that you’ve been coy, Adam, and that I’m having to work for it.”

  “There are philosophical underpinnings,” Adam said, “which lie at the core of engagement. Given that humans are capable of compassion, why has economic efficiency so easily triumphed over it? More to the point for you, perhaps, what is the spiritual effect upon a species and a civilization that has segregated its sense of compassion?”

  “Spiritual?”

  “Psychological, then.”

  “Well, I suppose, the effect is, we acquire the habit of closing off avenues of compassion, of being selective. But we don’t do it collectively; we do it individually, within a general framework defined by cultural mores and taboos.”

  “Hence the ethical objection to meat by vegetarians.”

  Sam snorted. “You know, when a vegetarian says she doesn’t eat meat because she doesn’t like the taste, I’m good with that. Taste is personal, and an inalienable right. But that whole ethical argument rubs me the wrong way. More wild species have been and are being wiped out by agriculture than hunting or the slaughter of domesticated animals ever has and ever will. So the dead animals are just once removed, and in some ways even more egregious since we don’t eat them. To then argue against cruelty is just sophistry.”

  “The inhumane practices of modern livestock agribusiness notwithstanding?”

  “Then you’re back to selective compassion,” said Sam. “Decry the slaughterhouses and factory-farms while scoffing down soybean paste that came from another massive chunk of Brazilian rainforest cut down.”

  “Agreed,” said Adam. “Shall we consider, once again, this notion of ‘engagement’?”

  “Go on.” Sam sipped more coffee. It was still hot, impossibly so. “But just so you know, you giving me that—what did you call it—nano-suite? Giving me that without asking me first is making me feel like a steer loaded up on hormones and antibiotics.”

  “Indeed, and I don’t recall any instance of a human being asking the animal’s permission.”

  “And you wonder why I’m reluctant to be your spokesperson?”

  “Not at all. Paradigm shifts may appear to arrive suddenly, overwhelmingly, while in truth they depend upon a gradual, if inexorable, transformation of basic philosophical precepts.”

  “This nano-suite, what else does it do? You mentioned telomeres. Have I stopped ageing, then?”

  “In many respects, internally and selectively, your ageing has already been reversed, as each organ is brought to a higher efficiency, which at your age has necessitated DNA repair and what we might call a resetting of the clock.”

  “You can’t make us immortal, Adam. Well, maybe you can, but don’t you dare.”

  “Yes we can, or as near as immortal as finite biological entities are capable of being. And of course, no, we won’t. That said, if indeed we proceed with a universal application of nano-suites—”

  She thumped the tabletop with her fist. “You will fuck up Earth’s biome, Adam! How can you not see that? Are you going to give it just to humans? What about all the other life-forms? Whales, bats, dogs, goldfish? Fire-ants, termites, malaria viruses? I mean, what the hell is this nano-suite? What happens when it spills out into the environment? And guaranteed, it will!”

  Adam was silent for a few moments, and then the AI said, “Then you understand the nature of humanity’s presence within a specific and defined biome, presently contained on this single planet you call Earth. We suspected as much. For example, and despite the subversive efforts of your pharmaceutical industry, all effective treatments and cures for virtually all diseases afflicting life-forms on your planet are readily available within your global biome. And this, of course, is no accident.”

  The sudden switch of subject left Sam momentarily confused, and she frowned as she said, “My husband drops hints every now and then, but even for a man in the profession of healthcare, it’s more a suspicion than a certainty. Subverted cures, huh? Well, the reasons why are obvious enough. If you can’t make an artificial version of something, you can’t patent it, and if you can’t patent it, there’s no point in spending millions on research. And when a treatment or cure is found in the natural world, most of the effort and delays by the industry relate directly to the search for a manufactured match, or at least an artificial version that will do the same thing.”

  “Such subversion is in truth of little consequence,” Adam then said. “There are greater dangers pending. If you will allow me this brief digression.”

  “Sure, go ahead. I doubt you can make my head spin any more than it’s already doing.”

  “Bear in mind, Samantha, that as with any singular, self-contained organism, there are two sources of risk. One is external. That is to say the space between planets and stars. Life on Earth was seeded from space close to four billion years ago. Cometary ice and debris are in fact rife with basic life-forms, in particular bacteria, algae, viruses, and retroviruses. This appears to be the primary source of life’s proliferation in the galaxy and likely in the entire universe. Contrary to your belief, the void is not empty, not lifeless. Your planet, therefore, is in constant battle with external infection, but a healthy biome is one that possesses a strong immune system, and the adaptive capacity to accommodate ali
en viral incursions.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “The second risk is internal; when the biome sickens itself through excess toxicity. I trust my point is obvious here, Samantha. The sicker you make your world, the greater the risk from space-borne infection.”

  “We really have been living in a bubble,” Sam said. “But there’s already plenty of evidence for alien rain, though the scientific consensus has been to ignore it.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Maybe.” She considered. “Okay, it might be like this. There’s something comforting in the notion that everything beyond our immediate atmosphere is inimical to life, hostile and deadly and, therefore, utterly empty. That belief builds us a cozy cocoon.”

  “Yes,” said Adam, “I imagine it would. Consider again the principle of the incorporation I described thirty-one hours ago, in which I in effect assimilated your planet into my extended body, subjecting it to both autonomic and directed agency on my part. Your planet has done much the same for itself, and did so billions of years ago, with the first flowering of life, and continues to do so to this day. Indeed, this is a requisite necessity for life itself.”

  Sam nodded. “Right, I’m familiar with Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, the planet as a singular life-form. But he also suggested a directed purpose to evolution of complex life, leading to a planet becoming conscious of itself, which it did—with us humans.”

  “Yes, and accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, just as with your own body’s internal regulation, the planet as a whole operates within a similar system of self-regulation.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you just leave us to come to our own realization? To figure all this out for ourselves? Sure, I get it. That cocoon. All the delusions we cherish about our implicit isolation. I mean, despite everything that might be raining down on us, our medical system still manages to keep us alive. Well, most of us, anyway.”

  “Is the Gaia Hypothesis universally understood and ascribed to, in the self-maintenance of your planet’s body and all the necessary components within it?”

  “No, obviously not.”