“Thank you, Zack.” Though Zack’s face is still in shadow, it can’t conceal his smile.
• • • •
Don has been stuck below deck for a few days. It’s dark and feels colder. An oppressive hopelessness takes hold of him as he listens to Zack walk along the deck above him. He closes his eyes, trying to imagine the bay, the sunrise, and his yacht. There are glimpses of the scene, but he can’t grasp them, like reaching for a pen under a couch that slips further away each time his fingers brush against it. He strains to raise himself but is overwhelmed by pain and despair. He thinks of his son. Their lack of food. His injury. The cold. The storm.
“Zack!” he yells, ignoring the pain in his chest.
His son scrambles down through the hatch. “What is it, Dad?”
“What time is it?”
“Six.”
“When’s dawn?”
“Seven something.”
“Help me up.”
His son objects, but Don knows with a clarity that doesn’t exist anywhere else in his mind that he needs to see the sunrise. If he can just see the sun cresting the waves, he will be able to look ahead, to know that all is not lost.
“We tried this, Dad. We need to wait for the rib to heal more. You’re in too much pain.”
“Help me up!”
“Dad, we tried this yesterday.”
“ — and the day before. I know.” Don’s voice is strained. “Now help me up.”
His son pauses, shakes his head, and puts his arm behind his father’s back. He lifts him gently, and Don grunts, tears forming in his eyes. Zack gently lowers him to the blankets.
“No! I need to get out of here.”
“It’s okay. Don’t worry. You will.” Zack squeezes Don’s shoulder. “The fish are back, Dad. The storm got them active. We’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. You just rest here.” Zack turns and heads back up the ladder.
The muted light through the square hatch does little to change the oppressive darkness. This isn’t just his present. It is his future.
“Zack!” Don cries out, desperation in his voice.
His son rushes down again. “Are you okay?”
Don doesn’t answer at first. He knows the answer. His dream is dead. There are no more sunrises. The yacht is black with ash and dirt. The ocean will never be blue again.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” He tries to hide the bitterness in his voice. He adds in a whisper, “We’ll make it.”
“I know, Dad.”
Don doesn’t know how to respond. He is the one who doesn’t think they will make it. Before he can say anything, Zack adds, “We’ll be hitting shore soon.”
Of all the things his son could say, this is the one that Don least expects. “Wait —” Don gathers his thoughts, preparing to object or, at least, understand. Where did this thought come from? But before Don can speak, Zack interrupts him.
“The storm, Dad. It nearly sank us. I was on the manual bilge for six hours. Had to plug a seacock. We nearly lost her. But —” Zack pauses. His words are spoken not with fear, but with a calm confidence. “ — the winds, they cleared the clouds — it’s no longer raining ash. And the sea . . . the fish are back.”
“That’s good, Son, but —”
“No, Dad. This is important.” Zack looks up, an intensity in his eyes. He isn’t listening to Don. He is no longer the boy more interested in playing his VR game than escaping the asteroid. His words come out in a rush. “I want to help rebuild. I want to help others get back on their feet. I don’t care where. I really don’t care how. I just want to help make things normal again.” Zack takes a breath and sighs. “Is that crazy?”
Don takes a breath, even as pain pierces his side. He knows the right words. He has practiced them countless times before, and yet never had the opportunity to use them. “You’re right, Son. It is important.” Don turns his head away from his son, and says, his voice steady, “That’s a good dream. Don’t let go of it.”
• • • •
Zack tells Don that he is charting a course for São Luis. Don still can’t move much. He’s worried that he may have hurt his back or that he has internal injuries. He keeps his concerns to himself as Zack outlines various rebuilding plans. He listens intently, adding commentary every once in a while, but this is Zack’s dream, and Don knows the importance of staying out of the way.
The next morning Zack asks, “Dad, do you think you can make it up on deck?”
Don’s breath catches in his chest, the question a sudden light shone on a dark truth — Don feels better but is afraid to face another dead sunrise. He is living through his son’s dream. His is dead. “Still too much pain.” Zack nods and heads topside.
After three days, Zack stops asking.
• • • •
Don loses track of time. It is days later, but he isn’t sure how many. Zack climbs down and sits next to his father. “I know something is wrong, Dad.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Don tries to sound nonchalant.
“Then why won’t you come up to the deck?”
“There’s just no reason for me to be up there.”
“I think there is.”
“There isn’t. I told you. It’s okay. I’m just healing. There’s nothing wrong.”
“Dad.” Zack’s gaze is piercing as he looks at Don. “There’s a reason for you to be up there.” Don prepares another objection, but Zack stands up and reaches for Don’s arm, adding, “Sunrise is in ten minutes.”
He grabs his father’s arm. Don hesitates, but realizes that it’s pointless to resist. This new look in his son, he once understood it. It is forceful. Hopeful. His son has found his dream. That Don’s is gone doesn’t matter. He needs to support his son even if it pains him. Isn’t that what a good father would do?
Zack puts his arm around him, lifts him up, and helps Don up the steps. When did he get so big, Don thinks.
“We’re facing West,” Zack says, “so just sit at the stern and watch. You can make it.”
Don focuses on his feet and doesn’t look up as he walks slowly to the helm seat at the stern of the boat. There isn’t much pain, but Don knew there wouldn’t be — it wasn’t the pain that kept him inside. Zack helps him sit, and is quiet as Don closes his eyes and takes a few breaths. I’m doing this for Zack, he thinks.
• • • •
Don opens his eyes and grips the side of the boat to steady himself.
The sky is black, and there are pinpoints of white. Some of them sparkle. He looks left and right. There are no gray clouds of dust. Don looks at his son. “Where are we?”
“The North Equatorial Current runs South now, Dad. It’s already taken us around the Eastern tip of South America. Didn’t you notice it getting warmer?” Zack is smiling broadly.
Don answers, “No,” but doesn’t think of what he is saying; he is lost in the brightening sky in the distance. The water sparkles as a yellow glow peeks above the horizon. His heart beats faster.
Zack grabs his dad’s arm. “Oh, before it’s too late. Look up there!” Zack is pointing high in the sky. Don looks up at a bright group of stars. “It’s the Southern Cross!”
A sob escapes as Don gazes upon the constellation above him. He turns to the sun rising in the distance. The ocean is a deep blue, not black or ashen gray.
Don glances at Zack. His son is beaming; his dream of rebuilding has already begun.
• • • •
Don is on the beach, sitting in a weatherbeaten chair, the wood warped and the paint flecking away. Still, it is comfortable and solid. It’s a good chair. The Southern Cross is docked off the pier, the sun glinting off the glass windows of the cabin. It needs a new paint job, but Zack did an admirable job making it presentable. Zack. He is at the edge of the surf with Inez, the two of them sharing a single set of earbuds and dancing to some song that Don can’t hear. He doubts it’s jazz.
But that’s okay. This isn’t his dream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in Lightspeed and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in Fireside Magazine, Escape Pod, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.
THE GODS HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN
Ken Liu
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another.”
— G.E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” 1939.
Cloud-born, cloud-borne, she was a mystery.
• • • •
Maddie first met her sister through a chat window, after her father, one of the uploaded consciousnesses in a new age of gods, died.
So that was how Maddie came to call her sister “Mist”: the pylon of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate, hidden behind San Francisco’s famous fog.
Maddie kept the existence of Mist a secret from her mother.
After all the wars initiated by the uploaded consciousnesses — some of which were still smoldering — the reconstruction process was slow and full of uncertainty. Hundreds of millions had died on other continents, and though America had been spared the worst of it, the country was still in chaos as infrastructure collapsed and refugees poured into the big cities. Her mother, who now acted as an advisor to the city government of Boston, worked long hours and was exhausted all the time.
First, she needed to confirm that Mist was telling the truth, so Maddie asked her to reveal herself.
For digital entities like Maddie’s father, there was a ground truth, a human-readable representation of the instructions and data adapted for the different processors of the interconnected global network. Maddie’s father had taught her to read it after he had reconnected with her following his death and resurrection. It looked like code written in some high-level programming language, replete with convoluted loops and cascading conditionals, elaborate lambda expressions and recursive definitions consisting of strings of mathematical symbols.
Maddie would have called such a thing “source code,” except she had learned from her father that that notion was inaccurate: He and the other gods had never been compiled from source code into executable code, but were developed by AI techniques that replicated the workings of neural networks directly in machine language. The human-readable representation was more like a map of the reality of this new mode of existence.
Without hesitation, Mist revealed her map to Maddie when asked. Not all of herself, explained Mist. She was a distributed being, vast and constantly self-modifying. To show all of herself in map code would take up so much space and require so much time for Maddie to read that they might as well wait for the end of the universe. Instead, Mist showed her some highlights:
< > Here’s a section I inherited from our father.
((lambda (n1) ((lambda (n2 . . .
As Maddie scrolled through the listing, she traced the complex logical paths, followed the patterns of multiple closures and thrown continuations, discovered the contours of a way of thinking that was at once familiar and strange. It was like looking at a map of her own mind, but one where the landmarks were strange and the roads probed into terra incognita.
There were echoes of her father in the code — she could see that: a quirky way of associating words with images; a tendency to see patterns that defied the strictly rational; a deep, abiding trust for a specific woman and a specific teenager out of the billions who lived on this planet.
Maddie was reminded of how Mom had told her that there were things about her as a baby that defied theories of upbringing, that told her and Dad that Maddie was their child in a way that transcended rational knowledge: the way her smile reminded Mom of Dad even at six weeks; the way she hated noodles the first time she tried them, just like Mom; the way she calmed down as soon as Dad held her, even though he had been too busy with Logorhythms’s IPO to spend much time with her during the first six months of her life.
But there were also segments of Mist that puzzled her: the way she seemed to possess so many heuristics for trends in the stock market; the way her thoughts seemed attuned to the subtleties of patents; the way the shapes of her decision algorithms seemed adapted for the methods of warfare. Some of the map code reminded Maddie of the code of other gods Dad had shown her; some was entirely novel.
Maddie had a million questions for Mist. How had she come to be? Was she like Athena, sprung fully-formed from her father’s mind? Or was she something like the next generation of an evolutionary algorithm, inheriting bits from her father and other uploaded consciousnesses with variations? Who was her other parent — or maybe parents? What stories of love, of yearning, of loneliness and connection, lay behind her existence? What was it like being a creature of pure computation, of never having existed in the flesh?
But of one thing Maddie was certain: Mist was her father’s daughter, just as she had claimed. She was her sister, even if she was barely human.
• • • •
<>
Like her father, Mist had a habit of shifting into emoji whenever she found words inadequate. What Maddie got out of her response was that life in the cloud was simply beyond her understanding and Mist did not have the words to adequately convey it.
So Maddie tried to bridge the gap the other way, to tell Mist about her own life.
<>
<> I know lots about tomatoes: lycopene, Cortéz, nightshade, Mesoamerica, ketchup, pomodoro, Nix v. Hedden, vegetable, soup. Probably more than you.
<> You seem really quiet.
Other attempts by Maddie to share the details of her own life usually ended the same way. She mentioned the way Basil wagged his tail and licked her fingers when she came in the door, and Mist responded with articles about the genetics of dogs. Maddie started to talk about the anxieties she experienced at school and the competing cliques, and Mist showed her pages of game theory and papers on adolescent psychology.
Maddie could understand it, to some extent. After all, Mist had never lived in the world that Maddie inhabited, and never would. All Mist had was data about the world, not the world itself. How could Mist understand how Maddie felt? Words or emoji were inadequate to convey the essence of reality.
Life is about embodiment, thought Maddie. This was a point that she had discussed with Dad many times. To experience the world through the senses was different from simply having data about the world. The memory of his time in the world was what had kept her father sane after he had been turned into a brain in a jar.
And in this way, oddly, Maddie came to have a glint of the difficulty Mist faced in explaining her world to Maddie. She tried to imagine what it was like to have never petted a puppy, to have never experienced
a tomato filled with June sunshine burst between the tongue and the palate, to have never felt the weight of gravity or the elation of being loved, and imagination failed her. She felt sorry for Mist, a ghost who could not even call upon the memory of an embodied existence.
• • • •
There was one topic on which Maddie and Mist could converse effectively: the shared mission their father had left them to make sure the gods didn’t come back.
All of the uploaded consciousnesses — whose existence was still never acknowledged — were supposed to have died in the conflagration. But pieces of their code, like the remnants of fallen giants, were scattered around the world’s servers. Mist told Maddie that mysterious network presences scoured the web to collect these pieces. Were they hackers? Spies? Corporate researchers? Defense contractors? What purpose could they have for gathering these relics unless they were interested in resurrecting the gods?
Along with these troubling reports, Mist also brought back headlines that she thought Maddie would find interesting.
<> Today’s Headlines:
Japanese PM Assures Nervous Citizens That New Robots Deployed for Reconstruction Are Safe
European Union Announces Border Closures; Extra-European Economic Migrants Not Welcome
Bill to Restrict Immigration to “Extraordinary Circumstances” Passes Senate; Majority of Working Visas to Be Revoked
Protestors Demanding Jobs Clash with Police in New York and Washington, D.C.
Developing Nations Press UN Security Council for Resolution Denouncing Efforts to Restrict Population Migration by Developed Economies.
Collapse of Leading Asian Economies Predicted as Manufacturing Sector Continues Contraction Due to Back-Shoring by Europe and the US
Everlasting Inc. Refuses to Explain Purpose of New Data Center
The End Has Come Page 31