Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  He sighed. “Yes, I was.”

  “What was it like? What’s space like? We’re going to be a starship pilot.”

  Leto looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “You want to know the story.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I haven’t told anybody the whole story.” He paused. “Do you think it’s just a bit too convenient that they put me out here in the middle of nowhere, and yet nearby is one of their starship pilot clusters?”

  “I assume you’re a test for us.” We had come to assume everything was a test.

  “Precocious of you. Okay, here’s my story: Malcolm Leto, the last, or first, of his kind.”

  You can’t imagine what the Community was like. You can’t even comprehend the numbers involved. Six billion people in communion. Six billion people as one.

  It was the greatest synthesis humankind has ever created: a synergistic human-machine intelligence. I was a part of it, for a while, and then it was gone, and I’m still here. The Community removed itself from this reality, disappeared, and left me behind.

  I was a biochip designer. I grew the molecular processors that we used to link with the Community. Like this one. It’s grafted onto the base of your skull, connects to your four lobes and cerebellum.

  We were working on greater throughput. The basics were already well established; we—that is myself, Gillian, and Henry—were trying to devise a better transport layer between the electrochemical pulses of the brain and the chips. That was the real bottleneck: the brain’s hardware is slow.

  We were assigned lines of investigation, but so were a hundred thousand other scientists. I’d go to sleep, and during the night, someone would close out a whole area of research. The Community was the ultimate scientific compilation of information. Sometimes we made the cutting-edge discovery, the one that changed the direction for a thousand people. Usually we just plodded along, uploaded our results, and waited for a new direction.

  The research advanced at a pace we as individuals could barely fathom, until we submerged ourselves in the Community. Then, the whole plan was obvious. I can’t quite grasp it now, but it’s there in my mind like a diamond of thought.

  It wasn’t just in my area of technology, but everywhere. It took the human race a century to go from horses to space elevators. It took us six months to go from uncertainty cubes to Heisenberg AND gates, and from there twenty days to quantum processors and Nth-order qubits.

  You’re right. It does seem like a car out of control, barrelling down a hill. But really, it was the orderly advancement of science and technology, all controlled, all directed by the Community.

  We spent as much time as we could in the Community, when we worked, played, and even slept. Some people even made love while connected. The ultimate exhibitionism. You couldn’t spend all your time connected, of course. Everyone needed downtime. But being away from the Community was like being half yourself.

  That’s what it was like.

  Together, in the Mesh, we could see the vision, we could see the goal, all the humans of Earth united in mind, pushing, pushing, pushing to the ultimate goal: Exodus.

  At least I think that was the goal. It’s hard to remember. But they’re all gone now, right? I’m all that’s left. So they must have done it.

  Only I wasn’t with them when it happened.

  I don’t blame Henry. I would have done the same thing if my best friend were screwing my wife.

  Gillian, on the other hand.

  She said she and I were soul mates, and yet when I came out of the freezer twenty-six years later, she was as gone as the rest of them.

  You’d think in the Community things like marriage would be obsolete. You’d think that to a group mind, group sex would be the way to go. It’s odd what people kept separated from the Community.

  Anyway, Henry spent a week in wedge 214 with another group of researchers, and while he was gone, Gillian and I sorta’ communed on our own. I’d known Gillian almost as long as I’d known Henry. We were first-wave emigrants to the Ring and had been friends back in Ann Arbor when we were in school. We’d met Gillian and her friend Robin in the cafeteria. He liked them tall, so he took Gillian. Robin’s and my relationship lasted long enough for her to brush her teeth the next morning. Gillian and Henry were married.

  She was a beautiful woman. Auburn hair like yours. Nice figure. Knew how to tell a joke. Knew how to … Well, we won’t go there.

  I know, best man screwing the bride. You’ve heard that pitiful tale before. Well, maybe you clusters haven’t. Trust me. It’s pitiful.

  I’m sure it didn’t take Henry long to find out. The Community sees all.

  But he took a long time plotting his revenge. And when he did—bam!—that was the end for me.

  We were working on some new interfaces for the occipital lobe, to enhance visualization during communing, some really amazing things. Henry ran the tests and found out our stuff was safe, so I elected to test it.

  It’s funny. I remember volunteering to try it out. But I don’t remember what Henry said before that, how he manipulated me into trying it. Because that’s what he did, all right.

  The enhancements were not compatible with my interface. When I inserted them, the neural pathways in the cerebral cortex fused. The interface flash froze. I was a vegetable.

  The Community placed my body into suspended animation while it rebuilt my brain. All things were possible for the Community. Only some things take a while, like rebuilding a brain. Six months later, the Exodus occurred, and still the machinery of the Ring worked on my brain. For twenty-six years, slowly with no human guidance, it worked on my brain, until three months ago. It revived me, the one human left over from the Exodus.

  Sometimes I still dream that I’m a part of it. That the Community is still there for me to touch. At first those were nightmares, but now they’re just dreams. The quantum computers are still up there, empty, waiting. Maybe they’re dreaming of the Community, as well.

  It’ll be easier this time. The technology is so much farther along than it was before. The second Exodus is just a few months away. I just need a billion people to fuel it.

  On my hobby night, instead of painting, we spent the evening on the Net.

  Malcolm Leto had come down the Macapá space elevator two months before, much to the surprise of the Overgovernment body in Brazil. The Ring continued to beam microwave power to all the receivers, but no one resided on the Ring or used the space elevators that lined the equator. No one could, not without an interface.

  The news of Leto’s arrival had not made it to North America, but the archives had interviews with the man that echoed his sentiment regarding the Community and his missing out on the Exodus. There wasn’t much about him for a couple of weeks until he filed suit with the Brazilian court for ownership of the Ring, on the basis of his being the last member of the Community.

  The Overgovernment had never tried to populate the Ring. There was no need to try to overcome the interface access at the elevators. The population of the Earth was just under half a billion. The Gene Wars killed most of the people who hadn’t left with the Exodus. It’d taken the Overgovernment almost three decades to build the starships, to string its own nanowire-guided elevators to low Eearth orbit, to build the fleet of tugs that plied between LEO and the Lagrange points.

  No one used the quantum computers anymore. No one had an interface or could even build one. The human race was no longer interested in that direction. We were focused on the stars and on ourselves. All of us, that is, except for those in the enclaves that existed outside of, yet beneath, the Overgovernment.

  The resolution to Leto’s case was not published. It had been on the South American court docket a week ago, and then been bumped up to the Overgovernment Court.

  He’s trying to build another Community.

  He’s trying to steal the Ring.

  Is it even ours?

  He’s lonely.

  We need Moira.

  He
wants us to help him. That’s why he told us the story.

  He didn’t tell us. He told Meda.

  He likes Meda.

  “Stop it!” I made fists so that I couldn’t receive any more of their thoughts. They looked at me, perplexed, wondering why I was fighting consensus.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at me. I was looking at them. It was like a knife between us. I ran upstairs.

  “Meda! What’s wrong?”

  I threw myself onto the floor of Moira’s room.

  “Why are they so jealous?”

  “Who, Meda? Who?”

  “Them! The rest of us.”

  “Oh. The singleton.”

  I looked at her, hoping she understood. But how could she without sharing my thoughts?

  “I’ve been reading your research. Meda, he’s a potential psychotic. He’s suffered a great loss and awoke in a world nothing like he remembers.”

  “He wants to rebuild it.”

  “That’s part of his psychosis.”

  “The Community accomplished things. It made advancements that we don’t understand even decades later. How can that be wrong?”

  “The common view is that the Exodus was a natural evolution of humankind. What if it wasn’t natural? What if the Exodus was death? We didn’t miss the Exodus; we escaped it. We survived the Community just like Leto did. Do we want to suffer the same fate?”

  “Now who’s talking psychosis?”

  “The Overgovernment will never allow him back on the Ring.”

  “He’s alone forever, then,” I said.

  “He can go to one of the singleton enclaves. All the people there live alone.”

  “He woke up one morning, and his self was gone.”

  “Meda!” Moira sat up in bed, her face gray. “Hold my hand!” As she held out her hand, I could smell the pheromones of her thoughts whispering toward me.

  Instead of melding with her, I left the room, left the house, out the door into the wet night.

  A light was on in the cottage. I stood for a long time, wondering what I was doing. We spend time alone, but never in situations like this. Never outside, where we can’t reach each other in an instant. I was miles away from the rest of me. Yet Malcolm Leto was farther than that.

  It felt like half the things I knew were on the tip of my tongue. It felt like all my thoughts were garbled. But everything I felt and thought was my own. There was no consensus.

  Just like Malcolm had no consensus. For singletons, all decisions were unanimous.

  It was with thought that I knocked on the door.

  He stood in the doorway, wearing just short pants. I felt a thrill course through me, one that I would have hidden from my pod if they were near.

  “Where’s the rest of your cluster?”

  “At home.”

  “Best place for ’em.” He turned, leaving the door wide open. “Come on in.”

  There was small metal box on his table. He sat down in front of it. I noticed for the first time the small, silver-edged circle at the base of his skull, just below his hairline. He slipped a wire from the box into the circle.

  “That’s an interface box. They’re illegal.” When the Exodus occurred, much of the interface technology that was the media for the Communion was banned.

  “Yeah. But not illegal anymore. The OG repealed those laws a decade ago, but no one noticed. My lawyer pried it loose from them and sent it up.” He pulled the wire from his head and tossed it across the box. “Useless now.”

  “Can’t you access the Ring?”

  “Yes, but it’s like swimming in the ocean alone.” He looked at me sidelong. “I can give you one, you know. I can build you an interface.”

  I recoiled. “No!” I said quickly. “I …”

  He smiled, perhaps the first time I’d seen him do it. It changed his face. “I understand. Would you like something to drink? I’ve got a few fix’ns. Sit anyway.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just …” I realized that for a pod’s voice, I wasn’t articulating my thoughts very well. I looked him in the eye. “I came to talk with you, alone.”

  “I appreciate the gesture. I know being alone is uncomfortable for you.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew so much about us.”

  “Multiples were being designed when I was around. I kept up on the subject,” he said. “It wasn’t very successful. I remember articles on failures that were mentally deficient or unbalanced.”

  “That was a long time ago! Mother Redd was from that time, and she’s a great doctor. And I’m fine—”

  He held up a hand. “Hold on! There were lotsa incidents with interface technology before … Well, I wouldn’t be here if it were totally safe.”

  His loneliness was a sheer cliff of rock. “Why are you here, instead of at one of the singleton enclaves?”

  He shrugged. “There or in the middle of nowhere, it would be the same.” He half smiled. “Last of a vanished breed, I am. So you’re gonna be a starship captain, you and your mingle-minded friends.”

  “I am… . We are,” I replied.

  “Good luck, then. Maybe you’ll find the Community,” he said. He looked tired.

  “Is that what happened? They left for outer space?”

  He looked puzzled. “No, maybe. I can almost … remember.” He smiled. “It’s like being drunk and knowing you should be sober and not being able to do anything about it.”

  “I understand,” I said. I took his hand. It was dry and smooth.

  He squeezed once and then stood up, leaving me confused. I was sluggish on the inside, but at the same time hyperaware of him. We knew what sex was. We’d studied it, of course. But we had no experience. I had no idea what Malcolm was thinking. If he were a multiple, part of a pod, I would.

  “I should go,” I said, standing.

  I was hoping he’d say something by the time I got to the door, but he didn’t. I felt my cheeks burn. I was a silly little girl. By myself I’d done nothing but embarrass my pod, myself.

  I pulled the door shut and ran into the woods.

  “Meda!”

  He stood black in yellow light at the cottage door.

  “I’m sorry for being so caught up in my own troubles. I’ve been a bad host. Why don’t you—?” I reached him in three steps and kissed him on the mouth. Just barely I tasted his thoughts, his arousal.

  “Why don’t I what?” I said after a moment.

  “Come back inside.”

  I—they—were there to meet me the next morning as I walked back to the farm. I knew they would be. A part of me wanted to spend the rest of the day with my new lover, but another wanted nothing more than to confront myself, rub my nose in the scent that clung to me, and show me… . I didn’t know what I wanted to prove. Perhaps that I didn’t need to be a composite to be happy. I didn’t need them, us, to be a whole person.

  “You remember Veronica Proust,” Moira said, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, the rest of us behind her. Of course she would take the point when I was gone. Of course she would quote precedent.

  “I remember,” I said, staying outside, beyond the pull of the pheromones. I could smell the anger, the fear. I had scared myself. Good, I thought.

  “She was going to be a starship captain,” Moira said. We remembered Proust; she’d been two years ahead of us. Usually pods sundered in the crèche, with time to reform, but Veronica had broken into a pair and a quad. The pair had bonded, and the quad had transferred to engineering school, then dropped out.

  “Not anymore,” I said. I pushed past them into the kitchen, and as I did so, I balled up the memory of fucking Malcolm and threw it at them like a rock.

  They recoiled. I walked upstairs to our room and began packing my things. They didn’t bother coming upstairs, and that made me angrier. I threw my clothes into a bag, swept the bricabrac on the dresser aside. Something glinted in the pile, a geode that Strom had found one summer when we flew to the desert. He’d cut it in half and polished it by hand. />
  I picked it up, felt its smooth surface, bordering the jagged crystals of the center. Instead of packing it, I put it back on the dresser and zipped up my bag.

  “Heading out?”

  Mother Redd stood at the door, her face neutral.

  “Did you call Dr. Khalid?” He was our physician, our psychologist, perhaps our father.

  She shrugged. “And tell him what? You can’t force a pod to stay together.”

  “I’m not breaking us up!” I said. Didn’t she understand? I was a person, by myself. I didn’t need to be part of a thing.

  “You’re just going to go somewhere else by yourself. Yes, I understand.” Her sarcasm cut me, but she was gone before I could reply.

  I rushed downstairs and out the front door so that I wouldn’t have to face the rest of me. I didn’t want them to taste my guilt. I ran the distance to Malcolm’s cottage. He was working in his garden and took me in his arms.

  “Meda, Meda. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I whispered.

  “Why did you go back there? We could have sent for your things.”

  I said, “I want an interface.”

  It was a simple procedure. He had the nanodermic and placed it on the back of my neck. My neck felt cold there, and the coldness spread to the base of my skull and down my spine. There was a prick, and I felt my skin begin to crawl.

  “I’m going to put you under for an hour,” Malcolm said. “It’s best.”

  “Okay,” I said, already half asleep.

  I dreamed that spiders were crawling down my optic nerve into my brain, that earwigs were sniffing around my lobes, that leeches were attached to all my fingers. But as they passed up my arms, into my brain, a door opened like the sun dawning, and I was somewhere else, somewhen else, and it all made sense with dreamlike logic. I understood why I was there, where the Community was, why they had left.

  “Hello, Meda,” Malcolm said.

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “Not anymore,” his voice said. It seemed to be coming from a bright point in front of me. “I’ve hooked you up to the interface box. Everything went fine.”

  My voice answered without my willing it to. “I was worried that my genetic mods would cause a problem.” I felt I was still in my dream. I didn’t want to say those things. “I didn’t mean to say that. I think I’m still dreaming.” I tried to stop speaking. “I can’t stop speaking.”