I was bluffing, since I’d never actually opened that proxy. While bluffing wasn’t the most Amish of traits, I needed to know if Stryder was telling the truth.
Unfortunately, his proxy didn’t waver. “That’s perfect,” he said. “Let’s dispense with this charade. Download my data and use that little socket of yours. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”
My socket almost screamed at the chance to access Stryder’s information. Unfortunately, while my gut told me Stryder was also bluffing, unless I went against my community’s rules, I couldn’t be certain. I glanced at Ms. Watkins, who refused to meet my eye.
“Can you provide the data in a printed format?” I asked.
“It would comprise a hundred million of your printed pages.”
My heart sank.
“That’s what I thought,” Captain Stryder said with a sneer. “I knew you would act this way. Distrustful. Outwardly humble yet inwardly proud. Wanting to explore the world beyond your precious Amish, yet afraid of all we ‘English’ can do. Is that why you returned to your people? Out of fear?”
Not for the first time, I felt violated as a stranger accessed the memories which I’d long ago copied and uploaded. Instead of responding, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the memories Stryder had access to had been sold years ago. They weren’t the man I was today.
To my surprise, though, his words woke Emma from her socket-induced stupor. “Stop tormenting him. Provide the child with any analysis he needs. He wins, we win. We get to save these backward idiots and go home.”
Captain Stryder thought about this and nodded. “Yes, this is a waste of my time. Do you have any old-grade computers in your settlement?”
“Yes, in the school house.” Our order allowed a few higher tech machines for community use, in this case for accessing New Lancaster’s weather and emergency net. While the school computer was more advanced than anything else in our community, it was still a millennium behind anything the English used.
“Perfect. Emma can download the data and enter it into your computer. Run a simulation. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”
For a moment, my socket tingled as Captain Stryder and Ms. Watkins and Emma engaged in a ultra-fast and obviously high spirited argument. The communication ended with Emma apparently satisfied.
“What’s the catch?” I asked. The English never did anything without payment in return.
“They said I can spend some time with the Amish,” Emma said. “My research on you silly people is out of date.”
I sighed but, seeing no alternative, agreed. For the briefest of moments Emma’s eyes shivered as her socket downloaded the massive data on the comet, causing my own socket to ache for the power and ability it had once possessed. I muttered a silent prayer for God to deliver me from this temptation.
Instead of God answering, Emma blew me a kiss with her red, red lips.
*
Emma rode back to the farm with me. As the buggy creaked along the dirt road, she sat with her eyes glazed over as she dived her socket without even bothering to generate a cover personality to interact with me. I had insisted that Emma dress modestly, so she’d had the ship create a typical Amish outfit, in this case a full-length gray dress with long sleeves and a cape and apron. On her head she wore a black prayer covering, signifying, just like my lack of a beard, that she was not married. While Emma dressing as one of us annoyed me, I figured it was better than her running around naked.
We arrived home well after dark. After unhitching my horse, I turned on the faucet and found that the pipes were still blocked. After giving my horse some of our reserve water, I explained the situation with Emma to my parents and showed her to the guest bedroom. I then woke Sol and asked him about the pipes.
“I unblocked them,” Sol mumbled, half asleep. “Thickens had gotten inside. But I cleaned them out and patched the pipe.”
I told Sol to go back to sleep. I’d take care of the water problem in the morning.
At first light, I watered the animals with the remainder of our reserves, then hitched up the horse and loaded the buggy with all the tools I might need. The distant water collectors in the foothills glittered with moisture in the rising light. Obviously the nightly mists had arrived, so the pipe must still be blocked. While running the simulation on the computer was important, more important was getting water for the animals and crops. In New Lancaster’s dry air, they could die from dehydration well before the comet impact.
Once the horse and buggy were ready, I walked back in the house. To my horror, Emma sat in the kitchen talking with my mother. I panicked—afraid Emma would insult my mother, or worse, reveal what I’d done among the English. To my surprise, though, my mother appeared to enjoy talking with her.
“Is everything okay?” I asked warily as Emma handed me a plate of bacon, eggs, and oatmeal, which she’d evidently cooked by herself.
“Everything’s perfect,” my mother said. “Emma’s a delightful young lady.”
I glanced at Emma, who was again dressed like one of us. I wondered if my mother remembered Emma parading half-naked through our house only two days ago. Emma’s eyes flickered for a moment, and I realized she’d used yet another personality proxy to modify her behavior.
Not wanting to leave Emma alone with my parents, I told her we were riding up to the foothills to fix the water pipes.
“What about the computer sim?” she asked.
“We’ll do it when we get back.”
Emma shrugged and followed me out of the house, much to my relief.
The ride up was uneventful. Emma sat silently beside me, lost in whatever socket-derived world she wished to create. My own socket tingled to her presence and, as the buggy rolled slowly through the empty kilometers, I wished I could patch in with her. All I’d have to do was create a new personality to drive the buggy. I could then expand my mind into the endless connections and worlds used by all the English on New Lancaster.
As if knowing my thoughts, Emma turned to look at me. She seemed pleasant, and I assumed this proxy was the one she’d used with my mother.
“Why were you so anxious to get me out of the house?” she asked.
I started to yell at her—another habit I’d learned among the English—but the look in her eyes said she truly didn’t know. Proxies could compartmentalize knowledge and memories, so a person with a particular proxy literally wouldn’t know what they’d done only moments before with a different one.
“To be honest, I’m afraid you’ll tell my parents what I did among the English.”
She stared at me with uncertainty until her socket supplied the missing information. “You sold yourself,” she said.
I nodded. The problem all Amish face if they leave the faith is that, according to the current standards of humanity, we aren’t truly human. We lack sockets. When humans can create new personalities and emotions at the drop of a pin and have nanoforges to satisfy every whim and desire, what are the Amish, who’ve changed only a little across thousands of years?
As all Amish youth discover during rumspringa, an eighth-grade education can’t compete with enhanced humans who can download libraries of information. While charity ensured that none of us starved—after all, what were a few crumbs to nanoforges—there was little hope for advancement in a society where only access to a socket ensured one’s success.
Enter the devil’s bargain. Any Amish kid could earn their own socket in exchange for the one thing we had which others wanted: Our lives. In an age where nothing about humanity was stable, where any person might possess a thousand distinct personalities, what the Amish owned were our experiences. Our beliefs. Our years of hard, physical work. Our secure love from growing up in a deep, nourishing community.
Most Amish youth refused to sell their lives and returned to their family farms. Not me. I not only uploaded my memories, I allowed others to experiment on me. The English exposed me to endless personality proxies and shared in my reaction. I became a woman
, a baby, a genius, a warrior, an idiot, a bird, a whale, and more. For a bit of money, anyone could see through my naïve eyes as I reacted to each startling mental change.
After four years of this, though, I began to yearn for what I’d given up. Ironically, this nostalgia made me even more popular. Those who had everything had no way of missing anything. I tried to upload an explanation about the emptiness I saw all around me, how even if one connected into a million different lives these proxies were nothing but a distraction from life. However, no one understood. So I collected the scattered pieces and memories of my original life, stitched them together into a new/old personality, burned them back into my brain, and returned home to beg my God and community for forgiveness.
I didn’t explain any of this to Emma. With her socket, she downloaded all the stored information about me and understood in an instant. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me, I understand.”
Before I could ask her how she understood, my socket buzzed. I started to tell Emma no, but as I stared into her face I felt her utter sincerity. Asking God to forgive me, I opened my socket for the briefest of moments.
Emma’s life flooded into me. I saw her as a child more than six centuries ago, growing up in Lancaster County on Earth. She too was Amish, and she too yearned to see the universe beyond her one patch of ground. Like me, she sold her memories and life, but unlike me she never returned, instead living and aging across the years until she immigrated to New Lancaster as an Amish expert for the government.
But even as I learned this, I also saw her anger and regret. She hated her life, hated the emptiness of a society of self-centered people who could create anything they wished for. Emma only wished for one thing and that was the one thing she couldn’t have—to return to her family and community. Like me, she had created the proxy she now wore from the memories of her childhood and had embedded it into her brain by rewiring her very neurons. She used this hardwired proxy as an escape from her socket-driven life, or, occasionally, to interact with the planet’s Amish. The rest of Emma’s memories and personalities lived in her socket, connected forever and irrevocably to the very life they abhorred.
I closed my socket and said another prayer as I urged the horse up the gently sloping foothills. All the anger and hate Emma’s proxies felt showed me how I might have turned out if I hadn’t returned to the faith. I thanked Emma for sharing this, but instantly saw that the hardwired Emma was gone, replaced by a new proxy who sneered and called me a weak, backward idiot. I ignored her words and urged the horse to go even faster.
*
By the time we reached the water collection system, Emma was in rare form. She was so angry about her hardwired proxy giving me such a personal download that, as I unpacked my tools, she grabbed a knife and ran to the giant mesh nets which covered acre after acre of these hills.
“Screw Amish nonviolence,” she said, dangling the knife under a section of mesh. “What’ll you do if I cut this?”
“Repair it,” I said. Emma smirked and sliced a long gap in the mesh. I shook my head and walked over to take the knife, but she wanted to fight for it. Refusing to do that, I simply ignored her. After cutting a few more nets, she hacked in anger at the yellow thickens growing beneath the nets then jammed the knife in the ground.
“That’s why Stryder and Watkins will win,” she said. “You won’t fight them.”
“One can still win without fighting.”
Emma snickered, then zoned out as she retreated into the hedonistic paradise of her socket. While she zoned, I ran a rooter into the blocked section of pipe and pulled out a clump of thickens. While thickens grew all along these hills, I had never known them to clog the pipes. After estimating the distance to the clog, I grabbed my shovel and dug up the buried section of the nanoforge created pipe, which we’d been given in exchange for a crop of hand-grown tobacco. The pipe had cracked and thickens had grown inside, attracted by the abundant water source. It took me two hours to clear them out, an amazing fact since I could see where Sol had cleaned out and patched this very pipe the day before. Obviously thickens grew explosively fast when exposed to large amounts of water.
Once the pipe was clear, I reached for my patch kit before realizing that was exactly what Sol had done the day before. Knowing I didn’t have the time to keep returning to the foothills, I opened my socket and activated the pipe’s gollum. Instantly the pipe sealed shut.
Emma emerged from her socket trance to tease me. “You’re addicted,” she said, “so don’t you dare look down on me.” She then disappeared back into her socket.
I didn’t say a word as I drove us back to the farm.
*
Over dinner that night, Emma and I explained what we’d learned. After returning from the foothills, we’d had time for Emma to download the comet’s data into the school house computer, where I’d run a number of simulations. Each one suggested Captain Stryder and Ms. Watkins were telling the truth.
“So there’s no ulterior motive for wanting us to leave?” my father asked.
“I couldn’t tell,” I said. “But the information on why the comet is impacting nearby appears to be correct.”
My father nodded. He ate another bite of chicken and looked out the window at the comet, which shone brightly across the darkening sky. “When the congregation comes over tomorrow for worship services, I’ll tell everyone about this and suggest we evacuate until after the impact.”
Before I could agree with my father, Emma spoke up in the pleasant voice which meant she was using her hardwired Amish-girl proxy. “Ms. Watkins and Captain Stryder are lying to you. They don’t care about the Amish.”
My father stared at his fork. “Excuse me?” he asked.
Emma stared at her plate, obviously embarrassed at having said anything.
“What do you mean, they don’t care about us?” my father asked. “No offense intended, but I’m not sure you care either.”
Emma nodded, and suddenly the arrogant, hateful Emma appeared. “You are correct. Concern among my people changes like the wind. Are Ms. Watkins and Captain Stryder concerned? No. Ms. Watkins believes the Amish are needed for colonization because you provide an underclass we ‘English’ can look down on, making our powerful yet disjointed lives seem better in comparison. Captain Stryder’s proxy cares only about defending English civilization and terraforming this planet. You’re fools to trust either of them.”
As soon as she finished speaking, Emma’s eyes flickered and she blushed a deep red. “I’m so sorry,” she stammered, standing up from the table. “Please forgive me.” She then ran from the house. I explained to my shocked family how the English used personality proxies, which changed from moment to moment. I also explained that Emma had been born Amish and left during rumspringa. The personality we liked was created from the centuries-old remnants of Emma’s Amish memories. My father nodded with a sad look on his face, as if we’d just witnessed a horrible accident but could do nothing to help.
“When you disturb the most basic things God has given us—emory, emotion, soul—can you call what remains human?” my father asked. “But that’s for God to decide, I suppose.”
I nodded, even as I wondered if my father would consider me human if he knew how much I resembled Emma.
*
The next few days passed quickly. After Sunday church services in our house, my father explained to the congregation about the comet and why he believed we needed to temporarily evacuate. The congregation discussed the situation for hours, but eventually agreed we should leave. My father and I volunteered to stay until the last minute to take care of the animals on the nearby farms while the rest of the families flew to a relocation camp four hundred kilometers away.
Captain Stryder wasn’t happy with me and my father staying. Still, he said he’d spare a small AI piloted shuttle to pull us out at the last minute, as long as we accepted responsibility for our deaths if anything happened.
The next day the ships landed and our familie
s boarded. Sol hugged me so long that I didn’t think he’d board the ship. I also kissed my mother, who told me to watch over my father. They then flew away to safety.
That night, with the comet lighting up the entire sky, my father and I rode our buggy from farm to farm to check on the animals, making sure they had enough food and water and were protected from the coming blast. Now that we had time to talk, I mentioned how the thickens had grown into the pipe. He said he’d heard rumors they could grow explosively fast around standing water. He asked me how I’d fixed the pipe, to which I didn’t respond.
“No matter,” he said. “In the last week you have behaved very much like the man God intended you to be.” He didn’t say he was proud of me—that wouldn’t have been fitting—but I still felt a sinful pride at his words.
We woke the next morning a few hours before impact. After a final check on the animals in the area, we bedded down our horse and waited for the shuttle to arrive. It did so with a mere fifteen minutes left before impact.
“We English like to cut it short,” Emma said as the shuttle’s door opened. “Life’s boring without a little drama.”
My father started to ask why she was here, but I saw the wild look in her eyes and told him to get onboard before she changed her mind. While I didn’t trust this proxy of hers, I doubted she’d do anything to endanger her own life.
Naturally enough, I was totally wrong. Emma flew the shuttle directly toward the impact zone, buzzing so low over the foothills that I saw our buggy tracks from the other day.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m doing you a favor, Sammy boy. I downloaded your life last night and had a revelation. If I can’t go home, I might as well save your worthless community.”
My father glanced at me but remained silent. I was about to say something when I saw Captain Stryder’s ship appear on one of the foothills, where it’d been hidden from view. Emma landed the shuttle by the ship in a small explosion of dirt and thickens.
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