Solaris Rising 3 - The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Ian Whates

  Everything all sparkle. Fire sparks. Flaming hems. Black dots dancing in my vision. Can’t breathe. The ribs. Can’t breathe. Try to shift and gasp. Can’t move. Neck broken.

  Where’s the pain? None anymore. Nothing past the tight chest. Broken fingers don’t move. Toes too far away to know.

  Tiny, smashed girl-doll, all broken.

  Black dots and sparks. Char. Closing darkness. Can’t find air. Can’t find pain. Can’t find anything.

  IN THE TRIANGLE Shirtwaist Factory fire, Rosies died. Idas died. Gussies. Yettas, Jennies, Annies.

  I don’t know their names unless someone calls them, shouts it aloud. I know they’re Catholics if they clutch rosaries. I know they’re Jews if they mutter Yiddish. I know they all sew and sew and sew because even before the fire, their hands hurt so much.

  They warn you beforehand. They have to. And you listen, but it’s hard to know. They tell you that even though each death is only a few clock minutes, in mindscape it lasts forever. Doesn’t matter how much you upclock. You can experience it all, splash back into consensus stream fast-as-fast, maybe a nothingth of a second later. Doesn’t matter.

  Dying is endless. Even when you do it, and do it, and do it again. Even when it’s the same kind of death in the same kind of body in the same kind of place. Each time is the first. Each is forever.

  ABOUT ME: THESE days, everyone’s helix is knitted from pieces of everywhere, but if you pick out the hither-thither genetic such-and-such, just focus on the main strands, one of mine is American Japanese. They had names for the ones who came over first and the ones who lived there after. Isei, Nisei, Sansei. First generation born in the new place. Second. Third.

  That’s what I thought of when the Society pinged.

  “At first everyone on the network had been material and then technological,” the rep said. “Then the zeroes had children. But the firsts, they had their parents around to tell them what it was like.”

  The rep was one of a hundred. Split intelligence, not replicated. A single piece of hay pulled from a giant runtime stack of the same person. Stupid and nonreactive if you made it go off script. Doesn’t matter how smart you are to start with, split yourself that many times and there’s almost nothing left in each bit. Easier to reassemble when you’re done, though. No chance one of the replicas goes off and starts its own life.

  Would have been cheaper to use AI and allowed for more script variation. Then, I was annoyed. Later, I realized, the core-rep wanted to do everything itself. Wanted all those memories. Wanted to know how I reacted, how everyone did. Wanted to remember.

  That kind of information is useful in a revolution.

  It said, “Second generation, they knew how to ask. Third generation, sure. Fourth, fifth, sixth... we’re iterative. We’ve gone beyond. The zeroes had words for it before they instantiated. Singularity. Post-human. Incomprehensible. Lots of zeroes have wiped, but some are still around. Ever met one?”

  I grunted because I had. Had the same experience most post-threes did, too. Too different to understand, talk to, care about. Always a war with those people.

  Rep went on, “And before the zeroes, there are the dead generations. Oceans of mind gone blank. Not because they chose wipe. Usually not even because their hardware ran down. Died in violence, of stupidity, of fires, died sick, died alone. Child by child, the dead generations built us. Child by child, they died.”

  Left alone to give its script, the rep was passionate, flooding its sub-channels with emo triggers that shivered through me, made me feel a human-shape body, zinged chill and electric through nerve by simulated nerve.

  “We owe them,” the rep said.

  Gratitude, it meant.

  But me, as the rep described what it wanted, I remembered other things I’d learned about the origins of my helix strands. Sacrifice, ritual, honor given in the name of the dead. Ancestor worship. One of the most obvious and true ideas from substantiation. They gave gifts and then they died, leaving us with a debt we can never repay.

  THE DEAD DIED.

  They died for us.

  They didn’t know they died for us, but they did.

  They can’t eat cake. They can’t row boats. They can’t swing swords. They can’t use money.

  We can’t give cake. We can’t give boats. We can’t give swords. We can’t give money.

  We can give our memories.

  IT DIDN’T HAPPEN like this. I’m trying to talk to you. Remember the words you had before. Post-human. Singularity. Incomprehensible.

  After dying time and time, after living through burning bodies, I understand zeroes as well as any six can. Embodied fragility. That’s what sixes don’t understand. It’s abstract until you die and die and die and die.

  But I’m not a zero and you’re not sixes. You live surface instant, have brains that remember the structure of meat. For us, lots happens underwater: neural flares and tangle-thoughts and inverse treads.

  I’ll keep it straight though, much as I can. Someways, it happened like this.

  SMOKE. SMOKE. SMOKE. Pressed in the corner. Can’t get out. Two walls blocking me. I’ve only got half the opportunities to push through that other girls have.

  Girl next to me talking under her breath. Slurred. Could be saying anything. Voice rises, falls, skims above then sinks below the din. Slurry of words, but rhythm of prayer.

  Smoke. Everything smoke. I grab at fabric scraps by my feet. Press one over my mouth. Could get down, get away from the smoke, but for what? To burn later? Besides, can’t stand the idea of not being able to see, lost among hems and table legs.

  Smoke rises so I’ll die in smoke.

  Black everything. Eyes black, hands black, all black. Taste of black seeps through the cloth. Close my eyes. Black scrapes its way past eyelashes.

  Smoke fills me up. Organs, bone, marrow, all gone. Girl-shaped vessel emptied out, replaced by smoke.

  REP GAVE ME a list and I picked this one. First one I saw, maybe. No shortage of tragedies.

  Stupidity, avarice, malice and fire. Nasty combination. Lots of them were nasty, the deaths we owe.

  FORTY-FIVE THROUGH, I stopped to check my count.

  Paused to think. Forty-five eternities. Could I remember forty-five? Each like all the others, and each unique?

  Society AI showed up. Probably health req because I hesitated. Showed up shadow body, neutral shape without identifiers, but still incarnate because they do that when you’ve been embodied a long time.

  Zeroes needed that. Transitions. Sixes? AI is slow.

  AI said, “It does you no good to provoke a mental breakdown. If you go numb or mad, you will not honor the dead or yourself.”

  I found myself being embodied against my will. Shadow-shape, but mortifying to be in simulated skin. Anticipatory needles pricked my nerves, preparing for fire and pain they assume will be coming.

  AI shifted into casual mode. Shadow-shape went female. Another zero thing. It read me, tried to change to me. Either my implicit association scores had changed to female-over-neuter, or it was something about all the girls in the fire. Second seemed more likely. Dying girls everywhere.

  In a voice softened for emotional simulation, AI asked, “Do you want anything?”

  I glared smoke at her. Tried to initiate number forty-six but was blocked.

  AI went hard-edged again. “I am required to remind you that you may exempt yourself from this project at any time.”

  I snarled wordless, sub-band burst. Hold released. I went.

  NUMBER SEVENTY-THREE, I wake up next to one of the survivors. Recognize her. Seen her face survive before, from a distance. Closer this time.

  She tugs my hand. Murmurs a word. Must be my name. But this body’s ears are ringing. Head is so sore. Something fell on me maybe. Fingers press, find place where skull depresses, sharp burst of pain.

  She tugs me again. Trying to pull me toward the elevators. Works for some. I try to tell this body, okay, follow that way. I stagger after her and vision til
ts, blurs. Head hurts. Hurts.

  Tugs my hand again. Says something. Repeats it. Shouts it.

  Vision stills, then swirls again. This time, I puke. Survivor flutters over me, murmuring.

  Can’t say why I recognize her face. Another scared, sooty girl. Could be brunette or could be filthy. Undernourished skinny with long, thin eyes, and narrow eyes sunken into hollows carved by hunger and fear. Rough, calloused fingers clutch at mine.

  More heat as the fire shifts. Waves of screams doppler in the distance. Beyond the survivor, I see whoosh of skirts and shoes crowding the path she’d meant to follow. Soon there won’t be a way. Body starts to wretch again, but there’s nothing more to throw up.

  I come to the conclusion at the same time body does. She lives. We don’t. We shove the survivor down her path. Hard so she’s not tempted to overpower us, sacrifice herself to stay.

  Eyes show pain and shock before she takes the cue to run. Breathe. Breathe. Alone now. Slump down, stomach cramping over and over, relieving itself of nothing. I think she was our sister.

  AFTER SEVENTY-THREE, AI stopped me again. Didn’t shadow-shape this time. Didn’t talk. Only made a path for the rep.

  Rep was twenty-split this time. Almost present. Said, “You’ve seen now. What it was like.”

  I sent subliminal yes, every way but voice. Girl seventy-two had screamed and screamed. The idea of my throat was still raw with it.

  “You know how the method works,” the rep said.

  Took me a while to remember how brains work in the real world instead of the dead one. Doors and corridors and trap doors. There, the packet stored sideways-conscious.

  Time travel. Projecting instantiation into cold minds.

  “Zeroes, ones, twos. They think there’s no point if we can’t substantiate into created flesh. But instantiation is strong. AI says you’ve seen how strong.”

  I thought about the body pushing her sister away, how I became we. “I’ve seen,” I said. Voice a croak, grated with seventy-two’s screaming, even though her throat was rotted and gone and I’d died twice since then.

  “You can’t change back after that,” Rep said. “Can’t swim blithe without the past.”

  “Could lobotomy,” I said. Easy enough to cut out the parts you didn’t want. Store them behind the trap doors. Give them to the AI to keep.

  “For now,” Rep said.

  Sound of ‘now’ made me twitch. I exhaled doubt, misgiving. Interest, too.

  “Things have to change,” Rep said. “No more blithe swimming, three and four and five and six. And if we keep this way, what about seven and later? Historical strands keep attenuating? Is that just?”

  I thought: is that how we honor the dead?

  “We have everything,” Rep said. “They are nothing.”

  Rep said, “We owe them.”

  ZEROES, YOU MADE our world, but we’re not zeroes anymore. We are more and we are different. You wanted to move on. Singularity. Post-human. Incomprehensible. We are those.

  We’ll live as long as we want. We’ll never die from fire. We’ll never get sick. We’ll never be killed.

  We’ll never be fragile.

  You want to forget those things. We need to remember.

  EVERYWHERE, OUR INSTANTIATED memories will be. Pieced together from my hundred-and-forty-six deaths. From the strange fruit swinging on the tree. From the comfort women. From the first peoples who lost and lost and lost.

  In everyone’s minds, they’ll be. The zeroes and ones and twos who want to forget. The threes and fours and fives and sixes who never cared to learn. Lightning-quick, they will know.

  Not every story, not every moment. The strongest ones. The flashes and flares. The ones who sacrificed the most. Who died young and sick and badly.

  We the society are sixes and we are strong. AIs are ours now. We know the secrets of tangling and inverse. All will know. Born, they’ll know. Dreaming, they’ll know. Wiped, they’ll know.

  We know that some of you lived fragile. We know that this will be hard for you. We know you do not want to lose control of what you built. You are the first and you are the oldest, but in this water, you are leviathans, and we are fish. You must struggle to the surface to breathe, but we are always here. We are made for this place.

  Debts move in multiple directions. We owe you and you owe us. Now, it is our place to be the ones who decide. Someday, it will be sevens, eights, fifteens.

  Time remains before we will take our moment. There are memories to be collected, sifted, chosen. There are deaths and deaths and deaths and deaths.

  You are our predecessors, and we honor you, so we give you this time and this warning. We will remember the dead.

  ONE-HUNDRED-AND-TWENTY-THREE: SHOCK TO be a boy this time. In real, I’m neuter, but here in the cold, I have been so many girls that it is my skin. I am a girl and I am on fire.

  But now I am a boy. Another hand in mine. Small and trembling. Mine too, but I try to steady it. Must be solid. Must be steady. For the tiny hand.

  Want to get to a window. In this body, there is strength enough to push aside the screaming girls. I try not to, but it happens. I butt them aside with my shoulders as I pull the tiny hand along with me to the window. The girl it belongs to holds her breath as she follows.

  That girl, that girl, that girl, I know them from inside their skin. There: glimpse of a new face. One of those remaining to me? Or perhaps a survivor?

  I’ve made it through. Girl and her tiny hand beside me. A shallow wave of accomplishment. I can get her away from the fire. The air is so much better than burning.

  Pull her out with me. Take the tiny hand from mine. Sweep down to kiss it. Then up to kiss her lips. I smile and she smiles and the smiles are dead.

  Below us, the watchers, weeping and shouting in alarm. Pointing at us. A horror show staged for them. Flaming lovers, star-crossed.

  In three hundred years, no one else will have to die, ever. This day, this rotted eternity, we jump together. Our bodies are iron weights, dragging us down to shatter on the earth.

  Solaris Rising presents nineteen stories of the very highest calibre from some of the most accomplished authors in the genre, proving just how varied and dynamic science fi ction can be. From strange goings on in the present to explorations of bizarre futures, from drug-induced tragedy to time-hopping serial killers, from crucial choices in deepest space to a ravaged Earth under alien thrall, from gritty other worlds to surreal other realms, Solaris Rising delivers a broad spectrum of experiences and excitements, showcasing the genre at its very best.

  ‘What, then, are Solaris publishing? On the basis of this anthology, quite a wide-ranging selection of SF, some of it very good indeed.’

  – SF Site on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction

  ‘A cliché it may be, but there really is something for everyone here... an ideal bait to tempt those who only read novels to climb over the short fiction fence.’

  – Interzone on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

  ‘The stories presented in this latest volume are intended to showcase the diverse nature of science fiction. Does it succeed? Absolutely.’

  – SF Signal on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 3

  www.solarisbooks.com

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  Following the enormous success of the critically-acclaimed Solaris Rising, Solaris are proud to announce they've commissioned a follow-up, Solaris Rising 2, due out in Spring 2013.

  But you can't wait that long, and we honestly can't blame you! To that end, we present Solaris Rising 1.5, a short anthology of nine short stories from some of the most exciting names in science fiction today. From both sides of the pond - and further afield - these nine great writers offer you everything from a mystery about the nature of the universe to an inexplicable transmission to everyone on Earth, and from engineered giant spiders to Venetian palaces in space.

  So settle in, and enjoy yet more proof of the ext
raordinary breadth and depth of contemporary SF.

  “**** A well-presented buffet of tasty snacks.”

  – SFX on Solaris Rising

  “Essential reading.”

  – BBC Focus Magazine on Solaris Rising

  “One of the three or four best SF anthologies published this year.”

  – Gardner Dozis, Locus on Solaris Rising

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Google Play is a trademark of Google Inc.

  THE NEW SOLARIS BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION

  Having re-affirmed Solaris’ proud reputation for producing high quality science fiction anthologies in the first volume, Solaris Rising 2 is the next collection in this exciting series.

  Featuring stories by Allan Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kim Lakin-Smith, Paul Cornell, Eugie Foster, Nick Harkaway, Nancy Kress, Kay Kenyon, James Lovegrove, Robert Reed, Mercurio D. Rivera, Norman Spinrad, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Liz Williams, Vandana Singh, Martin Sketchley, and more.

  These stories are guaranteed to surprise, thrill and delight, and maintain our mission to demonstrate why science fiction remains the most exiting, varied and inspiring of all fiction genres. In Solaris Rising we showed both the quality and variety that modern SF can produce. In Solaris Rising 2, we’ll be taking that much, much further.