by Matt Bell
We’d planned for mission critical personnel to be printed as needed to do maintenance, to study the conditions in the outside world, to generate predictions Eury and I weren’t qualified to make. But we had to stop bringing them back almost immediately after the closing of the Mountain. Whenever we spun someone up, we explained how much time had passed since they’d last lived, detailed the current conditions. Then we’d ask them to flush a clogged water pump or repair the air filtration system, to debug some software error or rebuild a server rack. No one ever said no, but some of the Volunteers delayed. They knew what we would ask of them afterward: to willingly step into the recycler and return to the biomass.
Most of the time, we could convince the Volunteers to go peacefully. But the recycler wasn’t painless. Some Volunteers came back screaming, their minds as they’d been at the moment of their deaths, recorded as we’d destructively scanned them.
Those Volunteers did not go easily.
The first time Eury shot a Volunteer, it seemed the sound of her sidearm’s discharge reverberated for days. Together we scrubbed and scrubbed, but the blood stained the concrete.
The spot took years to fade but eventually it did.
We became more careful. We didn’t want to spook the Volunteers. Better to force them into the recycler without spilling more blood, because spilled blood was waste, and the first rule was to never waste anything. Then one day Eury presented me with a new solution. We could keep printing the expertise we needed, with all the frustrations and danger other people brought—or she could simply download what she needed from the backups, adding their expertise directly to her rung.
I objected. It wasn’t what we’d promised. It was, explicitly, a violation of what we’d said we’d do. But it’s for the greater good, Eury said. Printing a scientist would use up irreplaceable biomass, then that person would for a time consume food and water, precious air pumped in from the frozen surface. When we didn’t need them anymore, they wouldn’t want to recycle themselves, while we wouldn’t want to have to force them.
All I have to do, Eury said, is make sure each new personality remains subservient to my own—and as soon as she said this I knew she’d already done it, was convincing me only after the fact.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop. There was too much to know, too many skills she didn’t have. She became a conqueror again, ruling over a collective of the minds we’d scanned, imprisoning them inside her skull. I confronted her, we fought. But it was impossible to win an argument with her: soon a thousand philosophies were at her command, thousands of minds. How she was able to integrate them all, I’ll never know. I was too busy fighting to contain my own many selves, the remainders of all the lives I’d lived beneath the Mountain.
I—me and you, me and all the others who came between us—struggled from the first not to go mad from living alongside so many other versions of ourselves. Eury didn’t have the same problem, not for a long time. Of course not. In any contest of wills, she was always the strongest.
I gave in, accepted her crimes. The Mountain had become a microcosm of the world we’d lost: we’d harvested as much as we could but it wasn’t enough, not if we consumed more than we replaced. We did not stop consuming. Sooner or later the batteries below the Mountain would fail. We knew this. Sooner or later every storage medium would disintegrate. We knew this too. There could never be enough backups, never enough redundancies. We had printers that could print more printers, but even their feed materials would eventually be exhausted. The servers holding the scanned humans would one day fail, but Eury had become a storage medium too, her rung a backup of every mind we’d saved. She held the expertise of countless disciplines, she knew a hundred languages fluently, often sliding between them as she spoke, some thoughts better expressed in one than in another. We began to have trouble communicating. Whatever she’d become wasn’t what used to be meant by a person. She asked me to join her in becoming whatever it was she’d become, but I didn’t need more voices echoing inside my skull than I already had.
I told her I didn’t want what she wanted—but there was something else I’d begun to believe my body might be made to carry.
I could only add so much per cycle. The genomes couldn’t be loaded wirelessly, like the personalities crowded into E’s rung. But every time I prepared myself for the recycler, I had the Loom splice in more foreign DNA, replacing unexpressed, unused parts of my genome. It was simple enough to take some of that useless material out, then put in the genetic code for a black bear, a raccoon, domesticated corn, the apple tree. We had thousands and thousands of scans, some for animals I’d never heard of before they went extinct, uncounted varieties of plants we’d never remember were missing if we decided not to put them back into the world. There was only so much unused space in my original genome, but with each new addition my genetic capacity expanded—and then the next time I cycled out, I spliced some other creature into the blank spaces in whatever code I’d added last.
The matryoshka method, I joked to Eury, who didn’t find it funny.
She might have, if I hadn’t said it so often, every time I was recycled and reprinted.
She might have, if she hadn’t guessed what I was preparing to do. She knew before I did that after I made my genome into a genetic repository exactly as complete as the one in our computer, I’d try to leave. Centuries of homesickness, of wanting to be anywhere but buried beneath the weight of the world. She didn’t want me to leave, or at least she didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone either, but I didn’t think I could stay.
One of the last years we spent together, I found Eury in the auditorium built to one day welcome our Volunteers back to the restored world. The auditorium was dilapidated by then, crumbling like so much else. She sat on the edge of the buckling stage, kicking bare feet against the plastic boards, but she wasn’t alone: she’d spun up the tiniest yellow warbler, a little bright-beaked thing, its flash of color breaking up the dull monotony of the fading facility.
We’d long since agreed she wouldn’t print any more wolves, all of them so unhappy underground, never lasting long enough to be worth the mass. But this bird, flitting through the vacant echoing air, singing the prettiest tune you ever heard? It was a gift. It was against the rules but the rules were ours. It was against the rules but we’d lived dozens of lifetimes by then, all spent in a cavernous underworld bereft of what made life worth living.
We let the bird stay but it was lonely too. We trapped it in the auditorium so it wouldn’t vanish into the rest of the facility; all we had to feed it was the same nutrient gruel we ate ourselves. The bird lived a year, maybe two. But after the first few weeks it never sang again. Then it died and went back into the recycler, making only the smallest, saddest puff of paste.
Soon after that, when the time came for me to leave, Eury didn’t try to stop me. Maybe she knew our choices had separated us. Maybe she wasn’t herself enough to care. By then, she’d integrated all the human consciousnesses we possessed. There was no more romance in us but we might as well have been married, we who’d ruled this underworld together for untold numbers of years. When the centuries-long snowstorm outside the Mountain stopped—when it seemed we’d weathered the worst of what we’d made—then we divorced. Together, we printed a dozen copies of the me you used to be, each ready to command a crawler stocked with enough biomass to begin the terraforming experiment wherever the continent was ready; each of us was spliced with so much DNA that if local storage failed it might be possible to reverse engineer an entire biosphere from what we carried inside our blood, kept safe at the center of our every cell.
It’s easy to cast Eury as the villain of our story, but tell me: Which of us was the greediest? The woman who wanted to be humanity? Or the man who tried to become the world?
My crawlers left one after another, each of us headed to different regions by whatever route might be possible; once there, each of you would bunker down, recycling yourselves to wait out the ic
e age, letting the crawler’s Loom reprint you every fifty years to check conditions.
Eury says only one other crawler ever returned, arriving under someone else’s command, manned by reprinted personnel who’d mutinied before journeying here to seize the safety they thought the Mountain hid. You saw the machine-gun nests outside: we weren’t unprepared for that eventuality. Eury sympathized but she couldn’t let them enter. Before she fired, she tried to explain how they’d been printed from scans stored inside the Mountain.
It wasn’t murder, Eury said, because inside the Mountain weren’t they still alive?
After all the crawlers had left, I made Eury promise not to reprint me. She agreed, but as I stepped into the recycler for the last time, ready to be finished with this subterranean life, she offhandedly recounted a dream I’d had a long time ago, something I was sure I’d never shared. I screamed inside the recycler, furious to learn she’d downloaded me too, that she’d already added my life to her rung, already had all my many lives snug inside her head.
It was a long time ago now, I know. And despite her promise, I’m glad I’m here to meet you, to see Eury one more time.
Whatever her flaws, whatever her mistakes, she really did intend to save the world.
Even now, I know she believes it’s possible.
As for us, well, when you left you were me, exactly as you see me now, plus two good legs tacked on to make surface life easier. I don’t know how you became this astonishing creature instead. Was it an accident caused by trying to stretch your biomass, or did some version of you mean for this to happen? Do you feel any guilt for the mission you abandoned, for all the potential life in the crawler that you never brought back? Do you somewhere in you still carry the remorse I felt at my many mistakes, my unending hubris, how always I convinced myself I was on the side of the righteous, even after it was clear we’d doomed the world, even knowing it was the decision I made that chose the way the world would end?
Now, at this cycle’s end, do you still crave forgiveness or forgetfulness, as I do?
What would you give to get it? Would you give your life?
Would you give our last life, always the only one that really counts?
C-433
“You won’t survive the operation,” E explains, returning at the end of John’s story to hover beside his wheelchair, all of her a mere bot-wisp except for her face and a stretch of disembodied neck, her right hand resting on John’s shoulder. “You’ll die, but the tree will live,” she says, her swarm’s glow throbbing in a comfortingly rhythmic pattern. “The tree, its beetles, whatever else should grow after the tree no longer grows in you.”
“You can’t—” C’s voice rasps, breaks. The tree’s pressure on his chest is heavier than ever. “You can’t scan the tree without destroying it.”
E’s ghost-swarm swirls angrily, flashes red.
John says, “You told me to tell him the truth. I told him. There’s no scanning without destruction. If you recycle C, the tree dies. If you cut away the tree, C dies. If you cut the tree from C, then scan the tree, they both die. Maybe you can print another. Maybe you can’t.” John spins his wheelchair, the ghost-swarm fluttering out of his way. “Think of all your lasts, E. We told ourselves it was worth it to make each species extinct sooner, because later we would bring them back. But we haven’t. They would’ve died anyway, I know. But we didn’t have to rush them from the world.”
“We saved them,” E says petulantly. “They’re all still here. We can make them live again, exactly as they were. Just as soon as we put the world back the way it was.”
John shakes his head. “Help C live, E. Help his tree as it is, not as you want it to be.” John turns to C, C struggling to breathe, C struggling to stay in the scene, to be a part of the conversation deciding his fate. “You have to choose: this one life you have been given, the life of C-433, the creature who grew a tree. If that’s what you want, we’ll help you live the best you can. Surely there’s some way of easing your pain, of making it easier for you and the tree to share this one body. Or we can cut the tree free from you, save it and whatever might grow from it until the time it can be planted on the surface. But if we do—”
E interrupts, her ghost-swarm swirling around John’s chair, enveloping him in her glow. “Freed from you,” she says, “the tree can be studied, scanned, its fruit replanted, its branches grafted onto root stocks printed from our data banks. If this tree evolved inside you—generation after generation, the DNA shifting inside the hollow spaces of your own genome—now it can evolve on the outside. A tree made not for the world that was but the world as it is. This is the gift you’ve brought us: an ecosystem in miniature, primed for the future we made.”
It isn’t only the tree they want. There is the purple grass, clumped and mossy in the bark’s cracks; there are the buzzing beetles that John calls bees, feeding at the flowers’ nectar, nesting in new cysts swelling beneath C’s skin, ridging the flesh along the bark’s edges.
C is no longer the creature he’d been born. But what he’s become is not only a tree.
“You will be the seed,” E says. “The seed from which the new world grows. We can back up your mind before we take your body. We can give you your own swarm, like mine. No more pain or suffering. No more crawling into the recycler, no more waking loomsick and starving and lesser. This is your chance to live forever. I took it when it was my turn. You, when you were John, refused to entertain such ideas. Be better than you were. Show me you learned something in all these centuries. Show me you’ve got the will to win.
“Say yes,” she says. “John, tell him to say yes.”
John leans in, again taking C’s gnarled hand in his own. Their palms are exactly the same size, their fingers exactly the same length. John moves his head as close to C’s free ear as possible. C can barely see John’s gray eyes, can barely hear him whisper a single word.
Run, John whispers.
Louder, he says, “She promised the choice would be yours, not hers.”
Run. C hears it again, but this time the man’s lips aren’t moving. Maybe it’s what he imagines wheelchair-confined, recycler-bound John wishes.
Run, C hears a third time, or else fight—and this time he knows the voice is inside his rung, speaking from the same place the remainder’s voice once originated—and contained inside the imperative is a simple program, a wirelessly transmitted gift of a couple hundred lines of code, a worm C understands he could pass on to someone else with a squeeze of his one good fist, the same hand John releases before turning from C’s bed to push his wheelchair out of the room, back toward the recycler and the dreamless sleep of the unprinted.
At first E doesn’t pressure him. She leaves him alone, keeps the dwarves away. Time passes, but C can’t tell how much in the perpetual red glow of the hospital lights. He clocks time there in the sunless facility only by the continued advance of the bark crossing his body, by the appearance of another generation of beetles. He knows it’s foolish, but he can’t stop hearing John’s voice, hearing his own voice as it sounds from John’s body: Run, he’d told himself, but how can he run when he hasn’t walked in days, when he hasn’t left this bed since the dwarves lifted him into it?
Except he’s stronger than he’s let on. He’s been resting, intravenously fed and hydrated, breathing filtered air, soaking up the rays of the UV lamps E instructed her dwarves to install, beaming radiation at his leaves: the weak sunlight outside was barely enough for photosynthesis, so the tree had no choice but to feed on his flesh, on nutrients soaked up from the paste he swallowed twice a day. Now the tree feeds itself, its leaves brightening, the pulp of its bark swelling thanks to the limitless nutrients from the IV, the limitless sunlight of the lamps. Now it’s C who eats from the tree, healing even as the bark buries him beneath its burden. Every day, the tree of him is more immense, but perhaps it isn’t a tree overtaking a body. Perhaps it’s just him giving up one shape to become another. Perhaps he, last in a line of monstrous
creatures, is merely the first in this other species, the faun who became a tree.
No matter what he told E before, he no longer wants to leave the tree behind. Not if it means he’ll die. Not if it means he’ll live on only as a ghost.
Because to live without a body is not to live.
C wraps his good hand around the breathing tube snaked into his trachea, then pulls. A long gagging slowly reverses. He tries to tear the IVs from his elbow, too difficult with only the same hand free: he raises the tubing to his mouth, chews through it with his remaining teeth.
In one corner of the room, a previously unnoticed red light begins blinking steadily.
C leaves the bed with a dense thud, landing on the creaking, cracking trunk of the tree, his left leg vanished into its wood. With his hoofed foot leading, he drags the meat of him to the doorway, something of the tree breaking with every step.
No tree was ever made to walk—but surely the faun was designed to run.
And so the last faun runs, dragging the tree behind him. The dimly lit corridor offers no clues for which way to go, the hospital ward as silent and empty as the rest of the habitat; all C can do is move one heaving lunge at a time. His body is unwieldly, his movements slow and fraught; he can’t turn his cracking bulk without cost—and when he hears a sound behind him, he knows what it is without looking: E’s ghost-swarm, divided again into the woman and the wolf.