by Peter Watts
You are motionless for so long that one crow flaps down to inspect you, eyeing his reflection in your metal side. He pecks. Once, twice. You have been working a loose wire out of your neck, which was wound up somewhere inside you but is now poking out, and you twist it off and hold out the gleaming piece.
He yanks it from your fingers and flees. Immediately, two more crows drop out of the trees to pummel him. You watch his oily back disappear into a squall of black bodies, reappear, disappear again. As they fight, black beak, jet claw, ragged bundles of greed, you remember what it meant to feel desire.
Over the course of a week, as a glittering shape flowers inside your head, you examine your budget, your savings, your expenses.
You order twelve carnival mirrors and set them up in your apartment. There is no more room for your bed, so you sell that to a new arrival. You also buy three old industrial robots, rusted and caked in machine oil. The boxes arrive thick and fast, and your apartment manager, who knows the square footage of your room, raises his single eyebrow at you when you come to collect them. Now, everywhere you turn, you confront an elastic vision of yourself, stretching as high as the ceiling and snapping to the shortness of a child. The eyes in the mirror gradually lose their fear.
You write about everything to your former lover as a matter of habit, not expecting a reply.
Biting your cheek, you call Joel to ask where you can buy faulty artificial organs. He listens to your flustered explanation and gives you contacts as well as three hearts, Mk. 1, 2, and 4, out of his own collection. You balance them in the robots’ pincers like apples in a bowl.
With a net and a handful of bread, you catch birds on the roof: house sparrows, rock pigeons, crows, an unhappy seagull. You release the birds in your glass coffin crammed with carnival mirrors. They batter themselves against the window and shit on the mirrors and on you. Your room is all trapped, frantic motion, exaggerated in swells and rolls of glass. People look sideways at you when you leave your room, your chrome and steel parts streaked with white. You look at your slumped, stretched, stained reflections and recognize nothing and no one.
Sometimes, when the room is dark, you can admit that you are making this for someone who will never see it, who will never come back, who will never write to you. Then you roll onto your good side and listen to the flurry of wings until you fall asleep.
You set out neatly lettered signs in your window and on your door. Musée de l’me Seule. Signage is probably against building regulations, but you used the shreds of your lease to line your room. You run a notice in the news that is two inches by two inches. Saturdays and Sundays. You keep your door unlocked. You feed the birds, you wipe down the hearts, and you wait.
Joel comes to see you, or perhaps to see what you’ve done with his hearts.
“Where do you sleep?” he says, looking around.
Anywhere, you say.
His expression says he thinks parts other than your lung need examining. But he is also curious. He touches the orange arms curled around artificial ventricles, the frozen rovers sprouting substitute livers at odd angles.
“I’m not very good at art,” he says. A sparrow shits in his hair.
You offer to wipe up the mess, you are already wetting a towel in the sink, but he has to leave, he is meeting someone somewhere else, he has left his jacket at the clinic, he is late.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday morning, one more person walks into your museum. She swings open your door and is surprised into laughter by a burst of gray wings. She is even uglier than you are, most of her face gone, hard bright camera lenses for eyes. She has glued pages of books and playbills over her carapace.
“I was an actress,” she says.
She has been in all the shows that she wears. The pages came from books she liked but couldn’t keep. Her name is Nim. She has been in the city ab urbe condita, she says, meaning four years ago, when it was fifteen residents and three doctors and one building. She walks around your room as she talks, studying the mirrors, the machines, the birds, the bounce of her own reflection.
Without asking permission, she shoves a window open and shoos out the birds. They leave in one long shout of white and gray and brown. Flecks of down spin and swirl in their wake.
You ask her how long it took to remember how to walk, how to function, how to smile.
“Two weeks. Three months. Two years.” She shrugs. “Sooner or later.”
Nim has no hair, only a complex web of filaments across her metal skull, flickering her thoughts in patterns too quick to follow. Her hands are small and dark and unscarred.
“Look,” she says, touching the skin of your cheek, showing off her lean titanium legs. “Together we make one whole person.”
More than that, you want to say, as you add up fingers and toes and organs and elbows. A sum that is greater than one. More than two. But you are tongue-tied and dazed. You realize that you stink of birds and bird shit.
She smiles at your confusion. “I’ll bring you some gloves and cleaning supplies.”
What for, you say stupidly.
“To shine up this place.”
But this is what I am, you say. This is what I look like. You stretch out your hands to indicate the mirrors, the stained, spattered floors, the streaked walls.
“You could use a spit and polish too, frankly.” She demonstrates, using her sleeve, and you blush.
But why are you here, you ask. Why is she touching you with gentleness? You are afraid that this is all an accident, a colossal misunderstanding, that she will walk out of the door and vanish like your sparrows.
“I’m looking for a collaborator,” she says. “I’ve got an idea. Performance art. Public service. If you can clean up and come for lunch tomorrow, I’ll tell you about it.”
Inside you, a window opens.
That was when you stopped writing to me. Your long, careful emails came to an end. What is there to say? The stories of people we have loved and injured and deserted are incomplete to us.
If I could write an ending for you, it would be Nim holding your new hand in hers, Nim tickling your back until you wheeze with laughter, the two of you commandeering an office block for a new museum, a museum of broken and repaired people, where anyone for an hour or three can pose in a spotlight and glitter, glisten, gleam, haloed in light, light leaping off the white teeth of their laughter. But it is never that easy, and that is not my right.
You knew, I think, before I did. That no one can have a life that is without questions, without cracks. And now you are the deepest one in mine.
Here is what I have. A year and two months of emails. A restaurant check. A glossy fragment from a magazine, two inches by two inches. Terse. Opaque. Musée de l’me Réparée. Saturdays and Sundays. Revival, WA.
What could I say? What could I ever say?
Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant
Seth Dickinson
Inequality is inevitable. Someone always wins.
If you’re really so transcendently smart, Tayna, you would’ve known that from the beginning.
These are the things Connor’s geist says to chase her down off the Rockies, back out into the world she remade. Tayna thinks he means well, as he did in life. It’s not his fault he’s a prick, or that he’s blind to it.
Just another victim of structural forces.
Connor walks with her under blizzard skies. You tried to fix the world, he says. You thought you knew how to do it better than me. (His laugh doesn’t exist outside the machine caucus alloyed into her skull, but still she hears it echo off the peaks around her, rebound, diminish. When did she decide to make Connor’s voice thunder and geology?) But you only made it worse. You stole Haldane from me crying utopia but you fucked it all up.
The wind’s picking up. Tayna fastens herself to the mountain face, skin sealing to stone, and starts metabolising hydrocarbons for warmth.
Connor, she says. You’re kind of an asshole.
Coming from the woman who destroyed human civiliz
ation.
I saved the world.
From me. From my dream. (It’s been twenty-two years since she betrayed him, and Connor’s geist still sounds so hurt.) I could’ve avoided this. With Teilhard.
Yeah, Tayna says, downregulating the instinct to shiver. I saved it all. From you.
Connor’s geist puts a comradely hand on her shoulder, where her paramuscle deltoid tethers to laminated bone. Look at this, he says, gesturing downslope, down the range. You wouldn’t be going back down to visit if you weren’t afraid I was right.
It’s just a checkup, she says.
The very first people you meet, Connor says, are going to prove me right. They’re going to prove your whole ecosystem, your brave new post-structures world, is fucked. Irreparably, fundamentally, mathematically fucked. And I’m going to be the only way out.
Tayna hangs onto the Rockies and grits her teeth.
Not for the first time, she considers deleting Connor’s geist. She won’t do it—she’s better than that. But it feels good to think about. She’s not better than that.
Lillian, she says. Lillian.
The other geist coalesces out of the wind, keyed-up pareidolia summoning her face from blown-snow noise. Hey, she says, and then, with concern: You look cold.
Tayna can’t smile, because she’s sealed up her face against the wind. But Lillian’s only real inside her head, so she can probably feel the sentiment.
I’m afraid, she says.
She wants Lillian to hold her. This is sort of emotionally onanistic, since Lillian is part of her, built of old memory and bootstrapped simulation. (A special guilt she’s grappled with—when you have the ability to regulate and modify every aspect of yourself, to snuff or satiate every need, do you have a right to want anything?)
So what does it mean that Lillian frowns, draws back, and, exhaling lovingly rendered frost, says:
Oh. I can see why you’re scared. Things are going wrong.
Connor and Lillian know everything she knows. The Haldane network that ate her brain has room for the sweep of Tayna, and a few merely human minds too.
But they don’t usually agree on anything.
Ten years ago, in the days of post-civilizational convulsion and the rise of tentative new paradigms, Tayna visited with a little mountaineering collective near Kremmling, Colorado. They kept to themselves, eschewing the headnets coalescing around Colorado Springs. But like everyone they still used Haldane, still gave their bodies and brains over to the new power.
In theory, everyone had a choice. Tayna and Lillian’s subterfuge shattered Connor’s dream of monolithic engineered transcendence (Teilhard, her dreams still whisper, when she lets herself dream: Teilhard was the other way . . . ) and set the Haldane nanomech infrastructure loose, open-source, freely transmissible. Conversion was voluntary.
But, in retrospect, the choice was so one-sided it might as well have been coercion. The new breed didn’t need the systems that made baseline life possible, the states, the economies—and so those systems collapsed. Old shackles broken. A new world enabled.
Maybe, Connor and Lillian seem to think, just a chrysalis for something worse.
Tayna heads back towards Kremmling. She follows the old California Zephyr railway southwest through canyons cut in banded gneiss. The train doesn’t run now. The winter thaws into an early spring.
Do you miss trains? Connor asks. Governments? Civil society? Organized human achievement? I expect not, since you ruined them.
I made them unnecessary.
You balkanized the species.
I liberated them.
Tauntingly: Them?
Get new material, Connor.
One apocalypse isn’t enough for you, is it? You’re not going to be satisfied until you get the God job full-time.
In Gore Canyon, where the kayakers used to play, she finds people from Kremmling gathered in a rowdy knot up on the cliffs. They leap from the canyon walls on wings of paramuscle grown wrist to ankle and ride the rapids down through rock and hole until the chaos spits them out into calm water and they come up whooping.
Tayna sits down to watch for a while. They’ve diverged farther from the baseline, but that’s all right. That was really the whole idea. Ensure diversity. Avert Connor’s singularity—the monolithic future exploding out of a single stifled point.
They’re playing a computation game, for the joy of it. Watch the rapids, plot a course, and leap. Whitewater turbulence is a tough problem. Ten years ago nobody in Kremmling could’ve managed that.
The very first people you meet are going to prove me right.
She gets up from her roost and lights her antenelles to send a greeting.
Warmth comes back her way: welcome to a stranger. And the photon caresses of a millimeter-wave scan as a bunch of them team up to search her for guns or combat organs.
“Is Mariam here?” she calls. “I’m looking for my friend Mariam, if she’s still around—”
“Tayna!” Mariam calls, and sends a little pulse of happiness. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
You never told me about her, Lillian’s geist says. Old friend?
The truth is that there are ten thousand Mariams in ten thousand communities Tayna’s visited, people who cherish Tayna as a dear friend, because Tayna’s incredible cognitive firepower lets her look on them and understand them and make herself someone they can trust with a fluency that can’t in all honesty be distinguished from manipulation. And that makes her guilty, like the friendships are just instrumental, like she’s just a water-bug on the surface of the human experience. Too smart to swim.
You’re lying, Connor says. That’s not the truth.
Fuck you.
But Lillian’s brow furrows and she says: He’s right. Fuck him, still! But . . .
The truth is that Tayna’s been gone so long, deep in the self-catalysis trance, that she’s not sure she can relate to anyone else on Earth as more than a child. It’s the wizard syndrome, the weight of age and power, and it’s coming on hard.
She has the ability, via the Haldane backdoor, to do nearly anything she wants to anyone she meets. And if she does find something deeply wrong out here, some fundamental inequity rising . . . she already knows she’ll use that power.
But she smiles, and waves, and sends her own happiness back, a stutter of brain activity jacketed in peer-to-peer protocols, scrubbed of any complication.
The Kremmling cliff-divers rest a while in the sun. Mariam spreads her wings to catch the light and waits, smiling, for Tayna to say something.
She hasn’t aged, of course. Tayna inhales one of Mariam’s dead skin cells from the mountain wind, sequences it, and compares it to a decade-old reference. Finds CAS9 touchups all over Mariam’s genome: gentle rewrites where Haldane has repaired oncogenes, extended telomeres, laid the metabolic groundwork for her beautiful new wings. And, engraved in the chromatin, little signatures and signs—developers who wrote some of the packages Mariam has adopted. There will be others, elsewhere in the body and brain. The power of Haldane’s programmable tissue goes far beyond the genetic.
A cluster of strangers pop up on Tayna’s inferentials, coming in from the west. She checks them out, decides they’re not important, and goes back to Mariam.
Hey—look here. A sequence that pops up again and again: trust certificate by the Lillian Banning Cabal. Execution-safe.
Looks like you remain a going concern, Young Miss Banning, she tells Lillian’s geist. Still camped out in Chicago, screening the ecosystem for pathologies.
Happy to hear it. Shouldn’t you talk to your friend? She looks so happy to see you.
Tayna’s just putting it off, Connor interjects. She already knows.
Knows what?
That the moment she starts asking questions, she’ll see the disintegration of this anarchic world-wide interregnum on the horizon. The rise of the new and final class of power structure.
Lillian kneels to marvel at Mariam’s wings. I don’t know,
she says. Is anything inevitable, now? They can change so much . . .
Connor makes a mockingbird sound, an ostrich sound. You two enabled a dire new kind of inevitability, he says. And it’s right here. I’ll bet my simulated life on it.
“Mariam,” Tayna says. “I need to ask you for something. It’s personal, and it’s big.”
The newcomers are closing in, opening into a loose perimeter. But none of the Kremmling cliff-divers seem concerned. Tayna’s sure they’re unimportant.
“Anything,” Mariam says, brow furrowed. “Why even ask, Tayna? I know how much you’ve done for us. I know—”
The awe and reverence and fear coming through say: I know you can have whatever you want.
Tayna hesitates. She doesn’t want to know yet. Once she has the data, the engines of her intellect will render it down to a conclusion and that will be that, irrevocable. “Do you ever want things to . . . go back?” she asks.
“To the old world?” Whisper of emotion, voluntarily disclosed: an absence of doubt, a pre-emptive certainty.
“Yeah.”
“There’s nothing important we had then,” Mariam says, “that we don’t have now. And now I’m happy.”
“Because you can tweak your brain chemistry.” Tayna smiles wryly, to take the edge off. “Hardly objective.”
Mariam leans back on her hands. The new arrivals have circled them, dark, angular, closing. Not urgent. “You think that’s not important? Choosing when to be happy, why? What higher freedom could you ask?”
Connor makes an impatient gesture.
“I need performance profiles,” Tayna says. Is it really asking, when you know you’re going to get it, one way or another? “I need to know everything you’re thinking about, and how hard, and what it’s for. And who. Who it’s for, too.”
Something like the crack of a cable stunner sounds from somewhere close, but Tayna knows it can wait. Especially because—
Mariam’s facial muscles slam into self-paralysis. Sweat glands shut down. Armoring herself against analysis of her microexpressions. It’s a conditioned defensive response, a trigger to guard a secret.