by Unknown
“Why didn’t you tell me you’ve tasted tomatoes?” Maddie asked. “I thought you were—”
“Not just tomatoes. I’ve had every variety of potato, squash, cucumber, apple, grape, and lots of other things you’ve never had. In the food labs, I tried out billions of flavor combinations. The sensors they had were far more sensitive than the human tongue.”
The robot that had once seemed such an extraordinary gift now seemed shabby to Maddie. Mist did not need a body. She had been living in a far more embodied way than Maddie had realized or understood.
Mist simply didn’t think the new body was all that special.
•Expert Report Declares Nuclear Fallout Clean Up Plan in Asia Unrealistic, Further Famines Inevitable
•Japan Joins China and India in Denouncing Western Experts for “Scaremongering”
•Indian Geoengineering Plan to Melt Himalayan Snow for Agricultural Irrigation Leaked, Drawing Condemnation from Smaller SE Asian Nations for “Water Theft”
•Protestors in Italy and Spain Declare “African Refugees Should Go Home”: Thousands Injured in Clashes
•Australia Announces Policy of Shooting on Sight to Discourage “Boat People”
•Regional “Resource Wars” May Turn Global, UN Special Commission Warns
•White House Stands Firm Behind “NATO First” Doctrine: Use of Military Force Is Justified to Stop Geoengineering Projects That May Harm Allies or US Interests
Mom was working late most nights now, and she looked pale and sickly. Maddie didn’t have to ask to know that reconstruction was going worse than anyone expected. The war of the gods had left so much of the planet’s surface in tatters that the survivors were fighting over the leftover scraps. No matter how many refugee boats were sunk by drones or how high the walls were built, desperate people continued to pour into the US, the country least damaged by the war.
Protests and counterprotests raged in the streets of all the major cities day after day. Nobody wanted to see kids and women drown in the sea or electrocuted by the walls, but it was also true that all the American cities were overburdened. Even the efficient robots couldn’t keep up with the task of making sure everyone was fed and safe.
Maddie could tell that the ration packets were going down in quality. This couldn’t go on. The world was continuing its long spiral down toward an abyss, and sooner or later, someone was going to conclude that the problems were not solvable by AI alone, and we needed to call upon the gods again.
She and Mist had to prevent that. The world couldn’t afford another reign of the gods.
While Mist—possibly the greatest hacker there ever was—focused on testing out the defenses around Everlasting and figuring out a way to penetrate them, Maddie devoted her time to trying to understand the fragments of the dead gods.
The map code, a combination of self-modifying AI and modeling of human thinking patterns, wasn’t the sort of thing a programmer would write, but Maddie seemed to have an intuition for how personality quirks manifested in this code after spending so much time with the fragments of her father.
In this manner, Maddie came also to understand Chanda and Lowell and the other gods. She charted their hopes and dreams, like fragments of Sappho and Aeschylus. And it turned out that deep down, all the gods had similar vulnerabilities, a kind of regret or nostalgia for life in the flesh that seemed reflected at every level of organization. It was a blind spot, a vulnerability that could be exploited in the war against the gods.
“I don’t have a weak spot like that in my code,” said Mist.
Maddie was startled. She had never really considered Mist one of the gods, though, objectively, she clearly was. Mist was just her little sister, especially when she was embedded in the cute robot Maddie had built for her, as she was now.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I am a child of the ether,” said Mist. And the voice was now different. It sounded older, wearier. Maddie would almost have said it sounded not human. “I do not yearn for something that I never had.”
Of course Mist wasn’t a little girl, Maddie berated herself. She had somehow allowed the cartoonish trappings she had created for Mist, a mask intended to help Mist relate to her, fool her. Mist’s thoughts moved at a far faster pace, and she had experienced more of the world than Maddie had ever experienced. She could, at will, peek through billions of cameras, listen through billions of microphones, sense the speed of the wind atop Mount Washington and at the same time feel the heat of the lava spilling out of Kilauea. She had known what it’s like to gaze down at the world from the international space station and what it was like to suffer the stress of kilometers of water pressing down upon a deep-sea submersible’s shell. She was, in a way, far older than Maddie.
“I’m going to make a run at Everlasting,” said Mist. “With your discoveries, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. They might already be creating new gods.”
Maddie wanted to tell Mist some words of comfort, assuring her of success. But really, what did she know of the risks Mist was undertaking? She wasn’t the one to put her life on the line in that unimaginable realm inside the machine.
The features on the screen that served as Mist’s face disappeared, leaving only a single emoji.
“We’ll protect each other,” Maddie said. “We will.”
But even she knew how inadequate that sounded.
Maddie woke up with a start as cold hands caressed her face.
She sat up. The small bedside lamp was on. Next to her bed was the squat figure of the robot, whose cameras were trained on her. She had fallen asleep after seeing Mist off, though she hadn’t meant to.
“Mist,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “are you okay?”
The cartoonish face of Mist was replaced by a headline.
•Everlasting Inc. Announces “Digital Adam” Project
“What?” asked Maddie, her thoughts still sluggish.
“I better let him tell you,” said Mist. And then the screen changed again, and a man’s face appeared on it. He was in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a kind, compassionate face.
All traces of sleep left Maddie. This was a face she had seen many times on TV, always making reassurances to the public: Adam Ever.
“What are you doing here?” asked Maddie. “What have you done to Mist?”
The robot that had housed Mist—no, Adam now—held up his hands in a gesture intended to calm. “I’m just here to talk.”
“What about?”
“Let me show you what we’ve been working on.”
Maddie flew over a fjord filled with floating icebergs until she was skimming over a field of ice. A great black cube loomed out of this landscape of shades of white.
“Welcome to the Longyearbyen Data Center,” Adam Ever’s voice spoke in her ears.
The VR headset was something Maddie had once used to game with her father, but it had been gathering dust on the shelf since his death. Adam had asked her to put it on.
Maddie had known of the data center’s existence from Mist’s reports, and had even seen some photographs and videos of its construction. She and Mist had speculated that this was where Everlasting was trying to resurrect the old gods or bring forth new ones.
Adam told her about the massive assembly of silicon and graphene inside, about the zipping electrons and photons bouncing inside glass cables. This was an altar to computation, a Stonehenge for a new age.
“It’s also where I live,” Adam said.
The scene before Maddie’s eyes shifted, and she was now looking at Adam calmly lying down on a hospital bed, smiling for the camera. Doctors and beeping machines were clustered around the bed. They typed some commands into a computer, and after a while Adam closed his eyes, going to sleep.
Maddie suddenly had the sensation that she was witnessing a scene similar to the last moments of her father.
“Were you ill?” she asked hesitantly.
“No,” said Adam. “I was in the prime of health. This is a
video recording of the moment before the scan. I had to be alive to give the procedure the maximal chance for success.”
Maddie imagined the doctors approaching the sleeping figure of Adam with scalpel and bone saw and who knew what else—she was about to scream when the scene shifted mercifully away to a room of pure white with Adam sitting up in a bed. Maddie let out a held breath.
“You survived the scan?” asked Maddie.
“Of course,” said Adam.
But Maddie sensed that this wasn’t quite right. Earlier, in the video, there were wrinkles near the corners of Adam’s eyes. The face of the Adam in front of her now was perfectly smooth.
“It’s not you,” said Maddie. “It’s not you.”
“It is me,” insisted Adam. “The only me that matters.”
Maddie closed her eyes and thought back to the times Adam had appeared on TV in interviews. He had said he didn’t want to leave Svalbard, preferring to conduct all his interviews remotely via satellite feed. The camera had always stayed close up, showing just his face. Now that she was looking for it, she realized that the way Adam had moved in those interviews had seemed just slightly odd, a little uncanny.
“You died,” said Maddie. She opened her eyes and looked at the Adam, this Adam with the smooth, perfectly symmetrical face and impossibly graceful limbs. “You died during the scan because there’s no way to do a scan without destroying the body.”
Adam nodded. “I’m one of the gods.”
“Why?” Maddie couldn’t imagine such a thing. All of the gods had been created as a last measure of desperation, a way to preserve their minds for the service of the goals of others. Her father had raged against his fate and fought so that none of the others had to go through what he did. To choose to become a brain in a jar was inconceivable to her.
“The world is dying, Maddie,” said Adam. “You know this. Even before the wars, we were killing the planet slowly. There were too many of us squabbling over too few resources, and to stay alive we had to hurt the world even more, polluting the water and air and soil so that we might extract more. The wars only accelerated what was already an inevitable trend. There are too many of us for this planet to support. The next time we fight a war, there won’t be any more of us to save after the nukes are done falling.”
“It’s not true!” Even as she said it, Maddie knew that Adam was right. The headlines and her own research had long ago led her to the same conclusion. He’s right. She felt very tired. “Are we the cancer of this planet?”
“We’re not the problem,” said Adam.
Maddie looked at him.
“Our bodies are,” said Adam. “Our bodies of flesh exist in the realm of atoms. Our senses require the gratification of matter. Not all of us can live the lifestyle we believe we deserve. Scarcity is the root of all evil.”
“What about space, the other planets and stars?”
“It’s too late for that. We’ve hardly taken another step on the moon, and most of the rockets we’ve been building since then have been intended to deliver bombs.”
Maddie said nothing. “You’re saying there is no hope?”
“Of course there is.” Adam waved his arm, and the white room transformed into the inside of a luxurious apartment. The hospital bed disappeared, and Adam was now standing in the middle of a well-appointed room. The lights of Manhattan shone beyond the darkened windows.
Adam waved his arm again, and now they were inside a voluminous space capsule. Outside the window loomed a partial view of a massive sphere of swirling bands of color, and a giant red oval slowly drifted among the bands like an island in a turbulent sea.
Once more, Adam waved his arm, and now it wasn’t even possible for Maddie to understand what she was seeing. There seemed to be a smaller Adam inside Adam, and yet a smaller Adam inside that one, and so on, ad infinitum. Yet she was somehow able to see all of the Adams at once. She moved her gaze around the space and felt dizzy: space itself seemed to gain an extra level of depth, and everywhere she looked she saw inside things.
“We could have all we ever desire,” said Adam, “if we’re willing to give up our bodies.”
A disembodied existence, thought Maddie. Is that really living at all?
“But this isn’t real,” said Maddie. “This is just an illusion.” She thought of the games she used to play with her father, of the green seas of grass that seemed to go on forever, of the babbling brooks that promised infinite zoom, of the fantastic creatures they had fought against, side by side.
“Consciousness itself is an illusion, if you want to follow that logic to its conclusion,” said Adam. “When you put your hand around a tomato, your senses insist that you’re touching something solid. But most of a tomato is made up of the empty space between the nuclei of the atoms, as far from each other, by proportion, as the stars are apart. What is color? What is sound?
What is heat or pain? They’re but pulses of electricity that make up our consciousness, and it makes no difference whether the pulse comes from a sensor touching a tomato or is the result of computation.”
“Except there is a difference,” the voice of Mist said.
Maddie’s heart swelled with gratitude. Her sister was coming to her defense. Or so she thought.
“A tomato made up of atoms is grown in a distant field, where it must be given fertilizer mined from halfway across the world and dusted with insecticide by machines. Then it must be harvested, packed, and then shipped through the airways and highways until it arrives at your door. The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Maddie. “My grandmother and I grew our tomatoes on our own, and we didn’t need any of that.”
“You can’t feed billions of people with backyard gardens,” said Mist. “Nostalgia for a garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it.”
Maddie remembered the words of her mother. The world has become too fragile for us to count on people.
“The world of atoms is not only wasteful, it is also limiting,” said Adam. “Inside the data center, we can live anywhere we want and have whatever we want, with imagination as our only limit. We can experience things that our fleshly senses could never give us: live in multiple dimensions, invent impossible foods, possess worlds that are as infinite as the sands of the Ganges.”
A world beyond scarcity, thought Maddie. A world without rich or poor, without the conflicts generated by exclusion and possession. It was a world without death, without decay, without the limits of inflexible matter. It was a state of existence mankind had always yearned for.
“Don’t you miss the real world?” asked Maddie. She thought of the vulnerability that existed at the heart of all the gods.
“We discovered the same thing you did by studying the gods,” said Adam. “Nostalgia is deadly. When peasants first moved into the factories of the industrial age, perhaps they also were nostalgic for the inefficient world of subsistence farming. But we must be open to change, to adaptation, to seeking a new path in a sea of fragility. Instead of being forced here on the verge of death like your father, I chose to come here. I am not nostalgic. That makes all the difference.”
“He’s right,” said Mist. “Our father understood that, too. Maybe this is why he and the other gods gave birth to me: to see if their nostalgia is as inevitable as death. They couldn’t adapt to this world fully, but maybe their children could. In a way, Dad gave birth to me because, deep down, he wished you could live here with him.”
Mist’s observation seemed to Maddie like a betrayal, but she couldn’t say why.
>
“This is the next stage of our evolution,” said Adam. “This isn’t going to be a perfect world, but it is closer to perfect than anything we’ve ever devised. The human race thrives on discovering new worlds, and now there are an infinite many of them to explore. We shall reign as the gods of them all.”
Maddie took off her VR set. Next to the vibrant colors inside the digital world, the physical world seemed dim and dull.
She imagined the data center teeming with the consciousnesses of billions. Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space?
She held out her hands. She noticed that they were becoming wrinkled, the hands of a woman rather than a child.
After the briefest of pauses, Mist rolled over and held them.
“We’ll protect each other,” said Mist. “We will.”
They held hands in the dark, sisters, human and post-human, and waited for the new day to come.
Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of twenty-seven science-fiction and fantasy novels, including Beggars in Spain, Probability Space, and Steal Across the Sky. She has also published over a hundred short stories and three books on the fundamentals of writing. She is a six-time Nebula Award winner and the recipient of two Hugos, the Sturgeon, and Campbell awards. Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read.
COCOONS
Nancy Kress
Arecon detail brought in another one just after dawn. The soldiers had donned full biohazard suits; nothing could convince them that this wasn’t contagious. They set the body on a gurney. I wheeled it into a quarantine room and inspected it.
This time, for the first time, it was a child. A girl, about eleven years old. Half of her face was still visible.