Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  Crow says, still intent on his computer keyboard, “When we open the door, we’re going to inhale the outside air. It might make you sick. Over the next few days, don’t give up if that happens.” He gives a lopsided smile. “We’ve got antibodies, too.” He glances up at me. “Time to open the door.”

  I crank it open. In streams all the musky, humid, cold green air of Greme. Despite the warnings, I take a huge gulp. As we slowly move closer to our target, I say, “There’s room for three, Crow.”

  “Littlespire can’t take the extra weight.” Then he says, as calmly as ever, “When Jonn climbs aboard, I’m climbing down.”

  Jonn has seen us. He’s stopped, but oddly, he’s pointing down the hill.

  Crow mutters, “The antibody surge is heading uphill.”

  My stomach lurches in panic.

  “Throw out the rope,” Crow commands.

  Oh God, I forgot the most important part! I throw down the coil.

  I can see the hillside and the hemlocks and Jonn with fierce clarity. I could reach out and touch Greme. Touch Jonn. This is the real world, I have time to think as Crow maneuvers the spire until the rope and Jonn’s hands make their connection.

  As Jonn climbs – he’s as good on a rope climb as he is at running – the thought occurs: “We’re already handling Jonn’s weight and yours.” Littlespire isn’t even listing in the direction of the rope climb.

  “Can’t sustain it,” Crow says. “You don’t have the fuel yet. When you get to the grasslands, your first job will be just like mine, extracting resources. The prairie might not have thought to clear deadfall.” It all sounds so clinical and proper. It’s how Crow is keeping me focused, of course.

  I lean close to the opposite window, seeing that the surge is now past Deepspire and continuing uphill. Jonn is fifteen feet off the ground, but a crest could easily take him. He’s got another twenty feet to go.

  Now, the wave has arrived underneath us. Time has run out. “Hurry,” I scream down at Jonn who accelerates his awful climb.

  A little cone appears on the surge just below us. Then Crow is beside me, and he’s hauling up the rope, bearing Jonn’s weight as he braces his feet against the lip of the door, while I’m wrapping the excess rope around the spiral railing.

  “Help him in!” Crow shouts. To my relief, Jonn has thrown his arms and shoulders over the threshold. Crow jams himself into the navigation chair and Littlespire chugs upward, away from the crest.

  I haul Jonn through the door, sparing a glance down at the trembling hill that is reaching for us an arm’s-span below.

  FOR TWO DAYS now we have been sailing across the prairie. It is late afternoon and the wind lays the golden grasses over, an inverse wave. On all sides the horizon is far away, defining a sublime emptiness except for the stacked cumulus clouds and little spikes of lightning in the distance. This new land is overwhelming and calming.

  Jonn puts his hand on my knee as I work next to him. We’ve hardly spoken, there’s been so much to do. We cannot falter or ever forget that Littlespire depends on us as much as we on her. (Jonn and I call it a her.) After two sleepless days and nights, I occasionally nod off, and Jonn doesn’t wake me. We’ve already taken on board our first branches, grinding them in the nutrient pod that hangs off the port side.

  I wonder what the mountains will look like when we first see them. I wonder if the buffalo ever came back in their endless brown herds, as in the stories. And I wonder if we’ll see remnant cities, since grass won’t cover them as Greme did.

  Oddly, I think I’m going to miss Highspire. I can’t believe such a magnificent thing will not endure. And I know I’m going to miss Greme. We had our differences, but there was blame on both sides. In time... but I can’t look backward.

  I’m hoping that when we get to the mountains we’ll find a welcome and the place will have a good, solid name, as a home should.

  I will never forget my last view of Crow, standing on this side of the Long River, as was his request. He was walking into the tall grasses, shading his eyes from the setting sun, watching us depart. I could see him for the longest time, facing west, his dark hair blowing gently over his face.

  MANMADE

  MERCURIO D. RIVERA

  Mercurio D. Rivera was nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for his short fiction. His stories have appeared in The Year’s Best SF 17, edited by David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, Other Worlds Than These, edited by John Joseph Adams, Unplugged: The Web’s Best SF and Fantasy for 2008, edited by Rich Horton, and markets such as Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nature, and Black Static. His work has been translated and published in China, Poland and the Czech Republic. His first collection, Across the Event Horizon, edited by Ian Whates, is out now from Newcon Press.

  ON HIS THIRD birthday, Alex Belfour showed up unannounced at my South Cannon beach house. I’d been curled up on the sofa at the time, dazed by the blue glow of afternoon infomercials, when the doorbell rang. I heard Tilly glide from the kitchen to the front entrance and a minute later she poked her sleek steel head into the living room.

  “It’s a former patient, ma’am,” she said. “A convert.”

  It took a moment for the words to register. A patient. Visiting me here?

  Not having dressed or showered, I wasn’t prepared – or in the right frame of mind – to deal with a guest. “Have him make an appointment,” I said.

  “I tried, ma’am, but the young man insists it’s an emergency,” Tilly said. “He says he’s willing to wait.”

  I sighed and stood up, pushing aside the wool blanket and the scattered clothes that draped the sofa.

  “Fine then. Have him wait.”

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, as I approached the den in the rear of the house, I overheard Tilly’s soothing voice peppering the patient with diagnostic intake questions. I entered the room to find an adolescent sitting slouched in the cushioned chair, his arms crossed over his rumpled plaid shirt. Before I could even greet him, he reached into the pocket of his jeans and handed me a bright blue card, the access code for his medical history written on it. As he introduced himself and explained what he wanted, I fiddled with my smartreader, punching in the code numbers, and skimmed the pages of his med-report, which flickered across the screen.

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said, although I understood his request well enough. I suppose part of me just hoped I’d heard wrong.

  “Reversed.” He repeated the word softly but emphatically. “I want the procedure reversed, Dr. DeLisse. I don’t want to be human anymore.”

  “I see,” was all I could muster. I’d encountered many AIs over the years who’d had some initial difficulties adjusting to their humanity. Reactions ran the gamut from minor emotional hiccups to serious psychological disorders that sometimes warranted intervention by psyche experts – but I’d never seen a three-year-old react this way. Most AIs resigned themselves to their conversion within a matter of days or, at most, weeks.

  “I’m from ManMade. Don’t you remember me, Dr. DeLisse?” He leaned forward. “You converted me.”

  The boy did seem vaguely familiar. “I’m sorry, but I’ve performed so many.”

  “You can change me back, right?”

  I walked around a stack of unpacked boxes and sat behind my desk. “It isn’t a question of whether I can do it.” I had access to Krell TechLabs, just a hundred miles down the coast. “It’s more a question of why. Why would you possibly want to do such a thing?”

  He opened his mouth as if he were about to launch into a rehearsed speech, but instead he hesitated. “Today’s my birthday, you know. I’m three years old.” His eyes reminded me of blue seawater.

  I squeezed my smartreader and the conversion date flashed in red. “So I see. Happy birthday.”

  “Cognitively, that makes me seventeen years old. I can vote now. I can fight in the wars if I choose to. I can make my own decisions, can’t I? Legally, I have rights.” His eyes begged me to agree.

  “Technic
ally, yes. But a decision like this... This is different.”

  “Why? You can see the results of my neural exam, my psyche evaluation.” He pointed at my reader.

  I clasped the device in my right hand. All normal results, true, but there was no way I was rubber-stamping such a drastic procedure. He was a living, breathing human being, after all. And just a kid.

  “Still,” I said. “I need to understand where this is coming from.”

  He sighed. He had the gangly awkwardness typical of most teenagers, but something about his pale blue eyes, his thick mussed eyebrows, stirred a memory I pushed away.

  “I’m not happy,” he said.

  I could certainly relate to that sentiment. I stared at the pine board shelves, which were empty except for a framed holo of me and Phillip and Tim. Tim was just a four-year-old toddler in baggy, yellow swim-trunks in the holo, banging the keyboard of a plastic piano in a steady beat. Phillip and I hovered over him, wide smiles stretched across our tanned faces while we stood in the clumpy beach sand.

  “Being human...” Alex said. “It’s not what I expected.”

  “So you’re not happy.” I forced a weak smile. “Join the club.” He didn’t react. “Look, young men your age sometimes go through phases. It’s not always easy coping with so many conflicting emotions, but it’s all a normal part of adolescence. You’ll get through this, I promise.”

  “It’s not a phase.” He rubbed his bloodshot eyes with the back of his hand and sat silent.

  “I know someone. Someone you can talk to about these feelings.”

  Alex pushed his chair back, and stood up. “I guess I’m wasting my time here.”

  “Relax.” I pointed to the chair. “Sit, sit, sit.”

  He looked at me warily before taking his seat again. “It’s important you understand the consequences. This isn’t a common procedure, Alex. You wouldn’t have the same functionality as you did before. Your sense of identity would be tenuous, Grade 1 level at best, like my Tilly housebot. Trust me, you don’t want to do this.”

  “But I do. I do.”

  I paused. “Have you discussed this with your guardians?” Until fully integrated into society, converts were placed in a foster home, usually with a childless couple.

  “My foster mom died a few months after I was converted. And I never got along with my father,” Alex said. “He didn’t care about me. Not really. No, I think he only loved the idea of me. He wanted me to play a role and... I was tired of it, tired of him and everyone else defining me and telling me what to do, who to be. Do you know what I mean? I had enough of that when I was an AI.”

  “Why me?” I said. “Why not go back to ManMade for the procedure?”

  He froze, and his eyes glazed over for a few seconds as if he were dreaming while awake, a common affectation among converts. It reminded me this was no ordinary teenager. Three years ago he had been a different form of life altogether.

  After a five-second pause, he picked up the conversation without missing a beat.

  “I heard that you left. I’m not stupid, okay? ManMade would never do it. It wouldn’t risk the bad publicity.”

  The boy was sharp. With the rising death toll and declining birth rates caused by the spread of the Red, ManMade had become the leader in the production of people, implanting AI syngrams into cloned teenaged bodies. Bodies designed to be immune to the plague. ManMade’s stock prices had quadrupled over the past three years. No, the boy was spot-on. The company would do right by its shareholders before it did right by him.

  I sighed. “Let’s do this. Think about it for a week. If you still want to give up your humanity, I’ll consider it.” And more likely than not, I thought, he would walk out the door, drive back to Portland, and find a different way to vent his normal teenage rebelliousness. Hopefully I’d never hear from Alex Belfour ever again.

  “Thank you, Dr. DeLisse.” Alex pushed his bangs out of his eyes and smiled sadly, wearily. He seemed so vulnerable at that moment that I had to fight the urge to hug him. Instead, I extended my hand in a detached, professional manner, and he shook it, his grip soft and warm and oh-so-human.

  “Celia,” I said. “Call me Celia.”

  MY FORMER COLLEAGUE at ManMade, Milt Maddox, stopped by my house the next morning. Apparently this was turning into the week of surprise visits. I’d performed hundreds of conversions with Milt – a pleasant enough fellow if a bit introverted. His shoulder-length hair, which he kept in a ponytail, had gone prematurely gray and there was something haunting about his thin smile. I had met his late wife, Carmen, in a cybertech course in grad school and years later she had recommended me for the position of techsurgeon at ManMade.

  “How are you f-feeling, Celia?” His nervous stammer always made him more endearing, I thought.

  I shrugged.

  He handed me a bouquet of sunflowers and we sat at the kitchen table while Tilly poured us tea. “Have you considered coming back to work?” he said. “Listen, I understand what you’re going through.” Milt had lost Carmen and his daughters to the Red. “It’ll do you good to stay busy.”

  “I’m not ready to return to ManMade.” I paused. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”

  Milt stared uncomfortably at the tabletop. His expression said it all. You need help, Celia.

  He sipped his tea. “Any word from Phillip? Do you think –”

  “No, he’s not coming back.” Last I heard, my husband had hooked up with a traveling companion on his road-trip across the Nordic countries. A young blonde half his age. It was for the best, I supposed. Just the sight of Phillip brought back memories of Tim. And I’m sure he felt the same way every time he looked at me. “I’m not bitter, Milt. Honest.”

  He nodded. “So I hear an old patient of ours paid you a visit yesterday. Alex BL4Z6M.”

  It took a moment for his words to sink in.

  “How do you know that?” Milt’s appearance here was starting to make sense.

  “I’m Alex’s guardian.”

  “You became a guardian?” Milt never struck me as the nurturing type.

  “After Carmen and I lost the girls to the Red, well, she really wanted to take in a convert. This was before Carmen became afflicted herself.” He picked up his cup of tea and stared into it. “Alex was one of the first in our BL4 series. Don’t you remember?”

  I shrugged.

  “No, why would you?” he said. “So many hundreds of conversions.”

  “If you came all this way, Milt, you must know why he sought me out, what he asked me to do.” I opened the cupboard where I stored the brandy and poured a shot into my morning tea. I offered some to Milt but he held up his hand. “You need to talk to him,” I said.

  “He won’t listen to me. He’s s-stubborn. No, he’s dead-set on going through with this. All we can do at this point is give him what he wants.”

  “What?”

  “It pains me, but I don’t see any way around it. Do you?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “SERA gives him the right to decide. If he wants to revert to his AI state... We’re required to follow the law and respect his decision.”

  To hell with SERA, I thought. “The boy just needs counseling.”

  “You have enough on your mind, Celia. I’ll reach out to Alex. ManMade will counsel the boy and perform the procedure, if need be.”

  “You’ll do this? You would really do this?” I said. “What about the negative publicity?”

  “I spoke with Legal. We can have Alex and everyone involved sign the necessary paperwork to keep this confidential.”

  I laughed in amazement. “And what about our oath? What about our ethical duty? Have you seen the latest birth-rate figures?” Suddenly it dawned upon me. “Oh, my God. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  “Celia,” he said, setting down his cup, “your p-political views – which, by the way, I happen to share – don’t give you the right to override the clear mandates of SERA. Yes, I’m sure there’
d be strong public sentiment against the procedure if it ever came to light. But we have to balance that against our legal exposure for violating the statute...”

  “I don’t give a damn, Milt. He’s just a kid. And you’re his guardian.”

  “I’m here in my role as Executive Director of ManMade.”

  “Be straight with me. Others in the BL4 series have suffered from similar disorders, haven’t they.”

  His face flushed. Milt obviously hadn’t expected me to do my homework so quickly. After Alex’s visit yesterday, I’d spent the entire evening studying up on the BL4 series. “I read about the others who mutilated themselves with razor blades and who turned to heavy drug use. And what about the two suicides?” Suicide. Just saying the word out loud made me queasy.

  He shook his head. “The autopsies revealed no physiological problems with the BL4s.”

  “I could never approve Alex’s request.” Saying the words out loud gave me a new resolve.

  “You’re letting personal feelings –”

  “Don’t say it, Milt.”

  “– cloud your p-professional judgment. After what happened with Tim...”

  I squeezed my mug so hard that it slipped through my fingers and shattered on the floor.

  His eyes shifted from my face to the scattered shards. “I’m sorry. It’s just so obvious, Celia. Look, there’s no reason to be embarrassed. You’ve been through a lot. But expending energy trying to save someone who doesn’t want saving, someone who’s made a personal choice about his future...”

  When I didn’t respond, Milt stood to leave.

  But as he opened the front door, I finally answered him. “If he shows up here again – and I don’t think he will, mind you – I won’t authorize the procedure,” I said. I couldn’t care less about Milt’s armchair analysis of my motivations. Or about the ‘Sentient Equal Rights Act.’ I wouldn’t allow any harm to come to that boy.

  “If he returns, you’re to send him to us,” Milt said as if reading my mind.