Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  “Start me in administration, then lock me in one hour. I want a blank canvas. No one leaves. No ejection points. No death safety. No matter what I say, lock me in one hour once I'm in. Then transfer all my administration privileges to Lydia Sortanova. Everything, not just Realm.”

  Watching his chest still rise and fall in peace, Lydia wants to grab him up from the bed, shake him until everything is normal again, until the life she's lost is regained.

  What has he done? To himself?–to her?–to everyone?

  “Do you understand?” he asks again.

  No. No, I don't understand, Jericho.

  But the voice speaks for her again.

  He stares at the screen for a long time, mulling over what must have been a vast swath of information.

  “Bring up my private video archives,” he says, setting the glass on the ledge by the screen and reaching under the bed, taking out a thin metal box.

  He pulls out a few things she can't see, moving closer to the screen and sitting.

  “Play all,” he says.

  Then he lifts one of the objects. It falls, long, from his collar past his chest.

  Her mother's pendant.

  Then, muffled, the voice of a ghost, she hears herself speak. Her voice. Some Lydia long-forgotten. Something she doesn't remember.

  “Turn that thing off,” the voice says. It's her sounding playful. Laughing.

  “Oh, come on,” Jericho's voice is saying, a hollow echo. But he's staring through them with reddening eyes.

  He's watching a video, too, but they can't see it in this mirror image.

  “Don't you want to remember?” Jericho's voice asks.

  “I can remember just fine,” Lydia's ghost says. “But there won't be anything to remember if you don't put that down and come here.”

  “Stop,” Emma says louder than she's ever spoken. “MAIA, turn it off. That's enough.”

  And just like that, Jericho's weary face and red eyes are gone. Just that minimalist screen, white on black.

  “That's enough,” Emma whispers, backing out of the room.

  ***

  Even with all of Jericho's casual speech, Keene doesn't really understand what Jericho asked MAIA to do, wants Emma to explain. But he understands enough–she doesn't want to be the harbinger of doom.

  She sits in the bridge. He pulls up a chair next to her, but Lydia remains standing, looking ready to explode.

  “We still have the signal,” he says. “We can still go home.”

  “Yeah,” Emma says, unphased. “We can.”

  “Look,” Lydia almost shouts, seeming to jolt even herself with surprise, “I need to know what's going on. I need some answers. How–how can I know what to do when I don't–I don't have a past. I don't know what's going on now. How can I–”

  “Okay,” Emma says. “Here you go. Jericho couldn't bring himself to be with you in Caligatha. At some point he overdoses, because even Jericho's paradise needs drugs. It kicks him out of Realm. He gets up, wishing he was really dead. But the problem is, he has over seventy people on board who've contributed to a several billion dollar orbiter waiting to go back home. He could just blow his brains out, but no–atonement is meaningless unless others suffer too, right Jericho?”

  Lydia clutches herself.

  “No, he can't just sit around waiting and he can't go back to Caligatha and he doesn't just blow his brains out. He sends an artificial Jericho that doesn't remember you back into Caligatha to, oh, be your savior, maybe? The man he wanted to be, the man without guilt? And then he sends himself and everyone else he hates into a new Realm–I don't want to know what that...what his idea of hell is.”

  “An–an artificial Jericho?”

  “We've been out for forty years because of that.” Emma's voice rises. “You said he overdosed twice. Well, you just watched him get kicked out the first time. You die in Realm, you get kicked out. Death-safety. But it's the copy he sends back. Even without the memories, Jericho is still Jericho. Probably even worse, because I'll be damned if he could just cut out all his memories and emotions so cleanly. The poor bastard sent back in, he does all the same shit.”

  “Oh no,” Lydia chokes. “I understand. Those drugs–my father's missing drugs. We still met, and when my father dies Jericho can't take it and overdoses.”

  “Whatever the reason, he can't be kicked out now because this copy of himself isn't linked to a physical body. And Realm can't force a short backtrack of only a few moments, do a rewrite, because his last backup had administration privileges. The idiot removed privileges from himself after he made the copy. Realm can't override administrator actions. You've been living in a feedback loop, Realm trying to make sense of it–when he dies it sends everything back to his first overdose. His copy's point of origin. Even our time was synced to Realm because it's such a sophisticated fucking clock, which is why we stopped routinely waking up.”

  “Why?” Lydia demands.

  “Why what?”

  “Why is all of this because of me?”

  “Maybe you should watch the old home movies,” Emma sneers, and Keene feels it cut through himself.

  Poor Lydia.

  “But–I didn't do anything,” she says, fighting back tears.

  “And you're just fine, aren't you? We're all just fine.”

  “What did he do to all those people?”

  Emma almost laughs, so angry she doesn't consider her words. “Who cares? They all deserve it. I guess he was right all along.”

  “No,” Lydia says. “I don't believe any of this.”

  This seems to remind Emma of Lydia's vulnerability, her innocence. She closes her eyes.

  “Twenty-four hours,” she says as Lydia starts off.

  Keene watches Emma's face, her clenched muscles.

  He draws near, kisses her throbbing temple.

  “I didn't mean that,” she says, watching Lydia disappear. “Look at her. Jericho doesn't know the meaning of misery.”

  “There's nothing you could do,” he tells her.

  “I know,” she says, eyes still closed. “That's the problem.”

  It's been so long since they've been able to look at each other the way they used to. The steeled nerves, the resolute determination. All this has replaced the woman he knows.

  Jericho, Emma, Lydia–he's become a man surrounded by martyrs.

  Well, scratch Jericho. Where the hell did he go?

  “If we land, and everything–” He pauses. “I know we don't know, but if everything is fixed down there...we can fix all this too, right?”

  Emma looks up. “Jericho disconnected Realm and gave her all his administrative privileges She can reconnect and pull everyone out. But you and I have only been asleep. Caligatha on the other hand–Jericho fucked it up, that was a well-documented error and exactly why Leviathan required Realm's users register by their DNA profile, so that they could minimize liability in the event of someone pulling this kind of half-assed cloning bullshit. If it hadn't been so long, it might be one thing. They've been living the same moment all this time. The level of EDP is probably off the charts. God only knows what it'd be like to pull them out now. And everyone else, everyone Jericho took with him–do you want to see what mental state those people are in after forty years of...wherever he took them...some Realm he created in a rage...after that?”

  “I guess not,” he says. “But those in Caligatha...Lydia is doing as well as we could expect.”

  Emma rubs her forehead, exasperated. “For now. Realm is the only concept of reality she has.”

  “We need to go back home,” he tells her. “Something's down there. We can go back and fix everything.”

  “But at the same time, even if a few people survived below, Christ. In 8000 BCE, humans were still painting in caves and just learning to plant seeds. I'm not sure anyone that survived would have the necessary skills for that level of civilization let alone regenerative neuroscience.”

  “Something is down there, though.” He thinks
of Lydia, stands. “What we need, maybe, is a reason to have hope again.”

  She gives him a look like he's gone insane. “What? That even the humble bamboo plant carries on?”

  They stare into each other's eyes for a moment, hoping the other's nerves will relent.

  “That's the spirit,” he says. “Meet me in the dining room in an hour.”

  As he steps away, he hears Emma's words again: the level of EDP is probably off the charts.

  Ghosting? Wasn't that fixed long ago?

  ***

  Lydia sits on the edge of Jericho's bed. It's all too reminiscent of the hospital. But Jericho isn't dying.

  Or he's not dead. Or not alive.

  She resists the urge to touch him. In spite of all that's happened, she wants to fit her body into the tiny bed, try to find that missing spot in time where she could curl against his form, cradled in his warm breathing.

  She stares at the blank screen, reaches forward to tap it. It fades into the familiar menu. She doesn't know what to do, says Jericho's words aloud, looking around to be sure no one overhears.

  “Bring up Jericho's video archives.”

  The screen fills with little thumbnails.

  “Play all,” she says.

  Then she's staring back at herself.

  Except this Lydia's in a bed she's never seen before, in a contemporary bedroom with light green drapes. The walls are filled with oil paintings of ocean scenes, a couple of European cathedrals drenched in a buttery warmth rivaling the room's sunlight.

  “Turn that thing off,” she watches herself say.

  The camera pans closer, until her face fills the whole screen.

  “Oh, come on,” Jericho says behind the camera.

  She watches the scene play out, Jericho and this stranger that looks like her. She convinces him to set the camera down, and they kiss, diagonally framed, until he reaches across the bed to turn it off.

  Then they're outdoors in sweatshirts. Lydia has the camera.

  “So here we are,” she says, and pans across a city below. They're on a mountaintop overlooking a valley of verdant pine. The buildings are glowing red before a setting sun, purple and stars weighing down overhead. “I finally got someone out.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says, suddenly in the frame, kissing the lens.

  This isn't the Jericho she knows. He's so loose, so at ease.

  “Stop,” she tells the screen. “Turn it all off.”

  What did Emma want to do? Drive home the fact that she couldn't remember all these things?

  “Come on,” Keene says from the doorway. “There's nothing for you here.”

  “These people–they–it's not me,” she says.

  He looks to the ground in reverence. “Can one remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.”

  “What? Is everything going to be a riddle?”

  He smiles, and it's good to see that again–not very reassuring, but at least someone can flash signs of levity.

  “Sorry,” he tells her. “Words of an old playwright.”

  “I don't know what to do,” she says, and reaches to feel under the bed until her fingers touch the box. She pulls it onto her lap.

  “Doubtful you'll find more understanding in a box than you will in tomorrow.”

  She pulls out the pendant, just as she remembers it.

  “This is my mother's,” she tells him.

  “It's beautiful.”

  “It's the only thing...Nothing else has come over with me from the other side.”

  There's scraps of paper in the box, but she doesn't want to read them, leafs with forlorn detachment around until she finds a little velvet box.

  She opens it, and inside is a glimmering square-cut diamond on a rose gold band. It isn't new; there's the faintest couple of nicks on the band.

  “He was going to give this to me again when we got out of Realm,” she realizes aloud. “When everything was okay down below...but why don't I remember? Why was he going to give it to me a second time, and I can’t remember the first?”

  “Some things have followed you. Come on.”

  She watches the dull overhead light in the diamond's glow for a moment, then hurriedly places everything but the pendant back under the bed. Somehow the pendant seems assuring, perhaps because her mother was always missing, always a concept, the only person who remains constant and can't betray her. Maybe even that isn't true, but she places it around her neck and tucks it under her shirt.

  He leads her back to the bridge and beckons her to the wall-length screen.

  “MAIA,” he says, “Let Lydia see what's outside.”

  Just like that, the black becomes a sky of deep blue and white, moving slow and graceful like a distant storm over the sea of Caligatha. She watches, speechless.

  “Perfect timing,” he says.

  “We're so close.”

  “We have some limited flight ability, but we're really just an orbiter just beyond the atmosphere. Looks like we're facing straight down.”

  “It's just like laying on the grass and watching the sky.”

  “Some things,” he tells her, “rarely–but some things look the same from wherever you see them.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “I expected it to be so much smaller.”

  “You took the wrong pill, Alice.” He smiles again. “The sort of freedom you've found has made for a much larger world.”

  “I prefer it just how it is. Is this a screen or–”

  “No, a special glass. Palladium. The overlay is just more of that embedded nano-crap.” He smiles again. “Go ahead.”

  She steps forward and places her palms and forehead on the cool glass.

  “We've really been here all that time?”

  “I'm just along for the ride, too, my dear, but it seems that way.”

  “And now we're going back?”

  “If we decide. Emma believes someone sent us coordinates.”

  “Coordinates. That's a far cry from a word like home.”

  Keene smiles. “I should say.”

  “No one's ever told me what happened.”

  “A lot has happened.”

  “The reason.”

  “Right,” he says, beginning to pace.

  “I might've been born yesterday, but I don't think all of this is over a forest fire.”

  “Remember what I said about Jericho's little machines?”

  “Yes. Artificial immune systems. Nanotechnology.”

  He breathes long and deep. “Jericho was only one of many pioneers. Pioneers across many fields. We lived in what he called transcendent times. Many, many rules had begun to bend at the hand of nanotechnology, gene therapy, robotics, artificial intelligence. This produced a lot of good, and a lot of bad. This trade-off has always plagued us. When you make waves, you produce peaks and troughs.”

  He pauses with his arms in the air, mid-gesticulation of a trough, lost in the thought of bygone horrors.

  “I understand,” she says. And so far, she does. “What was the bad?”

  “Accidents. Terrorism. But most of this was contained. Just as nuclear technology, miraculously, was scarcely used for ill in the entire century since its inception. So too were nanoswarms, intelligent and destructive machines in the form of dust clouds–or, synthesized microorganisms designed to destroy architecture–or, engineered diseases–all these things were crushed by the average goodness and ingenuity of humanity.”

  “Okay,” she says. “But something got through?”

  He breathes deeply again, but this time only says, “Yes.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Who did any of it? It depends who you ask. Some attacks were claimed by terrorist groups. But many of the attacks appeared indiscriminate. Every organization had a stake in pointing their finger somewhere. Anyway, there was very little death, very little destruction. There had been foresight for many of these things since the 1980's. Until–it hit.
Many people called it many different things. Saitei. La Peste. In English it was mostly called it. I…suppose my English-speaking brethren are not always equally inspired.” He tries to smile, but it's forced.

  “It?”

  “Just before leaving, it'd been formally dubbed Vesper Syndrome, after, in a reverse from usual nomenclature, the only case of apparent immunity. A woman named Vesper. It was different. Invisible. No one has managed to isolate it. Without isolating it, we couldn't perform animal tests or simulations. We don't even know how it works, but it seems to attack the haptic system and ruin the ability to interact with Realm.”

  “That's all?”

  “No, it acts like a sort of... neurological autoimmune disorder. It convinces the body to attack itself. By hijacking the haptic system it spontaneously deprives specific arterial pathways of oxygen, leading to tissue degeneration and loss of limbs or worse without immediate medical intervention. Its tendency to strike frequently and randomly in sufferers makes it very difficult to manage without constant medical supervision. I don’t know if I agree, but some speculate Vesper Syndrome is intelligent, that it spread to…synthetic…people in Realm. It was able to simulate its own potential mutations and evolve at a speed unachievable in nature. And it took those lessons into the real world, changing at will. Camouflaging.”

  Lydia watches the white and blue twist lazily beyond–is that all that's left now? Water, wind, and dust?

  She turns. “So is everyone dead?”

  “Shortly before this all began, Emma was contracted to develop MAIA for Blackthorne Aeuronautics, with consultation from Jericho. While a very low-level AI, MAIA has the specific purpose of being an intelligent autopilot for a ship navigating deep space with a crew in stasis for a very long period of time. And interfacing with Realm. This was for scientific purposes, supposedly. There was never more than loose talk, but...”

  “Where did they go?” She hadn't thought of the idea of more beyond this ship–or orbiter, as Keene called it–and Caligatha, and whatever was left of Earth.

  “We're not supposed to think they–anyone–went anywhere. But in the end dignitaries and captains of industry disappeared. There was also talk of underground bunkers amongst the common people, but it's doubtful that would have been feasible long-term. It all depends what you believe.”