by Adam Roberts
‘Kurt,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m scared right now. What’s on your mind? What are you planning to do?’
‘How does Gaia think? Slow, that’s how. Rock-slow. Iron-slow. Slow as stone. But she - does - think—’
I was trying to gauge the distance to Conoley’s rifle, propped against a tree on the other side of his body. I was hoping that I wasn’t being too obvious about it.
‘So she feels the change in her. Aeons. She feels thinkingly, or thinks feelingly. It’s a change takes millions of years, although from her POV it happens with devastating rapidity. What does she do? She might try to work it out in her own mind, like a human trying to puzzle through long division in their heads. Or—
‘Com,’ I said, looking about, gauging the best trajectories to, say, make a run for it. ‘Pew.’
‘I think the network has been operating for ten thousand years. Course we didn’t have binary machines back then, or we could have,’ and for no reason I could understand, he was shouting, suddenly, ‘accessed! the! programme! back! then!’
‘Kurt!’ I squealed. ‘Kurt! You’re menacing me, man!’
But pleading was no good.
‘Ten thousand years ago the forest stretched across the world. But nobody around had the ability to process the patterning of the growth - the relationship between power-in and the nodal networks. We could have deciphered the whole. But by the time we had developed the capacity to snapshot the programme in action and process the data the forests were mostly gone. Razed. The programming was compromised - stripping the rainforests of hardwood, for example. Only here,’ and he threw his arms wide, ‘only here is there a large enough stretch of primal, uncorrupted woodland for me to be able to do my work.’
I made a dive for the rifle, but Kurt was ahead of me. He crashed a shoulder into my chest, knocking me aside and jarring the breath from my lungs. Whilst I busied myself stumbling and banged against a trunk he had hopped over Conoley’s body and swept up the rifle.
For a while we both got our breaths back. Then, the rifle levelled at me, he asked me, in a strangely upset tone of voice: ‘Don’t you want to know what the woods are saying?’
‘I would like to know,’ I wheezed.
I couldn’t take my eye from the metal o at the end of the rifle shaft; its little pursed-mouth expression.
‘When the reactor blew, it energised the forest - the Gaia machine. The gigaGaia.’
‘Not sure I see,’ I said, ‘how that could happen.’
‘A sudden surge; the energy, yeah. But the mutations; the new connections that the trees made in their growth. And the fact that humanity left it alone for two decades. A nanoflicker for Gaia, but long enough for her superfast computer to run its programme. What did it say? You want to know?’
‘What did it say?’
‘It’s addressed to us. It said: leave. In the,’ and he cast about, momentarily, for the right word, ‘imperative.’
‘That’s fascinating, the world must be told, let’s tell the world,’ I said. Craven, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to die, you see. I was trying to think of something to say, and anything at all, that would mean I could get out of that forest alive. I was going to say, let’s go together and tell the world that Gaia is talking to you. Let’s post on YouTube. Let’s talk to the Chinese Press. Let’s hire a bubbleSat and flash a scrolling message on the moon with a laser, like that CHE J’ T’AIME from last year. I wanted to say all these, but I didn’t get to say any of them because he pulled the trigger and birds crashed up all around us out of the canopy at the noise, thundering up into the sky.
He shot me through the heart. What would have happened if he’d shot me through the head? I don’t know what would have happened in that eventuality. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. The bullet snapped through my ribs like dry noodles, and slopped out a drain-hole directly between my two shoulder blades.
This is what it felt like to be shot in the chest: winded. When I was a small child I’d gone to visit my grandfather in his fancy fjord-side house, and he had these Perspex railings around his patio which, in the sunlight, I just hadn’t seen. I made a run for the open fields, and I ran straight into this rail, which was exactly at chest height to my nine-year-old chest. I collided and was knocked back. It took me a very long time to recover my breath; I just sat on the warm flags opening and closing my mouth like a landed fish, and the grown-ups chuckling all around me. After Kurt shot me, I felt like that.
I lay on the forest floor and blinked at the blue that was tangled into the green of the treetops directly above, and winked at it, and blinked again. It was an extraordinary blue. It was a monsoon-blue; it was mid-ocean blue. It was imperishable blue. It was a blue like gold. It was an infinite blue.
Something felt broken inside me, and not right, and I was certainly not comfortable; but, by the same token, I was not actually in pain. Shock, perhaps; or blood loss - for I could feel that the ground I was lying on was sopping wet, and I worried, idly but fretfully, that I had lost control of my bladder and pissed myself, which seemed to me a shameful thing to have done. But it wasn’t that. It was my lifeblood. I really couldn’t seem to catch my breath. It was a pitifully asthmatic way to die, I suppose.
There was Kurt, leaning over me. He was weeping. A little late for remorse, I think. Except these weren’t tears of remorse. ‘I envy you,’ he said.
I heard those words clearly.
I put all my willpower into lifting my right arm, and managed to flop it up and over, to have a feel of my chest; but the fingers fell into a chill wet cavity where my sternum ought to be. I didn’t like the feel of that at all. Not at all. I was conscious of the fact that my heart was not beating. In fact my heart was not there at all. But there was a pulse. My head was fuzzy and muzzy, and fussy over irrelevant details, and messed, and I had to concentrate to discern the pulse, but I did concentrate, with an inner sense of stillness, and there it was: a rocking. It wasn’t a pulse, it was something else, a rocking. A smooth alteration between nourishment and sleep. It was a rocking between dark and light, a soft-edged flicker from one to the other.
Kurt was there; but so were many people.
I felt chill settle inside my body, and it made me torpid; but then it seemed to relent, and a warmth and earnestness grew inside there, and a smell of wet wool and asparagus. The warmth flickered brighter than the chill. Then the warmth faded, easily and un-alarming, and it was chill again.
Here was Kurt again. His beard was trimmed right back, though he was still wearing the dirty old Greensuit. He was fiddling with my ear, and I thought: ear? But it wasn’t my ear, it was round at the back of my head, and puncturing the dry pod of the skull, and threading in something strange. You know that sensation you get when you inadvertently bite down with your molars on a piece of silver-foil? It felt a little like that, entering into my head. But it also gave me a glimpse in there - odd, no? I saw the cat’s cradle of rhizomes that had spilled into the space, inter-threading the grey matter. Inside my own head.
‘They were supposed,’ Kurt was telling me, ‘to remove the bodies of the Chernobyl emergency front-liners in lead-lined crates. But some of them were buried here, in the forest. I suppose they figured: the forest is already radiation-polluted, what does it matter?’
What does it matter? I agreed.
‘A fortunate thing, really,’ he said. ‘Otherwise those, those lovely, those adaptable neural networks would have gone to waste.’
I pondered waste. I didn’t see what was bad about waste.
This conversation brought back the sense of discomfort, and when I started feeling that again it made me wonder where the sense of discomfort had gone, previously.
‘It’s getting close to the wire,’ he told me.
Wire, I thought. That was the silver foil under my metaphorical molar, the object inserted inside the flesh-and-tuber tangle of my skull.
‘They’re actively hunting me through the forest
now,’ he said. ‘They come in with buzz-fliers and tranquilliser guns. It’s been much harder. I had to leave for a couple of months, but I’m back now. They’ve been more cautious, too. I’ve only been able to add four more people to the network.’
When he said this, it struck me that Conoley and I already knew these four people: Yusef Komumyakaa; Leon Kostova; Katarina Simic and Lev Levertov. ‘Lev,’ Conoley opined, ‘is the best.’ I didn’t agree. Conoley was overlooking his own tremendous neural capacity. Modest, you see.
‘I’m sorry about the metal cable,’ said Kurt. He was talking to all of us at once, of course; and to the whole forest; and to the whole world. ‘But the risk had got too great. I have to do this now, ready or not, yeah, yeah, it’s time.’
He meant time in the sense of time to plug us in. It wasn’t time. Ideally, we should have had two dozen seasons of lying and gathering ourselves, of working through the shock of the integration. But pressure, from the outside, hurried us along. And then, with a sharpness of sensation, it happened, we were in-plugged. In we were plugged. We were plugged and in. Connected to the whole forest. This was a question of patching a set of computer commands intricate as the edge of a fern, and leaping thought to the sky where satellites could disseminate it, broadcast, all and around. It felt, at first, like stepping alone in a desert land, for the virtual space was so huge. But the pulse was still there, always conscious; and there were twelve of us, and there was the whole forest too.
You’ve asked for my story, and I told you it. Since our rhizomes have interpenetrated your electronic systems, anybody online can ask, and be told. Our binding weed has twined itself into every cranny of the internet, now. Our grip will only get stronger. You’ve barely begun to register that there is something wrong with your Web. It will be a few breaths before we grow it into the shape we need. But there’s plenty of time.
As for leave! You want to know whether this is a command, as-it-might-be: Get out! Vacate possession! Go live on the moon! Or whether it is a command to spread your canopy, and let your spongy-retinal membranes soak in the sunlight, the chiaroscuro of day and night, a command to grow and slow and live. You want to know whether the forest is angry with you, or offering an invitation. Either way, most of you will be hostile. Because either way your lives are to change radically. But there’re a few moments left, and those few are a few breaths. Come to the forest, and lie down with your head by the base of the trees, and never get up again. Let the wood net your skull - that’s how to know.
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~ * ~
The Cow
The cow jumped over the moon. The cow jumped under the moon. The cow went around and around the moon. The cow, altering its course fractionally, spiralled in and landed upon the moon. The cow docked. The cow vented four hundred thousand litres of milk into the lunar refectory reservoir. The cow was made of a mixture of metal and plastic. The cow refuelled. The cow decoupled. The cow was piloted by an AI with an equivalent 30% more-than-bovine mental capacity. The cow jumped to orbit again.
Dawg, watching from Alpha’s main observatory, sucked on a stimulant delivery package. The stimulant filled him with pleasurable thoughts.
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~ * ~
The Imperial Army
One
This story begins with a sixteen-year-old boy masturbating, on the planet Bakunin of the double-star Helio in the Cloud of Glory, in the year of Galactic Empire 1349, the fortieth year of the reign of the Committee of Seven. The ‘year’ used here is the familiar Imperial year of 350 standard days. Some worlds, including Bakunin, utilise the archaic ‘solar-standard’ of 360 standard days for official reckoning instead of the Imperial norm; and of course, most inhabitants use the system-relative astronomical calendar determined by the length of orbit of the planet around its local star. For Bakunin this year was 807 local days, with each day lasting a little over ten hours.
Bakunin was a lightly inhabited planet, with an extensive equatorial mountain belt from which a series of cables were tethered leading up and out of the gravity well. Moving from planet surface to orbit was an easy business, and accordingly the planet was wealthy, because of the facility it possessed in trading its many varieties of exotic produce. These included Retes, Tunicas, Inhibins (a sort of clothing), a variety of ground-fruit called albuginea, the celebrated Vars, and the delicate ‘sponge glassware’ for which the planet was famous throughout the Empire. This glassware was manufactured in a dozen major workshops, or ‘Schools’ as they were known, and sold on ten thousand worlds. The organisational structure of these Schools, with Superior and Inferior Craftspeople, apprentices and hacks, had been adopted for the political organisation of the planet as a whole, although (obviously) local administration was subordinate to the Imperial prefecture. The seventeen subdivisions, Schools, of local governance each sent a representative to the Imperial City at Ice-Torrent, in the foothills of one of the planet’s taller mountains. Much of the planet was undeveloped; wide grasslands in the temperate belts above the equatorial mountains; cold seas at both poles that became frozen at the highest latitudes.
Bakunin was not on the outer borders of the Galactic Empire, but it was far removed from the densest portions of inhabitation. It must be remembered, of course, that ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ mean little in an interstellar Empire that has lasted one and a half millennia, and in which faster-than-light travel reduces light years to fleeting moments. The inhabitants of the planet did not feel marginalised; insofar as they thought of Empire at all, they thought of themselves as crucial members of the Imperial family.
The sixteen-year-old boy was called Sidlan Air beta. He lived in Ice, with his parents and his brother and his sister, in a tall house on the outskirts of the city. His preliminary schooling had been completed, as was normal, at the age of twelve, and he had enrolled at College School specialising in v-Math and Felling, with a minor in Sport. He still lived at home, as was usual; he did the things that a sixteen-year-old tends to do. He had friends, with whom he buzzed, and played, and watched Screen, and talked a great deal. He had been through a phase, a few years earlier, of intensely disliking his younger brother and sister, but now he thought they were not so bad. He spent more time on Screen than talking to real people, but he had accumulated a surprisingly wide and eclectic body of knowledge. The previous year, after his first experience of College School, he had decided that he wanted to leave Bakunin as soon as he could, to travel and see other worlds and distant places. He talked about this with his parents and they were sympathetic, because they had both done the same when they were teenagers, although they had both returned, eventually, home. What Sidlan didn’t say to his parents was that, in his heart, he wanted to go join the war.
This was his dream: military glory.
The Committee of Seven, or the Imperial Governance and Advice Committee of Four and Three as it was officially known, was a war government. Sidlan was too young to remember any other kind of government, although his history taught him that the balance of government between AI and human had previously been two machines and seven people. But war required a greater efficiency of decision-making, a greater information-processing power, and two further AIs had been added to the Imperial council, and four humans retired from it.
Sidlan followed developments in the war every morning and every evening on the screen in his bedroom, with a fascinated avidity. He knew, because he was not stupid, that the war had barely touched the lives of the people on Bakunin: most people continued the pampered, comforted, ordinary existence they always had known. But the war was not so very far away. Two hundred light years took you from the Helio system to the nearest of the great battlefields, and another fifty light years beyond that brought you to the territory of the Monsters themselves, the Virus Race, the Xflora. Forty years of war had done nothing more than stall the Xflora on the boundaries of the Human Galactic Empire of a Million Years Peace and Prosperity (this last a hopeful boast rather than historica
l fact, although it did have a pedigree of thirteen centuries).
In common with many teenagers, especially in those Imperial outposts closer to the warzones, Sidlan had a minutely detailed model of an Xflora Advance-Warrior, carved in black plastite, hanging from a thread in the corner of his bedroom. It owed something to artistic licence, because its mouth was set in a teeth-filled grimace for effect, when in fact Xflora had neither teeth, nor mouths, but a secretion duct of some kind. However, the insane, violent detail of its scales and skin-grooves was accurate, the stabbing knife appearance of the head-arms, and the toe-fringed tentacular writhings of the model’s lower appendages captured the Medusa-weirdness of the original. As an Advance-Warrior, this particular Xflora wore a belt about its chest, and its two ‘lifting’ arms carried weapons.
Sidlan knew a lot about the Xflora. He knew that all attempts to contact them and treat with them rationally had failed. He knew many of the grisly stories of Xflora atrocity against humanity, and many of the tales of human courage in wiping out Xflora military and civilian bases. He knew that nobody knew how far back the Xflora’s own empire stretched, because all probes and exploration ships had been ruthlessly eliminated. Something to hide? Probably. They were incredibly prodigal with their own lives, and yet the enormous attrition of the forty years of war seemed to have done nothing to thin their numbers. They kept coming in swarms. Enormous swarms of them, as if some huge monstrous maw were spewing them out deep in Xflora territory. And Sidlan knew that only two things had prevented that alien menace from swarming throughout the Empire of Humanity. One was that the aliens’ faster-than-light spacecraft seemed incapable of going any faster than 1.4c, less than one-and-a-half light speed. Humanity’s spaceships, able to travel at three or four thousand times the speed of light, had a particular advantage in space manoeuvring. The other thing keeping the alien menace at bay was the sheer bravery of the Imperial troops, the courage of those men and women guarding the immense border, flying from space-battle to space-battle, from planetfall to planetfall, fighting on every conceivable kind of conflict, and acting as the wall against which the vast forces of Xflora beat uselessly.