by Paul McAuley
After the first swaggering flush of creation, when they had constructed solipsistic kingdoms and squabbled and gone to war with each other, re-enacting universe-spanning crusades out of the fantasies of the long ago, they had settled into a long, staid era of mutual cooperation. They had become conservators of their own legend. They had taken in other simulations, given homes to failed attempts at true artificial intelligence. They had, like many of their kind, dabbled in projects to reach out to alien civilisations, and had created simulations of universes inhabited by all kinds of intelligent species. In one of those, Rubber Duck told Hari, a group of the discorporate claimed to have created a genuine self-aware civilisation and had contacted it and watched it recoil and self-destruct. There was another group who after centuries of research claimed to have solid evidence that the observable universe was also a simulation: that humans had been created by aliens like unto gods. And so on, and so forth.
‘They do like their secrets and their conspiracies. They like to make themselves out to be more than they are. They want to believe that they are the last keepers of the true flame. That they haven’t been left behind. That they are still relevant,’ Rubber Duck said, with uncharacteristic scorn. ‘When all they do, like the posthumans they clearly aren’t, is burrow deeper and deeper into fantasy.’
The discorporate were, he said, the mirror image of posthumans. Posthumans tended to vanish into their own heads while they searched for the ultimate truths that underpinned the observable reality of the universe. The discorporate had vanished inside fantasies in which they were the microcosmic gods of their own creations. And meanwhile, human history flowed on around them both.
The Memory Whole’s only connection with the rest of humanity was through the services they offered. Their techniques were old but entirely reliable, and had been modified to take advantage of new technologies. They traded in various forms of life after death, could implant all kinds of augmentations, provide backup systems and exo-memories, and install secure neural networks. Hari’s father had gone to the Memory Whole when he had decided that his time had come. He had been discorporated and loaded into a corner of Pabuji’s Gift’s shipmind. Later, he had returned and paid to have a neural network installed in his newly decanted son, with a copy of himself woven into its root.
That copy was still there. It had never shown any sign of wakening, but it was impossible to forget its presence. It was like a mortal illness, a shadow always at Hari’s back. He knew that his life could never truly be his own until he had freed himself of his burden.
Rubber Duck did not dock the dropship because there was nowhere to dock. Instead, he matched delta vee with the Memory Whole’s unprepossessing rock, standing off at twenty kilometres as requested.
Earth and the Moon floated far off, small, lonely islands in the black sky.
Presently, a drone flashed out from the battered asteroid, trailing a superconducting monocrystalline tether. After some to and fro regarding compatibility and handshaking protocols, it coupled with one of Rubber Duck’s external interfaces and established a gateway to his fatline. That was how things were done, at the Memory Whole. That was why Hari had to travel to there in person. Connections to the outside were made through clunky old-fashioned hard links controlled by avatars of the Memory Whole crew. There was no point asking to use a qubit loop, a proxy, or even a randomly-modulated, highly-directional laser. The discorporate had survived the vastening of the seraphs, the True Empire, the humbling of Earth during the Long Twilight, and much else. They were paranoid about being hacked, invaded, turned; the boundary of their utopia bristled with security protocols and lethal traps.
Hari linked the fatline to his bios and settled in a hammock and composed himself for a long series of tests and checks. At last he was given the all-clear, and in an eyeblink found himself in an avatar that mirrored his own body and was dressed in antique clothing: bib coveralls of stiff scratchy blue cloth, and some kind of wide-brimmed hat that was, he discovered when he took it off, woven from straw. All alone on a log raft riding a red river of molten sulphur.
It was a viron that replicated a section of Jupiter’s moon Io with scrupulous fidelity. The lava river, fed by tributaries that pulsed down the slopes of a volcanic cone at the eastern horizon, was more than a kilometre wide, channelled between pillowy dykes. The rugged landscape beyond was patchworked in shades of red and yellow, orange and brown. Fallout deposits, fumarolic materials, remnants of local flows. The sky was hazed with a smog of frozen sulphur dioxide. Jupiter’s huge crescent tilted in the west, and the fat star of one of the other Galilean moons hung beyond its bright limb.
The air shimmered at the other end of the raft, coalesced into a roughly man-shaped robot clad in silvery skin that reflected the molten river and the raft and Hari’s avatar. The tiller of a steering paddle was tucked under one of its accordion arms. Its head was a glass turret in which a man’s face floated. Pale skin, sleepy eyes, a neat black beard parting in a smile.
‘Welcome to my favourite moon. Always changing, always the same.’
‘It seems very real,’ Hari said politely.
‘A trivial exercise from my youth, but it makes a handy sandbox. You never know what people may bring with them from the outside. If you try to run some sneaky app or demon you’ll find out what I mean.’
The robot gestured with its free arm, a curious looping snakelike motion. A plume of smoky gases spurted from the volcanic cone. A moment later, fat ripples coursed down the river’s sluggish flow. The raft bucked and slewed; Hari danced on the spot, waving his arms to keep his balance. All around, a faint sulphur dioxide snow began to fall, flurries of gritty white flakes blurring the landscape, flashing into vapour as they kissed the molten currents of the river.
‘I am as a god here,’ the robot said. ‘And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.’
The face’s lips didn’t move when the robot spoke. It gazed out at Hari with a kind of abstracted serenity.
Hari said, ‘I am happy to abide by your rules. My father had an agreement with you. I know you are an honourable people—’
‘You want to invoke the guarantee. Before we get into that, I’d like to know how the client in question failed.’
‘It was not caused by any fault in your work. My family’s ship was attacked. Its systems were compromised. My father and his viron were destroyed. I am carrying his backup in my neural net.’
‘I designed that backup, you know. Also its security, which I notice is missing.’
‘It became . . . troublesome,’ Hari said.
‘You’re undergoing one of your active periods out there, aren’t you? The so-called Bright Moment has stirred things up. It spawned all kinds of prophets, each believing themselves to possess the only true key to its enigma. And there was a faction of Belters who were trying to unriddle it using what used to be called the scientific method – your father was involved in that, and so were you. See, we aren’t as out of touch as you think we are. We keep an eye on developments. Mostly, it’s a steady decline into barbarism, but every now and then there’s a blip, a vexatious agitation, and we have to take measures to make sure we aren’t affected. So there’s a little more to your visit than honouring a contract. It could involve us in something we don’t want to be involved in,’ the robot said. ‘That’s why the service isn’t free. That‘s why I require something in return.’
‘But you will honour the guarantee,’ Hari said.
‘First, you’re going to tell me exactly how the original was destroyed. Take your time. This river is fresh and hot. It runs on for several hundred klicks before it finally cools and hardens. And anyway, time as you understand it isn’t a consideration. Every second that passes in your universe is a second lost for ever, and they pass at a steady rate. Here, in my universe, I control the rate at which time passes. You can spend an hour on your story, and when you are done we will still be in the same place. So speak out, kid. Tell me everything you know.’
Wh
at harm could it do to tell his story one more time? Hari started from the beginning, when he’d discovered that he’d been locked in the storage bay, moving from one incident to the next as if crossing a river on stepping stones. The escape from Pabuji’s Gift with Dr Gagarian’s head. Waking to find himself marooned on the rock. His escape from the two cloned assassins, his shipwreck on Vesta, and so on, and so on.
The face in the robot’s glass turret watched him as he spoke, its expression carefully neutral. The particoloured landscape slid by on either side of the lava river. Ever-changing. Ever the same.
When Hari was finished, the robot said, ‘It reminds me of an old joke. What do you get when you play a country-and-western song backwards?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You came here to fix the story of your life. Trouble is, it wasn’t much of a story to begin with.’
‘It is the only one I have.’
‘Did your father crack the meaning of the Bright Moment? Him and this Dr Gagarian?’
‘I don’t think so. But they might have made a good beginning.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t matter. Aside from the people who wanted to kidnap or kill you, no one else seems to have any interest in it. It isn’t your fault, kid. Not many people want to do any heavy lifting any more. This is an age of superstition and wishful thinking. The sky is full of evening’s empires, and every one of them is founded on sand.’
‘I can’t help what other people think,’ Hari said. ‘You’ve heard my story. It’s as truthful as I could make it. Perhaps it isn’t as exciting as you hoped, and has little in the way of revelation or resolution, but it’s all I have.’
‘Your wife comes back, your dog’s alive again, and your pickup truck hasn’t broken down,’ the robot said. ‘That’s what happens when you play a country-and-western song backwards. You hope that the backup copy of your father might know something. Something that might unriddle the Bright Moment, maybe. Or something that will give shape and meaning to what happened to you. That will restore order. Fix your broken life. I hate to disappoint you, but life usually isn’t that simple.’
‘When Dr Gagarian came aboard, my father made me his assistant,’ Hari said. ‘Dr Gagarian designed experiments, my father sourced the hardware he needed, I helped to construct the probes and bits and pieces of experimental apparatus. Dr Gagarian didn’t tell me what he was doing, or what he found, or what it meant, and I didn’t ask. He discussed his work with my father, and my father tried to explain it to me, but I wasn’t a diligent pupil. Oh, I truly believed that the work would change everything, but only because I believed everything my father told me. I never questioned it. I never asked what he really wanted from me. Perhaps the copy of my father that’s cached inside my neural net can help me understand what I was caught up in. Perhaps not. Perhaps I won’t ever be free of him, his influence. But I can’t even try to begin to escape my past while he’s still inside my head, and that’s why I’m here. I want to get him out of my head. And I want to talk to him, one last time.’
‘The past is always with us,’ the robot said. ‘It’s where we came from. It’s what we make, day by day. We leave it behind, but we can’t escape it. All we can do is come to terms with it.’
It made the curious looping gesture with its arm again, indicating the lava river and the dykes of congealed sulphur along its edge, the riven landscape beyond, Jupiter’s swollen, candy-striped crescent above.
‘You might think that this sandbox is like a dream. A harmless hallucination from which you can wake at any time, and take up your life as if nothing had happened. The question is, can dreams change dreamers?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hari said. ‘Perhaps – if it is the right dream, at the right time.’
‘You told me the story of how you got here. Let me tell you a story in return, about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew, in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were often represented in popular fiction about the future, although the one into which I walked, in my dream, was far more detailed than any of those make-believe cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with rows of windows. Some cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. All shining white and clean in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters, and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone. Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only gardens of raked gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No trees, no growing things of any kind, no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank canvases, and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.
‘In many dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would have been dressed in waking life, which to them must have seemed as strange as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway.
‘The people of the city all seemed to be members of the same family. They had light brown skin and black hair cut in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in combinations of pastel colours. In my day, birds nested on ledges of buildings, as if on cliffs, and people kept certain species of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. And no children. Only men and women of varying ages. There were a great number of them, but the walkways and monorail cars were not crowded because the city was so large.
‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western sides, at the foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), a man came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and said that this was his present, but not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, one day in the waking world, but there were other paths I might take instead.’
The robot paused, then said, ‘Some philosophers claim that we are composites of multiple personalities, of agents. They share a common substrate of memory and traits, these agents, but are discrete entities, each knowing certain things that are forever hidden from all the others. If that’s the case, then the people we meet only in dreams are part of us, yet not part of us. We do not find it difficult to believe that such a stranger would know things we do not. So it is in dreams, where we sometimes meet people who reveal to us new truths, or reveal to us that things we have always believed to be true are in fact false.
‘The man who greeted me in that white city of the future was one such. He was tall, in his middle years, and strongly built. And he was confident, easily carrying the power he had been lent by his fellow citizens. The power he represented. His black hair was cut level with his eyes and shaved high around his ears and at the back of his neck, so that it resembled a cap tilted forward. His gaze I remember still. It was friendly, but it looked right through me. He told me that he was one of the citizens who had been chosen by lottery to protect the city. I asked him what he protected it from, and he looked at me gravely and said that he protected it from people like me. People who thought differently. Visitors from the outside. And then he laughed, and said that his job was easy because people like me were solitons, while the citizens all
shared their thoughts, united and indivisible.’
Hari said, ‘Did they possess a common bios?’
‘I did not ask how they shared their thoughts. When monsters appear in dreams, you are as terrified as you would be in what is commonly called real life, but you don’t ask why they have appeared or where they come from, or what they eat when they aren’t chasing dreamers.’
‘Because you know it is a dream. And you knew this story you’re telling me was a dream.’
‘Just so. I accepted that they shared their thoughts, but I did not ask how it was done. Later, I realised that it was a city of communists. That its citizens were in fact the ultimate expression of communism. All were equal. All shared all. Were they happy? I suppose they were, but only because they did not know any better. Their protectors kept them safe from thoughts that would contaminate their unthinking purity. I also realised that they had no ambitions, no drive to better themselves. Theirs was a way of life that was changeless, because change would destroy it. It was a city of the eternal present. A city of the eternal now, where every day was day zero.’
Hari said, ‘There are clades of posthumans who share their thoughts and memories. But I do not think they are anything like the people in your dream city.’
The robot said, ‘But they may be the first step on an evolutionary path that will lead to such cities, such citizens. Despite all we have done to try to avoid that future, it may yet come about.’
‘You take this dream very seriously.’
‘It was eighteen hundred years ago, and I have not dreamed a dream like it since. But I still remember every detail because it changed my life. I have not yet told you how it ended. Sometimes, when you meet strong and unique people in a dream, you wake up. As if they are gatekeepers who have the power to prevent you from travelling deeper into the dream. You may have met such people in your own dreams.’