Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  “Goodbye, Maya the Mariner,” Clara shouts against the crashing waves.

  Thank you for remembering my name, I think.

  I need to go farther before the ocean can take me. Finally, I’m carried away. The currents crush me against the reef. I can feel the other corals there waiting for me to take my place as my body breaks apart like a shipwreck.

  What will become of me? I must be something new. Singular, a first for this strange alien rock. A first time for everything, I think. All things must die a little bit to birth something new. A first time for having a child. For losing a child. For being a we, an I. For finding a soul. A first time for me. A first time for dying, or perhaps for becoming someone.

  Hello, Maya Sankovy, a voice whispers in my head.

  Welcome, Maya the Mariner, the corals speak gently, but with the force of nature underneath. It’s Beebee’s voice, but also the planet’s calling.

  I’ll be part of you and still be me, I answer without lips.

  We and I can coexist. Maya Sankovy continues.

  Yes, Beebee says and, if I could, I would smile a sad but happy smile.

  Yes, the planet whispers through its corals as they rejoice at my arrival.

  And Yes, Mama, my daughter says, calling me home.

  About the Author

  G. D. Angier is a bookseller by day and a writer by night. She lives with her dog and her ferret near Berlin. This is her first publication. “What Remains of Maya Sankovy” takes place in the same universe as the novel she is currently working on. For updates follow her on twitter @GenAngier.

  Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City

  Arula Ratnakar

  I remember being born. I remember the sensory overload of light and sound and scent, making me cry aloud and take fresh air into my lungs—a new sensation. I remember the weight of gravity, rendering my fragile limbs helpless and clumsy where they had been graceful and nimble in amniotic fluid. Then I remember Mother, holding me, and GrandMother, watching us.

  A

  They were all hard at work, preparing for the long sleep. The sunlight-scattering sulfate aerosol constantly injected into the atmosphere since the time of the Geoengineering Generation had not been enough, providing little more than periodic acid rainfalls and a red-tinted sky. Temperatures were soon to become uninhabitable, and there was nowhere left to evacuate to.

  So the city had decided to sleep, or rather, temporarily disconnect their consciousnesses from their subconsciousnesses, and lend their brain motor circuitry to pods—spheroidal vessels that would hold their frozen bodies and tend to the sick lands with robotic appendages—until the time came for the city to wake once again, this time in a world of greenery.

  The chief biochemist of the endeavor was an old woman from the Geoengineering Generation, named Karisma. She had found a way to preserve and selectively freeze parts of the human body and mind for eternity, if needed, pumping tissues full of various concentrations of urea and glucose and a cocktail of other cryoprotectants.

  The lead brain simulation scientist was even older than Karisma—an ancient, uploaded man from the very first Wave of Uploads, named Emil. Committed to staying and saving the Earth instead of leaving it, he had designed a way to temporarily and noninvasively transfer the city dwellers’ consciousnesses to the pod walls. During the sleep, the biological brains’ processing abilities were to be reduced to bare minimum visual, auditory, and olfactory feeds and motor circuitry, to direct the pods as they restored the land, while the rest of the tissue froze. But the city dwellers’ consciousnesses would experience something very different. That’s what they designed you for.

  Your own consciousness was built into a large transparent dome around a climate-controlled abundance of flowers, plants, trees, and seeds—the garden from which the pods would slowly restore the lands around you. Your thoughts, emotions, instincts . . . they were highly abstract and near impossible for anyone but Emil, your creator and the person to whom your mind was directly linked, to even partially decipher. To the rest of the world, your entirety appeared as swirling, colorful patterns that danced across the dome, creating an effect quite like the iridescent film on soap bubbles as they creep closer and closer to their bursting points.

  Your job was to create Inserts. Simulated worlds and simulated progressions of lives, for each and every one of the city dwellers, from the most elderly un-uploaded inhabitants to the newborns, that would exist for only the sleep, looping after completion for as long as they would be needed, and dissipate like a dream upon reawakening. Babies’ consciousnesses would grow up, surrounded by a simulated family, into adulthood—live out entire lifetimes with simulated love and simulated education and simulated ambitions, as their tiny bodies were preserved in the pods, waiting for them to return. Children between the ages of five and fifteen, for the most part, were given the same as the babies—family, resources, education . . . though they also had a choice to appeal to a board of ethicists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, pediatricians, architects, computer scientists, and a small self-selected group of other children, and request the same opportunity the older teenagers and adults were given. To design the foundations of their own simulations and live those out instead.

  Most adults had similar desires. Fulfilling their personal goals, holding powerful positions, seeking revenge, finding peace in idyllic settings and calming hobbies, satiating their darkest impulses and fantasies, feeling or keeping love, experiencing the nothingness of death, or learning and advancing a field of study were common ones. But the desires you found the most interesting were seeded from regret, guilt, or curiosity. The ones where the people wanted to know what their lives would have been like, if they had only decided a single thing differently.

  You were still very young, then. There was a lot to learn and years ahead still, before you would be ready to transmit the simulations to the pods. Often in your youth, you would spend time watching children and their parents as they strolled through the garden and wonder if you were a child too. If you were, then you thought Emil must be your parent. But he didn’t treat you like his child, he treated you more like an . . . acquaintance, or a colleague, or not even quite those. He treated you with respect, acknowledged your consciousness. But he did not love you. This made you sad, and Emil could sense your sadness, but he reacted with curiosity and intrigue, where you wanted him to feel guilt.

  The other children did not want to play with you either—or rather, they did not know that you wanted to play with them. They could not tell what you were feeling, what you were thinking. They knew you as a fascinating entity that they should treat with respect, but they did not consider you one of them. And you could not run and play with them either, only dance your swirling, colorful thoughts across the dome. But all of this changed as soon as you met Eesha.

  Eesha was Karisma’s granddaughter, and she was the same age as you—seven years old. Her mother Tara was a well renowned embryologist. Tara had left the city and Eesha, suddenly and without any warning, so Eesha started to live with Karisma after that, and consequently began to spend a lot of time inside the garden and the dome around it that contained your mind.

  Other children would marvel at the iridescence of your consciousness for some time, then they would soon become bored when the novelty of the phenomenon wore off. But Eesha would stay in the garden during all of her free moments, watching you, until someone else or something else interrupted her. She named you Opal, because you reminded her of a gemstone in a necklace that Tara had given her a long time ago—a necklace Eesha never took off. When Emil was with her, she would ask him to translate your thoughts. “What is Opal thinking about? What is Opal feeling?”

  It took him some effort—he couldn’t fully understand your consciousness despite having created it—but often, when he replied to her, he got it right, and he would tell her, “Opal is thinking about . . . you. And feels . . . seen.” Then Eesha would go quiet and smile.

  One summer dusk, when diurnal frogs and ins
ects began to come out of hiding in the garden, Eesha was catching beetles. Karisma told her that she was allowed to catch only one of each beetle species, and that she would show Eesha how to dissect them the following day. When the last of the garden visitors and scientists had left the dome, and Eesha was the only one left, she stopped catching beetles and set the jars down in the grass. You saw that the firefly she caught in one of the jars was flashing and trying to escape.

  She walked up to the walls of the dome and began to trace the patterns of your thoughts with her eyes. You must have reacted, because she smiled and rested her palm against the dome before saying the first words she would ever speak to you directly.

  “You’re like me, Opal. We are the same. You’re beautiful. And I feel seen by you, too.”

  S

  Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

  “Why are you so nice to me, Emil?” she asked him once. “You aren’t as nice to other people. Karisma doesn’t think you are good.”

  This made him laugh, but then he fell into a contemplative silence before replying to her. “It’s a bit more nuanced, Eesha. Karisma and I do respect each other, and I think she’s amazing—I even collaborated with her mother on brain simulation designs a long time ago, during the first Wave of Uploads, and Karisma knows her mother would not have collaborated with bad people. But we have very different opinions on how brains should work, which can make us argue. As for why I’m nicer to you . . . A very, very long time ago, I had a daughter. She died when she was a bit younger than you, from an allergic reaction. And I suppose you remind me of her. Spending time with you takes away some of that pain that has lasted over a century now.”

  Eesha frowned. “Allergies don’t exist anymore. I don’t have any.”

  He smiled sadly. “That’s right. This was almost two hundred years ago. We’ve achieved a lot since then.” He looked out the transparent dome, at the arid land outside and the few people wearing full heat-protecting gear and air-filtration masks dashing from one city shelter to the next to avoid prolonged exposure. “And we’ve done a lot of damage too, which ended up rendering several of those technological advancements useless. So much of the world is unrecognizable now compared to when I was young, with these small, scattered, isolated city-states, and a drastically depleted global population and inhospitable atmospheres. These kinds of long sleeps might be our last hope for survival, as a species, in our biological forms.”

  As you watched and listened, you noticed Karisma quietly walk into the dome, unnoticed by Eesha and Emil.

  Eesha continued. “The Diastereoms can’t sleep, can they, Emil? Did you design the simulations like that on purpose? What will happen to them?”

  “Yes . . . their brain circuitry is very different, Eesha, and I don’t understand it. I couldn’t have fit them into the simulations or isolated their motor systems if I tried. But this city doesn’t have many Diastereoms, anyway. The ones who live here will evacuate when we sleep and move to a different city.”

  Emil had told you about the Diastereoms. The city-states seemed to be set up such that a city either consisted of mostly non-manipulated biological humans, or mostly Diastereoms, but was never equal in population. From what Emil had told you, the Diastereom population had started after various methods of brain simulation had progressed.

  It was established that brain simulations really didn’t need the dimensionality of nearly one hundred trillion synapses to upload someone’s consciousness. Thinking of the brain as a set of interconnected systems, which each work in specific ways, reduced the dimensionality drastically. Entire neural ensembles and population level activity could be modeled instead, for those systems that depended more on average firing rate and didn’t have spatially localized neurons, for example, specific parts of the motor and learning systems. And the uploads, once transferred into these electronic, reduced-dimensionality frameworks, seemed to function exactly like they did when they were biological humans.

  Controversy intensified, however, when a group of scientists decided to secretly perform surgeries and genetic changes that would alter the dimensionality of their own, biological brains, but more importantly, the brains of their future children, to reflect those upload systems and see whether there was any noticeable difference in biological function. This involved intensive surgeries replacing a significant portion of their brain circuitry with electronic systems—systems that were usually reserved for only those with brain damage and were never studied in children under the age of ten, especially not infants.

  When those scientists had children, with each other, of their own, because of the genetic changes they had induced in themselves, those offspring also needed to have the reduced-dimensionality electronic brain circuits implanted bit by bit during their embryonic and fetal development stages, in external incubation chambers. The electronic implants were designed to be malleable and change shape to accommodate the true neurons around them, which were all part of circuits that relied on individual synaptic activity. But the implants were only taking in singular inputs and releasing singular outputs instead of the countless inputs and outputs biological synapses used within the same circuitry in non-manipulated brains—the implants were representing what average firing rate would look like in biological neural ensembles. This new generation of children was the beginning of the Diastereoms.

  Back then, people were already watching and waiting with bated breath for something to go wrong with the children—for there to be some sort of fatal flaw that showed that we really do need all trillions and trillions of synapses to function, especially as children with their pruning and strengthening and constantly changing neural networks, to be us. But if there was any difference, it went unnoticed, and the children eventually became adults and had children of their own. Still, both non-manipulated humans—“Originals”—and Diastereoms agreed: the two populations should not risk procreating with each other.

  The watching and waiting and ban on inter-procreation between Originals and Diastereoms only intensified as the Diastereoms began to create their own intricate, meticulous cultures of brain circuit manipulation and creation.

  They invented advanced new technologies tailored for their unique minds and made the electronic implants safer and safer for their embryos and fetuses. They played around with dimensionalities of different circuits, making some dependent on individual patterns of synapses where they had once been dependent on neuron population activity, and vice versa. They created and implemented entirely new circuits as well, adding new levels of perception and emotion to the default state the Originals had. Soon enough, their ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving were nearly incomprehensible to the Originals—even though the Diastereoms continued to communicate with Originals in the same ways so as to not entirely isolate the two populations of humans from each other.

  Emil was very wary of the Diastereoms. Several people from his generation had the opinion that it was risky to deviate from the way brain circuitry was connected in the Originals, and nearly everyone from his generation agreed that changing the dimensionality of the brain during embryonic development was incredibly risky and unethical. But even though that was a very, very long time ago, with ancient, invasive, dangerous brain simulation technologies that had become mostly obsolete, it seemed like Emil’s opinions had not changed as the centuries passed.

  You tuned back into the conversation. Eesha was frowning and holding onto the opal on her necklace. You knew she only did this when she was thinking about her mother, the embryologist Tara.

  “Is it true, what everyo
ne says? That she left the city with a Diastereom?”

  Emil sighed. “Yes, it’s true. Your mother was . . . confused, Eesha. She—”

  Karisma chose that moment to step in. “Stop right there. Stop it, Emil. I will not have you start spouting your nonsense to my granddaughter.” She kneeled next to Eesha. “I was hoping to tell you differently. Tara . . . fell in love, Eesha. With a Diastereom—their name was Bosch, and they were an embryologist too, like your mother, but for Diastereoms.”

  After a long silence, Eesha replied. “Did Bosch love her back?”

  Karisma sighed. “I don’t know, Eesha. The Diastereoms think and feel very differently from you and I. But—”

  Emil interrupted. “This is what I’m trying to say! They are incapable of love, they’ve over manipulated their circuitry, they—”

  Karisma shot him a scathing look, and he scoffed before falling silent. “As I was saying, even though Bosch thinks and feels very differently from us, I do know that Tara was very important to them, and whatever they felt for Tara was just as meaningful and powerful, possibly more so, than what we know as love.”

  Eesha looked back and forth between Emil’s sphere and Karisma and seemed upset.

  “Why did she leave me?”

  Emil turned away.

  Karisma said, “I don’t know. Maybe—” she glances at Emil. “Maybe the two of them felt unwelcome, here . . . And you are safer staying in the city and preparing for the sleep than running away with them. But the truth is that I don’t know. She left me without warning too.”

  Eesha began putting on her heat-protecting gear and mask. “I want to be alone.”

  After the child left the garden, Karisma sighed and began to speak.

  “Emil, I am an old woman, but you are an ancient man—of my grandparents’ generation, not even my parents’. Ideas and societies are constantly transforming and updating as history continues onward. And it is crucial to follow and respect those changes if you want to continue holding a position of respect during your immortal life. Don’t you remember, when you and my mother were working in the early days of brain upload science, and simply uploading was controversial and derided by many as being dangerous and unnatural? You have to accept the fact that some of those ideas that seemed unthinkable, and were possibly considered dangerous and unethical during your time, are now feasible and have already been woven into the fabric of humanity. If you can’t accept it, it just . . . confirms my opinion, about you, about my mother, about everyone really, from the First Wave of Uploads.”