The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  The whole country sat, holding its breath, waiting to see what this new visitor would do. It was during this interim that Bharo showed up at the hospital, surrounded by five military officers, and also with Charles.

  “Welcome to Portal City!” Sahaan said.

  “Thank you, President Ekeer.”

  Sahaan let out a small, embarrassed laugh. From others, he could get used to that. He wasn’t sure he ever would with Charles. “Did you get to visit a library, like you wanted to?”

  “Yes. I’ve been to Portal City Central Library several times now. In the Pinnacle, no one reads. We download data directly. Anyone who wants to can know the contents of innumerable books in seconds. But no one has the experience anymore of imagining a sequence of events as their eyes scan over words. It’s an experience I want to bring back to them.”

  “I see. Does that mean—?”

  “I’ve decided to go back. With the other Charles.”

  “Do you know how you’ll be regarded in the Pinnacle?”

  “Charles tells me I’ll be fine. I trust him.”

  Sahaan had to smirk at that. How odd to be able to have a conversation with a person whose memories you mostly shared.

  “There are other things they’ll experience, too. Crying. Eating. A myriad of other sensations that don’t map to anything they know. It will be good for them, I think.”

  “They will… experience all this?”

  “They have something called the memetwork. Experience can be recorded and shared. Either privately or publicly. I want to make my time here public. Anyone will be able to download my experience and live through my time here as though they were me… in their heads. If that makes sense.”

  “I think it does. You’re decided then?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Good luck.”

  “There’s one more thing I wanted to ask you about. When I went to the library the first time, I went instinctively for a particular book. In a way, it’s the whole reason that Charles ended up deciding to bring me into existence. Bharo mentioned it’s important to you, too. Kenek’s The Politics.”

  Sahaan smiled widely. “Yes. My grandmother introduced me to that work. She was trying to unite the two parties.”

  “For him, it was fascinating. The Pinnacle made so many modifications to the human genome, and yet our social organization still fell into familiar patterns, ones that Kenek described so clearly three thousand years ago. All we managed to do in that regard was amplify our human problems.”

  “It’s similar to what we did. My grandmother realized, at the end of her life, that she’d been so busy trying to prove the other side wrong and her side right, that she’d lost sight of the fact that her brother was a human being, whose perspective was valuable.”

  Charles nodded. “It will take a very long time for each side to unlearn fear.”

  “It will,” Sahaan admitted.

  “Will you be seeing us off tomorrow?” Charles asked.

  Sahaan glanced at Dr. Darshak. “I hope so. It remains to be seen.”

  The doctor released a sigh. He shook his head at Lachel, who eyed Sahaan warily.

  “Well,” Charles said. “In case I don’t see you again, goodbye. And thank you for everything you did for me while I was here.”

  “Thank you, Charles. Goodbye, and good luck.”

  Charles stood, and left along with the soldiers and Bharo, who waved to Sahaan and his family on his way out.

  ~

  On the day of Charles’s arrival, the news began a non-stop satellite broadcast of the area outside the wall around the new airlock. Sahaan and his family watched from his hospital room, attention rapt. Even Dr. Darshak showed up and took a seat.

  When the nanite-bodied Charles was spotted moving toward the airlock, the attention focused in on him. They watched him enter the airlock, the walls sliding back in place behind him. A large group of military personnel stood around him, all holding weapons of a make that Sahaan had only seen in history textbooks.

  They stood motionless for some time. Perhaps too long, Sahaan thought. The scientists were probably just being thorough, he kept telling himself. Finally, the interior door of the airlock started to slide open, and the whole room exhaled. Charles had passed the first test, at least. No Pinnacle nanites had followed him in through the airlock gap.

  As the walls slid open, the view switched from aerial to a ground-based location near the airlock’s outer wall ring. A camera person must have been granted access to film the event. The walls rolled along their track, and Charles appeared, striding out through the gap in the walls, his body towering three additional meters over the heads of the soldiers surrounding him. His skin was a shimmering, metallic gray. His feet were haunched back like a quadruped’s. His head was taller and longer, and he possessed nose, ears, and eyes—very human-looking eyes—but no mouth. The surface of his entire body was aflutter with orange holograms, appearing and disappearing across the surface of his frame too quickly to grasp at what any of them were, or to read them if they contained any kind of writing.

  The ground had been marked out for him, a white line leading away through a field comprised mostly of tall grasses, a narrow corridor of which had been mowed down so that the white line would be visible. Charles followed the line without a moment’s hesitation.

  The camera followed him, and a few minutes later they came to a what was one of the largest semis Sahaan had ever seen, probably something military-grade. The soldiers order Charles into the bed of the trailer, and he complied. The trailer took off through the plains, and before too long, came to the edge of the Eline-Portal City highway, where it clambered up onto the pavement and then, having righted itself, took off toward the capital.

  “When will he arrive?” Jaan asked.

  “In an hour or two,” Lachel said.

  Commentary appeared on top of the video of Charles’s now very uninteresting, silent ride in the back of a military tractor-trailer. Sahaan lay quietly, realizing that it was likely not just the entirety of the Reclamation watching these events. Catherine had said that Pinnacle nanites watched them from above, moving across the dome-shaped field created by the walls, watching. The entire planet was likely watching and waiting to see what would happen next.

  Conversation in Sahaan’s hospital room grew lighter. Even Dr. Darshak joined in, before starting a round of checking all of Sahaan’s vitals.

  “You’re doing well,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Definitely better,” Sahaan said. “Perhaps I could—?”

  Darshak raised a hand. “We’ll see.”

  Sahaan grumbled, and Lachel shot him a gaze.

  When Charles’s semi exited the highway into the city, the news grew much more active. The cameras followed the semi, with Charles’s head sticking up comically out of the back, through the city, and around turns, until finally the white, shimmering containment boundary appeared. The light from it seemed brighter than ever, lighting up all its surroundings.

  The semi stopped just ten or twelve meters from the boundary, and one of the walls along the bed of the semi was pulled down. Charles hopped down, his enormous feet cracking the pavement. He pulled one foot up, looked down at it, then seemed almost to wince. He proceeded with much more careful steps toward the boundary of the zone.

  And here they were. The one moment Sahaan and Aapada couldn’t have possibly prepared any contingency for. If Charles decided now not to neutralize the Pinnacle nanites, but to empower them in some way, to cause them to again expand, it would at the very least be bad, it could potentially be the end.

  But he had to start somewhere. Trust always had to start with that leap of faith. If he could never trust at all, then they would remain perpetual enemies. Such an extraordinary risk. But for the lives of twelve thousand people? Yes. He would make the same decision again.

  The soldiers held their firearms ready.

  Charles grew closer to the containment zone field. His steps grew more
careful, more hesitant, but still he drew closer.

  He came to its edge.

  He stepped through it, disappearing from view.

  A gasp came through the news feed from the cameraperson.

  “What’s happening?” Lachel asked.

  “Was he supposed to do that?” This from the doctor.

  “He wasn’t specific about the details,” Sahaan said. “He merely said he would neutralize all the Pinnacle nanites and put our people back the way they were.”

  Unbearably long minutes passed. The news anchors began reading off energy usage statistics for the containment field, amongst its other monitoring equipment.

  “Wait!” The voice of one of the scientists on the news interrupted one of the anchors. “There’s a fluctuation. Another one. Power requirements are dropping! Get a camera on it. Is the field itself shrinking?”

  The view from the street returned. At first there didn’t seem to be any change, but then Sahaan saw it, a water drain slowly peeling into view at the base of the field, a street lamp slowly appearing, then the side of a damaged car. Charles came into view, too, the field moving through and around him. He walked back toward the semi and merely hopped into it, shaking the vehicle as it did so, a blank, plain expression on his face as the containment field receded into the distance. People had now appeared, some two blocks away, lying on the ground, naked.

  Aapada dialed her phone frantically and began speaking hurriedly with the Army Medical Corp liaison about the logistics of getting medical attention to the survivors.

  “What happened to their clothes?” Jaan screwed up his face.

  Lachel put a hand on his shoulder. “Until just now, they were all as big and as tall as Charles, honey.”

  “I want to go see him,” Sahaan said, his gaze directly at Dr. Darshak.

  The doctor looked at the machines hooked up to Sahaan, and winced, then sighed. “All right.”

  Sahaan got on his handheld to Bharo. “Tell them to hold until I get there.”

  “All right,” Bharo said. “I’m still trying to get our Charles and the shipment of plants all ready to go, anyway.”

  Sahaan dressed, and then he, Dr. Darshak, and his family got slowly underway. The soldiers posted at the entrance to the hospital did not try to detain them.

  Dr. Darshak retrieved his car from the parking garage and they piled in, Lachel looking up the location of Charles’s semi and giving instructions to the doctor.

  They arrived to see Bharo pull up in his own car, their Charles exiting out the passenger-side door of Bharo’s car, and scientists carrying trays of plastic baubles emerging from the back seats.

  Lachel helped Sahaan out of the car, and they all moved toward Bharo, then toward the semi. Pinnacle Charles stood up in the back of the semi when he saw them. The soldiers rolled down the grating in the side of the semi, and Charles stepped carefully down onto the pavement.

  Sahaan looked up at him, looked up into his eyes, and smiled. Charles, he realized, couldn’t smile, but there was a joy, a very human kind of joy, that Sahaan recognized in his eyes. He thought back to the stories he’d learned about his great-great-grandfather, about arriving on Asura and being hauled up into the air in the enormous hands of a person like Charles. He recalled his own instinctive fear of the breach in the Citrine park walls. He didn’t want to be afraid anymore.

  “Thank you,” Sahaan said. He pressed his hands together and bowed slightly, a very ancient gesture of respect.

  Charles pressed his hands together and bowed his tall head down.

  Sahaan gestured for his family to come forward. “This my wife Lachel, and my son Jaan.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Lachel said.

  Jaan repeated the phrase meekly.

  Charles nodded, then climbed back into the semi, and waved to them, while it was being loaded.

  “I’m glad you could be here.” It was the voice of the boy who was definitely not a boy.

  Sahaan turned. “Charles! You’re going with him, then.”

  Charles nodded.

  “I’m glad I could be here, too.”

  “Take care. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Charles waved as well, then approached the semi, where a soldier had to pick him up and haul him into the back. The doors of the semi rolled up, its engine started, and it thundered away.

  Pinnacle Charles watched them until they were out of sight, his head sticking up out over the walled bed of the semi. Sahaan wondered what untranslatable words were flowing through that mind. He would find out in a chat with Charles over the communication device some years later.

  “I was thinking,” Charles said, “how I would be able to share my memories of this too, of the Reclamation’s president thanking me, of him using respectful gestures. I was thinking I would show them all that we don’t have to be afraid of you or diminish you anymore. That we could respect you instead.”

  Epilogue

  Transcript of Symposium at the Intranational Conference of Historians

  Portal City University, Federated States of Asura

  New Adjusted Calendar Year 3241 (Old Reclamation Calendar Year 416)

  Chair: Good evening, and welcome to this evening’s symposium. The topic for this evening is the events surrounding the first contact between the Reclamation and Pinnacle in 2916, a topic we have chosen since this year marks the bicentennial of the founding of the FSA. We have with us this evening Dr. Iti Haas of the University of Archway, Dr. Derek Sommers of the University of Redwing, and Dr. Adya Hyaan of the University of Adamantine. We’ll start with Dr. Haas, who has recently completed his Ph.D. on Charles Mayworth and his role in first contact.

  Dr. Haas: Good evening. Thank you for having me. I know that the goal is for us to have time for discussion at the end, so I’ll be going over everything at a high level. Charles Mayworth left us an enormous wealth of written work both about his life leading up to first contact and everything that he learned from his walldoppel. I think we have probably all watched or downloaded those experiences at some point by now, since they’ve been so heavily integrated into secondary curricula. While it’s widely known that Mayworth was a prolific writer, the sheer volume of material cannot really be appreciated until you task yourself with studying it. Even I was forced to scan a good chunk of it rather than read it due to the practical limitations of time, and the irony therein is certainly not lost on me. Charles Mayworth was of a political orientation at that time which had become critical of the changes that the Pinnacle had made to the human organism and their myriad unintended side-effects. Today we possess a well-trusted system of integrating a change into a sub-population who desires it and watching the effects over three generations before either ratifying the change for widespread use or mandating that it spread no further. In Charles’s Pinnacle, no such system existed. The human genome was modified wherever and whenever it was deemed by any individual to potentially be better, and those changes were allowed to propagate uncontrolled throughout the entire population. The Nanophage was also still sixty years away, this being the computer program-biological hybrid virus that wiped out almost two-thirds of the population of the Pinnacle, and so this was also a time in which the general populace of the Pinnacle was largely unafraid of any negative effects of their changes. You can see perhaps hints of a growing concern when Charles writes about his early political influence. The failure to create hybrid technological-biological flora was certainly a damaging blow to Pinnacle psyche, and got some people, like him, thinking about what other negative impacts might be forthcoming, but at the time this was merely speculation. My big takeaway from studying Charles was the sheer tenacity he showed. One of the more interesting details is that he had been capable of enacting his plan to create a walldoppel for nearly twelve years before finally doing so. When he first discovered subatomic particle QF8634A92, he kept the discovery to himself. He formulated the plan for creating a walldoppel but did not act on it. Two things
are striking about this. First, the friendship he struck up with Bradley Moore, who ultimately convinced him to pursue his plan. The other detail is that he paid for the energy to execute this plan out of his own pocket, wiping out nearly half of his life savings at the time in order to do so. This was someone deeply committed to his principles, and that impression is reinforced all the more throughout the written work he has left us.

  Chair: Thank you, Dr. Haas. I have a number of questions, and I can see that our audience does, too, but again, let’s hold those until the end. Dr. Derek Sommers is a senior fellow at the University of Redwing. He holds a doctorate in Alterra and Asuran history, and his most recent book is Connected Worlds: The Long History of Cross-Societal Influence in Pre-FSA Societies.

  Dr. Sommers: Thank you, and good evening. For this symposium, I’ll focus on one section of my book in particular, part two, which is about the role of chance in the development of pre-FSA social configurations. Particularly, I began noticing a number of parallels between first contact in 2916 and the end of the Resistance Period leading up to 2804. Dr. Haas has already done me the favor of outlining how Charles Mayworth only proceeded with his plan to create the walldoppel after encouragement from his friend Bradley Moore. About their meeting, Charles writes, “It was pure luck. On a particularly lousy morning, I abandoned normal social inhibitions and admitted to a complete stranger my interest in a three-thousand-year-old political philosopher.” This chance event culminated in decisions that changed the course of our entire civilizations, though they may have seemed innocuous at the time. A less well studied period of our history is the Resistance, most notably because there are a number of disagreements on what political structure exactly to assign the pre-Pinnacle technologically modified humans. My own position is somewhat irrelevant here, as I wish to focus attention instead on a topic less well studied, that of Resistance culture itself. Few know this today, but the walls of the Reclamation were actually an Alterran invention, not an Asuran one, and an accidental one at that. The portal that the first Alterrans arrived through had already been active for over thirty years, and they found that the iron deposits in the hill beneath the portal had already gained quantum repellent properties. A man named Stok Thiksay, whom I could talk about for just as long as Charles Mayworth, actually brought the walls through the portal to Asura with his husband (then boyfriend) Le Namgyal. Stok had spent a year on Asura alone. He had come through the portal to Asura as part of an ancient Alterran ritual of redemption, which no longer exists, although you can still see some of its trappings in the Alterran graduation ceremonies, especially those of the Alterran Institute. One of the most ironic things about this situation is that Stok Thiksay was not the first visitor from Alterra. The literature indicates that dozens, perhaps even hundreds of Alterran visitors preceded him, but all before him were immediately transformed by the evolver nanites which then covered Asura entirely. Stok survived and was able to tell the Asuran Resistance about the walls because he had illegally entered walled zones on Alterra and exposed himself to nanites running benign programs. Interacting with those nanites slowed the evolver nanites long enough for the Resistance to find and save Stok. Without these chance occurrences, there would not have been a Reclamation or, arguably, a Pinnacle either. There is some, admittedly divisive, speculation about whether or not the Pinnacle became an organized political entity as a reaction to the appearance of the walls on Asura, or whether they would have continued to maintain the form of political organization they had prior (again, I’d like to set the status of that configuration aside for the sake of this discussion). In both cases, Stok and Charles, we see individuals who possessed both determination and a strong sense of their principles. However, without the occurrence of chance events, we can hardly imagine the kind of societal dynamics we can see in our present-day society ever having come into existence.