Diaspora

by Greg Egan

  Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. However malleable their minds, in a sense they obeyed the same kind of deep constraints as the diamond net — short of suicide and de novo reinvention, short of obliterating themselves and constructing someone new. That meant that they had to possess their own immutable mathematical signatures — like the Euler number, only orders of magnitude more complex. Buried in the confusion of details of every mind, there had to be something untouched by time, unswayed by the shifting weight of memory and experience, unmodified by self-directed change.

  Hashim’s artwork had been elegant and moving — and even without the outlook running, the powerful emotions it had evoked lingered — but Yatima was unswayed from vis choice of vocation. Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drives that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth — but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.

  Only in the Mines could ve begin to understand exactly who ve was.

  * * *

  3

  –

  Bridgers

  « ^ »

  Atlanta, Earth

  23 387 545 324 947 CST

  21 May 2975, 11:35:22.101 UT

  Yatima’s clone started up in the gleisner body and spent a moment reflecting on vis situation. The experience of “awakening” felt no different from arriving in a new scape; there was nothing to betray the fact that vis whole mind had just been created anew. Between subjective instants, ve’d been cross-translated from Konishi’s dialect of Shaper, which ran on the virtual machine of a womb or an exoself, into the gleisner version which this robot’s highly un-polis-like hardware implemented directly. In a sense, ve had no past of vis own, just forged memories and a secondhand personality ... but it still felt as if ve’d merely jumped from savanna to jungle, one and the same person before and after. All invariants intact.

  The original Yatima had been suspended by vis exoself prior to translation, and if everything went according to plan that frozen snapshot would never need to be re-started. The Yatima-clone in the gleisner would be re-cloned back into Konishi polis (and re-translated back into Konishi Shaper) then both the Konishi original and the gleisner-bound clone would be erased. Philosophically, it wasn’t all that different from being shifted within the polis from one section of physical memory to another — an undetectable act which the operating system performed on every citizen from time to time, to reclaim fragmented memory space. And subjectively, the whole excursion would probably be much the same as if they’d puppeted the gleisners remotely, instead of literally inhabiting them.

  If everything went according to plan.

  Yatima looked around for Inoshiro. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, let alone penetrated the canopy, but the gleisner’s visual system still managed to deliver a crisp, high-contrast image. Thigh-high shrubs with huge, droopy, dark green lenticular leaves covered the forest floor nearby, between massive trunks of soaring hardwood. The interface software they’d cobbled together seemed to be working; the gleisner’s head and eyes tracked the angle-of-view bits of Yatima’s requests for data without any perceptible delay. Running eight hundred times slower than usual was apparently enough to let the machinery keep up — so long as ve remembered not to attempt any kind of discontinuous motion.

  The other abandoned gleisner was sitting in the undergrowth beside ver, torso slumped forward, arms hanging limp. Its polymer skin was all but hidden, encrusted with dew-wet lichen and a thin layer of trapped soil. The mosquito-sized drone they’d used to port themselves into the gleisners’ processors — which had stumbled on the disused robots in the first place — was still perched on the back of the thing’s head, repairing the tiny incision it had made to gain access to a fiber trunkline.

  “Inoshiro?” The linear word came back at Yatima through the interface software, imprinted with all the strange resonances of the gleisner chassis, muffled at odd frequencies by the jungle’s clutter and humidity. No scape’s echo had ever been quite so ... undesigned. So guileless. “Are you in there?”

  The drone buzzed, and rose up from the sealed wound. The gleisner turned to face Yatima, dislodging wet sand and fragments of decaying leaves. Several large red ants, suddenly exposed, weaved confused figure-eights across the gleisner’s shoulder but managed to stay on.

  “Yes, I’m here, don’t panic.” Yatima began receiving the familiar signature, via an infrared link; ve instinctively challenged and confirmed it. Inoshiro flexed vis facial actuators experimentally, shearing off mulch and grime. Yatima played with vis own expression; the interface software kept sending back tags saying ve was attempting impossible deformations.

  “If you want to stand up, I’ll brush some of that crap off you.” Inoshiro rose smoothly to vis feet; Yatima willed vis viewpoint higher, and the interface made vis own robot body follow suit.

  Ve let Inoshiro pummel and scrape ver, paying scant attention to the detailed stream of tags ve received describing the pressure changes on “vis” polymer skin. They’d arranged for the interface to feed the gleisners’ posture, as reported by the hardware, into their own internal symbols for their icons — and to make the robots, in turn, obey changes to the icons (so long as they weren’t physically impossible, and wouldn’t send them sprawling to the ground) — but they’d decided against the kind of extensive re-design that would have given them deeply integrated flesher-style sensory feedback and motor instincts. Even Inoshiro had balked at the idea of their gleisner-clones gaining such vivid new senses and skills, only to slough them off upon returning to Konishi, where they would have been about as useless as Yatima’s object-sculpting talents were in this unobliging jungle. Having successive versions of themselves so dissimilar would have made the whole experience too much like death.

  They swapped roles, Yatima doing vis best to brush Inoshiro clean. Ve understood all the relevant physical principles, and ve could cause the gleisner’s arms to do pretty much what ve liked by willing vis icon to make the right movements ... but even with the interface to veto any actions which would have disrupted the elaborate balancing act of bipedal motion, it was blindingly obvious that the compromise they’d chosen left them clumsy beyond belief. Yatima recalled scenes from the library of fleshers involved in simple tasks: repairing machinery, preparing food, braiding each other’s hair. Gleisners were even more dextrous, when the right software was in charge. Konishi citizens retained the ancestral neural wiring for fine control of their icons’ hands — linked to the language centers, for gestural purposes — but all the highly evolved systems for manipulating physical objects had been ditched as superfluous. Scape objects did as they were told, and even Yatima’s mathematical toys obeyed specialized constraints with only the faintest resemblance to the rules of the external world.

  “What now?”

  Inoshiro just stood there for a moment, grinning diabolically. Vis robot body wasn’t all that different from vis usual pewter-skinned icon; the polymer beneath all the stains and lingering biota was a dull metallic gray, and the gleisner’s facial structure was flexible enough to manage a recognizable caricature of the real thing. Yatima still felt verself sending out the same lithe, purple-robed flesher icon as always; ve was almost glad ve couldn’t part vis navigators and clearly observe vis own drab physical appearance.

  Inoshiro chanted, “Thirty-two kilotau. Thirty-three kilotau. Thirty-four kilotau.”

  “Shut up.” Their exoselves back in Konishi had been instructed to explain to any callers precisely what they’d done — no one would be left thinking that they’d simply turned catatonic — but Yatima still felt a painful surge of doubt. What would Blanca and Gabriel be thinking? And Radiya, and Inoshiro’s parents?

  “You’re not backing out on me, are you?” Inoshiro eyed ver suspiciously.

  “No!” Yatima laughed, exaspera
ted; whatever vis misgivings, ve was committed to the whole crazy stunt. Inoshiro had argued that this was vis last chance to do anything “remotely exciting” before ve started using a miner’s outlook and “lost interest in everything else” — but that simply wasn’t true; the outlook was more like a spine than a straitjacket, a strengthened internal framework, not a constrictive cage. And ve’d kept on saying no until ve finally realized that Inoshiro was too stubborn to abandon vis plans, even when it turned out that not one of vis daring, radical Ashton-Laval friends was willing to accompany ver. Yatima had been secretly tempted all along by the idea of stepping right out of Konishi time and encountering the alien fleshers, though ve would have been just as happy to leave it all in the realms of plausible fantasy. In the end, it had come down to one question: If Inoshiro went ahead and did this alone, would it turn them into strangers? Yatima had found, to vis surprise, that this wasn’t a risk ve was willing to take.

  Ve suggested hesitantly, “We might not want to stay for the full twenty-four hours, though.” Eighty-six megatau. “What if the whole place is empty, and there’s nothing to see?”

  “It’s a flesher enclave. It won’t be empty.”

  “The last known contact was centuries ago. They could have died out, moved away ... anything.” Under an eight-hundred-year-old treaty, drones and satellites were not permitted to invade the privacy of the fleshers; the few dozen scattered urban enclaves where their own laws permitted them to clear away the wildlife completely and build concentrated settlements were supposed to be treated as inviolable. They had their own global communications network, but no gateways linked it to the Coalition; abuses on both sides dating back to the Introdus had forced the separation. Inoshiro had insisted that merely puppeting the gleisner bodies via satellite from Konishi would have been morally equivalent to sending in a drone — and certainly the satellites, programmed to obey the treaty, would not have permitted it — but inhabiting two autonomous robots who wandered in from the jungle for a visit was a different matter entirely.

  Yatima looked around at the dense undergrowth, and resisted the futile urge to try to make vis viewpoint jump forward by a few hundred meters, or rise up into the towering forest for a better view of the terrain ahead. Fifty kilotau. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren’t reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

  “We’d better start moving.”

  “After you, Livingstone.”

  “Wrong continent, Inoshiro.”

  “Geronimo? Huckleberry? Dorothy?”

  “Spare me.”

  They set off north, the drone buzzing behind them: their one link to the polis, offering the chance of a rapid escape if anything went wrong. It followed them for the first kilometer-and-a-half, all the way to the edge of the enclave. There was nothing to mark the border — just the same thick jungle on either side — but the drone refused to cross the imaginary line. Even if they’d built their own transceiver to take its place, it would have done them no good; the satellite footprints were shaped with precision to exclude the region. They could have rigged up a base station to re-broadcast from outside ... but it was too late for that now.

  Inoshiro said, “So what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  Yatima replied without hesitation. “Quicksand. We both fall into quicksand, so we can’t even communicate with each other. We just float beneath the surface until our power runs out.” Ve checked vis gleisner’s energy store, a sliver of magnetically suspended anticobalt. “In six thousand and thirty-seven years.”

  “Or five thousand nine-hundred and twenty.” Shafts of sunlight had begun to penetrate the forest; a flock of pink-and-gray birds were making rasping sounds in the branches above them.

  “But our exoselves would restart our Konishi versions after two days — so we might as well commit suicide as soon as we’re sure we wouldn’t make it back by then.”

  Inoshiro regarded ver curiously. “Would you do that? I feel different from the Konishi version already. I’d want to go on living. And maybe someone would come along and pull us out in a couple of centuries.”

  Yatima thought it over. “I’d want to go on living — but not alone. Not without a single person to talk to.”

  Inoshiro was silent for a while, then ve held up vis right hand. Their polymer skins were dotted with IR transceivers all over, but the greatest density was on the palms. Yatima received a gestalt tag, a request for data. Inoshiro was asking for a snapshot of vis mind. The gleisner hardware was multiply redundant, with plenty of room for two.

  Entrusting a version of verself to another citizen would have been unthinkable, back in Konishi. Yatima placed vis palm against Inoshiro’s, and they exchanged snapshots.

  They crossed into the Atlanta enclave. Inoshiro said, “Update every hour?”

  “Okay.”

  The interface software wasn’t too bad at walking. It kept them upright and steadily advancing, detecting obstacles in the ground cover and shifts in the terrain via the gleisners’ tactile and balance senses, and whatever vision was available — without actually commandeering the head and eyes. After stumbling a few times, Yatima started glancing down every now and then, but it was soon clear how useful it would have been if the interface had been smart enough to plant an urge to do so in vis mind at appropriate times, like the original flesher instinct.

  The jungle was visibly populated with small birds and snakes, but if there was any other animal life it was hiding or fleeing at the sound of them. Compared to walking through an indexscape for a comparable ecosystem, it was a rather dilute experience — and the thrill of interacting with real mud and real vegetation was beginning to wear thin.

  Yatima heard something skid across the ground in front of ver; ve’d inadvertently kicked a small piece of corroded metal out from under a shrub. Ve kept walking, but Inoshiro paused to examine it, then cried out in alarm.

  “What?”

  “Replicator!”

  Yatima turned back and angled for a better view; the interface made vis body crouch. “It’s just an empty canister.” It was almost crushed flat, but there was still paint clinging to the metal in places, the colors faded to barely distinguishable grays. Yatima could make out a portion of a narrow, roughly longitudinal band of varying width, slightly paler than its background; it looked to ver like a two-dimensional representation of a twisted ribbon. There was also part of a circle — though if it was a biohazard warning, it didn’t look much like the ones ve recalled from vis limited browsing on the subject.

  Inoshiro spoke in a hushed, sickened voice. “Pre-Introdus, this was pandemic. Distorted whole nations’ economies. It had hooks into everything: sexuality, tribalism, half a dozen artforms and subcultures... it parasitized the fleshers so thoroughly you had to be some kind of desert monk to escape it.”

  Yatima regarded the pathetic object dubiously, but they had no access to the library now, and vis knowledge of the era was patchy. “Even if there are traces left inside, I’m sure they’re all immune to it by now. And it could hardly infect us —”

  Inoshiro cut ver off impatiently. “We’re not talking nucleotide viruses, here. The molecules themselves were just a random assortment of junk — mostly phosphoric acid; it was the memes they came wrapped in that made them virulent.” Ve bent down lower, and cupped vis hands over the battered container. “And who knows how small a fragment it can bootstrap from? I’m not taking any chances.” The gleisners’ IR transceivers could be made to operate at high power; smoke and steam from singed vegetation rose up through Inoshiro’s fingers.

  A voice came from behind them — a meaningless stream of phonemes, but the interface followed it with a translation into linear: “Don’t tell me: you’re starting a fire to attract attention. You didn’t want to creep up on us unannounced.”

  They both
turned as rapidly as their bodies permitted. The flesher stood a dozen meters away, dressed in a dark green robe shot through with threads of gold. Broadcasting no signature tag — of course, but Yatima still had to make a conscious effort to dismiss the instinctive conclusion that this was not a real person. Ve had black hair and eyes, copper-brown skin, and a thick black beard — which in a flesher almost certainly meant gendered, male: ‘ve’ was a he. No obvious modifications: no wings, no gills, no photosynthetic cowl. Yatima resisted jumping to conclusions; none of this surface conservatism actually proved he was a static.

  The flesher said, “I don’t think I’ll offer to shake hands.” Inoshiro’s palms were still glowing dull red. “And we can’t exchange signatures. I’m at a loss for protocol. But that’s good. Ritual corrupts.” He took a few steps forward; the undergrowth deferentially flattened itself to smooth his path. “I’m Orlando Venetti. Welcome to Atlanta.”

  They introduced themselves. The interface — pre-loaded with the most likely base languages, and enough flexibility to cope with drift — had identified the flesher’s speech as a dialect of Modern Roman. It grafted the language into their minds, slipping new word sounds into all their symbols side-by-side with the linear versions, and binding alternative grammatical settings into their speech analysis and generation networks. Yatima felt distinctly stretched by the process — but vis symbols were still connected to each other in the same way as before. Ve was still verself.