by Lavie Tidhar
We skirted Hampstead and sailed eastward, following the vanished channel of old Tamesis.
How do I describe the site to you?
Even after all these years, a shudder of recognition runs through me… and I awake at night with an ache, a sense of loss like a ghost limb.
Well, then. Let me try.
It was dusk when we approached the salvage operation…
Heavy platforms floating on the water, dark towers, searchlight beams illuminating the sea. Divers moving below the surface, their lights leaving a faint trail in their passing. A broken dome deep down below… I saw a diving bell lowered into the water from one of the platforms, heard the scraping of heavy metal chains… I knew this from the memory Gawain had sent me.
“It will be cold,” I said. Mowgai looked uncomfortable.
“I don’t ask you to follow me farther,” I said to him, gently. “Only to wait for me to come back.”
“If you come back…” he said.
“I will.”
“Promise?”
He smiled and so did I, though we both knew my survival wasn’t something that could any longer be guaranteed.
“Promise,” I said.
I dressed slowly in the heavy suit as the diving bell was raised from the depths, and then Gawain and I climbed inside. It smelled dank, and when we spoke our voices sounded distorted, as though somehow filtered through a machine. I took a deep breath as we were plunged into the water. Through the small window I could see the murky waters of the sea, and the lights of the divers bobbing in the currents. Streets, houses, the remnants of a bridge all came into view. I shivered.
Gawain said, “This isn’t quite how I expected to meet you again, Mai.”
“No,” I said.
“I kept thinking I would go back, then something always intervened. But I never—”
“I know,” I said, gently. “Me, too.”
His shoulders slumped and he looked relieved. I thought of the past, how it is always out of reach, forever, and yet how vivid it remains to us, the living. Gawain and I had been together, for a while. I was glad neither of us resented how it ended, or that it had.
“I wouldn’t have come, otherwise,” I said.
“I know. I hoped you would.”
We smiled, together, something of the old, awkward teenage intimacy restored. It was quiet inside the diving bell, and our words when we spoke echoed back at us from the metal walls.
“Tell me about the vault,” I said. “How large is the Bostrom Field?”
“As large as a city, we think,” he said. “The old city. With as many as fifty thousand souls, maybe.”
“Sentient?”
“45.67 on the Markram Scale, according to the readouts.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
We descended through the layers of water to the seafloor. We docked with the makeshift dome that had been erected there, over the buried vault, and went across.
Inside, you could feel the chill. It wasn’t the ocean pressing down on you from above, not even the dead weight of broken history that littered the seabed, nothing as metaphorical as that. It was the vault itself. Like many others like it, it had been constructed some time in the dying decades of the age of excess, when for one glorious era it seemed everything was possible. As the planet died we had reached for the stars, and as the seas writhed in pain we sought to colonize them, and as species died in their thousands, humans sought immortality: immortality of flesh, immortality of mind.
It was cold because the vault was cold. It was colder inside the vault than the cosmic background temperature of space itself. Behind multiple shielding and cooling chambers, the quantum processing strata existed in a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It was powered by Fleischmann reactors sunk deep into the bedrock and kept operational by a rat-brained (17.05 Markram) self-repair system of Turings. I mean, these are the details, more or less. Other vaults used noncompatible systems, anything from Narula spaces to Artaud one-shots, and most were meant to last forever… But forever, as it turns out, is a long time.
The truth was, they were the last, sad gasp of a dying race, a repeating act of hubristic hope that was simply more refuse the human species had littered on the planet. But I loved them—their quirky world-building and their slowly deteriorating insides, unwitnessed by any living being. Populated by echoes and ghosts, they were images of the past caught in amber, and there was no way I would have missed this one. I’d traveled a long, hard way to the New Atlantis. But what interested me wasn’t the laid-back island life above water. It was the world that had been buried centuries past in the dead drowned city.
All around us in the subaquatic base people were moving; machines had been attached to the metal surface of the buried dome and I could hear the high-pitched whine of drilling, and taste rust on my tongue. I admired the New Atlanteans’ equipment, the delicate computational machinery that did not look like salvage—they looked new.
“So it’s true,” I said. “You still… manufacture.”
“That sounds like an accusation,” Gawain said, but he squirmed a little. “We respect the pact. But we are still… a civilization, Mai.”
“I did not come here to argue,” I said.
I’d seen machines like this before, but those had been old, lovingly repaired and maintained. These cast a spell around them, reading out data from the buried vault. I longed to use them.
“It is hard,” I said. “To give up the toys of the past.”
“We had these built purely for this excavation,” he said.
“And you’ve made Breach.”
“We have. Do you… ?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
They’d penetrated into the vault with a micron-wide tunnel. A seeking tendril plugged into the unit, establishing just the tiniest foothold, analyzing the vault’s protocols, then monitoring the outer layer. It was at Breach but there was one final act that could take place, and I was willing to do it. This was what the old astronauts must have felt like, I often thought, as they got ready to blast off into space. You never knew if the rocket wasn’t about to explode underneath you.
“Are you ready?” he said. “There is no rush, we could go back to the surface and you could rest for a day or a week or a—”
“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
I changed and lay down in the submersion tank and made myself comfortable, then reached across and took the small grip in my hand. The Injection would fire a massive burst of qubit data down the thin band and into the core. I’d be the first to see this world in centuries… if I survived Translation.
The machines would construct a Minsky shell copy of my consciousness which would be injected into the vault. In theory, I would remain behind, able to Waldo the shell-me… but entanglement and Heisenberg fluctuations meant things were never that clear-cut. If I weren’t careful, it would be me who became the ghost in the old machine.
I took a deep breath, and then I laughed and pressed the button, and everything went dark.
And then, just like that, I was elsewhere.
IX. The Drowned World
Elsewhere.
The world loses definition and returns with the taste of blue, a shriek of salt, a flash of musical notes from a popular song no one has played in centuries. The world tastes of pain and soapsuds.
I fall.
The sky is rent asunder and static devours the horizon. A bridge like a clean black line spans a low-resolution river. The world takes on definition, blocks of buildings, tiny figures moving jerkily in the streets between.
I fall.
The world explodes around me. Color returns, but everything is so gray. Bostrom worlds are meant to be happy places, the last refuge of the climate-clans rich into a make-believe world. Tiny hidden microworlds scattered deep underground in shelters built to weather nuclear storms. They never did count enough on entropy, though.
I fall.
The world gains and loses def
inition. Termites crawl across the sky. A diseased river flows down below…
I fall.
I—we stood at the north end of the Blackfriars Bridge, ghosting on a local host. Local data flooded into my-our consciousness. I knew, for example, that had once been a great bridge that spanned the river from south to north, but that by now it was reduced to a pile of rubble still, somehow, just standing up, and that a makeshift rope bridge that ran along its five spans was the only way to cross it in relative safety. I could see, from where I stood, the fishing nets that hung from the bridge, and the objects caught in them: debris, blowing in a powerful wind.
I wore a parka, heavy-soled boots, thick gloves, and goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind. The sky was a gray and impenetrable expanse of clouds through which sunlight filtered wanly. It was the sort of sky you get during a hurricane, but here it looked permanent. Small figures moved nimbly over the bridge, pulling up ropes and nets, scavengers looking for salvage.
“You! You there!”
I turned, and saw them. There were five of them, thin, scraggly, dressed much as I was. They moved with a loping gait, into the wind. Coming my way.
“You there! Stand where you are!”
I began to back away. I saw them reach for weapons. Ahead of me I saw a domed cathedral but there were holes in the dome and the road leading up to it was filled with tenement buildings, and more figures came out at the shouts, and they stared in my direction but made no move either way.
“Outsider! Outsider!”
Thiels, I thought, with a sense of horror. I should have anticipated this. A Level IV Bostrom world slowly degrading to a Level III, and its inhabitants, at least some of them knowing, or at least suspecting, their world was a simulation—
They wanted out. My arrival would have been a shot of data powerful enough to send checksums awry all across the virtuality. They’d pinpointed me quickly—too quickly.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!”
I started to run, away from the river, away from the Thiels. They gave chase. I had to assume sentience, but sentience does not equate kindness or mercy. I could feel my lifeline back to the Up and Out, but it was a thin, wispy thread, and I had come too far, and I needed to see, and to know! This world had been closed off for centuries, and the things it could teach me about the past outweighed any personal danger—even death. I could imagine I-me in the Up and Out, plugged in, twitching, drooling, neural networks quantum-entangled with the I-we local host’s data-field.
Then the pop pop pop of projectile weapons discharging, and I heard a swarm of bees fly around me and one stung me on the arm. I spun around and my body screamed in pain. The bullet had burned through the parka and grazed the skin, drawing blood. I tasted rust.“What are you doing!” I shouted. “Stop that!”
“Get her!”
They came swaggering up the path from the river. I knew the people of the past had a mad violence about them, I knew violence was a part of being human, I had even experienced the past before, in other Markram worlds, in Byblos and elsewhere… but I’d never been shot before.
“That hurt!”
“It’s going to hurt a lot more when we’re done with you,” the one who seemed to be their leader said. He came forward, not hurrying, and he’d removed his goggles and behind them one eye was a black orb, and the other a sharp blue that stared at me. “You’re from out there. We want out, do you understand? Out!”
“But that’s…” I stopped, helpless.
“What?” he demanded. “What!”
“But that’s not possible,” I said, softly. “You’re… you’re Markram minds, 45.67 to maybe 62.18 peak. You’re digitally native, man!”
He pointed his gun at me. His single eye was blue and clear and, I thought, quite mad.
“You have no bodies,” I said. “No physicality. If you truly believe you’re a simulation… then what is there for you in the world beyond?”
His face twisted, in anger or pain. As though he had expected that answer. But what could I tell him? I think he knew.
“Then shut it down,” he said. “Shut it down!”
“What happened here?” I said. “It can’t always have been like this.”
“It was beautiful, once,” he said. “Then it started to revert. This, what you see? The storms, the dead river, the blind sky—this is how it was outside.”
There was nothing I could say to him.
“What happened to the people of our time?” he asked me, then. He must have been a man of power, in the Up and Out, before he brain-mapped himself and Translated into the time vault.
“They died,” I said. I had no reason to lie to him. “Most of them. A few survived. The moon broke, and there’s no one on Mars now but a few dead robots, rusting in the winds. Most people died. The seas rose, the earth shook… Now there’s just a handful of us. But we endure. Like… weeds.”
“Weeds?” he said. “Weeds? We ruled the world!”
“Well,” I said. “I guess we don’t do that, anymore.”
I turned my back on him. I had nothing left, and my arm hurt. I half-expected a bullet in the back, to finish me off. But he did nothing, and I simply walked away.
For months I wandered this shell of a town. Remember, in the Up and Out, this place was buried underwater, a ruin of antiquity. Here I had the chance of seeing it the way it was, the way it lived, even in its final days. Its denizens lived as all people live. It was a city on the edge of climate-collapse, yet it functioned still. In the Regent’s Park allotments, they raised beets and cabbages and dug for potatoes, men and women braced against the winds, and autonomous Asimovs, old and rusted, swept the constant debris off the city streets. It was easy, after a time, to forget that one existed in a simulation. And, of course, it wasn’t, not quite. It was a world upon itself, a pocket universe. To its residents it was real and, after all, isn’t reality what we think it is? They lived, they died, they endured. We are all just weeds.
I spent much of my time in what was left of the British Museum, poring over documents with the semblance of old paper, but mostly I needed to interact with the people who lived in the town. I was to be their only witness to the outside.
I was at the Amundsen Arms…
The pub off Leicester Square was lit with tallow candles…
The smell of underground vegetation, fungi, and the river… People moving in the near-dark, the sound of loud laughter, the smell of spilled beer, a haze of smoke from cigarette sticks. They grew mostly marijuana; tobacco such as I believe was plentiful once did not grow in that city, in that time. Most of their agriculture was underground, in the old tunnels where the trains once passed. A fire burning in the hearth…
I liked it there.
It was then that I saw him.
He came in through the door and the storm outside and shook his hair loose and smiled. His eyes were Hyla-frog green. He was tall, he had to stoop a little under the low ceiling. When he walked he had the slightly bow-legged gait of a Mudlark. He crossed the room and people parted for him. Above the bar, a television set was flickering, a political broadcast from Mrs. Equitone in No. 10. He perched himself at the bar, easily; the bartender brought him a shot glass without being asked and he drank it. He looked around, and saw me, and smiled.
I never meant for it to happen, but the past has always held such an attraction…
“I’m Kay,” he said.
What is real? This question often bothers me, more so now, as age hobbles my progress through time. All lives are finite, and someday, I think, the human race shall fade, at last, and it will be the ants who take over the planet. But perhaps this has always been their world, and only our arrogance led us to assume otherwise…
The nights grow long and I miss the light, and my bones ache. Age brings with it a thousand small pains. It is pain that tells us we are still alive.
This is the story. I told it to you back at the start. I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found lov
e…
It is a curious thing. How do you define love? How do you quantify it? We know the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetism. But where does love feature in a unified field theory of the universe? Do ants love? Do stars?
Kay was real to me, as real as pottery shards or the wind, as necessary as sunlight. He was a Mudlark, hunting for salvage on the banks of Tamesis, which they called the Thames. It was a dangerous, laborious job, but he did it gladly. He saw himself as an archaeologist, I think, digging up the past. Buried in the mud he’d find Roman coins and plastic dolls, a Georgian necklace, unexploded ordnance, a Norman bronze horse, a comical mouse on a key ring wearing red pants and white gloves, and polycarbonate disks with reflective surfaces that caught the light and broke it into tiny rainbows.
But what is love? Some say it is merely a projection of our imagination—a miniature virtuality constructed in the neuron-firing pathways of the brain. That every existence is a solitary one, that we are each of us a simulation, and how do we trust anything we see, or feel?
But to be human, I think, is to love—to love and to hate, also. We have always possessed such a great capacity for emotion that it spilled over the entire world and nearly killed it.
Was Kay real? Was I?
For months I lived in that city, in that time. At times, I wished never to leave it. With Kay I explored its hidden passageways—they did not burn their dead but processed them using Wiigh-Mäsak promation, to cultivate the soil. With him, I crossed the rickety bridges in the constant storms, and visited the south bank, where wild, mutated animals roamed. Once, we visited the British Library, as it was called, but it, or its simulacrum, had burned to the ground in centuries past, and all I could find of its books were some blackened fragments.