Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  “You think you’re still on your spaceship?” Qiusheng said, coming down the stairs. “Everything here is dumb. We aren’t like you, being waited on hand and foot by smart machines. We have to work hard with dumb tools. That’s how we put rice in our bowls!”

  “We also worked hard. Otherwise how did you come to be?” God said carefully.

  “Enough with the ‘how did you come to be?’ Enough! I’m sick of hearing it. If you’re so powerful, go and make other obedient children to support you!” Yulian threw her towel on the ground.

  “Forget it. Just forget it,” Qiusheng said. He was always the one who made peace. “Let’s eat.”

  Bingbing got up. As he came down the stairs, he yawned. “Ma, Pa, God was coughing all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You don’t know how good you have it,” Yulian said. “Your dad and I were in the room next to his. You don’t hear us complaining, do you?”

  As though triggered, God began to cough again. He coughed like he was playing his favorite sport with great concentration.

  Yulian stared at God for a few seconds before sighing. “I must have the worst luck in eight generations.” Still angry, she left for the kitchen to cook breakfast.

  God sat silently through breakfast with the rest of the family. He ate one bowl of porridge with pickled vegetables and half a mantou bun. During the entire time he had to endure Yulian’s disdainful looks—maybe she was still mad about the liquefied petroleum gas, or maybe she thought he ate too much.

  After breakfast, as usual, God got up quickly to clean the table and wash the dishes in the kitchen. Standing just outside the kitchen, Yulian shouted, “Don’t use detergent if there’s no grease on the bowl! Everything costs money. The pittance they pay for your support? Ha!”

  God grunted nonstop to show that he understood.

  Qiusheng and Yulian left for the fields. Bingbing left for school. Only now did Qiusheng’s father get up. Still not fully awake, he came downstairs, ate two bowls of porridge, and filled his pipe with tobacco. At last he remembered God’s existence.

  “Hey, old geezer, stop the washing. Come out and play a game with me!” he shouted into the kitchen.

  God came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. He nodded ingratiatingly at Qiusheng’s father. Playing Chinese Chess with the old man was a tough chore for God; winning and losing both had unpleasant consequences. If God won, Qiusheng’s father would get mad: You fucking old idiot! You trying to show me up? Shit! You’re God! Beating me is no great accomplishment at all. Why can’t you learn some manners? You’ve lived under this roof long enough! But if God lost, Qiusheng’s father would still get mad: You fucking old idiot! I’m the best chess player for fifty kilometers. Beating you is easier than squishing a bedbug. You think I need you to let me win? You . . . to put it politely, you are insulting me!

  In any case, the final result was the same: the old man flipped the board, and the pieces flew everywhere. Qiusheng’s father was infamous for his bad temper, and now he’d finally found a punching bag in God.

  But the old man didn’t hold a grudge. Every time after God picked up the board and put the pieces back quietly, he sat down and played with God again—and the whole process was repeated. After a few cycles of this, both of them were tired, and it was almost noon.

  God then got up to wash the vegetables. Yulian didn’t allow him to cook because she said God was a terrible cook. But he still had to wash the vegetables. Later, when Qiusheng and Yulian returned from the fields, if the vegetables hadn’t been washed, she would be on him again with another round of bitter, sarcastic scolding.

  While God washed the vegetables, Qiusheng’s father left to visit the neighbors. This was the most peaceful part of God’s day. The noon sun filled every crack in the brick-lined yard and illuminated the deep crevasses in his memory. During such periods God often forgot his work and stood quietly, lost in thought. Only when the noise of the villagers returning from the fields filled the air would he be startled awake and hurry to finish his washing.

  He sighed. How could life have turned out like this?

  This wasn’t only God’s sigh. It was also the sigh of Qiusheng, Yulian, and Qiusheng’s father. It was the sigh of more than five billion people and two billion Gods on Earth.

  2.

  It all began with an autumn evening three years ago.

  “Come quickly! There are toys in the sky!” Bingbing shouted in the yard. Qiusheng and Yulian raced out of the house, looked up, and saw that the sky really was filled with toys, or at least objects whose shapes could only belong to toys.

  The objects spread out evenly across the dome of the sky. In the dusk, each reflected the light of the setting sun—already below the horizon— and each shone as bright as the full moon. The light turned Earth’s surface as bright as it is at noon. But the light came from every direction and left no shadow, as though the whole world was illuminated by a giant surgical lamp.

  At first, everyone thought the objects were within our atmosphere because they were so clear. But eventually, humans learned that these objects were just enormous. They were hovering about thirty thousand kilometers away in geostationary orbits.

  There were a total of 21,530 spaceships. Spread out evenly across the sky, they formed a thin shell around Earth. This was the result of a complex set of maneuvers that brought all the ships to their final locations simultaneously. In this manner, the alien ships avoided causing life-threatening tides in the oceans due to their imbalanced mass. The gesture assured humans somewhat, as it was at least some evidence that the aliens did not bear ill will toward Earth.

  During the next few days, all attempts at communicating with the aliens failed. The aliens maintained absolute silence in the face of repeated queries. At the same time, Earth became a nightless planet. Tens of thousands of spaceships reflected so much sunlight onto the night side of Earth that it was as bright as day, while on the day side, the ships cast giant shadows onto the ground. The horrible sight pushed the psychological endurance of the human race to the limit, so that most ignored yet another strange occurrence on the surface of the planet and did not connect it with the fleet of spaceships in the sky.

  Across the great cities of the world, wandering old people had begun to appear. All of them had the same features: extreme old age, long white hair and beards, long white robes. At first, before the white robe, white beard, and white hair got dirty, they looked like a bunch of snowmen. The wanderers did not appear to belong to any particular race, as though all ethnicities were mixed in them. They had no documents to prove their citizenship or identity and could not explain their own history.

  All they could do was to gently repeat, in heavily accented versions of various local languages, the same words to all passersby:

  “We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

  If only one or two old wanderers had said this, then they would have been sent to a shelter or nursing home, like the homeless with dementia. But millions of old men and women all saying the same thing—that was an entirely different thing.

  Within half a month, the number of old wanderers had increased to more than thirty million. All over the streets of New York, Beijing, London, Moscow . . . these old people could be seen everywhere, shuffling around in traffic-stopping crowds. Sometimes it seemed as if there were more of them than the original inhabitants of the cities.

  The most horrible part of their presence was that they all repeated the same thing: “We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

  Only now did humans turn their attention from the spaceships to the uninvited guests. Recently, large-scale meteor showers had been occurring over every continent. After every impressive display of streaking meteors, the number of old wanderers in the corresponding region greatly increased. After careful observation, the following incredible fact was discovered: the old wanderers came out of the sky, f
rom those alien spaceships.

  One by one, they leaped into the atmosphere as though diving into a swimming pool, each wearing a suit made from a special film. As the friction from the atmosphere burned away the surface of the suits, the film kept the heat away from the wearer and slowed their descent. Careful design ensured that the deceleration never exceeded 4G, well within the physical tolerance of the bodies of the old wanderers. Finally, at the moment of their arrival at the surface, their velocity was close to zero, as though they had just jumped down from a bench. Even so, many of them still managed to sprain their ankles. Simultaneously, the film around them had been completely burned away, leaving no trace.

  The meteor showers continued without stopping. More wanderers fell to Earth. Their number rose to almost one hundred million.

  The government of every country attempted to find one or more representatives among the wanderers. But the wanderers claimed that the “Gods” were absolutely equal, and any one of them could represent all of them. Thus, at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, one random old wanderer, who was found in Times Square and who now spoke passable English, entered the General Assembly Hall.

  He was clearly among the earliest to land: his robe was dirty and full of holes, and his white beard was covered with dirt, like a mop. There was no halo over his head, but a few loyal flies did hover there. With the help of a ratty bamboo walking stick, he shuffled his way to the round meeting table and lowered himself under the gaze of the leaders. He looked up at the Secretary-General, and his face displayed the childlike smile particular to all the old wanderers.

  “I . . . ha—I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  So breakfast was brought. All across the world, people stared as he ate like a starved man, choking a few times. Toast, sausages, and a salad were quickly gone, followed by a large glass of milk. Then he showed his innocent smile to the Secretary-General again.

  “Haha . . . uh . . . is there any wine? Just a tiny cup will do.”

  So a glass of wine was brought. He sipped at it, nodding with satisfaction. “Last night, a bunch of new arrivals took over my favorite subway grille, one that blew out warm air. I had to find a new place to sleep in the Square. But now with a bit of wine, my joints are coming back to life . . . You, can you massage my back a little? Just a little.”

  The Secretary-General began to massage his back. The old wanderer shook his head, sighed, and said, “Sorry to be so much trouble to you.”

  “Where are you from?” asked the President of the United States.

  The old wanderer shook his head. “A civilization only has a fixed location in her infancy. Planets and stars are unstable and change. The civilization must then move. By the time she becomes a young woman, she has already moved multiple times. Then they will make this discovery: no planetary environment is as stable as a sealed spaceship. So they’ll make spaceships their home, and planets will just be places where they sojourn. Thus, any civilization that has reached adulthood will be a starfaring civilization, permanently wandering through the cosmos. The spaceship is her home. Where are we from? We come from the ships.” He pointed up with a finger caked in dirt.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Two billion.”

  “Who are you really?” The Secretary-General had cause to ask this. The old wanderers looked just like humans.

  “We’ve told you many times.” The old wanderer impatiently waved his hand. “We are God.”

  “Could you explain?”

  “Our civilization—let’s just call her the God Civilization—had existed long before Earth was born. When the God Civilization entered her senescence, we seeded the newly formed Earth with the beginnings of life. Then the God Civilization skipped across time by traveling close to the speed of light. When life on Earth had evolved to the appropriate stage, we came back, introduced a new species based on our ancestral genes, eliminated its enemies, and carefully guided its evolution until Earth was home to a new civilized species just like us.”

  “How do you expect us to believe you?”

  “That’s easy.”

  Thus began the half-year-long effort to verify these claims. Humans watched in astonishment as spaceships sent the original plans for life on Earth and images of the primitive Earth. Following the old wanderer’s direction, humans dug up incredible machines from deep below Earth’s crust, equipment that had through the long eons monitored and manipulated the biosphere on this planet.

  Humans finally had to believe. At least with respect to life on Earth, the Gods really were God.

  3.

  At the third emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Secretary-General, on behalf of the human race, finally asked God the key question: why did they come to Earth?

  “Before I answer this question, you must have a correct understanding of the concept of civilization.” God stroked his long beard. This was the same God who had been at the first emergency session half a year ago. “How do you think civilizations evolve over time?”

  “Civilization on Earth is currently in a stage of rapid development. If we’re not hit by natural disasters beyond our ability to resist, I think we will continue our development indefinitely,” said the Secretary-General.

  “Wrong. Think about it. Every person experiences childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, finally arriving at death. The stars are the same way. Indeed, everything in the universe goes through the same process. Even the universe itself will have to terminate one day. Why would civilization be an exception? No, a civilization will also grow old and die.”

  “How exactly does that happen?”

  “Different civilizations grow old and die in different ways, just like different people die of different diseases or just plain old age. For the God Civilization, the first sign of her senescence was the extreme lengthening of each individual member’s life span. By then, each individual in the God Civilization could expect a life as long as four thousand Earth years. By age two thousand, their thoughts had completely ossified, losing all creativity. Because individuals like these held the reins of power, new life had a hard time emerging and growing. That was when our civilization became old.”

  “And then?”

  “The second sign of the civilization’s senescence was the Age of the Machine Cradle.”

  “What?”

  “By then our machines no longer relied on their creators. They operated independently, maintained themselves, and developed on their own. The smart machines gave us everything we needed: not just material needs, but also psychological ones. We didn’t need to put any effort into survival. Taken care of by machines, we lived as though we were lying in comfortable cradles.

  “Think about it; if the jungles of primitive Earth had been filled with inexhaustible supplies of fruits and tame creatures that desired to become food, how could apes evolve into humans? The Machine Cradle was just such a comfort-filled jungle. Gradually we forgot about our technology and science. Our civilization became lazy and empty, devoid of creativity and ambition, and that only sped up the aging process. What you see now is the God Civilization in her final dying gasps.”

  “Then . . . can you now tell us the goal for the God Civilization in coming to Earth?”

  “We have no home now.”

  “But . . .” The Secretary-General pointed upward.

  “The spaceships are old. It’s true that the artificial environment on the ships is more stable than any natural environment, including Earth’s. But the ships are so old, old beyond your imagination. Old components have broken down. Accumulated quantum effects over the eons have led to more and more software errors. The system’s self-repair and self-maintenance functions have encountered more and more insurmountable obstacles. The living environment on the ships is deteriorating. The amount of life necessities that can be distributed to individuals is decreasing by the day. We can just about survive. In the twenty thousand cities on the various ships, the air is filled wi
th pollution and despair.”

  “Are there no solutions? Perhaps new components for the ships? A software upgrade?”

  God shook his head. “The God Civilization is in her final years. We are two billion dying men and women each more than three thousand years old. But before us, hundreds of generations had already lived in the comfort of the Machine Cradle. Long ago, we forgot all our technology. Now we have no way to repair these ships that have been operating for tens of millions of years on their own. Indeed, in terms of the ability to study and understand technology, we are even worse than you. We can’t even connect a circuit for a lightbulb or solve a quadratic equation . . .

  “One day, the ships told us that they were close to complete breakdown. The propulsion systems could no longer push the ships near the speed of light. The God Civilization could only drift along at a speed not even one-tenth the speed of light, and the ecological support systems were nearing collapse. The machines could no longer keep two billion of us alive. We had to find another way out.”

  “Did you ever think that this would happen?”

  “Of course. Two thousand years ago, the ships already warned us. That was when we began the process of seeding life on Earth so that in our old age we would have support.”

  “Two thousand years ago?”

  “Yes. Of course I’m talking about time on the ships. From your frame of reference, that was three-point-five billion years ago, when Earth first cooled down.”

  “We have a question: you say that you’ve lost your technology. But doesn’t seeding life require technology?”

  “Oh. To start the process of evolving life on a planet is a minor operation. Just scatter some seeds, and life will multiply and evolve on its own. We had this kind of software even before the Age of the Machine Cradle. Just start the program, and the machines can finish everything. To create a planet full of life, capable of developing civilization, the most basic requirement is time, a few billion years of time.