Twiceborn

by C. L. Kagmi

  I thought, briefly, about submitting myself to her for a tune-up.

  On this day, Amy seemed to know exactly what I needed. The coat-hanging ritual grounded and centered me. I savored the rough-yet-soft fabric of my tweed jacket—another wave of deja vu washing over me as I did so. She took it and hung it with care, as though there were a real possibility that it might crease if treated roughly.

  “Hello, Amelia.”

  “There’s tea,” she said, and led me into her kitchen.

  The spotted dog—a spotted dog—was pacing there, its little nails making click-click-clicks against the maple floor. I watched it debate how to parse the arrival of this new human in its domain.

  “Is that…?”

  “No,” Amelia said softly. “I wouldn’t put a Bio animal through this.”

  The almost-dog was friendly and endearing without overbearing. It circled me a few times before finally stopping and offering its snout to sniff my hand. I let it go.

  Amelia looked over from where she was pouring iced tea, beaming. “His name is Trevor,” she said. “He’s a little shy around strangers, but he’ll warm up if you want him to.”

  “He’s beautiful, Amy.”

  I sat down in a spindly oak chair, and the silence stretched between us for a moment too long. There was something waiting here—a subject she was reluctant to broach. I could feel it in the air.

  She brought a plate of lemon cookies to the table, and set them down before she spoke.

  “Have you heard,” she asked hesitantly, “of Erik Chiyari? The painter?”

  Lack of an adrenal system be damned. My body, simulated or not, went rigid with alarm.

  “Is...that what you call it, now?” I asked carefully.

  “Yes.” A note of defensiveness in her voice. “I do. I think what he does is beautiful.”

  I looked away. Watched her dog pace, nervously sniffing the floor where I had stood.

  “I know this is hard for you, Remy.”

  My first name. Formalities observed, this was to be an adult-to-adult talk, then.

  “You know what is hard for me?” I asked.

  “Everything. So many things have changed because—because of what you’ve done. I wanted to make sure that you—had everything you needed.”

  I managed to meet her eyes. Felt the cold in my own, and hated it. But hated even more what I suspected she was going to say.

  “I’m going to work with him on his sesquicentennial piece. It’s—appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “Tell me you don’t mean what I think you mean.”

  “Oh, alright; I’m going to be the piece, then. It’s a perfect reversal, you see. Once, you saved me from a Bio body. Now I don’t need one.”

  I found my eyes going strangely unfocused. Wondered if I could will that away, but found that I had no desire to do so.

  “Does your father know?” The old man had been Uploaded even before me, a few months after his wife died suddenly of a heart attack.

  “Yes,” she told me. “But he has his own life now. And I’m—not particularly interested in anybody’s feedback. I just wanted you to hear it from me. Not from someone else.”

  The words hung in the air between us.

  “How long?”

  “We’ve been talking for months.”

  “‘Talking.’”

  “Remy, don’t.”

  She looked at me and with the slightest change to her posture became forbidding, reproving. Almost scornful.

  The situation warped in my mind; became absurd. And, for lack of any other response, I started to laugh.

  She sat at the table, the cookie platter between her and I. Tapped her foot and leaned forward on her elbows, the picture of long-suffering patience.

  “Please, Remy,” he said softly. “Sometimes, being old-fashioned is harmless. This isn’t one of those times. You can be upset if you want to be. That’s only hurting you. But don’t try to change my mind. I have considered this carefully.”

  “Amy,” I said to her. “Amy.”

  She waited.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that strangers will pay to watch him kill you?”

  “I’ve been to Erik’s shows.”

  Erik. She was on a first-name basis with the bastard, spoke of him with more than a little bit of affection.

  What had I done when I killed Death?

  “What scares you about this?” she asked me.

  “What?”

  “Bear with me. It’s a therapy technique. What scares you, about me going to Chiyari?”

  I flapped my mouth at her soundlessly.

  “I know you’ve always been conservative, Dr. Burnes. I’ll admit that surprised me at first, because you were all on the leading edge—back then. You were doing what others were afraid to even speak of.

  “But your conservatism doesn’t bother me anymore. I just…” she hesitated, “I wish you were happier here.”

  As she said it, a salted breeze stirs the curtain in the window nearest me. I was touched. Moved, nearly, to tears.

  None of which helped my reaction to the thought of what Chiyari is going to do to her.

  The window that the breeze was coming through looked out on the sea. I imagined that all four walls of the house did, because Euclidean geometry does not matter here. It’s the same view I had coming in the front but from a different angle, jade whitecaps crashing with distant majesty on the rocks perhaps a hundred meters below Amelia’s mountain perch.

  I peered down at the whitecaps, the jagged black pumice rocks bare of such softness as grass or soil. I imagined the body-shattering—irreversibly shattering—power of ocean, sky and rock in the Bio world. I remembered how sunlight could bring cancer to unprotected skin, which could spread to other organs, how in the Bio world the Earth’s fragile atmosphere was—is—surrounded by the void of space will suffocate or freeze you and will sometimes send asteroids hurtling out of the sky.

  “I’m sorry, Amy,” I told her. “I’m sorry if I have upset you.” I hesitated, but could not resist: “You know it’s going to hurt, don’t you?”

  “Of course it will. That’s the point.”

  I flinched a little at the matter-of-factness in her voice, still strongly patterned after the voice of the Bio teenager I knew once upon a time. I wondered when Amelia Langley became so bored.

  “But it won’t change anything. Not in a bad way.” She put down her cup of tea which, I suddenly noticed, had transformed from an iced glass into a steaming porcelain cup at some point in the course of our conversation.

  “You made sure of that. I’ll always exist. Until the explosion of the Sun or the heat-death of the Universe, anyway. And we have people working on solving those.”

  And I saw little Amelia, bald, gaunt, curious Amelia overlaid atop this eldritch creature who would lie down on Chiyari’s canvas in a few short weeks, and I shook my head.

  “I knew that old age involved confusion,” I told her. “But I never imagined it would hold this much.”

  She smiled at me. “I wondered why your self-image remained old. So few people’s do.”

  Her observation made me frown. To feel that you are old—not due to biological inevitability, but willfully outdated—is unsettling.

  Amy was still smiling.

  I began, that day, to notice new things about her. It had never been odd, to me, that a teenager would choose to look forty at sixteen—especially one who had faced mortality as brutally as Amy had.

  But I had never noticed the particular attributes of Amy’s chosen form. Things that had always been there in her forty-year-old body-design, in the thickness of her lips and the darkness of her lashes and, somehow, in the sharpness of beginning wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  How much of this woman did I never see before?

  Was she a woman, frozen like the rest of the world in my mind—or had I stunted her maturation when I copied her neural patterns into code?

  “Why do you want what Chiy
ari’s offering?” I asked, looking for a way for this to make sense.

  And I saw the horrible beginnings of heat behind her eyes. “Death. You took that from me when you moved me here. I don’t regret that I will stay alive. But there are experiences that—a person should have.”

  She could make this thing sound almost sane.

  “Besides,” she said, “he’s an artist.”

  Oh dear, sweet Jesus, I thought, what is wrong with the world?

  The world that I made. The world I had constructed for her, for all of them.

  Amy was attracted to this butcher. I didn’t build that.

  I caught myself thinking that maybe I would have left that part of her out, let it die with her cancer-riddled flesh. If I had known what she contained, if I could have changed that without changing her too much…

  ‘In a system as interdependent as a mind,’ a line from an old textbook comes back to me, like an ugly nursery rhyme, ‘to change a single aspect is to change the entire system.’

  Amy’s green eyes remain on me, waiting, patiently, for me to understand. Panic grips me for no reason I can name, and she stares into space for another minute, her eyes glazed, daydreaming.

  And suddenly I’m filled with a real murderous desire to kill this Chiyari fellow.

  And I realize that that is not wholly outside of the realm of possibility.

  Chiyari was netborn. He was never burdened by a biological body nor shaped by one, birthed instead by complicated algorithms that constructed his nervous system from the templates of other human minds.

  This made Chiyari, technically, an AI—but considered legally human, as there was little enough difference between him and us now.

  Almost all children for the past century and a half had been netborn. Bearing a child into a fragile, limited biological body had begun to be considered cruel very shortly after the Upload became accessible to all.

  I think somebody arranged a biological birth as an art project a few years back. They had to use frozen sperm and eggs and robotic cloning vats to control the process from inside the computer matrix, because nobody thought far enough ahead to preserve a reproductively viable population outside the computer matrix when abandoning them entirely became possible. Well, people like me thought of it; but that, too, was considered cruel.

  The baby was fine, or so the press coverage said—and I believe it. I remember well the perfect health of the vast majority of births I attended in the Bio world. Although I do wonder about the unforeseen effects on this poor baby, who was raised entirely by lovingly designed robots projecting holograms of his in-matrix parents for ten years before they decided to Upload him.

  His life was a popular reality show for a while, I remember—considered both thrilling and controversial because the possibility of permanent death existed for him. Doing that to a child, the majority opinion soon held, was unthinkable.

  Anyway. Chiyari was netborn. He was never subject to such cruelties as the possibility of death.

  I began to research him. The first shock was that I knew his mother. From Before. I did not know her well, but she had worked in biotech a couple of centuries ago. She’d been an up-and-coming talent when I retired. I remember shaking her hand at a conference once, a mechanical nicety. I remember that there was something unsettling in her eyes. Later she’d asked questions about human subjects research that unsettled me even more.

  She’d decided about half a century after her own Upload that she wanted a son. One that she could design, in every aspect, from scratch. She’d made a copy of her own brain—quite a brilliant brain, as I recall—and introduced the necessary changes to make it male. She upped the aggression factor because she had, by her own account, always felt herself too passive. Said in interviews, after her son gained fame, that she had always considered herself to be a pathological wallflower.

  She’d added a bit of sensory-art appreciation—another thing she had always found lacking in herself. Added some witch’s brew for sociability, wiped the memories clean, age-regressed the resulting neural pattern and placed it in a lovely little programmed baby body.

  Voila. The result was a beautiful psychopath.

  The young Chiyari played the violin and made 2D and 3D light sculptures until he was about twelve—at which point he started slicing up his own arms and was disappointed not to find anything interesting inside. So his mother began teaching him Bio anatomy and coding, to make himself a body that resembled the ones his Bio ancestors had had. Naturally.

  She helped convince the others that he was a visionary—one of the few who understood how fundamentally the Upload had affected us. That his art was simply something that enlightened people got used to, like programming babies from scratch, or interacting with people who’ve programmed themselves to have the bodies of centaurs at a dinner party.

  After all, the rules of our world meant that the kid couldn’t actually hurt anyone.

  He killed his first volunteer victim—his first publicized one, anyway—when he was sixteen. The same age Amy had been when she Uploaded. A very different creature, the young Amy had been, from a world of Bio steepled roofs and white picket fences and sunlight and soccer matches and death, a world where people still protected their children because there were still things that couldn’t be rewritten.

  I’d had some thought, when I first started, of sharing my research on Chiyari with Amy. But I soon saw that that would be pointless—everything I found was public. Everything, likely, she had read already.

  It became more about knowing what I was up against.

  Now chronologically fifty-six years old—and spiritually probably about five. Chiyari had stopped his aging algorithm and inhabited a roughly twenty-six-year-old body, blonde- and blue-eyed like the one his mother had designed for him at birth.

  The overall effect was charming. Even I had to admit that, watching his recordings. A winning smile, a face whose symmetry even I could appreciate.

  I found that I hated the bastard.

  I had to see Chiyari. I had to talk to him. It would have been a psychological necessity, even if it weren’t a technical one.

  The self-proclaimed artist was happy to oblige. There are advantages to being one of the most famous people in the world—and when I wrote to him, he answered. His reply, written on lovingly programmed antique stationery, said in beautifully looping handwriting that he would be honored to meet me.

  I held the letter a little bit away from myself after reading it. Found myself wondering at the politeness of it, wondering if Chiyari and I were already engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse. Or if I was being completely delusional.

  The antiquated stationery—chosen by Chiyari for an antiquated soul like me? He’d never resorted to text in any of his other art or communications that I’d seen, except as a purely aesthetic ingredient in visuals. He’d written in blood once, I remembered, involuntarily—his own blood mixed with that of some other man, repeating some poetry written centuries before my own time.

  His letter to me sung the praises of my work. Said in too-warm terms how much he owed me.

  How much he owed me. If I had not done what I did, this creature would not exist. People would not buy his recordings, and—

  Amelia would be dead, and how many others?

  Someone else would have done it eventually, chimed an automatic voice in my brain, established long ago, originally as a guardian of humility. This world, being possible, was always inevitable.

  Was it, though? I wondered and for a moment, before I managed to shove it away again, the weight of responsibility was crushing.

  I wondered if Chiyari hated me. I could not see sincerity in his words. If he knew me well enough to send old stationery, did he know me well enough to predict my feelings about the sesquicentennial? To predict my reason for contacting him? Or did he truly assume that my intentions were pure?

  You’re getting paranoid, Remy.

  Perhaps it was something else. Because I was the First Welcomer, a
fter all. He could not learn about Amy without learning about me.

  And suddenly, I felt ill.

  I was the First Welcomer, the original conqueror of Death. Chiyari claimed that his every work was a celebration of my own.

  Did he think I wanted to help with his show?

  Whether he understood—or even suspected—that I might bear him ill will was perhaps the most unsettling question. It still is. Could he understand the protectiveness of a friend? Or was he a manner of creature so different that he believed all that he said about his art?

  Perhaps his admiration, his apparent idolization of me, was genuine.

  We all ignore our own uncomfortable possibilities. This is one of mine.

  Chiyari was waiting for me in a stylish coastal cafe. The sensibilities of the 1940s and 50s were popular at the time, and this cafe fit that to a tee. The cobalt skies and jade seas near Amy’s apartment were repeated here, along with white sugar sands and a charming recreation of a 20th century roadway complete with cars that may have been functional constructs driven by real people, or programmed pieces of scenery. There was probably a bit of both.

  He was leaning lazily to one side in the cafe’s white metal chair, wearing dark glasses against the sun’s glare in an apparent effort not to break the cafe’s vintage atmosphere.

  The vintage effect was, however, ruined by the ten-foot-long wasp hovering at a table behind Chiyari, apparently conducting business negotiations with a fairy. It helped that the wasp seemed to have brought its own theme music, a metal ballad that emanated gently from its table.

  I sat down between my quarry and the wasp, and tried to shut out the sound of heavy bass.

  “Good Doctor,” Chiyari gave me a truly brilliant grin, perfect teeth a clean yet respectably natural shade of ivory. He extended a hand and shook mine, warmly.

  I tried not to stiffen at the touch; his flesh was warm and strong and alive, practically vibrating with enthusiasm. It might just be possible to like this man.