Twiceborn

by C. L. Kagmi

  If I’d had the ability, would I have given Amy a new mortal body instead of an immortal digital life? Would it have been better if I had?

  If I had, perhaps no one else would have accomplished Upload in my lifetime. I would not be standing here in an apartment on simulated Mars, but Amy would have had a Bio life. A spouse and children, maybe, grown in her own belly. Inescapable hardships and victories that meant something.

  Chiyari stopped to pet one of his plants on the way out; a venus fly trap of emerald and gold, which closed a thorned mouth on his finger when he prodded it. One of the spines pierced his skin and a ruby drop welled until he licked the wounded finger.

  The significance of the action—that he was maybe the only person in my world who kept blood beneath his skin—was not lost on me.

  “Thank you for coming, Doctor,” Chiyari told me, genuine gratitude in his voice. “I hope you have enjoyed your visit. And I hope I will see you again.”

  A few days later I was back in the warmth of Amy’s home, this time in the teal-carpeted parlor adjacent to her entry hall. This was a more intimate space than her kitchen—and, I sense, a more adult one. This was a place for work to be done.

  We sat in cushioned Victorian-inspired chairs, drinking hot tea.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come to peace with this, Remy.” I was ‘Remy’ from the outset this time, an equal and a friend. I knew my smile betrayed none of my uneasiness as I watched Amy, rapturously graceful, lower her cup to its saucer.

  “Yes,” I said to her. “Things are different now. We must come to terms with that—accept what it means. Of course, I don’t think we’ve even begun to figure that out. Chiyari and his—paintings—are probably representative of our new culture in its infancy.”

  Amy smiled at me warmly, with the air of one who’s pleased with a student.

  “Our society has existed like this for one-hundred and fifty years,” she said. “There were empires in the Bio world that didn’t last that long. But infant for our timescale, yes. Still in its infancy.”

  “There were also empires that lasted twenty times longer,” I reminded her. “This sesquicentennial is nothing to the span of human history.”

  “You’re right. It’s not.” Amy leaned forward, wrapped her fingers around her mug of tea as though to warm them.

  “Were you nice to him?” she asked.

  “To Chiyari? I like to think so.”

  She snorted, and I saw a teenage girl’s giggle. Tried not to think of us as father and daughter, tried not to think of Chiyari as her date.

  The moment passed as quickly as it came, and Amy was all maturity again.

  “I worry about you, Remy. He said you seemed confused. Out-of-sorts. Are you...” I could feel her hesitation to offend, to approach me as a therapist rather than a friend. “...are you alright?”

  Confused, yes. Out-of-sorts. That would be a good way to put it. But I would not let her worry for me.

  “I was older than you when I was Uploaded, Amy. I still am. And you know I won’t take those damned youth mods, so don’t ask me to.”

  “Yes, Remy,” she said sadly. “I know you don’t like modifications.”

  I wondered what she would do—what she would say, what she would feel—when she found out about the new thing I was planning to add to the world I brought her into.

  I had not been completely idle in the century-and-a-half since my Upload.

  I did not study new things with the voracity of Amelia and her ilk; had not engaged in the same sensory explorations, come to accept the same new truths, or fought to build a place for myself in this deathless society the way she has.

  But I clung, with an old man’s grasping, to what measures of control I could. Immediately upon entering this matrix, I had to know how to manipulate it. And though many functions of manipulating my environment would never be reflexive to me—the sound-dampening shields, the re-winding, the pretty little apps like Chiyari’s wormhole or our giant wasp friend’s body—I remembered enough about the pre-Upload world to ask the deeper questions.

  The fundamental questions of a computer program: what is its language? Not ‘what clever little shortcuts have other people built?’ but ‘how does the data interface with the machine at the bottom of it all?’

  I sometimes felt like a ghost or a mystic, walking through my world. Like one of very few people who were even aware of the deeper truth, the physical devices we all lived on.

  Perhaps that’s why it worked. I asked not what magic words I must say, but what the magic itself was made of. I dug into the code of time and space, dug layers-deep until I hit cold silicon with a stream of binary numbers passing through it in the same way nerve impulses once passed through the human brain.

  I dug that deep and learned to dive layers deeper than most netizens would. Under sensory perception; under the invisible communication streams and other ‘sixth senses.’ Underneath, even, the basic property-coordinate links and into the mother files that held the very essence, the ongoing process of a human mind. I saw through our existence, and that was where I made my changes.

  I wanted to know the parts that only the programmers had understood on the day we uploaded Amelia. I learned how the people around me worked. Could have been a healer, perhaps, if there had not been a repletion of those. As it was I kept my talents to myself for a long, long time.

  But for my newest project, I needed a test subject. I started with a copy of Chiyari’s little flytrap.

  My code capture program had worked its flawless magic on that construct while I visited Chiyari’s home, locating its original server and lifting the necessary binary to recreate it in full. I stored the stolen record on my own server; activated it in my own bedroom and let it blossom.

  Its development sequence had been included in the code, and I set it to run from start to maturity over the course of a week. The thing would blossom from a tiny lime-green shoot into an emerald-and-gold thing with leaves spread the radius of my hand and a stalk as tall as my forearm. And teeth. Teeth strong and sharp enough to cut the skin. I planted the seed of the thing in my desk.

  Then I sat down to eat—a purely voluntary ritual—and waited.

  I asked Chiyari to come see me when a week’s time was up. A reciprocal invitation; a reciprocal opening of my home to him.

  He smiled at me and insisted on offering his hand again—which nearly made me shudder again, his flesh so warm, alive, and solid-seeming. The confidence with which he leaned close to me told me he thought he was becoming part of my inner cadre. In another life, perhaps, he might have been.

  Three visits from the great Remy Burnes—culminating in an invitation to the doctor’s own home—must have been something that the younger netizens would assume was glamorous and rare.

  Well, rare—I’d give them that. I couldn’t actually remember the last time someone less than a century and a half old had been inside of my apartment.

  He came in through the door, not by way of teleport—an old-fashioned sort of modesty on my part and perhaps a little bit of shame. I always made a point of keeping my place humble. Close to my roots. Accurate. None of these fantasy castles for me, thanks. I lived in a recreation of Old St. Louis, near the medical campus. I keep my streets accurately pedestrian and noisy and unwashed.

  Chiyari actually looked concerned by the time he took in my living room—apparently his generation had missed the myth of the sage who keeps humble surroundings. He looked as though he may have been taking my living room with its stained carpet, tattered leather sofa, and sun-faded polaroids on the wall as a sign of mental illness.

  “Please,” I told him, “come in.”

  He obliged, with consideration but nothing like caution in his step. His eyes lit up with fascination as he realized that his shoes were actually tracking dirt from the outside, and for a moment I hated myself for what I had planned for him.

  The spark of interest in something new passed quickly, as for any netborn, and he gravitated towards
my photographs.

  “These are very nice,” he murmured. He eyed an old polaroid of my wife and daughter—both deceased in a car accident a decade before I met Amelia—with entirely too much interest.

  “They’re not art,” I told him.

  “I know.” There was something like reverence in his voice.

  I wished he wouldn’t show such reverence. Wished that he had not re-created Amy’s body in such loving detail. Wished that there was nothing in this man that I could like.

  I drummed my fingers nervously, imagining that I was twisting little lines of code in the air around me. I laid them around Chiyari in an intricate spiderweb-pattern. The web glowed faintly in my mind’s eye, and something predatory flared in me.

  “Now it’s my turn,” I told him, “to show you something new.”

  Chiyari blinked, wondering and unafraid, and followed me into my bedroom-office.

  He took in the bed with more uncomprehending judgement of my lifestyle. Not comprehending that I should choose to sleep and work in the same space when infinity was available; a little confusion, perhaps, about why I was showing him such an intimate space.

  Then he saw the flytrap on my desk, and his eyes went wide.

  “You copied me!”

  Copied, used in that sense, referred to a theft of intellectual property. But he sounded not at all displeased, and slightly flattered. “Did you know I wrote that program myself?”

  “I suspected. Watch.”

  And now I pulled the string that starts the cascade around the little flytrap, the test-run of the program I’d been working on for the past three weeks.

  The little flytrap was gone. As though it never existed. Simply disappeared.

  Chiyari turned to me, frowning. His eyes said ‘And?’, for deleting an inanimate object is nothing. Less than nothing. A simple act of storage.

  “It’s gone,” I told him. “Deleted. Unrestorably. Nothing that you or anyone else could do would get it back.”

  The moment when he realized my intent was beautiful and terrible to see. His blue eyes widened, real fear in them for the first time, maybe, in his life.

  He tried to disappear. To teleport safely far away, but my spiderweb code had done its work and he was trapped. None of his exit pings were reaching his server.

  No one could hear him but me.

  His face went ashen, deer-in-headlights still, and I watched him silently calculate the implications of his mortality.

  “Please,” he said, finally. “Please.” His eyes held mine. There was fear in them, but also certainty. As though pleading must necessarily yield mercy.

  Something twisted in me. I called to mind the memory of the photograph on his wall, the man’s face juxtaposed with the splatter of his blood.

  “You were going to kill Amy.”

  “Not, kill—not this,” he said softly. “She would wake up afterwards. She would be alive.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. And I realized I was drawing out the scene.

  I could feel him running through his possible responses, through what to say that would not enrage me further. I could feel the tendrils of his mind, little whiplashes of code slamming against my barrier, against the laws of virtual physics below the level of visible reality.

  Chiyari was brilliant—the defenses and workarounds he had mustered on a whim were impressive, and might have worked if I had not been so well-prepared.

  But I had known what I was up against. I was very well-prepared.

  I found that, for the first time in more than two centuries of life, the possibility of my own death did not scare me; no more than the prospect of living on as a murderer myself, at any rate.

  “I’ll die with you,” I proposed. “Then you won’t be alone in it.”

  Chiyari smiled sadly, and behind his eyes I saw Martian sunsets and black razor-deer and wondering, wondering what would pass in this universe without him. “What difference would that make?” he asked.

  “None,” I admitted, and decided that I did not really want to die anyway. Not yet.

  I wanted to see how my world handled it—the coming of true death to their world. Once it had been done, it could be done again. Immortality would no longer be a guarantee.

  “Goodbye,” I told Chiyari, and triggered the several-layers-deep code that would compel the silicon matrix to perform the ultimate travesty. To delete all instances of his code.

  My bug would race back through his timeline, corrupting not only the man who stood before me but all previous ‘save points’ from which he could be restored. No grieving mother or criminal justice body would be able to undo it.

  I’m ashamed to admit how much thought I put into how I wanted it to look.

  Which would be more final, I’d wondered? Deleting everything within the boundaries that encompassed “Chiyari,” to have his body vanish like his mind, like the program he had always been? Or to cause only the contents of his brain and mind to disappear, leaving a useless corpse to remind my people of what Bio death had been like?

  I had decided, in the end, that the people of this world were too used to corpses. Half a dozen of them hung in Chiyari’s studio, were re-created in living rooms, and no one seemed to find that unsettling anymore.

  Absence would be worse. The thought of something missing. Here, nothing ever disappeared.

  Chiyari did. My little code-bugs gnawed through his reality in a fraction of a second, and he was simply gone. The room stood empty before me as though no one else had ever been here.

  For a moment the emptiness seemed vacuous and awful—part of me had liked him.

  Then I straightened and stretched, savoring the warmth of programmed sunlight on my skin.

  On Speaking with The Stars

  Content warning: This story involves giant insects and, toward the end, severe bodily injuries.

  * * *

  This novelette has never before been seen in print.

  Kit has never been afraid before. They’ve had anxiety—test anxiety, performance anxiety. And they thought they knew, from that, what fear was like.

  But now adrenaline is like acid in their blood, threatening to drive them to—

  What? Running will not stop the walls from shaking, rattling as though the shuttlecraft is about to fly apart. Hiding would be no escape from the solid surface that’s hurtling up at them as they plunge into its gravity well.

  Kit knows, in their mind, that there is nothing to be afraid of. The shuttle will slow itself and bring them smoothly to the ground. The chances of failure are so astronomically low as to be laughable. But their body doesn’t know that.

  The Reshaped worship the body and its animal instincts.

  Why? This is awful.

  They can, at least, pretend that the shaking is all coming from the ship. Maybe it is; maybe their limbs really aren’t trembling nor their teeth chattering. It’s hard to tell in the midst of this din.

  Below, the planet grows. Kit tries to focus on that—on strangeness and newness and beauty. On potential. It’s a tableau of jade oceans and continents, the land swirled pale on the dry plains and dark in the forests. There is something strangely compelling about the ribbon of atmosphere that glows on the curved horizon. Something compelling about the wildly curling shapes of peninsulas and archipelagos, the almost-random pattern of pale desert and dark jungle.

  Kit tries to focus on the beauty. Tries not to think about the gravity well.

  This titanic world is, by orders of magnitude, the largest thing they’ve ever seen. Its gravity well is the strongest physical force they’ve experienced. In Kit’s mind’s eye the spacetime curve yawns before the shuttle, an irresistible incline that stops not at the planet’s surface, but at its white-hot core. In Kit’s mind’s eye, the shuttle thrusters fail, and the surface intercepts them at an impossible speed—

  Kit reaches for the override. Stops themself, trembling.

  What’s to become of an Eternal who does not trust mathematics to predict the fu
ture, who does not trust their ship to take them to a safe arrival?

  I have faith in the equations.

  At last the shaking does begin to cease, soothing quiet in its place as the curve of the horizon falls away. The tableau becomes a world; a waving substance Kit recognizes as grass ripples far below, and they marvel at convergent evolution. They’ll find almost exactly the same forms here, for the most part, as they would have on their ancestors’ homeworld hundreds of lightyears away.

  Kit cares little for the minutiae of biology, but feels something in their brain cataloguing it nonetheless, noting the microscopic differences between the structures of blades of grass from one world to the next. Catalog, catalog, catalog. You can never know too much.

  They are no longer afraid. But now, more puzzling, Kit feels sick. Nausea rises.

  A quick system scan shows many readings off, but no signs of physical damage. Nothing their training says cannot be stress-induced.

  Kit breathes deeply, willing themself to calm. This is their final test. And they will pass it.

  The shuttle levels and ribbon of atmosphere becomes a horizon.

  The black ship descends from the jade sky, smooth and silent as a piece of the Void. This, Lily thinks, is what the end of the world looks like.

  Strangely, she feels no fear. This was always certain. This outpost was only a temporary mercy; an attempt to give her purpose that no one had truly believed would work. It hadn’t been a shock, then, when she failed to decipher the language of the Ants.

  It had been a shock when her overs professed their intent to call in an Eternal. Her kind and theirs rarely trusted each other. But she had always known that someone would come to replace her. There were always going to be more people, more qualified and talented experts, coming in to take over her quiet world.