Existence

by David Brin

  Like Emily’s unique idea for using the Mother Probe technologies. A scheme that called for taking an ancient dream, one that was a lie, and turning it into truth. A truth that might then help to expose liars …

  Something about his thought-drift must have wandered in the right direction, because suddenly Gerald felt a creepy presence. A chill up the back of his neck that said he wasn’t alone in the quiet stretch of slightly curved hallway. And along with all that … a queer sense of approval.

  Of course, the moment he noticed it, the glimmer started fading. So he veered quickly to another topic. Diverting away from the maybe-cobbly.

  Why me? Why now?

  Why are Ika and Hiram so insistent I try this, even as our ship plows deeper into dangerous territory? How am I a better candidate than younger, more mentally agile crew members?

  Something about the nothing changed—it felt vaguely like a nod. He was asking good questions. Try conjectures.

  Because he was the famous explorer Gerald Livingstone? Tested by space and time and alien demon-artifacts. The man who lassoed an ancient, star-voyaging crystal out of orbit, brought home dire news from the galaxy, then helped find new ways around the danger.

  Venerable commander and warrior. Helping humanity to claim the solar system. Already with his visage on a dozen postage stamps … though with stronger jaw and straighter nose than he ever saw in a mirror, and no hint of the flawed, limited creature who lurked behind those eyes. Any single part of the legend seemed unlikely.

  The whole thing? Preposterous!

  But I already knew all that. I’ve been luckier than anyone deserves. Starting the moment I saw something fishy in that object Hachi and I snagged with our tether.…

  He recognized the same feeling now. A shiver near the base of the spine. A frisson of uncanny recognition. Still veering his attention and gaze away from that patch of hallway, Gerald thought hard.

  Other generations would attribute it all to intervention by the gods … or God. Or apply the catch-all “destiny.” Human egos perceive convenient correlations that flatter our prejudices, our outrageous sense of self-importance, ignoring exceptions.

  And so, science leans far the other way, training us to dismiss subjectivity. To shrug off observation bias. A good and mature teaching …

  … but shouldn’t we keep one eye cracked open, just a little, for the fey and strange? For things that are too good—or too bad—to be true?

  Movement in his blind spot.

  It shouldn’t happen. He had no retinal cells aimed at that small portion of the corridor. But Gerald glimpsed something anyway, allowing it to form, without expectation—

  —then recoiled from a sudden-strong impression—a momentary, electric imprint on his mind. The glimmer of a narrow, pointed face, fuzzy, with long whiskers, a looping tail and black eyes that shone.…

  “Porfirio,” he whispered. The rat god of the InterMesh. Mostly mythological, yet paid homage by countless groups, individuals, and ais across Earth and space, who tithed one-millionth of their bit cycles for use by the patron deity of uploaded beings.

  Gerald broke the trance, rubbing his eyes before glancing at the corridor again, this time with full attention. Nothing was there. Nothing but scattered dust, held to the plastic floor by static charge and centrifugal force.

  That was no cobbly. Rather, the famous little software rodent was exactly what his subconscious might dream up! An illusion born of imagination and fatigue. At another level, clearly, Porfirio represented a different explanation for Gerald’s life story. The usual obsessive thought—that all of this could be a simulation.

  The next time I rouse, will I find myself living in some crystal world, doomed to drift across the vast desert between stars? Or already sealed in mud beneath some planet’s sea? Is this reality of mine, aboard a mighty ship where I’m a legendary hero-leader, the place where my mind goes in order to evade some awful truth?

  In which case, should I be trying so hard to poke at “reality”? Or to wake up? Isn’t it better to leave things alone?

  Good question.

  But character is character. Personality is personality. And Gerald knew what the answer had to be, for the type of man he was.

  Hell yes. Always try to wake up.

  * * *

  He chuckled.

  Enough.

  All he could allocate, for Ika’s cobbly hunt, were a few minutes here and there, while devoting all his strength to the fight at hand. The battle for humanity. For Earth. And maybe more.

  Still, a person can do many things. Can be many things.

  So I’ll be back, he told the stretch of hallway. And I won’t forget.

  88.

  LUNGFISH

  She was running, tanned legs bare and gleaming with a soft sweat-sheen. Silk shorts and a halter top, bare feet pounding lightly across a surface that was richer between-the-toes than grass. And with it all came a voluptuous sensation of pursuit. One moment the chaser, then the chased. Knowing that, if she were caught, it would only happen by her choice. Bounding, leaping in the open breeze.

  * * *

  Now swimming. The flow of water velvety across her skin. Primordial but limitless. Almost prenatal in its innocence, but without the cramped confinement of a womb. Turning her head at just the right rhythm to breathe. Feeling the gentle burn of strength in use. Wanting or needing no protection.

  * * *

  And water became a lover. Roving across every sleek and fleshy curve, flowing along her legs and arms, hips and waist and thighs. Hands upon her, eager, admiring, greedy-lusty and appreciative, gradually grabbing harder, more needy, in perfect tempo to her own, back-arching desire. A mouth, nibbling, play-biting, covering and devouring hers with guileless kisses … Wesley …

  * * *

  Except the mouth and hands and kisses changed. Transformed. Improved. Still supple, still masculine-demanding, yet flavored now—in pleasant ways—with a tangy added hint of polymer and iron. Proud and strong and male and deserving … and modified, evolved, redesigned … Gavin …

  * * *

  Tor fought against awakening. But her dream faded as the cool-nap monitor cruelly said enough. Ten days of sleep, that was the limit, followed by two awake, tending the ship. Eating and stretching and exercising. Tending to real life.

  As usual, Tor had to spend her first waking moments negotiating with her complicated self-image. Her layered boundaries included metal and plastic encasements, without which she would die.

  Will they offer me new mods, when I get home? Will a day come when I can run again or swim? Take a real shower? Take a lover?

  She had chosen to keep all the internal chemistry from her old self. Including a libido that still foamed through her dreams. Reconnecting all of that to real skin, real flesh … well, one could always hope.

  Gavin will upgrade easier, she thought, vaguely recalling what he had seemed like in the dream. A demigod. Or just a man, only with many “good parts” enhanced.…

  “Oh criminy,” Tor muttered, wishing she could pinch the bridge of her nose—if she still had one—or splash her face with cold water. Instead, with a sigh, she unplugged the cool-napper umbilicus and floated free. Getting to work.

  * * *

  Hours later, with all of her inspections done and ship systems apparently nominal, Tor rested in the dim control room, half-floating in faint pseudo-gravity provided by the Warren Kimbel’s throbbing rockets.

  As it had since the womb, Tor’s heart beat against her rib cage. And the gentle pulse rhythmically rocked her inner body against the cerametal casing that enclosed her. Tor’s carapace ever after flames enveloped the Spirit of Chula Vista.

  Shells within shells. And beyond the skin of her ship, more layers still.

  Plato and his peers envisioned a cosmos consisting of perfect, crystal spheres, on which rode planets and the stars. A more comforting image, perhaps, than our modern concept—a roiling expanse spanning tens of billions of light-years.

  W
ith her percept expanded by the ship’s wide-gazing sensors, Tor felt awash in clusters and nebulae, as if the stars were flickering dots of phosphorescent plankton in a great sea. And, once again, she felt drawn to wonder.

  What happened out here, so long ago?

  What’s going on out there, right now?

  She felt haunted by the story that small hands chiseled into the Rosetta Wall. Though some parts seemed clear, the rock mural’s core eluded understanding. Scenes that portrayed strange, machinelike beings, doing incomprehensible things. Tor suspected some parts of the puzzle no archaeologist or smart-mob—biological or cybernetic—would ever decipher.

  We’re like lungfish, climbing ashore long after the continents were claimed by others. Blinking in confusion, we stare across a beach that looks devastated. Surrounding us are skeletons, from those who came earlier.

  But they’re not all dead or gone, those who emerged before us.

  There are footprints in the sand.

  The Wall testified to a time when simple, naive rules gave way. Machines changed. Evolved.

  We’ll learn much from studying the wrecks we find out here. But we’d better remember—those corpses were the losers!

  The carvings also depicted something else—the plague of fomite viroids, portrayed as little packets of peril, crisscrossing the Rosetta Wall. Infecting. Enticing. Replicating and spreading.

  Facing all this, should a sensible lungfish scoot back underwater? Surely, that path to safety was chosen by many races. To cower. To live in shabby, feudal nostalgia, praying to heaven while ignoring the sky. But hunkering also means declining to irrelevance. Existing, not thriving, while using up a single, fragile world.

  Like it or not, that won’t be our way. Whatever was deciphered from ruins of the past, men and women couldn’t stay crouched by one tiny fire, terrified of shadows.

  An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants—and hers—forging bravely into a dangerous galaxy. Explorer-machines who had been programmed to be human. Or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes. A maker race blending with its mechanical envoys.

  A pattern she had not seen among the rock wall depictions. Because it was doomed from the start? Should we try something else?

  What options had a fish, who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?

  Tor blinked. And as her eyelids separated, stars diffracted through a thin film of tears, breaking into rays. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, spreading a myriad ways. In too many directions. Too many paths to follow.

  More than her mind could hold.

  PART EIGHT

  TO BE …

  I like to think (and

  the sooner the better!)

  of a cybernetic meadow

  where mammals and computers

  live together in mutually

  programming harmony

  like pure water

  touching clear sky.

  —Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

  89.

  LUMINOUS

  An expanse of cloudy shapes spread in all directions, puffy and throbbing with potentiality. An almost limitless capacity to become.

  Rising to consciousness—now alert, aware, interested—he looked around and knew at once; this was no earthly landscape.

  Light came from all directions … and none.

  Up and down, apparently, were only suggestions.

  He wasn’t alone; figures could be seen dimly, through a haze that drank all definition from their moving forms. They might be small and close, or giants moving ponderously, very far away. Or both at once? Somehow, he suspected that could happen in this place.

  This … place …

  What is all this? How did I get here?

  I knew the answer to that, didn’t I?

  Once upon a time.

  There was something more pertinent. A question they (they?) had said he must ask of himself, each time he awakened here.

  Oh, yes.

  Who am I?

  What is my name?

  Letting his gaze settle downward, he looked upon a pair of masculine human hands—my hands—rather large, with long fingers that flexed when he told them to. Manicured nails gleamed. Floppy sleeves covered his arms, part of a robelike garment. Not angels’ robes, he noted with some relief. Terry cloth. Rough and comforting. My old bathrobe.

  And I am…?

  Words. He spoke them out of reflex, before jerking at how hollow and resonant they sounded in this place.

  “Hamish. My name is … Hamish Brookeman.”

  Author. Director. Producer. E-tropist. Celebrity confidant of statesmen and the mighty. Beloved of masses. Failed husband. Object of ridicule and devotion. Both hands lifted to stroke his face, finding the texture taut, vibrant, pleasantly youthful. And somehow he knew that he would never have to shave again. Unless he wanted to.

  “Oh yes,” Hamish recalled. “I know where I am. What this place is.

  “I’m aboard a starship. A crystal emissary, bound for a distant sun.”

  * * *

  The first production run of envoy-capsules would be just ten million, they said. All that could be made on a narrow starting budget, equal to that of a medium-sized nation. All that could be propelled by just one giant laser-launcher, perched in orbit above the moon. Of course, those ten million were the vanguard of enormous numbers to come later, once remaining political and social resistance was finally overcome with relentless persuasion—imaginative, varied, and persistent.

  The message carried by this little probe—(it seemed so vast inside!)—was worth all the effort, the expense, the resources, and sacrifices. A message of cautionary warning for other young species. An offer of hope.

  Now Hamish recalled the pride, the great honor, of being chosen as one of the first. Not only to upload a version of himself into many tens of thousands of crystal ships, but also when he was invited to come up in person—frail but spry in his nineties—to inspect the first batch of probes, all shiny and new, emerging from humankind’s first giant, automated factory-in-space.

  That memory—of being old, with creaky joints and aching bowels, yet lauded with a role at the ribbon cutting—seemed fresh as yesterday. In fact, he remembered everything up to the point, a few days later, when they attached electrodes and told him to relax, assuring him that personality and memory recording almost never hurt.

  So, it must have worked.

  I was skeptical, in my deepest heart, that any copy of me would ever waken in a virtual world, no matter how thoroughly we tested alien technologies, modifying and revising them with human science. Many of us feared the inhabitants would be just clever simulations. Robaitic automatons, not really self-aware.

  But here I am! Who can argue with success?

  It was all coming back. Years spent leading a new branch of the Renunciation Movement, fighting an obsolete prophet for control, then guiding the faction in new directions. Making it less a tool of oligarchs, religious troglodytes, and grouchy nostalgists. Transforming it instead into a more aggressive, technologically empowered force. An affiliation combining tens of millions … even hundreds of millions … who wanted science controlled. Guided by wisdom.

  Good times. Especially sticking it to all the boffins and would-be godmakers who thought they could “prove” him wrong with mere evidence. A notion easily belied by hordes of adoring fans who stayed loyal to him, even when his “hoax” story about the artifacts was shown to be a hoax, in its own right …

  Hamish frowned then, recalling how many of those same followers later reviled him when he veered yet again, lending his support to a bold technological endeavor. The growing push in favor of building star messengers.

  Well, new reasons, new arguments, new motives … all can lead to new goals. New aspirations. So he explained at the time. So he believed now.

  Anyway, millions held true, accepting his assurance that the universe needs us.

  With
nervous curiosity, Hamish performed a body inventory, palping and flexing arms and legs. They felt strong. The torso, tall and lean as it had been in youth, twisted and rippled satisfactorily. Simulation or not … I feel like me. In fact, more like me than I did as a frail old man.

  And if it weren’t accurate, how would you know? asked a small part of him that tried to raise existential questions. Might a virtual being be programmed to find its new self satisfactory?

  Bah.

  Hamish had always dabbled in philosophy, but more as a storytelling tool. A plot gimmick. A great source for aphorisms and wise protagonist chidings, letting his characters opine about chaos theory or laws of robotics, while preaching against hubristic technology. In fact, he had no use for philosophers.

  “I am aboard a crystal starship.” He tasted the declaration out loud, getting reacquainted with speech. “I’m Hamish Brookeman, on an adventure across interstellar space! One of many, on thousands of such vessels, each of them equipped with new ways to contact new races. Each of us charged with a mission, to spread good news!

  “And maybe … with luck … those thousands could become billions, scattering through the galaxy, delivering a desperately needed antidote. The cure to combat a galactic plague.”

  * * *

  Movement in this strange new setting involved more than just flexing your legs and shifting your weight. By trial and error, Hamish learned to apply direct volition—willing motion to happen—the way he might impel his arm to extend, with unconscious assurance. At first, progress took many fits and starts … but soon he began gliding among the cloudlike globs, which started out mushy or springy, each time he landed. Hamish adapted his technique and soon they reacted by providing firm, reliable footing.

  Once he got the knack, movement became smooth, even fun.

  Hamish tried heading toward some of the shapes that he made out vaguely through the haze. But chasing after them proved difficult—like clutching at an elusive idea that kept slipping away.

  Eventually, he was able to approach one. Perched atop this cloud-blob was a house with gabled roof—more of a cottage, actually. The wooden, clapboard walls seemed quite realistic and Earth-homey, down to paintbrush strokes covering each exterior panel. Alighting near the front porch, Hamish wiped his feet on a doormat that read EXPECT CHANGE.