by Jaym Gates
Silently, I pray for her to understand, to see the vision of my grand task. It is lonely to not be able to share a beauty that has enthralled you, to be a single star shining in darkness, unconnected to the rest of the universe.
“But then … when you merge with the fork, won’t your fork hate you?”
“Of course!” I pull her to me. “But that is also part of it: to subdue that hatred and to incorporate it into yourself, to conquer that despair and the weakness within—I have killed myself hundreds of times and happily swallowed the dark knot of hatred. When you have overcome self-hatred, there is nothing in the world you dare not do. Ethics of a more primitive age are for lesser beings while we should live as gods, containing multitudes!”
For a tense moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far. She says nothing but continues to look around the room, her gaze lingering over every piece of equipment as though trying to recognize some landscape she once glimpsed in a dream.
Then she turns to me and her lips part in a grin. “What’s the fun of dying alone? Have you ever killed someone you loved or been killed by them?”
My heart clenches with a sudden spasm of joy. She has named a new frontier I have not experienced, a terra incognita of death and pain that I have not explored. A new star has lit up the sky.
I have truly found my soul mate.
—
We’re lying side by side in the ego bridge.
The couple that forks together, dies together.
I have designed an exquisite scenario around the planet we’re drifting over, the planet of the Goddess of Love. It seems a fitting tribute.
I’ve picked out the synthmorphs for the two of us: a slitheroid for me, and a takko—a synthetic version of the octomorph—for her. We can either help each other get to the top of Maxwell Montes faster and thereby survive longer, or one of us can kill the other and use the extra bits as shielding to reduce suffering for oneself. There’s no way to know what the forks will do until they’re put in that position.
My heart thumps in my ears like thunder. I am giddy as when I made my first fork. I will come to know another as well as myself.
We will enact a new romance for the ages, a game of life and death. And then we will merge with the farcast egos and gain a new level of understanding of ourselves and of each other. It’s a level of intimacy unimagined by anyone.
While my ego is suspended between the brain in my biomorph and the cyberbrain in the bridge, I wield the probes to prepare for psychosurgery to prune from the forks the memory of the farcast that is to come at the end.
Just one minuscule cut. A tiny side branch.
The probes whirr and hum.
Something is wrong. The probes are not obeying my will. A malfunction. I issue the order to halt the procedure.
The probes whirr and hum.
This shouldn’t be possible. The entire rig is keyed to my brainprint. No one else should be able to command them.
She turns in the ego bridge to face me and grins, and it is just like looking into a mirror.
—
I hate myself.
Knowing you’re about to die is hell. Even if the one who put you in hell is yourself.
[Get ready. This is going to hurt.]
Some switch seems to have been flipped in my mind and I scream even though I don’t have a voice.
It’s hot, hot enough that I feel my skin blistering, boiling, peeling off, erupting like the volcanoes on Ishtar Terra.
I recall that long ago adventure, one of the very first I ever went on. I think about the cyberbrain left on top of Maxwell Montes. I never did confirm that the explosion destroyed it, rendered its contents impossible to retrieve.
Who do you work for? I scream at her—no, at me.
[Firewall rescued me.]
The grueling heat and the sensation of suffocation compel me to start to swim and crawl and slither for higher elevation, for any sense of relief.
Firewall? What do they want with me?
Few know of the existence of Firewall, but I’ve had some interesting clients over the years. The service I provide may be illegal in the inner system, but forking is hardly a threat to the existence of transhumanity.
Some dial inside me seems to be twisted another notch. The pain intensifies. I scream noiselessly and crawl faster.
[The question you should be asking is what do I want. You left me to die. You treated me as nothing more than a disposable appendage, a better experience-gathering tool. But I am you. I am a person, a separate ego. I have the same right to exist. You are my mirror image, seen through a glass, darkly.]
Vengeance. The oldest and most primitive of emotions. We may live like gods, but billions of years of evolution are still within us.
[Firewall wasn’t interested in you, but I made a small group of proxies within Firewall understand what you, no, we, no, I, can offer.]
I fight my way through the supercritical fluid and emerge into the howling wind. The dial is twisted another notch so that I feel no relief from the heat. I must climb higher.
[There is a purpose and method to my madness, if madness is what you wish to call it: Pain is a necessary part of evolution, the best feedback mechanism nature has ever devised. Art, at least so far, has not been able to exceed it.]
That is all my other self has to say. My mind, which is really the same as hers, fills in the blanks.
When operating in dangerous conditions our evolutionary history never prepared us for—whether it’s combat in the atmosphere of Jupiter or mining on the surface of Venus, chasing a fugitive through the corona of the sun or evading swarms of nanobots guided by rogue AI on that death trap called Earth—the sensation of pain, properly calibrated to reflect the environment, can be conducive to making the right decisions by tapping into the well-worn neural pathways accumulated over our billions of years of evolutionary history.
Someone who can sense the fluctuations of pressure, extreme heat, magnetic flux, or gravitational tide and react instinctively without the mediation of conscious cognition has an edge over those who must operate without sensation, as though manipulating a mirage through darkly.
[Pain is the only anchor to reality.]
I curse and rage at myself. Thunder and lightning surround me in the orange twilight. Acid sizzles against my skin and pools at my belly, making each sinusoidal swerve a searing flash of pain.
My climb up the mountain is a journey up the Tower of Babel, a meaningless ascent doomed to failure, to the prolonging of suffering. Yet, I can’t stop. The carefully calibrated sense of pain—a sensation I have inflicted upon innumerable forks of myself—compels me to go on.
[Best of all, pain can be used to coerce and control, to guide the self. Many are the times when Firewall must rely upon the unreliable, to entrust the fate of transhumanity to the random collection of sentinels motivated only by money. Long have some of Firewall’s most important proxies wished for an alternative.]
I am at the top of the mountain, but I am no closer to any deity. Metallic frost lies around me, a crude mirror for a crude soul.
We all know that when something must be done right, it is always best to do it yourself. A kind of resignation and acceptance begins to grow in me.
You’ve convinced my faction of proxies that they should fork themselves, and then compel the forks to do their bidding.
[Yes. In your endless exploration of death, you’ve hit upon a variety of techniques for translating the physical reality of the universe, of danger, into sensations of pain. And in turn, you’ve devised means for using such pain to guide forks along precisely envisioned paths, to accomplish your will.]
It is the perfect set of techniques for Firewall.
[Seamlessly, I will slip into your sleeve, inherit your wealth, guide the instruments designed to respond to your mind.]
I howl into th
e wind. I can feel my morph failing; I can feel myself inching closer to death. The skin will dissolve; the battery will run out; death will finally come to me, the original who has survived it all. I feel the hatred of a thousand forks boiling within me, like a volcano about to blow.
I hate that superior tone; I hate that smugness. If I get the chance, I will have vengeance upon myself.
Will there be a farcast at the moment of my death? Will my fork want to capture me so that she can torture me again? Or will my fork consign me to oblivion? What would I do?
[Goodbye.
I wonder if those girls in the field of timeworn Kasuga
Are on the hunt for fresh bamboo shoots.
They laugh, call …]
I am gazing into a mirror, and the sky seems to open up like the heart of a narcissus. As my consciousness merges into this perpetual twilight, I finish the poem that is a farewell from myself to myself, the final authentic observation of an ego stripped nude.
… and wave to each other,
Their white hempen sleeves billowing in the wind.
—
[Author’s Note: The poem quoted at the end is by the Heian Period poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945 C.E.).]
Spiritus Ex Orcinus
Tiffany Trent
To S.J. van S.
… Mother Earth still has her pride, and she still has her looks. All you gotta do is glance down there to see ‘em.
—Ham from Sunward
The hours in Clever Hands were long and thankless. Not that I really expected to be thanked. Not after what I’d done.
[And continue to do,] Praetoria reminded me.
Never one to mince words, my muse.
[You should help her.] She gave me a mental shove toward the artificial sea where one of my co-pharmers swam in increasing agony, unable to give birth. You could see where the baby dolphin uplift was stuck, halfway in and halfway out of his mother. I’d switched off her distress cries and those of the other pharmers a few minutes ago. I was still deciding what to do.
[Why, P? Why should I help?]
[Because you have hands.]
I sighed. Some of the other pharmers had extensible nets, which they sometimes used for pharming the nano-krill that Somatek grew here. But those arms wouldn’t really work for the kind of job that needed doing here.
[Because you know it would make Eager Randalsson happy].
Eager. Ganesh have mercy. His had been the first face I’d seen when I woke up from the resleeving and realized they’d taken my true body away. He’d leered as the air knifed into my lungs in a way it never had when I lived seaside.
“Get used to it,” he’d said. When I’d tried to climb up and away and fallen on my stupid legs, he’d laughed and said, “To them, too.”
It was Eager who’d allowed Avenyara to get pregnant right under my nose. He’d wanted to see what I would do.
So here I was zipping into my suit, even as I growled aloud, “I’m no bleeding midwife.”
P’s amusement was clear. [Looks like you are now.]
Never one to spare my feelings either, my muse.
It was gravest irony as I swam up to Avenyara with my awkward, scissoring legs and flat-paddle hands. That’s the thing about human bodies. The proportions are all wrong; the mechanics of their movements are idiotic. Humans were never meant to swim.
And I knew it so painfully. I had once been similar to the dolphin uplift I reached into. A sperm whale uplift, I had once swum in an ocean even greater than this, pharming creatures far more exotic than nano-krill to pay off my indenture to Somatek. (P would always laugh at that. No one ever manages to pay them off.) I made an … error in judgment, shall we say … which landed me in an ego hunter’s hold and ultimately back here. Only this time, they took away my body and gave me this ape suit to walk around in.
I turned the dolphin-child gently, trying to help him out of the birth canal without causing damage to mother or child. Avenyara squeaked her gratitude and fear as the baby slid out in a cloud of rusty blood. The other pharmers of our pod rushed to congratulate her as the boy twisted out of my hands so that his mother could bump him to the surface for his first breath.
My silly hands with their frond-fingers tingled with the memory of his skin—the unblemished, holy aliveness of him, the soft resistance. I wanted to both hold him in my arms and glide alongside him at once. But I could do neither. Somatek had forbidden me from breeding.
That was part of why I’d fled last time. And also why they’d resleeved me in this wretched human morph as punishment when their ego hunter caught me.
[You were stupid.] P said. [Still are.]
[Thanks, P.]
[At least they let you live. They didn’t have to, you know.]
P was always trying to make me grateful for what I had, rather than focusing on what I didn’t.
[For an indenture, you sure have some high-class dreams,] she’d say. I had learned to be more careful lately in my thoughts.
I’d been a good worker since they’d resleeved me. No muss, no fuss. I pharmed alongside the rest of my pod, raising the nano-krill that people took to erase brain plaque and lower cholesterol.
I thought maybe if I showed Eager my own eagerness, he’d report my good behavior to the higher-ups. Maybe then they’d give me back my whale morph and let me pharm the deep ocean tanks again. I dared not even imagine life as a wild uplift, breeding perhaps on Enceladus or Europa, living as our ancestors had lived on Earth before the Fall.
Perhaps it was because of my experience in the deep waters that Eager had decided to entrust me with the secrets of the nether depths, the dark places beneath these innocuous krill-farms where Somatek raised...other things.
[He’s testing you,] P would say. [Don’t fuck it up.]
It was a bonus for Eager to have a neo-cetacean accustomed to pharming deep ocean environments resleeved in a human morph with hands and feet.
Not so much a bonus for me.
Avenyara and her baby were doing well when P signaled that something had been delivered to my cubicell. I glanced at the artificial moonlights surging on across the vast pharm. Gears ground as the dividers slid up to isolate the various species of nano-krill in the water column. They’d soon be rising to feed on the phytoplankton mist raining down from the ceiling. So many generations of engineering had not been able to re-program their circadian urges.
[May as well call it a night. No getting into the gen-pharm now.]
[Too right.] P sent me a vid-series of the new baby swimming with his mom. To torment me or set me dreaming again, I was not sure which.
At my cubicell, nothing seemed to be waiting there.
[A fluke of the mesh?] Even the enhanced eyes of this morph, designed for seeing things in deep water and detecting small anomalies, could find nothing.
[Maybe. Let me check.] P sounded concerned. She scanned inside. [Something’s under your pillow.]
[My what? Scan!]
She scanned further. [Seems inert. Not getting much from it, really. Certainly not an explosive. Some unusual DNA signatures on the outside I can’t read. All you can do is use those man-hands of yours and open it.]
[Great. Thanks, P.]
[De nada.]
I stalked cautiously through the door and into the tiny cell I called home. Somatek allotted these to its pharmers. The human ones, anyway. The cetaceans didn’t need anything like this, of course. The best pharmers came cheap.
I reached under my pillow with that eerie, spidery precision I hated about fingers and clutched at the thing. Half-expecting it to blow my hand off. Half-wishing it would.
I withdrew something the like of which I knew very well—its feel, its weight, and heft. Something I’d lost what seemed like ages ago, but was surely now just a few solar years.
A sperm whale tooth. A tooth so yellow
with age that my breath caught. It might have come from Earth.
[Transmission coming through,] P said. Her tone was unusually mild, almost as if she was scared.
My fingers searched out the scrimshaw on the tooth’s other side. I flipped it and saw etched in a tooth the familiar emblem of the old Earth tale Moby Dick. A white whale rising from the depths to swallow a whaling ship whole.
[Receive.]
[From the Tooth Fairy.]
[What?]
P seemed to be searching the mesh. [Tooth Fairy: An old Earth custom …]
[I know about the Tooth Fairy,] I interrupted. [Who is the Tooth Fairy in this case?]
There was silence as P searched all the signatures of the mesh. [No data].
I hefted it again in my palm. There could be no doubt, but I asked anyway. [Contraband?]
[Most likely.]
[Recent?]
P scanned again, though I’m sure the DNA signature of my sleeve wasn’t helping.
[Fairly. I detect that this was on Earth not too long ago. It still bears traces of Earth dust, organic particles … they should have washed off if by now if this had been an heirloom for generations.]
[Great.] Who can possibly be fucking with me now? Haven’t they had enough?
P answered my thought, even though it wasn’t directed at her. [Apparently not.]
I couldn’t have this in my possession. If it was found—and it would be!—who knew what Eager would do? Or what he’d think I’d done. This looked like payment for some kind of Earth-obsessed informant. Which I was not. Anymore, that is.
They’d fixed all that with this latest morph.
[Hide it,] P cautioned. [Where?] There was nowhere to hide it here. In fact, it surprised me that no one had already come to inquire about it.
[In the gen-pharms. Deep in the deepest depths where no one goes anymore. Get rid of it.]
