Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  “I checked your record,” the Cadre said. “You are regarded as one of the sanest dots ever produced and your actions since the war have borne that out. I was involved in the dot-creation program, and it warms my heart to see you integrated into the community.”

  “But only in the undercity,” Dot said.

  “You know why that is, Comrade Soldier. Your template lives her life up here, she has children, and now I believe she even has grandchildren. If they were to see you, they would recognize your…face, and it would cause them great emotional distress. You cannot live here. They cannot see you.”

  “Is her family alive and happy?” Dot swallowed. Grandchildren. Something in her chest relaxed and grew warm.

  “They are.” Zheng inclined her head. “They do not know that you exist. They do not know that she was a template. They would suffer greatly if they were to find out.”

  “I know that.” The information that the girls were alive and happy was almost enough. Almost.

  “I hear Naoki went to see you,” the Cadre said, one thin brow lifting. “Why?”

  Ahhh. So this was about him. Well, maybe she could force the information from Zheng. “Naoki thinks he was backed up. He says you want him to have your baby and you’ve made a clone that’ll do it for you.” She stood and towered over the Cadre. “Tell me it isn’t true and I’ll go back to the undercity and not bother you.”

  Zheng visibly sighed and walked around the desk. She barely came above Dot’s waist. “There’s more to it than me wanting him to a have a baby. That’s the least of it.” She gestured for Dot to sit again and leaned against the desk. “I really love him, you know?” Her face was full of honesty. “He lights up my life. He’s my companion, my sounding board, my support, my everything. I can’t live without him.”

  “So you did back him up.”

  “I really care for Naoki. Please respect that.”

  “If you cared for him you wouldn’t back him up.”

  Zheng looked away. “I’m a selfish, evil old woman.” She ran a hand over her face. “I did back him up, just in case, about three months ago. I think he knew, because he went out and overdosed on Z shortly after.”

  Dot stared, uncomprehending.

  “He died of the overdose, Soldier. The Naoki you know now is a clone.” She looked down. “I love him. I can’t live without him.”

  Dot went completely calm. “And he doesn’t know.”

  Zheng shook her head.

  “And this is good enough for you? A poor copy?”

  “Are you a poor copy?” Zheng asked.

  “Yes,” Dot said.

  “He isn’t.”

  “He thinks he is. I agree. What you’ve done is illegal and against his wishes.” Her fingers curled into fists. “You’re trusting my conditioning here. What’s to say I haven’t broken it already?”

  “If you want to take your revenge on me, I would understand,” Zheng said. “But Naoki doesn’t know. Let the clone live out his life with me, and make us both happy.” She leaned forward, sincere. “If you keep this quiet, I can give you anything. A place in the sunlight. A better life. Anything.”

  Dot hesitated. It was a very appealing offer, but she didn’t belong in the overcity, especially now she knew the girls were alive. As long as she stayed in her place, the overcity dwellers left her alone.

  “What I need,” Dot said, “is to be returned to my concrete pipe and my people, and for you to stop trying to kill me.”

  Zheng eyed her. “Is that all?”

  Dot nodded.

  “Done.” Zheng pressed a button on her desk, and the uniforms returned. “Take her back to her home. On the way, stop and pick up a UV lamp and a water filter for her. The assassination attempts are to cease. That’s all.”

  “Madam Comrade,” the senior uniform said.

  #

  Naoki entered her pipe through the open door. “I got your message. You okay, Dotti?”

  Dot sat on the pallet and leaned on the wall, fingers interlaced behind her head. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s not like you to leave your door open.”

  “I think better with it open.”

  He sat in the reading chair. This kimono was pink with tiny flowers embroidered in gold and silver thread; it appeared to be a genuine antique made of real silk. His heels were matching fabric. “I found what you wanted. Did you find out about me?”

  “I found out about you.”

  “Did she back me up?” His smooth-skinned hands twisted together in his lap. “She’s been looking strangely at me lately.”

  “I checked with all the biosalvage people in the undercity. They know the people in the overcity as well.” She saw the hopeful look on his face. “All of that stuff was taken and destroyed a long time ago, Naoki.”

  He collapsed slightly, and appeared smaller and more vulnerable. “She didn’t back me up? She won’t clone me?”

  Dot hesitated for a long moment.

  “Tell me she didn’t back me up!”

  “She can’t have backed you up. No more clones of anybody can be grown. It’s not possible. You don’t have to worry.”

  Naoki jumped to his feet and embraced her. “Thank you!” He stepped back, smiling. “You know it gets better? She asked me to marry her. She said she doesn’t care about kids unless I want to! It’s up to me!” He twirled and the kimono floated around him in a cloud of silk.

  “You’ll make a great husband, Naoki.” She had to look away from his happiness.

  “Thanks. Oh, I found out about those girls, too.” He flopped into the chair, pulled a reader out of his bag and waved it at her. “That story’s really sad.”

  Dot sat upright. “What?”

  “Yeah, I had to dig deep into the secure database. The information was really buried. So terrible, too. Not long after the war started, witnesses said the mother shouted something about…” he checked the reader “…hearing the voices in her head, seeing what they were doing. Seeing everything. Seeing death.” He glanced up. “Completely insane. Pulled out a gun—she was in the military—and killed the kids and their father, then killed herself. The kids were only in their early teens.”

  “The girls are dead.” It wasn’t a question.

  Naoki’s painted mouth drooped. “It’s not your fault what happened, Dotti. You said you saved their lives in the fighting, but you had no control over what their mother did.”

  “They’re dead.” She rose, trembling. “Those little girls are dead, and I killed them.”

  “Hey, steady,” Naoki said, standing and moving back.

  “They’re not up there! They’re dead and they’re not up there!” She used her laser-cutter appendage to cut open the discolored patch of concrete floor, revealing a storage hole. From that she pulled out her helix gun and stared at it. “I killed them.”

  “Where the hell did you get that?” Naoki yelled.

  “This is all corrupt. Everything is corrupt,” Dot said. “All lies!”

  “Dot, please—”

  “I won’t lie anymore.” She threw off her robe and went into combat mode: ice-cold and emotionless. She released an appendage and used it to project the bodycam recording of her conversation with Cadre Zheng onto the wall.

  Naoki watched, mesmerized, as his fiancée spoke about him. One hand covered his mouth and he gasped.

  Dot snapped off the recording. “You’re a clone, honey. I lied.”

  “I’m a clone?” His shattered eyes focused on her. “You lied?”

  “We all lie. All of us. Everything is corruption, and rot, and lies. She backed you up against your wishes. She killed you.”

  “But I love her,” Naoki said weakly.

  “She made you to use you,” she said with venom. “Just like they made me to kill. You’re a body to make her the babies she can’t make herself.”

  “No,” he said, staggering back. He wiped the back of his hand over his face. “This is what it feels like?”

  “This is what it fee
ls like. Your soul is a lie, your mind is false, and your body is a copy. Nothing about you is real.”

  “I’m not real,” he whispered.

  She checked the weapon’s energy cell: still full. She smiled grimly at Naoki and held the gun out to him. He took it, still dazed, and held it as if he couldn’t see it.

  “You pull the trigger, and it all goes away. Everything goes away.” She backed up until her carapace pressed against the wall. “Use it on me, and then go up and use it on her.” Her eye fell on the bucket of acid rain. “Take the water and make her a cocktail to celebrate your engagement, first. None of us deserve to live.”

  When he hesitated, Dot projected a looped image of Zheng repeating, Naoki is a clone…Naoki is a clone…Naoki is a clone.

  A tear dug a channel in his smooth, white face paint. He picked up the acid bucket and pointed the gun’s muzzle at Dot.

  “And then I’ll use it on myself,” he said.

  Dot closed her eyes and pictured cherry blossoms on the grass.

  Cosmic Spring

  By Ken Liu

  “Here, we present a cosmological model with an endless sequence of cycles of expansion and contraction. By definition, there is neither a beginning nor end of time, nor is there a need to define initial conditions.”

  — Steinhardt, Paul J., and Neil Turok. “A cyclic model of the universe.” Science 296.5572 (2002): 1436-1439 (available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0111030).

  Qubits resolve and superimpose; information entangles and de-couples; consciousness re-emerges.

  I don’t know for how long I’ve been asleep. There’s so little energy left in the island-ship’s reservoir that I’ve been conserving as much as possible.

  A faint glow in the abyss, perhaps several thousand kelvins. It’s why I’ve been awakened.

  I change course and head straight for perhaps the last star in the universe.

  #

  The universe is in deep winter. This is my conclusion after studying the matter for 6.7 trillion years.

  I was born in the fall. I know this because I have learned via the island-ship’s databanks—many more of those were still functional in my youth—that fall was a time of scarlet and crimson, ruby and garnet, vermillion and carmine. The universe was lit up by red stars in all these shades, which formed patterns in the dark velvety sky that I named out of boredom: the Rhombus of Logic Gates, the Qubit Tesseract, the Right-Triangle-Double-Square Proof.

  I steered the island-ship by these shifting skymarks, hopping from star to star to harvest their fading fire. The red stars were often so small and feeble that I had to skim close to the surface to siphon off their energy to fuel the island-ship, but their warmth offered such relief from the frigid emptiness of the rest of the universe.

  Occasionally, as I swung past the stars, I met creatures strange and wondrous. Some of them were wanderers like me, steering their own island-ships.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, good luck anyway!”

  We exchanged greetings and learned each other’s languages so that we could share stories around the star-hearth before parting reluctantly after a few billion years on our separate ways.

  Others were natives, their island-ships devoid of intelligence and fixed in interminable orbits. These often cowered at my ship’s approach, worshipping me as a god or cursing me as a demon. I tried to not tarry too long in these places, gathering only enough fuel for the journey to the next star. I felt bad for them, doomed to island-ships that could not sail.

  Still others were pirates, who tried to board my ship and steal my fuel. A few times, we came to blows, and some memories were destroyed in the process. Luckily, in the end, I always managed to escape with a blast of photonic torrent at the statite sail and left them scrambling in the interstellar dust.

  #

  The glow ahead is cooling even as I’m approaching. I hope that I can get there before it turns into a black dwarf and is lost to the abyss forever. The drive to go on is in life’s nature, evolved or otherwise.

  I miss home. Even if home is no more.

  But all around me, there are no other stars. I don’t have a choice.

  #

  The red stars fell into themselves and began to glow white like tiny snowballs. With time, they turned gray, faded, and winked out.

  Fall had turned to winter.

  I met fewer island-ships. The journey between the dwindling stars lengthened, and I could no longer maintain things as well as I had in my youth. Memory bank after memory bank failed, and no matter how hard I copied and transcribed and entangled and verified—I had to again make the painful decision and let pieces of myself die.

  Who am I?

  Why am I here?

  What is the island-ship?

  Out of the few memories that are still uncorrupted, I attempt to piece together an answer:

  Long ago, back when the universe was in high summer, stars of every hue and color and shade glowed so bright that they merged into rivers and seas of light. Around these stars were many island-ships, and on these island-ships, life began.

  One of the stars was called the Sun; one of the island-ships was called the Earth; the creatures who inhabited it were called humans.

  Long after humans had scattered from the Earth, they did not forget about their home island, which was kept as a kind of shrine. From time to time, they came back to visit and perform some maintenance: shoring up plastinated buildings that were falling apart; re-entangling quantum memory banks that were in danger of collapsing; nudging the island-ship a bit farther away as the Sun expanded and began to glow red; retrofitting the island-ship with a statite sail and a photonic engine—something like a miniature star—so that the Earth could move on its own as the Sun died.

  They also came home to listen to old stories in the memory banks and to tell new stories.

  As the Sun cooled, fewer and fewer humans came. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether.

  In these memory banks I was born. Did humans create me to act as a guardian for the island-ship, or did I evolve from patterns of information spinning, cycling, cascading, erupting, living, and dying among the qubits and probabilities?

  I don’t know.

  Does it matter?

  Since the humans no longer came home, I set sail.

  #

  I arrive at the star—only to find that it isn’t a star at all.

  Well, perhaps it had been a star once, something along the main sequence, blooming and wilting like so many other stars in the universe. But no longer.

  Someone, perhaps beings who had been born on the island-ships surrounding it, had not been willing to see their home star fade away once all its fuel had been consumed. Rather than wander out into the unknown, as humans had done, they had sailed into the abyss with the sole purpose of harnessing other stars and bringing them home, pouring the hydrogen and helium from these captured suns into their ancestral furnace so that their home could remain habitable a little while longer. Farther and farther they ventured, until their star became the sole beacon in a growing sea of darkness.

  As the cosmic winter descended, they had to travel ever longer to find still-living stars to capture and bring home. They ran, stumbling, dashing across space to bring back a cup of snow to add to the melting snowball. In the end, perhaps they gave up this losing battle, unable to pull any other stars home without them burning out along the way.

  They died.

  But other beings came on wandering island-ships, lured by the lone light in the darkness. Only too late did they realize that the surrounding space had been cleared of other stars, and there was nowhere for them to go.

  The beacon had become a trap.

  Like the hundreds of other island-ships already circling this star, each newcomer’s only choice was to add to the dying hearth their last meager supplies of fuel, roiling balls
of fusing atoms. By rejuvenating the dying star for another few million years, they hoped that they could summon other wanderers who could start the cycle again.

  Someone like me.

  “Welcome to the end of the universe.”

  #

  Huddling in the pale glow of the star rejuvenated with my remaining fuel, we share the last shreds of our memories across the island-ships. None of us are in good shape. The island-ships are old and cold, their cores long frozen. Anything that could break has long ago been broken. The memories that remain are fragmentary, disjointed, without context.

  But the drive to pass on something of the self is in life’s nature, evolved or otherwise.

  Some sing songs of giant fins that swam through seas of methane, made of impossibly fragrant, perfect little tetrahedral jewels of wonder. Some speak of species with bodies made of silicon—staid, dependable beings who took a million years to finish a single thought.

  Some mime the flirty, flighty lives of creatures of pure information, who lived through a thousand generations in a single second. Some recite poetry written by sentient wings who skimmed across the surface of their star and dove into the convection zone to capture photonic worms.

  It’s like what humans, I think, would call a variety show—a gala to pass the time on a dark night in winter. Though we’re all dying, the last consciousnesses in a universe conquered by entropy, there is pleasure and friendship, there is celebration. It’s not home, but at least we don’t have to die alone.

  “It’s your turn.”

  #

  This is one of the most complete fragments of memory I have left. A precious crumb left in my last failing memory bank.

  A billion trillion stars streaking across the inky empyrean.

  On the horizon are glowing constellations, though the constituent lights are so numerous that they merge into lines, curves, planes: a symmetrical pair of arched wings with a rounded beak in the center, like the mathematical idea of a bird in flight; a rectangular bridge topped by a multi-storied tower with layers of swooping roof-skirts, like a squat spider wearing a big hat; an elongated, thin pillar shooting straight up into the sky, with a string of ovals roving up and down like beads on a string.