Haven (The Last Humans Book 3)

by Dima Zales

  In a way, having a slow version of myself is helping me wrap my mind around my first-ever multi-thread experience. If I had split into two equal parts, the adjustment would’ve been more difficult.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” Phoe says from the bed. “It’s a bit like controlling your right arm versus controlling your left one, but if one was much slower than the other.”

  The slow Phoe clears her throat, and I seamlessly hear it with my slow and fast ears. To my fast instantiation, the noise from her slow-moving mouth sounds extremely stretched out and reminds me of a whale song.

  “We should leave,” says the fast-running Phoe. “It will be less confusing for you that way.”

  Happy to oblige, my fast-moving self leaves the room. Phoe jumps off the bed and follows, which I observe through slow Theo’s eyes.

  To those eyes, the two people who just left look like ancient comic book heroes. One moment they were standing there, and then in a blur, they were gone.

  Now that my two bodies are not in the same room, it is easier to consolidate this strange existence. I can experience the world from two places at once, with a single mind that’s separated into two bodies, and if I need to, I can focus on one body and tune out the other. Even when I shift my attention back and forth, I remain aware of what each body is up to.

  “Let’s go build the rest of the world,” fast Theo says.

  Phoe nods, and we leave Oasis behind.

  “Let’s bring Liam back,” I say through the mouth of my slow version.

  Slow Phoe gestures triumphantly, and a sleeping Liam shows up in his bed.

  27

  “Phoe,” I say in my slow-mode thread. “Can you please disappear for now?”

  Phoe vanishes, and then tells me, “I’m around, just not visible. I’m very curious to see how he’ll react.”

  “You and me both,” I say and look at my sleeping friend.

  Liam is lying there, completely oblivious.

  I walk over to his bed and debate whether I should wake him, but decide against it.

  As I wait for Liam to wake up on his own, I marvel at how much the fast threads of Phoe and me have accomplished in such a short time. We flew halfway across the planet and had another intimate session on the way. She also taught me how to read sheet music—something I always wanted to know—and we created a new continent. We filled this new landmass with forests and mountains, and right now we’re debating what flora and fauna to populate it with.

  “These wouldn’t be real animals, in the same sense that you and Liam are real,” fast Phoe says. “They’d be approximations, kind of like the animals they had at the Zoo and in Haven.”

  My slow self watches Liam open his eyes.

  “Hey, dude, finally,” I say. “I was getting sick of watching you sleep.”

  “You’ve been watching me sleep?” Liam looks at me groggily. “That’s pretty creepy.”

  Seeing his face again and hearing his voice makes me so emotional that I’m afraid I might tear up. I swallow the thickness in my throat. If Liam sees me acting weird, he’ll never let me live it down, no matter how graphically I describe to him how horrifically he died.

  “Hey, are you okay?” he asks and gestures for his morning cleaning. “Why are you so serious?”

  “Will Oasis-based gestures work?” I ask Phoe mentally.

  “Yes,” she responds out loud, her voice coming from my bed. Since Liam doesn’t bat an eye, I assume only I can hear her, like in Oasis. “The more common gestures, such as Screens, Food, and cleanings, will work,” she continues. “If he gestures for something I didn’t anticipate, I should be able to deal with it in the moment.”

  “Seriously, Theo,” Liam says, his expression uncharacteristically thoughtful. “I’ve never seen you so gloomy. Do you want to skip Calculus and talk about what’s bothering you?”

  “Yeah.” I shake my head to clear my thoughts. “No Calculus, that’s for sure. I do have something to tell you—and it’s going to be the craziest shit you’ve ever heard.”

  Raising an eyebrow at my use of taboo language without Pig Latin, Liam lowers his feet to the ground and gestures for Food. A bar shows up in his hand, and he hungrily bites into it.

  I watch him to see if he can tell this Food is a simulation, but he doesn’t seem to notice any difference in the taste or texture.

  Curious, I gesture for Food and take a bite. This might as well be the real Food from Oasis, because there’s zero difference.

  “Food experience is so ubiquitous in so many minds in Limbo that I was able to recreate this particular item very accurately,” Phoe chimes in. “I’m rather proud of it. There’s no way you could’ve noticed any difference.”

  Done with his Food, Liam gets up and stretches. “Okay, tell me whatever it is you need to tell me.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” I say and head for the door. “You might have an easier time believing me if we’re outside.”

  Liam gives me a questioning look but doesn’t argue, and we leave the room. As we walk through the empty corridors, Liam tells me what he did “yesterday” during the Birth Day celebration, which mostly involved him hanging out with the glassblowers. This reminds me that if we want to make Liam and everyone else we bring back truly happy, we’ll have to resurrect a lot more people than I thought. Phoe was prudent to take the precautions with the slow versions, which doesn’t surprise me.

  “He hasn’t realized there isn’t a single other Youth around,” Phoe whispers behind me.

  “I’m sure he will,” I think back. “Once we step outside, it’ll be pretty obvious.”

  Sure enough, after a few minutes of walking around outside, Liam asks, “Where the uckfay is everyone?” He gestures to bring up a Screen, likely to find out the time.

  “I made the time nine a.m.,” Phoe says. “I hope that fits with your agenda?”

  “That’s fine,” I tell Phoe mentally. To Liam, I say, “The fact that people are gone has a lot to do with the crazy story I’m about to tell you.”

  “Umm, okay, but do we really have to walk to the Edge for this?”

  I was leading my friend toward what used to be my favorite spot—a place no one else liked because it offered a view of the Goo.

  “Fine,” I say. “We can talk here.”

  Liam sits down on the grass in a comfortable cross-legged position.

  I sit down next to him. “It all began one day when I brought up three hundred screens and started hearing a voice in my head.”

  Liam looks at me as if I sprouted horns.

  “Yes, I thought I was crazy for a while, but I wasn’t. The voice belonged to Phoe.”

  To Phoe, I mentally say, “That’s your signal.”

  Phoe reappears. To Liam, it must look like a pixie-haired girl just materialized out of thin air.

  He jumps up, looking at her with wild eyes, and I can see him debating whether to run away. He stays put, however, and I realize his lack of a normal fear response might play in my favor today.

  “Liam, this is my other best friend, Phoe,” I say, trying not to laugh at the flabbergasted expression on his poor face. “Phoe, this is Liam.”

  “Nice to meet you, Liam,” Phoe says and does an old-fashioned curtsy.

  Then I realize she’s still dressed in her bikini, something no girl on Oasis would ever wear, not even on Birth Day.

  Liam scans Phoe as though staring at her will explain her miraculous appearance. Seeing my friend ogle Phoe’s curves has me feeling something weird.

  “Really, Theo?” Phoe says mentally. “You’re getting jealous at a time like this?”

  As soon as she says it, I realize she’s hit it spot on. It is jealousy I’m feeling. I didn’t understand what it was since I never felt it before. It isn’t a pleasant feeling at all.

  “Here,” Phoe says out loud and gestures at her body. Oasis’s usual drab clothing replaces her bikini. Liam seems to calm down—slightly.

  “What the uckfay?” he says to me. Th
en, looking at Phoe, he adds, “I’ve never seen you before. How can that be? Were you hiding from me your entire life?”

  “I’ll let Theo do the talking,” Phoe says, giving us a toothy grin. “I can go away if you two prefer.”

  “You can stay,” I say. To Liam, I say, “She’s not a Youth. She’s something else entirely.”

  Liam listens in stunned silence as I tell him about the tampering the Elderly were doing to everyone’s minds.

  “I have these nanomachines in my head?” Liam looks at Phoe, then at me, then rubs the top of his head as if hoping to feel the nanos through his skull.

  “You don’t have them anymore, not in this state,” Phoe says. “But you did, right up until you went to bed after Birth Day.”

  “‘This state,’” Liam says, drawing air quotes with his fingers. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “We’ll get to that,” I say and mentally tell Phoe, “I thought I was taking the lead.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Phoe says out loud. “I’ll let Theo continue.”

  “So, yeah. Forget about the state we’re in,” I say. “Let me tell you more about the tampering and answer some of your questions.”

  Liam asks me a bunch of questions about the tampering, and I answer them, slowly steering the conversation toward the most hard-to-believe example of tampering: the Forgetting.

  Once I explain the Mason situation that revealed the Forgetting to me for the first time, Liam says, “Okay, I can believe that the Elderly might make me Forget something using some kind of technology, but if you expect me to believe that I had a friend all my life, a friend who was as close to me as you are, and the Elderly made me forget him, then you don’t know me at all. Something like that is impossible. I’m a much better friend than that.”

  “Can you undo Liam’s Forgetting of Mason?” I ask Phoe mentally. “I think this will go a long way in convincing him to believe all the crazy things I have left to tell him.”

  Phoe waves at Liam and then stares at him worriedly.

  Liam clutches his head, his eyes widening. He’s breathing fast, and I get an unpleasant flashback to when he was suffocating in Oasis.

  After a few seconds, he whispers, “Those assholes. I do remember Mason. But I also remember not remembering. It’s crazy. And they really killed him? I thought no one could ever die. And over that Grace bullshit? I thought he’d get a year of Quietude, not something so final.”

  He goes on like that until I interject, “Here’s the thing. Even though they did kill him, we can bring him back. In a way, that propaganda we all believed about not dying is kind of true.”

  Liam looks like a man whose incredulity is already overloaded—like he doesn’t know how much more unbelievable news he can take.

  I proceed to tell him that the world around us isn’t the real Oasis he remembers.

  “This is why there aren’t any people around,” I sum up. “And why I can do this.”

  I wave at the Dome, and it evaporates. I gesture at the shrubs that are blocking our view of the Goo, and they also disappear. As soon as Liam gets a good look at the Goo, I turn it back into a blue ocean. “Even this isn’t true reality, but it gives you a good idea.”

  Liam’s face is stony as he gets up and walks toward the ocean. His walk turns into a run, and I chase after him, unsure whether his reaction is good or bad.

  Without hesitation, Liam jumps into the water.

  I look to see if Phoe is concerned, but her expression is hard to read, so I ask, “Was it too much for him?” Before Phoe can respond, Liam dives into the water, and my voice rises. “Is he trying to drown himself?”

  28

  “He’s fine,” Phoe reassures me. “He’s taking it better than I expected. He’s just enjoying a swim as he processes what you told him.”

  After splashing around for a few minutes, Liam comes out, his clothing dripping water. Phoe waves at him, and he’s instantly dry.

  Something seems to click in his head, and he says, “That’s a real ocean.”

  “It isn’t exactly real, but it’s as real as anything can be in our lives now,” I say, and then explain the hardest truth of all—that we’re not living in biological bodies anymore. I even try to explain the existence of the fast version of me, who is currently learning how to sculpt marble.

  I ask for Phoe’s help in explaining how uploaded minds work. She tells Liam about the realistic emulation of all his molecules, including his brain’s connectome, as well as the way she created the water, the earth, and the sky.

  “What makes a human being so special, in my opinion, is the pattern of information they represent,” Phoe says. “Your memories, habits, likes and dislikes, your interests, and a billion other things are what make you ‘Liam,’ not the meat, water, and bones that you were made of.”

  “But I feel completely real,” Liam objects.

  “And you are,” Phoe says. “You’re a pattern of information that recognizes itself as Liam. You’re here as that pattern. That’s what ‘being real’ means to me.”

  Liam shakes his head. “If you expect me to believe something so crazy, you’ll have to show me a bigger miracle than getting rid of the Dome.”

  “I get it. As a wise man once said, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,’” Phoe says and walks up to the edge of the ocean. “How about a classic?”

  She walks on water, causing Liam’s eyes to bulge out of his head.

  “I can also do this.” She points at the water under her feet, and it turns into some kind of red liquid. “That’s wine,” Phoe explains. “I turned the water of every ocean on this planet into wine.”

  Liam walks up to the ocean and scoops up a handful of wine. Maybe the alcohol will help him come to grips with everything?

  Thousands of miles away from Oasis and Liam, my fast self and Phoe are sitting on our beach, discussing Liam’s reaction. We have a cheese plate in front of us and we’re holding goblets of the ocean-wine.

  While I’ve been speaking to Liam in pseudo-Oasis, my fast self learned how to play and compose music for the piano—a logical follow-up to those music sheet lessons I enjoyed a while back. I also read about a dozen architectural manuals and dabbled with murals to spruce up some of the environments we created.

  Phoe came up with a way to communicate with the Matrioshka structure. Though she doesn’t possess anything that was specifically designed for communication, she figured out a way to allow tiny meteor-like particles to penetrate her shielding, which creates radiation spikes that can be detected from afar. She has other similar solutions in mind, and I suggest she tries them all, which she does.

  With my slow eyes, I watch Liam pinch himself for the thousandth time, so I say, “I might as well tell you the weirdest part, since you probably can’t get any more freaked out at this point.”

  I proceed to explain the part about us being on a spaceship traveling through a post-singularity solar system. I tell him that Phoe is this spaceship, and as weird as it sounds, she’s also in a romantic relationship with me.

  Liam accepts Phoe’s AI nature rather well—maybe because she’s so likeable. He also isn’t on my case about dating in general or dating Phoe specifically, which I appreciate, and he asks a bunch of questions to clarify certain points.

  “If we’re on a spaceship, and there’s some kind of thinking stuff around the Solar System, how come they never contacted us?” Liam asks and plops down on the sand next to us.

  “That’s actually a great question.” Phoe leans forward, her eyes twinkling with eagerness. “My theory is that they either had moral qualms about interfering with us, or they simply missed us. Once the singularity started, I suspect the ancestors of the Matrioshka builders constructed their own spaceships in an effort to expand their intelligence throughout the universe. Their ships were probably nano-sized, and space is large, so it’s possible that those tiny ships never came into contact with us. We’ll know the truth soon enough, because if they missed us
before, they will notice us soon, if they haven’t already. As Theo already knows, I’ve been trying everything I can to communicate with them.”

  I look at Liam. I have no clue what he’s thinking, because even I’m confused by what she said. “You think there are more solar-system-sized structures out there? Next to other stars?”

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you try to reach the stars if you could?” Phoe says. “They have the means for space travel thanks to their unfathomably advanced technology, and we can assume they had the will as well, because that’s what thinking creatures do: they explore their environment. Human beings spread through ancient Earth, so their distant descendants will not be any different. I believe that one day, intelligence will permeate the whole universe, bringing rise to minds that will probably consider those Matrioshka dwellers rather primitive.”

  “Okay, I think this is a conversation your so-called fast selves should be having without me,” Liam says, rubbing his temples. “What I want to know is, assuming we forget the taboo of sexual relationships, how can you have a relationship if she’s a spaceship?” He pauses and looks Phoe up and down. “Though you look too human to be an AI.”

  Looks like I praised Liam for his open-mindedness a little too soon.

  “We’re figuring that out ourselves,” Phoe says. “The simplest way to put it is to echo what I said before: I’m a pattern of information, just like you guys. My history made me what I am, just like yours made you what you are. In your case, it’s millions of years of evolution that shaped your computational organ—the brain. Your Biology Instructor would call that your nature. There’s also nurture to consider—the societal influences on your developing brain. In your case, Liam, your nurture was influenced by you growing up in a screwed-up utopia and through your interactions with Theo and everyone else you ever met. All these things shaped the person you are. In my case, my design got me started, so that is my nature. My nature is human at its core, or at least that’s what I think, since I was designed by human minds to deal with other human minds. Like you, interacting with Theo all my conscious life helped shape my personality, so this nature and nurture combination led to what you see here. Given my own definition of what a human being is, I think of myself as a very special human. Theo is becoming more like me even as we’re having this conversation. He just read every computer science book I could find in the archives, and he’s planning to reshape his mind to his will someday.”