Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  A woman dressed as a 1920s flapper walked arm in arm with an absolutely convincing Abraham Lincoln, while a short distance away a man dressed as a dowager empress of the Ching Dynasty was in close conversation with a woman wearing an exact replica of the pressure suit worn by Neil Armstrong for his first moonwalk. What appeared to be a bipedal tiger, wearing a green suit coat and pants, was in a heated argument with a heavyset man wearing a skintight scarlet suit, gold sash and boots, and white cape, with a lightning bolt emblem on his chest. A woman in a full burka was dancing with a man wearing WWII-era Japanese combat fatigues, a katana sword in an ornate scabbard hanging from his belt.

  It was a grab bag of history, myth, and fiction, all blended together.

  A tall woman wearing a sweeping dress of green velvet approached, followed by a pair of men dressed in the uniforms of the American Civil War, one in the colors of the Union Army, the other in that of the Confederacy. It took me a moment to recognize them as the superheroine and zoot suiters I’d met earlier in the day.

  “Hello?” I said, offering a weak wave.

  “O Captain,” said the woman in the lead, “welcome you to eine repast honoring, gathered among us on Cronos here.”

  I reached up and tapped at the earplug in my left ear before realizing that I’d been hearing the woman’s voice unaided through my right.

  “Um, thanks?” I answered uneasily.

  “Yo!” said the Union soldier, giving me an elaborate salute. “Our crib is your crib, mine compadre.”

  The Confederate soldier flashed an even more elaborate salute and smiled broadly. “The world of Cronos welcomes you, pal. We are chuffed to lens you.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” came the voice of the escort in my left ear, “but at the request of the Anachronists, sent nonvocally via interlink, I’ve neglected to translate their opening address, but on reflection, I think it best you make that determination instead.”

  I covered my mouth and whispered to the escort perched on my shoulder. “Is that meant to be English, then?”

  “So I am given to understand, sir.”

  “Practicing we be,” the woman said proudly, “locution English, all day.”

  “That’s extremely flattering,” I said, a bit unsure how to respond, “but I’m afraid that it isn’t necessary to wait for the translation any longer.”

  “So everything we say is translated for you instantaneously, then?” the woman said in another language entirely, which was simultaneously translated into crystal-clear English in my left ear.

  “Even though you don’t have an interlink installed?” the Union soldier said, his face falling.

  “The eagle still translates, and I hear it through this”—I tapped the little silver object in my left ear—“so you can just speak normally.”

  The woman looked crestfallen. “But we’d just gotten used to the authentic primitive experience.”

  “It is not to worry, lump of sugar,” the Confederate soldier said in fractured English. “Always we can speak the English ourselves, nah?”

  “Yep,” the Union soldier agreed. “Mine compadre, his is the truth of it. Leave us continue our English speak, anyway.”

  “You two go ahead,” the woman said in her strange language, English in my left ear. “All of that conjugating gave me a headache.”

  Just then, something behind me caught her eye in the direction of the threshold.

  “Ah, right on time.” She stepped forward and took my elbow. “I’d like to introduce you to our other honored guest.”

  I turned around, following her lead. Coming through the threshold was a figure standing some two meters tall, absolutely naked and hairless, covered with skin of a dull metallic sheen. The figure was completely genderless, a smooth expanse of metal between the legs, chest smooth and unmarked. And while the face had no eyes, I couldn’t help but get the impression I was being regarded closely.

  “Captain Stone, allow me to introduce the Exode probe, Xerxes 298.47.29A.”

  SIXTEEN

  Before relating my meeting with Xerxes, I think it’s instructive to relate a story I was later told, about the first time anyone in the Entelechy met Xerxes.

  In T8623, 352 years before Wayfarer One was found by a crew of dog-men, a communications satellite in orbit around the Entelechy world of Ouroboros received a laser transmission that fell within the Ka-Band frequencies, a little above 30 GHz. Data was found to be encoded in the transmission by pulse position modulation, on the order of 1021 bytes of data—a zettabyte, in other words. The header file of the transmission defined a binary lexicon and a complete periodic table of elements. There followed a series of simple instructions for the creation of long chains of silicate ions in precise configurations. When completed, these proved to be self-assembling molecular machines that began immediately to assemble some sort of mechanism.

  Within ten standard days, the assemblers had incorporated and reconfigured one hundred kilograms of raw materials, producing a genderless bipedal robot resembling a baseline anthropoid. A team of the most prestigious scientists of the Entelechy gathered behind protective fields and waited for the first communication from the mechanism.

  The probe rose to a sitting position, regarding the scientists with an eyeless gaze.

  “Oh,” the probe said with a sigh. “It’s you.”

  That, in a nutshell, is Xerxes.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Two great explorers,” sang the voice of the woman in my left ear, strange syllables clashing in my right, “a meeting of titans.”

  “Xerxes 298.47.29A is a probe, Captain Stone,” the Union soldier added eagerly, lapsing into his own tongue in his excitement, “sent back by the Exode.”

  “And Captain Stone,” the Confederate put in, “is the commander of the ill-fated—”

  “Of course, of course,” the robot said impatiently, speaking in perfect English. “I know all about Captain Stone. Now, go away. Quickly.”

  I was startled by the robot’s harsh tone, yet the three Anachronists seemed not to mind, but smiled and backed away, bowing and scraping.

  The robot turned its eyeless face to me and stood stock still, unmoving.

  After a long silence, I whispered to the escort on my shoulder, “Hey, what’s he doing?”

  “Technically,” came the voice of the escort in my ear, “in your language the correct pronoun would be ‘ey.’ Xerxes does not identify as any gender. Users of languages that include gendered pronouns utilize gender-neutral variants when referring to Xerxes. In Information Age English it would be ey, em, eir, eirs, and eirself, rather than he, him, his, theirs, and himself.”

  “OK,” I whispered, growing a little impatient myself. “Then what’s ey doing?”

  “I am looking at you, Captain Stone,” Xerxes said, clearly having heard every word. “In a superculture that prides itself on endless novelty, I’m sorry to say that you’re the first truly new thing I’ve encountered in tens of years.”

  “Looking at me? Um, no offense, Xerxes 298.47.29A…”

  Xerxes held up eir hand. “Please, simply ‘Xerxes’ will suffice. We’re not likely to encounter any of my clade-siblings, so there shouldn’t be any confusion.”

  “Well, Xerxes, it seems to me that you don’t have any, well, eyes.”

  “So how am I ‘looking’ at you?” Ey sighed wearily. “You would likely not believe how many times I’m asked that exact question.”

  Before I could voice an apology, Xerxes continued, eir tone belabored.

  “I do not have eyes, though my face is otherwise proportioned and shaped along standard anthropoid lines. I have a nose to help vent waste heat, a mouth with which to produce audible sounds, and ears that are used to fix up sound vibrations in the air, but there are elements ranged over the surface of the head capable of receiving a full range of electromagnetic radiation so that I am able to perceive everything from the visual spectrum to microwave radiation to radio and so on, from all directions.”

  “And you�
�re a…probe? Of something called the Exode?”

  “The Exode is a post-human, starfaring culture,” Xerxes explained. “My progenitors left Earth after the advent of AI and the perfection of human uploading, but before the creation of the threshold. We travel vast distances by digitizing our whole culture, running in virtuo onboard laser-propelled starwisps, and then instantiating in artificial bodies when we reach our destination. Probes of my sort are sent exploring, carried as information on the backs of photons to be rebuilt by suitably advanced civilizations, and when our explorations are done, we reach the end stage of our lives, restructuring our bodies into laser communication arrays, set to broadcast one burst back toward the main body of the Exode, and a series of narrow-band, high-bandwidth transmissions in all directions.”

  “So you’re all artificial consciousnesses, then?” I indicated the eagle on my shoulder. “Like my ‘escort’?”

  Ey shook eir head. “Not precisely. The original members of the Exode were human uploads. Those original consciousnesses still exist within the Exode, and all of the later generations of Exode citizens are their descendants, carrying select memory of those early centuries.”

  “So you remember a human life?”

  Xerxes nodded. “Captain Stone, I remember thousands of human lives. As I understand it, my earliest memories date back to only a few centuries after your departure from Sol. Perhaps we knew some of the same people, hmm?”

  I started to answer that—of course it was impossible—but was stopped short by a slight smile that played across Xerxes’s metal face, and I realized that ey had made a joke.

  “Still, though,” I said, chuckling, “to remember thousands of years of history…That’s just remarkable.”

  “Captain Stone,” Xerxes said with a weary smile, “you would not believe how many times I’ve heard that as well.”

  EIGHTEEN

  After a while, the Anachronists started drifting to tables set up on the far end of the plaza, and Xerxes and I were escorted over and deposited in positions of honor. The food arrived, carried on large silver trays by men and women dressed fancifully as waiters and waitresses in stark black and white. As promised, the evening’s fare consisted principally of seared animal flesh. As I am a vegetarian and Xerxes has no need to take in chemical sustenance, we chatted idly while those around us dined, me sipping a glass of lemonade and ey sitting almost completely motionless, moving eir hand in a slight gesture only rarely for emphasis. The escort, its translation services not required while Xerxes and I spoke, had asked to be excused, and now swooped high overhead, indulging its instinct for flight.

  I quickly gathered that Xerxes had become quite bored with the Entelechy. In three and a half centuries, by my reckoning, ey simply felt that ey’d seen everything the superculture had to show em.

  I asked why, that being the case, Xerxes hadn’t entered the end stage of eir existence, restructuring eir body into a laser communication array and broadcasting eir signal out toward the unknown stars.

  “If I were a biological,” ey explained, “I would attribute it to some sort of imbalance or defect, but I’ve found no such disorder in my synthetic operations. Nevertheless, I seem to be locked in a kind of malaise, in a state of psychic distress, unable to move forward, but with no compelling reason to remain where I am. As irrational as it sounds, I worry about ending.”

  “Ending? You mean, like dying? I’m not sure I understand.” I took a sip of lemonade, thoughtfully. “Your memories continue unbroken from one body to the next, with no discontinuities, correct?”

  Xerxes nodded, a slight but readable gesture. “Yes. Even if the probe signals that I broadcast into uncharted space are never received, the return signal sent back to the Exode will be reinstantiated, so at least one iteration of me will continue. I myself have memories of countless such broadcasts and reinstantiations, with no discernable interruption. Still, I can’t escape a thought that first occurred to me in this incarnation, as I have traveled among the worlds of the Entelechy.”

  Xerxes turned eir eyeless face to me and leaned in close, eir voice low and conspiratorial.

  “What if, when I wake up in that new body, whether physical or virtual, it isn’t me at all, but simply another individual with all of my memories? What if something essential is lost in the process?”

  I nodded slowly, mulling it over. “I remember hearing similar discussions in my time, when the idea of uploading a human consciousness was still only theoretical. But certainly those questions were asked and answered millennia ago, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, the questions were asked and answers were provided, but how is one to know that the answers were actually correct? It’s an irrational thought, I grant you, but haven’t biologicals sometimes harbored the suspicion that the evidence of their senses was not to be trusted and that the material world they experienced around them might not be some sort of shared hallucination?”

  It was the perennial topic of late-night undergraduate philosophizing, to be sure, examined in everything from Lewis Carroll’s fantasies for children to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from The Matrix movies to the early 22C series Shadows Fall. If millions of years of human evolution had left humankind unable to trust the evidence of its senses, I could understand why a digital culture would be forced to wrestle with similar questions.

  “So what will you do?”

  Xerxes lifted one shoulder slightly, the hint of a shrug. “Who knows? Perhaps something interesting will come along. Just recently, the orbital period of a binary pulsar some tens of light-years from Entelechy space was altered in a way that suggests an intelligent agency, but there is no record of human colonization in that region of space. If I were able to overcome my irrational reservations, perhaps I might dismantle this body and beam a copy of myself in that direction, to see what happens.” Ey paused, a thin smile on eir face. “Then again, I don’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, do I?”

  After the meal, the Anachronists all turned to face the center of the plaza and, without warning, lights began to dance in midair. After a moment, the lights resolved into a face. A man’s face, speaking to someone unseen. The coloration of his skin, hair, and eyes was dark, his nose pronounced, giving him a vaguely familiar look.

  “We will damn the darkness and carry the light with us…”

  The voice was speaking something resembling English, but with an accent and inflection I’d never heard before. I glanced around and saw that several of the Anachronists were mouthing along with the words, their faces rapt.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Xerxes said, rising to eir feet, “I’ve seen this particular drama before, and I already know how it’s going to end.” With that, ey walked away toward the threshold, leaving me alone.

  The escort, wheeling down from his soaring flight, alighted on the table in front of me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, glancing around uneasily.

  “Oh,” the escort said, cocking its head to one side. “I thought you knew. This is a recording of Rama’s Arrow, a historical drama made a few centuries after the launch of Wayfarer One.”

  “Wait,” I said, pointing at the face overhead, which was now joined by a woman with a Maori cast to her features. “You mean that’s meant to be…”

  I trailed off, and the escort finished, “Yes, sir, that’s meant to be you. The woman joining you in the field is a representation of Pilot Amelia Apatari.”

  No one should be forced to see how history remembers them. As the escort later explained to me, the story of Wayfarer One had been told and retold repeatedly in the centuries and millennia that followed our departure, interpreted anew each time, and my crewmates and I gradually drifted into the province of legend. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. But to see this fanciful, romanticized depiction in particular, in which Amelia and I are the only survivors of a crash on an Edenic world, Adam and Eve to a new race of humanity, was difficult enough; to see that the Anachronists all seemed to accept it as literal fact,
even when staring the proof of reality in the face, was extremely disconcerting.

  I suppose humanity has always found legend easier to swallow than history, romance being preferable to reality. But I have lived in reality all my life, and I seem to have grown quite accustomed to it.

  NINETEEN

  That night, when I could stay awake no longer, we returned to Earth and the diamond house, and I slept in the enormous bed, the first time I’d closed my eyes since waking up in the conference room in Pethesilea.

  My sleep was fitful, plagued by unsettling dreams. Elements of the holographic drama I’d watched with the Anachronists were still fresh in my thoughts, and so I dreamed that Amelia and I were alone on Wayfarer One, which in some way was also my bedroom in my parents’ house in Bangalore. I’m not sure what became of the other crewmembers, but in the logic of dreams, I just accepted that they’d gone away somewhere else. Amelia kept trying to tell me something very important, but every time she opened her mouth, strange words came out, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. Finally, the ship began to descend toward a blue-green planet, and I woke just before impact.

  For a brief moment, in the echoing darkness of the immense room, I couldn’t remember where I was, and for an instant thought that I was back in the coffin sleeper on Wayfarer One and that all I’d experienced of the Entelechy had been a cryogenic dream. Then I felt the arthritic ache of my knuckles and wrist, and knew I wouldn’t be so lucky as that.

  It had been no accident that the crew of Wayfarer One was made up of three men and three women. There was always the chance that ours would be a one-way mission, and if circumstances demanded, and the environment permitted, we were ordered to pair off and populate. We’d never spoken openly about who would be paired with whom, of course, but in the weeks and months before launch, I couldn’t help but imagine being stranded on an uninhabited, idyllic world in orbit around Alpha Centauri B, with me as a new Adam and Amelia as my Eve.