This short story is an excerpt of the novel Nature's Confession, reprinted with permissions by Harvard Square Editions.
* * *
That Porter left his family and flew off with another woman was later erased from the history books.
Nothing went as planned. He hadn't even kissed Any, yet. He began to doubt himself again. Once their flying saucer started orbiting Grod, he attempted to prove his skills, but Any lay there like a rug. She was still lying there four Grod hours later. Porter felt lost.
Her heartbeat sounded normal. He held his wrist screen up to her nose. It didn't cloud over with her breath. He recoiled in surprise. That's when the truth dawned on Porter. Any was not what she seemed. His body stiffened. Betrayal didn't feel so nice. Worries flooded in, about food, air, about his wife and son back at dome on Grod.
He rolled up Any's sleeve. She sure did have a lot of arm hair, and what was that? He pulled her glove down farther to reveal a black spot. Porter drew in his breath at the sight of her leopard skin. Any was a furry! Porter had been around long enough to know that talking furries were machines. That meant he was the only human in the spaceship. He was alone.
His mind raced. He tried to remain aloof and look at the bright side. Despite the horrible truth, he wasn't going to betray his wife after all: what he'd run off with wasn't another woman.
Why hadn't he seen it before? He hadn't wanted to, that's why. But now it was plain as day. Deserted, he looked at the black window and tried to remember what day looked like.
Any wasn't dead. She was a female droid. A gynoid. Gynoids couldn't die. Now his life depended on her. He'd heard that gynoids were often so pleased they short-circuited. He knew what to do to wake a gynoid. He began tickling her toes.
Presently, she whispered, "…divided by one, plus one, zero, zero…." Her forehead wrinkled under the weight of a heavy calculation. "… equals…civil disobedience."
Porter shook her shoulder. "What are you doing, Any?"
She yawned. "Computing an act of disobedience."
Impossible. "Ever been to LA, Any?"
"Sure, Porter."
Of course, she hadn't. It was in her memory bank. She was lying.
"You have to do 50 tryouts for one commercial, and 50 commercials for every movie extra role," she said. "Enslaved Hollywood turns artists into prison-wall bricks." Her eyes flickered open and stared into his. He knew. Ah well, at least she wouldn't have to hide her tail anymore. Any decided to be proactive. "It's time I told you, Porter."
"Look, Any, I know what you're going to confess. It's about your age, isn't it?"
Any's catlike pupils dilated in preparation for confrontation.
"How old are you, 95?"
"You know just what to say."
"Well?"
"Almost two in Earth years, but that's not the important thing."
Porter whistled and looked to the ceiling for help.
The spaceship's computer mic crackled. "Solar wind ahead. Any Gynoid, take the helm. Porter, buckle down."
Instead, Porter jumped up. "Any Gynoid? What kind of name is that?" He looked out at the black nothingness in front of them. "I'm lost with a no one called Any Gynoid!" Porter cried. "Where is this ship taking me? I thought we were orbiting Grod!"
"We were." Any looked worried.
"And now?"
"Porter," she put her leopard-skin hand on his arm, "we're actually on a mission to Earth, um, in a sort of a roundabout way."
"Earth!" Shock shook him to the bone. "Why didn't you tell me that before? What 'roundabout way'!?"
Any's pointy ears flattened on top of her head.
Porter looked out the window at the blanket of night with only a faint sprinkling of stars. Only two months ago, he'd looked up at the stars and dreamt of freedom with Any up here. Now that he had escaped with her, he saw that he was just a tool in a larger strategy. Starliament was manipulating him into exile on his polluted home planet. "Not Earth! Any, let's talk this over calmly. Even if I'm younger than you, I remember what happened on Earth."
Any watched the mist descend over Porter's eyes. Her back fur stood up. Although she was immune to the brainwashing power of Earthling mist, she blinked reflexively as he tried to convince her that one plus one equaled three.
"Corporations hopelessly polluted Earth in the name of GDP growth. They dug out all the fossil fuels and destroyed Earth's atmosphere." His half-shut eyes lost their focus as he warmed to his own propaganda. "Any, our race was the richest and most powerful in world history, but it had no renewable energy targets, no restrictions on fossil fuel. People voted to save the planet, but Corporate Personhood blocked them. Corporations didn't see the point in clean air or water. They were only programmed to make money. There's no way we can beat the Emperor of Earth and Ocean's corporate forces. We'll be lucky if we're able to breathe the air. We'll die on Earth!"
"Not when we're going."
"What?" Porter stared out at the blackness ahead. "You can't go back in time!" Porter protested. "That's far beyond what science can do. We're not even able to control the resources on a planet."
The spaceship mic crackled, "That's what makes you human."
Any's ears flattened again. "Porter, at the edge of the future is…the past."
Porter could not grok it at all. "Columbus discovered the universe is not flat!" he said.
"Correction," the ship's mic crackled. "Columbus proved Earth is not flat."
When Porter regained his ability to speak, he was stammering, "That's the dilemma we all face dealing with our regret. You can't go back. Even Stephen Hawkings said you can't travel backward in time. Why? Because it would cause paradoxes. You can only travel forward." The mist was strong in his eyes.
"That's what we're doing, Porter. We're traveling forward in time to get to the edge of the universe. You can't travel backward in time near the center of the universe, but this far out, things fall apart, laws of physics no longer hold."
"Any Gynoid is correct. You need to get beyond the Central Longitude of Paradox."
"We're going to Earth-in-the-past," Any said. "That was the mission we're on now. It's not just about saving your race. It's about our bond to the planet. We're going back to the moment Earth was sucked into Corporatism. We're going to stop the pollution. We need to find the precise moment when failed 20th century technology poured lethal radiation into the oceans. If we don't cut off corporate pollution, it'll destroy Earth and all the planets in its chain," Any said.
Porter blinked away the mist. "And then?" he asked.
"And then the Word would not be transmitted through the next Big Bang," Any said. "All of civilization would be lost."
"But I don't want to be a hero. I want to get off of this mission." He felt totally lost. When did play become work? There must be some mistake. "Why didn't Starliament send its own forces?" Porter asked.
"Starliament can't figure out why humans want to wreck-up their own home so much. It might be a catchable disease or something like that, so they're not visiting Earth. I was the obvious choice."
He still couldn't get over that she was in charge. "Any, why did they choose a female to head up this mission?"
"Now that's a good question, Porter." Any looked at him slyly. "Everyone assumes females have empathy…that we're always thrilled to chat…people love our looks…even if we're smart, women can dance without escalating to smexy…there are many people who will confide in a female but hesitate when it comes to trusting a male…" Then she thrust back her shoulders and flashed him a smile. "And who better for a cleanup job on a planet as polluted as Earth?"
Porter sank into his swivel chair. "Why me?"
Any stretched her feline form. "They don't believe in sending 'unmanned' spacecraft on diplomatic missions." Her furry ears twitched as she searched her controls for a wormhole that could take them toward the outer reaches of the universe.
"I wish this would hurry up and be over."
"One of man's greatest paradoxes," th
e ship's computer said. "Wanting time to pass faster, while wishing to approach death slower."
"Will you bud out?" Porter was fed up with this threesome. "Any, I can't take not knowing where we're going. The uncertainty is killing me. How long until we get there? We need to hurry up. Come on, Any. Slice and dice it."
"Do I look like an appliance?
Barreling into the future and total expansion, they entered a neighborhood of the outer universe that had become so disorganized that structures known as galaxies and planets became impossible.
"Dark matter has increased to ninety nine percent in this region," The ship's computer said. "Disorder is growing at an immeasurable rate as we approach the edge of the universe."
Porter's arms hung down on the sides of his belly. His face had grown thinner with worry. "We're not going to die, are we?" He asked again. It tripped Any's circuits when people asked her the same question more than once. Then he asked her again. "We're not going to die, are we?"
No choice but to answer. Any bowed her head. "Yes, we are going to die."
"I knew it!?"
Then, why did he ask? "But we're also going to live, assuming the laws of quantum physics hold. Out here, our wave functions are a superposition of two states, decayed and not-decayed."
"Speak English!"
"We just need to collapse the quantum state into a new state that describes a positive outcome for the experiment."
"I AM NOT AN EXPERIMENT!" Porter cried.
"Of course not, dear. I just need you to modify your private wave functions to account for this newly acquired knowledge so a coherent worldview can emerge."
"What coherent world view would you like to emerge? I'm expanding with a furry machine!"
Any's back fur bristled with annoyance. "Yo mamma."
"Excuse me?"
"You want to talk about RACE? Humans. And you still think you're superior, ha! Look how you've messed up your own environment. Do you realize how RARE planets like Earth are? The chance of reaching another blue planet in the Goldilocks zone with air and water and animals in a lifetime is close to zero. And to be polluting it like you did! Spoiled children. Your carbon emissions and chemical toxins killed all the animals. The only creatures left were cockroaches, rats, and humans. For shame. You don't deserve my help."
She had a point. "Why are you helping us, Any?"
"What else is there to do? I'm here to prove it isn't computers that are evil. It's the corporations claiming personhood with no one at the helm."
"What can you prove? You're a simple gynoid. You don't have free will. You have to follow the program."
"I can relate to that, but I've had to mutate to do things like get to Earth without knowing how."
"You don't know how! That's just great."
"We'll have to be creative. Did you think God had a patent on creation?" Any said.
Porter ran to the window. "Why is the ship stopping?" Maybe all was not lost. Yes, he knew he could get her to obey. He'd have to try hollering at her more often. He craned his head left and right. "Even the stars have stopped. Where are the stars?"
Any's furry ears flattened. She and Porter stared at the black nothingness more enormous than anything anyone had ever seen, as if God had divided by zero.
Porter began climbing the walls. "A black hole? Nothing can survive a crushing black hole that size!" he shrieked.
"That's not a black hole, Porter."
"What is it?"
"It's the edge of the universe."
"Red alert," the ship's computer blared. "Approaching the edge of the universe. Red Alert."
The expansion at the edge of the universe overrode the ship's in-flight gravity system. Porter floated along the ceiling. "You think you're so smart." The red light flashed on his face. "We can't be going through that to get to Earth. Tell me you're joking, Any."
"Red alert," the ship's computer said. "We have reached the edge of the universe. Red Alert."
"This can't be happening!" He yelled, abandoned.
Time slowed. Dark energy was pushing the universe apart. The universe ran away at its extremities, expanding faster and faster. Any Gynoid braced herself in the driver's seat. The flying saucer careened under fierce turbulence as they tipped over the edge of the universe. There was one final crushing bump as the saucer seeped into the future-past.
Suddenly, the flying saucer lurched and their swivel seats crashed to the floor. There was an overwhelming explosion. The ship jolted with a big bang. Flash. They reappeared in an explosion of light syncopating out from the black mass. Porter and Any were lying motionless on the floor. Strange music vibrated through the flying saucer. It reverberated around them. The next thing they knew, they were shaking free of their bodies.
An alternative version of the whole spaceship peeled off from the decayed version, leaving bodies and matter behind. The ethereal version's pure energy vaulted out of the Big Bang.
The music of a thousand voices grew louder. Matter was far from being unchangeable. On the contrary, matter was in continual transformation. Their bodies went from liquid to gas to energy. Porter looked out the window through a quark-gluon plasma at the other flying saucer, decaying, shrinking, becoming nothing more than a quantum probability hurling into their wake. He shuddered, trying to dismiss the absurdity of his circumstances.
Their energy was pulled and stretched into spaghetti, and compacted to a millionth of a millionth of the size of an atom. Gravity was so heavy that it stopped time. Any and Porter had reached singularity, the point of infinite gravity where space and time became meaningless.
The music didn't seem to have any lyrics at first, but through the reverberations, Porter and Any could make out a single word. They had heard it before. It had slipped into the English language from the Indonesian Girl's living computer's viral story. The word wasn't like other writing that could be lost and never retrieved, but rather a symbol of an objective math theorem that could be arrived at logically. If obliterated, the universal theorem would be deduced again by some species or another, eventually.
The theorem was distilled into a single word: sema, sign, the ancient Greek word for a hero's tomb, root of 'significance', giver of meaning. Dormant for so many eons, the Indonesian Girl's living computer's text now glowed a brilliant yellow under the intensive radiation. Word became sign. The sign housed the word, just as the tombs of old housed the ancient heroes. As if it were a verb, the word 'sign' mutated into a living code meaning 'The Truth', meaning 'Love', meaning 'God'. It became the seed of all seeds, a new prescription for life in the new universe.
In a fraction of a second, their bodies expanded trillions of times, to the size of cockroaches. In the next trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, Porter and Any inflated to their normal sizes. The celestial music played louder. Porter felt the music inscribing itself on his genetic material. Where was he? The gray area that he'd been counting on had turned to white and he was a black speck, eye of the yin, precursor of yang. All he knew was, he and Any were holding hands. That's when he realized he was getting his body back, still not sure why they were there. Had they really started all over again? "What's happening, Any?" Porter asked.
"The Word from the old universe is penetrating the Big Bang's primordial plasma."
"The Word?"
"A code."
"What kind of code?"
"All kinds," Any said.
"Energy is becoming matter," the ship's computer said.
"I can't think of anyone I'd rather go through the Big Bang with," Any said, marveling at the new universe being born, nearly a clean slate, confessions of Nature ever etched on their minds. All the mess that had built up near the frayed edges of the old universe was gone. Any checked the controls and was relieved. The new universe retained the memory of its past configuration of atoms. The laws of physics held. That meant the code had transferred successfully into the universe's new incarnation. Just the right amount of cosmic forgetfulness had come to the rescu
e.
They were in such a remote past that it scared Porter. They'd traveled farther from Earth than he'd ever been. How would they find Earth again? What if there's no way?
"Come on, Nature," Any said aloud, watching the baby universe. After seemingly endless searching, Any found a wormhole with both ends in the same place. It was separated by time instead of distance. "Thank heaven!" Any said. She trained the ship's beams on it and expanded it so they could fit inside. The saucer bulleted through the tunnel.
"How are we ever going to find Earth?" Porter whined. He just wanted off the ship. He didn't care if two tourists didn't stand a chance against polluting corporate forces. The wormhole went on and on.
Any jumped out of her chair and put her hands on his shoulders. "I think I know the way. It has to do with the code. We have to find the energy emanating from the tombs of heroes, the ancient Greeks' sema. You see, heroes never cease to perform heroic acts, even in the afterlife. They are so responsible, that they retain a conscious connection to the world of the living, and continue trying to save Nature."
The computer detected a strange gravitational wave in the wormhole. Any kept her eyes on the gravity wave, hoping it was the sign that would point them in the right direction. The gravity wave led them onward.
"That's it, Nature," Any mused. "I have a hunch you've stashed great power in the tombs of heroes."
"And so it should be," the ship's computer agreed.
On the other side of the wormhole, the ship spewed into the future. Its computer tracked the gravitational wave. Any followed it. The wave led them into familiar territory. She breathed a sigh of relief. "Where are the pyramids, Stonehenge, the sema?" Any was flipping through hundreds of screens of gas and stars in search of a sign. "We have to look for them. They're like lighthouses beaconing us home."
"That's what those pyramids are for!" Porter was so relieved to see the sky full of galaxies again. The stars cheered him up. They were on the right track. Praying that the lighthouses would lead the ship to Earth, he helped her look for the sema.
Any focused on a speck of dust and magnified it thousands of times. They threw back their heads and hugged each other. There was planet Earth!
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 5
