Vacuum Diagrams

by Stephen Baxter

  Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn't matter. The board was the thing, a little world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her classes. Her parents didn't seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, and respected her privacy.

  The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude reproductions of the great events of human history.

  She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.

  By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was plundering than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.

  She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.

  She called for light, which flooded the room, sourceless. She sat up in bed.

  Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.

  Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother's warmth, trying to still her trembling.

  "I think it's time you asked me your questions."

  Lieserl sniffed. "What questions?"

  "The ones you've carried around with you since the moment you were born." Phillida smiled. "I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor thing... to be burdened with so much awareness. I'm sorry, Lieserl."

  Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable.

  "Tell me why you're sorry," she said at last.

  "You're my daughter." Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl's shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother's blonde hair, making it seem to shine. "Never forget that. You're as human as I am. But — " She hesitated.

  "But what?"

  "But you're being — engineered."

  Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl's body, Phillida said. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, force-growing her body like some absurd human sunflower — they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.

  Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. "Why? Why did you let this be done to me?"

  Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl's hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother's cheek on the crown of her head. "Not yet," Phillida said. "Not yet. A few more days, my love. That's all..."

  Phillida's cheeks grew warmer, as if she was crying, silently, into her daughter's hair.

  Lieserl returned to her snakes-and-ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.

  Already she'd outgrown it.

  She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.

  She wasn't the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontës, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed... The British in the nineteenth century had adopted it as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.

  But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early twentieth century of a sad-looking little clown; he slithered haplessly down snakes and heroically clambered up ladders. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.

  The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown.

  She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet's thirteen-to-eight — but how much harder?

  She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions — clean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games — to different forms of wonder.

  On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own, high-speed learning.

  The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.

  She read up on nanobots.

  Body cells were programmed to commit suicide. A cell itself manufactured enzymes which cut its DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growth — tumors — and a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds. Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals were sent by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive.

  The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made immortality simple.

  It also made the manufacture of a Lieserl simple.

  Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms. She still didn't know why.

  With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House — without her parents for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she'd played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she'd discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid — less magical — and she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses.

  But there were other compensations. Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like young apes — like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence...

  As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.

  That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.

  The next day — her sixteenth — Lieserl rose quickly. She'd never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.

  When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.

  He turned to face her.

  He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn't seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.

  She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still-childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The tho
ught of touching him — the memory of her feverish dreams during the night — seemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.

  She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream. Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she was viewing him through a tunnel.

  Once again the laboring nanobots — the damned, unceasing nanotechnological infection of her body — had taken away part of her life.

  This time, though, it was too much to bear.

  "Why? Why?" She wanted to scream abuse at her mother — to hurt her.

  Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones of her face, the lines etched deep. "I'm sorry," she said. "Believe me. When we — George and I — volunteered for this program, we knew it would be painful. But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had had children before. Perhaps if we had, we'd have been able to anticipate how this would feel."

  "I'm a freak — an absurd experiment," Lieserl shouted. "A construct. Why did you make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?"

  "Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible..." Phillida seemed to come to a decision. "I'd hoped to give you a few more days of — life, normality — before it had to end. You seemed to be finding some happiness—"

  "In fragments," Lieserl said bitterly. "This is no life, Phillida. It's grotesque."

  "I know. I'm sorry, my love. Come with me."

  "Where?"

  "Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something."

  Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida's warm grasp.

  It was mid-morning now. The Sun's light flooded the garden; flowers — white and yellow — strained up towards the sky.

  Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. "What am I supposed to be seeing?"

  Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.

  Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the light. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapor trail and the lights of habitats.

  "No." Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl's hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face flowerlike towards the Sun.

  The star's light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes, stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images.

  The Sun. Of course...

  Kevan Scholes said, Damn it, Lieserl, you're going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without—"

  I know. I'm sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?"

  Me? I'm fine. But that's hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let's run through the tests.

  "You mean I'm not down here to enjoy myself?"

  Scholes, speaking from his safe habitat far beyond the photosphere, didn't respond.

  "Yeah. The tests. Okay, electromagnetic first." She adjusted her sensorium. "I'm plunged into darkness," she said drily. "There's very little free radiation at any frequency — perhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And—"

  We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.

  "What I feel?"

  She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the "air" of the cavern. The huge convective cells buffeted and merged like living things, whales in this insubstantial sea of gas.

  "I see convection fountains," she said. "A cave full of them."

  She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face down, surveying the plasma sea below her. She opened her eyes, changing her mode of perception. The convective honeycomb faded into the background of her senses, and the magnetic flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.

  Lieserl dipped into a tube; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. Its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. "It's wonderful," she said. "I'm inside a flux tube. It's an immense tunnel; it's like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun."

  Maybe. I don't know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. Kevan Scholes hesitated, and when he spoke again he sounded severely encouraging, as if he'd been instructed to be nice to her. We're glad you're feeling — ah — happy in yourself, Lieserl.

  "My new self. Maybe. Well, it was an improvement on the old; you have to admit that."

  Yes. I want you to think back to the downloading. Can you do that?

  "The downloading? Why?"

  Come on, Lieserl. It's another test, obviously.

  "A test of what?"

  Your trace functions. We want to know if—

  "My trace functions. You mean my memory."

  ...Yes. He had the grace to sound embarrassed. Think back, Lieserl. Can you remember?

  Downloading...

  It was her ninetieth day, her ninetieth physical-year. She was impossibly frail — unable even to walk, or feed herself, or clean herself.

  They'd taken her to a habitat close to the Sun. They'd almost left the download too late; they'd had one scare when an infection had somehow got through to her and settled into her lungs, nearly killing her.

  She wanted to die.

  Physically she was the oldest human in the System. She felt as if she were underwater: she could barely feel, or taste, or see anything, as if she was encased in some deadening, viscous fluid. And she knew her mind was failing.

  It was so fast she could feel it. It was like a ghastly reverse run of her accelerated childhood. She woke every day to a new diminution of her self. She had come to dread sleep, yet could not avoid it.

  She couldn't bear the indignity of it. Everybody else was immortal, and young; and the AS technology which had made them so was being used to kill Lieserl. She hated those who had put her in this position.

  Her mother visited her for the last time, a few days before the download. Lieserl, through her ruined, rheumy old eyes, was barely able to recognize Phillida — this young, weeping woman, only a few months older than when she had held up her baby girl to the Sun.

  Lieserl cursed her, sent her away.

  At last she was taken, in her bed, to a downloading chamber at the heart of the habitat.

  Do you remember, Lieserl? Was it — continuous?

  "...No."

  It was a sensory explosion.

  In an instant she was young again, with every sense alive and vivid. Her vision was sharp, her hearing impossibly precise. And slowly, slowly, she had become aware of new senses — senses beyond the human. She could see the dull infra-red glow of the bellies and heads of the people working around the shell of her own abandoned body, the sparkle of X-ray photons from the Solar photosphere as they leaked through the habitat's shielding.

  She'd retained her human memories, but they were qualitatively different from the experiences she was accumulating now. Limited, partial, subjective, imperfectly recorded: like fading paintings, she thought.

  ...Except, perhaps, for that single, golden, day at the beach.

  She studied the husk of her body. It was almost visibly imploding now, empty...

  "I remember," she told Kevan Scholes. "Yes, I remember."

  Now the flux tube curved away to the right; and, in following it, she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighboring her own had become twisted into spirals too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.

  Lieserl, what's happening? We can see your trajectory's altering, fast.

  "I'm fine. I've got myself into a flux rope, that's all..."

  Lieserl, you should get out of there...

  She let the tube sweep her around. "Why? This is
fun."

  Maybe. But it isn't a good idea for you to break the surface; we're concerned about the stability of the wormhole—

  Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. "Oh, damn it, you're just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go."

  We're not done with the tests yet, Lieserl.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  One more...

  "Just tell me."

  Run a full self-check, Lieserl. Just for a few minutes... drop the Virtual constructs.

  She hesitated. "Why? The systems are obviously functioning to specification."

  Lieserl, you don't need to make this difficult for me. Scholes sounded defensive. This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which—

  "All right, damn it."

  She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive stab of will, let her Virtual image of herself — the illusion of a human body around her — crumble.

  It was like waking from a dream: a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.

  She considered herself.

  The tetrahedral Interface of the wormhole was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing-hot gas of the convective zone poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun's flesh, almost obscuring the Interface itself. The Solar material was, she knew, being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; convection zone gases emerged, blazing, from the drifting tetrahedron, making it into a second, miniature Sun around which human habitats could cluster.

  By pumping away the gas, and the heat it carried, the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive — with its precious, fragile cargo of datastores...

  The stores which sustained the awareness of herself, Lieserl.

  She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.