There are two types of moving through air. Flying - an embrace of possibility - and its opposite, falling. Flying has purpose, direction, ambition. It welcomes the future. Falling is withdrawing. It shows you the past: choices slipping away.
Was there something she could have done? Some nimble sequence of rhetoric that would have changed things? As she fell, Arianne saw her story recede into immutable black. Professor Golden, her guiding hands sliced into ribbons; Professor Sura, killed by her own experiment; the Bloggeration soldiers in pools of blood; Richard, her friend turned murderer in a conspiracy to make research more interesting; the singularity-souled cyborgs, designed to replace humanity, turning to stone. And after them, slicing out of the darkness came a wide grin.
“Smile,” said the voice of Vastion La Quana.
A bright flash made Arianne throw her arms up to shield her face. She flipped about in the rushing air, and was suddenly spooned onto a soft mat. She squirmed on her back as her body tried to make sense of still being in one piece. She looked back at where she had come from. In the flickering birth of halogen lamps she could see that a large fan attached to the ground was placed at the bottom of the tall shaft she had come from. It must have eased her fall to a standstill.
Arianne levered herself up on her elbows. She was in a large, low room with black marble floors and long geometric lines of light snaking across the ceiling. A few steps lead down from the shallow dais where she lay into a broad area with a few sofas and tables. At the far end of the long room was a wide balcony, reflecting in pale blends of cream and salmon a blood-orange sun being slowly juiced over rocky mountains.
Standing next to her on a shallow dais was linguistics magnate La Quana, dressed in an elaborate white suit with wide flowing folds like a conch shell. He was poking away at a small hand-held screen, critically assessing something. He seemed suddenly satisfied and turned towards her.
“Sorry about the surprise,” said La Quana. “I hope you don’t mind - I’m making a collection.”
He swiped his rotund fingers across the screen he was holding and turned towards the wall. A digital image as big as a large painting appeared across it. It was a photograph of Arianne’s face, cheeks flushed with shock but eyes sunken in despair. Arianne watched as the wall became flooded with similar images - over exposed faces with muscles pulled into topologies between regret, sorrow, anger, disgust and apathy. Dozens of sweating brows like furrowed deserts, fringed with wild forests of hair. A few cheeks were marked with short glistening streaks like rivers.
“Failure,” said La Quana, stepping confidently from the dais, greeting his wall of images with open arms. “It’s something we all experience. All of these people,” he waved his hand at the wall, which scattered the images around, revealing new ones, “they all experienced exactly what you’re feeling now. Over millennia, countless humans have gone through the pain of wanting something and losing the chance to get it. It is, perhaps, the universal human experience.” He strode closer to the wall, pausing to reach out to a single photograph of a young man, face rippled with confusion.
“And yet!” La Quana span on his heels, raising a finger in his immaculate tai-chi oratory style. “We all feel alone in our defeat.” His arms drifted down and his palms opened, a magician revealing all.
“I take these pictures to remind us that we are not alone,” he explained, stepping closer to Arianne. “That failure is simply a grant to the greatest and most prolific center of research in history.” Here he paused as his hands presented an invisible gift before him.
“The University of Learning from Our Mistakes.”
There was a silent moment, when even Arianne could not quite resist the Saganesque delivery. But she drew in a breath, and staggered to her feet.
“If I was Han Solo,” she said, “I would have started shooting about a minute ago.”
La Quana winced slightly, as if trying to inhibit something, but he gave in.
“If I were Han Solo” he corrected.
Arianne rolled her eyes, ran her fingers down her forearm in a series of taps and looked up at the wall of floating faces. The whole wall flickered, then changed completely to an image of a graph. Two lines showed how often people used “If I were X” and “If I was X” in each decade. For the last six hundred years, Arianne’s choice of phrasing was winning hands-down.
Arianne strode past La Quana’s perplexed face, walking towards the balcony.
“Indeed”, started La Quana, trying to get ahead of Arianne. “You may be wondering why …”
Arianne cut him off.
“Look, normally I’d just let this play out. You’re a creepy, mad linguist who relishes in the opportunity to do evil in the name of science.”
“I - ”
“You’re talking to me because you want me do something. I’ll rail against the evil things you’ve done and how you almost got me killed.”
“Well -”
“Twice”
“Hmm”
“So you’re going to give a big speech about new opportunities, take me out on the balcony and do the whole ‘all this can be yours’ spiel and try to get me to help you in some devious plot.”
“Well -”
“I get it”, Arianne continued, now striding towards the open door. “You had it all planned out, you’ve been practicing, it would have been great. But: I’ve had a difficult day, and I can’t be spaced going through all that.”
Arianne and La Quana walked onto the terrace. It jutted out from a sheer cliff face, a hundred meters from the ground. They faced the sunset against a crown silhouette of mountains in the distance. The air was warm with a sweet sulphur taste.
“So,” said Arianne, turning to La Quana, “here we are.” She brought both her hands up to her eye height and made rapid pinching motions, looking from one to the other.
“Blah blah blah, I’m an evil bastard,” said Arianne’s right hand in a doglike voice.
“I hate you,” pinched the left in a squeak.
“But I have an important task for you,” flapped her right hand.
“I’d rather die,” flailed her left.
“Ah, but the ace up my sleeve is ...”. Both of Arianne’s hands looked towards La Quana in expectation.
La Quana regained some of his composure and, very slowly, let a sinister smile slip across his face. He pointed towards the valley below.
An icy mash lay below them - shallow pools of water covered with scarred sheets of ice, threaded through with narrow banks bristling with frosty grass. Massive robots on multiple octopus-like legs picked their way between the shallow pools streaked with reflected sunlight. A ship was descending in the near distance, and one of the lumbering robots reached out its arms to receive a cargo pod being lowered down. It swung the pod to the surface of the water, and released a hatch in one side. A laser beam burst from the mouth of the robot, slicing through the ice beneath it. Heavy, red, egg-shaped packages, large as coffins, slid out of the robot’s hatch.
“The waiting fields,” said La Quana.
“As you know, millions of interviews for funding are held every month here. People come from all over the galaxy for a chance at funding. Most of them come here frozen in chryosleep. This is where they wait. They don’t remember, of course, they're zapped at a transit terminal somewhere and then re-animated in the assessment dungeon foyer - like a cut in a film. But due to the, let’s say, complexities of the funding system, they may have to wait a while in between. You yourself had a short stay here just recently.”
Arianne looked from La Quana out onto the fields. She couldn’t help checking her chronometer.
32 years old (subjective, local); 315 years old (objective, local)
Confronting your age was never a pleasant experience. Chryosleep and interstellar travel made the shock of confronting your age cosmically horrifying. Worse yet, a quick calculation showed she had spent 7 years in a red bubble under the icy fields below.
“But your interview didn’t go
too well, and you have no job. Since you have a few other applications submitted, you’ll have to go back under, and wait for the next interview. So since we’re being candid, Dr. Arianne, the first ace up my sleeve is in fact a classic veiled threat. Your next interview may be …”
La Quana’s pause managed to pull her gaze towards him.
“… considerably delayed,” he said, carefully. “Who knows how long you could be lying out there?”
La Quana took a step towards Arianne.
“But the real ace, the real reason why you’ll help me, is because you want to.”
“Want to what?” demanded Arianne, angrily.
“You’ll want to know.”
Arianne’s jaw tightened, but she managed to keep her eyes locked on La Quana.
“We’re both fascinated by the way culture changes and adapts. After hundreds of thousands of years of human creativity, there’s almost nothing new to call our own, except the explanations for why everything got into this sorry state. The mystery haunts us. Questions claw at us and we want to own the answers.”
La Quana took a step closer.
“If you go back to sleep, I promise you Arianne, by the time you wake up, the biggest mystery in cultural evolution for centuries will be part of long-archived children’s stories.”
Arianne turned away and stepped towards the rail of the terrace. She gripped the cold bar and looked out across the frosty landscape, the sudden taste of iron in her mouth.
“What mystery?”
La Quana smiled.
“The great convergence,” he said, his smile widening as Arianne remained silent.
“After millennia of the diversity of culture expanding continuously, the cultures of the galaxy scattered and divided, have begun to converge. Now, for the first time, diversification is slowing down.”
Arianne’s grip on the rail tightened.
“Right across the galaxy, people have started to speak the same language, and nobody knows why.”
Chapter 3
Arianne glanced about her as she strode through the transport hub. It was the same coldly comfortable white lacquer cavern that could be found in any part of the galaxy. Supposedly the uniformity helped with people zapping back from chryosleep, but Arianne suspected that only the most unimaginative, depressed architects got jobs building transport hubs. All the shops and cafes were also of a kind. Even in a galaxy of a million cultures there would still be ridiculously expensive coffee and cheap perfume. Maybe she should start drinking perfume.
She sulked at an uncomfortable table and watched the other travelers walking past. They were dressed as different as they could possibly be. Every color, cut and fold imaginable were on display. Except the drab military grey she was looking for. To her left was a small exhibition designed to placate any traveler unable to afford the luxury of transit chryo. It was labelled “The archaeology of Old Earth”. Without a better plan, she was drawn towards it. The main case had two objects. One was a fragmented set of jewelry – a necklace of small, brilliant blue stones. Upon them were carved symbols, tiny caricatures of animals long extinct. In the center of the necklace was a whorl of pale stone – a spiral pocked and cracked by time. The second object was much simpler – a flat black rectangular stone, highly polished with a silver back plating and edging. She leaned down to read the small sign on the side of the case.
“Necklace and iPad, circa 1000 CA”
Arianne laughed - the necklace was almost certainly ancient Egyptian, probably more like 1000 BCA, and the tablet was a world apart in time and tech. An Egyptian waking from a sarcophagus in the 21st Century would have been completely overwhelmed with the leaps in technology behind the dark mirror of the iPad - they would have no words or concepts to cover the idea of email or the internet. In their world, ideas only spread as fast as people could. In the information age, ideas travelled instantaneously, and for the first time, people started to relax their view of how important physical presence was and communicate with digital signals across their world, barely 50 light milliseconds wide. The two objects in the glass case were so radically different that there was no way the should have been bundled together.
Then again, thought Arianne, although the owners of these objects were a few thousand years apart, the tiny footprint of Earth meant that they also shared a lot of common ground. They would both recognize the pyramids, and they both might even understand certain long preserved words, like “ammonite”. And after all, there were probably people walking past Arianne right now who had been born a thousand years before her, but it may just have well been an eternity in the amount of culture they shared. In her world, for all practical purposes, people now moved about as fast as information could. By the time any message reached your neighbor, their languages would have changed so much that you would be better off travelling there yourself, spending a few months learning their language and then deliver your message personally.
The 21st century host may even have been at a technological advantage. The ancient tablet on display was not really so different from Arianne’s own tablet communicator, built tens of thousands of years later. And it needed only keep up with about 8,000 languages, tops, all evolving together.
If a 21st Century sleeper had woken up today, would they be as surprised as the Egyptian? There was really nothing here that would totally blow their mind. Sure, they’d be impressed at how far humanity had spread, but this was well within the realm of even their least imaginative fiction. They might be confused as to what the hell humanity had been up to all this time to have progressed so little.
“Waiting”, thought Arianne. “Waiting in transport hubs.”
Her ebrain beeped, letting her know that it had finished downloading the translation packages for the 934 languages currently in use on the hub. She was surprised to see that this only required full downloads for about 300 languages, with her ebrain effectively joining the dots to make translation paths to the rest. She also noted that there were actually only half a dozen languages native to the local vicinity, but people were coming in from a wide range of systems and, because of the vast amounts of time in chryosleep that space travel required, effectively a wide range of times. Many of the languages now in her ebrain were just older versions or dialects of the local varieties. She would have expected much more diversity. Was this the great convergence at work?
She looked around her again, annoyed that, in this age of space travel and hyper-connected technology, her current search algorithm was simply pointing her eyes at different parts of the world. She checked her ebrain mail. A barrage of voices filled her mind. She grimaced and jacked up her filter levels. Only one message rose to the surface - her priority funding status had come through. So, La Quana was at least keeping some promises.
Arianne sighed. Could she really trust him? Was she doing the right thing? He’d said something about an outside agency. Who were they? Best not to think about it, Arianne thought, just take it one step at a time. She called up the application she’d been working on.
Central Academic Funding Council Administration
Type: Small Support Grant
Applicant: Karen G. Arianne
Format: Formal / Priority / Electronic
Institution: Independent, direct location
She scanned the text of the application again, then shrugged. If it wasn’t ready now, it would never be, plus she had more demanding things to think about. She cleared it for sending and it was whisked away into the local network. Almost instantly, she got a message back.
Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Sent
Arianne felt a weight lifting off her, like some trash folder had been swept clean in her mind. Then a second message came in.
Small Support Grant G67HS995A: Warning: Spelling error in section 5
Resister: Space Funding Crisis II Page 2
