Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  Kaimu withdraws, taking Michelle with him. They drift back to themselves, and the warm hospital air shifts to the biting chill of the mountain. He has to pause and collect himself. Michelle doesn’t acknowledge his return.

  “That memory meant nothing to you,” Kaimu said, disappointed.

  “You used my access rights to get a hospital recording of a private individual. Those are only supposed to be used in the event of a malpractice suit.” She tried to sound stern, but Kaimu could tell that she was more amused than angry. “Besides, I’ve seen it before. Outdated minds thinking outdated thoughts.”

  “Human minds thinking human thoughts,” he snapped back.

  “I never said the minds weren’t human.” Her voice was quiet, sad. As though he had missed something, had failed some test. Her sadness diffused his anger, and he let the argument lapse into silence.

  The Earther’s eyes were open, pale blue like the color of the sky diluted with white snow. They reminded him of his son, Kenji, before he disconnected from his body. He’d been six years old. Kaimu had married and divorced a few women in the centuries since, but he never fathered any more children. Michelle was right, he was outdated. He shook the memory away. The Earther’s eyes didn’t move except to blink. Her right eye was clouded over by cataracts.

  While his mind had been locked away in the past, Michelle had finished work on the lower gash. Now she reprogrammed bits of her skisuit to serve as bandages. She pulled strips of suit from the back of her neck. The thick curls of Michelle’s hair would block the icy air.

  Michelle buried her hand wrist-deep into the upper gash. There shouldn’t have been room, the Earther’s torso was small. She must have pushed all the organs aside. Orbs of blood dotted the blue-green fabric of her skisuit. The fabric refused to absorb the stain, so the globules floated like crimson buoys on a tropical sea. So much blood.

  “Any updates?” he asked. She wasn’t transmitting assessments anymore. Maybe more of the collective was in her head now, eliminating the need to broadcast.

  “You’re not helping,” Michelle responded.

  *

  This time, Michelle sends him to a memory in his own perspective. He recognizes where he is from the functionality of the space. Every inch is utilized, cozy and enclosed, but not cramped. He is cradled in the mind of the Willflower, his ship. He’s far more comfortable here than he was in the hospital.

  At least, he is until he realizes when she’s sent him.

  He is in the aft lounge. A group of passengers is gathered around the bar, downing colorful fruit-and-alcohol concoctions, killing time until they have to get into the stasis tanks. There’s an iridescent blue shiproach on the counter, and everyone places wagers on which dimensional coordinates it will take off from. The shiproach scurries about, seemingly uninterested in flight.

  Off to Kaimu’s right, a section of the wall moves. His brain adjusts to recognize Dahnjii, his least favorite of Michelle’s collective. Dahnjii is a collective within the collective, like Jasmine/Elliot/Michelle but with seven minds mashed together. He is trendy and arrogant. His genes are spliced with chameleon or octopus or some other long extinct creature so that he can change color at will. He’s been hiding against the wall, and now he ripples with yellow stripes. Aggressive. Nearly all the members of Michelle’s collective seek novelty, but Dahnjii goes out of his way to make other people squirm so he can study their reactions.

  “Hey precious,” he sneers, “want to join my collective?”

  Kaimu doesn’t know whether he means his mini-collective, or the collective he shares with Michelle. He wants nothing to do with Dahnjii, regardless. “No, thanks.”

  “You realize how dumb it is, to be with Michelle, and not the rest of us,” Dahnjii continues. He’s been in the med-ward for several days, and Kaimu isn’t thrilled that he’s back in circulation. “Like loving an arm.”

  “An arm isn’t conscious, it’s not the same.”

  “Fine, like loving an arm, and the little blob of brain that controls it.” Dahnjii turns his head. The left side of his skull is gone, replaced by a clear dome. The surgery he’s had done is a brainshaping, purely cosmetic. Instead of the normal folds of gray cortex, his brain has been molded into the form of a dragon.

  “I’m getting it colorized tomorrow,” he says. Then he lifts the dome that covers the brain. “Want to lick it?”

  Kaimu backs away, as though the exposed tissue will leap out and attack him. Dahnjii laughs, sticks his hand into his skull, and pets the dragon with one finger. The lounge has gone silent as all the drinkers admire the unusual design of Dahnjii’s brain. Novelty. The shiproach takes off, and Kaimu is the only one to notice.

  “Cover that up. Nobody wants to see your little lizard,” Kaimu says.

  Dahnjii’s fist smashes through his face. It is a strange sensation, almost painless despite the sickening crunch as splinters of bone are pushed into his brain.

  The safety protocols of the ship lock down his mind. There are several seconds of blackness. The Michelle fragment skips him forward through time.

  Kaimu is in his cabin. A few paces away, Michelle studies his most prized possession, a bonsai tree. It is centuries old, with roots that curl around a smooth gray stone before disappearing into a shallow layer of soil. The bonsai comes from a simpler time.

  “If you lived in that time, you’d be dead by now. Or horribly disfigured.”

  Michelle is in his head, monitoring him. He resents the intrusion.

  “Okay, okay, I’m out,” she says, “I had to make sure the reconstructive surgery was successful.”

  “That was barbaric,” he says. “Bastard could’ve killed me.”

  “There’s a copy of your consciousness stored in the Willflower, so even if the body had been inoperable, I could have generated another manifestation, started from scratch. It would’ve taken longer, but death wasn’t really an issue. Dahnjii doesn’t like you, but he’s not a monster.”

  “After what he did to me? How much of my brain did you have to regenerate? How much of my face?” He’s practically yelling at Michelle, despite the fact that she probably spent the last several hours putting him back together.

  Michelle transmits the surgical data. She’s regrown seven percent of his cortex, mostly frontal lobe, and reconstructed his nose and his left eye. This isn’t the first time Kaimu has been badly injured. Over the years, almost 45 percent of his brain and body have been replaced. He doesn’t feel any different.

  “If you have a ship,” he says, “and you replace it, one board at a time, and all the while it sails—is it still the same ship?”

  The problem is from ancient philosophy, and it takes her a moment to find the appropriate reference. “Sorites. But the ships weren’t sentient then. It wouldn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. Whether it’s the same ship, and whether this,” he waves his arms up and down his torso, “is the same body, the same brain.”

  “This attachment to your organics, it’s pretty neurotic. You know that, right?” Michelle puts her hand on his cheek. She means it in a caring way, not as an insult. “And while I don’t like what Dahnjii did, it’s not as vicious as you make it out to be. Not to him. Not really to me either, except that I know how much it bothers you. Dahnjii’s just upset that we’re here on the Willflower, in bodies for the whole trip, rather than going on the Roving Never and getting new bodies when we arrive at Earth. He almost left the collective over it. So now he’s frustrated and bored—”

  “So it’s okay that he smashed my face and sent bone shards into my brain. Because he was bored.” How could Michelle refuse to understand?

  “No. It’s okay because it’s just organics. Haven’t you ever smashed your fist into the ship’s interface console when you were frustrated?”

  “That hurts my fist and doesn’t damage the ship,” he counters. “But yes.”

  “Have you asked the ship how she feels about it?”

  “She’s a ship.”


  “And you think we’re the barbarian.”

  Something happens, not in the memory, but in realtime. Kaimu can sense it through Michelle’s fragment. He tries to go back, but Michelle resists.

  *

  Kaimu is certain that something is wrong. Michelle is stalling him, keeping him off the mountain. He flings his consciousness forward through the memory cache, against her resistance. She lets him reach the point where they are preparing to ski, early that morning in their temporary lodge at the top of the mountain. The lodge is programmed with red walls adorned with replicas of ancient Japanese art—delicate cherry branches in black and pink, stylized blue tidal waves, bold black characters done in flawless calligraphy.

  Michelle doesn’t care whose perspective he takes for this memory so he settles into his own mind. He sits on the floor and yanks on the legs of his skisuit, trying to push his toes down into the stiff boot bottoms.

  “That’s ridiculously antique,” Michelle says, “And I have plenty of paint. You’re sure you don’t want some?”

  Michelle is fresh out of the shower, naked and holding a jar of N-body Paint. Her skin is pink from the heat of the shower. The color of cherry blossoms. Sandy-brown freckles splash across her chest, trailing down her arms and up her neck. He loves it when she wears the freckles.

  “Well?” she asks, holding up the paint.

  “No, I’ll wear this,” he points to the suit. Uncomfortable as it is, at least his private parts won’t flap around while he skis.

  “Suit yourself,” she says.

  Michelle orders up a cushion, and sprawls herself across the squishy blob that emerges from the floor. Comfortable, she opens her jar of paint and applies it to her legs with smooth strokes. Kaimu halfheartedly tugs on his suit, but his attention is focused on Michelle.

  She’s programmed the nano-fiber paint to a shifting pattern of blues and greens—sunlight filtering through ocean waves. She paints her way down her thigh, coating the indented curve on the back of her knee, the swell of her calf. By the time she gets to her foot, he’s dropped his skisuit, and simply stares at her, making no effort to dress himself. She knows he’s watching, and takes her time, painting the ticklish arch at the bottom of her foot, then swirling paint around each toe.

  He takes the bait and stands up, his legs encased in the suit to mid-thigh, but the rest of the suit dangling down.

  “You’ll get pretty cold, skiing like that.”

  “You’ll get pretty ravished, teasing me like that.”

  “I’ll get pretty ravished after skiing, you mean.” She’s finished her legs now, and starts painting her way up from her hip. “I’m already painted from the waist down.”

  “I can think of a few ways to get that stuff off.”

  “But you won’t,” she says, “because you’re a gentleman, and I enjoy the anticipation.”

  “You enjoy teasing me all day.”

  She laughs. “That too.”

  Kaimu watches himself suit up. The Michelle fragment apologizes, but doesn’t explain why.

  Kaimu flies down the slopes, his skis skimming over the fluffy snow. Michelle is behind him, taunting him to go faster. Adrenaline pumps through his system and mingles with an urge to impress her. He gives up on turning and points his skis straight down, letting the pines whiz by in the periphery of his vision. Single trunks blur together, their individuality stolen by his speed. He is the wind in air that stands still. Tendrils of his mind reach backwards for Michelle, to share with her this beautiful chaos of falling.

  The green wall of treeness to his right closes in, swerves in front of him. Fear replaces excitement and he cannot turn. A single tree separates itself from the others, unmoving despite his speed because it stands directly before him. It looms over him.

  Against his volition, his feet shoot upwards and sideways, twisting his body inside the skisuit. He hears the smack of skis on wood. A glancing blow, the safeties on the skis automatically avoiding a harmful collision. His skis reconnect with the snow, back under his control, slowed now, and traveling at an angle to the slope, redirected by the tree. Michelle lets out a whoop behind him, as though he’d skidded off the tree on purpose, a trick to impress her. He slows to a stop, and turns in time to see her mimic his trick, intentionally and far more gracefully. She stops on the hillside above him, spraying him with snow in the process.

  “Good trick,” she says, smiling.

  He relaxes after that, knowing that the skis can rescue him from his own ineptitude. In short order, they reach the bottom of the mountain and cuddle together in the anti-grav chute that propels them back to the top. From above the tree line, he can see mountains in every direction, monuments of ice and rock reaching up to the sky. “Down the other side this time?”

  “Race you, meet up at that rock,” she says, and dumps the coordinates to his navigation system.

  “You win.”

  “I’ll give you a head start.”

  “Okay, I—”

  “Go!” She gives him a little shove, sending him over a ledge and onto a steep mogul-covered slope. The skis recognize his inability to deal with the bumpy conditions, and swerve through the bumps. He gets the hang of it, and the safeties turn off again.

  “Now me!” Michelle is too far away for speech, so she transmits. Even so, there’s no way he’ll win with such a tiny lead.

  Still, he can at least make it challenging. He bends his knees and tucks down to decrease his wind resistance. A smattering of trees dot the slope as he gets lower, then denser trees close in around the run. He watches them carefully this time, scanning the slope ahead of him so he’ll have plenty of time to turn. Avoid the green. Michelle hasn’t passed him yet. He risks a glance, and she’s farther back than he expected. If he can avoid plowing into the trees, he might even win.

  The run curves, and Kaimu turns to follow it. He can see the rock in the distance, and Michelle is still behind him.

  Something moves.

  He’d have seen it sooner, but it was white and he was watching for green. It’s running out across his path. The skis slash sideways.

  The safeties on his skis are old, and to avoid overloading them, he’d simplified the obstacle-detection by specifying that he and Michelle were the only humans on the slope. His breath sticks in his chest as the blades tear through fur and flesh. It is worse in memory than in realtime.

  Finally, Michelle releases him.

  *

  The Earther was dead. Her unfocussed eyes reflected the empty sky. Kaimu’s freshly relived memories mingled with the realities of the present.

  “You should have let me stay,” he told Michelle.

  “You wouldn’t have understood what I was doing,” she said. “You don’t understand what’s happening now. Look.”

  She pointed to the Earther, to the wound that stretched across her chest. Several ribs had been broken away. Her heart and lungs were rearranged, shoved off to the sides to gain access to her spinal cord. Blood pooled in the cavity. Michelle had never tried to save the Earther’s body. All along, she’d been working her way down to the spinal cord. Trying to pry the consciousness free before the body died.

  “She’s completely organic. Why would you even try?” he asked.

  “You started organic,” she said. “All it takes is time. Time to map the pattern of neuronal connections, time to record the firing patterns.”

  “But we’re on a mountainside, you used a ski to cut her open for godsakes,” he said. “You should have operated on her body. How could you possibly record everything you needed to save her consciousness? And even if you could, she’d never make it on the network.”

  Michelle held up her arm. There was a cut on her wrist. “I reprogrammed some of my peripherals to do the recordings.”

  He needed to see what she had done, to understand, but she was blocking him out. “It’s my fault, not yours,” he said. “I’m sure you did all you could.”

  She still refused to let him in. He’d never experienced
this before. Sometimes he had blocked her out, when he wanted privacy, but she had always been open. He missed the closeness of being tangled with her mind. She must have felt this same frustration, when he had closed himself off. From now on, he’d try to be more open to her, less stubborn.

  “You don’t have to hide from me,” he said.

  “It worked.”

  “You put her on the network? And she adapted to that?”

  “No.” She put her hand on his shoulder. He could barely feel her touch through the stiff fabric of his skisuit. “I started out that way, but I learned something from you. To me, a body is nothing, but to you, or to her . . . I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry,” he echoed. Then he realized what she’d done. “She’s there. With you.”

  Michelle nodded. “I’m almost done teaching her my body. Her body.”

  “What about you?”

  “I—” she started, but then paused. “We. We are going to merge more fully. Distributed existence was interesting, but it’s time for something else now.”

  “You’re leaving me.”

  “I couldn’t bring you, even if you wanted to come,” she said. “I’ll miss you, even with your strange ideas and your locked off mind. But you aren’t ready. And that’s okay. Besides, she’ll need you.”

  “But we . . . Stay a little longer.”

  “And what about her? Leave her trapped in a body she doesn’t control?”

  He took her hand from his shoulder and brushed her fingertips against his lips. He had always known that she was beyond him, but instead of trying to grow, he tried to force her to come to his level.

  Michelle withdrew. He sensed her in the network, mingling with others, dissolving and changing. He felt her brush against the edge of his consciousness, briefly, a goodbye kiss to his mind. Then she was gone.