Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Declan smirked at me. I nodded back and leaned against a bulkhead beside Agnes. The buzz of excited and nervous conversation died down.

  ‘Now that we’re all here,’ he said, ‘we’re ready to go. We’ve hacked an entry permission for a body-works plant right in the middle of the Synth Quarter. Image templates uploaded, fake IDs generated from your agreed and rehearsed jackets. All clear?’

  Nods all round.

  ‘Good. Let’s all join in a quick prayer.’ Declan winked at me. ‘With the usual exception, of course.’

  Everyone else bowed their heads. I watched and listened, unmoved, as Declan hurried through a request to Mary, St Bernadette, and St Clive to intercede for our safety and success. After the ‘Amen,’ he looked up and made the sign of the cross in the virtual air. Then he was suddenly as brisk and businesslike as the Dublin street cop he’d been before his calling. He invoked the copier with a gesture and pointed us towards its glowing arch.

  ‘OK, everybody, by the numbers!’

  One by one, as he called the roll, we walked through the glowing arch. I was number seventeen, and had plenty of time to see the expressions of those who went before me, as they wheeled around on the other side of the copier and walked back to their former places in the room. A weird, and in other circumstances downright funny, succession of anti-climax, elation, and concern flickered like shadows on every face.

  Because, of course, a copy is just that. You’re still there when it’s over. At least, one instance of you is. The other—

  ‘Seventeen! Henderson, Brian!’

  I stepped through the copier and instantly sat upright, naked and coughing salt water. After floundering and spluttering for a minute, I grabbed the sides of the tank, hauled myself upright, and stepped warily out on to a cold concrete floor. It was just like climbing out of a municipal bath. The room was long and low, dim-lit, furnished with wooden benches, stacks of folded towels, and tall plastic lockers. No one else had come through at the same time. I glanced along the row of tanks, empty except for two in which bodies were taking shape, grotesque, glittering assemblages of meat and offal, skin and bone. I had no idea where in the sequence of our party I had arrived: the body-manufacture was quite independent of our order of copying. Days or weeks might have passed, for all I knew.

  The locker directly in front of me had my false name on it: Warren Dutch. It had been assigned to me automatically, as part of the process. All the names of Synths here were, well, synthetic: slave names, pornstar names. I grabbed a towel and dried off, then stepped over to the locker, naked and not ashamed, innocent of Adam’s sin: born again, again.

  #

  In my early teens, just as the hormones started to kick in, I had three secret, shameful wishes. I wished I could go to Mars, I wished I could be sure of not going to Hell, and most of all I wished I had never been born.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Don’t get me wrong—growing up under the Reconstruction was not too bad. Compared to many parts of the post-war world, we had it lucky in the Dominion. The privations were no worse than those in the Confederacy, the Union, or Europe, and a lot better than what people had to endure in Asia and the Middle East. Even today, I bristle a little at too-easy jibes. You could play in the ruins, the war wounded and the otherwise deformed were treated with kindness (and childish cruelty, but that’s another universal, and I have no defence of that), and even education was (within its limits) thorough.

  With me, compulsory church attendance didn’t rankle. I had no idea it was compulsory, because everybody went. Even if it hadn’t been, my parents would have made it compulsory for us. At Sunday School, we all learned by heart the Shorter Catechism, and enthusiastically chanted the Five Points of Calvinism, the famous ‘TULIP’ formula:

  ‘Total depravity! Unconditional election! Limited atonement! Irresistible grace! Perseverance of saints!’

  I can’t say we understood any of them, apart from total depravity. All kids understand total depravity. (I’ll be fair: all boys, anyway.)

  When you’re a kid it all makes sense. Jesus was right about that. It’s when you get a bit older that the contradictions start gnawing away at you. Like, you begin to understand physics, and relate it to theology. The big deal in Calvinism, the unique selling point, is that God Rules. Everything. Every particle. (Even if it’s undetermined. Oh yes, I understood that too.) But if every particle, then every thought. (We were using pre-Reconstruction biology textbooks, which didn’t mention evolution but which did describe neurophysiology.) Our teachers were quite proud of the congruence between Calvinism and physical determinism. Every particle, every thought.

  Including every bad thought? Yes.

  So why are we to blame for our bad thoughts, if…That’s not given for us to understand. You mustn’t think that.

  So that thought, too…? Yes.

  So God determined from all eternity that I should think it unfair that God determined my every thought from all eternity and still hold me responsible for my every thought? Including this thought? Yes.

  Round and round it went, sending me sometimes into a thumb-biting spiral of despair. That was when I started to wish I had never been born. Hell didn’t come to the top of the stack until I heard in a sermon that Hell and Heaven were perfectly and mutually visible. Hell would not be so unendurable without a perfect vision of the joy of the saints, and Heaven would not be so wonderful without a perfect vision of the torments of the damned. It seemed logical, therefore, that God would have thoughtfully provided the blessed with this delight, and the damned with this dismay.

  To my thirteen-year-old brain, the notion at first made Heaven seem a sight more attractive than it had been hitherto. Whenever the eternal singing and harping palled, there would always be the endless horror video of Hell to watch. There were quite a few people, not all of them attending my school, whose eternal torment I could easily imagine enjoying watching.

  The second part of the sermon made me sit up in the pew. The preacher explained that—however disturbing this might seem to our hard and rebellious hearts—a world with Hell was better than a world without Hell, because without Hell, the full glory of God could never be made manifest. It was better that evil should exist, and God’s hatred of it be eternally demonstrated, than that evil should not exist at all. Because the greatest good was God’s glory, and what was God’s glory without His every attribute being made known to His creatures?

  This comforting theodicy shook me. I had somehow managed to think, despite all I’d been told to the contrary, that Jesus’ death on the cross was, so to speak, God’s Plan B; that a possible world in which our first parents had not eaten the forbidden fruit was a genuine counterfactual.

  But that outcome had never been possible. This world, Hell and all, was Plan A. Adam’s sin had been eternally pre-ordained. There was no Plan B.

  Pondering the matter, as I walked home in the company of my brothers and sisters and parents with half my mind on our Sabbath lunch, I realised that there could never have been any Plan B. God’s decree was eternal. In that sense, everything that happened, down to the dance of every dust mote and deeper yet, was as necessary and inevitable as geometry. From God’s viewpoint there was no time, no change, no chance, and no freedom: the universe was a single solid four-dimensional block, from 4004 BC to the unknown but likewise certain date of its dissolution. Beyond that, equally unchanging and unchangeable, lay the endless deserts of eternity: of ecstasy for the few, of agony for the many.

  My thoughts tumbled on, one after the other, helter skelter. If the universe was unchanging from the viewpoint of God, wasn’t it just as eternal and necessary as God? How could it be distinguished from God? How could geometry be distinguished from God?

  By the time we all fell on our cold chicken I was half-way to a glimmer of Spinoza, only without the intellectual love of God.

  The dark vision settled on my mind. You may wonder why I didn’t take my perplexities to my parents or to the preacher.
I had learned early and hard that questioning was itself a sin. I would no more have discussed these matters with these worthies than I would have shared with them my (likewise disturbing, likewise pathetically normal) sexual fantasies.

  A year or so later—it seems longer—I was browsing one of the downtown second-hand bookshops. (The internet was firewalled, new publications censored, but second-hand bookshops had not yet been purged.) I came across a volume of Lovecraft. I opened it, started reading, and was hooked. I finished ‘The Color out of Space’ before I thought to walk to the counter and hand over my ten dollars. I took the volume home and read it from cover to cover, in secret and in delight.

  Lovecraft’s vision of the universe is of a vast, ancient, mindless, pitiless mechanism, within whose depths vast, ancient, malevolent beings lurk and may spring upon us at any moment. Reading his stories gave me a sensation of relief, of light, of freedom, of simple joy like that of a child skipping across a sunny meadow. A universe in which the worst that could happen was that the Old Ones would return when the stars are right and eat our brains was an infinitely happier place than the one in which I dwelt.

  My wary further research (on an old Britannica disk still in the local library) revealed to me that, fictitious though his monsters were, the basis of Lovecraft’s vision was his real belief. That belief had a name: materialism. One click took me to a history of the doctrine, and the name of a poet who had sung its praise: Lucretius. I had seen that name before, on the spine of a slim volume on the same shelf as Lovecraft. It had meant nothing to me then.

  I made haste to the second-hand bookshop, and found the treasure I sought: a Hackett Classics paperback, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. The cover was black, the title and details red, the poet’s name white: a colour scheme that excited me obscurely. I glanced at a few pages, and was ravished. Here was a man who saw nature’s beauty as well as its horror with the same unflinching eye. I bought the book and bore it home next to my skin. I devoured it with the same intensity and secrecy as I’d read Lovecraft, and with greater joy.

  For the first time in my life, I had heard good news. I drank that black gospel to the lees. Its spiritual effect was astonishing, self-testifying. That life was meaningless and morality a human contrivance lifted the burden of sin. I was still totally depraved, but no longer responsible. My depravity came not because one of my ancestors had eaten an apple, but because all of my ancestors had eaten each other.

  I applied myself to technical studies, got a sound degree in biomechanical engineering, and at the first opportunity left the Dominion for good.

  #

  I opened the locker door. A hydrochloric tang made me catch my breath—the locker (a specialised drexler, basically) must have just flushed its nanotech. Inside, I found a suit and shirt, a few changes of underwear, shoes, and a tote bag. Everything fitted perfectly. In the suit’s pocket was a card. I thumbed it over quickly, checking the identity and back-story. Everything fitted there too. The card had a Dominion thou on it, enough for me to get by until I found a job. At the end of the row of lockers was a mirror. I checked my appearance, getting an uncomfortable jolt of a reminder of the last time I’d seen myself from the outside: when I’d looked in the face of the flesh I’d left behind after my first copy had uploaded. (In the virtual environment of the ship, with no need to shave or wash, I hadn’t needed mirrors. Arrogance I’ll admit to, vanity I won’t.) As far as I could tell, I still looked much the same; a little more toned and sharp, a little younger. Teeth perfect, eyesight sharp. But so they had been in the virch.

  Indistinguishable though the experiences were, it was curious to reflect that I was back in the flesh. A different flesh, to be sure: built from a remastered genome, with an optimisedoptimized genetic code, intelligently designed, with no trace of ape or Adam in its ancestry—no ancestry, come to that. I packed the spare clothes in the bag, adjusted my expression to a cheerful confidence I didn’t feel, strode to the exit, and stepped out, into the Dominion.

  The Dominion—as on Earth, so not in heaven.

  I found myself standing on a sidewalk of an unpaved street of rutted pink dust. A few slow electrical vehicles whined and coughed and stirred up dust-motes that settled lazy in the low gravity, wafted on the chill breeze. The shop-fronts and apartment buildings had the look of a strip-mall on the edge of town, which indeed they were. Neon and holograms blazed or flickered. The street, from what I could see, was part of a scurf of similar streets around the inside of the dome. So far, so familiar, from all the shattered Americas of my memory. What struck me as strange was the absence of litter and graffiti. This slum had the neatness of suburbia.

  Turning around, I saw the true New Bethel, rising in tiers like a ziggurat under the geodesic sky, level upon level of shining white and gleaming gold, festooned with hanging gardens, crowned with a cupola-topped capitol hundreds of metres above ground level, a half-dozen kilometres away, and itself a good hundred metres high. It seemed to reach to heaven, or at least to almost touch the top of the dome. Above it, in an artificial breeze, the Cross and Stripes fluttered a rectangle of red, white, and blue the size of a football field.

  The architecture was of spectacular vulgarity: imagine a Mormon temple designed by Albert Speer. Build it of sheet diamond. Crust it with baroque, eliminate the Catholic from the kitsch, and pile a Vatican and a St Paul’s atop. Make it ten times bigger, then take it to eleven.

  ‘Newly hatched, I see,’ said a voice behind me. I turned, and saw my Lilith.

  #

  After my first decade of freedom, in Brussels…I sat in Du Bon Vieux Temps, admiring the St George and Dragon stained-glass window to nowhere and enjoying a Gaulois and a Trappist brew while scrolling the Jobs screens of Le Soir for something better than my part-time post as a distance lecturer at Louvain. The elderly bar-lady smoked too, the extractor fan rattled for us both, and in a cage a mechanical blackbird sang Johnny Halliday and Jacques Brel like it was his parlour trick.

  Eyeballing job ads is for the birds, I thought, I should get with the programmers and buy an agent like everyone else. Just as I was about to give up, two words caught my eye: biomechanique and athéiste. And then a third: Américain.

  Somebody was looking for a fluent English speaker with a good American accent, a background in biomechanics, and unshakeable irreligious convictions. I clicked Call on the ad, and found myself talking to a man with an Irish accent and perfect French. Father Declan O’Connell, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

  ‘It’s very simple, Brian,’ he told me when I came round to the Cathedral’s back office for the interview the following day. ‘The International Court of Justice at Geneva is open to hearing a case against the Dominion. The plaintiff—whose name we can leave out of this—needs hard evidence of certain, ah, violations. The Church has the means and the motivation to collect that evidence, but for legal reasons which again needn’t detain us, we need a hard-shelled, copper-bottomed, black-hearted atheist to take part in our, ah, evidence-gathering. You with me so far, Mr Henderson?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, sipping Dowe Egbert noir and not at all sure where this was going. ‘But—for a start—it’s quite hard to make a human rights case against the Dominion. It’s a horrible place, but run by the book. They’re clever that way.’

  ‘Quite so, Brian, quite so,’ said Declan. ‘Oppressing people without violating their rights is an old game. But the Church has been in the game for longer. She knows what signs to watch for. And the Dominion has rather given the game away, theologically speaking, ever since the First Church of the Reconstruction ruled that a certain class of beings has no rights.’

  ‘Have they backslidden on the race question?’ I asked, shocked. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been keeping up with—”

  ‘No, not the race question, exactly,’ said Declan. ‘The question of the synthetic people, and of copies and uploads.’

  ‘But the Dominion doesn’t allow any of that!’ I said. �
��They regard all these procedures as sinful.’

  ‘Not quite all,’ said Declan. ‘Copying and uploading, yes. But genetic reverse engineering, to create a human-like body from a completely artificial genome, they regard as well within the compass of man’s dominion—just as the manufacture of AIs is, in their view. So far, the Church—my Church, I mean—would find itself in cautious agreement. Where these, ah, separated and misguided brethren have rather gone out on a limb is in confidently and dogmatically asserting that synthetic people—whether their brains have human minds copied in, or have native intelligence through growth from infancy, or have a copied artificial intelligence imposed on them—are quite outside the Covenants of Noah, of Moses, and above all of Christ. Or, to put it in secular terms, are not human and have no human rights. They are mere organic machines. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to copies and uploads, and of course to AIs.’

  I shrugged. ‘So that’s the theory. Where are they doing it in practice?’

  ‘In their Mars colony. That’s the suspicion, anyway—that they’re using synthetic people as slaves.’

  ‘Why the hell—excuse me—would they need slaves in New Bethel? It must have all the machinery they need to live in luxury as it is. I thought that was the whole idea—to build a showcase.’

  ‘A showcase not yet opened to the public,’ Declan pointed out. ‘We suspect that when the cameras are allowed in—twenty or thirty years from now, possibly—the Dominion hopes to have the system working so smoothly that the servile class of Synths’—he made a sour mouth as he used the slightly pejorative word—‘won’t even look like slaves. It’s the process of making that class know its place that they wish to conceal.’