Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

The first thing she did when they reached Arachne was check to make sure Silent Liquidity was still sealed and docked. It was. Alander’s alien friend appeared to be waiting calmly and patiently for his return.

  Then she sealed Arachne’s own airlock in turn.

  GOU MANG? I’M GOING TO BE OUT OF CONTACT FOR A WHILE. YOU’RE IN CHARGE UNTIL I COME OUT.

  UNDERSTOOD, SOL.

  IF I DON’T COME OUT...

  She wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. What could Gou Mang do if she didn’t? There was only one thing she could think of.

  SPEAK TO AXFORD. HE’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO.

  Gou Mang hesitated, then said, understood, sol.

  Then, with some apprehensions niggling at the back of her mind, she cut all connections with the outside world. If the Yuhl had prepared a surprise for her, then it would end here, in Arachne. She wasn’t going to take everyone down with her.

  She turned to Alander, who had seated himself on the couch. She sat facing him and tested the edges of his mind for anything untoward. For all intents and purposes, it seemed perfectly clear.

  “Here,” he said, offering her his hand.

  At first she didn’t know what he meant. When it came to her, however, she suddenly felt embarrassed on his behalf. The first time she had invaded him in Arachne, she had gained access via infrared ports in his android body’s palms. He wasn’t aware that she had already trawled extensively through his mind in Sol System, and he had clearly assumed that she would use the same route. His naïveté disarmed and disturbed her. She decided to humor it, taking his hand and continuing her exploration. He closed his eyes as though preparing himself for an injection.

  She probed gently—too gently for him to notice. The difference between this time and the previous time he remembered was that then she had been trying to hurt him. Her world had just been destroyed, and he had been about to blindly rush both of them to their deaths. Stopping him had been a priority, and dumping her grief onto him had been a fitting method of achieving that. Or so it had seemed at the time. Later, when the crisis had passed, she had lifted the bulk of the memories from his mind to ease the load on his already burdened psyche. As a result he remembered little of the actual experience, just the distress it had caused him.

  She visualized this intrusion less as a hammer blow and more as though her thoughts were comprised of a school of tiny, darting fish infiltrating the nooks and crannies of a giant coral outcropping. The fish spread in an expanding cloud around and through the coral, penetrating the inner layers with increasing caution. Soon enough, she had its broad structure mapped out, and she paused to study it before taking in the details she was looking for.

  His mind had definitely changed. The Yuhl had done more to him than just transfer his Overseer into a body of genuine flesh. For one thing, the distinction between his engram and the Overseer that ran it seemed markedly blurred. They embraced each other in a tangle of hard- and software that looked like something grown rather than built. She thought she could probably unravel it, given time, but for the moment she had to content herself with only the briefest of passes. There didn’t seem to be any obvious Yuhl traps lurking in the strange operating structure, and she had to be satisfied with that for now.

  She needed his memories, though, not the finer points of his thought-to-thought processes. She sent her “fish” in search of the conceptual markers corresponding to the Yuhl which, she assumed, should be relatively fresh, given that all his experiences with them had occurred in only a few days. Results came in quickly, and she began to scan the flagged loci. That was when she encountered her next hurdle.

  Memories in engrams were laid down in an extensive but functionally simple register, associating gross experiential data with their emotional tags and saving them, one after the other, in various dedicated locations. In the human brain, the process was much more complicated and had not been cracked at the time of the UNESSPRO probes. The rough engram analog had worked well enough to simulate human behavior and therefore allow the engrams to function, to a point, but it contained the seeds that ultimately led to senescence. The memories Alander had inherited from his original had come with internal conflicts that resulted in instability and dysfunction. She recognized the signatures of those conflicts, even if she didn’t know exactly how to erase them without erasing him at the same time.

  What she saw when she looked into him now was not that the conflicts were gone but rather that they had been absorbed. They were part of a new and very complex tapestry that wove everything together in a fashion not dissimilar to the memories in her own mind. It was difficult to pull at one thread without teasing out another with it.

  Structure and memories... The realization of how deeply he had been altered brought to mind something his version from Vahagn had said to him: “You are me, after all. Nominally.”

  But was he, anymore? She didn’t even know which version of Alander she should compare this one to. The original, the dysfunctional engram, the fragile cripple she had first met, or the slightly randomized version she had turned him into? She wondered if it made any difference. An outdated, primeval part of her wanted to know who exactly she was talking to, but did it really matter?

  Putting aside the problem for the time being, she began searching for the information she required. She found Axford first, and the encounter in Vega. She saw herself through Alander’s eyes, not in her original form but as Thor. She saw Thor’s attack on the Yuhl prisoners and gained an insight into the trauma her copy had undergone upon learning of the destruction of her colony. She earmarked that information for future consideration: the subtle adjustments she’d made to Thor’s engram had clearly destabilized that aspect of her personality instead of fixing it.

  The Yuhl loomed large in Alander’s mind, once she found them. She followed their thread and found everything she needed. She saw the Mantissa in Alsafi, and its much larger counterpart in Beid—the “asteroid belt” of ships; she experienced being eaten by the Praxis and swallowed by the organic helmet by which he had communicated with the Fit; she followed the negotiations between Alander and the aliens, noting the conflicts within the Yuhl and understanding for the first time that they weren’t a unified group as she had assumed them to be. She had perceived a front, based on a few interactions, but they were actually as fractured and divisive behind it as the human survivors. The arguments between the Yuhl that Alander had perceived as Zealot/Shrieking, Status Quo/Mellifluous, Stoic/Enduring, and Radical/Provocative were proof of that.

  But there was also the Praxis to take into account. This she hadn’t anticipated. The vast alien being was difficult to fathom, and she didn’t kid herself that she was even close to understanding it. The exact relationship between the Praxis, the conjugators, and the Fit had not been clearly drawn. It had avoided Alander’s questions about the Starfish and the Spinners, too. The Praxis had read from his mind the standoff between her and Axford, and it placed him even more firmly in the middle by giving him a new body and naming him envoy/catechist. It had also indicated that it would like to absorb her in the same way it had absorbed Alander.

  Hatzis shuddered at the thought. She hadn’t lived over one and a half centuries only to end up being swallowed by a giant slug. But she hadn’t imagined herself in this position, either: sifting through the mind of a man rebuilt by aliens, trying desperately to find a way to keep the human race alive, and in the process picking up other thoughts along the way.

  She felt Alander’s outrage at learning that she had been tinkering with the engrams. But he didn’t seem to have made the connection between such modification and her actually reading his thoughts. Maybe, she thought, he believed she would honor her promise and just stick to mechanical interference and not snoop around. Or maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.

  She felt the same coldness as he had when the Yuhl revealed that the Ambivalence had a scorched-Earth policy, that they would leave nothing of humanity behind in its wake.

  She felt Alan
der’s puzzlement at realizing that the Praxis had given him a measure of Yuhl-ness as well as granting him a second biological start.

  And she felt his dismay at learning from Axford that she had declared war on the Yuhl and understood his fear that a single, unfortunate incident might unravel all the work he had done to bring the various alien species in surveyed space together.

  That brought her up to date with everything he had done with the Yuhl since they had been apart. But, having come that far, she found that she couldn’t stop. There was a strange familiar unfamiliarity about his thoughts that intrigued her, drew her to the encounter with himself upon his return to Sothis. She had already tasted the fringes of that incident; it was too wrapped up in his sense of self—and how it had been changed by the Praxis—for her to avoid it completely. Through his eyes, it was an enormously challenging event, one he would take some time to recover from. The shock of meeting his old self had firmly underlined the growing realization that he had changed. He wasn’t who he used to be. This was more than just disliking the title doctor because he felt that it was no longer relevant. This was making him question the very core of his being.

  From there, she roamed freely. A thousand thought images flashed across his mind as she dove even deeper into him. A score of worlds around a dozen suns; the changing expressions of Ueh/Ellil’s face; the shock of feeling stubble on his scalp and seeing the fleshy pinkness of his new skin. She saw herself through his eyes in among the rush, not as an individual but as the center of a vast kaleidoscope of identical faces. The impression she received of herself was of a chaotic fracturing of identity, multiplied ad nauseam until he felt as though he was drowning. When he looked at her, he didn’t see her; in fact, he hadn’t really seen her as a person since Adrasteia, when her engram had sent him back to Earth to report the coming of the Spinners to what remained of UNESSPRO. Even in Sol System, she had been subsumed by the concept of the Vincula and had become a kind of cipher, a mask behind which incomprehensible forces hid. And he still saw her that way.

  She could understand that, even though it left her feeling slightly hurt. After all, she was a person, too. She wasn’t a machine. Shit, he gave the Praxis more credit for basic humanity. Just because she was different from anyone he had known didn’t mean she had turned her back on everything human.

  She found a deep vein of loneliness and, feeling it strike a sympathetic note in her, followed it right into the heart of him, tugging at it even though there was a good chance he would feel her doing so. Along the way, she felt the hurt of rejection as the colonists on Adrasteia had relegated him to the status of a crippled outsider. Once the renowned generalist, he had been outcast and sent to do menial jobs on the surface of the planet. Only Cleo Samson had had time for him, had seen how a new Peter Alander took the pieces of the old one and molded himself into something different. Or tried to, anyway. By the time he had proven himself capable of doing something on his own, the colony had been destroyed by the Starfish.

  And then...

  Hatzis felt Alander’s delight at seeing how his relationship with Samson had become something deeper on Athena, where the only other functional version of him had lived. She felt his pain at learning that his copy had died, the death of his vicarious happiness.

  At least one of him had been happy.

  Underlying his feeling of isolation, though, was another hurt. It was a hurt that owed much to his old self, the person on which his original engram had been based, but which his new persona had embraced as proof positive of his deservingness to be lonely. She heard Thor’s words in Silent Liquidity: “Lucia was enjoying being a tourist too much. She didn’t want to stop.” She sensed his feeling of abandonment at the realization that Lucia had never intended to see him again after their affair on Earth.

  You fool, she thought—not knowing if she meant Thor, Alander, Lucia, or herself—and he thought it with her. Their minds were so deeply entangled by then that it was becoming hard to tell who was who. She was swept up in a tornado of self-loathing and despair, shot through with grief. A sob escaped her as the emotions called up echoes within her own mind, rising from deep recesses that she hadn’t touched for decades. She knew how he was feeling all too well, even if the source of her emotions wasn’t the same.

  They were the odd ones out at the post-Starfish party. Everyone else had copies except for him, while she was the only surviving member of the Vincula, profoundly isolated, surrounded by fragments of minds squabbling over territory that might be eroding under their very feet. But at least he was one of them. In his mind she was a hyper-advanced, humanoid robot, with all the tricks of an old sci-fi monster. She wasn’t real.

  Did everyone else see her that way? Was that how they all thought of her?

  She realized with a shock that she was crying. Somehow, even though she had gone into Alander hoping to learn more about him, she had ended up uncovering vulnerability in herself that she hadn’t suspected. She had been feeling lonely and isolated, even from her own copies, but she hadn’t realized just how deeply it was motivating her.

  If they won’t accept me of their own free will, she thought, then I’ll make them accept me. The Congress of Orphans carried the same emotional payload as a child’s attempt at blackmail. They both had the same need—to belong, to be wanted, to be loved—and the shared ache created a resonance that drew them together like magnets. She felt Alander physically holding her at the same time as he accepted her mental embrace. They clutched each other like mourners at a funeral. Her body was shaking in his arms. She felt drained and weak, profoundly weary, yet strangely comforted at the same time. She felt almost as though they had physically coupled, taken solace in base physical needs in the face of emotional and intellectual distress.

  But they hadn’t. It was all in her mind—literally. And that was enough. Perhaps too much, in fact. The prospect of such intimacy, with anyone, would ordinarily have terrified her.

  Even his own engram had rejected him...

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she physically and mentally pulled away from him. She was unable to look him in the eye. “I hadn’t meant to dig so deep. Not at first, anyway.”

  “It’s...” He hesitated over the word okay, she was still inside him enough to feel that. “It’s understandable.”

  “I’m sorry anyway.”

  Forgive me, she wanted to say. Tell me I’m not a bad person!

  But that was just stupid. She couldn’t let what she had seen in both of them affect her decisions. She couldn’t let her emotions override what she knew made sense. They still had work to do.

  His expression was guarded and puzzled at the same time. “What does this mean, Caryl?” he asked. “What happens next?”

  “I found what I needed,” she said. And more, she added to herself. “I guess we talk. All of us.”

  “No, I mean to me. An hour ago, I shut down a version of Peter Alander on the grounds that I had the right to do that to myself. But does that make me a murderer? What right did I have to do that to him? If I’m not who I used to be, then who am I?”

  “Remember what the Praxis said.” She kept his hand in hers, squeezing it tightly. “Change is life. You are the superior version that has grown out of what Vahagn was... because you have changed. You had to let him go, Peter. Clinging to him was driving you crazy.”

  Alander nodded miserably. She wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with her or just indicating that he’d heard her point.

  “I went through something like this after the Spike,” she went on. “I was changing, evolving, growing into something else. Each step challenged my perception of who I was, and sometimes it seemed that the only thing separating me from the other povs were the few kilograms of tissue that had been with me ever since my family died on Io. What basis was that to found a hierarchy? When it became obvious that I was no longer the strongest link in the chain, I had to let go of the reins. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was no longer the core of the being I had become. It
was somewhere else. In a sense, it was someone else, too, even though it shared continuity with me. I was part of it, and I learned to accept that role. It was an important role, but it wasn’t the role, you know?” The decades she had existed as part of her distributed, greater self had been the most challenging and exciting in her life, but she didn’t know how to get that across to Alander. The loss of the rest of her still burned in her mind like the cauterized stumps of vestigial limbs. The gradual connection of her engrams was in no way sufficient to ease that hurt, but she hoped that it might evolve into an alternative. “I knew I had to accept the change or become redundant.”

  “That’s not the same thing as dying,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s worse.” She held his gaze, defying him to disagree. “There can be no greater challenge to your identity than being cast out by your own self. It’s more painful than losing a family or a home. Who are you, if the superior aspect of yourself is no longer part of you?”

  He grimaced. “So you’re saying the onus is on them—my engrams—to adjust to me, not the other way around?”

  She hesitated for a second, balancing conflicting impulses, then said, “You weren’t a very nice person, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Back on Earth. You weren’t popular. Respected, admired, even envied, yes; but not liked. You could be arrogant, impatient, and patronizing. You had special status, and you knew it. You took people for granted; you used them, even if you thought they were your friends. You could be entertaining, but that wasn’t the main reason people associated with you. Your main attractions were your intellect and your status. But never your company.”

  “Don’t hold back, Caryl,” he said, wincing. “Give it to me straight.”

  “I’m only telling you this, Peter, because you need to know,” she said without apology. “You are the better part. If your engram chose death over absorption, then that’s his problem, not yours. Don’t let his failure drag you down. You’re no longer him, Peter. You’re better than that. Let him go. Whatever you’ve become, you have an obligation to yourself to keep moving on.”