Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Have you ever done life-molds of yourself?”

  In response, she had her mechs bring six years’ worth of her own bronze Personae into the studio and place them alongside his. The differences were subtle in themselves, but contrast made them obvious. Her face had developed creases and furrows that his hadn't. Her body had changed, particularly about the hips and breasts, in ways he'd never seen in any other woman he'd known. It was as if the seriousness and gravity that had long characterized Moira's personality had now begun manifesting in her body as well.

  Afterwards, when they made love, Moira did so with a passionate earnestness utterly new to Hsiao. It was exhilarating, even a bit frightening. But when she suggested that he stay with her, that he settle in for a while, Hisao politely laughed it off.

  “No can do, kiddo. You know the spectacle Jorge and his team have planned for this week.” Their mutual friend Jorge was an orbital mechanist whose latest project involved telepresently steering an asteroid into the inner Solar System from the Kuiper belt.

  “Crashing that skystone of his into the Sun, isn't he?”

  “Exactly so! He's invited me to his observatory, to be part of the private audience tele-immersed for the actual impact—realtime inside the ultimate firework!”

  “I certainly wouldn't want you to miss that, no,” Moira said, taking his begging-off in stride. Hisao felt almost like she was being condescending toward him, but he couldn't quite figure out how or why.

  As he kissed her good-bye, Hisao was both relieved and obscurely disappointed. Heading to Jorge's eyrie in Peru, he felt that, by rejecting her offer to “settle in,” he had dodged an arrow by which he might have dearly wished to be struck—if he were about a hundred years older.

  He didn't think much on it again until Moira exhibited her first ten years of Persistent Personae, in a show at a gallery in Nuevo Seattle. She called the exhibit “Too Too Solid Flesh,” for reasons Hisao was unable to fathom.

  The show was by no means the toast of every art critic who'd been given a preview, but the opening for it drew quite a crowd, nonetheless—and not just telepresently. In that crowd, Hisao saw Wilena again, for the first time in quite a few years.

  Together they walked among the statues in the pavilioned gallery space. Not only were the rapidly changing hair and clothing styles holoed onto the Personae now, but streets and city skylines (projected around them in diorama) built and unbuilt themselves, shifted and changed in time-lapsed fashion, completely recycling themselves every three years or so, just as they did in reality.

  “Time increasingly sublimes into space,” intoned a voiceover narration as they walked, their feet unintentionally triggering its comments. “Nature disappears into culture. Reality dissipates into simulation. Response vanishes into stimulus. All our depth is on the surface.”

  Hisao shook his head.

  “Kind of a strange narration.”

  “What's stranger here,” Wilena said, looking about at the others in the gallery, bodies flesh and electric, “is how few of the sitters have shown up in person for the opening.”

  Hisao nodded. He'd noticed it too.

  “You have to admit there's something a little disturbing about what she's done with us,” he said.

  “Yes. Especially when she puts the statues of herself among all of ours.”

  Just then Moira herself, mingling, stopped to give both of them quick hugs. Embracing her, Hisao noted the subtle white streaks in her hair. Some obscure artcult fashion, he supposed. She was more than a little busy with her—Three! Count them! Unbelievable!—young children in tow. She wished she could stop to talk, but ... They understood completely and congratulated her as she moved on.

  Hisao and Wilena turned back to contemplating the sculptures.

  “Unsettling. The rest of us look so, I don't know—”

  “Infantilized?” Wilena suggested. “Or at best not quite fully pubescent?”

  “Yes.”

  “The hairlessness accentuates that. Makes us more of what we already are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you homeworlding for a while?” she asked. When he nodded, she sent contact info into his headplug. “Stop by my lab in Taiga City, and maybe I'll give you something to think about.”

  With a brief wave of her hand, she turned and walked away, leaving him both puzzled and curious as she disappeared into the crowd.

  * * * *

  “You do know that Moira's oldest—the little boy, Masao—is your son?” Wilena said, walking with him into the sterile space of her homelab, brilliant in its retro chrome-and-white cleanroom decor.

  “Oh. Really? I hadn't heard.”

  “I suspect Moira isn't mentioning it to any of the children's fathers, unless they ask. Did you see much of your own bioparents—Mother? Father?—when you were growing up?”

  Hisao pondered that for a moment.

  “They were usually off working or studying or traveling. Like everybody else, except they were actually married—Open Probational, twenty-year term. Before my thirteenth birthday I probably saw my parents, together, more than most children do.”

  “Before the Moving On,” Wilena said, nodding and leaning against her workstation. “Before ‘parent’ can become confused with ‘playfellow.’ And of course there's the incest taboo, too.”

  Hisao laughed. Wilena gave him a quizzical look.

  “For some reason, whenever I hear the phrase ‘incest taboo,'” he explained, “I always mishear it as incest tattoo—and into my head pops an old picture of a burly guy with ‘Mother’ stenciled into a bicep.”

  Wilena smiled politely.

  “Yes. Still, that taboo was one of the few things that didn't really change—even when the quick, shiny, tiny things changed everything.”

  “The moteswarms? They're your field, right?”

  “As much as anything else, yes. Before the Intervention, I might have been called a medical doctor. Officially, I'm a specialist in medically applicable biologically based nanotechnology, particularly human-obligate biocompatibles like the motes. In reality, the motes made people in my profession about as obsolete as general practitioners—and for the same reasons.”

  Hisao dropped into a hoverchair, slouching as it settled and adjusted with his weight. Wilena toyed with a Hoberman sphere paperweight on her workstation's main desk.

  “A medical doctor,” he said, the obsolete term strange in his mouth. “That's why you're working with Moira?”

  “Among other things I'm her ‘personal physician,’ for lack of a less arcane title,” Wilena said, taking a seat behind the desk. “And she's given me permission to talk about this with my fellow researchers—and with you.”

  “I thought something odd was going on with her. I mean, three kids? That's practically unheard of.”

  Wilena shook her head.

  “Her situation is about much more than that, but we can start there.” She flashed a series of diagrams up from a small tabletop holo. “The moteswarms view the suite of physiological changes surrounding conception, gestation, and birthing as symptomatic of senescence—and therefore something to be countered. Female fertility is largely unimpaired for the first child, more difficult with the second. The odds are astronomically against even the conception of a third.”

  “Moira has beaten those odds, obviously.”

  “Yes. About one in fifty million people, both male and female, are like Moira in that they're not mote-immortalized. Moira can have more than one or two children, but she will also experience a lifespan closer to what was the human average, before the moteswarms intervened.”

  “Wait a minute. You're saying she's actually growing old?"

  Wilena nodded, flashing up images of human faces and bodies, bald-headed or white-haired people from those bygone days when human beings grew old and died as a matter of course.

  “Moira is one of those extremely rare individuals who experience what we now consider atavistic aging. Before the Intervention three c
enturies ago, though, her type of aging was not atavistic at all. It was an absolutely ordinary and unavoidable part of the normal human life cycle.”

  “But—now? Today? That's ridiculous. Moira's not some kind of lower animal!”

  “I know it's hard to believe. ‘Animals die, things pass away, but people last.’ That's what we're always told, and that's how it is, in our cases.”

  “But not in Moira's?”

  “No. Unlike the rest of us, she's maturing. Becoming fully adult.”

  “And the rest of us aren't—?”

  “Actually mature? No, none of us are that. The rest of us are all diapaused just beyond the cusp of puberty. We remain essentially larval, indefinitely—permanently neotenized, both physically and psychologically. Unending adolescence is our trade-off for being immortal.”

  “How is that possible?” Hisao asked, fidgeting enough in the hoverchair to make it swivel slightly. “Why did it happen?”

  “Those are two very different questions. Let's take the first one first.” She shot onto the holovirt between them an image of a coordinate system. “This is a graphical depiction of our species’ neotenization, our long childhoods even before the Intervention. The motes already had that as a starting point, to make their task easier.

  “In every complex organism—including humans, in the past—the onset of reproductive maturity was the first real stage of dying. An unintended consequence of the fact that evolution didn't much care what happened to you after you'd reached breeding age—and bred.”

  Wilena holoed up another series of images—cells, cellular mechanisms, gene lines.

  “Some of the same traits selected by evolution to maintain early life fitness have unselected deleterious effects later in life. What saved us in youth killed us in age.”

  “And that was the thing the moteswarms fixed?”

  “One of them. One of the many small changes that led to a big change.” She holoed up a series of further graphs and diagrams. “The more you exploit genetic polymorphisms to adjust this neurosecretory pathway—involving the hypothalamus, pituitary, gonads, and eventually general metabolism—the more longevity increases and the more slowly this curve here approaches full sexual maturity onset.”

  “Fertility decreases as longevity increases, then?” Hisao asked. The diagrams, charts, and creatures began to swim before his eyes. “This is some fairly heavy-lifting biology....”

  “I know,” said Wilena with a sigh of frustration, flash cutting through more holo images—of the humble nematode roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, of chemosignal/lifespan connections, developmental arrest, polymorphism, neoplasm and neoteny. “Sorry. Suffice it to say the motes carried all of this still further, by treating births subsequent to the first as symptoms of senescence that were in need of being, um, overcome.”

  “But what were ‘they’ after?” Hisao asked, staring absently at his own hands. “The motes are just swarms of tiny, not-very-bright machines.”

  “Indeed, but in their own emergent, decentralized fashion they can share and collectively understand a great deal—much the same way an ant colony ‘knows’ a lot more than any single ant in the colony does. And the woman who created them, well, she was larger than life, and a genius.”

  A blond woman—with another one of those old faces—holoed up into the space before Wilena's desk, her words both spoken and captioned.

  “...my answer was swarms of little cellular mechanics diagnosing and repairing time's ravages—what we do to our bodies,” said the ghostly woman in the holo, “as well as flesh's thousand inherited natural shocks—what our bodies do to us.”

  “Cherise LeMoyne,” Hisao said, gesturing. “The Mother of Intervention. The person who unleashed the Wellness Plague.”

  “That's right. At the time of the Intervention, she was chief scientist and CEO of Manipulife Corporation. Her firm specialized in blending traits from programmable machines into programmable life, and vice versa. All built on LeMoyne's discovery of the core Universal Turing Gene, the shortest segment of DNA on which can be simulated any and all operations performable in DNA.”

  “Which allowed her to create the motes that re-created us.”

  “Yes.”

  “'Even as she herself was dying of a previously unsuspected and undiagnosed cancer'—or so the story goes.”

  “A rare uterine cancer, actually,” Wilena said, replacing the holo of LeMoyne with an image half circuit diagram, half microbiology illustration. “LeMoyne's diagnosis had come too late. She died, but not before giving the motes their ability to swarm-communicate. She connected the ‘bots, even gave them links and search capabilities into the human infosphere—apparently hoping everything we humans had ever learned might serve as the motes’ classroom, their school, their teacher, their database. She also gave them their most important commands, at least after their Hippocratic ‘Do no harm’ substrate.”

  Into the air above her desk Wilena holoed up the twin directives, where they hovered in golden numbers and letters:

  1) Eliminate human mortality.

  2) Replicate human consciousness.

  “Evidence suggests that the motes’ great solution to the first directive—the longevity/ birth-limit linkage,” she said, flashing up images of bio-processes, and graphs chronicling global trends, “came about as a result of their researching the uterine cancer that killed their creator. They couldn't save LeMoyne, but forging that particular linkage ended up solving the problem of lingering human hyperpopulation—which vastly increased longevity by itself would have exacerbated, especially in regions that had yet to pass through demographic shift. Soon afterward, other scientists perfected similar mote-tech for atomic-level recycling and energy conversion, which solved the other great problem of the time—material hyperconsumption.”

  Wilena looked away, embarrassed.

  “One ‘hyper’ thing the motes didn't fix,” she said, standing up, “was hyperspecialization. At least in my case. Sorry.”

  “Mine too. I should have known more about all these things, but history has never been a particular interest of mine.”

  “Don't beat yourself up about it,” she said, placing her hand lightly on his shoulder. “Our hyperspecialization goes hand in hand with being psychologically neotenized.”

  Hisao unfolded himself from the hoverchair and stood up.

  “Oh?”

  Wilena turned away shyly once more as, together, they slowly walked from her workstation, back through her lab, toward her living space.

  “There I go again, talking shop. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Hisao said. “Very thorough. Just one question: If the motes are so well suited to overcoming our aging and mortality, why is Moira growing older?”

  Wilena made that frustrated sigh again.

  “No one knows for sure. Some of my colleagues theorize that atavistic aging, like Moira's, results from a breakdown in biocompatibility, such that the immune systems of these rare individuals attack the moteswarms and counteract their efforts.”

  The door out of the lab dilated before them and they walked through.

  “Others suggest the problem's deeper than just an ‘allergy to the agents of immortality’ on the part of the human host.”

  “Deeper? How?”

  “The motes have pretty much achieved the goal of Directive One. From all we can tell, they're not nearly as far along toward accomplishing Directive Two. Perhaps the motes themselves must leave some human individuals mortal, in order to better understand the nature of individual human consciousness.”

  Hisao stared at her, wondering if he'd heard right.

  “You mean the motes are allowing Moira to age? Maybe even to die? But why?”

  “Fully overcoming human mortality and fully understanding human consciousness may not be complementary efforts,” Wilena said. “It's possible that the elimination of human mortality and the replication of human consciousness cannot both be accomplished simultaneously. Perhaps one cannot ha
ve a fully developed individual human consciousness unless one also has a deep awareness of one's own mortality.”

  “I don't follow you.”

  “What if the bracketing provided by death is what gives individual consciousness its depth? That's how theorists of the ‘directive noncomplementarity’ school pose the question, at any rate.”

  Wilena stopped, pausing at the entrance to her sleep room.

  “Whichever theory you follow, the upshot is the same. All known cases of atavistic human aging are characterized by an almost complete absence of motes from the bodies of the aging individuals.”

  Hisao nodded slowly.

  “You promised you'd give me something to think about, Wilena, and you have. Thanks.”

  His dalliance with Wilena in her sleep room shortly thereafter—although it might not have smacked of Moira's passionate earnestness—at least was familiar romance, full of the superficial intimacy and intimate superficiality that so characterized love in their time.

  * * * *

  As the years passed, Hisao traveled to more and newer places throughout the Solar System and beyond. He made new friends everywhere, did new things, and experienced new sensations as often as he liked. He learned how to speak new languages and play new musical instruments. He tired of hoverball and moved on to astrosurfing—more dangerous, and so more thrilling, more sensational, more fun.

  Always he found himself among crowds of perennial boy geniuses and intelligirls, all gloriously vibrant and flawlessly healthy—never-changing people in an ever-changing world, forever thronging to experience novel places, people, and things, and just as quickly growing bored and leaving them behind.

  Only much later, while talking with the aged Alphonse about Moira's art, did Hisao think again of those to whom mortal change might still apply.

  Moira's latest major work, Coming and Going, was a strange piece—even for Moira. Like all of her more recent work, it was monumental, starkly visible from a thousand miles up, even its smallest detail requiring only slight magnification to be seen clearly from geostat orbit. It was also built to last, or at least built to resist recycling—one of many reasons it aroused controversy.