Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  But sometimes, when they felt the ancestral longing for physicality, they could choose to become individuals and be embodied in machines, as Atax and his companions were. Here, they lived in the slow-time, the time of atoms and stars.

  There was no more line between the ghost and the machine.

  “This is what humanity looks like now,” Atax said, spinning around slowly to display his metal body for the benefit of the colonists on the Sea Foam. “Our bodies are made of steel and titanium, and our brains graphene and silicon. We are practically indestructible. Look, we can even move through space without the need for ships, suits, layers of protection. We have left corruptible flesh behind.”

  Atax and the others gazed intently at the ancient humans around them. Maggie stared back into their dark lenses, trying to fathom how the machines felt. Curiosity? Nostalgia? Pity?

  Maggie shuddered at the shifting, metallic faces, a crude imitation of flesh and blood. She looked over at Bobby, who appeared ecstatic.

  “You may join us, if you wish, or continue as you are. It is of course difficult to decide when you have no experience of our mode of existence. Yet you must choose. We cannot choose for you.”

  Something new, Maggie thought.

  Even eternal youth and eternal life did not appear so wonderful compared to the freedom of being a machine, a thinking machine endowed with the austere beauty of crystalline matrices instead of the messy imperfections of living cells.

  At last, humanity has advanced beyond evolution into the realm of intelligent design.

  * * *

  “I’M NOT AFRAID,” Sara said.

  She had asked to stay behind for a few minutes with Maggie after all the others had left. Maggie gave her a long hug, and the little girl squeezed her back.

  “Do you think Gran-Gran João would have been disappointed in me?” Sara asked. “I’m not making the choice he would have made.”

  “I know he would have wanted you to decide for yourself,” Maggie said. “People change, as a species and as individuals. We don’t know what he would have chosen if he had been offered your choice. But no matter what, never let the past pick your life for you.”

  She kissed Sara on the cheek and let go. A machine came to take Sara away by the hand so that she could be transformed.

  She’s the last of the untreated children, Maggie thought. And now she’ll be the first to become a machine.

  * * *

  THOUGH MAGGIE REFUSED to watch the transformation of the others, at Bobby’s request, she watched as her son was replaced piece by piece.

  “You’ll never have children,” she said.

  “On the contrary,” he said, as he flexed his new metal hands, so much larger and stronger than his old hands, the hands of a child, “I will have countless children, born of my mind.” His voice was a pleasant electronic hum, like a patient teaching program’s. “They’ll inherit from my thoughts as surely as I have inherited your genes. And some day, if they wish, I will construct bodies for them, as beautiful and functional as the one I’m being fitted with.”

  He reached out to touch her arm, and the cold metal fingertips slid smoothly over her skin, gliding on nanostructures that flexed like living tissue. She gasped.

  Bobby smiled as his face, a fine mesh of thousands of pins, rippled in amusement.

  She recoiled from him involuntarily.

  Bobby’s rippling face turned serious, froze, and then showed no expression at all.

  She understood the unspoken accusation. What right did she have to feel revulsion? She treated her body as a machine too, just a machine of lipids and proteins, of cells and muscles. Her mind was maintained in a shell too, a shell of flesh that had long outlasted its designed-for life. She was as “unnatural” as he.

  Still, she cried as she watched her son disappear into a frame of animated metal.

  He can’t cry any more, she kept on thinking, as if that was the only thing that divided her from him.

  * * *

  BOBBY WAS RIGHT. Those who were frozen as children were quicker to decide to upload. Their minds were flexible, and to them, to change from flesh to metal was merely a hardware upgrade.

  The older immortals, on the other hand, lingered, unwilling to leave their past behind, their last vestiges of humanity. But one by one, they succumbed as well.

  For years, Maggie remained the only organic human on 61 Virginis e, and perhaps the entire universe. The machines built a special house for her, one insulated from the heat and poison and ceaseless noise of the planet, and Maggie occupied herself by browsing through the Sea Foam’s archives, the records of humanity’s long, dead past. The machines left her pretty much alone.

  One day, a small machine, about two feet tall, came into her house and approached her hesitantly. It reminded her of a puppy.

  “Who are you?” Maggie asked.

  “I’m your grandchild,” the little machine said.

  “So Bobby has finally decided to have a child,” Maggie said. “It took him long enough.”

  “I’m the 5,032,322th child of my parent.”

  Maggie felt dizzy. Soon after his transformation into a machine, Bobby had decided to go all the way and join the Singularity. They had not spoken to each other for a long time.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have a name in the sense you think of it. But why don’t you call me Athena?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a name from a story my parent used to tell me when I was little.”

  Maggie looked at the little machine, and her expression softened.

  “How old are you?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer,” Athena said. “We’re born virtual and each second of our existence as part of the Singularity is composed of trillions of computation cycles. In that state, I have more thoughts in a second than you have had in your entire life.”

  Maggie looked at her granddaughter, a miniature mechanical centaur, freshly made and gleaming, and also a being much older and wiser than she by most measures.

  “So why have you put on this disguise to make me think of you as a child?”

  “Because I want to hear your stories,” Athena said. “The ancient stories.”

  There are still young people, Maggie thought, still something new.

  Why can’t the old become new again?

  And so Maggie decided to upload as well, to rejoin her family.

  * * *

  IN THE BEGINNING, the world was a great void crisscrossed by icy rivers full of venom. The venom congealed, dripped, and formed into Ymir, the first giant, and Au∂umbla, a great ice cow.

  Ymir fed on Au∂umbla’s milk and grew strong.

  Of course you have never seen a cow. Well, it is a creature that gives milk, which you would have drunk if you were still …

  I suppose it is a bit like how you absorbed electricity, at first in trickles, when you were still young, and then in greater measure as you grew older, to give you strength.

  Ymir grew and grew until finally, three gods, the brothers Vili, and Vé, and Odin, slew him. Out of his carcass the gods created the world: his blood became the warm, salty sea, his flesh the rich, fertile earth, his bones the hard, plow-breaking hills, and his hair, the swaying, dark forests. Out of his wide brows the gods carved Midgard, the realm in which humans lived.

  After the death of Ymir, the three brother gods walked along a beach. At the end of the beach, they came upon two trees leaning against each other. The gods fashioned two human figures out of their wood. One of the brother gods breathed life into the wooden figures, another endowed them with intelligence, and the third gave them sense and speech. And this was how Ask and Embla, the first man and the first woman, came to be.

  You are skeptical that men and women were once made from trees? But you’re made of metal. Who’s to say trees wouldn’t do just as well?

  Now let me tell you the story behind the names. “Ask” comes from ash, a hard tree that is used to make a
drill for fire. “Embla” comes from vine, a softer sort of wood that is easy to set on fire. The motion of twirling a fire drill until the kindling is inflamed reminded the people who told this story of an analogy with sex, and that may be the real story they wanted to tell.

  Once your ancestors would have been scandalized that I speak to you of sex so frankly. The word is still a mystery to you, but without the allure that it once held. Before we found how to live forever, sex and children were the closest we came to immortality.

  * * *

  LIKE A THRIVING hive, the Singularity began to send a constant stream of colonists away from 61 Virginis e.

  One day, Athena came to Maggie and told her that she was ready to be embodied and lead her own colony.

  At the thought of not seeing Athena again, Maggie felt an emptiness. So it was possible to love again, even as a machine.

  Why don’t I come with you? she asked. It will be good for your children to have some connection with the past.

  And Athena’s joy at her request was electric and contagious.

  Sara came to say goodbye to her, but Bobby did not show up. He had never forgiven her for her rejection of him the moment he became a machine.

  Even the immortals have regrets, she thought.

  And so a million consciousnesses embodied themselves in metal shells shaped like robot centaurs, and like a swarm of bees leaving to found a new hive, they lifted into the air, tucked their limbs together so that they were shaped like graceful teardrops, and launched themselves straight up.

  Up and up they went, through the acrid air, through the crimson sky, out of the gravity well of the heavy planet, and steering by the shifting flow of the solar wind and the dizzying spin of the galaxy, they set out across the sea of stars.

  * * *

  LIGHT YEAR AFTER light year, they crossed the void between the stars. They passed the planets that had already been settled by earlier colonies, worlds now thriving with their own hexagonal arrays of solar panels and their own humming Singularities.

  Onward they flew, searching for the perfect planet, the new world that would be their new home.

  While they flew, they huddled together against the cold emptiness that was space. Intelligence, complexity, life, computation—everything seemed so small and insignificant against the great and eternal void. They felt the longing of distant black holes and the majestic glow of exploding novas. And they pulled closer to each other, seeking comfort in their common humanity.

  As they flew on, half dreaming, half awake, Maggie told the colonists stories, weaving her radio waves among the constellation of colonists like strands of spider silk.

  * * *

  THERE ARE MANY stories of the Dreamtime, most secret and sacred. But a few have been told to outsiders, and this is one of them.

  In the beginning there was the sky and the earth, and the earth was as flat and featureless as the gleaming titanium alloy surface of our bodies.

  But under the earth, the spirits lived and dreamed.

  And time began to flow, and the spirits woke from their slumber.

  They broke through the surface, where they took on the forms of animals: Emu, Koala, Platypus, Dingo, Kangaroo, Shark … Some even took the shapes of humans. Their forms were not fixed, but could be changed at will.

  They roamed over the earth and shaped it, stamping out valleys and pushing up hills, scraping the ground to make deserts, digging through it to make rivers.

  And they gave birth to children, children who could not change forms: animals, plants, humans. These children were born from the Dreamtime but not of it.

  When the spirits were tired, they sank back into the earth from whence they came. And the children were left behind with only vague memories of the Dreamtime, the time before there was time.

  But who is to say that they will not return to that state, to a time when they could change form at will, to a time where time had no meaning?

  * * *

  AND THEY WOKE from her words into another dream.

  One moment, they were suspended in the void of space, still light years from their destination. The next, they were surrounded by shimmering light.

  No, not exactly light. Though the lenses mounted on their chassis could see far beyond the spectrum visible to primitive human eyes, this energy field around them vibrated at frequencies far above and below even their limits.

  The energy field slowed down to match the subluminal flight of Maggie and the other colonists.

  Not too far now.

  The thought pushed against their consciousness like a wave, as though all their logic gates were vibrating in sympathy. The thought felt both alien and familiar.

  Maggie looked at Athena, who was flying next to her.

  Did you hear that? they said at the same time. Their thought strands tapped each other lightly, a caress with radio waves.

  Maggie reached out into space with a thought strand, You’re human?

  A pause that lasted a billionth of a second, which seemed like an eternity at the speed they were moving.

  We haven’t thought of ourselves in that way in a long time.

  And Maggie felt a wave of thoughts, images, feelings push into her from every direction. It was overwhelming.

  In a nanosecond she experienced the joy of floating along the surface of a gas giant, part of a storm that could swallow Earth. She learned what it would be like to swim through the chromosphere of a star, riding white-hot plumes and flares that rose hundreds of thousands of miles. She felt the loneliness of making the entire universe your playground, yet having no home.

  We came after you, and we passed you.

  Welcome, ancient ones. Not too far now.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A time when we knew many stories of the creation of the world. Each continent was large and there were many peoples, each told their own story.

  Then many peoples disappeared, and their stories were forgotten.

  This is one that survived. Twisted, mangled, retold to fit what strangers want to hear, there is nonetheless some truth left in it.

  In the beginning the world was void and without light, and the spirits lived in the darkness.

  The Sun woke up first, and he caused the water vapors to rise into the sky and baked the land dry. The other spirits—Man, Leopard, Crane, Lion, Zebra, Wildebeest, and even Hippopotamus—rose up next. They wandered across the plains, talking excitedly with each other.

  But then the Sun set, and the animals and Man sat in darkness, too afraid to move. Only when morning came again did everyone start going again.

  But Man was not content to wait every night. One night, Man invented fire to have his own sun, heat and light that obeyed his will, and which divided him from the animals that night and forever after.

  So Man was always yearning for the light, the light that gives him life and the light to which he will return.

  And at night, around the fire, they told each other the true stories, again and again.

  * * *

  MAGGIE CHOSE TO become part of the light.

  She shed her chassis, her home and her body for such a long time. Had it been centuries? Millennia? Eons? Such measures of time no longer had any meaning.

  Patterns of energy now, Maggie and the others learned to coalesce, stretch, shimmer, and radiate. She learned how to suspend herself between stars, her consciousness a ribbon across both time and space.

  She careened from one edge of the galaxy to the other.

  One time, she passed right through the pattern that was now Athena. Maggie felt the child as a light tingling, like laughter.

  Isn’t this lovely, Gran-Gran? Come visit Sara and me sometime!

  But it was too late for Maggie to respond. Athena was already too far away.

  I miss my chassis.

  That was Bobby, whom she met hovering next to a black hole.

  For a few thousand years, they gazed at the black hole together from beyond the event horizon.

  This i
s very lovely, he said. But sometimes I think I prefer my old shell.

  You’re getting old, she said. Just like me.

  They pressed against each other, and that region of the universe lit up briefly like an ion storm laughing.

  And they said goodbye to each other.

  * * *

  THIS IS A nice planet, Maggie thought.

  It was a small planet, rather rocky, mostly covered by water.

  She landed on a large island, near the mouth of a river.

  The sun hovered overhead, warm enough that she could see steam rising from the muddy riverbanks. Lightly, she glided over the alluvial plains.

  The mud was too tempting. She stopped, condensed herself until her energy patterns were strong enough. Churning the water, she scooped a mound of the rich, fertile mud onto the bank. Then she sculpted the mound until it resembled a man: arms akimbo, legs splayed, a round head with vague indentations and protrusions for eyes, nose, mouth.

  She looked at the sculpture of João for a while, caressed it, and left it to dry in the sun.

  Looking about herself, she saw blades of grass covered with bright silicon beads and black flowers that tried to absorb every bit of sunlight. She saw silver shapes darting through the brown water and golden shadows gliding through the indigo sky. She saw great scale-covered bodies lumbering and bellowing in the distance, and close by, a great geyser erupted near the river, and rainbows appeared in the warm mist.

  She was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.

  She heard a nervous rustling and looked for the source of the sound. A little ways from the river, tiny creatures with eyes studded all over their heads like diamonds peered out of the dense forests, made of trees with triangular trunks and pentagonal leaves.

  Closer and closer, she drifted to those creatures. Effortlessly, she reached inside them, and took ahold of the long chains of a particular molecule, their instructions for the next generation. She made a small tweak, and then let go.

  The creatures yelped and skittered away at the strange sensation of having their insides adjusted.

  She had done nothing drastic, just a small adjustment, a nudge in the right direction. The change would continue to mutate and the mutations would accumulate, long after she left. In another few hundred generations, the changes would be enough to cause a spark, a spark that would feed itself until the creatures would start to think of keeping a piece of the sun alive at night, of naming things, of telling stories to each other about how everything came to be. They would be able to choose.