21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  Step Two: Become an Overlord

  Now we come to the central question at the core of planetary domination: just how is it done? The answer is a riddle. Of course, it would be.

  You must already be an overlord in order to become one.

  Ask yourself: What is an overlord? Is he a villain? Is she a hero? A cowboy, a priestess, an industrialist? Is he cruel, is he kind, does she rule like air, invisible, indispensable? Is she the first human on Mars, walking on a plain so incomprehensible and barren that she feels her heart empty? Does she scratch away the thin red dust and see the black rock beneath? Does he land in his sleek piscine capsule on Uppskil, so crammed with libraries and granaries that he lives each night in an orgy of books and bread? What does she lord over? The land alone, the people, the belligerent patron gods with their null-bronze greaves ablaze?

  Is it true, as Oorm Nineteen wrote, that the core of each red world is a gem of blood compressed like carbon, a hideous war-diamond that yearns toward the strength of a king or a queen as a compass yearns toward north? Or is this only a metaphor, a way in which you can anthropomorphize something so vast as a planet, think of it as something capable of loving you back?

  It would seem that the very state of the overlord is one of violence, of domination. Uncomfortable colonial memories arise in the heart like acid—everyone wants to be righteous. Everyone wishes to be loved. What is any pharaonic statue, staring out at a sea of malachite foam, but a plea of the pharaoh to be loved, forever, unassailably, without argument? Ask yourself: Will Mars be big enough to fill the hole in you, the one that howls with such winds, which says the only love sufficient to quiet those winds is the love of a planet, red in tooth, claw, orbit, mass?

  We spoke before of how to get to Mars if your lonely planet offers no speedy highway through the skies. Truthfully—and now we feel we can be truthful, here, in the long night of our seminar, when the clicking and clopping of the staff has dimmed and the last of the cane-cream has been sopped up, when the stars have all come out and through the crystal ceiling we can all see one (oh, so red, so red!) just there, just out of reach—truthfully, getting to Mars is icing. It is parsley. To be an overlord is to engage in mastery of a bright, red thing. Reach out your hand—what in your life, confined to this poor grit, this lone blue world, could not also be called Mars? Rage, cruelty, the god of your passions, the terrible skills you possess, that forced obedience from a fiery engine, bellicose children, lines of perfect, gleaming code? These things, too, are Mars. They are named for fell gods, they spit on civilized governance—and they might, if whipped or begged, fill some nameless void that hamstrings your soul. Mars is everywhere; every world is Mars. You cannot get there if you are not the lord and leader of your own awful chariot, if you are not the crowned paladin in the car, instead of the animal roped to it, frothing, mad, driven, but never understanding. We have said you must choose, as Bauxbaum and Oorm and Fo chose—to choose is to understand your own highest excellence, even if that is only to bake bread and keep promises. You must become great enough here that Mars will accept you.

  Some are chosen to this life. Mars itself is chosen to it, never once in all its iterations having been ruled by democracy. You may love Mars, but Mars loves a crown, a sceptre, a horn-mooned diadem spangled in ice opals. This is how the bride of Mars must be dressed. Make no mistake—no matter your gender, you are the blushing innocent brought to the bed of a mate as ancient and inscrutable as any deathshead bridegroom out of myth. Did you think that the planet would bend to your will? That you would control it? Oh, it is a lovely word: Overlord. Emperor. Pharaoh. Princeps. But you will be changed by it as by a virus. Mars will fill your empty, abandoned places. But the greatest of them understood their place. The overlord embraces the red planet, but in the end, Mars always triumphs. You will wake in your thousand year reign to discover your hair gone red, your translucent skin covered in dust, your three hearts suddenly fused into a molten, stony core. You will cease to want food, and seek out only cold, black air to drink. You will face the sun and turn, slowly, in circles, for days on end. Your thoughts will slow and become grand; you will see as a planet sees, speak as it speaks, which is to say: the long view, the perfected sentence.

  And one morning you will wake up and your mouth will be covered over in stone, but the land beneath you, crimson as a promise, as a ruby, as an unrhymed couplet, as a virus—the land, or the machine, or the child, or the book, will speak with your voice, and you will be an overlord, and how proud we shall be of you, here, by the sea, listening to the dawn break over a new shore.

  DARYL GREGORY Born and raised in Chicago, Daryl Gregory made his first couple of fiction sales in the early 1990s, then paused and returned over a decade later. He won the Crawford Award for his debut novel, Pandemonium (2008), and his second novel, The Devil’s Alphabet (2009), was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best of the year.

  “Second Person, Present Tense” postulates a drug that can destroy the construction of self. This has happened to a teenaged girl, and her new replacement self has been, in effect, raised for a couple of years by her neurologist. Now she has to go back to the family that raised her original self . . . a person she can remember, but whom she is not.

  SECOND PERSON, PRESENT TENSE

  If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.

  —SHUN RYU SUZUKI

  I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.

  —EMO PHILLIPS

  When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl’s parents. He isn’t happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. “And here she is,” he says, like a game show host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private, encouraging wink.

  The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in our previous visits, he is almost frowning, struggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother, though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It’s way over the top.

  “Oh, Therese,” she says. “Are you ready to come home?”

  Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking for her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.

  My hand is still on the door handle. “Do I have a choice?” On paper I’m only seventeen years old. I have no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.

  Therese’s mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She’s a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.

  As usual, whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a soap opera and no one’s given me my lines. I look directly at Dr. S, and his face is frozen into that professional smile. Several times over the past year he’s convinced them to let me stay longer, but they’re not listening anymore. They’re my legal guardians, and they have Other Plans. Dr. S looks away from me, rubs the side of his nose.

  “That’s what I thought,” I say.

  The father scowls. The mother bursts into fresh tears, and she cries all the way out of the building. Dr. Subramaniam watches from the entrance as we drive away, his hands in his pockets. I’ve never been so angry with him in my life—all two years of it.

  • • • •

  The name of the drug is Zen, or Zombie, or just Z. Thanks to Dr. S I have a pretty good idea of how it killed Therese.

  “Flick your eyes to the left,” he told me one afternoon. “Now glance to the right. Did you see
the room blur as your eyes moved?” He waited until I did it again. “No blur. No one sees it.”

  This is the kind of thing that gets brain doctors hot and bothered. Not only could no one see the blur, their brains edited it out completely. Skipped over it—left view, then right view, with nothing between—then fiddled with the person’s time sense so that it didn’t even seem missing.

  The scientists figured out that the brain was editing out shit all the time. They wired up patients and told them to lift one of their fingers, move it any time they wanted. Each time, the brain started the signal traveling toward the finger up to 120 milliseconds before the patient consciously decided to move it. Dr. S said you could see the brain warming up right before the patient consciously thought, now.

  This is weird, but it gets weirder the longer you think about it. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

  The conscious mind—the “I” that’s thinking, hey, I’m thirsty, I’ll reach for that cold cup of water—hasn’t really decided anything. The signal to start moving your hand has already traveled halfway down your arm by the time you even realize you are thirsty. Thought is an afterthought. By the way, the brain says, we’ve decided to move your arm, so please have the thought to move it.

  The gap is normally 120 milliseconds, max. Zen extends this minutes. Hours.

  If you run into somebody who’s on Zen, you won’t notice much. The person’s brain is still making decisions, and the body still follows orders. You can talk to the them, and they can talk to you. You can tell each other jokes, go out for hamburgers, do homework, have sex.

  But the person isn’t conscious. There is no “I” there. You might as well be talking to a computer. And two people on Zen—“you” and “I”—are just puppets talking to puppets.

  • • • •

  It’s a little girl’s room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and window sills, shoulder to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hair brushes and bottles of nail polish. Pin-ups from Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league gymnastics medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled “I Promise . . .” exhorting Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who she’d been, who she was supposed to become.

  I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread—they’ve been re-sewn, maybe more than once.

  Therese’s father sets down the pitifully small bag that contains everything I’ve taken from the hospital: toiletries, a couple of changes of clothes, and five of Dr. S’s books. “I guess old Boo Bear was waiting for you,” he says.

  “Boo W. Bear.”

  “Yes, Boo W!” It pleases him that I know this. As if it proves anything. “You know, your mother dusted this room every week. She never doubted that you’d come back.”

  I have never been here, and she is not coming back, but already I’m tired of correcting pronouns. “Well, that was nice,” I say.

  “She’s had a tough time of it. She knew people were talking, probably holding her responsible—both of us, really. And she was worried about them saying things about you. She couldn’t stand them thinking that you were a wild girl.”

  “Them?”

  He blinks. “The Church.”

  Ah. The Church. The term carried so many feelings and connotations for Therese that months ago I stopped trying to sort them out. The Church was the red-brick building of the Davenport Church of Christ, shafts of dusty light through rows of tall, glazed windows shaped like gravestones. The Church was God and the Holy Ghost (but not Jesus—he was personal, separate somehow). Mostly, though, it was the congregation, dozens and dozens of people who’d known her since before she was born. They loved her, they watched out for her, and they evaluated her every step. It was like having a hundred overprotective parents.

  I almost laugh. “The Church thinks Therese was wild?”

  He scowls, but whether because I’ve insulted the Church or because I keep referring to his daughter by name, I’m not sure. “Of course not. It’s just that you caused a lot of worry.” His voice has assumed a sober tone that’s probably never failed to unnerve his daughter. “You know, the Church prayed for you every week.”

  “They did?” I do know Therese well enough to be sure this would have mortified her. She was a pray-er, not a pray-ee.

  Therese’s father watches my face for the bloom of shame, maybe a few tears. From contrition it should have been one small step to confession. It’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.

  I sit down on the bed and sink deep into the mattress. This is not going to work. The double bed takes up most of the room, with only a few feet of open space around it. Where am I going to meditate?

  “Well,” Therese’s father says. His voice has softened. Maybe he thinks he’s won. “You probably want to get changed,” he says.

  He goes to the door but doesn’t leave. I stand by the window, but I can feel him there, waiting. Finally the oddness of this makes me turn around.

  He’s staring at the floor, a hand behind his neck. Therese might have been able to intuit his mood, but it’s beyond me.

  “We want to help you, Therese. But there’s so many things we just don’t understand. Who gave you the drugs, why you went off with that boy, why you would—” His hand moves, a stifled gesture that could be anger, or just frustration. “It’s just . . . hard.”

  “I know,” I say. “Me too.”

  He shuts the door when he leaves, and I push the panda to the floor and flop onto my back in relief. Poor Mr. Klass. He just wants to know if his daughter fell from grace, or was pushed.

  • • • •

  When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I.” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.

  Dr. S says that nobody knows what the mind is, or how the brain generates it, and nobody really knows about consciousness. We talked almost every day while I was in the hospital, and after he saw that I was interested in this stuff—how could I not be?—he gave me books and we’d talk about brains and how they cook up thoughts and make decisions.

  “How do I explain this?” he always starts. And then he tries out the metaphors he’s working on for his book. My favorite is the Parliament, the Page, and the Queen.

  “The brain isn’t one thing, of course,” he told me. “It’s millions of firing cells, and those resolve into hundreds of active sites, and so it is with the mind. There are dozens of nodes in the mind, each one trying to out-shout the others. For any decision, the mind erupts with noise, and that triggers . . . how do I explain this . . . Have you ever seen the British Parliament on C-SPAN?” Of course I had: in a hospital, TV is a constant companion. “These members of the mind’s parliament, they’re all shouting in chemicals and electrical charges, until enough of the voices are shouting in unison. Ding! That’s a ‘thought,’ a ‘decision.’ The Parliament immediately sends a signal to the body to act on the decision, and at the same time it tells the Page to take the news—”

  “Wait, who’s the Page?”

  He waves his hand. “That’s not important right now.” (Weeks later, in a different discussion, Dr. S will explain that the Page isn’t one thing, but a cascade of neural events in the temporal area of the limbic system that meshes the neural map of the new thought with the existing neural map—but by then I know that “neural map” is just another metaphor for another deeply complex thing or process, and that I’ll never get to the bottom of this. Dr. S said not to worry about it, that nobody gets to the bottom of it.) “The Page takes the news of the deci
sion to the Queen.”

  “All right then, who’s the Queen? Consciousness?”

  “Exactly right! The self itself.”

  He beamed at me, his attentive student. Talking about this stuff gets Dr. S going like nothing else, but he’s oblivious to the way I let the neck of my scrubs fall open when I stretch out on the couch. If only I could have tucked the two hemispheres of my brain into a lace bra.

  “The Page,” he said, “delivers its message to Her Majesty, telling her what the Parliament has decided. The Queen doesn’t need to know about all the other arguments that went on, all the other possibilities that were thrown out. She simply needs to know what to announce to her subjects. The Queen tells the parts of the body to act on the decision.”

  “Wait, I thought the Parliament had already sent out the signal. You said before that you can see the brain warming up before the self even knows about it.”

  “That’s the joke. The Queen announces the decision, and she thinks that her subjects are obeying her commands, but in reality, they have already been told what to do. They’re already reaching for their glasses of water.”

  • • • •

  I pad down to the kitchen in bare feet, wearing Therese’s sweatpants and a T-shirt. The shirt is a little tight; Therese, champion dieter and Olympic-level purger, was a bit smaller than me.

  Alice is at the table, already dressed, a book open in front of her. “Well, you slept in this morning,” she says brightly. Her face is made up, her hair sprayed into place. The coffee cup next to the book is empty. She’s been waiting for hours.

  I look around for a clock, and find one over the door. It’s only nine. At the hospital I slept in later than that all the time. “I’m starved,” I say. There’s a refrigerator, a stove, and dozens of cabinets.

  I’ve never made my own breakfast. Or any lunch or dinner, for that matter. For my entire life, my meals have been served on cafeteria trays. “Do you have scrambled eggs?”