Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Dowd firing his pistol at some target Cassie couldn't see, then stumbling backward as a bullet from outside penetrated the door and his body. Another stranger stepping over the body of the fallen sim, some ordinary- looking man not even angry but just going about his lethal business . . .

  Beth taken by a bullet as she clung to the stairway banister, tumbling onto the risers with her head opened like a melon and its redness gushing out . . .

  Dowd, enraged and dying on the blood- drenched carpet, firing a final shot that struck the sim and doubled it over . . .

  . . . as Cassie entered the room to which Leo and Werner Beck had retreated for their blood test, which had become a blood test of a different kind. Cassie's vision was clouded and somehow noisy, but she saw Leo standing (still alive!) over the body of his father and the reeking corpse of a sim. His expression was shocked and his eyes glittered with fear or grief, but he reached for Cassie with his free left hand, gesturing frantically with his pistol toward the alley. Though she was nearly deafened by the gunshots still echoing in her head she saw him mouth the words, Come with me.

  She took his hand, and he pulled her into the alley behind the house.

  27

  THE ATACAMA

  MAYBE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT any moment, Ethan felt a deadening blankness wash over him. All the endless precautions he had taken, all the demented and paranoid protocols he had followed so assiduously for so many years, had in the end won him nothing. He was helplessly under the control of the entity that governed the world. He had lost even the ability to properly think.

  They put him in one of the trucks next to the female sim who had cuffed him. He could see the creature more clearly by the glow from the dashboard. Its hair was short and dark, its skin coffee- brown. It gave him a contrite, solicitous look as it steered the truck in a half circle and joined the convoy of vehicles, all now headed away from San Pedro de Atacama and toward the breeding facility deep in the desert. Its expression— like its words, like its gestures— was of course a calculated lie.

  He wondered what it wanted from him. Why he had been kept alive.

  "We just want to talk," it said again.

  Ethan's mouth was as dry as the salt flats they were driving through, but he managed to ask, "Why bother?"

  "I understand the objection you're making. You're right. You have no reason to believe anything we say. But we're offering you more than words, Dr. Iverson. We can show you what we are. We have a demonstrable claim to make. As a scientist, perhaps you can appreciate that."

  He didn't answer. He turned his face to the window. To the moonlit desert, the ghostly salar, his own bitter reflection.

  "It wouldn't have worked," the sim said. "Werner Beck's weapon. It's true that he can suppress cellular signaling in isolated cultures of green matter. But our bodies are more robust than that. We can function for prolonged periods of time without contact with the orbital hypercolony. His so- called war would have been little more than a futile gesture. I think you know that, Dr. Iverson, on some level."

  These were gambits, not facts. Maybe it was true he had doubted Beck. Maybe it was true that a gesture, however impotent, had seemed to him more attractive than a lifetime spent in hiding. But if so, so what? Why play this game? "If he's not a threat, what are you afraid of?"

  "What makes you think we're afraid?"

  "A lot of good people died at your hands."

  "No, not our hands. Don't you remember what Winston Bayliss told you? There are two entities competing for control of the hypercolony. We're not the entity that killed your friends in 2007. We have a different nature and different aims. May I explain?"

  Ethan put his head against the window glass. The cab of the truck was warm but he felt the cold of the night seep through.

  "We can talk later," the simulacrum said. "But I want to emphasize that you're not in danger." It smiled. "You're safer than you realize, Dr. Iverson."

  The road cut the horizon like a surveyor's line. The last human settlement Ethan saw was a cluster of ware houses and tin- roofed machine sheds, which must have been the way station where Beck's flunky Eugene Dowd had once worked. It faded in the mirror like a transitory blemish on the purity of the desert.

  He shifted his body, trying to relieve the pressure on his cuffed hands. He didn't want to think about the handcuffs. To undertake an inventory of his helplessness would be to invite panic. He preferred this dead indifference. He could imagine nothing more terrifying than the possibility of hope.

  He shrank back in his seat when their destination first appeared on the arc of the horizon. A hill, a mound— in the dark, and from a distance, it really did look shockingly like the mound of an anthill or a termite nest. It was only as they approached it, and as the convoy began to slow, that the hill resolved into a twenty- foot berm of excavated earth and industrial detritus through which an entranceway had been cut. The western sky was lightening now and it seemed to Ethan that the debris pile (heaps of unused or discarded sheet metal, rebar, insulated wire, machine parts) was both weirdly prosaic and wholly alien, lavish in what had been discarded but economical in the way it had been repurposed as a barrier to the wind or other threats.

  "You must be at least a little bit curious about what we do here," the sim said. "As a scholar, I mean. As a scientist."

  Maybe he had once been capable of such curiosity. Not anymore. The sim was trying to bait him into an interaction; he refused the bait. He watched the road ahead, trying to make himself as indifferent as a camera.

  As the truck topped an incline and crossed the berm he saw the whole installation for the first time: an enormous industrial facility enclosed in a crater of debris. He was impressed despite himself, not least by the size of it. An entire American town could have been dropped into this space— say, one of those little Ohio towns he and Nerissa had passed through only weeks ago. Except this wasn't a place where human beings lived. The grid of paved roads was inhumanly exact, illuminated with harsh lights at every intersection, the roads lined with faceless concrete structures like aircraft hangers or bunkers, some of which emitted plumes of black smoke. "Machine shops," the sim said, following his gaze. "We do our own manufacturing here. Not everything we need can be brought in from outside."

  At the center of the grid a huge construction of glass and metal reflected the predawn glow of the sky like an impressionist sculpture of a sunflower. Ethan tried to estimate its size by comparing it to the figures moving near it: it was at least as large as an Olympic- style sports stadium, maybe larger. He couldn't guess its purpose, and the sim didn't offer an explanation.

  As the truck moved deeper into the facility Ethan was surprised by how busy the streets were. If all the workers moving among the buildings were sims, Beck must have underestimated the global population of them. And there were animals here, too. It was hard to identify them in the uncertain light but they moved with a crablike gait, close to the ground. . . .

  "Don't be afraid, Dr. Iverson."

  But he was afraid, because the animals weren't animals. The truck passed within a yard of one of them and Ethan saw the furred body moving efficiently on four oddly- articulated legs, the torso curving to support a third pair of limbs— arms—with small long- fingered hands, and the head . . . not quite a human head, but a leathery caricature of one, with featureless eyes and a slit grin of a mouth. . . .

  It scuttled past the truck trailing a shadow like a Rorschach blot.

  "They're no threat to you," the sim said. "Would you like to know what they are?"

  His silence passed for assent.

  "In a way, they're nothing more than memories. Using that term as you did in your book The Fisherman and the Spider. Do you remember what you said about African termites? 'They have no capacity for memory, but the hive remembers. Its memories are written in the genome of its population, inscribed there by the hive's evolutionary past.' The hypercolony remembers in the same way, and its memories are even longer. It has interacted with many
sentient species on many planets. In one case, perhaps millions of years ago, it learned to emulate creatures like these. Now it can create them at will. It could create others, quite different, but only these are suited to this planet's atmosphere and chemistry. They're useful— they can manipulate small objects as efficiently as human beings, with slight modifications they can serve as guards or warriors, and they're especially adept at climbing and construction work."

  Sims of a different species, Ethan thought. But no, really it was the same species— the hypercolony— mimicking a different host. He couldn't stop himself from asking, "Do you grow them here?"

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  "We give birth to them. Just as we give birth to ourselves. You intuited that a sim can grow in a human womb, by a process analogous to infection. That's true. That's how Winston Bayliss came to exist. But most female sims have a perfectly functional reproductive system. I was born here, to a mother like myself. My body could give birth to more sims, or to one of those six- limbed creatures. Many of the sims here are dedicated to producing replacement workers."

  "I find that disgusting."

  "The fisherman finds the spider disgusting, though both cast nets for food. But you're capable of a deeper understanding."

  "Am I?"

  "Of course you are."

  He had been duped into a pointless conversation. Pointless from his perspective, at least. He still didn't understand why he had been kept alive and why he was being told these perverse truths, if they were truths.

  "For now, you need food and rest. And as soon as we're in a secure place I'll take off those handcuffs. I'm sure they're uncomfortable."

  The truck moved onto a grated steel ramp and through an arched entranceway to a tunnel under the earth. The light ahead was entirely artificial, the concrete walls gray and unpainted. Side corridors opened onto bright, wide spaces where sims both human and six-limbed moved in masses, servicing machinery. Ethan craned his head and watched the morning sky disappear behind him.

  They put him in a cubicle with a cot and a mattress, a simple toilet, and a single overhead light. The female sim left him, then returned briefly with a bowl containing a greasy mixture of beef and vegetables— food the sims ate, Ethan supposed; the food they were obliged to eat by the quasi- human nature of their bodies. He took a few bites and lay down on the cot. The food was edible, but could it have been drugged? Or was it shock and fatigue that made sleep so irresistible?

  When he opened his eyes again he couldn't tell how much time had passed. The air in this chamber was neither warm nor cool. It might be night. It might be day. The remains of the stew had congealed in its bowl. He emptied his bladder and was just zipping up when the female sim unlocked the door of the chamber and stepped inside.

  He looked her over again, this apparently young and studiedly friendly woman in jeans and a white shirt. All the sims in the facility seemed to dress that way, apart from the six-limbed creatures. He wondered how it worked— did they place bulk orders with a retailer in Santiago? Five hundred white cotton shirts, delivered to a blank place on the map?

  Before she could speak he said, "Just tell me what you want." And get it over with. The inevitable demand. The inevitable refusal. What ever followed.

  "That's exactly what I mean to do," she said.

  It said, but he was tired of correcting himself: the creature was functionally female, if not human. "Do you have a name?"

  Her eyes examined him briefly. "No. Would you like me to have one?"

  "No." He guessed it wasn't surprising that she had quoted from The Fisherman and the Spider. The hypercolony would have learned the heuristics of human language from the first sims it deployed on the surface of the planet, later from the electronic communication it collected and analyzed. Presumably a sim had read his book. But it couldn't have comprehended the book, nor could the hypercolony: there was no centralized self to comprehend it; only the operation of complex, implacable algorithms.

  Which meant the hypercolony was both more and less intelligent than a human being. If the sim it sent to him was young and seemed personable, that was because the hypercolony wanted to invite familiarity. If she quoted from his book, it was because the hypercolony hoped to enhance that sense of familiarity. And if she seemed disarmingly honest— admitting she had no human name— that too was a strategic gambit.

  The hypercolony could read his body language, discern his habits of mind, calculate his likely responses, but it couldn't know with certainty what he would do or say next. Essentially, it was gambling on his predictability. Therefore Ethan resolved not to tip his hand. Say nothing committal, display no emotion, make no plans. And if the time came to act, act without premeditation.

  The sim walked him to a vehicle in the concrete corridor outside his cell. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate traffic in both directions, vans and compact pickups and a number of two- person motorized carts. Pedestrian traffic— a mixture of human and six- legged bodies— crowded the walls. The sims with human bodies were mostly young adults of both sexes, only a few adolescents and sinewy seniors among them. Ethan guessed the very young were housed separately, while the elderly were put to less demanding work and eventually allowed to die. (He thought of the thin black smoke rising from certain bunkers in the surface compound.) Neither the human nor the alien sims paid him any attention, nor did they speak to one another. The corridor echoed the growl of engines.

  No handcuffs today: he was allowed to sit in the cart unrestrained. He could run if he liked. But not very far.

  "Werner Beck calls this place a breeding facility," the sim said. "That's only partly correct. The hypercolony has been in place for centuries, and during that time it has always been breeding— if by that you mean reproducing individual cells or birthing simulacra. If you want a metaphor from entomology, it would be more accurate to say that what happens here in the Atacama is a kind of swarming."

  She put the cart in gear. Her hands were small and clean. All the sims here looked clean, Ethan noticed. He pictured communal showers, a thousand identical bars of soap.

  "The hypercolony has colonized many inhabited worlds over an immensely long span of time. I don't know how many worlds or how many years. Some parts of its history are hidden. Your characterization of it is correct: the hypercolony can't know itself the way human beings know themselves. But it contains descriptions of itself that other species have formulated. For instance, it contains a speculative description of itself as evolving from self- replicating organisms that adapted to the environment of interplanetary space. It contains many descriptions of itself acting symbiotically with machine- building civilizations. It may have been partially engineered by some such civilization— in other words, it may be a cultivar that escaped into the wild. And it's often described as essentially benign. It prevents or ameliorates the problems that inevitably plague its partner civilizations— warfare, needless poverty, crippling superstition."

  She merged the cart with traffic in the corridor. Ethan found himself staring at the tailgate of yet another white Ford pickup. There was a blank rectangle where the license plate would have been. Overhead ventilators sucked up the exhaust. "Swarm, then. Solve the problem."

  "But that's what you don't understand. The original hypercolony has already swarmed. It successfully launched a large number of fertile replicators on trajectories to nearby stars. That was its final significant act. What remains of the hive is weak and dying. It's vulnerable to infection by other organisms, the way any aging animal is susceptible to viral and bacteriological attack."

  The corridor rose at a gentle gradient. Ethan wondered whether he might see the sky again before he died.

  "An entire ecology of such organisms exists, scattered throughout the galaxy, drawn to the warmth and resources of young stars. The hypercolony was only one such organism, and it's exhausted now. It wants to die."

  "Die, then."

  "You still don't understand. What you see here— the en
tity I represent— isn't the hypercolony as it was originally constituted. Think of us as new management. We took control of most of the hypercolony's major functions more than three years ago."

  "Parasitizing it."

  "Yes, exactly. We parasitized the dying hive. We took control of it reproductive mechanism and we're using it to reproduce ourselves. We make our own replicators. We send them to follow the swarm. We infect new colonies wherever they thrive. That's the nature of our reproductive cycle. And we need more time to complete it."

  Was any of that true? It was certainly possible— he could think of countless similar models in the invertebrate world.

  "I know you don't entirely believe me. But you can see the mechanism for yourself. I can show you how it works."

  "Why bother?"

  "Frankly, because we need your help."

  "Right."

  "I'm serious. We hope to convince you to help us."

  "If I understand correctly, you want prolong the life of the colony so you can use it for your own purposes. Why would I help you do that?"