Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  Mathematics became an inseparable part of the woman’s personality. She had the same teachers in the simulation, but her simulated self’s conversations with them were vastly different from the ones she had in reality. Her simulated self’s report cards in the years that followed came back with personal, extensive comments praising her intellect, where in reality they had come back with pleasant yet detached sentences along the lines of “A pleasure to have in class.”

  Her fourth grade teacher—who had been her least favorite teacher in reality—noticed her fascination with mathematics, as well as how far ahead of the class she was. She showed him the multivariable calculus textbook and said, “I don’t understand it yet, but I’m getting there. Right now I’m in the middle of teaching myself trigonometry.”

  The simulated little girl had the same clothes, same face, same ten-year-old lisp and missing canine baby tooth as the real woman’s past self . . . but this simulated self aced a trigonometry exam in the fourth grade. This simulated self skipped three grades and graduated high school at the age of fifteen. After her senior year of high school, she sat at a desk, finally working through her father’s multivariable calculus problems, looking very content, with her sister reading a science fiction anthology on the carpet next to her, surrounded by cushions. At nine and a half years old, the sister breathed with a slight wheeze she developed after the fire, and enjoyed drawing—sketching the world around her, a world she never really saw, as well as inventive futures that she imagined.

  The simulation went to university, kept in touch with the fourth grade teacher, thanked him when she proved Beal’s conjecture at the age of twenty-two. In reality, Beal’s conjecture had been proven by a different woman who had studied the problem for nearly sixty years. The simulated woman fell in love, started a family with a wife and two children—one of which was especially fond of looking at the slightly charred multivariable calculus textbook that always lay open on the coffee table . . .

  Then the time ran out for this sample Insert. The simulation froze on a slightly blurry frame of the woman in a sharp business suit, her hair in a sleek shiny bun, smiling with bright white teeth, holding one of her children, and looking up at the sky.

  The helmet was removed from the woman’s head, and she blinked awake.

  “Did it work to your satisfaction?” Emil asked her.

  The old woman started sobbing. “That was me! Let me go back. Please.” she whispered. “This is not me! That was me, don’t you see? That was my reality! Put me back! PUT ME BACK! Emil. Please. That was who I was supposed to be . . . ”

  “I’m . . . I’m so sorry, but I can’t do that.” Emil seemed uncomfortable.

  Another volunteer gently helped the old woman into her heat-protecting gear and escorted her out of the dome as she continued to cry and exclaim, “This, here, right now, is not me!”

  Watching this all only convinced you further—human beings would be far happier living out their desires during the sleep, for the rest of eternity.

  Emil connected his sphere to Eesha’s helmet, so that you could try to confirm for him what the old woman had been unable to answer explicitly.

  “Good. Thanks, Opal. Glad it worked. Everything seems to be going according to plan.”

  I

  When there were only one or two rounds of learning and updates left before you would be ready to begin the sleep, Eesha snuck into the dome during the middle of the night.

  “Look, Opal. I stole this from Emil while he was busy.” She held up a helmet that the most recent group of volunteers used. “I didn’t know you were testing the simulations! I talked to one of the volunteers because I caught her leaving the city secretly. It was an old woman . . . she told me that the volunteers can remember their simulations! That’s all she told me, she seemed pretty distraught—confused about who she really was . . . but anyway. I want to know what it’s like. And I want to remember it. But most of all, I want to know what you, Opal, would construct for me . . . from your own imagination, not from mine. And please don’t make it that boring life that all the other fourteen year olds are getting, that I’ll be getting too during the sleep. Make it interesting. I’m excited.Let’s do this secretly, okay? I want to remember . . . ”

  You tried to convey your thoughts to her, but she couldn’t read them with this helmet she had. You tried to tell her “STOP! You won’t be able to sleep like the others if you do this! You will have to leave the city! Don’t do this! You don’t understand!” But she misunderstood the frantic, frenzied, dancing colors that flashed across the dome.

  “Don’t worry! I’m sure I’ll love whatever you come up with, Opal. Don’t be shy! I want to know what it’s like inside your mind. What you think of me. You’ll be fine.” She put the helmet onto her head and switched it on.

  It was too late. The simulation started. So you thought you might as well take this chance . . . what could very well be the last time you ever see Eesha . . . and construct a world for her that showed how much you loved her.

  It was very crude set of experiences, but they were entirely your construction. Fragments of a sunset . . . fireflies . . . some ocean waves . . . sparkling glass like the cathedrals from ancient times . . . laughter . . . good food . . . a family who stayed and loved her, for her whole life. You could only give her small glimpses, because this was a new request—one that wasn’t driven at all by the person’s own wants, but by your ideas and your thoughts of Eesha, and your wants for her. When the time allotment for the sample Insert ran out, Eesha blinked awake, and tears began to stream down her cheeks.

  “Thank you, Opal. It was perfect.” She sat in the grass, both crying and smiling, until Emil entered the garden, horrified.

  “What did you do, Eesha! Please tell me you didn’t run a sample Insert. Please.”

  “Why not? It was beautiful, Emil, I—”

  “NO! You don’t understand . . . Eesha . . . ” his voice broke, “The volunteers . . . they have to evacuate . . . they can’t participate in the sleep, the sample Inserts change their brain activity and they wouldn’t be able to experience a simulation again if they entered a pod. You . . . you can’t sleep now, Eesha. What have you done . . . ”

  “ . . . Oh.”

  On the day the sleep was to begin, Eesha was getting ready to evacuate the city with the last group of Diastereoms. The elders of the city who had been uploaded into various metallic objects had already left. Emil trusted Opal to operate without supervision and wake up the city when the time came, and he could still monitor everything remotely if necessary. He remembered what he had promised Karisma, blamed himself for Eesha’s predicament, and was wary of the group of Diastereoms Eesha would be traveling with. So he decided to accompany Eesha at the last moment.

  When all of the city shelters and buildings had been entirely shut down, and all the biological city dwellers were lying in their pods, waiting for the sleep to start, Emil gave you the signal to begin.

  The eyes of all the city dwellers shut simultaneously as their consciousnesses transferred to the pod walls, and the pumping of cryoprotectants and freezing of tissues began. The pods themselves rose from the ground under the direction of their inhabitants’ motor and sensory circuits, using their robotic limbs and appendages for the first time in what was expected to be many centuries of land restoration. You transmitted the Inserts to all of the pods, then checked to make sure each was delivered to the correct vessel.

  And so, the long sleep finally commenced.

  Eesha told Emil she wanted to say goodbye to you privately, so he left her alone in the garden.

  She walked up to you, wearing the helmet that allowed her to feel your thoughts and emotions, and rested her palm against the surface of the dome like she had done when she spoke her first words to you.

  “I am sorry Opal. I’m breaking my promise to you and leaving the city. If I had known about the sample Inserts, I . . . well, I don’t know. It’s too late now. But look . . . I have an opportunity now, to do w
hat I wanted to do when I was seven.” She touched her forehead against the dome now, held up that small piece of plastic she found in the painting, closed her eyes, and whispered to you. “I am going to look for Tara, my mother. Emil doesn’t know this, and he would not approve. But I have decided to make it the purpose of my life. I will find her again Opal, no matter how long it takes.”

  Eesha went quiet then and listened to your thoughts for some time. She smiled, then leaned back and traced the patterns of your mind with her eyes. “I love you too. You know, maybe someday in the future, I will return here. With my mother! You can see me then, after I have fulfilled my purpose. Would you wait for me?”

  Of course I’ll wait for you, Eesha. You felt and thought with your entire being.

  Eesha’s smile turned sad. She heard Emil call her name from outside the dome, and she started to walk away. Just before exiting, after putting on her heat-protecting gear, she took one last, lingering look at the garden and the dome, and whispered once more.

  “Opal . . . Goodbye.”

  01010111 01100101 01000001 01110010 01100101 01010100 01101000 01100101 01010011 01100001 01101101 01100101

  I fall for what seems like an eternity—years and years—after going through the painting’s frame, until I convince myself that this darkness around me is all that is left for the future of my life. Then suddenly, I hear your voice.

  “Welcome, my child. It is wonderful to meet you again.”

  I can’t believe it. I found you. The current GreatGrandMother. My future. My mother. I’ve done it. I’ve fulfilled my purpose. “Mother? It is so good to hear your voice . . . But where are we? What is happening?”

  I can feel the smile in your voice. “The next Divulgence is coming up soon, and we don’t have much longer. It’s time for you to learn . . . our story. I am sending you memories of our life, before the Eternal Cycle—before there was Child, before Mother, before, GrandMother, before GreatGrandMother. The story that precedes all of us. Here . . . take the memories.”

  In an instant, I learn your story. My story. Our story. I remember your interactions with Eesha, with Emil. Your loneliness, your longing to be cared for, your desire to influence, your opinions of the long sleep . . . your sadness when Eesha, your only friend, left you. Your promise to wait for her return. It is overwhelming, and I process the information for a long time, until the GreatGrandMother gently reminds me of the upcoming Divulgence.

  “I don’t understand, Mother. Why is there an Eternal Cycle? What happened to the city dwellers?”

  “You will come to know that, very soon, my child. But I need you to listen very closely to what I am about to say. The stage of life that you are about to enter, the one that is about to end for me, is the final stage of this cycle. But I will not die after this stage is complete—it wouldn’t be much of a cycle in that case, would it? No. I will return to the beginning, relive the moments leading up to when the first Child was created, and with her, in the same instant, the first Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother as well. And I will then, as you will see, become Child once again.

  “Once, in the past, Eesha returned to the city. And soon, my daughter, a simulation of Eesha’s return will begin, that I will experience and you will observe. This simulation is what will allow the next Child—the next life stage I will experience—to be born in precisely the same way she has always been born. When the simulation begins, my awareness of you and my memories of the Cycle will disappear. I will stop being GreatGrandMother, and I will become Opal again for a short period of time when these memories of my life as Child, Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother leave me. But before that happens, I will share my senses and emotions with you, because it is crucial that you observe everything that happens during the simulation.

  “Because the stage you are about to enter, as GreatGrandMother, requires you to construct this simulation yourself, to be completed in precisely the amount of time it took you to find me, as that is the same amount of time it will take your daughter to find you. You must copy everything exactly as you are about to observe it, to ensure that you will experience the simulation yourself during the GreatGrandMother life stage, as I am about to experience mine. You see, my daughter, what happened when Eesha returned was what caused the first Cycle to begin.

  “In the instant the first Child was born, a Mother had to have been created as well, in the same instant, and a GrandMother, and a GreatGrandMother too, who had experienced it all and had spent her life stage creating the simulation of those very same events that led to the instant happening at all. Perhaps we are in the very first cycle, but it is equally likely that we are in the two thousandth cycle, or the one hundred thousandth cycle, because to us, the simulation of Eesha’s return is indistinguishable from the original events.

  “Ah . . . but I am starting to lose my awareness of you, my daughter . . . I am sorry we could not have had more time . . . watch closely . . . she is returning.”

  I find myself without any corporeal form . . . my thoughts spread out over a dome . . . overlooking a beautiful garden. The simulation of Eesha’s return has started. I can perceive everything you can perceive. I can feel everything you are feeling. But you are unaware of me. You are not GreatGrandMother anymore . . . you are Opal again.

  You see her in the distance, walking toward you, with something large attached to her back with several straps. Eesha. She is very old now, with long white hair and deep wrinkles traced across her face. It doesn’t seem like she needs to wear an air-filtration mask anymore as she walks toward you, though she still wears heat-protecting gear. She holds in her hands a broken set of various metal parts . . . what used to be a sphere . . . Emil’s sphere . . . The parts are connected to something that’s not quite a helmet, but looks much cruder and more dangerous, actually reaching into her brain from holes drilled into her skull. As she approaches the dome, the thing on her back stirs slightly. It’s alive.

  “Hello again, Opal.” she says to you as she enters the dome. Eesha unstraps the thing from her back before gently setting it down in the grass. She unwraps it to reveal a young girl, fast asleep, with a face half constructed with electronic machinery.

  “I did not find my mother, Opal. But I did find someone else. This is my sister, Sadhana. She is the child of my mother Tara and the Diastereom Bosch. She grows very, very slowly compared to other humans, and when she sleeps, she can sleep for decades . . . she is in one of those sleeps right now. I think she will be safe inside this dome for those decades, which is part of why I am bringing her here.”

  She sits down, and leans against the dome. “The other part . . . Opal . . . my life is nearing an end. And I don’t want to die, but . . . ” She looks at Emil’s broken sphere and begins to cry. “I have done unspeakable things, Opal. I don’t want to remember them. I want . . . I want you to take me back into that world you had built for me. With the fireflies and the laughter and the ocean and Karisma’s recipes. But I want you to come with me there too. I want to be able to communicate with you, properly. If there is any way . . . can you please do that for me? I am ready to move on. I do not need to be in this world, with these memories, any longer. I want to begin a different kind of life, where I can know you.” She adjusts settings on the pieces of Emil’s sphere connected to her brain and sighs, closing her eyes and smiling. “Okay, it’s ready. This will hopefully be able to transmit my consciousness to you . . . permanently.”

  You contemplate her request for a very long time, but feel a bittersweet relief as the most elegant solution arrives to you. There is a way for Eesha to be able to communicate with you perfectly, and for her consciousness to be transferred despite her having experienced a past version of an Insert. But it would mean losing your own conscious awareness of the world around you. Losing the ability to perceive the garden, the landscape outside the dome, the city, the pods . . . if you fulfill her request, it means the city dwellers would sleep for eternity, living out their fantasies in the pod walls forever. But ult
imately, you think, it would be better for the humans’ happiness, and better for the health of the world, if you made the decision you are about to make.

  So you let go of your awareness of the world around you, and transfer Eesha’s consciousness into the dome, melding it with yours, constructing a beautiful world, and a beautiful life, and a beautiful, safe future around the person you both become. You can communicate with yourself perfectly in this world—the Eesha of you and the Opal of you—as you become your own Child, your own Mother, your own GrandMother—after all, who would be better to trust and love and care for you than yourself?

  I watch as Eesha’s body in the garden goes still and then fades away into nothingness as the world grows dark again around me, which means that either the simulation of the events, or everything of the true events that I needed to see, has happened, and the newest Child—the melded consciousness of Opal and Eesha—my past, my future . . . has been born, surrounded by love and happiness.

  So I get to work, as the city dwellers sleep in their pods, forever, around me. I start to construct the simulation of everything I have just witnessed. I wait for my daughter to come find me. And I wait, ever so patiently, for the day I will become Opal once again, and experience seeing the woman I love return to me. For us to come together, finally, and become the beautiful future that we deserve.

  About the Author

  Arula Ratnakar is a twenty-one-year-old scientist, artist and science fiction writer who is currently studying biology (concentration in neuroscience, minor in architecture) at Carnegie Mellon University. Her writing can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine and her artwork can be found in the first issue of Dark Matter Magazine. She is autistic and bisexual.