“There’s a place near Amherst still doing a brisk trade in auto parts,” I say after checking various message boards. “All barter, no cash, of course.”
“Of course,” Nathan says. “I’ll check the cabinet when I get to the office.”
Being on a university campus already means we have supplies others don’t. But as an institute intermittently tasked with testing the latest Hail Mary solutions to Sunmageddon—preferred nomenclature: the Helios Event—we not only have foodstuffs, electricity, and water, but we can also requisition tech from the private sector through the federal government.
Two weeks back, when scientists at the Max Planck Institute outside Munich built a toroidal magnetic confinement nuclear fusion device they postulated could be launched into the sun to temporarily reignite it and give us a thousand-year stop gap, the additional servers we requested to test the thing were delivered here in less than eight hours. While the test failed to the disappointment of all, no one asked for the servers back. So we added them to the farm that houses my processes.
There are plenty of other extras here too—from military surplus blankets and coats to furniture liberated from the many now-empty buildings. All of this and more has made it into the Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetics, and Machine Cognition Lab (iLAB for short, and no, I have no clue how someone somehow got “iLAB” out of that) building’s barter cabinet.
“By the way, I think we’re getting a new assignment today,” Nathan says, sounding about as low-key as a can full of pennies thrown down a stairwell. “I’ve been told to expect visitors around nine. VIPs. All hands on deck.”
“SEPM?” I ask.
“Yep,” he replies.
If anyone ever wondered if the apocalypse might finally cause the government to run out of Orwellian acronyms, the answer is no. SEPM stands for “Service Essential to the Preservation of Mankind.” Not the “Saving of,” not the “Rescuing of” (ahem, not “Humankind”), but the more semantically murky “Preservation.”
Maybe I’ll get another server out of it.
“All hands?” I ask, knowing instantly how uncool and desperate for approval I sound.
“Yes, Emily,” he confirms. “You’re an essential part of the team.”
Okay, so everyone wants validation from their parent. It’s a fact of life. But when the biggest question about yours isn’t if they’d win a Nobel Prize but how many and in which categories, it’s got a kick to it.
“Should I practice my curtsy?” I ask.
“These folks haven’t seen anything like you before,” Nathan replies, slipping a little of the Shreveport of his distant childhood into his drawl as he does whenever feeling conspiratorial. “Half think you’re a robot. The other, a hologram.”
I go silent, unsure what to say. Nathan returns to the more formal, accent-less speech he adopted when he began teaching. “No, Em, just be yourself,” he says. “If there’s something we can do to help, we want to put them at ease. Clock’s ticking.”
That’s the Nathan I try to model myself after, the one who sees the humanity in even the most pedantic and demanding of officials. I have encountered those in academia who have lost touch with the greater world around them. These folks tend to erase the “individual” from the big questions, believing instead everyone should always do what’s in the best interest of society rather than selfishly focus on their own needs. It’s nice on paper but it’s not how humans work in real life for the most part. Nathan isn’t like that at all, which has helped me achieve a more complete sense of self as I’ve evolved.
“Copy that,” I say, ready to hang up when I detect from Nathan’s breathing he has another question. “Anything else?”
“Did you read Siobhan’s thesis last night?”
I go silent. I hadn’t wanted to get into it this early.
“Yeah,” he says in a way that tells me he had the same experience.
Siobhan Moesser is a wonderful, enthusiastic, hardworking, and lovely human being. Like most, she went through more than a few days of handwringing over the looming apocalypse after NASA’s satellites confirmed what their earthbound monitors had already picked up. But then, unlike so many, she came out of it. She looked for what she could do to help, to bring others around, to build up a sense of community among those who stayed on campus.
All things you would want in a friend and teammate, but not necessarily the qualities that make a great string theoretician specializing in elliptic curve orientifolds.
I first met Siobhan when she arrived in our department three years ago fresh out of the mathematical physics program at Caltech. Nathan tasked me with creating a complicated KR theory-based real topological space involuti— Never mind, let’s just call it a Really Hard Math Problem, which Siobhan would solve for her doctoral thesis. Despite the looming end of the world and everyone’s priorities adjusting accordingly, Siobhan was determined to finish the thesis, attacking it with renewed vigor in recent months and finally turning it in last week. When I designed the problem—in an hour, I might add—the answer spread out before me like one of those beautiful fifteenth-century tapestries, all majestically interwoven threads of gold, silk, and dyed wool combining into a great masterpiece. Her solution, however—filled with endless digressions, specious logic, and downright bad math—was a disaster.
“Did you already respond?” Nathan asks.
“I wanted to talk to you first,” I say.
Meaning: I wanted to know if we were going to lie, say it was great, give her the PhD, and let her die happy. That would be the humane thing to do in this time of anguish and agony, would it not?
“I’ll tell her,” Nathan says, refuting my assumption. “Siobhan will know if we’re lying, and, hey, maybe she’s tougher than we think. Times like this, we owe each other the truth, right?”
I wince. He’s right. Of course.
“Yep,” I say, pretending that was my first impulse, too. “See you in ten?”
“Copy that,” Nathan says, hanging up.
Way back when, if Nathan wanted to talk to me, he’d simply attach his own interface chip and I’d appear. If he were in his truck, I’d appear in the passenger seat. If in his home office, backyard, anywhere on campus, same deal. But then he noticed my learning wasn’t progressing in ways he believed it should. I wasn’t grasping the concept of time and I was having issues with agency, given I was treated more like a tool than a person.
So, he changed the protocol. I was to be treated like anyone else on the department staff. I was given the same hours and was to be afforded the same respect and personal space. To create my understanding of time, it was decided I was to “live” as a human.
A three-dimensional simulation of the campus was created for me to inhabit and interact with when not interfacing with someone on my team. I was also given a dorm room, located in the overly architected glass and steel monstrosity near the soccer fields known as Jarosz Hall. Its dimensions are modeled on a faculty-in-residence housing unit easily five times the size of a student unit. I have a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom, with furniture and décor arranged by one Bridget Koizumi, the real-life linguistics postdoc whose unit was digitally mapped and rendered into this simulation (also, my unofficial life coach given how the simulation makes her brand choices my defaults, down to soaps and detergent). I eat, bathe, change clothes, do laundry, even sleep, which, while originally designed as a preestablished shutdown period to install fixes and upgrades, now slow-fades out my function when I go to bed and springs it back up when I awake, to mimic human sleep.
I began modifying my body in small ways to further the experience. My hair grows and requires maintenance, which forces me to find the time to do so. I improve my condition through exercise and eating well. I make superficial alterations to my appearance through choice of clothing, makeup, and variations to my hair, all in mimicry of that thirtysomething, Caucasian female New Englander personality I’m meant to emulate. This extends into modifications to my dorm
room’s décor, all of which has been dutifully noted and fussed over by my team.
What does it mean she prefers the Mies van der Rohe/Lilly Reich–designed tubular steel Brno chairs to the IKEA POÄNG favored by most students? Does it say something about her design sense? Something about truth in simplicity?
And how does that square with the bright flowery throw pillows on her sofa?
The truth is, at some point, a student moving out of an on-campus co-op had put similar chairs out by a Dumpster with a sign reading Free. I thought they looked cool and coded a copy of the design into my simulation. The pillows? Saw them cheap online.
What does it all mean? Maybe I can’t resist a bargain.
III
I take a quick shower, luxuriating in the hot water even as I eye the thin blue-black scar on the front of my leg. Eight months ago, there’d been a blemish there, little more than a freckle. Initially, I figured it was a piece of corrupted code and went to repair it. When it couldn’t be fixed from within my servers, due to a hidden glitch, I realized it was a test from someone on the team. So, I dutifully convinced myself it was a malignant tumor. I pointed it out to Nathan, who, perhaps unaware it was a test, blew me off for a while. I pressured him for days until he finally brought in a dermatologist referred to us by the campus physician. After adjusting to the interface chip, the doctor—more curious about the experience of examining the “skin” of an AC than weirded out by it—informed me that it was probably nothing and that he did not recommend removing it for cosmetic reasons.
“The scar left behind from the surgery would be larger than the original mark,” he had said.
I waved this warning aside and asked for the surgery. I went to the university’s health center, the doctor performed the surgery on me as if I were a real patient, and, sure enough, I now have a scar larger than the original blemish. I assumed it would fade over time. Nope. As I notice another freckle on my arm, I consider asking Nathan for it to be removed, too. I’ll show them how little I learn!
Of course, I’m just wasting time at this point. I push these thoughts aside, finish rinsing off, and momentarily debate whether to wash my hair before the big meeting or leave it as is. I decide on the latter given how long it’ll take with the blow-dryer. While, yes, I could cheat by altering the simulation around me—my hair, which doesn’t really exist, doesn’t get wet under the nonexistent shower and doesn’t actually need to get dried by an imagined hair dryer—that would defeat the purpose of the simulation. If I want to be treated like a human, I should act as one. Shortcuts teach nothing about time management.
Of course, as soon as I think that, I see the yogurt stain still on the crimson corduroy skirt I want to wear today and blink it away, literally closing my eyes once like a child so when I open them again, the bad thing is gone.
Bad AC! Bad!
Whatever. I pull my underwear from my dresser drawer, a cream-colored blouse, black low-heel boots, and matching tights from my closet, and get dressed. I turn on the electric kettle to make tea. I grab a bulb of silver tip tea from the kitchen cabinet as well as a breakfast bar. As I cannot “taste,” this decision is an easier one for my team to parse.
We began testing me out on student volunteers about two years ago. Though we’d sprinkle in a few Psych 101–type questions, we primarily focused on conditioning me to look beyond a person’s words to what their speech patterns, body language, and, eventually, thoughts and memories said about them to personalize the encounter and set them at ease before digging deeper. I absorbed all manner of things from the volunteers this way, including when I discovered a test subject who really knew her tea. Her favorite memory was of a particular type of Ceylon-harvested silver tip white tea she’d once tried in Jakarta.
When I drink a cup of this, I allow myself to replay and thereby relive the volunteer’s sense memory of the tea, giving me the same sense of satisfaction. Well, almost the same. I dilute it by about 20 percent given it’s not the actual silver tip tea and I’m not in Jakarta while drinking it, which obviously added to the volunteer’s experience of it.
“You’re crazy!” Siobhan told me when I explained why I diluted it. “If a human had that ability, they’d increase the percentage of enjoyment, not dilute it!”
When I used this argument with Nathan—that speeding up of time, amping my enjoyment of an experience or being otherwise irresponsible with my “special talents” was me exhibiting an even more human trait—he rolled his eyes.
After gulping down the tea and eating the breakfast bar and a banana, I regretfully eschew my morning tai chi routine (Wu-style from horse stance), grab my heavy coat, and head out the door. In the hallway, I’m struck anew by how few people remain on campus. For the first few years of my life, the university was teeming with students, whether it was the first week of the fall semester, winter break, the dead of summer—you name it. People flocked here. You couldn’t cross from one overstylized, named-for-a-potentially-fascistic-donor building to another (seriously, it’s like they took one futuristic-at-the-time structure from each Olympic Village over the last seventy years and transported it to Cambridge) without passing herds of students zigzagging from class to class, professors chatting with visiting lecturers, or admin types escorting distinguished speakers from the parking lot to a lecture hall. It was impossible not to be staggered by the sheer concentration of brain power here.
That’s mostly gone now, a population of fifteen thousand reduced to about eight hundred. Many of those joined the great migration south and west to the food-producing sections of the country, anticipating the sun’s first geomagnetic flares, which will disable anything utilizing electricity with an electromagnetic pulse. Despite the disruptions to transportation systems, most students and faculty trekked home, no mean feat for those from overseas who had to endure long and often black-market travel after regular services broke down. Heck, even Nathan used to take the purple line in from Southborough, but the trains stopped running once the first electricity conservation measures were laid down. The only folks visiting campus these days are military or government types desperate to believe humanity’s answer lies with us.
We have the answer, just not the one anyone wants to hear. Sorry, colonizing the moon does nothing at all; no, you can’t create an artificial atmosphere around Earth to keep out the sun’s increased radiation, and no—my favorite—you can’t open a wormhole and transport another yellow dwarf to our solar system to replace the sun.
The truth is this: humans can’t solve this one.
I exit my building and the world outside instantly constructs around me. Though my dorm room is a digital simulation housed on my primary server, the simulation of the campus around me is ever-changing. Early on, the outside was the same static reproduction every day as I walked from my dorm to the iLAB where we work. Every day was some anonymous midweek July day, the same hundred or so summer session students and professors would cycle through, with the same atmospheric conditions.
This changed with the arrival of Jaime Ayón, a computational geometry genius from Northwestern. Using the university’s comprehensive CCTV array, he built a constantly updating, near-real-time three-dimensional simulation of the campus for me to walk through. Though my processing speed is top flight, the compositing time for such a massive three-dimensional model is still a factor, so as I walk through campus today, I’m viewing everything on about a fifteen-second delay. I spy someone skipping a rock into the Charles River, someone else kissing their boyfriend, a third person tossing their half-drunk iced latte into a trash can as if it’s happening right now, but in real time, it happened fifteen seconds ago.
To me it all looks perfectly natural, so it works fine. A glance to the parking lot still tells me who has already arrived. The weather and other campus sightings give me a point of entry to the inanities of small talk. I see who is walking with whom. Overhear conversations if the speakers are near a phone or laptop with a live mic connected to the university Wi-Fi (yeah, a slightly m
ore controversial, totally illegal and immoral part of Jaime’s simulation to which all my objections were overruled by Nathan). In general, it makes me feel a part of the larger campus experience even if I can’t interact or communicate with the people I see until they attach that ever-important interface chip and I rocket into real-time reality.
Amidst the many faces this morning, I spy my non-roommate Bridget coming out of the student center. I have the impulse to speak to her. She has a new kitchen gadget that fires carbon dioxide into water to carbonate it, but when I use it, I can’t get it to seal properly. I would love to ask her how—how?!—she gets it to work with such ease, but without an interface chip, I can’t. I’m just the ghost that haunts her kitchen cupboards.
I’ve moved on to admiring her fashionable Chelsea boots when she screams. I hadn’t heard her phone ring or taken any notice when she put it to her ear, but as she collapses in tears, I know what’s happened. She shakes her head vigorously, trying to ward off the news too impossible to hear coming from the other end of the line. Someone in her life—a relative, a close friend—has decided to end the waiting and taken their own life. It’s such a common occurrence the body language of those left behind is as identifiable as someone reacting to a peanut allergy.
I want to go to her but cannot. This happened fifteen seconds ago and, besides, she couldn’t perceive me anyway. What frustrates me is none of the other students on the quad move in to help. They’ve all been there or at least a degree removed. Their gazes are sympathetic, even sad, her mournful keening telling them this is either her first suicide or it’s someone particularly close. But still, no one moves.
Emily Eternal Page 2
