“And now you mean to kill me, too,” I say, almost carelessly as I let any last feeling I might have for Siobhan drain away.
“No, Emily,” Siobhan says, shaking her head as she eyes me imploringly. “Nathan was willing to sacrifice you, but that was never our intention. We needed your help. Your expertise. You said you loved us. We ‘were a species worth fighting for.’ We wanted you to prove it. Yes, billions will die. We can’t change that. But mankind will survive. Your, well, I think of her as your sister, is helping us now, but she…she’s not like you.”
“Yeah, about that,” I say. “What did you mean by ‘sister’?”
“The Emily program we’re using to interface with the digital ark,” she says, a wry grin on her face. “Oh, that’s right—you still think you are the firstborn. No, your older sister was shut down before any human trials began, before we upgraded to you. She’s less sophisticated, far less experienced, but she also hasn’t watched idea after idea fail miserably to get us to this point, so approaches things with a little more optimism. A can-do attitude.”
I’m dumbstruck. I guess it makes sense there were earlier versions of my programming, but I had no idea they were still around. But…a sister? Maybe she’s logical. Maybe she can be reasoned with. If I can talk to her, if I can bring her proof of this evolutionary solution, maybe she’ll understand. Maybe she’ll even help.
“Huh,” I say. “Tell me more about this Select.”
XXVIII
I wish I weren’t smart. I wish I could take Siobhan’s hand, nod along as she explains her project, then canter down this yellow brick road she’s laying out for me, the two of us arm in arm. I really wish this idea of hers—theirs—my sister is helping them with was the magic bullet that comes closest to solving everything.
But really, it’s a sick joke undermined by mathematics, physics, and biology. And it gets worse with every word of Siobhan’s explanation.
“Once we explained the protocol to Emily—well, called Emily-2 by those of us who knew you—we tell her our preferred genetic traits, the ones we believe will help the Select colonists best survive the rigors of the journey as well as carry on the species, and she presents us with candidates.”
I want to ask how you select what genetic traits you pick out for an as-yet-unknown lunar or planetary destination but bite my tongue.
“How many people make up this Select?” I ask.
“Fifteen hundred,” she replies. “We’d like it to be more, but we have only the amount of space shuttles, capsules, and rockets available from the world’s space programs and private companies, as well as the fuel available to reach escape velocity from Earth’s gravity. If we had another year, even another six months, we could double that number. But right now, it’s the best we’ve got.”
This makes me think Nathan was going along with their plan hoping it might lead to something else. Fifteen hundred is a woefully unrealistic number. Five thousand, according to the various scientists our group at the iLAB consulted with when considering colonization protocols, is the absolute least number of people you need to recolonize the species, balancing birth and death rates, attrition through disease, and environmental failures. And even then, it is entirely theoretical and postulates Earthlike conditions.
“Fifteen hundred Homo sapiens means twelve tons of food, forty-five hundred liters of water, over seven hundred fifty thousand liters of oxygen—per day. Even if you recycle the water and air, that’s hundreds of thousands of tons of additional payload. And if you need nine pounds of fuel for every one pound of payload just to escape Earth’s gravity, you’ve got the heaviest rockets of all time. Once you’re in flight, I assume you’re switching to solar power, but with the sun in the condition it’s in, even that’s hardly reliable. You might get past Jupiter before you run out of fuel and supplies, but that’s at best. You really think killing all these people on Earth is worth it so the planet’s best and brightest can enjoy a slow death out in space?”
Siobhan scowls. “You sound like Nathan,” she says limply.
Bully for me.
“Should we instead do nothing?” Siobhan asks. “Roll over and die?”
“You shouldn’t murder people who have a different opinion,” Jason offers.
“Nathan threatened to destroy Emily to prevent us from using her,” Siobhan says. “It would’ve all been for nothing. Luckily, we found the earlier Emily program to interface with. Otherwise, the ark would be impenetrable. Your visual filing system can’t be read by computers and it would take a human decades if not longer to piece it together.”
Putting Siobhan and Argosy’s mad plan aside for a moment, I wonder—how did Nathan read the files? Unless…unless that was the point of all this. Who else but Nathan would’ve known there was an earlier version of me to access, much less to use to interface with the digital ark? It wasn’t Siobhan and Argosy who woke Emily-2; it was Nathan. Similarly, who else would’ve known how to hide her from me? He must’ve imagined—postulated, to use the scientific term—there might be something hidden in the genome that could save us. I wish he’d felt he could tell me.
Argosy’s plan is like a corruption of this idea. Fifteen hundred allegedly genetically superior people. But superior according to whose standard? It reminds me of the eugenicists of the early twentieth century whose prejudices informed who they thought should live and breed versus who should be sterilized. This isn’t so far off, a group of government wonks using traits evolved on Earth to line up some astronaut corps of supermen and women they believe the fittest of the species. But who the heck knows what traits will be necessary in perpetuating the species off Earth?
Wouldn’t someone who is super-strong on Earth suddenly find all that muscle mass a burden on a planet with higher proportional gravity like Jupiter? Or, conversely, at a loss when they came to weigh next to nothing on Pluto and their muscles began to atrophy? The same thing goes for speed and dexterity. Millions of years of evolution honing a human to hunt on Earth means nothing other than they’d be completely out of place in an extraterrestrial environment.
Better to have a few potentially genetically adaptable posthuman individuals rather than fifteen hundred mere humans who will die out a good few millennia before they begin to adapt to their new environments.
I turn to Jason, but he’s staring at me as if puzzling something out.
“What is it?” I ask.
But he’s not interested in talking to me.
“When did you say this Emily-2 was created?”
Siobhan thinks about this, then nods to me. “Emily’s been online, what, five years? Emily-2 was about two years before that.”
Oh. I see where he’s going with this.
“But the person she’s based on—the person I met—when was she a student?”
Siobhan eyes him with confusion, then turns to me, a wry smile on her face. “Oh. The ‘real’ Emily. Sure. When did you meet the ‘real’ Emily?”
“Stop it, Siobhan,” I demand.
“No, no,” she continues. “I’m curious. When?”
“In undergrad, on an exchange to Paris,” Jason says, walking into her trap. “Four years ago.”
“Huh!” Siobhan says. “That’s quite something. You have fond memories of this person?”
“Yeah,” Jason says coolly. “You guys did a pretty good job replicating her.”
“Oh, is that a fact?” Siobhan replies, eyes wide. She nods to me. “Looked like her? Talked like her?”
“Yeah,” Jason admits.
“That’s enough, Siobhan,” I say.
“Romantic, huh?” Siobhan asks.
Jason doesn’t reply, as if sensing something’s up. Siobhan turns to me.
“Tell me something, Emily,” she begins. “Was this an accident? Or did you do this on purpose knowing he’d be more willing to help you this way? More amenable if he already had—or thought he had—strong feelings for you? I mean, either way, well played. But from a purely scientific standpoint, I’d lov
e to know how gifted you are in your deceptions. I’ll bet all of us would benefit from this information.”
I can’t even look Jason’s way. I don’t want to know what he must think of me right now. Nothing good comes to mind.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Mayra says.
“There’s a second me,” I tell her. “But she’s different.”
“How so?” she asks.
“We have the same sort of digital DNA,” I say. “And she’s probably had a few of my experiences replicated into her so she has a sense of the real world, but without the mental pathways opened up by learning on her own.”
“Ah,” Mayra says, as if looking for a way to lighten the mood. “You’ve lived your life. She’s just trying to pull off your look.”
“Something like that,” I say.
Siobhan doesn’t look interested in answering any more questions, so I simply return to her mind. I get a slight shock when I see how accurate Mayra’s tossed off remark is. When Emily-2 created the physical image of herself after getting rebooted, she copied almost precisely how I self-visualize. It makes her look like my twin, albeit slightly younger, possibly a bit prettier. What a strange decision to make.
But as I dig deeper into Siobhan’s interactions with her, I see how different Emily-2 and I really are. Emily-2 lacks the grounded ethical core I received through interfacing with so many hundreds of volunteers over the years. When the scientists working for Argosy, led by Professor Arsenault, in concert with—big shock—Vice President-turned-UN Ambassador Winther, explained to Emily-2 what they needed, she acquiesced right away. Unencumbered with a sense of morality or the rights of the individual, she was happy to be a part of the team.
I step back out of Siobhan, shaking my head. “So that’s it? Nathan and everyone else had to die so you could perfect this little master race of colonists?”
“No,” Siobhan retorts, indignant. “It’s to determine, with the greatest scientific accuracy we could muster, which among us gives the species the best chance to survive this mass extinction event. I know how it must sound to you. But the time for debate was over. We had to act. When Columbus set out with his three ships and eighty-seven men, he didn’t know if he’d be successful. But then he was, and it changed mankind forever.”
“Yeah, because the diseases he carried with him wiped out a hundred million indigenous people, and the religion and lust for conquest that followed killed almost everyone else,” I say. “Any solution that doesn’t take into consideration the needs of the whole is not a solution worth pursuing.”
Siobhan snorts. “Again, that’s what Nathan said.”
This gladdens me. Without asking, I search her mind for context and find Nathan protesting to Dr. Arsenault on the morning he died. He has another idea, he says, a breakthrough he never saw coming. Better than the digital ark, better than some kind of haphazard evacuation of a few hundred colonists. It won’t simply save humanity; it’ll lead it into the future.
Too bad the details of this would prove to be beyond their limited comprehension. He’s laughed at and dismissed.
“If you and folks like Nathan got your way, you’d let everyone die on Earth after sneaking your little digital ark into deep space,” Siobhan says. “That’s not survival. That’s…”
I’ll never know what Siobhan was going to say next. I slow the passage of oxygen to her brain long enough for her to pass out.
“She’ll come around in an hour or so,” I say to Jason and Mayra. “We’ll leave a knife by her hand so she can free herself.”
“I don’t know if I got all you guys were talking about, hon,” Mayra says. “Do we have a new destination?”
“Winnipeg,” I say. “It’s time we find this Shakhawat Rana.”
XXIX
Mayra informs us she needs a few minutes of rest before leaving. I don’t blame her. She retreats to the master bedroom, admonishing us to wake her in half an hour. I head upstairs as well, only to find myself anchored in place. I glance to Jason, whose chip I’m interfaced with, and nod.
“We should look for supplies,” I say.
But he’s found a chair and is sitting down, his face contorting as if he’s puzzling something out. The lie, I realize. He’s still angry about the lie.
“Come on, Jason,” I say quietly, attempting the stairs again. “We can talk about this while we search.”
But I still can’t get to the top step. That’s the trouble with being in interface. I’m geographically tied to the chip. So, if the person wearing it doesn’t budge, I’m not going anywhere either. This is fine in normal circumstances, but if you’re in a fight? I mean, how’s that for a way to force people to engage with one another?
“Jason, I—”
He rises and moves to the stairs without a word. He takes the steps two at a time but doesn’t pause when he reaches me, instead, simply passing through my body as if to remind me how immaterial I am.
That’s how it goes for the next twenty minutes as I’m made to follow Jason from room to room, enduring his silence as he searches for supplies. Only, he does so with such a single-minded focus as if to convince me he’s just that determined and definitely not, 100-percent no-way-at-all ignoring me.
I get it. I wish I had a simulation to blink off into for a while just to give him some space. But I don’t and we’re out of time.
When next he goes to brush past me, I step directly into his path, daring him to walk through. He grunts.
“Are we going to talk?” I ask.
He glances out the window. As if the answer can be found in the snow-covered backyard.
“Talk about what, Emily?” he asks.
“If you’re going to sulk, I’ll go wait with Mayra.”
As soon as I say this, however, I worry I’ve gone too far. When my team became frustrated with me back on campus, they always turned it inward. As if they’d done something to screw up my programming they would have to repair. To have someone actually angry with me because of my own actions is a new experience for me and not a pleasant one.
“If I wasn’t with you in Paris, was there someone else?” Jason asks finally.
“Yes. Her name was Sandrine.”
He nods, then turns his head as if trying to shake something off. My words not squaring with his memory of events is driving him nuts. My attempt to remain aloof collapses in a pile of guilt.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” I say, taking his hand even as I catch sight of Nathan in a nearby family photo. Boy, would he be disappointed in me right now. “It was an accident, a really serious one. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“So how did it?” he asks.
“Well, when I was in your memories on the first day, I…I found myself attracted to you. Everything had been so chaotic I imagined it was me instead of her in these recollections of yours, which, I didn’t realize, overwrote what was there. It was me playing out a fantasy, but it had the effect of chemically altering your memories. I had no idea I had the ability to do that. My team didn’t either.”
“And then you lied about it,” he says. “Why?”
“Because I was afraid you’d turn off the interface chip for good if you didn’t think I was the girl from Paris.”
“For someone so focused on the rights of the individual, this is a pretty big violation. Can you imagine the implications of this? I truly believed—believe—I’d been infatuated with you. If you can literally place thoughts in people’s minds, you can influence them in all sorts of nefarious ways.”
“I know that now,” I say. “And I’ll never do it again.”
“What about other side effects of all this?” he asks, still flinty. “What else do I have to worry about happening as your symbiotic host through all this?”
“Nothing else,” I say. “I mean, I hope nothing else.”
He scoffs, but I hope he knows I mean it. He steps back into the empty kitchen, staring around at the evidence of the Wyman family’s life. The patterns on their dishes,
the wallpaper, the notes tacked on a nearby pegboard. It reminds me of my relationship with Bridget Koizumi, haunting the life of another.
“You know, in non-evil terms, you could do a lot of good with that,” Jason offers. “Help people with brain injuries who need to relearn old skills, reestablish synapses to long-term memories. Might be applications in the field of dementia, too. Could even extend to any kind of learning. The possibilities are endless.”
I’m surprised but nod. Jason has every right to be infuriated over this violation right now—which I’m sure deep down he is—but instead he comes up with altruistic applications of my blunder. I’m not sure if he’s trying to make me feel better or just saying what occurs to him, but the result is the same.
“So, what happened to Sandrine?” he finally asks. “Was it really a great romance?”
“No,” I reply bluntly. “You both said you’d write. She did. Twice. You didn’t write back.”
“I don’t remember that,” he says.
“Can I show you?”
He nods. I dive into his memory and bring the e-mail forward, one that arrived a few weeks after he returned to the States. He reads it quickly, then shakes his head.
“It really is gone,” he says. “I thought it would spark something, but there’s…nothing. Not even a memory of a memory.”
“Well, that’s something else.”
“What?” he asks.
“It wasn’t that romantic,” I explain. “You were both kind of forcing it, like, ‘Oh, a Parisian romance!’ But she wasn’t over her old boyfriend and brought him up enough to let you know it.”
I watch him try to rationalize this with his current memories of Paris. He can’t.
“It’s crazy,” he says, shaking his head. “In my mind, it’s this great romantic adventure. Everything is so poignant. So incredible. But it’s all you.”
“No, that’s us,” I say. “You and Sandrine didn’t really know each other. It was kinda boring? With me, I was cheating, reading your mind, as this was fantasy. We got to know each other in minutes. Nothing held back, no mind games.”
Emily Eternal Page 17
