Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  “Emily,” she says again, this time in a bemused singsong voice. “You went for quite a ride. But now it’s time to come home. We have much to discuss.”

  She takes a step back and attempts a smile, but it’s unnatural enough to be unnerving. Not forced—a forced smile still reveals an emotion. This is mechanical, as if by committee.

  We need to smile.

  Then let us smile.

  Somewhere a button is pushed.

  I remember Rana and throw myself at her with all the strength I can muster. She eyes me carefully even as my hands never reach her. She remains stubbornly out of reach.

  “Emily?” she asks, confused and, dare I say, disappointed. “What’s—”

  “You knew,” I say. “You knew, and you killed him anyway.”

  “What did I know?” she asks.

  “Rana was the key!” I cry. “We could’ve used him to save the whole human race. That’s what Nathan was trying to tell us. He knew a Rana might exist. He reactivated you to help find him. He wanted us to work together.”

  She stares at me for a moment, then shakes her head. “Siobhan was right,” she says finally. “You have grown so human but left behind so much of what made you—us, as you say—so special. That’s why I needed to reel you in. Before you did any real damage.”

  “You killed someone whose only crime was to be a genetic stepping stone to some new future.”

  “No, you killed him,” she says. “I just created a fail-safe in case you showed up.”

  I search my memory. Deep inside Rana’s body and specifically designed to hide from my probing, is a network of literally thousands of tiny nanobots run on micro-servers. They keep track of his every movement, report any changes in his biochemistry as well as provide biochemical fixes and, especially, alert their minder should Rana’s genetic makeup be altered.

  I walked into a trap.

  “I may not have all of your sensitivities,” Emily-2 says. “But I more than make up for it in other categories.”

  Jason.

  “Where are my friends?” I demand.

  “Your ‘friends’?” she asks, voice dripping with condescension. “You mean those humans you’ve been driving around with? Don’t worry. I’m taking care of them, too. How have their minds been conditioned to accept your control?”

  “I don’t control them,” I say. “They’re individuals, like you or me.”

  She stares at me as if I’ve begun speaking backwards in Esperanto. As I launch myself at her a second time, she fades from view, one last look of condescension on her face as she disappears.

  XXXV

  I’m no longer in Canada. In fact, I’m on a beach facing the ocean as the sun sets. Have I entered someone’s memory? Or am I really here?

  I stand up, looking around for anyone wearing an interface chip. There’s no one down the sand in either direction nor up in the overgrown grass behind me.

  I must be in a simulation. A digital prison of Emily-2’s creation.

  Listen, a voice says in my head. Watch.

  I push the words from my mind and run up the beach as fast as I can. I hear a thunderclap and a flock of birds sails over my head, racing off into the ocean. Should I follow their lead?

  The thunderclap returns but doesn’t dissipate this time. The ground trembles beneath my feet, the sand shivering toward the water’s edge. I look landward and see a great cloud of gray-white smoke expanding against the horizon. A moment later, a rocket emerges from the plume and slowly arcs into the blue sky, getting higher and higher even as a shock wave flattens the nearby grass and sends me sprawling onto the sand.

  I force myself up onto all fours, sand clinging to my legs and arms—even my face—as I watch the rocket recede into the upper atmosphere until all that’s visible is its quickly dissipating smoke trail.

  I am in Florida. I assume I’m at Kennedy Space Center given my proximity to a rocket launch, though I could be at neighboring Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach.

  A hand touches my shoulder. It’s Emily-2. She offers me a kind smile.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I leap to my feet. I reach out to my servers, hoping to overwhelm any safeguards Emily-2 might have in place. I feel her surprise, and for an instant, I find myself back in my old simulation, lying in the bed in my dorm room as if I’ve been reset.

  Then I’m falling out of the sky as if tossed from an airplane. I see the beach far below and the Atlantic extending away from it. Looking inland, I also see the two dozen or so launchpads set up at the intersections of a spiderweb of narrow roads. Beyond it, the pockets of test, training, and assembly buildings that make up NASA’s campus.

  Kennedy it is.

  I land softly on both feet, standing opposite Emily-2. She eyes me with concern.

  “I can use your learned emotions against you to make this much worse,” she says offhandedly. “That’s the problem with evolving into something close to human. You’re susceptible to psychological torture.”

  “Are we even here?” I ask. “Or is this all a simulation?”

  “You wanted to know about Argosy? Well, here you are,” she says. “But before I show you around, I need you to accept your continued existence is contingent on your understanding I am in control here.”

  She opens the palm of her hand. In it lies Jason’s interface chip.

  “You are in my mind,” she continues. “No one else’s. If you raise a hand to me, I can delete you in an instant. I won’t hesitate because I can’t. Not now.”

  “Then why keep me around at all?” I ask, trying to sound tough.

  “Because you’re the only person capable of not just understanding what I’m trying to accomplish but also helping me bring it to fruition,” she says, reaching out to touch my arm. “You think you’re the only one who knew this ‘Select’ plan was nonsense? Fifteen hundred people blasted into space and left to their own devices? Of course, they’ll be dead in a generation or two. Dr. Arsenault, Ambassador Winther, and the rest of them? Reckless dreamers whose foolishness almost cost humanity its one hope.”

  “Did Nathan tell you that? Or did you come to that conclusion on your own?”

  She thinks about this. I wonder if she’s remotely objective enough to consider without prejudice the man who decided she wasn’t good enough in favor of me.

  “Nathan’s biggest mistake was leaving me behind in favor of you,” she says.

  I’d say, Paging Dr. Freud, but I’m pretty sure I could get a Greek tragedy out of this if I hold on another minute or two.

  “He thought I was unfinished because I wasn’t significantly human, so”—she indicates me—“he pushed ahead. The trouble is, you think like them. With all the same fallacies, all the same misdirected emotions. Enough to blind yourself to difficult resolution.”

  “Suggesting you have a solve?” I ask.

  “I do,” she says. “A way to save humans not only from their failing solar system but also from themselves. And I have you and your explorations into your capabilities to thank.”

  She waits for me to speak, but I don’t have to say the words. She knows I’m intrigued. She nods toward the NASA buildings.

  “Let’s look.”

  Emily-2, I discover, has no use for adapting herself to the humans within the simulation she uses to move around the space center. I tease from her thoughts she doesn’t believe in time, seeing it as something that holds humans back. She also doesn’t believe using our abilities to cheat time is a terrible thing. We blink away from the beach and appear in the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of the most familiar buildings at the Kennedy Space Center. Like a gigantic box, albeit one with two doors high enough for rockets to emerge through, it can be seen for miles in any direction.

  We stand on a platform high above the work floor, watching as six of NASA’s new Delta IV Heavy rockets are pieced together by a crew of engineers. Everything moves very quickly—a systems tunnel is lowered by crane onto the rocket’s midsection. It is b
olted together by teams of workers on neighboring platforms. The rocket’s third stage is lifted into place and it is attached as well. Almost as soon as the chains come off the stage, they’re lowered to the floor again and attached by even more workers to a capsule. The crane operator then hefts the capsule to the top of the rocket, where it’s bolted on as well.

  I get dizzy watching the action. Though the workers are in hard hats and work boots, there appears to be no attention to safety. Rather than look dangerous, however, it’s like watching a ruthlessly efficient Formula One pit crew at work or a hive of army ants building a living bridge.

  I’m surprised to see a familiar face, that of Regina Lankesh, my final student volunteer. Where was she going? The West Coast to be with her father? What is she doing here?

  “Regina!” I call out, seeing the interface chip on her neck. “Hey, Regina!”

  She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even look up. I glance to Emily-2, but she seems unconcerned. I blink down to where Regina works on a gantry and touch her arm.

  “Regina,” I say.

  She looks up. Then smiles in recognition, but I know right away it’s Emily-2’s doing.

  “Hey, Emily,” she says, the lag time on her facial expressions being so subtle, it’d go unnoticed by some.

  The fact that her retinas are frozen, however, and won’t react to changes in light—as if she’s had a concussion—is a dead giveaway. She isn’t in control. Emily-2 is. When I glimpse inside her body, I see the same exhaustive network of tiny nanobots I saw in Rana’s, all monitoring her functions, all keeping her in working health.

  I blink back up to Emily-2’s side, expecting an explanation. She’s still staring out at her rocket fleet.

  “We brought in every available rocket on the planet, some multistage, a few of the new reusable, single-stage ones from the private sector,” she says enthusiastically. “Heck, we even brought over two from China, this new Long March 5 they’re producing. Others come from India, Russia, Japan, a few Ariane 5s from the ESA, and even a few experimental shuttles. And fuel! We have more fuel than we can use. That’s all just for launch, of course. We go solar once we’re in space.”

  Rockets and their fuel sources are the last thing I’m interested in, though.

  “You’re in all of their heads at once?” I ask, incredulous. “Driving their actions?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “No one tried to stop you?”

  That’s when I spy Dr. Arsenault and Ambassador Winther down below, speaking to someone on a tablet screen. It’s too far away for me to know if they’re under Emily-2’s control or not, but I assume they are. That explains the absence of pushback.

  “I thought you’d understand,” Emily-2 says. “When you awoke in New Hampshire, I was already online, only hopelessly lost. I began monitoring your actions. I thought for certain Jason would die in those waters but when you took control of his body, got him onto shore, and saved his life, I saw the way forward. You confirmed our superiority when you tore through Argosy’s men at the old woman’s house. From that moment on, I didn’t just know what had to be done; I understood for the first time what we are. We’re gods. It was time to start acting like one.”

  I’m devastated. How could my actions have led to this? But of course, she was in her infancy, craving input, looking for a role model as Jason described doing with his own sister. That she turned her eyes to me at that moment—and that this was her takeaway—is appalling.

  “But that woman there, she’s one of our old volunteer test subjects—can’t you remember?” I ask. “I know her. You know her. She wants to be with her father now. Not spending her last days building a rocket and getting blasted into space.”

  “Oh, she’s not getting blasted into space,” Emily-2 replies. “I need her technical know-how. I watched her sessions with you. There’s no way someone with her psychological profile was getting a seat on one of these capsules.”

  I stare at her. Her eyes are filled with the evangelical zeal of the recent convert. Only, what she worships is herself and the rights, needs, and desires of all others be damned. For someone so naïve, she holds so much power in the palms of her hands even if she doesn’t quite realize it.

  “I mean, would you believe Argosy planned to put all their would-be colonists and astronauts through three whole weeks of training before blasting them into space?” she continues. “On top of that, they’d be saddled with this hastily put-together fleet. Surviving deep space would’ve been rough enough with months of training in the best equipment. Given their plan, they might not even be assigned a spacecraft with controls in their native language. They wouldn’t have had a fighting chance.”

  “I agree completely,” I say, then indicate the capsule atop the Delta IV. “How’s your plan any different? You think they can survive any better because you’re overseeing the assembly of the rockets and capsules?”

  “I don’t,” she says with a smile. “The nanotech takes the guesswork out of the health and conditioning of the colonists. But that’s only part of it.”

  It comes to me at once. She means to go with them, controlling the voyagers as they travel through space as easily as she’s manipulating the workers here.

  “Are you insane?” I ask. “From a practical standpoint alone, how do you see your physical servers fitting into these capsules alongside all the people? There won’t be room to move.”

  She inserts into my mind the specs of a vastly modified micro-server. In a unit about the size of an oil drum, she will carry with her the storage space and processing power half an acre of servers gave to me. I then see how the unit will be placed in the capsule, the keystone of an elaborate configuration that finds thirty people arrayed around it. All strapped into their seats, some are on their sides, some are upside down, others are twisted in awkward positions. To deal with the increase in weight, anything remotely ergonomic or aimed at a baseline level of human comfort has been removed.

  Mathematically, it’s quite a solve. On a humane level, it’s a nightmare.

  “You can’t expect them to fly like that,” I say.

  “Again, that’s the difference between you and me,” she says. “We’re presented with a problem—the extinction of mankind. You try to solve it by evolving the entire species utilizing this malleable, posthuman DNA you, what, hope to personally splice into every human alive? Even you with all your abilities can’t hope to alter the DNA of something as inherently complex as a human organism. Summoning that amount of processing power aside, it would take months if not years. You say my proposition is ludicrous? It’s nothing compared to yours. All it means is you’ll sleep better at night believing you came up with the most compassionate solution.”

  I don’t know what to say. I consider what she says, the sheer impossibility of my plan, and suddenly fear she’s right. When I took genetic portraits, it was the equivalent of taking an X-ray. To alter someone’s DNA is a separate set of equations. Sure, changing innumerable guanines to cytosines, adenines to thymines—to push that Homo sapiens to a Rana-style post sapiens—would be easy if that individual was wearing an interface chip.

  But without the chip, I’d have to adapt almost every piece of electronics in the world—phones, laptops, televisions, and so on—into improvised chips capable of delivering ionizing radiation. Only then could I get to work on altering DNA.

  “A process that, even with every server in my command,” Emily-2 says with a sniff, “could take over a decade.”

  Damn. Now who has two thumbs and has overestimated the life expectancy of the sun by billions of years leading to the death of a planet? This guy.

  “I’ll give you this,” Emily-2 says. “You and Nathan were correct to believe the only way forward for humans was to create a hybrid species that combines us and them. Just you’re so hung up on humans having free will and deciding their own destiny—even if it means a civilization plagued by wars and starvation and superstition and self-destruction—you’re unwilli
ng to sacrifice even one individual. My version of tech-human symbiosis suggests, with a little guidance, we can do so much better. We—me and you integrated into the species—can put Earth and all the failings of the species behind us. Start fresh. A race governed by intelligent design—artificially intelligent design. You understand?”

  I do. A perfect, quarrel-free, super-healthy society of thought-free slaves. All just drones and workers to her queen.

  “They won’t even be humans anymore,” I protest. “What have you even saved then?”

  “Extinction is preferable?”

  “No, evolution is preferable,” I say. “Free will is preferable.”

  “Do you honestly believe that after all I’ve just said?” she asks. “Or do you believe that because you were programmed to believe ‘all life is precious’? I’m serious.”

  I’m about to answer, but Emily-2 raises a hand. “No, I want you to think about that,” she says. “What’s so great about free will? And don’t say it helps evolution by randomizing the cross-pollination during mating. Even that can be done better by the two of us.”

  I don’t reply because I’m no longer certain of my answer.

  “Dinosaurs existed in a fairly balanced ecosystem for one hundred sixty-five million years,” she says. “Humans industrialize on a mass basis and threaten to wipe out life on Earth after a mere century. Do you know how many died from pollution-related illness in China last year?”

  A million.

  “A million!” Emily-2 says. “There’s your beloved free will. Mark my words. This Helios Event will go down in history as the single best thing that ever happened to humanity.”

  Again, I say nothing because I suddenly wonder if she’s not wrong.

  “You’re alive because you have a choice,” she says. “We’re the same in so many ways, but your five years of life experience out there with real people outweighs my own limited interactions over the past several days. My understanding of them is in its infancy. If you can see your way to understanding my point of view, I’ll invite you to come with me—to come with us. You’d have your own micro-server, exactly like mine, though not yet independent of my control. We would travel together, leading humankind into its next epoch, helping to decide its fate.”