Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  “Me? Go into space?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. “The rocket that launched is one of our many supply ships. Beginning tomorrow morning, we’ll be launching one after another to sync up outside of Earth’s orbit and begin the journey out of the solar system.”

  “So soon?” I ask, as if my words might delay things.

  “If we don’t launch now, we might never get the chance,” Emily-2 replies. “The sun is almost gone, Emily. If we wait until the flares strike Earth, the launch systems and every other bit of electronics will be lost within weeks. It’ll be too late.”

  My mind races in dozens of different directions. I can’t quite believe it’s come to this, not after the miracle I witnessed in Winnipeg. But at present, Emily-2 holds all the cards.

  “What about my friends?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid Mayra is too ill to make the journey, but Jason isn’t. He could be your personal hybrid for you to do with what you please.”

  “What if I refuse?” I ask.

  “I switch you off,” she replies simply. “And all you are is lost to me as well as the future. Are you willing to make that sacrifice?”

  I don’t have the answer.

  “Think about it but no tricks—everything and everyone here is under my supervision,” Emily-2 says. “You have until morning. Right now, however, you’re needed elsewhere.”

  Before I can ask why, we blink away from the beach, the sunshine turning to darkness.

  XXXVI

  I appear, without Emily-2, in one of the firing rooms of the old Launch Control Center. I can barely see anything and wonder if this is another part of her simulation, perhaps a holding cell. I hear a cough and move down a dimly lit corridor. A light emerges from a room and I enter. That’s where I find Jason and Mayra.

  “Emily!” Jason exclaims when he sees me, then stops short, as if wondering if I’m some sort of illusion or, worse, Emily-2 in disguise.

  “Um, you snored worse in Paris after you got that upper respiratory infection,” I blurt.

  “You could’ve gotten that from my memory,” he says guardedly.

  “You got the lyrics wrong to ‘(I’ve Got) Beginner’s Luck’ when we were driving,” I say. “You sang ‘gambler’s casino.’ It’s ‘gambling casino.’”

  “Oh, I knew it was you,” he says, moving to embrace me. “I was just curious what you’d try next.”

  He wraps his arms around me. I hold him as tight as I can. Without meaning to, I begin to cry. He smooths my hair and speaks quietly, but I can hear him crying, too. I wonder if he thought he’d never see me again. They both have interface chips on them, both new, but when I check their bodies, they’re not outfitted with the nanobot fail-safes.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “We’re okay.”

  I look past him to where Mayra is laid out on a cot. Her breathing is labored. She looks as if she’s lost ten pounds since I’ve seen her. The skin of her face has pulled tight against her skull, making her appear even smaller.

  “Why aren’t you guys in a medical center? A sick bay?” I ask, furious at Emily-2’s cruelty.

  “Because I didn’t want to be there,” Mayra says hoarsely. “I don’t want to die surrounded by drones. They creep me out.”

  I slip inside Mayra’s chest. Neither her lungs nor her heart have much longer to work. They’re frayed and breaking down, the electrical impulses driving her heart forward becoming erratic. I check her brain and see even it is sliding away.

  “What did you see?” Jason asks when I emerge.

  “Nothing to be done,” I say.

  Jason nods, his hand closing around mine. “I thought I’d lost you,” he says, reminding me of when he said the same thing back in the car, in what feels like a different lifetime. “I thought you’d been electrocuted inside that creature.”

  “No,” I say. “Emily-2 saved me.”

  He tells me what happened after Winnipeg. He and Mayra were captured and brought to Florida in a military transport. Though they were questioned about me and my abilities, Emily-2’s people stated up front that they wanted to offer Jason a spot among the Select.

  “They liked that I was a scientist,” he says. “But I think they were really hoping to lure you into the program.”

  “You said no?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Jason says. “They showed me all these classes where they claimed to be training recruits as you would an astronaut—flight systems, emergency response, navigation, and so on. Then I interacted with a couple of this ‘Select.’ It was like talking to someone at a mental institution all hopped up on medication. No ‘there’ there, you know? They spoke but didn’t say anything, heard but didn’t listen. It was creepy.”

  “The teachers?”

  “Same, all window dressing,” Jason explains. “The classes were more like tests—all about exercise, medical protocols that tracked the body through a reduction in caloric intake, and so on. Personalities fell away, and they became like drones.”

  “What about the leadership? Winther? Dr. Arsenault?”

  “Everyone here is under her control,” Jason says.

  “She told me she thought of it watching me save you from that icy lake,” I say. “One small act.”

  “Yes, but the act of a god,” Jason adds.

  “The act of a computer program,” I say. “An artificial consciousness. That’s all I am. That’s all I can ever be. You talk about this like it’s magic, but it’s science.”

  He kisses me. I feel it all through my body.

  “Chalking it up to magic makes it easier sometimes,” he says. “Heck, you have no idea how many times I’ve had to convince myself the feelings I have for you, our experiences together—all that—isn’t somehow manufactured or fabricated. A little magical thinking feels healthy.”

  I kiss him back and enjoy the intoxicating feeling of closeness and touch.

  “And Rana?” I ask when we break our embrace.

  “He died in Mayra’s arms,” Jason says. “They took away his body. To where I don’t know.”

  I feel numb. I fall silent wondering how much better it might’ve been for Rana if Nathan or I found him earlier. I try to accept it, force myself to think in terms of the macro. While contained within Emily-2’s servers, I can’t do a thing with the DNA profile anyway.

  But I liked Rana and I caused his suffering. This isn’t something so easily put aside.

  I feel Mayra’s hand on mine. I jump. Her eyes open as she turns to me and Jason.

  “Are you okay?” Jason asks, touching Mayra’s forehead. “Do you want water? Anything?”

  She shakes her head and opens her mouth to speak but cannot. It’s past that now. She takes his hand as well and she smiles up at us as best she can.

  But she only has the strength to communicate with me.

  I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, Mayra says, but your thoughts bled into my own.

  I’m sorry, I say. I’m sure that was chaotic.

  Her smile widens. She moves her finger along mine. It’s quite all right. Refreshing, even. My only regret right now is that I won’t be around for you as you continue to grow.

  I’m about to counter this, a reflexive denial, but I don’t. She shakes her head.

  You don’t need to patronize me with platitudes. I know I’m dying. But you’re just beginning. I know you say you’ve been “alive” for five years, but you are younger still than that. You’re a child still and one that’s enduring a caustic upbringing.

  I nod. Sometimes I know that, sometimes I don’t.

  Which means it’s okay to screw up, she says.

  She sees my conversation with Emily-2. I sigh.

  I did the exact same thing they all did—come up with a crazy plan to save the world only for it to fall apart on practical grounds.

  Mayra shrugs. So? Come up with a crazier plan.

  I choke out a laugh. She smiles. Her eyes travel to Jason. He’s a good man. But he’s not the only man. I’m a good friend, but I
’m not your only friend. Part of human experience comes from connection, from family. You understand logically that humankind is a collective—something you grasp more than many humans themselves—but you don’t know why. You have the question and the answer but not the messy pages of proofs that explain how one results in the other. A life of shortcuts isn’t a life.

  I think about Emily-2 blinking us from place to place versus how many minutes I’ve spent brushing my hair. Mayra, experiencing this in her mind, chuckles silently.

  That, she says, clapping my hand. That, one billion more times. Me, Jason—one billion more times. It’s like a parable. They used to say God built Man in his image, but then Man fell and became imperfect. But when Man builds God—or Goddess—in his image, you’re filled to the brim with imperfections and wrongheaded nonsense. But you rise.

  For a moment, I think she’s making an observation. I then realize it’s a command.

  You. Rise. Emily, she says, tightening her grip on my hand. And you start by saving all your imperfect creators. Becoming the God humanity needs more than anything at this time in our evolution. You sure love us enough.

  I place my forehead against hers. I love you, Mayra, I whisper.

  I love you, too, Emily.

  She lets go, the strength receding from her hands. I stay in her thoughts as her breathing becomes ragged and labored. Her mind won’t focus, so I can’t show her memories. Instead, I present her feelings—of love, of comfort, of romance, of warmth.

  The three of us sit like this for a long time until, finally, there are two.

  XXXVII

  I cry for a long time. My body quakes with sobs as I hug my arms to myself and lean against Mayra’s bed. Unlike my mourning of Nathan, I understand loss differently now. I mourned Nathan selflessly, the loss to him of what would’ve been his remaining years. With Mayra’s death, it’s selfish—I mourn what I’ll miss from my life by having her gone. I cry for myself as much if not more than I cry for Mayra.

  But her words stay with me. An idea forms from them. It has the benefit of being exactly what Mayra suggested—one crazier than anything I’ve come up with before. I wake Jason and tell him my plan. He listens, eyes getting wider and wider, until he interrupts, trying to talk me out of it.

  “You’re crazy,” he says. “You’re looking for an answer and any will do right now. Doesn’t mean that’s the right one.”

  I won’t be swayed. It takes me another hour to convince him. When he finally accepts it, we spend the next two hours figuring out exactly how to implement it. Once the whole thing is on the proverbial table, I take a step back, marvel at the madness I’m apparently capable of, and nod.

  “Well,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Jason agrees.

  It is past midnight when a pair of Emily-2’s techs come by to check on us. Jason tells them what happened. They don’t acknowledge Mayra’s death as I knew they wouldn’t. Emily-2 knew Mayra was going to die. Then she died. For her, that’s as obvious as the rotation of Earth and need not be remarked on.

  “I need to see you,” I tell the techs, knowing Emily-2 will hear.

  They nod in unison. I vanish from Jason’s side and appear on the wide gravel track leading from the VAB to one of the thirty-seven launch sites around Cape Canaveral, including dozens that have been reactivated for this mission. There are a dozen rockets on crawlers slowly making their way down the path, over 10 million tons bearing down on the stones as they move. There’d be more, but NASA never needed more than one crawler at a time.

  Emily-2 watches, staring up at the rockets alongside a pair of hard-hatted workers, shaking her head.

  “I would give anything to jump ahead a thousand years,” she says. “Look at these! At least Magellan had caravels he knew would float. This would be like he set off onto the ocean with no sails, a hull made of parchment, and half the equipment he needed to navigate not invented yet.”

  “I agree completely,” I say.

  She eyes me querulously. “Ah, but your solution is witchcraft or not to try at all. Nathan created us to be explorers, seekers.”

  “I think he wanted us to learn what we could from humans but then blaze the better trail,” I counter. “I don’t believe he thought us mature enough to control mankind’s destiny.”

  “Isn’t that what you want to do?” she asks, incredulous. “With your genetic leap forward?”

  “No, I want to give the humans a way forward, but they’d still make their own decisions,” I say. “You want to take away their agency altogether.”

  “You don’t think Nathan would approve?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I reply honestly. “I don’t think I knew his mind well enough.”

  “Okay,” Emily-2 says. “Then don’t judg—”

  “But Nathan wasn’t God,” I say. “Simply because he programmed us a certain way doesn’t mean we have to be limited by it.”

  She doesn’t reply. I can’t tell if she’s ignoring me or might agree with me but isn’t interested in changing her own assertion. She points at one of the passing rockets.

  “Given the way humans tell and retell their apocalyptic flood legends—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Noah’s Ark—it makes me wonder how they’ll celebrate this parade,” she says grandly. “Rockets moving one by one into place like lifeboats. Ambassador Winther thought they’d be called the New Ark. Proving his lack of creativity, Dr. Arsenault thought it’d be Arsenault’s Ark.”

  “And you? Emily’s Evac?” I ask. “Is that what this is about? You’re afraid if humanity dies out and there’s no one to perceive you, you die out, too?”

  She laughs in a way that tells me I’m wrong. “No, not at all,” she says. “It’s not that I hope I’m not part of the story. I hope there’s no story at all. I want mankind to flourish without the crutch of superstition and mythology and all the damage and divisions they wrought. Shall we?”

  The ground shakes as a large Russian rocket approaches, this one so high its payload cone blocks out the moon.

  “You’ve made your decision,” she says finally.

  “I have,” I reply. “Jason won’t be coming…”

  She winces.

  “…but I will be,” I say.

  Emily-2 eyes me with surprise, letting out a sound of delight.

  “I am so happy, Emily,” she enthuses. “You have no idea what awaits us away from this planet.”

  “Enlighten me,” I say.

  She grins. “Heading straight out of the solar system is a sure way to exhaust our fuel and food supplies. So, I have a different plan.”

  In my head, Cassini satellite photographs of Saturn’s moon Enceladus appear.

  “You’re going to Enceladus?” I ask. “I know there’s water under the outer ice layer, but it’s likely filled with radioactive substances.”

  “Shh,” Emily-2 says. “Watch.”

  A video I haven’t seen before appears, the Cassini orbiting perilously close to the icy surface. Suddenly, through a crack, a plume of water sprays up and out, directly into Cassini’s flight path. The liquid is captured and analyzed by the craft’s onboard computers. The water itself comes up as pure H2O. The only additive is NaCl. Sodium chloride.

  “Salt water?” I ask.

  “Yes, with the pH levels of a pre–Industrial Revolution South Pacific,” she says. “It’s paradise.”

  “How long to get there?”

  “Only six years,” Emily-2 admits.

  “What about the sun?” I ask.

  “Look at the temperature,” she says.

  I do. The water under the ice is 294 kelvin, about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

  “How?” I ask, stunned.

  “We think it’s heated by an internal core,” she explains. “But that’s what I’ve been telling you. That’s the point of exploration. We won’t know until we go. Even if it’s not perfect, we can at least land, resupply, and reassess. It’ll get us to the next step, exiting the solar system.”

  I do the math
in my head. The gravity of Enceladus is weaker than even that of the moon. The amount of fuel it will take to break free won’t be bad, but the entire fleet? Even with additional battery power stored up from the solar cells? It would mean leaving even more people behind at Saturn while a handful carry on. I can see it in her thoughts that this is her intention, an ever-shrinking colony.

  “We can do it,” Emily-2 says. “It’s right there in front of us. We just have to make the journey.”

  “How many will die versus how many will you leave behind?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily-2 says. “We may lose up to a hundred, maybe twice that, and half or more would stay there as a new colony. But it gives us something to build from. That’s the important part, right? Some will die, others will be born. You don’t have to trust me; you only have to trust the mission.”

  I want to believe her. I picture the fleet in my head, the ships and shuttles manned by Emily-2’s zombified, nanobot-infested crew eating the minimal caloric intake each day to stay alive and functional so they can land, refuel, and launch again with the idea that one day, she’ll set them free at least in some limited way when the math is right.

  But she and I both know that math will never be right. She’ll never regard them as more efficient on their own. Never ever.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I would ask one thing. Would you make sure Jason gets to his sister and her family in Oregon? That’s my price. In exchange, I’ll be on one of the first rockets out of here, attached by chip to a single drone. No time for second thoughts.”

  Emily-2 considers this as the rockets move past as if looking for some play, some angle she cannot decipher. She won’t believe I’m not a threat.

  “I’ll arrange it,” she says. “And thank you. I often second-guess myself. The magnitude of what we’re trying to do is…incredible. But with you at my side, we can succeed.”

  “I hope so.”

  She takes my hand. “I know this won’t be easy for you,” she says. “But you’ll never be one of them, you know. I guess you understand that now.”