Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  “Yes,” I say. “It means you can adapt to new environments, including ones off-world. Space travel won’t have to be about preserving Earth-like conditions at all costs.”

  “Will it hurt?” one of the volunteers, a twenty-year-old man from Abuja, Nigeria, named Loyiso asks. “The transformation?”

  Loyiso is a devout Christian and writes incendiary articles for one of the nation’s largest tabloids on everything from illiteracy to cancer rates in the Niger Delta. Before Sunmageddon, he’d planned to segue into a political career.

  “No,” I say. “It’ll be as natural as blinking your eyes.”

  There’s hesitation. Then conversation. The eyes of my fellow astronauts meet. Heads shake. If I were Emily-2, I would simply take over their bodies and make them do what I believe is right. But I can’t do that. Not after all they and I have been through to get to this point. Either free will counts for something or it doesn’t.

  Finally, a hand goes up. Then another—Xavi is the second—and then nine more. It’s not everyone, but it’s enough. I’m relieved.

  “All right,” I say once it’s clear no one else will volunteer. “The rest of you will go on to your rendezvous. Those with me, we’re going for a walk.”

  The capsule moves at 20,000 miles per hour, but it’s not like we can feel that. When we exit through the airlock, as if merely to do an extravehicular activity, we’ll be going the same speed. It will feel perfectly natural. We will have our suits on, our air, and our radio connection.

  It’s only when we leave all of that behind that we will be breaking new ground.

  “The ISS is coming up within minutes,” I say when we get near-synchronous orbit. “Let’s go.”

  Though I half expect the airlock door to have been held in place somehow by Emily-2’s intervention, it slides away without a problem. One at a time, my brave team of eleven people—all from various walks of life, all who can’t quite rationalize how it is they find themselves in space—exit, attached only by the thinnest of safety tethers. Shelley closes the door back from inside, staring at us through the window as the capsule moves on into the darkness.

  I hardly blame her, but I don’t have time for sentiment.

  “I’m falling!” cries one of my team, a middle-aged man named Bryan. “I can’t hold on much longer!”

  It’s the suits. They still think of themselves as human. But the last humans they’ll ever know they left behind on the capsule.

  I appear to them in space without a suit, breathing freely in the vacuum. I slip into their minds, determine their language of choice, and speak softly to each.

  Breathe easy, I whisper.

  Now comes the interesting part. I go into their bodies and get to work splicing in Laney’s DNA strip. Though this takes less than a second, as I initially predicted, I still feel their eyes on me, as if they’re expecting their own surgeon to kill them.

  I concentrate on what I learned from Rana. The DNA was already part of his genetic code. There was no period of adjustment. Even more so, that was done on Earth, where a slip—hey, turns out Homo sapiens can’t be adapted to breathe nickel tetracarbonyl—could be reversed, as we were still in a human-friendly environment. Out here in space, the lives of these eleven people are in my hands alone.

  I look through the eyes of all eleven to the distant stars, the not-so-distant-anymore moon, and the drone-filled capsules receding in the distance. My God, I wonder, how did we get to this point? To a moment in which something this maddening, this unlikely, is the only solution that makes any sense whatsoever?

  “Okay,” I whisper in three languages. “Now, take off your helmets.”

  I cannot see their faces through their visors, but I hear gasps. I feel the fear. I know what I’m asking is for them to step off the edge of the world in a starker way than Emily-2 ever did. Maybe it really would’ve been less cruel to do this to drones, but it’s too late now. If they believe that humans have a right to survive, the moment to act is now. They don’t know their bodies have already begun to change.

  Carissa Meijas is thirty and from Salvador. She works in telecommunications and is a dancer—a tremendous dancer, a world-class dancer—with plans to move to Argentina. She is unmarried, no kids, no siblings, and even her parents have passed on. But she loves the world around her. She loves human expression.

  Carissa puts her hands on the front clip of her helmet, gets a finger under the handle, then pulls it forward. She turns it counterclockwise and lifts.

  I am within her body as it speeds up its evolution to meet the challenge of space. There’s a rush of pain and tension and panic. Her body begins to die almost immediately. But then her cells begin to rebuild her organs. There’s a great transformation as her heart, mind, and lungs adapt in an instant to these new surroundings. Her skin and eyes evolve next, followed by her mouth, nose, and ears. She is a new creature—distinctly hominid but so much more.

  I’m struck by an odd memory. Following a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, fish that have never been seen before washed up dead in India. They resembled other aquatic life as man knew it, but they had adapted over millions of years to conditions humans had never seen before.

  This is Carissa Meijas—the first posthuman to adapt to an environment not at all her own.

  And she is magnificent.

  XL

  Xavi and Loyiso follow Carissa immediately, but Caroline is terrified. She doesn’t want to become the monster she sees beside her. A couple of others feel the same way. I don’t know if I blame them, but we’ve passed the point of no return.

  “The ISS will be visible within seconds,” I say. “And we’re going to need to catch up to it. This may require me taking over your bodies for a moment. But I can’t do it until you’ve transformed. There are too many risks.”

  Caroline shakes her head even as another volunteer, Anat, a middle-aged Israeli who teaches economics at the university level, owns a dog but considers herself a cat person (?), and has always believed she’d get to space somehow but can’t believe she’s actually there, follows Xavi’s and Loyiso’s example.

  “Promise me,” Caroline says, “if we get through this and I want to be human again, you can remove the DNA.”

  I have no idea if this is feasible. Theoretically, sure, but in practice?

  “Done,” I say, kicking myself for lying but feeling I have no alternative.

  Caroline removes her helmet and evolves. I wonder how shitty a god I am if I can’t de-evolve her back should she wish it, but hey.

  The other holdouts join Caroline in removing their helmets. I hold my breath for each, waiting for their bodies to reject the DNA or the massive changes they’re going through, but it holds. While there may be side effects down the line to zero-G evolution, the research into that will have to wait.

  Once my team is assembled, I look across their faces. Though they have gone through immeasurable changes to bring them forward in evolution, they are no less individual. Their eyes are pulled deep into the skull. Their skin has become thick and rigid, almost like bone. In the absence of follicles, hair falls away. Their noses are perceptibly larger to accommodate the gases that now power their lungs. There are vestigial genes that continue to express themselves, keeping them unmistakably humanoid with two legs and two arms, an elongated torso, and personalized features such as eye and skin color. Each are somewhat recognizable as what their great-great-great-grand-descendant might look like after going through a hundred thousand generations while evolving and adapting to the vacuum of space.

  With a teeny, tiny amount of help, they’re able to do it in nearly an instant. Just like that, step three of my plan is achieved. Woot!

  I raise my hand as if to speak and realize that, visually speaking, I still look like a Homo sapiens. While I could upgrade myself to look like them, it would take real study to mimic their physiognomy. For me, it’d be like starting over from the beginning of my learning. I’m okay with that, but when I have more time. In the short term, I’
ll be the odd human-looking one out.

  “All right,” I say. “Let’s get to the ISS.”

  Along with new abilities relating to breathing in space—converting hydrogen and helium into a new chemical compound that alters the circulatory system to allow it to have the same effect as oxygenation—they also develop a new means of locomotion. Space being a vacuum means there’s nothing to push off against. So, the only way to alter direction or speed up comes from exhaling gas and altering its shape to careen forward at a slightly different angle in relation to Earth’s gravity. It doesn’t take much, but their bodies soon learn to, for all intents and purposes, fly.

  Or, to be slightly more scientific, alter their rate of orbit enough to prevent absolute, engulfed-in-flames catastrophe.

  Admittedly, I’m behind some of it, nudging things in the right direction just long enough for nature to take over and adapt. An updraft keeping a baby bird aloft as it emerges from the nest, but only long enough for it to discover it can fly. I may be the training wheels, but the versatility of the genetic sequence does the rest.

  As my mind reels with the possibilities, Carissa speaks to me from her mind.

  Emily? she asks. Why are the capsules getting bigger?

  I look back to the arc of white dots leaving Earth behind only to see a considerable number of them—no, all—are returning.

  Oh, God, I think. It’s Emily-2.

  I spy the ISS approaching and point. “There! Now!” I command.

  Like a school of anchovies, we alter course as one and dive for the ISS, building up the necessary speed to grab hold of the space station when it does come. It won’t be more than a minute before we make contact. I look back to the capsules. We’ll only just beat them.

  What’re you doing, Emily?

  Emily-2’s voice roars in my head like a roll of thunder. I remain calm.

  Look, Emily, I say, mentally indicating around me. What I said would work has worked. Humans can evolve to live in space. Isn’t that amazing? Now, I ask you what you so recently asked me—will you join me? Will you come with me as we take humankind into the future?

  I wait and wait. I plead with Providence and the Universe around me to move Emily-2 in the direction of my thinking. I don’t want her to play the villain. I want her to see there’s something better. But this would require her to put aside the narcissism that drove her to this decision in the first place, so I already know the outcome.

  She cares nothing for humans. She cares everything for control.

  You’ve gone too far, Emily, Emily-2 barks from somewhere unseen. Remember—you’ve left me no other choice.

  I have no idea what she means until I feel something bubbling up within Loyiso. Somehow, Emily-2 has found a way to hack back into the deactivated nanobots positioned throughout his nervous system and is fighting me for control of his very cells.

  “No, Emily!” I cry. “You’ll kill him!”

  But that’s exactly what she means to do. Slowly but surely, she overwhelms my own control and begins unzipping his new DNA. The effect is immediate. Loyiso’s body begins to de-evolve on the spot, throwing off my command and returning him to his Homo sapiens stage.

  “Put your helmet back on!” I cry.

  But that won’t do a thing if his suit isn’t pressurized. Loyiso spins away from the group like a wounded bird, fighting his constricting throat as his body rebels against its surroundings. I fight back from inside, but Emily-2 is too strong. I exist within the interface chips of these eleven people. Her processing power is far greater given the proximity of her micro-servers.

  I’m sorry, Emily, she says. But this is how it has to be.

  She seizes control of Loyiso’s mind and his hands reach for his interface chip.

  “No!” I scream.

  But it’s too late. He tears off the chip, severing his connection to me and allowing Emily-2 to take the reins. Loyiso’s Earth-adapted lungs expand in the absence of atmospheric pressure. The moisture within him begins to superheat. But it’s the lack of air that will strangle him, drowning in a vacuum. Within seconds, he is dead and drifting lifeless through space.

  My team, now reduced to ten, stares at me in horror.

  Who’s next? Emily-2 roars into our minds. Unless you come with me and return to your capsule, you will all die like Loyiso.

  Emily-2 fills their minds with images from within the other capsules. They see the other members of the Select, all drones, all making their way into space oblivious to all else. Their faces are blank, controlled from afar, their fates in Emily-2’s hands alone.

  Trying to convince people they’d be happier as slaves is the exact disconnect over the nature of humanity that has led Emily-2 here. All she’s doing is making it clear how disposable she thinks they are, which is the wrong message to send when trying to convince folks—folks who’ve seen you murder their comrades—that you’re the right choice to lead them into the great beyond.

  “We have to get to the ISS!” Xavi cries, waving an arm to lead the group forward.

  Everyone follows Xavi’s example, pushing harder than ever to reach the approaching space station. I am a non-entity, following now, not leading. Holding their bodies together as they go.

  Have it your way! Emily-2 shouts.

  She attacks all ten of the surviving members of my team at once. It takes some doing, but I’m able to repel her. The ISS draws near in its orbit, coming at us at 17,500 miles per hour. Already nearing that speed, we alter our angles again to get a slight boost from Earth’s gravity until we’re out ahead of the station and can decelerate and allow the station to catch up. Seeing what we’re doing, however, Emily-2 realizes she can’t pick us off all at once, so she turns her focus to killing us one at a time.

  A Scotsman in his late thirties—Bruce Osbourne, who prefers to be called “Oz” by one and all—is her first victim. He’s a medical equipment salesperson who jets between Edinburgh and Montreal, Canada. Recently married to a waitress at his favorite St. Catherine Street pub, he had plans to move to Canada in the new year. He is bringing up the rear when I feel the distant numbness of Emily-2’s concentrated appearance in his body. I try to fight it off but it’s like fighting a constantly evolving virus. By the time I come up with a cure, it changes configuration and the new strain swarms over my defenses.

  “Emily, no!” I yell into the vacuum. “You can’t do this!”

  It’s a desperate gambit to shift her focus to me and away from Oz, but it doesn’t work. She says nothing as she unzips the Scotsman’s DNA, causing his body to revert and his lungs to expand and rupture the same as Loyiso’s. His limp corpse falls away from the team like a downed kite, continuing to orbit but decelerating at the same time.

  I scream louder than I have ever screamed before, a keening wail of anguish and fury.

  Two down, nine to go, Emily-2 whispers. Soon it’ll be me and you.

  Leave them alone! I yell. If it’s me you want, come and get me.

  Soon, she says. You need to see what you’ve done first.

  I am about to respond when Caroline cries out. I turn back to her in time to see her body revert and rupture. Her last thought is of her boyfriend, Wyatt. She thinks of love and of hope.

  I don’t scream this time. I put my human emotions aside.

  It’s time to finish this.

  XLI

  We lose three more of the team before we reach the ISS. The capsules are close now and a couple prepare to dock with the ISS even as we close in on the airlock. Emily-2 unzips a young woman named Nuhari as she attempts to manually open the airlock. Her body bounces off a solar array strut, shattering into a cluster of cells as she falls away. But a moment later, the last four members of my team—led by Xavi—claw their way into the space station. I guide their bodies through a de-evolution, adapting to the human-friendly conditions inside the station, so they don’t even need to depressurize.

  “Where to now?” Xavi asks.

  “Service module,” I say, appearing alo
ngside him in physical form. “But we have to turn on the power first.”

  By the time we’re through the Russian-built docking module, however, we can hear the first two capsules attaching. In a minute or two, sixty of Emily-2’s drones will flood into the ISS. Even if I were in control of my team’s actions, I don’t think we could beat those odds.

  Emily-2 could continue to unzip the DNA of my team from afar, but it’s as if she’s realized she’d lose more members of her carefully curated Select. She’s gunning for me.

  My team makes their way to the service module and turns on the main power. Luckily, the solar cells are full. The station’s batteries are charged. The lights come on almost immediately and the computers begin to come online.

  Now, to find the radio.

  Yes, a radio.

  I jump between the eyes of my remaining team members until I spy the communications station through Carissa’s vision on the command deck. But it’s through her ears I hear the airlock clanking open on the U.S.-side docking module.

  Focus, Emily, I tell myself. Distractions elicit emotional responses. Block them out.

  “There’s the radio,” I tell Carissa. “Frequency 143.2—voice uplink.”

  Communications being what they are now, the use of a radio seems downright arcane. But for our purposes—namely, to reposition over two dozen satellites utilizing their CO2 cold gas thrusters into new altitudes and trajectories to maximize my broadcast—it will do fine.

  “You are up and ready for broadcast,” Carissa says.

  Of course, I have no voice. At least not one that any kind of machine could hear. Connecting someone’s interface chip to the ISS mainframe would get the job done, but we don’t have the time.

  “Repeat what I say,” I tell Carissa.

  I run the algorithms in my head one at a time based on the current position of each satellite, then spit them back at her. Carissa speaks the information into the microphone, and with a little bit—a lot—of luck her voice commands result in each satellite moving into alignment.