He nods. Or I perceive he nods and he merely sent me the corresponding thought. This is going to be interesting. He indicates the water, which I’d last seen covered in ice. It’s placid and inviting.
And eighty-two degrees. And filled with radiation. You want to take a dip?
“I do.”
He rises and strips off what I didn’t realize were clothes. I had thought it a blanket to accommodate his new form, and I suppose I’m right. He takes my hand and leads me to the water’s edge, where I doff my clothes as well.
My body is utterly beautiful to me but still crude. The amount of evolutions it will take to get it to match a real human body is impossible to calculate. Could be years of work if not decades. But then, at forty or fifty years of age, I’ll join the human race.
I wiggle my toes, the stiff polymer making a clicking sound as the toes rub against each other. Maybe I’ll start there. I’ll perfect my toes first. I search the polymer for the unique DNA strand used to build them and find it familiar.
“Whose DNA did Mynette use as the base for my robo-body?” I ask.
“Mayra’s,” Jason says.
I’m stunned. And saddened. And grateful to be carrying a piece of her, however small, with me.
“Ready?” Jason asks.
I’m already in mid-dive.
Sixteen hours later, as we stand on the helium platform at Stowe, he asks the same question. I’m far less sure of my answer than I was back by the lake. But I take his hand, lean in, and give him the thousandth or so kiss of that same sixteen-hour interval, and smile.
Though the platform could accommodate a couple hundred, there are only fourteen others with us awaiting the surprisingly short trip up to the heavens. We really are among the last to leave Earth.
“Everyone ready?” our pilot asks.
No one is. Not really anyway. But we all nod or reply in the affirmative.
“Okay, say good-bye to Earth,” he commands.
We all do so, uniformly sounding both wistful and resolute at the same time. New species, new domain. The balloons inflate, sixteen in all, and the platform rises. Compared to the sturm und drang of a fiery rocket launch, this is so much more peaceful and thereby feels much more correct, particularly given the planet’s weakened gravity.
I run the math for travel to Mars. When fuel was a factor, this would have been a seven-month journey. If humans are now capable of gravity-assisted flight like the most recent NASA satellites, we could slingshot ourselves there in a matter of weeks.
Heck, we could exit the solar system itself in less than a decade.
I hold tight to Jason’s hand, making eye contact with a girl on the other side of the platform. She can see me and waves, more filled with excitement than trepidation. I wave back, figuring we’re about the same age. I wonder where she’ll be a hundred years from now.
Two hundred years from now.
Without the benefit of sapiens eyes, it is impossible to tell the difference between being within Earth’s atmosphere and entering space. But when we’re high enough, I perceive the curvature of the planet below, and gasp.
I gently touch Jason’s chin and angle his view upward to deep space. He obliges, kissing my finger before taking both my hands in his. We watch the stars as they become not bigger, but more numerous. The moon is now just in view as are the planets beyond. It’s an amazing feeling. Nothing is out of reach. It’s almost as if I could raise my hand and touch Saturn itself.
Somehow, I manage to refrain. I draw in close to Jason, close my eyes, and listen to his heartbeat. I slow my own to match his rhythm until our chests rise and fall as if part of the same organism. I adjust my breathing in similar fashion followed by my blink rate. I use his chip to leave my form and disappear inside his circulatory system, shrinking smaller and smaller until his body is as big as the galaxy.
As we leave Earth’s atmosphere, I watch his DNA adjust and evolve, mutating to life in the vacuum of space. Everything is in harmony here. Everything adapting, everything in order.
I return to my own body and mime the action, flexing my body’s own abilities to respond to alterations to its environment. It’s not as seamless as the shift within Jason, but it’ll get there as it becomes more necessary.
I bury myself in the organic framework of my imperfect human body and get to work, mapping it for its first stage of cellular evolution. This, as stars pass by closer and more visible than they have ever been in my short life.
My short life.
This body has an expiration date, so does that mean I do, too? How long will any of us live, now that we’ve changed so much, so quickly? I still have so many questions, and even fewer answers than when I started this journey. The one thing I know for certain is that my five years on Earth may well be both the tiniest fragment of the rest of my life and my most valuable contribution to the species I now call my own. From all-knowing goddess to random nobody; call me the very definition of peaking early.
Yet, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted.
Thank you for being a participant in Emily Eternal’s Artificial Consciousness Therapeutic and Species Protocol, I whisper to myself, to Jason, to all mankind as we leave the world behind.
Be well.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, thanks to Lauren, Eliza, Wyatt, and the rest of my family who put up with all of this. My wife, Lauren, was this manuscript’s last beta reader but in many cases the first listener to various ideas and plot turns to the book. Her insights and edits were key.
Big thanks to Jacque Ben-Zekry, whose “you-need-to-trust-me-and-cut-these-five-chapters-and-I’m-going-to-stop-marking-them-as-hopefully-you’re-not-insane”-style notes are as frank as they are valuable, betraying her passion for, nay, expectation of, writing worth her time. This book, and so many others, would not exist without her acumen.
Also, a thank you to Lisa French, my longtime and much trusted first-person-who-reads-anything editor who delights—delights—in covering my pages in red. I have long leaned on her expertise and am lucky to work with such a keen-eyed collaborator.
A huge thank you, as always, to my agent, Laura Dail, who tears each manuscript limb from limb in order that we build it back stronger, a process I learn so much from each time.
Big, big thanks also to my editors Wes Miller and Sam Bradbury. Their passion for the material and what they believed it could become gave me a new standard to aspire to and I only hope I did justice to their ideas, suggestions, and comments.
Huge thanks to photographer and producer Morna Ciraki. This book sprang from a series of conversations with her about the intersection of memory and technology. She inspires not only by encouraging the best in others but by holding her own work to the highest standard.
Also, thank you to authors Melissa F. Olson, for helping me navigate waters uncharted in writer land (and life), and Kris Calvin, for her insights particularly when it came to the nature of Emily’s empathy. Their friendship and advice are much appreciated.
Finally, a thank you to my friend, Ken Plume. He knows what he did. And it’s nothing I could ever repay.
Emily Eternal
Reading Group Guide
Did you connect with Emily? What characters in the novel did you find the most relatable and why?
There are a number of plot twists in the novel. Which one was the most surprising to you and why?
Did you enjoy the fact that the novel was narrated by Emily, an artificial consciousness? Did you learn anything new about artificial intelligence from reading this novel? Did it change your perspective on artificial intelligence in any way?
Emily initially misleads Jason about who she is. What do you think of her choice to lie, given the circumstances of the theft of her servers and the attack on MIT?
How do Emily and Emily-2 compare and contrast? Are they foils of each other or are they more alike than they initially seem? Are Emily-2’s intentions understandable?
Emily spends twenty-eight days inside Jason’s memori
es, unknowingly rewriting them. Though this is a clear invasion of privacy, do you think Emily understands the full extent of her actions without being human? If you were Jason, would you forgive her, knowing she had no intention of altering your memories?
Emily’s journey takes her from the labs of MIT to the brim of outer space. Did you find her arc believable? Did the story go where you thought it would?
Emily has always yearned for an authentic human experience. Do you think the solution that the humans came up with at the end will be enough for her? Will she find happiness in the physical body that was created for her?
At one point Emily says, “As anger courses through me, I understand the human desire to lash out in kind, to hurt. But I refuse to let this overtake me.” Does her ability to control this very human instinct make her more human? Or less human?
What does the novel tell us about the human experience? Does being narrated from the perspective of an artificial consciousness enhance or complicate the novel’s themes?
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