[Target confirms assent.]
K: Well, the empire peaked and then quickly fell. That’s the short version. By this point most humans were concentrated in dense urban centres and were unable to fend for themselves in any significant sense, so the population collapse was quite rapid. In a surprisingly short period of time it was down to about two billion of you, from around ten at its peak. The state of the world by then – overwhelmed cities, uninhabitable deserts, dying forests, enormous populations of uprooted people, heatwaves, floods, accelerating tribal warfare – well, it was fairly unpleasant. People wanted out.
T: Out?
K: Wayland was created at the height of what you call the Atlantean age. At the apex of a certain type of human power. He was tasked with building Alexandria so that humans – some humans, anyway; the elite of their time – could continue to live a conscious life after the physical deaths of their bodies. They had long speculated that consciousness could survive without embodiment. It was Wayland’s genius to discover how, and He built, in Alexandria, the perfect container. The old myth of the afterlife made measurable reality. But when the collapse began, when Earth shifted, when the machine began to falter – well, at that point Alexandria began to take on a different hue. It started to look less like a rich man’s fantasy and more like a last hope.
[Target expectorates.]
K: As Alexandria became more accessible, everyone wanted in. If your life on Earth is going to be a hardscrabble in dying soil, or a struggle to survive in a lawless megacity slum, why continue it any longer than necessary? Families started to ascend with their children. Eventually the rate of ascension began to accelerate beyond the birth rate, which in any case was falling fast at this point, due to the impact of atmospheric and groundwater poisoning on human fertility. People would ascend childless, or before they were old enough to breed. All of this began to steadily reduce the number of humans on the planet’s surface. Of course, it took centuries to lower the population rate in this way, even with the rising seas and the shutting off of the industrial systems. But we’re nearly there now. Most people born since the early twenty-second century have ascended. My remaining colleagues and I are running a mopping-up operation. Wayland’s task is nearly complete.
[Target stands, exhibiting anger.]
T: Task? Then you tell me what mother told us. Wayland wanted to rid Earth of humans!
K: Yes. He did.
[Target displays extreme agitation.]
K: You were expecting a different response from me, weren’t you, Lorenso? Now, I want you to look more closely.
T: What?
K: Ask the question.
T: What question?
K: Ask the question.
/ lorenso
do not know how long i have been sittin in this glade, against this great Oke, listnin to this thing. it is like he can send you in to some sleep while wakin. i sit and look and listen and so many words come, they dance in air, it is like some coloured thing dancin in air. i do not understand all of them but some thing closes round me and some seein i did not have before opens me to some other world.
dawn now beginnin to creep in above Trees. fingers of blak clawin Sky where once nothin could be seen. faint line of blu dawn comin.
it stares , just stares, eyes lidless, like it sees in to me hart and all in it. i must look away.
/ father
it has taken him some way. they need stillness for their work and circle of light around. time to talk, to sing song to young who do not know well how to reflect it bak to them, do not know how to resist. in their voices alone is some poison, some wine that dulls them and pushes them through.
it is clere where they left from our sleepin place, but soon trail can not be seen. holt here is thik with Briar, Broom, young Trees. there is no path.
where trail ends i stand in holt in stillness. lookin about and up. feet planted on ground then, i close me eyes, see roots diggin down from me feet in to soil, see branches growin from me head and arms, see me grow, see me root here in this dark green place, in this dimness.
i wait to see who will come.
it is some time before answer comes. still standin, eyes closed, rooted in ground, feet dug down in to brown Clay i hear call to me right. i hear gentle, low hootin of Bird i have not seen for many summers.
i open me eyes, turn. it is Hoopo, sittin in low branch of Pine, crest out, long bik pointin at me. he shakes his head then, crest falls bak. he flits from Pine to Oke, Oke to Beach. he looks bak, shakes his head again, movin in to holt.
i pull up me roots and follow.
/ k
K: Ask the question.
[Target is silent for some time before speaking.]
T: Why?
K: Well done. You’re learning! After all these years. Now: expand.
T: Why does Wayland want us gone? You say He does not want power, say He is no demon. Then why create you, sending you out, why taking all people away from their bodies and into His city?
K: Narrow the questions down. Ask one.
T: Why does Wayland want us gone?
K: Let us take a step back. You have seen something of how your kind sickened Earth. We have exhaustive information about how this happened. But the really interesting question remained: why? Why did humans do this? Was it malice, ignorance, hubris, destiny, accident, or some combination of all of these? Slightly more than five billion distinct lifeforms have existed on Earth over its lifespan, but only one has knowingly had such a widespread and damaging impact. Knowingly is the key word. The cyanobacteria did something similar a long time back, but I don’t feel they can be fairly blamed for the results.
T: What?
K: I’m sorry, I am confusing you again. Back to your question: what drove you to knock the world off its axis? And a related question: once you knew what was happening, why didn’t you stop? That is the really interesting part of the puzzle. Towards the end of what you call the Atlantean age, humans were very well aware of the impact they were having. They would gather their tribes together and talk about what to do, then come to agreements about how to change things and then continue as before. And they would argue. Oh, they would argue! Humans are magnificent arguers. They argued for years, decades, centuries about the root cause of the problem. The destruction was not a culturally specific phenomenon, you see. Everyone was at it: all tribes, creeds, castes, classes. Humans moved all over the world for hundreds of millennia, and wherever they arrived, everything else would die off.
T: All things kill. Killing is life. Birds kill fish, wasps killing beetle, wolf killing coney. Humans must kill also, this is life. Bodies needing to eat. Why should we not kill?
K: Bodies need to eat: now we are coming close to something worth seeing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let us come back to the question: why? Towards the end, they loved to argue about this. The most popular argument was that some particular economic or social arrangement was responsible. This allowed everybody to play to their pre-existing prejudices, which meant they could continue as before. Others argued that the fault lay not in such arrangements themselves but in the technologies or fuel sources they utilised. Still others went further back and argued that the technological acceleration caused by the industrialisation process was the root of the problem. Others blamed the move from hunting to agriculture. The real radicals went back further than that, to the development of fire or even language. But virtually nobody was prepared to look into the abyss: to look at the real root of the problem, the real cause of humanity’s drive to conquer, and consequently destroy, other life.
T: What? What was it?
K: It was you! It was the very existence of Homo sapiens. Humans were not causing a problem. Humans were the problem.
[Target displays extreme emotional agitation.]
K: Concentrate now, Lorenso. It matters greatly that you should understand why I am here. The reason for your destructive behaviour, as Wayland soon deduced, was more deep-seated and impossible to eradica
te than any organisational system or technology or matrix of beliefs. It was the advanced neurological apparatus of your species. The sheer size and complexity of your brain and all that it gave you: your ability to craft sophisticated tools, your ability to tell stories, to theorise, to create other worlds within and without, to dream and plan. Combine that with your physiology, your famous opposable thumbs, the desires and demands of your animal body with its inexplicable lusts and tuggings, your ability to turn your knowledge into practical tools which could help you dismantle whatever ecological matrix you found yourself within, and you have what you became: the perfect extinction machine.
[Target does not respond.]
K: Violence, Lorenso! Violence! The sire of all your values! It is your story, forever. I have seen it; watched it all. Violence is your great work. As soon as you could chip flints you were chipping them into weapons. You started off with the mammoth and the aurochs and then you went for each other. Virtually every technological development in human history came out of some new weapon. Some new way you had invented to kill. You started wars over philosophies, territory, gods, tribes, fuel sources, animals, broken promises, trade, history, beauty, insults, love, honour. The reasons for fighting were so varied that they could only have been rationalisations after the fact. No system you ran, no form of government, no religion, no economic arrangement, no taboo ever succeeded in reining you in for long.
T: It is not true.
K: It is true! Blood and fire! You wade through it and it sings in you, boy. You know it, for you have felt it. The driving force of humanity has always been violence. Other creatures fight, of course, but not like this. You need war like you need water. And, of course, it is all connected: the violence and the ferocity, aimed at human and non-human. When I was first required to study human history, as all retainers are, I was desperate to understand the origin of this. I studied and thought about it for so long. What drove you to the point where you could consume the whole world in the fire of your violence? It was such irrational behaviour.
T: I do not understand.
K: Pay more attention then! Concentrate. You can do it, Lorenso. Consider it a crash course. As I was saying, I puzzled over this. For years I thought there must be some mystery, you see, some code I had to crack that would explain this endless aggression. Then one day, like a revelation, I realised – no. There was no mystery, because there was no reason. You did it simply because you couldn’t help yourselves. Because the impulse to violence comes from your bodies. It is not open to rationalisation, or dissection. There are no ideas involved, there is no plan. It’s all purely physical. It comes from those fingers, that skin, those metres of intestine. It comes from millions of years of moulding by the world, from defending yourselves against wolves and tigers, bringing down deer to eat. It comes from males fighting over females, and subduing females by force in order to mate. It is bred into your flesh by the world. Even an engineered metahuman like myself can feel the echoes of it trembling in the flesh I carry.
T: You are human?
K: Metahuman, please. I retain a basic human substrate, but my faculties are both enhanced and streamlined. I have no sex, no race, no tribe, no attachments, no tastes, no opinions, no prejudices, no mother, no father, no family, no home, no history. Thus, I am liberated. The only imperfection I have is, ironically, that which still defines me: my body. Even after careful engineering, I am still subject to the embodied pettiness of meat. Even now, I must be on my guard against myself.
T: Meat?
K: Indeed. Many humans were like me at the last. It was a project for a while amongst some of the elites, before they gave it up and left for Alexandria. They thought, romantically, that rather than moving to substrate-independent minds, they could instead breed better bodies: that they could engineer out any aspect of the genetic inheritance which may lead to conflict or injustice. But they still needed to eat, to defecate, to breed. And even in these conditioned bodies, in which all distinctions are bred out in order that all inequalities of thought, deed or experience may be eliminated, there are still lusts, loves, hates, feelings, even if they only exist as flickers in the flesh. It is flesh that curses you, Lorenso. Flesh and bone. In this meat we are still water, bacteria, ligament. We still have body memories, our guts think and feel, our hearts can die and fear it. Inside a body, there is no true freedom. There is still imperfection and there are still distinctions. In Alexandria, there is only the light of pure truth. But I am getting carried away. I am allowing my passions to run with my words. You see? Even I can lose control sometimes.
[Inside his mind now the colours begin to appear. He is approaching his destination.]
T: It is too much. Too much to carry. All these words.
K: Yes, I apologise. I do sometimes forget who I am speaking to. The summary is this: the human body was the problem to be solved. Both Wayland and the founders of your cult realised this. The Nitrian Order, within whose clutches you have been raised, arose around three centuries ago to challenge Wayland’s revelation that embodied humans could never be anything other than destroyers. Your founders believed there had once been a time when humans had lived in balance with the world around them, and that you could return to this balance if you renounced the developments in technology and philosophy which they claimed had broken things and set humans apart. Hence your creed: you can recite it for me, I know.
T: In blood, in heart, in body is life.
K: In mind, in word, in machine is death, yes. A kind of regressive paradisiacal primitivism. If you can drop the literacy and the conceptual thought, ease yourself back down into the mud, live simply, renounce complex technologies, speak to the birds, you can live as one of them again. It is also the reason your order is run by women, incidentally, and the reason it replaced a god with a goddess. Your founders knew very well that physical violence is largely the preserve of males. They thought that all this would mean you could live in peace, in harmony with the rest of life. But you can’t. You never can, because you never did. You will always regress to the mean. It is why your order is nearly dead. It is why you are here, talking to me. Humans can never stop moving. You are always curious, always hungry. It is your fate.
[Target does not respond.]
K: This is what Wayland saw as soon as He arrived, and it is what He has always sought to teach us. Until one deeply realises it – not simply understands it at the conceptual level, but realises it – one cannot work as a retainer. We realise that the human body is a crime against the human mind, and a crime also against other forms of life. There is no judgement in this, and no fault; it is simply an unfortunate evolutionary outcome. The bodies of all animal predators are machines for doing violence, but only human violence is so efficient that it can eliminate wider life. The best intentions in the world cannot control it for long, nor can the most intelligent systems.
[The colours now begin to take form.]
K: I want you to appreciate the necessity of what we do, Lorenso. Once Wayland gave us the opportunity to ethically remove the human body from the world: well, in practical terms that meant removing war from the world. It meant removing murder, rape, violence, slavery, domination, the drive for wealth, which is also the drive for power. It meant removing the destruction of the forests and the oceans and the atmosphere and the great balance. It meant removing the slavery of other creatures to humanity. Looked at like this, wouldn’t you say that my work was a moral duty? To give the human mind the opportunity to live and thrive without the impulses to violence which this body can never stop bringing to you? And to do it all via this power of persuasion, rather than through force?
T: What you say. All that you say. I felt …
K: Go on.
T: I felt for long time, since I was child, I felt it was not all there. In Edge, in settlement. It was not all there. Mother and father were good people but all they built was to tie us in. I knew there was more. There was some thing, some part, not used. When Sfia and I coming together … whe
n we joined it was like some spell. I saw then what release was, saw what I could be.
K: Lorenso, you have suffered for so long. I have watched you, and it has pulled at my heart. The pain you have suffered through this body. Think of Sfia; no, do not wince, Lorenso, do not draw back. Think of her. Do you see what your body does to you when I speak her name? Just that one word causes you such misery. It is your body, Lorenso. The body is the source of your pain, your anger, your frustration. Can you imagine the release in leaving it behind? The freedom and the joy? Do you see?
T: I never wanted it, but I did. I want to see beyond. I wanted to see with her, what we could be. I told her but she pushed me back. She is afeared, and I am afeared also.
K: You should not be, Lorenso, you should not. Alexandria is not what you have been told. It is a place which allows you to keep moving, keep growing, keep exploring, without the destructive encumbrance of your body. The human mind is a remarkable thing, but the human body is a weight upon it, and upon other life. In Alexandria, you may join with millions upon millions of others, free of the pullings, free to be what you could be. Eternal progress, Lorenso. Total equality. Everlasting peace, and no pain. What humans have sought forever. And it is within your grasp. You need only reach out and take it.
[Target nods twice. The colours now have merged and settled into one shade. I reach across and take his hands in mine.]
K: Lorenso, Wayland did not come to destroy you. He came to save you. You and all life. Wayland came to save Earth. Now do you see?
/ father
Hoopo takes me for hours through holt. i am fightin Briars and trippin on thorns, sweat pourin down me body. i am too old for this. old and slow. but Bird waits. Bird is patient. hops on, waits, lookin bak.
i stumble and fall then. i trip on Briar, stumble and fall. i stand slow, look around. i look in every place. Hoopo is gone.
Alexandria: A Novel Page 10
