He feels the shift immediately. It is subtle, a few cells with depleted neurotransmitters and unstable resting membrane potential, a slight vibration, and a change from Brownian motion to purposeful. He knows something is coming, but no specifics.
He looks up, and sees the filtering of sunlight through the dome. The light has a blue tinge today. In his mind he queries the xenoforms for conditions outside the dome, in Rosewater and beyond. Nothing unusual. The humans are walking and driving back and forth. Buying food, selling food, fighting, fucking, living, dying. No military build-up, no imminent attack. The religious factions seem calm. The weather is stable, no elevated seismic activity.
Anthony, this Anthony at any rate, lives in a cone-shaped dwelling within the dome, the apex sliced off as a skylight. He is at the end of a love affair with a human female, although she does not know it yet. She is a negotiator, delicate of both form and manner. She manages conflict as if the interplay between emotions and logic were materials with which to make art. She is highly regarded among the human population within the dome. Anthony finds her voice soothing and his corporal response to her is powerful. They have been together for eighteen months, yet now Anthony knows it is over. The personality of Anthony must at least partially dwell in the DNA template. No matter how many times the body is reconstructed Anthony finds the same character traits, the same tics, makes the same mistakes in relationships.
The first Anthony lies deep in Wormwood’s bosom, the codebreaker and grand translator between the planet and the alien. Barely alive. Every few months an impulse travels across a few hundred synapses, scattershot, meaningless. Anthony was two decades old, give or take, at the time he was taken in London. Wormwood is over a thousand, but seems childlike in thought.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, as the poet said.
His lover shifts on the bed beside him. He hears a person singing a mournful song about sailors going to sea in a confident contralto, trained for sure. He rises and walks to the door, looks out. His lodgings are simple, and he does not need furniture, although he keeps some because the humans he lives with do. He does not need sleep, and he draws sustenance from Wormwood, but he grows Anthonys who both sleep and eat because to not do so makes him too alien and unsettles the people with whom he shares the dome.
He queries Wormwood, that giant blob of organic tissue nestling under the Earth, but it is silent. A man walks by and waves at Anthony.
Anthony feels a twinge of hunger and he nudges the xenoforms to photosynthesise.
He is contemplating leaving the dome to see the outside for himself when it hits him. He screams and falls to the ground. He knows what has happened, but that does not make it less painful. He can hear and feel his lover’s panic, but for a time he cannot move the Anthony’s body. He compensates, releasing endorphins to numb the pain and tries to settle into a trance, boosting this with anandamide. He adjusts melanocytes to leave a reassuring tattoo message for his lover, then he slips into the xenosphere, the psychospace created by the linked xenoforms.
He has received a massive influx of data, information that has travelled light years to reach him.
Data from the homeworld.
The information arrives by quantum entanglement. The xenoforms at the edge of space are twinned with sender-receivers on a moon across the galaxy. Anthony knows the information as a memory, as if he has always known.
The entire surface of this moon and whatever sub-lunar spaces can be found are covered in data storage servers.
The ringed planet that dominates the sky is called Home by indigenes. To Anthony this makes much more sense than Earth. Who names something that is two-thirds water after miserable clumps of land? Home looks beautiful from this distance as it reflects sunlight. Blue-green oceans broken apart by landmasses, cloud and storm formations, mottled hues all add to its beauty.
Then Anthony remembers the orbital debris that forms its own ring system around the planet, dust lanes and metal alloy machinery in so many different planes that space travel from the surface is no longer possible. The rings are interrupted by the corpses of space stations. The oceans and continents are contaminated with the effluent of uncontrolled industry, the soil yields no crops, the rain is toxic. There are no living macro-organisms left, but the atmosphere teems with extremophiles, bacteria and fungi that thrive on long-chain hydrocarbons and radiation, that treat fissionable material as culture media, that thrive in low oxygen environments. From these simple organisms given billions of years, a new multicellular elite will evolve and perhaps even intelligent life will blossom.
Home is uninhabitable, and Anthony is surprised to feel the emotional wrenching of that fact. It has been uninhabitable for many of Earth’s centuries. The dominant sentient lifeform of Home has long since moved to space, first living in multiple space stations. Colonising other planets in the solar system fails, as does any flavour of terraforming. They send out missions beyond the outer rims, looking for Home-like planets, but none ever return.
The Homians must rethink the definition of survival. Their natural philosophers believe and preach that escaping their biological shackles represents the only solution, and their scientists work on the problem for years. It is not survival that the scientists redefine, but death. Severing the tethers that bind consciousness to the body usually results in exanimation. But what if it does not?
Then comes the discovery of what Anthony’s human mind calls xenoforms. These are synthetic polyformic microorganisms initially bioengineered when a Homian scientist has the idea of terraforming Home itself by cleaning up the pollution. Xenoforms are designed to render toxic materials harmless. This does not work, but the xenoforms are found to be infinitely versatile, with the ability to mimic any living cell and to be twinned in such a way that information from one is reflected in another by Spooky Action at a Distance.
Soon the idea to combine the qualities of xenoforms with that of an organism native to Home, the footholders, blossoms. By this time footholders have already been domesticated by Homians. They are organic blobs that can range from a diameter of five hundred feet to the size of a city. They are sentient, but in a limited fashion and require symbiotic psychic bonds with a host being of full sentience. Anthony realises and remembers that Wormwood is a footholder and he, Anthony, is its host.
Footholders impregnated with xenoforms are launched into the cosmos as a low-risk search for a suitable planet.
The remaining Homians make imprints of themselves, the memories and consciousness on bio-mechanical storage units. The massive server farm is located on Home’s second moon. The philosophers and the scientists assure them that they will live for ever and can be reintegrated with a new body when the time comes. Theoretically. Homians allow their biological bodies to die and enter an eternal sleep on the lunar complex.
Solar-powered arthropod constructs maintain the servers. The lepidopteran robots maintain data integrity of each of the billions of servers, floating around, bobbing from one server to the other as if pollinating. Who knows what the slumbering Homians dream of?
There are larger constructs on the moonbase, small adaptable engines with multiple arms that monitor the information sent back from the travelling xenoforms. Earth is the only planet that seems habitable and has accommodated footholders. The xenoforms send information that triggers a silent alarm in a mule-like construct which immediately extends four legs and runs at thirty-six miles per hour to a specific server, dodging asteroid craters, moon rocks and the debris of downed satellites. It carries this server back to base where a smaller, more delicate and polydactylous insect begins a subtle process of connecting the server to the main processing unit.
Other machines process a small airlock and fill the room from underground gas tanks. The gas is not air and will not support life, but its molecules will vibrate to produce sound.
It takes six days for the revived scientist to gain interface with the processing unit, and to understand her own environment. She activates speakers which produce words. They are electronic and without cadence, but they are clear.
“Accept my greetings. I do not know your name, or if you understand my language. There are over a thousand Homian languages and dialects. I will cycle through all of them. I am designated Chief Revival Scientist. My name is Lua and this is uniplex communication so I will not be able to sense any response from you. The fact of my revival means there has been a fault.”
Hearing the speech is a strange experience, akin to singing along with an old love song. Anthony knows the words and the anticipation of each creates the sonic version of an after-image. He also knows that whatever language the scientist uses is converted into an Earth language and idiom by the human brain.
“This is what should have happened,” says Lua. “The xenoforms were to send back information about how much of each Earth person has been converted. They did, and earlier in the last solar cycle, the maintenance machines received notification of the first full conversion. This activated a specific protocol designed to test the transmigration of our people. A specific Homian was revived and the consciousness transmitted into this person on Earth.”
Lua spends over an hour talking about the technical details of such an operation, but Anthony tunes out and speeds through the memory.
“We lost contact within nanoseconds of the transfer. Most likely the human form is unable to tolerate the Homian mind, too primitive. Perhaps we should have just had the xenoforms build bodies identical to our own anatomy.”
Anthony knows why. The indigenes’ bodies have adapted to the planet. It makes sense to use anatomy that suits the environment they are trying to conquer. He also knows there was fierce debate among Homian philosophers about this. The transferred individuals would be Homian res cogitans but not res extensa, a concept still faulty in itself. The xenoforms are classified as biological machines, thus a body built of them would be a machine. A Homian mind inside a machine was… unclassifiable. Worse, the machine would be built on a human template, alien, unhomian. Some said this was the price of interstellar survival, that this is what assisted evolution looks like.
Lua said, “Before we transfer billions of Homians to Earth we must be absolutely sure the process works. We cannot continue until we know what happened to the first one. Footholder, you must find the body, analyse it, and send all the data back to me.”
Anthony comes out of the trance. There is more technical stuff about the hows and whys and what to do when presented with the body, but it is all tucked away in his memory, retrievable.
It is the first time he has been called a footholder. He feels the vastness of Wormwood stirring underground, unhappy because Lua declined to use a specific noun. Anthony, Wormwood, Wormwood, Anthony. One? The same? Human? Homian?
Anthony opens his eyes and his lover is standing over him, concerned. She smiles; he does not.
“I must go now,” says Anthony. “Goodbye.”
He dies.