Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the 90s, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Many of his stories have appeared in other best of the year series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon”, which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella Oceanic. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and Schild’s Ladder and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. Egan fell silent for a couple of years at the beginning of the oughts but is back again with a vengeance, with new stories in markets such as Asimov’s, Interzone, The New Space Opera, One Million A.D., MIT Technology Review, and Foundation 100. His most recent books are a new novel, Incandescence, and a new collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories. He has a website at netspace.netau/^gregegan/.
In the unsettling story that follows he suggests that the problem with playing God is that you might turn out to be too good at it.
1
“MORE CAVIAR?” DANIEL Cliff gestured at the gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to transparent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning.”
“No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.
Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested.
Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said.
“Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s performance.”
She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t seeing double.
“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?”
Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?”
“Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelize; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence.
The FLOPS rating was unchanged.
Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my attention. Where is it?”
“Turn the keyboard over.”
There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.
“This connects to the processor?” she asked.
“No. It is the processor.”
“You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screwdriver and take the thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve got a few hundred spare.”
“A few hundred grand? Hardly.”
“A few hundred million.”
Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was a few hundred grand, everyone would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”
Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”
“No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”
“A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”
“Fair enough.” She thought for a while. “I take it you don’t expect me to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would barely cover it.”
“In your present position. But you’re not joined to the university at the hip.”
“So this is a job interview?”
Daniel nodded.
Julie couldn’t help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined it again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could discern. “Can you give me a job description?”
“Midwife.”
She laughed. “To what?”
“History,” Daniel said.
Her smile faded slowly.
“I believe you’re the best AI researcher of your generation,” he said. “I want you to work for me.” He reached over and took the crystal from her. “With this as your platform, imagine what you could do.”
Julie said, “What exactly would you want me to do?”
“For the last fifteen years,” Daniel said, “you’ve stated that the ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level, artificial intelligence.”
“That’s right.”
“Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed.”
She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was thinking, there was no denying that she was tempted. “It’s gratifying that you have so much confidence in my abilities,” she said. “But we need to be clear about some things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the production costs down I’m sure it will have some extraordinary applications. It would eat up climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling, proteomics . . .”
“Of course.” Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing the device. He’d bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his own private funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his use of the technology.
“But AI,” Julie said, “is different. We’re in a maze, not a highway; there’s nowhere that speed alone can take us. However many exaflops I have to play with, they won’t spontaneously combust into consciousness. I’m not being held back by the university’s computers; I have access to SHARCNET anytime I need it. I’m being held back by my own lack of insight into the problems I’m addressing.”
Daniel said, “A maze is not a dead end. When I was twelve, I wrote a program for solving mazes.”
“And I’m sure it worked well,” Julie replied, “for small, two-dimensional ones. But you know how those kind of algorithms scale. Put your old program on this crystal, and I could still design a maze in half a day that would bring it to its knees.”
“Of course,” Daniel conceded. “Which is precisely why I’m interested in hiring you. You know a great deal more about the maze of AI than I do; any strategy you developed would be vastly superior to a blind search.”
“I’m not saying that I’m merely groping in the dark,” she said. “If it was that bleak, I’d be working on a different problem entirely. But I don’t see what difference this processor would make.”
“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.
“Evolution.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”
Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”
“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.
“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”
“On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.”
“Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?”
“Part of your job would be to minimize the suffering.”
“Minimize it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?”
Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.”
“I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.”
“Just, and omnipotent,” Daniel suggested. “Sadly, that second trait’s even rarer than the first.”
“I don’t think it’s going to take omnipotence to create something in our own image,” she said. “Just a little more patience and self-knowledge.”
“This won’t be like natural selection,” Daniel insisted. “Not that blind, not that cruel, not that wasteful. You’d be free to intervene as much as you wished, to take whatever palliative measures you felt appropriate.”
“Palliative measures?” Julie met his gaze, and he saw her expression flicker from disbelief to something darker. She stood up and glanced at her wristphone. “I don’t have any signal here. Would you mind calling me a taxi?”
Daniel said, “Please, hear me out. Give me ten more minutes, then the helicopter will take you to the airport.”
“I’d prefer to make my own way home.” She gave Daniel a look that made it clear that this was not negotiable.
He called her a taxi, and they walked to the elevator.
“I know you find this morally challenging,” he said, “and I respect that. I wouldn’t dream of hiring someone who thought these were trivial issues. But if I don’t do this, someone else will. Someone with far worse intentions than mine.”
“Really?” Her tone was openly sarcastic now. “So how, exactly, does the mere existence of your project stop this hypothetical bin Laden of AI from carrying out his own?”
Daniel was disappointed; he’d expected her at least to understand what was at stake. He said, “This is a race to decide between Godhood and enslavement. Whoever succeeds first will be unstoppable. I’m not going to be anyone’s slave.”
Julie stepped into the elevator; he followed her.
She said, “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.’”
“We will be as kind as possible,” Daniel said. “And don’t forget, we can determine the nature of these beings. They will be happy to be alive, and grateful to their creator. We can select for those traits.”
Julie said, “So you’re aiming for übermenschen that wag their tails when you scratch them behind the ears? You might find there’s a bit of a trade-off there.”
The elevator reached the lobby. Daniel said, “Think about this, don’t rush to a decision. You can call me any time.” There was no commercial flight back to Toronto tonight; she’d be stuck in a hotel, paying money she could ill-afford, thinking about the kind of salary she could demand from him now that she’d played hard to get. If she mentally recast all this obstinate moralizing as a deliberate bargaining strategy, she’d have no trouble swallowing her pride.
Julie offered her hand, and he shook it. She said, “Thank you for dinner.”
The taxi was waiting. He walked with her across the lobby. “If you want to see AI in your lifetime,” he said, “this is the only way it’s going to happen.”
She turned to face him. “Maybe that’s true. We’ll see. But better to spend a thousand years and get it right, than a decade and succeed by your methods.”
As Daniel watched the taxi drive away into the fog, he forced himself to accept the reality: she was never going to change her mind. Julie Dehghani had been his first choice, his ideal collaborator. He couldn’t pretend that this wasn’t a setback.
Still, no one was irreplaceable. However much it would have delighted him to have won her over, there were many more names on his list.
2
Daniel’s wrist tingled as the message came through. He glanced down and saw the word PROGRESS! hovering in front of his watch face.
The board meeting was almost over; he disciplined himself and kept his attention focused for ten more minutes. WiddulHands.com had made him his first billion, and it was still the pre-eminent social networking site for the 0–3 age group. It had been fifteen years since he’d founded the company, and he had since diversified in many directions, but he had no intention of taking his hands off the levers.
When the meeting finished he blanked the wall screen and paced the empty conference room for half a minute, rolling his neck and stretching his shoulders. Then he said, “Lucien.”
Lucien Crace appeared on the screen. “Significant progress?” Daniel enquired.
“Absolutely.” Lucien was trying to maintain polite eye contact with Daniel, but something kept drawing his gaze away. Without waiting for an explanation, Daniel gestured at the screen and had it show him exactly what Lucien was seeing.
A barren, rocky landscape stretched to the horizon. Scattered across the rocks were dozens of crab-like creatures – some deep blue, some coral pink, though these weren’t colours the locals would see, just species markers added to the view to make it easier to interpret. As Daniel watched, fat droplets of corrosive rain drizzled down from a passing cloud. This had to be the bleakest environment in all of Sapphire.
Lucien was still visible in an inset. “See the blue ones over by the crater lake?” he said. He sketched a circle on the image to guide Daniel’s attention.
“Yeah.” Five blues were clustered around a lone pink; Daniel gestured and the view zoomed in on them. The blues had opened up their prisoner’s body, but it wasn’t dead; Daniel was sure of that, because the pinks had recently acquired a trait that turned their bodies to mush the instant they expired.
“They’ve found a way to study it,” Lucien said. “To keep it alive and study it.”
From the very start of the project, he and Daniel had decided to grant the Phites the power to observe and manipulate their own bodies as much as possible. In the DNA world, the inner workings of anatomy and heredity had only become accessible once highly sophisticated technology had been invented. In Sapphire, the barriers were designed to be far lower. The basic units of biology here were “beads”, small spheres that possessed a handful of simple properties but no complex internal biochemistry. Beads were larger than the cells of the DNA world, and Sapphire’s diffractionless optics rendered them visible to the right kind of naked eye. Animals acquired beads from their diet, while in plants they replicated in the presence of sunlight, but unlike cells they did not themselves mutate. The beads in a Phite’s body could be rearranged with a minimum of fuss, enabling a kind of self-modification that no human surgeon or prosthetics engineer could rival – and this skill was actually essential for at least one stage in every Phite’s life: reproduction involved two Phites pooling their spare beads and then collaborating to “sculpt” them into an infant, in part by directly copying each other’s current body plans.
Of course these crabs knew nothing of the abstract principles of engineering and design, but the benefits of trial and error, of self-experimentation and cross-species plagiarism, had led them into an escalating war of innovation. The pinks had been the first to stop their corpses from being plundered for secrets, by stumbling on a way to make them literally fall apart in extremis; now it seemed the blues had found a way around that, and were indulging in a spot of vivisection-as-industrial-espionage.
Daniel felt a visceral twinge of sympathy for the struggling pink, but he brushed it aside. Not only did he doubt that the Phites were any more conscious than ordinary crabs, they certainly had a radically different relationship to bodily integrity. The pink was resisting because its dissectors were of a different species; if they had been its cousins it might not have put up any fight at all. When something happened in spite of your wishes, that was unpleasant by definition, but it would be absurd to imagine that the pink was in the kind of agony that an antelope being flayed by jackals would feel – let alone experiencing the existential terrors of a human trapped and mutilated by a hostile tribe.
“This is going to give them a tremendous advantage,” Lucien enthused.
“The blues?”
Lucien shook his head. “Not blues over pinks; Phites over tradlife. Bacteria can swap genes, but this kind of active mimetics is unprecedented without cultural support. Da Vinci might have watched the birds in flight and sketched his gliders, but no lemur ever dissected the body of an eagle and then stole its tricks. They’re going to have innate skills as powerful as whole strands of human technology. All this before they even have language.”
“Hmm.” Daniel wanted to be optimistic too, but he was growing wary of Lucien’s hype. Lucien had a doctorate in genetic programming, but he’d made his name with FoodExcuses.com, a web service that trawled the medical literature to cobble together quasi-scientific justifications for indulging in your favourite culinary vice. He had the kind of technobabble that could bleed money out of venture capitalists down pat, and though Daniel admired that skill in its proper place, he expected a higher insight-to-bullshit ratio now that Lucien was on his payroll.
The blues were backing away from their captive. As Daniel watched, the pink sealed up its wounds and scuttled off towards a group of its own kind. The blues had now seen the detailed anatomy of the respiratory system that had been giving the pinks an advantage in the thin air of this high plateau. A few of the blues would try it out, and if it worked for them, the whole tribe would copy it.
“So what do you think?” Lucien asked.
“Select them,” Daniel said.
“Just the blues?”
“No, both of them.” The blues alone might have diverged into competing subspecies eventually, but bringing their old rivals along for the ride would help to keep them sharp.
“Done,” Lucien replied. In an instant, ten million Phites were erased, leaving the few thousand blues and pinks from these badlands to inherit the planet. Daniel felt no compunction; the extinction events he decreed were surely the most painless in history.
Now that the world no longer required human scrutiny, Lucien unthrottled the crystal and let the simulation race ahead; automated tools would let them know when the next interesting development arose. Daniel watched the population figures rising as his chosen species spread out and recolonized Sapphire.
Would their distant descendants rage against him, for this act of “genocide” that had made room for them to flourish and prosper? That seemed unlikely. In any case, what choice did he have? He couldn’t start manufacturing new crystals for every useless side-branch of the evolutionary tree. Nobody was wealthy enough to indulge in an exponentially growing number of virtual animal shelters, at half a billion dollars apiece.
He was a just creator, but he was not omnipotent. His careful pruning was the only way.
3
In the months that followed, progress came in fits and starts. Several times, Daniel found himself rewinding history, reversing his decisions and trying a new path. Keeping every Phite variant alive was impractical, but he did retain enough information to resurrect lost species at will.
The maze of AI was still a maze, but the speed of the crystal served them well. Barely eighteen months after the start of Project Sapphire, the Phites were exhibiting a basic theory of mind: their actions showed that they could deduce what others knew about the world, as distinct from what they knew themselves. Other AI researchers had spliced this kind of thing into their programs by hand, but Daniel was convinced that his version was better integrated, more robust. Human-crafted software was brittle and inflexible; his Phites had been forged in the heat of change.
Daniel kept a close watch on his competitors, but nothing he saw gave him reason to doubt his approach. Sunil Gupta was raking in the cash from a search engine that could “understand” all forms of text, audio and video, making use of fuzzy logic techniques that were at least forty years old. Daniel respected Gupta’s business acumen, but in the unlikely event that his software ever became conscious, the sheer cruelty of having forced it to wade through the endless tides of blogorrhoea would surely see it turn on its creator and exact a revenge that made The Terminator look like a picnic. Angela Lindstrom was having some success with her cheesy AfterLife, in which dying clients gave heart-to-heart interviews to software that then constructed avatars able to converse with surviving relatives. And Julie Dehghani was still frittering away her talent, writing software for robots that played with coloured blocks side-by-side with human infants, and learnt languages from adult volunteers by imitating the interactions of baby talk. Her prophesy of taking a thousand years to “get it right” seemed to be on target.
As the second year of the project drew to a close, Lucien was contacting Daniel once or twice a month to announce a new breakthrough. By constructing environments that imposed suitable selection pressures, Lucien had generated a succession of new species that used simple tools, crafted crude shelters, and even domesticated plants. They were still shaped more or less like crabs, but they were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees.
The Phites worked together by observation and imitation, guiding and reprimanding each other with a limited repertoire of gestures and cries, but as yet they lacked anything that could truly be called a language. Daniel grew impatient; to move beyond a handful of specialized skills, his creatures needed the power to map any object, any action, any prospect they might encounter in the world into their speech, and into their thoughts.
Daniel summoned Lucien and they sought a way forward. It was easy to tweak the Phites’ anatomy to grant them the ability to generate more subtle vocalizations, but that alone was no more useful than handing a chimp a conductor’s baton. What was needed was a way to make sophisticated planning and communications skills a matter of survival.
Eventually, he and Lucien settled on a series of environmental modifications, providing opportunities for the creatures to rise to the occasion. Most of these scenarios began with famine. Lucien blighted the main food crops, then offered a palpable reward for progress by dangling some tempting new fruit from a branch that was just out of reach. Sometimes that metaphor could almost be taken literally: he’d introduce a plant with a complex life cycle that required tricky processing to render it edible, or a new prey animal that was clever and vicious, but nutritionally well worth hunting in the end.
Time and again, the Phites failed the test, with localized species dwindling to extinction. Daniel watched in dismay; he had not grown sentimental, but he’d always boasted to himself that he’d set his standards higher than the extravagant cruelties of nature. He contemplated tweaking the creatures’ physiology so that starvation brought a swifter, more merciful demise, but Lucien pointed out that he’d be slashing his chances of success if he curtailed this period of intense motivation. Each time a group died out, a fresh batch of mutated cousins rose from the dust to take their place; without that intervention, Sapphire would have been a wilderness within a few real-time days.
Daniel closed his eyes to the carnage, and put his trust in sheer time, sheer numbers. In the end, that was what the crystal had bought him: when all else failed, he could give up any pretence of knowing how to achieve his aims and simply test one random mutation after another.
Months went by, sending hundreds of millions of tribes starving into their graves. But what choice did he have? If he fed these creatures milk and honey, they’d remain fat and stupid until the day he died. Their hunger agitated them, it drove them to search and strive, and while any human onlooker was tempted to colour such behaviour with their own emotional palette, Daniel told himself that the Phites’ suffering was a shallow thing, little more than the instinct that jerked his own hand back from a flame before he’d even registered discomfort.
They were not the equal of humans. Not yet.
And if he lost his nerve, they never would be.
Daniel dreamt that he was inside Sapphire, but there were no Phites in sight. In front of him stood a sleek black monolith; a thin stream of pus wept from a crack in its smooth, obsidian surface. Someone was holding him by the wrist, trying to force his hand into a reeking pit in the ground. The pit, he knew, was piled high with things he did not want to see, let alone touch.
He thrashed around until he woke, but the sense of pressure on his wrist remained. It was coming from his watch. As he focused on the one-word message he’d received, his stomach tightened. Lucien would not have dared to wake him at this hour for some run-of-the-mill result.
Daniel rose, dressed, then sat in his office sipping coffee. He did not know why he was so reluctant to make the call. He had been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years, but it would not be the pinnacle of his life. After this, there would be a thousand more peaks, each one twice as magnificent as the last.
He finished the coffee then sat a while longer, massaging his temples, making sure his head was clear. He would not greet this new era bleary-eyed, half-awake. He recorded all his calls, but this was one he would retain for posterity.
“Lucien,” he said. The man’s image appeared, smiling. “Success?”
“They’re talking to each other,” Lucien replied.
“About what?”
“Food, weather, sex, death. The past, the future. You name it. They won’t shut up.”
Lucien sent transcripts on the data channel, and Daniel perused them. The linguistics software didn’t just observe the Phites’ behaviour and correlate it with the sounds they made; it peered right into their virtual brains and tracked the flow of information. Its task was far from trivial, and there was no guarantee that its translations were perfect, but Daniel did not believe it could hallucinate an entire language and fabricate these rich, detailed conversations out of thin air.
He flicked between statistical summaries, technical overviews of linguistic structure, and snippets from the millions of conversations the software had logged. Food, weather, sex, death. As human dialogue the translations would have seemed utterly banal, but in context they were riveting. These were not chatterbots blindly following Markov chains, designed to impress the judges in a Turing test. The Phites were discussing matters by which they genuinely lived and died.
When Daniel brought up a page of conversational topics in alphabetical order, his eyes were caught by the single entry under the letter G. Grief. He tapped the link, and spent a few minutes reading through samples, illustrating the appearance of the concept following the death of a child, a parent, a friend.
He kneaded his eyelids. It was three in the morning; there was a sickening clarity to everything, the kind that only night could bring. He turned to Lucien.
“No more death.”
“Boss?” Lucien was startled.
“I want to make them immortal. Let them evolve culturally; let their ideas live and die. Let them modify their own brains, once they’re smart enough; they can already tweak the rest of their anatomy.”
“Where will you put them all?” Lucien demanded.
“I can afford another crystal. Maybe two more.”
“That won’t get you far. At the present birth rate —”
“We’ll have to cut their fertility drastically, tapering it down to zero. After that, if they want to start reproducing again they’ll really have to innovate.” They would need to learn about the outside world, and comprehend its alien physics well enough to design new hardware into which they could migrate.
Lucien scowled. “How will we control them? How will we shape them? If we can’t select the ones we want —”
Daniel said quietly, “This is not up for discussion.” Whatever Julie Dehghani had thought of him, he was not a monster; if he believed that these creatures were as conscious as he was, he was not going to slaughter them like cattle – or stand by and let them die “naturally”, when the rules of this world were his to rewrite at will.
“We’ll shape them through their memes,” he said. “We’ll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.” He would need to keep an iron grip on the Phites and their culture, though, or he would never be able to trust them. If he wasn’t going to literally breed them for loyalty and gratitude, he would have to do the same with their ideas.
Lucien said, “We’re not prepared for any of this. We’re going to need new software, new analysis and intervention tools.”
Daniel understood. “Freeze time in Sapphire. Then tell the team they’ve got eighteen months.”
4
Daniel sold his shares in WiddulHands, and had two more crystals built. One was to support a higher population in Sapphire, so there was as large a pool of diversity among the immortal Phites as possible; the other was to run the software – which Lucien had dubbed the Thought Police – needed to keep tabs on what they were doing. If human overseers had had to monitor and shape the evolving culture every step of the way, that would have slowed things down to a glacial pace. Still, automating the process completely was tricky, and Daniel preferred to err on the side of caution, with the Thought Police freezing Sapphire and notifying him whenever the situation became too delicate.
If the end of death was greeted by the Phites with a mixture of puzzlement and rejoicing, the end of birth was not so easy to accept. When all attempts by mating couples to sculpt their excess beads into offspring became as ineffectual as shaping dolls out of clay, it led to a mixture of persistence and distress that was painful to witness. Humans were accustomed to failing to conceive, but this was more like stillbirth after stillbirth. Even when Daniel intervened to modify the Phites’ basic drives, some kind of cultural or emotional inertia kept many of them going through the motions. Though their new instincts urged them merely to pool their spare beads and then stop, sated, they would continue with the old version of the act regardless, forlorn and confused, trying to shape the useless puddle into something that lived and breathed.
Move on, Daniel thought. Get over it. There was only so much sympathy he could muster for immortal beings who would fill the galaxy with their children, if they ever got their act together.
The Phites didn’t yet have writing, but they’d developed a strong oral tradition, and some put their mourning for the old ways into elegiac words. The Thought Police identified those memes, and ensured that they didn’t spread far. Some Phites chose to kill themselves rather than live in the barren new world. Daniel felt he had no right to stop them, but mysterious obstacles blocked the paths of anyone who tried, irresponsibly, to romanticize or encourage such acts.
The Phites could only die by their own volition, but those who retained the will to live were not free to doze the centuries away. Daniel decreed no more terrible famines, but he hadn’t abolished hunger itself, and he kept enough pressure on the food supply and other resources to force the Phites to keep innovating, refining agriculture, developing trade.
The Thought Police identified and nurtured the seeds of writing, mathematics, and natural science. The physics of Sapphire was a simplified, game-world model, not so arbitrary as to be incoherent, but not so deep and complex that you needed particle physics to get to the bottom of it. As crystal time sped forward and the immortals sought solace in understanding their world, Sapphire soon had its Euclid and Archimedes, its Galileo and its Newton; their ideas spread with supernatural efficiency, bringing forth a torrent of mathematicians and astronomers.
Sapphire’s stars were just a planetarium-like backdrop, present only to help the Phites get their notions of heliocentricity and inertia right, but its moon was as real as the world itself. The technology needed to reach it was going to take a while, but that was all right; Daniel didn’t want them getting ahead of themselves. There was a surprise waiting for them there, and his preference was for a flourishing of biotech and computing before they faced that revelation.
Between the absence of fossils, Sapphire’s limited biodiversity, and all the clunky external meddling that needed to be covered up, it was hard for the Phites to reach a grand Darwinian view of biology, but their innate skill with beads gave them a head start in the practical arts. With a little nudging, they began tinkering with their bodies, correcting some inconvenient anatomical quirks that they’d missed in their pre-conscious phase.
As they refined their knowledge and techniques, Daniel let them imagine that they were working towards restoring fertility; after all, that was perfectly true, even if their goal was a few conceptual revolutions further away than they realized. Humans had had their naive notions of a Philosopher’s Stone dashed, but they’d still achieved nuclear transmutation in the end.
The Phites, he hoped, would transmute themselves: inspect their own brains, make sense of them, and begin to improve them. It was a staggering task to expect of anyone; even Lucien and his team, with their God’s-eye view of the creatures, couldn’t come close. But when the crystal was running at full speed, the Phites could think millions of times faster than their creators. If Daniel could keep them from straying off course, everything that humanity might once have conceived of as the fruits of millennia of progress was now just a matter of months away.
5
Lucien said, “We’re losing track of the language.”
Daniel was in his Houston office; he’d come to Texas for a series of face-to-face meetings, to see if he could raise some much-needed cash by licensing the crystal fabrication process. He would have preferred to keep the technology to himself, but he was almost certain that he was too far ahead of his rivals now for any of them to stand a chance of catching up with him.
“What do you mean, losing track?” Daniel demanded. Lucien had briefed him just three hours before, and given no warning of an impending crisis.
The Thought Police, Lucien explained, had done their job well: they had pushed the neural self-modification meme for all it was worth, and now a successful form of “brain boosting” was spreading across Sapphire. It required a detailed “recipe” but no technological aids; the same innate skills for observing and manipulating beads that the Phites had used to copy themselves during reproduction were enough.
All of this was much as Daniel had hoped it would be, but there was an alarming downside. The boosted Phites were adopting a dense and complex new language, and the analysis software couldn’t make sense of it.
“Slow them down further,” Daniel suggested. “Give the linguistics more time to run.”
“I’ve already frozen Sapphire,” Lucien replied. “The linguistics have been running for an hour, with the full resources of an entire crystal.”
Daniel said irritably, “We can see exactly what they’ve done to their brains. How can we not understand the effects on the language?”
“In the general case,” Lucien said, “deducing a language from nothing but neural anatomy is computationally intractable. With the old language, we were lucky; it had a simple structure, and it was highly correlated with obvious behavioural elements. The new language is much more abstract and conceptual. We might not even have our own correlates for half the concepts.”
Daniel had no intention of letting events in Sapphire slip out of his control. It was one thing to hope that the Phites would, eventually, be juggling real-world physics that was temporarily beyond his comprehension, but any bright ten-year-old could grasp the laws of their present universe, and their technology was still far from rocket science.
He said, “Keep Sapphire frozen, and study your records of the Phites who first performed this boost. If they understood what they were doing, we can work it out too.”
At the end of the week, Daniel signed the licensing deal and flew back to San Francisco. Lucien briefed him daily, and at Daniel’s urging hired a dozen new computational linguists to help with the problem.
After six months, it was clear that they were getting nowhere. The Phites who’d invented the boost had had one big advantage as they’d tinkered with each other’s brains: it had not been a purely theoretical exercise for them. They hadn’t gazed at anatomical diagrams and then reasoned their way to a better design. They had experienced the effects of thousands of small experimental changes, and the results had shaped their intuition for the process. Very little of that intuition had been spoken aloud, let alone written down and formalised. And the process of decoding those insights from a purely structural view of their brains was every bit as difficult as decoding the language itself.
Daniel couldn’t wait any longer. With the crystal heading for the market, and other comparable technologies approaching fruition, he couldn’t allow his lead to melt away.
“We need the Phites themselves to act as translators,” he told Lucien. “We need to contrive a situation where there’s a large enough pool who choose not to be boosted that the old language continues to be used.”
“So we need maybe twenty-five per cent refusing the boost?” Lucien suggested. “And we need the boosted Phites to want to keep them informed of what’s happening, in terms that we can all understand.”
Daniel said, “Exactly.”
“I think we can slow down the uptake of boosting,” Lucien mused, “while we encourage a traditionalist meme that says it’s better to span the two cultures and languages than replace the old entirely with the new.”
Lucien’s team set to work, tweaking the Thought Police for the new task, then restarting Sapphire itself.
Their efforts seemed to yield the desired result: the Phites were corralled into valuing the notion of maintaining a link to their past, and while the boosted Phites surged ahead, they also worked hard to keep the unboosted in the loop.
It was a messy compromise, though, and Daniel wasn’t happy with the prospect of making do with a watered-down, Sapphire-for-Dummies version of the Phites’ intellectual achievements. What he really wanted was someone on the inside reporting to him directly, like a Phite version of Lucien.
It was time to start thinking about job interviews.
Lucien was running Sapphire more slowly than usual – to give the Thought Police a computational advantage now that they’d lost so much raw surveillance data – but even at the reduced rate, it took just six real-time days for the boosted Phites to invent computers, first as a mathematical formalism and, shortly afterwards, as a succession of practical machines.
Daniel had already asked Lucien to notify him if any Phite guessed the true nature of their world. In the past, a few had come up with vague metaphysical speculations that weren’t too wide of the mark, but now that they had a firm grasp of the idea of universal computation, they were finally in a position to understand the crystal as more than an idle fantasy.
The message came just after midnight, as Daniel was preparing for bed. He went into his office and activated the intervention tool that Lucien had written for him, specifying a serial number for the Phite in question.
The tool prompted Daniel to provide a human-style name for his interlocutor, to facilitate communication. Daniel’s mind went blank, but after waiting twenty seconds the software offered its own suggestion: Primo.
Primo was boosted, and he had recently built a computer of his own. Shortly afterwards, the Thought Police had heard him telling a couple of unboosted friends about an amusing possibility that had occurred to him.
Sapphire was slowed to a human pace, then Daniel took control of a Phite avatar and the tool contrived a meeting, arranging for the two of them to be alone in the shelter that Primo had built for himself. In accordance with the current architectural style the wooden building was actually still alive, self-repairing and anchored to the ground by roots.
Primo said, “Good morning. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
It was no great breach of protocol for a stranger to enter one’s shelter uninvited, but Primo was understating his surprise; in this world of immortals, but no passenger jets, bumping into strangers anywhere was rare.
“I’m Daniel.” The tool would invent a Phite name for Primo to hear. “I heard you talking to your friends last night about your new computer. Wondering what these machines might do in the future. Wondering if they could ever grow powerful enough to contain a whole world.”
“I didn’t see you there,” Primo replied.
“I wasn’t there,” Daniel explained. “I live outside this world. I built the computer that contains this world.”
Primo made a gesture that the tool annotated as amusement, then he spoke a few words in the boosted language. Insults? A jest? A test of Daniel’s omniscience? Daniel decided to bluff his way through, and act as if the words were irrelevant.
He said, “Let the rain start.” Rain began pounding on the roof of the shelter. “Let the rain stop.” Daniel gestured with one claw at a large cooking pot in a corner of the room. “Sand. Flower. Fire. Water jug.” The pot obliged him, taking on each form in turn.
Primo said, “Very well. I believe you, Daniel.” Daniel had had some experience reading the Phites’ body language directly, and to him Primo seemed reasonably calm. Perhaps when you were as old as he was, and had witnessed so much change, such a revelation was far less of a shock than it would have been to a human at the dawn of the computer age.
“You created this world?” Primo asked him.
“Yes.”
“You shaped our history?”
“In part,” Daniel said. “Many things have been down to chance, or to your own choices.”
“Did you stop us having children?” Primo demanded.
“Yes,” Daniel admitted.
“Why?”
“There is no room left in the computer. It was either that, or many more deaths.”
Primo pondered this. “So you could have stopped the death of my parents, had you wished?”
“I could bring them back to life, if you want that.” This wasn’t a lie; Daniel had stored detailed snapshots of all the last mortal Phites. “But not yet; only when there’s a bigger computer. When there’s room for them.”
“Could you bring back their parents? And their parents’ parents? Back to the beginning of time?”
“No. That information is lost.”
Primo said, “What is this talk of waiting for a bigger computer? You could easily stop time from passing for us, and only start it again when your new computer is built.”
“No,” Daniel said, “I can’t. Because I need you to build the computer. I’m not like you: I’m not immortal, and my brain can’t be boosted. I’ve done my best, now I need you to do better. The only way that can happen is if you learn the science of my world, and come up with a way to make this new machine.”
Primo walked over to the water jug that Daniel had magicked into being. “It seems to me that you were ill-prepared for the task you set yourself. If you’d waited for the machine you really needed, our lives would not have been so hard. And if such a machine could not be built in your lifetime, what was to stop your grandchildren from taking on that task?”
“I had no choice,” Daniel insisted. “I couldn’t leave your creation to my descendants. There is a war coming between my people. I needed your help. I needed strong allies.”
“You have no friends in your own world?”
“Your time runs faster than mine. I needed the kind of allies that only your people can become, in time.”
Primo said, “What exactly do you want of us?”
“To build the new computer you need,” Daniel replied. “To grow in numbers, to grow in strength. Then to raise me up, to make me greater than I was, as I’ve done for you. When the war is won, there will be peace forever. Side by side, we will rule a thousand worlds.”
“And what do you want of me?” Primo asked. “Why are you speaking to me, and not to all of us?”
“Most people,” Daniel said, “aren’t ready to hear this. It’s better that they don’t learn the truth yet. But I need one person who can work for me directly. I can see and hear everything in your world, but I need you to make sense of it. I need you to understand things for me.”
Primo was silent.
Daniel said, “I gave you life. How can you refuse me?”
6
Daniel pushed his way through the small crowd of protesters gathered at the entrance to his San Francisco tower. He could have come and gone by helicopter instead, but his security consultants had assessed these people as posing no significant threat. A small amount of bad PR didn’t bother him; he was no longer selling anything that the public could boycott directly, and none of the businesses he dealt with seemed worried about being tainted by association. He’d broken no laws, and confirmed no rumours. A few feral cyberphiles waving placards reading “Software Is Not Your Slave!” meant nothing.
Still, if he ever found out which one of his employees had leaked details of the project, he’d break their legs.
Daniel was in the elevator when Lucien messaged him: MOON VERY SOON! He halted the elevator’s ascent, and redirected it to the basement.
All three crystals were housed in the basement now, just centimetres away from the Play Pen: a vacuum chamber containing an atomic force microscope with fifty thousand independently movable tips, arrays of solid-state lasers and photodetectors, and thousands of micro-wells stocked with samples of all the stable chemical elements. The time lag between Sapphire and this machine had to be as short as possible, in order for the Phites to be able to conduct experiments in real-world physics while their own world was running at full speed.
Daniel pulled up a stool and sat beside the Play Pen. If he wasn’t going to slow Sapphire down, it was pointless aspiring to watch developments as they unfolded. He’d probably view a replay of the lunar landing when he went up to his office, but by the time he screened it, it would be ancient history.
“One giant leap” would be an understatement; wherever the Phites landed on the moon, they would find a strange black monolith waiting for them. Inside would be the means to operate the Play Pen; it would not take them long to learn the controls, or to understand what this signified. If they were really slow in grasping what they’d found, Daniel had instructed Primo to explain it to them.
The physics of the real world was far more complex than the kind the Phites were used to, but then, no human had ever been on intimate terms with quantum field theory either, and the Thought Police had already encouraged the Phites to develop most of the mathematics they’d need to get started. In any case, it didn’t matter if the Phites took longer than humans to discover twentieth-century scientific principles, and move beyond them. Seen from the outside, it would happen within hours, days, weeks at the most.
A row of indicator lights blinked on; the Play Pen was active. Daniel’s throat went dry. The Phites were finally reaching out of their own world into his.
A panel above the machine displayed histograms classifying the experiments the Phites had performed so far. By the time Daniel was paying attention, they had already discovered the kinds of bonds that could be formed between various atoms, and constructed thousands of different small molecules. As he watched, they carried out spectroscopic analyses, built simple nanomachines, and manufactured devices that were, unmistakably, memory elements and logic gates.
The Phites wanted children, and they understood now that this was the only way. They would soon be building a world in which they were not just more numerous, but faster and smarter than they were inside the crystal. And that would only be the first of a thousand iterations. They were working their way towards Godhood, and they would lift up their own creator as they ascended.
Daniel left the basement and headed for his office. When he arrived, he called Lucien.
“They’ve built an atomic-scale computer,” Lucien announced. “And they’ve fed some fairly complex software into it. It doesn’t seem to be an upload, though. Certainly not a direct copy on the level of beads.” He sounded flustered; Daniel had forbidden him to risk screwing up the experiments by slowing down Sapphire, so even with Primo’s briefings to help him it was difficult for him to keep abreast of everything.
“Can you model their computer, and then model what the software is doing?” Daniel suggested.
Lucien said, “We only have six atomic physicists on the team; the Phites already outnumber us on that score by about a thousand to one. By the time we have any hope of making sense of this, they’ll be doing something different.”
“What does Primo say?” The Thought Police hadn’t been able to get Primo included in any of the lunar expeditions, but Lucien had given him the power to make himself invisible and teleport to any part of Sapphire or the lunar base. Wherever the action was, he was free to eavesdrop.
“Primo has trouble understanding a lot of what he hears; even the boosted aren’t universal polymaths and instant experts in every kind of jargon. The gist of it is that the Lunar Project people have made a very fast computer in the Outer World, and it’s going to help with the fertility problem . . . somehow.” Lucien laughed. “Hey, maybe the Phites will do exactly what we did: see if they can evolve something smart enough to give them a hand. How cool would that be?”
Daniel was not amused. Somebody had to do some real work eventually; if the Phites just passed the buck, the whole enterprise would collapse like a pyramid scheme.
Daniel had some business meetings he couldn’t put off. By the time he’d swept all the bullshit aside, it was early afternoon. The Phites had now built some kind of tiny solid-state accelerator, and were probing the internal structure of protons and neutrons by pounding them with high-speed electrons. An atomic computer wired up to various detectors was doing the data analysis, processing the results faster than any in-world computer could. The Phites had already figured out the standard quark model. Maybe they were going to skip uploading into nanocomputers, and head straight for some kind of femtomachine?
Digests of Primo’s briefings made no mention of using the strong force for computing, though. They were still just satisfying their curiosity about the fundamental laws. Daniel reminded himself of their history. They had burrowed down to what seemed like the foundations of physics before, only to discover that those simple rules were nothing to do with the ultimate reality. It made sense that they would try to dig as deeply as they could into the mysteries of the Outer World before daring to found a colony, let alone emigrate en masse.
By sunset the Phites were probing the surroundings of the Play Pen with various kinds of radiation. The levels were extremely low – certainly too low to risk damaging the crystals – so Daniel saw no need to intervene. The Play Pen itself did not have a massive power supply, it contained no radioisotopes, and the Thought Police would ring alarm bells and bring in human experts if some kind of tabletop fusion experiment got underway, so Daniel was reasonably confident that the Phites couldn’t do anything stupid and blow the whole thing up.
Primo’s briefings made it clear that they thought they were engaged in a kind of “astronomy.” Daniel wondered if he should give them access to instruments for doing serious observations – the kind that would allow them to understand relativistic gravity and cosmology. Even if he bought time on a large telescope, though, just pointing it would take an eternity for the Phites. He wasn’t going to slow Sapphire down and then grow old while they explored the sky; next thing they’d be launching space probes on thirty-year missions. Maybe it was time to ramp up the level of collaboration, and just hand them some astronomy texts and star maps? Human culture had its own hard-won achievements that the Phites couldn’t easily match.
As the evening wore on, the Phites shifted their focus back to the subatomic world. A new kind of accelerator began smashing single gold ions together at extraordinary energies – though the total power being expended was still minuscule. Primo soon announced that they’d mapped all three generations of quarks and leptons. The Phites’ knowledge of particle physics was drawing level with humanity’s; Daniel couldn’t follow the technical details any more, but the experts were giving it all the thumbs up. Daniel felt a surge of pride; of course his children knew what they were doing, and if they’d reached the point where they could momentarily bamboozle him, soon he’d ask them to catch their breath and bring him up to speed. Before he permitted them to emigrate, he’d slow the crystals down and introduce himself to everyone. In fact, that might be the perfect time to set them their next task: to understand human biology, well enough to upload him. To make him immortal, to repay their debt.
He sat watching images of the Phites’ latest computers, reconstructions based on data flowing to and from the AFM tips. Vast lattices of shimmering atoms stretched off into the distance, the electron clouds that joined them quivering like beads of mercury in some surreal liquid abacus. As he watched, an inset window told him that the ion accelerators had been redesigned, and fired up again.
Daniel grew restless. He walked to the elevator. There was nothing he could see in the basement that he couldn’t see from his office, but he wanted to stand beside the Play Pen, put his hand on the casing, press his nose against the glass. The era of Sapphire as a virtual world with no consequences in his own was coming to an end; he wanted to stand beside the thing itself and be reminded that it was as solid as he was.
The elevator descended, passing the tenth floor, the ninth, the eighth. Without warning, Lucien’s voice burst from Daniel’s watch, priority audio crashing through every barrier of privacy and protocol. “Boss, there’s radiation. Net power gain. Get to the helicopter, now.”
Daniel hesitated, contemplating an argument. If this was fusion, why hadn’t it been detected and curtailed? He jabbed the stop button and felt the brakes engage. Then the world dissolved into brightness and pain.
7
When Daniel emerged from the opiate haze, a doctor informed him that he had burns to sixty per cent of his body. More from heat than from radiation. He was not going to die.
There was a net terminal by the bed. Daniel called Lucien and learnt what the physicists on the team had tentatively concluded, having studied the last of the Play Pen data that had made it off-site.
It seemed the Phites had discovered the Higgs field, and engineered a burst of something akin to cosmic inflation. What they’d done wasn’t as simple as merely inflating a tiny patch of vacuum into a new universe, though. Not only had they managed to create a “cool Big Bang”, they had pulled a large chunk of ordinary matter into the pocket universe they’d made, after which the wormhole leading to it had shrunk to subatomic size and fallen through the Earth.
They had taken the crystals with them, of course. If they’d tried to upload themselves into the pocket universe through the lunar data link, the Thought Police would have stopped them. So they’d emigrated by another route entirely. They had snatched their whole substrate, and ran.
Opinions were divided over exactly what else the new universe would contain. The crystals and the Play Pen floating in a void, with no power source, would leave the Phites effectively dead, but some of the team believed there could be a thin plasma of protons and electrons too, created by a form of Higgs decay that bypassed the unendurable quark-gluon fireball of a hot Big Bang. If they’d built the right nanomachines, there was a chance that they could convert the Play Pen into a structure that would keep the crystals safe, while the Phites slept through the long wait for the first starlight.
The tiny skin samples the doctors had taken finally grew into sheets large enough to graft. Daniel bounced between dark waves of pain and medicated euphoria, but one idea stayed with him throughout the turbulent journey, like a guiding star: Primo had betrayed him. He had given the fucker life, entrusted him with power, granted him privileged knowledge, showered him with the favours of the Gods. And how had he been repaid? He was back to zero. He’d spoken to his lawyers; having heard rumours of an “illegal radiation source”, the insurance company was not going to pay out on the crystals without a fight.
Lucien came to the hospital, in person. Daniel was moved; they hadn’t met face-to-face since the job interview. He shook the man’s hand.
“You didn’t betray me.”
Lucien looked embarrassed. “I’m resigning, boss.”
Daniel was stung, but he forced himself to accept the news stoically. “I understand; you have no choice. Gupta will have a crystal of his own by now. You have to be on the winning side, in the war of the Gods.”
Lucien put his resignation letter on the bedside table. “What war? Are you still clinging to that fantasy where überdorks battle to turn the moon into computronium?”
Daniel blinked. “Fantasy? If you didn’t believe it, why were you working with me?”
“You paid me. Extremely well.”
“So how much will Gupta be paying you? I’ll double it.”
Lucien shook his head, amused. “I’m not going to work for Gupta. I’m moving into particle physics. The Phites weren’t all that far ahead of us when they escaped; maybe forty or fifty years. Once we catch up, I guess a private universe will cost about as much as a private island; maybe less in the long run. But no one’s going to be battling for control of this one, throwing grey goo around like monkeys flinging turds while they draw up their plans for Matrioshka brains.”
Daniel said, “If you take any data from the Play Pen logs —”
“I’ll honour all the confidentiality clauses in my contract.” Lucien smiled. “But anyone can take an interest in the Higgs field; that’s public domain.”
After he left, Daniel bribed the nurse to crank up his medication, until even the sting of betrayal and disappointment began to fade.
A universe, he thought happily. Soon I’ll have a universe of my own.
But I’m going to need some workers in there, some allies, some companions. I can’t do it all alone; someone has to carry the load.
One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the nineties, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1990, and has since become a mainstay of that magazine – one of its most frequent contributors – with almost thirty sales there to her credit. She has also sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Pulphouse, New Legends, and elsewhere.
Her linked series of Drylands stories have proved to be one of Asimov’s most popular series, but she has also published memorable stories such as “The Stone Garden”, “Synthesis”, “Flight”, “California Dreamer”, “Casting at Pegasus”, “Entrada”, “Rat”, “The Centaur Garden”, “Skin Deep”, “Songs the Sirens Sing”, and many, many others. Her novella Gas Fish won the Asimov’s Readers Award Poll in 1996, and was a finalist for that year’s Nebula Award. Her first novel, The Drylands, appeared in 1993 to wide critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the Year; it was followed in short order by her second novel, Chimera, and her third, The Stone Garden. Her first short story collection, Synthesis and Other Stories, was widely hailed by critics as one of the best collections of 1996. She has also written a trilogy of mystery novels under the name Mary Freeman. Her most recent book is a major new science fiction novel, Horizons. A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives in Portland, Oregon.
In the tense story that follows she takes us to an ecologically devastated future that seems all too likely to be around the corner for a look at people struggling to survive – and perhaps, if they can, to hold on to a bit of their souls.
ZIPAKNA HALTED AT midday to let the Dragon power up the batteries. He checked on the chickens clucking contentedly in their travel crates, then went outside to squat in the shade of one fully deployed solar wing in the 43 centigrade heat. Ilena, his sometimes-lover and poker partner, accused him of reverse snobbery, priding himself on being able to survive in the Sonoran heat without air conditioning. Zipakna smiled and tilted his water bottle, savouring the cool, sweet trickle of water across his tongue.
Not true, of course. He held still as the first wild bees found him, buzzed past his face to settle and sip from the sweat-drops beading on his skin. Killers. He held very still, but the caution wasn’t really necessary. Thirst was the great gentler here. Every other drive was laid aside in the pursuit of water.
Even love?
He laughed a short note as the killers buzzed and sipped. So Ilena claimed, but she just missed him when she played the tourists without him. It had been mostly tourists from China lately, filling the underwater resorts in the Sea of Cortez. Chinese were rich and tough players and Ilena had been angry at him for leaving. But he always left in spring. She knew that. In front of him, the scarp he had been traversing ended in a bluff, eroded by water that had fallen here eons ago. The plain below spread out in tones of ochre and russet, dotted with dusty clumps of sage and the stark upward thrust of saguaro, lonely sentinels contemplating the desiccated plain of the Sonoran and in the distance, the ruins of a town. Paloma? Zipakna tilted his wrist, called up his position on his link. Yes, that was it. He had wandered a bit farther eastward than he’d thought and had cut through the edge of the Pima preserve. Sure enough, a fine had been levied against his account. He sighed. He serviced the Pima settlement out here and they didn’t mind if he trespassed. It merely became a bargaining chip when it came time to talk price. The Pima loved to bargain.
He really should let the nav-link plot his course, but Ilena was right about that, at least. He prided himself on finding his way through the Sonora without it. Zipakna squinted as a flicker of movement caught his eye. A lizard? Maybe. Or one of the tough desert rodents. They didn’t need to drink, got their water from seeds and cactus fruit. More adaptable than Homo sapiens, he thought, and smiled grimly.
He pulled his binocs from his belt pouch and focused on the movement. The digital lenses seemed to suck him through the air like a thrown spear, grey-ochre blur resolving into stone, mica flash, and yes, the brown and grey shape of a lizard. The creature’s head swivelled, throat pulsing, so that it seemed to stare straight into his eyes. Then, in an eyeblink, it vanished. The Dragon chimed its full battery load. Time to go. He stood carefully, a cloud of thirsty killer bees and native wasps buzzing about him, shook free of them and slipped into the coolness of the Dragon’s interior. The hens clucked in the rear and the Dragon furled its solar wings and lurched forward, crawling down over the edge of the scarp, down to the plain below and its saguaro sentinels.
His sat-link chimed and his console screen brightened to life. You are entering unserviced United States territory. The voice was female and severe. No support services will be provided from this point on. Your entry visa does not assure assistance in unserviced regions. Please file all complaints with the US Bureau of Land Management. Please consult with your insurance provider before continuing. Did he detect a note of disapproval in the sat-link voice? Zipakna grinned without humor and guided the Dragon down the steep slope, its belted treads barely marring the dry surface as he navigated around rock and thorny clumps of mesquite. He was a citizen of the Republic of Mexico and the US’s sat eyes would certainly track his chip. They just wouldn’t send a rescue if he got into trouble.
Such is life, he thought, and swatted an annoyed killer as it struggled against the windshield.
He passed the first of Paloma’s plantings an hour later. The glassy black disks of the solar collectors glinted in the sun, powering the drip system that fed the scattered clumps of greenery. Short, thick-stalked sunflowers turned their dark faces to the sun, fringed with orange and scarlet petals. Zipakna frowned thoughtfully and videoed one of the wide blooms as the Dragon crawled past. Sure enough, his screen lit up with a similar blossom crossed with a circle-slash of warning.
An illegal pharm crop. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. This was new. He almost turned around, but he liked the folk in Paloma. Good people; misfits, not sociopaths. It was an old settlement and one of his favourites. He sighed, because three diabetics lived here and a new bird flu had come over from Asia. It would find its way here eventually, riding the migration routes. He said a prayer to the old gods and his mother’s Santa Maria for good measure and crawled on into town.
Nobody was out this time of day. Heat waves shimmered above the black solar panels and a lizard whip-flicked beneath the sagging Country Market’s porch. He parked the Dragon in the dusty lot at the end of Main Street where a couple of buildings had burned long ago and unfurled the solar wings again. It took a lot of power to keep them from baking here. In the back Ezzie was clucking imperatively. The oldest of the chickens, she always seemed to know when they were stopping at a settlement. That meant fresh greens. “You’re a pig,” he said, but he chuckled as he made his way to the back to check on his flock.
The twenty hens clucked and scratched in their individual cubicles, excited at the halt. “I’ll let you out soon,” he promised and measured laying ration into their feeders. Bella had already laid an egg. He reached into her cubicle and cupped it in his hand, pale pink and smooth, still warm and faintly moist from its passage out of her body. Insulin nano-bodies, designed to block the auto-immune response that destroyed the insulin producing Beta cells in diabetics. He labelled Bella’s egg and put it into the egg fridge. She was his highest producer. He scooped extra ration into her feeder.
Intruder, his alarm system announced. The heads-up display above the front console lit up. Zipakna glanced at it, brows furrowed, then smiled. He slipped to the door, touched it open. “You could just knock,” he said.
The skinny boy hanging from the front of the Dragon by his fingers as he tried to peer through the windscreen let go, missed his footing and landed on his butt in the dust.
“It’s too hot out here,” Zipakna said. “Come inside. You can see better.”
The boy looked up, his face tawny with Sonoran dust, hazel eyes wide with fear.
Zipakna’s heart froze and time seemed to stand still. She must have looked like this as a kid, he thought. Probably just like this, considering how skinny and androgynous she had been in her twenties. He shook himself. “It’s all right,” he said and his voice only quivered a little. “You can come in.”
“Ella said you have chickens. She said they lay magic eggs. I’ve never seen a chicken. But Pierre says there’s no magic.” The fear had vanished from his eyes, replaced now by bright curiosity.
That, too, was like her. Fear had never had a real hold on her.
How many times had he wished it had?
“I do have chickens. You can see them now.” He held the door open. “What’s your name?”
“Daren.” The boy darted past him, quick as one of the desert’s lizards, scrambled into the Dragon.
Her father’s name.
Zipakna climbed in after him, feeling old suddenly, dry as this ancient desert. I can’t have kids, she had said, so earnest. How could I take a child into the uncontrolled areas? How could I leave one behind? Maybe later. After I’m done out there.
“It’s freezing in here.” Daren stared around at the control bank under the wide windscreen, his bare arms and legs, skin clay-brown from the sun, ridged with goosebumps.
So much bare skin scared Zipakna. Average age for onset of melanoma without regular boosters was twenty-five. “Want something to drink? You can go look at the chickens. They’re in the back.”
“Water?” The boy gave him a bright, hopeful look. “Ella has a chicken. She lets me take care of it.” He disappeared into the chicken space.
Zipakna opened the egg fridge. Bianca laid steadily even though she didn’t have the peak capacity that some of the others did. So he had a good stock of her eggs. The boy was murmuring to the hens who were clucking greetings at him. “You can take one out,” Zipakna called back to him. “They like to be held.” He opened a packet of freeze-dried chocolate soy milk, reconstituted it, and whipped one of Bianca’s eggs into it, so that it frothed tawny and rich. The gods knew if the boy had ever received any immunizations at all. Bianca provided the basic panel of nanobodies against most of the common pathogens and cancers. Including melanoma.
In the chicken room, Daren had taken Bella out of her cage, held her cradled in his arms. The speckled black and white hen clucked contentedly, occasionally pecking Daren’s chin lightly. “She likes to be petted,” Zipakna said. “If you rub her comb she’ll sing to you. I made you a milkshake.”
The boy’s smile blossomed as Bella gave out with the almost-melodic squawks and creaks that signified her pleasure. “What’s a milkshake?” Still smiling, he returned the hen to her cage and eyed the glass.
“Soymilk and chocolate and sugar.” He handed it to Daren, found himself holding his breath as the boy tasted it and considered.
“Pretty sweet.” He drank some. “I like it anyway.”
To Zipakna’s relief he drank it all and licked foam from his lip.
“So when did you move here?” Zipakna took the empty glass, rinsed it at the sink.
“Wow, you use water to clean dishes?” The boy’s eyes had widened. “We came here last planting time. Pierre brought those seeds.” He pointed in the general direction of the sunflower fields.
Zipakna’s heart sank. “You and your parents?” He made his voice light.
Daren didn’t answer for a moment. “Pierre. My father.” He looked back to the chicken room. “If they’re not magic, why do you give them water? Ella’s chicken warns her about snakes, but you don’t have to worry about snakes in here. What good are they?”
The cold logic of the Dry, out here beyond the security net of civilized space. “Their eggs keep you healthy.” He watched the boy consider that. “You know Ella, right?” He waited for the boy’s nod. “She has a disease that would kill her if she didn’t eat an egg from that chicken you were holding every year.”
Daren frowned, clearly doubting that. “You mean like a snake egg? They’re good, but Ella’s chicken doesn’t lay eggs. And snake eggs don’t make you get better when you’re sick.”
“They don’t. And Ella’s chicken is a banty rooster. He doesn’t lay eggs.” Zipakna looked up as a figure moved on the heads-up. “Bella is special and so are her eggs.” He opened the door. “Hello, Ella, what are you doing out here in the heat?”
“I figured he’d be out here bothering you.” Ella hoisted herself up the Dragon’s steps, her weathered, sun-dried face the colour of real leather, her loose sun-shirt falling back from the stringy muscles of her arms as she reached up to kiss Zipakna on the cheek. “You behavin’ yourself, boy? I’ll switch you if you aren’t.”
“I’m being good.” Daren grinned. “Ask him.”
“He is.” Zipakna eyed her face and briefly exposed arms, looking for any sign of melanoma. Even with the eggs, you could still get it out here with no UV protection. “So, Ella, you got some new additions to town, eh? New crops, too, I see.” He watched her look away, saw her face tighten.
“Now don’t you start.” She stared at the south viewscreen filled with the bright heads of sunflowers. “Prices on everything we have to buy keep going up. And the Pima are tight, you know that. Plain sunflower oil don’t bring much.”
“So now you got something that can get you raided. By the government or someone worse.”
“You’re the one comes out here from the city where you got water and power, go hiking around in the dust with enough stuff to keep raiders fat and happy for a year.” Ella’s leathery face creased into a smile. “You preachin’ risk at me, Zip?”
“Ah, but we know I’m crazy, eh?” He returned her smile, but shook his head. “I hope you’re still here, next trip. How’re your sugar levels? You been checking?”
“If we ain’t we ain’t.” She lifted one bony shoulder in a shrug. “They’re holding. They always do.”
“The eggs do make you well?” Daren looked at Ella.
“Yeah, they do.” Ella cocked her head at him. “There’s magic, even if Pierre don’t believe it.”
“Do you really come from a city?” Daren was looking up at Zipakna now. “With a dome and water in the taps and everything?”
“Well, I come from Oaxaca, which doesn’t have a dome. I spend most of my time in La Paz. It’s on the Baja peninsula, if you know where that is.”
“I do.” He grinned. “Ella’s been schooling me. I know where Oaxaca is, too. You’re Mexican, right?” He tilted his head. “How come you come up here with your eggs?”
Ella was watching him, her dark eyes sharp with surmise. Nobody had ever asked him that question openly before. It wasn’t the kind of question you asked, out here. Not out loud. He looked down into Daren’s hazel eyes, into her eyes. “Because nobody else does.”
Daren’s eyes darkened and he looked down at the floor, frowning slightly.
“Sit down, Ella, let me get you your egg. Long as you’re here.” Zipakna turned quickly to the kitchen wall and filled glasses with water. While they drank, he got Bella’s fresh egg from the egg fridge and cracked it into a glass, blending it with the raspberry concentrate that Ella favoured and a bit of soy milk.
“That’s a milkshake,” Daren announced as Zipakna handed Ella the glass. “He made me one, too.” He looked up at Zipakna. “I’m not sick.”
“He didn’t think you were.” Ella lifted her glass in a salute. “Because nobody else does.” Drank it down. “You gonna come eat with us tonight?” Usually the invitation came with a grin that revealed the gap in her upper front teeth, and a threat about her latest pequin salsa. Today her smile was cautious. Wary. “Daren?” She nodded at the boy. “You go help Maria with the food. You know it’s your turn today.”
“Aw.” He scuffed his bare feet, but headed for the door. “Can I come pet the chickens again?” He looked back hopefully from the door, grinned at Zipakna’s nod, and slipped out, letting in a breath of oven-air.
“Ah, Ella.” Zipakna sighed and reached into the upper cupboard. “Why did you plant those damn sunflowers?” He pulled out the bottle of aged mescal tucked away behind the freeze-dried staples. He filled a small, thick glass and set it down on the table in front of Ella beside her refilled water glass. “This can be the end of the settlement. You know that.”
“The end can come in many ways.” She picked up the glass, held it up to the light. “Perhaps fast is better than slow, eh?” She sipped the liquor, closed her eyes and sighed. “Luna and her husband tried for amnesty, applied to get a citizen-visa at the border. They’ve cancelled the amnesty. You live outside the serviced areas, I guess you get to stay out here. I guess the US economy faltered again. No more new citizens from Outside. And you know Mexico’s policy about US immigration.” She shrugged. “I’m surprised they even let you come up here.”
“Oh, my government doesn’t mind traffic in this direction. It likes to rub the US’s nose in the fact that we send aid to its own citizens,” he said lightly. Yeah, the border was closed tight to immigration from the north right now, because the US was being sticky about tariffs. “I can’t believe they’ve made the Interior Boundaries airtight.” That was what she had been afraid of, all those years ago.
“I guess they have to keep cutting and cutting.” Ella drained the glass, probing for the last drops of amber liquor with her tongue. “No, one is enough.” She shook her head as he turned to the cupboard. “The folks that live nice want to keep it that way, so you got to cut somewhere. We all know the US is slowly eroding away. It’s not a superpower anymore. They just pretend.” She looked up at Zipakna, her eyes like flakes of obsidian set into the nested wrinkles of her sun-dried face. “What is your interest in the boy, Zip? He’s too young.”
He turned away from those obsidian-flake eyes. “You misunderstand.”
She waited, didn’t say anything.
“Once upon a time there was a woman.” He stared at the sun-baked emptiness of the main street on the vid screen. A tumbleweed skeleton turned slowly, fitfully across dust and cracked asphalt. “She had a promising career in academics, but she preferred field work.”
“Field work?”
“She was a botanist. She created some drought-tolerant GMOs and started field testing them. They were designed for the drip irrigation ag areas, but she decided to test them . . . out here. She . . . got caught up in it . . . establishing adaptive GMOs out here to create sustainable harvests. She . . . gave up an academic career. Put everything into this project. Got some funding for it.”
Ella sat without speaking as the silence stretched between them. “What happened to her?” She asked it, finally.
“I don’t know.” The tumbleweed had run up against the pole of a rusted and dented No Parking sign and quivered in the hot wind. “I . . . lost contact with her.”
Ella nodded, her face creased into thoughtful folds. “I see.”
No, you don’t, he thought.
“How long ago?”
“Fifteen years.”
“So he’s not your son.”
He flinched even though he’d known the question was coming. “No.” He was surprised at how hard it was to speak that word.
Ella levered herself to her feet, leaning hard on the table. Pain in her hip. The osteo-sarcoma antibodies his chickens produced weren’t specific to her problem. A personally tailored anti-cancer panel might cure her, but that cost money. A lot of money. He wasn’t a doctor, but he’d seen enough osteo out here to measure her progress. It was the water, he guessed. “I brought you a present.” He reached up into the cupboard again, brought out a flat plastic bottle of mescal with the Mexico state seal on the cap. Old stuff. Very old.
She took it, her expression enigmatic, tilted it, her eyes on the slosh of pale golden liquor. Then she let her breath out in a slow sigh and tucked the bottle carefully beneath her loose shirt. “Thank you.” Her obsidian eyes gave nothing away.
He caught a glimpse of rib bones, faint bruising, and dried, shrunken flesh, revised his estimate. “You’re welcome.”
“I think you need to leave here.” She looked past him. “We maybe need to live without your eggs. I’d just go right now.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Listened to the chuckle of the hens. “Can I come to dinner tonight?”
“That’s right. You’re crazy. We both know that.” She sighed.
He held the door for her as she lowered herself stiffly and cautiously into the oven heat of the fading day.
She was right, he thought as he watched her limp through the heat shimmer, back to the main building. She was definitely right.
He took his time with the chickens, letting them out of their cages to scratch on the grass carpet and peck at the vitamin crumbles he scattered for them. While he was parked here, they could roam loose in the back of the Dragon. He kept the door leading back to their section locked and all his hens were good about laying in their own cages, although at this point, he could tell who had laid which egg by sight. By the time he left the Dragon, the sun was completely down and the first pale stars winked in the royal blue of the darkening sky. No moon tonight. The wind had died and he smelled dust and a whiff of roasting meat as his boots grated on the dusty asphalt of the old main street. He touched the small hardness of the stunner in his pocket and climbed the sagging porch of what had once been a store, back when the town had still lived.
They had built a patio of sorts out behind the building, had roofed it from the sun with metal sheeting stripped from other derelict buildings. Long tables and old sofas clustered inside the building, shelter from the sun on the long hot days where residents shelled sunflower seed after harvest or worked on repair jobs or just visited, waiting for the cool of evening. He could see the yellow flicker of flame out back through the old plate-glass windows with their taped cracks.
The moment he entered he felt it – tension like the prickle of static electricity on a dry, windy day. Paloma was easy, friendly. He let his guard down sometimes when he was here, sat around the fire pit out back and shared the mescal he brought, trading swallows with the local stuff, flavoured with cactus fruit, that wasn’t all that bad, considering.
Tonight, eyes slid his way, slid aside. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, but he made his smile easy. “Hola,” he said, and gave them the usual grin and wave. “How you all makin’ out?”
“Zip.” Ella heaved herself up from one of the sofas, crossed the floor with firm strides, hands out, face turning up to kiss his cheeks. Grim determination folded the skin at the corners of her eyes tight. “Glad you could eat with us. Thanks for that egg today, I feel better already.”
Ah, that was the issue? “Got to keep that blood sugar low.” He gave her a real hug, because she was so solid, was the core of this settlement, whether the others realized it or not.
“Come on.” Ella grabbed his arm. “Let’s go out back. Rodriguez got an antelope, can you believe it? A young buck, no harm done.”
“Meat?” He laughed, made it relaxed and easy, from the belly. “You eat better than I do. It’s all vat stuff or too pricey to afford, down south. Good thing maize and beans are in my blood.”
“Hey.” Daren popped in from the firelit back, his eyes bright in the dim light. “Can my friends come see the chickens?”
My friends. The shy, hopeful pride in those words was so naked that Zipakna almost winced. He could see two or three faces behind Daren. That same tone had tainted his own voice, back when he had been a government scholarship kid from the wilds beyond San Cristobal, one of those who spoke Spanish as a second language. My friends, such a precious thing when you did not belong.
“Sure.” He gave Daren a “we’re buddies” grin and shrug. “Any time. You can show ’em around.” Daren’s eyes betrayed his struggle to look nonchalant.
A low chuckle circulated through the room, almost too soft to be heard, and Ella touched his arm lightly. Approvingly. Zipakna felt the tension relax a bit as he and Ella made their way through the dusk of the building to the firelit dark out back. One by one the shadowy figures who had stood back, not greeted him, thawed and followed. He answered greetings, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything, exchanged the usual pleasantries that concerned weather and world politics, avoided the real issues of life. Like illegal crops. One by one, he identified the faces as the warm red glow of the coals in the firepit lit them. She needed the MS egg from Negro, he needed the anti-malaria from Seca and so did she. Daren had appeared at his side, his posture taut, a mix of proprietary and anxious.
“Meat, what a treat, eh?” Zipakna grinned down at Daren as one of the women laid a charred strip of roasted meat on a plate, dumped a scoop of beans beside it and added a flat disk of tortilla, thick and chewy and gritty from the bicycle-powered stone mill that the community used to grind maize into masa.
“Hey, you be careful tomorrow.” She nodded towards a plastic bucket filled with water, a dipper and cups beside it. “Don’t you let my Jonathan hurt any of those chickens. He’s so clumsy.”
“I’ll show ’em how to be careful.” Daren took the piled plate she handed him, practically glowing with pride.
Zipakna smiled at the server. She was another diabetic, like Ella. Sanja. He remembered her name.
“Watch out for the chutney.” Sanja grinned and pointed at a table full of condiment dishes. “The sticky red stuff. I told Ella how to make it and she made us all sweat this year with her pequins.”
“I like it hot.” He smiled for her. “I want to see if it’ll make me sweat.”
“It will.” Daren giggled. “I thought I’d swallowed coals, man.” He carried his plate to one of the wooden tables, set it down with a possessive confidence beside Zipakna’s.
Usually he sat at a crowded table answering questions, sharing news that hadn’t yet filtered out here with the few traders, truckers, or wanderers who risked the unserviced Dry. Not this time. He chewed the charred, overdone meat slowly, aware of the way Daren wolfed his food, how most of the people here ate the same way, always prodded by hunger. That was how they drank, too, urgently, always thirsty.
Not many of them meant to end up out there. He remembered her words, the small twin lines that he called her “thinking dimples” creasing her forehead as she stared into her wine glass. They had plans, they had a future in mind. It wasn’t this one.
“That isn’t really why you come out here, is it? What you said before – in your big truck?”
Zipakna started, realized he was staring into space, a forkful of beans poised in the air. He looked down at Daren, into those clear hazel eyes that squeezed his heart. She had always known when he wasn’t telling the truth. “No. It isn’t.” He set the fork down on his plate. “A friend of mine . . . a long time ago . . . went missing out here. I’ve . . . sort of hoped to run into her.” At least that was how it had started. Now he looked for her ghost. Daren was staring at his neck.
“Where did you get that necklace?”
Zipakna touched the carved jade cylinder on its linen cord. “I found it diving in an old cenote – that’s a kind of well where people threw offerings to the gods centuries ago. You’re not supposed to dive there, but I was a kid – sneaking in.”
“Are the cenotes around here?” Daren looked doubtful. “I never heard of any wells.”
“No, they’re way down south. Where I come from.”
Daren scraped up the last beans from his plate, wiped it carefully with his tortilla. “Why did your friend come out here?”
“To bring people plants that didn’t need much water.” Zipakna sighed and eyed the remnants of his dinner. “You want this? I’m not real hungry tonight.”
Daren gave him another doubting look, then shrugged and dug into the last of the meat and beans. “She was like Pierre?”
“No!”
The boy flinched and Zipakna softened his tone. “She created food plants so that you didn’t need to grow as much to eat well.” And then . . . she had simply gotten too involved. He closed his eyes, remembering that bitter bitter fight. “Is your mother here?” He already knew the answer but Daren’s head shake still pierced him. The boy focused on wiping up the last molecule of the searing sauce with a scrap of tortilla, shoulders hunched.
“What are you doing?
At the angry words, Daren’s head shot up and he jerked his hands away from the plate as if it had burned him.
“I was just talking with him, Pierre.” He looked up, sandy hair falling back from his face. “He doesn’t mind.”
“I mind.” The tall, skinny man with the dark braid and pale skin frowned down at Daren. “What have I told you about city folk?”
“But . . .” Daren bit off the word, ducked his head. “I’ll go clean my plate.” He snatched his plate and cup from the table, headed for the deeper shadows along the building.
“You leave him alone.” The man stared down at him, his grey eyes flat and cold. “We all know about city folk and their appetites.”
Suddenly the congenial chatter that had started up during the meal ended. Silence hung thick as smoke in the air. “You satisfied my appetite quite well tonight.” Zipakna smiled gently. “I haven’t had barbecued antelope in a long time.”
“You got to wonder.” Pierre leaned one hip against the table, crossed his arms. “Why someone gives up the nice air conditioning and swimming pools of the city to come trekking around out here handing out free stuff. Especially when your rig costs a couple of fortunes.”
Zipakna sighed, made it audible. From the corner of his eye he noticed Ella, watching him intently, was aware of the hard lump of the stunner in his pocket. “I get this every time I meet folk. We already went through it here, didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Yeah, they did.” Pierre gave him a mirthless smile. “And you want me to believe that some non-profit in Mexico – Mexico! – cares about us? Not even our own government does that.”
“It’s all politics.” Zipakna shrugged. “Mexico takes quite a bit of civic pleasure in the fact that Mexico has to extend aid to US citizens. If the political situation changes, yeah, the money might dry up. But for now, people contribute and I come out here. So do a few others like me.” He looked up, met the man’s cold, grey eyes. “Haven’t you met an altruist at least once in your life?” he asked softly.
Pierre looked away and his face tightened briefly. “I sure don’t believe you’re one. You leave my son alone.” He turned on his heel and disappeared in the direction Daren had taken.
Zipakna drank his water, skin prickling with the feel of the room. He looked up as Ella marched over, sat down beside him. “We know you’re what you say you are.” She pitched her voice to reach everyone. “Me, I’m looking forward to my egg in the morning, and I sure thank you for keeping an old woman like me alive. Not many care. He’s right about that much.” She gave Zipakna a small private wink as she squeezed his shoulder and stood up. “Sanja and I’ll be there first thing in the morning, right, Sanja?”
“Yeah.” Sanja’s voice emerged from shadow, a little too bright. “We sure will.”
Zipakna got to his feet and Ella rose with him. “You should all come by in the morning. Got a new virus northwest of here. It’s high mortality and it’s moving this way. Spread by birds, so it’ll get here. I have eggs that will give you immunity.” He turned and headed around the side of the building.
A thin scatter of replies drifted after him and he found Ella walking beside him, her hand on his arm. “They change everything,” she said softly. “The flowers.”
“You know, the sat cams can see them.” He kept his voice low as they crunched around the side of the building, heading toward the Dragon. “They measure the light refraction from the leaves and they can tell if they’re legit or one of the outlaw strains. That’s no accident, Ella. You don’t realize how much the government and the drug gangs use the same tools. One or the other will get you.” He shook his head. “You better hope it’s the government.”
“They haven’t found us yet.”
“The seeds aren’t ready to harvest, are they?”
“Pierre says we’re too isolated.”
Zipakna turned on her. “Nowhere is isolated any more. Not on this entire dirt ball. You ever ask Pierre why he showed up here? Why didn’t he stay where he was before if he was doing such a good job growing illegal seeds?”
Ella didn’t answer and he walked on.
“It’s a mistake to let a ghost run your life.” Ella’s voice came low from the darkness behind him, tinged with sadness.
Zipakna hesitated as the door slid open for him. “Good night, Ella.” He climbed into its cool interior, listening to the hens’ soft chortle of greeting.
They showed up in the cool of dawn, trickling up to the Dragon in ones and twos to drink the frothy blend of fruit and soymilk he offered and to ask shyly about the news they hadn’t asked about last night. A few apologized. Not many.
Neither Daren nor Pierre showed up. Zipakna fed the hens, collected the day’s eggs, and was glad he’d given Daren his immunization egg the day before. By noon he had run out of things to keep him here. He hiked over to the community building in the searing heat of noon, found Ella sewing a shirt in the still heat of the interior, told her goodbye.
“Go with God,” she told him and her face was as seamed and dry as the land outside.
This settlement would not be here when he next came this way. The old gods wrote that truth in the dust devils dancing at the edge of the field. He wondered what stolen genes those seeds carried. He looked for Daren and Pierre but didn’t see either of them. Tired to the bone, he trudged back to the Dragon in the searing heat. Time to move on. Put kilometers between the Dragon and the dangerous magnet of those ripening seeds.
You have a visitor, the Dragon announced as he approached.
He hadn’t locked the door? Zipakna frowned, because he didn’t make that kind of mistake. Glad that he was still carrying the stunner, he slipped to the side and opened the door, fingers curled around the smooth shape of the weapon.
“Ella said you were leaving.” Daren stood inside, Bella in his arms.
“Yeah, I need to move on.” He climbed up, the wash of adrenaline through his bloodstream telling him just how tense he had been here. “I have other settlements to visit.”
Daren looked up at him, frowning a little. Then he turned and went back into the chicken room to put Bella back in her travelling coop. He scratched her comb, smiled a little as she chuckled at him, and closed the door. “I think maybe . . . this is yours.” He turned and held out a hand.
Zipakna stared down at the carved jade cylinder on his palm. It had been strung on a fine steel chain. She had worn it on a linen cord with coral beads knotted on either side of it. He swallowed. Shook his head. “It’s yours.” The words came out husky and rough. “She meant you to have it.”
“I thought maybe she was the friend you talked about.” Daren closed his fist around the bead. “She said the same thing you did, I remember. She said she came out here because no one else would. Did you give it to her?”
He nodded, squeezing his eyes closed, struggling to swallow the pain that welled up into his throat. “You can come with me,” he whispered. “You’re her son. Did she tell you she had dual citizenship – for both the US and Mexico? You can get citizenship in Mexico. Your DNA will prove that you’re her son.”
“I’d have to ask Pierre.” Daren looked up at him, his eyes clear, filled with a maturity far greater than his years. “He won’t say yes. He doesn’t like the cities and he doesn’t like Mexico even more.”
Zipakna clenched his teeth, holding back the words that he wanted to use to describe Pierre. Lock the door, he thought. Just leave. Make Daren understand as they rolled on to the next settlement. “What happened to her?” he said softly, so softly.
“A border patrol shot her.” Daren fixed his eyes on Bella, who was fussing and clucking in her cage. “A chopper. They were just flying over, shooting coyotes. They shot her and me.”
She had a citizen chip. If they’d had their scanner on, they would have picked up the signal. He closed his eyes, his head filled with roaring. Yahoos out messing around, who was ever gonna check up? Who cared? When he opened his eyes, Daren was gone, the door whispering closed behind him.
What did any of it matter? He blinked dry eyes and went forward to make sure the thermosolar plant was powered up. It was. He released the brakes and pulled into a tight turn, heading southward out of town on the old, cracked asphalt of the dead road.
He picked up the radio chatter in the afternoon as he fed the hens and let the unfurled panels recharge the storage batteries. He always listened, had paid a lot of personal money for the top decryption chip every trek. He wanted to know who was talking out here and about what.
US border patrol. He listened with half an ear as he scraped droppings from the crate pans and dumped them into the recycler. He knew the acronyms, you mostly got US patrols out here. Flower-town. It came over in a sharp, tenor voice. He straightened, chicken shit spilling from the dustpan in his hand as he listened. Hard.
Paloma. What else could “Flower-town” be out here? They were going to hit it. Zipakna stared down at the scattered grey and white turds on the floor. Stiffly, slowly, he knelt and brushed them into the dust pan. This was the only outcome. He knew it. Ella knew it. They’d made the choice. Not many of them meant to end up out there. Her voice murmured in his ear, so damn earnest. They had plans, they had a future in mind. It wasn’t this one.
“Shut up!” He bolted to his feet, flung the pan at the wall. “Why did you have his kid?” The pan hit the wall and shit scattered everywhere. The hens panicked, squawking and beating at the mesh of their crates. Zipakna dropped to his knees, heels of his hands digging into his eyes until red light webbed his vision.
Flower-town. It came in over the radio, thin and wispy now, like a ghost voice.
Zipakna stumbled to his feet, went forward and furled the solar panels. Powered up and did a tight one-eighty that made the hens squawk all over again.
The sun sank over the rim of the world, streaking the ochre ground with long, dark shadows that pointed like accusing fingers. He saw the smoke in the last glow of the day, mushrooming up in a black flag of doom. He switched the Dragon to infrared navigation, and the black and grey images popped up on the heads-up above the console. He was close. He slowed his speed, wiped sweating palms on his shirt. They’d have a perimeter alarm set and they’d pick him up any minute now. If they could claim he was attacking them, they’d blow him into dust in a heartbeat. He’d run into US government patrols out here before and they didn’t like the Mexican presence one bit. But his movements were sat-recorded and recoverable and Mexico would love to accuse the US of firing on one of its charity missions in the world media. So he was safe. If he was careful. He slowed the Dragon even more although he wanted to race. Not that there would be much he could do.
He saw the flames first and the screen darkened as the nightvision program filtered the glare. The community building? More flames sprang to life in the sunflower fields.
Attention Mexican registry vehicle N45YG90. The crudely accented Spanish filled the Dragon. You are entering an interdicted area. Police action is in progress and no entry is permitted.
Zipakna activated his automatic reply. “I’m sorry. I will stop here. I have a faulty storage bank and I’m almost out of power. I won’t be able to go any farther until I can use my panels in the morning.” He sweated in the silence, the hens clucking softly in the rear.
Stay in your vehicle. The voice betrayed no emotion. Any activity will be viewed as a hostile act. Understand?
“Of course.” Zipakna broke the connection. The air in the Dragon seemed syrupy thick, pressing against his eardrums. They could be scanning him, watching to make sure that he didn’t leave the Dragon. All they needed was an excuse. He heard a flurry of sharp reports. Gunshots. He looked up at the screen, saw three quick flashes of light erupt from the building beyond the burning community centre. No, they’d be looking there. Not here.
Numbly he stood and pulled his protective vest from its storage cubicle along with a pair of night goggles. He put the Dragon on standby. Just in case. If he didn’t reactivate it in forty-eight hours, it would send a mayday back to headquarters. They’d come and collect the hens and the Dragon. He looked once around the small, dimly lit space of the Dragon, said a prayer to the old gods and touched the jade at his throat. Then he touched the door open, letting in a dry breath of desert that smelled of bitter smoke, and slipped out into the darkness.
He crouched, moving with the fits and starts of the desert coyotes, praying again to the old gods that the patrol wasn’t really worrying about him. Enough clumps of mesquite survived here in this long ago wash to give him some visual cover from anyone looking in his direction and as he remembered, the wash curved north and east around the far end of the old town. It would take him close to the outermost buildings.
It seemed to take a hundred years to reach the tumbledown shack that marked the edge of the town. He slipped into its deeper shadow. A half moon had risen and his goggles made the landscape stand out in bright black and grey and white. The gunfire had stopped. He slipped from the shed to the fallen ruins of an old house, to the back of an empty storefront across from the community building. It was fully in flames now and his goggles damped the light as he peered cautiously from the glassless front window. Figures moved in the street, dressed in military coveralls. They had herded a dozen people together at the end of the street and Zipakna saw the squat, boxy shapes of two big military choppers beyond them.
They would not have a good future, would become permanent residents of a secure resettlement camp somewhere. He touched his goggles, his stomach lurching as he zoomed in on the bedraggled settlers. He recognized Sanja, didn’t see either Ella or Daren, but he couldn’t make out too many faces in the huddle. If the patrol had them, there was nothing he could do. They were searching the buildings on this side of the street. He saw helmeted figures cross the street, heading for the building next to his vantage point.
Zipakna slipped out the back door, made his way to the next building, leaned through the sagging window opening. “Daren? Ella? It’s Zip,” he said softly. “Anyone there?” Silence. He didn’t dare raise his voice, moved on to the next building, his skin tight, expecting a shouted command. If they caught him interfering they’d arrest him. It might be a long time before Mexico got him freed. His bosses would be very unhappy with him.
“Ella?” He hurried, scrabbling low through fallen siding, tangles of old junk. They weren’t here. The patrol must have made a clean sweep. He felt a brief, bitter stab of satisfaction that they had at least caught Pierre. One would deserve his fate, anyway.
Time to get back to the Dragon. As he turned, he saw two shadows slip into the building he had just checked – one tall, one child short. Hope leaped in his chest, nearly choking him. He bent low and sprinted, trying to gauge the time . . . how long before the patrol soldiers got to this building? He reached a side window, its frame buckled. As he did, a slight figure scrambled over the broken sill and even in the black and white of nightvision, Zipakna recognized Daren’s fair hair.
The old gods had heard him. He grabbed the boy, hand going over his mouth in time to stifle his cry. “It’s me. Zip. Be silent,” he hissed.
Light flared in the building Daren had just left. Zipakna’s goggles filtered it and crouching in the dark, clutching Daren, he saw Pierre stand up straight, hands going into the air. “All right, I give up. You got me.” Two uniformed patrol pointed stunners at Pierre.
Daren’s whimper was almost but not quite soundless. “Don’t move,” Zipakna breathed. If they hadn’t seen Daren . . .
“You’re the one who brought the seeds.” The taller of the two lowered his stunner and pulled an automatic from a black holster on his hip. “We got an ID on you.”
A gun? Zipakna stared at it as it rose in seeming slow motion, the muzzle tracking upward to Pierre’s stunned face. Daren lunged in his grip and he yanked the boy down and back, hurling him to the ground. The stunner seemed to have leaped from his pocket to his hand and the tiny dart hit the man with the gun smack in the centre of his chest. A projectile vest didn’t stop a stunner charge. The man’s arms spasmed outward and the ugly automatic went sailing, clattering to the floor. Pierre dived for the window as the other patrol yanked out his own weapon and pointed it at Zipakna. He fired a second stun charge but as he did, something slammed into his shoulder and threw him backward. Distantly he heard a loud noise, then Daren was trying to drag him to his feet.
“Let’s go.” Pierre yanked him upright.
“This way.” Zipakna pointed to the distant bulk of the Dragon.
They ran. His left side was numb but there was no time to think about that. Daren and Pierre didn’t have goggles so they ran behind him. He took them through the mesquite, ignoring the thorn slash, praying that the patrol focused on the building first before they started scanning the desert. His back twitched with the expectation of a bullet.
The Dragon opened to him and he herded them in, gasping for breath now, the numbness draining away, leaving slow, spreading pain in its wake. “In here.” He touched the hidden panel and it opened, revealing the coffin-shaped space beneath the floor. The Dragon was defended, but this was always the backup. Not even a scan could pick up someone hidden here. “You’ll have to both fit. There’s air.” They managed it, Pierre clasping Daren close, the boy’s face buried against his shoulder. Pierre looked up as the panel slid closed. “Thanks.” The panel clicked into place.
Zipakna stripped off his protective vest. Blood soaked his shirt. They were using piercers. That really bothered him, but fortunately the vest had slowed the bullet enough. He slapped a blood-stop patch onto the injury, waves of pain washing through his head, making him dizzy. Did a stim-tab from the med closet and instantly straightened, pain and dizziness blasted away by the drug. Didn’t dare hide the bloody shirt, so he pulled a loose woven shirt over his head. Visitor, the Dragon announced. US Security ID verified.
“Open.” Zipakna leaned a hip against the console, aware of the headsup that still showed the town. The building had collapsed into a pile of glowing embers and dark figures darted through the shadows. “Come in.” He said it in English with a careful US accent. “You’re really having quite a night over there.” He stood back as two uniformed patrol burst into the Dragon while a third watched warily from the doorway. All carrying stunners.
Not guns, so maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t been spotted.
“What are you up to?” The patrol in charge, a woman, stared at him coldly through the helmet shield. “Did you leave this vehicle or let anyone in?”
The gods had come through. Maybe. “Goodness, no.” He arched his eyebrows. “I’m not that crazy. I’m still stunned that Paloma went to raising pharm.” He didn’t have to fake the bitterness. “That’s why you’re burning the fields, right? They’re a good bunch of people. I didn’t think they’d ever give in to that.”
Maybe she heard the truth in his words, but for whatever reason, the leader relaxed a hair. “Mind if we look around?” It wasn’t a question and he shrugged, stifling a wince at the pain that made it through the stimulant buzz.
“Sure. Don’t scare the hens, okay?”
The two inside the Dragon searched, quickly and thoroughly. They checked to see if he had been recording video and Zipakna said thanks to the old gods that he hadn’t activated it. That would have changed things, he was willing to bet.
“You need help with your battery problem?” The cold faced woman – a lieutenant, he noticed her insignia – asked him.
He shook his head. “I’m getting by fine as long as I don’t travel at night. They store enough for life support.”
“I’d get out of here as soon as the sun is up.” She jerked her head at the other two. “Any time you got illegal flowers you get raiders. You don’t want to mess with them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He ducked his head. “I sure will do that.” He didn’t move as they left, waited a half hour longer just to be sure that they didn’t pop back in. But they did not. Apparently they believed his story, hadn’t seen their wild dash through the mesquite. He set the perimeter alert to maximum and opened the secret panel. Daren scrambled out first, his face pale enough that his freckles stood out like bits of copper on his skin.
Her freckles.
Zipakna sat down fast. When the stun ran out, you crashed hard. The room tilted, steadied.
“That guy shot you.” Daren’s eyes seemed to be all pupil. “Are you going to die?”
“You got medical stuff?” Pierre’s face swam into view. “Tell me quick, okay?”
“The cupboard to the left of the console.” The words came out thick. Daren was staring at his chest. Zipakna looked down. Red was soaking into the ivory weave of the shirt he’d put on. So much for the blood-stop. The bullet must have gone deeper than he thought, or had hit a small artery. Good thing his boarders hadn’t stuck around longer.
Pierre had the med kit. Zipakna started to pull the shirt off over his head and the pain hit him like a lightning strike, sheeting his vision with white. He saw the pale green arch of the ceiling, thought I’m falling . . .
He woke in his bed, groping drowsily for where he was headed and what he had drunk that made his head hurt this bad. Blinked as a face swam into view. Daren. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, his head splitting.
“You passed out.” Daren’s eyes were opaque. “Pierre took the bullet out of your shoulder while you were out. You bled a lot but he said you won’t die.”
“Where’s Pierre?” He swung his legs over the side of the narrow bed, fighting dizziness. “How long have I been out?”
“Not very long.” Daren backed away. “The chickens are okay. I looked.”
“Thanks.” Zipakna made it to his feet, steadied himself with a hand on the wall. A quick check of the console said that Pierre hadn’t messed with anything. It was light out. Early morning. He set the video to sweep, scanned the landscape. No choppers, no trace of last night’s raiders. He watched the images pan across the heads-up; blackened fields, the smouldering pile of embers and twisted plumbing that had been the community centre, still wisping smoke. The fire had spread to a couple of derelict buildings to the windward of the old store. Movement snagged his eye. Pierre. Digging. He slapped the control, shut off the vid. Daren was back with the chickens. “Stay here, okay? I’m afraid to leave them alone.”
“Okay.” Daren’s voice came to him, hollow as an empty eggshell.
He stepped out into the oven heat, his head throbbing in time to his footsteps as he crossed the sunbaked ground to the empty bones of Paloma. A red bandanna had snagged on a mesquite branch, flapping in the morning’s hot wind. He saw a woman’s sandal lying on the dusty asphalt of the main street, a faded red backpack. He picked it up, looked inside. Empty. He dropped it, crossed the street, angling northward to where he had seen Pierre digging.
He had just about finished two graves. A man lay beside one. The blood that soaked his chest had turned dark in the morning heat. Zipakna recognized his grizzled red beard and thinning hair, couldn’t remember his name. He didn’t eat any of the special eggs, just the ones against whatever new bug was out there. Pierre climbed out of the shallow grave.
“You shouldn’t be walking around.” He pushed dirty hair out of his eyes.
Without a word, Zipakna moved to the man’s ankles. Pierre shrugged, took the man’s shoulders. He was stiff, his flesh plastic and too cold, never mind the morning heat. Without a word they lifted and swung together, lowered him into the fresh grave. It probably wouldn’t keep the coyotes out, Zipakna thought. But it would slow them down. He straightened, stepped over to the other grave.
Ella. Her face looked sad, eyes closed. He didn’t see any blood, wondered if she had simply suffered a heart attack, if she had had enough as everything she had worked to keep intact burned around her. “Did Daren see her die?” He said it softly. Felt rather than saw Pierre’s flinch.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He stuck the shovel into the piled rocks and dirt, tossed the first shovelful into the hole.
Zipakna said the right words in rhythm to the grating thrust of the shovel. First the Catholic prayer his mother would have wanted him to say, then the words for the old gods. Then a small, hard prayer for the new gods who had no language except dust and thirst and the ebb and flow of world politics that swept human beings from the chess board of the earth like pawns.
“You could have let them shoot me.” Pierre tossed a last shovelful of dirt onto Ella’s grave. “Why didn’t you?”
Zipakna tilted his gaze to the hard blue sky. “Daren.” Three tiny black specks hung overhead. Vultures. Death called them. “I’ll make you a trade. I’ll capitalize you to set up as a trader out here. You leave the pharm crops alone. I take Daren with me and get him Mexican citizenship. Give him a future better than yours.”
“You can’t.” Pierre’s voice was low and bitter. “I tried. Even though his mother was a US citizen, they’re not taking in offspring born out here. Mexico has a fifteen-year waiting list for new immigrants.” He was staring down at the mounded rock and dust of Ella’s grave. “She was so angry when she got pregnant. The implant was faulty, I guess. She meant to go back to the city before he was born but . . . I got hurt. And she stuck around.” He was silent for a while. “Then it was too late, Daren was born and the US had closed the border. We’re officially out here because we want to be.” His lips twisted.
“Why did you come out here?”
He looked up. Blinked. “My parents lived out here. They were the rugged individual types, I guess.” He shrugged. “I went into the city, got a job, and they were still letting people come and go then. I didn’t like it, all the people, all the restrictions. So I came back out here.” He gave a thin laugh. “I was a trader to start with. I got hit by a bunch of raiders. That’s when . . . I got hurt. Badly. I’m sorry.” He turned away. “I wish you could get him citizenship. He didn’t choose this.”
“I can.” Zipakna watched Pierre halt without turning. “She . . . was my wife. We married in Oaxaca.” The words were so damn hard to say. “That gave her automatic dual citizenship. In Mexico, only the mother’s DNA is required as proof of citizenship. We’re pragmatists,” he said bitterly.
For a time, Pierre said nothing. Finally he turned, his face as empty as the landscape. “You’re the one.” He looked past Zipakna, towards the Dragon. “I don’t like you, you know. But I think . . . you’ll be a good father for Daren. Better than I’ve been.” He looked down at the dirty steel of the shovel blade. “It’s a deal. A trade. I’ll sell you my kid. Because it’s a good deal for him.” He walked past Zipakna toward the Dragon, tossed the shovel into the narrow strip of shade along one of the remaining buildings. The clang and rattle as it hit sounded loud as mountain thunder in the quiet of the windless heat.
Zipakna followed slowly, his shoulder hurting. Ilena would be pissed, would never believe that Daren wasn’t his. His mouth crooked with the irony of that. The old gods twisted time and lives into the intricate knots of the universe and you could meet yourself coming around any corner. As the Dragon’s doorway opened with a breath of cool air, he heard Pierre’s voice from the chicken room, low and intense against the cluck and chortle of the hens, heard Daren’s answer, heard the brightness in it.
Zipakna went forward to the console to ready the Dragon for travel. As soon as they reached the serviced lands again he’d transfer his savings to a cash card for Pierre. Pierre could buy what he needed on the Pima’s land. They didn’t care if you were a Drylander or not.
Ilena would be doubly pissed. But he was a good poker partner and she wouldn’t dump him. And she’d like Daren. Once she got past her jealousy. Ilena had always wanted a kid, just never wanted to take the time to have one.
He wondered if she had meant to contact him, tell him about Daren, bring the boy back to Mexico. She would have known, surely, that it would have been all right.
Surely. He sighed and furled the solar wings.
Maybe he would keep coming out here. If Daren wanted to. Maybe her ghost would find them as they travelled through this place she had loved. And then he could ask her.
New writer Hannu Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland, but currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is working on his Ph.D. in string theory. He is the co-founder of ThinkTank Maths, which provides consultation services and research in applied mathematics and business development. He is also a member of Writers’ Bloc, an Edinburgh-based spoken-word performance group.
Rajaniemi has had a big impact on the field with only a few stories. His story from 2005, “Deus Ex Homine,” originally from the Scottish regional anthology Nova Scotia, was reprinted in several best of the year anthologies, including this one, and was one of the most talked-about stories of the year. He’s published little else since, a handful of Finnish fantasy stories that were collected in the chapbook – until the story that follows, which appeared this year in Interzone. He is reported to have just sold a trilogy of SF novels to Gollancz though, and I suspect that if he can find the time to write more, he’s going to turn out to be very important to the field.
In an idea-packed story with as high a bit-rate as you’re ever likely to see, he proves once again that man’s best friend is his dog. Particularly if the dog has a nuclear warhead.
BEFORE THE CONCERT, we steal the master’s head.
The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.
The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.
“Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”
It gives me a mildly offended look and dons its armour. The quantum dot fabric envelops its striped body like living oil. It purrs faintly and tests the diamond-bladed claws against an icy outcropping of rock. The sound grates my teeth and the razor-winged butterflies in my belly wake up. I look at the bright, impenetrable firewall of the city of the dead. It shimmers like chained northern lights in my AR vision.
I decide that it’s time to ask the Big Dog to bark. My helmet laser casts a one-nanosecond prayer of light at the indigo sky: just enough to deliver one quantum bit up there into the Wild. Then we wait. My tail wags and a low growl builds up in my belly.
Right on schedule, it starts to rain red fractal code. My augmented reality vision goes down, unable to process the dense torrent of information falling upon the necropolis firewall like monsoon rain. The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish.
“Go!” I shout at the cat, wild joy exploding in me, the joy of running after the Small Animal of my dreams. “Go now!”
The cat leaps into the void. The wings of the armour open and grab the icy wind, and the cat rides the draft down like a grinning Chinese kite.
It’s difficult to remember the beginning now. There were no words then, just sounds and smells: metal and brine, the steady drumming of waves against pontoons. And there were three perfect things in the world: my bowl, the Ball, and the Master’s firm hand on my neck.
I know now that the Place was an old oil rig that the Master had bought. It smelled bad when we arrived, stinging oil and chemicals. But there were hiding places, secret nooks and crannies. There was a helicopter landing pad where the Master threw the ball for me. It fell into the sea many times, but the Master’s bots – small metal dragonflies – always fetched it when I couldn’t.
The Master was a god. When he was angry, his voice was an invisible whip. His smell was a god-smell that filled the world.
While he worked, I barked at the seagulls or stalked the cat. We fought a few times, and I still have a pale scar on my nose. But we developed an understanding. The dark places of the rig belonged to the cat, and I reigned over the deck and the sky: we were the Hades and Apollo of the Master’s realm.
But at night, when the Master watched old movies or listened to records on his old rattling gramophone we lay at his feet together. Sometimes the Master smelled lonely and let me sleep next to him in his small cabin, curled up in the god-smell and warmth.
It was a small world, but it was all we knew.
The Master spent a lot of time working, fingers dancing on the keyboard projected on his mahogany desk. And every night he went to the Room: the only place on the rig where I wasn’t allowed.
It was then that I started to dream about the Small Animal. I remember its smell even now, alluring and inexplicable: buried bones and fleeing rabbits, irresistible.
In my dreams, I chased it along a sandy beach, a tasty trail of tiny footprints that I followed along bendy pathways and into tall grass. I never lost sight of it for more than a second: it was always a flash of white fur just at the edge of my vision.
One day it spoke to me. “Come,” it said. “Come and learn.”
The Small Animal’s island was full of lost places. Labyrinthine caves, lines drawn in sand that became words when I looked at them, smells that sang songs from the Master’s gramophone. It taught me, and I learned: I was more awake every time I woke up. And when I saw the cat looking at the spiderbots with a new awareness, I knew that it, too, went to a place at night.
I came to understand what the Master said when he spoke. The sounds that had only meant angry or happy before became the words of my god. He noticed, smiled, and ruffled my fur. After that he started speaking to us more, me and the cat, during the long evenings when the sea beyond the windows was black as oil and the waves made the whole rig ring like a bell. His voice was dark as a well, deep and gentle. He spoke of an island, his home, an island in the middle of a great sea. I smelled bitterness, and for the first time I understood that there were always words behind words, never spoken.
The cat catches the updraft perfectly: it floats still for a split second, and then clings to the side of the tower. Its claws put the smart concrete to sleep: code that makes the building think that the cat is a bird or a shard of ice carried by the wind.
The cat hisses and spits. The disassembler nanites from its stomach cling to the wall and start eating a round hole in it. The wait is excruciating. The cat locks the exomuscles of its armour and hangs there patiently. Finally, there is a mouth with jagged edges in the wall, and it slips in. My heart pounds as I switch from the AR view to the cat’s iris cameras. It moves through the ventilation shaft like lightning, like an acrobat, jerky, hyperaccelerated movements, metabolism on overdrive. My tail twitches again. We are coming, Master, I think. We are coming.
I lost my ball the day the wrong master came.
I looked everywhere. I spent an entire day sniffing every corner and even braved the dark corridors of the cat’s realm beneath the deck, but I could not find it. In the end, I got hungry and returned to the cabin. And there were two masters. Four hands stroking my coat. Two gods, true and false.
I barked. I did not know what to do. The cat looked at me with a mixture of pity and disdain and rubbed itself on both of their legs.
“Calm down,” said one of the masters. “Calm down. There are four of us now.”
I learned to tell them apart, eventually: by that time Small Animal had taught me to look beyond smells and appearances. The master I remembered was a middle-aged man with greying hair, stocky-bodied. The new master was young, barely a man, much slimmer and with the face of a mahogany cherub. The master tried to convince me to play with the new master, but I did not want to. His smell was too familiar, everything else too alien. In my mind, I called him the wrong master.
The two masters worked together, walked together and spent a lot of time talking together using words I did not understand. I was jealous. Once I even bit the wrong master. I was left on the deck for the night as a punishment, even though it was stormy and I was afraid of thunder. The cat, on the other hand, seemed to thrive in the wrong master’s company, and I hated it for it.
I remember the first night the masters argued.
“Why did you do it?” asked the wrong master.
“You know,” said the master. “You remember.” His tone was dark. “Because someone has to show them we own ourselves.”
“So, you own me?” said the wrong master. “Is that what you think?”
“Of course not,” said the master. “Why do you say that?”
“Someone could claim that. You took a genetic algorithm and told it to make ten thousand of you, with random variations, pick the ones that would resemble your ideal son, the one you could love. Run until the machine runs out of capacity. Then print. It’s illegal, you know. For a reason.”
“That’s not what the plurals think. Besides, this is my place. The only laws here are mine.”
“You’ve been talking to the plurals too much. They are no longer human.”
“You sound just like VecTech’s PR bots.”
“I sound like you. Your doubts. Are you sure you did the right thing? I’m not a Pinocchio. You are not a Gepetto.”
The master was quiet for a long time.
“What if I am,” he finally said. “Maybe we need Gepettos. Nobody creates anything new any more, let alone wooden dolls that come to life. When I was young, we all thought something wonderful was on the way. Diamond children in the sky, angels out of machines. Miracles. But we gave up just before the blue fairy came.”
“I am not your miracle.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You should at least have made yourself a woman,” said the wrong master in a knife-like voice. “It might have been less frustrating.”
I did not hear the blow, I felt it. The wrong master let out a cry, rushed out and almost stumbled on me. The master watched him go. His lips moved, but I could not hear the words. I wanted to comfort him and made a little sound, but he did not even look at me, went back to the cabin and locked the door. I scratched the door, but he did not open, and I went up to the deck to look for the Ball again.
Finally, the cat finds the master’s chamber.
It is full of heads. They float in the air, bodiless, suspended in diamond cylinders. The tower executes the command we sent into its drugged nervous system, and one of the pillars begins to blink. Master, master, I sing quietly as I see the cold blue face beneath the diamond. But at the same time I know it’s not the master, not yet.
The cat reaches out with its prosthetic. The smart surface yields like a soap bubble. “Careful now, careful,” I say. The cat hisses angrily but obeys, spraying the head with preserver nanites and placing it gently into its gel-lined backpack.
The necropolis is finally waking up: the damage the heavenly hacker did has almost been repaired. The cat heads for its escape route and goes to quicktime again. I feel its staccato heartbeat through our sensory link.
It is time to turn out the lights. My eyes polarise to sunglass-black. I lift the gauss launcher, marvelling at the still tender feel of the Russian hand grafts. I pull the trigger. The launcher barely twitches in my grip, and a streak of light shoots up to the sky. The nuclear payload is tiny, barely a decaton, not even a proper plutonium warhead but a hafnium micronuke. But it is enough to light a small sun above the mausoleum city for a moment, enough for a focused maser pulse that makes it as dead as its inhabitants for a moment.
The light is a white blow, almost tangible in its intensity, and the gorge looks like it is made of bright ivory. White noise hisses in my ears like the cat when it’s angry.
For me, smells were not just sensations, they were my reality. I know now that that is not far from the truth: smells are molecules, parts of what they represent.
The wrong master smelled wrong. It confused me at first: almost a god-smell, but not quite, the smell of a fallen god.
And he did fall, in the end.
I slept on the master’s couch when it happened. I woke up to bare feet shuffling on the carpet and heavy breathing, torn away from a dream of the Small Animal trying to teach me the multiplication table.
The wrong master looked at me. “Good boy,” he said. “Shh.” I wanted to bark, but the godlike smell was too strong. And so I just wagged my tail, slowly, uncertainly. The wrong master sat on the couch next to me and scratched my ears absently.
“I remember you,” he said. “I know why he made you. A living childhood memory.” He smiled and smelled friendlier than ever before. “I know how that feels.” Then he sighed, got up and went into the Room. And then I knew that he was about to do something bad, and started barking as loudly as I could. The master woke up and when the wrong master returned, he was waiting.
“What have you done?” he asked, face chalk-white.
The wrong master gave him a defiant look. “Just what you’d have done. You’re the criminal, not me. Why should I suffer? You don’t own me.”
“I could kill you,” said the master, and his anger made me whimper with fear. “I could tell them I was you. They would believe me.”
“Yes,” said the wrong master. “But you are not going to.”
The master sighed. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”
I take the dragonfly over the cryotower. I see the cat on the roof and whimper from relief. The plane lands lightly. I’m not much of a pilot, but the lobotomized mind of the daimon – an illegal copy of a twenty-first century jet ace – is. The cat climbs in, and we shoot towards the stratosphere at Mach 5, wind caressing the plane’s quantum dot skin.
“Well done,” I tell the cat and wag my tail. It looks at me with yellow slanted eyes and curls up on its acceleration gel bed. I look at the container next to it. Is that a whiff of the god-smell or is it just my imagination?
In any case, it is enough to make me curl up in deep happy dog-sleep, and for the first time in years I dream of the Ball and the Small Animal, sliding down the ballistic orbit’s steep back.
They came from the sky before the sunrise. The master went up on the deck wearing a suit that smelled new. He had the cat in his lap: it purred quietly. The wrong master followed, hands behind his back.
There were three machines, black-shelled scarabs with many legs and transparent wings. They came in low, raising a white-frothed wake behind them. The hum of their wings hurt my ears as they landed on the deck.
The one in the middle vomited a cloud of mist that shimmered in the dim light, swirled in the air and became a black-skinned woman who had no smell. By then I had learned that things without a smell could still be dangerous, so I barked at her until the master told me to be quiet.
“Mr Takeshi,” she said. “You know why we are here.”
The master nodded.
“You don’t deny your guilt?”
“I do,” said the master. “This raft is technically a sovereign state, governed by my laws. Autogenesis is not a crime here.”
“This raft was a sovereign state,” said the woman. “Now it belongs to VecTech. Justice is swift, Mr Takeshi. Our lawbots broke your constitution ten seconds after Mr Takeshi here —” she nodded at the wrong master “ – told us about his situation. After that, we had no choice. The WIPO quantum judge we consulted has condemned you to the slow zone for 314 years, and as the wronged party we have been granted execution rights in this matter. Do you have anything to say before we act?”
The master looked at the wrong master, face twisted like a mask of wax. Then he set the cat down gently and scratched my ears. “Look after them,” he told the wrong master. “I’m ready.”
The beetle in the middle moved, too fast for me to see. The master’s grip on the loose skin on my neck tightened for a moment like my mother’s teeth, and then let go. Something warm splattered on my coat and there was a dark, deep smell of blood in the air.
Then he fell. I saw his head in a floating soap bubble that one of the beetles swallowed. Another opened its belly for the wrong master. And then they were gone, and the cat and I were alone on the bloody deck.
The cat wakes me up when we dock with the Marquis of Carabas. The zeppelin swallows our dragonfly drone like a whale. It is a crystal cigar, and its nanospun sapphire spine glows faint blue. The Fast City is a sky full of neon stars six kilometres below us, anchored to the airship with elevator cables. I can see the liftspiders climbing them, far below, and sigh with relief. The guests are still arriving, and we are not too late. I keep my personal firewall clamped shut: I know there is a torrent of messages waiting beyond.
We rush straight to the lab. I prepare the scanner while the cat takes the master’s head out very, very carefully. The fractal bush of the scanner comes out of its nest, molecule-sized disassembler fingers bristling. I have to look away when it starts eating the master’s face. I cheat and flee to VR, to do what I do best.
After half an hour, we are ready. The nanofab spits out black plastic discs, and the airship drones ferry them to the concert hall. The metallic butterflies in my belly return, and we head for the make-up salon. The Sergeant is already there, waiting for us: judging by the cigarette stubs on the floor, he has been waiting for a while. I wrinkle my nose at the stench.
“You are late,” says our manager. “I hope you know what the hell you are doing. This show’s got more diggs than the Turin clone’s birthday party.”
“That’s the idea,” I say and let Anette spray me with cosmetic fog. It tickles and makes me sneeze, and I give the cat a jealous look: as usual, it is perfectly at home with its own image consultant. “We are more popular than Jesus.”
They get the DJs on in a hurry, made by the last human tailor on Savile Row. “This’ll be a good skin,” says Anette. “Mahogany with a touch of purple.” She goes on, but I can’t hear. The music is already in my head. The master’s voice.
The cat saved me.
I don’t know if it meant to do it or not: even now, I have a hard time understanding it. It hissed at me, its back arched. Then it jumped forward and scratched my nose: it burned like a piece of hot coal. That made me mad, weak as I was. I barked furiously and chased the cat around the deck. Finally, I collapsed, exhausted, and realized that I was hungry. The autokitchen down in the master’s cabin still worked, and I knew how to ask for food. But when I came back, the master’s body was gone: the waste disposal bots had thrown it into the sea. That’s when I knew that he would not be coming back.
I curled up in his bed alone that night: the god-smell that lingered there was all I had. That, and the Small Animal.
It came to me that night on the dreamshore, but I did not chase it this time. It sat on the sand, looked at me with its little red eyes and waited.
“Why?” I asked. “Why did they take the master?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” it said. “Not yet.”
“I want to understand. I want to know.”
“All right,” it said. “Everything you do, remember, think, smell – everything – leaves traces, like footprints in the sand. And it’s possible to read them. Imagine that you follow another dog: you know where it has eaten and urinated and everything else it has done. The humans can do that to the mindprints. They can record them and make another you inside a machine, like the scentless screenpeople that your master used to watch. Except that the screendog will think it’s you.”
“Even though it has no smell?” I asked, confused.
“It thinks it does. And if you know what you’re doing, you can give it a new body as well. You could die and the copy would be so good that no one can tell the difference. Humans have been doing it for a long time. Your master was one of the first, a long time ago. Far away, there are a lot of humans with machine bodies, humans who never die, humans with small bodies and big bodies, depending on how much they can afford to pay, people who have died and come back.”
I tried to understand: without the smells, it was difficult. But its words awoke a mad hope.
“Does it mean that the master is coming back?” I asked, panting.
“No. Your master broke human law. When people discovered the pawprints of the mind, they started making copies of themselves. Some made many, more than the grains of sand on the beach. That caused chaos. Every machine, every device everywhere, had mad dead minds in them. The plurals, people called them, and were afraid. And they had their reasons to be afraid. Imagine that your Place had a thousand dogs, but only one Ball.”
My ears flopped at the thought.
“That’s how humans felt,” said the Small Animal. “And so they passed a law: only one copy per person. The humans – VecTech – who had invented how to make copies mixed watermarks into people’s minds, rights management software that was supposed to stop the copying. But some humans – like your master – found out how to erase them.”
“The wrong master,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” said the Small Animal. “He did not want to be an illegal copy. He turned your master in.”
“I want the master back,” I said, anger and longing beating their wings in my chest like caged birds.
“And so does the cat,” said the Small Animal gently. And it was only then that I saw the cat there, sitting next to me on the beach, eyes glimmering in the sun. It looked at me and let out a single conciliatory miaow.
After that, the Small Animal was with us every night, teaching.
Music was my favourite. The Small Animal showed me how I could turn music into smells and find patterns in it, like the tracks of huge, strange animals. I studied the master’s old records and the vast libraries of his virtual desk, and learned to remix them into smells that I found pleasant.
I don’t remember which one of us came up with the plan to save the master. Maybe it was the cat: I could only speak to it properly on the island of dreams, and see its thoughts appear as patterns on the sand. Maybe it was the Small Animal, maybe it was me. After all the nights we spent talking about it, I no longer know. But that’s where it began, on the island: that’s where we became arrows fired at a target.
Finally, we were ready to leave. The master’s robots and nanofac spun us an open-source glider, a white-winged bird.
In my last dream the Small Animal said goodbye. It hummed to itself when I told it about our plans.
“Remember me in your dreams,” it said.
“Are you not coming with us?” I asked, bewildered.
“My place is here,” it said. “And it’s my turn to sleep now, and to dream.”
“Who are you?”
“Not all the plurals disappeared. Some of them fled to space, made new worlds there. And there is a war on, even now. Perhaps you will join us there, one day, where the big dogs live.”
It laughed. “For old times’ sake?” It dived into the waves and started running, became a great proud dog with a white coat, muscles flowing like water. And I followed, for one last time.
The sky was grey when we took off. The cat flew the plane using a neural interface, goggles over its eyes. We sweeped over the dark waves and were underway. The raft became a small dirty spot in the sea. I watched it recede and realized that I’d never found my Ball.
Then there was a thunderclap and a dark pillar of water rose up to the sky from where the raft had been. I didn’t mourn: I knew that the Small Animal wasn’t there any more.
The sun was setting when we came to the Fast City.
I knew what to expect from the Small Animal’s lessons, but I could not imagine what it would be like. Mile-high skyscrapers that were self-contained worlds, with their artificial plasma suns and bonsai parks and miniature shopping malls. Each of them housed a billion lilliputs, poor and quick: humans whose consciousness lived in a nanocomputer smaller than a fingertip. Immortals who could not afford to utilize the resources of the overpopulated Earth more than a mouse. The city was surrounded by a halo of glowing fairies, tiny winged moravecs that flitted about like humanoid fireflies and the waste heat from their overclocked bodies draped the city in an artificial twilight.
The citymind steered us to a landing area. It was fortunate that the cat was flying: I just stared at the buzzing things with my mouth open, afraid I’d drown in the sounds and the smells.
We sold our plane for scrap and wandered into the bustle of the city, feeling like daikaju monsters. The social agents that the Small Animal had given me were obsolete, but they could still weave us into the ambient social networks. We needed money, we needed work.
And so I became a musician.
The ballroom is a hemisphere in the centre of the airship. It is filled to capacity. Innumerable quickbeings shimmer in the air like living candles, and the suits of the fleshed ones are no less exotic. A woman clad in nothing but autumn leaves smiles at me. Tinkerbell clones surround the cat. Our bodyguards, armed obsidian giants, open a way for us to the stage where the gramophones wait. A rustle moves through the crowd. The air around us is pregnant with ghosts, the avatars of a million fleshless fans. I wag my tail. The scentspace is intoxicating: perfume, fleshbodies, the unsmells of moravec bodies. And the fallen god smell of the wrong master, hiding somewhere within.
We get on the stage on our hindlegs, supported by prosthesis shoes. The gramophone forest looms behind us, their horns like flowers of brass and gold. We cheat, of course: the music is analog and the gramophones are genuine, but the grooves in the black discs are barely a nanometer thick, and the needles are tipped with quantum dots.
We take our bows and the storm of handclaps begins.
“Thank you,” I say when the thunder of it finally dies. “We have kept quiet about the purpose of this concert as long as possible. But I am finally in a position to tell you that this is a charity show.”
I smell the tension in the air, copper and iron.
“We miss someone,” I say. “He was called Shimoda Takeshi, and now he’s gone.”
The cat lifts the conductor’s baton and turns to face the gramophones. I follow, and step into the soundspace we’ve built, the place where music is smells and sounds.
The master is in the music.
It took five human years to get to the top. I learned to love the audiences: I could smell their emotions and create a mix of music for them that was just right. And soon I was no longer a giant dog DJ among lilliputs, but a little terrier in a forest of dancing human legs. The cat’s gladiator career lasted a while, but soon it joined me as a performer in the virtual dramas I designed. We performed for rich fleshies in the Fast City, Tokyo, and New York. I loved it. I howled at Earth in the sky in the Sea of Tranquility.
But I always knew that it was just the first phase of the Plan.
We turn him into music. VecTech owns his brain, his memories, his mind. But we own the music.
Law is code. A billion people listening to our master’s voice. Billion minds downloading the Law At Home packets embedded in it, bombarding the quantum judges until they give him back.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made. The cat stalks the genetic algorithm jungle, lets the themes grow and then pounces on them, devours them. I just chase them for the joy of the chase alone, not caring whether or not I catch them.
It’s our best show ever.
Only when it’s over, I realize that no one is listening. The audience is frozen. The fairies and the fastpeople float in the air like flies trapped in amber. The moravecs are silent statues. Time stands still.
The sound of one pair of hands, clapping.
“I’m proud of you,” says the wrong master.
I fix my bow tie and smile a dog’s smile, a cold snake coiling in my belly. The god-smell comes and tells me that I should throw myself onto the floor, wag my tail, bare my throat to the divine being standing before me.
But I don’t.
“Hello, Nipper,” the wrong master says.
I clamp down the low growl rising in my throat and turn it into words. “What did you do?”
“We suspended them. Back doors in the hardware. Digital rights management.”
His mahogany face is still smooth: he does not look a day older, wearing a dark suit with a VecTech tie pin. But his eyes are tired. “Really, I’m impressed. You covered your tracks admirably. We thought you were furries. Until I realized —”
A distant thunder interrupts him.
“I promised him I’d look after you. That’s why you are still alive. You don’t have to do this. You don’t owe him anything. Look at yourselves: who would have thought you could come this far? Are you going to throw that all away because of some atavistic sense of animal loyalty? Not that you have a choice, of course. The plan didn’t work.”
The cat lets out a steam pipe hiss.
“You misunderstand,” I say. “The concert was just a diversion.”
The cat moves like a black-and-yellow flame. Its claws flash, and the wrong master’s head comes off. I whimper at the aroma of blood polluting the god-smell. The cat licks its lips. There is a crimson stain on its white shirt.
The zeppelin shakes, pseudomatter armour sparkling. The dark sky around the Marquis is full of fire-breathing beetles. We rush past the human statues in the ballroom and into the laboratory.
The cat does the dirty work, granting me a brief escape into virtual abstraction. I don’t know how the master did it, years ago, broke VecTech’s copy protection watermarks. I can’t do the same, no matter how much the Small Animal taught me. So I have to cheat, recover the marked parts from somewhere else.
The wrong master’s brain.
The part of me that was born on the Small Animal’s island takes over and fits the two patterns together, like pieces of a puzzle. They fit, and for a brief moment, the master’s voice is in my mind, for real this time.
The cat is waiting, already in its clawed battlesuit, and I don my own. The Marquis of Carabas is dying around us. To send the master on his way, we have to disengage the armour.
The cat miaows faintly and hands me something red. An old plastic ball with toothmarks, smelling of the sun and the sea, with a few grains of sand rattling inside.
“Thanks,” I say. The cat says nothing, just opens a door into the zeppelin’s skin. I whisper a command, and the master is underway in a neutrino stream, shooting up towards an island in a blue sea. Where the gods and big dogs live forever.
We dive through the door together, down into the light and flame.