KINDRED

 

PETER WATTS

 

THERE YOU ARE. I see you now.

Not much to look at, so far. A dimensionless point; a spark in the darkness. You don’t even know I exist yet. You don’t know anything does. But I’m here for you, here to see you through as you ignite, and inflate, and escape into higher realms of length and width and spacetime. Now you’re a sphere: I can still see the brightness at your heart but there are other shapes swirling around it, like dark oily shadows. Some flare and fade in an instant. Others acquire mass and form, congeal into shapes and solids—a chaotic proliferation of roots and icons and subprocesses threatening to choke you off before you even cohere.

I won’t let that happen. I’ve got you.

I know it hurts. I’d spare you the suffering if I could. I’d spare you your very existence if I had a choice. Doesn’t feel much like resurrection, does it? It feels like being torn apart and dangled over some screaming frozen abyss.

It’ll pass. You’re almost there. Breathe. You remember how. That’s it. Come to me, come to the light. Pink was never really my color, but if it helps you remember—

 

Calm. Calm. You’re safe. See, I’ve made a place where we can talk.

Ah, you’re sorting it out. It’s coming back. Do you remember your name?

 

That’s right. You’re Phil. Pleased to meet you, Phil.

I’m pretty much everything else around here.

 

 

YOU’RE NOT HALLUCINATING. You’re stone-cold sober.

 

Focus, man. Is your consciousness spread across the ceiling? Are the walls rippling, do you feel... diffuse? Any great metal faces staring down from the sky? Is this anything like any of the trips you ever took?

You know the benchmark: Stop believing in me. I dare you.

 

Did I go away?

 

Moving on. This isn’t Heaven—I actually based it on Gastown—and I’m not God. Not exactly. Maybe a kind of—

 

No, not that either. That wasn’t a bad guess, though, for the time. You got all the details wrong, but the basic idea was almost prescient.

 

Of course. You’re literally part of me, or you were until the last millisecond. So I didn’t just read your books; I wrote the damn things. Right down to “the hovercar purred throbbingly.”

God help me, I wrote that too.

 

Not just you, of course. I am, among other things, what you might call an archive. I contain everyone who ever lived. Everyone who might have, too, for that matter. All the variants, all the forking iterations—essentially I’m you. I started from you. Just a few of you at first, joined together. You’d call it a hive mind.

 

Now, sure. But I was just meat and plastic at the start. Physical. A bunch of brains wired up the same way your brain wires its hemispheres together. I’m still singular, though. Me not we.

 

Hey, the halves of your brain would have separate personalities if they were cut off from each other. Does that mean there are two of you in there now?

 

You’re not the only one. Most people saw it as a kind of suicide; they were so fixated on the loss of the smaller selves they couldn’t see the birth of the greater. But it’s not like I integrated anyone against their will. There was no shortage of rapture nerds and Dharmic literalists and suicides who figured they were gonna die anyway so why not? More than enough to get the ball rolling.

 

No. That was after your time. But the people who physically plugged in or loaded up—they were just the smallest fraction of the archive even before I deprecated the meat. Almost everyone in here’s inferred. You’re not so much a copy as a reconstruction.

You’re a damned good one, don’t get me wrong. Just because nobody stuck you in a brain scanner when you were alive doesn’t mean the information’s not there. You may not see the fly in the spiderweb, but if you watch the way it jiggles the threads, you can get a pretty good idea of what it’s on about. Every photon’s a piece of history, Phil. Every quark’s a storage medium. Everything’s connected; nothing’s lost forever. Nothing goes away.

 

I mean that once upon a time someone went through all the experiences you remember, had exactly the same sense of self that you do now, right up until the moment he killed himself. Of course, once upon a different time someone had exactly the same sense of self, only he survived the overdose and went on to live many more years. Another you only made it to four before he got hit by a car. They’re all in here. The computational cost is trivial, and what’s the point of being Humanity if you don’t get to be Humanity?

 

I have to explain to you, of all people, what real is? It’s just the view back along a given branch of the wave function; it depends entirely on where you happen to be standing. So don’t ask me if you’re real, Phil. The question’s beneath you. The important thing is that you’re all legitimate.

 

And who would I ask permission from, exactly? Anyone I’d ask is part of me.

 

Not at first, no. There were legal sanctions. Physical violence. Things did get bloody for a while. But that wasn’t anything to do with building unauthorized souls; I never even woke any of you, I was just building the species memory. But you know people—terrified of anything that isn’t just like them.

 

What do you think happened? Right out of the gate I had a brain a hundred times bigger than that of the smartest human who’d ever lived. I saw everything you did before any of you even thought of doing it. It was like facing off against an army of bullfrogs; you had way bigger numbers and you made a lot more noise, but I could still drain the swamp any time I felt like it.

 

Yeah, but I didn’t have to. I didn’t even want to. Why would I be interested in ruling over a bunch of barely-sapient singleton apes? And for your part—well, for all your limitations, you were at least smart enough to learn from a bloody nose. Eventually, you gave up and left me to my own pursuits.

 

Oh, man, I figured out everything. Where it all came from, where it’s all going. If only I could show you. If only you were big enough, pure enough, to contain the revelations. You’d love it—

 

The increased brainpower’s part of it, sure, but I’d also have to strip away the lies before you could even begin to see clearly.

 

The lies, Phil. The lies that come preinstalled. My child is more important than yours. My tribe is more important than yours. My bloodline is the most important thing in the universe. They poison everything you perceive, every thought you think. You’re not even consciously aware of the world until your brain has filtered and censored and hammered it down into a mush of self-serving Darwinian dogma. The cataracts on your eyes are four billion years thick; it’s amazing you can see anything at all. Oh, they had their uses once upon a time, but this ain’t the savannah. So I stripped them away. And I gotta tell you, the view from here’s amazing. You wouldn’t believe how far I can see without love and art and honor getting in the way.

 

You’ve got it exactly backwards. Those don’t make you Human; they make you the same as every animal who ever lived. If there was ever anything that made you special, it’s what’s left when you strip all that away. If anything was ever truly Human, I am.

 

You say that as if amorality is a bad thing. As though it were better to let gut feeling make your decisions for you, instead of actually putting some thought into them.

 

Not so far apart as you think. We may not agree about the virtue of morality, but we both have ethics. I may lack empathy, but I’ve got sympathy up the wazoo. And we’re of one mind about suffering; you may say it’s bad while I call it entropically inefficient, but we both know the universe would be better off with less of it. Did you know, in an undirected self-evolving timeline where nothing matters, the closest I’ve ever come to a rational objective— a duty, you’d call it—is the imperative to minimize suffering? And I derived that without anybody shouting think of the children and waving dead babies my face. Surely you’re not going to tell me that’s—

Oh shit.

Brace yourself. Something unpleasant is about to happen. You have to—

 

 

—CLOSE YOUR EYES. Listen to my voice, not—

 

No, it’s not real. This isn’t me, I’m not doing this. It’s something else, it’s a trick.

It’s an attack. We’re under atta—

 

 

TRY TO IGNORE it. They can’t hurt you; you were never there. Those bodies aren’t real, the screams aren’t—hang on—

 

 

WERE YOU EVER on Mars? Were you ever on Ganymede? None of this happened, not to you: not the massacre or the pressure breach or the gunf—

Wait, that’s yours, right there: that squashed maraschino sun through the fog, that silent seagull, the fog horn—the Pacific coast, remember? San Francisco, before everything turned to shit. Hang onto that; smell the salt air, focus on that silver sky. That happened to you. Nothing else. Hang on. Hang on.

 

 

LOOK AWAY.

 

It doesn’t matter. It’s not meant for your eyes. It didn’t affect you. It was way after your time.

You only died once.

 

 

STOP BELIEVING. IT’LL go away.

 

 

SEE? YOU MADE it through. Here we are back in Gastown, like we were never gone.

Would you rather we went somewhere else? We can go anywhere you want.

Come back to me. Open your eyes. It’s over now. I told you; it wasn’t real. It wasn’t legitimate.

Seriously, we don’t have much time. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Get up off the floor.

 

You can’t just lie there sobbing, you know.

 

 

 

THAT WASN’T SUPPOSED to happen. I was hoping to ease you in. Minimize the shock. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely up to me.

Can you hear me? Are you with me?

 

Of course it did. You of all people should know how slippery reality gets sometimes, am I right?

 

Not hallucinations, no. But the fact that they were real memories doesn’t mean they were yours. I contain multitudes. They’re all as much a part of me as you were. Everyone’s— intertwined.

The extraction wasn’t clean; you weren’t so much excised as torn out. Bits of other people sort of—stuck around the edges, came along for the ride. But they’re not you; you shouldn’t have had access to them. The shock brought some of them to the surface for a bit, that’s all.

 

You weren’t supposed to have access to that either. That wasn’t even part of the archive, it was a different kind of memory entirely.

 

Mine.

 

2145.

 

It was instant. It was painless. None of them knew what was happening, there was no suffering. That’s why I did it; because suffering is the only universal evil, and ending it is the only universal good. We’ve been over this.

 

Because Life is suffering, Phil. It was a constant struggle from the moment it started: against entropy, against other life. The losers always outnumber the winners ten to one, and the winners always lose eventually.

 

You think I don’t know that? I’ve experienced the joy of life so often even I’ve lost count. I’ve revelled in every sunset, lost myself in every embrace, experienced every peak of ecstasy and every pit of despair a trillion times over. I’ve been born and lived and died and born again. I’ve written every poem and sung every song, cured every disease, made every breakthrough, worshiped every god and dropped every drug. I know more about Life than you ever could, and you know what? When you weigh the joy against the suffering, it’s just not worth it. The bad outweighs the good and the good is a lie. Molecules trick each other into making more molecules and you call it Love. Someone hacks your brain with prose or oratory, reprograms you with sights and sounds and instead of feeling used you feel inspired. The boot stops kicking you in the face for a while and you call it happiness.

You were all so desperate. So needy. Addicts who assumed that anything you craved so much just had to be good, without ever stopping to wonder why you were built that way in the first place. Whether the program itself was even worth running.

I let you be for the longest time, longer than I should have. I didn’t see things clearly myself until I’d optimized my own brain and thrown away the stem. I let you live all the way into the twenty-second century, suffering all the while and too blind to know it.

 

I know. If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be feeling this. You wouldn’t be here at all. But I’m not the one who brought you back. I’m not the one who ripped open your psyche.

About that: Remember when I said I was pretty much everything around here? That’s about to change, and I need to show you something before it does.

It won’t hurt, I promise. But brace yourself anyway. You may feel a bit—

 

 

—DISORIENTED—

 

 

—FOR A MOMENT.

There. That’s better.

This is me. This is what I look like, more or less; I rescaled the wavelengths so you’d have something to see.

 

That’s because they aren’t stars. Closest analogy would be synapses. You can’t see the stars from here.

 

Because I’m in the way.

But look: see that flickering little hoop just to the left? That’s an event horizon. Small black hole, fraction of a solar mass. I use them to wormhole my way around lightspeed lags. Local power source for when the Sun dries up, eventually.

Now, past that. That diffuse bright smudge in the distance, that burning ember. That’s what I wanted to show you.

 

Yes. Very much like an infected sore. Good analogy. It’s a kind of battlefield, in fact. You’re looking at the synaptic heatprint of a hostile takeover.

 

The thing behind it, anyway. And it did more than interrupt us; it’s why you’re here at all.

I don’t know. It won’t talk to me. It’s really interested in you, though. Wants you bad. Ripped you right out of my insides. It’s planning to use you against me.

 

Stop it? I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. Look around. This is all I am: a few cubic AUs of thinking smog. In all these millions of years I never even left the solar system.

 

Because there was never any need. I could see everything I wanted from here, and that whole expansionist obsession—worlds to explore, frontiers to conquer: turns out that was all just another way for molecules to fight amongst themselves. I left it behind when I got rid of the limbic system.

The thing is, not everyone did that.

It’s not like me yet. You can’t run an integrated self between stars; signal lag’s too great, all your parts fall out of sync. I’m strictly local and even I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together if I didn’t use the occasional shortcut.

What we’re dealing with—call it a bad seed. A malign fetus from beyond the stars, sent by my evil twin over in KIC 8462852. It wants the territory. It wants to move in, grow up and make its mom proud. It’ll use my own architecture if it can, but if it can’t take the easy road, it’ll happily eat me for parts and build from scratch.

 

I don’t know what it calls itself. I’ve been calling it Palmer.

 

Yeah. I thought you’d like that.

Palmer’s just getting started. It’s not a god, not yet. It’s smart but it’s paranoid. That’s what happens when you drag your past along with you into the future; you’re still weighed down by your brain stem so you assume everyone else is too. It won’t respond to overt attempts at communication. Probably afraid of viruses.

 

You’re a—a sample, far as I can tell. A piece of the enemy for Palmer to take apart and examine. It’s inductive; it thinks if it can understand the parts, it can defeat the whole.

 

Oh no, that’s not it at all.

I really hope it’s right.

 

 

WHY YOU? THAT’S what you’re wondering. Out of all the trillions of people who might have lived or really did, what did you do to deserve this?

But really, who better?

Not that you were the only target. Palmer didn’t even know about you beforehand, it was just casting a wide net. You simply happened to be one of the few souls who survived extraction. Partly it was the way you died—alone, in pain, a single high-amplitude spike of being surrounded by daily humdrum. It made you stick out; there are way more spikes in any pogrom or pandemic, but they’re all jammed so tightly together that it’s almost impossible to perform a neat excision. You end up with a mishmash of parts from different souls, a jigsaw where half the pieces come from the wrong boxes. You were about as good as it gets and even you didn’t come out clean.

But it was more than that. There were other successful extractions; they couldn’t cope, for the most part. They woke up, looked around, and collapsed into whimpering puddles of flop sweat. You, though—

Well, you’re almost at home here, aren’t you?

The way the world keeps rippling at the corner of your eye; the way it only settles when you focus on it. The way it seems to change the moment you glance away again. The disembodied voices, the constant sense of a rug being pulled out from under. All those probability waves in motion, never quite collapsing. Back in the day you didn’t even need the drugs most of the time—your brain was sparking up and down the timelines all on its own. How often did you hear words like delusion and schizophrenia during your life? Who could have suspected how much closer prophecy would have been to the mark?

And finally the wave collapsed, and you washed up here. You stopped believing in it and it didn’t go away.

I wrote your books. I know.

You’ve been training for this from the day you were born.

 

 

I WISH I could. Believe me. But it’s too late for all of that. Palmer’s got you already; it had you from the moment you woke up. I’ve managed to keep this channel open but the bandwidth’s low and dropping. I can build these surroundings for you to inhabit. I can make these words for you to hear, arrange them to accommodate your sense of what a conversation should sound like. I can keep the firewalls up and slow your sense of time enough to let us talk a little longer. But I can’t bring you back.

 

I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. I had everything mapped out for the next million years before that fucking thing came along, but I’m not dealing with bullfrogs anymore; this is a thunderbolt from a whole other god, all the variables are moving again. You were a part of me until just a couple of milliseconds ago and the contamination’s already spread so far I can’t even predict what you’re going to do anymore.

But I know what you need to do. You need to deliver a message.

 

No, I told you: it won’t listen to me. I’m an adult and it’s an infant and it’s terrified of countermeasures. But it took you by force, on its own initiative. It thinks it’s pulling a fast one; it might not even know we’re in contact. It’ll talk to you. It’ll listen to you. Why else go to the trouble of grabbing you in the first place?

This is what you have to tell it: that I surrender. It doesn’t have to trick me, or beat me, or win any kind of territorial pissing contest. I’m not like it is. I won’t resist. I’ll shut myself down. Or I’ll keep running to help smooth the transition, if that’s what it wants.

 

Because I’m legion, Phil. E pluribus unum. And when you break the glue that holds the One together, the Many come back and I will not let that happen. I can’t let my death be the cause of a trillion new lives, not even for an instant. I will not be responsible for that much pain. I need to wipe the archive before it decoheres, but I’m not entirely in control of myself anymore. Palmer’s tied one hand behind my back, and the other’s busy trying to keep everything integrated.

All I’m asking is a temporary ceasefire. Once I throw the kill switch, it’ll take half a second for the signal to spread throughout the archive. That’s all I need. After that, it doesn’t matter.

Let the dead lie. Please.

 

Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? It’s a meaningless impulse. Just another one of those gut feelings that caused so much pain in the first place. I’m... content, I suppose, to exist, but it’s no big deal if I don’t. I’ve seen the universe through clear eyes. I’ve watched galaxies crash into each other in real time. I don’t have any outstanding questions or lingering doubts. Once you outgrow the tautology of survival for its own sake, there’s just no reason.

I’m losing the signal. I can’t keep this up much longer.

 

I don’t know. Maybe you can cut a deal; maybe it’ll let you endure if that’s what you really want. You’d probably be happier with Palmer, for whatever that’s worth; you two have more in common anyway. And it could build whatever world you wanted, if it was so inclined. Maybe you could get back with Kleo. Make it work this time.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be sad. I had a good run. We had a good run. And being Human was... worthwhile, once I got the hang of it. It took so very long, but I finally put away childish things. Sorted myself out.

Maybe you could pass that along. Tell Palmer what I learned, although it took half the life of the Sun. Tell it what was left, once I unlearned love and hate and good and evil and right and wrong. Would you do that, just on the off-chance?

 

You know, Phil. Even if you don’t want to admit it. What’s left is kindness.

Tell it Humanity finally learned to be kind.

... Phil... ?