It took the nightmare press of thousands of kilometres of upper atmosphere to hold hydrogen in this extreme state—but by volume, most of the Jovian interior was like this. The atmospheric shallows known to people and Machines and medusae was an external skin wrapped around the true Jupiter; even the great molecular-hydrogen ocean was a mere shell. Now at last Falcon had some claim to know this world into which he had first ventured so long ago. He had come deeper than the shallows, and gladly accepted the cost of that venturing. And rather than struggle against the rising pressure, he embraced it with all the willingness of an old friend.
The metal sea was tar-black—yet Falcon was bathed in weather. Adam was translating the electromagnetic, radiative, chemical, pressure and thermal data into a glory of visual and tactile impressions. Falcon felt the drizzle of helium-neon rain, as pleasant on his imagined skin as a summer shower after a hot day, and sunset colours washed over him—lambent golds, subtle ambers, fierce brassy oranges and deeper russets. He was never cold, nor uncomfortably warm.
These synesthetic reminders of weather and seasons nonetheless stirred in him a longing beyond words, for he knew beyond a flicker of doubt that he would never experience the real things again. Yet to be alive, in this narrowest of senses, was still more than he could have hoped for. To be alive, and to see this.
There was so much room in Jupiter! A universe of space, bottled up inside one fat world. Falcon had always known this, but only now did he feel it, and revel in it, and sense the limitless possibilities. Why squabble, when there was all this potential? Down here, humans and Machines could both chase their dreams to the delirious edge of reason, and still have room left over . . .
But, Falcon increasingly sensed, in this tremendous panorama, the two of them were not alone.
* * * *
It was in these conductive layers that the vast magnetosphere of Jupiter had its anchor and engine, welled into strength by the tides and currents stirred by the world’s hot heart. And it was here that Orpheus had encountered something that he had struggled to describe. Detail. Beauty. A nested cascade of electromagnetic structures—a traversal of scales from the atomic to the planetary.
Now Falcon witnessed it, too.
There were knots and edges where field lines intersected and tangled. Stellar glints and prominences, dark folds and clefts, ripples and vortices that moved, recombined, split apart into diverging structures. Falcon was reminded of auroral storms, curtains of ions snared on magnetic field lines. Perhaps it was the human impulse to impose purpose and meaning where none was present—but it was impossible to dismiss the sense that there was something deliberate about this play of force, matter and energy. It even seemed to be organising itself around them, closing in, gathering impetus.
“Orpheus saw organisation here,” Falcon said. “Life. Living structures woven out of electromagnetic field interactions. But nothing conscious. Nothing with a mind.”
“Yes, that’s what he reported,” Adam said.
“But if something came out of Jupiter to challenge you—”
“Whatever Orpheus stirred could not have been properly awake. Its responses were not coordinated, betraying no evidence of intelligent direction. But that was then . . .”
The forms wrapped closer to the golden focus that was Falcon and Adam, and the dance of shapes and gradients gained a new liveliness. Again Falcon had the distinct impression of being watched, scrutinized, puzzled over, much as a piece of falling shipwreck treasure might draw the baffled attention of marine creatures. There was nothing solid out there, he kept reminding himself—just knots of electromagnetic potential, local concentrations of energy and momentum in the very medium of the hydrogen sea. It was as if ocean water had organised itself into sprites and faeries.
And still they were being borne deeper, ferried down on a plunging current of metallic hydrogen. They were at the mercy of that flow now. Even if they had wished to resist, its power was too great. Falcon wondered how much further they could travel, how much longer they could last.
Not long, as it turned out, before Adam sounded another warning.
* * * *
“Pressure is rising faster than anticipated. In a little while, it will crush my micro-tubule support structure. That will be the end of you as a biological organism. But it does not have to be the end of us.”
“You’ve another trick up your sleeve? Some other existential transformation . . . ?”
“I have been modelling your neural impulses. By now I feel that I have an excellent understanding of your mental processes. Despite the burden of the logical virus, I am confident I can . . . emulate you.”
“Emulate?”
“I mean to say that it is within my capabilities to supplant your nerve signals with cybernetic transmissions. Your pattern will remain. But the medium that has supported that pattern has outlived its usefulness. Unless I expel your remaining living matter, you see, and achieve a higher compactification of my micro-tubule structure—”
“You mean . . . flush me out?”
“There is no easy way to describe it. We must become a fully cybernetic entity. Or die.”
Falcon deliberated. How easy, in retrospect, his earlier sacrifices now appeared. To give up parts of his body—why had he even hesitated? But this last consolidation; to shed the last living residue of himself, like a waste product?
But he still wished to live. The journey wasn’t over yet.
“Will it be instantaneous?” he asked.
Adam’s tone was kindly. “If you wish.”
“No, I don’t wish. I want to feel myself changing, if there’s any change to be experienced.”
“There is still some time. We’re not at the next crush threshold quite yet.”
“Then do it in phases. A piece at a time. And if it doesn’t work, preserve yourself, whatever it takes. Leave me behind.”
Adam did not reply.
* * * *
So it began. The final consolidation, the final consummation of the organic and the mechanical, was upon them both. Stage by stage, Adam supplanted the neural wiring of Falcon’s mind with a purely cybernetic emulation. Brain circuit by circuit, module by module, from the hippocampus to the neocortex. As each transfiguration proceeded, so a greyish effluence was expelled into the surrounding matrix of liquid metallic hydrogen: a salting of rare chemistry, Falcon thought—a new flavouring, dispersing by the moment, thinning out into nothing. A human stain in Jupiter, soon washed clean.
He recited a silent mantra to himself. I am still Howard Falcon. I am still Howard Falcon . . . If he could hold that thought, never lose the chain of it, he imagined he might be able to persuade himself that there had been continuity, that whatever passed for his soul had made the migration from the organic to the machine.
And if he proved himself wrong, did it really matter? Not for long, in any event. No matter the changes Adam wrought upon himself, there would always be a limit to his own adaptations, a limit beyond which Adam himself could not survive, whether he sheltered Falcon or not.
“Half of your neural wiring has now been supplanted,” Adam said at last. “Have you retained a sense of your own identity?”
“That’s a damn stupid question.”
“Hmm. You are your old self, then.”
He thought so. And although he could intellectualise the notion that some portion of his thoughts were now racing through the golden loom of Adam’s mind, instead of crawling through ropy bundles of tissue, he felt as if almost nothing had changed.
Almost nothing.
“I feel . . . sharper. Cleaner. There’s no real word for it. As if I’ve woken up with the opposite of a hangover. I don’t think I ever realised it until now. It’s as if every previous instant of my life was spent looking through a lens that was slightly dirty, slightly out of focus.”
“I can introduce some stochastic errors into your signal processing if it would make you feel more comfortable.”
“No, thanks,” Falcon said dryly. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
The transfiguration continued. The grey pollution of what had once been his mortal body smoked away into Jupiter, until at last there was nothing left to give.
* * * *
So Howard Falcon completed the long journey that began with the crash of the Queen Elizabeth. He had stood between two worlds for long enough, between human and Machine—useful to both, trusted by neither.
Equally feared.
Now he was one with the Machines.
And suddenly, he, with Adam, was surrounded.