“The best fruit you’ve never tasted,” Cassandra said, correcting her with an amused smile. “It’s rather unfair, of course: how could any real food compare with direct stimulation of the taste centre?”
Being reminded that the orange was a figment of her imagination was enough to kill what little of her appetite remained. “Is this what it’s like for you every day?” Auger asked. Beside her, Floyd continued to attack a bunch of grapes.
“More or less.”
“I suppose you get used to it, in the end. Being able to experience anything you want, when and wherever you want to…”
“It has its attractions,” Cassandra said. “But so does unlimited access to candy, when you’re a child. The simple fact of the matter is that we learn to live with what we have, and the novelty begins to wear off after a while. The machines in my environment can reshape any room—any space—according to my immediate needs. If the machines can’t respond quickly enough, or there’s a conflict with someone else’s requirements, I can tell other machines in my head to achieve the same thing by manipulating my perceptions. If there’s a memory that troubles me, I can erase or bury it, or programme it to surface only when I need some reminder of my shortcomings. If there’s an emotion I find unpleasant, I can turn it off or lessen it.”
“Like anxiety about the future?”
“Anxiety is a useful tooclass="underline" it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.” Cassandra leaned back in her seat, making the wooden joints creak. She reached for an apple from a bowl on a nearby table and bit into it. “It’s a matter of balance, you see. These things may sound miraculous to you, but to me they’re simply part of the texture of my life.”
Floyd pushed aside his plate. “It sounds like Heaven to me. You can make anything happen, or at least make yourselves think it’s happened. And you live for ever.”
“Cassandra’s people have no past,” Auger said. “We don’t have much of one, but what we do have is sacrosanct.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Floyd said.
“Everyone alive today is a descendent of someone who was living in space when the Nanocaust hit,” Auger elaborated. “No one on the surface of the planet made it out alive, so we’re all descended from the colonists who had already begun to settle the solar system.” She looked at the Slasher. “True, Cassandra?”
“True enough.”
“But getting into space was difficult back then. Every gram had to be accounted for, argued over, justified at the expense of another gram. We didn’t bring books when we could make do with digital scans of the texts, preserved in computer memory. We didn’t bring films or photographs when we could more easily transport digital versions of them. We didn’t even bring animals or flowers, making do with transcriptions of their DNA.”
“It went the same way for both of our ancestral peoples,” Cassandra added. “The only difference being that Auger’s grouping—the ancestors of the USNE—embraced the digital with slightly less gusto than we did. They were cautious—rightly so, as it happened.”
“We brought some physical artefacts into space,” Auger said. “A few books, photographs. Even some animals. It cost us terribly, but we sensed that the storage of so much knowledge in the form of digital records—in the memories of machines—made us vulnerable. After the Nanocaust, when we’d seen machines go wrong on such a scale, we embarked on a crash programme to convert as much of that electronically stored information as possible back into solid, analogue format. We made printing presses to produce physical books. We burnt digital images back on to chemical plates. We had factories churning out paper as fast as our printers could swallow it. We even had armies of scribes copying texts back on to paper in longhand, in case the printers failed before the work was done. We did everything we could—everything we could think of doing—to make copies we could touch and smell, like in the old days. It almost worked, too. But we just weren’t fast enough.”
“We call it the Forgetting,” Cassandra said. “It happened about fifty years after the Nanocaust, when our respective societies had regained some measure of stability and self-sufficiency following the death of Earth. Even now, no one really knows what caused it. Sabotage is sometimes mentioned, but I’m inclined to think it was an accident—just one of those things waiting to happen.”
“The digital records crashed,” Auger said. “Overnight, some kind of virus or worm spread through every linked archive in the system. Texts were turned into garbled junk. Pictures, movies—even music—were scrambled into senselessness.”
“Some archives survived,” Cassandra said. “But after the Forgetting, we could never be certain of their reliability.”
“We lost almost everything,” Auger said. “All we had left of the past was fragments. It was like trying to reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from a few books saved from a burning library.”
“What about institutions?” Floyd asked. “Didn’t they keep the originals of all this stuff?”
“They’d been falling over themselves to shred and pulp their paper collections for years,” Auger said. “They couldn’t do it quickly enough once they’d been sold on the idea that they could reduce all this cumbersome volume to a single sheet of microfiche, or a single optical disk, or a single partition in a flash memory array, or whatever was being hailed as the latest and best storage medium that week.”
“Perfect sound for ever,” Cassandra said, in the manner of someone reciting an advertising slogan. “That, at least, was the idea; it’s just such a shame that it didn’t actually work. You see now why our people have followed two paths. The Threshers believe that the Forgetting must never be allowed to happen again. To that end, they abstain from the very technologies that could offer them immortality.”
“No one’s immortal,” Auger said sharply. “You’re just immortal until the next Nanocaust, or the next Forgetting, or until the Sun blows up. And any one of us is free to defect to the Polities, if we don’t like living under the iron rule of the Threshold Committee.”
“A fair point,” Cassandra said. “We, on the other hand, have decided not to worry about the past. We’ve lost it once, so why worry about losing it again? We live in the moment.”
She extended her hand and made the room change, expanding it massively, the white walls racing away in all directions. Suddenly they were in a space the size of a cathedral, and then a skyscraper. It kept on growing, the walls receding until they were kilometres or tens of kilometres away, the ceiling rocketing into the sky until it took on the blue of the atmosphere itself, with a layer of clouds suspended just below it. The room’s open window now looked out into star-sprinkled night.
It was a bravura display of control, but Cassandra wasn’t finished. She narrowed her eyes and the distant walls flickered with vast, sculptural detaiclass="underline" fluted columns and caryatids as tall as mountains, buttresses and arches leaning across absurd reaches of empty space. She made stained-glass windows open into the walls, shot through with light in a spectrum Auger had never imagined. Cassandra must have been tweaking her brain on a fundamental level, altering her very perceptual wiring. Not only were the colours unfamiliar (and heart-wrenchingly beautiful), but she could hear them, feel them, smell them.
She had never known anything so lovely, so sad, so wonderful.
“Please stop,” she said, overwhelmed.
Cassandra returned the room to its prior dimensions. “I’m sorry,” she said to Auger and Floyd in turn, “but I felt that some demonstration was necessary to illustrate what I understand as living in the moment. That’s the kind of moment I mean.”