Kata Bindu
by Robert J. Sawyer
We sometimes contemplated giving ourselves a name. “Those Who Had Been Flesh” appealed to us. So did “The Collective Consciousness of Earth.” And “The Uploaded.”
But, to our infinite sadness, there was no need for a name—for there was no one to speak with, no one to proffer an introduction to, no possible confusion about the referents of pronouns. Despite centuries now of scanning the sky for alien radio signals, we’d found nothing.
Because of that, we’d never even had to resolve the question of whether we should refer to ourselves in the singular or the plural. Granted, we had once been ten billion individuals; plurals were no doubt appropriate then. But after almost all members of Homo sapiens had taken The Next Step, we had surrendered that individuality, slowly at first, then with abandon—for who would not want to take into themselves the genius of the world’s greatest mathematicians, the wit of the cleverest comedians, the virtue of the most altruistic humanitarians, the talent of the most gifted composers, and the tranquility of the most serene contemplatives?
Ah, but it turned out there were some who did not want this. Mennonites were long gone; Luddites were likewise a thing of the past. But there was one last group left, in Africa, that still lived by traditional means. They did not want to take The Next Step—and so we instead gave them that famous giant leap: we moved them all to the Moon.
What else could we have done? Although we had been about to become something more than human, we were, and are, still humane: we certainly weren’t going to just eliminate them. But we couldn’t leave anyone here on Earth, for once we’d uploaded our consciousnesses, once we had merged into the global web, a fanatic could disable the computers, could destroy our helpless, noncorporeal selves.
To send hunter-gatherers to the Moon might seem, well, lunatic: establishing a colony of the least technologically advanced people in a place where technology was the only thing making life possible. But we rationalized that we were actually being beneficent: with their hearts laboring under gentle lunar gravity, they would likely live decades longer, and their elderly—who, on the African veldt, had had no access to artificial hips or even wheelchairs—would be far more mobile than they had been on Earth.
More: we no longer cared what happened to Earth’s ecosystem, and, indeed, we knew that the inevitable impact of an asteroid would eventually cause worldwide calamity here. The Last Tribe, of course, could do nothing to avert a meteor strike, and we, no longer physical, could do nothing on their behalf. But now that they were on the airless, waterless moon, only a direct hit to their domed ecosystem would do any real damage. We had likely granted their civilization tens of millions of years of additional life.
Safety for us, and a better life for them.
It should have been a win-win scenario.
Prasp fashioned his wings from elephant skin spread between elongated wooden fingers. When Kari, his woman, helped him strap the wings to his arms, they stretched several times as wide as Prasp was tall.
The old stories, handed down now for a thousand generations, told of wind, the invisible hand of one of the gods moving through the air, pushing things about. But wind, like the stars of legend, did not exist here; Prasp wondered, despite the spellbinding stories he’d heard, whether it had ever existed even in Kata Bindu, the Old Place. Indeed, he wondered whether the Old Place itself was a myth. How could lights—and even orbs, one of fire, another of stone—have moved across the sky? How could people have weighed five or six times as much as they do here? The ancients were said to have been no bulkier, indeed, to have if anything been shorter, than people of today. By what magic could they have acquired additional weight?
Regardless, Prasp was pleased that his weight was what it was. Even with the great wings he’d built, he could barely get aloft. Yes, they did well for gliding from tree to tree—on those rare occasions when he managed to climb a tree without damaging his fragile contraptions. But to take to the air as the birds did still eluded him. Oh, even without the wings, Prasp could jump twice his own body height. But he wanted to go much higher than that.
Prasp wanted to touch the center of the world’s roof.
It was easy enough for us, for—The Uploaded; yes, that’s what we’ll call ourselves—to access information. Indeed, for us, to wonder was to know.
We knew that the refuge for the last primitive humans was in Copernicus, a lunar crater ninety-three kilometers wide. The roof over it consisted in part of two transparent silicone membranes, the outer of which was coated with 2.5 microns of gold. That gold layer was thin enough to screen out UV and other radiation, while still letting most visible light through—sunglasses for the entire sky.
Between those two membranes was a gap twelve meters thick filled with pure water. Transparent gold, transparent membranes, transparent water—the only thing that should have marred the primitives’ view upward from the inside of the dome was the crisscrossing network of load-bearing titanium cables, which divided their sky into a multitude of triangles.
If the water only had to shield the habitat from solar radiation, a thickness of 2.5 meters would have been enough. But this multilayered transparent roof—appearing almost flat, but really a section out of a vast sphere— had to contain the habitat’s atmosphere, as well. The air inside was almost pure oxygen, but at only 200 millibars: quite breathable, and no more prone to supporting combustion than Earth’s own atmosphere, which had a similar partial pressure of O2.
Still, even that attenuated atmosphere pressed upward with a force of over two tonnes per square meter. So the water shield had been made twelve, rather than two-and-a-half, meters thick; the air pressure helped keep the roof up, and the water’s weight eliminated stresses on the inner silicone membrane that would have otherwise been caused by the atmosphere trying to burst out into the vacuum of space.
It was a simple, elegant design—and one that required virtually no maintenance. But there was one more component to the roof, a topmost layer, an icing on the transparent cake. A thin film had been applied overtop of the gold-covered outer membrane, a polarizing layer of liquid crystals that, under computer control, simulated a night of Earthly length by making the dome opaque for eight out of every twenty-four hours during the two-week-long lunar day. It also darkened the sky during the fourteen-day-long lunar night when the Earth was full or nearly full.
And indeed, the sky had blackened just as it should have one evening at 2100 local time, the sun fading and then completely disappearing as the crystals polarized, darkening the re-creation of southern Africa that filled the bottom of Copernicus. The only light came from the lamps located at each crisscrossing of the load-bearing cables; collectively, they providing as much illumination as the full moon did on Earth’s surface.
The night had continued on like any other, with beasts prowling, and humans huddling for warmth, and protection, and companionship.
But sometime during that night, the computer controlling that circadian winking, that daily shifting of the sky from opaque to transparent, had crashed. When morning should have come, the polarizing membrane did not clear. The world of the last biological humans was cut off from the rest of the universe by a night that seemed as though it would never end.
Prasp ran, each stride taking him two bodylengths farther ahead. He flapped his arms, moving the great wings of skin and sticks, beating them up and down, up and down, as fast as he could, and—