Maddie was startled. She had never really considered Mist one of the gods, though, objectively, she clearly was. Mist was just her little sister, especially when she was embedded in the cute robot Maddie had built for her, as she was now.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I am a child of the ether,” said Mist. And the voice was now different. It sounded older, wearier. Maddie would almost have said it sounded not human. “I do not yearn for something that I never had.”
Of course Mist wasn’t a little girl, Maddie berated herself. She had somehow allowed the cartoonish trappings she had created for Mist, a mask intended to help Mist relate to her, fool her. Mist’s thoughts moved at a far faster pace, and she had experienced more of the world than Maddie had ever experienced. She could, at will, peek through billions of cameras, listen through billions of microphones, sense the speed of the wind atop Mount Washington and at the same time feel the heat of the lava spilling out of Kilauea. She had known what it’s like to gaze down at the world from the international space station and what it was like to suffer the stress of kilometers of water pressing down upon a deep-sea submersible’s shell. She was, in a way, far older than Maddie.
“I’m going to make a run at Everlasting,” said Mist. “With your discoveries, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. They might already be creating new gods.”
Maddie wanted to tell Mist some words of comfort, assuring her of success. But really, what did she know of the risks Mist was undertaking? She wasn’t the one to put her life on the line in that unimaginable realm inside the machine.
The features on the screen that served as Mist’s face disappeared, leaving only a single emoji.
“We’ll protect each other,” Maddie said. “We will.”
But even she knew how inadequate that sounded.
Maddie woke up with a start as cold hands caressed her face.
She sat up. The small bedside lamp was on. Next to her bed was the squat figure of the robot, whose cameras were trained on her. She had fallen asleep after seeing Mist off, though she hadn’t meant to.
“Mist,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “are you okay?”
The cartoonish face of Mist was replaced by a headline.
Everlasting Inc. Announces “Digital Adam” Project
“What?” asked Maddie, her thoughts still sluggish.
“I better let him tell you,” said Mist. And then the screen changed again, and a man’s face appeared on it. He was in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a kind, compassionate face.
All traces of sleep left Maddie. This was a face she had seen many times on TV, always making reassurances to the public: Adam Ever.
“What are you doing here?” asked Maddie. “What have you done to Mist?”
The robot that had housed Mist — no, Adam now — held up his hands in a gesture intended to calm. “I’m just here to talk.”
“What about?”
“Let me show you what we’ve been working on.”
Maddie flew over a fjord filled with floating icebergs until she was skimming over a field of ice. A great black cube loomed out of this landscape of shades of white.
“Welcome to the Longyearbyen Data Center,” Adam Ever’s voice spoke in her ears.
The VR headset was something Maddie had once used to game with her father, but it had been gathering dust on the shelf since his death. Adam had asked her to put it on.
Maddie had known of the data center’s existence from Mist’s reports, and had even seen some photographs and videos of its construction. She and Mist had speculated that this was where Everlasting was trying to resurrect the old gods or bring forth new ones.
Adam told her about the massive assembly of silicon and graphene inside, about the zipping electrons and photons bouncing inside glass cables. This was an altar to computation, a Stonehenge for a new age.
“It’s also where I live,” Adam said.
The scene before Maddie’s eyes shifted, and she was now looking at Adam calmly lying down on a hospital bed, smiling for the camera. Doctors and beeping machines were clustered around the bed. They typed some commands into a computer, and after a while Adam closed his eyes, going to sleep.
Maddie suddenly had the sensation that she was witnessing a scene similar to the last moments of her father.
“Were you ill?” she asked hesitantly.
“No,” said Adam. “I was in the prime of health. This is a video recording of the moment before the scan. I had to be alive to give the procedure the maximal chance for success.”
Maddie imagined the doctors approaching the sleeping figure of Adam with scalpel and bone saw and who knew what else — she was about to scream when the scene shifted mercifully away to a room of pure white with Adam sitting up in a bed. Maddie let out a held breath.
“You survived the scan?” asked Maddie.
“Of course,” said Adam.
But Maddie sensed that this wasn’t quite right. Earlier, in the video, there were wrinkles near the corners of Adam’s eyes. The face of the Adam in front of her now was perfectly smooth.
“It’s not you,” said Maddie. “It’s not you.”
“It is me,” insisted Adam. “The only me that matters.”
Maddie closed her eyes and thought back to the times Adam had appeared on TV in interviews. He had said he didn’t want to leave Svalbard, preferring to conduct all his interviews remotely via satellite feed. The camera had always stayed close up, showing just his face. Now that she was looking for it, she realized that the way Adam had moved in those interviews had seemed just slightly odd, a little uncanny.
“You died,” said Maddie. She opened her eyes and looked at the Adam, this Adam with the smooth, perfectly symmetrical face and impossibly graceful limbs. “You died during the scan because there’s no way to do a scan without destroying the body.”
Adam nodded. “I’m one of the gods.”
“Why?” Maddie couldn’t imagine such a thing. All of the gods had been created as a last measure of desperation, a way to preserve their minds for the service of the goals of others. Her father had raged against his fate and fought so that none of the others had to go through what he did. To choose to become a brain in a jar was inconceivable to her.
“The world is dying, Maddie,” said Adam. “You know this. Even before the wars, we were killing the planet slowly. There were too many of us squabbling over too few resources, and to stay alive we had to hurt the world even more, polluting the water and air and soil so that we might extract more. The wars only accelerated what was already an inevitable trend. There are too many of us for this planet to support. The next time we fight a war, there won’t be any more of us to save after the nukes are done falling.”
“It’s not true!” Even as she said it, Maddie knew that Adam was right. The headlines and her own research had long ago led her to the same conclusion. He’s right. She felt very tired. “Are we the cancer of this planet?”
“We’re not the problem,” said Adam.
Maddie looked at him.
“Our bodies are,” said Adam. “Our bodies of flesh exist in the realm of atoms. Our senses require the gratification of matter. Not all of us can live the lifestyle we believe we deserve. Scarcity is the root of all evil.”
“What about space, the other planets and stars?”
“It’s too late for that. We’ve hardly taken another step on the moon, and most of the rockets we’ve been building since then have been intended to deliver bombs.”
Maddie said nothing. “You’re saying there is no hope?”