“If they were idiots then, they are idiots now.”
“But idiots with money and influence. Do you understand the terms of the offer, Rhawn?”
“My understanding is irrelevant. I can no more be ‘undone’ than an egg can be unsmashed, or meat uncooked. Let me demonstrate. Have you a strong stomach?”
“I–”
But Oleg had barely begun to give his answer. The surgical clamp around Rhawn’s cyborg head was reconfiguring itself, pulling away to separate the tight-fitting segments of her armour. Oleg thought back to what he had learned from Gris, of how the cyborg exoskeleton had become its living skin. This was how it must have been for Rhawn, before she exiled herself to the Totalists. There was a human head under her metal plates, but it was a head already skinned back to an anatomical core of muscle and sinew and nervous system. She had been blind, without the cameras. She had no nose or mouth or ears, for she did not need to breathe or speak or hear. Her cyborg senses were wired directly into deep brain structure, bypassing the crude telemetry of ancient nerve channels. Machinery was plumbed directly into her heart and lungs.
“Are you horrified? You should not be. This is the state of being that Mercury demands of us. There is no pain, no discomfort, in being what we are. Far from it. We revel in our new strength, our bold new senses◦– our resilience. To each other, we have become beautiful. We drink in the sustenance of the dayside Sun and glory in the stellar cold of the Mercurean night. But why come this far, and not go all the way?”
“They tell me that your crossing is nearly done.”
“It’s true.” And for the moment her spite seemed to move off him. “There is almost nothing left of my old self now◦– the old vehicle in which I moved. What use are lungs and a heart, on Mercury? What use is a digestive system? What use is meat? These things are simply waiting to go wrong, waiting for their moment to fail us. To undermine us in our absolute, unblinking dedication to art. So we gladly discard that which the Collective fears to surrender. The flesh. Every organic part of ourselves. We donate our bones to the Bone Cathedral! The Playa was made for robots, Oleg◦– not ‘mere mortals’, or their half-way cousins. We are the true heirs of Mercury◦– we the Totalists!”
Something in him snapped in that moment. “You’re committing suicide, in other words. Being taken apart, until there’s nothing left of you. You can’t become a robot, any more than you can become air, or sunlight!”
“What is this◦– a glimmer of contradiction? The faintest signs of a spine? Keep at it◦– there may be hope for you yet.”
“This isn’t about me. This is about you, throwing yourself away◦– wasting what you are.”
“How little you understand of us. What would be the last thing I clung to, do you think? The last, most sacrosanct piece of myself?”
“Your mind,” he stated firmly. “You do not reside in your heart and lungs, but without your brain, there is no Rhawn.”
“What you mean is, without the encoding of my personality implied by my detailed idiosyncratic brain structure, there is no Rhawn. How could there be? But that encoding doesn’t care about the terms of its own embodiment.”
“I would,” Oleg said, with fierce certainty.
“Weeks ago, at the commencement of my second crossing, small volumes of my brain structure were duplicated by artifical connective structures located outside my body. Machine circuits, in other words. When neural signals passed through the interfaces of these brain volumes, my Totalist peers had the freedom to choose whether those signals continued to pass through my existing anatomy, or were instead shunted through the exosomatic structures. The change was made, and then switched back◦– and made again, over and over! The key thing is that I felt no change in my perception of self, regardless of whether my thoughts were running inside my head, or in the exterior circuitry! Electricity doesn’t mind which route it takes, as long as it gets to the same destination! And so, step by step, volumes of my own brain were switched out◦– supplanted and discarded! This continued. Over the weeks, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of my old architecture was supplanted by exosomatic machinery. And now you arrive. I stand now on the cusp of absolute machinehood◦– ready to make the final transition to Totality. Only the last ten percent of my mind is still inside my head. You see now why it is far, far too late to reverse what I have become?”
“There’s still active brain tissue inside you?” he asked. “Still some meat, inside the head I’m looking at?”
“What is left of me, you could squeeze between your fingers, like a handful of wet grey sand.”
“Then where is the rest of you? Executing inside one of these machines? Already in a robot, waiting for you to take control?”
“You misunderstand. Ninety percent of me has already completed the transition. And one hundred percent of me is already in control. My robot body is not ‘waiting’ for me. I am already mostly in it. And we have already met.”
He turned from the globed head, conscious that the robot that had brought him in from outside was still there. He looked with renewed fascination at the symphony of flickering coloured lights.
“I should have guessed. You never did give me your name.”
“And you never asked,” the robot said, nodding. “But here I am. This is me. I am Rhawn. That thing that you have been talking to, that is just the place where I used to live.”
“You could have given me your answer outside.”
“I thought it would help if you understood. I am ready now, you see. But that last ten percent of me◦– I won’t pretend that there has not been hesitation. I could have completed the transition days ago. On the brink, I quailed! Foolishly, I could not quite bring myself to submit to Totality. The meat’s pathetic last twitch! But you have been the spur I needed. For that alone, Oleg, you have my undying gratitude.”
“I’ve done nothing!”
“You have come, and now you may observe. Suffer one useful moment in your miserable existence. Are you prepared?”
“For what?”
“To bear witness. To document my becoming. In a moment, the last traces of my living neural tissue will cease to serve any useful function. And I will have transcended myself.” But when he thought she might be done, Rhawn added: “You may thank your masters, Oleg, for their kind offer. I spit it back at them, all the same. They were much too late, of course, but it would have made no difference if they had sent you years ago. I have been on this path for much too long for that. I have always felt the pull of Totality, even before I knew it in my self. The more I move from the meat, the more the meat repulses me.”
“And one day,” Oleg said, “you’ll feel the need to go beyond this as well. It’s in your nature.”
“What could possibly lie beyond the perfection of robotic embodiment?”
“The greater perfection of non-embodiment. The flawless condition of non-existence.”
“You mean that I would kill myself.”
“I’m sure you will. You can’t ever accept what you are, Rhawn. It’s just not in your nature.”
A new light came on in the robot’s head. It was a pale green, rising and falling in brightness without ever quite dimming completely. Oleg was quite sure it had not been activated earlier on.
“Even now?” she asked.
“Even now.”
“Well, you’re mistaken. But then, you are only human. And now that I have completed my second crossing, I feel my conviction more forcefully than ever before. We shall have to see who is wrong, won’t we? I hope you have a great deal of patience, not to mention a solid medical plan. You are a bag of cells with an expiration date. Parts of you are already starting to rot. It will take me centuries to begin to exhaust the possibilities of Totality.”