Boris looked at the rising sun. He felt tired, drained. He kept his father company throughout the night. His father, Vlad, hardly slept any more. he sat for hours in his armchair, a thing worn and full of holes, dragged one day, years ago (the memory crystal-clear in Boris’ mind) with great effort and pride from Jaffa’s flea market. Vlad’s hands moved through the air, moving and rearranging invisible objects. He would not give Boris access into his visual feed. He barely communicated, any more. Boris suspected the objects were memories, that Vlad was trying to somehow fit them back together again. But he couldn’t tell for sure.
Like Weiwei, Vlad had been a construction worker. He had been one of the people who had built Central Station, climbing up the unfinished gigantic structure, this space port that was now an entity unto itself, a miniature mall-nation to which neither Tel Aviv nor Jaffa could lay complete claim.
But that had been long ago. Humans lived longer now, but the mind grew old just the same, and Vlad’s mind was older than his body. Boris, on the roof, went to the corner by the door. It was shaded by a miniature palm tree, and now the solar panels, too, were opening out, extending delicate wings, the better to catch the rising sun and provide shade and shelter to the plants.
Long ago, the resident association had installed a communal table and a samovar there, and each week a different flat took turns to supply the tea and the coffee and the sugar. Boris gently plucked leaves off the potted mint plant nearby, and made himself a cup of tea. The sound of boiling water pouring into the mug was soothing, and the smell of the mint spread in the air, fresh and clean, waking him up. He waited as the mint brewed; took the mug with him back to the edge of the roof. Looking down, Central Station—never truly asleep—was noisily waking up.
He sipped his tea, and thought of the Oracle.
The Oracle’s name had once been Cohen, and rumor had it that she was a relation of St. Cohen of the Others, though no one could tell for certain. Few people today knew this. For three generations she had resided in the Old City, in that dark and quiet stone house, her and her Other alone.
The Other’s name, or ident tag, was not known, which was not unusual, with Others.
Regardless of possible familial links, outside the stone house there stood a small shrine to St. Cohen. It was a modest thing, with random items of golden color placed on it, and old, broken circuits and the like, and candles burning at all hours. Weiwei, when he came to the door, paused for a moment before the shrine, and lit a candle, and placed an offering—a defunct computer chip from the old days, purchased at great expense in the flea market down the hill.
Help me achieve my goal today, he thought, help me unify my family and let them share my mind when I am gone.
There was no wind in the Old City, but the old stone walls radiated a comforting coolness. Weiwei, who had only recently had a node installed, pinged the door and, a moment later, it opened. He went inside.
Boris remembered that moment as a stillness and at the same time, paradoxically, as a shifting, a sudden inexplicable change of perspective. His grandfather’s memory glinted in the mind. For all his posturing, Weiwei was like an explorer in an unknown land, feeling his way by touch and instinct. He had not grown up with a node; he found it difficult to follow the Conversation, that endless chatter of human and machine feeds a modern human would feel deaf and blind without; yet he was a man who could sense the future as instinctively as a chrysalis can sense adulthood. He knew his children would be different, and their children different in their turn, but he equally knew there can be no future without a past—
“Zhong Weiwei,” the Oracle said. Weiwei bowed. The Oracle was surprisingly young, or young-looking at any rate. She had short black hair and unremarkable features and pale skin and a golden prosthetic for a thumb, which made Weiwei shiver without warning: it was her Other.
“I seek a boon,” Weiwei said. He hesitated, then extended forwards the small box. “Chocolates,” he said, and—or was it just his imagination?—the Oracle smiled.
It was quiet in the room. It took him a moment to realize it was the Conversation, ceasing. The room was blocked to mundane network traffic. It was a safe-haven, and he knew it was protected by the high-level encryption engines of the Others. The Oracle took the box from him and opened it, selecting one particular piece with care and putting it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment and indicated approval by inching her head. Weiwei bowed again.
“Please,” the Oracle said. “Sit down.”
Weiwei sat down. The chair was high-backed and old and worn—from the flea market, he thought, and the thought made him feel strange, the idea of the Oracle shopping in the stalls, almost as though she were human. But of course, she was human. It should have made him feel more at ease, but somehow it didn’t.
Then the Oracle’s eyes subtly changed color, and her voice, when it came, was different, rougher, a little lower than it’s been, and Weiwei swallowed again. “What is it you wish to ask of us, Zhong Weiwei?”
It was her Other, speaking now. The Other, shotgun-riding on the human body, Joined with the Oracle, quantum processors running within that golden thumb… Weiwei, gathering his courage, said, “I seek a bridge.”
The Other nodded, indicating for him to proceed.
“A bridge between past and future,” Weiwei said. “A… continuity.”
“Immortality,” the Other said. It sighed. Its hand rose and scratched its chin, the golden thumb digging into the woman’s pale flesh. “All humans want is immortality.”
Weiwei shook his head, though he could not deny it. The idea of death, of dying, terrified him. He lacked faith, he knew. Many believed, belief was what kept humanity going. Reincarnation or the afterlife, or the mythical Upload, what they called being Translated—they were the same, they required a belief he did not possess, much as he may long for it. He knew that when he died, that would be it. The I-loop with the ident tag of Zhong Weiwei would cease to exist, simply and without fuss, and the universe would continue just as it always had. It was a terrible thing to contemplate, one’s insignificance. For human I-loops, they were the universe’s focal point, the object around which everything revolved. Reality was subjective. And yet that was an illusion, just as an I was, the human personality a composite machine compiled out of billions of neurons, delicate networks operating semi-independently in the grey matter of a human brain. Machines augmented it, but they could not preserve it, not forever. So yes, Weiwei thought. The thing that he was seeking was a vain thing, but it was also a practical thing. He took a deep breath and said, “I want my children to remember me.”
Boris watched Central Station. The sun was rising now, behind the space port, and down below robotniks moved into position, spreading out blankets and crude, hand-written signs asking for donations, of spare parts or gasoline or vodka, poor creatures, the remnants of forgotten wars, humans cyborged and then discarded when they were no longer needed.
He saw Brother R. Patch-It, of the Church of Robot, doing his rounds—the Church tried to look after the robotniks, as it did after its small flock of humans. Robots were a strange missing link between human and Other, not fitting in either world—digital beings shaped by physicality, by bodies, many refusing the Upload in favor of their own, strange faith… Boris remembered Brother Patch-It, from childhood—the robot doubled-up as a moyel, circumcising the Jewish boys of the neighborhood on the eighth day of their birth. The question of Who is a Jew had been asked not just about the Chong family, but of the robots too, and was settled long ago. Boris had fragmented memories, from the matrilineal side, predating Weiwei—the protests in Jerusalem, Matt Cohen’s labs and the first, primitive Breeding Grounds, where digital entities evolved in ruthless evolutionary cycles: