I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.
The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.
Alia told me stories of the far future, of her time. Her stories come back to me in dreams.
A half a million years from now, she said, children can Skim. It’s like teleporting, I think, “beaming,” but you don’t need any equipment, any fancy flashing lights and instrument panels and stern-jawed engineers. You just do it. You just decide you don’t want to be here anymore, you would rather be over there, and there you are. Literally.
Children are born this way. Babies learn to Skim before they can walk, or crawl, or climb. Teleporting babies: imagine that. Their parents have to chase them down with butterfly nets. And the problem of droppings is awesome. But nobody minds: on Alia’s starship, people like having a sky full of babies.
Older children use their Skimming in play. These are smart post-human super-kids who can teleport; their games are elaborate, endlessly complicated. One game Alia tried to describe to me sounded like an aerial combination of football and chess.
Adolescence comes late for kids in Alia’s time; you live a long life, and you get to enjoy a very long childhood. But when the hormones do kick in, the Skimming games get sexual, morphing seamlessly into elaborate courtship chases that can thread their way from one end of the ship to the other. The older adolescents are trained up for more formal dances, endlessly complicated quantum ballets.
And then, when you finally grow up, the ability to Skim atrophies.
I got the feeling Alia was close to this age of transition, but she didn’t want to think about it. All your life distance has been irrelevant, and you have been flitting over the static crowds of lumpen adults. Now you are dragged down to join them, and you are going to be stuck in a spacetime suddenly as thick as glue, forever. What a growing-up present, like all the trials of age hitting you at once.
Sometimes I dream of writing this up, of spinning fiction out of it. I could use it as a metaphor for growing up. Or for the plight of the Transcendence, on the point of deity, and yet unable to put aside its human past. I could add to George’s ancient science fiction library. Nobody would ever know I had stolen it all.
I came out of my contact with the Transcendence shattered. Drained. It was like the bombing of the Refrigerator project, the very instant of the explosion, the world suddenly turned to chaos, the blast’s tremendous punch in the chest. It was like that moment, but going on and on.
I don’t remember much of the weeks that followed. Tom and Sonia looked after me during that time. I wasn’t so bad. I was able to get dressed, take myself to the bathroom. I even kept working, after a fashion, on the hydrate project. I have notes that prove it, though to me they read like they were written by somebody else. But I’d forget to eat, for instance. I’d forget what time it was and stay up through the night, and be startled by the dawn. That kind of thing.
It was a time when I needed my mother, I guess. But she died not long afterward, not so long after her brother, George. Ironic, one of life’s little jokes. I miss her, of course.
The family rallied around. I think there were rows between Tom and John about who should be responsible for me: “You’re his brother.” “You’re his son.” But they kept this away from me. I don’t mind; if I’d been capable of it I’d have been rowing, too. We were never again quite as close again as we were during the crisis days. Maybe it’s enough to know we’re there for each other when we need it. Funny lot, we Pooles.
I was put into therapy. Except they don’t call it therapy now but “consciousness reengineering.” I was assigned a robot companion, a cybernetic quack the size of a footstool that rolled enthusiastically around after me. A robot, but no black leather couch, no notebook, no bust of Freud. I spent a lot of time sitting alone in a room, with a VR representation of the state of my own brain, trying to explore my innermost sensations of my memories, my self. I was innately suspicious of the whole process.
John paid for all this privately. From the beginning it was John’s instinct to keep all this strangeness away from the authorities, and despite the fact that some oddities showed up on public records, like Morag’s incarnation before the bombing, we succeeded, with some subtle help, I think, from Gea. Even the conspiracy theorists with their super-powered search engines and cross-correlation machines didn’t get a sniff of me.
So I saved humanity, perhaps, in past, present, and future, but nobody knows. Astounding when you think about it.
But what was it I did? Trying to remember the Transcendence is like recalling a dream. The more you think about it, the more it eludes you. Or it is like my haunting by Morag: glimpses, remoteness, that you try to break through, but never can. I was vaguely comforted by Alia telling me that it was the same for her. She had only ever been a semi-detached member of the Transcendence, a part-qualified new recruit. It was just as hard for her to hold onto as for me.
It was frustrating not to be able to recall all I had seen. I felt as if I had glimpsed a vast, rich landscape through a pinhole, just for a second. But as time passed, and the direct experience of the Transcendence receded, I was left with memories of memories, like polished pebbles. In time, even the sense of frustration has passed away.
Gea’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations went remarkably well. Gea spoke about the urgency of the hydrate-stabilization proj-ect, and more generally on how it ought to serve as a model for the way we manage the planet in the future.
She even put in a short plea on behalf of her fellow artificial sentiences, and herself. We humans weren’t alone on the planet anymore, she said. We had a duty of care for our children. After all, Gea said, an artificial like herself was not limited by human biology as we were. Potentially she could be immortal. But all that potential would be destroyed if the fabric of our culture fell apart, if the technological substrate on which she depended broke up.
You would think such an appeal would alarm us. The conventional wisdom has always been that humans won’t share the future with anybody else. That even seems to have been the truth of the future I glimpsed through my contact with Alia. But according to the snap polls, the response to Gea’s appeal was warm, sympathetic. This is an age when, conscious of the past, we feel guilty about it. Gea judged our mass psychology just right.
The Refrigerator won the backing of the Stewardship agencies, and was rushed through its final stages of technical validation. Now the rollout has begun. Our pilot plant off Prudhoe Bay is the seed of what is still the largest single field, but other bases have started operating all around the Canadian Arctic, and across Siberia. Next year, Antarctica.
EI are continuing to advance the technology, even as the rollout is continuing. They hope to develop a new generation of moles that will be able to make copies of themselves. Each of these super-moles will be more pricey than the originals, but you’d only have to pay for the first generation of them, if you think about it, and the long-term costs of the project will drop away to zero.
Of course it’s expensive. But the cost of not stabilizing all those strata full of greenhouse cocktails would have been far more: potentially infinite, if the worst case had come about.
That isn’t all EI are doing. Shelley Magwood is working on high-level concept designs of a whole range of ambitious new geoengineering proj-ects.