Limpopo looked at the sky with its scudding clouds, listened to the trees rattling. Her suit’s temperature was perfect ambient, a not-warm/not-cool you wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t minus twenty around you. “I thought the B&B crew liked heavy discussions at the drop of a hat, but then I met you academics. Shit, you like to broaden the frame.”
Limpopo saw her shoulders shake a little, and she had a moment’s panic that she’d inadvertently reduced Sita to tears, not unheard of in walkaways, everyone carrying around hidden trauma-triggers you could trip by accident.
When she slogged through the snow and looked at her faceplate, she saw Sita was laughing silently, staring fixedly ahead. When she followed Sita’s gaze, she saw they were being stared down by a moose with an antler-rack at least as wide as she was tall.
“Big moose,” she whispered.
“Shh,” said Sita, through a hiccuping laugh.
Limpopo made the hand-gesture that bookmarked her suit’s video-recording for interestingness and a soft red light pulsed in the top right of her visor. The moose regarded them for a moment. It had threadbare upholstery spots over its knees. Its shaggy fur glittered with ice-crystals. Steam poured out of its nostrils in plumes that swirled in the breeze. Its jaw was ajar, making it look comically stunned, but when she looked into its huge eyes, she saw an unmistakable keenness. This moose wasn’t anyone’s fool.
The moose shifted and a large turd plopped into the snow, melting and disappearing, leaving behind a steaming hole. They snickered at the unexpected earthiness. It gave them a look Limpopo read as “Oh do grow up,” though that was anthropomorphizing. It shuffled around in a broad circle, ungainly legs swinging in all directions but somehow not stepping in its own turd crater, turned its broad backside to them and walked – no, sauntered – away with a sway-hipped gait that was pure fucks-given-none.
Both of them burst into laughter. It rolled on, turning into giggle fits that ricocheted between them. Whenever one of them started to taper, the other got things rolling again.
“Say what you will about bodies,” Limpopo said, at last, “they sure are funny.”
“No argument.”
“Come on.” Limpopo took the lead. There was a birch stand ahead, huge trees with curls of white bark peeling away like cuticles begging to be picked at. Limpopo remembered her days after the fire, living on the land. She’d lost her gas-phase stove/generator and been reduced to building campfires, stoking them with shreds of birch bark. She had been traumatized and hurt, but her literal time in the wilderness had a reflective peace, slow-paced satisfaction for each day survived that she’d missed ever since.
“I can practically hear what you’re thinking.”
“What’s that?” Limpopo led them past the birch to a fast-moving icy brook with the footprints of many species around it. She tentatively stepped into the rushing water, feeling it as soft massage through the suit’s insulation. The grip-surfaces on her boot soles bound her fast to the streambed. From the brook’s middle, she could see uphill and downhill for some distance. She admired the hills above her, the valley below.
“You’re thinking how all this beautiful stuff proves that living in a virtual environment would never be truly satisfyingly human.”
“I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s certainly something I have thought.”
“Smartass.” Sita maneuvered into the streambed, finding a deeper spot, sinking to her knees. “This is beautiful, no question. Being stimulated with this view and this environment is profoundly satisfying.”
Limpopo stopped herself from saying We agree then, let’s get walking because that kind of flippancy was more Seth’s department and because this was eating Sita.
“Go on.”
“First, I’d like you to consider that the reaction we have is a marker for something we could call ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness.’”
“Or ‘beauty’?”
“Sure. There’s a body of computational linguistics on the difference between ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness.’ I don’t propose we go down that rat-hole, but this demands further discussion.”
“Noted.”
“Good.” She sloshed to the other side and went into a pine-stand where the trees leaned toward the open sky over the crick. “Come on.” Now she was in the lead, heading uphill, and Limpopo understood that there was an abandoned road ahead, switchbacking up the hill. It was blanketed with snow and she wondered if there was any way to attach cross-country skis to the environment suit, because that looked damned challenging.
“This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on a grand scale. Evacuate the planet.”
“Uh.”
“Think of it for a minute. I’m not talking mass suicide. I’m talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We’d be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we coevolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years’ worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place.
“At the same time, we’re consumptive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We’ve hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”
“You lost me.”
“Lysenko. Soviet scientist. Thought you could change an organism’s germ plasm by physically altering the organism. If you cut off a frog’s leg, then cut off its offspring’s leg, then its offspring’s leg, eventually you’d get a line of naturally three-legged frogs.”
“That’s dumb.”
“It was attractive to Stalin, who loved the idea of shaping a generation and imprinting the changes on their kids – which happens, just not genetically. If you teach a generation of people they have to step on their neighbors to survive, setting up a society where everyone who doesn’t gets stepped on, the kids of those people will learn to betray their neighbors from the cradle.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“That was just for starters. Stalin insisted they could weatherproof wheat by growing it in shitty conditions. That ended badly. Famine. Millions dead.”
“But now we can, uh, ‘hack Lysenkoism’?”
“We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.”
They wound up and up the hill. The snow was just as deep, but there weren’t trees to avoid, so the going was easier. Still, Limpopo was getting puffed out, to her embarrassment. Sita, fifteen years older, showed no sign of slowing, so Limpopo swallowed her pride and called for a rest. They were over the tree line and could see over it deep into the basin, the weird tunnel-scape of the spacies, the rotting houses and farms colonized by small trees that just pierced the snow.
“Wow,” Limpopo said, not subjecting her laboring lungs to anything longer.
“Indeed. So, Lysenkoism. With the sims, we can make Lysenkoism work. Think of Dis inside her constraint envelope. We’ve brainwashed her – or helped her brainwash herself – to be fine with being a simulation.”