Further: Beyond the Threshold (11 page)

“Xerxes 298.47.29A is a probe, Captain Stone,” the Union soldier added eagerly, lapsing into his own tongue in his excitement, “sent back by the Exode.”

“And Captain Stone,” the Confederate put in, “is the commander of the ill-fated—”

“Of course, of course,” the robot said impatiently, speaking in perfect English. “I know all about Captain Stone. Now, go away. Quickly.”

I was startled by the robot’s harsh tone, yet the three Anachronists seemed not to mind, but smiled and backed away, bowing and scraping.

The robot turned its eyeless face to me and stood stock still, unmoving.

After a long silence, I whispered to the escort on my shoulder, “Hey, what’s he doing?”

“Technically,” came the voice of the escort in my ear, “in your language the correct pronoun would be ‘ey.’ Xerxes does not identify as any gender. Users of languages that include gendered pronouns utilize gender-neutral variants when referring to Xerxes. In Information Age English it would be ey, em, eir, eirs, and eirself, rather than he, him, his, theirs, and himself.”

“OK,” I whispered, growing a little impatient myself. “Then what’s
ey
doing?”

“I am looking at you, Captain Stone,” Xerxes said, clearly having heard every word. “In a superculture that prides itself on endless novelty, I’m sorry to say that you’re the first truly new thing I’ve encountered in tens of years.”

“
Looking
at me? Um, no offense, Xerxes 298.47.29A…”

Xerxes held up eir hand. “Please, simply ‘Xerxes’ will suffice. We’re not likely to encounter any of my clade-siblings, so there shouldn’t be any confusion.”

“Well, Xerxes, it seems to me that you don’t have any, well, eyes.”

“So how am I ‘looking’ at you?” Ey sighed wearily. “You would likely not believe how many times I’m asked that exact question.”

Before I could voice an apology, Xerxes continued, eir tone belabored.

“I do not have eyes, though my face is otherwise proportioned and shaped along standard anthropoid lines. I have a nose to help vent waste heat, a mouth with which to produce audible sounds, and ears that are used to fix up sound vibrations in the air, but there are elements ranged over the surface of the head capable of receiving a full range of electromagnetic radiation so that I am able to perceive everything from the visual spectrum to microwave radiation to radio and so on, from all directions.”

“And you’re a…probe? Of something called the Exode?”

“The Exode is a post-human, starfaring culture,” Xerxes explained. “My progenitors left Earth after the advent of AI and the perfection of human uploading, but before the creation of the threshold. We travel vast distances by digitizing our whole culture, running in virtuo onboard laser-propelled starwisps, and then instantiating in artificial bodies when we reach our destination. Probes of my sort are sent exploring, carried as information on the backs of photons to be rebuilt by suitably advanced civilizations, and when our explorations are done, we reach the end stage of our lives, restructuring our bodies into laser communication arrays, set to broadcast one burst back toward the main body of the Exode, and a series of narrow-band, high-bandwidth transmissions in all directions.”

“So you’re all artificial consciousnesses, then?” I indicated the eagle on my shoulder. “Like my ‘escort’?”

Ey shook eir head. “Not precisely. The original members of the Exode were human uploads. Those original consciousnesses still exist within the Exode, and all of the later generations of Exode citizens are their descendants, carrying select memory of those early centuries.”

“So you remember a human life?”

Xerxes nodded. “Captain Stone, I remember
thousands
of human lives. As I understand it, my earliest memories date back to only a few centuries after your departure from Sol. Perhaps we knew some of the same people, hmm?”

I started to answer that—of course it was impossible—but was stopped short by a slight smile that played across Xerxes’s metal face, and I realized that ey had made a joke.

“Still, though,” I said, chuckling, “to remember thousands of years of history…That’s just remarkable.”

“Captain Stone,” Xerxes said with a weary smile, “you would not believe how many times I’ve heard
that
as well.”

After a while, the Anachronists started drifting to tables set up on the far end of the plaza, and Xerxes and I were escorted over and deposited in positions of honor. The food arrived, carried on large silver trays by men and women dressed fancifully as waiters and waitresses in stark black and white. As promised, the evening’s fare consisted principally of seared animal flesh. As I am a vegetarian and Xerxes has no need to take in chemical sustenance, we chatted idly while those around us dined, me sipping a glass of lemonade and ey sitting almost completely motionless, moving eir hand in a slight gesture only rarely for emphasis. The escort, its translation services not required while Xerxes and I spoke, had asked to be excused, and now swooped high overhead, indulging its instinct for flight.

I quickly gathered that Xerxes had become quite bored with the Entelechy. In three and a half centuries, by my reckoning, ey simply felt that ey’d seen everything the superculture had to show em.

I asked why, that being the case, Xerxes hadn’t entered the end stage of eir existence, restructuring eir body into a laser communication array and broadcasting eir signal out toward the unknown stars.

“If I were a biological,” ey explained, “I would attribute it to some sort of imbalance or defect, but I’ve found no such disorder in my synthetic operations. Nevertheless, I seem to be locked in a kind of malaise, in a state of psychic distress, unable to move forward, but with no compelling reason to remain where I am. As irrational as it sounds, I worry about ending.”

“Ending? You mean, like dying? I’m not sure I understand.” I took a sip of lemonade, thoughtfully. “Your memories continue unbroken from one body to the next, with no discontinuities, correct?”

Xerxes nodded, a slight but readable gesture. “Yes. Even if the probe signals that I broadcast into uncharted space are never received, the return signal sent back to the Exode will be reinstantiated, so at least one iteration of me will continue. I myself have memories of countless such broadcasts and reinstantiations, with no discernable interruption. Still, I can’t escape a thought that first occurred to me in this incarnation, as I have traveled among the worlds of the Entelechy.”

Xerxes turned eir eyeless face to me and leaned in close, eir voice low and conspiratorial.

“What if, when I wake up in that new body, whether physical or virtual, it isn’t
me
at all, but simply another individual with all of my memories? What if something essential is lost in the process?”

I nodded slowly, mulling it over. “I remember hearing similar discussions in my time, when the idea of uploading a human consciousness was still only theoretical. But certainly those questions were asked and answered millennia ago, weren’t they?”

“Oh, the questions were asked and answers were provided, but how is one to know that the answers were actually correct? It’s an irrational thought, I grant you, but haven’t biologicals sometimes harbored the suspicion that the evidence of their senses was not to be trusted and that the material world they experienced around them might not be some sort of shared hallucination?”

It was the perennial topic of late-night undergraduate philosophizing, to be sure, examined in everything from Lewis Carroll’s fantasies for children to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from
The Matrix
movies to the early 22C series
Shadows Fall
. If millions of years of human evolution had left humankind unable to trust the evidence of its senses, I could understand why a digital culture would be forced to wrestle with similar questions.

“So what will you do?”

Xerxes lifted one shoulder slightly, the hint of a shrug. “Who knows? Perhaps something interesting will come along. Just recently, the orbital period of a binary pulsar some tens of light-years from Entelechy space was altered in a way that suggests an intelligent agency, but there is no record of human colonization in that region of space. If I were able to overcome my irrational reservations, perhaps I might dismantle this body and beam a copy of myself in that direction, to see what happens.” Ey paused, a thin smile on eir face. “Then again, I don’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, do I?”

After the meal, the Anachronists all turned to face the center of the plaza and, without warning, lights began to dance in midair. After a moment, the lights resolved into a face. A man’s face, speaking to someone unseen. The coloration of his skin, hair, and eyes was dark, his nose pronounced, giving him a vaguely familiar look.

“
We will damn the darkness and carry the light with us…
”

The voice was speaking something resembling English, but with an accent and inflection I’d never heard before. I glanced around and saw that several of the Anachronists were mouthing along with the words, their faces rapt.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Xerxes said, rising to eir feet, “I’ve seen this particular drama before, and I already know how it’s going to end.” With that, ey walked away toward the threshold, leaving me alone.

The escort, wheeling down from his soaring flight, alighted on the table in front of me.

“What’s going on?” I asked, glancing around uneasily.

“Oh,” the escort said, cocking its head to one side. “I thought you knew. This is a recording of
Rama’s Arrow
, a historical drama made a few centuries after the launch of
Wayfarer One
.”

“Wait,” I said, pointing at the face overhead, which was now joined by a woman with a Maori cast to her features. “You mean that’s meant to be…”

I trailed off, and the escort finished, “Yes, sir, that’s meant to be you. The woman joining you in the field is a representation of Pilot Amelia Apatari.”

No one should be forced to see how history remembers them. As the escort later explained to me, the story of
Wayfarer One
had been told and retold repeatedly in the centuries and millennia that followed our departure, interpreted anew each time, and my crewmates and I gradually drifted into the province of legend. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. But to see this fanciful, romanticized depiction in particular, in which Amelia and I are the only survivors of a crash on an Edenic world, Adam and Eve to a new race of humanity, was difficult enough; to see that the Anachronists all seemed to accept it as literal fact, even when staring the proof of reality in the face, was extremely disconcerting.

I suppose humanity has always found legend easier to swallow than history, romance being preferable to reality. But I have lived in reality all my life, and I seem to have grown quite accustomed to it.