The End Has Come (44 page)
Authors: John Joseph Adams
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #Fantasy
Other attempts by Maddie to share the details of her own life usually ended the same way. She mentioned the way Basil wagged his tail and licked her fingers when she came in the door, and Mist responded with articles about the genetics of dogs. Maddie started to talk about the anxieties she experienced at school and the competing cliques, and Mist showed her pages of game theory and papers on adolescent psychology.
Maddie could understand it, to some extent. After all, Mist had never lived in the world that Maddie inhabited, and never would. All Mist had was data
about
the world, not the world itself. How could Mist understand how Maddie
felt?
Words or emoji were inadequate to convey the essence of reality.
Life is about embodiment,
thought Maddie. This was a point that she had discussed with Dad many times. To experience the world through the senses was different from simply having data about the world. The memory of his time in the world was what had kept her father sane after he had been turned into a brain in a jar.
And in this way, oddly, Maddie came to have a glint of the difficulty Mist faced in explaining her world to Maddie. She tried to imagine what it was like to have never petted a puppy, to have never experienced a tomato filled with June sunshine burst between the tongue and the palate, to have never felt the weight of gravity or the elation of being loved, and imagination failed her. She felt sorry for Mist, a ghost who could not even call upon the memory of an embodied existence.
• • • •
There was one topic on which Maddie and Mist could converse effectively: the shared mission their father had left them to make sure the gods didn’t come back.
All of the uploaded consciousnesses — whose existence was still never acknowledged — were supposed to have died in the conflagration. But pieces of their code, like the remnants of fallen giants, were scattered around the world’s servers. Mist told Maddie that mysterious network presences scoured the web to collect these pieces. Were they hackers? Spies? Corporate researchers? Defense contractors? What purpose could they have for gathering these relics unless they were interested in resurrecting the gods?
Along with these troubling reports, Mist also brought back headlines that she thought Maddie would find interesting.
<
> Today’s Headlines:
Japanese PM Assures Nervous Citizens That New Robots Deployed for Reconstruction Are Safe
European Union Announces Border Closures; Extra-European Economic Migrants Not Welcome
Bill to Restrict Immigration to “Extraordinary Circumstances” Passes Senate; Majority of Working Visas to Be Revoked
Protestors Demanding Jobs Clash with Police in New York and Washington, D.C.
Developing Nations Press UN Security Council for Resolution Denouncing Efforts to Restrict Population Migration by Developed Economies.
Collapse of Leading Asian Economies Predicted as Manufacturing Sector Continues Contraction Due to Back-Shoring by Europe and the US
Everlasting Inc. Refuses to Explain Purpose of New Data Center
<> You still there?
<> ??
<> ???????????
<> Sorry, I’m still under-compensating for how slow your cycles are. I’ll leave you to it. Ping me when you’re done.
Mist’s consciousness operated at the speed of electric currents fluctuating billions of times a second instead of slow, analog, electrochemical synapses. Her experience of time must be so different, so
fast
that it made Maddie a little bit envious.
And she came to appreciate just how patient her father had been with her when he was a ghost in the machine. In every exchange between him and Maddie, he probably had had to wait what must have felt like eons before getting an answer from her, but he had never shown any annoyance.
Maybe that was why he had created another daughter,
Maddie thought.
Someone who lived and thought like him.
<> Everlasting is where I tracked them dragging those fragments of the gods.
<> Way ahead of you, sister. I took care of burying the pieces of Dad as soon as it calmed down.
Adam Ever, the founder of Everlasting, Inc. was one of the foremost experts on the Singularity. He had been a friend of Dad’s, and Maddie vaguely recalled meeting him as a little girl. Ever was a persistent advocate of consciousness uploading, even after all the legal restrictions placed on his research after the crisis. Maddie’s curiosity was tinged with dread.
<> Not that easy. I tried to go through Everlasting’s system defenses a few times, but the internal networks are completely isolated. They’re paranoid over there — I lost a few parts when they detected my presence on the external-facing servers.
Maddie shuddered. She recalled the epic fights between her father, Lowell, and Chanda in the darkness of the network. The phrase “lost a few parts” might sound innocuous, but for Mist it probably felt like losing limbs and parts of her mind.
<> I did manage to copy the pieces of the gods they took. I’ll give you access to the encrypted cloud cell now. Maybe we can figure out what they’re doing at Everlasting by looking through these.