The Witnessing was a muddling-up of future and past. She talked about her information surfaces again, her holograms. All that Witnessing had damaged the holograms, somehow: it had worn holes in the fabric of my life. And through those holes I glimpsed other times, other places.
“Like the pages of a much-loved book,” Rosa said. “So worn through by a tracing finger they become transparent, and you can read the next page.”
At an intensely Witnessed moment you could get leaks, she said, traces of events from other times in your life showing through. And since Morag had been associated with the most intensely joyful and painful moments of my life, and it was those instants that had been rubbed through and linked up, what I mostly glimpsed was her. It was as if all my life with Morag had been joined together in a single eternal moment.
Alia said, “I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better.”
Rosa nodded, as if satisfied. “So Witnessing muddles future and past. I wonder if this rationalizes away every ghost story in the past—the few which were not simply delusional.”
Alia said to me, “In fact Witnessing is supposed to be neutral. You aren’t supposed to perturb your subject. Not many people know it has this kind of effect.”
John laughed. “So even in the far future we are polluters! If you need a good compensation lawyer, Michael—”
“Shut up, John.”
Rosa said coldly, “And since from Michael’s perspective you are a creature from eternity, from outside his life altogether, your intrusion has damaged his whole life.”
Alia said, “But Michael’s case was special.”
“How?”
“Because I am here. I had to push hard to break through, to be here. The distortion of your timeline was—exceptional.”
Rosa murmured, “Michael, what are you thinking?”
I shrugged. “I thought I was seeing Morag. I always imagined she wanted to come back to me. I’m disappointed that it was all just some jerky time-traveler fuck-up from the future. I’m pissed that it was nothing but
you
all the time.” I spat the words at Alia. I wanted to hurt her.
Her face crumpled further. But she said earnestly, “Michael,
she was there,
in the hauntings, the visitations. Yes, I was the Witness. But what you saw was
her.
And the revenant, the flesh-and-blood resurrection—that was Morag, too, Michael, in every way that it could be her.”
“Ah, yes,” Rosa snapped. “The revenant. And why was
she
brought back?” She used her sharp exorcist’s voice again. “You told me your name, but you have yet to tell me the full truth. What is your purpose, creature?”
Alia turned to me. “You are special, Michael Poole,” she said. “You must know that by now—it is true, whether you like it or not. You are truly a pivot of history, in this age, and your name is known into the far future.”
“Here we go,” Tom said, and he linked his hands behind his head. “The really nutty stuff.”
I turned away. I really, truly, did not want to hear this. Maybe every kid dreams that she is special, that her name will be known forever. It’s just a fantasy, an expression of adolescent yearning and uncertainty, something you grow out of. But now this Alia, this strange being from the future, was saying that for me, Michael Poole,
it was so.
It was as if every paranoid, grandiose dream I had ever had were folding down into this moment. But I did
not
want to be a fulcrum, famous for all time.
Gea said, “To be clear, you believe that Michael’s great contribution will be the hydrate project. The Refrigerator.”
“Yes. But there is more.”
“What else?”
“The restoration of Morag was part of it. I have more to ask of you, Michael Poole, a grave responsibility . . . You will see.” She glanced around at us all, our bewildered, angry faces. “But this is not the time. I will return.”
Rosa snapped, “When?”
But Alia would only speak to me. “When you call me, Michael.”
And she disappeared. There was nothing left but the chair where Morag had sat, with the little vials of wine and salt, and a small heap of crumpled, abandoned clothing.
We all sat back. Tom blew out his cheeks. Sonia was wide-eyed, silent—delighted, I thought, full of wonder.
John seemed angry, resentful. “I wish they had left us alone. These future ape-people, whatever they are. This is the Bottleneck, for God’s sake. Don’t we have enough to do without dealing with the future as well?”
“I imagine we all feel like that,” Rosa said. “But we may not have a choice. It is precisely because this is a time of crisis that Alia has come here. It seems we are important enough to merit visitors from the future—or at any rate, Michael is.”
John said, “I don’t want to know about the future. I don’t want to think of my life as just an archaeological trace, locked in stone. It’s
my life.
It’s all I have.”
“I understand. But it can’t be helped.” Rosa stood. “This has been a long session. I suggest we break, sleep, eat. We will talk tomorrow.” She eyed me. “And then you will summon back your admirer from the future, Michael.”
“If I must,” I said.
“I think you do. For it appears you have a mission. How exciting,” she said dryly. And, with a flourish like a stage magician’s, she vanished in a mist of pixels.
Chapter 55
That night I lay down in my room, alone for the first time since the bombing. Morag was gone—if she had ever been there at all.
The exorcism and all that had followed had been a roller-coaster ride for me. I was battered, bewildered, and resentful at everybody: Rosa for setting the whole thing up, Alia who had somehow engineered all this with her “Witnessing” from the far future—and Morag, for returning into my life in such a remote and agonizingly incomplete way, and then leaving me again. None of which was fair, of course. Shit happens, I told myself, even such astounding shit as this. Even Alia wasn’t to blame. She might look like a stretched orangutan, but I had seen in her eyes, in the way she looked at me, that she was a person, fully conscious, fully formed emotionally. She was no doubt a product of her times and her society, just as I was. And I had seen, inexplicable as it was, that she was fond of me. It was as if I had developed a crush on Wilma Flintstone. What a joke.
As I drifted toward sleep, exhausted, my thoughts softened. It was in just this sleeping-waking condition that I had had so many glimpses of Morag in the past. But I knew that this time she would not come to me.
The next day I woke feeling drained. When I ordered the curtains to open, they revealed a day that was harsh even by Alaskan standards, with a sky like a steel prison roof clamped down over Deadhorse.
I had a sudden, sharp memory of a contrasting morning on Florida, a winter’s day full of bright cold sunshine, when I had gone out, at age ten or so, to fly a kite or a Frisbee or a water rocket or some damn thing. I could hear the boom of Atlantic breakers kilometers out, smell the sharp salty brine, feel the texture of the sand under my feet and on my skin. Every sense open to the max, I was fully locked into the world, and I never felt so alive, so joyous. But even then, I think I knew I wouldn’t always feel this way. I would age, my eyes would glaze over, my hearing clog, my fingertips crust over with dead flesh, and my body would become like a space suit, insulating me from the world. I knew it even then, and I dreaded it. And in time it had come to pass: this was my reality, my own aching, aging body, a face like old leather, a head stuffed with cotton wool.
When I thought back over the events of the day before—an exorcism, for God’s sake, the strange appearance of Alia, all that allusive gabble about the future—it seemed foolish, an indulgence, like the memory of a dinner party where the talk got out of hand. It seemed to me that morning that Alia’s future was a bright and shiny bubble that had somehow burst in my head overnight. And reality was responsibility: responsibility to my real work, the hydrate project.
So I went to work.
I grabbed some breakfast at Deadhorse’s one and only coffee shop, and made my way to the offices EI had set up in a small three-story block. I picked a cubicle, started up a softscreen with a tap of my fingernail, and put in a call to Shelley. While I waited for a reply I ran through my mail and other progress reports, trying to get a sense of where the project had gotten to while I had been absent in other realms.
Technically the project was going well. In a way the bombing had done us good; the heart of our prototype setup had been swept away, and Mark Two was proving to be a much sounder beast. We were starting to look further afield, too. We had started to talk to the Canadians about spreading our work out along their Arctic coast, and the Russian government had already given us permission to set up another pilot off the Siberian shore.
To obtain a mandate to roll out a global solution, it was the U.S. government, the UN, and the Stewardship agencies whose endorsement we really needed, of course. But once again poor, deluded Ben Cushman, our bomber, had probably done us long-term good. I thought that among the commentators and opinion formers a consensus was emerging that regardless of the environmental arguments, to allow our project to fail now would be a betrayal of Barnette, and of the others who had died.
That was all fine, but we still needed to make the case. And so we were starting to work with Gea’s sponsors toward a presentation to the UN. It would be given by Gea herself. Given the loss of Barnette, I couldn’t think of a better spokesperson for the cause. But it would be the first time an artificial sentience had addressed the UN General Assembly: quite an occasion. I wondered what form Gea would choose to incarnate herself. Presumably not my uncle George’s toy robot.
“How about like Alia?” I said to Shelley, when she at last came on the line. I had downloaded a record of our exorcism to her. “Perhaps an apelike post-human form would be a fitting symbol. All our futures are in the balance, et cetera.”
“Yes. And if things go wrong she could climb a pillar and swing out the window.” Shelley seemed to be multitasking: as she spoke to me she kept glancing aside, and I thought somebody just out of sight was passing her bits of paper as we spoke.
Shelley had been at her desk since six. She had always had those enviable reserves of energy, but since the loss of Ruud Makaay a vast burden of responsibility had fallen on her, and the lines around her eyes were disturbingly dark. “Hey, Michael,” she said, “I don’t want to hang up on you but we’re kind of rapid-responding here. Is there anything else you need from me right now?”
“I called to see what I could do for you.”
She eyed me; for a moment I had her full attention. “Look, Michael, we’re trying to ramp up to a production facility. We’re at a level of detail you can’t much help with. There’s always Gea’s speech; you could work on that, if you’re kicking your heels. But you have other stuff to sort out, don’t you?”
“You know me too well,” I groused.
“Maybe. I know you’re sometimes tempted to hide, just as you’re trying to hide right now in work that you don’t need to be doing. But this Alia came for you, didn’t she? I think you’re going to have to face that, and resolve it somehow, before you can move on.”
“I know.”
“Then get off the line and do it. Talk to you later, bye.” She turned away. “Now, where the hell are the results of that last deconvolution—” The image blanked out.
There was a call from John, waiting for my reply.
Shelley was right, of course. I tapped the screen, took John’s call, and immersed myself once more in strangeness.
John, Tom, and I gathered in another small office. As drab as everything else seemed to be in Deadhorse, it was empty save for a small conference table and chairs, and a few softscreens on the wall. John and Tom looked as washed-out as I felt.
We were alone save for Gea, who trundled back and forth on the tabletop, spitting sparks. Gea was going to give us some preliminary results from her scanning of Alia’s manifestation.
I spoke to John, who had called us together. “I take it you didn’t want Sonia here.”
“Tom agrees. This is a family thing, Michael. It’s all about us, about Morag. She was your wife, Tom’s mother—”
“Your lover.”
His face hardened, but he didn’t look away; for better or worse that awful truth was becoming embedded in the fabric of our relationship. “I know the future is mixed up in all this.
Alia.
” He spoke the name like a curse. “But it’s about our lives, the three of us. So let’s try to start from that basis.”
“And Rosa?”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s keep it down to Earth, shall we?”
Maybe he was right. Three Pooles was probably enough craziness for any one room. I turned to Gea. “So where do we start? What is Alia?”
Gea rolled complacently. “First, she wasn’t a VR. No doubt she was a projection of some sort, as she tried to explain to us. But equally she was real, as real as you are, Michael. Her body responded to our attempts to scan it, with X-rays, MRI, thermal imagers, other technologies. She shed strands of hair! With that we were even able to perform a genomic analysis.”
Gea said that Alia was human—almost.
As Rosa had guessed, that apelike form appeared to be an adaptation to zero gravity. A starship on a long-duration voyage was in an evolutionary sense like an island on Earth, where stranded animals routinely become dwarfs to spread out a limited food supply among more individuals. So the crew found their children growing smaller. And, in low or zero gravity, as the generations ticked by the children’s forms had reverted to an ancient apelike plan, with more of a balance of length between arms and legs—a design more suitable for climbing.
Surprisingly, Gea said, the basic body-plan changes seemed to be the result of natural selection rather than deliberate engineering. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but it seems there are some changes the genes find “easy” to make, such as relative growth rates, and faced with a challenging new environment, selection reaches for the easy options first. How strange, though, that these far-future people, projected into the unimaginable environment of space, had found their bodies reaching deep back in time for genetic memories of vanished African forest canopies.
“There is also some redesign of the joints,” Gea said. “For instance it looks as if Alia, like a baboon, could dangle from one arm and turn, allowing the arm to turn a full rotation in its socket.” But such redesign seemed radical for a “mere” half-million years, Gea said; perhaps this was an expression of engineered genes.
John grunted. “Next time you see her, throw her a banana and ask her to do some tricks.”
“Shut up,” I said mildly.
Gea talked us through more subtle changes, all of which pointed to an advancement over the
Homo sapiens
standard model circa the twenty-first century. The skeleton had been redesigned; Alia had more ribs than I did, perhaps to hold her organs in place more effectively, and so avoid hernias. Although she was designed for swinging around in weightlessness, Alia had thicker bones, vertebrae, discs in her back. She would be less prone to osteoporosis than I was, and would do a better job of functioning in high gravity, if she had to. Gea showed us images of a redesigned throat. Alia had no epiglottis, but there was a raised trachea, a kind of extension to her windpipe, so that food and drink could never get mixed up with the air she breathed; she was very unlikely to choke.
There were detailed modifications to her eyes, too. The optic nerve seemed to be attached to the retina more firmly, so that there was less chance of suffering a detached retina, and there were rings of tiny muscles around Alia’s pupils. “She seems to have a zoom facility,” Gea said dryly.
And Gea talked about Alia’s genome. Her existence was governed by DNA just as mine was, so we were both obviously products of the same lineage of life, both ultimately products of Earth. But Alia’s DNA showed divergences.
“Some of these changes appear to be the result of genetic drift, of natu-ral selection,” Gea said. “But others appeared to be engineered. We can only guess at the purpose of most of this. It may be she has a general regenerative ability, for instance. Cut off a finger, and another will grow in its place.”
John drew a softscreen toward him and made rapid notes. “Somebody ought to patent this stuff,” he said. “Just a thought.”
Tom sneered. “Uncle, how crass to be thinking of commercial gain at a time like this.”
John was unperturbed; he had endured such insults all his life. “Just doing my job. If there’s profit to be made, why not by us?”
Gea moved on to still stranger aspects of Alia’s anatomy. Much of what she had described so far had been extrapolations of the human. But there were signs of much more peculiar developments. Gea had imaged hard, impenetrable knots in Alia’s bloodstream, motes that might have been technological, remote descendants of the nanomachines of our age, perhaps.
And there even were traces of other life-forms in Alia’s body. For instance there was a kind of sheathing around portions of her nervous system, its function unknown—perhaps it was there for protection from deep-space radiation. It seemed obviously alive, and was based on an amino acid chemistry, just as Alia was. But it did not share Alia’s genome—indeed there was no trace of DNA to be found in it at all.
“Alien life,” I said slowly. “Not from Earth, because not based on DNA. She has a kind of symbiosis with alien life-forms.”
“So it seems.”
For long heartbeats we sat there, trying to digest this latest bit of news. I think I was the most imaginative of the three of us, the most open-minded. But even I was struggling with this. Here was not just a woman from the future, here was ET—and not sitting in a flying saucer looking back at me, but wrapped around the neurons of this remote descendant.
“All of this is evidence of advancement, in the broadest sense,” Gea said now. “Many past developments life’s capabilities have depended on symbiosis, the cooperation of one kind of life-form with another, or even the incorporation of one into the other.” Even complex cells were the result of one such merger, she said. Mitochondria, once independent creatures, were now used as miniature power plants within our own cells.
“And so what might come next,” I said, trying to follow her chain of thought, “is more mergers. Of our bodies with machines, and biology with technology. Or of our Earth-derived life-forms with life from another biosphere altogether, alien life.”
“Just as we see with Alia,” Gea said.
John scowled at the little robot. “I don’t think I like you telling me I’m inferior to that monkey woman.”
Gea said, “Then who would you like to tell you?”
Tom grinned, and I suppressed a laugh.
John leaned over the robot. “And what about you, sparky? If humanity is progressing onward and upward, what’s going to become of you?”
“I suspect we artificial types will play our part in your development,” Gea said, as unfazed as ever. “We know that Alia is actually far more intelligent than any modern human being. With all respect. We have the evidence of her speech for that, her ‘true speech,’ the accelerated gabble we recorded from Morag. I strongly suspect that she is also more
conscious
than any human alive today, in the truest sense. She has a deeper mind, and surely a deeper sense of herself. Some humans fear that artificial minds will make humans obsolescent. But Alia shows us that humans will not become obsolescent, any time soon. So what has happened? Perhaps there has been a competition with the machines, a selection pressure to become smarter.”