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.
The one that catches my eye is a direct challenge to the dreary modern paradigm of sea-level rise and flooding. At the end of the Ice Age, as the great ice sheets melted, swathes of landscape were drowned. There was “Doggerland,” which is now under the North Sea, and “Beringia,” which bridged between Alaska and Asia, and “Sundaland,” between Australia and South-East Asia, once the home of the largest belt of tropical rain forest in the world. Now there are strong proposals to turn back the sea, to reclaim some of those vast stretches of lost terrain. It seems outrageous, but the geography of the seabed will allow it, in places. The new lands, opened up for refugees, will be farmed or given over to forest land, so sequestering some of our excess carbon out of the air, and improving things long-term.
The Stewardship authorities are already talking about a model for the administration of the new provinces. There will be local democracy and chains of accountability all the way up to the planetary level, just as there should be. But there will be no new “nations” planted in Doggerland. We haven’t always lived in nation-states, and they aren’t always very constructive entities to share our world with. Maybe with the new territories as models of a different kind of governance, the old nations will at last wither away.
Shelley Magwood is in heaven with all of this. She’s even becoming a media star. An engineer as modern hero: who’d have thought it?
Of course there are still risks ahead, difficult times. We may have fixed the hydrate problem but there is plenty left to do. We’ll just have to get through this damn Bottleneck one step at a time. But we’re starting to believe we can achieve great things. And after the Bottleneck, who knows?
There will be costs. There are costs in anything you do. Alia’s vision of mankind spread across the Galaxy, an arena for trillions upon trillions of human lives, was magnificent, but it was a Galaxy we emptied out along the way. And in a sense it all started here. But the future isn’t fixed; I’ve learned that. So maybe even the downside isn’t inevitable. Maybe we can have it all. Why not?
I’m starting to believe what Alia told me, that people of the future really will look back on our age as a time to admire, a time you’d wish you’d lived through.
John has a house not far away from me. But he is often off in New York, Washington, or Geneva, pursuing his own projects, heroic in his own legalistic way. And he’s at last writing his book on his new ethics-based economics paradigm, his new kind of money.
I don’t see much of his Happy kids. It doesn’t feel like much of a loss.
I haven’t seen Rosa for some time. She gave up her ministry in Seville, and has, well, disappeared. As if into a hole in the ground.
I suspect that the Coalescence has come back into her life, somehow. It was always a shadow behind her, a depth of darkness into which I could never pry. Maybe it called her back—but from George’s account that seems unlikely;
it
would have no use for her, a failed drone who did her job but got too smart for her own good. Maybe, on the other hand, she tracked it down, or some descendant of it after the great scattering in Rome. Maybe she’s at least able to figure out what the meaning of it all was for her. I hope so.
Tom and Sonia are working on relief efforts in Siberia once more. Now that the Refrigerator project is rolling out there’s a lot to be done. Sonia has resigned her army commission to work with Tom. I keep a room in my apartment for them. They store some of their stuff there, so they have a permanent place in my life. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like, however. I don’t know what the future holds for them, but I think they’ll be happy together.
We are all getting rich, incidentally.
John moved fast to patent as much as he could of the information derived from images and scans of Alia, and indeed Morag, in the name of EI and ourselves; he was able to make a convincing case to the company’s lawyers that if not for us Pooles this windfall from the future wouldn’t have fallen into their laps anyhow. The genomic studies seem likely to yield fruit quickly. Longevity treatments may be the first big payoff: EI even has a trademarked name for their soon-to-be-announced product range,
AntiSenescence,
or AS. They are paying us for licences to investigate the material, and in future we’ll take a small but serious cut of the profits.
I don’t have any qualms about profiting from my experiences. I suffered enough; I guess I’ve a right.
Shelley has expressed doubts about polluting the timeline. After all we are patenting genetic and other enhancements that have been fed to us from the future; we will be introducing them centuries, millennia before they are “due.” I don’t worry about that, any more than about the nonexistence of the Kuiper Anomaly. I take my lead from Alia, who seemed to have a robust view of time paradoxes. The universe can take a few punches from us without disappearing up its own paradoxical fundament. Things will work out somehow—or maybe they already have.
Anyhow when this all unravels the Pooles are going to be rich. We’ve always been engineers, we’ve always been meddlers, and now we will have money, and money means the power to do things. I guess my own race is run. But I wonder what the Pooles will do with all that power in the future.
Sometimes I think all our adventures, we Pooles, are to do with a quest for God. Rosa’s Coalescence, if George’s analysis was right, was certainly superhuman, but no god, nothing but a mindless multiplication. Alia hinted that at mankind’s peak we went to war at the center of the Galaxy, and what we found there was very strange, unimaginably ancient, and powerful. So that generation found God, and, exultantly, used Him as a weapon. And in Alia’s time, we looked for God in the last place He might be hiding—deep within ourselves. But He wasn’t there either.
As for me, I’ve returned to my work on the interstellar-probe application of the Higgs technology.
You’d think that my exposure to the future might have crushed my confidence in what we can achieve. Alia, after all, was
born
on a starship, a ship that had been cruising for half a million years. How can my trivial little unmanned probe, a one-shot water rocket, compare to that? But I don’t feel like that at all. This is what
I
can build, this is what I can contribute. Anyhow,
they
wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without me.
I love it. I feel like I’m playing. I feel as if I’m a kid on the beach once more, ten years old, throwing Frisbees with uncle George.
Suddenly, though, the starship study has become a lot more urgent. NASA engineers have been poring over our results, and there is talk of some serious money being pumped our way. The motive is clear. The Kuiper Anomaly has vanished.
That strange, tetrahedral object drifting among the dead comets and ice moons of the outer solar system, only discovered within my own lifetime, has suddenly disappeared. There’s not a trace of its passage; it just went. And so people want to find a way to get out there, to find out what the hell is happening. It’s ironic that the probe’s disappearance has created more interest and alarm than its presence ever did. But while the Anomaly was evidence that there had once been other minds, its removal is proof that those minds
are still acting.
I know, as very few others do, that the true purpose of the Kuiper Anomaly was to mediate the linking of the future with the past; it was the channel through which the Transcendent generation was able to reach us—reach
me.
When the Transcendence collapsed, its great projects abandoned, the construction and launch of the probe in their future was aborted—and so it never reached our past.
I think reality has changed. I think the probe never existed, and I don’t think that exploring astronauts are going to find any trace that anything was ever out there at all. Of course that begs the question of how come I remember the thing, how come there are libraries full of forty years’ worth of space-telescopic records of its presence. I try not to think about that.