Robert Wilson - Vortex

Getting any kind of hard information out of Oscar (who continued to pop up with annoying regularity) was impossible; but the nurses who still hovered around us, bringing meals or inquiring about our health like nosy parents, could occasionally be coaxed to talk. Through them I learned that the Voxish consensus had evolved from jubilation (“We transited to Earth, the prophecies are fulfilled”) to dismay (“But the Earth is a ruin and the Hypotheticals continue to ignore us”) to a stoic rededication to the ancient cause (“The Hypotheticals won’t come to us, we’ll have to seek them out”).

Seeking them out was the hard part. Fleets of drone aircraft were dispatched to survey the landmasses of what had once been Indonesia and southern India, but all they found was an unrelieved wasteland. There was nothing alive there—or at least, nothing larger than a bacterium.

The oceans were anoxic. Back in Champlain, I had done a lot of reading about ocean toxicity. All the CO 2we were pumping into the air back then—the fossil carbon reserves of not one but two planets—had been the trigger event, though it had taken centuries for the full effect to be felt. Rapid warming had stratified the seas and fed huge blooms of sulfate-reducing bacteria, which in turn spewed clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The word for this process was “eutrophocation.” It had happened before, without human intervention; eutrophication episodes had been blamed for some of the planet’s prehistoric mass extinctions.

Vox’s administrative class had studied the few surviving records of the Terrestrial Diaspora and concluded that we ought to proceed to the site of the last known human habitation, near the southern pole, on the shore of what used to be called the Ross Sea. In the meantime, robotic craft would extend the aerial survey as far as Eurasia and the Americas.

When I told Turk all this he asked me how long the trip to Antarctica would take. Turk still thought of Vox more as an island chain than a seagoing vessel. But although it was vastly larger than any ship Turk had ever sailed or even imagined, it was a ship, with a surprisingly shallow draft and decent maneuverability for its colossal size. A couple of months to reach the Ross Sea, I told him. I promised I’d take him down to see the engine decks sometime soon… and it was a promise I meant to keep, for reasons I wasn’t yet willing to explain.

There was a whole lot I couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that we had no privacy. In Vox Core, the walls had ears. Also eyes.

Not necessarily for the purpose of spying. All those nanoscale eyes and ears, embedded in structural surfaces, fed their data to the Network, which sorted it for anomalies and issued alerts whenever an unusual situation arose: a health crisis, a technological failure, a fire, or even a violent argument. I was guessing, however, that an exception had been made in our case. Back when I was Treya I had been taught that when interacting with an Uptaken like Turk Findley, no word or gesture was too trivial to be sifted for clues about the Hypotheticals or the state of existence the Uptaken had experienced among them. So we were almost certainly being listened to, and not just by machines. I couldn’t allow myself to say anything I didn’t want the administrators to overhear. Which ruled out much of what I needed to say, and needed to say quickly.

(And even if the administrators weren’t listening, the Coryphaeus surely was. I had been thinking a lot about the Coryphaeus… but I didn’t want the Coryphaeus to know that.)

I also wanted Turk to have at least a basic understanding of the geography of Vox Core and how it operated, because the knowledge might be useful later. So for the next few days I tried to act like a compliant and acceptable liaison, doing what Treya had been trained to do even though I was no longer Treya nor wanted to be.

I introduced Turk to the book room just down the corridor. The book room had been prepared years in advance as a way of educating the Uptaken, and it was just what the name suggested: a room housing a substantial shelf of books. Real books, as Turk said admiringly when he saw them. Books printed on paper and bound in boards, freshly minted but startlingly archaic.

They were the only such books in all of Vox, and they had been created explicitly for the use of the Uptaken. The books were mostly histories, assembled by scholars and translated into simple English and five other ancient languages. They were reasonably reliable texts, according to my understanding. Turk was interested but intimidated by the dozens of titles, and I helped him pick out a few volumes:

The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora

On the Nature and Purpose of the Hypothetical Entities

The Decline of the Terrestrial Ecology

The Principles and Destiny of the Polity of Vox

Cortical and Limbic Democracies of the Middle Worlds

—and a couple more, enough to give him a rough sense of what Vox was and why it had fought its battles back in the Ring of Worlds. The titles, I told him, were more daunting than the texts.

“Really?” he said. “So what are, uh, ‘cortical and limbic democracies’?”

Ways of implementing consensus governance, I explained. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. Most of the communities of the Middle Worlds were “cortical” democracies, so called because the brain areas they interfaced with were clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. (Turk blinked at the words but kindly let me keep talking.) “Limbic” democracies like Vox worked differently: their Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. “To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Why the distinction? Why not a cortical-limbic democracy? Best of both worlds?”

Such arrangements had been attempted. Treya had studied them in school. The few cortico-limbic democracies that had been created had worked well enough for a period of time, and some had seemed idyllically peaceful. But they were ultimately unstable—they almost always decayed into Network-mediated catatonic loops, a kind of mass suicide by blissful indifference.

Not that the limbic democracies had fared much better, though I didn’t say so where the walls might hear me. Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.

Except our own, of course. Vox was an exception to all the rules. At least, that was what I had been taught in school.

I kept my troubles to myself, mainly because I didn’t want to give Oscar more leverage to use against me. More important, I didn’t want to raise any doubt in Turk’s mind that I was Allison Pearl, that I preferred to be Allison Pearl, and that I would remain Allison Pearl until the day they strapped me down and forced a Network node into my brain stem.

But the situation wasn’t as simple as that.

So, the question I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night: was I really Allison Pearl?

In the most obvious sense, no. How could I be? Allison Pearl had lived and (presumably) died on Earth ten thousand years ago, back when Earth was a habitable planet. All that remained of her were a few gigs of diary entries that had somehow survived to the present day. The diary began in Allison Pearl’s tenth year of life and ended for no apparent reason in her twenty-third. Treya had absorbed all those diary entries (and thousands of ancillary details about twenty-first-century life) both cortically and limbically, as data and as identity. Certainly Treya had never believed herself to “be” Allison Pearl. But she had carried Allison Pearl like a copybook deep in the meat of her brain. The Network had installed Allison Pearl in Treya’s psyche, and the Network had built and maintained rigorous barriers between Allison and Treya.