Robert Wilson - Vortex

I had lied to more than a few people over the course of my life, for good and bad reasons. There were truths about myself I didn’t like to share, and often enough I altered them in the telling. But I didn’t consider myself a natural-born liar, and that was unfortunate, because I would have to become one now. The lie I needed to tell—the lie I would have to enact in every waking moment and ideally in my sleep—was the pivot on which our futures were balanced.

Vox progressed steadily toward Antarctica, making pretty good speed, or so it seemed to me, for a floating island with a population of some few million souls. Twice more I went with Allison up to the high towers of Vox Core to discuss what we couldn’t discuss down below, and every time the view was the same, the same ruined wasteland riding in the same discolored sea. The days grew longer—it was summer in these latitudes—but the sun hugged the horizon as if it was afraid of coming untethered from it. To the best of anyone’s knowledge Vox was the only remaining human habitation on Earth. I didn’t discuss it with Allison, but maybe the awareness of that lonesome truth was part of what drew us closer together.

I set about teaching myself to navigate the city’s passageways and gangways. The Voxish people were peculiar in the way they denominated public and private spaces, but I learned to recognize the signs that distinguished homes from dormitories and dormitories from meeting places. I even picked up a few words of the Voxish language, enough to make myself understood in the local markets, though if I wanted to buy anything—an item of food, say, or one of the copper necklaces Voxish men wore for decoration—I needed Oscar to complete the exchange in Network-space. I arranged to have my hair cut short in the Voxish style, and before long I could pass (or so Allison said) as a native, seen from distance. Up close, of course, I was something no Networked citizen would ever mistake for normal.

The feeling worked both ways. Viewed from a distance, Vox was a community like any other, populated by men and women working at their jobs and raising their kids and doing all the other predictable things human beings do. Get in among those people, however, and you could feel the Network running like a river behind their eyes. Enthusiasms and disappointments swayed them in unison, like wind combing a field of wheat. And as the days passed that invisible wind began to gust and turn uneasily.

I knew what it was Allison wanted from me. And I knew it might be our only hope of survival. But the hardest thing to hide was my fear of it: the fear of what I would have to do and the fear of what it would cost me.

Oscar was never going to trust Allison. He considered her a traitor and wasn’t bashful about saying so. But Oscar was the administrator in charge of us, and for our plan to succeed he would have to trust one of us, at least to some extent. So I made it my business to cultivate that trust. I began to ask his advice even when Allison had already rendered an opinion. I went to him with questions about the history books I was reading. I was aloof and a little skeptical, which was what he expected. But he was eager to ingratiate himself, and all it took to raise his hopes was a grateful word now and then. I think he believed he might eventually be able to convert me to the cause of Vox—whatever that cause was or was becoming.

Oscar’s advantage in this duel was the Network: its omnipresent eyes and its powers of calculation. My advantage was that I was neither Networked nor a Vox-born native, which made me a little bit inscrutable. So when I first demanded to see Isaac Dvali, Oscar was surprised but willing to cooperate. And when I insisted on bringing Allison along with me, Oscar gnashed his teeth but agreed.

It turned out Isaac wasn’t far away from the rooms I shared with Allison. He was being treated in a hospital unit a couple of corridors aft of us, and Oscar escorted us there, ignoring the sidelong looks of the medical workers as we passed. He warned me, not for the first time, that Isaac’s injuries had been grave and that I might be shocked at what I saw.

“I’ve seen a few things,” I told him. “I’m not easy to shock.”

Spoke too soon, as it turned out.

Isaac wasn’t under guard but he was attended by medical staff at all times, and Oscar had to consult and mollify a few of that flock before we were finally admitted to the room in which he lay surrounded by the machinery that was keeping him alive.

The first time I had seen Isaac Dvali was at his father’s compound in the Equatorian desert. There had been something uncanny about him even then—an adolescent boy who had been hybridized with Hypothetical nanotechnology and raised in isolation from the rest of the world. I had never really gotten to know him during the time we had been together in the badlands—I doubted anyone had ever really gotten to know him—but I was friendly toward him, and I believed he welcomed that friendship. It was Isaac, probably more than any of us drawn into the temporal Arch, who deserved a second shot at life.

But not this life, I thought, and not like this.

Much of his body had been destroyed in the attack on Vox Core. What was salvaged had been badly burned. It was a testimony to Voxish medical science, and to the power of the Hypothetical biotech embedded in him, that Isaac had survived at all.

Allison hung back queasily as I approached Isaac’s nest of tubes and wires, while Oscar hovered at my shoulder. “Many parts of him had to be regrown,” Oscar was whispering. “His left leg and arm, his lungs… most of his internal organs in fact. Only a fraction of his brain tissue was salvageable.”

Isaac’s head was encased in a gelatinous cowl that filled in the missing portions of his skull. His right eye, jaw, and cheekbones were intact; everything else was a foaming, pinkish mass. Skin, bone, and brain tissue were slowly being reconstructed from within, Oscar said.

I took a step closer, and Isaac’s single good eye rolled to follow me. I guessed that meant there really was someone buried inside this living wreckage—an arguably human being.

“Isaac,” I said.

“It’s unlikely that he can hear you,” Oscar whispered.

“Isaac, it’s Turk. Maybe you remember me.”

The boy made no response. His good eye remained moistly observant. The other socket looked like a cup filled to brimming with scarlet jelly.

“You’re hurt pretty bad,” I said, “but they’re fixing you up. Takes time. I’ll come and see you once in a while while you’re getting better, all right?”

He opened his toothless mouth and sighed.

I could tell by Allison’s expression that the encounter had made her angry, though I wasn’t sure why. She waited until we were back in the pedestrian walkway before she turned on Oscar. “You’re not just treating him,” she said coldly. “I saw the interface. You Networked him.”

“Isaac is special. You know that. Of all the Uptaken, Isaac is the one who was linked to the Hypotheticals even before he was taken up by the temporal Arch. He’s the most effective intermediary between Vox and the Hypotheticals. Did you expect us to rely on words to communicate with him? Isaac needs to interact with the collectivity of Vox, not just me or you or Mr. Findley or any other individual.”

“You’re grafting your own madness into him.”

Oscar answered with a few words in his own language.

It was a Voxish proverb, Allison told me later. Loosely translated: The bee must not pass judgment on the hive.

As we sailed south, Vox sent out fleets of unmanned aircraft to map the continents of the Earth at increasingly finer scales. The drones flew at the upper limits of the atmosphere, as much spacecraft as aircraft, and their cameras and sensors were sensitive enough to penetrate the near-perpetual shroud of high haze.