Robert Wilson - Vortex

He was talking about the Hypotheticals.

For the first time, Oscar had invited me to his home. Before today I hadn’t really envisioned Oscar having either a home or a family. But he had both, and he wanted me to see them. His home was a low, pleasant wood and stone structure deep in one of the starboard tiers of Vox Core, set around with delicate thin-leafed trees. The members of his family present when I visited were three women and two children. The children, his daughters, were eight and ten years of age. One of the women was his permanent partner; the other two were more distant members of the family—the Voxish language had a word for the relationship but Oscar said it wasn’t easy to translate into English; we settled on “cousins.” The family shared a meal of braised fish and vegetables, during which I answered polite questions about the twenty-first century; then the cousins escorted the noisy daughters away. Oscar’s partner, a mild-eyed woman named Brion (with the customary string of titles and honorifics), lingered after dinner but eventually excused herself. Which left Oscar talking to me about the Hypotheticals as the artificial daylight faded to dusk.

It wasn’t just casual conversation. I began to understand that Oscar had invited me here to pose a difficult question or make some onerous demand.

“Even if they know about us,” I said, “what’s that mean?”

He touched a control surface in the table, calling up a two-dimensional image that floated in the air between us. It showed a recent aerial view of the Hypothetical machines as they inched their way across the Antarctic desert: three featureless boxes accompanied by a half dozen smaller rectangles, objects as bluntly simple as drawings in a high school geometry text. “Over the course of the last week,” he said, “they changed direction. The path they’re now following intersects precisely with our current location.”

The pride he took in this apparent confirmation of Voxish prophecy wasn’t just his own. I had seen the same knowing smile on other faces today.

“These machines, or devices similar to them, have crossed and recrossed all the continents of Earth. Now that we know what to look for we can recognize and analyze their tracks. Evidence suggests they may even have traveled across the ocean floors—that’s not impossible. Our scholars believe they’re mapping the topography of the Earth to a very close approximation.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Any answer would be speculative. But think of it, Mr. Findley. These machines are the local incarnation of a system of intelligence that literally spans the galaxy, and they’re coming for us! ”

If so, they weren’t in any hurry. The Hypothetical machines were traveling at two or three kilometers per hour over flat land. And they were still more than a thousand kilometers away, out in the windswept Wilkes Basin, with the Transarctic Mountains between us and them. “For that reason,” Oscar said, “we’ve decided to send an expedition to meet them.”

He seemed to expect me to share his delight at this news, as if his enthusiasm was contagious—as it would have been, I guessed, had I been wired into the Network. When I didn’t respond he continued: “Our unmanned aircraft consistently fail to function if they come within a certain distance of the machines. The same may be true of manned vehicles. Therefore we propose to travel to a point outside that radius and proceed on foot.”

“Why, Oscar? What do you expect to happen?”

“If nothing else, we can conduct a passive reconnaissance. Or some sort of interaction with the machines might take place.”

One of the cousins brought us glasses of juice and left us alone again. The evening breeze moved through the open architecture of the house. A window looked aft, and I could see rain falling over distant regions of the tier, gossamer banners of it, far away.

“In any case,” Oscar said cautiously, “we think it would be desirable to have one of the Uptaken on the expedition.”

There were only two Uptaken in Vox Core, and I was one of them. The other, of course, was Isaac Dvali. I had been following his progress. Isaac’s skull had been successfully reconstructed, and lately he had learned to walk a few paces and pronounce a few tentative words. But he was far too fragile to risk on an expedition to the Antarctic hinterland.

“Do I have a choice in this?”

“Of course you do. At this point, I’m simply asking you to consider it.”

In fact I knew I would have to accept. Doing this for Oscar would buttress his belief in my possible conversion to Voxish principles. And it was necessary for Oscar to believe in that possibility, if Allison’s plan was to have any chance of succeeding.

If there still was a plan. If we hadn’t already surrendered to our own lies.

The truth was that I had no home in the world but Vox. And Vox, as Oscar insisted, was eager to adopt me, if I was in a mood to accept it.

I tried to behave like a man for whom that offer held some attraction.

Maybe, on some level, it did. Now that I knew it better, Vox had ceased to be a frightening abstraction. I had learned how to dress so that I wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and I understood at least the most basic social customs. I continued to study the books I had been given, trying to pry comprehensible stories out of the legalistic prose. I knew that Vox had originated as a planned polity in the global ocean of a planet called Ester, a Middle World in the chain of habitable planets. I had learned to name the founders of Vox’s limbic democracy and to enumerate its five hundred years of wars and alliances, victories and defeats. I could recite a little of the vast collage of theory and speculation that constituted the Voxish Prophecies. (Some of us who had disappeared into Equatoria’s temporal Arch ten thousand years ago were named in those prophecies, eerily enough. Our second coming had been calculated to the day and hour.)

In other words I had begun to create a Voxish identity for myself in every way I could, short of having a node installed at the base of my neck.

Meanwhile Allison was moving in the opposite direction, away from her past and deeper into her impersona . The price she paid was social isolation and a chronic, brittle loneliness. And that served a purpose, too. She wanted her overseers to believe she was losing touch with reality.

After I left Oscar I made my way back to the quarters I shared with her. I found her sitting at a table, shoulders hunched, doing what she had been doing daily and obsessively for weeks now: writing. She wrote on sheets of paper with a pencil. Paper hadn’t been hard to come by, since Vox manufactured small amounts of it for various purposes. Vox didn’t use conventional pens or pencils, however, but once I explained the concept to Oscar he had agreed to have a machine shop produce a few samples—rods of graphite in carbon-fiber tubes, more like what we used to call “mechanical” pencils.

The original Allison Pearl had been an obsessive writer, which was one reason her diaries had been so useful to the Voxish scholars who re-created her. I put my hand on Allison’s shoulder to let her know I was home. Leaning over her I caught a glimpse of her cursive script. (Big letters, shakily produced: she had been given Allison Pearl’s urge to write but not the physical skill itself.) Vox was anchored relatively close to the mainland of Antarctica, in a deep basin where the Ross Ice Shelf had once been; Allison had visited one of the high towers today, and she was writing about what she’d seen.

… the mountains are the Queen Maud Range in the ancient atlases, gray bleak teeth under an ugly sky dead as everything else on this ruined planet, green clouds dropping yellow rain on the windward slopes. It’s like a judgment on humanity and tho I know humans have moved on from this place it still looks like a monument to our mistakes, how we lived lives with consequences we could never truly predict or understand…