Robert Wilson - Vortex

“They took flesh first of all,” he said.

There was no one left alive. No one but us, three bloodstained witnesses to the world’s end. We went down into the ancient city to wait.

Sandra told her brother Kyle about the facility outside of Seattle. She thought he’d like it—it was a lot like Live Oaks, she said. Good doctors. Big rooms. Lots of green lawn and even a little bit of forest, that green wet West Coast forest. Seldom as hot as Houston.

Though even Houston was tolerably cool this morning. She had wheeled Kyle from his room at the residential complex to the mott of live oaks by the creek. The sky was blue. There was a breeze. The oaks bent together conspiratorially.

Kyle was looking skinny. The doctors had said they were adjusting his feeding regimen to deal with a minor but persistent digestive problem. But today his mood was benign. He registered his appreciation of the weather, or her presence, or the sound of her voice, or nothing at all, with a gentle ah.

The managers of Kyle’s trust fund had given tentative approval to her plan to relocate him, and they were negotiating terms with the Seattle facility. As for herself… Bose had been patient and encouraging, but it was still a radically new life she was about to embark on. Certainly, she couldn’t go back to the old one.

Nor could Bose. The investigation of the fire at the Findley warehouse had been appended to a federal investigation of the life-drug ring Findley had serviced. The FBI had cited Bose as a “person of interest,” which meant he had to stay out of sight for a while, but that wasn’t a problem: Bose’s community of friends knew how to shield one of their own. He had asked her to join him, without preconditions, long-term or short-term, as a friend or a lover—or whatever she was comfortable with. His friends, he said, would help her find work.

She had met some of those friends of his, the ones who administered the Martian longevity treatment as the Martians had intended—the middle-aged couple who had driven Orrin and Ariel out of Houston, to begin with, and others when she visited Seattle.

They seemed like decent-enough people, earnest in their beliefs. The only hope of salvaging this overheated and heedless world, they believed, was to find a new way of being human. The Fourth treatment was a step in that direction. Or so they claimed, and Sandra wasn’t sure they were wrong… though they might be naïve.

And there was Bose himself, a Fourth by default and at the wrong age. Some of the qualities she loved in Bose might have come out of that treatment—his easy calm, his generosity, his sense of justice. But most of Bose was just—Bose. She was certain of it. It was Bose she had fallen in love with, not his blood chemistry or his neurology.

But he had told her bluntly there was no hope of getting the Fourth treatment for Kyle. Bose had received it because it was the only way of saving his life; Kyle didn’t qualify, mainly because the treatment wouldn’t really cure him. As Bose had said, it would only render him an infant in a healthy man’s body, perhaps permanently. And that was an outcome Bose’s friends, after all their colloquies and ethical debates, couldn’t countenance.

Kyle slumped in the wheelchair with his head inclined, his eyes tracking the swaying oaks.

“I got a letter from Orrin Mather yesterday.” Bose’s friends had been characteristically generous about helping Orrin and Ariel during the investigation that followed the fire, finding them a home where neither the law nor the criminals were likely to come looking. “Orrin’s working part-time at a commercial nursery. His shoulder healed up nicely, he says. He says he hopes things are going well for me and Officer Bose. Which I guess they are. And he says he doesn’t mind about me reading his notebooks.”

( I would of given you permission, Orrin had written, if you had asked, and Sandra accepted the implied rebuke.)

“He says what I read was everything he ever wrote, except for a few pages he finished after he got to Laramie. He enclosed them with his letter. Look—I brought them with me.”

You can keep these pages, Orrin had written. I don’t need them anymore. I believe I’m finished with all that business. Maybe you will understand it better than I do. It is all bewildering to me. To be honest I would rather just get on with things.

She listened to the creek as it rippled through the grove. Today the creek was running shallow, as clean and bright as glass. She guessed this water would eventually wend its way into the Gulf—or evaporate, perhaps, to fall as rain in some cornfield in Iowa, as snow in some wintery northern town.

The sum of all paths, Sandra thought.

Then she took up the pages Orrin had sent her and began to read them aloud.

My name is Isaac Dvali, and this is what happened after the end of the world.

In the end, Vox was mine. Its people (whom I had hated) were dead (which I regretted), and there was no one left alive but Turk Findley and the impersona of Allison Pearl.

Do you blame me for hating Vox?

The people of Vox had resurrected me when all I wanted was to die. They had believed I was something more than human, when in fact I was something less. All I had ever received at their hands was pain and incomprehension.

I had been among the Hypotheticals, my captors insisted, the Hypotheticals had “touched” me; but that wasn’t true. Because the Hypotheticals (as Vox imagined them) simply didn’t exist.

My father had made me so that I could hear the Hypotheticals talking to themselves, the whispers they sent between stars and planets, and what I had learned was that the Hypotheticals were a process —an ecology, not an organism. I could have told my captors so… but it was a truth they would have rejected, and it would have changed nothing.

The Hypotheticals were already billions of years old when they first intervened in human history.

They had originated with the first sentient biological civilizations to arise in the galaxy, long before the Earth and its sun condensed from interstellar dust. Like the first shoots rising from a wheat field in the spring, those forerunner civilizations were fragile, vulnerable, and alone. None of them survived the exhaustion and ecological collapse of their host planets.

But before they died they launched fleets of self-replicating machines into interstellar space. The machines were designed to explore nearby stars and broadcast home whatever data they acquired, and they did that, patiently and faithfully, long after their creators had ceased to exist. They moved from star to star, competing for scarce heavy elements, exchanging behavioral templates and fractions of operating code, changing and evolving over time. They were, in a sense, intelligent, but they were never (and would never become) self-aware.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

I hated the people of Vox—whom I could hate collectively, because they behaved collectively—for their deeply embedded limbic superstitions, and for calling me back from the indifference of death into the pain of my physical body. But I could not hate Turk Findley or the woman who had come to call herself Allison Pearl.

Turk and Allison were broken and imperfect things—like me. Like me, they had been created or summoned by the will of Vox. And, like me, they proved to be something more and less than Vox had anticipated.