Robert Wilson: Vortex

Treya was talkative by daylight, probably because she was fairly heavily medicated. (She had applied the ampoule to her arm twice already.) Obviously she was leaning on the drug as a way of compensating for the loss of “the Network,” whatever that meant to her. And just as obviously, her problem was getting worse. She started talking almost as soon as we broke camp, and it wasn’t a conversation but a nervy, absentminded monologue—a cocaine monologue, I would have thought in another time and place. I listened closely and didn’t interrupt, though half of what she said made no sense. In the odd moments when she paused, the wind in the trees seemed suddenly loud.

She told me she had been born to a family of workers in the far leeward quarter of Vox Core. Both her father and her mother had been equipped with neural interfaces that allowed them to perform any of dozens of skilled jobs, “overseeing infrastructure or implementing novel instrumentalities.” They were a lower caste than “the managers” but they were proud of their versatility. Treya herself had been trained from birth to join a group of therapists, scholars, and medics whose sole purpose was to interact with the survivors plucked from the Equatorian desert. As a “liaison therapist” assigned specifically to me (knowing only as much about me as had been preserved in historical records: my name and date of birth and the fact that I had vanished into the temporal Arch), she needed to speak colloquial English as it had been spoken ten centuries ago.

She had learned it from the Network. But the Network had given her more than a vocabulary: it had given her an entire secondary identity—a set of implanted memories synthesized from twenty-first-century documents and channeled through the interactive node that had been attached to her spinal cord at birth. She called this secondary personality an “impersona”—not just a lexicon but a life, with all its context of places and people, thoughts and feelings.

The primary source from which her impersona had been constructed was a woman named Allison Pearl. Allison Pearl was born in Champlain, New York, a little after the end of the Spin. Allison’s diary had survived as an historical document, and the Network had synthesized Treya’s impersona from those diary entries. “When I need an English word I get it from Allison. She loved words. She loved writing them. Words like ‘orange,’ the fruit. A fruit I’ve never seen or tasted. Allison loved oranges. What I have from her is the word and the concept, the roundness and brightness and the color of an orange, though not the qualia, the taste… But memories like that are dangerous. They have to be kept within boundaries. Without the Network’s neurological constraints, Allison’s personality is beginning to metastasize. I reach for my memories and I come up with hers. It’s… confusing. And it will only get worse. The drugs, the drugs help, but only temporarily…”

Treya said all that and more. Insofar as I understood it, I believed she was telling the truth. I believed her because her voice had taken on an American twang, colored with phrases that might have been lifted directly from Allison Pearl’s diary. It explained the song she had been compulsively humming, her fits of absentmindedness, the way she stared into space with her head cocked as if she were listening to a voice I couldn’t hear.

“I know these memories aren’t real, they’re made of Network inferences and collations of ancient data, but even talking about it this way feels strange, as if—”

“As if what?”

She turned and stared at me. Probably she hadn’t realized she was talking out loud. I shouldn’t have interrupted her.

“As if I don’t belong here. As if this is all some peculiar future. ” She scuffed her heel into the damp earth. “As if I’m a stranger here. Like you.”

Not long before sunset we reached the edge of the island. Edge, not shore. Here the island’s artificiality was obvious. The forest gave way to a slope of scrub grass and exposed rock that fell away almost vertically, a drop of some few hundred feet to the sea. Across that gap was the next island in the Vox archipelago, separated from this one by a chasm half a mile wide. “Pity there isn’t a bridge,” I said.

“There is,” Treya said tersely. “A sort of bridge. We ought to be able to see it from here.”

She got down on her belly and scooted to the edge of the cliff, motioning for me to do the same. Heights don’t bother me particularly—I had flown airplanes for a living in the world before this one—but inching over that vertical drop wasn’t the most comfortable thing I had ever done. “Down there,” Treya said, pointing. “Do you see it?”

The sun was sinking and the chasm was already in shadow. Seabirds nested where centuries of wind and rain had carved hollows in the obdurate, artificial rock. Far to the left, I could see what she was pointing at. An enclosed tunnel connected this artificial island to the next, though only the far end of it was visible around the precise curvature of the island’s wall. The tunnel was a salt-rimed shade of black, the same color as the sea below. Vertigo and the odd perspective made it hard to judge its true size, but I guessed you could have put a dozen semi trucks abreast and driven them from one end to the other with room to spare. Even so, there were no spars, ropes, wires, or girders supporting it—somehow the structure carried its own weight. Each island in the archipelago contained its own drive system, slaved to a central controller at Vox Core. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the physical stress born by the link between these two enormous floating masses, even if the tunnel itself was bearing only a fraction of the load.

“Automated freight carriers pass through the tunnel carrying raw biomass to Vox Core and refined goods back to the farmers,” Treya said. “It’s not meant to be crossed on foot, but it’ll have to do.”

“How do we get inside?”

“We don’t. We might be able to do that from down in the farmholds, but not from here. We’ll have to cross on the outside.”

I held that thought for a moment, trying to keep it at a reassuring distance.

“There are stairs carved into the cliff,” she added. “You can’t see them from this angle. But they were cut during the original construction, so they’re probably somewhat eroded.” Even the foamed-granite composite the islands were made of couldn’t resist wind and salt water indefinitely. “It won’t be an easy climb.”

“The top of the tunnel is a curved surface, and it looks pretty slick.”

“It may be wider than you think.”

“Or it may not .”

“We don’t have a choice.”

But it was too late to begin the attempt, with only a couple of hours of daylight left.

We set up a fresh camp back in the forest. I watched Treya take another hit from her drug syringe. I said, “Is that thing bottomless?”

“It refills itself. It has its own metabolism. It draws a little blood during the injections and uses that as raw material to catalyze active molecules. It runs on body heat and ambient light. For you, it fabricated a drug to suppress anxiety. What it gives me is something different.”

I had stopped taking doses when she offered them—I had decided to live with my anxiety, for better or worse. “How does it know what to synthesize?”

She frowned the way she did whenever she tripped over a concept for which her ghostly tutor Allison Pearl didn’t have a ready word. “It samples blood chemistry and makes an educated guess. But no, it isn’t bottomless. It needs to be refreshed, and this one is getting tired.” She added, “If you want to use it, though, that’s all right.”