Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

The enlightened informed process was the democratic entitlement of all Highers. People didn’t have to strive, with their material requirements supplied by Neumann cybernetics and their bodies supported by biononics they could devote themselves to their uniqueness. Human thought was the pinnacle of terrestrial evolution, Earth’s most profound success. Now each mind was yoked into the Commonwealth unisphere, collecting, arranging, and distributing information. Whole districts of the city were given over to institutes that delved into science and art, multiplying into thousands of sub-disciplines. Their practitioners communed in mental harmony. Higher culture was reaching for the Divine. Can you not see the rightness of it, the inevitability? The comfort ?

Paul had to wrench his thoughts away from the guileful desire Trojan. Even in its crippled state the angel’s brain was dangerous. There were many elaborate traps that remained empowered amid the waning neurones, quite capable of ensnaring the unwary. He pushed his own mind back into the memories of Imelda and Erik.

There were long lazy evenings spent in the angel’s secluded apartment. Bottles and aerosols were imbibed slowly, their contents complemented by a chemical designed to neutralize any standard female contraception troche. The lights were dimmed, the lovers’ thoughts sluggish and contented, bodies inflamed. Paul experienced Erik in congress, his youthful body straining hard against the angel. There were loud, near-savage cries of joy as he climaxed successfully.

Deep inside the angel’s complicated sexual organs Erik’s spermatozoa were injected with a biononic organelle.

Imelda’s smiling, trusting face as she rolled across the jellmattress underneath the now very male angel, unruly hair spreading across the soft pillows. Her sharp gasp of delight at the impalement. Wicked curl of her mouth at the arousal, and piercing cry of fulfilment. A fulfilment greater than she knew as the modified semen was released inside her.

Under the angel’s tutelage the eager youngsters experimented with strenuous and exciting new positions night after night. Bodies writhed against it, granting each other every request that was whispered or shouted before granting its single wish. Each time it focused their arousal and ecstasy to one purpose, the creation of its beloved changeling.

Imelda arrives home in the dead of night after staggering some unknown distance along the street outside. The house recognizes her and opens the front door. She has clearly had a lively evening, her movements lack any real co-ordination; she squints at most objects unable to perceive what they are; her electronic emissions are chaotic, nonsensical. Every now and then she giggles for no reason. At the bottom of the stairs her legs fold gracelessly under her, and she crumples into a heap. She begins snoring.

This is how her parents find her in the morning. Imelda groans in protest as they rouse her; she has a hangover which is surely terminal. Her parents fuss, and issue a mild chastisement about the state she is in; but they are tolerant liberals, and understand the impulses which fire all adolescents. They are not worried, after all, this is the Greater Commonwealth, citizens are safe at night even in dear old worn-down Kuhmo. Imelda is helped upstairs to her bed, given water and some vitamins, and left to sleep off her night of youthful excess.

When she wakes up again, around midday, she quickly calls Erik, who himself is still recovering from his narcotic sojourn. Their questions are almost identical: ‘What did we do?’ As are their answers: ‘I don’t remember.’

‘I think we met up in the Pathfinder,’ Imelda says uncertainly. ‘I remember going there, but afterwards I don’t know…’

Erik jumps on this, relieved that one of them has some memory of the evening. ‘We must have struck a bad aerosol,’ he claims immediately.

‘Yeah right,’ Imelda agrees, even though the voice of doubt is murmuring away inside her head. But accepting that easy explanation is so much more comfortable than examining ideas that may have unpleasant outcomes. ‘You want to meet up again tonight?’ she asks.

‘Sure, but maybe at my house. We thought we could have a quieter time. And we need to talk about the baby, we’ll have to tell our parents.’

‘It’s early days,’ Imelda says carelessly, she sends him a tactile ping of a very personal nature. ‘Maybe not too quiet, huh?’

Erik grins in disgraceful delight, last night already forgotten.

Nine months later, Erik is grinning in an altogether different fashion as he is present at the birth of his daughter. The little girl is perfect and beautiful, born at the Kuhmo General Hospital with an ease that only modern Commonwealth medical technology can provide. Afterwards, Imelda lies back on the bed in the airy delivery room, and cuddles the newborn, lost in devotion.

‘We have got to decide on a name,’ she says dreamily.

Erik idly brushes her mane of auburn hair away from her shoulders. ‘How about Kerry?’ he suggests tentatively. It is the name he knew the angel as; he often wonders where she is now.

‘No,’ Imelda says. There is still some association about Kerry and his abrupt disappearance that she can’t shake off.

‘Okay, well there’s no rush. I’d better go out and see everyone.’

The respective families are waiting outside. Imelda’s parents are polite; happy that the birth has gone without a hitch, and of course delighted they have another grandchild. However there is a certain degree of strain showing in their outwardly civil attitude towards Erik. His own parents are less formal, and hug him with warm excitement. He goes over to Sabine and kisses her.

‘Congratulations,’ she says.

Erik tenderly brushes Sabine’s thick auburn hair. ‘This doesn’t change anything,’ he says sincerely. Sabine smiles back, grateful for the reassurance, especially right now. She is Imelda’s younger sister by forty minutes, and so genuinely doesn’t want their special sibling bond soured by any jealousy.

As Erik confessed to Kerry, bedding the sisters was his fantasy since the first moment he saw them. Identical twins is a common enough desire in a hormonally active teenager; and Kerry of course made that particular wish come true readily enough. Even today Erik still has trouble telling his lovers apart, and his memories of them during those wonderful long erotic nights in that apartment on the arcology’s fifteenth floor are completely indistinguishable.

Now Inigo wakes up and loudly starts to demand his afternoon feed. Sabine is immediately busy with their infant son who was born in the very same hospital two weeks earlier. She too rejected the name Kerry.

Nova Zealand was the world chosen for the massacre for exactly the same reason the party of youthful Dynasty members had chosen it as their fun-time holiday destination. It barely qualified as H-congruous, capable of supporting human habitation; but that bad geophysics gave it some astonishing scenery which simply begged to be exploited by extreme sports enthusiasts. There was a small population without any real industrial base; its commerce was the leisure industry. Yet in case of a genuine emergency the Intersolar Commonwealth with all its fabulous medical and technical resources was only a single fast train ride away.

The trains came in at Compression Space Transport’s planetary station on the north side of the capital, Ridgeview (pop 43,000). They arrived through a wormhole which provided a direct link back to EdenBurg, an industrial planet, owned by the Halgarth Dynasty, and one of the major junctions in CSTs interstellar transport monopoly. None of the trains went any further than the station: Nova Zealand didn’t have the kind of road and rail network common to most Commonwealth worlds. All medium-and long-distance travel was by plane.