Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It isn’t, ah, permanent. You aren’t stuck with this new self-knowledge, any more than you have yet taken what you call an ‘immortality pill.’ I have brought you here so you can feel how it may be to immerse yourself in this Second Implication. But you have taken no irrevocable step on your road to Transcendence.”

“I can see why it’s necessary,” she said. “This cold self-awareness. You can’t make a super-mind out of a crowd of dreamers.”

“But it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

“You’ve no idea.”

“When you see your sister again, what will you do?”

“Apologize,” she said fervently.

“Perhaps that’s enough. Alia, your time on the Rustball is nearly over.”

“It is?” she asked, surprised.

“The Rusties have only one more development to show you — or rather, to help you discover in yourself. But you must decide if you want to take that final step.”

“Is it up to me?”

“It always has been, child. You should know that by now. Try to get some sleep.”

But try as she might, alone with herself in the dark, sleep didn’t come.

Another day — her last day on the Rustball — and another session in the gloomy room with the Campocs and their extended family.

But today it felt different. She gazed around at their faces, which seemed to glow gently in the soft pink glow of the room. They were all turned to her, all their expressions open. They were looking at her, they were thinking about her, and what she had revealed of herself since coming to this community.

And suddenly she was looking back at herself.

It was a view from many angles, as if the eyes around her had turned to mirrors. She had gone through another sharp transition, another expansion of her awareness, as if a door had opened, admitting light. She quailed, battered.

Bale touched her hand. The shock of physical contact was there, but it was not as it had been before, just one more link in a web of connecting. And besides, since her intimacy with him there was tenderness in his touch.

“Do you feel it?” he asked.

“I think so…” As he held her hand the sense of an extended perspective wavered, but did not collapse.

He said, “Now you can see yourself through my eyes. You can look into the memories, even of yourself, stored in me. The others, too. It is as if we are all one mind, in this room, one nervous system united, memory and thought processes distributed and yet joined. You can look at yourself, not just from within your own head, but through the minds of others.”

This was necessary, she was told, necessary for her mind to grow. If her consciousness was founded on the ability to look into herself, now she could see herself through the eyes of others, too — and so her consciousness was enhanced by an order of magnitude.

“It takes some getting used to,” Denh said.

“You can say that again,” said Seer ruefully.

Alia asked, “How?…”

There was a technology, she was told, or perhaps it was a biology, very ancient, that could link humans on some level deeper than words. Some even said this faculty derived from an alien species long assimilated by mankind. But its origin didn’t matter. The communication was not mind to mind, for that was impossible; mind was only an emergent property of the brain, the body. But it was as if the physical barriers between one nervous system and another became irrelevant.

Bale said, “This is Unmediated Communication. There are no symbolic barriers. You will know what I am thinking as I think it — and I will know your thoughts, too, as if they were my own, as direct as an embrace, or a punch in the mouth.” He hesitated. “It is not yet fully developed in you. Even if you go further you will be able to pull back. Do you want—”

“Yes,” she said, not giving herself time to think. “Do it.”

Suddenly the mirror-minds in the room shone bright — all the barriers between them fell away — and she saw herself, not just in this moment, not just physically, but in the Rusties’ deepest perception. She could sense what they were thinking about her. She rummaged through their memories, of how she had been during her conversations with this group. She could see her body language, her shyness slowly giving way to enthusiasm as she talked — and the times when her words hadn’t contained the whole truth, and she had been evasive, breaking eye contact, turning away, laughing unnecessarily, fiddling with her body fur.

She knew what these people thought of her. It was shocking, bewildering.

But, as she looked at herself through her own eyes and others, the self she saw wasn’t so bad. Yes, she had sometimes been spiteful to her sister, driven by rivalry. But such incidents, spiky in memory, had taken up only a small fraction of their relationship. She was just a kid, promising, flawed, unformed. She hadn’t known any better.

And, she realized to her surprise, she forgave herself. Suddenly she was crying, her vision blurred by tears.

An arm spread around her shoulders: Bale’s great-aunt. “There, there,” she said. “We all go through it. Three steps. You have to see yourself; you have to accept yourself; and you have to learn to forgive yourself. But forgiveness is as hard as blame, isn’t it? There, there; this will pass.”

So it would, Alia realized, even as she wept.

This was Reath’s purpose, she saw. The Transcendents were linked as these Rusties were linked. The Transcendence was surely much more than this, in its antiquity, its complexity, its wisdom. But this extraordinary linking was enough for now: one step at a time.

And now she thought she understood the strange community of the Rustball. There was no art, music, expression, individuality, because none were needed. Art was only a form of communication, and a symbolic one at that; who needed the imperfect channels of art or music when you could directly access another’s memories, thoughts, emotions? Why struggle to express yourself if you knew your own mind with a pitiless clarity? And why travel if you knew that wherever you went you would find nothing so fascinating as other people? People are more interesting than worlds: Denh had said it explicitly.

But how limited this community was as a result, she thought. How introverted, how drab their lives were.

Was this really the future of mankind?

Bale watched her, a kindly concern mixed with pride. But, it struck her now, every second they had spent together, even those moments when they had embraced in the water, had been shared in the heads of his brothers and cousins. They had never been alone. She felt a qualm of unease, a stab of revulsion.

Tom and I had twenty-four hours before our flight back to the States. Tom wanted to see London.

I decided to go visit uncle George.

George lived alone in a smallish dormitory town about a dozen kilometers southwest of Manchester. I took the train up from London. On arrival, consulting my softscreen map, I decided to skip the pod buses and rickshaws and walk the couple of klicks to George’s home.

It wasn’t a terribly interesting place.

When I was a kid George was fond of telling me that it’s foolish to imagine that the future is going to be disconnected from the present or the past, as if everything will be ripped down and rebuilt. He was right. In this town, all the old housing stock was still there, the boxy commuter houses crammed side by side into every available square centimeter. But now their wooden doors had been replaced by massive weatherproof steel shutters, their brickwork coated by silvery Paint, their windows bricked up. In the age of the automobile this had become just another dormitory suburb for the nearby big city, its historic roots swamped by residential developments. Now, sensibly enough, if you wanted to work in the city you lived in the city, but that meant places like this had lost what had been their primary function for a century or more.