Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

A siren clamored, echoing across the flat sea. It was coming from the oil rig, out on the ocean. Distracted, I looked that way, and saw vapor venting into the air. I knew that the siren had been the signal for the start of the trial — and cheering from inside the dome, slightly muffled, told me it had been a success, that the moles had been launched and were doing their job. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less.

I turned back to Morag. And she was gone, gone, in that instant. Perhaps there was a trace of her, a profile of her figure in dancing dust, hanging in the air, sparkling; but even that dispersed on the wind. I was oppressed by guilt, for it felt as if it had been my fault that she had gone, as if I had broken the rules by looking away.

There was a soft whirring at my feet, a crackle of friction sparks. I looked down. The little Gea-robot rolled back and forth on the concrete at my feet.

“Gea, did you see all that? Did you see her? ”

“I recorded everything, Michael,” the robot said. “But for now I think you should consider your son.”

Tom. I had forgotten him. I whirled around. Tom was hunched over on the ground. His whole body heaved as he wept. I ran toward him, but Sonia Dameyer got there first, and wrapped him in her arms.

And in that vignette you have the whole story of our two lives.

Alia was immersed in some deep, dark, viscous ocean. She tried to struggle — but she could not, there was nothing to fight with. She tried to concentrate on her fingers, to move her toes, but there was no sensation. She felt no pain, nothing but a cushioning, cradling warmth.

She had no idea what had happened to her, where she was — if she was anywhere in any meaningful sense. Of course it was all something to do with Leropa, and her strange projects. Was this another hideous Skimming — or something stranger still? And what could it have to do with Redemption?

She couldn’t even feel herself breathe, she realized suddenly. She panicked. She looked deep inside herself, but she had no sense of her own pulse, the deepest rhythms of her body. Even her sense of her body, her arms and legs, her torso and head, was dissipating. She cowered, even more terrified. She was like a prisoner, she thought, unexpectedly released after years of captivity, longing to remain confined.

But a kind of acceptance began to steal over her. She floated, without her body, a mote adrift in this strange sea.

Was this mood of resignation itself part of the process? Without a bloodstream fizzing with adrenaline, perhaps it was impossible for her to feel fear: perhaps there was too little left of her even to be afraid. And if she had no body, did she have a self anymore?

She felt herself spreading out. If the edges of her body had been erased, now so was the boundary of her mind, her very self. She was merging with this wider sea, she thought, like a drop of coloring dropped into a bottle of water, spreading out, growing more and more dilute. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a subtle dissolving. It was like falling asleep.

Or it was like joining the Transcendence, she thought, like being immersed in that vast panoply of linked minds. But the Transcendence was something higher than mind. This bloody ocean was different; it was something lower than the body, lower than biology itself. Still she tried to fight it, to reflect back on herself.

It was her last conscious thought. After that, for an unmeasured time, there was only an endless, formless, oceanic dreaming.

And then something new.

Separateness.

There was no detail, nothing to be said about this which was separated from that. There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure — an exultance that I am.

Then something more. A kind of growing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the I, of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers. Cells: they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.

The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.

But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the I should understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was itself wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the I — or around it, or beside it — was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not it.

The separated viewpoint was Alia. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.

And meanwhile the I, the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.

That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over there was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over there were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.

This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells how to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell’s cytoplasm to another’s. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function — to become an eardrum or a heart valve — and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.

The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the I, the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complexifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.

Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feet began to die, in waves and bands. It hurt, surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.

The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not its, Alia thought — his. Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.

His curiosity, not Alia’s.

This union was not like Witnessing. She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child’s shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through — and would throughout his whole life — but not his will, his choice.