Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling

Darling walks up the long hallway, counting doors.

Seventy-two of them between the hospital entrance and the room where his lover lies. All patient rooms; he hasn't included labs or breakrooms or janitorial stations in his census. His math is made easier by the high prices at the hospital: the rooms hold one patient each, no doubling of beds, no long, anonymous wards echoing with coughs. Seventy-two, then, is his first factor.

So how often does an occupant die in any given room?

A point to consider: This hospital reserves its rooms, its doctors and expensive machines, its long-gathered hoard of expertise for serious illness only. No cosmetic nanowork or body augmentation, no eyescreen advertising filters, no simple treatments for the cranial inflammations of cheap direct interfaces. Only the spectre of death behind every door.

A second point: The grim fragility of humans, which artificials can only shake their heads or blackboxes or sensory arrays at. The open architecture of orifices: mouths and ears and genitals, so ready to admit viruses, bacteria, parasites. And the inviting spaces within, moist and warm as if humans were designed as a nursery for the replication of marauder-organisms. And that joke of an immune system: easily coopted by retroviruses, blind to invaders from unfamiliar biospheres, given to rejecting useful transplants and augmentations. And if only infection were the whole story! There are the quick deaths, too. A host of vital organs susceptible to shock, to penetration, to all the simple and ubiquitous versions of kinetic energy; you could kill a human with a rock. So fragile: the muscular but overexcitable heart, the spindly spine, the toy-balloon lungs, and the infinitely fragile core of brain, almost unprotected on its lofty, unstable perch. And for those humans neither plagued with microorganisms nor battered by chance collisions: the fifth column of cancer. With every photon of radiation the human body endures (gamma, X-ray, even ultraviolet—that's right, sunlight), it suffers the minute risk of a deadly change to its DNA, the all-important information redundantly stored throughout. One bad roll of the dice among trillions, one cell gone mad enough to forget how to die, and the swelling progeny of that cell becomes a choking, bloated army consuming its host.

So, conservatively, he estimates six deaths per year, per room.

Few enough, given all the ways a human can die. The place is very good at what they do. If you can get yourself here, strapped to a stasis grid or sealed in a cryotank or stalwartly breathing on your own, you have a fair chance of them excising the parts that aren't working, and replacing them with better.

Six times seventy-two: four hundred thirty-two deaths.

And that's per year. Darling direct interfaces the hospital's highest-level PR page, reads the proud masthead bragging its date of origin. These medium-long spans of time are very impressive to fragile humans; they cling to them for lack of immortality.

One hundred seven years.

So as he walks the long path to his lover's room, which he has done dozens of times now (don't include that in the formula, please), he passes the death sites of (432 x 107 =) 46,224 souls. A small city. A large luxury starship. A colossal prison, every sentence eternal.

Darling walks a little stiffly. The case he carries weighs over a hundred kilograms, and its shape prevents easy leverage or proper distribution of the mass. And there is also that more subtle cargo, the weight of fear and hope in what the case contains. The burden necessitates the stiff-legged gate of some monstrous golem, which is what, he supposes, he must seem to the hospital's staff. They certainly get out of his way.

When he arrives at Rathere's room, he deposits the case in the corner, and prepares himself to look at her.

She has moved, he realizes as he compares her position on the bed with cruelly exact memory. But that's merely the shuffling of bedpans and spraybaths and injections. She hasn't moved herself in nineteen months.

But as he flips between memory's image and the present, he does see changes. She isn't wasting away, exactly; there are flexor-implants to exercise her muscles, precise regimens of cardio and vascular stimulation, nutrients and roughage delivered by intravenous tubes, by nanomachines, by stomach probes. But something has slipped away a little further. She was always pale, raised on a starship without even forged sunlight, but her pallor seems to have gone from heliophobic white to a colder, less vital gray. But Darling flips the image to compare again, and realizes it's his imagination.

Or perhaps merely artificial intuition.

She has moved farther from him in the months he's been gone.

He waves for the tiny camera mounted discreetly above her bed. Its image chip feeds directly into her visual cortex, assuring that she «sees» what the world brings to this brightly colored hospital room. Sometimes, when he is gone, the little camera will pan across the presents he has brought. It does so according to a small patch of code cunningly both random (a nice surprise!) and not (a surprise that feels somehow inevitable, like that perfect weather just yesterday, or was it years ago?). In this way, the hopeful camera tries to stimulate Rathere from her coma, or at least sustain some glimmer of consciousness trapped inside.

"I have something new for you, my dear," he tells the microphones mounted just to either side of Rathere's head. "It's from my trip to the Koraq Mors. Remember, I told you I was shipping bachi and lyre? And you remember that when we were together there, we took an airship to the equatorial desert? I returned to that place, thought of you."

Later, he will upload a few hours of his visual memories into the tiny confines of the camera's chip. It will show them to Rathere according to those same fanciful yet deterministic algorithms.

He reaches to the case and pops its seals. There is a breathy intake like a child's gasp; the air pressure here on Earth is rather higher than on Koraq.

"I found this there."

There are two objects in the case. His eyes avoid one guiltily as he pulls the other out.

He is moved again by the sculpture's beauty.

The eye first perceives it as a school of fish, packed into a tight formation as if suddenly threatened or forced to navigate some narrow passageway. The fish are gold and seem to flutter with movement. But the fluttering is trompel'oeil, coalescing out of the minute structure of their scales: a multitude of tiny chevrons, each with its own angle of reflection. But take a closer look, they aren't fish at all; the elements that seemed a moment ago to be tails and fins are in fact wings, two colliding flocks of birds glimpsed from below, perhaps a skirmish in some avian war. Held closer, the shapes resolve into mere blobs of metal, dripped molten into this confection that is mostly air, connected by the slightest of metal tendrils (mistaken a moment before for fins or wings). And then, finally, the eye catches the negative space, and the empty regions between the blobs become figure, an Escher-esque, regular pattern that dances as the piece is turned.

He steps with the sculpture toward the camera. The machine tracks him, its tiny mind in love with movement, activity. Darling holds the sculpture at different ranges from the camera, enduring the whine of its focus, turns the work to many angles, telling stories of the old bootstrapped factory drone named Vaddum who made it with the pilot jet of a surplus flame thrower.

And through this all, Rathere sleeps. The input, the interaction, the new places and objects with which she raised up Darling to become a person seem useless here. There isn't enough left of her.