Stephen Baxter: Ring

Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable. “ Who am I, Phillida?”

“You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother’s blond hair, making it shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But — ” She hesitated.

“But what?”

“But you’re being — engineered.

“There are nanobots in your body,” Phillida said. “Do you understand what a nanobot is? A machine at the molecular level which — ”

“I know what a nanobot is,” Lieserl snapped. “I know all about AntiSenescence and nanobots. I’m not a child, Mother.”

“Of course not,” Phillida said seriously. “But in your case, my darling, the nanobots have been programmed — not to reverse aging — but to accelerate it. Do you understand?”

Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, forced her body to sprout like some absurd human sunflower — they even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.

Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “ Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”

Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”

Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she were crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.

Lieserl returned to her snakes and ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.

Already she’d outgrown it.

She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.

She wasn’t the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontes, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed… The British in the nineteenth century had adopted the game as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.

But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early twentieth century of a sad-looking little clown who clambered heroically up ladders and slithered haplessly down snakes.

The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.

She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet’s thirteen-to-eight — but how much harder?

She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractions clean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of games — to different forms of wonder.

On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own, high-speed learning.

The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.

She read up on nanobots. She learned the secret of Anti-Senescence, the process which had rendered humans effectively immortal.

Body cells were programmed to commit suicide.

Left alone, a cell manufactured enzymes which cut its own DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed itself down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growth — tumors — and a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, for example, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds.

Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals had to be sent out by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive. It was a dead-man’s-switch control mechanism: if cells grew out of control — or if they separated from their parent organ and wandered through the body — the reassuring environment of chemical signals would be lost, and they would be forced to die.

The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made AntiSenescence simple.

It also made simple the manufacture of a Lieserl.

Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms.

She looked up the word Superet in the Virtual libraries. She had access to no reference to it. She wasn’t an expert at data mining, but she thought there was a hole here.

Information about Superet was being kept from her.

With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the House without her parents, for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she’d played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she’d discovered mussels. The place seemed less vivid — less magical — and she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses. She wondered why no adult ever commented on this dreadful loss of acuity. Perhaps they just forgot, she thought.

But there were other compensations.

Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence.

As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.

That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.

The next day — her sixteenth — Lieserl rose quickly. She’d never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.

When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.

He turned to face her.

He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.

She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of touching him — the memory of her feverish dreams during the night — seemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.