Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘You are prisoners of war.’

‘Good,’ said Carlyle. She kicked the pistol towards the squad leader. ‘Now please take us in.’

Her knees buckled. Somebody caught her arm. She straightened up, determined to walk while she still could. Two people picked up Higgins. Surrounded by the squad, Carlyle went through the airlock and a decontamination chamber, and stepped out into a vast, airy space where clumps of botanic garden were interspersed with grassland and low trees and tall pseudowood buildings. The squad took their helmets off. They were all women, three Japanese and two Indian. Responding to a gesture from the squad leader, she took her own helmet off. A clump of hair came with it. From the expressions of those around her, she looked and smelled dreadful.

There followed several minutes of rush and confusion which ended with her being wheeled on a stretcher trolley to an emergency clinic close to the airlock: a medium-sized green-walled room with a window looking out on the sand. The equipment it contained was obviously for dealing with accidents outside, none of which were likely to involve radiation exposure. She was laid on a bed and put on a drip, and lost consciousness in seconds.

S

he woke in a different clinic, naked on a bed. The air was heavy with floral scents over the faint unmistakeable clinical reek of shit masked by disinfectant. A big steel machine beside the bed was attached to her body in a great number of places by shiny curved pipes and thin fibre-optic monitoring cables. A Japanese woman in a white overall leaned over her.

‘How are you feeling?’

Carlyle moved her arm and the plugged-in pipes moved with it. Metal nanotech, like Morag’s face. She could feel the tug and give of skin and muscle where they went into her bones, and a dull ache there. She tried to sit up, but the woman pushed her gently back.

‘I’m feeling a lot better,’ Carlyle said.

‘So I see,’ said the woman. ‘So you should be. You have been unconscious for a week. In that time you have had a complete bone marrow replacement, and other extensive and invasive treatments.’

‘Oh. I expected euthanasia.’

The woman frowned, then forced a smile. ‘You people with your backups, you give up too easily. Enlightened approach is to develop medical tech to recover the living, not raise the dead. In any case you are prisoner of war. We are not allowed to kill you. Geneva Convention I believe.’

Carlyle swallowed. Her throat hurt. From certain absences on the edges of her vision she could see that she’d lost her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. The medic passed her a glass of water. She sipped. There were gaps where teeth had been, cold in the water. She investigated with her tongue, also painful: an incisor, a canine, a couple of molars were missing. Skin was sloughing off her tongue.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said. ‘What about Higgins?’

The woman gave here an odd look. ‘Something complicated and strange. We were unable to save her body. The metal nanotech head is … inactive, but something continues within. We are studying it carefully. We will attempt to preserve its continuity.’

‘Good,’ said Carlyle. She smiled, feeling skin crack. ‘You know, I didn’t expect this, but dying really sucks.’

‘It is natural for consciousness to desire continuation,’ the woman said. ‘At present this would be best served by sleep.’

Carlyle lay back and let herself drift off, soothed by her surroundings. They were much more pleasant than the emergency clinic: the bed was surrounded by paper screens, between and over which she could see a sort of bower, and glimpse other beds. Overhead the sun, dimmed to visibility by some property of the dome, warmed her face, and then her closed eyelids.

She woke again in the same place, but the machine had gone and there was a sheet over the bed. The sun was low, and in some indefinable way she knew that it was morning, not evening. She sat up, and found that she was wearing a plain cotton hospital nightdress that opened down the back. The holes in her arms and legs and sides had all been closed up with what looked and felt like natural flesh, and might have been. There was no hair on it, but nor was there any hair anywhere else. Her skin still felt dry and her teeth were still missing. All of that could be fixed. She felt extraordinarily lucid and lively.

The Japanese woman came back, holding a tissue-paper packet.

‘Good morning,’ she said. She bowed. ‘My name is Dr Kaori Yoshi.’ She sat on a folding stool by the end of the bed. ‘You are feeling better.’

‘Much better, thanks.’

‘Good. If you wish, you may get up. You are already washed.’ She laid down the packet. ‘Clothes.’

Yoshi disappeared behind the screen while Carlyle pulled on a blue silk wrap and flat black slippers. She found herself steady on her feet, and walked out.

‘Let us go somewhere more pleasant,’ said Yoshi.

They walked on real grass as smooth and dry as astroturf past the rows of screened beds and out into a garden. Parkland, lakes, mist under a glass sky. Black squiggles of buildings. Distant voices of women and children. Yoshi lead her to a black wooden bench, subtly curved, comfortable on the seat and back.

‘Very peaceful,’ Carlyle said.

‘I have something to tell you,’ said Yoshi. ‘You have been asleep for another week. Your treatment is complete. Unfortunately it has not been successful. The cell damage has been too extensive. We have given you drugs to eliminate pain and confusion of mind. When you next fall asleep, in a few hours perhaps, it will be for the last time.’

Carlyle stared at her, pained and confused. ‘I’m going to die after all?’

Yoshi leaned forward and took her hand. ‘I am sorry, but yes.’

Anger surged. ‘Why couldn’t you have sent me back ? Then at least I could have taken a new backup before I—’

She couldn’t go on.

‘We are more than a week’s travel from the nearest place where you could have taken a backup,’ said Yoshi. ‘You would have been dead before you got there, and without the opportunity to gather your thoughts before you go into a future cycle of the universe.’

Carlyle felt caught up short. ‘What?’

Yoshi cupped her hands as though holding water. ‘It is something to know that you have something to carry forward.’ She blinked, eyelashes sparkling. ‘It is not much, but it is something. It is all we have.’

The confirmation of the old Haldane theory of the eternal and infinitely various return of all possible combinations of matter over googolplexes of cosmic cycles was one of the earliest fruits of KE investigation of posthuman discovery. The physics was accepted, it was as true and hard and established as physics got. The cold comfort drawn from it by the Knights was not. That was something you had to come to spiritually, a lonesome valley you had to walk by yourself. There was some speculation that a sort of progress was possible, not simply an endless and unimaginably if not incalculably immense recurrence but an evolution, not just of the material soul but of the material universe; that if such a progress was possible at all, it depended on that portion of lucidity with which the mind faced the inevitable darkness before the inevitable return of the light. She believed that as much as she believed anything, and she realised now that taking backups had not been, as she’d joked to Armand, a way to save time so much as a way to put off that confrontation.

Calm again, she sighed. Breathing was good. Every breath was good. She had not known that, the last time she’d taken a backup. There was a lot she hadn’t known: that breath is good and death sucks, that it’s the end and the beginning, that none of it matters and it all counts, that the soul is material but the form of its materiality is, well, immaterial… . That she had not been wrong in her first response to Winter. The prejudice of her second response, she saw now, had been burned out of her in the hard radiation on Chernobyl, when she’d been dying together with Higgins.