Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 Read online

“Why is sky blue, Mariam?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Victor.”

  “Can you touch it, Mariam?”

  The grass around the tanks kept itself a perfect green and at a perfect height of half an inch.There were small hills, rocky outcrops, and sudden patches of sand. Over to the east there was a lake that stretched beyond the horizon, and sometimes she spotted a sailboat with white canvas taut in the breeze.

  Axon had given up asking her to walk on the water out to the sailboats, but Axon loved it when Mariam stood beside the lake and squeezed the warm mud between her toes. Or when she stripped off and swam in the clear water, diving sometimes to catch sight of a silver-green fish or the tentacles of an octopus peeping out from a reef crevice.

  There was no sensation – hot, cold, warm, rough, slippery, prickly, or smooth – that Axon would not take in and absorb. If Mariam cut herself, Axon was fascinated by the bleeding, the scab, and the scars.

  Mariam was twelve years old, with coal-black hair, dark eyebrows and a slim, athletic body. She liked to keep her hair tied back, but sometimes Axon wanted her to let it blow around her face, and mostly she did, unless she was in a mood, which was usually because Victor had told her she was stupid.

  Usually she was forbidden to go near the tanks, but today was Axon’s Layer Day and she was smart enough to know that they didn’t want her there for the fun of it. She walked down the slope over the perfect grass towards the white domes of the tanks, her flip-flops smacking against her heels and the light almost too bright to bear.

  “What will it be like, Mariam?” asked the soft voice in her head.

  “I don’t know. I will be with you.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “I don’t know. If it hurts you, it will hurt me.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Who taught you afraid?”

  “Victor.”

  “Is Victor afraid?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Is there time for swimming?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Are you afraid, Axon?”

  “I’m trying. I know it, but I can’t feel it.”

  The gate in the electric fence around the tanks opened, and Mariam walked in, head high, but very scared. Her twin, Victor, was already standing on the concourse beside the nearest of the mushroom-like buildings, shading his eyes from the intense light. Mariam was tanned and lithe. Victor was paler, heavier, disliked physical activity, but they were still clearly identical twins. Axon sometimes jokingly called them Exo and Endo – she was a child of the wind and the waves, and Victor was a more cerebral cave-dweller.

  “Hi,” said Victor. This in itself was unusual. Normally they communicated through a private gateway they shared in the Axon interface. But today was different – very different. It was Layer Day.

  A door in the mushroom-dome’s sixty-foot stem slid open and their foster mother, Julia, beckoned them in.

  All the adults they knew were in the conference room, and several they had never seen before. Nobody was smiling as they took their seats. It felt as though they’d failed an exam or been caught stealing.

  “Don’t worry, Axon,” she thought. Silence. She looked at Victor and thought “Can you get Axon?” He shook his head.

  Director Somerton stood up and came to sit beside them. “During this phase we have to cut your link to Axon,” he said. “This is just a precaution.”

  “Against what?” Victor asked, in his belligerent way.

  Somerton ignored Victor’s tone, and went on: “This is a critical stage. I will be honest with you – you’re both growing up fast and you have a right to know. There have sometimes been complications. It’s better for you if we play safe. So we’re going to put you in a light sleep for the next few hours and slowly bring back the link when we think it’s safe, which I’m sure it will be.”

  Victor started to say something, but Mariam shushed him quiet. “I refuse,” she said.

  Somerton was momentarily shocked, but then recovered and said, “I’m sorry, Mariam. I don’t quite understand you.”

  She was quivering, finding it hard to breathe, but she forced the words out. “I will not be cut off from Axon. I will not be put to sleep.”

  “Why?”

  She stood up and ran out of the room. The outside doors slid aside and she kept on running until she reached the gate through the perimeter fence. It wouldn’t open. She stood there, staring out at the grass, with her hands on the grill, suddenly crying, until a hand stroked her back. Finally she turned, expecting to see Julia. Instead, it was Victor.

  “I suppose they sent you!” she shouted.

  “No,” said Victor. “I decided I agree.”

  Inside, Somerton paced around the room. “The culture is ready,” he said. “We must proceed.”

  Normally, Julia was silent in meetings. She was tiny, beak-nosed, like a small bird, but now she stood up and said, “No.” She marched up to the much taller figure of the Director and faced him.

  “They’re like triplets. They’ve been in each others’ minds for twelve years. Are you surprised they don’t just go along with you chopping them off?”

  “They’re children.”

  “Those two are not just children, are they? They are nearly teenagers, and they have a right to be included. If they want to maintain the link, that’s their decision. Explain it to them. If they want to refuse an anaesthetic, that’s their decision. They are not laboratory rats.”

  Somerton turned and faced the science team. “Well?” he asked.

  The Senior Biochemist looked at her watch and said, “We have two hours at most to begin layering. If we have to abort it will take four months to breed and verify another batch. The ship is ready and waiting for our signal. They will not be pleased.”

  “This is not a democracy, normally, but in this instance I would like to see a show of hands. Should we proceed with the operation with the links open and the children conscious?”

  All present raised their hands. Somerton turned back to Julia. “Explain the danger to them, ask them one more time, and then we go ahead either way.”

  * *

  Mariam and Victor were walking around the inside of the perimeter fence. They had never been to this area before. As they passed the main mushroom building they came to a section of fence with a very big gate that could slide aside on rollers, but now refused to budge when they pulled it. A wide concrete road led back from the gate to a high door in a cube-like building with a cluster of antennae on the roof. The road had parallel metal strips with grooves which ran out under the gate and onto a vast grey road with scorch-marks clearly visible and in the distance a group of white-painted parallel stripes.

  “What are they for?” Mariam asked, pointing at the metal strips.

  “I think they’re tracks. Maybe you could run wheels along them.”

  They had never witnessed Julia move fast before, but she came sprinting up to them.

  “Please listen to me,” she said. “I’m very sorry. We never told you everything. You were too young. We don’t have much time, but let me explain as quickly as I can.”

  * *

  The human brain contains something like a hundred billion neurons. Nobody knows the real count. Each neuron may connect with up to seven hundred others, making an incomprehensibly complex network. The brain weighs about one point five kilos and has a volume of something like twelve hundred cubic centimetres.

  The volume of the two-metre diameter sphere in the centre of the cube-like building was over four million cubic centimetres – the capacity of more than three hundred human brains. It was supported in an alloy framework connected to hoists above. The lights were dimmed and only a diffuse red glow, like a photographic darkroom, lit the lattice of steel pipes that ran from the titanium sphere, through ducts in the wall, and into a second chamber. Technicians clad in full biohazard suits adjusted settings on a large touch-screen panel to one sid
e.

  In the wide-windowed observation room set high in the wall, Julia sat between Mariam and Victor. Somerton stood to one side, nearer the window, blinking more rapidly than usual. “Begin,” he said.

  “Am I looking at myself, Mariam? Victor?”

  “I don’t know. Think about something nice.”

  In the next-door chamber digital read-outs on the breeding tanks were steady. Nano-scale sieves measured the exact structure of the stem cell clusters and trapped any that were less than perfect, and the perfect were fed forward to a holding tank.

  Through the observation window, as though watching a silent movie, they saw the red-lit sphere begin to rotate about its vertical axis, apparently hanging from the umbilical tubes that entered the centre of the top. On the far wall a projection lit up showing a three dimensional model of the interior of the sphere. It was like a shell with a nut inside. The nut was smaller than the outer shell – held in place by millions of fine struts, surrounded by the image of a light blue membrane. The sphere was not yet full.

  The female voice over the loudspeakers was so sudden and loud that everyone was startled. “Lowering temperature now,” she said. Unseen, viscous chilled cooling fluids moved through capillaries in the central mass of the sphere. Within a few seconds the temperature read-out on the tank dropped five degrees.

  “I have no word for this. Thought slow…fragments, maybe…discontinuity… Sky leap – Earth flame.”

  “Start cell delivery.”

  In the vat chamber, pumps began to spin up, pushing billions of cells in their nutrient wash slowly through sterile pipes from the final holding tank towards their destiny. The projection showed a steadily rising tide filling the space between the central core and the shell of the containment sphere.

  “There’s no more room after this,” said Victor. “Is this the final layer?”

  “Yes,” Julia replied.“This is the OCC – the Outer Cortical Complex. When the barrier dissolves, these cells will evolve billions of links into the earlier layers.”

  Mariam shivered. “Axon is cold,” she said.

  “No,” Julia said. “Axon is not cold. Axon has no sensory feelings itself. You are the feelings. You are Axon’s skin, eyes, smell, instinct, arms, and legs. That is your purpose.”

  Again, there came the calm voice over the loudspeakers in the observation room. “The layer is stabilised. Raising the temperature to normal minus one. Preparing to dissolve the barrier. Permission is required.”

  Somerton gripped the handrail in front of the wide window, looked back towards Julia and the children, and said, “Proceed.”

  New fluids entered the sphere. The temporary membrane surrounding the original core of the Axon brain – the dura mater – thinned and its dead cells were washed way. Very slowly the impenetrable wall between the old cells and the new grew thinner. On the big display the blue was steadily eroded and became patchy. At the same time, internal blocking membranes dissolved, and what was a place of many rooms became one. Tendrils of tailored neuronal fibre spread through the new tissue like a root system growing at an impossibly fast rate. Microscopic tubules carrying oxygen and nutrients followed.

  It hit Mariam like a tsunami. The world vanished, and huge arcs of geodesics, star-fields, vector-diagrams, swiftly-changing complex mathematical functions, planetary systems and galaxies swamped her with colour and deep ringing sounds like a vast tolling of underwater bells. And then, suddenly, she felt a terrible pain, and screamed.

  Medics who had been standing near the children with their hands behind their backs, as though merely observing, brought the gas-powered syringes forward and sprayed anaesthetic directly into their carotid arteries.

  Inside the building, on the outside of it, around the perimeter fence, and throughout the world, biohazard warnings lit up and flashed.

  “Switch the HUD on!” Somerton shouted. A technician on the floor below pressed a finger on a panel and an incomprehensible green text overlay appeared on the window, scrolling fast.

  INTERPENETRATION FAILURE-LEVEL RISING. CORE TEMPERATURE RISING. RE-COOLING INITIATED. CORTICAL ACTIVITY SYMMETRY IS COLLAPSING.

  * *

  As the soothing coolants flowed into the maddened biological brain that was Axon, the medics lifted Mariam and Victor onto wheeled stretchers and pushed them down long white corridors to the hospital suite, Julia walking alongside.

  “Prognosis? Assessment?” Somerton snapped at the Senior Biochemist, who was standing next to him. She took a step backwards, ran her fingers through her blonde hair, and said, “I did warn you that this was a dangerously large volume to layer at one time.”

  “I didn’t ask for a history lesson!”

  “This is not just a brainstorm. This is a hurricane. We were prepared and we’re doing what we can, but it looks at the moment like total network collapse.”

  Axon raged in random fury and fever. The trees of logic grown over years fell apart. The music of the synapses lost all coherence and was swamped in chaotic noise. The older connections fought the new, and the new knew nothing except their urge to be, to be something, to be a link, or a constant, or a function, or the signature of the scent of a rose. Fractal patterns swept through the complex of tissues. Filaments grew and shrank, touched and embraced or touched and withered, as their electrical charges and biochemical payloads summed or negated.

  Evolution can be slow. To build a hawk or a daffodil can take several million years. But it can also be very fast. Axon’s brain was a war zone as strategies competed. But eventually, all wars come to an end.

  Thirty-seven hours later the anaesthetists turned off the systems which had been keeping Mariam and Victor safe from the storm in their bunker of unconsciousness.

  Mariam’s first thought was not hers: “I could do with a swim.” She smiled as the nurse held the plastic beaker of water to her lips.

  Victor opened his eyes and saw a thought that was an equation. “Sparse search on eleven dimensional vector space in log(n) time. Not bad for a twelve-year-old!”

  * *

  The ship was two thousand metres long and shaped like an elongated silver ovoid with lattices of filigree golden wire at each end, like a vast insect egg trapped between the centres of two magical spiders’ webs that connected to – nothing. The light from the star reflected from its body and drive webs, but here there were no eyes to see its strange beauty. It orbited the star silently, patiently and entirely automatically. Yes, it did contain life – plants, seeds, soil, saplings, mature olive trees, fish, sheep, ravens and cabbages – but they were all frozen and silent in the hold. The control bridge, with its comfortable chairs and wraparound 3D screens was empty. All was dark; the screens and tell-tale lights were of no use to a room without observers.

  Sixteen navigational and systems computers controlled the ship’s status constantly and voted on any required action, which, since they had arrived into the vicinity of the star Angelus XI three hundred Earth days ago, had been next to nothing apart from a unanimous decision to send a mining drone to a metal-rich asteroid within easy reach.

  It had been a long journey. The silicon-based computers could not manage the complexity of a level three void jump, and they’d coasted here at only near light-speed.

  The ship was waiting.

  In an orbit perpendicular to the ship a strange object moved around Angelus XI. Take a can of beer and add a cone to one end and half of a transparent ball to the other. Add gigantic light-catching wings radiating from its waist, and colour it a blue so deep it bordered on the ultraviolet. Now, expand the length of the can to fourteen thousand metres, and spin it slowly around the long axis. Add some powerful transmitters that broadcast, on a sweeping frequency band covering most of the electromagnetic spectrum, the following message: “Bio-containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen. Warning. Unauthorised approaches within one million kilometres will trigger lethal and indiscriminate attack. This facility is protected with a network of cloaked military drones with
a lot of fire-power and a minimal sense of humour. Have a very nice day.”

  Times passes. That’s its job. Sixteen-year-old Victor was sitting on the beach beside the lake eating something that resembled a hamburger. He refused to go into the water where Mariam floated, flipped and dived.

  “Why won’t you show me the world?” Victor thought.

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Victor. If I could tell you why, you would see it. Go for a swim while you can.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I won’t share some quite cute solutions for quantum gravity. No swim, no tell.”

  Victor kicked off his shoes, his T-shirt and shorts, walked down to the edge of the water, and stuck his toes in. “It’s freezing!” he yelled. Mariam emerged from the lake very close to the shore and splashed water over Victor. He ran back up the beach, swearing.

  In the cluster of buildings that housed the Axon development system, Somerton was hosting a five-hour crucial meeting of the full team. “This,” he said, “is the decision point. If there are any doubts you must articulate them now.”

  One by one the teams voted. Only the Senior Biochemist raised an issue. “The complexity of Axon is now, as we would expect, far beyond our diagnostics. However, we can see some zones that are constantly changing – changing faster than we would expect. Specifically, these are in the inferior temporal gyrus region. We predict that this pattern will eventually stabilise, but I must flag up this slight anomaly. We have no objection to advancement.”

  “Very well,” Somerton said. “Many of you have given the best years of your lives to this project. There have been differences, and quite properly so, but we move towards our goal united in the will to succeed. I hereby authorise advancement to level Sigma.”

  Far away, the ship decoded a signal and began to move.

  Julia walked down from the Centre towards the lake as the flyer came in low over the beach with a sound like a deep breath. They ran towards her.

  “What was that?”

  “Get dressed. Then you really can come and see your world.”