Flood

36

December 2018

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

In the final days Maria spent as much time as she could in her flat, in central Manchester just off Deansgate, alone with her virtual child. Whenever Maria logged on, Linda always abandoned her toys and the soulless avatars who shared this domain with her, the pets and companions and nannies, and came running to her mother’s image with squeals of delight.

Little Linda, a HeadSpace baby, was four years old now. She lived in an apartment cut into the side of a cliff, overlooking a sparkling sea. Maria had designed the place herself. The location within the virtual world called HeadSpace was non-specific, but Maria had vaguely modeled it on the Sorrento coast, where she had had some happy holidays as a kid with her own family. Of course the sea was a hateful thing now, and Maria had installed louvered blinds to close the big picture windows and shut out the view. But the little girl playing on the sunlit patio still made a beautiful image for Maria to gaze on, in her desktop screen, in her damp, darkened flat.

Linda was Maria’s baby, entirely virtual, painlessly born and raised within the glowing domain of HeadSpace. Everything Linda knew Maria had taught her. Maria had gloves and a headset, and she could hear the child laugh, feel her when her avatar hugged her, a ghostly presence through the pads on her fingertips. She still couldn’t be with the child, not fully. Her screen was a barrier between HeadSpace and the real world-Dullworld as Maria thought of it, this damp, breaking-down world where she was stuck, a drab, childless thirty-seven-year-old.

But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised. Technologies such as AI, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would accelerate human evolution; they would uplift Maria herself into a union of flesh and technology. And beyond that would come the singularity, the point at which human technologies became smarter than humans themselves. It would all exponentiate away into a glittering transcendence, out of anybody’s control, the opening up of a new realm of enhanced existence. She had been reading about this for years, for half her lifetime. When the singularity came she would be able to live forever, if she chose. And she would be able to step seamlessly between one world and another, between the dull world of Manchester and the shining realm of HeadSpace. She could be with her child, in the light, as real as Linda was.

But the singularity was slow in coming.

She rarely heard from her transhumanist contacts now. As the floods bit away there were power-outs or, worse, failures at the ISPs that linked her to Linda in HeadSpace. And Maria herself was distracted from her time with her child. Forever hungry, thirsty, cold, she found herself spending hours in queues for food and medicines, even fresh water.

The fact was, her access to HeadSpace was the product of a complex and interconnected society, the capstone of a pyramid grounded in very old technologies, in farming and mining and manufacture and transport and energy production. It was only as that essential pyramid was crumbling that Maria became fully aware of its existence. The singularity came to seem more and more out of reach-an absurdity, actually. You couldn’t have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.

It was a Sunday morning when the HeadSpace website finally crashed. She kept trying to access it through that day, over and over, into the night. She didn’t accept it had gone for good for twenty-four hours, when her own internet connection failed.

Then the power went. She sat in her dark, cooling flat, her open hand against the dead screen, longing to pass through out of Dullworld to join Linda in the pixelated sunlight.

At last she began to mourn.