Vortex

1.

The conversation with Allison left me with more questions than I could count, but the one that mattered most was: how successfully could I lie?

I had lied to more than a few people over the course of my life, for good and bad reasons. There were truths about myself I didn’t like to share, and often enough I altered them in the telling. But I didn’t consider myself a natural-born liar, and that was unfortunate, because I would have to become one now. The lie I needed to tell—the lie I would have to enact in every waking moment and ideally in my sleep—was the pivot on which our futures were balanced.

Vox progressed steadily toward Antarctica, making pretty good speed, or so it seemed to me, for a floating island with a population of some few million souls. Twice more I went with Allison up to the high towers of Vox Core to discuss what we couldn’t discuss down below, and every time the view was the same, the same ruined wasteland riding in the same discolored sea. The days grew longer—it was summer in these latitudes—but the sun hugged the horizon as if it was afraid of coming untethered from it. To the best of anyone’s knowledge Vox was the only remaining human habitation on Earth. I didn’t discuss it with Allison, but maybe the awareness of that lonesome truth was part of what drew us closer together.

I set about teaching myself to navigate the city’s passageways and gangways. The Voxish people were peculiar in the way they denominated public and private spaces, but I learned to recognize the signs that distinguished homes from dormitories and dormitories from meeting places. I even picked up a few words of the Voxish language, enough to make myself understood in the local markets, though if I wanted to buy anything—an item of food, say, or one of the copper necklaces Voxish men wore for decoration—I needed Oscar to complete the exchange in Network-space. I arranged to have my hair cut short in the Voxish style, and before long I could pass (or so Allison said) as a native, seen from distance. Up close, of course, I was something no Networked citizen would ever mistake for normal.

The feeling worked both ways. Viewed from a distance, Vox was a community like any other, populated by men and women working at their jobs and raising their kids and doing all the other predictable things human beings do. Get in among those people, however, and you could feel the Network running like a river behind their eyes. Enthusiasms and disappointments swayed them in unison, like wind combing a field of wheat. And as the days passed that invisible wind began to gust and turn uneasily.

I knew what it was Allison wanted from me. And I knew it might be our only hope of survival. But the hardest thing to hide was my fear of it: the fear of what I would have to do and the fear of what it would cost me.

2.

Oscar was never going to trust Allison. He considered her a traitor and wasn’t bashful about saying so. But Oscar was the administrator in charge of us, and for our plan to succeed he would have to trust one of us, at least to some extent. So I made it my business to cultivate that trust. I began to ask his advice even when Allison had already rendered an opinion. I went to him with questions about the history books I was reading. I was aloof and a little skeptical, which was what he expected. But he was eager to ingratiate himself, and all it took to raise his hopes was a grateful word now and then. I think he believed he might eventually be able to convert me to the cause of Vox—whatever that cause was or was becoming.

Oscar’s advantage in this duel was the Network: its omnipresent eyes and its powers of calculation. My advantage was that I was neither Networked nor a Vox-born native, which made me a little bit inscrutable. So when I first demanded to see Isaac Dvali, Oscar was surprised but willing to cooperate. And when I insisted on bringing Allison along with me, Oscar gnashed his teeth but agreed.

It turned out Isaac wasn’t far away from the rooms I shared with Allison. He was being treated in a hospital unit a couple of corridors aft of us, and Oscar escorted us there, ignoring the sidelong looks of the medical workers as we passed. He warned me, not for the first time, that Isaac’s injuries had been grave and that I might be shocked at what I saw.

“I’ve seen a few things,” I told him. “I’m not easy to shock.”

Spoke too soon, as it turned out.

Isaac wasn’t under guard but he was attended by medical staff at all times, and Oscar had to consult and mollify a few of that flock before we were finally admitted to the room in which he lay surrounded by the machinery that was keeping him alive.

The first time I had seen Isaac Dvali was at his father’s compound in the Equatorian desert. There had been something uncanny about him even then—an adolescent boy who had been hybridized with Hypothetical nanotechnology and raised in isolation from the rest of the world. I had never really gotten to know him during the time we had been together in the badlands—I doubted anyone had ever really gotten to know him—but I was friendly toward him, and I believed he welcomed that friendship. It was Isaac, probably more than any of us drawn into the temporal Arch, who deserved a second shot at life.

But not this life, I thought, and not like this.

Much of his body had been destroyed in the attack on Vox Core. What was salvaged had been badly burned. It was a testimony to Voxish medical science, and to the power of the Hypothetical biotech embedded in him, that Isaac had survived at all.

Allison hung back queasily as I approached Isaac’s nest of tubes and wires, while Oscar hovered at my shoulder. “Many parts of him had to be regrown,” Oscar was whispering. “His left leg and arm, his lungs… most of his internal organs in fact. Only a fraction of his brain tissue was salvageable.”

Isaac’s head was encased in a gelatinous cowl that filled in the missing portions of his skull. His right eye, jaw, and cheekbones were intact; everything else was a foaming, pinkish mass. Skin, bone, and brain tissue were slowly being reconstructed from within, Oscar said.

I took a step closer, and Isaac’s single good eye rolled to follow me. I guessed that meant there really was someone buried inside this living wreckage—an arguably human being.

“Isaac,” I said.

“It’s unlikely that he can hear you,” Oscar whispered.

“Isaac, it’s Turk. Maybe you remember me.”

The boy made no response. His good eye remained moistly observant. The other socket looked like a cup filled to brimming with scarlet jelly.

“You’re hurt pretty bad,” I said, “but they’re fixing you up. Takes time. I’ll come and see you once in a while while you’re getting better, all right?”

He opened his toothless mouth and sighed.

I could tell by Allison’s expression that the encounter had made her angry, though I wasn’t sure why. She waited until we were back in the pedestrian walkway before she turned on Oscar. “You’re not just treating him,” she said coldly. “I saw the interface. You Networked him.”

“Isaac is special. You know that. Of all the Uptaken, Isaac is the one who was linked to the Hypotheticals even before he was taken up by the temporal Arch. He’s the most effective intermediary between Vox and the Hypotheticals. Did you expect us to rely on words to communicate with him? Isaac needs to interact with the collectivity of Vox, not just me or you or Mr. Findley or any other individual.”

“You’re grafting your own madness into him.”

Oscar answered with a few words in his own language.

It was a Voxish proverb, Allison told me later. Loosely translated: The bee must not pass judgment on the hive.

3.

As we sailed south, Vox sent out fleets of unmanned aircraft to map the continents of the Earth at increasingly finer scales. The drones flew at the upper limits of the atmosphere, as much spacecraft as aircraft, and their cameras and sensors were sensitive enough to penetrate the near-perpetual shroud of high haze.

They were designed to seek out any evidence of human activity, past or present. At first, all they found were lifeless ruins. I talked Oscar into letting me see some of the images the aircraft had relayed to Vox, but the video was bland and uninformative. Many of the last human cities had been built in the boreal lands of the northern hemisphere (places I still thought of as Russia or Scandinavia or Canada), but they had been abandoned now for more than a thousand years. All that remained were faint suggestions of roads and foundations, blemishes on the otherwise trackless uniformity of the circumpolar deserts.

I had read in the history books about the Terrestrial exodus. Calling it that made it sound as if the Earth had been systematically evacuated, but the truth was much uglier. Even the vast number of refugees who flooded across the Arch to Equatoria had constituted only a fraction of the planet’s population. The rest had simply died, over a grueling few centuries of progressive impoverishment. They died of starvation as crops failed and arable land shrank, died of asphyxia as anaerobic blooms choked the oceans and poisoned the air. Hydrogen sulfide seeping from the seas had sterilized the coastal plains and river deltas; then, inexorably, over decades, the hinterlands had also succumbed. Massive fires swept through ravaged forests, adding tons of liberated carbon to the thickening atmosphere. Decades of lightless cold were followed by decades of rising heat as the climate began to oscillate like a cracked bell.

The trigger had been pulled back in my day, Oscar said. Human beings had burned much of the carbon stored on Earth as oil, coal, and natural gas, and the consequences of that would have been bad enough. But it was the discovery of oil deposits in the Equatorian desert, a bounty of light sweet crude, easily extracted and imported by sea across the Arch of the Hypotheticals, that had signed the planet’s death sentence. Maybe we could have burned all our own carbon and survived the consequences, but pumping two worlds’ worth of CO₂ into the atmosphere had overwhelmed any conceivable coping mechanism.

I told Oscar that made us sound pretty stupid. No, he said. It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.

Maybe so. But it was depressing all the same, and I didn’t hide my reaction. If I wanted Oscar to trust me I had to let him see my feelings. Some of them.

He said I should try to look at it through the lens of time. All this world’s death, all its grief, was finished now. And when the destiny of Vox was fulfilled, a new era would begin: an age in which humanity would consort with its masters on an equitable basis. “Much will be made clear, Mr. Findley. Miracles will become possible. You’ll see. You’re lucky to be aboard Vox at such a time.”

“You really believe that?”

“Of course I do.”

“On the basis of a few prophecies?”

“On the basis of the calculations and inferences of the founders of Vox. Those calculations were sound enough to carry us across the oceans of a half dozen worlds. And sound enough to get us to Earth.”

“A dead planet.”

He smiled. Oscar had held back a nugget of information, like a stage magician waiting for the right moment to pull a paper flower out of his sleeve. “Not entirely dead. We have new images from Antarctica. Look.”

He showed me another video segment. Like the rest, it had been shot from high in the troposphere; like the rest, it was hard to interpret. At first glance it appeared to show one more stretch of generic desert, from a part of the world that in my day had been buried in ice. I might have been looking at boulders or pebbles: the scale was marked in characters I couldn’t read. But at the center of the image was a blip of regularity, and the image stabilized and resolved as the aircraft moved closer. There was something structural there, for sure. Mist-obscured squares and rectangles in dusty pastel colors. Some of these objects, Oscar said, were nearly the size of Vox Core. And they weren’t ruined or abandoned buildings, not in the ordinary sense. It was increasingly obvious as the view honed down to a narrow field that some of the structures had left long, linear trails in the Antarctic dust. They were mobile.

“We believe these are the work of the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said mildly.

I guessed he was right. The structures didn’t look like anything human beings would build. But the image abruptly faded to a staticky blank. The drone aircraft’s sensors had failed, Oscar explained. More drones had been sent to the same site, but they had failed too. Oscar chose to interpret the failures optimistically. “Clearly, the Hypotheticals still have a presence on Earth. Just as clearly, they registered the presence of the unmanned vehicles and reacted to them. Which means—I think the conclusion is inescapable—that they’re aware of us. ” His smile was fixed and unworried. “They know we’re coming, Mr. Findley. And I believe they’re waiting for us to arrive.”