Vortex

1.

The medics kept Oscar and me in a weeklong quarantine, scanning us for any sign of contamination. They failed to find anything unusual in our bodies or our psyches, though that wasn’t conclusive—Hypothetical devices were perfectly capable of eluding detection. But we measured consistently clean, and the sample we had brought back with us, the crystalline butterfly in its sealed container, remained dead or dormant.

News of what happened out in the Wilkes Basin quickly spread through Vox. Collective grief for the lost soldiers and scientists was written in the faces of the medics who examined us and in Oscar’s face, too. I asked him what it was like to feel an emotion amplified by the entire population of a city.

“It’s painful,” he admitted. “But it’s better than being alone. What was unbearable was what we felt after the attack that shut down the Coryphaeus—so many dead, and no way to share that grief. It was agonizing, horrible beyond belief.”

“Coryphaeus” was the word scholars had chosen to translate a concept for which there was no English equivalent. In the ancient dictionaries it was defined as a noun from classical Greek: the leader of a chorus, a choirmaster. In Vox it referred to the nest of feedback loops and functional algorithms that regulated the input and output of the community’s neural nodes. It was the emotional heart of the Network—Allison had called it “the parliament of love and conscience.”

Solitary grief (like guilt, like love) was an inescapable part of the human condition, or at least it once had been. We had endured it for most of our tenure as a species. I guessed it wasn’t a bad thing to be able to share that burden in a way that lessened the pain, and maybe there was something admirable in the willingness of the people of Vox to shoulder their countrymen’s burden of tears. But the price of that anodyne was reckoned in personal autonomy; it was reckoned in privacy.

I tried to give Oscar the impression that I was sympathetic and even curious. That, too, was part of the plan.

As soon as we were released from quarantine I hurried back to the quarters I shared with Allison. She ran to me as the door slid open and came shivering into my arms.

We couldn’t say any of the things we wanted and needed to say. We settled for a few self-conscious endearments. After a while we fixed a meal in the kitchen dispensary and Allison accessed (clumsily, with a manual interface) a video stream that was the local equivalent of a newscast. The final images from the vanguard expedition were playing on a loop, slowed down so that events happened as if in an underwater ballet. The glassy butterflies dropped out of the darkness and settled like lethal snowflakes on the soldiers and technicians; the human figures froze in astonishment, then jerked and danced like unstrung marionettes as they were systematically swarmed and killed.

The loop ran for two cycles before I asked Allison to turn it off.

After the disaster a drone aircraft had been sent to survey the site from a safe distance. But by daybreak there was no sign that anything unusual had happened—no human bodies, no trace of the analytical gear or of the crystalline insects that had destroyed it. Nothing but the immense and indifferent Hypothetical machines, patiently grinding across the Antarctic wasteland.

2.

Soon, Allison had whispered to me at the aircraft docks, which meant I had to cultivate Oscar’s confidence despite what had happened in the Wilkes Basin. I arranged to meet him on a platform overlooking the nuked sector of Vox Core—I wanted to see how the reconstruction work was going. I left early for the appointment and took a roundabout route.

The better I had come to know Vox Core, the less monolithic it seemed. The five elements of Voxish urban design (Oscar had explained this) were terraces, zones, enclosures, plains, and tiers, each of these terms having a precise technical definition—as I walked and rode that morning I passed through three terraces and an enclosure and caught a glimpse of a plain from a bridge that spanned two tiers. Vox Core ran on a seasonless diurnal cycle, sixteen hours of artificial daylight and eight hours of night, but every sector had its own unique and shifting quality of light. I crossed a terrace in which the light was as diffuse as rainy daylight and I walked through an enclosure illuminated by a point-source as bright as the noonday sun. Come nightfall the busy slopes would glitter like separate cities, while the wooded or grassy plains slipped into silent darkness.

The last time I had come to the ruined sector of the city it had been an ugly and impenetrable mass of debris. Now most of that debris had been collected and recycled or dumped into the sea. Lingering radiation had been “chelated” (Oscar’s word) by some technology I didn’t understand, and the reconstruction was proceeding briskly. The main crater had been retained as a memorial, but it was already scalloped with new slopes and elegantly landscaped terraces.

I met Oscar at a workers’ commissary overlooking the site. The food we were given was good but the portions were small: supplies were low due to the loss of farming manpower after the transit to Earth. We talked a while about Allison. I told him I was worried about her, that her bouts of depression were becoming more frequent and more severe. I mentioned her crying jags, her intermittent crippling anxiety.

“This isn’t unexpected,” Oscar said. He gazed from our table across a low wall and into the crater. Below and aft of us, robotic construction machines were cutting foamed-granite pillars for a new terrace. “The fact is, she simply can’t become what she wants to be—what some part of her mind insists she is. And the conflict is compromising her health and her sanity.”

“All she wants to be is Allison Pearl.”

“Allison Pearl is nothing but an illusion, all inference, synthesis, and ancillary data. Treya’s belief that she is Allison is a symptom of the separation trauma that happened when her link to the Network was broken. I know you’re sympathetic to her, and I understand the source of that sympathy. She’s a connection to your past. That’s what she was meant to be. That’s why we engineered the Allison Pearl impersona in the first place. But she’s not a time traveler from the twenty-first century, Mr. Findley.”

“I know that, but…”

“But?”

“Her hostility to Vox seems pretty authentic.”

He shrugged. “She’s entitled to her grievances. Grafting the impersona into her neocortex was a controversial act from the beginning, though of course no one expected a prolonged Network failure to compound the effect. But she can’t solve the problem by hiding from it. ‘Allison Pearl’ simply isn’t a stable configuration. What Treya needs more than anything is to have her limbic node restored.”

I nodded as if I conceded the point. In the crater, machines shaped like segmented snakes dismantled the spars of a damaged enclosure. I asked Oscar whether it made sense to reconstruct the city when the Hypothetical machines were headed for us, presumably for the purpose of rapturing us all into heavenly communion.

“No one knows what union with the Hypotheticals might mean in practical terms. Undoubtedly we’ll all be changed—spiritually, intellectually, physically. But we might still need a city to live in.”

“You don’t find that frightening?”

“As an individual I might be frightened. Collectively, we’re braver than that.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s hard for me to imagine what that’s like—the node, the Network, the Coryphaeus.”

“I’ve described how they function.”

“Subjectively, I mean. What it feels like.”

“If you’re talking about the implant, the surgery is entirely painless…”

“Oscar, not the surgery! What does it feel like, living with wires inside your head?”

“Ah. Well, they’re not wires. They’re spindles of artificial nervous tissue and opsin proteins—no,” holding up his hand to cut off my objection, “I do understand what you’re asking. All I can tell you is that it feels like nothing at all. Of course, my own node was installed at birth. But I can describe what it was like when the Network failed, if you think that would be helpful.”

I nodded. The terrace trembled with the distant construction work. The air smelled faintly of granite dust.

“Losing the Network was like losing a sense. Like a subtle blindness. One of the node’s functions is to facilitate communication. Even in a simple conversation, the limbic interface helps us perceive and interpret nuances we might otherwise miss. At least when both parties are so equipped. Excuse me if this sounds insulting, but to us a nodeless person can appear insensitive almost to the point of imbecility.”

“Uh-huh… is that how I seem to you?”

He smiled. “I’ve learned to make allowances.” That was Oscar’s sense of humor—about as deep as it went.

“At some point, though, a kind of emotional consensus emerges, right? And that’s what I can’t quite picture.”

“Maybe the word ‘emotion’ is misleading. It’s subtler than that. Conscious judgment is beyond the reach of the Coryphaeus. But consider how much of human cognition is un conscious. For instance, Mr. Findley, both you and I often make decisions on the basis of moral intuition. We call that intuition ‘conscience.’ Conscience doesn’t arise out of deliberate, systematic reasoning. Which is not to say it’s unreasonable or illogical! Suppose you see a man drowning in a river and you swim out to save him—do you think about it first? Do you calculate the risks against the benefits? Obviously not; you act out of an instinctive identification with the drowning man; you feel his distress as if it were your own and you act to relieve that distress despite your fears. Or, if you fail to act, you might feel guilt or remorse. This isn’t a trivial phenomenon. Acts of conscience have overturned governments and toppled empires—even in your time.”

“And we didn’t need nodes or Networks to do it.”

“No. But at the same time, individual conscience is notoriously unreliable. An individual might talk himself out of doing the right thing. Or he might be genuinely uncertain about what the right thing is. ”

“You’re no more infallible than I am, Oscar.”

“But when I sum my conscience with a thousand or a million others, errors become less likely and self-deception almost impossible. That’s what the Coryphaeus does for us!”

He had given me a textbook argument for limbic democracy, and he was utterly sincere about it. But he hadn’t really answered my question. “I don’t want to know what it’s good for. I want to know how it feels.”

He thought for a moment. “Take the recent food rationing. Historically, rationing has always produced black markets, hoarding, even violent resistance—yes? But you won’t find any of that in Vox. Not because we’re saints, but because our collective conscience is muscular enough to prevent it. The sum of our better instincts—which is just another name for the Coryphaeus—knows the rationing is necessary and fair. And so, as individuals, we feel it as necessary and fair.”

“It still sounds like coercion.”

“Does it? Tell me, did you ever break into a neighbor’s house and steal his property?”

“No—”

“And is that because you were coerced, or because you knew it would be wrong? Only you can answer that question, but I have to assume it’s because you felt it would be a shameful act, that you would make yourself abhorrent in your own eyes and in the eyes of others by committing it. Well, that’s how I feel about cheating on my rations. And I’m secure in the knowledge that my neighbors feel exactly the same way.”

I had been abhorrent in my own eyes more often than he could have guessed, but I raised a slightly different question: “What if the consensus is wrong? Conscience isn’t infallible even if you count hands.”

“Perhaps not infallible, certainly less likely to be wrong.”

“I’m new here, Oscar, and it’s not my place to criticize, but I saw a lot of Farmers killed in the rebellion. You folks didn’t bother taking prisoners, either. You left the survivors out to die. Is your collective conscience okay with that?”

“That decision was taken when the Network had ceased to function. Had the Coryphaeus been active we might have behaved differently.”

“What about keeping Farmers as bonded serfs? You’ve been doing that for centuries, according to the history books.”

“I won’t debate the historical reasons for doing what was done. I’ll grant you it’s an uneasy compromise. And you’re right, of course, we’re not morally infallible. We don’t claim to be. But compare our history with that of any other nation or culture, death for death, injustice for injustice—compare.”

“I’m not sure that’s a claim you want to make, given that we’re sitting next to a bomb crater.”

“That was the result of a cortical republic enacting its own radical bionormative ideology. Reason breeds more monsters than conscience, Mr. Findley.”

Maybe so. I let a few moments pass.

“About Allison,” I said. “That is, Treya. If she replaced her node, would the suffering stop?”

“It might take time for her to adjust,” Oscar said, giving me an evaluative stare. “But the conflicts that are troubling her would quickly be resolved.”

White plumes of dust lofted up from the crater, drawn toward filters in the artificial sky. There was the sound of distant hammering. It occurred to me that I was constructing a deception as systematically as those machines were constructing new tiers and terraces. And I had come to the central pillar of that deception.

“I want to help her,” I said.

Oscar nodded encouragingly.

I said, “This isn’t easy for me. But I’ve come to a couple of conclusions since what happened out in the wasteland.”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t choose to come to Vox. And to be honest? Knowing what I know now, I might have preferred to travel up the Ring, maybe see what those Middle Worlds are like.”

“I understand,” Oscar said cautiously.

“But I can’t do that. I can’t undo what’s been done and I can’t change the future. This is where I’m going to live and die.”

His eyes narrowed.

“And if I’m going to live here, I want to live with Allison. But I don’t want to watch her suffer.”

“There’s only one way to relieve her suffering.”

“She has to accept the implant.”

“Yes. Can you convince her to do that?”

“I don’t know. But I’m willing to try.”

His expression was cautious, opaque, calculating, the look of a gambler contemplating a bet. He said, “We gave her the Allison impersona so she could bond with you. You’re the reason she’s clinging to it. You could be the reason she abandons it.”

Down in the crater a chorus line of machines began welding iron beams, sparks showering from their fingers like falling stars.

“Maybe if I went first,” I said. “I mean, if I volunteered for the surgery.”

Oscar’s eyes widened. Then, slowly, he began to smile.