Vortex

1.

Often in the weeks after the first encounter between Vox and the Hypothetical machines I caught myself quietly repeating my own name— Allison Pearl, Allison Pearl —anchoring myself to the syllables, the sound of them, the feeling of them in my throat and on my tongue.

As Allison, I had once read a book about the human brain. From that book I had learned the term “neural plasticity,” which means the ability of the brain to modify itself in response to changes in its environment. Neural plasticity was what made it possible for me to be Allison Pearl. It was also what made it possible for a living brain to be wired to a limbic implant. The brain adapts: that’s what brains do.

When Turk told me he had volunteered for surgery I pretended to be surprised. The implant had been an essential part of our plan from the beginning. But for the benefit of the Network’s hidden sensors I was obliged to feel betrayed, I was obliged to argue with him. So I argued. So I wept. It was a convincing performance. It was convincing because it was nine-tenths sincere. I didn’t doubt his courage, but no plan is foolproof. I was terrified of what he might become.

Shit happens, as the original Allison once wrote in her diary. No truer words, etc. For instance: the day Turk had his node installed—probably about the time he was being wheeled into surgery—Isaac Dvali came to see me, and he laid my secrets bare.

I knew from the newsfeeds that Isaac’s recovery had proceeded at an astonishing rate. Everyone in Vox Core was paying breathless attention to him now. Far more than Turk, Isaac had become what the city’s founders had hoped and believed one of the Uptaken ought to be: a living connection to the Hypotheticals—which meant the city’s promised transcendence remained at least plausible. Without Isaac, Vox was nothing but a congregation of fanatics whose faith had stranded them on a dead and deadly planet. With Isaac, it was still possible to believe Vox was a community of like-minded pioneers poised at the vanguard of human destiny.

Only days after the disaster in the Wilkes Basin, Isaac had mastered the ability to speak fluent Voxish. His motor skills improved to the point where he could walk unassisted, his body went from frail to remarkably robust, and the reconstructed portions of his skull began to look almost normal. The croaking, screaming creature Turk had known was gone. The newly and unsettlingly articulate Isaac had been released from medical care, though he still lived and slept in the rooms where he had been treated. Lately he had conducted vague but ingratiating interviews with scholars and managers, the contents of which were publicly broadcast. He praised Vox for its dedication and endurance; he expressed his admiration for the wisdom of the founding prophecies. For days now he had been traveling around the city like a tourist, sometimes mobbed by curious children whose equally curious parents hung back shyly and didn’t dare speak.

I had followed all this on the newsfeeds. Vox was listing toward insanity, and the abject worship of Isaac Dvali was just the latest symptom. I told myself to expect more of the same. “Expect the unexpected,” Allison had written in her diary. Not an original sentiment but always apt.

And I believed I was well braced for surprises… but I was shocked beyond words when Isaac showed up at my door, pale as a mushroom and bright-eyed as an infant, smiling and calling me by name: not Treya but, amazingly, Allison.

I was afraid of him, of course.

I didn’t know what he wanted and I was instantly terrified of the attention he would attract—must already have attracted—just by being here. Somewhere in the nearby corridors and walks his minders were surely hovering. The hidden ears and eyes of the Network were pricked and focused.

But all he said was, “May I come in?” And I nodded, mutely, and let the door slide shut behind him.

Somehow I found the courage to ask him to sit down.

He remained standing. “I won’t stay long.” He spoke in English. It was the language he had been born to, I reminded myself. Under all the layers of synthesis and reconstruction there was still at least some fragment of the Isaac Dvali he once had been, a boy raised in the Equatorian desert by people whose urge to make contact with the Hypotheticals had been almost Voxish in its intensity. He was, like me, like Turk, a divided and incomplete soul. He was also, at least potentially, a very dangerous one.

Apart from his pale skin, his eyes were his most striking feature. When he looked at me my first instinct was to wince. He told me not to be frightened and I said, “That’s not so easy.”

“You came to my suite when I was sick,” he said.

“You remember that?”

He nodded, smiling. “I’ve learned a lot about you since then.”

“About me?”

“From the Network. I know who and what you are. And I think it would be useful if we can talk to each other. I won’t hurt you. And I won’t tell anyone about your plan to escape.”

For months I had been training myself in the art of inscrutability, as a way of keeping that one simple secret. Now the charade had collapsed, and I was too shocked to move.

“No one can hear us,” Isaac said.

“You’re wrong,” I managed to say.

His smile was insistent, maddening. “The Network sensors in this room are disabled. They’ll stay that way as long as I’m here.”

“You can do that?”

“Because of what I am, because of what the surgeons put inside me, I can influence the Network and even the Coryphaeus.”

Was that possible?

The Coryphaeus was the sum and master of the Voxish collectivity, a nested hierarchy of quantum processors distributed throughout Vox Core. Even a nuclear attack had only temporarily silenced it. It had never occurred to me that the Coryphaeus could be influenced. But there had never been anyone like Isaac before, either. He had been deeply infused with Hypothetical biotechnology since birth, and his neural implant hadn’t simply been added to his brain; his brain had been regrown around it.

“It’s true,” he said. “At least for now, you can speak as freely as you like.”

My heart was pounding. But since Isaac apparently knew about our plan—and since he had announced it out loud—I could only hope he was telling the truth. “You can really shut down the sensors?”

“Yes, or make sure anything they observe is left unanalyzed.”

“But if you already know about…”

“Your escape,” he said. I flinched again. “You were extremely clever about hiding it. Pulse, respiration, cortisol traces in your sweat and urine, all those markers have been at elevated levels for weeks; but the effect was indistinguishable from emotional stress. Stochastic and heuretic indicators—the things you did or didn’t say or do—took the Coryphaeus much longer to analyze. But you would have been found out eventually.” That Buddha smile again. “If I hadn’t intervened.”

I took a breath and said, “Then… how did you know?”

“The Coryphaeus was already beginning to draw inferences. I extrapolated from that. The details aren’t clear to me, but I guess you intend to steal an aircraft and take it through the Arch to Equatoria.”

“Close enough,” I whispered.

“And I hope you succeed.”

“Does that mean—what are you saying? Do you want to come with us?”

His smile faded. “That’s not possible. When I was reconstructed, important neurological functions were delegated to remote processors inside the Network. Only part of me lives in this body. You understand that, don’t you? That a person can have more than one nature?”

“… Yes…”

“I can’t come with you, but I may be able to help.”

“Help how?”

“Turk can’t pilot an aircraft until his node is functional enough for him to gain access to the vehicle’s controls. But once the node is fully functional, he won’t be willing to leave. I assume you understand how narrow that window of opportunity is.”

“Obviously, but—”

“Right now Turk sees himself as facing a choice between escape and bondage. Once the node begins to influence his brain, it may seem more like a choice between escape and forgiveness.”

Forgiveness for what? I wondered but didn’t ask.

“The point is, I can warn you when he’s close to that line. And I can help by diverting the attention of the Coryphaeus at the critical time. We can talk about it in more detail later on, but I want you to know you have a friend and an ally. I hope you’ll think of me that way.”

He sounded so much like a precocious child who wanted to be liked that I almost forgot to be afraid of him. But when he stood up and moved toward the door I nearly panicked. “Wait! The Network surveillance in this room, is it turned off permanently?”

“No, I’m sorry. There are limits to what I can do. Unless I’m physically present, you should assume the Network is listening.”

I forced myself to stand close to him. The skin on the right side of his face was seashell-pink and almost poreless, imperfect because it was too perfect. His eyes were softly radiant. “One more question.”

“What is it?”

“Are you—you know, what they say you are?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What the prophecies say you are. Can you really talk to the Hypotheticals?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

Less than an hour later Oscar showed up at the door, obviously distraught. He knew Isaac had been here, and he was maddeningly curious about what Isaac might have said, but he couldn’t access a Network record of it. He demanded an explanation.

I had known Oscar reasonably well back when I was Treya, training for liaison duties. Oscar had always had a serene confidence in the purity and purpose of his work. There was a Voxish saying: “He rises and falls with the tide,” describing someone who tracks the needs of Vox Core and caters to them uncomplainingly. That was Oscar. But lately his serenity had begun to fray at the edges. The fact that Isaac had chosen to meet privately with a nodeless apostate—and to enforce that privacy even against the Network’s routine surveillance—had sabotaged his finely honed sense of order.

I told him Isaac had wanted to reminisce about the twenty-first century.

“Anything you might know about the past he can easily access for himself.”

“Maybe he was curious about me. I don’t know. Maybe he felt like speaking English for a little while.”

“What could you possibly have to say that would interest a being like him —even in English?”

That was insulting, so I used an expression Oscar might not have encountered in his formal training: “Fuck you,” I said, and closed the door.

2.

No word came from Turk—he had warned me they might keep him overnight after the surgery—and I decided I couldn’t sit alone any longer, partly because I was afraid my elevated heartbeat or hormonal chemistry might give the Network another clue to my state of mind, especially if Isaac wasn’t paying attention and blocking the sensors. I needed distraction. So I left the suite and rode transit to the nearest large public space, a terrace overlooking a market zone, to watch the parade of lights that marked the Festival of Ido.

Vox Core was a city of rituals and festivals. As Treya, I had always loved them. The part of me that was Allison was surprised that a polity as tight-laced as Vox should be so fond of celebrations. But Vox was a limbic democracy; sharing public emotion was what we did best.

Vox had been founded on a planet called Ester, five worlds away from Old Earth. We still kept the Esterish year of 723 days and the Esterish division of a day into twenty-four hours (a custom as ancient as Earth itself, though Ester’s days and hours were slightly longer). Vox had journeyed through all five of those worlds, sailing the isotropic sea that linked every Ring world with the exception of Mars. We marked many of our days with celebrations: celebrations of the Founding, of the Prophecies, of the anniversaries of historical battles and so on. The Festival of Ido commemorated our victory over bionormative forces at the Arch of Terivine—the battle in which we had taken the prisoners who eventually formed the nucleus of the Farmer caste.

It was a martial holiday, with fireworks and drums and torch parades. Most years the celebration was joyous, bountiful. This year the feasts were rationed and there was a note of hysteria in the festivities. Everyone knew it might be the last Ido before the remaking of the world.

Obviously, I couldn’t participate. Even if I had wanted to, everyone in Vox Core knew me from the newsfeeds. I was a traitor to my own past, a dissonant note in the story of the Uptaken, and because I was nodeless my behavior would seem opaque and untrustworthy. I wasn’t in any danger from the crowds—at least, not yet—but I would be ostracized and ignored if I tried to join them. So I found a place where I could be alone, a wooded patch overlooking the market zone. A half mile or so downslope, as ambient light dimmed toward night, the market square filled with celebrants. They carried luminous rods of various sizes and colors, and they gathered behind a leader who conducted them through the maze of market stalls in a sinuous moving line. The effect was spectacular in the dark and from a distance, a glowing multicolored snake twining around and through itself, swaying to the beat of the drums.

I felt sad, I felt perversely nostalgic. I wasn’t Treya anymore and I didn’t want to be Treya, but I missed the pleasure Treya had once taken in events like this. That is, my pleasure. She, me, mine, hers. Deceptively simple words, not as easy to parse as they had once seemed.

Even nodeless, I could tell when a fresh rush of excitement swept through the crowd. I had to look across a gap of treetops to one of the festival’s huge video displays to see what had happened. The display showed a group of snakedancers unfurling a banner; on the banner was a portrait of Isaac Dvali, literally glowing in the dark. Cheering and applause echoed up the terrace like the sound of a hard rain falling.

But it wasn’t really Isaac they were cheering for. They were cheering for what Isaac represented: the fulfillment of prophecy, the imminent end of days. It was the voice of the doomed Coryphaeus, worshipping itself through the body of Vox.

How do you measure a universal madness? I took as signs the contagious irrationalities, the bland indifference to real problems (shortages of grain and animal protein, for instance), the public obsession with the Hypotheticals that followed the massacre in the Antarctic desert. Images of the Hypothetical machines were everywhere now, and a belief had begun to emerge that the soldiers and scientists killed in the vanguard expedition weren’t really dead but had been Uptaken.

Presumably, when the machines eventually arrived at Vox, the rest of us would be similarly raptured into communion with the Hypotheticals… or killed; the terms were commutable. Prophecy had always been a little vague on that point. Vox’s founders had believed the end of Vox would take the form of what they called ajientei, for which the nearest English equivalent might be “enlargement”—the diffusion of human consciousness over galactic space and geologic time, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were presumed to operate.

In any case, our scholars had estimated that at their current rate of progress the Hypothetical machines wouldn’t reach Vox for months or even years. In fact certain pious elderly citizens were petitioning to be flown to the machines so they could be Uptaken before they died.

They needn’t have worried. Only hours after the Festival of Ido, our unmanned aircraft delivered unsettling news from the Wilkes Basin. The Hypothetical machines had begun to move more quickly than before. In fact they were accelerating—doubling their speed every few hours. That didn’t amount to much at the moment, but if the acceleration continued they would arrive sooner than expected. Much sooner, the scholars said: a matter of weeks. Possibly days.

Vox rang like a bell with the news.