Vortex

1.

What I saw after the surgery, as I was coming up from anesthesia, not quite awake and not entirely asleep, was a vision of a man on fire—a burning man dancing in a pool of flame, staring at me through ripples of superheated air.

The vision had all the qualities of a nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

The medical team had shown me the limbic implant before they installed it. I believe they interpreted my horror as preoperative anxiety.

The node was a flexible black disk a few centimeters wide and less than a centimeter thick. It was covered with nubs the size of pinheads from which fibers of artificial nervous tissue would grow, once the node established a suitable blood supply from the surrounding capillaries. Almost as soon as it was installed the implant would power up its link to the Network; within days its artificial nerves would have bonded to the spinal medulla and begun to infiltrate the targeted areas of my brain.

The medics asked me if I understood all this. I told them I did.

Then: the prick of an anesthetic injection, a cold swab at the back of my neck, oblivion while the surgeon wielded his knife.

The burning man had been a night watchman at my father’s warehouse in Houston.

He was a stranger to me. The killing was unpremeditated, and in a court of law the charge might have been reduced from murder to manslaughter. But I never went before a court.

Twice in my life I had told some version of that story to another person—once when I was drunk, once when I was sober; once to a stranger, once to a woman with whom I had fallen in love. In both cases the story I told was incomplete and partially fabricated. Even my best attempts at confession inevitably foundered on lies.

The people I had confessed to were all ten thousand years gone, but the dead man was locked in my conscience, where he had never stopped burning. And now I had given the keys to my conscience to the Coryphaeus, and I didn’t know what that might mean.

2.

The first change I noticed after the surgery wasn’t in myself but in other people, especially their faces.

I felt some of the side effects I had been warned about—transient dizziness, loss of appetite—but the symptoms weren’t severe and they passed quickly. What scared me wasn’t what I felt but what I might not be feeling… what I might have lost without knowing I had lost it. I questioned every unguarded impulse and I kept to myself for days, hardly speaking even to Allison (who in any case had begun treating me with a kind of mournful disdain, which I hoped was only theatrical). Both of us knew what had to be done; both of us knew I wasn’t yet ready to attempt it.

The medics had prescribed exercises in what they called “interactive volitional skills,” meaning the ability to manipulate node-enabled control surfaces—things as simple as turning on a graphic display by a combination of touch and will. These were the same skills I would need to pilot us away from Vox, so I pushed myself up a fairly steep learning curve. Oscar stopped in from time to time to monitor my progress, and on one of these visits he brought me a selection of tutelary devices intended for Voxish children: Network toys that changed color or made music when I told them to. Except mostly they didn’t. The node was still infiltrating key parts of my brain, still learning to enhance or suppress activity at selected sites; not all the necessary feedback loops had formed or stabilized. Oscar counseled patience.

It wasn’t until I stopped focusing on control surfaces and ventured out into the public spaces of Vox Core that I saw the difference the node had made. I had walked these corridors and passed through these tiers and terraces dozens of times, but suddenly it was as if I had never really seen them. The faces of the people I passed were almost luminous in their expressiveness and complexity. I found I could read the moods of strangers as accurately as if I had known them all my life. The doctors had told me this would happen, but since their explanations had been couched in phrases like “amygdalic linkage” and “mirror neuron profusion” and “chiasmic induction”—Oscar’s translations—I had never really grasped the significance of it. Now the effect was almost overwhelming.

I decided to travel up to one of the city’s high places, away from the crowds. Taking vertical transit in Vox was like riding an elevator the size of a subway car: it put me eye-to-eye with other passengers. I sat opposite a woman holding a young child in her lap. She noticed me and smiled. It was the smile you might give any amiable stranger, except that in some sense we weren’t strangers—we were bound by the Network, and wordless intimacies scrolled between us. Her restless eyes and the alternating ease and tension of her body told me she was anxious about the future—it had recently been announced that the Hypothetical machines were accelerating toward us—but she was humbly willing to submit to whatever fate the prophets had mandated for her. It was when she looked at her infant son that her uneasiness grew more focused and concentrated. The boy was five or six months old and his own limbic implant was still a prominent pink bump at the base of his skull. He radiated simple needs and absolute dependency. And she was reluctant to entrust him to the care of the Hypotheticals, no matter how benevolent she believed them to be. Whenever she held her son in her arms, she was tempted by the sin of fear.

I felt the soothing euphoria of the Coryphaeus running through both of them, counterpoint to the text of their bodies and gestures. That was unnerving. And of course they sensed my reaction as keenly as I sensed theirs. The mother frowned and averted her eyes, as if she had seen something distasteful. The child squirmed and arched against her body.

I hurried away at the next stop.

The next time I felt restless I went out at night, when the corridors were dimly lit and mostly empty. I had been working with Network interfaces all day and although I was tired I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

News had come from our fleet of drone aircraft that the Hypothetical machines were crossing the Transarctic Mountains faster than expected. Out in the Wilkes Basin the machines had looked like cumbersomely solid objects, but when they encountered rough ground they deformed in order to negotiate large obstacles. In extreme terrain they actually seemed to flow like a viscous liquid, moving edgelessly up narrow passes and steep, chaotic inclines. Estimates of the time it would take the machines to reach Vox were revised downward yet again.

The few people I encountered that night were bristling with conflicting emotions—their faces glowed like torches, to my eyes—and I hurried past them. I had begun to understand what Allison meant about collective insanity. It wasn’t just euphoria the Coryphaeus was sharing. Fear smoldered in the Voxish collective like a fire in a coal seam, too strong to be entirely suppressed. I passed a maintenance worker whose anxiety literally radiated from his face, a spiky halo of awe and dread. I felt it myself, a pressure as faint and persistent as the beating of my heart: the longing for a better and larger existence, set against the suspicion that what was approaching from the Antarctic desert might be nothing but a quick and nasty death.

Allison was awake when I got back, and she wasn’t alone. Isaac Dvali was with her.

I knew about Isaac’s miraculous recovery and the endorsement of the Voxish prophecies that had made him a public hero. His image was everywhere in Vox Core. But he was here without his minders, he was smiling at Allison and she was smiling at me: “We can talk!” she said.

Which made no sense. I stared at Isaac. To my eyes he looked gilded, like a painting of a medieval saint. More subtly, I could see hints of the trauma that had shaped him, sparks in an aura—he was a mosaic of colored glass, coruscating with unexpected energies. I asked him what he wanted.

“Let me explain,” he said.