Vortex

1.

Once we’d made the transit to Earth, the managers put us in adjoining medical care suites and we slept for most of two days. A team of nurses hovered over me at all times, and at intervals I asked them about Turk. They said he was doing well and that I could talk to him soon. They wouldn’t say more than that.

I needed the rest, for obvious reasons, and it was pleasant to wake, sleep, dream, and wake again without fearing for my life. Obviously, there were problems I would have to face sooner or later. Big ones. But the meds I was swallowing washed away all urgency.

My wounds were minor and they healed nicely. Eventually I woke feeling fit and hungry and for the first time impatient, and I asked the bedside nurse—a male worker with big eyes and a fixed smile—when I could have something more substantial than protein paste to eat.

“After the surgery,” he said blandly.

“What surgery?”

“To replace your node,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought he was talking to a slow-witted child. “I know how hard it must have been for you, surviving in the wild without it. When the Network went down it was hard for all of us. Like being alone in the dark.” He shuddered at the memory. “But we’ll have you repaired before the end of the day.”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want surgery. I don’t want my node back.”

He frowned for a moment, then turned his maddening smile back on. “It’s perfectly natural to experience anxiety at a time like this. I can adjust your medication—would you like that?”

I told him my medication was fine and that I was simply and explicitly refusing surgery, as was my right under established Voxish medical protocols.

“But it’s not an invasive surgery. It’s just a repair! I’ve seen your history. You were implanted at birth like everyone else. We’re not changing you in any way, Treya. We’re restoring you.”

I argued with him at length and fiercely. I used words I shouldn’t have, both Voxish and English. He was shocked at first, then silent. He left the room with moist eyes and a perplexed expression, and I figured I’d won a victory, or at least gained a reprieve.

Ten minutes later they wheeled in the prep cart and the knives. That was when I started to scream. I was too weak to make much noise, but I was loud enough to be heard in the adjoining rooms.

The medical workers were about to strap me down when Turk came bulling through the doorway. Turk was wearing a patient’s gown cinched at the waist, and he didn’t look intimidating—our sojourn in the wilderness had left him skinny and brown as a nut. But the med staff must have seen the ferocity in his eyes, not to mention his balled fists. More than that, he was Uptaken, touched by the Hypotheticals: in Voxish theology that made him something next door to a god.

I told him in a few words that the medics were trying to re-install my limbic implant and turn me back into Treya.

“Tell them to stop,” he said. “Tell them to take their fucking knives away or I will personally call down the wrath of the Hypotheticals on Vox and all its works.”

I translated, with embellishments. The medical staff hastened out of the room with eyes averted, abandoning their surgical tools. But this, too, was only a reprieve. The medics were almost instantly replaced by a man in a gray jumpsuit, an administrator, a manager—a man I recognized from Treya’s training sessions. He had been one of my teachers, not one of my favorites.

Apparently he and Turk had already met. “Stay out of this, Oscar,” Turk said in English.

The administrator’s Voxish name was long and decorated with honorifics, but “Oscar” was a decent approximation of the patrilineal fraction of it. Oscar spoke English, of course. His English wasn’t as nuanced as mine—he had learned it mainly from ancient textbooks and legal documents—but it was functional, and unlike me he was empowered to speak on behalf of the managerial class.

“Please calm down, Mr. Findley,” he said in his reedy voice. He was a small man, pale-skinned, yellow-haired, a couple of years past young.

“Fuck you, Oscar. Your people were about to force a surgical procedure on a friend of mine. I don’t take that lightly.”

“The woman you describe as your ‘friend’ was badly injured in the Farmer rebellion. You witnessed that injury, didn’t you? In fact you tried to stop it.”

It figured that Oscar would attempt some kind of legalistic argument, schooled as he was in ancient writs and warrants. Turk ignored him and turned to me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay for the time being. I won’t be, if they put my node back in.”

“That’s irrational,” Oscar said. “Surely you must see that, Treya.”

“My name isn’t Treya.”

“Of course it is. Your denial is a symptom of your disorder. You’re suffering from a pathological cognitive dissociation that cries out for repair.”

“Oscar, shut the fuck up, ” Turk said. “I need to speak to Allison privately.”

“There is no ‘Allison,’ Mr. Findley. ‘Allison’ is a tutelary construct, and the longer we allow Treya to sustain this delusion the harder it will be to cure her.”

Treya herself would have deferred to Oscar without question, and I could still feel that old and craven impulse. But now it was hateful to me. “Oscar,” I said in a quieter voice.

He shot me a hard look and repeated his Voxish name with all its status markers: I was a worker, and it was an insolence to call him by his short name. “Oscar,” I repeated. “Are you hard of hearing? Turk asked you to shut the fuck up.”

His pale complexion turned red. “I don’t understand this. Have we hurt you, Mr. Findley? Have we threatened you in any way? Haven’t I served as your personal liaison in a satisfactory manner?”

“You’re not my liaison,” Turk said. “Allison is.”

“There is no Allison, and this woman can’t function as a liaison—she has no connection to the Network… she doesn’t have a working neural node!”

“She speaks English well enough.”

“Like a native,” I said.

“There you go.”

“But—!”

“So I’m appointing her as my translator,” Turk said. “From now on, any interaction I have with Vox goes through her. And we’re both finished with doctors for the time being. No knives, no drugs. Can you arrange that?”

Oscar hesitated. Then he addressed me directly, in Voxish: “If you were a whole human being you would recognize your behavior as an act of treason, not just against the administrative class but against the Coryphaeus.”

They were weighty words. Treya would have trembled. “Thank you, but I know what I’m doing,” I said in the same language. “Oscar.”

It was during this time that Vox began its lumbering, hopeless journey to Antarctica.

Getting any kind of hard information out of Oscar (who continued to pop up with annoying regularity) was impossible; but the nurses who still hovered around us, bringing meals or inquiring about our health like nosy parents, could occasionally be coaxed to talk. Through them I learned that the Voxish consensus had evolved from jubilation (“We transited to Earth, the prophecies are fulfilled”) to dismay (“But the Earth is a ruin and the Hypotheticals continue to ignore us”) to a stoic rededication to the ancient cause (“The Hypotheticals won’t come to us, we’ll have to seek them out”).

Seeking them out was the hard part. Fleets of drone aircraft were dispatched to survey the landmasses of what had once been Indonesia and southern India, but all they found was an unrelieved wasteland. There was nothing alive there—or at least, nothing larger than a bacterium.

The oceans were anoxic. Back in Champlain, I had done a lot of reading about ocean toxicity. All the CO₂ we were pumping into the air back then—the fossil carbon reserves of not one but two planets—had been the trigger event, though it had taken centuries for the full effect to be felt. Rapid warming had stratified the seas and fed huge blooms of sulfate-reducing bacteria, which in turn spewed clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The word for this process was “eutrophocation.” It had happened before, without human intervention; eutrophication episodes had been blamed for some of the planet’s prehistoric mass extinctions.

Vox’s administrative class had studied the few surviving records of the Terrestrial Diaspora and concluded that we ought to proceed to the site of the last known human habitation, near the southern pole, on the shore of what used to be called the Ross Sea. In the meantime, robotic craft would extend the aerial survey as far as Eurasia and the Americas.

When I told Turk all this he asked me how long the trip to Antarctica would take. Turk still thought of Vox more as an island chain than a seagoing vessel. But although it was vastly larger than any ship Turk had ever sailed or even imagined, it was a ship, with a surprisingly shallow draft and decent maneuverability for its colossal size. A couple of months to reach the Ross Sea, I told him. I promised I’d take him down to see the engine decks sometime soon… and it was a promise I meant to keep, for reasons I wasn’t yet willing to explain.

There was a whole lot I couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that we had no privacy. In Vox Core, the walls had ears. Also eyes.

Not necessarily for the purpose of spying. All those nanoscale eyes and ears, embedded in structural surfaces, fed their data to the Network, which sorted it for anomalies and issued alerts whenever an unusual situation arose: a health crisis, a technological failure, a fire, or even a violent argument. I was guessing, however, that an exception had been made in our case. Back when I was Treya I had been taught that when interacting with an Uptaken like Turk Findley, no word or gesture was too trivial to be sifted for clues about the Hypotheticals or the state of existence the Uptaken had experienced among them. So we were almost certainly being listened to, and not just by machines. I couldn’t allow myself to say anything I didn’t want the administrators to overhear. Which ruled out much of what I needed to say, and needed to say quickly.

(And even if the administrators weren’t listening, the Coryphaeus surely was. I had been thinking a lot about the Coryphaeus… but I didn’t want the Coryphaeus to know that.)

I also wanted Turk to have at least a basic understanding of the geography of Vox Core and how it operated, because the knowledge might be useful later. So for the next few days I tried to act like a compliant and acceptable liaison, doing what Treya had been trained to do even though I was no longer Treya nor wanted to be.

I introduced Turk to the book room just down the corridor. The book room had been prepared years in advance as a way of educating the Uptaken, and it was just what the name suggested: a room housing a substantial shelf of books. Real books, as Turk said admiringly when he saw them. Books printed on paper and bound in boards, freshly minted but startlingly archaic.

They were the only such books in all of Vox, and they had been created explicitly for the use of the Uptaken. The books were mostly histories, assembled by scholars and translated into simple English and five other ancient languages. They were reasonably reliable texts, according to my understanding. Turk was interested but intimidated by the dozens of titles, and I helped him pick out a few volumes:

—and a couple more, enough to give him a rough sense of what Vox was and why it had fought its battles back in the Ring of Worlds. The titles, I told him, were more daunting than the texts.

“Really?” he said. “So what are, uh, ‘cortical and limbic democracies’?”

Ways of implementing consensus governance, I explained. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. Most of the communities of the Middle Worlds were “cortical” democracies, so called because the brain areas they interfaced with were clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. (Turk blinked at the words but kindly let me keep talking.) “Limbic” democracies like Vox worked differently: their Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. “To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Why the distinction? Why not a cortical-limbic democracy? Best of both worlds?”

Such arrangements had been attempted. Treya had studied them in school. The few cortico-limbic democracies that had been created had worked well enough for a period of time, and some had seemed idyllically peaceful. But they were ultimately unstable—they almost always decayed into Network-mediated catatonic loops, a kind of mass suicide by blissful indifference.

Not that the limbic democracies had fared much better, though I didn’t say so where the walls might hear me. Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.

Except our own, of course. Vox was an exception to all the rules. At least, that was what I had been taught in school.

I kept my troubles to myself, mainly because I didn’t want to give Oscar more leverage to use against me. More important, I didn’t want to raise any doubt in Turk’s mind that I was Allison Pearl, that I preferred to be Allison Pearl, and that I would remain Allison Pearl until the day they strapped me down and forced a Network node into my brain stem.

But the situation wasn’t as simple as that.

So, the question I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night: was I really Allison Pearl?

In the most obvious sense, no. How could I be? Allison Pearl had lived and (presumably) died on Earth ten thousand years ago, back when Earth was a habitable planet. All that remained of her were a few gigs of diary entries that had somehow survived to the present day. The diary began in Allison Pearl’s tenth year of life and ended for no apparent reason in her twenty-third. Treya had absorbed all those diary entries (and thousands of ancillary details about twenty-first-century life) both cortically and limbically, as data and as identity. Certainly Treya had never believed herself to “be” Allison Pearl. But she had carried Allison Pearl like a copybook deep in the meat of her brain. The Network had installed Allison Pearl in Treya’s psyche, and the Network had built and maintained rigorous barriers between Allison and Treya.

Rigorous, but not rigorous enough. Because here was a secret I had told no one: even before the Network went down, even before the rebel Farmers destroyed my node, Allison had been bleeding into Treya. And Treya had never objected, nor had she complained to her administrative handlers. Instead Treya had kept the steady drip of Allison Pearl into her daily life a secret—a guilty secret, because there were qualities in Allison that Treya had coveted for herself.

Treya was obedient. Allison was defiant. Treya was willing to submerge her identity in the greater identity of Vox. Allison would sooner have died. Treya believed everything she was told by duly anointed authorities. Allison distrusted all authority, on principle.

But even that distinction falls short of absolute truth. Better to say that, through Allison, Treya had begun to discover the possibilities of skepticism, defiance, rebellion.

So ask again. What was I, now that the door between Treya and Allison had been thrown wide open? Was I Allison, or was I Treya being Allison?

No! Neither. I was a third thing.

I was what I had made of myself from all these incompatible parts, and I was entitled to all my memories, real and virtual. Vox had cultivated both Treya and Allison, but Vox hadn’t counted on the consequences of the mixture. And fuck Vox, anyway! There it was, the heresy Treya had always resisted and for which the voice of Allison had silently begged: Fuck Vox, fuck its quiet tyranny, fuck its frozen dream religion, and fuck its craven obsession with the Hypotheticals.

Fuck especially the madness that had brought Vox to this ruined Earth, and fuck the more profound madness I believed was about to break loose aboard her.

Fuck Vox! And bless Allison Pearl for making it possible to say so.

Though Oscar had agreed to withdraw the surgical knives, he hadn’t abandoned the project of convincing me to submit to surgery. He conducted the campaign secondhand, confronting me with people I couldn’t refuse to speak to, people who were or had been Treya’s friends and family.

They were my friends and family, too, in a real sense, though I wasn’t the person they had known, much less the person they wanted and expected me to be. And I was human enough to be hurt by their incomprehension and their grief.

One day Oscar brought my mother (Treya’s mother) to see me. My father (my Vox-father) was an engineering worker who had been killed in the collapse of an exchange tunnel not long after I was born. As a child I had been cared for by my mother and a crew of aunts, all of whom loved me and whom I had loved. And enough of Treya remained in me that I couldn’t help reaching out to the woman whose arms had so often comforted me, couldn’t help looking into her terrified eyes while I told her no, her daughter wasn’t dead, only transformed, freed from a harsh but invisible bondage. She understood none of it. “Don’t you want to be useful?” she asked me. “Don’t you remember what it means to be part of a family?”

I remembered altogether too well. I ignored the question and told her I still loved her. And truly, I did. But she wasn’t consoled. Why should she be? She had lost her daughter. Treya was gone, and I was just some stubborn golem who had taken her place. And in the moment I told her I loved her, I saw from her frozen expression that she hated me in return, actually hated me; that the person she loved wasn’t me but a shadow I had ceased to cast.

Well, maybe she was right. I would never be the daughter she had known. I was what I had become. I was the thing I was and the name of the thing I was was Allison, Allison, Allison Pearl. I whispered it to myself long after she had left the room.

I didn’t mean to take these troubles to Turk. Turk had troubles of his own. He wore his stoic come-what-may attitude proudly, and I guessed he had earned it, but fundamentally, inescapably, he was alone here, a stranger in what must have seemed to him a terrifyingly strange land. Our rooms adjoined, and some nights I woke to hear him pacing or mumbling to himself, confronting fears I couldn’t imagine. It seemed to me that he must feel like a man trapped in a dream, aware of the lunacy of it but helpless to break through to a saner reality.

I tried not to pin my own hopes and fears on him. But I couldn’t help thinking that for all our differences we were more alike than not. I found myself wondering whether he might have crossed paths with Allison Pearl back in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, some chance encounter in a faceless American crowd. Surely if anyone in Vox Core was equipped to understand Allison Pearl, it was Turk. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that on one of those nights when neither of us could sleep I went into his room for comfort. We talked at first, the kind of talk we could have with no one but ourselves, intimacies shared not because of but despite what we knew about each other. “I am the thing most like you in the world,” I said, “and you’re the thing most like me,” at which point it was inevitable that we would go to bed and take some solace there, and in the end I didn’t care what the walls might hear or to whom they might whisper their dangerous secrets.

2.

In the morning I toured him through Vox Core, heel to head.

Of course he couldn’t see all of it, or even more than a representative fraction. Vox Core above ground was the size of a modest twenty-first-century city. Below ground, in the hollow of the island, it was bigger: unravel all those complex spaces onto a two-dimensional grid and it would have been the size of Connecticut or maybe even California. We avoided the damaged zones that were still being decontaminated and rode vertical transit downward. We paused whenever the tube walls allowed a broad perspective, so Turk could see the plazas and terraces and tiers, the wide agricultural levels bathed in artificial daylight, the dormitory complexes set like alabaster chips in forested wildspaces.

Then I took him to the lowest levels of Vox, the engineering decks. The engines that drove Vox were immense—more a territory than an object—but I showed him reactor units the size of small towns, bathed in an eternal wash of desalinated water; I showed him a shadowy acreage of mu-metal chambers in which magnetic fields directed flows of molten iron; I led him past superconductive field coils around which moisture condensed like snow and was swept away in gales of forced air. Turk was awed, which would play well with the administrators who were no doubt monitoring us. There were ears in the walls even here.

But there were no ears where I took him next. We rode a transit stem up as far as it would go, then transferred to a smaller transport that slid up the spine of Vox’s tallest tower. Two more transfers and we arrived at the highest accessible public platform in Vox Core, essentially a roof with a view.

Back when Vox had sailed the oceans of habitable worlds, this platform had not been enclosed. Now an osmotic perimeter had been established—I told Turk it was a “force field,” a quaint and inaccurate term but one he more or less understood. “It doesn’t seem to be working too well,” he said. “Smells a little like a pig farm out here.”

I guessed it did. The air was rank and windless, though we could see clouds speeding past aloft, seemingly close enough to touch. I felt sick with vertigo even before we approached the rim. For the first time I almost regretted the loss of my node: missed its calming presence, an invisible anchor. I felt as if a brisk wind would carry me away.

Vox was moving steadily south by southeast, out of the Indian Ocean and into the South Pacific. The sea here was faintly purple to every horizon, the sky a poisonous shade of ocher. I hated the look of it.

Turk peered into the misty distance. “The whole world’s like this?”

I nodded. It was the decline and death of these oceans that had spurred the great Terrestrial exodus, which in turn had fed the bitter rivalries and conflicts of the previously settled Middle Worlds. “And the Hypotheticals did nothing to prevent it. Doesn’t that seem strange? That they would protect the planet from the expanding sun but do nothing to prevent a catastrophic human die-off? Apparently they’re happy with an Earth populated exclusively by bacteria. No one knows why.”

“Your people expected to find something different.”

They weren’t my people. But I didn’t correct him. “They expected to enter into direct communion with the Hypotheticals as soon as they arrived on Earth. It’s a religious idea, really. The people who founded Vox were fanatics by any rational measure. The history books won’t tell you so, but it’s true. Vox is a cult. Its beliefs were built into its Network and scripted into its limbic democracy. When you’re Networked all these doctrines feel reasonable, they feel like common sense…”

“But not to you.”

Not anymore. “And not to the Farmers. The Farmers are something less than citizens. They were Networked into compliance but not into communion.”

“They were slaves, in other words.”

“I suppose you could say that. They were taken as prisoners back in the Middle Worlds, generations ago. They refused to accept full citizenship, so they were modified into cooperation.”

“Harnessed and put to work.”

“That’s why they destroyed their nodes as soon as the Network crashed.” Though the survivors—the ones who had stayed in their environmentally sealed farmlands under the out-islands—would have been reyoked by now. The rebels, of course, were all dead. Including Digger Choi, whose life Turk had attempted to save. Saved him for all of half an hour, maybe. If the warplanes hadn’t got him, he would have died choking on the poisonous air.

Turk pressed up against the security railing that followed the edge of the roof, surveying what had become of the exterior land of Vox. The island was unprotected from the atmosphere and looked as if it had entered some grim and final autumn. The forests were dead. Leaves were brown and scattered, fruit rotted. Even the limbs of the trees looked leprous and fragile. The wind of passage was dismantling the woodlands branch by branch.

“Vox,” I said, “I mean the collective Vox, limbic Vox, considered itself redeemed when we managed to pass through the Arch. But you’re right, what they found isn’t what they expected, and disappointment is setting in. That’s what we need to talk about, up here where no one can hear us. We need to make a plan.”

He stood a moment gazing over the ruined lands. Then he said, “How bad do you expect it to get?”

“Assuming Vox fails to find a door into Paradise down in Antarctica, it could get—well, really bad. The idea of merging Vox with the Hypotheticals is a foundational faith. It’s the reason Vox exists. It’s the promise we were all given at birth, along with our nodes. No dissent from it has ever been possible, nor would it have been tolerated. But now—”

“You’re up against an awkward truth.”

“ They are. I’m not one of them anymore.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sailing to Antarctica is an act of desperation, and it’s only postponing the inevitable.”

“Okay, so reality sets in sooner or later—then what? Chaos, anarchy, blood in the streets?”

I was Voxish enough to feel a trace of shame at the answer to that question. “There have been other limbic cult communities in the past, and when they fail… well, it’s ugly. Fear and frustration are amplified by the Network to the point of self-destruction. People turn on their neighbors, their families, ultimately themselves.” There was no one to hear us, but I lowered my voice. “Social breakdown, maybe communal suicide. Eventually starvation when the food supply fails. And no one can opt out. You can’t just reconfigure the prophecies or choose to believe something else—the contradiction is built into the Coryphaeus.”

I had seen hints of it even today, as we traveled through the city—a general sullenness too subtle for Turk to pick up on but plain enough to me, like the sound of thunder on a rising wind.

“And there’s no way to protect ourselves?”

“Not if we stay here, no.”

“And nowhere to go even if we had a way out. Christ, Allison.” He couldn’t stop staring at the mottled horizon, the rotting forest. “This was a pretty nice planet, once upon a time.”

I stood closer to him, because we had come to the heart of the matter. “Listen. There are aircraft on Vox that can fly from pole to pole without refueling. And because you’re Uptaken, the Arch is still open to us. We can leave. If we’re careful and lucky, we can get ourselves back to Equatoria.”

And in Equatoria we could surrender to Vox’s ancient enemies, the people who had nuked Vox Core in an attempt to prevent us from provoking the Hypotheticals. The cortical democracies despised and feared Vox, but they wouldn’t refuse to accept a pair of earnest refugees—I hoped. They might even help us make our way from Equatoria to one of the pleasanter Middle Worlds, where we could live out our lives in peace.

Turk was giving me a hard look. “You can fly one of these vehicles?”

“No,” I said. “But you can.”

I told him all of it then. I told him the plan I’d worked out in the long nights when I couldn’t sleep, nights when Treya’s loneliness threatened to shut down Allison’s defiance, nights when it was almost impossible to find a space between those two borders of self, impossible even to name myself with any real conviction. The plan was practical, I believed, or might be. But it required a sacrifice Turk might not be willing to make.

When he understood what I was asking, he didn’t give me an answer. He said he’d have to think about it. I accepted that. I said we could come up here in a few days and talk about it again.

“In the meantime,” he said, “there’s something else I need to do.”

“What?”

“I want to see the other survivor,” he said. “I want to see Isaac Dvali.”