[vi]
LIMPOPO FLEXED HER arms in the confines of her environmental suit. It was a fourth-generation model, fresh off the printer and snapped together around her body by a Thetford spacie who made anachronistic squire-and-knight references. When she asked him, he shrugged and said, “Sci-fi and fantasy are two sides of the same coin.” He had a twang that might be Texan, and looked like he might be Vietnamese. Spacies came from all over. They had a wild-eyed visionary aspect that set them apart, even by walkaway standards, where wild-eyed-ness came with the job.
The suit was stiff but not terrible. There was a hydraulic boost in the joints that helped it support itself, gave it strength of its own, like a junior mecha-loader. She’d ordered hers skinned with a mosaic of van-art Hobbits and elves she’d picked from a catalog, and watched in fascination as an algorithm figured out how to resize and tessellate them so that they covered the whole suit without any mismatched edges.
She’d been outside once since they’d arrived, ferried by bubble-car into a bouncy-castle room they used for common-space. That time, she’d gone in a loaner suit, a gen-2, and it had been so hot and ungainly that she’d done a circuit around one of the ruined houses and gone back in, face mask clouded with condensation and scratches.
Now she had the custom fitted gen-4, she was ready to try again. They had a house rule of going in pairs, and she knew Sita had been champing to get outside. They got acquainted on the long march and working in the makeshift infirmary after the Better Nation had been shot down. They were both scared and excited by the rage that burned in Sita. It was a casual ruthlessness in her desire to defend walkaways. She took over defense of the column, putting up drones in a rotating pattern, working evenings to charge and inspect their weapons – mostly pulsed sound and energy weapons, though there was a big, weird projectile thing, a rail-gun they’d brought from Walkaway U and then towed from the B&B.
Now they were settled in at Thetford Space City, Sita led the project to get neural scanners running, providing administrative and work-flow support. Her own background – computational linguistics – didn’t have practical application to that part of the project, so once things were humming, she didn’t have anything to do besides bringing hot drinks to real experts, and she got squirrelly.
Sita’s suit was tiled with a forest camouflage pattern that was composed of thousands of distorted faces sporting bizarre expressions. Looking at it made Limpopo’s eyes go swimmy.
“Ready?” Sita said, through the point-to-point network. It was encrypted, used multiple bands for redundancy, and had clever telemetry in its radios that also detected interference and used it to infer the state of the electromagnetic environment, allowing it to overcome electrical storms. Sita’s voice was so crisp, so beautifully EQ’ed with the ambient wind sounds and the windmill thrums, so well-corrected in binaural space that she sounded like a game character.
Limpopo gave her a thumbs up and punched the airlock button. They crowded together, and she got Sita’s elbow in the side, making the suit rub along her scar in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. At a time when so many of the people around her treated their bodies as inconvenient meatsuits they were obliged to use as mechas for toting around their precious brains, it was nice to have a piece of her identity that was inextricably bound to her flesh.
Her last trip out an airlock had been a confusion of impeded movement, chafed skin, and poor visibility. Now, stepping into the tall, brittle wild grass poking out the snow, sapphire visor so clear it felt like UI, complete with lens-flare, she was struck by the place’s beauty.
Sita gave her a shove from behind. “Dude, don’t block the door.”
“Sorry.” She sidestepped. The trees were tall and lavish with needles, the snow so fluffy, the sky an expanse of dramatic clouds. “Just a bit—”
“Hard to remember it’s a blasted wasteland when it’s this beautiful. You should see the wildlife. Moose, deer, even wildcats, judging from scat and paw prints. And birds! Owls, of course, but so many winter birds, you’d swear migration was an urban legend.”
“How?”
Sita struck off through the snow, sinking to her knees with each step. Limpopo walked in her footprints, marveling at her suit’s wicking sweat from her back.
“No people. It’s like this around Chernobyl. Turns out that, relative to sharing a biome with humans, living in the shadow of a radioactive plume or a place where the dirt and air are forty percent asbestos is a good deal.”
“You put it that way and we sound like a blight.”
“Whaddya mean ‘we,’ White Man?”
She knew the joke – “Tonto, the Indians have us surrounded!” “What do you mean ‘we’ White Man?” – even though she’d never read a Lone Ranger book or played the game or seen the cartoons or whatever, but it took a moment to get Sita’s meaning.
“Really? Anyone who wants a body is worse than asbestos?”
Sita stopped. The snow was above her knees. She was really having to work to keep up the pace. Limpopo heard her hard breathing in the earbuds. “Let me catch my breath.” Then: “It’s kind of obvious. The amount of stuff we consume to survive, it’s crazy. End-timers used to project our consumption levels forward, multiplying our population by our needed resources, and get to this point where we’d run out of planet in a generation and there’d be famine and war.
“That kind of linear projection is the kind of thinking that gets people into trouble when they think about the future. It’s like thinking, ‘Well, my kid is learning ten exciting new things every week, so by the time she’s sixty, she’ll be smarter than any human in history.’ There are lots of curves that start looking like they go up and to the right forever, but turn into bell-curves, or inverted Us, or S-curves, or the fabled hockey-stick that gets steeper and steeper until it goes straight vertical. Any assumption that we’re going to end up like now, but moreso, is so insufficiently weird it’s the only thing you can be sure won’t happen in the future.”
Limpopo looked at the sky with its scudding clouds, listened to the trees rattling. Her suit’s temperature was perfect ambient, a not-warm/not-cool you wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t minus twenty around you. “I thought the B&B crew liked heavy discussions at the drop of a hat, but then I met you academics. Shit, you like to broaden the frame.”
Limpopo saw her shoulders shake a little, and she had a moment’s panic that she’d inadvertently reduced Sita to tears, not unheard of in walkaways, everyone carrying around hidden trauma-triggers you could trip by accident.
When she slogged through the snow and looked at her faceplate, she saw Sita was laughing silently, staring fixedly ahead. When she followed Sita’s gaze, she saw they were being stared down by a moose with an antler-rack at least as wide as she was tall.
“Big moose,” she whispered.
“Shh,” said Sita, through a hiccuping laugh.
Limpopo made the hand-gesture that bookmarked her suit’s video-recording for interestingness and a soft red light pulsed in the top right of her visor. The moose regarded them for a moment. It had threadbare upholstery spots over its knees. Its shaggy fur glittered with ice-crystals. Steam poured out of its nostrils in plumes that swirled in the breeze. Its jaw was ajar, making it look comically stunned, but when she looked into its huge eyes, she saw an unmistakable keenness. This moose wasn’t anyone’s fool.
The moose shifted and a large turd plopped into the snow, melting and disappearing, leaving behind a steaming hole. They snickered at the unexpected earthiness. It gave them a look Limpopo read as “Oh do grow up,” though that was anthropomorphizing. It shuffled around in a broad circle, ungainly legs swinging in all directions but somehow not stepping in its own turd crater, turned its broad backside to them and walked – no, sauntered – away with a sway-hipped gait that was pure fucks-given-none.
Both of them burst into laughter. It rolled on, turning into giggle fits that ricocheted between them. Whenever one of them started to taper, the other got things rolling again.
“Say what you will about bodies,” Limpopo said, at last, “they sure are funny.”
“No argument.”
“Come on.” Limpopo took the lead. There was a birch stand ahead, huge trees with curls of white bark peeling away like cuticles begging to be picked at. Limpopo remembered her days after the fire, living on the land. She’d lost her gas-phase stove/generator and been reduced to building campfires, stoking them with shreds of birch bark. She had been traumatized and hurt, but her literal time in the wilderness had a reflective peace, slow-paced satisfaction for each day survived that she’d missed ever since.
“I can practically hear what you’re thinking.”
“What’s that?” Limpopo led them past the birch to a fast-moving icy brook with the footprints of many species around it. She tentatively stepped into the rushing water, feeling it as soft massage through the suit’s insulation. The grip-surfaces on her boot soles bound her fast to the streambed. From the brook’s middle, she could see uphill and downhill for some distance. She admired the hills above her, the valley below.
“You’re thinking how all this beautiful stuff proves that living in a virtual environment would never be truly satisfyingly human.”
“I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s certainly something I have thought.”
“Smartass.” Sita maneuvered into the streambed, finding a deeper spot, sinking to her knees. “This is beautiful, no question. Being stimulated with this view and this environment is profoundly satisfying.”
Limpopo stopped herself from saying We agree then, let’s get walking because that kind of flippancy was more Seth’s department and because this was eating Sita.
“Go on.”
“First, I’d like you to consider that the reaction we have is a marker for something we could call ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness.’”
“Or ‘beauty’?”
“Sure. There’s a body of computational linguistics on the difference between ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness.’ I don’t propose we go down that rat-hole, but this demands further discussion.”
“Noted.”
“Good.” She sloshed to the other side and went into a pine-stand where the trees leaned toward the open sky over the crick. “Come on.” Now she was in the lead, heading uphill, and Limpopo understood that there was an abandoned road ahead, switchbacking up the hill. It was blanketed with snow and she wondered if there was any way to attach cross-country skis to the environment suit, because that looked damned challenging.
“This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on a grand scale. Evacuate the planet.”
“Uh.”
“Think of it for a minute. I’m not talking mass suicide. I’m talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We’d be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we coevolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years’ worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place.
“At the same time, we’re consumptive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We’ve hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”
“You lost me.”
“Lysenko. Soviet scientist. Thought you could change an organism’s germ plasm by physically altering the organism. If you cut off a frog’s leg, then cut off its offspring’s leg, then its offspring’s leg, eventually you’d get a line of naturally three-legged frogs.”
“That’s dumb.”
“It was attractive to Stalin, who loved the idea of shaping a generation and imprinting the changes on their kids – which happens, just not genetically. If you teach a generation of people they have to step on their neighbors to survive, setting up a society where everyone who doesn’t gets stepped on, the kids of those people will learn to betray their neighbors from the cradle.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“That was just for starters. Stalin insisted they could weatherproof wheat by growing it in shitty conditions. That ended badly. Famine. Millions dead.”
“But now we can, uh, ‘hack Lysenkoism’?”
“We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.”
They wound up and up the hill. The snow was just as deep, but there weren’t trees to avoid, so the going was easier. Still, Limpopo was getting puffed out, to her embarrassment. Sita, fifteen years older, showed no sign of slowing, so Limpopo swallowed her pride and called for a rest. They were over the tree line and could see over it deep into the basin, the weird tunnel-scape of the spacies, the rotting houses and farms colonized by small trees that just pierced the snow.
“Wow,” Limpopo said, not subjecting her laboring lungs to anything longer.
“Indeed. So, Lysenkoism. With the sims, we can make Lysenkoism work. Think of Dis inside her constraint envelope. We’ve brainwashed her – or helped her brainwash herself – to be fine with being a simulation.”
A cold feeling spread in Limpopo’s gut. She looked at Sita with horror. “You’re not talking about turning people into sims who aren’t moved by natural beauty?”
Sita stared through her face mask. “Oh girl, no. Jesus, you think I’m a monster? We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”
“That’s just weird.”
They moved again. Two switchbacks later, Limpopo said, “I think I’ve got that. That is some fucked-up shit.”
“For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?
“We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite – like wishful thinking trumped physics – for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.
“Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”
They came to a ruined building, a vast refinery or processing plant, big as an aerodrome, two great cave-ins marring the roof line.
Sita gestured at it. “A couple years without maintenance and it just imploded. It’s the climate control. Place like that, unless you build it air- and vapor-tight, give it a Q factor like a space-suit, it’ll cost you more to heat than you could make by running it. That stuff needs climate control or it starts to trap moisture, and come summer it rots. The next winter it’s worse. A couple years later, boom, it’s rubble. That thing was a giant computer that housed people and machines and when they turned the computer off, it was an instant tear-down.
“The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.
“You want to change the history of the future, give us a chance for a life worth living, without oppression? There’s only one way. You know it, but you can’t make yourself face it.”
“But I could if I was a sim? Nudge the sliders until I was in the envelope that loved being simulated?”
“Bingo. We’d have a world that belonged to animals, and we’d experience it through sensors that perfectly simulated our wet stuff, but without crushing all those precious roots.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“When you make this pitch, don’t mention Lysenko. Making the world a better place by realizing the failed dreams of the pet mad scientist of one of history’s greatest monsters—”
“Duh.”
“Just saying.”
“The point isn’t Lysenko or Stalin. It’s the angels of our better natures. Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”
“What if someone else chooses for you?”
“If someone else gets control over your sliders? Disaster. Teetotal capsizement. Terror without historical parallel. Better make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I get the feeling that you’ve already planned this argument, Sita. An ambush.”
“Not an ambush,” she said. “Just the marketplace of ideas. We’re getting somewhere, something is brewing that’s going to bubble over. We’re part of it. I want to get everyone ready for it, so there’s a minimum of headless chickening.”
Limpopo remembered arguments with Jimmy about the way the world was about to change and how she had to face it, how he’d offered to put her in charge if she backed him. It was so nakedly manipulative that she’d never been tempted. Is that what Sita was doing? If so, why wasn’t her back up?
“One more question.”
“As many as you’d like, Limpopo.”
“Just one. Then I want to go back to enjoying nature.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do we have differing levels of executive control over our minds? Why would we evolve to foil our own better natures?”
“Because evolution isn’t directed. It’s not streamlined. We’re an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you’ll make.”
Limpopo laughed in spite of herself, despite Sita having obviously used that line before. “All that stuff in the attic, it’s useful, right? That’s why the attics themselves haven’t been squeezed out by evolution. Having a statistically normal distribution across every trait – including the ability to make up your mind and stick to it – means that as a species we’re able to face a variety of challenges. We’ve got a tool for every occasion, genomically speaking.”
“Can I interrupt you?”
“Of course.”
“This isn’t a new argument. There’s a whole neurodiversity contingent who hate my ideas of sliders, and want to preserve our incapacity to ‘make up your mind and stick to it’ in case there’s some hypothetical species-destroying crossroads in the future where we need to rescue it. I say, you keep your irrationality intact. I’ll switch mine off. Other people can make up their own minds. Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”
“Okay, I know how this goes.”
“I know you do.”
They picked through the ruins, over huge machines under their blankets of snow and treacherous piles of rubble that could be used as wobbly staircases to reach the remains of the roof and odd preserved relics, including a manager’s station with a faded set of laminated safety memos tacked around its missing observation window.
“If it turns out the level of executive control we get from sims backfires, we’ll just turn it off. That’s the point of executive control: deciding what you’re going to do.”
“What about the existential crises?”
“What?”
“Iceweasel told me that Dis kept suiciding—”
“Crashing.”
“Terminally freaking. Until you figured out how to constrain her to versions of herself that wouldn’t have existential crises.”
“Yeah...” She sounded cautious. Limpopo sensed weakness.
“You can’t simulate someone unless you turn down the slider that freaks out at the thought of being simulated.”
“Yes...” Deeper caution.
“What happens if you ditch your bodies, upload, and it turns out the human race can’t survive without whatever makes us terrified of losing our bodies?”
“That is perverse.”
“It’s not. It’s not hard to think of an aversion to having a body-ectomy as pro-survival. What if you’re engineering the mass suicide of the human race?”
“All you’ve got is a hypothetical. I’ve got a concrete risk: we are in the midst of mass suicide. If it turns out turning off our existential terror makes us give up hope and switch ourselves off, we’ll deal with that when it arrives. Come on, Limpopo, be serious.”
The rebuttal was so hot, so different from the argument thus far, Limpopo knew she’d touched something tender. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. When people got like this, you couldn’t convince them of anything. She wished for a way to turn off Sita’s anxiety, a slider she could dial to a middle ground where Sita could confront her anxieties without freaking. Sita wished she had one, too.