DAMIRA COULD NOT forget the feeling of waking up. The horror of it. She woke unable to move, unable to speak, unable to open her eyes. It was like sleep paralysis, which she had experienced only twice in her life—once as a little girl in her bedroom in Tomsk, and once as a student in Saint Petersburg. But this was far worse. She was unable to even perceive the location of her eyes, her hands—any part of her body. Where was she? What had happened to her? When was she? Where was the light?
“Dr. Damira Khismatullina?”
The voice was no voice she recognized. She struggled to answer, to find the pathways to the muscles that would allow speech. To feel them, anywhere. They were nowhere.
“The connectome is online, but it has only been functioning for a few seconds now. There will be a good deal of confusion.”
Another voice. But she wasn’t hearing the voices. It was as if they were registering somehow in her mind, as if written there, without the sensation of hearing them. As if they just appeared in her consciousness. In this void that enclosed her—no, even enclosed was not correct. This void that was her.
I’m here, she thought.
“There she is,” the second voice said. “She’s responsive.”
“Thank God,” the first voice answered. “Damira, my name is Dr. Almas Aslanov. We can hear you—we can communicate. All you need to do to get through to us is to shape the words in your mind that way. To think them.”
“Like this?” And she thought she heard a voice, somewhere in a room—like the echo of a voice speaking on a terminal, filled with interference.
“Yes. Like that. I know you must be very confused. And what I am going to tell you now is going to make it much worse. But we don’t have much time, and I need you to decide. It will be one of the most important, and most difficult, decisions you have ever had to make. You will not be given much time to make it. You will be making it under terrible, terrible conditions. I will give you as much information as I can, and then leave you to make this decision. And whatever you decide, we will respect it. We cannot force you to do what we need you to do—we can only ask it of you. But I want to tell you now—many lives depend upon the choice you will make here, today. Do you understand all of that?”
“Where is here? What is today?”
“Those are good questions. Let me start at the beginning.”
“You may not want to do that,” the second voice said. “We’ve found it can be very … disruptive.”
“I won’t begin this relationship by lying to her. This part is hard, but there will be many things that are harder, ahead.”
“I want to know,” Damira said. Again, that voice—computer-modulated, drained of human emotion. “If something has happened to me, if I am paralyzed … whatever it is, I want to know.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Aslanov. “Everything I have read about you tells me that is exactly what you would want. You’ve lived a life of almost unbelievable courage, battling poachers and governments and international cartels to save the last of the wild elephants in Africa. Nobody fought like you did to save them.”
“Plenty of people fought like I did to save them. Thousands of people fought like I did to save them.” Musa, Wamugunda …
“What are those words?” Dr. Aslanov asked.
“Names, I think,” the second voice answered.
There was no difference between thinking and speaking.
She heard that computer-modulated voice—her voice—say, “There is no difference between thinking and speaking.” She continued. “Musa. Wamugunda. Those are just two names. My closest friends in Kenya. But there were so many others who fought as I did. I was just the only one who looked like you, and spoke Russian.”
Come quickly. Wamugunda is dead.
Panic rose in her. But it was strange—there was no feeling of panic—no bodily feeling—instead there was just a sudden scattering of her thoughts, as if a wave had crashed through them. “You need to tell me what has happened to me.”
“Dr. Damira Khismatullina, you were murdered.”
“Injured, you mean. I’m in a hospital.”
“No. You were murdered. You were killed by a group of poachers. Your camp was attacked. There were seven of you there. They shot the others, but you—they wanted to make an example of you. You were hacked to death with machetes. They delivered your head to the president as a warning to stop fighting them. He did not stop fighting them. He tried, instead, to use your death as a rallying cry. He tried to make you a martyr. He went to the UN and gave a speech that made you a saint, a symbol of the fight. But he did not outlive you by long. He was assassinated six months later.”
“How can this be? I was just in Moscow. I hadn’t returned yet, I…”
“Your memories—the memories of this version of you—would end here, in Moscow, on the day of your uploading.”
“None of this makes sense.” Again, panic—not as a bodily feeling, but as the scattering of thought, the confusion of reasoning. As if a boulder had been dropped into water.
“I know. But I need you to think. You will come to understand this is true. What is the last thing you remember?”
Come quickly. Wamugunda is dead.
“I received a message on my terminal. A message that my friend had been killed. And then … I remember … I tried to stand up. The technician asked me to sit down. She told me we were almost done. Thirty seconds. I could barely sit still. Then she came around the counter, and … that’s it. It’s the last thing I remember.”
“Yes. That uploading of your connectome to storage occurred a little less than a year before your murder.”
“But how long have you waited to bring me back? You said the president was assassinated six months after I was killed.”
“Yes. And all of that happened over a century ago. Doctor, we are seeking to bring you back because you are a most extraordinary person. Not only were you the leading expert in elephant behavior of your time … you are also the only existing human mind that remembers elephants in the wild. The only mind that knew them. We still have elephants in zoos—the ones we have been able to protect from poaching—and in research facilities—but those are captive elephants, raised by humans. They are not the same.”
“We failed. I failed.”
“You did everything you could. You sacrificed your life. But yes—we failed. Humanity failed. The African elephant was driven into extinction in the wild a decade or so after your death. The Asian elephant outlived its African cousin by a few years. Soon enough, armed men were attacking zoos to get at the last of the elephants. The ones that are left now are in heavily guarded facilities. I know it must be a shock, knowing they are gone.”
“No. I knew it would happen. I knew we could not stop it. I saw it happening. Nothing could stop the greed that was destroying them.” But as she said these words, she knew they were not true. She had thought that, somehow, they would win. She had always believed that. And now it must have been grief that made the words of her thoughts seem to splinter in her mind, falling to pieces as she fought to keep their syllables composed.
“You knew, but you kept fighting.”
“What else could we do?”
“And that is why we need you, Doctor.”
“You need me?” And it felt strange to say it, but there were no other words for it: “What more could you possibly need from me? I am dead.”
“I need you to help save my mammoths. We have done all we can. We stitched as much of their genetic code back together as we could, we spliced and reconstructed what we could recover—all of the differences between their DNA and elephant DNA, all of the changes made in their genes over the nearly six million years since they diverged from the Asian elephant. We sequenced it fragment by fragment, using the broken strands of DNA recovered from mummified specimens, and once we had completed that massive puzzle, we used surrogate Asian elephants to give birth to the first calves. This was all accomplished even before I joined the project. Much of the hardest work was done even before my birth. But the sequencing, and the births in captivity, were only the first of so many steps. We didn’t want mammoths in the zoo, to be gawked at. We wanted the mammoth in its own habitat. And not an individual—a species. We cleared land for them, created an entire national preserve centered on the last of the mammoth steppe—a place where they could roam free, re-establish a species, and re-establish, perhaps, a lost ecosystem.”
“You should have brought back my elephants instead.”
“Yes,” Dr. Aslanov said. “I understand that point of view. I do. But there would be nowhere to put your elephants if they were brought back. Their world is still unsafe. But in Siberia, we have given the mammoth a place to thrive. A chance at a new life for an entire species. And if we can solve this puzzle of de-extinction—really solve it—then maybe one day we will be able to bring your elephants back to their savannahs as well. We are so close to solving the problem: we have a sufficiently diverse population, now, of mammoths. We raised not one but dozens of them in captivity. We used several variants of DNA. And we have a place for them to live, protected. To roam free. It is a life’s work. Several lives’. But once we released them, they began to die. They wandered, confused. They failed to form proper groups. They hurt themselves needlessly. We’ve lost thirteen of them in three seasons, and there have been no births in the wild.”
“Why? What went wrong?”
“I said before that you are the only existing human mind that worked and lived with wild elephants. And that is true. But I should have put it another way. You are the only existing mind of any kind that knows the culture of elephants. The last wild elephant died over half a century ago. Our surrogates were raised in captivity, as was every elephant they know. Wild elephant culture is dead on planet Earth, except in one place: your mind. And wild elephant culture is the closest we’ll ever get to wild mammoth culture, which disappeared when the last mammoths died out eight thousand years ago.”
“Mammoths didn’t die out. They were driven to extinction by humans. Just like practically every other extant species of megafauna.”
“Many theories say it was simply the warming of the planet, the change in their ecosystem.”
“Their species had survived every other warm interval. They had always declined, hidden in refugial habitats. It wasn’t until this time around that they disappeared entirely. Why? We all know why. The difference this time was us. We killed them. And the beavers as big as bears, and the North American horse, and the North American camel. And the ground sloth. And the short-faced bear. And the moa. I could go on…”
Anger, too, she felt like a scattering of her thoughts. It was a confusion of their order, of their weight. A shivering through her mind that threatened to splinter logic.
“You are probably right.”
“I am right.”
“But now is our chance to bring them back. Giants will walk the earth again—and you will be a part of that.”
“Giants may walk the earth again, but for how long? The problem you are trying to solve—how to bring animals back from extinction—it’s the wrong problem. Extinction has only one cause, and that cause is older, even, than the wheel. That cause is human greed.”
She heard the echo of her own voice. A digital rasp in that room—the room where Dr. Aslanov was standing.
A room in the real world. A room of flesh and blood. A space, a physical space. It would feel so good to move in the world again—to feel the connective tissues of a body. To stand, to lift an arm. To see. To be alive again.
“Tell me what you propose. What you want from me.”
“We propose to make you a matriarch. We propose to transfer your mind into one of theirs. You will lead them. You will teach them how to be mammoths. Under your leadership, they will thrive.”
SHE CRASHED INTO the tent, lifting her forelegs and bringing them down again and again, twisting from side to side, stomping. She could feel them—the bodies giving way under her enormity, the shattering of them, the bursting of the weak little bags that contained what they were. The crying out of the tiny, fragile men.
She moved away and the others rushed in. The tent was a loose sack now, poles down. Kara raised her legs and brought them down repeatedly. She tangled the tent in her tusks and dragged it. Then another mammoth strode across it. Turned, trampled it again. And another, and another—until the tent was nothing but a mangled stain—more a pool than a heap, nearly as flat as the land around it.
They found the mule-things and knocked them to the ground, dragged them, stepped on them, feeling their joints give way and snap, driving them into the soil.
Kara stood by the last of the mule-things. She stroked the end of her trunk over the tusks strapped to it. Koyon’s tusks, Yekenat’s tusks. She nudged them and the mule-thing tipped over. Another mammoth, Temene, moved next to Kara. Temene touched the tusks as well, put her trunk in her mouth, and then stroked the side of Kara’s face with the end of her trunk, rumbling.
Then others came, until Kara was surrounded. Their trunks stroked her sides and face, her ears. They touched her with their feet. The calves reached out to her, tugging at her hair, touching her face with the pink ends of their trunks. The rumble moved back and forth between them all. Damira could feel it, vibrating up from the ground through her bones. The group sound, both in the air and in the ground. Seismic waves that traveled from her toenails, conducted by her bones, to her ear, so that she did not only hear the sound of them, together—she felt it move through her, vibrating in her blood and bone.
The together feeling. She moved into the circle as well. It parted to accommodate her, accepted her, enlarged and remade itself with her inclusion. She raised her trunk and stroked Kara’s face, tasting her grief with the others.
When she turned to leave, they all followed. Kara trailed behind a bit, smelling Koyon, conjuring him from his remains. Just for a moment—but even she was eager to be gone from that place, which stank now of death. Of the burst, mangled bodies of men and the stench they carried inside them.