Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Kata Bindu

Many years ago, with great trepidation, I approached Gregory Benford, the king of hard SF, and asked him to read my novel Starplex, and, if he liked it, to offer a blurb for the cover. Fie did so: “Starplex is complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast; for big time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”

That was flattering enough, but the best was yet to come: Greg remembered me and, in 2001, when he was putting together an anthology of stories about microcosms, he asked me to contribute. This story is the result of that invitation.

We sometimes contemplated giving ourselves a name. “Those Who Had Been Flesh” appealed to us. So did “The Collective Consciousness of Earth.” And “The Uploaded.”

But, to our infinite sadness, there was no need for a name—for there was no one to speak with, no one to proffer an introduction to, no possible confusion about the referents of pronouns. Despite centuries now of scanning the sky for alien radio signals, we’d found nothing.

Because of that, we’d never even had to resolve the question of whether we should refer to ourselves in the singular or the plural. Granted, we had once been ten billion individuals; plurals were no doubt appropriate then. But after almost all members of Homo sapiens had taken The Next Step, we had surrendered that individuality, slowly at first, then with abandon—for who would not want to take into themselves the genius of the world’s greatest mathematicians, the wit of the cleverest comedians, the virtue of the most altruistic humanitarians, the talent of the most gifted composers, and the tranquility of the most serene contemplatives?

Ah, but it turned out there were some who did not want this. Mennonites were long gone; Luddites were likewise a thing of the past. But there was one last group left, in Africa, that still lived by traditional means. They did not want to take The Next Step—and so we instead gave them that famous giant leap: we moved them all to the Moon.

What else could we have done? Although we had been about to become something more than human, we were, and are, still humane: we certainly weren’t going to just eliminate them. But we couldn’t leave anyone here on Earth, for once we’d uploaded our consciousnesses, once we had merged into the global web, a fanatic could disable the computers, could destroy our helpless, noncorporeal selves.

To send hunter-gatherers to the Moon might seem, well, lunatic: establishing a colony of the least technologically advanced people in a place where technology was the only thing making life possible. But we rationalized that we were actually being beneficent: with their hearts laboring under gentle lunar gravity, they would likely live decades longer, and their elderly—who, on the African veldt, had had no access to artificial hips or even wheelchairs—would be far more mobile than they had been on Earth.

More: we no longer cared what happened to Earth’s ecosystem, and, indeed, we knew that the inevitable impact of an asteroid would eventually cause worldwide calamity here. The Last Tribe, of course, could do nothing to avert a meteor strike, and we, no longer physical, could do nothing on their behalf. But now that they were on the airless, waterless moon, only a direct hit to their domed ecosystem would do any real damage. We had likely granted their civilization tens of millions of years of additional life.

Safety for us, and a better life for them.

It should have been a win-win scenario.

Prasp fashioned his wings from elephant skin spread between elongated wooden fingers. When Kari, his woman, helped him strap the wings to his arms, they stretched several times as wide as Prasp was tall.

The old stories, handed down now for a thousand generations, told of wind, the invisible hand of one of the gods moving through the air, pushing things about. But wind, like the stars of legend, did not exist here; Prasp wondered, despite the spellbinding stories he’d heard, whether it had ever existed even in Kata Bindu, the Old Place. Indeed, he wondered whether the Old Place itself was a myth. How could lights—and even orbs, one of fire, another of stone—have moved across the sky? How could people have weighed five or six times as much as they do here? The ancients were said to have been no bulkier, indeed, to have if anything been shorter, than people of today. By what magic could they have acquired additional weight?

Regardless, Prasp was pleased that his weight was what it was. Even with the great wings he’d built, he could barely get aloft. Yes, they did well for gliding from tree to tree—on those rare occasions when he managed to climb a tree without damaging his fragile contraptions. But to take to the air as the birds did still eluded him. Oh, even without the wings, Prasp could jump twice his own body height. But he wanted to go much higher than that.

Prasp wanted to touch the center of the world’s roof.

It was easy enough for us, for—The Uploaded; yes, that’s what we’ll call ourselves—to access information. Indeed, for us, to wonder was to know.

We knew that the refuge for the last primitive humans was in Copernicus, a lunar crater ninety-three kilometers wide. The roof over it consisted in part of two transparent silicone membranes, the outer of which was coated with 2.5 microns of gold. That gold layer was thin enough to screen out UV and other radiation, while still letting most visible light through—sunglasses for the entire sky.

Between those two membranes was a gap twelve meters thick filled with pure water. Transparent gold, transparent membranes, transparent water—the only thing that should have marred the primitives’ view upward from the inside of the dome was the crisscrossing network of load-bearing titanium cables, which divided their sky into a multitude of triangles.

If the water only had to shield the habitat from solar radiation, a thickness of 2.5 meters would have been enough. But this multilayered transparent roof—appearing almost flat, but really a section out of a vast sphere— had to contain the habitat’s atmosphere, as well. The air inside was almost pure oxygen, but at only 200 millibars: quite breathable, and no more prone to supporting combustion than Earth’s own atmosphere, which had a similar partial pressure of O₂.

Still, even that attenuated atmosphere pressed upward with a force of over two tonnes per square meter. So the water shield had been made twelve, rather than two-and-a-half, meters thick; the air pressure helped keep the roof up, and the water’s weight eliminated stresses on the inner silicone membrane that would have otherwise been caused by the atmosphere trying to burst out into the vacuum of space.

It was a simple, elegant design—and one that required virtually no maintenance. But there was one more component to the roof, a topmost layer, an icing on the transparent cake. A thin film had been applied overtop of the gold-covered outer membrane, a polarizing layer of liquid crystals that, under computer control, simulated a night of Earthly length by making the dome opaque for eight out of every twenty-four hours during the two-week-long lunar day. It also darkened the sky during the fourteen-day-long lunar night when the Earth was full or nearly full.

And indeed, the sky had blackened just as it should have one evening at 2100 local time, the sun fading and then completely disappearing as the crystals polarized, darkening the re-creation of southern Africa that filled the bottom of Copernicus. The only light came from the lamps located at each crisscrossing of the load-bearing cables; collectively, they providing as much illumination as the full moon did on Earth’s surface.

The night had continued on like any other, with beasts prowling, and humans huddling for warmth, and protection, and companionship.

But sometime during that night, the computer controlling that circadian winking, that daily shifting of the sky from opaque to transparent, had crashed. When morning should have come, the polarizing membrane did not clear. The world of the last biological humans was cut off from the rest of the universe by a night that seemed as though it would never end.

Prasp ran, each stride taking him two bodylengths farther ahead. He flapped his arms, moving the great wings of skin and sticks, beating them up and down, up and down, as fast as he could, and—

Yes! Yes!

He was rising, lifting, ascending—

Flying!

He was flying!

He rose higher and higher, the ground receding beneath him. He could see the savanah grasses far below, the giant, sprawling Acacia trees diminishing to nothing.

He kept flapping the wings, although he could feel that his face was already slick with sweat and he was gulping in air as fast as he could. His arms were aching, but he continued to move them up and down, his body rising farther and farther. He’d always known the faint lines crisscrossing the dome were actually thick cords, as big around as his own waist, for he had seen them where they touched the mountains that encircled the world. And now he was getting up far enough that he could see that thickness, see the pinpoints of light at each of their intersections resolving themselves into glowing disks, and—

Pain!

A spasm along his right arm.

A great ache in his left wrist.

A seizing of his back muscles, a throbbing in his shoulders.

So near, so close, and yet—

And yet he could go no higher. He wasn’t strong enough.

Sadly, Prasp held his arms out straight, keeping the wings flat. He began the slow, long glide down to the grasses, far, far below.

It took a long time for him to come down. As he got closer to the ground, he became aware that a crowd of people had assembled, all of them looking up at him, many of them pointing. As he descended further he could make out their expressions—awe on some the faces; fear on a few of them.

Prasp skidded along the grasses until he was able to stop himself. Kari came running over to him, arriving before the others. She helped him remove the wings, and, once he was free of them, she hugged him tightly. Prasp could feel that her heart was pounding almost as hard as his own; she’d clearly been terrified for him.

Others of the tribe soon arrived. Prasp wasn’t sure how they were going to react to his flight; had he committed a sacrilege? Balant, the tribe’s greatest hunter, was among those who’d been watching. He looked at Prasp for a time, then held a clenched fist high over his head, and gave a great whoop—the tribe’s custom when one of its members had made a spectacular kill during the hunt. The others soon followed Balant’s lead, whooping with excitement as well.

Prasp was relieved that they’d accepted his flying, but he couldn’t join in the shouts of joy.

He had failed.

We, The Uploaded, had no way to monitor what was going on beneath the roof over Copernicus, but we could guess. We knew that the artificial lamps on the underside of the roof would have started at low power during that fateful night, collectively providing no more illumination than the full moon as seen from Earth. But we also knew that they were controlled by a separate computer, and so presumably weren’t affected by whatever had caused Copernicus’s sky to remain perpetually opaque. Those lamps should still flare with light rivaling Sol’s own for sixteen hours per Earth-day day during the lunar night. Our simulations of the ecosystem suggested that some of the plant species under the roof would have died off, unable to get used to fourteen Earth-days of dim light, followed by fourteen more of two-thirds bright light and one-third dimness. But many other kinds of plants, most of the animals, and, yes, the humans, should have adapted without too much trouble.

But as to what those humans might be doing, we had no idea.

Prasp left his wings near his hut. There were some, he knew, who privately ridiculed his attempts at flying, although none would publicly contradict Balant. And certainly none of them would damage the wings. Prasp was known for his cleverness—and that cleverness often yielded extra meat while hunting, meat he shared freely with others. No one would risk being cut off from Prasp’s bounty by wrecking his wings, or allowing their children to do so.

There were people in Prasp’s tribe who had run the entire diameter of the circular valley that was their world, staying directly beneath one of the thin lines that crossed through the center of the roof. Although it was easier to run in the cool semi-darkness of night rather than the heat of day, most people had done it during the day, to avoid hyenas and other nocturnal hunters.

But Prasp had to do the run both day and night—he couldn’t let fourteen sleeping periods go by without repeating the course, for he wasn’t doing this just once to impress a woman or gain status among the men. He wanted to do it over and over and over, back and forth, crossing the valley again and again.

This wasn’t a stunt, after all.

This was training.

One day, as he was about to embark on his run, Prasp found Dalba, one of the tribe’s elders, waiting for him—and that was usually a sign of trouble.

“I saw you fly,” she said.

Prasp nodded.

“And I hear you intend to fly again.”

“Yes.”

“But why?” asked Dalba. “Why do you fly?”

Prasp looked at her as if he couldn’t believe the question. “To find a way out.”

“Out? Out to where?”

“To whatever is beyond this valley.”

“Do you not know the story of Hoktan?” asked Dalba.

Prasp shook his head.

“Hoktan was a foolish man who lived generations ago. He talked as you are now talking—as if one could leave this place. He tried another method, though: he dug and dug and dug, day after day, trying to make a tunnel out through the mountains that encircle our world.”

“And?” said Prasp.

“And one day the gods used wind against him, pulling him out through his tunnel.”

“Where is this tunnel?” asked Prasp. “I would love to see it!”

“The tunnel collapsed, the wind ceased—and Hoktan was never seen again.”

“Well, I do not plan to dig through the roof—but I do hope to find a passage to whatever is beyond it.”

Dalba shook her wizened head. “There’s nothing beyond the roof, child.”

“There must be. Legend says we came from the Old Place, and—”

Dalba laughed. “Yes, Kata Bindu. But it’s not somewhere you can go back to. The trip here is a one-way journey.”

“Why?” asked Prasp. “Why should it be that way?”

“The name of where we came from,” said the elder. “Surely you understand the name?”

Prasp frowned. He’d only ever heard it called Kata Bindu, the Old Place; did it have another name? No, no—that was all it was ever called. But …

“Oh,” said Prasp, feeling foolish. He was a hunter, of course, and a gatherer, too—and this place, this territory, this land that his people knew so well, that fed them and sustained them, was Bindu, the term in their language for place, for territory, for home—but Bindu was also the word for life, the thing the land gave. Kata Bindu wasn’t the Old Place; it was the Old Life.

And this—

“This is heaven,” said the Dalba, simply. “You can’t go back to the Old Life.”

“But if it’s heaven,” said Prasp, “then where are the Gods?”

“They’re here,” said the Dalba, tipping her head up at the sky. “They’re watching us. Can’t you feel that in your heart?”

Prasp flew again—but this time he rose farther than he ever had before. His muscles were stronger, his lungs more capacious. All that running had had the desired result.

Prasp was close enough now to the roof to see the circular lights, each wider than his body was long. Of course, it was night now; the lights were glowing dimly. Only a fool would strap on wings and try to fly toward the lights when they were burning with their daytime intensity.

Still, this close, there was enough illumination to make out things he’d never noticed from the ground. He could see that the roof was slightly curved, slightly concave, arching up and away. He continued to fly along, but everything was the same—massive cords, circular lights, and, supporting them, a thick, clear membrane—and beyond that, he couldn’t say, for all was dark. The lights all faced down toward the ground, far below.

Prasp thought that if there were an exit anywhere, it might be at the very center of the roof—easy enough to spot, for all the radial cords converged at that point. He knew there was no exit around the edges of the roof, for others had long ago climbed the steep, rocky terraces that surrounded the valley, concentric shelves each wider and higher than the one below it. They’d circumnavigated the world, hiking around its edge, examining the entire seal between the roof and the rocky walls—but there was nothing; no break, no passage, no tunnel.

Finally, Prasp reached the exact center—and there was something special there. Prasp’s heart began pounding even faster than it already had been. There was a platform hanging from the roof, a wide square, attached at its four corners by cylinders that rose to the sky. The platform was large, and Prasp was able to glide between two of the cylinders, his belly scraping along the platforms inner surface. He skidded along, thinking that the skin on his chest would soon be flayed from his ribs, and—

Gods, no!

There was a giant cube in the middle of the platform, a building of some sort as big as a multifamily hut. Prasp wanted to throw his hands up in front of his face to shield it from the crash, but he couldn’t; his arms were strapped to the wings. He continued to skid forward, and he twisted his body sideways, finally slamming into the building.

He lay on the platform, catching his breath, supported from beneath for the first time since he’d taken flight.

Finally, he moved again. The building had a door in its side. Prasp had rarely seen doors before; some members of his tribe had tried to make them for their huts—vertical walls of sticks that articulated on gut ties down one side. This one was simpler and more elegant, but it was a door just the same.

Still, there was no way to get through it without shedding his wings— and he had to go through that door; he had to see what was on the other side of it. Prasp normally had his woman’s help in strapping his wings on before each flight, but surely he’d be able to reattach the wings on his own when it came time to return to the valley. It would be tricky, but he was confident he could do it.

Prasp struggled to divest himself of the great elephant-hide membranes, and at last he was free of them. He rose to his feet and walked toward the door. There was something like a crooked arm attached to it. Prasp grabbed hold of it and pulled, and the door swung open, revealing the inside of the cube.

Prasp’s heart immediately sank. There was no other door in the cube, no opening in its roof. He’d thought for sure he’d found the way out, but clearly that was not the case. Still, the room contained things the likes of which Prasp had never seen before: angled panels made of something that wasn’t wood or stone, with lights glowing upon them. Most were green, but a few were red. He stared at them in wonder.

We had access to the plans for the Copernicus refuge, of course. After all, it was we who had built that habitat prior to taking The Next Step. We’d put the computers controlling the habitat high above the ground, hanging from the center of the roof, where the primitives could never reach them. Indeed, from the ground, some 3.8 kilometers below, the computing room and its surrounding platform would be all but invisible.

We’d tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. Our best guess was that the computers had failed when February 28, 3000, had rolled around—certainly, the two-week long lunar day that straddled that Earth date had been the one in which the polarizing film had gone dark for the last time. We’d tested the computers for behavior at leap years, but it hadn’t occurred to us to check millennial years, with their arcane and sometimes conflicting rules about whether the day after February 28 was February 29 or March 1.

We’d called ourselves humane. Every conceivable programming error, every possible bug, every potential infinite loop, had been tracked down in the systems that now hosted us. But somehow the computers that were to look after those not taking The Next Step were given less rigorous testing.

Yes, we’d been humane—and human; all too human, it seemed.

In the cubical structure at the roof of the world Prasp found the most remarkable thing: a vertical rectangular panel that had symbols glowing on it, and, resting on a horizontal surface in front of it, a—something—that looked like packed animal teeth, white and concave.

Prasp counted them; there were 107, divided into one large cluster and four smaller ones. Most of the teeth had single symbols on them. One whole row of them, plus a few others, had two symbols, one above and one below. A few had strings of symbols. He tried to match the symbols glowing on the panel with those on the teeth. Some of them did have matches; others did not. The glowing strings on the panel made no sense to him, although he looked at each one carefully: “System halted. Press Enter to reinitialize.”

On the rack of teeth he could find the S symbol—although why the panel showed it in two different sizes, he had no idea. He also found the P symbol, and the E, and the z, and two teeth marked with circles that might be the o symbol, and two others marked with vertical lines that might be the I symbol. Some of the other symbols had loose counterparts amongst the teeth: the m seemed similar to, but less angular, than one of the tooth markings, for instance. But many of the others shown on the panel—e, h, a, d, r, n, and i—seemed to have no counterparts among the teeth, and—

“Enter.” Right in the middle of the glowing characters was the string “Enter.” And that entire string was reproduced on an extra large tooth at the far right of the main collection; that tooth also was marked by a left-pointing arrow with a right-angle bend in its shaft.

Prasp ran his index finger over that large tooth, and was surprised to find it wobbling, almost like a child’s tooth about to come out. Very strange. He pressed down on the tooth to see just how much play it had, and it collapsed inward, and then, as soon as Prasp pulled his finger back in disgust, it popped back out again.

But the symbols on the screen disappeared! Whatever Prasp had done clearly had been a mistake; he’d ruined everything.

Fourteen sleep periods later, Prasp, his woman Kari, Dalba and the other elders, and the rest of the tribe all watched in awe as something incredible happened. The sky turned dear, and high in the sky, there was a giant blue-and-white light, shaped like half a circle, set against a black background.

“What is that?” asked Kari, looking at Prasp.

Prasp felt his voice catching in his throat, catching with wonder. “What else could it be?” he said. “The Other Place.” He repeated the phrase again, but with a slightly different intonation, emphasizing the double meaning. “The Other Life.”

Someday, perhaps, the hunter-gatherers of Copernicus will develop a technological civilization. Someday, perhaps, they will even find a way out of their roofed-over crater, a way to move out into the universe, leaving their microcosm behind.

But for us, for Those Who Had Been Flesh, for The Collective Consciousness of Earth, for The Uploaded, there would be no way out. Who’d known that The Next Step would be our last step? Who’d known that the rest of the universe would be barren? Who’d known how lonely it would be to become a single entity—yes, we refer to ourselves in the plural as if that sheer act of linguistic stubbornness could make up for us being a single consciousness now, with no one to converse with.

Maybe, after a thousand years, or a million, the men and women in Copernicus will develop radio, and at last we will have someone else to talk to. Maybe they’ll even leave their world and spread out to colonize this empty galaxy.

They might even come here, although few of them will be able to endure Earth’s gravity. But if they do come, yes, they might accidentally or deliberately put an end to our existence.

We can only hope.

We are no longer human.

But we are humane; we wish them well. We are trapped forevermore, but those who are still flesh, and can again see the sky, might yet be free.

We will watch. And wait.

There is nothing more for us to do.