Year's Best SF 17

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer KEN LIU

My name is Renée Tae-O ‹star› ‹whale› Fayette. I’m in the sixth grade.

There is no school today. But that’s not what makes it special. I’m nervous and I can’t tell you why yet. I don’t want to jinx it.

My friend Sarah and I are working on our school project together in my bedroom.

I’m not old enough to create my own world, but I’m very happy with the world my parents have given me. My bedroom is a Klein bottle so I don’t ever feel like I’m boxed in. A warm yellow light suffuses the room and fades gradually into darkness at infinite distance. It’s old-fashioned, like something from years ago, when designs still tried to hint at the old physical world. Yet the smooth, endless surface makes me feel secure, something to hang onto, being enclosed and outside at the same time. It is better than Sarah’s room in her home, which is a Weierstrass “curve”: continuous everywhere, but nowhere differentiable. Jagged fractals no matter how closely you look. It’s certainly very modern, but I don’t ever feel comfortable when I visit. So she comes over to our place a lot more often.

“Everything good? Need anything?” Dad asks.

He comes “in” and settles against the surface of my bedroom. The projection of his twenty-dimensional figure into this four-space begins as a dot that gradually grows into an outline that pulses slowly, bright, golden, though a little hazy. He’s distracted, but I don’t mind. Dad is an interior designer, and the services of the firm of Hugo ‹left arrow› ‹right arrow› Fayette and Z. E. ‹CJK Ideograph 4E2D› ‹CJK Ideograph 4E3D› Pei are in so much demand that he’s busy all the time, helping people build their dream worlds. But just because he has little time to spend with me doesn’t mean he’s not a good parent. For example, he’s so used to working in much higher dimensions that he finds four dimensions very boring. But he still designed my bedroom as a Klein bottle because experts agree that it is best for children to grow up in a four-dimensional environment.

“We are all set,” Sarah and I think together. Dad nods, and I get the feeling that he would like to think with me about the reason for our anxiety. But Sarah is there, and he feels he can’t bring it up. After a moment, he whisks away.

The project we are working on is about genetics and inheritance. Yesterday at school, Dr. Bai showed us how to decompose our consciousnesses into their constituent algorithms, each further broken down into routines and subroutines, until we got to individual instructions, the fundamental code. Then he explained to us how each of our parents gave us some of these algorithms, recombined and shuffled the routines during the process of our births, until we were whole persons, infant consciousnesses new to the universe.

“Gross,” Sarah thought.

“It’s kind of cool,” I thought back. It was neat to think that my eight parents each gave me a part of themselves, yet the parts changed and recombined into me, different from all of them.

Our project is to create our family trees and trace out our descent, all the way up to the Ancients, if possible. My tree is much easier, since I have only eight parents, and they each had even fewer parents. But Sarah has sixteen parents and it gets very dense up there.

“Renée,” Dad interrupts us. “You have a visitor.” His outline is not hazy at all now. The tone of his thoughts is deliberately restrained.

A three-dimensional woman comes out from behind him. Her figure is not a projection from higher dimensions—she’s never bothered to go beyond three. In my four-dimensional world, she looks flat, insubstantial, like an illustration of the old days in my textbooks. But her face is lovelier than I remembered. It’s the face that I fall asleep to and dream of. Now the day really is special.

“Mom!” I think, and I don’t care that the tone of my thoughts makes me seem like a four-year-old.

Mom and Dad had the idea for me first, and they asked their friends to help out, to all give me a bit of themselves. I think I got my math aptitude from Aunt Hannah and my impatience from Uncle Okoro. I don’t make friends easily, the same as Aunt Rita, and I like things neat, just like Uncle Pang-Rei. But I got most of me from Mom and Dad. On my tree, I’ve drawn the branches for them the thickest.

“Will you be visiting long?” Dad thinks.

“I’ll be here for a while,” Mom thinks. “I have some things I want to tell her.”

“She’s missed you,” Dad thinks.

“I’m sorry,” Mom thinks. Her face fails to hold her smile for a moment. “You’ve done a wonderful job with her.”

Dad looks at Mom, and it seems that he has more to think, but he nods and turns away, his outline fading. “Please come by … for good-bye before you leave, Sophia. Don’t just disappear like before.”

Mom is an Ancient, from before the Singularity. There are only a few hundred million of them in the whole universe. She lived in the flesh for twenty-six years before uploading. Her parents—she had only two—never uploaded.

My fractional siblings used to tease me sometimes about having an Ancient as a parent. They told me that unions between the Ancients and regular people rarely worked out, so it was no surprise that Mom eventually left us. Whenever anyone thought such a thing, I fought them so hard that they eventually stopped.

Sarah is excited to meet an Ancient. Mom smiles at her and asks her if her parents are well. It takes Sarah a while to go through the whole list.

“I should probably get back,” Sarah thinks, after she finally pays attention to the urgent hints I’ve been shooting her way.

When Sarah is gone, Mom comes over and I allow her to give me a hug. Our algorithms entwine together; we synchronize our clocks; and our threads ping onto the same semaphores. I let myself fall into the long-absent yet familiar rhythm of her thoughts, while she gently caresses me through my own.

“Don’t cry, Renée,” she thinks.

“I’m not.” And I try to stop.

“You haven’t changed as much as I expected,” she thinks.

“That’s because you’ve been overclocking.” Mom does not live in the Data Center. She lives and works in the far south, at the Antarctica Research Dome, where a few Ancient scientists with special permission to use the extra energy live on overclocked hardware year round, thinking thoughts at many times the speed of most of humanity. To her, the rest of us live in slow motion, and a long time has passed even though she last saw me a year ago, when I graduated from elementary school.

I show Mom the math awards I’ve won and the new vector space models I’ve made. “I am the best at math in my class,” I tell her, “out of two thousand six hundred twenty-one kids. Dad thinks I have the talent to be a designer as good as him.”

Mom smiles at my excitement and she tells me stories about when she was a little girl. She is a great storyteller, and I can almost picture the deprivation and hardships she suffered, trapped in the flesh.

“How terrifying,” I think.

“Is it?” She’s quiet for a moment. “I suppose it is, to you.”

Then she looks straight at me and her face takes on this look that I really don’t want to see. “Renée, I have something to tell you.”

The last time she had this look, she told me that she had to leave me and our family.

“My research proposal has been approved,” she thinks. “I finally got permission to fuel the rocket, and they’ll launch the probe in a month. The probe will arrive at Gliese 581, the nearest star with a planet that we think may hold life, in twenty-five years.”

Mom explains to me that the probe will carry a robot that can be embodied by human consciousness. When the probe lands on the new planet, it will set up a receiving parabolic dish pointed at Earth and send a signal back to let Earth know that it arrived safely. After we receive the signal—in another twenty years—the consciousness of an astronaut will be radioed by a powerful transmitter to the probe, crossing the void of space at the speed of light. Once there, the astronaut will embody the robot to explore the new world.

“I will be that astronaut,” she thinks.

I try to make sense of this.

“So another you will be living there? Embodied in metal flesh?”

“No,” she thinks, gently. “We’ve never been able to copy the quantum computation of a consciousness without destroying the original. It won’t be a copy of me going to the other world. It will be me.”

“And when will you come back?”

“I won’t. We don’t have enough antimatter to send a transmitter big and powerful enough to the new planet to beam a consciousness back. It took hundreds of years and an enormous amount of energy just to make enough fuel to send the small probe. I’ll try to send back as much of the data gathered from my exploration as possible, but I will be there forever.”

“Forever?”

She pauses and corrects herself. “The probe will be made well and last a while, but it will eventually fail.”

I think about my mother, trapped in a robot for the rest of her life, a robot that will decay and rust and break down on an alien world. My mother will die.

“So we have only forty-five years left together,” I think.

She nods.

Forty-five years is the blink of an eye compared to the natural course of life: eternity.

I’m so furious that for a moment I can’t think at all. Mom tries to come closer but I back off.

I finally managed to ask, “Why?”

“It is humanity’s destiny to explore. We must grow, as a species, the same as you are growing as a child.”

This makes no sense. We have endless worlds to explore, here in the universe of the Data Center. Every person can create his own world, his own multiverse even, if he wants to. In school, we’ve been exploring and zooming in on the intricacies of the quaternion Julia sets, and it is so beautiful and alien that I shiver as we fly through them. Dad has helped families design worlds with so many dimensions that I can’t even wrap my mind around them. There are more novels and music and art in the Data Center than I can enjoy in a lifetime, even if that lifetime stretches into infinity. What can a single three-dimensional planet in the physical world offer compared to that?

I don’t bother keeping my thoughts to myself. I want Mom to feel my anger.

“I wish I could still sigh,” Mom thinks. “Renée, it is not the same. The pure beauty of mathematics and the landscapes of the imagination are very lovely, but they are not real. Something has been lost to humanity since we gained this immortal command over an imagined existence. We have turned inward and become complacent. We’ve forgotten the stars and the worlds out there.”

I do not respond. I am trying not to cry again.

Mom turns her face away. “I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“You are leaving because you want to leave,” I think. “You don’t really care about me. I hate you. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

Mom does not think anything. She hunches down a bit, and though I cannot see her face, her shoulders are trembling, almost imperceptibly.

Even though I am so angry, I reach out and stroke her back. It has always been difficult to harden myself against my mother. I must have inherited that from Dad.

“Renée, will you take a trip with me?” she thinks. “A real trip.”

“Tap into the vehicle feed, Renée, we’re taking off,” Mom tells me.

I tap in, and for a moment I’m overwhelmed by the data flooding into my mind. I’m connected to the maintenance flier’s camera and the microphone, which translate light and sound into patterns that I’m used to. But I’m also tapped into the altimeter and the gyroscope and the accelerometer, and the unfamiliar sensations are like nothing I’ve ever felt.

The camera shows us lifting off, the Data Center below us, a black cube in the middle of the white ice field. This is home, the hardware foundation of all the worlds in the universe. Its walls are pierced with fine honeycomb holes so that the cold air can flow through to cool the layers of hot silicon and graphene full of zipping electrons whose patterns form my consciousness and those of three hundred billion other human beings.

Still higher, clusters of smaller cubes that are the automated factories of Longyearbyen come into view, and then the deep blue waters of Adventfjorden and floating icebergs. The Data Center is large enough that it dwarfs the floating icebergs but the fjord makes the Data Center look tiny.

I realize that I’ve never actually experienced the physical world. The shock of all the new sensations “takes my breath away,” as Mom would think. I like these old-fashioned expressions, even if I don’t always fully understand what they mean.

The sense of movement is dizzying. Is this what it was like to be an Ancient in the flesh? This feeling of straining against the invisible bonds of gravity that tether you to the Earth? It feels so limiting.

Yet so fun at the same time.

I ask Mom how she’s able to do the calculations to keep the vehicle balanced so quickly in her head. The dynamic feedback calculations needed to stabilize the hovering flier against gravity are so complex that I can’t keep up at all—and I’m very good at math.

“Oh, I’m going by instinct here,” Mom thinks. And she laughs. “You are a digital native. You’ve never tried to stand up and balance yourself, have you? Here, take over for a minute. Try flying.”

And it is easier than I anticipated. Some algorithm in me whose existence I have never been aware of kicks in, fuzzy but efficient, and I feel how to shift weight around and balance thrust.

“See, you are after all my daughter,” Mom thinks.

Flying in the physical world is so much better than floating through n-dimensional space. It’s not even close.

Dad’s thoughts break into our laughter. He’s not with us. His thoughts come through the commlink. “Sophia, I got the message you left. What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Hugo. Can you forgive me? I may never see her again. I want her to understand, if I can.”

“She’s never been out in a vehicle before. This is reckless—”

“I made sure that the flier has a full battery before we left. And I promise to be careful with how much energy we use.” Mom looks at me. “I won’t put her life in danger.”

“They’re going to come after you when they notice a missing maintenance flier.”

“I asked for a sabbatical in the flier and got it,” Mom thinks, smiling. “They don’t want to deny a dying woman’s last wishes.”

The commlink is silent for a while, then Dad’s thoughts come through. “Why can’t I ever think no to you? How long will this take? Is she going to miss any school?”

“It might be a long trip. But I think it’s worth it. You’ll have her forever, I just want a little bit of her for the time left to me.”

“Take care, Sophia. I love you, Renée.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

Being embodied in a vehicle is an experience few people have had. To begin with, there are very few vehicles. The energy it takes to fly even a maintenance flier for a day is enough to run the whole Data Center for an hour. And conservation is humanity’s overriding duty.

So, only the operators for the maintenance and repair robots do it regularly, and it is rare for most people, who are digital natives, to take up these jobs. Being embodied never seemed very interesting to me before. But now that I’m here, it’s exhilarating. It must be some Ancient part of me that I got from Mom.

We fly over the sea and then the wild European forest of towering oaks, pines, and spruces, broken here and there by open grassland and herds of animals. Mom points them out to me and tells me that they are called wisent, auroch, tarpan, and elk. “Just five hundred years ago,” Mom thinks, “all this used to be farmland, filled with the clones of a few human-dependent symbiotic plants. All that infrastructure, the resources of a whole planet, went to support just a few billion people.”

I look at Mom in disbelief.

“See that hill in the distance with the reindeer? That used to be a great city called Moscow, before it was flooded by the Moskva River and buried in silt.

“There’s a poem that I remember by an Ancient called Auden who died long before the Singularity. It’s called ‘The Fall of Rome.’ ”

She shares with me images from the poem: herds of reindeer, golden fields, emptying cities, the rain, always the rain, caressing the abandoned shell of a world.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

I’m enjoying myself but then I think maybe I shouldn’t be. Mom is still leaving at the end, and I still need to be mad at her. Is it the love of flight, of these sensations in the physical world, that makes her want to go?

I look at the world passing below us. I would have thought that a world with only three dimensions would be flat and uninteresting. But it’s not true. The colors are more vibrant than any I’ve ever seen, and the world has a random beauty that I could not have imagined. But now that I’ve really seen the world, maybe Dad and I can try to recreate all of it mathematically, and it will feel no different. I share the idea with Mom.

“But I’ll know it’s not real,” Mom thinks. “And that makes all the difference.”

I turn her words over and over in my mind.

We fly on, pausing to hover over interesting animals and historical sites—now just fields of broken glass, as the concrete had long washed away and the steel rusted into powder—while Mom thinks more stories to me. Over the Pacific, we dip down to scan for whales.

“I put the ‹whale› in your name because I loved these creatures when I was your age,” Mom thinks. “They were very rare then.”

I look at the whales breaching and lobtailing. They look nothing like the ‹whale› in my name.

Over America, we linger over families of bears who look up at us without fear (after all, the maintenance flier is only about the size of a mama bear). Finally, we arrive at an estuarial island off the Atlantic coast covered with dense trees punctuated by wetlands along the shore and rivers crisscrossing the island.

The ruins of a city dominate the island’s southern end. The blackened, empty frames of the great skyscrapers, their windows long gone, rise far above the surrounding jungle like stone pillars. We can see coyotes and deer playing hide-and-seek in their shadows.

“You are looking at the remnants of Manhattan, one of the greatest cities from long ago. It’s where I grew up.”

Mom then thinks to me of the glory days of Manhattan, when it teemed with humanity in the flesh, and consumed energy like a black hole. People lived one or two to a vast room all their own, and had machines that carried them around, cooled or warmed them, and made food and cleaned clothes and performed other wonders, all while spewing carbon and poisons into the air at an unimaginable rate. Each person wasted the energy that could support a million consciousnesses without physical needs.

Then came the Singularity, and as the last generation of humans in the flesh departed, carried away by death or into the Data Center, the great city fell silent. Rainwater seeped into the cracks and seams of walls and foundations, froze and thawed, pried them open ever wider, until the buildings toppled like trees in the ancient horror of logging. Asphalt cracked, spewing forth seedlings and vines, and the dead city gradually yielded to the green force of life.

“The buildings that still remain standing were built at a time when people over-engineered everything.”

No one ever talks about engineering now. Building with physical atoms is inefficient, inflexible, limited, and consumes so much energy. I’ve been taught that engineering is an art of the dark ages, before people knew any better. Bits and qubits are far more civilized, and give our imaginations free rein.

Mom smiles at my thoughts. “You sound like your father.”

She lands the flier in an open field with a clear view of the ghost skyscrapers.

“This is the real beginning of our trip,” Mom thinks. “It’s not how long we have that matters, but what we do with the time we have. Don’t be scared, Renée. I’m going to show you something about time.”

I nod.

Mom activates the routine to underclock the processors on the flier so that its batteries will last while our consciousnesses slow down to a crawl.

The world around us speeds up. The sun moves faster and faster across the sky until it is a bright stripe arching over a world shrouded in permanent dusk. Trees shoot up around us while shadows spin and twirl. Animals zoom by, too fast to be perceived. We watch one skyscraper, topped by steel step-domes rising to a defiant spear, gradually bend and lean over with the passing of the seasons. Something about its shape, like a hand reaching for the sky and tiring, moves me deeply inside.

Mom brings the processors back up to normal speed, and we see the top half of the building fall down and collapse with a series of loud crashes like calving icebergs, bringing down yet more buildings around it.

“We did many things wrong back then, but some things we did right. That’s the Chrysler Building.” I feel infinite sadness in her thoughts. “It was one of the most beautiful creations of Man. Nothing made by Man lasts forever, Renée, and even the Data Center will one day disintegrate before the heat death of the universe. But real beauty lasts, even though anything real must die.”

Forty-five years have passed since we set out on our trip, though it didn’t seem to me much longer than a single day.

Dad has left my room just the way it was on the day I left.

After forty-five years, Dad now has a different look. He’s added more dimensions to his figure and his color is even more golden. But he treats me as though I only left yesterday. I appreciate how considerate he is.

While I’m getting ready for bed, Dad tells me that Sarah has already finished her schooling and started a family. She has a little girl of her own now.

I’m a little sad at this news. Underclocking is rare and it can make someone feel left behind. But I will work hard to catch up, and a real friendship will survive any gap of years.

I would not exchange the long day I spent with Mom for anything in the world.

“Would you like to change the design of your bedroom?” Dad thinks. “A new start? You’ve had the Klein bottle for a while now. We can look through some contemporary designs based on eight-dimensional tori, or we can go with a five-dimensional sphere if you like it minimalist.”

“Dad, the Klein bottle is fine.” I pause. “Maybe I’ll try making my room three-dimensional when I’m rested.”

He looks at me, and maybe he sees in me something new that he didn’t expect. “Of course,” he thinks. “You are ready to do the design yourself.”

Dad stays with me as I drift off to sleep.

“I miss you,” Dad thinks to himself. He does not know that I’m still awake. “When Renée was born, I put the ‹star› in her name because I knew one day you would go to the stars. I’m good at making people’s dreams come true. But that is one dream that I can’t create for you. Have a safe journey, Sophia.” He fades out of my room.

I imagine Mom’s consciousness suspended between the stars, an electromagnetic ribbon shimmering in the interstellar dust. The robot shell is waiting for her on that distant planet, under an alien sky, a shell that will rust, decay, and fall apart with time.

She will be so happy when she is alive again.

I go to sleep, dreaming of the Chrysler Building.