Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project) Read online

  I will.

  “His anxiety has gone down considerably since we made contact,” the physician says. “And with the interface starting to bounce back, I think we can start administering some medication to reduce his distress. It will still be some time before we can know how extensive the permanent damage is, but I think it’s very likely he will be able to integrate into a body again.”

  “That’s good,” Diana hears herself say.

  “I don’t want to oversell the situation. He may be blinded. He may have reduced motor function. There is still a long, long way to go before we can really say he’s clear. But his responses so far show that he’s very much cognitively intact, and he’s got a great sense of humor and a real bravery. That’s more important now than anything else.”

  “That’s good,” she says again. Her body rises, presumably because she wants it to. “Excuse me.”

  She walks down the hall, out the metal door, into the bright and unforgiving summer sunlight. She’s forgotten her things in Stefan’s room, but she doesn’t want to go back for them. They’ll be there when she returns or else they won’t. On the streets, autocabs hiss their tires along the tracks. Above her, a flock of birds wheels. She finds a little stretch of grass, an artifact of the sidewalk and the street, useless for anything and so left alone. She lowers herself to it, crosses her latest set of legs and pulls off her shoes to look at some unreal woman’s feet, running her fingertips along the arches.

  None of it is real. The heat of the sun is only neurons in her brain firing in a certain pattern. The dampness of the grass that cools her thighs and darkens her pants. The half-ticklish feeling of her feet. Her grief. Her anger. Her confusion. All of it is a hallucination created in tissue locked in a lightless box of bone. Patterns in a complication of nerves.

  She talked with her son. He talked back. Whatever happens to him, it already isn’t the worst. It will only get better, even if better doesn’t make it all the way back to where it started from. Even if the best it ever is is worse than what it was. She waits for the relief to come. It doesn’t.

  Instead, there is Karlo.

  He strides down the walk, swinging beefy arms, wide and masculine and sure of himself. She can tell when he sees her. The way he holds himself changes, narrows. Curls in, like he is protecting himself. That is just nerves firing too. The patterns in the brain she’d loved once expressing something through his costume of flesh. She wonders what it would be like to be stripped out of her body with him, their interface neurons linked one to another. There had been a time, hadn’t there, when he had felt like her whole universe? Is that what the kids would be doing a generation from now? No more deep-sea rays. No more human bodies. Carapaces set so that they become flocks of birds or buildings or traffic patterns or each other. When they can become anything, they will. Anything but real.

  He grunts as he eases himself to the grass beside her, shading his eyes from the sun with a hand and a grimace.

  “He’s doing better,” Karlo says.

  “I know. We passed notes.”

  “Really? That’s more than I got out of him. He’s improving.”

  “He gave me a message for Kira.”

  “That’s his girlfriend.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Karlo nods and heaves a wide, gentle sigh. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything.”

  “You didn’t do everything.”

  “No,” he says. “Just what I could.”

  Diana lets her head sink to her knees. She wonders, if her first body had survived, would she have been able to? Or would the decades have stiffened her joints the way they had her mother’s, dimmed her eyesight the way they had her father’s. The way they might never for anyone again. “What happened?” she says. “When did we stop being human? When did we decide it was okay?”

  “When did we start?” Karlo says.

  “What?”

  “When did we start being human and stop being. . . I don’t know. Cavemen? Apes? When did we start being mammals? Every generation has been different than the one before. It’s only that the rate of change was slow enough that we always recognized the one before and the one after as being like us. Enough like us. Close. Being human isn’t a physical quality like being heavy or having green eyes. It’s the idea that they’re like we are. That nothing fundamental has changed. It’s the story we tell about our parents and our children. “

  “Our lovers,” she says. “Our selves.”

  Karlo’s body tightens. “Yes, those too,” he says. And then, a moment later, “Stefan’s going to come through. Whatever happens, he’ll be all right.”

  “Will I?” she says.

  She waits for an answer.

  AT THE MOMENT of freedom they give you the choice of the sun or the choice of the deep.

  In the prison, each cell is too small for peace, each bed too narrow for consolation, each window too small for a future.

  In the prison, all choices are poor. But taking none of them is death of another sort.

  THE MIND IMPOSES the familiar onto the foreign, and so Isyavan slowly comes to think space would be yellow dunes and harsh slashes of light; that the lip of black holes would be parched, their accretion disks pale gold and smelling of baked sediment. She has never seen one. She will never see one. Her imagination will do as well as any.

  Her commander, insomuch as that office carries meaning, succumbs on their sixtieth sunrise. It is quiet, and as ever, asymptomatic. There were no warnings. The commander never wakes, simply loses her pulse as though she’s misplaced or left it behind in her sleep. They open her up with their bare hands, chip away at bones gone to resin overnight with knives, tear at rapidly ossifying muscles with nails. Isyavan is the one to crack the sternum into a fistful of amber shards. Everyone lets her do that each time, as though it’s part of a sanctified ritual. Heartbreaker they call her, their terrible joke, but a refined sense of humor and wit don’t endure long, out here.

  Underneath, the scans tell them their commander’s lungs and kidneys are fifty years older than they were yesterday.

  No one objects when Isyavan collects the shards. They click in her hands, rough edges pecking at her skin. They won’t penetrate; her flesh is hardened, proof against grit and heat and desert hunger. But their commander’s was supposed to be, too.

  She turns her face to the sky. Optics polarize to compensate, shielding her sight. A horizon like jaundice, like a rank of rotting molars. But that doesn’t mean anything. An isotopic storm can happen any time, steal up on them under a calm day, no louder than heat haze or the memory of anesthetics.

  They don’t bury their commander. There is no point. Her prostheses will decay, down to half-life and halved again until they are dust. The parts of her she was born with – skin and fat and veins – will go even faster, dissolved in a day or two.

  Nor do they mark the place where she has fallen, save in their memory. Even that does not last.

  THE RISEN INTELLIGENCES never register on sensors.

  At the prison, while Isyavan lay breathless with pain from surgery, a short hard-eyed woman – some engineer or biotech; Isyavan wasn’t paying attention – explained that the old desert machines send out disruptive signals that scatter communication frequencies, glitch detection subroutines. “That is why we can’t use drones or automatons,” the woman said, as though in apology. “When you are done, you’ll have full amnesty.”

  “When I am done,” Isyavan rasped through peeling cracked lips, “I’ll be dead.” But the other option would have been the hadopelagic deep, to mine and capture kinetic surges disgorged from the thermal vents, and never see the sun again.

  “You are a good candidate. Better odds than most; you have the training, the experience. The knowledge both visceral and theoretical.” The woman averted her gaze, unable or unwilling to look at the seams around Isyavan’s head like a crown. In profile the engineer looked a little like an aunt long dead, and never o
ne of Isyavan’s favorites. “Those intelligences served past wars – ballistic calculations, drones, vehicles. Veterans, just like you. In a way you’ll be putting comrades to rest.”

  Even in agony, her skull hurting as though they had sewn nerves into her cranium, that shocked a laugh out of Isyavan. It turned into vomiting. Clear bile from nutrient tubes down her mouth, pooling in the hollows of her throat, running over her thin stained shift. The woman wipes her down, not without a grimace of distaste. Isyavan didn’t have her motor control back yet. At the time, it seemed like she never would.

  THE EVENING AFTER their commander’s death, they meet an ancient engine pushing and threshing its way up, sand sluicing from its caked flanks. It might have been a tank, once, thick armor and spine lined by cannons. A mouth of dull, rotating saws.

  To the limited, lesser intelligences orbiting Isyavan’s mind, the relic – immense as it is, loudly as it howls – is a ghost, invisible and impossible to target. But it’s the size of a small house. None of them will miss.

  Coordination comes easily, now, drilled into them by the need to stay alive. By having seen what happens without it. There were eight of them, at the start. Down to four, and as honed and tight-knit a squad as can be had given the conditions and the briefness of sixty days. Soldiers learn faster in extreme stress, if they don’t fray and break down first.

  Haduan in first, rushing low – the machines are so ancient and clogged by grit that their guns have become slow to angle, twitching by degrees at a time. Tarasi has climbed up the protrusions, calmly setting up mines as she goes, hanging them from the tank’s protrusions and sensors like pendants. They have to be close to inflict damage, and very precise: not a single bullet can go to waste. Ammunition was one of the first things that ran low, though their attrition has compensated somewhat. Equipment and supplies for eight go a long way for half that number.

  Isyavan is last. She used to take point, but Haduan is faster and she’s had to overcome her pride to accept that.

  She waits for the right moment. When she finds it, she charges.

  The blade in her hand shudders, angrier and harder than anti-tank recoil, miniature cousin to the relic’s mouth. Certain things she does better than anyone, and so she conserves ammunition when she can. Close combat doesn’t use up bullets.

  At this range the engine feels almost animal, the heat and screech, the congealed fuel musk-thick. The throb of its locomotive parts like a pulse. She slashes, on instinct more than certainty – if this machine has specs, they are lost to antiquity, distorted by long survival among the dunes hunting and absorbing other relics for components. There are softer points, though, where the parts join and the cables flex. Humans build things greater and larger than them with weaknesses in mind. Not consciously, perhaps, but there. Hindbrain imperative, from the days of holding territories contested by creatures with eyes that gleam in the dark and incisors like abattoir grinders.

  Her weapon goes through, between joints.

  Afterward she’s the filthiest, drenched in coolants and lubricants, stained gray and black like she’s been fighting mud and raw sewage. Tarasi compulsively measures while they still have an intact carcass: the mass, the breadth, the scale of its cortex. She’s the only one among them with a scientist’s training, believes in empirical verity with a zeal most reserve for religion or revenge. “Machine thought has the briefest half-life of anything,” she says, nearly rote, a frequent lament as she cracks open the tank’s cortex. What passes for a cortex.

  “Good,” Isyavan says, trying unsuccessfully to get clean. Sandstorms eventually score most of the fluids off her armor, sometimes taking a layer of epidermis with it, but she’s used to that. Flesh, armor. Much the same these days. “Imagine if they were still smart by the time we come to them.”

  Laughter buzzes in her ears, earpiece to earpiece. Earpiece for her, at least; Rimael doesn’t have much cartilage and skin around there anymore, only silicone and a transmitter bead grafted to cochlea. They return to their carrier, taking stock: how much ammunition was used, how many mines were blown. The vehicle isn’t armed, and only lightly shielded – not for them the safety of a carrier teeth-bright and full of claws. That would be too easy.

  Another joke, that, no funnier than their nickname for Isyavan. But the roof is a good perch for Rimael, picked as their sniper, though his rounds must be rationed even more tightly than anyone else’s. Their last resort, him and his rifle, on the handful of occasions where they can see something coming from far off. Something too dangerous or too complex for Isyavan, Tarasi and Haduan to destroy at close range.

  “So what were you in for?” This from Haduan, in the relative hush of the carrier. A familiar refrain; Isyavan is the only one who hasn’t disclosed. Not when they were eight. Not even now.

  Her mouth is shut, the way closed fists are.

  “Desertion,” Rimael says, the most certain of them that Isyavan was in the army once, not that it’s a secret.

  Perhaps he comes closer than most – but perhaps not. She never denies or confirms; it lends her mystique, maintains her place and the respect they afford her. And they leave it be, after a certain point. The thought that they might have a political dissident or hero among them soothes. A meaning, of sorts, to what they are doing that is otherwise without hope or purpose.

  They all stink. By the time they are out of here, if they aren’t dead, their noses will be.

  ISYAVAN WAS THE first to get them to open up, putting a key to each of their locks even while jealously guarding her own. Rimael used to be an accountant, Haduan police, and Tarasi a researcher turned demolitionist: graduated with a degree in marine biology, found herself without employment prospects, joined the military. It’s not an uncommon story, though they tease that all things considered, isn’t Tarasi meant for the ocean floor?

  “No,” she likes to say, peevish at layperson ignorance, “I didn’t study deep sea life. Sharks and coral reefs, thank you very much. Marine biologists specialize, friends.”

  They take turns sleeping, though none of them is ever truly at rest; a part of them is constantly at work, a gnosis of signals in their marrow and muscles singing data to the skies. Weather conditions, signs of an ecosystem in the desert if any, diagnostics of isotopic damage on their equipment and bodies. The nominal objectives of their expedition couldn’t be simpler: ninety days to map the bounds and power of the storms, the radiative fallout. Staying in place at the periphery isn’t an option – both the carrier and their own bodies goad them forward, across and deep into the dunes. Ninety days. They all count, viciously obsessive, shouting congratulations on another hour logged, another day outwitted. To their knowledge the best record yet is sixty-five days, and they are closing in on that.

  No one is so vulgar as to bring up that none of the expeditions have ever lasted the full three months. There’s always hope. Every round of modification and augmentation is iterative on the last, hardening respiratory and nervous systems, shielding organs and skin against the blows of sudden age. Cybernetics that can survive this place can survive anything; integration of flesh-and-not that holds here would never falter anywhere. Their bodies are a study for future wars.

  They like to think they are tougher than the previous teams. They like to believe they will be the last, and that no more expeditions will be necessary after. These beliefs vary in strength and conviction, though they persist. The human capability for delusion has no limits.

  When they eat, none of them truly tastes; the receptors in their mouth and tongue measure texture and intake, and their implants moderate their rate of metabolism with an architect’s care for angles and altitudes. Sustainability is important. The soldiers of tomorrow must be able to endure vast stretches of privations. But there has to be a control, and so Haduan’s rate of metabolism is on purpose heightened. He eats more from the tubes of gel and compressed proteins. He moves faster and his vitals elevate more quickly. Perfect for taking point, but Tarasi worries about him. The way he co
nsumes, it’s suspected his metabolism is being made to step up by the day.

  “What if,” Rimael says, always talking too much, “our side has already lost? What if our operators are dead?”

  “Then we turn around and get out.”

  “Then we’ll die here.”

  “No,” Isyavan says, and that ends the conversation.

  One subject they never discuss is their dead commander and the other three casualties. On most things, Isyavan gives no opinion. On this, she is firm: try not to remember the dead too fondly or even too well. The act of forgetting liberates. Upend the vessel of thought until they are empty of the past, and something better may fill you up. The only memento is the shards of calcified hearts, which Isyavan alone carries as though she means to embody their record.

  Perhaps this is why, when they have brought down a mastiff of ignited incisors and radial tongues, they don’t recognize their commander until the last engine growl has died, the final twitch of rust-sheathed muscles extinguished. It is not a cry they hear or a plea; the tune is wordless, the voice scratched gravel. A snatch hummed in a moment of distraction, off-key notes they have all listened to as they went to sleep or took their shift on the carrier’s roof.

  They stand in silence as the voice diminishes, spiraling into an afterlife of dimming circuits and burnout cells. Isyavan kneels to stroke the mastiff’s abraded, blackened tendons. Optics eclipse her sclera, making her eyes tar pits in the scuffed crags of her face, her pupils needlepoints.

  Haduan laughs, too loud and too high. Rimael for once has nothing to offer. Tarasi measures the carcass.

  “Don’t transmit,” Isyavan says softly.

  Rimael’s mouth gashes into a grin. “We can’t control that.”

  “Tarasi, leave it alone. The rest of you, delete what you can.”