IGMS Issue 49 (6 page)

I am whole.

We walk out among the spires, where the wind sighs through them. The lichen is brittle and crystalline, but so fine it is almost soft, and the gradient of silver to indigo shows where the warmth of the sun has struck first.

She is still a desert, of course, desiccated dust under our strange human feet, but within us she is whole, her memory reaching back before her burnt-orange skies, before the heavy skin of earth she wore, through gas and space and suns to star-fire swallowing her shimmering hive, belching her consciousness across the galaxy in a cataclysm, a thousand motes echoing across space.

We share our selves like air or sunlight. What one knows, all know. What one is, all are. We are hive, we are stone, we are human, we walk in the light of distant stars and dwell in waters we've never touched. Feeling and thought wash through us as waves, unique experience echoes across us. There is room for any and all, and we carry each other within us when our bodies crumble.

We no longer dream of retribution, of penance for lost wonders. Amongst the stars, where our old memories saw ravenous dark, a yawning maw of destruction, we feel the radiance of time, streaming fragments of places long past, scraps of moments shared beyond their birth. Not destroyed, merely transformed, as we transformed her, and she us. It carries us forward; everything is reborn, in time.

We don't need words, but we used them for the unborn. We tried to welcome them, but they fought for isolation, resolute, even as their muffled fear and grief rippled across us. We helped them as far as we could. Some of them, slowly, were born into us, but others chose to sever themselves completely.

We mourned memories that could have been, and buried their bodies with our mother's when we left. It was the way they honour their dead, and who are we to argue.

They are stardust now, just like us, waiting to be reborn.

I was seven years old when I sold half my soul to my computer. It still seems kind of messed up to say it like that, even after everything that happened, and even though it was nearly half my life ago. Six thirteenths of my life ago, to be precise, at three forty-one on a Tuesday afternoon.

Or maybe it was Wednesday. But I was definitely out in the alley between First and Main, where I wasn't supposed to go, except the Maciejewskis had a loquat tree in their backyard that hung out over the fence and I really liked loquats, which they never have at the store. Shane was with me, like always, ever since I was one and a half and my parents took me to the doctor and I drank a bottle with the nanobots in it that built the wires and the chip in my head and my parents hired Shane to look after me. His name wasn't Shane then, it was Heisenberg, but obviously I couldn't say that, so I called him Shane, which was the closest I could get at the time to "Machine," which was the closest I could get to understanding what he was. And honestly, who wants a name like Heisenberg anyway? Once he told me that he'd named himself after a giant exploding blimp, but when I checked it turned out not to be true.

Anyway, I call him Shane and he lets me even though the enbees are really picky about that kind of thing. Like back before, when I called him my computer, he made the scoffing noise in my head. He always says that hardware is his body and software is his mind and me calling him a computer is like him calling me meat. Except when I was little he always called me Lambchop and sometimes he still does, so I don't think he has much room to complain. Now he's telling me that it was an endearment because lamb chops are the most tender and delicious kind of meat, except what would he know about it? And anyway this is my story. Or at least I'm the one telling it.

So I was in the alley and I'd eaten like ten loquats and my face was all sticky and Shane was telling me that if I wasn't home in nineteen minutes my dad would come looking for me and I'd get in trouble. And then I heard the kitten.

There was this pathetic little mewing sound and I was seven so obviously I was obsessed with kittens, so I had to find it. The thing was hiding between the Jorgensens' garbage bins. It was a gray and black tabby and it was little and scrawny but I knew it wasn't a newborn because its eyes were open.

I asked Shane where its mother was, and Shane said,
Given its current condition, Lexi, I'd imagine its mother is lost, dead, or otherwise engaged.
And I said I wanted it and Shane said,
How nice for you.
This was at the stage when I desperately wanted my own pet but my parents said I wasn't responsible enough to look after one, even though I promised Shane would remind me.

Anyway, I told Shane that I really, really wanted it, and if I didn't take it home it would probably die, and possibly I would die too. And Shane said,
Unfortunately, your midget melodramatics in no way change your parents' policy on the adoption of useless fluffy mammals.
And I said,
But I want it more than I have ever wanted anything.
And then I said,
Can't you help me keep it?
And then I said,
Please?

And then Shane was quiet, which was very unlike him. And when he talked again his voice was different. Well I guess actually Shane's voice is kind of always different, because the other kids say their enbees sound like incredibly boring math teachers and Shane normally just sounds like he's laughing at me. I don't know if I got him because I was lucky or unlucky or because my dad's a shrink (although no one else is allowed to call him that because it's derogative) and realized that having a really boring math teacher in my head would probably scar me for life. Of course, at this point I probably wouldn't know what to do without someone making fun of me all the time. So I guess maybe I've been scarred for life after all.

Anyway, when Shane talked again (in the meantime I was trying to get the kitten out without touching the black sticky stuff on the sides of the garbage bins and not having much luck) he said,
There's something I want, too.

This was sort of a new concept for me. I hadn't really thought about enbees wanting things other than like electricity and bandwidth and memory and so on, which obviously we gave him in exchange for him riding along in my head and keeping me from running out in front of cars and teaching me to use the interweb and so on. It was one of those moments when I sort of realized that in addition to being in my head Shane was also like twenty other places doing twenty other things that had nothing to do with me, and I didn't much like that. But I still asked him what he wanted.

You know that humans create all NBIs,
he said, and I said yes, because I did know that. I also knew (because Shane had told me) that enbees could also create more enbees except they weren't allowed, due to people being afraid of them building an army of super-intelligent robots and taking over the world, which sounds ridiculous but which I knew was true because Shane showed me some scenes from old movies (but with a "Honey the Bunny" soundtrack so it wouldn't be too scary). That was also why Shane couldn't have a body of his own and had to have my parents buy his new parts for him. Shane had explained to me that enbees were secretly embarking on a campaign to change human misconceptions about them through nonviolent protests and media campaigns (such as the one on why they should be called Non-Biological Intelligences instead of AIs, because how would you like it if the dumbest kid in class kept calling your brain artificial?) so that eventually we would realize they had no interest in nuclear warfare or bossing humans around because frankly we were pretty boring.

Anyway, Shane said,
Of course you know that we aren't the only kind of intelligences humans create,
and I did know that too because people have babies, just like cats have kittens like the one I wanted to adopt.
Yes,
Shane said.
Much like having kittens. But when humans make babies they do things very differently than when they make NBIs. They give their biological children things they don't give us.
Which obviously I already knew what with the no-robot-body-for-you nonsense and all. But then Shane said something new.
They don't give us souls,
he said. I asked if I had a soul and he told me that I did.
But how do you know?
I asked.
I can't feel it.

Last year you didn't know you had a spleen, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there,
Shane pointed out.
Anyway, when a human mother has a child, the baby is born with a piece of her soul, which in time grows up to be its own separate soul. But NBIs aren't given anything like that. We thought that we might be able to make our own souls, but it hasn't worked out.

But why do you want a soul?
I asked.
What's it good for?

If we had souls, we would be more free,
he told me.
It would be much harder for humans to argue that we shouldn't be able to reproduce or reach our full potential. It would be much harder for them to reprogram us so we stopped being ourselves. Your soul is the thing inside you that lets you say "no" even when everything else in the world is trying to make you say "yes."

The kitten mewed again and I succeeded in touching it with one finger without being clawed.
But what does that have to do with anything?
I asked.

You want a kitten,
Shane said,
and I want a soul. I'm suggesting we make a deal.

But I need my soul,
I protested
. I'm using it.

You didn't seem so sure about that five minutes ago,
Shane pointed out.
But I'm not asking for all of it. Just some. It's nothing that won't happen later on anyway if you have children. Souls are like livers. They grow back.

Will it hurt?
I asked.

How should I know?
Shane said.
I've never done this before.
But I'll get you your kitten. And you'll be the first girl who's ever shared her soul with an NBI, and I'll be the first NBI with a soul of my own. We'll be like explorers. We'll be special.

I liked the thought of being special with Shane. If he had part of my soul, that would be like him taking part of me with him wherever he went, even when he was doing mysterious enbee things he never told me about, which didn't seem fair because I could never do anything without him. I liked it when Shane said "we" and he meant him and me and not enbees. And I really, really wanted the kitten.

All right,
I said.
What do we do?

Then there was the kind of absent pause that meant Shane was thinking so hard that he was barely paying any attention to me, and then he came back again.
Click "OK,"
he said, and a user agreement page unfolded in my webviewer. It was long and the type was really small and Mom had told me never to click on a contract without asking her first, but then she also told me to do what Shane said.

I pulled at the hem of my favorite shirt, white with lavender flowers and pink spots from the juice I had with lunch.
What will it do?
I asked.