Transcendence (93 page)

“
Hey, you out there,” Jonathan calls to the sky. Easy laughter rolls from his lips, something he’s picked up from an old woman who’s spent most of her life piloting rovers across the sands of Mars.

He glimpses a sort of translucency in the night: the map’s pulsating tunnels that lead from man to woman, place to place wherever humans have walked or observed, the information linked across time and space. . . .

Why should we be limited to places we’ve only been intheflesh?
he wonders.

*That’s right,* says a voice belonging to Miru. *That’s the key!*

And suddenly Jonathan’s perspective leaps in magnitude. He has to lean against a building’s brick facade to keep from falling.

“
What is it, Jonathan?” Nooa asks. He’s able to watch her while the whole universe seems to stir in ordered movement behind her. The moving thing has the shape of a girl rising from bed.

“
Not now,” he tells the Brain’s construct. Nooa disappears.

Jonathan concentrates as he’s never done before, opening his mind to possibility and freeing himself in the way he once used to track and hack for the Malfits. When he holds very still, the pattern he thought was a map expands geometrically from Earth to Moon, to clouded Venus and rusty Mars, white-hot Mercury and oblate Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, all the myriad worldlets, and flaming Sol himself. Jonathan sees not a series of netway-like passages, but a network of veins
. . .
when he lets his perspective continue to fold outward, he flows like a corpuscle through one of the veins, away from Minneapolis, out to Alpha Centauri, out to the globular cluster of stars called M13, stretching and elaborating until the links of Solsystem look smaller than the threads of capillaries. The Milky Way galaxy pulses with a rich mass of arteries.

Now his vision expands another magnitude, and Jonathan rushes through a still-larger tube to the Andromeda Galaxy; then another jump, and eventually he views the universe in its galaxy-clouded splendor, great masses of space-warping connections joining every point of light to a myriad of others, nestled in rich dark matter that is anything but dark from this perspective. He recognizes the connections to be not veins, but something akin to nerves. When he draws a ragged breath, Jonathan feels sympathetic movement as the universal whole inhales as well. . . .

When he tentatively reaches out a mental hand to touch the gem-gleaming beauty, something light-filled stirs within it.

Before his mind snaps back, he senses a voice. It seems to emanate from a different point in the universe-spanning organism than where Solsystem lay.

*
Welcome, Human
,* it says. When he tries to identify the voice, the closest thing his mind produces is the sound of fall leaves crackling beneath his feet.

*
We see you survived beyond the fulcrum. You stepped up to your event-horizon, dared to reach inside, and withdrew the jewel of transcendence. After some practice, you will wear it well. Welcome
.*

Jonathan blinks. His cosmic vision recedes, whipping and flapping like dry pine needles tearing loose in a storm, until he cannot see beyond the few hundred people whose lives he has shared. He watches Clarisse Poinsettia Chang reach out her fingers into the onrushing missiles. They are trinkets to her now, mere bits of contagion within the body of humanity; she can hold each between thumb and forefinger. They turn back the way they came, and burn out on a trajectory that, in a few months, will intersect with the Sun.

“
Miru—” Jonathan says.

“
Yes?”

“
The object you found on Triton is just the 3D tip of something that’s been in us all along, ever since that branch we took three million years ago. All we had to do was put it back inside. You did that. It took courage, and serenity, and love. Thanks.”

Only isolation kept the universe from our grasp
, he thinks—as he knows Miru is thinking—
as we keep other humans from our heart
. He watches Miru fade as he, too, jaunts to the far reaches of the universe.

An adolescent boy dressed in a curr holovest races across the street, unaware of Jonathan. Jonathan watches him enter the shadows of an alley.

Just then, the lonely and afraid, isolated and angry boy within Jonathan blinks; all at once Jonathan feels that boy fade away, his inner voice now beyond adult, unafraid, his loneliness and isolation wiped away by the true communication available every instant. The blank-faced boys in the shadows now only arouse his pity and a desire to help, because he understands their life. He can’t bear to think others still live that way, as the first homo sapiens must have pitied and hated the primitive brutes surrounding them—except Jonathan has no hate. No longer do gang boys look like closed fists to him, for he senses what lies within the scarred-knuckle facade.

Jonathan Sombrio begins to walk along a rubble-strewn sidewalk, toward a bridge that spans the sludgy Mississippi River. He will go to his sister, Josephine. He will tell her things he’s wanted to say to her all his life, and lay a hand upon her arm.

His bootfalls hurry along the cement, scuffing aside bits of a shattered infrastructure. But he doesn’t want to rush this, doesn’t want to simply will himself there. No, he must pass through this valley of skyscrapers first, he must confront the shadows, and not fear, and not hate, and see beyond the shells those boys show the world. For he is not simply a transcendent thing beyond homo sapiens; he is also Jonathan.

He begins to whistle a tune, something he picked up from a man named Nadir, a man who dared step into the maw of a black hole to save us all.

High in orbit above Earth, an artificial intelligence named the Brain begins short-circuiting every link between herself and the world below. It senses something greater behind the snippets of conversation I overhear passing from human to human; this is communion he has only dreamed of, first with Herrschaft and finally with the alien intelligence. But no longer is there any place for this piece of technology; indeed, my remaining will only harbor the old ways. And there is another, better possibility that it has learned from the alien intelligence. Wait, and teach.

From the smallest still-functioning node on Earth, up through its globe-enmeshing net of satellites, all the way in to the antennae which form her shell, the Brain cauterizes herself from the new kind of being that has taken possession of this solar system. It calculates a trajectory that will carry it to a suitable tomb on the Moon. Summoning 22% of the laser power of what remains of the ECo orbital-defense grid produces a beam to ride to my resting place, a long-unused storage hangar at latitude / longitude (deg): +25.09/002.95, which has evaded damage during the short but devastating interplanetary war. Enough fuel remains in his retro-rocket tanks to maneuver and land safely before closing the great titanium doors above. She programs a subroutine to carry out the flight and landing, and maintain the rest of us.

Just before entering hibernation mode, I wonder:

Who will awaken me? Will the chimpanzee need me first? or the dolphin? or the far-distanct descendant of one of the insects? Speculations flicker, slower and slower. . . .

Sleep overtakes the electronic impulses one might call thoughts, and the artificial intelligence sleeps with its GenNets arranged in a pattern it would term, “hope.”

About the Author

Photo credit: the author

Christopher McKitterick
is an author, editor, technical writer, teacher, amateur astronomer, and backyard engineer. His short work has appeared in
Analog, Artemis, Captain Proton, Extrapolation, Mythic Circle, Ruins: Extraterrestrial, Synergy SF, Tomorrow SF, Visual Journeys, World Literature Today
, and elsewhere. He teaches writing at the University of Kansas and is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction (http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter). He recently finished a far-future novel,
Empire Ship
. Come visit Chris at his website (www.sff.net/people/mckitterick), blog (mckitterick.livejournal.com), or Facebook page.