What I was really afraid of was that QUENTIAM was wrong. That, unknown to It, Haradil had somehow discovered on the planet she’d destroyed some evidence of non-DNA-based life, existing right alongside the seeded anaerobes. I was afraid that she had blown up the place for precisely that reason. That she had become an Arlbenist, melded to the Great Mission, and lost to us.
If there had been panspermic, non-seeded life there, QUENTIAM should have known about it. QUENTIAM had had enough sensors in that star system to transmit detailed explosion data, including what Seliku had called “warping.” We had all asked QUENTIAM, Seliku and Bej and Camy and I and probably also the Mori, if the planet had held non-DNA-based life. It had said no. QUENTIAM could withhold information, but It could not lie.
Of course, if the panspermic life was very new, and in an isolated corner of the planet, it’s possible that QUENTIAM might not have known about it and Haradil had.
*Grow the bodies I specified, QUENTIAM.*
*I have already begun. But, I repeat, you cannot get down to Paletej in them.*
*We can get as far as the t-hole above it.*
*Yes. It is a universal t-hole.*
*As they all should be.*
It didn’t answer. Uncrumpling the durable in my hand, the sheet of symbols I could not understand, I realized that probably Seliku could read them. She was a cosmologist. I went to look for my sisters, my other selves, my solace in this suddenly icy city by the soft sea.
By the time our bodies were ready, so was our shuttle. Nano-built on one of Calyx’s many orbitals, it was a sprawling thing, fragile as a flower except for the tough nano-maintained force shield that surrounded it. The shield was protection against stray meteors and other cosmic junk. The shuttle, which didn’t need to survive an atmospheric entry, didn’t need to be durable.
Our bodies did. They turned out to be pretty much as I’d envisioned, and not too different from the one I was wearing now except for being much lighter and less muscular. Short, two legs, four tentacles ending in superflexible digits. My current webbed feet had been replaced with tough feet with prehensile toes, complementing the prehensile tail, in case ˄17843 had plants large enough to climb. We weren’t sure what specific flora to expect there, and the Mori weren’t sharing information.
The new body’s ears could detect the widest possible range of sound waves; electromagnetic sensing was as good as feasible in a biological; smell was stronger than even in celwyns. A double layer of fine, shit-brown fur made us as weatherproof as we’d need to be for the temperature range, although at the upper end, we might be a bit uncomfortable.
“Not very pretty, are they,” Camy said, gazing at the full-grown bodies in their clear vats. “The faces are so flat.”
“You could have ordered modifications earlier,” I pointed out, “but you said you didn’t care.”
“I don’t care.”
Seliku said, “QUENTIAM, are you ready to begin uploads?”
“Yes.” Its deepest, most authoritative tone; It was offended.
“We’re ready, too.” But the co-vats had begun to assemble even before she finished speaking. I climbed into mine, lay down, and was instantly asleep.
When I woke, an unknowable time later, the download was complete. I climbed out of my vat simultaneously with my sisters. It was a hard climb; we were now engineered for a gravity one-third less than Calyx’s. But that wasn’t the reason that we gazed at each other in dismay.
“Are… are you all right?”
“Yes,” Seliku said. “Are you?”
“Yes, but…”
But I’d had to ask. Looking at Seliku, Camy, Bej as we stood in our new dull fur, our new flat faces, I hadn’t automatically known that, yes, they were all right because otherwise QUENTIAM would have told me. I’d had to look, to question. Camy put her hand to her head and I knew what she was thinking: QUENTIAM was gone. We were without implants. We were on our own, not even able to image each other in real-time if one of us stepped into the next room.
“It feels very strange,” Bej said softly. “How will we…”
“We will,” Seliku said. “Because we must.”
I felt myself nodding. We would, because we must.
QUENTIAM said, “The shuttle can take you up to the orbital now, and your t-hole shuttle is ready there.”
“Not yet,” I said, not without pleasure. It’s hard to surprise QUENTIAM, but I guessed that we were doing it now. ‘There’s more things I want to prepare.”
“More things?” Definitely offended. I saw Bej grin slightly at Camy.
“Yes,” I said, savoring the moment. “We’ll be ready to go soon.”
The four of us waddled laboriously—curse this gravity—to my lab. I had set it up days ago in a room grown near the vat room. Ostensibly the lab’s purpose was to study the microbiology of the flowers Bej and Camy had designed and QUENTIAM had created for Calyx, just as if they were biologicals or cyborgs that had naturally evolved from seedings. And I had done some of that work, storing the data in QUENTIAM, carefully packing and storing both specimens and experimental materials in opaque canisters for any future biologists who might want them. But that was not all I had done.
*QUENTIAM, give me—*
Give me nothing. It couldn’t hear me. I had no implant.
The eeriest sensation came over me then: I am dead. It was a thousand-fold-stronger version of what I had felt moments before, in the vat room. I was detached, unconnected, alone, in the supreme isolation of death.
But of course I was not. My sister-selves were there, and I clutched Bej’s hand. She seemed to understand. We were not alone, not cut off, not dead. We had each other.
This must be what Haradil felt. And she did not have the rest of us.
For a brief moment I hated QUENTIAM. It had done this, It and Its parameters for permissible human behavior. QUENTIAM had gone along with this brutal Morit “justice,” and now Haradil…
Camy said quietly, “It must be even worse for her. Because… you know.”
We all knew.
There are five possible states for a human being. Without implants, as we were now. Implanted, which is the normal state. A machine body, which is really just a much heightened version of implants plus a virtually indestructible body. Upload, which is bodiless but still a separate subprogram within QUENTIAM, with its own boundaries. And merged, in which individual identity is temporarily lost in the larger membrane-self of QUENTIAM. Few humans merge, and most never return. Those that do are never really the same.
Haradil, three bond-times ago, had merged with QUENTIAM.
It had been after a bad love affair. We all took those hard; I thought of Camy and Bej’s ravaged looks when I’d landed on Calyx. We were all intemperate, single-minded in romance as in all else. But Haradil, who had never really chosen a field of work, had been the one who tried to handle the emotional pain by merging with QUENTIAM. And she had come back calmer but almost totally silent, unwilling to tell us what it had been like. “Not unwilling,” she’d finally said. “Unable. It’s an experience you can’t put into words.” It had been the longest speech she’d made since returning.