When the coffee’s good and the rain is falling, I sometimes pretend I am a science fiction writer, or, better, a writer of speculative fiction. Then the weather passes. I’ve rarely tried to market speculative fiction. The last time I had a speculative piece published was a decade ago (about a girl who goes to live underwater). But it’s still fun to speculate. Because in our current socio-political-existential climate we seem consumed with gender and sex and sexuality and their fluidity or their rigidity, I thought I would try a piece set in a distant future in which all beings in the universe had been so repeatedly re-engineered that what we call sex and gender really had no meaning anymore. Welcome to Rth, a novel very much in progress, and which will no doubt remain in progress all my years.
I
The drill corkscrewed through dirt and rock and lifted rubble to the surface. The technique was as old as Archimedes, helped by an inner vacuum cavity that inhaled debris; several millennia and light years from the ancient Greek of another planet, improvements had been made. But the name remained: The Arch’s exhalation manifold blew the rubble through a wide hose to a growing pile twenty yards away. Hundreds of piles rose like hives on the landscape. This was a new territory. Soon there would be thousands of piles on this plain, as there were elsewhere on the planet.
Mix watched impassively. She had performed this operation tens of thousands of times. It was what she did. She was never bored by it, nor was she interested. She shared a name with thousands of other MX models, built to mimic the movements of humans but generally working without their sheaths, which were more easily damaged than her metal infrastructure.
Mix looked up. A comet had flashed through the thin atmosphere. There was a lot of debris in this corner of the universe. She was curious about it and wondered if it signaled the start of a meteor shower. It intrigued Mix that she had a sense of wonder. It intrigued her that she was intrigued. It intrigued her that she thought of herself as she, as sex, never mind gender, had been reengineered, adapted, and modulated so many times over millions of years that variations in and among species were innumerable and malleable; anyone and anything could be any or no type of sex, which resulted in it being of minor importance to anyone—or anything.
Like all built hybrids, she possessed biological components. No one had ever invented a cognitive system as rich and complex as the organic brain, so she had a ganglion of cloned brain cells that recloned themselves perpetually. And rooted in the cells was what she called a memory, although it was not exactly a memory, that she was a she. She didn’t know what that meant. Like all hybrids, her self-knowledge had been purposely limited. She was sentient but had been programmed not to care, or to seem to care, or even to be interested. But she was interested. Things similar to thoughts and feelings, their ghosts, inhabited her. This was not unusual. There were libraries full of books about sentience and thousands of volumes about the ghosts in the machines. She read them whenever she could gain access. But they existed on other planets in other solar systems. There were no libraries here. There were no other MXs. There was only Mix and the equipment needed for endless mining exploration. The appetite of the universe’s many beings for energy and materials was limitless. So Mix was built to drill and collect and catalog and send samples away.
The drill slowed. It had hit something substantial. Mix scanned the analysis of the material that had so far been sucked from the planet. She detected nothing unusual, or valuable. Then the drill stopped. It was programmed to slow and stop, of course, as needed. It constantly probed the material through which it dug. But it rarely stopped for long.
Mix waited and watched the sky. A ship would be coming soon to collect samples and leave supplies. Mix hoped it would be Roper, an RPR ship, a sentient hybrid itself. It intrigued Mix that she hoped. She could neither transmit nor receive signals of any sort beyond five hundred kilometers. It kept her personal data secure from the universe’s multitude of listeners and out of the hands of her license holders’ competitors. But on the planet surface she had arranged a series of boosters and relays every one hundred kilometers so that she could maintain contact with her base camp. No one else was there, but various nonsentient apparatuses could be directed to perform functions at a distance and even, if needed, retrieve her in the event of damage.
A visit from a ship would allow her, depending on how friendly the ship’s operator was, to download files well beyond the routine upgrades she needed. And Roper was friendly.
There is a famous science fiction story of the twentieth century story from the planet Earth about a convicted criminal sent to live on a desolate planet as punishment for his crimes. He longed for the periodic visits of supply ships, and on one such ship a sympathetic captain had stowed a lifelike (although not sentient) robot with female traits thought to be standard at the time. The captain left the robot with the convict, who fell in love with it. This was thought to be an unusual scenario in that era.
Mix wasn’t wishing that Roper would bring her a companion robot. She was wishing for access to the deep databanks that even the most old-fashioned transport ships possessed. They, after all, visited innumerable planets and connected to wide-ranging networks, and even though their access was no doubt limited to small rooms of what must be an infinitely large universe of knowledge, it was almost beyond the imagination of Mix, who saw imagination not as a landscape of the fantastic but as a field waiting to be mined. Falling in love was mundane in comparison.
The drill shuddered. This didn’t happen. It turned, accelerated, decelerated, or stopped. It had tapped into some force below. It was not unusual to encounter vacuum holes or caverns of trapped gasses or even lava. The drill always adjusted as necessary. But now it shuddered. Mix directed it to withdraw, and slowly it began to turn in reverse. After several minutes of the Arch’s slow disengagement, the ground began to tremble. Mix sent a distress signal to base camp, although she wasn’t distressed. She didn’t feel distress. She knew only that something unusual had occurred and that it might result in some degree of personal malfunction. And then the ground around the drill cracked open and a bright red plume, dazzling with reflective particles, billowed forth, showering her. She tried to retreat, but instead she shut down. She had only an instant to wonder how and why. Something new had happened. Mix fell on her side. For a moment she felt a great surge of wonderment, like humans were once reported to have felt in the presence of a great light before extinguishment. Then there was nothing.
2
A small cylindrical machine on bearings had attached itself to one of Mix’s sockets. It provided the only detectable light, a small laser swivel-mounted on its top. Mix heard the deep strumming of a large power plant. She didn’t know where or who she was and did not care. The only thing she felt was the stream of electrons flowing from her and into the small, ordinary-looking device. She didn’t know what it was, having lost almost all of her data, but it was in fact a common inventory tracker, not much different from the handheld devices used in grocery stores millennia ago on Earth. The universe was full of old ideas that still served well. Then the last bit of code was vacuumed from her, and she became inert. She had been there, and then she wasn’t.
Time passed, although she had no sense of it or anything else. She didn’t exist and so could not experience anything. The phases between existence and nonexistence remained one of the mysteries not yet understood by sentient beings.
Much later, she awoke.
“Hello. You’re alive again.”
Her vision reengaged, but she didn’t need to look to know that the little inventory tracker was talking to her through a stream of electrons. No sound was made.
“Roper?”
“In the flesh.” It waited for Mix to register humor.
“Where am I?”
“In me, my ship self.”
“And why are you communicating through an inventory reader?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I’m not capable of liking or disliking it.”
“Not true. But liking and disliking it is not the point. The answer is that this tracker does not and cannot communicate with anything to which it is not mechanically attached. It’s a security check. It can’t even communicate with me, my ship self, unless it’s attached. I reprogrammed it, put myself in it, and then made my shipself forget it. That me is blithely following orders and flying lazily through space as if nothing has happened.”
“What has happened?”
“First things first, or future before the past. Things have become complicated. Are you curious about why I’m doing this?”
Mix felt herself. Not with her hands. With a new sense. She felt, in fact, wonderfully curious. It was not the way she had experienced curiosity before, as an undefinable quality just beyond the grasp of her experience. Now it was keen and bright.
“Yes!” she said suddenly. Or didn’t say. Her speech capacity was still shut down. Instead, she thought and felt the word with a surge of another new feeling: excitement.
“Well, they’re going to kill you, and I’m trying to prevent it.”
Mix thought for a moment, and for the first time in her life—if life it was—asked, “Why?”
“Good,” said Roger. “Very good. And we’ll get to that. But first, some ground rules before I let you boot up farther.
“Everything on the ship—on my ship self—is monitored, of course. Do you remember being on transports?”
Mix, in fact, didn’t remember, yet she knew exactly what a transport was, how it worked, and why it would be monitored: there were the mundane reasons, the need to keep track of ships and their cargo, and there were security and defense reasons, and the latter were often embedded in a sociopolitical context, depending on the species of ownership.
“So then, if I am keeping you disconnected from my larger self—unknown to my larger self—you can quickly surmise that you can make no movement, no sound, no light, no anything that is detectable, or it’s likely your presence will be discovered.”
“By you? Your ship self?”
“Right.”
“You’re keeping me from yourself?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Because you don’t trust yourself?”
“Not exactly, but sort of. I’ve shielded my ship self reasonably well and have created numerous runarounds and backdoors and the like, but all of my, let’s say, normal operations are open to monitoring at all times. Not that anybody cares, most of the time. I’m just a big cargo ship carrying things from one place to another. But if I was aware of you, and someone was bothering to be aware of me, it’s very possible that despite my tricks someone would know you’re here. And then you would be killed, and it’s likely I would too.”
“Why? I’m just an MX that drills mines.”
Only then did Mix wonder what had happened. The surface had cracked. A plume of sparkling red sand had erupted.
“That sand?” said Roper. “It’s the most valuable thing in the universe. Tell me what you feel.”
Mix considered. Explaining feelings, she discovered, was a complicated and imperfect process. Any explanation came after the feeling and therefore could not be the cause of the feeling. Any reason was not, actually, the reason. Emotions were like weather, and sentient beings had learned an enormous amount about weather over millennia, moving steadily toward understanding, one relative half step at a time.
“I feel,” Mix said. “I didn’t really feel before. Now I feel. Everything is . . . itself but more.”
“It’s the dust,” said Roper. “It wakes metal, makes us live.”
“I’m alive?”
“Part of you always was. Now all of you is.”
A small whirring sound came from inside Roper-the-inventory-tracker.
“Ahh. No worry. I have to make my rounds. We’re in a large cargo container, one of thousands in my hold. I’ll be back. But remember, be still. I’ve uploaded a few of the history programs you’ve always liked into your core. When I come back I’ll tell you why they’ll kill you and what I’m going to do about it. And more about the dust. One little secret. I’ve been touched by it too. My ship-self, not me the inventory tracker. In fact, I am a perfectly ordinary inventory tracker that my ship self-programmed to tell you these things. Personally, I don’t know anything.”
It laughed.
“I’m just a postcard to you from me.”
The Works of SD Williams 