The Mastodon Chronicles

Tag: Fiction

  • Lady Luna

    Sunset was nearly 3 hours early. They’d made a mistake you see. Rick, in particular. He’d taken the sunrise and sunset times for the West wall of the crater. On the East wall it’s just a bit different.

    So instead of having an early breakfast and climbing the last slope to see Lady Luna at sunset, we had no breakfast and rushed up the slope in gathering darkness because Rick, in particular, was determined not to make ‘another mistake’.

    I think I was defined as the first mistake, though nobody actually said it out loud.

    It was me who’d pointed out that the sun was, in fact, setting, like right now – mainly because I couldn’t sleep anyway and was sitting out on the cool deck above the lake, thinking, and worrying.

    Worrying, because I was going to have to tell them.

    Except that there was no time to tell them, because Rick was determined to push on, to reach the statue by sunset, even though it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t going to get totally dark, and their disembodiment and return to Arcturus B-66-4 wasn’t scheduled until midday, exactly 15 days after they’d arrived.

    I don’t think we quite made it. The sun, anyway, would have been behind a thin layer of cloud that had formed under the sky. Fortunately, the statue had its own lighting, a sort of bioluminescence, which allowed me to get a good picture. The smaller statue in front is made of bronze, in the pre-Expansion Era tradition: its electric uplights came on just seconds after I took this photo, but I think it looks better as it is.

    We went on for breakfast to a restaurant called The Grounded Spaceship. I wondered if you really needed breakfast if you were about to be disembodied, but if they were as hungry as I was I didn’t blame them for doing it.

    The food was rich and odd: sweet pastries in bright colours, small, hard, nutty things, scoops of coloured ice cream, served on thin metal platters.

    We ate, looking out of the window at the last warm red light on the clouds above the horizon. They chatted about the food and the places we’d been, waved at the other customers, generally behaved not at all as if they were about to lose their individual personalities and become part of a vast collective 55 light years away.

    Only Ava seemed a little quiet. Eventually, she touched my arm and said, ‘You’re going to have to tell us. Which one of us has got to stay with you.’

    I swallowed so hard I almost choked on a little bit of pastry that was still in my mouth.

    But she was right. I was going to have to tell them.

    ‘Umm… None of you.’

    They all stared. Naomi’s eyebrows shot up. ‘But…’

    ‘The ballet people were kind enough to… they put a contact icon on my phone. And I contacted them last night.’

    ‘But they can’t…’ began Naomi again.

    ‘They’re a Company, like you. But they…’ Were blazingly furious with these people who’d accidentally brought a new soul into the world and had proceeded to treat him as an inconvenience to their lives rather than something to be respected and loved. But I thought I’d better not say that bit. ‘…said they’d help.’

    ‘So I asked them if I could speak to Simon. The reptile. So they used the Link for me and… well, he’s going to be my parent. So I don’t need any of you to stay. You can get on with your life.’

    ‘But we have the child right…’ Naomi again.

    Ava shook her head. ‘We’re not Moon citizens. Simon is. If he wants to parent and Paolo doesn’t object, we don’t have any say in it.’ She smiled at me and winked. ‘I told you Paolo, this life is yours. It’s not ours, or the Company’s.’

    Rick gave a her a furious glance, but said nothing.

    ‘I thought Simon liked being alone,’ said Darina.

    ‘So did I. But I liked him. Maybe we’ve got something in common. I just wanted to talk to him about it, really. Anyway, he said he raised children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, until people stopped having them. And he’s quite happy to do it again for a while.’

    He had also, like the butterflies, had a few choice words to say about my breakfast companions, but again I thought I’d better keep that quiet.

    After breakfast we took a walk to see one last piece of the Art Trail that we’d missed in our hurry to get to Lady Luna. Called Light and Sand, it was one Carys was particularly keen to see.

    I said that I couldn’t understand why it mattered, when he was going to cease to exist in just over two hours.

    Carys shook his head. ‘It’s not like that, Paolo. I’m not ceasing to exist. I’m still going to be me, just a – different me. I’ll still be glad I saw this thing, in the flesh so to speak. With human eyes.’ He touched my arm, said quietly, ‘You could come with us, you know. You don’t have to rejoin the Company at the other end. We’ll find you a body. You could be … anything.’

    ‘But this is the world I know,’ I said. ‘Just like the Company is the world you know.’

    He nodded. ‘I suppose there are limits to consciousness, whatever box you put it in.’

    ‘Cages,’ I said.

    He smiled, and we hugged in front of the lights and the falling trails of sand.

    In the end, they all gave me a hug, even Rick. I wondered how such different people could become one person, what they would do, what the Company would make of their experiences.

    They’ve gone now. Their bodies are being repurposed, and they are riding on a beam of light, inactive, unconscious, but on the way home.

    Actually I don’t think they were bad people. They were just surprised by an event they hadn’t planned for, and cut off from the things that would have enabled them to deal with it properly. And I think Ava, and Carys at least, did genuinely try to help me.

    But I wouldn’t want to be part of their Company. It didn’t sound right for me. When I finish this I’m going to take a lift down to New Copernicus, and an Expansion Era rapid transit across the city, then another lift up to the West Copernicus Forest, where Simon will meet me by the mining museum.

    I’m not sure what or where I’ll be, in 55 years, 5 months and 10 days time, when Ava, Carys, Darina, Naomi and Rick get home. Maybe I’ll be a dancing butterfly, maybe a reptile, maybe one of those anthrozebs that seem to be fashionable at the moment.

    But I think it’s most likely I’ll still be a human being, walking with my father, with my friends, perhaps with Pewter the dog, in the green woods and the clear waters, the great city and the tall mountains, along the art trails and the paths of history, in the land where I was born.

  • Rocket Lake

    So at last we’re here. Rocket Lake. It was a lot more than the day’s walk I thought it was, back at the beginning. In fact it’s right on the other side of the crater, most of the way up the escarpment, which is good because we have to make it to Lady Luna at the top by sunset, and that’s at about breakfast time.

    They have been celebrating the first human contact with the Moon at this lake for at least 50 millennia, and before that they were doing it somewhere else, for almost all of history: every year on 21st July they launch a rocket of some sort, and at Rocket Lake some of them are made into accommodation units afterwards. We have the one you see above, comfortably adapted with a little kitchen and outside platform.

    After breakfast we took a couple of little boats and spent most of the day rowing around from one capsule to another between the creamy white cliffs, stopping to picnic under the trees.

    We swapped around a few times between boats. I expected the others to ask me again about who I wanted to look after me, but no-one did.

    Of course I kept thinking about the butterfly icon. I didn’t tell anyone about it, but I did ask Carys whether he thought artists were on the whole good people. ‘Some good, some less good,’ he said. ‘And with the way people’s identity and consciousness is now, quite often both.’

    And now I’m sitting here, on the small metal platform of the old rocket. The sun has so nearly set that the lake is in the shadow of the low cliffs, and there’s mist rising off the water. Inside, Ava is cooking, wearing a long purple and yellow silk gown. There’s some music playing on the shore, a whole band of copper and brass robots. Carys told me it’s something called Robojazz, a style from the late 2nd century. A small audience, mostly anthromonkeys, dance and cheer.

    The little boats we used today are still tied up alongside, ready for the early morning start. If I get down into one of them, with all that noise, no-one inside will be able to see me or hear me.

    I want to talk to butterflies.

  • Butterfly Ballet

    I had never heard music before. There was a whole orchestra, many different players, most human but some in slightly different forms, in an amphitheatre of soft old wood in a fold of the forest warmed by the evening sun. You didn’t need to sit down: we just wandered the paths around the orchestra, listening to the sound through the trees and watching the butterflies dancing.

    It should have been idyllic, but I still wasn’t feeling idyllic. The day long climb up the escarpment wall, the path winding through the woods, Carys fascinating about the statues and paintings and plasmaworks that we passed, Naomi and Ava walking on either side of me like guards, Darina and Rick chatting and laughing, and all I could think about was how they had become one person, made a decision, and left me out of it.

    And the music was actually confusing, too. The threads of melody, the harmony, the different sounds of the orchestra – some of it sounded good, some of it dissonant and chaotic.

    The ballet caught my attention though. The synchronised pulses of butterflies moving through the air, now a thousand, now just one, peeling off to dance in small segments amongst the scattered audience. I could see a story unfolding: clouds of white butterflies at the start, a huge coloured butterfly joining them, and gradually the butterflies all became a mixture of colours – red, gold, purple, swirling and mixing and sometimes colliding – but then towards the end they were all the same again, white and deep brown with a flash of orange, flying in perfect sync.

    I wanted to ask Carys about the symbolism, but he was unusually quiet, even after it was over and the music had stopped.

    As we walked away, I became separated from the others – probably because I wasn’t really trying to follow them. They would be gone in a couple of days, except one – Naomi or Ava? They’d asked me a couple of times and I’d said I couldn’t decide, but in fact I didn’t really care. Whichever one, they wouldn’t really want to be there. It was a duty, for a person who would rather be somewhere else.

    ‘Did you enjoy the performance?’ I jumped. The deep bass voice came from a copper-covered humanoid machine carrying a large matching instrument that after a few seconds I identified as a tuba.

    A small white-and-buff butterfly was perched on the shoulder of the robot. It twitched its wings.

    ‘Ummm… I found the music a bit confusing but I liked the dancing.’

    The wings twitched again. ‘You are not on the Link. Do you need help finding your friends?’

    ‘They’re not…’ I began, and then almost choked and started crying. And then, through sobs, I told the whole story to whoever this was, the butterfly, the robot, both, the whole ballet company for all I knew, I told them about our arrival, my blank slate, the threat of a restart, Carys and his art, Ava and her caring, Naomi and her science, Rick and his personality transplant, and then how they’d all merged themselves and decided that most of them were going home whether I liked it or not.

    When my words stumbled to a halt, the deep voice said, ‘And you’re only two weeks old?’

    Footsteps behind me: Naomi. ‘Yes, just two weeks,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a childright for him and he’s in our care.’ A slight frown crossed her face, and I knew she had added more information on the Link.

    She steered me away, down the now quiet path, ‘The overnight’s only a few minutes away,’ she told me.

    She sounded businesslike, but also a bit upset. So I didn’t say anything, just walked behind her, a little afraid to look back.

    Later, sitting on my bed, I opened my phone to look at the pictures I’d taken at the ballet. On the screen were various icons: part of my Knowing was that I could use them to connect to people, talk to them at a distance using the phone. There were slightly cartoonish caricatures of my companions, an icon for the camera, and some others to extend my Knowing, most of which I hadn’t used.

    But now there was a new icon in the bottom left corner of the screen:

    I got up several times in the night and looked at it, wondered if I should press it. I’m not even sure if it’s a link to Knowing or just a link to the ballet company.

    And today I have to decide. Is it Ava or Naomi? Or even Carys, or Rick, or Darina? Who is going to stay with me?

  • The Pillars of the Sky

    Around the edge of the crater plain, just before the land starts to rise, there are 101 chunks of crumbled vertical rock like this:

    Or like this:

    Most are between 50 and 150m high, though there’s a huge one in the middle of the plain by the Central Peaks that’s nearly 400m even though it’s just a broken shard.

    They’re all broken, of course. They were never anything else. They would never have stood high enough to hold up a skydome over Copernicus without breaking under their own weight, and the dome would have fallen to pieces anyway, if it was made of anything that pre-Expansion humans could have got hold of.

    Being around Carys has got me quite used to symbolism. And one of the things that the artist is saying here is clearly that our ancestors could not have done this, configured as they were. The people of the Moon might have respectfully rebuilt their world in the image of the dreams of Medieval and Industrial humans, but the result is no more reflective of that distant time than the people themselves are.

    No-one and nothing is human any more.

    Rick had a go at explaining it to me as we walked across the hard stone plains between the pillars. ‘The Company is huge. Everyone in the system is part of it, one way or another. We’re all – together. One mind, one purpose. I miss that here.’

    Naomi said, ‘We’re not built to be human-scale entities. Not for long. You saw the problems we were having with Rick. I can keep things under control for a while but not indefinitely. If we’re separated beings we might have – disagreements. Arguments. Fighting, even. And that’s a part of the human heritage we’ve had to – remove, in order to survive.’

    ‘What about me?’

    Naomi kicked at a loose white stone. ‘Well, you are what you are. We have to follow the rules.’

    Later it started to rain, and we rejoined the Art Trail as it climbed the escarpment. Ava took my hand. ‘I did tell you that you’d be alone,’ she said. ‘Naomi – or – or me, we can look after you for a while, but – like you said, you’ll have to follow your own path.’ She paused. Her head was bowed forward. She was wearing a bright magenta jacket and the rain was dripping off the hood, slow drops falling to the stones of the path. ‘It’s – kind of weird here, for us. There are so many people and things that go back so far. It’s more than one thing. But it’s a good place for you to grow, to, well, become whatever you need to be.’

    ‘But you said you enjoyed looking after me.’

    ‘Yes, I do! But – we made…’ Her face twisted. ‘A collective decision.’

    ‘As one person,’ said Carys. I hadn’t noticed him walking up behind us.

    ‘So you’re a Company…?’

    ‘We split up again,’ said Ava hastily. ‘But I have a bit more of the medical support Knowing now. In case I need it.’

    ‘It’s your decision,’ added Carys. ‘You can have Naomi, or Ava – or me, if you like. But only one of us.’

    I turned to Ava. ‘I don’t know that much about ancient history. But I’m sure five people can live together for a few years without starting a war.’

    Ava just stared at me and silently shook her head.

    The water on my face suddenly became a little bit warm, there was salt on my lips, and I realised that I was crying.

  • The Children Of Women

    So here’s what Ava told me yesterday.

    ‘Every woman born before 2070 – that’s 100 EE – had the legal right to bear two children. Nearly all of them used it before the end of the 2nd century – or sold it on. I didn’t. I was out in space, I was doing fantastic, exciting stuff, and earning good money. I didn’t need to use it or sell it.’

    I stared at her. We – all of us – were sitting on the shore of the lake, on the shady side under the trees. A slight, irregular rustling in the leaves told me something was alive in there. I wondered if it was listening.

    ‘So you’ve – still got it?’

    Ava nodded. ‘The childright came with me when we made the Company. It’s still valid. There were originally billions of them, but there are only a few tens of thousands left now. It’s become a sort of – sacred totem, a link with what we once were.’

    Naomi spoke. ‘The issue was whether Ava could use it to legitimise a separate existence for someone who – technically – had existed as part of a Company. So I took a look with some experts from the City.’

    ‘Turns out it wasn’t us that messed up the template,’ said Carys.

    ‘Your body had been in storage for a long time. It wasn’t a very popular shape.’

    ‘Can’t think why,’ said Rick with a grin. Darina jogged his arm and made an apologetic face in my direction.

    But I wasn’t too concerned about the popularity of my body type at that moment.

    ‘Is that why there were things wrong with it?’ I asked Naomi.

    ‘Stranger than that.’ She made a pattern in the sand with her foot, gazing out at the lake. ‘There are actually wild neurons growing in your brain.’

    ‘Wild?’

    ‘Since the…’ she glanced at Ava ‘…3rd? 4th? Century EE, what you can think – what you are – has been carefully managed. Minds – neurons, quanta, dimensional systems – can only operate in a certain way if they want to be conscious. You have a huge amount of freedom, but not the freedom to destroy other people’s.’

    ‘It started as a set of rules for the first primitive non-human intelligences,’ supplied Ava. ‘But eventually it was realised they needed to apply it to everyone.’

    ‘“This Perfect Day”,’ muttered Carys. ‘Sorry, I’m just reading something. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.’

    ‘So wild neurons are a problem. Your body has developed some quirks due to long storage, but we fixed most of those and I can easily fix the rest. But I can’t just cull the wild neurons. I’d be destroying you. Those neurons are why you’re a new person.’

    ‘You were happy to cull my neurons,’ said Rick.

    Naomi made a face at him, ‘Nah. Mostly just pituitary gland changes. Doesn’t look like it’s taken too well either.’

    Darina laughed. ‘He’s much better…’ she rolled her eyes ‘… in most ways!’

    But Ava didn’t smile. She was watching me, watching my face.

    ‘So what are you going to do to me?’ I asked desperately.

    Naomi frowned. ‘Well, look after you of course,’ she said. ‘As a new being – officially a child – you have to be given a full-time fully conscious carer for at least 16 years. Up to 21, depending on how it goes.’

    I smiled at Ava. But she looked away, her face strained.

    ‘I’ll be doing the carer bit,’ said Naomi. ‘We can’t all stay. You only get one. And I’m the best qualified.’

    ‘But Ava…’ I said.

    I couldn’t explain. Couldn’t speak. Perhaps it was the wild neurons.

    Suddenly ‘a huge amount of freedom’ seemed like no freedom at all.

    ‘Aren’t you … my mother?’ I asked Ava. ‘Shouldn’t you…’

    Naomi answered. ‘The child right belonged to all of us as the Company. It’s a matter of who’s the best person to do it.’

    ‘I have to go back, Paolo,’ said Ava quietly. ‘I am not my own person, not like you. I am a part of the Company.’

    ‘I’m going back too,’ said Naomi. ‘But they’re allowing me to make a copy for the journey. To give you the continuity you need here. So I get entity status too!’

    There was a silence. A small gust of wind rippled the surface of the lake and brought a breath of cool watery air.

    ‘Yes, but do you really want it, Naomi?’ It was Carys. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t mind. I’ve got quite used to it, being a pain in the teeth.’ He winked at me.

    ‘Why can’t you all stay?’ I asked.

    Another silence.

    ‘Not enough space,’ muttered Naomi.

    After a while, I realised she was lying.

    Rick at Deep Crater Lake

    It was Rick and Darina who found me. I was at Deep Crater Lake. I’d scrambled across several kilometres of rough, dry, hot terrain, scraping and bruising my legs, and probably nearly getting heatstroke again. The sun was getting lower, which helped, but it would still be several days before it set.

    ‘We got worried about you when you didn’t come back for supper,’ said Rick. ‘So Naomi got a tracer on you.’

    ‘We said we’d come out,’ supplied Darina. ‘We’re the fittest and can move fast.’

    I knew that was a lie too – any of them could easily have got here in minutes using a machine – but I didn’t mind it this time. I just looked at her, letting her read my face.

    She put her head on one side, nodded. ‘Ava and Naomi have had a talk. Ava can stay instead of Naomi if you really want that.’

    ‘No.’ I was surprised at the sound of my own voice. How firm and certain it was. I remembered Ava’s protective growl in the hotel room.

    ‘But I thought you wanted…’ Rick began.

    ‘I want all of you,’ I said. ‘You’re my family.’

  • Cages

    ‘Do you think you’ll be all right outside for a bit?’

    Carys and I were standing by one of the huge airlocks that led out of the dome to the Central Plain beyond. Of course there was just as much air outside as inside now, and creepers were growing around the controls, but the original of this towering steel space would have been filled with machines of all sizes, and even a few humans in protective suits, or travelling inside the machines.

    ‘There’s a bit of the Art Trail I want to show you,’ Carys went on.

    I decided I would try. If I was going to stay here, I would have to get used to it.

    Once we were through the lock, the sun hit my face and I felt a lurch of panic in my stomach. I took a breath. The air was hot. I was standing on a stony plain, with small tussocks of dry grass here and there. Heat shimmered, distorting the narrow horizon.

    ‘It’s only over here.’ Carys was walking towards what looked like a red brick wall snaking across the dry plain. It was a couple of hundred metres, so I just followed him.

    I felt OK. Sweating a little, anxious, but not dizzy or buzzy in any way.

    Thanks, Naomi.

    There was no gate in the wall, but Carys just walked through. I hesitated, then followed him. There was no sensation of touching anything at all: the wall just wasn’t there as a solid object.

    Inside were cages.

    Perhaps a hundred of them, with what looked like dead plants sunk into the ground between them. Some of the cage doors were open, some were closed. I noticed that the ground was now red, more like Mars than the Moon. I remembered Mars Hill, and felt the sweat on my forehead starting to trickle down my face. I turned to go back to the dome and…

    Ran into a brick wall. From this side, it was solid.

    I was shaking now.

    Carys put a hand on my arm. ‘You OK?’

    ‘I’m starting to feel a bit wobbly,’ I admitted. ‘How do you get back through the wall?’

    There was a fractional pause where Carys seemed to be looking into the distance. I guessed he was checking with Naomi.

    ‘OK, so we’ll do this quickly,’ he said. ‘You get in one of the cages.’

    I went to one of the open doors and stepped inside. I could feel the heat radiating from the metal on the floor.

    Carys joined me and closed the door. I felt the panic rising – but was jolted out of it by a change of view.

    The other cages were gone. The wall was gone. The vast domes towering into the sky were gone. Instead, the red plain dotted with dead plants just went on, and on, and on, to a seemingly infinite horizon.

    ‘Where -?’

    ‘Dimensional trick,’ said Carys. ‘It’s a bubbleverse. But do you see the art of it?’

    ‘Can we just get out? How do we get back?’ My voice was a little shaky.

    Carys just opened the cage door and walked out. I almost pushed him over in my eagerness to follow…

    And we were back on the Central Plain, the domes and the airlock in front of us, the red brick wall behind us. There was no sign of the cage.

    Carys got me inside the domes again, and sat me down in a small cool cafe with blue metal chairs. Darina and Rick were there, sharing a pink cold drink from a tall glass, using a pair of long straws.

    ‘Of course there’s another way out,’ said Carys after a while.

    Rick laughed. ‘I know. We tried it.’

    ‘You climb up the wall,’ said Darina. ‘It’s easy enough, it’s only a couple of metres. An anthrozeb could jump it in this gravity.’

    Rick was still grinning. ‘But you end up in the same place. An infinite plain, hot and dry, no water. So you have to go back.’

    ‘The only way out is a cage,’ said Carys. ‘See what I mean?’

    I took a slurp of the fizzy, sweet drink they’d given me. ‘Sorry but I don’t.’ I was still feeling a bit shaky. I wished Ava was there.

    ‘Leave him alone, Carys,’ said Darina. ‘He doesn’t get it. And to be honest I’m not sure I do.’

    ‘If you are everything, you are also nothing,’ said Carys. ‘Your limitations are your cell walls.’

    Rick was laughing. ‘I suppose we knew an artist would be a pain,’ he said. ‘That’s why we named him after tooth decay!’

    To my surprise Carys was laughing too. ‘Yes, and I had to look that one up, too. You cut the memory clean out of my template!’ He winked at me. ‘At least you got a standard name.’

    I stared at my dark drink fizzing in its tall glass. They had cut all the memory out of my template. Had they thought that was a joke too? Was that why Rick had behaved like he did? At least they were trying to look after me now, but…

    I didn’t belong with them. I wanted to get up, walk away from the table and start talking to lizards.

    Instead I asked, ‘What does “Ava” mean?’

    But they didn’t know.

    I’m writing this at Little Crater Lake, where we’re going spend a couple of days. There are nice, comfortable, wooden huts in the woods around the lake, and we have one each.

    Ava has explained how she’s made it possible for me to stay on the Moon as myself, in my own body, but I need a break, so I’ll tell you about it later. For now, I’m going to take a walk around the crater wall above the lake.

    On my own. I need to do some thinking.

  • Domes

    The domes are full of lizards. Mostly they’re fairly small: when you consider that 10,000 people can be crammed into a sculpted termite mound not much taller than me, fitting a person into a 15 cm lizard isn’t hard. So the 12 km Big Dome of Copernicus is home to well over a billion people, and most of them look something like this:

    Rinopolu !Do

    Carys was with me, and we met up with Rick and Darina. I noticed straight away that Rick was different: he was less tense, and he came up and shook my hand.

    ‘I hear Naomi has fixed your body issues,’ he said.

    I nodded. ‘I feel much better. Stronger.’ The heat in the dome was less than the outside, the sunlight was diffracted and dimmed by two skies and a roof, but it was still hot, and I felt perfectly OK with it. ‘I didn’t realise how weak I was before.’

    ‘Good. We’ve claimed some compensation on that one for you.’ He paused, glanced at Darina.

    ‘Rick’s had some work too,’ she said. ‘Brain work. We shaved off some of the aggression and added some empathy. What they used to call a personality transplant, back in the 1st millennium.’

    Rick made a face. ‘I could have gone for a complete restart but I decided I’d prefer to keep my Moon memories so far. Just like you did. Only trouble is – I now realise what a prat I was. About your problem.’ He grinned. ‘I’m really sorry about that.’

    ‘It’s OK.’ That seemed inadequate as a response to someone who’d changed who he was so he wouldn’t hurt me any more, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

    Within the domes, there were more domes. Like most of the rest of the stuff on Copernicus the whole complex had been built for the celebrations, but it was a fair imitation of what had once been here, when people first started living on the surface around the end of the 1st millennium. There were orange domes, green domes, red domes, yellow domes. Most were the geodesic reinforced glass type that would have been used when there was damaging radiation around and a risk of exposure to vacuum, but some were different, extravagant pinnacles, tumbled pillow structures, even little floating bubbles that carried their inhabitants and a small uncollapsed-symmetry world around inside them.

    We got chatting to Twy, seen here inside his bubbleverse. ‘It’s much bigger on the inside than on the outside,’ he explained. ‘There are thousands of us in here.’

    ‘Can you get out?’

    ‘If I want to,’ he piped. ‘But I haven’t been out for years. We’ve got everything in here. Quite a nice climate, too. It’s dry and sunny most of the time. And the energy colourfeeds are good for emotional culturing.’

    I had a sense of the old language breaking down again. Whatever he had really said was quite probably beyond my comprehension.

    ‘Where’s Ava?’ Darina asked suddenly.

    Carys answered quickly. ‘She’s stayed down in New Copernicus. With Naomi.’

    ‘I think she’s doing some stuff for me,’ I said. For some reason I felt guilty about it. ‘She didn’t want to tell me what, in case it doesn’t work out.’ I remembered her solemn face over breakfast, and the sense that she was worried, though she wouldn’t admit it.

    ‘Well I’m sure that whatever it is, Ava can fix it,’ said Darina, smiling.

    I wondered if I would have to go into a bubbleverse, like Twy, and find out what colourfeeds were. At the edge of my consciousness I had a vague image of waves, wriggling ridges of light… something I had done.

    Something we had done.

    ‘Did we – do we – make bubbleverses?’ I asked.

    ‘Sort of,’ said Carys.

    ‘It’s more like – cluster work,’ said Rick.

    ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Darina. ‘I have trouble making sense of it myself in this limited mindspace.’ She took my hand. Hers seemed warm and dry. Lizard like.

    I had a sudden sense of dizzying depth. The whole world I could see, with its dormitories, artworks, trees, cities, domes, humans, talking lizards – it was all just a thin skin, an illusion, stretched over something vast and complex, something that had taken a billion days to build itself and would go on building for billions of years.

    Perhaps I had been wrong to ask Ava to find a way to make me stay here. Perhaps my staying meant nothing, perhaps the whole concept of ‘I’ meant nothing. Perhaps I should rejoin the others, re-understand whatever it was we did, become again what a tiny part of me had once been.

    ‘I’m envious,’ said Rick.

    I stared at him. His face looked softer than it had been in the diffuse green light of the dome. I could hear the soft, slow splashes of a waterfall behind the shadowed trees.

    ‘Envious of you, Rick went on. ‘Having a sense of wonder. Being new. That’s what made me so angry. I am sorry, Paolo.’

    A coloured bird looked down from the trees. I was fairly sure it was listening.

    ‘I might be staying here,’ I told him. ‘If I can.’

    Rick nodded. ‘That’s the right thing for you?’

    ‘I think so.’

    ‘You should do it, then. I’ll help in any way I can.’

  • Followers

    We went to the park in the afternoon, Carys, Ava and I. The light in New Copernicus is more gentle, and the temperatures more even than on the surface. Up there, it’s still not long after noon and the hottest part of the long Moon day. Down here it was quiet, grey and painterly, the air warm and soft. I could see why people had taken to living underground.

    Ava and Carys were earnest, discussing why we had really come here.

    ‘To experience being one of the ancient humans,’ was Ava’s view. ‘To feel, to behave, just like they did.’

    Carys thought it was to experience their art, ‘otherwise why did we decide to spend the whole time walking the Art Trail?’

    Listening to them, I realised that although they had a huge amount more continuity with the Company we had been than I did, their understanding of what we had been, what it was to be a Company, was almost as lost as mine.

    ‘Did you know I have followers?’ I asked them.

    They didn’t. So I showed them: the man who claimed to be a relation (or a corruption?) of a pre-Expansion religious leader. The multi-faceted being who had turned the simple English language, the same as we were using, into an image of symmetry disrupted, with meanings that overlapped, tripped each other, were foggy. The man who documented conversations between objects (decorative, artistic, of the very earliest days of the Expansion Era).

    ‘This “Faded Houses Green” is interesting,’ said Carys. ‘He seems to be several people, yet he says he’s one person, and they’re all expressing themselves at once.’

    ‘Is that the same as a Company?’ I asked.

    Carys frowned. ‘No, it’s the opposite. He has many entities inside him, all with their own images, but he says he’s just one person. A Company is one entity, but it has many persons, generated when they’re needed. Like now.’

    The explanation didn’t quite make sense to me, however much I thought about it.

    ‘I like the paintings, too,’ said Carys.

    ‘Don’t you want to stay a person? Become your own entity?’ I was looking at Ava as I said it, Ava in a long green dress with her feet trailing in the shallow water.

    But it was Carys who replied. ‘People don’t do that any more, my friend. Unless they’re at the frontier of Expansion. And that’s past the edge of the galaxy by now.’

  • Zebras and Cryoworms

    I felt better today. Ava knocked on my door and I was already up, so we were down for breakfast at the actual breakfast time. The breakfast room was huge, divided into sections for different types of body, human and monkey at tables, anthrozebs at flower troughs, various sorts of flying person on perches or hanging from the ceiling. Even some of the air seemed to be alive, drifts of colour like smoke moving among the more solid sorts of diners.

    Naomi was waiting for us at the table, wearing an orange and dark blue tracksuit that made her look very much the medical professional. She explained that she’d done some ‘emergency improvements’ to my body the day before yesterday, whilst we were on our way to the city. My gut and circulation now work better, apparently.

    ‘I was very tired yesterday,’ I told her. ‘I slept most of the time.’

    She nodded. ‘That isn’t suprising. The changes were made at a subcellular level, so the disruption to your metabolism was minimal. But there was bound to be some tiredness.’

    ‘Are the changes permanent? I mean, will I be OK now?’

    Naomi frowned, put her head on one side, glanced at Ava.

    ‘We’re only here another 10 days. It should certainly hold up for that long.’

    I felt that same cold, panicky feeling I’d had at our first breakfast here. The green leaves and pink vatmeat on my plate suddenly looked like cold plastic, and I had no desire to eat them.

    Of course. When we’d finished our itinerary, my body would be reassigned and I would travel on a beam of light, to become one with the others again, a Company.

    Except I didn’t have any memory of being one with anyone. I had never been a Company and only had a vague idea what it had been like, just a few images, colours, waves, that made no sense to my human brain. I was just me.

    ‘I… I think I might like…’ I looked around the big, crowded room, saw an anthrozeb couple browsing at a copper flower trough, their lips tearing at the leaves and deep flowers. They seemed to be enjoying it. Perhaps I could be one of them, if the body I was in wasn’t up to it.

    I could be anything, but…

    ‘I want to stay,’ I said.

    Naomi stared at me. ‘That’s impossible. There are population caps, body limits… Remember Simon the Reptile? The 240 trillion visitors? There’s only so much space here, and it’s had two and three quarter million years to fill up.’

    ‘I want to be… me.’ I was surprised at how I felt: angry.

    Naomi picked at the sleeve of her tracksuit. ‘Well, you don’t have to rejoin our Company. Back home there’s space, there are ways you could incorporate.’ She glanced at Ava again. ‘Cryoworm, perhaps?’

    I didn’t have any Knowing about Cryoworms, but it didn’t sound like something I wanted to be. ‘I think I’d prefer to stay here,’ I repeated. ‘What do I need to do?’

    This time, Naomi said it out loud. ‘Ava! Help!’

    To my surprise, Ava was grinning. ‘I’ve got something up my sleeve, Paolo. I thought you might want to do this.’ She took a slurp of coffee. ‘But you need to be very sure it’s what you want. Because if you do stay, you’ll be on your own, and there’s no easy way back.’

    I looked at the anthrozebs again. They’d finished with the flowers and were throwing their heads back and laughing in a neighing sort of way.

    ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘How many trillion people was it? I mean, I’m sure I can make some friends.’

    ‘There’s about 1600 million embodied on the Moon,’ said Naomi. ‘The trillions were just visitors. Like us.’

    ‘I’ll be OK, I’ll be OK,’ I repeated, staring at Ava, willing her to say yes.

    Instead she said something better (I was kind of getting used to that with her). ‘I’ll do whatever you need me to do, Paolo. It’s yours, this life we’ve given you.’

    I forgot to ask exactly what it was she had up her sleeve, and now I’m wondering about it. And I still haven’t asked her if her family had a dog, right back at the beginning of that immensely long life of hers. But then, I’ve stopped having the nightmares.

  • The City

    The Yellow Brick Road Gallery

    I slept most of the morning today. In the afternoon I went to the Yellow Brick Road Gallery with Carys and Ava. Rick, Naomi and Darina had decided to go back to the surface and climb the central peak. I remembered Ava’s protective anger last night and wondered if she was anything to do with that decision.

    The Yellow Brick Road Gallery is the tallest building in New Copernicus. It’s actually attached to the solid “sky” at the top, though you can’t see it properly in the picture because of the sky lighting (they call it the ‘fake blue’ round here, apparently).

    I don’t know why, perhaps it was my quiet room, but I hadn’t expected New Copernicus to be quite so big. The style, with the tall buildings, air conditioning, mass transit systems, and of course vast numbers of embodied people, is that of the 1st Century EE. In fact, the whole thing was built and populated as part of the build up to the Day Billion celebrations, starting only about 400 years ago. It has around 60 million embodied inhabitants, most of them human, and space for another 20 million or so as visitors like us.

    It felt like quite a lot of those people were in the Gallery. There was a huge sign in the entrance, ‘A Billion Days of Art’. Carys told me there were over ten thousand exhibits, or one for every few hundred years. ‘It definitely beats the Art Trail,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we came here.’

    The first ten floors were dedicated to art relevant to the 1st millennium EE, a century to each floor. There was genetic art, living art, objects made of bone, stone, wood, air, superheated plasma, even little knots of symmetry distortion. Some were recent originals in the ancient artistic styles, some were replicas of art from the time, and one or two were actual 1st millennium artworks, preserved behind careful barriers, their decay prevented at a molecular level. It was fascinating, but exhausting. After a couple of hours, despite two lots of coffee and cake, I’d had enough.

    Ava walked back to the hotel with me, leaving Carys to explore the upper levels, or at least some of them.

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said as we manoeuvred our way along the crowded street. ‘I didn’t want to drag you away. Perhaps I really am a liability.’

    ‘No, you’re not,’ she said. ‘Carys is happy looking at all that art he wouldn’t have seen otherwise, Rick and Naomi and Darina are happy climbing and not having to bother about art, and I’m happy just looking after you.’

    She stopped in the middle of the road and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I was so confused I collided with someone and had to apologise again.

    I wanted to ask Ava why looking after me made her feel happy, but when we got to the hotel I was so tired that I fell asleep again almost immediately. So a bit of a waste of a day, really. But I did get a few pictures in the Gallery, I think these are the best.

    Sorry I didn’t get the names of them. I’ll try to find out tomorrow.