Vortex

victory, or at least gained a reprieve.

Ten minutes later they wheeled in the prep cart and the knives. That was when I started to scream. I was too weak to make much noise, but I was loud enough to be heard in the adjoining rooms.

The medical workers were about to strap me down when Turk came bulling through the doorway. Turk was wearing a patient’s gown cinched at the waist, and he didn’t look intimidating—our sojourn in the wilderness had left him skinny and brown as a nut. But the med staff must have seen the ferocity in his eyes, not to mention his balled fists. More than that, he was Uptaken, touched by the Hypotheticals: in Voxish theology that made him something next door to a god.

I told him in a few words that the medics were trying to re-install my limbic implant and turn me back into Treya.

“Tell them to stop,” he said. “Tell them to take their fucking knives away or I will personally call down the wrath of the Hypotheticals on Vox and all its works.”

I translated, with embellishments. The medical staff hastened out of the room with eyes averted, abandoning their surgical tools. But this, too, was only a reprieve. The medics were almost instantly replaced by a man in a gray jumpsuit, an administrator, a manager—a man I recognized from Treya’s training sessions. He had been one of my teachers, not one of my favorites.

Apparently he and Turk had already met. “Stay out of this, Oscar,” Turk said in English.

The administrator’s Voxish name was long and decorated with honorifics, but “Oscar” was a decent approximation of the patrilineal fraction of it. Oscar spoke English, of course. His English wasn’t as nuanced as mine—he had learned it mainly from ancient textbooks and legal documents—but it was functional, and unlike me he was empowered to speak on behalf of the managerial class.

“Please calm down, Mr. Findley,” he said in his reedy voice. He was a small man, pale-skinned, yellow- haired, a couple of years past young.

“Fuck you, Oscar. Your people were about to force a surgical procedure on a friend of mine. I don’t take that lightly.”

“The woman you describe as your ‘friend’ was badly injured in the Farmer rebellion. You witnessed that injury, didn’t you? In fact you tried to stop it.”

It figured that Oscar would attempt some kind of legalistic argument, schooled as he was in ancient writs and warrants. Turk ignored him and turned to me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay for the time being. I won’t be, if they put my node back in.”

“That’s irrational,” Oscar said. “Surely you must see that, Treya.”

“My name isn’t Treya.”

“Of course it is. Your denial is a symptom of your disorder. You’re suffering from a pathological cognitive dissociation that cries out for repair.”

“Oscar, shut the fuck up, ” Turk said. “I need to speak to Allison privately.”

“There is no ‘Allison,’ Mr. Findley. ‘Allison’ is a tutelary construct, and the longer we allow Treya to sustain this delusion the harder it will be to cure her.”

Treya herself would have deferred to Oscar without question, and I could still feel that old and craven impulse. But now it was hateful to me. “Oscar,” I said in a quieter voice.

He shot me a hard look and repeated his Voxish name with all its status markers: I was a worker, and it was an insolence to call him by his short name. “Oscar,” I repeated. “Are you hard of hearing? Turk asked you to shut the fuck up.”

His pale complexion turned red. “I don’t understand this. Have we hurt you, Mr. Findley? Have we threatened you in any way? Haven’t I served as your personal liaison in a satisfactory manner?”

“You’re not my liaison,” Turk said. “Allison is.”

“There is no Allison, and this woman can’t function as a liaison—she has no connection to the Network… she doesn’t have a working neural node!”

“She speaks English well enough.”

“Like a native,” I said.

“There you go.”

“But—!”

“So I’m appointing her as my translator,” Turk said. “From now on, any interaction I have with Vox goes through her. And we’re both finished with doctors for the time being. No knives, no drugs. Can you arrange that?”

Oscar hesitated. Then he addressed me directly, in Voxish: “If you were a whole human being you would recognize your behavior as an act of treason, not just against the administrative class but against the Coryphaeus.”

They were weighty words. Treya would have trembled. “Thank you, but I know what I’m doing,” I said in the same language. “Oscar.”

* * *

It was during this time that Vox began its lumbering, hopeless journey to Antarctica.

Getting any kind of hard information out of Oscar (who continued to pop up with annoying regularity) was impossible; but the nurses who still hovered around us, bringing meals or inquiring about our health like nosy parents, could occasionally be coaxed to talk. Through them I learned that the Voxish consensus had evolved from jubilation (“We transited to Earth, the prophecies are fulfilled”) to dismay (“But the Earth is a ruin and the Hypotheticals continue to ignore us”) to a stoic rededication to the ancient cause (“The Hypotheticals won’t come to us, we’ll have to seek them out”).

Seeking them out was the hard part. Fleets of drone aircraft were dispatched to survey the landmasses of what had once been Indonesia and southern India, but all they found was an unrelieved wasteland. There was nothing alive there—or at least, nothing larger than a bacterium.

The oceans were anoxic. Back in Champlain, I had done a lot of reading about ocean toxicity. All the CO₂ we were pumping into the air back then—the fossil carbon reserves of not one but two planets—had been the trigger event, though it had taken centuries for the full effect to be felt. Rapid warming had stratified the seas and fed huge blooms of sulfate-reducing bacteria, which in turn spewed clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The word for this process was “eutrophocation.” It had happened before, without human intervention; eutrophication episodes had been blamed for some of the planet’s prehistoric mass extinctions.

Vox’s administrative class had studied the few surviving records of the Terrestrial Diaspora and concluded that we ought to proceed to the site of the last known human habitation, near the southern pole, on the shore of what used to be called the Ross Sea. In the meantime, robotic craft would extend the aerial survey as far as Eurasia and the Americas.

When I told Turk all this he asked me how long the trip to Antarctica would take. Turk still thought of Vox more as an island chain than a seagoing vessel. But although it was vastly larger than any ship Turk had ever sailed or even imagined, it was a ship, with a surprisingly shallow draft and decent maneuverability for its colossal size. A couple of months to reach the Ross Sea, I told him. I promised I’d take him down to see the engine decks sometime soon… and it was a promise I meant to keep, for reasons I wasn’t yet willing to explain.

There was a whole lot I couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that we had no privacy. In Vox Core, the walls had ears. Also eyes.

Not necessarily for the purpose of spying. All those nanoscale eyes and ears, embedded in structural surfaces, fed their data to the Network, which sorted it for anomalies and issued alerts whenever an unusual situation arose: a health crisis, a technological failure, a fire, or even a violent argument. I was guessing, however, that an exception had been made in our case. Back when I was Treya I had been taught that when interacting with an Uptaken like Turk Findley, no word or gesture was too trivial to be sifted for clues about the Hypotheticals or the state of existence the Uptaken had experienced among them. So we were almost certainly being listened to, and not just by machines. I couldn’t allow myself to say anything I didn’t want the administrators to overhear. Which ruled out much of what I needed to say, and needed to say quickly.