Vortex

One day Oscar brought my mother (Treya’s mother) to see me. My father (my Vox-father) was an engineering worker who had been killed in the collapse of an exchange tunnel not long after I was born. As a child I had been cared for by my mother and a crew of aunts, all of whom loved me and whom I had loved. And enough of Treya remained in me that I couldn’t help reaching out to the woman whose arms had so often comforted me, couldn’t help looking into her terrified eyes while I told her no, her daughter wasn’t dead, only transformed, freed from a harsh but invisible bondage. She understood none of it. “Don’t you want to be useful?” she asked me. “Don’t you remember what it means to be part of a family?”

I remembered altogether too well. I ignored the question and told her I still loved her. And truly, I did. But she wasn’t consoled. Why should she be? She had lost her daughter. Treya was gone, and I was just some stubborn golem who had taken her place. And in the moment I told her I loved her, I saw from her frozen expression that she hated me in return, actually hated me; that the person she loved wasn’t me but a shadow I had ceased to cast.

Well, maybe she was right. I would never be the daughter she had known. I was what I had become. I was the thing I was and the name of the thing I was was Allison, Allison, Allison Pearl. I whispered it to myself long after she had left the room.

I didn’t mean to take these troubles to Turk. Turk had troubles of his own. He wore his stoic come-what-may attitude proudly, and I guessed he had earned it, but fundamentally, inescapably, he was alone here, a stranger in what must have seemed to him a terrifyingly strange land. Our rooms adjoined, and some nights I woke to hear him pacing or mumbling to himself, confronting fears I couldn’t imagine. It seemed to me that he must feel like a man trapped in a dream, aware of the lunacy of it but helpless to break through to a saner reality.

I tried not to pin my own hopes and fears on him. But I couldn’t help thinking that for all our differences we were more alike than not. I found myself wondering whether he might have crossed paths with Allison Pearl back in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, some chance encounter in a faceless American crowd. Surely if anyone in Vox Core was equipped to understand Allison Pearl, it was Turk. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that on one of those nights when neither of us could sleep I went into his room for comfort. We talked at first, the kind of talk we could have with no one but ourselves, intimacies shared not because of but despite what we knew about each other. “I am the thing most like you in the world,” I said, “and you’re the thing most like me,” at which point it was inevitable that we would go to bed and take some solace there, and in the end I didn’t care what the walls might hear or to whom they might whisper their dangerous secrets.

2.

In the morning I toured him through Vox Core, heel to head.

Of course he couldn’t see all of it, or even more than a representative fraction. Vox Core above ground was the size of a modest twenty-first-century city. Below ground, in the hollow of the island, it was bigger: unravel all those complex spaces onto a two-dimensional grid and it would have been the size of Connecticut or maybe even California. We avoided the damaged zones that were still being decontaminated and rode vertical transit downward. We paused whenever the tube walls allowed a broad perspective, so Turk could see the plazas and terraces and tiers, the wide agricultural levels bathed in artificial daylight, the dormitory complexes set like alabaster chips in forested wildspaces.

Then I took him to the lowest levels of Vox, the engineering decks. The engines that drove Vox were immense—more a territory than an object—but I showed him reactor units the size of small towns, bathed in an eternal wash of desalinated water; I showed him a shadowy acreage of mu-metal chambers in which magnetic fields directed flows of molten iron; I led him past superconductive field coils around which moisture condensed like snow and was swept away in gales of forced air. Turk was awed, which would play well with the administrators who were no doubt monitoring us. There were ears in the walls even here.

But there were no ears where I took him next. We rode a transit stem up as far as it would go, then transferred to a smaller transport that slid up the spine of Vox’s tallest tower. Two more transfers and we arrived at the highest accessible public platform in Vox Core, essentially a roof with a view.

Back when Vox had sailed the oceans of habitable worlds, this platform had not been enclosed. Now an osmotic perimeter had been established—I told Turk it was a “force field,” a quaint and inaccurate term but one he more or less understood. “It doesn’t seem to be working too well,” he said. “Smells a little like a pig farm out here.”

I guessed it did. The air was rank and windless, though we could see clouds speeding past aloft, seemingly close enough to touch. I felt sick with vertigo even before we approached the rim. For the first time I almost regretted the loss of my node: missed its calming presence, an invisible anchor. I felt as if a brisk wind would carry me away.

Vox was moving steadily south by southeast, out of the Indian Ocean and into the South Pacific. The sea here was faintly purple to every horizon, the sky a poisonous shade of ocher. I hated the look of it.

Turk peered into the misty distance. “The whole world’s like this?”

I nodded. It was the decline and death of these oceans that had spurred the great Terrestrial exodus, which in turn had fed the bitter rivalries and conflicts of the previously settled Middle Worlds. “And the Hypotheticals did nothing to prevent it. Doesn’t that seem strange? That they would protect the planet from the expanding sun but do nothing to prevent a catastrophic human die-off? Apparently they’re happy with an Earth populated exclusively by bacteria. No one knows why.”

“Your people expected to find something different.”

They weren’t my people. But I didn’t correct him. “They expected to enter into direct communion with the Hypotheticals as soon as they arrived on Earth. It’s a religious idea, really. The people who founded Vox were fanatics by any rational measure. The history books won’t tell you so, but it’s true. Vox is a cult. Its beliefs were built into its Network and scripted into its limbic democracy. When you’re Networked all these doctrines feel reasonable, they feel like common sense…”

“But not to you.”

Not anymore. “And not to the Farmers. The Farmers are something less than citizens. They were Networked into compliance but not into communion.”

“They were slaves, in other words.”

“I suppose you could say that. They were taken as prisoners back in the Middle Worlds, generations ago. They refused to accept full citizenship, so they were modified into cooperation.”

“Harnessed and put to work.”

“That’s why they destroyed their nodes as soon as the Network crashed.” Though the survivors—the ones who had stayed in their environmentally sealed farmlands under the out-islands—would have been reyoked by now. The rebels, of course, were all dead. Including Digger Choi, whose life Turk had attempted to save. Saved him for all of half an hour, maybe. If the warplanes hadn’t got him, he would have died choking on the poisonous air.

Turk pressed up against the security railing that followed the edge of the roof, surveying what had become of the exterior land of Vox. The island was unprotected from the atmosphere and looked as if it had entered some grim and final autumn. The forests were dead. Leaves were brown and scattered, fruit rotted. Even the limbs of the trees looked leprous and fragile. The wind of passage was dismantling the woodlands branch by branch.

“Vox,” I said, “I mean the collective Vox, limbic Vox, considered itself redeemed when we managed to pass through the Arch. But you’re right, what they found isn’t what they expected, and disappointment is setting in. That’s what we need to talk about, up here where no one can hear us. We need to make a plan.”

He stood a moment gazing over the ruined lands. Then he said, “How bad do you expect it to get?”

“Assuming Vox fails to find a door into Paradise down in Antarctica, it could get—well, really bad. The idea of merging Vox with the Hypotheticals is a foundational faith. It’s the reason Vox exists. It’s the promise we were all given at birth, along with our nodes. No dissent from it has ever been possible, nor would it have been tolerated. But now—”

“You’re up against an awkward truth.”

“ They are. I’m not one of them anymore.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”