Yet so
I ask Mom how she’s able to do the calculations to keep the vehicle balanced so quickly in her head. The dynamic feedback calculations needed to stabilize the hovering flier against gravity are so complex that I can’t keep up at all—and I’m very good at math.
“Oh, I’m going by instinct here,” Mom thinks. And she laughs. “You are a digital native. You’ve never tried to stand up and balance yourself, have you? Here, take over for a minute. Try flying.”
And it is easier than I anticipated. Some algorithm in me whose existence I have never been aware of kicks in, fuzzy but efficient, and I
“See, you are after all
Flying in the physical world is so much better than floating through n-dimensional space. It’s not even close.
Dad’s thoughts break into our laughter. He’s not with us. His thoughts come through the commlink. “Sophia, I got the message you left. What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, Hugo. Can you forgive me? I may never see her again. I want her to understand, if I can.”
“She’s never been out in a vehicle before. This is reckless—”
“I made sure that the flier has a full battery before we left. And I promise to be careful with how much energy we use.” Mom looks at me. “I won’t put her life in danger.”
“They’re going to come after you when they notice a missing maintenance flier.”
“I asked for a sabbatical in the flier and got it,” Mom thinks, smiling. “They don’t want to deny a dying woman’s last wishes.”
The commlink is silent for a while, then Dad’s thoughts come through. “Why can’t I ever think no to you? How long will this take? Is she going to miss any school?”
“It might be a long trip. But I think it’s worth it. You’ll have her forever, I just want a little bit of her for the time left to me.”
“Take care, Sophia. I love you, Renee.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
Being embodied in a vehicle is an experience few people have had. To begin with, there are very few vehicles. The energy it takes to fly even a maintenance flier for a day is enough to run the whole Data Center for an hour. And conservation is humanity’s overriding duty.
So, only the operators for the maintenance and repair robots do it regularly, and it is rare for most people, who are digital natives, to take up these jobs. Being embodied never seemed very interesting to me before. But now that I’m here, it’s exhilarating. It must be some Ancient part of me that I got from Mom.
We fly over the sea and then the wild European forest of towering oaks, pines, and spruces, broken here and there by open grassland and herds of animals. Mom points them out to me and tells me that they are called wisent, auroch, tarpan, and elk. “Just five hundred years ago,” Mom thinks, “all this used to be farmland, filled with the clones of a few human-dependent symbiotic plants. All that infrastructure, the resources of a whole planet, went to support just a few billion people.”
I look at Mom in disbelief.
“See that hill in the distance with the reindeer? That used to be a great city called Moscow, before it was flooded by the Moskva River and buried in silt.
“There’s a poem that I remember by an Ancient called Auden who died long before the Singularity. It’s called ‘The Fall of Rome.’ ”
She shares with me images from the poem: herds of reindeer, golden fields, emptying cities, the rain, always the rain, caressing the abandoned shell of a world.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
I’m enjoying myself but then I think maybe I shouldn’t be. Mom is still leaving at the end, and I still need to be mad at her. Is it the love of flight, of these sensations in the physical world, that makes her want to go?
I look at the world passing below us. I would have thought that a world with only three dimensions would be flat and uninteresting. But it’s not true. The colors are more vibrant than any I’ve ever seen, and the world has a random beauty that I could not have imagined. But now that I’ve really
“But I’ll
I turn her words over and over in my mind.
We fly on, pausing to hover over interesting animals and historical sites—now just fields of broken glass, as the concrete had long washed away and the steel rusted into powder—while Mom thinks more stories to me. Over the Pacific, we dip down to scan for whales.
“I put the ‹whale› in your name because I loved these creatures when I was your age,” Mom thinks. “They were very rare then.”
I look at the whales breaching and lobtailing. They look nothing like the ‹whale› in my name.
Over America, we linger over families of bears who look up at us without fear (after all, the maintenance flier is only about the size of a mama bear). Finally, we arrive at an estuarial island off the Atlantic coast covered with dense trees punctuated by wetlands along the shore and rivers crisscrossing the island.
The ruins of a city dominate the island’s southern end. The blackened, empty frames of the great skyscrapers, their windows long gone, rise far above the surrounding jungle like stone pillars. We can see coyotes and deer playing hide-and-seek in their shadows.
“You are looking at the remnants of Manhattan, one of the greatest cities from long ago. It’s where I grew up.”
Mom then thinks to me of the glory days of Manhattan, when it teemed with humanity in the flesh, and consumed energy like a black hole. People lived one or two to a vast room all their own, and had machines that carried them around, cooled or warmed them, and made food and cleaned clothes and performed other wonders, all while spewing carbon and poisons into the air at an unimaginable rate. Each person wasted the energy that could support a million consciousnesses without physical needs.
Then came the Singularity, and as the last generation of humans in the flesh departed, carried away by death or into the Data Center, the great city fell silent. Rainwater seeped into the cracks and seams of walls and foundations, froze and thawed, pried them open ever wider, until the buildings toppled like trees in the ancient horror of logging. Asphalt cracked, spewing forth seedlings and vines, and the dead city gradually yielded to the green force of life.
“The buildings that still remain standing were built at a time when people over-engineered everything.”
No one ever talks about engineering now. Building with physical atoms is inefficient, inflexible, limited, and consumes so much energy. I’ve been taught that engineering is an art of the dark ages, before people knew any better. Bits and qubits are far more civilized, and give our imaginations free rein.
Mom smiles at my thoughts. “You sound like your father.”
She lands the flier in an open field with a clear view of the ghost skyscrapers.
“This is the real beginning of our trip,” Mom thinks. “It’s not how long we have that matters, but what we do with the time we have. Don’t be scared, Renee. I’m going to show you something about time.”
I nod.
Mom activates the routine to underclock the processors on the flier so that its batteries will last while our consciousnesses slow down to a crawl.
The world around us speeds up. The sun moves faster and faster across the sky until it is a bright stripe arching over a world shrouded in permanent dusk. Trees shoot up around us while shadows spin and twirl. Animals zoom by, too fast to be perceived. We watch one skyscraper, topped by steel step-domes rising to a defiant spear, gradually bend and lean over with the passing of the seasons. Something about its shape, like a hand reaching for the sky and tiring, moves me deeply inside.
Mom brings the processors back up to normal speed, and we see the top half of the building fall down and collapse with a series of loud crashes like calving icebergs, bringing down yet more buildings around it.
“We did many things wrong back then, but some things we did right. That’s the Chrysler Building.” I feel infinite sadness in her thoughts. “It was one of the most beautiful creations of Man. Nothing made by Man lasts forever, Renee, and even the Data Center will one day disintegrate before the heat death of the universe. But real beauty
