analogue.
Despite Bharat trumpeting the largest IT skill pool on the planet, Ashwin knows that he and every other body on its live-skin couch only got there because of strong body mapping. It still took him many shifts to feel his way into a new, weightless body to which modules could be added or swapped. His hands and arms are obviously the wiry little manipulators-though no human arm ever experienced the sensation of detaching itself and swinging, hand-over-hand to a new attachment point elsewhere on the body. His legs he regards as the fan-pods, his lungs the lift bags and the curved silver shell his body, the center of his being. The slave units, hooked up according to work schedule, were more difficult, but he has learned a way; he expands his sense of self to incorporate them. I am vast, I contain multitudes. It still takes some minutes after the computers flick him home at light-speed to snap out of three-hundred-sixty-degree vision. The rabbit-eye sight of his hundreds of optical sensors has taught Ashwin truths about how body shapes consciousness. The universe of meat is divided rigidly into front and back, visible and invisible. Objects are sought out, selected, made part of the view. Morphology begets psychology. Ashwin, like a divinity, sees everywhere at once. There is no forward or backward, up or down, just movement toward a destination or away from it.
It is this aspect of his job that he finds hardest to tell others. His parents nod and say how good it is that he has employment and good steady money but they do not comprehend what he is doing up there, let alone how he feels doing it. They are one generation away from believing that gods live in the sky. He does not want to tell them that, in a sense, they do. The girls are a little more sophisticated; they know about other planets and terraforming. Mars! How exciting! How romantic! Is it really really dangerous? Do you face sandstorms and explosions and volcanoes? Telling them that Mars is a quiet, placid sort of place, where what action there ever was happened billions of years ago, is not what they want to hear but they have passed on anyway, for these women also know what kind of work the corporadas hire for, and how little it pays.
He feels locked. The cable grippers bind molecule to molecule with the lift points. Ready, Ashwin says. Coprates control whispers clearance in his inner ear: the site foreman waves her hand. Take her up. Fans swivel to full lift. Winches wind in the strain. Flicker-lasers torch up: these loads require every gram of lift. Ashwin feels motor/muscles tense, strut-bones strain. He mentally grits his teeth. You are a weight lifter, going for the clean lift.
The rosette of twelve linked LTAs pulls the five-hundred-meter diameter glass hexagon clear from the sand. Ashwin lifts straight for a hundred meters, then tilts the whole array from side to side to clear it of lingering dust and dead glass-weavers. Gently, gently. The glass is engineered to tolerances far beyond terrestrial norms, and the gravity slight, but one crack, three kilometers up… Tiny crystal shells cascade from the edges of the roof pane like iridescent snow. The great glass light heliographs in the sun. The forewoman raises an arm in salute as Ashwin gains cruising altitude. It is a sight he never tires of, this resurrection of glass from the earth. Two kilometers up, bearing 5.3 pi rad, Pier 112, 328. Pane 662, 259.
Telephone number engineering.
Beneath him graders are leveling billion-year-old outwash hills for new glass fields. Ahead, the buried panes are stains in the sand, a mesh of linked hexagons. Tiny machines, working, working. Ashwin reflects a moment on the incomplete dome of Kharar railway station, then a proximity alert gently chides him: Heavy Lift Array 2238 is on approach to pick up. Day and night the LTAs carry and set, busy and sterile as drone bees.
In the air lane now. The lifters move in strictly regulated traffic zones over cleared terrain. There has not been an accidental drop since Ashwin started on the job, but a five-hundred hexagon of fifty-centimeter glass falling from three kays is the stuff of health and safety legend. HLA 1956 comes up from the glass fields of Gander and slips in ahead of Ashwin: a colleague, though Ashwin has never seen his flesh face, nor knows where his meat is based. He sends a greeting message over the com channels; truckers flashing their headlights. Closing on the target now. The front edge of the construction is visible as a line of white light. Ashwin has never seen the sea, but he always thinks of the edge of the world roof as a line of surf breaking on a beach, frozen, turned to slow-flowing glass, inching forward day by day, hour by hour. One kilometer out, construction control taps into Ashwin’s neural matrix and dispatches him and his load into an approach pattern to Pier 112, 328. As he moves in high over the open fingers of the Main Left Branch, he sees another heavy-lift cluster retract cables and slide away from the pier top. Spider- welders skitter across the glass on delicate sucker feet to bolt the plate to the struts. That is what Ashwin’s friend from Senegal does: Ashwin can see his spider-welder hugging the pure white spar like a tick as he swivels the rig on its belly fans. They earn more than lifter pilots. They have more responsibility.
Lasers flicker from all around Ashwin’s multiple body-another sensation for which his meat has no likeness- guiding him in onto the baffle plates. The alignment must be millimeter perfect. Ashwin tunes the ducted fans to compensate for an unseasonable breeze he can feel picking up across his sensory skin, descends steadily through the mesh of laser light. Thirty meters. Twenty.
Looking good, Ash, says the bolter from Senegal on the innercom.
Ten meters.
Looking good. A simple expression of solidarity, but it opens Ashwin’s extended senses like a key. From skin to horizon in every direction he can look, his world rushes in on him. He sees it all fresh, entire, as one thing. The stupendous canyon, one end to the other, wall to wall. The thin pink sky, the wisps of high cirrus. The surface three kilometers beneath him; the constructions of man, the patterns they make on the soil as they fuse sand to glass. The machines: those above, those below, those between, that crawl upon the pillars and roof of the world. The SkyWheel on its ponderous orbits, ROTECH’s habitats wheeling overhead in a carousel of satellites. The men and minds that looked on this world, and set their will upon it. He sees it all, and it looks good to him. Very good indeed. He is so proud of all that he is part of, this Bharati boy one foot out of the chawl, who is become Creator of Worlds.
Five meters.
And in that instant, everything goes white…
Is this what it is to be dead? he thinks and thinking so, knows himself to be alive. An image: the holy woman, buried alive for righteousness’ sake. Real? Imaginary? Is the darkness of the grave really a white so intense it cannot be regarded by the eye? Is there any difference between outside and inside in this featureless white? A freezing thought. This is the pure white light of cyberspace. There has been an error in the mindlink, a fault in the tap-head technology. The kind of thing that sends some people thrashing and fitting on their couches. You, it has sent into nowhere. No thing. A mind without a body.
He cannot tell if he has flesh perception or machine sense: everything in every direction looks the same and therefore robs him of dimension. An uncle driven blind by cataracts once told him the horror of blindness. It is not not seeing. It is everything white.
A mind, with no senses, no connection to the outside world. He could be lying on his couch at the Ambedkar corporada, in a hospital, at home. A mind with only its own thoughts for company. A thought to make the heart kick coldly in the chest. At least, he can still feel. And if he can feel…
“Hello?” Ashwin ventures. He can hear himself. His own voice, inside, and outside. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
Does he hear an echo, or is it the resonance of his own skull? If he does, is it in another voice, another accent?
“Hello?”
Hello.
And the white: is it moving, are there shapes within it, like figures in a fog? Ashwin is sure now; the fog boils like milk and he can sense up and down, forward, back. Dimensions. Gravity. Slowly he becomes aware that he has a body, his own body, his home flesh. There is a surface under his feet, and there is a human shape walking toward him through the white fog. A white man in a white fog, an old man, dressed for cold, with a compass in his hand. He steps into clear focus and frowns at Ashwin.
“Who the hell are you?” he says.
A milky blue box on a living-room table. A photonic array tumbling over Terra Tyrrhena. Calculations made in billions of parallel universes. Each computer contains the other, and millions more besides.
The machines that are building Mars have more than just the viewpoint of gods. They have something of the power. Quantum computing, quantum engineering. If calculations can be made in multiple universes, one of which supplies the perfect solution, how much simpler to cut out the application of that answer and cut straight to the result? It’s mere extension of theory into practice to take those solutions out of the abstract into the real world.
