Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was old and wide, branching like the forks in a tree. Lying nearly still, he sensed the deep, fiery places beneath him, the pulls and tugs of the magnetized lava surging below, rising up like incandescent lace. Overhead he sensed the great cold, the more distant, yet larger, grander pull of something unfathomable, enormous beyond comprehension. The tugs from the star surged and varied, so although he could not see the red dwarf, he came to know its moods, its storms and meditations. He felt the tugs mediated by cold rock, the rock within which he lay like a many-armed god, but above that he had a sense of space, of motion. Here, in this tenuous region, he sensed the flow of magnetized material as dust, smaller bodies that moved differently, as though free of the grasp of the earth below. And a longing rose up in him to stretch toward that intermediate space between the star and the planet, neither of which he could see. But he knew their deep hearts, their veins of fire. Stretching, moving, he sensed he could make the lindymotes (for that was what the dust was) move in response. Through their resistance he knew the wind, and he thought: there is someone other than me in that clear space above the rock. I must speak to it, he said, and in that moment of recognizing another, he also knew loneliness. So he shifted his massive, coiled, many-branched body, and the wind, through the motion of the lindymotes, knew him too. So he danced with the wind, and Dusty Woman said: who is shaking my skirts?
Annie:
Kranti had a sort of breakdown last week. I don’t know what to call it. She collapsed just after a session in the immersphere. We got her through the barricades to the university hospital. Chirag and I were terrified. She is stable now, somewhat annoyed at all the fuss, which is heartening. I’m so glad I’m here with the two of them. Together we four are something that deserves a name of its own. So far Chirag’s only come up with AKCX, which is kind of clunky.
Kranti’s mother and grandfather came to be with her. Her mother is a stern woman, very focused on the care being given to her daughter. Her grandfather is a character. He’s very old, wiry and thin, with a bright and irreverent gaze. He reminds me of my great-uncle Victor. I could stay up trading stories with him all night. Grandfather, as we call him, tells us how his foothill tribe is trying to create a hybrid lifestyle, an alternative economy based on their old ways but “internet-savvy.” If only the rest of the world would let them be! They are sitting on huge veins of bauxite, which are needed to feed the world’s demand for aluminum, and for staying on their land they are treated like terrorists, under attack by drones and paramilitary forces. And they still have not given up. Listening to Grandfather’s somewhat broken English, I am homesick suddenly, for the high plateau.
Update (a): Kranti’s been told that she can get back to work in a couple of weeks. She’s not sick in any way we understand—but I think it is a lot to take: all those hours spent looking through Avi’s eyes! The neurologists tell us her EEG shows irregularities that were not in her baseline data. Chirag has this wild idea that the apparent irregularities are actually patterns, similar to the so-called noise in Avi’s signals, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the as-yet-undeciphered private language of the twin ultrAIs. If it’s happening with Kranti, is it a matter of time before this process, whatever it is, starts to happen with Chirag and me? What are we becoming? Could ultrAIs like Avi can achieve a connection across the gulf of space-time, resulting in the formation of a being that is morphologically distributed over such vast distances? Maybe I’m being fanciful.
Update (b): We received a message on a secure channel today. Point of origin not yet traced. Chirag ran his decrypting program and the result was a scramble of pairs of numbers. We had the brilliant idea that these were (x,y) coordinates. We got a plot that didn’t make sense—a fuzzy pattern rather than a recognizable function. Then I happened to see the printout from a distance. “It’s a picture,” I said, and Chirag looked and said, “That’s Avi.” Why would there be a picture of Avi on a secure channel, and a pointillist one, for heaven’s sake? Then it hit us both. Bhimu. It was a fuzzy picture of Avi’s twin, but with sharp protrusions like wings. Wings?
That got us excited, and scared. The only ultrAI left on Earth, the one that got you killed. Is the message from her? From her protectors? Where is she? Chirag’s trying to trace the point of origin of the message. It can only be from someone in our inner circle (which includes Bhimu)—unless security’s been breached.
In Kranti’s hospital room we
