Once I was born in the same nuclear fire my other self had witnessed, delivered into a suit jacket in the lee of an overturned car, just as the first of the radioactive ash began to fall like snow—and I swear I still remember the first sound I heard when my infant ears left the womb: my mother’s last screams, as much in pain as in rage and terror at the world she knew she was giving me to.
No one expected me to live—but despite them all, despite the fallout, despite the inventive geometries my bones assumed with time and the arbitrary cruelty that sometimes attracted, I grew into a man. I traveled far. I helped rebuild, and I studied the reconstruction and the assumptions with which it was undertaken—the litany of curious disconnects between each person’s versions of the past they wanted to resurrect, one I’d never seen myself—and I wrote down all my observations of memory, and strangers read them. I became a philosopher. I was a husband, a father, a grandfather. Then one day, when I was an old man who thought he had it all figured out, one of my students approached me with what sounded like some kind of metaphor or thought experiment. It took me time to believe him when he told me who and what he was. When I did believe, and when I’d finally wrapped my head around it all, I knew I had to try it for myself.
Once I was a physicist in Senegal whose life work was using gravity waves to study primordial black hole collisions in the far reaches of the observable universe. Once I spent my summers studying the geology of Antarctica and never dreamed of a day when the frozen wastelands I trudged across would be warm enough to host cities and the emerald green expanses of algae fields. Once I was a musical prodigy in Shanghai, long before it was part of Norpak. Once I was a holographic artist in Argentina, before it was Communidad. The bodies in which all these lives began are long gone, but I am all of them. I am young and old, poor and rich, black and brown and white, and I am men and women and a dozen other genders. I’m a native speaker of fifty tongues. I’m from everywhere.
On a hot day fifty-seven years ago, I struggled (as I always do) to find the words to explain all this to a colleague, a gifted molecular biologist named Zinn. I loved him. I also needed him: I needed to become him and let him become me, because the world was dying and he was my best hope of saving it.
“That makes you, what? A hive mind?” He was staring at me, trying to understand. We were lying naked on his bed. I was speaking to him through one of my male bodies. He liked that body, and I liked being liked from within it.
“‘Hive mind’ makes it sound like my bodies are all just my mindless thralls,” I chuckled. I tapped my chest. “I am this person. For twenty-four years I was only him, and now he’s part of the gestalt I am now.”
“Okay. So you’re . . . a collective consciousness.”
I sighed and said, “Better, but the word ‘collective’ still connotes distinct parts working together but remaining distinct. I’m not a group, I’m one person. Not a ‘we’ but an ‘I.’ And I’m the same person now, out of unity, that I would be if I were in unity—just a lot smaller. And, well, not as smart.”
“What term would you use, then?”
“Words, words,” I said. “Language is a painfully inefficient way to copy a thought from one brain to another.”
That was the first year of Blood Rain—the year the infamous weaponized lyssavirus strain, to which over a billion deaths are now attributed, began its accelerating spread across Europe. I had met Zinn in a lab in France while we were both working on a vaccine, but we both knew the problem was too vast. It was spreading and mutating too quickly. Someone had engineered it to resist all the approaches we were trying to take to it. All our simulations showed that we were rapidly approaching a point of no return, past which its spread across the whole Earth would become logistically irreversible.
“And if . . . if we unify, like you’re suggesting,” Zinn said.
“Then together we’ll become a new iteration of my consciousness,” I said solemnly. “We’ll become someone who knows everything you know, and everything I know. Someone who can make connections we can’t, conceive of solutions we’re not able to—not as separate people.”
“But it will be like dying,” he said—I remember saying, as him, before he was me. “Won’t it?”
“And like being born. Both and neither.”
Even as we spoke, I was in a dozen other places, in other bodies, having similar conversations with other people I needed to be. Virologists. Epidemiologists. Genetic engineers. Disaster relief workers. Many of them decided against joining my gestalt, but some did—and when we unified, and the whole of me knew everything they had ever known, I brought my entire intellect to bear on the problem.
It took two years (in chronological time, but that was almost a century of internal experience) to reverse-engineer the virus and perfect an immunity, and a third year to engineer my own strain (even more contagious, but benign) to act as a self-replicating vaccine in the absence of any working infrastructure to distribute injections.
Those were some of the hardest years of my life. None of my bodies slept a full night. Over the course of the project, I was forced to sacrifice six of them to gather all the data I needed. I know what it’s like to
