Radiant

Suddenly, the paralysis holding me rigid slumped away like a pregnant woman’s water breaking. Splash. I doubled over and threw up gratefully. The taste of vomit was clean and pure compared to everything else I’d just ingested.

Then a hand touched my shoulder, and someone asked, 'Are you all right?'

The words were spoken in Bamar, my first language. When I looked up, it was Mr. Puffy.

I gaped. How could a creature sixty-five hundred years old know my mother tongue? The Bamar language hadn’t existed when Mr. Puffy went into stasis — in those days, my ancestors spoke some Indo-European dialect far removed from anything my modern ear would recognize. Besides, even if the Fuentes had visited Earth in the ancient past, and even if Mr. Puffy had learned the language of a minuscule tribe in the Irrawaddy river valley, how would he know to address me in that tongue? Telepathy? Could he pluck my background from my mind? Could he even learn my first language by drawing it from the whorls of my brain?

Then I remembered the red dots in Mr. Puffy’s bite wounds and the fluids that had poured from my sinuses.

Spores. Balrog spores.

I almost threw up again. The whole thing, with the hand in my mouth and my involuntary chomping down, had been a data transfer. Mr. Puffy had taken one look at me and had seen the Balrog inside. He’d shoved his hand between my teeth and I’d helplessly injected him with spores — as if I were some rabid animal frothing crimson at the mouth. Moss had skittered into the Fuentes’ wounds, then headed for his alien brain.

Now Mr. Puffy had a link to any data the Balrog chose to share. That included the Bamar language, which the Balrog had taken from my own memories. Demon! I thought. Demon, demon, demon.

I straightened up. Wiped vomit off my face with my bare hand, then cleaned my fingers by rubbing them on a nearby tabletop. Checked my clothes, and thanked whatever reflex had helped me throw up without getting puke on my borrowed Unity uniform. Taking a deep breath, I told Mr. Puffy, 'Use English. Explain what’s going on.'

In a soft voice, speaking English with an accent identical to my own, he said, 'What do you want to know?'

This time, it was Tut and Festina who reacted in shock. I enjoyed the looks on their faces.

Festina recovered first. 'Who are you?' she asked.

'Ohpa,' the alien said. Its mandibles twitched. 'Does that irrelevant fact enlighten you?'

Festina gave a humorless chuckle. 'Fair enough. I’ll ask something more meaningful. How can you speak English?'

Ohpa waved his hand. 'Also irrelevant.' He didn’t look in my direction. I wondered if he was keeping the Balrog’s data transfer a secret for my sake, or if there was some other reason not to speak of it.

'All right,' Festina said. 'Relevant questions. What is this place and what were you doing here?'

'This place is a playroom of reductionism and control. What you would call a laboratory.' Ohpa shook himself and hopped toward a cadaver on a nearby table. Under his breath he muttered something in a language I didn’t know, then extended his hand in a gesture of blessing. He turned back and told Festina, 'I’m here because I succumbed to hope and ambition. I volunteered to be a test subject.' He spread his arms to display his hairless body; his tail gave a spasmodic jerk. 'As you can see, the experiment was unsuccessful.'

'What was the experiment supposed to do?'

'Make me Tathagata.'

I gasped. Festina looked my way, then asked the Fuentes, 'What’s Tathagata?'

Ohpa waved as if I should answer — a movement so human, he must have learned my body language from the Balrog as well as spoken words. I told Festina, 'Tathagata means ‘the one who has come at this time.’ It was an honorific for Prince Gotama, the Buddha… to distinguish him from other Buddhas who’d lived in earlier times or might come in the future.'

Festina turned back to Ohpa in surprise. 'The experiment was supposed to make you a Buddha?'

'Tathagata.'

'A living Buddha,' I said. 'One who’s enlightened right now… as opposed to someone who might become a Buddha in a million more lives. Theoretically, we’re all Buddhas — we all have the potential and will get there eventually — but a Tathagata has Awakened in the current lifetime.'

Festina made a face. 'I’m not thrilled when an alien claims to be a figure from Earth religion. It’s way too convenient.'

'Ease up, Auntie,' Tut said. 'Ohpa likely peeked into our heads with X-ray vision, and Youn Suu’s brain happened to have an approximation for what he really is.' Tut turned to the alien. 'You aren’t really Tatha-whosit, right? That’s just the closest equivalent you could find in our minds.'

'I’m not Tathagata at all,' Ohpa replied. 'The experiment was supposed to make me so, but it failed.'

'How did it fail?' Festina asked.

'The actual cause you would find uninteresting.' Ohpa gave a sudden leap with his rabbitlike haunches, landing several paces away and pointing to a thigh-high gray box whose contents had been partly dissected by Team Esteem. 'If I told you this machine had a flaw, would you be any wiser? If I said there was an unforeseen feedback loop between my DNA and the molecular logic circuits herein, would you hear more than empty words? Do you understand the complexities of dark matter and transdimensional biology, or would it be futile to explain?'

'Transdimensional biology?' Festina said. 'You’re just making that up.'

'If I were, you wouldn’t know, would you?' Ohpa made a rasping sound in his throat — perhaps the Fuentes version of a laugh. 'Suffice it to say, the procedure I underwent had errors. Instead of becoming Success Number One, I became Failure Number Thirty-six. Instead of becoming Tathagata, I became a travesty.'

I asked, 'What did you think it meant, becoming Tathagata? A mental transformation? A process to remove fixations from your brain?'

Ohpa swished his tail, then drove the sharp spade tip into the computer-like box beside him. Fragments of broken metal and plastic spilled onto the floor. 'A mental transformation?' he said. 'Removing fixations? You give my people too much credit. We had no thought of changing our psyches; we didn’t think we needed it. My people dreamed of becoming gods — increasing our intelligence a thousandfold, abandoning our physical bodies and becoming pure energy — yet we imagined we’d retain our original personalities. We’d be vastly more powerful, but the same people, with the same prejudices, conceits, fears, hatreds, blind spots, envies, distorted priorities, unexamined desires, irrational goals, unconfronted denials… ah, such fools. Believing we could don transcendence as easily as a new coat. So sure of our unquestioned values. So ready for a fall.'

'What kind of fall?' Festina asked. 'What happened to you? To this planet? What’s going on?'

'Karma,' Ohpa replied. 'A harvest of suffering, grown from the seeds of arrogance. Trying to seize heaven by force. Taking the easy way again and again, rather than daring the hard way once.'

Festina rolled her eyes. 'Why do I always end up listening to gobbledygook from godlike aliens? And why can they never give a straight answer?'

'Here’s a thought,' Tut said. 'Ohpa buddy, with your not-quite-Tathagata wisdom, why don’t you just tell what we need to know? And please, your Buddhousness, give it in a form we’re likely to follow. Okay?'

Ohpa’s mandibles relaxed; I could almost believe he was smiling, if his complex alien mouth was capable of such a thing. Tut had done what every disciple must do: submit to the teacher’s agenda rather than demanding the teacher submit to yours.

'Very well,' Ohpa said. 'I’ll tell you a tale of hubris.'

And he did.

There came a time [Ohpa said] when Fuentes scientists realized the body was not the self.

[He looked at me. He was quoting Buddhist doctrine. One’s body is not one’s self. Neither are one’s emotions, perceptions, desires, or even one’s consciousness. All those things are partial aspects, not one’s absolute essence. We have no absolute essence. We’re ever- changing aggregates of components that constantly come and go.]

If the body is not the self [Ohpa continued], perhaps the self could be divorced from the body — made manifest in some other medium besides flesh. Flesh is weak and short-lived. Would it not be better to place the self in a stronger vessel? One that did not age. One immune to sickness. One that could not die.

Many believed this goal might be achieved by becoming simulations within a computer; but that proved unsatisfactory. Computers could simulate a single person’s intellect, and they could simulate small environments, but no computer has the capacity to simulate an entire planet, let alone the galaxy or the universe. Computerized personalities soon felt they were prisoners in tiny, predictable worlds.

But scientists determined there were other media to which an individual’s consciousness could be uploaded. In particular, personalities might be impressed upon constructions of normal and dark matter. This may sound like nonsense, but your scientific knowledge is too primitive to allow for more detailed explanation. How would you describe a silicon-chip computer to preindustrial peoples? Would you tell them you’d combined sand and lightning to make a box that could think? They’d think you were mad. Some concepts can’t be conveyed to those without the background to understand. You must simply accept that consciousness can be transferred from flesh into something more Celestial.

Or so our scientists believed. They still had to overcome technical difficulties.

A world was set aside for research. This world. Every person in every city was either a scientist or a support worker. If the project was successful, our entire species would use the resulting process to become higher lifeforms. To ascend. To become transcendent.

The research was divided into smaller subprojects. Experiments were conducted around the planet, but this building was one of two centers where everything came together. Scientists assembled subcomponents to create test processes, and to try those processes on volunteers who were willing to risk everything for the chance to become Tathagata.

[Ohpa waved his hand at the cadavers in the room.] Here lie the volunteers. Failures all. After their deaths, they were analyzed to see what had gone wrong. Errors were corrected, and the researchers would try again.

Compared to the dead, I might be considered fortunate. I survived; I even attained a partially heightened consciousness. I can perceive more than I once did — things that are hidden from mortal eyes.