My brain has the plasticity of a ten-year-old’s. ??Why would I want to give that up? Bobby said.
Maggie had to admit that she always felt more comfortable with Lydia and her descendants. Even though they had all chosen to die, as Jo?o did, which could be seen as a kind of rebuke of her decision, she found herself better able to understand their lives and play a role in them.
With Bobby, on the other hand, she couldn’t imagine what went on in his head. She sometimes found him a little creepy, which she agreed was a bit hypocritical, considering he only made the same choice she did.
But you won’t experience what it’s like to be grown, she said. To love as a man and not a boy.
He shrugged, unable to miss what he never had. I can pick up new languages quickly. It’s easy for me to absorb a new worldview. I’ll always like new things.
Bobby switched to speech, and his boyish voice rose as it filled with excitement and longing. “If we meet new life and new civilization down there, we’ll need people like me, the forever children, to learn about them and understand them without fear.”
It had been a long time since Maggie had really listened to her son. She was moved. She nodded, accepting his choice.
Bobby’s face opened in a beautiful smile, the smile of a ten-year-old boy who had seen more than almost every human who had ever lived.
“Mom, I’ll get that chance. I came to tell you that we’ve received the results of the first close-up scans of 61 Virginis e. It’s inhabited.”
? ? ?
Under the Sea Foam, the planet spun slowly. Its surface was covered by a grid of hexagonal and pentagonal patches, each a thousand miles across. About half of the patches were black as obsidian, while the rest were a grainy tan. 61 Virginis e reminded Maggie of a soccer ball.
Maggie stared at the three aliens standing in front of her in the shuttle bay, each about six feet tall. The metallic bodies, barrel-shaped and segmented, rested on four stick-thin, multijointed legs.
When the vehicles first approached the Sea Foam, the colonists had thought they were tiny scout ships until scans confirmed the absence of any organic matter. Then the colonists had thought they were autonomous probes until they came right up to the ship’s camera, displayed their hands, and lightly tapped the lens.
Yes, hands. Midway up each of the metallic bodies, two long, sinuous arms emerged and terminated in soft, supple hands made of a fine alloy mesh. Maggie looked down at her own hands. The alien hands looked just like hers: four slender fingers, an opposable thumb, flexible joints.
On the whole, the aliens reminded Maggie of robotic centaurs.
At the very top of each alien body was a spherical protuberance studded with clusters of glass lenses, like compound eyes. Other than the eyes, this “head” was also covered by a dense array of pins attached to actuators that moved in synchrony like the tentacles of a sea anemone.
The pins shimmered as though a wave moved through them. Gradually, they took on the appearance of pixellated eyebrows, lips, eyelids—a face, a human face.
The alien began to speak. It sounded like English but Maggie couldn’t make it out. The phonemes, like the shifting patterns of the pins, seemed elusive, just beyond coherence.
It is English, Bobby said to Maggie, after centuries of pronunciation drift. He’s saying, “Welcome back to humanity.”
The fine pins on the alien face shifted, unveiling a smile. Bobby continued to translate. We left Earth long after your departure, but we were faster and passed you in transit centuries ago. ??We’ve been waiting for you.
Maggie felt the world shift around her. She looked around, and many of the older colonists, the immortals, looked stunned.
But Bobby, the eternal child, stepped forward. “Thank you,” he said aloud, and smiled back.
? ? ?
Let me tell you a story, Sara. We humans have always relied on stories to keep the fear of the unknown at bay.
I’ve told you how the Mayan gods created people out of maize, but did you know that before that, there were several other attempts at creation?
First came the animals: brave jaguar and beautiful macaw, flat fish and long serpent, the great whale and the lazy sloth, the iridescent iguana and the nimble bat. (We can look up pictures for all of these on the computer later.) But the animals only squawked and growled, and could not speak their creators’ names.
So the gods kneaded a race of beings out of mud. But the mud men could not hold their shape. Their faces drooped, softened by water, yearning to rejoin the earth whence they were taken. They could not speak but only gurgled incoherently. They grew lopsided and were unable to procreate, to perpetuate their own existence.
The gods’ next effort is the one of most interest to us. They created a race of wooden manikins, like dolls. The articulated joints allowed their limbs to move freely. The carved faces allowed their lips to flap and eyes to open. The stringless puppets lived in houses and villages, and went busily about their lives.
But the gods found that the wooden men had neither souls nor minds, and so they could not praise their makers properly. They sent a great flood to destroy the wooden men and asked the animals of the jungle to attack them. When the anger of the gods was over, the wooden men had become monkeys.
And only then did the gods turn to maize.
Many have wondered if the wooden men were really content to lose to the children of the maize. Perhaps they’re still waiting in the shadows for an opportunity to come back, for creation to reverse its course.
? ? ?
The black hexagonal patches were solar panels, Atax, the leader of the three envoys from 61 Virginis e, explained. Together, they provided the power needed to support human habitation on the planet. The tan patches were cities, giant computing arrays where trillions of humans lived as virtual patterns of computation.
When Atax and the others colonists had first arrived, 61 Viriginis e was not particularly hospitable to life from Earth. It was too hot, the air was too poisonous, and the existing alien life, mostly primitive microbes, was quite deadly.
But Atax and the others who had stepped onto the surface were not human, not in the sense Maggie would have understood the term. They were composed of more metal than water, and they were no longer trapped by the limits of organic chemistry. The colonists quickly constructed forges and foundries, and their descendants soon spread out across the globe.
Most of the time they chose to merge into the Singularity, the overall World-Mind that was both artificial and organic, where eons passed in a second as thought was processed at the speed of quantum computation. In the world of bits and qubits, they lived as gods.
But sometimes, when they felt the ancestral longing for physicality, they could choose to become individuals and be embodied in machines, as Atax and his companions were. Here, they lived in the slow-time, the time of atoms and stars.
There was no more line between the ghost and the machine.
“This is what humanity looks like now,” Atax said, spinning around slowly to display his metal body for the benefit of the colonists on the Sea Foam. “Our bodies are made of steel and titanium, and our brains graphene and silicon. We are practically indestructible. Look, we can even move through space without the need for ships, suits, layers of protection. We have left corruptible flesh behind.”
Atax and the others gazed intently at the ancient humans around them. Maggie stared back into their dark lenses, trying to fathom how the machines felt. Curiosity? Nostalgia? Pity?
Maggie shuddered at the shifting, metallic faces, a crude imitation of flesh and blood. She looked over at Bobby, who appeared ecstatic.
“You may join us, if you wish, or continue as you are. It is of course difficult to decide when you have no experience of our mode of existence. Yet you must choose. We cannot choose for you.”