Something new, Maggie thought.
Even eternal youth and eternal life did not appear so wonderful compared to the freedom of being a machine, a thinking machine endowed with the austere beauty of crystalline matrices instead of the messy imperfections of living cells.
At last, humanity has advanced beyond evolution into the realm of intelligent design.
? ? ?
“I’m not afraid,” Sara said.
She had asked to stay behind for a few minutes with Maggie after all the others had left. Maggie gave her a long hug, and the little girl squeezed her back.
“Do you think Gran-Gran Jo?o would have been disappointed in me?” Sara asked. “I’m not making the choice he would have made.”
“I know he would have wanted you to decide for yourself,” Maggie said. “People change, as a species and as individuals. We don’t know what he would have chosen if he had been offered your choice. But no matter what, never let the past pick your life for you.”
She kissed Sara on the cheek and let go. A machine came to take Sara away by the hand so that she could be transformed.
She’s the last of the untreated children, Maggie thought. And now she’ll be the first to become a machine.
? ? ?
Though Maggie refused to watch the transformation of the others, at Bobby’s request, she watched as her son was replaced piece by piece.
“You’ll never have children,” she said.
“On the contrary,” he said, as he flexed his new metal hands, so much larger and stronger than his old hands, the hands of a child, “I will have countless children, born of my mind.” His voice was a pleasant electronic hum, like a patient teaching program’s. “They’ll inherit from my thoughts as surely as I have inherited your genes. And someday, if they wish, I will construct bodies for them, as beautiful and functional as the ones I’m being fitted with.”
He reached out to touch her arm, and the cold metal fingertips slid smoothly over her skin, gliding on nanostructures that flexed like living tissue. She gasped.
Bobby smiled as his face, a fine mesh of thousands of pins, rippled in amusement.
She recoiled from him involuntarily.
Bobby’s rippling face turned serious, froze, and then showed no expression at all.
She understood the unspoken accusation. What right did she have to feel revulsion? She treated her body as a machine too, just a machine of lipids and proteins, of cells and muscles. Her mind was maintained in a shell too, a shell of flesh that had long outlasted its designed-for life. She was as “unnatural” as he.
Still, she cried as she watched her son disappear into a frame of animated metal.
He can’t cry anymore, she kept on thinking, as if that was the only thing that divided her from him.
? ? ?
Bobby was right. Those who were frozen as children were quicker to decide to upload. Their minds were flexible, and to them, to change from flesh to metal was merely a hardware upgrade.
The older immortals, on the other hand, lingered, unwilling to leave their past behind, their last vestiges of humanity. But one by one, they succumbed as well.
For years, Maggie remained the only organic human on 61 Virginis e, and perhaps the entire universe. The machines built a special house for her, one insulated from the heat and poison and ceaseless noise of the planet, and Maggie occupied herself by browsing through the Sea Foam’s archives, the records of humanity’s long, dead past. The machines left her pretty much alone.
One day, a small machine, about two feet tall, came into her house and approached her hesitantly. It reminded her of a puppy.
“Who are you?” Maggie asked.
“I’m your grandchild,” the little machine said.
“So Bobby has finally decided to have a child,” Maggie said. “It took him long enough.”
“I’m the 5,032,322th child of my parent.”
Maggie felt dizzy. Soon after his transformation into a machine, Bobby had decided to go all the way and join the Singularity. They had not spoken to each other for a long time.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t have a name in the sense you think of it. But why don’t you call me Athena?”
“Why?”
“It’s a name from a story my parent used to tell me when I was little.”
Maggie looked at the little machine, and her expression softened.
“How old are you?”
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Athena said. “We’re born virtual and each second of our existence as part of the Singularity is composed of trillions of computation cycles. In that state, I have more thoughts in a second than you have had in your entire life.”
Maggie looked at her granddaughter, a miniature mechanical centaur, freshly made and gleaming, and also a being much older and wiser than she by most measures.
“So why have you put on this disguise to make me think of you as a child?”
“Because I want to hear your stories,” Athena said. “The ancient stories.”
There are still young people, Maggie thought. Still something new.
Why can’t the old become new again?
And so Maggie decided to upload as well, to rejoin her family.
? ? ?
In the beginning, the world was a great void crisscrossed by icy rivers full of venom. The venom congealed, dripped, and formed into Ymir, the first giant, and Aueumbla, a great ice cow.
Ymir fed on Aueumbla’s milk and grew strong.
Of course you have never seen a cow. Well, it is a creature that gives milk, which you would have drunk if you were still . . .
I suppose it is a bit like how you absorbed electricity, at first in trickles, when you were still young, and then in greater measure as you grew older, to give you strength.
Ymir grew and grew until finally, three gods, the brothers Vili, and ?Vé, and Odin, slew him. Out of his carcass the gods created the world: his blood became the warm, salty sea, his flesh the rich, fertile earth, his bones the hard, plow-breaking hills, and his hair, the swaying, dark forests. Out of his wide brows the gods carved Midgard, the realm in which humans lived.
After the death of Ymir, the three brother gods walked along a beach. At the end of the beach, they came upon two trees leaning against each other. The gods fashioned two human figures out of their wood. One of the brother gods breathed life into the wooden figures, another endowed them with intelligence, and the third gave them sense and speech. And this was how Ask and Embla, the first man and the first woman, came to be.
You are skeptical that men and women were once made from trees? But you’re made of metal. Who’s to say trees wouldn’t do just as well?
Now let me tell you the story behind the names. “Ask” comes from “ash,” a hard tree that is used to make a drill for fire. “Embla” comes from “vine,” a softer sort of wood that is easy to set on fire. The motion of twirling a fire drill until the kindling is inflamed reminded the people who told this story of an analogy with sex, and that may be the real story they wanted to tell.
Once your ancestors would have been scandalized that I speak to you of sex so frankly. The word is still a mystery to you, but without the allure that it once held. Before we found how to live forever, sex and children were the closest we came to immortality.
? ? ?
Like a thriving hive, the Singularity began to send a constant stream of colonists away from 61 Virginis e.
One day, Athena came to Maggie and told her that she was ready to be embodied and lead her own colony.
At the thought of not seeing Athena again, Maggie felt an emptiness. So it is possible to love again, even as a machine.
Why don’t I come with you? she asked. It will be good for your children to have some connection with the past.
And Athena’s joy at her request was electric and contagious.
Sara came to say good-bye to her, but Bobby did not show up. He had never forgiven her for her rejection of him the moment he became a machine.