Spin (55 page)

Jason had admitted that he was dying. Now I began to admit it to myself.

As a physician I had seen more of death than most people ever see. I knew how people died. I knew that the familiar story of how we face death—denial, anger, acceptance—was at best a gross generalization. Those emotions might evolve in seconds or might never evolve at all; death could trump them at any instant. For many people, facing death was never an issue; their deaths arrived unannounced, a ruptured aorta or a bad decision at a busy intersection.

But Jase knew he was dying. And I was bewildered that he seemed to have accepted it with such unearthly calm, until I realized that his death was also an ambition fulfilled. He was on the brink of understanding what he had struggled all his life to understand: the meaning of the Spin and humanity’s place in it—
his
place in it, since he had been instrumental in the launch of the replicators.

It was as if he had reached up and touched the stars.

And they had touched him in return. The stars were murdering him. But he was dying in a state of grace.

“We have to hurry. It’s almost dark now, isn’t it?” Carol had gone off to light candles throughout the house. “Almost,” I said.

“And the rain stopped. Or at least, I can’t hear it.”

“Temperature’s dropping, too. Would you like me to open the window?”

“Please. And the audio recorder, you turned it back on?”

“It’s running now.” I raised the old frame window a few inches and cool air infiltrated the room.

“We were talking about the Hypotheticals…”

“Yes.” Silence. “Jase? Are you still with me?”

“I hear the wind. I hear your voice. I hear…”

“Jason?”

“I’m sorry… don’t mind me, Ty. I’m easily distracted right now. I—
uh
!”

His arms and legs jerked against the restraints Carol had tied across the bed. His head arched into the pillow. He was having what looked like an epileptic seizure, although it was brief: over before I could approach the bed. He gasped and took a deep lungful of air. “Sorry, I’m sorry…”

“Don’t apologize.”

“Can’t control it, I’m sorry.”

“I know you can’t. It’s all right, Jase.”

“Don’t blame them for what’s happening to me.”

“Blame who—the Hypotheticals?”

He attempted a smile, though he was clearly in pain. “We’ll have to find a new name for them, won’t we? They’re not as hypothetical as they used to be. But don’t blame them. They don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m under their threshold of abstraction.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He spoke rapidly and eagerly, as if the talk were a welcome distraction from the physical distress. Or another symptom of it. “You and I, Tyler, we’re communities of living cells, yes? And if you damaged a sufficient number of my cells I would die, you would have murdered me. But if we shake hands and I lose a few skin cells in the process neither of us even notices the loss. It’s invisible. We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies. The same is true of the Hypotheticals. They inhabit a larger universe than we do.”

“That makes it all right to kill people?”

“I’m talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being—
my
death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can’t.”

“They’ve done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn’t that one of the things the replicators discovered before the Hypothetical shut them down?”

“Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hypothetical has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is what they do when they encounter a planet that hosts a sentient, tool-using species of a certain degree of maturity—they enclose it in a Spin membrane.”

I pictured spiders, wrapping their victims in silk. “Why, Jase?”

The door opened. Carol was back, carrying a tea candle on a china saucer. She put the saucer on the sideboard and lit the candle with a wooden match. The flame danced, imperiled by the breeze from the window.

“To preserve it,” Jason said.

“Preserve it against what?”

“Its own senescence and eventual death. Technological cultures are mortal, like everything else. They flourish until they exhaust their resources; then they die.”

Unless they don’t, I thought. Unless they continue flourishing, expand into their solar systems, transplant themselves to the stars…

But Jason had anticipated my objection. “Even local space travel is slow and inefficient for beings with a human life span. Maybe we would have been an exception to the rule. But the Hypotheticals have been around a very long time. Before they devised the Spin membrane they watched countless inhabited worlds drown in their own effluvia.”

He drew a breath and seemed to choke on it. Carol turned to face him. Her mask of competence slipped, and in the moment it took him to recover she was plainly terrified, not a doctor but a woman with a dying child.

Jase, perhaps fortunately, couldn’t see. He swallowed hard and began to breathe normally again.

“But why the Spin, Jase? It pushes us into the future, but it doesn’t change anything.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “It changes everything.”

The paradox of Jason’s last night was that his speech grew awkward and intermittent even as his acquired knowledge seemed to expand exponentially. I believe he learned more in those few hours than he could begin to share, and what he did share was momentous—sweeping in its explanatory power and provocative for what it implied about human destiny.

Pass over the trauma, the agonized groping after appropriate words, and what he said was—

Well, it began with, “Try to see it from their point of view.”

Their point of view: the Hypotheticals.

The Hypotheticals—whether considered as one organism or many—had evolved from the first von Neumann devices to inhabit our galaxy. The origin of those primal self-replicating machines was obscure. Their descendants had no direct memory of it, any more than you or I can “remember” human evolution. They may have been the product of an early-emerging biological culture of which no trace remains; they may have migrated from another, older galaxy. In either case, the Hypotheticals of today belonged to an almost unimaginably ancient lineage.

They had seen sentient biological species evolve and die on planets like ours countless times. By passively transporting organic material from star to star they may even have helped seed the process of organic evolution. And they had watched biological cultures generate crude von Neumann networks as a byproduct of their accelerating (but ultimately unsustainable) complexity—not once, but many times. To the Hypotheticals we all looked more or less like replicator nurseries: strange, fecund, fragile.

From their point of view this endless stuttering gestation of simple von Neumann networks, followed by the rapid ecological collapse of source planets, was both a mystery and a tragedy.

A mystery, because transient events on a purely biological time scale were difficult for them to comprehend or even perceive.

A tragedy, because they had begun to conceive of these progenitor cultures as failed
biological
networks, akin to themselves—growing toward real complexity but snuffed out prematurely by finite planetary ecosystems

For the Hypotheticals, then, the Spin was meant to preserve us—and dozens of similar civilizations that had arisen on other worlds before and since—in our technological prime. But we weren’t museum pieces, frozen in place for public display. The Hypotheticals were reengineering our destiny. They had suspended us in slowtime while they put together the pieces of a grand experiment, an experiment formulated over billions of years and now nearing its ultimate goal: to build a vastly expanded biological landscape into which these otherwise doomed cultures could expand and in which they would eventually meet and intermingle.

I didn’t immediately grasp the meaning of this: “An expanded biological environment? Bigger than the Earth itself?”

We were courting full darkness now. Jason’s words were interrupted by convulsive movements and involuntary sounds, edited out of this account. Periodically I checked his heartbeat, which was rapid and growing weaker.

“The Hypotheticals,” he said, “can manipulate time and space. The evidence of that is all around us. But creating a temporal membrane is neither the beginning nor the end of their abilities. They can literally connect our planet through spatial loops to others like it… new planets, some artificially designed and nurtured, to which we can travel
instantaneously
and
easily
… travel by way of links, bridges, structures, structures assembled by the Hypotheticals, assembled from—if this is truly possible—the matter of dead stars, neutron stars… structures literally dragged through space, patiently, patiently, over the course of millions of years—”

Carol sat beside him on one side of the bed and I sat on the other. I held his shoulders when his body convulsed and Carol stroked his head during the intervals in which he could not speak. His eyes sparked in the candlelight and he stared intently at nothing at all.

“The Spin membrane is still in place, working, thinking, but the temporal function is finished, complete… that’s what the flickers were, the byproduct of a detuning process, and now the membrane has been made permeable so that something can enter the atmosphere through it, something
large
.…”

Later it became obvious what he meant. At the time I was bewildered and I suspected he might have begun to pass into dementia, a sort of metaphorical overload governed by the word “network.”

I was, of course, wrong.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est
: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

But the other memory that sprang to mind, as the substance of Jason’s nervous system was transformed and eroded by the Hypotheticals in a way they could not have known was lethal to him, was of that afternoon, long ago, when he had ridden my thrift shop bicycle down from the top of Bantam Hill Road. I thought of how adroitly, almost balletically, he had controlled that disintegrating machine, until there was nothing left of it but ballistics and velocity, the inevitable collapse of order into chaos.

His body—and he was a Fourth, remember—was a finely tuned machine. It didn’t die easily. Sometime prior to midnight Jason lost the ability to speak, and that was when he began to look both frightened and no longer entirely human. Carol held his hand and told him he was safe, he was at home. I don’t know if that consolation reached him in the strange and convolute chambers his mind had entered. I hope it did.

Not long after that his eyes rolled upward and his muscles relaxed. His body struggled on, drawing convulsive breaths almost until morning.

Then I left him with Carol, who stroked his head with infinite gentleness and whispered to him as if he could still hear her, and I failed to notice that the sun when it rose was no longer bloated and red but as bright and perfect as it had been before the end of the Spin.

I stayed on deck as the
Capetown Mam
left its berth and made for the open sea.

No less than a dozen container ships abandoned Teluk Bayur while the oil fires were burning, jostling for position at the harbor mouth. Most of these were small merchant ships of dubious registry, probably bound for Port Magellan despite what their manifests said—vessels whose owners and captains had much to lose from the scrutiny that would follow an investigation.

I stood with Jala and we braced ourselves against the rails, watching a rust-spackled coastal freighter veer out of a bank of oil-fire smoke alarmingly close to the
Capetown’s
stern. Both ships sounded alarms and the
Capetown’s
, deck crew looked aft apprehensively. But the coastal freighter sheered off before it made contact.

Then we were out of the protection of the harbor into high seas and rolling swells, and I went below to join Ina and Diane and the other emigres in the crew lounge. En sat at a trestle table with Ibu Ina and his parents, all four of them looking unwell. In deference to her injury Diane had been given the only padded chair in the room, but the wound had stopped bleeding and she had managed to change into dry clothes.

Jala entered the lounge an hour later. He shouted for attention and delivered a speech, which Ina translated for me: “Setting aside his pompous self-congratulation, Jala says he went to the bridge and spoke to the captain. All deck fires are out and we’re safely underway, he says. The captain apologizes for the rough seas. According to forecasts we ought to be out of this weather by late tonight or early tomorrow. For the next few hours, however—”

At which point En, who was sitting next to Ina, turned and vomited into her lap, effectively finishing her sentence for her.

Two nights later I went up on deck with Diane to look at the stars.

The main deck was quieter at night than at any time during the day. We found a safe space between the exposed forty-foot containers and the aft superstructure, where we could talk without being overheard. The sea was calm, the air was pleasantly warm, and stars swarmed over the
Capetown’s
stacks and radars as if they had tangled in the rigging.

“Are you still writing your memoir?” Diane had seen the assortment of memory cards I was carrying in my luggage, alongside the digital and pharmaceutical contraband we had brought from Montreal. Also various paper notebooks, loose pages, scribbled notes.

“Not as often,” I said. “It doesn’t seem as urgent. The need to write it all down—”