Burning Paradise

They put him in one of the trucks next to the female sim who had cuffed him. He could see the creature more clearly by the glow from the dashboard. Its hair was short and dark, its skin coffee-brown. It gave him a contrite, solicitous look as it steered the truck in a half circle and joined the convoy of vehicles, all now headed away from San Pedro de Atacama and toward the breeding facility deep in the desert. Its expression—like its words, like its gestures—was of course a calculated lie.

He wondered what it wanted from him. Why he had been kept alive.

“We just want to talk,” it said again.

Ethan’s mouth was as dry as the salt flats they were driving through, but he managed to ask, “Why bother?”

“I understand the objection you’re making. You’re right. You have no reason to believe anything we say. But we’re offering you more than words, Dr. Iverson. We can show you what we are. We have a demonstrable claim to make. As a scientist, perhaps you can appreciate that.”

He didn’t answer. He turned his face to the window. To the moonlit desert, the ghostly salar, his own bitter reflection.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” the sim said. “Werner Beck’s weapon. It’s true that he can suppress cellular signaling in isolated cultures of green matter. But our bodies are more robust than that. We can function for prolonged periods of time without contact with the orbital hypercolony. His so-called war would have been little more than a futile gesture. I think you know that, Dr. Iverson, on some level.”

These were gambits, not facts. Maybe it was true he had doubted Beck. Maybe it was true that a gesture, however impotent, had seemed to him more attractive than a lifetime spent in hiding. But if so, so what? Why play this game? “If he’s not a threat, what are you afraid of?”

“What makes you think we’re afraid?”

“A lot of good people died at your hands.”

“No, not our hands. Don’t you remember what Winston Bayliss told you? There are two entities competing for control of the hypercolony. We’re not the entity that killed your friends in 2007. We have a different nature and different aims. May I explain?”

Ethan put his head against the window glass. The cab of the truck was warm but he felt the cold of the night seep through.

“We can talk later,” the simulacrum said. “But I want to emphasize that you’re not in danger.” It smiled. “You’re safer than you realize, Dr. Iverson.”

The road cut the horizon like a surveyor’s line. The last human settlement Ethan saw was a cluster of ware houses and tin-roofed machine sheds, which must have been the way station where Beck’s flunky Eugene Dowd had once worked. It faded in the mirror like a transitory blemish on the purity of the desert.

He shifted his body, trying to relieve the pressure on his cuffed hands. He didn’t want to think about the handcuffs. To undertake an inventory of his helplessness would be to invite panic. He preferred this dead indifference. He could imagine nothing more terrifying than the possibility of hope.

He shrank back in his seat when their destination first appeared on the arc of the horizon. A hill, a mound—in the dark, and from a distance, it really did look shockingly like the mound of an anthill or a termite nest. It was only as they approached it, and as the convoy began to slow, that the hill resolved into a twenty-foot berm of excavated earth and industrial detritus through which an entranceway had been cut. The western sky was lightening now and it seemed to Ethan that the debris pile (heaps of unused or discarded sheet metal, rebar, insulated wire, machine parts) was both weirdly prosaic and wholly alien, lavish in what had been discarded but economical in the way it had been repurposed as a barrier to the wind or other threats.

“You must be at least a little bit curious about what we do here,” the sim said. “As a scholar, I mean. As a scientist.”

Maybe he had once been capable of such curiosity. Not anymore. The sim was trying to bait him into an interaction; he refused the bait. He watched the road ahead, trying to make himself as indifferent as a camera.

As the truck topped an incline and crossed the berm he saw the whole installation for the first time: an enormous industrial facility enclosed in a crater of debris. He was impressed despite himself, not least by the size of it. An entire American town could have been dropped into this space—say, one of those little Ohio towns he and Nerissa had passed through only weeks ago. Except this wasn’t a place where human beings lived. The grid of paved roads was inhumanly exact, illuminated with harsh lights at every intersection, the roads lined with faceless concrete structures like aircraft hangers or bunkers, some of which emitted plumes of black smoke. “Machine shops,” the sim said, following his gaze. “We do our own manufacturing here. Not everything we need can be brought in from outside.”

At the center of the grid a huge construction of glass and metal reflected the predawn glow of the sky like an impressionist sculpture of a sunflower. Ethan tried to estimate its size by comparing it to the figures moving near it: it was at least as large as an Olympic-style sports stadium, maybe larger. He couldn’t guess its purpose, and the sim didn’t offer an explanation.

As the truck moved deeper into the facility Ethan was surprised by how busy the streets were. If all the workers moving among the buildings were sims, Beck must have underestimated the global population of them. And there were animals here, too. It was hard to identify them in the uncertain light but they moved with a crablike gait, close to the ground….

“Don’t be afraid, Dr. Iverson.”

But he was afraid, because the animals weren’t animals. The truck passed within a yard of one of them and Ethan saw the furred body moving efficiently on four oddly-articulated legs, the torso curving to support a third pair of limbs—arms—with small long-fingered hands, and the head… not quite a human head, but a leathery caricature of one, with featureless eyes and a slit grin of a mouth….

It scuttled past the truck trailing a shadow like a Rorschach blot.

“They’re no threat to you,” the sim said. “Would you like to know what they are?”

His silence passed for assent.

“In a way, they’re nothing more than memories. Using that term as you did in your book The Fisherman and the Spider. Do you remember what you said about African termites? ‘They have no capacity for memory, but the hive remembers. Its memories are written in the genome of its population, inscribed there by the hive’s evolutionary past.’ The hypercolony remembers in the same way, and its memories are even longer. It has interacted with many sentient species on many planets. In one case, perhaps millions of years ago, it learned to emulate creatures like these. Now it can create them at will. It could create others, quite different, but only these are suited to this planet’s atmosphere and chemistry. They’re useful—they can manipulate small objects as efficiently as human beings, with slight modifications they can serve as guards or warriors, and they’re especially adept at climbing and construction work.”

Sims of a different species, Ethan thought. But no, really it was the same species—the hypercolony—mimicking a different host. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Do you grow them here?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We give birth to them. Just as we give birth to ourselves. You intuited that a sim can grow in a human womb, by a process analogous to infection. That’s true. That’s how Winston Bayliss came to exist. But most female sims have a perfectly functional reproductive system. I was born here, to a mother like myself. My body could give birth to more sims, or to one of those six-limbed creatures. Many of the sims here are dedicated to producing replacement workers.”