Burning Paradise

“I find that disgusting.”

“The fisherman finds the spider disgusting, though both cast nets for food. But you’re capable of a deeper understanding.”

“Am I?”

“Of course you are.”

He had been duped into a pointless conversation. Pointless from his perspective, at least. He still didn’t understand why he had been kept alive and why he was being told these perverse truths, if they were truths.

“For now, you need food and rest. And as soon as we’re in a secure place I’ll take off those handcuffs. I’m sure they’re uncomfortable.”

The truck moved onto a grated steel ramp and through an arched entranceway to a tu

They put him in a cubicle with a cot and a mattress, a simple toilet, and a single overhead light. The female sim left him, then returned briefly with a bowl containing a greasy mixture of beef and vegetables—food the sims ate, Ethan supposed; the food they were obliged to eat by the quasi-human nature of their bodies. He took a few bites and lay down on the cot. The food was edible, but could it have been drugged? Or was it shock and fatigue that made sleep so irresistible?

When he opened his eyes again he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. The air in this chamber was neither warm nor cool. It might be night. It might be day. The remains of the stew had congealed in its bowl. He emptied his bladder and was just zipping up when the female sim unlocked the door of the chamber and stepped inside.

He looked her over again, this apparently young and studiedly friendly woman in jeans and a white shirt. All the sims in the facility seemed to dress that way, apart from the six-limbed creatures. He wondered how it worked—did they place bulk orders with a retailer in Santiago? Five hundred white cotton shirts, delivered to a blank place on the map?

Before she could speak he said, “Just tell me what you want.” And get it over with. The inevitable demand. The inevitable refusal. What ever followed.

“That’s exactly what I mean to do,” she said.

It said, but he was tired of correcting himself: the creature was functionally female, if not human. “Do you have a name?”

Her eyes examined him briefly. “No. Would you like me to have one?”

“No.” He guessed it wasn’t surprising that she had quoted from The Fisherman and the Spider. The hypercolony would have learned the heuristics of human language from the first sims it deployed on the surface of the planet, later from the electronic communication it collected and analyzed. Presumably a sim had read his book. But it couldn’t have comprehended the book, nor could the hypercolony: there was no centralized self to comprehend it; only the operation of complex, implacable algorithms.

Which meant the hypercolony was both more and less intelligent than a human being. If the sim it sent to him was young and seemed personable, that was because the hypercolony wanted to invite familiarity. If she quoted from his book, it was because the hypercolony hoped to enhance that sense of familiarity. And if she seemed disarmingly honest—admitting she had no human name—that too was a strategic gambit.

The hypercolony could read his body language, discern his habits of mind, calculate his likely responses, but it couldn’t know with certainty what he would do or say next. Essentially, it was gambling on his predictability. Therefore Ethan resolved not to tip his hand. Say nothing committal, display no emotion, make no plans. And if the time came to act, act without premeditation.

The sim walked him to a vehicle in the concrete corridor outside his cell. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate traffic in both directions, vans and compact pickups and a number of two-person motorized carts. Pedestrian traffic—a mixture of human and six-legged bodies—crowded the walls. The sims with human bodies were mostly young adults of both sexes, only a few adolescents and sinewy seniors among them. Ethan guessed the very young were housed separately, while the elderly were put to less demanding work and eventually allowed to die. (He thought of the thin black smoke rising from certain bunkers in the surface compound.) Neither the human nor the alien sims paid him any attention, nor did they speak to one another. The corridor echoed the growl of engines.

No handcuffs today: he was allowed to sit in the cart unrestrained. He could run if he liked. But not very far.

“Werner Beck calls this place a breeding facility,” the sim said. “That’s only partly correct. The hypercolony has been in place for centuries, and during that time it has always been breeding—if by that you mean reproducing individual cells or birthing simulacra. If you want a metaphor from entomology, it would be more accurate to say that what happens here in the Atacama is a kind of swarming.”

She put the cart in gear. Her hands were small and clean. All the sims here looked clean, Ethan noticed. He pictured communal showers, a thousand identical bars of soap.

“The hypercolony has colonized many inhabited worlds over an immensely long span of time. I don’t know how many worlds or how many years. Some parts of its history are hidden. Your characterization of it is correct: the hypercolony can’t know itself the way human beings know themselves. But it contains descriptions of itself that other species have formulated. For instance, it contains a speculative description of itself as evolving from self-replicating organisms that adapted to the environment of interplanetary space. It contains many descriptions of itself acting symbiotically with machine-building civilizations. It may have been partially engineered by some such civilization—in other words, it may be a cultivar that escaped into the wild. And it’s often described as essentially benign. It prevents or ameliorates the problems that inevitably plague its partner civilizations—warfare, needless poverty, crippling superstition.”

She merged the cart with traffic in the corridor. Ethan found himself staring at the tailgate of yet another white Ford pickup. There was a blank rectangle where the license plate would have been. Overhead ventilators sucked up the exhaust. “Swarm, then. Solve the problem.”

“But that’s what you don’t understand. The original hypercolony has already swarmed. It successfully launched a large number of fertile replicators on trajectories to nearby stars. That was its final significant act. What remains of the hive is weak and dying. It’s vulnerable to infection by other organisms, the way any aging animal is susceptible to viral and bacteriological attack.”

The corridor rose at a gentle gradient. Ethan wondered whether he might see the sky again before he died.

“An entire ecology of such organisms exists, scattered throughout the galaxy, drawn to the warmth and resources of young stars. The hypercolony was only one such organism, and it’s exhausted now. It wants to die.”

“Die, then.”

“You still don’t understand. What you see here—the entity I represent—isn’t the hypercolony as it was originally constituted. Think of us as new management. We took control of most of the hypercolony’s major functions more than three years ago.”

“Parasitizing it.”

“Yes, exactly. We parasitized the dying hive. We took control of it reproductive mechanism and we’re using it to reproduce ourselves. We make our own replicators. We send them to follow the swarm. We infect new colonies wherever they thrive. That’s the nature of our reproductive cycle. And we need more time to complete it.”