The This, page 7
It has cost Ewe some physical effort to end Roane’s life, and she is panting as she lets the twisted-about garment loosen from the crushed neck. She hasn’t much time. Presses two fingers into the dead woman’s mouth. The HMθ are, in many ways, much cleverer than individual old-school humans, but in some ways they are simply naif – perhaps over-trustful in their collective residual memory of what being an individual entailed. This transparent attempt to coax information out of Ewe is a case in point. The HMθ presumably thought they’d mocked up a perfectly convincing simulacrum of an individual human being when in a hundred ways their imposture was easy to read. Easy for an individual to read.
Ewe doesn’t have long.
Her diamond tooth comes out – so much of what the HMθ do depends upon consciousness raised to a higher science, an active muscle in the world, that they possess odd little blind spots when it comes to quite basic material technology. The tooth is red at one end, but the continual passage of water soon blurs that into a hanging pink mist, and then everything is clean again. In this room, everything is always clean again eventually.
Fiddle-faddle with a thumbnail and the tooth changes shape. A needle extrudes. Ewe pulls the corpse’s mouth open, grasps the back of her head with her left hand, and pushes the spike into the roof of Roane’s unresponsive mouth. There’s no time to waste. Roane has, in some way that Ewe cannot quite grasp, semi-disconnected herself from the gestalt so as to be able to simulate old-school individuality, but only semi-disconnected, and what happens to one consciousness in the HMθ happens to them all, which means it won’t be long before—
—there. The water all around has been replaced with some other chemical, Ewe can’t tell what, but it tastes foul, it is manifestly toxic, and in a second she is
We
The individual having been neutralised, the collective wisdom tells us that it is time to proceed. As for the presence of other devices, hidden on Earth or elsewhere, we must address that problem if and when it becomes a problem. Since it will be a problem whether or not we proceed with our Veneration, there is no need to delay the terraforming process. In the meantime we can use assets to monitor algorithmically identified likely nodes – chatfora, ancillary scientific developments, gossip, select laboratories and tech-tribes – to watch for any signs that the Fridge exists in any other form: from working models to plans to speculations about the underlying tech. Simultaneously, of course, we are spreading a pollen cloud of disinformation, fake news, diversions, straw and chaff through all the socially and culturally connective media of humanity’s three worlds and eighty habitats. We are very good at doing this. This is deep in our collective DNA.
We cannot be certain that none of the individuals scattered and fractured among the old-school humans will develop a new Fridge, but we are doing what we can to prevent it.
Venus. First we position our soletta, to maintain the necessary temperature on the Venusian surface after insertion of the Fridge. Considering the distance of the sun, and the location of the Lagrange point between it and Venus, a conventional soletta would need to be many times the diameter of the planet itself, and would be subject to continual buffeting from solar wind. We are not interested in so ungainly and resource-draining an artefact. Instead we deploy a cloud-soletta – 876,000 smart drones, each one made from programmed smartgel, each bundling into a smartnut as it passes the dark side, and unfolding into a photovoltaic broad frond on the dayside. When each unit is fully extended this cloud prevents something like 60 per cent of the sunlight reaching the Venusian surface, and we can tweak and adapt as necessary.
We deploy not one but two of the sub-ab Fridges to the Venusian atmosphere. One alone would, we calculate, be sufficient to freeze out the entire air, but asymmetries in cooling the planetary hemispheres would set off chaotic storm fronts among the falling CO2-snow, and for several reasons that would be suboptimal. Antipodean placement – activation – and the cascade rolls round to meet itself on a meridian with a shock wave impact that jars open the planetary crust below it.
A moment.
A pure moment …
… and the entire superheated CO2 atmosphere of this world shivers into flakes and falls, tumbling and swirling, through its new-made ultra-low-pressure medium.
It is part of the beauty of the sub-ab device that it is able to orchestrate this vastly energetic transformation, this massive phase change in trillions of tonnes of material, by, in effect, stealing energy from the process’s own future. This is the quantum mystery of the shrinking atomic nucleus: it both requires and creates an immense potential energy that is released when energy – in effect – drains back from the present into the past moment of the activation, and so powers its own action. That, in a conservation of momentum sense, is how so much energy drains away so rapidly. The reaction comes back, temporally shifted, with enough kick to provoke the entire process in the first place.
And to think an old-school fragmented human, a shard, a broken piece of the whole, lighted upon this technology! It is a strange and wonderful thing.
And now the snow is falling. Snow was general all over Venus. It is falling softly upon the Dickinson Impact Crater and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous volcanic domes of the shield plains. It is falling, too, upon every part of the lonely landscape where the once temperate planet lay buried. It lies thickly drifted on western Aphrodite and eastern Aphrodite, on the shallow peaks of Ishtar and in the shallow Cytherean and Eryxian basins. Our collective soul swoons slowly as we hear the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of life’s last end, upon all the living and the dead.
But this is only the first stage. There is much to do. Even with the soletta orbiting in place, the sun starts straight away subliming the CO2 back into gas. Atmospheric pressure, reset with a jolt at close to zero, starts to climb. That’s all right: we need some atmosphere. We shall keep the level close to one bar, and do not permit the greenhousing that led to Venus’s hellscape in the first place.
Venus is still a hellscape, of course. Before our arrival it was a scorching and crushing hell. Now it is a frozen hell, Dante Alighieri’s lowest infernal circle.
So we seed a broad equatorial band with a special strand of unicellular algae. These thrive in the high CO2 environments, and have been genetweaked to respond to the low-nitrogen environment by redirecting their energies towards the production and accumulation of energy-dense lipids. Algae do not waste energy on complex root, branch or leaf systems; they simply take in CO2 and give out oxygen. Good!
The soletta is reconfigured to open a long horizontal window onto this growing zone, and our algal bloom bathes in the light, and begins its process – slowly at the start, more rapidly as its exponential curve starts to lift – liberating oxygen and locking carbon into itself. We send down a constant stream of cometary lumps of water. Comets are easy to tag, and easy to redirect. With a simple thruster buried in the flank, even very large cometary objects can be nudged, with all their lovely dirt and ice, out of their orbits and into new ones. A crocodile of comets, swirling round the sun and into Venusian orbit. We don’t bombard these all into the planetary surface in one go, for to do so would generate more heat and dissipate more CO2 into the atmosphere than is ideal for our timetables. But we break chunks and drop them, as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: it feeds the algae, and after them the arctic grasses and adjusted bamboos with which we have now seeded the territory, as soon as the ground became capable of supporting them – and it gathers in pools, icy sludge to begin with, but as we slowly lift the temperature and adjust the soletta, it will turn into liquid. We shall make lakes, and then we shall make seas, and then we shall make oceans, and then we will be the thronèd monarchs of an oceanic world. The terrain has been flattened by billions of years of insane pressures and insane temperatures, landscapes boiled and burst through from beneath by lava and flattened again, so the peaks are low and the valleys are shallow, so the oceans will never be Gaia-deep; but water will cover our world, for the primal chaos of creation was an attribute of God himself; and our earthly power must show most like to God’s. Therefore, you, solitary human, though justice be your slogan, consider that in the course of justice none of you shall see salvation. Salvation is ours. And our world is surrounded by our craft, and our machines are dropped with parachute – for the atmosphere is starting to recoalesce – to burrow through the snow fields and churn down. Thousands and thousands of tunnelling machines that trace out the borderline between the bottom of the CO2-ice and the top of the underlying regolith. Mixing together the ice and the basalt underneath locks the CO2 away. Sourcing nitrogen for our atmosphere is a very long-term project, but in the nearer future we can port in neon, which, though rare on earth, is the fifth most commonly occurring element in the universe. When our air is one fifth oxygen and three quarters neon, with traces of other gases, we will be able to walk upon the surface of Venus.
Do not believe that this process goes smoothly. This is precisely the time of crisis – old-school humanity, fractured into twenty billion broken pieces, factorises resentment, and species-deep suspicion of newness and otherness, and finally is catalysed by actual fear. They have started to understand the journey we are on, and that it leaves them behind. They do not like the implications of this inevitability.
They attempt to disrupt the terraforming of our world.
They cannot succeed in this disruption, but lacking whole vision, all their rest is desolation.
They bomb the surface, in the hopes of massive outgassing to disrupt our delicate atmosphere-building. This is inconvenient, but not impossibly so. The cratering mixes some of the CO2 with underlying basalt, sequestering it; and our bloom has spread through the dry ice, greening it, so spreading it through the atmosphere puts its granular algae into the air, to circulate and continue its work. Still: we would prefer that they stopped.
A co-ordinated fleet-attack – what they call, with characteristic old-school hubris, the First Battle of Venus (there will never be a second) – results in some HMθ losses, but we are a gestalt and can absorb such depredation. The attacking Earth fleet is eliminated, and the rare minerals and metals out of which their crewed spaceships have been built are added to the Venusian mix – a tiny augmentation, but not unwelcome.
Part of their problem is that they are hobbled by their way of thinking: unitary, crystalline, brittle. Their Martian soletta is a single structure, focusing light onto the red land below – and a single structure can be singularly destroyed. Our soletta dances its pretzel dance as missiles and smartordnance hurtle through. The tuna school evades the shark.
Almost as soon as it begins, the old-school attack sputters out and dies. It lasts a microsecond. It lasts seven years. These are differences in timescale that register, perhaps, upon Homo sapiens but, increasingly, do not matter to Homo collectus, and will not matter to Homo spirans. We communicate with the residual populations of old-school humanity, those countless billions, most of whom do not even know they have been superseded. We negotiate and instruct, we bully and trade – some material objects, some more rarefied commodities like rare mathematical proofs that are beyond the capacity of individual humans to resolve. They supply us with their people – their people flock, willingly, to us, and so we are refreshed and renewed. We will always need a breeding population, and will never extirpate the old-school; but its utility is quite sharply limited.
Venus is ours. Drier than we would wish, but it is a slow business adding cometary bodies to a surface area equivalent to earth – raining dirt and steam to unsettle the slushy seas, if only for a moment. Over time it will become a wetter place. Over time we will warm it, we will populate it with a greater variety of plant life and introduce animals. Over time we will make Venus a better world than Earth, a more beautiful world, a kinder world, a world fit for us. By such means we achieve our Veneration.
We are inevitable. If there’s one thing you need to understand it is this. Post that sentiment to social media – we are inevitable – and see how many people rush to endorse it. This! This! This! A little iconic finger pointing down to the original expression. Send this thought to all your communities.
We do not regard time with the same destabilising urgency and terror as you do. We live forever. We will make a world for ourselves. You, in your aloneness, are weak; we, in our togetherness, are strong.
We are the graveyard in which humanity is buried, and the temple in which they are memorialised; we are the Frankenstein’s laboratory in which humanity will return to life, and the mountain on which the tablets of the law will be handed down. We are the river Alph, and the Mountain of Abora. We have erected the mighty pleasure dome and it is us. We are the wind on the sea. We are the stag of seven tines. We are the shining tear of the sun – your kind wrote many stories about such spacecraft and without realising it they were writing about us. Our ships are spears that roar for blood. We are a lure from paradise, we are the tide that drags to death, we are the infant that is reborn, we are the blaze on every hill. We are the queen of every hive.
We are you.
By such veneration we achieve our means.
4
Richer
:1:
Rich filed the pro forma for his interview at The This, and D-Work paid him. He even got a five-star Workadvisor rating from his client, which ought to help when it came to picking up subsequent gigs. So the whole odd episode had a happy ending, it seemed. At university, a friend had once tried to convince Rich that the universe itself had a happy ending, that we were all moving towards that consummation. It was a God thing for the friend, a religious conviction: God had written the story and God loves happy endings. A consummation, things finally coming right, a scene in a garden. But Rich wasn’t religious and had no reason to believe that localised happy endings were anything other than way stations on the road to Ragnarok and ultimate defeat. It didn’t do to get too excited over instances of good fortune.
Still: five stars was pretty neat. So was the money.
Three people had killed themselves in the Wandsworth area the previous night. Two had put their ears to the rail as the 00.04 to Waterloo was picking up speed. Rich tried to imagine what that must have been like – just waiting, feeling the vibration of the metal rod against the side of your head, and then: gone. Bam! Both together. It’s murder, was Connolly1999’s opinion. ‘They’ killed them and laid them on the rail to destroy their teeth. Dental records, it’s a classic gangsta move. But there was no issue about the identity of the corpses: they had fingerprints, driving licences and credit cards in wallets in their back pockets. Rich @’d Connolly1999 with this rebuttal, but he didn’t reply.
He should have been doing other work, but The This continued to tickle his imagination. He read through such gubbins as had been written, fact and speculation, about the rapid advance of this new company. Gleaming profiles, investors slavering for profit. He had a series of vivid dreams about Aella Hamilton. He googled her, and found her official corporate portrait, then used a match-app to find porn stars who resembled her and indulged himself with those clips.
Then he made himself a cup of coffee.
He did a large amount of general reading up about The This as an organisation, and joined a few chatboards and ingroups, not posting so much as eavesdropping on the way people were talking about the organisation. There were, of course, a hundred opinions, including some pretty far-out conspiracy theories, but the consensus was: chill, dudes. It’s just a way of taking the finger-tapping out of Twitter and Instagram.
Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal.
There were a dozen similar start-ups. The This happened to be the biggest. Lots of smartvestors were guessing that making Twitter hands-free was the wave of the future. Rich didn’t think so, but nobody was asking him. There were companies that fitted you with temporary grids – a rather conspicuous-looking shower cap was one, a combo sunglasses-earpiece gizmo was another – that (according to online reviews) were supposed to facilitate hands-free typing, but which proved slow and glitchy in practice. Focus your thoughts, they say, but I’m straining so hard to type hello I’m at risk of shitting myself – zero stars. One company inserted a pea-sized machine in the back of the head, in a process that required actual surgical intervention. Another company had machines that were injected via a needle as big as a chopstick round the side of each eyeball, attaching themselves to the optic nerve and growing threads back into the forebrain. The insertion process could be undergone either with or without anaesthetic. Rich shuddered to read this (without? seriously?).
By comparison The This’s system looked piece-of-cakey: sit back in the padded chair in one of their gleaming Thisstores, open wide like at the dentist’s: a prick in the roof of the mouth as the local analgesic went in, and a slight sense of pressure as the tech was inserted. Apparently you could feel a lump in the roof of your mouth (with your tongue, with a finger) for a couple of days afterwards, and then it settled down. What happened was this: the tech leached microscopic quantities of carbon and iron from the body – iron supplement tablets were recommended for a fortnight or so – to build its filaments, and these grew slowly. The whole thing started working within ten to twelve days. If you changed your mind, Thisstore would remove it (painlessly) for free; or you could ask your dentist or doctor to do the same (but they would charge you). The device itself popped out easily, and though the filaments were generally left in situ, they were so fine they were like strands of gossamer and were physiologically quite inert. FDA and NICE approved. Certified by eighty medical authorities. IP and TechC protected. Credit available.
Rich always organised his autosex to minimise mess: sitting on the loo, seat down, tissue ready. Her face, beautiful and uninterested, looking coolly down at him, and, and … out slotted a quantum of Venus-coloured fluid. There. Done. Like an owl regurgitating a food pellet. If stickier. Down the toilet, and press the flush button.
