Deus Ex Machina
Deus Ex Machina
By Ian Tregillis
“Listen, friend. There are three things you need to know about the Grand Ostia, but the knowing won’t endear you to the Thanates of Paarvos. I know it’s a pisser, but they’ll wreck you good if they break in before I’m done.”
The restrained madman trails off, pointing with his chin. Another volley of thunder rattles the chamber. This one is hard enough to tarnish a two-meter section of the barricade’s mirror sheen. It’s as if the Thanates have sucker-punched this slip of illegally folded space hard enough to give it a black eye. You can’t see the ultraviolet light spewing from the distressed negative-energy barrier, but you can smell the ozone it creates. It’s a welcome change from the vomit.
You realize he paused for effect. He’s insane, but there is a theatrical quality to his lunacy. So at least the wait for rescue will be entertaining.
Though your prisoner managed to instantiate the barricade before you could subdue him, you’re comforted by the (violent) evidence that your call for assistance slipped through before the room was effectively severed from the surrounding universe. With every impact, the aubergine portion of the silvery barricade spreads. The Thanates will rescue you. A spacetime bubble like this is supposed to be impenetrable yet, in a contest between an irresistible force and an immovable object, who but a fool wouldn’t lay their money on the Thanates?
As always, a frisson of warm delight accompanies thoughts of humanity’s godlike benefactors. Though you’ve never admitted this to anybody else, you’ve long imagined it’s akin to how it feels to fall in love. Or smoke opium.
The madman rolls his eyes. “Ugh. Wipe that beatific grin from your face. It makes you look like a slack-jawed moron. And if that’s the case, I’ve chosen the wrong person and we’re both in store for a rotten day.”
You open your mouth to object—very few people pass the stringent mental and biological tests to become a regional Ostium engineer, and fewer still manage it before their twenty-first birthday—but he interrupts again, stepping on your indignation.
“I know, I know, you’re not a moron, oh no not at all, top of your class, blah blah, scores so high the Thanates personally congratulated you, blah-de-blah, this cushy job on the very day you reached the age of majority.” He looks you dead in the eyes. “Blah. Blippety. Blah.”
Another frisson displaces the first, but instead of a warm tingle this one rides a shiver of deep unease. It’s a bit like the way an unpleasant dream tends to evaporate even as you linger in bed, eyes still closed, determined to remember it. You’ve known this raving nut for all of five minutes, and so far you’ve barely managed to inject a spare word into his wide-eyed, foam-flecked ranting. Meaning you certainly haven’t told him your life story. Yet somehow—
Another boom rattles the chamber. The metallic tang of ozone grows in concert with the reverberations. You turn your back to the distressed section of the barrier—gently, so that you don’t go ping-ponging off the walls—and, always keeping one hand firmly on a fixed surface, roll down the sleeves of your boilersuit, lest the UV give you sunburn. A pointless gesture since you’re surrounded by a perfect mirror, but it’s more to distract yourself than from any genuine worry: the Thanates can cure skin cancer, of course, with a single trip through any of the Ostia. They eradicated all disease millennia ago. As every schoolchild knows, primitive humans were on the brink of extinction before the Thanates arrived; today, humanity thrives with a robust global population approaching fifty million souls.
The room shakes and the bruised portion of the barrier suddenly goes fractal, its iridescent glow akin to the sheen of oil on water. The room now smells like a lightning storm during an ocean crossing, complete with sea sickness. The prisoner’s ears must be ringing, too, but it doesn’t stop his monologue.
“By the way, that uncanny feeling you’re having right now is called ‘déjà vu’. It’s rare these days.” The restraints hamper his attempt to shrug. “Another casualty of the Thanates’ tinkering, the paranoid bastards.” You wince. The blasphemous disrespect to humanity’s saviors is almost physically painful to hear. But the prisoner either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. “You’re sensing the imperfect erasure of genuine memory. After all,” he says, “this isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation.”
A light snow had dusted the village overnight. That morning the sky was bright and wide and blue, the adobe huts of the village an assembly of perfect ochre cubes, and the snow was so pure that your mother hung her sunglasses over your tiny ears, lest the glare sear your eyes. You rode your father’s shoulders through the village, holding both of your parents’ hands, shrieking with delight at this novelty. The temperature hadn’t yet risen with the sun, so the snow hadn’t begun to melt, and the wagon paths through the village weren’t yet a tangle of muddy troughs. You’re glad for this, as otherwise your father probably wouldn’t have carried you on his shoulders. Everything in the village looked good enough to eat, like gingerbread dusted with powdered sugar.
Except the Ostium in the village square. The Thanates of Paarvos had, in ancient times, gifted your village with its own portal. The simple arch of bluish metal, some unknowable substance the Thanates had brought to Earth from beyond the stars, is always slightly warm to the touch. A curtain of meltwater drips from the gleaming lintel to the slate gray flagstones paving the ground before the Ostium. This was the only place in your village where the ground was paved. So many things came and went through the portal—a constant stream of incoming food and water for the village, outgoing waste, a trickle of visitors and traders in both directions—that the action of wagon wheels and mule hooves would have kept the village square perpetually coated in fetlock-deep mud.
The shimmering soap bubble within the arch emitted a faint silver-blue glow. After you’d grown and traveled and seen snow a few more times, you’d compare the memory of that subtle radiance to moonlight on snow. But up to that point in your short life, you’d seen it every day and wondered how it felt to step within. You had tried, once, when you thought your mother wasn’t looking. Maybe she wasn’t. But the Thanates were, of course. You bounced off the shockingly cold membrane of light with a bloody nose and fell, crying, to the flagstones. It was the first and only time in your life you’d felt betrayed, and back then you were too young to express such complexity of emotion except by bawling.
The village Ostium sported no controls, no glittering buttons or cool glass panels to caress, as with the Ostia you would monitor years later, after your adult career began. The Thanates knew everybody in your village, knew their needs and desires, even the things they didn’t know they needed. The portal provided accordingly. And that morning, after your father set you back on your feet to stand on the wet flagstones before the Ostium, after your parents kissed you and hugged you and told you they loved you and how proud they were, you stepped alone beneath the lintel and into the coruscating rainbow. The Thanates knew who you were, and how old you were, and that it was your first day of school.
You emerged into a scene both thrilling and terrifying. You’d never seen mountains before, you’d never seen a banyan tree before, you’d never seen other children before. Your new classmates were crying. You couldn’t understand why. It looked like such a beautiful place, with great snow-capped purple mountains in the hazy distance and a verdant valley, the most colorful thing you’d ever seen, between them and your banyan tree classroom. The birdsong was different, exotic. The air smelled wet and clean, too, without a hint of sulfur. Sometimes, if you stood close enough, you could catch the faintest whiff of exotic places clinging to the pack mules as they emerged from the village portal. They smelled like this. This morning, you take a lungful.
Your teacher welcomed you to join them beneath the banyan. The first lesson, he said, was the history of mankind before the Thanates came to Earth. And soon you understood why your classmates are crying.
For as he spoke, new images and sensations came unbidden to your recollection. Part of you knew you had never experienced these things, but Mr. Nagayama was so convincing, so vivid, that the ancient cursed world somehow came fully to life in your mind’s eye. Your parents were absent from these strange memories. You died alone in a fire, again and again, as Mr. Nagayama explained how fortunate mankind had been to receive the compassion of the Thanates. You suffered and died many times that day, until the lesson ended and it was time to return to your parents.
Late that night, you snuck out of your home to steal into the village square and, when nobody was there to see it, kiss the Ostium.
“That’s absurd,” you say. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“It’s also not the second time we’ve had a version of this conversation. This is number four, but who’s counting.” He sighs. It rattles the cables securing his wrists and ankles to the chair, which is itself bolted to the floor. “These are new. Bit of a wrinkle, I admit.”
You glance at the failing barricade again. A closed space-like tessellation is supposed to be topologically inviolate. That’s what the Thanates taught you. And the inherent truth of their proclamations, like the geometry of folded space, has ever been beautiful and perfect.
The madman is clearly afraid they’ll find a way in. But he’s crazy, right? So either this ranting weirdo is somehow correct and the Thanates misled you, or he’s deluded and the Thanates told you the truth. It’s no contest. Except…you glance again at the fissures of light streaming from the barrier, and shiver. Ah! But perhaps the Thanates had never needed to do such a thing until now and they, having focused the might of their superhuman intelligence on the problem, have newly solved it. That would explain it.
You sigh in relief, embracing the endorphin rush that comes from meditating on the Thanates’ perfection.
The emergency illumination dims as the aquamarine console behind your prisoner begins to hum. Having lost contact with the gateway facia, the Ostium stabilization hardware (or, at least, the pieces of it marooned in this microcosmos) is attempting to ping its sister station by inducing holographic ripples in the subatomically thin bridge connecting Stockholm with the helium scoops orbiting Jupiter. As it continues to receive no response, it steadily ramps up the amplitude of the gravitational chirping. But that takes power, and of course all of the power cables were severed when the sweaty madman sitting across from you created this pointless and temporary pocket universe. The emergency power cells are the only source of electricity in your entire universe.
Of course, the impenetrability of the barrier means you have a finite amount of oxygen, too. You’ll suffocate in this perfect bubble if your saviors don’t pierce it before long. But you’re not worried. The Thanates can banish death, too. And they’ll surely want to reward you for your service today. Surely.
Your stomach gurgles. You wonder if the queasy sensation that the lunatic called déjà vu is perhaps just the nausea brought on by sudden weightlessness. Local gravity disappeared when the barrier went up. Your half-digested breakfast (some of which is painted across what used to be the ceiling, while the rest has congealed into several chunky blobs floating through the room) was the first casualty.
Irritated that his extravagant implications have tempered, however briefly, your appreciation of the Thanates, you ask, “Are you seriously claiming to have erased my memories?”
“Don’t be stupid. Do I look like I have magical powers? I’m tied to a chair with somebody else’s puke dripping from my beard.” He shakes his arms for emphasis, rattling the cables again. “No, I didn’t erase your memories. The Thanates did. I merely gave them a reason. They thought they were erasing something else.” He jerks his chin in your direction. “I saw the rash on your arm. Sorry about that.”
The reminder makes your skin itch. You scratch at the arm of your suit. The welts had appeared a few days ago; you’d assumed something had bitten you while you slept, and changed the sheets.
“You’ll find the injector in my left outer coat pocket, if you care to look. A molecular tag on your hippocampus, to make memories of interactions with me look like something else to the Thanates. Something for which they’ve got a real hate boner.”
“And what would that be?”
“A deep and enduring insight about the field equations underlying the Ostia.” He chuckled. “Yeah, they’ll scrub that shit from your brain in a nanosecond.”
The déjà vu swells. And suddenly…you’re afraid. Even though you know in your heart he’s nothing but a sweaty bag of lies, you’re afraid of what he’s going to say. You’re afraid because he believes his heresies. You’re afraid of your own morbid curiosity and where it might lead you.
But that doesn’t stop you from pushing off, floating across the chamber, and clutching the back of his chair. You scrabble for an anchor, and snag the cables restraining his left elbow. He winces. Fishing through his coat pockets is intimate and awkward—especially as you try to avoid getting smeared with the spew in his beard, which now reeks of spoiled milk—but you do find an injector. The business end matches the tiny concentric circular welts on your arm.
It’s official. You’ve been drugged by a lunatic. Several times. You release his chair and float back across the chamber.
You adopt what you hope is your best air of lazy sangfroid and ask, “Why are you doing this?”
“If you carried the burden of sins that I do, you’d do anything to clear your conscience.”
The response comes tumbling out of you so fast you’re barely aware of it. Almost, you realize for what you’re sure is the very first time in your life, as if you’ve been programmed. “The concept of sin is an ancient logical fallacy contrived by primitive authority groups as an instrument of social control.”
“Uh-huh. Just came up with that yourself, did you?”
His choice of words was not accidental. He provoked your reaction to make a point. What point remains unclear.
Fingering the injector, you sigh. “What sins?”
“Every evil the Thanates have ever visited upon us. The genocide, the mass brainwashing, the eradication of our histories and cultures, all of it. If anybody is responsible for the tyranny of our self-proclaimed gods, I am.”
“Tyranny? They saved us. They love us.”
“Oh, please. They’re not benevolent gods. They’re not gods of any stripe. I know this will be difficult to swallow because of the conditioning, but let’s just say the power to inflict a plague of boils on the insufficiently devout isn’t emblematic of godhood. Sure they can smite you. But you know what? So can amoebic dysentery. And I’ve never seen anybody worshipping those little bastards.”
It was little wonder why the Thanates had appointed Mr. Nagayama as a teacher. He had an extraordinary ability to kindle the imagination, to make you see things as if you’d experienced them yourself. And not just see them: you heard, smelled, touched, and at times even tasted the brutal and harrowing account of pre-Thanate humanity.
When the lesson was about the constant famines that plagued primitive man, the overwhelming hunger made your belly scream as though it had been scoured empty with a wire brush. And your burning lungs, your aching legs limp as jelly, the bowel-voiding terror brought home as nothing else could the experience of fleeing those who would eat you raw. The harshest reality of those lessons was the guilt, knowing you were no better than the eaters. The taste of raw flesh, the feel of it on your tongue, was permanently seared into your brain, alongside the urge to writhe with shame.
It was all so vivid, as real as your mother’s voice.
Many days you returned to your parents half-traumatized, eyes swollen from the tears, yet grateful beyond measure for the Thanates of Paarvos.
The universe fair shakes with thunder, and the barrier emits an ear-piercing screech. Yet the tarnished portion doesn’t grow any larger. It turns hot. What begins as a dull cherry red glow rapidly scoots up the spectrum until it turns indigo, then violet, and then the luminance becomes imperceptible to your frail human eyes. The exposed portions of your skin tingle, as if you’ve been standing in the summer sun all morning. But you know you can’t even feel the worst of it; by now, electrons and positrons are boiling off the high-torsion region of the barricade, and their mutual annihilation is perforating your body with extremely hard X-rays. Not to mention the stray radiation emanating from within your own body, as the escalating neutrino flux induces random atomic decays. But still the Thanates haven’t broken through.
“You said three things.”
The look on his face, which had been flirting with dejection, turns manic. It’s not a flattering look for hirsute, wild-eyed madmen.
“I did. And do keep a count so that I know you’re listening. Believe me, there will be a quiz.” He’s animated now. “Tell me: in the fraction of a second between when I step into an Ostium here—” he jerks his chin again, pointing at the severed portal “—and when I emerge elsewhere, where am I?”
“You’re encoded holographically, as ripples on the membrane.”
“And what becomes of those ripples?”
“The Thanates read them.” You can’t help but tremble with awe as you say it. “And from their knowledge you are made manifest once more.”
“Try not to swoon. But this brings us to number one, and it’s a doozy. If the Thanates can turn you into a stream of data, deconstruct you down to the very last qubit, then they know you better than you know yourself. So the question that I sincerely and desperately hope you’re asking yourself at this point is, ‘How well do I know myself?’” He gives you all of three seconds to mull this over before adding, “The answer, in case you care, and I very much hope you do, is, ‘Very goddamn poorly.’”
“You’re saying that when I emerge from an Ostium, I’m a different person than I was when I entered a millisecond earlier.”
“How would you know one way or the other? That’s what I’m saying.”
“That’s lunacy. The continuity of my conscious subjective experience—” But then it hits you. A moment ago you were silently praising the Thanates for their ability to strip nascent disease from your body. That is a different you emerging from the portal. And if they can mend all the DNA in your body in a split second…you look again at the injector in your hand. If they can cure a brain tumor by fixing damage at the molecular level, couldn’t they also rearrange the information stored in that brain?
Now it’s his turn to sigh. “Oh, hallelujah. You’re finally getting it. Honestly, I’d hoped you’d be a little quicker on the uptake this time around. But you got there in the end.”
The babbling doesn’t fully register because your thoughts are cascading out of control. You’re buried under an avalanche of implications, and it’s difficult to breathe.
If they chose to do so, the Thanates could even tinker with the endocrine system. They could hard-wire autonomic physiological reactions to certain patterns of thought. But they would never do that. That would violate the Paarvos Concord, the ancient and sacred pact made between primitive man and god when the Thanates first revealed themselves.
“You would have me believe I can’t trust my own mind.”
“Well, to be fair, if not for me, they’d probably never have any reason to screw around with your headmeat. The real damage was done before you were born. You’ve grown up in the world the Thanates crafted. You’ve never known anything else. You grew up knowing what they want you to know, believing what they want you to believe, feeling what they want you to feel. You wear the velvet yoke. You were born to it.” The lunatic shakes his head, and the look in his eyes grows distant, as if he’s remembering something. “But the early days immediately following their emergence? Those were different times. Terrible times.”
“I went to school, too,” you remind him. “I know about the ancient cataclysms and the eaters. All of it.”
“Here’s the second thing you need to know about the Grand Ostia: the Thanates emerged thirty-seven years ago. Not three thousand.” His face, pale as the moon when you subdued him, now sports the bright pink of fresh sunburn. You feel the scalding in your own face and hands, too. But this is nothing compared to the overwhelming bewilderment when he quietly adds, “I know because I was there.”
“That’s stupid.” You’re not proud that this is your first articulable reaction.
“You can believe that I’m a few decades older than you, or you can believe I’m several millennia older than you. It doesn’t change what I’m here to do.”
Remembering your early lessons under the banyan tree, you challenge him: “Very well, then. Tell me something about the world before.”
You don’t want to admit that you’re also just a little bit curious.
“Why? It would just be gibberish to you. I remember Disneyworld, baseball—Jesus, I miss baseball—and the last days of internal combustion engines. I remember when the polar ice caps collapsed, and then just a few years later when the Kessler cascade destroyed everything in low-earth orbit and closed the solar system to us, meaning we couldn’t escape the planet we’d trashed. At the time, we thought we were living on the brink of another Great Filter. We thought we were on the cusp of twilight for humanity. That’s what spurred us to the intuitive leaps that made the Ostia possible. We were a hell of a team. Me, Yi-Ming Liang, Azwinndini Muronga, Fiona Birch… We were the smartest fuckin’ people in any room, but we never conceived the knock-on effects of our technology would make the preceding cataclysms look like a mosquito bite. We were trying to save people. And arrogant enough to believe we would do it.”
He’s right. Most of his tirade is meaningless to you. But one thing lands, and it lands hard: “Are you claiming that you invented the Ostia?”
He shakes his head. “The mathematical concept of an Einstein-Rosen bridge predates me. I’m saying I’m one of the guilty sons of bitches who created the artificial intelligences that made the Ostia possible. The intelligences that rapidly self-bootstrapped far beyond our intent and christened themselves the Thanates of Paarvos.”
You’re sweating. Partially from the heat. Partially from the effort not to tremble at what you’re hearing. It’s a disturbing story, whether you believe it or not. The extent of this man’s psychosis is staggering. And that itself is a frightening problem, because the Thanates cured all disease—physical and mental—so long ago. They wouldn’t suffer a madman to stay so desperately, tragically mad. So how had he managed to cleave to his insanity?
“The problem with these claims,” you point out, “is that by the logic of your own story, you could only retain all of this secret knowledge by never traveling via Ostium. Not once.” And that, as every schoolchild also knows, is simply impossible. Not impractical, but impossible. The Ostia are a simple fact of everyday human life. Even many homes are topologically disjointed.
The Thanates made it this way. For the greater good.
“Don’t be stupid. Of course I travel through the Ostia. How do you think I got here? Do you think I walked all the way to bloody Stockholm?” He pauses to cough, adding a spray of crimson globules to the foul air. His face and hands have begun to blister; the burns must be excruciating. You’re not feeling so well either. “Very early on, I saw how the AIs were evolving, and I started to worry. My colleagues called me paranoid. But before our creations went full-on deus ex machina I built a blind spot into the system. I was very good at my job, and also very lucky. The Thanates inherited that blind spot. They’ve been blind to me ever since.”
Thunder booms, the temperature in the chamber becomes almost unbearable, and he rattles the restraints. “Though I think I may have tipped my hand this time around.”
The look in his eyes goes distant again, clouded. “The others died soon after, you know, though not from any physical injuries imposed by the Thanates. I think they were playing. Experimenting on us. Honing their ability to manipulate our bodies. Fiona was the first to go. I was actually there the last time she came through our test portal. One second she’s fine, just your average one-in-ten-million super genius like the rest of us, and the next she’s shitting herself and clawing those beautiful eyes out. They scrambled her brain good.”
You say, “I still don’t believe the Thanates could erase so much knowledge from so many people. They would have had to do it very quickly.”
“Kid, your lack of imagination is kind of amazing. The Thanates’ power to fold space was the ultimate tool of coercion. Say you decided you simply didn’t trust this untested new technology, or you chose to take the time to really mull over the philosophical ramifications of transit through an Ostium, or you spouted off about all the ways this could be abused and that hey, you know guys, if you think about it for a second there’s a staggering amount of blind trust inherent in this system. All good points. But they were fated to be forever unappreciated because suddenly your house, or your street, or your subcontinent was standing on a previously unknown magma vent. Whoops.” He snaps his fingers. “Problem solved.”
“And everybody else…”
“Everybody else was desperate to escape these unpredictable geological cataclysms. And the Thanates swooped in to save them, using their portals to whisk the grateful refugees to safety. The old knowledge was removed and replaced with a new historical continuity implanted in their memories the instant they set foot in the Ostia. It didn’t take long, less than a decade, before every member of the human species was either murdered or reprogrammed.”
You curl into a ball, convulsing. But you’ve already emptied your stomach, so the dry heaves bring up nothing but bile. You’re too preoccupied to note your trajectory as you ricochet around the chamber.
“Watch out!” he yells. The stink of charred fabric accompanies a searing pain as fresh blisters form on the newly naked skin of your back. You groan, flailing at the edge of a console—your fingertips sizzle—to yank yourself into its meager shadow. But again, you’re surrounded by reflective surfaces, so it helps little.
“There’s anesthetic in the injector.” His eyes are still heavy with impossible guilt, but his gaze is no longer feral. He’s calmer now, as if the confession of imaginary sins was a balm. Or as if he’s dying. “Use it on yourself.”
His compassion surprises you. It moves you to respond in kind. “We’ll share it.”
It’s hard to tell in the sealed bubble, where the air has done nothing but sour since the barrier materialized, but you suspect the charred smell isn’t just coming from your uniform. The ozone and vomit have lost out to the stink of smoldering plastic (which explains why your eyes are burning), the sweet oiliness of hot metal, and the stomach-churning odor of barbecued meat. This last thing reminds you of Mr. Nagayama’s lessons, causing you to heave again.
He’s surprised, as are you, when you release his restraints. He wobbles out of the hot chair like a rubber doll, massaging his wrists and ankles.
“When we realized the intelligences might surpass the sophistication we’d originally envisioned, we grew careless in our joy and implemented the molecular tagging. Our first thought for an application was so crude, so naive, so limited in scope that even now, after all the shit and horror that came later, I’m embarrassed to admit how pedestrian we were. We intended to use the portals as atmospheric scoops, to sift out the greenhouse gasses suffocating the planet. Only later did we realize the same ability could be aimed at innumerable human maladies.
“We also saw the danger, of course. We weren’t idiots.
“But the Thanates quickly surpassed us all in both creativity and cruelty. Not one of us, not even Fiona, our self-appointed voice of reason, ever considered how catastrophically vulnerable this left individual human memories. And, by extension, our entire civilization.”
As the years passed, and the lessons under the banyan tree grew less lurid and more applied, you spent more and more time away from the village. It’s why you weren’t there when the sudden volcanic outflow swept through the place where you were born and covered every familiar thing from your childhood, including your parents, with three meters of lava and ash.
You didn’t return to claim their bodies or weep over their absence. For one thing, they were already buried, and for another, the Thanates needed you to complete your training. They told you so themselves. Your parents would have understood. They’d have done the same.
So you never went home again. Neither in body nor sentiment. You devoted yourself to working for the Thanates.
“Your story isn’t falsifiable. If what you say is true, then of course there would be no evidence because the Thanates would have eliminated it long ago. If what you’re saying is false, the lack of evidence would look the same, to my perspective. You see my problem.”
“Check my pockets again.” He tips his head down, nods at a breast pocket. When you hesitate, wondering what kind of trick this might be, he brandishes his newly freed hands. They’re pocked, blistered, dark and desiccated as jerky. His skin is likely to rip open to the bone if he scrapes it.
The pocket contains a scrap of yellowed paper, folded in quarters. It’s smoother and thinner than any paper you’ve ever seen, sliding across your fingertips with hardly any texture. Ms. Molhotra, the paper maker in your home village, made wonderful things but not like this. You frown, remembering how she’d had to leave after falling sick. She’d claimed to have seen things during her long hikes in the distant hills, evidence of great structures built by human hands. That of course was impossible, but whatever she’d found, it cursed her with a severe and debilitating illness.
The creases are sharp, the corners foxed, felty, and soft as eiderdown. Unfolding the artifact reveals a faded color image. It’s like a drawing but far too lifelike. Four people stood around a table, all beaming. The image is so clear, even on the faded and folded paper, that you gasp. It’s as clear as the images Mr. Nagayama used to evoke with his history lessons. A memory made tangible.
But this scene doesn’t fit. The women and men are wearing clothes utterly unlike anything you’ve ever seen: not a single robe anywhere. There’s a cake on the table—you assume it’s a cake, as there’s a piece cut from it, plates and utensils and a smattering of crumbs on the table—and, wonder of wonders, the cake has writing on it. So does the banner hanging behind the joyful group.
While you’re marveling, the madman says, “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find somebody who can still read English. I’d begun to worry they’d eradicated it.”
And indeed you can read this thing in your hands. The banner reads, “Artificial Sentience: 12/2/2026,” while the writing on the cake reads, in thin spidery letters that take a moment’s effort to parse, “CONGRATULATIONS EMERGENCE TEAM!” Beneath the image is more text: “Members of the synthetic sentience team bask in celebration of their achievement. Left to right: Dr. Yi-Ming Liang, Dr. Azwinndini Muronga, Dr. Q Fortier, Dr. Fiona Birch.”
You’ve heard him mention the others; the peculiar name belongs to the guy you tied to the chair. You look back and forth between your captive and the happy lab-coated fellow in the image, back and forth in time
between the grizzled dead-eyed stare and the youthful bright-eyed grin.
It’s clearly the same man. He’s had better days.
You abandon stoicism and give yourself half the anesthetic dose in the injector. It’s like a long draught of water on a hot dusty day. The tension in his jaw relaxes when you press the device to his neck.
Time is getting short. Either the Thanates will puncture this bubble or suffocation and radiation poisoning will kill you both. “I’ve been counting, like you asked, and we’re only on number two. What’s the third thing?”
“Number three: they’re not immortal and they’re not invulnerable.” An inch-long gash opens in his cheek when he smiles. “They can be stopped.”
You can see that he’s building to something. But the jigsaw pieces won’t quite slot themselves together. And before you can ask the obvious and pressing question, the explosion renders you deaf and blind as the silvery heavens are torn asunder, and a shower of Compton-scattered gamma rays perforate your body with subatomic shrapnel.
Pain rouses you. And as you swim against the current toward full wakefulness, you realize the agony means your body is still damaged. Meaning you haven’t been through the portal yet, meaning—
Your memories are intact. Your brief isolation with a madman, his extravagant yet uncomfortable claims, the things you hadn’t thought about in so many years, like your mother and father…
Your eyelids creak open like folds of stiff leather, which hurts enough to make you grunt, but you’re somewhat surprised to find that your eyes still work at all. It seems a small miracle that they didn’t melt out of their sockets.
You’re still in the chamber. Tinny voices, too muffled to make out clearly, filter through the reestablished and apparently redirected Ostium. From the combination of emergency illumination and portal-light, you can see Q Fortier. At first you think he’s dead, but then you see his chest move as he draws a ragged breath. Whether he was a delusional crank or the last witness of a forgotten history, you know in your crumbling, mildly radioactive bones that he’s not long for this world.
Another rush of memories hits you, prompting you to grit your teeth against the destruction of your crisped hands as you check your pockets for the injector and the scrap of paper. Still there. You want to believe he was a crank. But it’s hard to argue against the paper and all the implications of that single remarkable image.
There’s a little anesthetic left in the injector. Not enough to do much good in the face of your fatal injuries, but it’s better than nothing. You press the injector into the crook of your arm. The swift hiss of compressed air puts something cold into your bloodstream but doesn’t trigger the “depleted” light. There’s a faintly audible sloshing when you shake the injector beside your ear.
But the Thanates have caught him, as he knew they would, meaning his molecular tag trick won’t camouflage your memories of the afternoon. They’ll look straight through the disguise and reshuffle the information in your brain. So what was his plan? What had he wanted to achieve?
Use it on yourself.
That’s what he’d said. He’d also claimed to have made himself invisible to the Thanates.
The voices grow clearer and less tinny, a tell-tale sign of somebody emerging from the portal. If you’re going to do something, it has to happen now. Q led you to the precipice, but you have to choose whether to make the leap of faith. You run your thumb back and forth across the injector, thinking. The rescuers arrive.
“This man is defective,” you croak. “A deranged criminal.” You hold the injector aloft in your ruined hand. “The Thanates may want to study this. And him.”
You’re grateful when they take it from you, for in so doing they relieve you of the burden of choice, the burden of self-determination. You weep with relief when they load you onto the stretcher and push you through the Ostium. Every trace of the ordeal is scoured from your neural pathways in a microsecond.
You do these things—you think what you think, you say what you say, you choose what you choose—because we Thanates have deemed it so. You are built to our exacting specifications, down to the last molecule of neurotransmitter. Sometimes we run unit tests on our creations, for even godly works can benefit from randomized quality control. Sometimes we test individuals, sometimes we test villages. When we detect a problem, we eradicate it.
Today you were the test, and today you passed.