The Long List Anthology Volume 7, page 20
It takes me years to explore GrandMother’s Wing, which has countless hallways and rooms carved deep into the cliff body. If it wasn’t for a thread that I tied to the entrance and unspooled as I explored, I would certainly become hopelessly lost in the depths of the place. Is this how she disappeared? I often wonder. The thread cut, forever wandering these endless spaces?
As the years go by, I also reexperience all my past memories as Child and Mother from an entirely new perspective. This time, I am the one preparing the poori-bhaji, cutting the mangoes, telling various stories to my descendants’ eager ears. Try as I might, however, I find I have a puzzling, frustrating inability to recall anything from my Wing when I am in any other space of the house, and I cannot tell my child or grandchild anything about the rooms that lie deep within the cliff.
Then, one day, at last, after I have reached the point where I can trust my navigational and memorization skills enough to leave the spool of thread behind, I reach the final unexplored room of GrandMother’s Wing, after having traveled into the depths for several days of exploration. The door is glass, and it contains patterns from windows of both Mother’s and Child’s Wing, along with new patterns of its own. There is a soft light emanating from within, and a piece of music playing as well. I open the door and enter.
There is no visible light source, but the room is beautifully lit with what feels like natural light. Apart from me, the only other occupant of the room is a large painting, titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. It feels oddly familiar, and as the music slowly grows louder, I recognize its melodic motifs in a small fragment of the painting. I laugh. That’s a funny spot.
Something draws me to peel back the canvas of the painting, and as soon as I do, the music stops. There is a vast, dark emptiness behind the canvas, with no discernible boundaries to the space. That must be where my mother went . . . I think to myself, and the thought convinces me to do what I do next.
After taking a deep breath, I climb past the painting’s frame and plunge into the abyss.
I
Seven years after Eesha showed you her discoveries from the painting, Karisma passed away one night, in the garden, surrounded by various flowers, where she could see the cloudy, starless sky through the dome. Emil and Eesha were by her side. Her last words had been, “Take good care of her, Emil.”
After Karisma’s body had been carried away, Eesha said, “Now I have no family. My mother is gone, and my grandmother is gone too. I can’t believe she would leave too. That she didn’t get uploaded like you. I will never forgive her for that.”
“Hey. You have me, remember?” Emil said. “I care about you immensely, and I’ll always do everything in my power to make sure you have a good life. And . . . while you might not see Karisma’s perspective right now . . . I have a feeling that in time, you will, and you’ll realize her opinions deserve respect, and that what she did, at least in accordance with her set of beliefs . . . was incredibly brave.”
Eesha put on her helmet and absorbed your thoughts. After a long silence, she spoke. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I do have you. And . . . I have Opal too.”
These were the weeks when you were starting to test the Inserts, and the Diastereom population of the city was preparing for evacuation. Emil liked to keep your progress private, so as to not draw too much attention, and—at least as he told you—so that he would not be distracted from the work.
A small, secret group of volunteers had agreed to test your current simulation capacity. Emil had borrowed the helmet from Eesha for this portion of the project, and for the time being she was not able to know your thoughts.
This set of volunteers knew what they were signing up for. They would experience an Insert-esque simulation briefly, and be woken from it, but the memory of the simulation would not dissipate upon their reawakening—so that they could tell Emil if it worked or not. But during the process, their brain activity patterns would be permanently altered in a way that would make it impossible for them to ever experience an Insert simulation again. Future simulations would not work on minds that had experienced an earlier version of the simulations, making it impossible for this volunteer group to participate in the long sleep.
The volunteers knew this, however, and were preparing to evacuate with the Diastereoms after this test. They actually seemed eager to do this despite not being able to sleep later on. The idea of remembering their simulations was too enticing. For the rest of the city, particularly for babies who would need to return to an infantile state of consciousness to not be tortured within their bodies when woken, and for those who were satiating dark and evil fantasies in their Inserts, it was agreed that dissipation of the simulation memories was necessary in order for the society to start up again as usual. But these volunteers were not going to be a part of the city society anymore . . . there was no risk to future city function if they remembered.
You, personally, had begun to have your own thoughts and opinions about the sleep. If human beings had done so much damage to the world, and their literal lack of conscious presence was what was needed to restore the world’s health, then why would they want to wake up from the Inserts at all, especially if the Inserts were what they desired to experience the most? The most logical solution, to you, was to put the human beings to sleep for eternity, experiencing their fantasies forever, and allow their subconscious brains to control the pods and restore what they had damaged, forever, too. But it was not up to you. And you had a feeling Emil would be alarmed by your thoughts, so you only contemplated them when Emil did not connect his sphere to the helmet.
The first volunteer was a very melancholy, very old woman, who wanted to know how her life would have been different if she had decided in her childhood to save her baby sister from a disastrous fire, instead of only saving herself. She described her days as being lonely and unfulfilling, and that her guilt and regret from that day had affected her motivation to pursue her dreams throughout her life—she felt like she didn’t deserve a good life. She put on a helmet with a similar design to Eesha’s, and the simulation began.
You could see the fear in the eyes of the woman’s six-year-old self, as the flames licked the walls of her room, eating up the pale yellow wallpaper, casting eerie shadows over her stuffed animals that made them seem more like monsters. The window was open. That window, the choice she would regret for the rest of her life. She could hear her baby sister crying in the room next to her. You saw the dilemma—the stark contrast between the two choices—play out in her eyes. Her parents were gone already. It was too late to save them. But her baby sister . . . You had the simulation choose the path that symbolized the erasure of the deepest regret of this woman’s life.
You watched her turn away from the window, pull her shirt over her mouth, answer her sister’s cries, push against the door and choke on the smoke, almost turning away but persevering nonetheless, stumbling through the charred beams and spark-ridden carpets. Her father’s old multivariable calculus textbook lay open on the table. You saw the wonder in the young girl’s eyes, speculating to herself how that textbook could have survived the flames. She picked up the thousand-page textbook and ran to her sister’s room, the weight of the heavy object forcing her to hunch her back. She picked up her sister, placed her in the open textbook to protect her from the flames, and hugged the covers to her chest.
That single decision to turn away from the window had an immense impact on the woman’s personality after that point. The textbook became the most important motif in her life. She pored over the unfamiliar symbols, sounding out the word “D-E-R-I-V-A-T-I-V-E” and running her hand over the typed problems before she fully knew long division. The book became her constant companion, though she couldn’t understand a word of it. She couldn’t wait until the day she would be able to solve those problems in her father’s old, slightly charred, but otherwise unscathed book.
Mathematics became an inseparable part of the woman’s personality. She had the same teachers in the simulation, but her simulated self’s conversations with them were vastly different from the ones she had in reality. Her simulated self’s report cards in the years that followed came back with personal, extensive comments praising her intellect, where in reality they had come back with pleasant yet detached sentences along the lines of “A pleasure to have in class.”
Her fourth grade teacher—who had been her least favorite teacher in reality—noticed her fascination with mathematics, as well as how far ahead of the class she was. She showed him the multivariable calculus textbook and said, “I don’t understand it yet, but I’m getting there. Right now I’m in the middle of teaching myself trigonometry.”
The simulated little girl had the same clothes, same face, same ten-year-old lisp and missing canine baby tooth as the real woman’s past self . . . but this simulated self aced a trigonometry exam in the fourth grade. This simulated self skipped three grades and graduated high school at the age of fifteen. After her senior year of high school, she sat at a desk, finally working through her father’s multivariable calculus problems, looking very content, with her sister reading a science fiction anthology on the carpet next to her, surrounded by cushions. At nine and a half years old, the sister breathed with a slight wheeze she developed after the fire, and enjoyed drawing—sketching the world around her, a world she never really saw, as well as inventive futures that she imagined.
The simulation went to university, kept in touch with the fourth grade teacher, thanked him when she proved Beal’s conjecture at the age of twenty-two. In reality, Beal’s conjecture had been proven by a different woman who had studied the problem for nearly sixty years. The simulated woman fell in love, started a family with a wife and two children—one of which was especially fond of looking at the slightly charred multivariable calculus textbook that always lay open on the coffee table . . .
Then the time ran out for this sample Insert. The simulation froze on a slightly blurry frame of the woman in a sharp business suit, her hair in a sleek shiny bun, smiling with bright white teeth, holding one of her children, and looking up at the sky.
The helmet was removed from the woman’s head, and she blinked awake.
“Did it work to your satisfaction?” Emil asked her.
The old woman started sobbing. “That was me! Let me go back. Please.” she whispered. “This is not me! That was me, don’t you see? That was my reality! Put me back! PUT ME BACK! Emil. Please. That was who I was supposed to be . . . ”
“I’m . . . I’m so sorry, but I can’t do that.” Emil seemed uncomfortable.
Another volunteer gently helped the old woman into her heat-protecting gear and escorted her out of the dome as she continued to cry and exclaim, “This, here, right now, is not me!”
Watching this all only convinced you further—human beings would be far happier living out their desires during the sleep, for the rest of eternity.
Emil connected his sphere to Eesha’s helmet, so that you could try to confirm for him what the old woman had been unable to answer explicitly.
“Good. Thanks, Opal. Glad it worked. Everything seems to be going according to plan.”
I
When there were only one or two rounds of learning and updates left before you would be ready to begin the sleep, Eesha snuck into the dome during the middle of the night.
“Look, Opal. I stole this from Emil while he was busy.” She held up a helmet that the most recent group of volunteers used. “I didn’t know you were testing the simulations! I talked to one of the volunteers because I caught her leaving the city secretly. It was an old woman . . . she told me that the volunteers can remember their simulations! That’s all she told me, she seemed pretty distraught—confused about who she really was . . . but anyway. I want to know what it’s like. And I want to remember it. But most of all, I want to know what you, Opal, would construct for me . . . from your own imagination, not from mine. And please don’t make it that boring life that all the other fourteen year olds are getting, that I’ll be getting too during the sleep. Make it interesting. I’m excited. Let’s do this secretly, okay? I want to remember . . . ”
You tried to convey your thoughts to her, but she couldn’t read them with this helmet she had. You tried to tell her “STOP! You won’t be able to sleep like the others if you do this! You will have to leave the city! Don’t do this! You don’t understand!” But she misunderstood the frantic, frenzied, dancing colors that flashed across the dome.
“Don’t worry! I’m sure I’ll love whatever you come up with, Opal. Don’t be shy! I want to know what it’s like inside your mind. What you think of me. You’ll be fine.” She put the helmet onto her head and switched it on.
It was too late. The simulation started. So you thought you might as well take this chance . . . what could very well be the last time you ever see Eesha . . . and construct a world for her that showed how much you loved her.
It was very crude set of experiences, but they were entirely your construction. Fragments of a sunset . . . fireflies . . . some ocean waves . . . sparkling glass like the cathedrals from ancient times . . . laughter . . . good food . . . a family who stayed and loved her, for her whole life. You could only give her small glimpses, because this was a new request—one that wasn’t driven at all by the person’s own wants, but by your ideas and your thoughts of Eesha, and your wants for her. When the time allotment for the sample Insert ran out, Eesha blinked awake, and tears began to stream down her cheeks.
“Thank you, Opal. It was perfect.” She sat in the grass, both crying and smiling, until Emil entered the garden, horrified.
“What did you do, Eesha! Please tell me you didn’t run a sample Insert. Please.”
“Why not? It was beautiful, Emil, I—”
“NO! You don’t understand . . . Eesha . . . ” his voice broke, “The volunteers . . . they have to evacuate . . . they can’t participate in the sleep, the sample Inserts change their brain activity and they wouldn’t be able to experience a simulation again if they entered a pod. You . . . you can’t sleep now, Eesha. What have you done . . . ”
“ . . . Oh.”
• • • •
On the day the sleep was to begin, Eesha was getting ready to evacuate the city with the last group of Diastereoms. The elders of the city who had been uploaded into various metallic objects had already left. Emil trusted Opal to operate without supervision and wake up the city when the time came, and he could still monitor everything remotely if necessary. He remembered what he had promised Karisma, blamed himself for Eesha’s predicament, and was wary of the group of Diastereoms Eesha would be traveling with. So he decided to accompany Eesha at the last moment.
When all of the city shelters and buildings had been entirely shut down, and all the biological city dwellers were lying in their pods, waiting for the sleep to start, Emil gave you the signal to begin.
The eyes of all the city dwellers shut simultaneously as their consciousnesses transferred to the pod walls, and the pumping of cryoprotectants and freezing of tissues began. The pods themselves rose from the ground under the direction of their inhabitants’ motor and sensory circuits, using their robotic limbs and appendages for the first time in what was expected to be many centuries of land restoration. You transmitted the Inserts to all of the pods, then checked to make sure each was delivered to the correct vessel.
And so, the long sleep finally commenced.
Eesha told Emil she wanted to say goodbye to you privately, so he left her alone in the garden.
She walked up to you, wearing the helmet that allowed her to feel your thoughts and emotions, and rested her palm against the surface of the dome like she had done when she spoke her first words to you.
“I am sorry Opal. I’m breaking my promise to you and leaving the city. If I had known about the sample Inserts, I . . . well, I don’t know. It’s too late now. But look . . . I have an opportunity now, to do what I wanted to do when I was seven.” She touched her forehead against the dome now, held up that small piece of plastic she found in the painting, closed her eyes, and whispered to you. “I am going to look for Tara, my mother. Emil doesn’t know this, and he would not approve. But I have decided to make it the purpose of my life. I will find her again Opal, no matter how long it takes.”
Eesha went quiet then and listened to your thoughts for some time. She smiled, then leaned back and traced the patterns of your mind with her eyes. “I love you too. You know, maybe someday in the future, I will return here. With my mother! You can see me then, after I have fulfilled my purpose. Would you wait for me?”
Of course I’ll wait for you, Eesha. You felt and thought with your entire being.
Eesha’s smile turned sad. She heard Emil call her name from outside the dome, and she started to walk away. Just before exiting, after putting on her heat-protecting gear, she took one last, lingering look at the garden and the dome, and whispered once more.
“Opal . . . Goodbye.”
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I fall for what seems like an eternity—years and years—after going through the painting’s frame, until I convince myself that this darkness around me is all that is left for the future of my life. Then suddenly, I hear your voice.
“Welcome, my child. It is wonderful to meet you again.”
