Diaspora

Liana spread her arms in a gesture of frustration. "The only trouble with all this exploration is… some species of exuberants have changed so much that they can't communicate with anyone else, anymore. Different groups have rushed off in their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds and now they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries. It's not just a question of language—or at least, not the simple question that language was for the statics, when everyone had basically identical brains. Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense. We're fragmenting. We're losing each other." She laughed, as if to deflate her own seriousness, but Yatima could see that she was passionate about the subject. "We've all chosen to stay on Earth, we've all chosen to remain organic… but we're still drifting apart probably faster than any of you in the polises!"

Orlando, standing behind her chair, placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. She reached up and clasped her hand over his. Yatima found this mesmerizing, but tried not to stare. Ve said, "So how do the bridgers fit in?"

Orlando said, "We're trying to plug the gaps."

Liana gestured at the tree diagram, and a second set of branches began to grow behind and between the first. The new tree was much more finely differentiated, with more branches, more closely spaced.

"Taking the ancestral neural structures as a starting point, we've been introducing small changes with every generation. But instead of modifying everyone in the same direction, our children are not only different from their parents, they're increasingly different from each other. Each generation is more diverse than the one before."

Inoshiro said, "But… isn't that the very thing you were lamenting? People drifting apart?"

"Not quite. Instead of whole populations jumping en masse to opposite ends of the spectrum for some neural trait giving rise to two distinct groups with no common ground—we're always scattered evenly across the whole range. That way, no one is cut off, no one is alienated, because any given person's 'circle'—the group of people with whom they can easily communicate—always overlaps with someone else's, someone outside the first circle… whose own circle also overlaps with that of someone else again… until one way or another, everyone is covered.

"You could easily find two people here who can barely understand each other—because they're as different as exuberants from two wildly divergent lines—but here, there'll always be a chain of living relatives who can bridge the gap. With a few intermediaries—right now, four at the most—any bridger can communicate with any other."

Orlando added, "And once there are people among us who can interact with all of the scattered exuberant communities, on their own terms…"

"Then every flesher on the planet will be connected, in the same way."

Inoshiro asked eagerly, "So you could set up a chain of people who'd let us talk to someone at the edge of the process? Someone heading toward the most remote group of exuberants?"

Orlando and Liana exchanged glances, then Orlando said, "If you can wait a few days, that might be possible. It takes a certain amount of diplomacy; it's not a party trick we can turn on at a moment's notice."

"We're going back tomorrow morning." Yatima didn't dare look at Inoshiro; there'd be no end of excuses to extend their stay, but they'd agreed hours.

After a moment's awkward silence, Inoshiro said calmly, "That's right. Maybe next time."

Orlando showed them around the gene foundry where he worked, assembling DNA sequences and testing their effects. As well as their main goal, the bridgers were working on a number of non-neural enhancements involving disease resistance and improved tissue-repair mechanisms, which could be tried out with relative ease on brainless vegetative assemblies of mammalian organs which Orlando jokingly referred to as "offal trees." "You really can't smell them? You don't know how lucky you are."