Year's Best SF 17

“My research proposal has been approved,” she thinks. “I finally got permission to fuel the rocket, and they’ll launch the probe in a month. The probe will arrive at Gliese 581, the nearest star with a planet that we think may hold life, in twenty-five years.”

Mom explains to me that the probe will carry a robot that can be embodied by human consciousness. When the probe lands on the new planet, it will set up a receiving parabolic dish pointed at Earth and send a signal back to let Earth know that it arrived safely. After we receive the signal—in another twenty years—the consciousness of an astronaut will be radioed by a powerful transmitter to the probe, crossing the void of space at the speed of light. Once there, the astronaut will embody the robot to explore the new world.

“I will be that astronaut,” she thinks.

I try to make sense of this.

“So another you will be living there? Embodied in metal flesh?”

“No,” she thinks, gently. “We’ve never been able to copy the quantum computation of a consciousness without destroying the original. It won’t be a copy of me going to the other world. It will be me.”

“And when will you come back?”

“I won’t. We don’t have enough antimatter to send a transmitter big and powerful enough to the new planet to beam a consciousness back. It took hundreds of years and an enormous amount of energy just to make enough fuel to send the small probe. I’ll try to send back as much of the data gathered from my exploration as possible, but I will be there forever.”

“Forever?”

She pauses and corrects herself. “The probe will be made well and last a while, but it will eventually fail.”

I think about my mother, trapped in a robot for the rest of her life, a robot that will decay and rust and break down on an alien world. My mother will die.

“So we have only forty-five years left together,” I think.

She nods.

Forty-five years is the blink of an eye compared to the natural course of life: eternity.

I’m so furious that for a moment I can’t think at all. Mom tries to come closer but I back off.

I finally managed to ask, “Why?”

“It is humanity’s destiny to explore. We must grow, as a species, the same as you are growing as a child.”

This makes no sense. We have endless worlds to explore, here in the universe of the Data Center. Every person can create his own world, his own multiverse even, if he wants to. In school, we’ve been exploring and zooming in on the intricacies of the quaternion Julia sets, and it is so beautiful and alien that I shiver as we fly through them. Dad has helped families design worlds with so many dimensions that I can’t even wrap my mind around them. There are more novels and music and art in the Data Center than I can enjoy in a lifetime, even if that lifetime stretches into infinity. What can a single three-dimensional planet in the physical world offer compared to that?

I don’t bother keeping my thoughts to myself. I want Mom to feel my anger.

“I wish I could still sigh,” Mom thinks. “Renée, it is not the same. The pure beauty of mathematics and the landscapes of the imagination are very lovely, but they are not real. Something has been lost to humanity since we gained this immortal command over an imagined existence. We have turned inward and become complacent. We’ve forgotten the stars and the worlds out there.”

I do not respond. I am trying not to cry again.

Mom turns her face away. “I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“You are leaving because you want to leave,” I think. “You don’t really care about me. I hate you. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

Mom does not think anything. She hunches down a bit, and though I cannot see her face, her shoulders are trembling, almost imperceptibly.

Even though I am so angry, I reach out and stroke her back. It has always been difficult to harden myself against my mother. I must have inherited that from Dad.

“Renée, will you take a trip with me?” she thinks. “A real trip.”

“Tap into the vehicle feed, Renée, we’re taking off,” Mom tells me.

I tap in, and for a moment I’m overwhelmed by the data flooding into my mind. I’m connected to the maintenance flier’s camera and the microphone, which translate light and sound into patterns that I’m used to. But I’m also tapped into the altimeter and the gyroscope and the accelerometer, and the unfamiliar sensations are like nothing I’ve ever felt.

The camera shows us lifting off, the Data Center below us, a black cube in the middle of the white ice field. This is home, the hardware foundation of all the worlds in the universe. Its walls are pierced with fine honeycomb holes so that the cold air can flow through to cool the layers of hot silicon and graphene full of zipping electrons whose patterns form my consciousness and those of three hundred billion other human beings.