Year's Best SF 17

Still higher, clusters of smaller cubes that are the automated factories of Longyearbyen come into view, and then the deep blue waters of Adventfjorden and floating icebergs. The Data Center is large enough that it dwarfs the floating icebergs but the fjord makes the Data Center look tiny.

I realize that I’ve never actually experienced the physical world. The shock of all the new sensations “takes my breath away,” as Mom would think. I like these old-fashioned expressions, even if I don’t always fully understand what they mean.

The sense of movement is dizzying. Is this what it was like to be an Ancient in the flesh? This feeling of straining against the invisible bonds of gravity that tether you to the Earth? It feels so limiting.

Yet so fun at the same time.

I ask Mom how she’s able to do the calculations to keep the vehicle balanced so quickly in her head. The dynamic feedback calculations needed to stabilize the hovering flier against gravity are so complex that I can’t keep up at all—and I’m very good at math.

“Oh, I’m going by instinct here,” Mom thinks. And she laughs. “You are a digital native. You’ve never tried to stand up and balance yourself, have you? Here, take over for a minute. Try flying.”

And it is easier than I anticipated. Some algorithm in me whose existence I have never been aware of kicks in, fuzzy but efficient, and I feel how to shift weight around and balance thrust.

“See, you are after all my daughter,” Mom thinks.

Flying in the physical world is so much better than floating through n-dimensional space. It’s not even close.

Dad’s thoughts break into our laughter. He’s not with us. His thoughts come through the commlink. “Sophia, I got the message you left. What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Hugo. Can you forgive me? I may never see her again. I want her to understand, if I can.”

“She’s never been out in a vehicle before. This is reckless—”

“I made sure that the flier has a full battery before we left. And I promise to be careful with how much energy we use.” Mom looks at me. “I won’t put her life in danger.”

“They’re going to come after you when they notice a missing maintenance flier.”

“I asked for a sabbatical in the flier and got it,” Mom thinks, smiling. “They don’t want to deny a dying woman’s last wishes.”

The commlink is silent for a while, then Dad’s thoughts come through. “Why can’t I ever think no to you? How long will this take? Is she going to miss any school?”

“It might be a long trip. But I think it’s worth it. You’ll have her forever, I just want a little bit of her for the time left to me.”

“Take care, Sophia. I love you, Renée.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

Being embodied in a vehicle is an experience few people have had. To begin with, there are very few vehicles. The energy it takes to fly even a maintenance flier for a day is enough to run the whole Data Center for an hour. And conservation is humanity’s overriding duty.

So, only the operators for the maintenance and repair robots do it regularly, and it is rare for most people, who are digital natives, to take up these jobs. Being embodied never seemed very interesting to me before. But now that I’m here, it’s exhilarating. It must be some Ancient part of me that I got from Mom.

We fly over the sea and then the wild European forest of towering oaks, pines, and spruces, broken here and there by open grassland and herds of animals. Mom points them out to me and tells me that they are called wisent, auroch, tarpan, and elk. “Just five hundred years ago,” Mom thinks, “all this used to be farmland, filled with the clones of a few human-dependent symbiotic plants. All that infrastructure, the resources of a whole planet, went to support just a few billion people.”

I look at Mom in disbelief.

“See that hill in the distance with the reindeer? That used to be a great city called Moscow, before it was flooded by the Moskva River and buried in silt.

“There’s a poem that I remember by an Ancient called Auden who died long before the Singularity. It’s called ‘The Fall of Rome.’ ”

She shares with me images from the poem: herds of reindeer, golden fields, emptying cities, the rain, always the rain, caressing the abandoned shell of a world.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

I’m enjoying myself but then I think maybe I shouldn’t be. Mom is still leaving at the end, and I still need to be mad at her. Is it the love of flight, of these sensations in the physical world, that makes her want to go?

I look at the world passing below us. I would have thought that a world with only three dimensions would be flat and uninteresting. But it’s not true. The colors are more vibrant than any I’ve ever seen, and the world has a random beauty that I could not have imagined. But now that I’ve really seen the world, maybe Dad and I can try to recreate all of it mathematically, and it will feel no different. I share the idea with Mom.

“But I’ll know it’s not real,” Mom thinks. “And that makes all the difference.”

I turn her words over and over in my mind.