IT’S ALWAYS OCTOBER THE
FIRST
Gregor sits on a
bench on the Esplanade, looking out across the river toward the
Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread crumbs, and he’s
ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck around
his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of
October the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too
late. This is how it always ends, although the onshore breeze and
the sunlight are unexpected bonus payments.
The pigeons jostle
and chase one another as he drops another piece of crust on the
pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak them overnight in 5
percent warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunch,
if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going
to be dead soon, and, if any of the pigeons survive, they’re
welcome to the wreckage.
There aren’t many
people about, so when the puffing middle-aged guy in the suit comes
into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing his stolen wallet,
Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly pathetic
when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and
Brundle alters course.
“Running late,” he
pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space
for him at the other end of the bench.
“Really?”
Brundle nods. “They
should be coming over the horizon in another five
minutes.”
“How did you engineer
it?” Gregor isn’t particularly interested, but technical chitchat
serves to pass the remaining seconds.
“Man-in-the-middle,
ramified by all their intelligence assessments.” Brundle looks
self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste specialization makes it
easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara was using the
NP-101 program as cover for a preemptive D-SLAM strike. At the same
time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping-launch frequency,
and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our
sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing
with positive feedback.”
Of course, Brundle
and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange.
Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful
modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroecto derm that
shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits
that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A
visitor from a more advanced human society might start chattering
excitedly about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed
broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in
1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think
the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social—but not
eusocial—primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers
of a higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and
although they look human, there’s less to their humanity than meets
the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist
trapped in the machinery of a utopian political hive. The termites
of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk
are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation to
anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations
that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully
implement true eusocial societies. Group minds aren’t prone to
anthropic errors.
“So it’s over, is
it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which
humans are constrained.
“Yep. Any minute
now—”
The air-raid sirens
begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white
panic.
“Oh,
look.”
The entity behind
Gregor’s eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his
cancers call home. He’s always vague about these last hours before
the end of a mission—a destructive time, in which information is
lost—but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the
huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow
vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to
his mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the
deep ocean floors. The next version of him will be created knowing
almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying,
hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent paranoid
individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few
enlightened ones like Sagan . . .
Humans are not
useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds.
Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to contribute. And
Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to
contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million
other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will
be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the
collective even as it systematically eliminates yet another
outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way toward
occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of
competing life-forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its
neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a
distributed consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast
ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this
time round, knowing why it is being
birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied
to its parent.
Gregor anticipates
being one of the overmind’s memories: it is a fate none of these
humans will know save at secondhand, filtered through his eusocial
sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider the
subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help
exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like
pouring gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the
wrong backyard. The necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud
in Brundle’s direction: “If they realized how thoroughly they’d
been infiltrated, or how badly their own individuality lets them
down—”
Flashes far out over
the ocean, ruby glare reflected from the thin tatters of
stratospheric cloud.
“—They might learn to
cooperate someday. Like us.”
More flashes, moving
closer now as the nuclear battlefront evolves.
Brundle nods. “But
then, they wouldn’t be human anymore. And in any case, they’re much
too late. A million years too late.”
A flicker too bright
to see, propagating faster than the signaling speed of nerves,
punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the mach wave flushes
their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far out
across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this
place and for the present time, the question has been answered. And
there are no human winners.
Afterword—“Missile Gap”In late 2004, Gardner Dozois—then editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine—asked me if I’d like to write a novella for him. Like many such invitations, it came with strings attached; he was commissioning long stories for an anthology titled One Million A.D. I find tales of the very distant future hard to write. How do you find a way to connect with deep time? Few of us have even a tenuous grasp on the meaning of a single century, let alone a century of centuries of centuries! The sum total of recorded human history is less than six thousand years; few of our institutions have lasted even one millennium without major change. A million years is somewhere between four and twenty times the life span of our entire species (the paleontologists are a little vague on precisely when Homo sapiens sapiens first showed up on the scene). Given that the focus of almost all fiction is the human condition, and that the human condition doesn’t scale well across even centuries (much less deep geological time), I decided to approach the subject indirectly.