Bridging Infinity Read online

  Her throat moves. She swallows, feeling herself pinned to this moving instant in space and time, paralysed by it. Her migraine feels less like a migraine and more like a window opening inside her head, letting in futures. Vast possibilities unfold from this moment. Terrifying futures, branching away faster and more numerous than thoughts can track. There is a weight on her that she never asked for, never invited. A pressure, sharpening down to a point like the tip of a diamond anvil.

  There’s a version of her that did something magnificent and terrible. She traces the contingent branches back in time, until they converge on this office, this moment, this choice.

  Agree to their request. Or fail.

  She gathers her notes and rises to leave. She smoothes her skirt. They watch her without question, faces blank – her actions so far outside the usual parameters that her interrogators have no frame of reference.

  “I have to go to the park again,” she says, as if that ought to be answer enough, all that was required of her. “It’s still hanami. There’s still time.”

  They watch as Kamala Chatterjee closes the door behind her. She goes to Ueno Park, wanders the cherry blossom paths, remaining there until the lantern lighters come and an evening cool touches the air.

  “WHAT’S THE CATCH?” Dory asked when it became clear no one else would.

  Dr. Réka Enescu looked down at her from her elevated able-chair. She had a face full of Freez™ but Dory’s enhanced eyesight detected a hint of a smile. “The catch is, you can’t come back.”

  A murmur ran through the rest of the room, except for Dory, who was sitting alone in the front row of the auditorium. This would be the Hell-No for a lot of them. People who had never experienced a large-scale disaster, natural or man-made, tended to balk at no-going-back. They didn’t like a situation with no Undo button; even if they had no intention of using it, they just wanted to know they could. Undo; re-do; save and exit; exit without saving – as if everything could be edited or done over. Dory blamed old software architecture; that, and endless entertainment reboots.

  Dr. Enescu looked at someone behind Dory and nodded. “Yes?”

  A man cleared his throat. “Why are you refusing to let people come back? People should be allowed to go home if they want to.”

  The woman hesitated. She was tired of answering this question; Dory didn’t blame her.

  “It’s not a matter of refusing to let people come back,” Dr. Enescu said. “It’s the distances involved. Jupiter is over four times farther away from the Earth than the Earth is to the Sun. It takes light over half an hour to go from Earth to Jupiter, which isn’t an easy journey for –”

  “Is that when Jupiter is closest, or when it’s farthest?” another man asked, then added, “Never mind. I looked it up.”

  “It’s not just the distance,” Dr. Enescu said sharply, “it’s also the physical adaptations to the human body. We evolved to live under the constant force of one gee. In order to survive in a weightless environment, changes have to be made. For example, in zero-gee, the heart doesn’t need to work harder to pump blood into the upper body. We also have to counter muscle atrophy, bone loss –”

  “The whole body has to be changed?” the first man asked, sounding unhappy.

  “I’m afraid so,” Dr. Enescu said. “And a body adapted to live in zero-gee can’t survive on Earth.”

  “What if you don’t want your body adapted?” the first man said.

  “We aren’t trying to force anyone to agree to the procedure before we’ll even talk to them,” Dr. Enescu replied. “Body modification is a deeply personal matter and no one should be coerced into doing something. Or not doing it. However, if you can’t even bring yourself to consider adaptation as a hypothetical, this is probably not for you.”

  Dory turned around; about a third of the audience in the auditorium were making their way to the exit at the back. Once they were gone, Dr. Enescu asked the remaining people to move closer to the front. Most did, some didn’t – the usual five percent who might stay but wanted to make an inconspicuous exit if they decided to leave. It was the same at every event. When had human behaviour become so predictable, Dory wondered? Or was it only apparent to her now because of her enhanced vision?

  “I have to admit I’m rather surprised most people don’t understand physical adaptation is mandatory, not optional,” Dr. Enescu said when everyone was settled. A small dark curl dropped down onto her forehead. As she raised her hand to tuck it back into place, Dory caught a glimpse up her sleeve of the exoskeleton. Enescu had said wearing it made her feel like a puppet that was also the puppeteer. On Earth, that was – in zero-gee, it was completely different. She only had another week before she left Earth for the last time. But it would be a pretty full week – all spinal-injury clinics and amputee rehab facilities. Dory wished her own schedule allowed her to sit in on some of those.

  “Hearing about it and having someone tell you face-to-face are two different things,” said the man who had asked about Jupiter’s nearest and farther points. There were murmurs of agreement.

  “But is it really irreversible?” an androgyne in the row behind Dory asked.

  “Are you planning to reverse your own physical form?” Dr. Enescu replied evenly. As she lowered her hand from her hair, the arm-rest angled up to meet it and brought it down the rest of the way. She should have been in a reclining position but Enescu was one of those people who had to do everything the hard way.

  “Absolutely not,” said the androgyne with a laugh. “But I can survive anywhere on Earth both as I was, and as I am now –”

  “Not anywhere, honey-bear,” said the androgyne next to him/her with a grim laugh.

  “You know what I mean,” the first androgyne said, elbowing her/him. “My heart would beat, I could breathe –”

  “Until the fundamentalist commandos found your hideout,” said his/her friend with a laugh.

  The first androgyne elbowed her/him harder. “And while we’re on the subject, what about us? Do you only take binaries?”

  “Adaptation has nothing to do with gender,” Dr. Enescu said.

  “So the stories about androgynes waking up and finding they’ve been assigned to be male or female without their permission aren’t true?” the first androgyne said, sounding slightly suspicious.

  Dr. Enescu let out a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh. “To my knowledge, no one has been assigned or re-assigned a gender against their will.”

  “A lot of things happen to us that no one knows about,” the second androgyne said darkly. “Until it’s too late, anyway.”

  Dr. Enescu lowered her chair from eye-level-standing height to eye-level-sitting. “Not in space,” she said, her voice quiet but firm. “In space, nothing happens in secret.”

  Dory waited for someone to realise Enescu had just divulged the real catch.

  “Oh,” the androgyne said after a moment. “So nobody gets experimented on?”

  “Unless they want to be,” added his/her friend.

  “Absolutely not.” For the first time, Dr. Enescu sounded annoyed and didn’t try to cover it. “Adaptation clinics aren’t set up for research or experimental medicine.”

  “And if you did want to be experimented on?” asked someone many rows back. “After you got adapted, what if you wanted to participate in –”

  “Not my area,” Dr. Enescu said, cordial but emphatic. “I’m only here to find people who might be interested in living and working in space, not to find subjects for medical trials.”

  Silence fell and stretched. Dory turned around for another look at the audience and was a bit surprised to see that no one else had left.

  Finally, another woman in the front row on Dory’s right said, “I’d like to see the video again.”

  There was a chorus of agreement so Dr. Enescu obligingly lowered the tank and ran the entire holo from the beginning. Only one person sneaked out when the lights dimmed; everyone else sat through the entire twenty minutes of what Dory though
t of as a cross between the Ain’t Science Great? edu-mercials they showed under-achievers in elementary school and the Don’t Kill Yourself Yet, You Can Train For A New Career – Really, You Can, No Joke! programmes the recently-fired found in their severance packages.

  Not that it wasn’t right for the audience, some of whom probably had been recently fired. In this particular part of the country, however, most of them were not-so-recently fired and getting desperate. The rest would include a mix of those fresh out of higher education with no prospects, those insisting they were only curious, and some dissatisfied souls wondering if this might be the escape hatch they were looking for.

  Even so, how many of them would take the next step and sign a provisional commitment was a crap-shoot. It didn’t matter how good the video was or how compelling the speaker. Sometimes you got almost everyone in the audience lining up, thumbs out to be scanned. Other times, you got maybe two or three who all backed out the moment they saw the scanner. And once in a while – not nearly as often as Dory would have thought – someone would say, Wait a second – what do you mean, ‘In space, nothing happens in secret’? Then things would get really interesting. Everyone might walk out, except for a few who wanted to debate privacy issues. Or they all might stay and argue, not just with the speaker but with each other, which could be entertaining but otherwise a total failure.

  Still, IRL events were proving to be a far better way to recruit for the Habitats project than ’casts, even those done live in real time. There were billions of ’casts on tap and most of them were more interesting than a factual presentation about living in outer space. In Dory’s experience, the best way to persuade people to physically go somewhere was to get them to physically go somewhere. They needed to experience their own six degrees of freedom. Plus, bodies in motion tended to stay in motion.

  A lot of people attended several different IRL events one after another, seemingly to wear down their own resistance. The hard-sell of Eat this! Wear that! Stop! Listen! Watch! they experienced every day was verboten at recruitment events. Research showed that in many areas of the west, decades – correction, generations – of exposure to aggressive media had produced people who never said yes to anything the first time around for fear of looking weak. If it’s that important, they won’t take no for an answer were words most people lived by. It made a classic lesson in strain energy and positive feedback; outside the classroom, however, Dory found it more than a little tiring.

  Recruitment had originally wanted to go with the hard-sell. Dory had spent most of two days changing their minds. Even with real facts and figures to show them, it had been the hardest sell of her career, an irony that wasn’t lost on her. Later, one of the execs told Dory s/he was surprised she hadn’t given up. Dory had smiled and murmured something polite but didn’t try to explain. The exec was organisation and admin; s/he understood flow within an existing structure as an end-user, not as a designer. That was all right. End-users weren’t supposed to think in those terms; if they did, it was a bad structure. Nonetheless, Dory thought that if most end-users were slightly better acquainted with the how and why of their tools, they’d have found them easier to use.

  The mentor on her final apprenticeship, a tall, muscular, grey-haired industrial design specialist named Fola Ekemeni, had agreed wholeheartedly. That’s a great idea, she told Dory. I’ll set up the first round of accredited seminars myself – just as soon as you engineer three or four more hours into each day. Even better – remodel the week so we get eight days instead of seven and I’ll pin a rose on you, too.

  Dory was still smiling at the memory when the lights came up again. Dr. Enescu asked for more questions. When no one had any, she asked if anyone wanted to make a personal appointment, which made Dory wince. She thought personal appointment sounded like something guaranteed to bore you to death. Enescu explained it was a one-to-one meeting with someone who would get to know them well enough to talk about possibilities based on an initial assessment of their strengths. Enescu never said strengths and weaknesses, just strengths; it was an Enescu thing. Everyone knows their weaknesses, she had said when Dory asked her about it; you want people demonstrating what they’re good at, not hiding what they’re bad at. Dory thought she’d have made a good engineer. But then, that was true of most x-abled people. Very few of them were content to be just end-users.

  A little over half the people in the audience lined up for the scanner. Enescu took care of that without Dory’s help – another one of her things. It went quickly, even with a few people suddenly thinking of questions but by the time everyone left, Enescu was visibly sagging. Except for her face, which was as smooth and immobile as ever.

  “WHAT’S THE CATCH?” The Freez™ hadn’t even begun wear off yet but Enescu gave a small laugh. “I think that’s the only question I wasn’t expecting.”

  “Can’t prove it by me – you didn’t even hesitate.” Dory smiled broadly. Maybe a bit too broadly – Enescu probably thought she looked like a jackass in mid-heehaw. But she couldn’t help it; after she spent an extended period of time around someone who was all Freez™-ed up, she’d get a compulsion to take on the facial expressions that were temporarily beyond the other person. It was one of her things. Kinda weird but to Dory’s mild surprise, not all that rare. Maybe she should open a side business: Faces In Places – we’ll smile at you or for you. Reasonable Rates.

  “Well, I actually didn’t know what I was going to say till I said it.” Enescu seemed to sink even deeper into the cushioned cradle in the backseat of the limo – ahem, transport. Nobody called them limos now. During the last economic debacle, the word limo had become closely associated with a certain kind of wealth and privilege that was both clueless and heartless. In some areas, even town car was iffy.

  “I didn’t mean to throw you.” Dory could feel her facial muscles straining to corroborate her concern. Maybe she needed a little Freez™ herself, just so she wouldn’t sprain her forehead.

  “Oh, you didn’t really throw me.” Enescu’s conciliatory tone completely contradicted her neutral masque. “I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve heard all kinds of kooky shite.”

  Kooky. Dory immediately broke into a broad grin. Now there was a word you hardly ever heard any more. It was a good one; Dory made a mental note to start using it herself.

  “Can’t say it hasn’t been fun,” Enescu went on. “I’m an extrovert with a streak of exhibitionism so this kind of gig is right in my sweet spot. But I’m looking forward to wrapping this up and losing weight for good. I was only up for three weeks but that was enough.” She looked down at her hands, resting on the lap cushion. “No matter how light or flexible or intuitive they are supposed to be, every exo I’ve ever had made me feel like a sack full of sticks and water balloons. But in zero-gee, you can actually forget you’re even using one. It was the first time I’d felt like myself since fate crapped on me.”

  Dory stared, hoping she looked more attentively caring than Kabuki.

  “Damn, I’m sorry,” Enescu said unhappily. “I talk too much when I get Freez™-ed up. I think I’m subconsciously trying to compensate for the poker face. If that makes any sense to you.”

  “You know, it really does,” Dory assured her. She considered telling Enescu about her own tic in that area and then decided not to. Giving end users extra information in a social setting was more likely to distract than edify. Besides, she could do much more with what she learned from Enescu than Enescu could do with anything Dory might tell her.

  “I won’t see you again after this, will I?” Enescu said. Dory shook her head. “That’s probably also part of it – we’ll never meet again so I run off at the mouth. I did enjoy working with you, though.”

  “It was kind of you to agree to fill in for Dr. Hupperton,” Dory told her.

  “I didn’t mind. It was –” She paused for so long, Dory wondered if she were going to continue. “It was nothing,” she said finally. “It was easy. And the extra Value I’m getting f
or it doesn’t hurt. Can you explain how that works? Value, I mean.”

  “Well...” Dory grimaced, suddenly stuck. “To be perfectly honest, no.”

  Enescu burst out laughing; her immobilised face made it sound as odd as it looked. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the Value system and the brain-boxes who thought it up. I’ve asked a whole bunch of people if they can explain how it works. About half said they can’t. The rest actually tried. I told them, talk to me like I’m stupid, I don’t mind. But I’m too stupid, I guess, because I still can’t make heads or tails or good red herring out of any of it. Economic engineering, my sweet tetraplegic ass.”

  “The Value system is a lot like time,” Dory said. “We know it, we use it, we live with it and by it. But try taking a close look at what it is and you might as well try gluing strawberry jelly to a ghost.”

  Enescu laughed harder this time. “Damn, I wish this shite would wear off already,” she said after a bit. “If I can’t crack a smile soon, I’m gonna get a lip hernia or something.”

  Now it was Dory’s turn to laugh. “Try decreasing your dosage by an eighth next time,” she suggested.

  “Next time, I’m decreasing it to zero,” Enescu said. “If I go into a room full of x-ables with this face. I’ll get my ass handed to me. In a million pieces.”

  Dory frowned. “Have you talked that over with Recruitment?”

  “No, I just told them. That’s my deal – when I’m going to talk to the extra-enabled, I go in bare-faced. They need to know I’m not trying to hide anything. X-ables see too much of this shite –” She jerked both thumbs in the general direction of her head. “Hell, if I ever sub for someone with a general audience again, I’ll do it bare-faced or not at all. I don’t know what I was thinking, agreeing to be more paralysed.”

  Dory’s enhanced vision caught a tiny movement at the corner of Enescu’s mouth, the first sign the Freez™ was finally letting go. Dory felt relieved for her. For both of them, really – her own facial muscles were so tired the corners of her mouth quivered when she smiled.