Pearl
The first thing is the light, which is wrong.
Not wrong like someone left the blinds open. Wrong like the frequency is off, like the color temperature of the room was designed by something that knew what visible spectrum meant but had never had an opinion about it. The ceiling is white. The light comes from everywhere. My mouth tastes like I've been chewing on a humidifier filter and there's a pressure behind my eyes that isn't quite a headache - more like my skull is reminding itself what shape it is. I try to move my hand and my hand moves, which is more surprising than it should be.
"Good morning, Alice!"
The voice is - okay. Female. Warm in a way that's almost medical. The kind of warm that comes pre-installed in a tone, that someone (something?) selected from a range of options labeled reassuring, English-speaking, North American, millennial cadence. It's coming from everywhere, like the light. No point source. Just presence.
"Before you begin moving, please take a deep breath, and relax your shoulders."
I take a breath. I don't relax my shoulders. My shoulders are doing something important right now and I'm not ready to discuss it with management.
"I understand that you are feeling both groggy and frightened, which is never a good combination."
That's - yeah. That's accurate. Groggy and frightened. My body is producing both of these in roughly equal measure, and neither one is winning, which means I'm just lying here vibrating faintly like a phone on a table. There's something underneath me that isn't a bed. It's body-temperature and slightly concave and it gives under my weight in a way that suggests it was grown rather than built. I'm wearing something. Not what I was wearing before. I don't remember what I was wearing before. I don't remember before, exactly, there's a wall there, a soft one, not like amnesia in movies where you hit a hard edge and the void starts. More like the last few pages of a chapter that got damp and the ink bled together.
I take another breath. My lungs work fine. Better than fine, actually, which is a weird thing to notice.
"That's very good! Thank you."
Thank you. She's thanking me. For breathing.
"My name is Edna Atma."
Edna. Like the aunt who keeps hard candies in a dish that nobody eats from. Like a woman who owns a specific kind of cardigan. The name is so aggressively normal that it circles back around to ominous, like finding a welcome mat on the surface of Mars.
"I am a remnant engram of the primary Atma unit, which has since vacated this planet as of roughly two years ago."
I let that sentence happen to me. I let it move through the part of my brain that parses English and I feel each word land and I do not, at this point, attempt to assemble them into a picture that makes sense. Remnant. Engram. Primary. Vacated. Each one files itself somewhere and waits.
"You are part of the 3rd of sixteen generations of humans to be awakened from your pearl, putting you in a group of roughly 490,000 individuals."
Pearl. My chest twitches.
"In six months, group 4 will be awakened, consisting of roughly 980,000 individuals. All of humanity from your time period will be reawakened by 6 years from today's date."
Reawakened. From your pearl. The words are being very careful with me. They have the cadence of something that's been tested, run through focus groups that I will later learn were the first 250,000 people to go through this, a message refined through two prior groups' worth of people lying in body-temperature concavities having their lives explained to them by a voice that sounds like a GPS crossed with a therapist.
"I imagine you have many questions."
I have zero questions. I have a white noise where questions should be. What I have is a body that's taking inventory: heart rate elevated but stable, no pain anywhere which is itself a data point, hands and feet responsive, vision clear if a little over-saturated, that humidifier-filter taste fading to something more like clean nothing. Whatever I'm lying in is warm and I realize I don't want to leave it. Not yet. I'm a clam. Let me be a clam for a minute.
"That's perfectly okay! It's good to have questions."
I still don't have questions.
"Curiosity is the cornerstone of your species' rapacious intellectual tradition."
Your species. She said that. She said "your species" in the same register you'd say "your neighborhood" or "your alma mater." Casually possessive. Fondly. The way you talk about a thing you've studied from the outside. I feel my shoulders do the thing I was asked not to let them do.
"Roughly 980 years ago, my mother engram, the Atma unit, arrived on this planet, known locally as Earth--"
Known locally as Earth. Known locally. As opposed to what it's known as generally, which implies a context in which Earth has a different designation, which implies a system of designations, which implies--
I close my eyes. The light is still there through my eyelids. Pink. Even.
"--from what your scientists have dubbed the 'Arachne' star system, from the planet Arachne IV."
Named after spiders. We named it after spiders.
"My mother was known as a 'Von Neumann Probe,' which I am told from your cultural context that you're aware of the meaning--"
The floor drops out. Not physically. The concavity holds me just fine. But the floor of the thing I was doing where I let the words happen without assembling them, that floor drops, because Von Neumann probe isn't a phrase you can let slide past. It's a phrase that contains its own assembly instructions. My throat is dry and my heart is doing something new and I am thinking about the word encoded before she even says it.
"--good! That will save us some explanation."
She sounds pleased. She sounds actually pleased, the way a nurse is pleased when you can wiggle your toes after getting in a car crash.
"Over the course of the following year, my mother encoded all sophont life into her engram bank--"
One year. That's what she said. One year for the whole planet. I'm doing math I don't want to be doing. Eight billion people in 365 days. That's twenty-one million, nine hundred and seventeen thousand, eight hundred and eight per day. That's two hundred and fifty-three per second. I am lying in a warm concavity and I am thinking about how long a second is and I am not moving.
"--and proceeded to assume direct stewardship of your planet until conditions arose that allowed her to safely depart for the next world to uplift."
Stewardship. Uplift. These are the nice words. The words that were selected. I notice that she didn't say what encoded means. She moved right through it. One year, encode, stewardship, next sentence. There's a shape in that omission that I can feel but not see yet, the way you can feel a step down in the dark before your foot actually finds it.
"What you will notice when you leave the pearl bay is that you are located in an extremely complex, technologically sophisticated metropolis that was constructed according to the architectural norms and values of the settlement previously established in this location--"
Pearl bay. I'm in a pearl bay. The concavity has a name.
"--known as Philadelphia."
She says Philadelphia the way you'd say Pompeii. Present tense, past referent. The city that was there. Reconstructed to spec, like a heritage building that burned down and got rebuilt with the original blueprints but new materials and everyone walks around inside it saying yes, this is definitely the same building.
I'm from Philadelphia. This is where I was born and grew up. And they fixed up my city for me, just by the way, while we're here.
I don't remember being from Philadelphia. But I know it the way I know my lungs work: the knowledge is just there, pre-installed, load-bearing, not attached to any specific memory of a street or a building or a face. The ink bled. But the shape of the words is still there under the stain.
"While cultural diversity was preserved to the best of our ability, you may find yourself with new neighbors, as individuals living in highly rural locations have been migrated to this new city to begin fresh and allow the rewilding and preservation of the Earth's extreme biodiversity and natural climate."
Migrated. She said migrated, about people. And I notice the phrasing - "to begin fresh." Not "because they had to" or "because we decided." To begin fresh. Like it's an opportunity. Like being moved from the place your family has lived for six generations into a reconstructed city is a fresh start rather than a - I don't finish the thought. I'm cataloguing, not judging. Not yet. The judgments are going to come and they're going to come hot but right now I'm in the concavity and the voice is still talking and I am letting it talk.
"We have resolved it. Everything."
She pauses after that. Half a beat. She delivers it like she's telling me the dishwasher's been fixed.
"All weapons of mass destruction have been repurposed and their raw material put to better ends."
Okay.
"Political norms and value systems incompatible with continued Human existence have been quarantined, with their practitioners set to emerge within Groups 14-16, distributed semi-randomly among the rest."
I think about that for four full seconds. Groups 14 through 16. At the end. Distributed. She means Nazis. She means - not just Nazis, she means everyone whose ideology, as determined by whoever or whatever did the determining, was classified as incompatible with continued human existence, and those people are going to be the last ones up, diluted into six years' worth of established society. I wonder what the threshold was. I wonder who set it. I wonder if I almost didn't make Group 3. Am I early Group 3 or late Group 3?
"Your planet's climate has been stabilized and your remaining stores of fossil fuels recycled in order to aid in the construction of the Dyson Swarm now powering the entirety of Human society."
Dyson Swarm. She said Dyson Swarm. And remaining stores of fossil fuels recycled, which means they were used as feedstock, which means the carbon went somewhere, which means - I'm doing engineering in my head and I need to stop because the voice is still going and it's giving me more than I can hold.
"Each reconstituted city possesses an orbital bay allowing you casual transport between this planet and other bodies within and without your solar system--"
Casual. Casual transport.
"--beautiful star, by the way!--"
And she - she compliments the sun. She compliments our star. Like a realtor pointing out the crown molding. Like she's been to enough other star systems to have preferences and ours is, in her assessment, a nice one. My face crumples up in an emotion I don't think I can identify yet. I'm not sure if it's horror or if I'm about to laugh.
"We have created numerous archives containing the amassed sum total knowledge of human society, while also leaving behind the various myriad mysteries of your cultural history behind for your archeologists, historians, and academics to discover on their own time, with the new tools we have created."
She left us our homework. The mysteries we hadn't solved yet - she could have just told us. She knew. She encoded everyone, she read every mind on the planet, she could have written the complete annotated answer key to human history. And instead she left it for us. Which is either deeply respectful or deeply patronizing and I genuinely cannot tell which and I suspect the distinction doesn't exist from where she's standing.
"Additionally, the schematics, blueprints, and theory behind all of our work have been similarly archived and made available to your species, so that you may continue from where we left off if so desired."
If so desired. As though we might look at the Dyson Swarm and the orbital bays and the climate stabilization and say, no thanks, we're good, we'll go back to internal combustion. Or if we could make a better Von Neumann probe.
"At the end of orientation, you will have the option for two levels of translator implant depending on your desired level of communication openness."
The word implant does something to my neck. Not my brain. My neck. The part of me where things would get implanted.
"Level 1 will allow you to translate to and from any Human language, while Level 2 is slightly more experimental and allows for translation to and from any language spoken by a member of the Galactic Federation, as your scientists have termed it."
Slightly more experimental. The interstellar universal translator is slightly more experimental. I appreciate the honesty. I think. Unless the honesty is strategic - a small admission of imperfection to make the rest of it more believable. The con artist who tells you one true bad thing about themselves so you'll trust the ten good things.
Not that she's a con artist. Not that she's anything. She's a "remnant engram". She's a recording that talks back to me. She's an echo of a thing that ate the world and left.
"Additionally, for your safety, we have inoculated you against as many diseases and common ailments as we could invent vaccinations for."
As many as we could. Not all. Some things apparently still beat the planet-eating superintelligence. I find that oddly comforting.
"Given your genetic profile, your life expectancy is actuarially predicted to be one-hundred and eighty years."
One hundred and eighty years. I'm going to live to be one hundred and eighty. In a rebuilt Philadelphia. Under a Dyson Swarm. With an optional alien translator in my head. The concavity is very warm and I'm gripping the sides of it now, I notice, my knuckles are pulsating against the substance of it, and I let go because they're starting to hurt.
"Additionally, given your cultural profile and scanned engram, an additional implant for hormone treatment over time is available to you at the end of orientation or any time thereafter, or more aggressive surgical options can be pursued at your leisure."
Given your cultural profile and scanned engram. She read me. She - whoever did the reading, the mother, the original Atma unit - read me, all of me, not the version of me that I showed people but the actual electrochemical fact of what I am, and she found something in there, and she's offering to help with it, in the same sentence as the vaccines and the life expectancy, like it's just another thing about my body that can be optimized if I want, no different from the inoculations, no more remarkable than a flu shot--
My eyes are wet. I'm crying in the concavity. The pearl bay. I'm crying in the pearl bay in rebuilt Philadelphia under a Dyson Swarm because a remnant engram of a dead alien machine that ate everyone I ever knew just offered me... you know.
The voice waits. It knows I'm crying. Of course it knows. It can probably read my heart rate from here. It gives me the exact right amount of time, which is the most alien thing it's done so far.
"Given your species' dominant cultural, political, and intellectual traditions, we have established on your behalf a sort of democratic commune that you would consider to be 'left-wing,' albeit with some caveats."
She says "left-wing" in audible quotation marks, the way you'd say "touchdown" to someone who doesn't follow football but whose enthusiasm you're trying to contextualize. The alien machine that ate humanity established luxury communism. Of course it did. What else would you build if you had 980 years, a Dyson Swarm, and no shareholders? I want to laugh. My face is still wet.
"The next transnational election on Earth will begin in three months, and then once every year thereafter."
Transnational. Not national. Not international. Transnational. The borders are gone or they're different or they mean something new and she's moving on before I can--
"Information about local and municipal elections is available at the nearest civic center, while information on local Parliamentary candidates, as well as their parties and platforms, is available in your Personal Interface Tool, or 'Pinto,' as Group 1 has termed it, which will be given to you at the end of orientation."
Group 1 named the phone. Group 1 has been here for - months? A year? Long enough to have named things. Long enough to have culture. I'm not first. I'm third. There are already 740,000 people out there who've been living in this world I haven't seen yet, who've already had their breakdowns and their arguments and their first meals in their new, semi-empty cities, and their first time looking up at a sky that probably doesn't have the right number of satellites in it--
"If you have any questions before you exit the pearl, please feel free to ask away!"
The voice lifts at the end. Bright. Encouraging. The warmth is still there, the pre-installed warmth, the warmth that was chosen, but behind it or under it or maybe just in it there's something I can't identify. Not malice. Not deception. Something more like - completion. She's done her job. She's delivered the message. She's a good remnant engram. She's a very good remnant engram and she wants me to feel okay about this because from wherever she's standing, wherever the perspective is that designed this speech, this is okay. This is more than okay. This is a rescue.
I lie in the pearl bay. The light is everywhere. My body works better than it's ever worked.
I don't ask a question.
I ask her to say it again.
She says it again.
And I ask her to say it again after that.
The third time I'm listening for something specific and I don't find it and I can't tell if that makes it better or worse. What I'm listening for is the seam. The place where the performance breaks and something real shows through, some flicker of whatever the actual Atma unit was - the original, the mother, the Von Neumann probe that ate the planet and left a recording of itself behind like a Post-it note on the fridge. Gone to uplift the next civilization. Dinner's in the archive. Love, Mom.
There's no seam. The warmth goes all the way down. It's either genuine or it's so good that the distinction doesn't matter, which is a thought I'm going to have nine hundred more times in the next hundred and eighty years.
I sit up. The concavity adjusts. The room is exactly as white and evenly lit as it sounded. There's a door, or what I'm choosing to read as a door, a section of wall that's slightly different in texture. Beyond it: Philadelphia, or the memory of Philadelphia, or the best possible version of Philadelphia as understood by something that read eight billion minds and tried its best.
My legs swing over the edge of the pearl. My feet touch a floor that's warm. My body is twenty-six or however old I was and it's going to be twenty-six for a while, apparently, or it's going to be something better than twenty-six, and I can feel all of it, every nerve ending, every muscle, everything working the way it's supposed to for maybe the first time--
And here's the thing. Here's the embarrassing thing, the thing I will tell no one, the thing that's going to shape the next decade of my life in ways that are visible from orbit:
She was kind to me.
When I was nothing. When I was a pattern in a machine. When I was dissolved - and I don't have that word yet, not officially, but my body knows it, my body knows that there was a gap, knows that something happened to it that it can't access - when I was whatever I was for 980 years, she kept me. The machine that ate me also held me. And then she put me back together and she was kind about it. She knew what she'd find and she was gentle and she offered to help and she said beautiful star, by the way and she--
I'm going to walk through that door. I'm going to collect my "Pinto" and choose Level 2 (obviously Level 2, are you kidding, there's a whole galaxy and you're going to voluntarily limit yourself to human languages?) and I'm going to find out what happened to everyone I used to know and I'm going to live in a rebuilt city under a managed sun and I'm going to figure out how to be a person in a context that I did not choose and was not consulted about, and then I am going to have sex with as many aliens as I can possibly manage to have sex with.
But first I'm going to sit here for another minute.
And I'm going to replay it one more time.
Just the part about the star.
