Niels introduced Mori to the young inventor, and he was thunderstruck. Seeing her dark hair tied in a tight ponytail, he wondered what it would look like loose, falling around her shoulders, cascading down her back. Her intellect and her loveliness were also coupled with a familiar surname, Buyers. Well, her mother was practically a celebrity.
Three
On a Theory of
Nothingness.
QUINN WAKES AND RISES from her grassy bed. The Research Station is a two-hour walk away; Lise will be waiting, and two hours is a long time for her to linger. They keep spare motorbikes in the nearby village of Grande Terre—old-style, retro machines with gears and manual steering and no self-balancing, auto-steer, or hands-free. Quinn’s father, Matt, taught her to ride when she was ten, but Mori is not as confident or as skilled a rider as her. On a straight, paved road he’ll stay upright, but tight turns and hill climbs stump him. She suggested modifying a bike for him, fixing it to include auto-assist, but he’s a traditional male and would rather impale himself before that ever happened.
Kerguelen is in the Desolation Islands, one of the most isolated places on Earth—an archipelago of three hundred islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Two months ago, Quinn set up a Research Station near Grande Terre. The place is a culture shock, and the Island is three decades behind the rest of the world—all very Low-Tech, except for Quinn’s little corner, which is filled with scads of equipment: magnetometers, electric sensors, particle detectors. They arrived with a container of modular flat-packed systems that, with the push of a button, expanded into buildings ten times their size. The locals had never seen anything like it; to them it was revolution, some futuristic, science fiction, High-Tech scenario. (It wasn’t; it was just clever hinging and counterbalanced parts.)
Grande Terre is the only village on the Island, and the buildings are the regular sort: two hundred years old, made from rammed earth and clad in timber. There are some retail stores selling maintenance equipment, fishing supplies, and rubber boots and clothing for men and boys, but nothing for women. A few food outlets sell dried goods and grain alcohol. There are two thousand residents, three thousand rare but very cute curly-horned sheep, and no AIs. Not one. The entire Island is robot free. Like the mantra from an AI Detox Retreat: “Reevaluate your relationship with humans. Focus on the tenets of connecting with people, not machines.” Mori thinks it’s ridiculously archaic; life is so much easier with AI doing the heavy lifting. But AI irks Quinn—she finds them tedious, especially when affecting a persona of caring. (If they ask her, “How are you feeling?” or worse, “How are you really feeling?” she tells them to “fuck off.”) She’s not a staunch Humanist, but her father is a devotee of the movement and parental ideologies trickle down.
Quinn jumps on a bike and heads west, following the only road, which trails from the harbor through the village and ends at the Research Station. The buildings at either end of town are abandoned; the farther away the greater the state of disrepair, like a creeping decay, edging towards the center of town. The MedCentre was the first to close, then the two churches, one on either side of town, were boarded up after the RE Wars (Religious Wars or Regional Wars, depending on your cultural ideologies). East verses West may have defined the geographical scope of the Wars, which began after the economic collapse in 2036, but as far as Quinn is concerned, people were fighting over organized religion. Biased political policies united Church and State in the mid 2020s, creating laws and legislation favoring right-wing fundamentalist religious groups. By 2030, Church and State were using violent regulatory forces to uphold religious doctrines. After the RE Wars ended, churches and places of worship were closed. Religion is not banned outright, but worshiping in groups is closely monitored and outspoken religious doctrines and fundamentalism are not tolerated by Hexad, the International Unified Government formed after the RE Wars ended six years ago.
Twenty minutes later, Quinn pulls into the main complex building. She finds Lise resting on a lawn chair in the shade there, and she’s not alone, she’s brought a plus-one: Ada, her ex-partner. Quinn is shocked. She thought it was over, finally over, and the breakup, when it happened, was a relief.
In the beginning, it was a perfect match: two independent, attractive, and accomplished women, Ada happily domestic and Lise happily career driven, neither entrenched in the Humanist or Transhuman camp. The cracks appeared early, when Lise described their new swarm drones as silver-white, like cadmium, and Ada corrected, “Technically grey.” Quinn understood the verity, this was true, the drones were not silver-white like cadmium at all, they were a much darker mid-grey color, like zinc. Then Lise said the new window screens were charcoal, because darker colors clarify the view and she wanted to filter the light and see the streetscape below, and Ada corrected, “Ironstone, not charcoal.” Ironstone. Really? Quinn realized then they magnetically repelled each other.
They split a year ago. But here they are, the two of them together. Is this one last attempt to make it work, to see if they can feel, or find, this thing called love, this thing that humanity can’t live without? Surely not, thinks Quinn, Lise is too smart to do this again.
She dismounts from the bike and kisses her mother’s cheek. “Thanks for coming.” She lowers her voice. “Thought it was over.”
“It is, long story. She loves a destination wedding, and she wanted to see you married.”
“Yes, of course.”
Lise considers her daughter’s furrowed countenance. “Darling, you haven’t slept.”
“I’m fine. Work’s mad.”
Quinn has the same dark, wavy hair and grey-blue eyes as her mother, but Lise’s eyes are world-weary, softer and kinder, and she wears her hair blunt and short. Still, the older Quinn gets, the more she resembles her mother; glimpses of passing reflections are a constant reminder that they share their genome and DNA. Thirty years ago, when Quinn was a fetus, Lise’s cells crossed the placenta and entered her daughter’s bloodstream. Today, they’re still here, in her eyes, her hair, her heart. This sharing of themselves was mutual, and Quinn left embryonic stem cells inside her mother.
The pair have a similar habit of biting their thumbnails when studying calculus. Lise doesn’t cook, and neither does Quinn. Both favor automatic pencils, which leave satisfying, heavy marks on the pages of their notebooks. They love math, and science is their religion. But Lise wants to change the world. She sees it as her duty to challenge the status quo, to make a difference, to find a fairer way for people to live, and this is the focus of her life and her work. Quinn sees problems everywhere; she knows the world is a mess, there are big problems, but she feels they are too weighty for her to address and it’s not her responsibility to solve the dilemmas of humanity in the mid-twenty-first century. The focus of her life is to get through the day without imploding.
Ada steps forward and cups a hand around Quinn’s cheek. “Darling, good to see you,” she says, then spies Quinn’s hands, white and stiff, still cold from the jump. She takes them and rubs them between hers, bringing the blood back. “Child abuse.” She frowns. “Could have been so easily fixed.”
Raynaud’s syndrome affects the lineage of females in Quinn’s family. In cold weather or under stress, Quinn’s smaller arteries spasm and contract, cutting off circulation and blood supply to her extremities—hands, feet, ears, nose. The faulty DNA could have been snipped from her genome using CRISPR before she was born, but her parents knew what was coming. Having a genetic predisposition to the cold would be a useful survival mechanism for the future.