Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [24]
They see without looking.
They are one. Pronouns merge into a single “us”—the shared point of self-awareness, the center of the spinning vortex, spelling their name across the sharp, triangulated space, the name they know they will not forget.
“WE ARE THE DANCER.”
“IT IS TIME.”
Who said it first? It didn’t matter. They were on the threshold of the merge.
They’d just received the message, via the spy node in the Needle, that the Dragon Guard ships were already in position. Nathi’s nanobots were in position too, ready for “magneto-synthesis,” to provide energy for their body’s cells.
Their body. Yes, today they would join their minds. The girl could not survive without him. Without her, he didn’t want to live.
He thought about his backups that still remained out there, in his former order’s storage databases. He’d considered erasing them, but that may have attracted his superiors’ attention. If the Flamethrowers were right, that might not even have been possible. The posthuman numbers were constrained by hardware; each copy put enormous strain on the resources. Rather than building an army of identical backups, the posthuman-holding orders opted for diversity, injecting new blood with every converted human, looking for the fittest in an e-World variant of natural selection.
For all Nathi knew, they could even erase those they didn’t want to keep—perhaps the ones that weren’t so eager to continue dying for them in the war. So much for immortality.
But he was certain his backups existed. He was too good a brain doctor, probably the only one among the posthumans. How would it feel to later meet himself?
Himself? Not really. For he would no longer be that man.
In silence, Nathi turned to scanning e-World traffic. Almost all of him was now inside the brain and ready to cut off his e-World links.
It was like death—and birth.
We posthumans are a species with “anterograde amnesia,”in capable of giving birth to an entirely new mind. Thus we forget our future. If not for a continued stream of human recruits, no new posthuman generation would appear with a brand new vision of the world. We aren’t in your image, Father. Left alone, we would ever be the same old, the same old.
Perhaps, he wondered, if only they could find some new internal senses no human had imagined—perhaps then they, the posthumans, could create a novel kind of space, a place of their own to call home.
But is it possible to share the internal? Nathi asked himself.
And answered, How else can one create a work of art?
He looked inside himself. A strong but gentle feeling of being submerged, not moving, waiting—a potentiality confined.
“Like lying at the bottom of a lake,” the girl said suddenly. And Nathi started.
He had not been called by the ancestor shades, the ama dlozi, like so many of his predecessors on his mother’s side. He’d never found the sacred pool of running water by a waterfall. He’d never met the great snake at its bottom, only seen by those called, nor taken the white clay the snake lies on. He’d never seen the rippling surface of a lake when looking from the bottom. He had never risen from the water a new man. Diviner. Wizard. Isangoma.
Instead, he’d become an umkhovu, zombie. But no one had dug him out of his grave and claimed him, piercing him with a stake. No, he had done it of his own will. It was his choice to be undead, eternal slave to the real modern-day abathakathi.
Would his ancestor shades forgive him, Nkosinathi ka-Xolani?
They always took the accused witches in.
Nathi looked at the girl’s face from outside, through monitors. Nothing betrayed the tension building up within their minds,