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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Salt Modern Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Alice Thompson's gripping, deep space novel sees scientist and dream investigator Artemis travelling to the distant moon of Oneiros. Her ship, the Chimera has been sent to look for organisms that will help assuage Earth's global warming, but it becomes clear on the journey that there are other disturbing reasons for the mission. Accompanied by dryads, sophisticated AIs with synthetic bodies, nothing is quite as it seems, even desire. This is a story of transfiguration, dreams and identity. Are we just a template of memories and experiences, or is there something that makes us uniquely human?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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ALICE THOMPSON
CHIMERA
For Isaac
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it contained, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on …
The Tempest
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
A week after returning from the moon Oneiros, she had been allowed to go home to Jason. As she entered his house, he thought he could see starlight in her eyes. When they kissed, her passion seemed new again. He held her tightly. The familiar shape of her body undulated over and beneath him.
At breakfast the next day he looked into her eyes. They seemed dark and fathomless, lacking self-doubt. Around the edges of her glance danced a malign mischief.
‘It’s as if you have fallen in love with me all over again,’ Jason said.
One evening he came back to find her writing.
‘Come to bed,’ he said.
‘I need to do this first,’ she said.
He was bemused. Jason lay in the bed and watched her writing, her lack of interest in him in the face of her new passion beguiled him more. He wanted to read what she had written.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not for anyone else. I can’t seem to stop …’
‘It’s based on what happened on Oneiros, isn’t it?’ Jason asked.
‘You know I’ve no memory of Oneiros. But I have some memories of the journey there on Chimera. It will be a novel inspired by art – what I have read and the films I have seen – combined with my memories.’
‘Who will be the heroine?’ he teased.
‘Me. Artemis. In third person …’
She put out her hand and touched his. She could feel his skin, hot, the knuckles of his fingers, the calloused palm of his hands. Again that feeling, acutely sensory, that flushed through her body, upwards into her thoughts, until she felt she could apprehend the icy reality of the world.
She wrote in a black slanted script, the angular style Jason had seen so often when she had once made her research notes. She had forgiven him, he realised. All her previous resentment of him before she had left for Oneiros nine months ago had been wiped away. She no longer expected him to be different from who he was. He was grateful.
She looked outside and saw the luminous lights of the city. Her heightened consciousness was aroused by their clarity. How she loved this feeling coursing through her, the sensation of her body shivering with transience as the neon lights scintillated like stars. Her skin felt tentatively on edge. This ambivalent sensibility had made her want to write.
At night, while she slept beside him, he wondered what had happened to the other astronauts. She had told Mission Control at the debriefing that she had no memory of what had happened. She had returned to Earth alone with the two pilot dryads on board.
While she slept, he picked up the manuscript of her novel from where it lay in a drawer. He wondered about reading it while she dreamt, wondered if the novel would hold any clues as to what had happened on Oneiros that had perhaps slipped onto the page from her unconscious while she wrote. He could try to separate the fiction from the truth, the fantasy from the real. But the larger part of him preferred to remain in the dark. Without looking at it any further he put the novel back in the drawer. Chimera lay there concrete and real, waiting to be read, understood, to become part of someone else’s dream.
CHIMERA
SHIP
CHAPTER 1
What had come to the surface seemed to be floating within the interior light of the Chimera. The ship radiated bright light. It seemed it would never cease. The computers arranged in rows beneath the central hub blinked silently. All was as it should be – the internal flickering constant, golden light over smooth, white surfaces, false snow.
Gravity had been introduced after launch, soldering her feet to the floor. It was like Earth’s gravity, sticky and persistent, while her thoughts were empty, floating as the spaceship floated, suspended. Here she was like air bubbles in a glass of spring water. Why had she thought that? Artemis went to the water fountain and took a swallow of the cold metal water.
Three months ago, at launch, she had looked down and seen the bright colours of the Earth, blues, greens and goldens. Fabulous jewels that belonged to the tales of the Arabian Nights like the blue and white lights of the computers that ran the spaceship. Costume jewellery. Or the colours of a child’s paint box.
She remembered as a child she had liked a small brass lantern with a switch that turned the light behind the glass red, green or blue. She had lain awake in the dark transfixed by the lantern’s coloured firefly glow. On Earth, there was nothing to define oneself against, just countless fabricated scenarios. The world below had been engulfed in light too, a place of no shadows, as humans gave technology their full attention.
This ship in a void was built of real material. The space outside was subject to extreme variations in temperature. What looked like virtual reality, the substance of the interior, was actually real. In space, she could define herself against reality.
In the centre of the ship was a small atrium of paths and garden beds and a single tree that almost reached the roof. The corridors to their rooms led off from the garden like spokes of an old-fashioned bicycle wheel. They all had to walk through the garden to reach the spiral staircase in the centre that led up to the first floor where their living quarters, observational deck and laboratory were.
Scents of the forest, bluebells and wild garlic were created to give a sensation of intense pleasure. It evoked memories in Artemis of playing in the forest as a child. She wasn’t sure if this forest had been virtual reality or a real forest. The few remaining forests had died out when she was young. Most of Earth was now a wasteland. It was impossible for her senses or memories to distinguish between the two types. Her memory of the forest contained a tree identical to the one now growing in the spaceship.
Part of her work as a researcher on Earth had been an investigation of dreams and their significance on the neural network. Her work was enabling her to see – by connecting the neural networks of human subjects to computers – visions of what people dreamt of. She learnt to see people’s dreams on the screen. The first images were shaky – pale-coloured figures on hazy landscapes. But over a year the images became clearer and clearer.
Now she was on the ship, she had further questions to do with her investigations. The questions were scattered like stars across her brain, waiting to be joined together in a cluster.
‘Thirsty?’
She looked up from the water fountain. There Masami stood, perfectly upright, more machine than human, although her DNA was one hundred per cent homo sapiens. She looked exquisite. Her long flat hair cut to a perfect edge. Sex robots looked like her. They had left the orbit of Earth almost three months ago. Masami looked the same as the day they had left.
A siren went off.
‘We are over-heating,’ Artemis said.
‘I know. It’s supposed to be designed for us.’
‘The dryads always take precedence. They’re more expensive to replace. But it’s way too hot …’ Artemis could feel her own sweat trickling over her skin. The siren stopped.
‘False alarm,’ went the tannoy in the ship’s low soft female voice. She always spoke as if she had all the time in the world. The tannoy clicked off.
‘Can you fix the heating too?’ Masami laughed, a girlish sprinkle of musical notes which Artemis knew were made from ice.
‘… and the texture of the food,’ Masami shouted out.
Both women laughed. Masami was head of communication technology. How different she was from how she seemed. Her face and delicate physique were the shells. But she needed to rebel. She enjoyed the look of surprise her small acts of subversion gave to other people’s faces.
As the women parted ways, Artemis caught sight of Troy sitting on a bench in the garden. She sat down next to him. She felt listless. Artemis looked into Troy’s face – oddly asexual, a perfect combination of male and female, a refined and slender face, not so much flat as carefully carved with slanted golden eyes. The symmetry of his face made him look enigmatic, as if there were no details of imperfection to hang onto, to get to grips with. Her attention would sheer off his face as if off a glacier.
‘Only certain people go into space,’ Troy said.
She wondered what he was talking about. Had he picked up on her body language, her slight boredom? Their official mission was to find bacteria on Oneiros that could help consume the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. The ecosystem of Earth was on the point of collapse.
‘Oh?’ Artemis asked. ‘What kind?’
‘They think out there, one billion light years away, they will find the solution.’
On the surface he was right. That was why the crew were here. An attempt to change reality, the surface of the environment on Earth. To choose to change reality rather than have change inflicted upon them.
‘And will they?’
Artemis felt light headed, trivial. Suddenly, she thought, what were she and the crew doing here?
‘They will find a solution. Made of atoms and molecules and stardust and dark matter.’ Troy gave an equivocal smile, ‘You all think it’s the wild frontier.’
The siren went off again. Its piercing sound reverberated around the ship and she put her hands to her ears to block it out.
‘Why do you think it is going off again?’ she asked Troy.
‘Probably a computer glitch.’
The compact, lithe body of Luther joined them in the garden. ‘Want to help me find out what’s going on?’ he asked Artemis. She accompanied Luther down into the bowels of the ship looking for the wiring for the siren. Nimble and compact, he could interweave amongst the computer banks like an otter between rocks. He discovered the siren had been triggered by overheating of the ship. He checked the computerised temperature control for the heating and found it had been raised a few degrees, probably by a minor malfunction.
He couldn’t source the initial issue but the siren had stopped ringing out now. Whatever had disturbed the temperature must have sorted itself out and he reset the temperature control. Over-programmed, he said to her, over-sensitive to the slightest disturbance.
CHAPTER 2
The interior of the ship was lined with rows of computer banks and wiring like a spider’s cobweb spun throughout the room. The lower part of the ship held banks of computers gleaming in the dark. They all ran the ship, its temperature, water and heating system and flight path. The huge walls of computers standing in rows like monoliths, blue and white lights glowing at night like the eyes of birds.
The soft whirring sound they made was louder than the gentle hum of the ship’s engine. There were no windows down here, just another kind of black space that looked inwards. It was Luther’s church here where he found significance, a large cathedral of data. The computers were just large coffins of data, sarcophaguses of information that were unintelligible to nearly everyone.
The twelve dryads who helped run the ship could understand it in limited ways but could not put the information together in larger patterns. Only Luther knew the larger patterns. He went around with this big secret pattern in his head that kept the ship alive. His dark concave face emanated energy, and was full of sharp angles like a crystal. Artemis looked at him and felt as if she couldn’t quite take in all of him, as if his expressions branched out behind her head.
He was the only one on the ship who understood its technologies, fully. The engineering dryads could signal problems rather than solve them. They could then, with their superior dexterity and high density of touch receptors, help fix them.
Artemis and Luther climbed up the spiral staircase to the living quarters where Artemis earlier had been making notes on the crew’s sleeping patterns. As Luther glanced up at the stars she looked at the shape of him in the close fitting but modulated dark clothing they all wore. The design of his mobile body was like a constellation of stars, she thought, perfectly placed and positioned.
‘We are seven days away,’ she said. She could not contain her excitement. ‘Thanks,’ she added.
‘For what?’
‘For fixing the siren. It was beginning to get on my nerves.’
He started to explain the wiring system in general terms. His black eyes gleamed as he talked but he never went into details about the workings, as if they were some secret tenet written in an ancient script that only he was privy to. He talked in vague terms as if he didn’t want to communicate the true logos. Like the sound of ravens calling as they flew up into the air, Artemis could feel he heard binary systems calling to him in his head as he spoke
His quiet manner was consolidated by his faith in technology, which gave him grounding and a subtle arrogance. And he despaired of others who did not share his faith. Religion was encouraged here, of any kind, as belief was known to give psychological and therefore cognitive advantages as long as its content didn’t interfere with logical processes to do with the mission. It also allowed for resilience in moments of crises.
Slight, hungry, bewitched like a priest who had found his calling and was grateful for it every day, unbothered by irrelevancies, he never seemed threatened by Artemis’s intensity. He seemed to realise her moods were like solar storms, shining too brightly and possibly ending in her own destruction. Compared to dryads, humans were clumsy, heavy, clod-hopping and slow, their smells too intense and their feelings incontinent.
Luther finally concluded, ‘Some movement must have triggered the temperature receptor.’
‘I didn’t notice any jolt.’
The ship moved through space as if it were a calm sea. Only when the ship accelerated did it give a very slight shake. And they had been cruising faster than the speed of light for months. Artemis felt the pull of a slight tension between her and Luther.
‘An imperceptible disturbance,’ he insisted. ‘And those sirens are over-sensitive …’ He was doing two things at once: Luther distrusted her sensitivity, too.
Artemis had had a privileged upbringing, shielded from access to virtual reality as a child, and her imagination and intuition had remained intact. Home-schooled rather than registered at one of the online schools, her education had included an historical distrust of the widespread automation and internet of things that were now integrated into society. Her family kept off grid and tried to let leak out as little personal data as possible.
Her late father was one of the IT elite, the governing body called the ElITe. He was one of the few who knew the damage technology had done to people’s minds. The brain’s plasticity had been deeply affected by technology but this had been kept hidden from the populace by the ElITe.
Virtual reality had destroyed downtime and daydreaming. In many ways all human progress, except for AI, had stagnated. The IT elite did not let their children play with computers or smart phones. They left the rest of the people to imagine the computers’ manufactured visions.
AI’s potential for good, however, also intrigued her, especially in the area of medical science. AI was not the issue, it was how humans managed it: as entertainment AI was just the tangent of human stupidity and darkness.
She noticed there were beads of sweat on his brow. ‘It has tired you out?’ she teased.
‘It’s just been hot down here,’ he said.
She left him there and climbed up into the garden and up the spiral staircase to the living quarters. Seth was there, in heated argument with a dryad.
Seth was their commander. He was tall and slightly clumsy, with languorous limbs. He had a pale oval face with thick dark eyebrows that matched his black curly hair. His pale blue eyes were opaque. There was something about Seth that was unknowable even to himself. It was unusual now to have a man in charge of a ship. It was rumoured he was transgender.
Seth lacked subtlety and nuance. He worked to rules. Ethical or legal. There was a rigidity to his thinking that discounted possibilities. The very focused intensity of his intelligence limited him. This was the penalty he had to pay for his quick thinking decisiveness.
‘Don’t do that without permission,’ he said to the dryad.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘A dryad. He was fiddling with the temperature control. It was in his recorded data.’
She turned to the dryad.’ Why?’
‘I felt it was to too low for optimum working conditions.’ Its white arms moved energetically to demonstrate sincerity. Dryads were biosynthetic. A hybrid of computing powers and cloned human DNA provided by anonymous donors. Their bodies were a mixture of synthetic and human cells. They cut and bled. Their feelings were just whispers.
On a day-to-day basis in space, the dryads’ role was to stay in the background helping and recording. When they moved, they did it silently and unobtrusively. The dryads were conditioned to please.
‘But you turned it up without permission,’ Seth said.
‘I meant to ask. And then I got distracted.’
‘It’s back down now?’ Seth sought to confirm.
‘Yes.’
‘Luther has sorted it,’ Artemis said.
‘We don’t know what’s out there. We can’t afford to take security risks. I don’t want anything randomly triggering the siren. Even for a minute,’ Seth said.
‘How long was the heat sensor triggering the siren for?’ Artemis asked.
Seth said, ‘I don’t know. How long?’
The dryad gave them an open-eyed expression again, its liquid blue eyes almost pleading. The dryad looked at her with an expression of open innocence. She immediately distrusted it. It was trying to charm her. It was a one way relationship with a dryad, she thought. It understood her completely but there was nothing about it to understand. Just logarithms and data.
‘Not long.’
‘Even a few minutes is enough time for something to get through without being detected. You can go.’
‘There is no record of any interference to the ship,’ the dryad said and turned and walked away.
CHAPTER 3
Artemis thought of Ivan, the ship’s biologist, looking out of the bedroom porthole and imagining he was at sea, travelling across calm waters perhaps in the Antarctic where the stars were distant floes of ice.
In her bedroom, at the appointed time, Artemis summoned up the hologram of Jason. He lay on her bed looking up at her as she stood in front of him, tousled haired and lax as if emotions and ideas spilled out of him in spite of himself whatever he did. He looked louche and fair with an oval face and languid green eyes, almost alien. He looked as he always did, before she found out.
‘How is it?’ he asked, in his soft voice.
‘Oh, you know.’
‘Anything to report?’ His hologram shivered a little.
‘You know I can’t talk about it.’
‘Oh, yes. Most secret, I believe.’ Jason gave her a smile that was very different from Troy’s. Not wanting to please at all.
‘I miss you,’ he said. She was a few years older. But people had good health to a hundred and age differences had become increasingly irrelevant. The fetish for youth had long died out. Babies were born in glass wombs. Besides she could see he liked the lines etched on her face. They belonged to her.
The combination of her longing and hurt had its own peculiar heavy weight, Artemis thought. She wondered what it equalled – the weight of a small child. His open face did that to her. It had become a symbol, with its curiosity and sensual irony, of something else altogether.
Jason put his arm around her shoulders, heavy as if he were weighing her down with his own character. A chasm had opened up between them, and growing across the gap was a black elder tree. Its branches were uplifted and wide out on either side of the chasm, poking into their bodies and separating them out, keeping them apart. On Oneiros, she knew that the whiteness of the snow would highlight the blackness of the branches and its interweaving patterns.
She switched him off. His phantom quivering into nothingness: fade out. She looked out at the expanse of glass into darkness pricked with a myriad of stars, just behind where he had been sitting.
The ship was travelling through the sky faster than the speed of light yet no one on board could feel the speed. It was as if the ship was standing still like Endurance in the packed ice: frozen, creaking, petrified. The astronauts had been doomed to stillness for eternity. The constant low hum behind the silence, the flickering of the machinery. The artificial light, the subtle smells of humans and metal and plastic melded into one.
Ivan was in the laboratory, conspicuous in his brightly coloured Hawaiian shirt, peering through a microscope, his heavy lantern-shaped head lowered over it like a minotaur bent low. He saw Artemis looking through the glass door and beckoned her in.
‘Look at this.’
She sat down next to him at the laboratory bench. They routinely took samples from outside in space. She looked through the microscope. She saw bacteria moving in a shape and size she had never seen before, like a maze constructing itself. The bacteria wriggled and danced on the slide making its own formation, its own intricate pattern. It was hypnotic. She stared at it for a while and then pulled her gaze away.
‘What is it?’ They exchange excited glances.
‘I’ve no idea.’ Ivan had a scientific curiosity and love of his subject, which was endearing, not like Seth’s obsessive interest in data but showing a curiosity about how life worked, its intricacies and complexities. Unlike Luther, Ivan treated her like a delicate flower he didn’t know the name of.
‘Where did it come from?’ she asked. Where did it come from?
‘A few days ago, I was looking at a slide that seemed to have picked nothing up at all from outside space. And then noticed something was on it. Their odd movement caught my eye.’
‘It must have come from somewhere.’
‘I tell you. It came out of nowhere.’
‘We are getting close to Oneiros. Could it have come from there?’
‘It’s the nearest planetary object.’
She looked again down the microscope. ‘It forms a pattern.’ She was full of wonder and awe.
‘I know. And quickly.’
She noticed a dryad was standing behind Ivan looking very still. As if he had been switched off. Dryads recorded everything they saw and she wondered if he were standing so still to make sure his recording had no interference from his own movements or behaviour.
He looked so still and she sensed she was projecting her own feelings onto him, hidden feelings, about other people. Free-floating emotions that were erratic, like a fly buzzing around, landing on any inanimate object that had the right edges, rubbing its legs, pretending to touch. Feelings that seemed real, tangible, unselfish, but were just arbitrary particles of dust shining in a beam of sunlight in an empty room. Hovering, moving, never static, needing the consciousness of a watcher to exist.
