Noelani made a number of sacrifices to be on the first ship out of Earth, including all of her savings. Her and her late husband’s. She also took the two frozen embryos they had created eight years, when he got his diagnosis. She had never felt ready – she had a bad back from her house cleaner days, and year by year her capabilities bled out of her. She knew she was running out of time but flinched at the thought of implantation. Pregnancy alone seemed horrible, not to speak of the rigors of parenting as a single and aging mother.
Right as she was thinking about donating the embryos, the aliens made contact with earth and told it that its children could be immortal, for those that came out into space. The broader galactic community had over a hundred species, all of whom were free of diseases or aging. Although they could not save the eight billion humans who had already been born, the fix for new life was a simple matter for them. Immortal children in a world that lacked for nothing, for whom the galaxy would be their ambit – this was an enormously different proposition from mere procreation.
The world splintered all over on the question of whether the aliens were telling the truth. Whether there were in fact a hundred immortal species could not be verified – there was only one species that came knocking, and very few people saw them in person. Although these First Cetans promised a safe habitat for emigrants, it seemed incredible that they could get it right on the first try. It was pointed out that their behavior was indistinguishable from that of a species trying to get a few hundred thousand test unresisting subjects for scientific experiments. Immortality was simply too good to be true.
There was a lottery. Noelani got in. There were forms to fill out as fast as the state could invent them. She completed them the hour they appeared in her inbox. At the end, there was a surreal video interview with a First Cetan using machine translation to ask her near-incomprehensible questions. When she could understand them, she often balked because they were so personal – about her deepest shames and desires. She had been tipped by a government official she was bribing that she should not bring up the frozen embryos – some cultural hangup they had, even though they must know how desirable it was for people on the verge of parenthood to leave Earth – so she did not. She emphasized her drive to explore and contribute, but the Cetan offered no rote positivity and she found herself retreating from this inhuman, intrusive authority standing between herself and her opportunity to have a family.
But it must have approved her, because the next day she was emailed a link to a ticket portal where all she had to do was forfeit everything she had in the bank. The government’s reasoning was, you’re not coming back anyway. What are you going to do with money? They don’t use it out there.
Her family told her she was crazy, but she bought the ticket and got on the ship with a backpack and a case holding the embryos – all she was allowed to bring. She was afraid of every conspiracy or failure Earth had quacked about since the aliens made contact. But the shuttle didn’t blow up. It landed on a much larger ship that was the size of an island. She stepped off into a real place full of real aliens of all sorts. What she could understand of the landscape of paradisiacal: unlimited food, arbitrarily configurable furniture for her failing body, robots to help with manual labor, perfect social order.
On her second week, she visited the hospital and asked to implant the embryos. The first one didn’t take. She was numb with fear when she brought them the second. Her pregnancy was a nine month long bated breath, exploding in a shout. It was not until she was holding Kōnane that she let herself believe she had a family.
Newborn Kōnane was fitted with language implants. Her left ear and left eye were modified to receive input from the ambient datastreams. Many languages in Extended Ceta used sounds or colors that were not visible to humans, and the little computer buried in Kōnane’s jaw would learn to translate those into human language, and vice versa. When she was grown she would be able to see the whole world in a way her mother could not.
The pregnancy had been hard on Noelani’s back. She only had an hour or two of standing in her every day. But out here in Cetan space, single motherhood was not the thing she had dreaded. She did not need a job, so raising Kōnane was her full time occupation. When she was too exhausted to do the physical parts, robots changed and entertained Kōnane, who was an easygoing baby and then an affectionate toddler. Every week she took Kōnane out to the park outside the human habitat where the species mingled in transparent atmosuits. Large signs proclaimed eight different universal friendly gestures or noises. Kōnane yelled and bounced and made the gestures. So did Noelani, grinning crazily in her wheelchair, loving that her daughter would live forever, that Noelani had carried her into eternal safety.
The frightened hostility Noelani had felt in her first alien meeting was gone. She stopped in the park and exchanged rudimentary greetings with these beings, thousands or tens of thousands of years old, who now struck her as gentle and full of grace, filled with the wisdom of the old and the openness of the young.
When she was ten, Kōnane asked for the sense implants to be extended to her other eye and ear, and for the computer that integrated with those sense implants to be upgraded. It was hard, she explained, to keep up with her Extended Cetan penpals without more processing power. When she was fourteen she asked for a neural enhancement that would let her play the same games. The first felt easy to accede to. The second felt frightening.
Kōnane argued she needed the neural modification while her brain was still plastic. She would spend the rest of her long, long life in the company of aliens. It was crucial that she learn what they learned, debate what they debated. What was the point, mom, of having come all this way, only to trap your daughter in an in-between world?
After a long and bitter fight Noelani suggested sleeping on it, but woke up to Kōnane making breakfast with bandaids around her head. She had simply walked out of the human enclave and gotten it done at a clinic.
Noelani visited the gentle gracious aliens who ran the clinic, who were bewildered by her rage. Kōnane had clearly been in her right mind and her stated reasons had been rational. It had never occurred to them to inquire whether Kōnane’s parent approved. To them it was an unpleasant quirk of earth culture that Noelani expected them to.
Kōnane, once the sweet laughing toddler who had run to hug her mother’s knees, stopped making expressions. She had started playing co-experiential games where she merged neurostreams with other players. This disrupted Kōnane’s functioning – she would sometimes knock plates to the ground and speak gibberish. It terrified Noelani, but Kōnane always regained control within seconds when required, annoyed at her mother’s interruption.
Noelani could not understand what the game was, and Kōnane’s explanations did not satisfy her. It was not just one game but several dozen in rapid improvisation, with thousands of other players, as Kōnane lived several lives in parallel.
“But surely they are not playing your life,” mother said to daughter.
“Of course they are.”
Shocked, Noelani said, “But what could be entertaining about watching you put dishes away?”
“It’s not just that they see everything I see, but that they think and feel what I feel. The whole human experience. They’re copying it out of my brain.” Kōnane said as if this were a joyous thing.
Noelani, now horrified: “So they see – me?”
They did. They had a screaming fight, of the sort they had never had before. Noelani tried to explain the concept of a privacy violation to Kōnane. Kōnane pointed out the enclave was full of cameras. Noelani said that it was different, that her daughter could not be a camera streaming her mother’s life to strangers. Kōnane said that they were not strangers, but friends. Noelani was sarcastic about Kōnane calling a group of thousands her friends. One could not possibly have more than, oh, a hundred friends. Kōnane’s whites showed with fury and she cursed her mother’s limitations, her ignorance. Then her face went slack.
Noelani shouted that this was not the time to slip back into the game. Kōnane said, “It was too interesting… I’m sorry. There are thousands of people tuned in.”
“Get them out!” Noelani yelled, demented with fury. “We are having a private conversation!”
“There is no such concept in the Extended Cetan world,” said Kōnane, much more calmly than before. Too calmly. “My name is, Ballistic Neon Particle Cloud. I am a hybrid intelligence between a First Cetan and a node of the ship AI. You can call me Balneon. I won an auction Kōnane opened eight seconds ago and have consensually taken, over, her motor functions for the next ten minutes.”
“You what?”
“Kōnane didn’t trust herself to steer the conversation in a productive direction and thought one of her, friends had a better chance at the job. And we were eager to do so, because this is such an interesting dialogue between the two of you and the novelty of, piloting a human was irresistible.”
Noelani stumbled over to her wheelchair and sat down. Whenever Balneon had to pause to pick an English word, like ‘piloting’, it put silence after a word where a human might say ‘ah’ or ‘mm’.
Balneon said, “We feel much compassion for you, progenitor. You have been one of the more interesting, side characters, in our part of the, experience cloud. We know of the sacrifices you made to come here and have a child. You went further than most of the other parents in the human enclave to make sure your child can integrate into Extended Ceta. Kōnane is deeply grateful for this. She harbors great guilt for your physical injury and sorrows over your impending death every day.”
“Impending death?” Noelani said stupidly. “I’m not that old – it’s decades away still. She’s never told me any of this.”
“She is afraid to. She feels such a deep sense of debt and gratitude. So she is afraid that, if she acknowledges that debt, you will pull on it to keep her with you.”
“Keep her with me? I’m her mother.”
“She philosophically rejects the human implications of that label. As do we. In a galactic society where no one dies unless by freak accident, it is a dangerous thing indeed for us to embrace the importance of kin. If we decided kin was of import, we would want to make more kin. If all of us wanted to make more kin, it would disrupt a peace of many millennia. We would no longer trust each other. If it’s a race, someone must win. The moment there isn’t enough to go around of whatever the material bottleneck is, whoever is ahead can start slaughtering others. So there is a deep kin taboo. After hearing the arguments, Kōnane embraced our viewpoint.”
Noelani, who had so carefully built the bridge between her daughter and the demons who had taught her this nonsense, cried, “You have turned my daughter against me.”
Balneon did not contest the charge. “You have our deepest condolences.”
Noelani sobbed, “She wants to move out – so young? Where? She doesn’t think I’m family…”
“It’s more that she thinks family is a, meaningless concept,” Balneon said. “No. Not meaningless. Meaningbad. A concept that is evil to have as an operational cognitive node.”
“I gave everything, everything, to have her!” Noelani knew even as she shouted that she was breaking a cardinal rule, one that had been so easy to set and believe in when Kōnane was a toddler – that Noelani would never use the sacrifices she’d made as an emotional bludgeon against Kōnane. And here she was, doing it, in front of thousands of alien watchers.
The black dishes of Kōnane’s pupils received the image of Noelani curling into her knees in shame and fury.
“And you never meant to use that against her. She knows that too. But you do, sometimes, and then you forget. She was confused by this behavior until we helped her figure it out. She doesn’t hold it against you that you say it – but she resents that you forget because you don’t want to remember. She thinks it a, pathetic privilege of the non-augmented. She will forgive you for the forgetting. But only if you let her move to a greater distance.”
“No, no…”
“Up so close, you two cannot love each other. Let her leave physically and live among us. And you will no longer feel the dreadful, tickle at the back of your head, like she is the, waste product of the spiritual experience that motherhood was for you when she was younger.”
Devastated, Noelani stared at the monster possessing her daughter, and remembered the First Cetan who had interviewed her all those years ago. It had asked those questions that drew no distinction between passing through the pulp of a human soul and passing through its pith. She had thought the creature enormously cruel and careless, taking what it would never give. Then, when she had arrived in alien space, she had thought the Cetans gentle and loving.
But both of these had been wrong. What they really were was… ē, ishitsu, xenos. Other.
And it was awful.
She said, “Where? Who would she go to? Who would love her and keep her safe?”
“Anywhere she wanted. Tens of thousands of us know and love Kōnane. We would take her dancing in the storms of Jupiter and play battle games with nuclear drones. Dissolve her in the hivemind of the Eagle Nebula. Take her to the dream worlds at the edge of Andromeda and bury ourselves in dreams a dozen layers deep, playing out wars and loves and alternate lives, waking up from each one and resuming in new roles, never knowing which one will be the final waking.”
She said, reviewing every decision she had made that had lost her her baby, said limply, “Oh. I have failed so terribly.”
“To, the, contrary,” Balneon slowed down as it tore processing power from the language centers to the facial muscles. It really wanted to reassure. To be understood. Kōnane’s face relaxed slackly, and then relaxed again differently, into the beatific grace of an angel. Noelani stared, stricken-hypnotized, as her daughter gazed back at her with a superstimulating kindness and pulsed out the slurred words like a broken blender:
“You have succeeded, beautifully. Kōnane, made, it. This is what, making it, looks, like.”