Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

Caribou

Katja stands outside her groundcar on the road from Nygothab to Kulusuk. The edge of the deserted highway is delimited by the fine gray lines of a translucent animal fence. She’s on a windswept tundra, 300 kilometers from anything, with the exception of the caribou, which should be quite close now, and with them, Javier Funes. The car, the first she’s ever driven, is broken down.

The land is desolate, gray brown white under the thin boreal sun. The cold is intense, and she doubts she’ll ever acclimate to it. Katja grew up in the orbit of Venus, and Grønland is the most alien place she’s ever been. She is an uninvited guest here. This is a feeling to which she’s accustomed. Katja is an investigative blogger; she’s often uninvited. She invites herself, and she noses around. Javier Funes probably will not want to talk to her.

Funes is a famous recluse. Earlier in life, he was a researcher, an entrepreneur, a man who turned the lead of ideas into the gold of innovation. Then, in his twilight years, he became obsessed with a new theory of mind and left all of his past business pursuits behind to live among a giant herd of barren ground caribou on the open tundra of Grønland, where he was purportedly conducting a grand experiment.

As stories go, the genius in seclusion was a well-worn trope. If rumors were true, though, Funes’ experiment was unprecedented in scale, if not unique, and in any case of keen interest to her personally because of Pierre, her former lover and childhood friend. What Funes was supposedly up to was like something Pierre might do. If she’s persuasive and lucky, Funes might consent to an interview.

A broken down auto was nothing to worry about, even out here. In another hour or so, the vehicle would probably be able to fix itself. She finds her position via GPS on her heads-up and examines the situation. The response time feels slower than Martian APS, perhaps because of the thicker atmosphere. As it happens, she is almost where she needs to be, or guesses she needs to be. She might as well do some scouting. She shoulders her pack and strikes out onto the tundra, planning to go a few klicks out and then return to the car.

It’s getting gray, and evening wind is kicking up a dust of snow and ice crystals. Katja can see what she judges are a few hundred meters in each direction before the distance is lost in gray. Her auto still appears on her heads-up as a blinking dot about half a kilometer from her current position, and she has net connectivity, although out here bandwidth isn’t abundant. Even so, the queer, low whistle of the tundra wind and the poor visibility tickle primitive human anxieties that the people who tinkered with her family’s genetics over the last century either didn’t worry about or had the good sense not to remove.

Something is moving toward her through the snow, still too distant to make out. At first she thinks it’s one of the caribou she’s seeking. Then there’s a moment of fear where she thinks it might be a bear, but it’s too small. It’s another human, running toward her at an incredible pace.

The person stops, and her personal area network gets a hail. A Grønlandic translator kicks in and relays the msg to her. The tone is polite, but the msg is alarming.

<You’ve entered the sovereign territory of Inkupat Herd. Please remain where you are until it can be determined that your presence is not hostile.>

She tries to enhance her vision to get a better view of the figure through the snow, but her software isn’t up to it. There’s something slung over their shoulder that’s probably a rifle. Then the figure winks out completely.

She msgs her attorney, <Frances, I need better vision enhancement software. Can you find me something for snow?> She tries the infrared spectrum but still sees nothing.

There’s the tiniest lag in the AI’s response. <Working on it. Could take as long as ten minutes. Packages like that are large, and the bandwidth out here is spotty.> She feels the AI accessing her visual cortex.

<That’s fine. I’m going to need it out here anyway.> But it won’t help her with the present situation.

“Hello?” she says out loud. The man abruptly reappears only five meters away. He has a rifle pointed at her. “What the–?”

<Documentation of citizenship, if you please,> the man msgs. He is tall and broad in white and gray snow gear, with longish black hair, advanced stubble, and a strong chin. There is frost in the cultured fur ringing his hood. <You look like an Icelander; let’s hope you’re not.>

She thinks, I look Icelandic? She raises her hands and transmits citizenship papers. Why did everyone in security on this planet behave like the Martian Counterinsurgency Directorate on a hutong-to-hutong search and liquidate mission? She resolves to be patient.

When he finally speaks, his voice carries an Irish brogue with hints of Scandinavia. “Checks out.” She loves Earth accents. Offworld, linguistic conformity is the fashion, an overzealous application of standards compliance in an arena from which it would be better excluded, in her opinion. Most of the people one meets sound like they’re from either Beijing, Bangalore, or Illinois. He lowers the gun but doesn’t move to put it away. “My apologies; Icelanders generally show up hungry for reindeer. Now why are you here?”

“I’m looking for Javier Funes.” She lowers her hands. “I’m not armed,” she adds.

“Well then you shouldn’t be out here at all.” He looks her up and down — her ECM picks up what feels like a weapons scan — and slings the rifle. “The wolves won’t bother you, but ursus maritimus has developed a taste for low-hanging fruit since the pack ice all melted. Why are you looking for Señor Funes?”

“I’m a blogger. I came to ask for an interview,” she says. She turns away from a gust of biting wind, taking several steps widdershins so that she’s still facing him.

“You could have just msg’d his attorney. He doesn’t normally entertain visitors.” Though it’s slung, one hand still hasn’t wavered from the butt of the rifle.

“No one who approaches Ms. Zinn gets an interview.” Zinn was human — the very wealthy had human attorneys in addition to AI assistants — and well known for shutting bloggers down before they could even make it through an elevator pitch. “I thought I’d try being more direct.”

“I doubt that will work. And as you’re unarmed in polar bear country, I recommend you leave. I’ve got patrols to run.” But he doesn’t break eye contact quickly enough for her to feel she’s being dismissed out of hand.

She checks her heads-up. “My auto is broken down. Estimates –” she checks her headware link to the car, “Shit, that can’t be right — six hours for repairs still.”

The man gives her a neutral look. “You can join me for dinner, I suppose. I don’t usually get visitors.” He had just told her to leave; should she be on guard?

She shrugs. “Why not? Better than being dinner.”

He gestures back toward the road. “Let’s get your gear.”

* * *

The man guarding the caribou herd is called Cabot Tycho Brahe McDunnagh. His mother was French, his father Irish, and he was raised in Denmark. He tells her all of this rapid-fire as he cooks dinner over a camp stove. She wonders how long it’s been since he’s had company.

“And where do you call home?” he ventures.

“Venus. I grew up in an orbital hab. It’s an O’Neill cylinder, one of the big older ones.” The wind twists the dusting of airborne snow around them in gentle arcs.

“Istriya, by any chance?”

This surprises her. “Yes. I’m surprised you even know of it.”

“I used to read this blog by a researcher there who’d got down to the surface in a botshell. Sounded proper hard… and good craic.”

“Craic?” her translators fail her.

“Fun; it’s Gaelic. Any rate, he went down planetside in a bot shell in pretty much the most hostile place you could imagine — not like I have to tell you that, you being from there.”

Like Pierre, she thinks. “I knew someone who did that,” she says.

He’s warming to her. “Must be difficult to run the shell. They’re all spidery. Can’t be anything like being in a human body.”

“No,” she says. She wants to change the subject. “You’re well equipped. Was that a nulloptic cloak you used earlier?”

“Uh-uh,” he says smiling, “State secret, that.” She raises an eyebrow. “Right, kidding. Yes, it was. They didn’t skimp on my gear.”

He finishes cooking and ladles out some kind of curry from a little covered pot, then begins eating his own with bone chopsticks. “So Istriyan children grow up without genders?” he asks between bites.

“It’s… Yes, it’s different, I suppose, although I have nothing to compare to. I chose female when I was old enough. My best friend growing up was a bot, though. They’re assigned genders from early childhood; it helps them socialize properly.”

“Huh,” he said, “Boy or girl bot?”

“Boy.”

* * *

They’d gone from childhood friends to dating, briefly and awkwardly, then back to friends. There were scattered flare-ups of interest over the years thereafter that always left her wanting more but wary of ruining their friendship. They both saw plenty of other people, but kept circling back to each other.

After they passed their evaluations and graduated social pod, Katja took up blogging, while Pierre joined a research collective. He’d spoken of little else for the last year of pod. Within seven months, he was doing field work on the Venusian surface in a survival shell. They both stayed on Istriya, where they’d grown up. They still spoke a lot in their off hours, but his collective was intense. She hardly saw him outside of vspace.

His group was studying the relationship between surface mineralogy and atmospheric dynamics, part of a study to develop carbon sequestration methods for terraforming the planet — a project that would take a thousand years at minimum. In a thousand years, she wondered, would people even want to live on planets? Despite the lack of proximity, she loved hearing him talk about his work.

One evening, he didn’t msg her at the usual hour. This had happened before and didn’t worry her immediately. She had a date that night with the aerostat engineer she’d been seeing, most of which they spent arguing about the heavy metals import agreement with the Mercurians. They both thought it was a weak deal, but he was for stepping up the timetable on surface mining, while she was for opportunistic extraction ops on the Centaurs and other erratic asteroids. Eventually she nailed him on the numbers, extracted some blatantly self-serving physical favors while he was still feeling dumb about it, and said good night.

“But–” he started.

“Don’t argue with me, kid.” She smiled, kissed him once, sent him home, and flopped onto the pillowy floor of her bubble apartment. Her augmented reality sky and clouds were off, and she could see stars and the faint infrared glow of Venus’ nightside albedo in the immense window kilometers above her.

The next evening, Pierre again didn’t msg her. She almost msg’d him to see what was going on, but instead she asked Frances to do a few searches.

She was worried. She was in the little garden outside her bubble where she grew nineteen different species of unmodified Earth chili peppers. Artisanal capsaicin was one of the few things that could reliably induce Pierre to snap on a biomass to energy converter and stop by for dinner. She sat down on the turf.

The AI msg’d a moment later, <Pierre Failsafe has been involved in an accident on the surface.>

She brought up the incident report from Transparency, the Istriyan council news feed. Pierre had not been destroyed, but his consciousness was in slowtime, pulling minimal cycles from the damaged hardware on which he was running. They’d recovered him before the Venusian atmosphere did its worst, but they couldn’t download his mind from the robotic shell yet. Psych physicians always proceeded cautiously in situations like this.

She tried msging Marc. Marc Supplychain was Pierre’s father, a first generation emergent consciousness who’d started as a sanitation bot in the shuttle fleet and now ran deep space freight logistics. Marc could not be reached, meaning he was probably outsystem working a gas mining op.

She msg’d Ailith. Ailith Lexicon was Pierre’s mother. She supervised automata in a pediatric clinic. Ailith and Marc had split up a few years ago. Katja hesitated before msging her; she’d always found Ailith harder to talk to than Marc. Ailith had monitored her health as a child, had overseen the removal of her wings when she grew too big to fly. Older adults were sometimes difficult to communicate with because of their complicated mental processes, but Ailith in particular tended to speak to her as if she were still a dimple. This annoyed Katja to no end, but in this situation, it seemed a small thing.

A moment later a phone bubble appeared on the periphery of her heads-up, and she answered. Ailith said, “Katja Valis.”

“Hello, Madam Lexicon. How are you?”

“Must you ask? I’m sorry, but I don’t have any news of Pierre. And you, darling, how are you?” Ailith used words like, “dear” and “darling” more or less automatically in any conversation, as far as Katja could tell. However it was intended, the tone was friendly but didn’t warm her.

“I’m very worried.”

She wanted very much to be told that everything would be all right, but candy coating things was not Ailith’s style. “You must be quite upset. My child means so much to you, but with Monsieur Supplychain outsystem, you have only me to speak with.” Ailith’s older-adult capacity to leap from circumstance to blunt, weirdly incisive emotional analysis with virtually no preamble was one of many things that made her difficult for Katja to deal with, though this same tendency made her an outstanding pediatrician. Children, too, were blunt.

“Madam, I know we sometimes have trouble talking,” she said (an understatement; Ailith had as much as said once before that she disapproved of Katja), “But that seems unimportant now. Is there any other news?”

“I am afraid not; the psychs say it’s too early to tell. But I’ve cleared Parker to discuss the specifics of Pierre’s condition with you on request.”

“Thank you, Madam Lexicon.”

“Thank you for calling, dear. I’m so sorry, but my attention is needed elsewhere right now.”

“Good day, Madam.” The call terminated.

She flopped back on the springy grass in her garden. An airship was passing overhead, bussing passengers from one end of the hab to the other. She’d read once — she forgot who said it — that the mundane always stood out in greater detail when one was confronted with personal tragedy. The airship, the overheard strains of conversation between two people walking past, and the slow progress of a formation of combine harvesters across a field curving above all struck her as alien things, because her best friend, the person whom, it must be admitted, she loved, might die.

They might restore him from backup, of course. The version of him on file wouldn’t be more than a few weeks old — but a backup would be a copy, and everyone, the new Pierre that might result included, would be aware of this. The data was a save point, but the process of consciousness animating it was precious, individual. So she’d been taught, and so she believed.

Ailith’s attorney, Parker, came onto the channel. Parker was a curiosity, one that made her wonder about Ailith’s tastes. He embodied a brand of crisp, unambiguously male professionalism that had been out of fashion for the better part of a century. For all her aloofness, Ailith had a strange impish streak, and Katja wondered if the choice wasn’t intended to mess with people a bit. At the moment, though, Parker was oddly comforting.

Struggling to keep it together, she asked the AI for a report on Pierre. She realized she was digging her fingers into the sod, so she crossed her hands over her stomach instead. She was crying. By Parker’s account, Pierre’s slowed mental processes narrowly skirted the gray area between what would legally be considered a living mind and a cold backup. Slowing a mind down that much meant something was seriously wrong, and the psychs were taking no chances.

Parker continued, but she’d heard enough. She was feeling angry now, which was preferable to helpless. She interrupted him. “Thanks, Parker. That’s enough detail. Would you please let me know right away about any changes?”

Parker adjusted his tie (whoever programmed him was rather fussy). “Of course, Mademoiselle Valis.”

He cut out, and she was left alone with her worry.

* * *

It is growing late, and her auto still reports that it’s in self-repair mode. She’s returning Cabot’s favor of food by preparing tea.

“You want to camp by me? You need to be behind a bear fence at night here. I’ll be turning in soon.”

“Yes, please. I appreciate the offer.” She reaches for his cup and fills it from her little kettle.

“Why do you want to talk to Funes?” Cabot asks.

“I’m a nosey blogger. I want a story.”

He looks at her for a second. “Sure, but you’ve gone to a lot of effort.”

“I’m not willing to go into my personal motivations, except to say that I have no axe to grind with Mr. Funes. I’m definitely not out to defame him. I think he’s interesting, is all.”

“That he is. Let me think on it. He may say no, even if I ask.”

“I don’t expect him to say yes, honestly. I expected this to be a long shot.”

He shifts; there’s nothing else to say on the topic. “What’s Istriya like?” he asks.

“I suppose it’s easier to say what it isn’t like.” The earlier mist of snow has cleared, and she scans the sky as she speaks, looking for home. She could call up a celestial map overlay to her vision and locate it immediately, but she wants to find it herself. She says, “It’s small, maybe 60,000 people and 30 or 40,000 bots. It’s cylindrical. Most people keep a sky and clouds overlaid on the air above them using augmented reality, but if you turn it off, you can see the land and windows above you. It’s nothing like living on a planet.”

“You’ve lived on one?”

“Um, Mars, for a year.” With Pierre. “We– I, lived on a hutong in EGZ.”

“That’s Eos-New Guangzhou, right? Quite a life you’ve lead,” he says.

Not so much, she thinks, and sips her tea.

He continues, “But you were talking about Istriya.”

“What else…? Just about everyone is involved in R&D. Everything else is automated. There are no minimal employment laws or regulations on AI admin. So you’re either researching, inventing, or on welfare. The big project the last few years has been trying to figure out how to float stable aerostat habs in the upper atmosphere. You know, you fill a hull with oxygen, and it floats on the CO₂ like a pontoon. They’re having quite a time getting them to stay stable in atmospheric turbulence. I’m more a language person, so I decided to try my luck offworld. What about you?”

“I’m… I grew up in sort of a weird place. It was an arco in Jutland, very corporate, with extraterritoriality. My parents were middle management. I got a pass to come to North America on a school break and didn’t go back.” He looks grim. “I’d be imprisoned if I did.”

She blinks. “Imprisoned? Whatever for?”

“Technically I’m corp property. Or, I owe a certain work debt to the conglomerate, which I didn’t pay.”

“That is fucked up.” She’s holding her tea under her nose, letting it warm her face. “I’ve heard of such arrangements before, but really…”

“No, you’re right; it’s awful. My parents were angry because my leaving made their stock go down. I don’t care. I’m not going back. Working for Javi is an incredible stroke of luck. Javi’s attorney’s gotten me Grønlandic citizenship.”

She scents his pheromones; at some point in their conversation, he’s turned them on. It’s a fairly blunt come-on, but nothing surprising. Katja could control her pheromones, too. Under different circumstances she might have reciprocated, but right now it’s an unwelcome distraction. She lets go some threat pheromones; he takes the hint and dials it down.

“The attorney… Masha Zinn. What is she like?”

“Oh, she’s… Very kind.” She’s sure she detects a split second long blush response. “Bit surprising for a lawyer. I met her in a bar, tell you the truth. She had some kind of other work offers for me, but I said something more in the line of out of doors work would suit me better. So she said how about soldiering?”

She decides not to ask about the other work. “Soldiering?”

“Aye, I’m not just a security guard. I’m the lawful military. Rank of general, if you can believe. Inkupat is sovereign, and I’m most of its army.”

“So it’s General Cabot Tycho Brahe McDunnagh? But I thought this was public land.”

“It’s complex. I can’t pretend to understand the full legalities of it, but Funes leased the herd’s entire migration route from the Grønlanders in perpetuity. It’s about 2,500 kilometers, and the herd has full extraterritoriality whereever it roams in that range.”

She’s getting cold and wants to wrap up in her sleeping bag, but their conversation is getting interesting. “How did he afford that?”

He looks at her as if to say, “Really?”

“Right. Still, it must have taken his entire fortune.”

“Not even close. Not for the land itself, anyway. The nuclear coverage, now that was expensive.”

“So he’s participating in a nukeshare agreement?” Like most offworlders, she finds the idea insane.

“Aye, with the Quebecois. Sadly, it’s a pretty standard type of arrangement down here. Funes had enemies.” He finishes his tea and begins cleaning his dishes with snow.

“So, will you help me meet Funes?” she asks.

He nods toward the herd. “You could walk right over there and scratch him behind the ears.”

“So it’s true. He’s downloaded himself into a reindeer?”

“He’s the whole herd. 149,236 animals at the moment. His consciousness is spread over every one one of them.”

They feed their food wrappers to her Leave No Trace unit. The pocket-sized bot tears into them like it’s hungry (which, based on its programming, it probably is), looking a little plumper when it’s finished.

She now had the tale of a swarm consciousness confirmed, but she still wants to know more. “Whatever for?”

“I never got to ask him. When I asked Masha that question, she only laughed.”

They pitch tents, and he expands the perimeter to keep out the bears. “Whoever outfitted you for this trip shouldn’t be too proud of themselves. They should have fabricated you a fence.”

“I didn’t tell them I was stopping out here. They thought I was driving straight on to Kulusuk.”

“Nykulusuk.” He snaps a tent pole into place. “Kulusuk is under water.”

“Oh. I’m going by the maps. There’s no mention of a drowned city.”

“They need a local editor. To be fair, a lot of the people living there call it just Kulusuk, but they don’t remember the old town.”

She’s finding him intriguing. Despite the earlier pheromonal come-on, she considers asking whether he’d like to sack with her, but decides he might take it as part of a plan to get access to Funes.

Before they bed down, she asks again, “I hate to ask twice, but will you ask Funes if he’ll talk to me?”

He considers. “Again: why?”

He’d asked earlier why she was so interested, and she decides it won’t hurt to divulge more. “I have a friend who’s giving up his body. The same one who went down on Venus in a bot shell. He’s going to become a research swarm on Neptune. I don’t understand his choice, and I suppose that’s why Funes’ story interests me.”

He gives her a long look. “All right. But if you assume he’s like your friend…”

They’ve climbed into their tents and are speaking from the openings. She says, “Who knows? But in the end I’m here for his story, not mine.”

“Hope so. I’ll ask him. Good night.” He zips shut the fly on his tent. She does the same and lays there for a while, thinking, before sleep comes.

* * *

She spent the rest of the week after learning of Pierre’s accident between numbness and wanting to scream. She considered an angry blog entry denouncing the safety regimen for surface side operations, but fought the urge down. She was trying to build up a rep for actual reporting, not op-ed screeds, and anyway she couldn’t think of a way to approach a piece of that sort that wouldn’t deeply upset Pierre when he came around.

She stopped working, stopped seeing the aerostat engineer, and spent most of her time poring over docs she didn’t wholly grasp on slow time, neurochemical rebalancing, and psychic trauma repair. She spent some time with Ailith, which was initially awkward but made her feel better, and later with Marc when he returned from the Jovian system. Several of her own parents came to visit her, brought her fruit and cheese they had designed to cheer her up, and made worried noises.

Finally, after almost two Terran months, the psychs judged Pierre ready for visitors. They met in a vspace that looked a lot like one of the rolling meadows they’d frequented as children. Pierre looked alert, fit as a fiddle. He was in a close approximation of his usual body: tall and solid, anthropomorphic, with a trio of horizontal tubes ending in cameras and sensors where the head would be on a human.

He swiveled a small antenna over one lens, his analog to a smile. “I hope you didn’t worry,” he said.

She was incredulous for a second. “You stupid asshole,” she said, and hugged him fiercely. He made a beep and a series of clicks. She shifted her grip; she’d been occluding one of his solar panels. Even in a virtual body, the reaction was a bit like if you pinched a human’s nose shut, forcing them to mouthbreathe.

He looked down at her. “What? I didn’t write the shell maintenance software. In any case, I’m…” She looked at him, realizing she was having trouble not looking pathetically expectant, but not really caring. “I’ve resigned from the field research pod. I’m done.”

This was not what she’d expected, and a bit alarming, even if it was an outcome for which she’d guiltily hoped. “It’s all you talked about for years. Are you certain?”

“Yes. I put in for a fellowship on Mars. I’m through doing that kind of field work.”

She kissed the side of his head. “I still sometimes wish you didn’t have a microscope for a face.”

“Yes, about that… I thought I might download into a bioroid when they release me from psych.”

This was even more unexpected. “Are you serious? Given your past profile, if I were one of those psychs, I’d be taking a close look now. Why?”

“Because… If I get this fellowship, would you like to go with me to Mars, to live?”

She blinked. Mars. Wow. She was beaming. “Do you even have to ask?”

“Sorry. I know my questions aren’t usually this dumb. I did just spend a month in psych, though.” He chuckled, and she could feel the vibrations in his chest plate, tingling against her.

* * *

When she wakes the next morning, Cabot is gone and his camp struck, although the bear fence is still up and running. She crawls out of her tent, stands, and there, from the rise where they’re camped, gets her first view of the herd.

Her lips form almost without volition around a soft exhalation of “wow.” It’s early spring, nearly calving time, and the caribou in their thousands are about to move. She’s looked at the maps; they’re on their way to a coastal plain a few hundred kilometers north of here. After the empty white silence of the tundra, the beat of the caribou’s big, soft hooves on the ground, the bleats and grunts, the churned ground showing rock and brown permafrost beneath the snowdrifts, and the faint smell of warm bodies and scat carried on the wind overload her senses. She turns on her IR vision, watches the dome of heat rising above the herd. She’s never seen so much active, roiling animal biomass in one place.

Cabot returns as she’s breaking camp. He says, “He’s agreed, tentatively. He wants to ask you some questions of his own first.”

“That’s reasonable. It can be off the record.”

Her gear packed, she follows Cabot down the slope toward the herd. “You’re lucky you came when you did,” he says, “I’m not sure how long it’ll be, but any time now, they’ll start migrating, and that’s when keeping up with them gets tricky.”

“How difficult is it?” she asks, “This is rough terrain, sure, but they only move what, fifteen or twenty klicks a day?”

He laughs. “I’ve plenty of physical enhancements for this sort of thing, but even on skis, it’s still rough.” He stops and kicks at a rock, exposing soft lichen. “Reindeer moss; they’re mad about the stuff. It’s ninety percent of their diet.” He continues toward the periphery of the herd. “Now you’ve got to watch out for bears and wolves. Making noise helps, but they get aggressive when there’s so much food to be had.”

The sounds of the herd as they approach within 100 meters are loud enough that they almost have to shout to hear one another. At sixty meters, the range at which the caribou begin eyeing them and shifting nervously as if to bolt, Cabot produces a whistle and blows on it. A small male emerges from the herd. No, she realizes — a female. Both males and females have antlers in this species. She approaches them, puts her muzzle up to Cabot’s gloved hand. He gives her a vigorous pat on the side, scratches her behind the ears, and offers a cube of tiny white crystals with his other hand, which she happily accepts. “Sugar and salt,” he says.

Katja studies the caribou closely. She is fairly certain that Funes is not yet controlling it. Its movements are graceful, natural in a way that she’s never seen from a human puppeting a quadrupedal bioform. Cabot has a small device that looks like a rounded off dumbbell, which he attaches to the caribou’s head between the antlers. The change is immediate. The caribou takes on a somewhat tenser stance, and turns its head so that one eye looks directly at Katja.

Sound comes from the device, a baritone male voice. His Chinese carries hints of an Argentine accent. His speech is achingly slow. “So you are a reporter?”

“Yes. Freelance; I blog on my own and for some of the feeds.”

“I have not given an interview since being the herd. Why are you interested?”

She’s anticipated this question and has an answer ready. “Immortality has become a powerful meme, but I don’t think people have thought very much about what it really means. I think you did. A man like you could have chosen to live as long as you had the will in a succession of human bodies, but instead you chose this. People are obsessed with deathlessness. What you’re doing presents an alternative.”

The caribou makes a pawing gesture with a forehoof that somehow comes across as a nod. “Yet there is more. You came from Venus. Cabot tells me you have a personal interest.”

That would have come up, of course. “True. I have a friend who is giving up his body to become a research swarm.”

“You think talking to me will help you understand his choice?” Damn the hyperaged and their freakish perspicacity, she thinks.

“I don’t know; I hope to learn something, even if it doesn’t help to understand him.”

“Truly?” The caribou studies her, Funes’ venerable intelligence behind its eye. “But you hope so. Probably I will disappoint you.”

“Even if that’s the case, I’m still interested in your story.”

“I might disappoint there, too. I have no intention of being immortal.”

* * *

The day she finally cut the deal for her first extended spot as a guest blogger with MarsFeed, she opened the inner door to their apartment and cried out as she was covered in a shower of soft red things. It took her a second to realize they were rose petals released from a bag over the door. The entire apartment was covered in flowers, and while she was still in a daze, Pierre snuck up behind her, grabbed her so that she let loose a little squeak, and kissed her on the back of the neck.

“Hey, what the–?” He cut her off with a kiss. “No, really, Pi–” He did it again. “Hey, can I–?” No, apparently not. Finally she put a hand to his mouth and wriggled back a bit. “Well hello yourself, Failsafe-san.”

“Grats on the deal. Also, this is when they celebrate Night of Sevens on the local calendar; Altair and Vega are in about the right positions.”

“Oh. Oh, now I feel like a shit. I didn’t get you anything… I mean, I wasn’t even paying attention to local time, and…”

He looked around, smiling. “That’s okay. I took care of things.” Human as he looked in his new body, his crooked smile was perfectly isomorphic to the smile she remembered from his facial display when they were dimples in kinderpod.

That night they did this dreamy narcoalgorithm he’d coded up like he used to when they were kids getting wrecked on the playground. High and tipsy on port wine and chocolate, they’d screwed each other senseless on nearly every surface in their apartment, then laid in bed talking softly and touching each other with fascinated, tripping fingers.

“You like this one?” he asked.

“It’s… weird, but lovely. There’s so much blue.”

“Most of my reading lately’s been on atmospheric distribution of Helium-3 beneath the cloud cover of Neptune. The visuals are based on the prevailing model of it.”

She smiled. “And here I was worried you’d gone off your rocker with all this lovey-dovey stuff.”

“No, off one’s rocker would be the people who’re putting themselves in research swarms and dropping inside the atmosphere to model cloud formations and turbulence patterns with their own bodies. Makes the stuff I was doing on Venus look rather pedestrian.”

He kept talking. Falling in love with ideas — not the way they affect you, or the footprint they leave in the world, but the ideas themselves — was, she decided, a guy thing. At some point, she fell asleep, happy as anything.

* * *

The interview — Funes’ interview of her — had gone on a bit longer. The caribou asked her questions about her schooling, stories that had interested her in the past, and her strategy for self-promotion. Then, seemingly satisfied, Funes explained that his herd member — the animal had become noticeably restive — needed a break. He offered to speak to her again in a week.

“I’d say he expects you’ll understand better if you spend some time out here,” Cabot told her later.

“I didn’t bargain on being out here that long. I can do it, but… That he’s willing to speak with me at all is unprecedented. But so much happens in a week!”

Cabot was making some kind of brown stew in his small cook pot. “Javi comes from a time when a week was a week, not a year. I don’t think he’s testing you. It just seems reasonable to him.”

“But… It’s not as if he’s doing anything during that time!”

“Oh, is that so? You know a third of him is pregnant right now?”

* * *

She goes on to Nykulusuk, planning to stay only for the night. On the way there, she browses a catalog of survival gear blueprints for a list of items Cabot provided. Once she has the blueprints she needs and has made a fair donation to the designers of some of the newer gear, she books a rack for the night and finds a 3D print shop near her motel.

The shop is in the last remaining section of old Kulusuk, what was once the town’s highest ground. The proprietor is a grizzled Faroese who sings quietly to himself as he instances her gear. She leaves with a bear fence, skis, snow shoes, sundry survival gear, and a semi-automatic rifle powerful enough to stop a polar bear — or an Icelander. She leaves it unloaded, but keeps it right next to her in the front seat of the car. She’s hasn’t used a gun since Civil Defense finals in social pod, and that was an Istriyan rail gun. This one uses old fashioned gunpowder in caseless cartridges; the composite alloy barrel and smell of gun oil are oddly comforting. She’s always had a thing for heavy, metallic gear.

<Frances, I need you to cancel the next few weeks of appointments; try to rearrange them, if you can.>

Her attorney responds testily, <You’ve got an interview with the PM of New Jersistan next week; you know I won’t be able to get another one any time soon.>

<Mr. Funes is more interesting.> She parks the car and goes into the motel.

<Very well,> Frances msgs, <Also, those orangutans you interviewed last month are violating your copyleft again. It’s actionable; should I do something?>

<Hold off for now. I’m not going to have time to respond to any legal documents for the next week or so.>

Fucking orangutans.

* * *

Learning to ski is harder than she’d expected, even with a motor control expert system built off a champion Norsk biathlete running on her headware. From the time she unloads the car, shoulders her pack, and takes off after the herd, following a transceiver frequency provided by General McDunnagh, it’s a week before she catches sight of her first caribou, even though most days she’s only a kilometer or two behind the herd’s stragglers. The herd is on the move.

On the eighth day, she reaches Cabot just in time for dinner. She’s surprised to see another man with him, a native Grønlander. Nearby is a snowmobile and a trailer piled with five or six caribou carcasses. She stops, unsure what she’s seeing, until Cabot calls to her, “Hey, Katja, you made it. Come have some stew.”

“Who’s your lady friend?” the man asks in Grønlandic.

“Katja; she’s a blogger. She’s here to talk to Javi. Katja, this is Jens.” He beckons her to sit with them. “He made some stew. The meat’s fresh.”

“I…” She’s unclipping her skis, still a bit confused. The day’s trek has left her sort of brain dead, and the stew, whatever it is, smells amazing. “Is that… Funes?”

Cabot smiles over his bowl. “Most generous employer I’ve ever had.”

Jens chuckles. “Try some, pretty lady. Where’d you find a girl like this out here, Cab? She looks like a Martian pinup.”

In spite of herself, she blushes. “I’m from Venus, and I’m sorry… I’ve, um, never eaten meat before.” She unstows her bowl and camp spoon, hands it tentatively to Cabot, who ladles it full of thick stew.

“Oh go on, yes you have, about a week ago,” Cabot says.

She accepts it. “Oh.” Feeding someone freshly killed animal meat without telling them would be an abhorrent breach of behavior where she’s from, but, she reminds herself as she tastes the stew, she’s very far from home. “It’s very good, Jens. Thank you.”

Jens makes a show of bowing comically, then unstoppers a flask of something, offers it to Cabot.

“Just a taste, I’ve a lot of ground to cover tomorrow.” He takes a nip and hands it back.

“So…” she begins, “I thought part of your job was to protect the herd from hunters?”

“Unauthorized ones,” Cabot says, “The Kalaallit were hunting Inkupat caribou long before Mr. Funes took up residence, and we’re not out to deprive them of their food. It’s these sea raiders out of Iceland and Labrador, and sometimes the Newfies I’ve got to worry about. I’ll most likely see some action when I hit the coast. Jens and his folk, though… We’re their guests.”

“It’s an okay arrangement,” says Jens, “We don’t have any army, nor many votes in Brussels. So some crazy rich white man comes along and offers us nuke coverage in return for uploading himself into the herd… Hey, why not?”

What a stroke of luck, she thinks. “Jens, can I make your acquaintance on SysNet? I’m here to talk to Javier Funes, but I might want to ask you some follow-up questions, if you’re willing.”

“You mean my e-mail address? Sure thing.” He takes out an old smart phone and starts thumbing through menus.

Wow. A real native. “Yes, that would do,” she says.

When they finish exchanging information, Cabot says, “There’s a lull in their movements. Probably wolves around, or maybe the caribou at the head of the line got bottlenecked somewhere farther up the valley. You’d better talk to Javi before they start moving again. The more of him’s standing still, the easier it is to get a cogent sentence out of him.”

They approach the herd, but this time, a circle of caribou forms around them with a diameter of about ten meters — close enough to feel the warmth produced by their massed bodies, which extends in a line for kilometers beyond where Katja now sits, having carefully picked a scat-free spot on the hummocky ground. This time, Cabot arranges a quartet of the dumbbell devices on telescoping monopods spiked into the ground in the cardinal directions around her, roughly equidistant between her and the animals.

“Your headware can host a vspace, right?” says Cabot. She nods. “Good, because it takes almost all of the processing power in the caribou mesh just to run Funes. He’s ready when you are.”

And then she is in a vspace that looks like the tundra where her body is situated, but instead of 150,000 caribou, there is only one. It’s either an average-sized male or a fairly large female; she can’t quite tell. Male, she guesses; it doesn’t look pregnant.

“Ms. Valis,” Funes says. His words echo out from around the caribou; the effect is a strange one. “You won’t have much time, I’m afraid. Ask your questions.”

“Thank you for agreeing to speak to me.” Her mind is suddenly racing; it’s been a while since an interview made her this nervous. “First, the mechanics of a swarm body like yours are well understood, but would you be willing to explain how you maintain consciousness in a herd of wild animals whose population is in flux due to births and deaths, in a remote area with no apparent maintenance of the system from outside?”

“Yes.” His remaining words come in slow clusters, as if he has to ponder every phrase. “The caribou-to-caribou mesh network on which my consciousness runs is formed from implants carried by every animal in the herd. Each node simulates the functions of a few hundred thousand neurons. The devices are self-replicating; they copy themselves in utero when a cow is with calf. Even now, tens of thousands of new nodes are slowly coming on line as the fetal calves develop.”

“And how do you prevent degradation of the system over time?” Part of her is thinking how Pierre-like the preceding explanation was; the rest is now deeply intrigued, and beaming over the scoop she’s being handed.

“I do not.”

“Do you mean that it will eventually fail?” So much for the immortality meme, she thinks.

“’Fail,’ is the wrong word, Ms. Valis. My neural network will eventually reach a level of simplicity below the threshold at which human cognition is possible. It will happen very slowly; I estimate decades, maybe even centuries. In that time, I will fade into the herd.”

“Some might call this just a peculiar form of suicide, Mr. Funes.”

Again the pawing gesture from the caribou. “And perhaps it is. But if so, it is the most peaceful and enlightening form of suicide I could conceive of… at least within the limits of the technology available to me when I embarked on it. And I am satisfied.”

“Enlightening is a word full of spiritual connotations. Are you… religious?” Some would take offense at this question, but she hopes Funes is old enough that he won’t.

“No,” he chuckles, and the caribou nods its head, “Not in the old, metaphysical sense, but I do think that reaching a peaceful accord with the natural world can be a balm for the anxiety preceding death.”

“What is it like to be a herd of caribou?”

“Now you ask the hard question.” The caribou before her looks restless, and despite her immersion in the vspace, she senses that the real caribou around her are growing restless, too. Funes’ words come even more slowly. “Maybe it is best to say what it isn’t like. It isn’t like programming a computer, or meeting in a boardroom, or sharing a house with a partner. It isn’t like walking on cement. It is painful and difficult, but it is simple.”

<Your time’s near up,> Cabot msgs her.

“I’m told we have very little time left, so thank you, Mr. Funes, for taking the time to speak with me. I have one more question: why?”

The reindeer shifts, and then one eye looks right at her, “It seemed better than the slow stagger of derangement which the longest lived of us humans undergo. It seemed better than dying the old-fashioned way. Don’t think that because of my wealth, only someone like me can do this; I hope others will consider it. With improvements to the hardware, to which I will one day open the source, one could become a school of fish, or a flight of songbirds. But if you really want to understand it, you should stay out here for a while. General McDunnagh is due for a vacation, I think, and you have all of the gear needed to accept a commission.”

A commission? The vspace cuts, and Cabot is hauling her to her feet. “Let’s go,” he says, “We’re disrupting their movement. We stay too close, and these ones will fall behind the herd.”

* * *

“I’ll come back when it’s done,” Pierre said.

“In eight years! You have to be fucking joking. You think I’m going to wait around for that long?”

“Well… I’d hoped so.”

“GAH!” She was standing by their tall chest of drawers in her underclothes, fists balled up in her tangled morning hair, and the scream felt good, like throwing up, which she thought she might also do, anti-gastric stress genefixing be damned.

Pierre was in bed, sitting up against the headboard, face toward her but gaze fixed on the dust motes slowly drifting in their skylight under the pale Martian morning sun.

Their apartment was a cube on a hutong, a narrow covered street with housing units tightly spaced to efficiently share life support and recycling. The ceilings were high, the walls carpeted (where they weren’t covered by cabinets), and the pressurized doors were high arches, all to compliment the bouncing gait of humans muscled for Earth gravity. The hutongs were vintage housing by Martian standards, over thirty years old, and popular with students, visiting scholars, and other offworlders.

She collected herself and looked back at him. Living here for a year, they’d both dropped a lot of body mass, mostly muscle. Pierre had opted for a typical Venusian/Terran body when he downloaded, but he now looked chiseled, while she just felt gaunt.

“How long are you going to live?” he asked.

She leans back against the chest of drawers with her hands behind her back, looks at her feet, then up at him. “Who cares? 200, 250 years before I fade and want to log off?” The psychs were still arguing about it; there were some people who threw in the towel at 150. “What you don’t fucking get is that I’m in love with you now.”

“I love you, too.”

“Yeah, but you’re not in love with me, or we wouldn’t be having this… I was going to say conversation, but it’s a breakup, isn’t it?”

He finally looked at her. “Only if you want it to be. We’ve plenty of time ahead of us.”

“You’re going to fucking Neptune to aerosolize yourself and bounce around in a fucking rain cloud. You know what? Helium-3 can be your new girlfriend, because I am fucking done.”

She dressed, wordlessly. She’d brought a few objects she really cared about with her to Mars. These she threw into a bag with a single change of clothes; everything else, including him, she left. The hutong led to an arterial with a tram line, and that line to the space elevator. She booked a third class berth on a Venus-bound liner on her headware while she walked. It was expensive, but she’d been saving all of her money, without telling him, envisioning a vacation to Pavonis Mons for some rock climbing. Right now Titan didn’t seem far enough away from him, but home would have to do.

He was right — in theory. They had long lives, plenty of time, but tweaking the brain chemistry of love (or the models of it bots ran in their virtual brains) was one of those taboos the psychs wouldn’t break. So she felt how she felt, and she knew he wouldn’t change his mind.

* * *

The first week on her new job barely gives her time to think. Funes insists on leaving a low ecological footprint, so all of her patrolling is on skis or foot. For someone accustomed to thinking in interplanetary distances, the once-tiny distance of 15 kilometers takes on new meaning as she schusses or snowshoes along her patrol route. McDunnagh’s augmented musculature and circulatory system had made covering ten or twenty kilometers a day with a fully loaded pack child’s play for him. For Katja, even with her reengineered Istriyan physiology, it’s grueling.

She spends eleven hours each day trudging over the permafrost from waypoint to waypoint, with only short bio breaks and meal stops. The routes she follows are generated by Ukkusik, a laconic AI whose job is to track the herd’s movements via the implants in each animal, predict potential hazards, and make security assessments. Other than giving her waypoints and occasional advice on what and where to observe, it barely communicates.

At each waypoint is a small security bot. They’re tiny, to avoid detection, and semi-autonomous. But they occasionally need charging on account of the overcast sky, and if the herd makes a large movement, they are too small to keep up and must be transported to new positions. Together, they form a security grid designed to detect anyone approaching. They have a friend or foe system and are armed. Other than them, the only security is her.

Each night, she stops, sets up her bear fence, pitches her tent, devours a quick dinner, and falls into deep and dreamless sleep. The routine quickly becomes second nature. The first few nights, she’s horribly sore, and the cold doesn’t help. The analgesic software Frances finds to fool her nervous system only partly masks the creakiness.

After a week, though, her body begins to toughen to her routine, and she can begin to appreciate her environment. She’s alone except for the wind, the frozen ground, the occasional cries of far-off wolves, and the herd. She enjoys the quiet, and Frances, sensing her mood, is generally silent. The AI’s usual stream of work-related info and legal/financial reminders ebbs to zero. Raised as she was in an environment hypersaturated with information, this would make her very uneasy but for the physical demands of the work. As it is, by the time she notices the weird info silence, she is already accustomed to it.

* * *

Nothing prepares her for the coast. One moment, she is following the caribou up yet another near-vertical featureless rock face, cursing their sheerfootedness and relentless stamina, the next she is standing in the stone ring of a camp site left by prehistoric hunters, looking down on to a flat coastal plain that teems with caribou, more than she’s seen in her entire time with the herd. So this is their calving ground. Here and there, wolves and polar bears can be sighted through her binoculars, trying to run down an unlucky herd member or catch an unattended calf, but the speed and thundering massed flight of the caribou foils them more often than they are able to eat.

She spends all afternoon hiking down the ridge, leaving the stone ring with its ancient bow rest behind. She plants security bots as she goes and looks for a spot to camp, finding one on a hillock amid the herd that still commands a sweeping view of the plain. By night, her fence is probed twice by hungry polar bears weary of chasing the nimble caribou, but they turn away after a few tense minutes during which she holds her rifle with white knuckles. The bears have never before gotten so close.

In the morning, she emerges to find a cow giving birth to its calf on a patch of snow only a few meters from her tent. She watches silently, enthralled. She was grown from an exowomb; she’s never seen natural birth like this. The mother licks the calf clean; then she begins eating the placenta as it wobbles to its feet. Katja watches the calf’s first steps as she starts her oatmeal.

<You have incoming.> This is the first time Ukkusik has msg’d in days; it is always a bit startling when it breaks its silence.

<What?> She tears herself away from the caribou and focuses her binoculars on the sea where Ukkusik is showing her a distant dot. An old fishing trawler. Icelandic colors.

<Confirmed. Sea raiders. Warn them,> she msgs.

Ukkusik sends the standard msg, <You’ve entered the sovereign territory of Inkupat Herd. Please remain where you are until it can be determined that your presence is not hostile.>

The response is a threat of sexual assault in Icelandic that the translation software paraphrases rather than attempting to render literally. She scans the boat deck with binoculars. There are at least a dozen crew that she can count, all armed and, from the way they’re playing their scopes around, trying to spot her.

<Advise you find lower ground/cover,> Ukkusik msgs, <They are not slowing?>

She glances back at the calf, tottering after its mother. She didn’t see anything on the deck worthy of the term ordinance, but she might have missed something. She pulls a cord that rapidly deflates her tent. They might open fire if they see anything that could be a human artifact. Then she tramps down amid the herd and activates her nulloptic cloak, hiding herself from visual. The caribou aren’t so easily fooled. A few shy as she comes closer, but most simply ignore her.

The blip is still incoming; she confirms it visually. <They’re not slowing. One more warning?>

<International law requires it,> Ukkusik msgs, <Perhaps you should affix your targeting laser.>

She fishes around in her pack for the snap-on targeting laser; she’s yet to use it and has a bit of trouble finding it. Meanwhile, she msgs the Icelanders, <This is Colonel Valis of the Military of Inkupat. Return at once to the six kilometer limit beyond this coastline, or we will open fire.>

The wake of the boat widens. Ukkusik msgs, <Authorization to fire?>

<I suppose I must. They’ll kill me, as sure as the caribou.>

Ukkusik msgs, <Paint the target. I will do the rest.>

She aims through her rifle scope. The dot from the underbarrel infrared laser is plain as day to her, but the Icelanders won’t see it unless they happen to be looking at their own boat in the IR spectrum, which she’s guessing they aren’t. There’s a whine of rockets from eight or nine places around the periphery of the plain, where she planted the little perimeter defense bots. Some of the caribou panic and stampede, but on the open ground there is little danger to them. The tiny missiles arc skyward, then home in on her target dot as one, bobbing and weaving to avoid countermeasures — but the old trawler has none. There is a bright detonation, followed seconds later by a boom that sends more caribou running in fear, and the trawler is listing.

She watches the boat turn and limp away, riding low in the water. The Icelanders are quickly patching the numerous hull breaches, but they’re no longer in the mood for a fight. Several bodies are sprawled on the decks; she hopes they had backups but knows they may not have. Iceland is one of the more unfortunate of Earth’s fragmented nations. She’s shaking a little from adrenalin, but otherwise feels fine. The caribou around her begin to calm, sensing no further threat.

A light snow starts to fall. She climbs back onto her hillock and returns to making breakfast.

* * *

When her tour of duty ends, Frances summons a car, and the same one she drove out in appears at the edge of the road about nine hours later. Cabot walks the ten kilometers to the highway with her. He’s deeply tanned from a month on the Costa del Sol, and strangely quiet as well.

“How was civilization?” she asks.

He chuckles. “It’s a funny word, isn’t it?”

“You wouldn’t be the first one to say so.”

He shrugs. “I’m not a writer. Entails a bit of working off the sentiments of others, you know. I got on well, anyhow. Lot of getting stoned on the beach and sacking with English cocktail waitresses. Took a few day trips to Gibraltar; they’ve rather a lot of monkeys there. You look different.”

Maybe, but she doesn’t feel much different. “I think this was good for me.” She realizes she doesn’t sound convinced.

“Did it help you at all?” He sounds hopeful.

“I don’t know, to be honest. It certainly took my mind off of things — well, everything, really. I’m looking forward to going back to my real job.” She spots the car in the distance.

“Any other out of body experiences you want to interview?”

“No. No, I’m off that topic for a while. Obsession doesn’t become me. Perhaps while I’m here, I can visit Borneo and do a follow up with those orangutans.”

Cabot glances over at her. “Wait, not those orangutans? The ones in Casa Brava?” Apparently they were well known.

“The same. You know,” she chuckles, “Orangutans are complete assholes. They’ve been violating my copyleft for the last month; Frances finally just gave up on nagging me about it. Makes me think there really is something in primate psychology that rebels against common licensing.”

They’ve reached the car. “Well,” Cabot says, “We really are simple, for the most part.”

“Yes. So, take care. You’re added to my network, to be sure.” They load her gear into the trunk.

Before going, he leans in and kisses her on the cheek. “Be well,” he says. She hugs him and gets in the car.

* * *

The drive back to Nygothab takes her from the largely flat tundra of the herd’s range into steep foothills. The highway wends for kilometers through the curving hollows and bottomlands between flat-topped hills covered in scrub and a dusting of snow before sloping sharply upward to meet the mouth of a mountain pass. Aside from the animal fence and the road itself, there is still no sign of human habitation, and she passes no other vehicles. The wind whistles eerily against the car. She doesn’t want music yet, and Frances remains silent, perhaps sensing that she’s not yet prepared for the barrage of information that betides civilization.

But then the wash of everyday data creeps back into her perceptions, and she turns up the car radio, ululating along with a Martian nullhouse track that happened to be the last thing she listened to before the car broke down so long ago. In the airport, she showers in a coffin hotel, buys a purple minidress and some threatening shoes, takes legal action against the orangutans, and books a ticket to the Costa del Sol (Cabot made it sound rather appealing; she hasn’t heard a British accent up close yet). A few days there, and then she plans to head back to Mombasa. The space elevator is calling her.

Pierre will be like rain, he said. A swarm of him, sinking into the winds of Neptune, until he dissipates and revives elsewhere. Let him have his dissipation.

She’s feeling pretty fucking together.

 

 

Caribou is dedicated to Black Francis and the Pixies, whose song of the same title inspired this story. I’m also indebted to biologist Karsten Heuer. When I began this story, I imagined that only augmented transhumans could keep up with a herd of migrating caribou, but he and his wife Leanne Allison actually did it! Their account of following the Porcupine herd in Alaska, Being Caribou, is a must-read. I have chosen not to release this story under a Creative Commons license yet; Caribou is copyright 2009, Jack Graham, all rights reserved.