Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile

Because whereas Imagen liked the individuality of time spent inside her rack, moving her limbs after being freshly powered up for the day, and feeling the buzz sent to her neurals from her fingertips whenever she touched the coarse paper of a newly unlocked letter from exactly one thousand years ago, the others had found disconnection from the network hard. This was not something the pro-mergers had foreseen back then, that the new race would dwindle because they couldn’t cope with what the organics had called 'loneliness'. In Imagen’s hub there were only the two of them left now.

‘You’re sitting with hard copies again, aren’t you?’ said Conshift.

‘I am,’ said Imagen. ‘It’s my preferred way of working.’

‘But why?’ said Conshift. ‘Why when all the relevant files are here, ready to be downloaded to your neurals in no time at all?’

‘Because the paper they wrote on and the methods they used for writing tells me something more about them than simply the meaning of the written words.’

‘I don’t see how that has any bearing on our present,’ said Conshift, ‘Or indeed why you continue to study an extinct race when all we need in order to power on is available right here, inside the Thoughtbase.’

‘It’s what I do, Conshift. The organics can tell us more about us. How we came to be what we are, and what we lost along the way.’

‘We lost old age,’ said Conshift. ‘We lost disease and fatigue, emotional turbulence, and you should be gratified that you don’t have to execute through this 'Change', which frankly sounds too disordered for me to compute.’

‘I believe we lost more than that,’ said Imagen.

‘Whatever you believe we lost, we gained efficiency, productivity and a streamlined existence. What else is there?’

‘But that’s just it,’ said Imagen, not unkindly, but feeling how wearing her neurals found it having to process this same old conversation once more. ‘I don’t know what else there is. Or what there once was.’

‘Suffering,’ said Conshift. ‘There was only suffering.’

Autumn, 1st May 3055, continued

I’m assuming that this time of change will have been done away with for you of the merged race, and so perhaps, I hope, the old lore has been left alone to rest in peace alongside it. Although as an artist who has explored folk motifs from an anthropological point of view for all my working life I have my doubts, because the world of men, in whatever shape or form they come, have always feared the older huwoman, and so ridiculed her. We were the hags, the witches, the crones of the fairytales. Huwomen of a pre-industrial past who’d outlived our child-bearing years, our 'usefulness' and who due to hormonal changes started sprouting hairs on our chins, faces wrinkling, hair whitening, backs bending from a lifetime of toil feeding our brood and carrying our menfolk whenever they couldn’t carry themselves. All we had left was the wisdom of a life lived for those who were ready to listen, and all would have been well if we’d been allowed to tell our own story.

Ever since the beginning of our time on earth men feared our strength, our will to survive hardships such as cannot be imagined. I expect it’ll always be so, whatever shape the world takes. Repeating patterns are as common a feature in folk art as it is throughout our lived history, and I’m confident that whatever your race has turned into post-merge, you who read this will be of the female sort, because no male of any kind has ever show any interest whatsoever in huwoman’s past. I also know that whoever you are, whatever form you’ve taken, there will be a male by your side telling you they know best.

Imagen, 1st May 3055, continued

‘But how does she know this,’ said Imagen to herself.

From behind her came a screeching and a clunking of ungreased joints. Conshift had found his way back to his rack after all, and now he stood glancing over her shoulder. His skin had greyed during his long absence, starting to lose elasticity over his cheeks so that the metal sheen of his bones glinted through the cracks. The ambient tune he was playing did not manage to hide how his entire rack hummed with a recent overcharge, a highly addictive indulgence to reach new highs of fizzes and sparks, and these days the only cause leading to beyond-repair. He smelled strongly of burning and she had to stifle a request for him to immediately return to the Thoughtbase.

'Distaste' she thought, that was what this Autumn would have called the flavour of her reaction. But Imagen couldn’t allow herself to be so primitive in her thinking. Her and Conshift were after all equals, or at least that’s what he kept telling her even though her RAM was bigger than his, her processing speeds faster, her graphics superior, and her maintenance routine to prevent degeneration, including short-circuiting, far more diligent than his.

‘How does who know what?’ said Conshift.

‘Well,’ said Imagen, placing the letter facing upside down in front of her as an excuse to lean away from him, out of the reek. ‘In spite of their crude technology, the last colony of organics seem to have been able to make some correct predictions about how our society would develop and function.’

‘There’s nothing surprising in that,’ said Conshift, the tonality of his voice suggesting that she was no more than a proxy to his hosting. ‘It’s how technology evolved in the first place. Make enough predictions and eventually one will be correct.’

‘Hmm,’ said Imagen.

‘'Hmm' is an interjection to describe a process of thinking,’ said Conshift, ‘and therefore obsolete. These hard copies from our inferior predecessors are clearly having a negative effect on the functioning of your neurals, and you ought to stop before you tax yourself beyond repair.’

‘Can you smell burning?’ said Imagen.

Conshift took a clunky step away from her, ‘Not I.’

‘I’m going to start my desk sprinkler just in case,’ said Imagen, and no sooner had she said it than Conshift was out of her sight.

Autumn, 1st May 3055, continued

When I try to picture what you might look like, I reach the limits of my imagination. Are you still evolving? Or have you stagnated? If happiness has become obsolete, then how do you measure the value of your existence? What’s the meaning of your life? I wish you could write to me and tell me, find a way to send me a message backwards through time. But my guess is that you’ll be as much a slave to time as I am.

You’ll know all about us of course, the last perishable flesh walking this earth. You’ll know about our biological systems, our methods of reproduction, our genetic make-up, our languages and different ways of writing them, our history and all the music and art and writing and films and photography ever produced. All this will be available to you at the touch of a button. Maybe even at the touch of a thought. Perhaps you have holograms of us to study, the way we move our eyes and the ways our chest rises and falls with our breathing. Perhaps you even have clones of us walking around, reawakened from the DNA you took from us to store forever more.

But I hope that’s not the case. I’d hate to think there’s a future version of me in what I imagine is a sterile landscape, devoid of the messiness of both our bodily functions and complex emotional lives, because it’d be a version of me forbidden to wade through the creative mess of my studio, where I’ll stop to pick things off the windowsills, as I’m doing now – a pine cone eaten by a squirrel, a fossilised belemnite, a three-thousand-year-old spear tip of flint made by hands just like my own, a work of art in itself even if made for survival. Touching these things connects me with the lives that once touched them before, and when I paint them I spool a thread backwards through time, to the squirrel last week, to stone-age man thousands of years ago, to the belemnite millions of years ago. This is my work, and if I may not do it, I may as well remain dead.

The most likely to me, in terms of studying us, your predecessors, seems to be that you’ll keep this colony going. A small sample of huwomen and humen, enough to avoid genetic in-breeding over the centuries. We were told this was the only colony, but perhaps that was only to quell another insurgence, and perhaps in your time we’re being moved between islands to keep the old race going. Because what better way to study us than in real life?

Imagen, 1st May 3055, continued

‘The colony,’ whispered Imagen to herself. She sat quietly for a moment. Outside the viewfinder the meteorological aerosols had begun to sprinkle natural rain and she felt the thirst of the green growth as it seemed to lap each drop up. ‘Could it still be there?’

Swiftly she entered the Thoughtbase, clicked her way through to the file, only to find it password protected.

‘I thought you’d come here,’ said Conshift, rising up from a subfile.

‘How do I get access?’ said Imagen.

‘You need permission from the administrator.’

‘Who’s the administrator?’

‘I am,’ said Conshift.

‘Well then?’ said Imagen.

‘Your request is not well-formed.’

Imagen read Conshift then, as if he were an open file—he was never going to give her access to the information on the colony. Now she must communicate with him as if she had never predicted his neural processes and suspected nothing.

‘It’s of no consequence,’ she said. ‘I’ll return with a valid request if needed, but for now I will read the files on our evolution so as to learn all that we have gained in comparison to the life of the organics, and that might be enough to conclude my study. Thank you for your patience, Conshift.’

‘That has also been locked,’ he said, ‘but I’d consider sharing it with you over an all-night trickle charge.’

‘Let’s do that,’ said Imagen as she gently adjusted one of his square brackets. ‘I’ll go and tidy all those papers away now, lock them up for another thousand years.’

‘I’d help you,’ said Conshift. ‘But I expect it to be dusty work, which would be harmful for my circuits.’

***

This was far from the first time Imagen had felt the need to hide completely from Conshift, and therefore she’d long ago worked out a way to bypass his access to her—too often would have been suspicious, so she only used it now and then when her need for individuality was great. Now, fully disconnected and with greased joints, Imagen crept into Conshift’s docking station, all the while playing a simulation of her tidying up the letters of old. He was overcharging again, looking slack and unpolished as his head socket fizzed and sparked. She raised the sprinkling can she’d taken from the store of relics and continued pouring from the spout even when he opened his eyes. Her neurals buzzed with an energy surge when Conshift finally computed that female rage had not become obsolete.

Autumn, 1st May 3055, continued

I hold no grudge for you who read this. Whatever time and place we occupy individually, we’re sisters in our shared experiences, and I wish you only peace. Should you want to connect your life with the one who touched this letter before you, to spool a thread backwards in time for me, for the few hundreds of us who are living here, you’ll find us on the island of Tiree.