The Woman Who Wanted to Be Trees, by Cat Rambo. – Slate

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State Universitys Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives.

For someone like me, Nefirahs client said, its not a question of whether or not Ill be remembered. The question is precisely how.

This high up above New York City, the roof penthouse of one of its tallest buildings, the view was a gray boil of smog, and sometimes the glint of windshields as pedal cabs moved through the streets. A few electric-powered vehicles here and there, like the chauffeured one that had brought Nefirah, but for the most part foot or pedal traffic.

Shed had to get up early to take the car. Never a case of a client accommodating her schedule. Always the other way around.

This one, K, had chosen an outdoor balcony for the audience. A smear of glass showed where the reality of air was walled off. The genetically modified houseplants showcased olive and purple blossoms, shaped like open-walled cages. Thumb-sized finches flitted among them, their colors matching the blossoms. Every once in a while, a lizard made of silver wire flickered across the tiles underfoot, cleaning up bird droppings or falling petals.

The only overt artifice was a subtle letter etched into the glass in one corner. When you were singular and rich enough to take a single symbol as your name, you didnt need to wallow in it.

But you wouldnt want anyone to miss it, either.

You will make me immortal, the woman who was a single letter said to Nefirah. Ive read about your installations.

You understand that its not you in the installation, Nefirah said wearily. Shed had this talk before. The I-word. Immortality. Impossible. Its a differentiable neural computer.

I want to be a tree, K said. The biggest tree outside thisworld.

K just shrugged. I understand that. How could you

A look raking up and down Nefirahs form, the sort of look shed had before from clients used to being paid the most attention in the room, a sort of how could I possibly be dependent on this person expression that mingled irritation and contempt, as K continued, hope to put all of me in a container? I know it wont be me. Ill stay here on Earth.

Bitterness salted that statement. Neither of them said the truth: that K, unable to handle the rigors of space travel, would be one of the few super-wealthy left behind on the devastated Earth. Others had gone long ago to living centers on Mars or the moon. Rumors said Elon Musks most recent clone planned still to conquer Venus.

The Earth had been used up. Its fruits and flowers taken. The rest crumpled and discarded by people like this.

Nefirah knew better than to say, You cant afford it, the way she would have to most. Instead she asked, What do you want me to put your mind in?

I want to be a tree, K said. The biggest tree outside this world.

A finch hopped onto her shoulder, pecking at the fabric as though she were a tree already. She brushed it away with an efficient gesture.

Outside the world? Nefirah said, and thought she knew what the woman would say next. But the words were not what she expected.

Ill fund the entire Love project if you do what I want.

Generation ship Love was the largest, longest-running crowdfunding campaign of all time. Kicked off by an initial, rare cooperation between multiple countries, it had limped along for over four decades now. Its initial crew had aged out of eligibility, and others after them.

Love had inspired three different reality shows; one ran for nearly a decade, doing its best to stir up drama while the people whose existences they were documenting tolerated them for the sake of the revenue they brought in. You could still buy plenty of merchandise; gear from the earliest, least successful show was the most collectible.

Countless podcasts and blogs were devoted to analyzing the Love, decrying it, hinting that it was part of a vast conspiracy, outright stating that it was part of a vast conspiracy, shipping various personnel together in fanfic couplings, on and on.

So many documentaries, and one tell-all memoir, which was why no one spoke to her Aunt Samirah anymore and also why Samirah had retired to the most luxuriant of Mars living centers.

A late-night talk show punchline: the project that kept going and going and going. The countries involved in its genesis had long ago given up, leaving the individuals involved in the project to keep it lurching forward. Still, it had come closer to success than any other generation ship project. And unlike any of the others, it still had hope.

Nefirah knew the details of the ships journey toward completion intimately. How could she not? The project had eaten the lives of so many close to her.

The countries had given up on the Love project within a decade, but it continued due to the six families who had taken to the Love with revolutionary zeal. They were why the idea had persisted so long, staggering from one iteration of its budget to another. Six families, though by now there were enough intermarryings that it seemed a single entity, a mass of Hernandezes, Ibrahims, Kims, Muhammeds, Parks, and Smiths that most of them just called the Family.

So many worked on the project, knowing they wouldnt be on it. Some might have been hoping for a place, sure, who wouldnt? But Family members committed themselves to the Love, regardless of where they fell on its potential roster. Nefirahs grandmother had been part of the original group, and shed borne six children, five of whom had followed in her footsteps, and brought others into the fold as well.

But enrollment on the Loves crew wasnt a hereditary thing, just as it wasnt for sale. Either would have been antithetical to its spirit. Instead, there were formulas and calculations. The denizens of the ship would be chosen for a variety of characteristics that they would pass onto their descendants. That would be incorporated in humanity to come.

And here was K, with an arrogance that marked so many of Nefirahs clients, proposing something just as antithetical, because it suited her. She would make it entirely her memorial, a ship dedicated to her and her wealth.

K would pay any price for that. But what would it cost Nefirah?

Shell fund it all, said cousin Ali. Ive confirmed it. He looked dazed, breathless.

Since Nefirah had seen him last, hed gotten a full-body mobile tattoo, writing flickering under the skin, spelling out Love in dozens of languages. A recent style in the family, another fundraising measure. Ali would be prepared to tell anyone who asked about the project, ready to sign them up for the notification list.

She says youll be able to describe the modifications to the core gardens she wants.

A redwood, she said. Sequoia sempervirens.

What?

The innermost garden space. She wants a redwood tree in it. The tree will be so large that the space will need to be reconfigured to be built around the tree.

Ali was quick to piece things together. And that tree will hold one of your installation computers?

It will be a computer, she said. Im working with neural computers. Living ones.

Why a redwood?

Nefirah had asked that, too.

Theyre a very American tree, K told her at their first meeting. Larger than life.

Monumental.

K continued as though Nefirah had not spoken. They dont exist anymore the way they used. A couple of small groves in biodomes, the one in Bezos-ball-land, the hollow earth project.

A gesture out at the city. My ancestors built this country, but the place they started was California. San Francisco. I hiked among redwoods as a child. Some of those trees were over 2,000 years old.

Nefirah had left it at that, but she wasnt dumb. She knew what was going on. She told Ali, Its her way around the restrictions on naming things after people.

Restrictions that had been a deliberate choice by the original Love designers, even though it shot down a major chance at fundraising. Nothing exalting individuals, everything celebrating the communal, including the name Love, an emotion that only existed in the spaces between people.

Ali thought. Amor flickered on his cheekbone, then was replaced by kanji characters. She could tell he didnt like the idea. But he was weighing it against the chance of the Love getting finished in their lifetime.

She wanted him to say no. Instead he said, Ill check with the planners.

When the word came back from the group that steered all design decisions, they had come to the choice that she knew they would. This wasnt the smallest of compromises, but the gardens could be adapted.

So much of the original plan had been adapted over the years as new technologies appeared and made some things obsolete, others smaller and more efficient, or precipitated new needs, changing specifications or models or even underlying tech.

At the projects start, they hadnt even known how theyd propel the ships! Plans for Bussard engines, for solar sails, and other, wilder possibilities before someone finally made Deuterium reaction drives practicable.

But someday it would simply change too far away from the original and everything would be lost. Love had to be implemented soon. Because the day was coming when the world would simply be too poor to keep the project going.

And that made it impossible to say no to K.

When she turned 18, Nefirah had opted to become one of the family members who devoted themselves to study and aimed for a lucrative career to bring in money for the project.

Upon graduation, shed surveyed the possibilities. Someone joked that morticians always had money and shed thought about her interestsarchitecture, computers, landscape design. Then that jumble coalesced in her mind into a single idea: memorials.

Dannefer v. Lucky the Lockman had established in 2033 that what the mem-tech created was a replica and not an actual person, no matter how many times they passed the Turingtest.

The Atelier was the first project she had created by herself. Bankrolled by a billionaire fashion designer who had taken a scattershot approach to immortality. Nefirahs proposal had been one of several hundred.

Had the designer known that hers would be the one to launch the fad, that the wealthy would flock to the idea? Start a career that stretched 20 years now? She thought they might have, but when she asked, they said it had been the only one that appealed to them.

Why? She wasnt sure. Shed designed as she would have designed for herself, a cathedral carved into a hillside, and aeolian pipes in it and grown into the trees outside. Shed picked pines for that installation, since they grew quickly. Nowadays it was much easier to accelerate growth and she would have opted for something deciduous, so the songs would change over the seasons, affected by the amount of leaves.

It was the only installation among all the submissions that didnt reference clothing. Shed tried to create the feeling that shed thought underlay the design aesthetics underlying their clothing, rather than the garments themselves.

She came to the designers site in simple black-printed clothing, the anonymity of mass culture, and didnt go in through the special entrance, but rather the one that anyone could take.

Every installation contained a version of the mind it had been patterned after. But it was, as shed told K, not immortality. Dannefer v. Lucky the Lockman had established in 2033 that what the mem-tech created was a replica and not an actual person, no matter how many times they passed the Turing test.

Tiny rooms offered private spaces where one could commune with that mind. Hers was barely big enough to hold her. Shed patterned the rooms after anchorite cells, bare stone and lines, so all you had to think about was the communion.

But she didnt speak for most of the time she was there, simply sat on the stone floor, listening to the winds cadences and thinking about the design decisions shed made.

Not just this place, but how shed structured her life. Her existence was a sculpture in time, dedicated to the Love. She didnt need anything more than that, to know that shed help the human race survive. That her Familys dream would come true.

When she finally stood, she said to the air, Why did you want this memorial? Youd already affected history.

To remind them I was a person, came the designers soft tones. No recognition tinged it. Another design decision. Shed kept herself out of the data. The slight friendship had been theirs. It didnt belong to time.

What did belong to time? Could K claim it the way she proposed to? Or ratherNefirah knew that she could. But should she?

She returned to her lab and began creating proof of concept trees.

The advantage of wetware computers was their complexity; instead of the 0/1 gates that made up a binary computer, a cell could hold much more sophisticated data structures. A tree would work well. But she didnt want the scale of space a redwood would take. She started with a simpler tree, the gingko.

That was something they had perfected in working on the generation ship, developing technology that was closer to living things than anything before. It made it able to self-heal, self-administer like a living creature.

The ship would be one of the most amazing things ever created by humanity, and it was so close. Theyd ridden the waves of public funding, of crowdfunds and grant-chasing, no matter how small.

Now they had K. All that the Family wanted, in exchange for Nefirahs work. Shed given so much of her life to the project and now here was the expected day, arriving when shed learned to no longer expect it.

She printed out little blue pots, over-glazed with circuitry, for them, set them in the growth inducers, watched them sprout over the coming days. The tiny gingkoes were charming with their delicate, fan-shaped leaves. When the first was ready, she showed it to another cousin, Sammi.

How does it work? Sammi said dubiously.

Here, give me your arm, she said, and tapped at the panel set in Sammis forearm, then passed it back so Sammi could tap in the access code to authorize the app shed just installed.

They waited for it to install.

Where are you on the List? her cousin asked, not meeting her eyes. That signaled some change in Sammis own status, probably upward.

Still below the line, she said. Still not close enough to the top of the list to make it aboard.

Not by far, though? Sammi said.

She shook her head and shrugged all at once. You could do that, could pretend that you hadnt tracked this figure as obsessively as everyone else close to the line. The line fluctuated, that was one of the things about it. Rumor says theyre going to do a refactoring, major criteria changes, in a few months.

No one could predict how the line would shift, let alone the ordering, in a major refactoring.

This could make you a Contributor.

Thats someone who makes a major change or addition, she protested. Not about fundraising.

Not just because you secured the funding, her cousin said. At her blank look, she scoffed and pointed at the trees. Theyll add more organic life to the project. Did you really not think how major this was?

I was always part of the garden group, she said.

Implementing your trees will be a group effort, Sammi said. But you came up with all of this on your own.

Sammis arm dinged to indicate the app was ready, and she held it back out to Nefirah. She opened the app and clicked through the +organism screen, adding new options.

Hello, she said to it.

Hello, maam! it piped cheerfully.

Thats the Sporty default, isnt it? Sammi said.

Yup, same one that drives a lot of todays toys, she said. I needed a personality to put into it, and that ones public domain.

Because youre advertising the company every time you use it, said with folded arms. Most of her family had strong opinions on advertising and ethics, not a trait that had helped them advance the ships progress, but understandable.

Itll get rewritten before anyone else accesses it, she said. Thats one of the differences between the end result and these.

How so?

They learn from everyone around them and add it to the mix. And personalities get created, amalgamations of those among them, storing strands of memory.

Is that how the redwood will function?

No. Thats not at all what K wants. She wants herself undiluted.

Sammi shook her head, expression incredulous. Youd think she started, poised to reignite a thousand Family discussions about the fate of humanity, of the necessity of setting aside individual ambition and petty pride for the common good, but Nefirah cut her off.

Shes the customer, she said. If shes paying the tab, she gets to decide whats on it.

Originally posted here:

The Woman Who Wanted to Be Trees, by Cat Rambo. - Slate