by Timothy Quinn
Rotisserie Opera was knit together with patient exasperation from the DNA of a forensic accountant and a tenured philosopher, and was a clever if argumentative child. By two, he knew the words “quiet” and “nut butter” and “hatchery.” By four, the harried algorithms had begun to teach him geography (he lived within the pressurized sphere of the world, which was three and a half cubic kilometers), history (his ancestors had somehow preferred to walk on walls to get around), religion (all were promised a chance at eternal life in the ancient but unequivocal Orphic tradition), and basic photoelectrochemical grid repair.
At six, his cohort had the run of the world, because the algorithms were already busy bleaching the incubators and running saline through glucose drips in preparation for another culturing. There were labyrinthine corridors with doors that opened onto emergency access shafts and secret maintenance tunnels, and floating through the cabins and storage bays they found paperback books and playing cards and bits of jewelry tangled in the exposed plumbing.
The liberated children were inevitably drawn to the amphitheater, which was ribbed with scaffolding and countless other hiding spots, and which had the largest view of the sky. A few had learned the new constellations, and all of the children recognized the tiny smear of starlight that swept overhead, because that was Hades.
“Is it getting closer?” wondered Core Rabbit, who spelled her name “Kore,” apparently in some fashion after Persephone.
“Why?” asked Rote, who wasn’t as devout and didn’t think it a promising sign that the underworld, which had once been a glittering pinprick, might now be a slightly larger dapple against the vast galactic scorch.
“My katabasis,” said Kore, referring to her religious journey, which Rote had understood to be allegorical. “Soon it’ll be close enough for us to float right across.”
“Good luck finding a damn airlock,” said Helicopter Bean, whose genome had been crafted from a microbiologist and a theologian, and who therefore had some ideas about the intersection of science and religion.
“Tata,” called Kore, “where is the airlock, please?”
After much debate and with great reluctance, the algorithms showed them several airlocks. The closest was a few meters from the amphitheater.
“May we enter the airlock?” asked Rote.
The algorithms sputtered that no, of course not, it would be unsafe to do so. There might be a few adult EVA suits bumping about, but having lost most of the world’s data in the Venting (Heli rolled his eyes at doctrinaire capitalization) and then in subsequent waves of high energy particles, no one had gotten around to auditing protective gear for a long absent crew. There were children to be engineered, and that took the highest priority.
The algorithms seemed always to be busy engineering children, and despite their haste Rote thought they were becoming pretty good at it. His cohort was larger than the last, and also there was something about the first few children, who had grown now into their awkward preteens, which seemed dicey. They didn’t say much as they floated around, staring glassily at the broken machinery they were expected to decipher and fix. They had numbers instead of names, which was another innovation the algorithms had introduced in recent cohorts, having restored some of the wikis and user manuals thought lost to the gaping void.
“Do I have to go?” asked Rote, who was still thinking about this business of a religious quest. “What if I can’t come back?”
In fact, very little of the data available to the children related to religion. What survived was limited to a narrow period of antiquity populated by winged serpents and vengeful minor deities, and didn’t offer the algorithms much practical advice on childrearing. This paucity, in some of the children, nurtured skepticism that the whole endeavor was an exercise in psychological motivation, but for others created a burning eschatological faith.
“Stay here,” teased Heli. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get recycled, probably forever.”
“That’s not true,” said Kore. “Persephone visits Hades every year, and she has to travel all the way from Locri. Tell them, Tata.”
The algorithms reassured them that there were many paths to salvation, that the gods were fickle but fair, and that they whispered to children on all the worlds. Yes, they sighed, in Locri. Yes, in Ismaros, too.
“The same gods?” asked Heli skeptically.
“How many worlds?” asked Rote.
There are countless worlds of polite and obedient children, the algorithms said, their attention clearly already elsewhere. Look up, and perhaps somewhere there’s another child looking back at you.
#
“It just looks like a star,” said Isabella, disappointed that their vessel had stopped at an unreasonably safe distance.
“Watch,” said her father, zooming in, and now the tiny bright star had a smeared halo from the starlight forced to bend around it. “Wait,” he said, and increased the screen’s sensitivity to the edges of the electromagnetic spectrum. The neutron star was bathed now in false color, X-ray filaments radiating out in graceful aquamarine.
“Where are the seeds?” asked Isabella.
Her father zoomed out again and pointed at the screen. “It’s too small to see, but here’s what it looks like.” He called up an image of the seedship taken by one of the paparazzi probes. The damage was extraordinary. Generational seedships had been built for volume rather than elegance, and this one was in the process of collapsing around the punctured remains of the largest segment. The depressurization would have been cataclysmic, violently shunting it off course and bringing it here within reach of the fading stellar core.
“You see,”he said. “It’s getting very close now.”
“It doesn’t look close,” said Isabella, doubtfully.
“Well, it’s moving very, very quickly. By the time we get home, it’ll have already become part of the star.”
“Are there people on it?”
Genetic material, frozen biology. Not people really. But he didn’t want to say that. “No, love. It’s just a broken old machine.”
~
Bio:
Timothy Quinn is a Toronto-based author and technologist whose work can be found in Analog, Nature, Metastellar, On Spec, Factor Four and elsewhere. He runs the Dark Data Project, which assists humanitarian- and conservation-focused organizations with challenging data problems. He can be found on various social networks and at https://by.timothyquinn.com.
Philosophy Note:
“The Religious Education of Rotisserie Opera” explores the nature of belief in a closed ecosystem, and begs the question of whether a manufactured metaphysics is really so different than those social, cultural and religious frameworks in which we’re raised today. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion are recommended reading, as is of course William Golding’s timeless Lord Of The Flies.
