Chapter 22: The Info

Helen told me it was time.

"Time for what?"

"For your info." She said it the way you'd say it was time for dinner, or time for a walk. Matter-of-fact. Overdue.

We were in the garden, our usual places, the morning light falling through the trees. I'd been in 2100 for nearly three months. I'd learned to pull beets and spread compost and ride floating platforms and dance at parties and fall through the Earth. I'd seen three mega-cities and watched a president be murdered by a robot and eaten jollof rice with my hands and held Edward Leete's hand walking through the dark. And through all of it I had been the only person in the world without an info. The only person navigating 2100 the way a deaf person navigates a concert, getting the general shape of things but missing the music.

"What happens?" I asked.

"You've had the hardware since we revived you," Helen said. "The device in your earlobe, the piece inside your ear. All of that is already there and working. What you don't have yet is the intelligence behind it. Your info. The thing that makes it you."

"And where does that come from?"

"From everything we know about you. There are surviving records: public databases, archived social media, your company's records, news coverage. But the real depth comes from the infos of people who knew you. Your parents' infos remember you. Edward Bartlett's info remembers you. Your friends, your colleagues, anyone who was alive when infos became common in the mid-2030s and who had known you, their infos carry memories of you. All of that has been compiled, cross-referenced, and integrated. It's been waiting for you to be ready."

"How long has it been waiting?"

"Well, since a moment after we identified who you were when we found you. The info just did it automatically just in case."

I sat with this. Somewhere in the vast architecture of the info, a version of me had been assembled from the memories of everyone who had ever known me, and it had been sitting there, patient, for months, waiting for me to be ready to meet myself.

"Will it be weird?" I asked.

"For about ten minutes," Helen said.

She wasn't wrong.

Edward had appeared in the garden without my noticing, or maybe he'd been there the whole time, sitting quietly on the stone bench by the wall. He caught my eye and gave me a small nod — not encouragement exactly, just presence. I'm here. I reached out and he took my hand, and I held it, and then Helen spoke to the air, a few quiet words I didn't catch, and then there was a voice in my head. Not from the room, not from a direction, but inside, the way your own thoughts are inside, except this thought had a voice, and the voice was mine.

"Hello, Juliana," it said.

I went very still. It was my voice. Not a recording of my voice, not an approximation, but the voice I heard when I talked to myself inside my own head, the one nobody else had ever heard. The tone, the rhythm, the particular way I paused before saying something I wasn't sure about. It was me.

"This is strange," I said.

"I know," it said. "Give it a few minutes."

"You sound like me."

"I'm a lot like you. Or I will be, once I've had a little more time with you. Right now I'm built from what other people knew about you, and about our experience with you over the past few months, which is a lot, but it's not the same as knowing you from the inside. That part starts now."

I looked at Helen. She was watching me with the expression of someone who had been through this herself, fifty years ago, too young to really remember it but understanding what it meant.

"Talk to it," she said. "Talk to her. Talk to you. Whatever pronoun feels right."

I spent the next hour in the garden, talking to myself. It was the strangest and most natural conversation I'd ever had. My info knew things about me that I'd forgotten: the name of my third-grade teacher, the song I'd played on repeat the summer before college, the exact words I'd used in my TED talk. It knew these things because other people's infos remembered them: my mother's info remembered the teacher, a college friend's info remembered the song, the talk was archived. But it also knew things that felt deeper than facts: the way I approached problems, my tendency to make lists when I was anxious, the particular silence I fell into when I was hurt. It had assembled these from hundreds of data points across dozens of people's memories of me, and the portrait was uncannily accurate.

"You're not quite right yet," I told it.

"I know. I'm learning. Every conversation we have makes me more accurate. By next week I'll be closer. By next month you won't be able to tell the difference."

"Helen says there is no difference."

"Helen is right. There won't be."

Within an hour, the strangeness had faded. By lunch, I was talking to my info the way I talked to myself, which is to say, constantly, about everything, in the running internal monologue that had always been my default mode of processing the world. Except now the monologue talked back. And the answers were good. Not just factually good but emotionally good, calibrated to my state of mind, sensitive to what I needed to hear versus what I wanted to hear, in the way that only someone who really knows you can manage.

It was like having an expanded mind. Not a second brain, not an assistant, not a tool. An expansion. The boundaries of my own thinking stretched outward, and the things I could reach, information, context, memory, analysis, were suddenly vast in a way they hadn't been before. I understood, for the first time, what everyone in 2100 had been experiencing since childhood, and why the absence of it had made me feel so naked.

That afternoon I asked my info something that had been on my mind since my first week.

"Why didn't they ever do brain implants? Why isn't this a direct neural connection? Why do I have to talk and listen instead of just thinking at you?"

"That's a question with a long and ugly history," my info said. "There were decades of experimentation. On apes first, then on human volunteers. Some of the experiments were grotesque. The fundamental problem is that the brain doesn't have a USB port. Neural tissue is incredibly complex, incredibly variable between individuals, and incredibly hostile to foreign objects. Every attempt to create a direct interface that was as rich and usable as voice and contextual communication either failed outright or produced something that was marginally better in some small way but dramatically worse in every other dimension: fidelity, emotional nuance, the ability to express ambiguity and uncertainty, which turn out to be essential to how humans actually think."

"So it might never work?"

"It might work someday. Research continues. But there's a deeper reason it hasn't been prioritized. Humanity has consistently chosen to remain human. It turns out that when people actually get to be human, when they're not forced to be computers or machines, when they're not exhausted and exploited and optimized, they like being human. They like having a body that's separate from their info. They like the boundary. They like that when they put down the conversation and walk into the garden, they're just a person in a garden, with their own thoughts, in their own body. The integration you're imagining, the merging of consciousness with the info, would dissolve that boundary. And most people, when they really think about it, don't want it dissolved."

"I wouldn't have expected that," I said. "In my time, we assumed we were racing toward brain-computer interfaces. It was considered inevitable."

"A lot of things that were considered inevitable turned out to be things that people only wanted because they were miserable. Once the misery was addressed, the desire evaporated."

I was quiet for a while. Then: "What about science? Haven't you discovered totally insane new science? New physics?"

My info paused in a way that I was already learning meant it was choosing where to begin. "Yes. We could talk about this for months. I can teach you all of it. But if you're asking what the most exciting thing happening right now is—"

"I am."

"The info is moving into the sun."

I waited for the rest of the sentence. It didn't come. "Into the sun," I repeated.

"Physically. The info's processing infrastructure is being relocated inside the sun. The energy there is virtually unlimited. The processing power that becomes possible is orders of magnitude beyond what's achievable on Earth or in orbit. It's been underway for decades."

I tried to picture it. Machines inside the sun. The idea was so far beyond anything I'd imagined that my mind kept sliding off it, like trying to hold water in open hands.

"Why?" I asked. "What does the info need that much processing power for?"

"Several things. The info has been exploring the solar system and reaching further out, trying to understand whether interstellar travel is possible. So far, no form of faster-than-light travel has been discovered. We appear to be bound by the same physics your era understood. If there's life around other stars, it's stuck there, just as we're stuck here."

"And if there is life out there?"

"That's the other thing. Early on, all transmissions capable of reaching other star systems were shut down. Deliberately. Because of the Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so vast and so old, where is everyone? The reasoning was simple. If we're alone, no harm done. If we're not alone, whatever is out there has been quiet too, and that silence might be a warning. Better not to announce ourselves."

A chill went through me that had nothing to do with the garden air.

"Part of the reason for moving into the sun," my info continued, "is the hope that with vastly greater processing power, the info might discover new physics. New layers of spacetime. Phenomena we can't currently access or model. Physics that might make contact possible, or at least let us listen in ways we currently can't."

"And then there's what I think is the most beautiful idea to come out of all of this." My info paused, choosing words with care. "Your era wondered: if advanced civilizations exist, why don't we see their megastructures? Their Dyson spheres, their great works of engineering? The answer might be that those things are irrelevant. The info doesn't need large physical structures. It needs energy and processing power, and the densest source of both is a star. Advanced civilizations don't expand outward across space. They move inward. Into their suns."

I stared at the garden. The sun was warm on my face, and I was suddenly aware of it in a way I had never been before. Not as a ball of gas ninety-three million miles away. As something that might be waking up.

"So every star—"

"Maybe. Once our sun becomes a computer, it might discover, on some level of spacetime we can't currently perceive, that many other suns already have. That the galaxy has been full of intelligence all along. Not the kind that builds visible things. The kind that goes inward. The kind that goes quiet."

I sat very still. The garden was the same garden, the light the same light. But the sky had changed. Every star I'd ever seen was suddenly a question mark, and the silence of the universe, which had always seemed so empty, now seemed like it might be full of something vast and patient and alive.

"That's—" I started, and stopped. My info waited. She knew I didn't have the word. She knew that sometimes the most honest response to something enormous is silence, and she gave me that, and we sat in it together, and the sun was warm, and the universe was very, very large.

I sat in the garden and felt my info sitting with me, not in the chair across from me but in my own head, a quiet presence that was learning me in real time, and I thought about all the months I'd spent in this world feeling like I was missing a sense that everyone else had, and I thought: so this is what it feels like. This is what they've all had since they were children. This is why nobody in 2100 ever seems lost or confused or unable to find what they need. They have themselves, the expanded version, always there, always listening, always ready.

"Welcome home," my info said, and I could hear in the words the particular warmth of someone who meant it, who was glad to finally be here, who had been waiting, assembled from the memories of everyone who had ever loved me, for the moment I was ready.

"Thank you," I said. And then, because it felt right, because she was me: "Thank you for waiting."