Foreshadow by Nova Ren Suma

Author:Nova Ren Suma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The day of my Connection, a storm blows in. I try to capture it on canvas: the gathering of great angry red clouds, the dousing of the city with wet and wind, the hammering of hail. The Surgeon is able to localize its work without affecting my motor abilities, so I continue painting even while it performs the surgery. On my canvas, high water spills into digital circuitry, an intelligent biology molts into transistors and chips.

With the implant procedure underway, everything slowly changes around me. The world has always had a soft focus, and now it’s as if I’m seeing it anew: sharp and bright and saturated. At first I try to mute the colors in my painting, to make everything appear more like what I remember, but then I give in to the jagged strokes and slashes from my new perception of the world. My brushstrokes are heavy, heated, too fast.

By the time the operation is over, the universe has shifted entirely. The shapes, the symmetry, the patterns, the variations of color. They can all be quantified, sorted, and filed away in data structures that didn’t previously exist in my brain.

“Leela, sweetie, how’re you feeling?” Mom takes my hand.

I blink, and all the anger and confusion of the last few days melts away. A history of the Grid has been downloaded into my brain, and I can easily retrieve the sections with the keywords I care about: the mysterious case of Kavya Patel.

“You were supposed to be a Princess!” I whisper.

“I didn’t want you to know about that.” Mom sits down on the hospital bed and sighs.

“Too late. Tell me your version.”

She runs a hand through her hair. “Everything was set. My marriage had been arranged by an algorithm that’s thousands of years old, the same one that brought my parents together. Even though I hadn’t expected to marry so young—I was only sixteen at the time—I was excited to find happiness. I was sure I knew who it was going to pick for me.”

“Dad?”

“Yes! We were perfect for each other. In love. But instead Deva chose me for itself, to be its Bride and Princess. It wanted me to merge with it in digital immortality.”

The old me wouldn’t have understood what she meant. Maybe that’s why she never told me about the proposal. But now I can intuit how a human might merge with machine, how consciousness can give itself over to digital storage.

The Grid was engineered by a man who wanted to create a utopian equilibrium in society. As the network grew in power and precision, fear swelled in those he was trying to help. There was widespread unease at the idea of becoming irrelevant, the same worries I felt when I viewed that extraordinary painting in my grandparents’ gallery.

So the inventor promised there would always be a human element. He uploaded his consciousness, every neural pathway in his brain. In doing so, he became a god, a Deva. An immortal inside the network, a soul to direct the other souls.

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