Awakening the Nen, by Ryan Boudinot
A sleep even deeper than death, and yet a sleep from which it is possible to wake. This was the sleep of Lo Birdsinger, shrouded in woolen blankets and buried beneath the roots of a proud old cedar in a wooded glade. Humans had populated these lands some twenty thousand years ago but now clung to the thinnest survival as whispers, rumors, tales. Deep in the loam the Birdsinger slept her dreamless centuries, the filaments of mycelium and roots penetrating her body through the pores, now suddenly retracting, recoiling almost, the larger roots straining and ripping to pull apart a cavity to allow Lo to emerge into the waking world of bird calls and sun beams. This wasn't right. It wasn't time. Why had her sentinel tree decided to wake her so early? For the first time in three hundred and twenty three years, Lo opened her eyes.
Lo Birdsinger had traveled far and seen much, but nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a human woman standing in front of her. The nen regarded this creature with wonder. She was so small and fragile, this being with skin of bright pink. Lo's gaze traveled over the woman's dark hair. The human wore something draped around her neck that emitted colored lights in time with the creature's pulse. Beneath the sunlight forest canopy they knew who each other must be, but couldn't speak for scarcely believing it.
"Why have you waken me?" Lo said in the thought language.
"We have returned from the stars to reclaim our birthright. I am called Nina Harker," said the woman with her mind. "I've been looking for someone like you among the trees. Thousands of years ago, your ancestors learned to hibernate and communicate using the Wood Wide Web. It seems you've evolved beautifully in our absence."
A brown speckled wren lit upon Lo's shoulder and cocked its head quizzically. Soon it was joined by another, and another, until six birds were hopping and pecking all over her milky smooth yellow head.
"I bet your ancestors were machines that saved birds," Nina said, sitting on a fallen log, pulling a sandwich out of her rucksack. "I hope you don't mind if I eat in front of you. I’ve been hiking awhile."
Lo slowly sat down on a moist, mossy rock. Only minutes before she had floated in the timeless plane of all knowing, one with the forest. Now she found herself dumbfoundedly watching a smelly primate mash food with its mouth. Ancestors? Machines? Although there was some debate among the nen about what it meant to be human or machine, most understood themselves to be descendants of humans who, in the centuries when life seemed to make a game of extinction, used genetic engineering and nano technology to create living machines that consumed excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while restoring vital nutrients to depleted soil. This awakening happened just in time for humankind's emergence into its next phase, in which they renamed themselves Homo virtualis, the Digital Man, the ones who stored their memories within nanotubes and instigated the Age of Permeation. But this Nina Harker creature looked like a pre-permeated human. An ancient. Flesh and blood, shackled to an obsolete mortality.
"Dang," said Nina, "Say what you will about the Internet of Things, but it sure can still make a mean PB&J." She took a bite and sighed with pleasure. "I've missed sandwiches."
"PB&J?" said Lo. The wrens hopped off her head to investigate this strange foodstuff. One perched on Nina's knee it as if keeping watch over an egg while another pecked at crumbs that had fallen into Nina's lap. Before long there were seven birds standing guard around the sandwich.
"Want to see me talk with my mouth?" said Nina.
"You can push sound waves in air?" Lo said.
Nina opened her mouth in a series of shapes and expelled air from her lungs. "This is me. This is what I actually sound like. Hi there!"
Lo was having trouble making sense of this. "You're here to reclaim the planet?" she said. "Why? What is here for you?"
"Our ship got sick. It started torturing crew members in deep sleep with recursive hallucinations. I was among a small band who managed to overtake the tree at the heart of our engine. We didn't have the crew we would have needed to terraform where we thought we were going. So we decided to come back," Nina said, pulled an empty metal bottle from her bag. "You don't know where there's water nearby, do you?"
Lo stood and hooted at all seven birds simultaneously using her mind voice, startling them into flight like dark leaves blown off branches during autumn windstorms. The two women walked together beneath the yellowing canopy among jewel-like red fungi and glittering crickets that zipped among fronds and twigs before disappearing down rabbit holes carved from rot. Under the ground were paths between worlds known only to those who lived within soil and wood as much as above ground. For many miles, their feet never touched soil but skirted around tree trunks where mushrooms occasionally sprang from bark wounds emitting clouds of spores powerful enough to obliterate airborne bacteria and summon bees via fungal sonar signals.
As the sun dipped beneath the line of trees they emerged at the pebbly shore of a river. The sky was a burning shade of orange. "I need to rest," Lo said, "It takes time to regain my strength after hibernation." As they sat on boulders watching fish surface to eat insects it seemed as if this sunset might last forever. Nina had no way of knowing how long the nen’s hibernation had been so she asked Lo about time.
"The years pass like hours, minutes," said Lo "And we don't sleep at night because there is too much happening then." She spoke these words but didn't know why they were important to say. It felt like something more than simple information sharing was taking place between them, an exchange born from an instinctual resonance that bound them both to everything around them: rocks, waterfalls, birds roosting overhead on branches gnarled into shapes resembling human hands grasping toward stars. Lo felt the need to tell Nina something about herself. "I have seen so much but I don't know what any of it means," she said, picking up a stone and skipping it across the water's surface.
"Tell me what you've seen," said Nina.
As they sat together beside this river listening to nature play melodies over their thoughts, Lo told stories from the past twenty thousand years. Humans had come back into being via biomimicry before transforming themselves again with machine minds connected through webbing, ultimately giving birth to virtual beings known as Homo Simulacra who populated millions of simulations, entirely without flesh or blood, yet somehow cognizant enough within simulspace to become one with each other, all while remaining unaware that they were nothing more than avatars designed by human/AI software engineers working far beyond earth's stratosphere, under contract for an interstellar corporation run by aliens called Bobs.
"What else? I want to hear it all," said Nina.
"A man whose name is so holy as to have become unspoken believed that nature, humanity, and technology have always been one indivisible force in the universe and that separation among them is an illusion. His writings made it possible for life to continue, to thrive, to seek other stars. Life goes on forever now because life is encoded in matter, waiting for love to stir it into movement."
As they turned together toward the riverbank where trees met soil there was a moment when both woman felt like someone or something was approaching before realizing it was just their twinned shadows stretching out across the stones. "Now it's my turn to tell a story," said Nina. "You're not real. I'm talking to a hologram."
"If you want me to be something other than what I am, then who will I become?" Lo said. "If you want me to be a storybook character, who will I become?"
"Who are you right now?" Nina said.
The river rippled over stones. An owl hooted from high above in the dark canopy of branches. The nen looked into the woman's eyes, searching for something neither could name, something that couldn't be captured with any of the five senses humans once possessed, long before they evolved beyond them.
"How did it happen?" Nina said. "How did people stop being human?"
"They changed themselves," Lo said. She found herself suddenly tormented by a question, not of how humans became gods, but rather, how they'd failed to become them, how evolution itself had stalled at humanity's doorstep. She would come to ponder this question for the next thousand years. Nina watched Lo stare into space with her eyes wide open but seeing nothing at all, her pupils turning back upon themselves like black mirrors revealing other worlds. "I was given an ancient human body and allowed to inhabit it for a time," she said, "I so loved the sensation of dreaming."