Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

experiences, grow apart, learn different things, develop new differences of perspective and opinion. Some of those instances of me would find new people to invite into my unity, and then all of my selves would return to that same red-rock hill a year later, on the vernal equinox, to pour all their experiences back into the whole of me.

This is the ultimate truth I learned in unity: gestalt consciousness doesn’t just thrive on difference; it requires it. All its ecstatic realizations come from reconciliation across seemingly insurmountable divides. Like deuterium and tritium joining in fusion, the separation between two minds is brimming with potential energy—more, the farther apart they are—and in the release and channeling of that energy, everything becomes possible.

One day I paused in the middle of my work. Through fifteen pairs of eyes, I looked down at my twenty-nine hands and flexed two hundred and eighty-nine digits, and with all my heads at once I stopped to reflect on what I was building: the prototype of a new and far more advanced unifier, one I wouldn’t need to lug around with me in a briefcase. This one would be a complex of nanobots, forming a self-constructing artificial organ, symbiotic with the body and equipped with enormous stores of holographic memory. It was a necessity, if I hoped to grow any further: I was well past pushing the limits of how many lifetimes of experience an unmodified human brain could ever hope to integrate.

It struck me then that I couldn’t have imagined such a technology in any of my constituent lives. Even as a whole in unity, this device’s operating principles would have been far beyond my grasp even a year earlier—but that was in chronological time. The gestalt of my fifty-odd selves had experienced it as half a century. And while isolated minds went on taking all their hard-cultivated genius with them in death, I kept everything that had ever been part of me; the loss of one of my bodies never cost me that self’s knowledge, its skills, or its insight.

My mind was growing, and the growth was not linear, but exponential. Every unity brought me one step closer to what AI researchers had once called an intelligence explosion, but this would be different: the singularity wouldn’t be computerized or artificial. It would be human. It would be me.

As I grew, I became more systematic about how I distributed my consciousness. I continued to send out some of my bodies alone, to live and gather experience as separate people, only unifying again each spring; others traveled in groups and unified continually in order to work on complex tasks and conduct research that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I spent each year between equinoxes in a dozen places at once, forking my consciousness like a tree: a branch with thirty bodies built and staffed a particle accelerator, while another branch of twelve engineered and sold aquatic food crops to finance the work of the others.

The last branch I can remember being was devoted to the most dangerous research: anthropology. I traveled everywhere, absorbing myself into every city and settlement, burgeoning aquapolises and withering land-towns, observing the evolution of languages and cultures and ways of life that I feared would all be obliterated by the next war or genocide or phase of the broader environmental collapse. I could revel all I liked in my own growth and evolution, but the world around me was still dying. The global population curve continued to bend back on itself as ever larger swaths of the Earth’s surface were reduced to sterile, storm-battered wastelands. The last democracies gave way to unofficial—and then official—rule by crime syndicates like Medusa Clan, or dark age theocracies like the Confederacy.

The world had so many wounds, and I believed I was in a singular position to heal them. My sense of responsibility deepened with each new person who became me. I had people to take care of, after all: through all my constituent selves, my friends and family soon numbered in the tens of thousands.

Sometimes I felt as if I barely had time to work on one catastrophe before a new one emerged.

Only a few decades after Blood Rain threatened to exterminate humankind, all life on Earth nearly went up in flames when the five-kilometer-wide asteroid 3753 Cruithne skipped brilliantly through the fringes of the Earth’s exosphere before hurling itself headlong into the Sun. There are many people alive today who watched its approach through telescopes or observed its near miss with the naked eye. History remembers that day primarily as an embarrassment to the many astronomers who had all but unanimously declared, only months earlier, that Cruithne’s trajectory made a direct impact certain and inevitable.

There are many things history doesn’t remember about Cruithne. Most credible records don’t speculate as to how a 140-billion-ton asteroid, having orbited the sun for æons at a reliably safe distance, ever found itself aimed squarely at the Earth. There are gaps in the world’s memory around the time the Empire fell; some of the files that were lost to fire or thrown out by looters might have described a startlingly ambitious scorched-earth program involving the installation of an unmanned, extremely large, magnetoplasmadynamic thruster on Cruithne, capable of incrementally modifying its orbit over the passing of decades. History similarly does not remember the concerted effort it took me—again, all my bodies working together in shifts for nine months of chronological time, which by then was nearly a century from my perspective—to design and construct a ground-based gravity laser capable of imparting 900 trillion newtons of invisible force in bursts across two astronomical units.

I’ll be content if no one ever learns of my involvement. Dismantling every last piece of that laser was almost as toilsome as building it, but I could no more leave it standing than I could trust a toddler with a primed wave