The This

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Cyberpunk; Time Travel

Synopsis

The This is the new social media platform everyone is talking about. Allow it to be injected into the roof of your mouth and it will grow into your brain, allow you to connect with others without even picking up your phone. Its followers are growing. Its detractors say it is a cult. But for one journalist, hired to do a puff-piece interview with their CEO, it will change the world forever.

Adan just wants to stay at home with his smart-companion Elegy - phone, friend, confidante, sex toy. But when his mother flees to Europe and joins a cult, leaving him penniless, he has to enlist in the army. Sentient robots are invading America, but it seems Adan has a surprising ability to survive their attacks. He has a purpose, even if he doesn't know what it is.

And in the far future, war between a hivemind of Ais and the remnants of humanity is coming to its inevitable end. But one woman has developed a weapon which might change the course of the war. It's just a pity she's trapped in an inescapable prison on a hivemind ship.

Release date: February 3, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 320

Sample

Bardo

In the Bardo subject and object are the same. You say, ‘I’m not sure I understand what that means.’

There’s somebody else with you in the Bardo and this other person is going through the same process you are. Or, to put it another way: there are many persons in the Bardo and they’re all going through the same process as you. The place is crammed with people. So many! Do any of them understand this business better than you do? You say it again: ‘I’m not sure I understand what that means.’

‘Means,’ says the other. ‘I mean, since we can’t suppose time has any purchase in this place, the present tense in your statement comes into question, rather, don’t you think? Meant, means, will mean. I mean, who’s to say?’

You say: ‘Huh?’

A flash of light marks your passage out of the Bardo, and you’re alive again. That flash was the sunlight. All of it. That flash of light is all the sunlight you will see in the course of your life, and all the darkness, too. Which is to say, you see, in an instant, the balance of the two – but of course you’ll see less darkness and more light over the run of your whole existence, because the day is lit and, though the night is not, there’s always light inside your dreams.

Embodiment, and its queasy wondrousness. Milk assuages your wailing. You run, and it’s a pure joy, and the high grass snickers at your hips. You take your share of the meat. You are a parent and sit under an overhang and watch the rain come down so hard it’s as if the whole sky has collapsed its liquid blue down upon you in one go. It smells of cleanness and clover, of sky and freshness. As you sit there, cradling one of your kids, a thought rushes your memory with intense and vivid suddenness: that time when Hari cut the throat of a wild cow with a lucky cut, and all the cow’s blood came out in one go, with a great sloshing and gushing – it was the noise of this rain, the noise of life sluicing endlessly through the sky and the earth, through you and all the animals, and you feel a sharp fragment of understanding. There was good eating for days from that cow. You sleep and dream of a great mountain. The next day the ground is muddy. A pain in your jaw grows until you can do nothing but lie on the ground and cry. It fills your head with its pain, and when you think the pain is so great it cannot possibly be greater, it swells further – fire and grinding and pressure combined into an agony. It breaks the bone to burst from your head through the side of your face, and the release of this pressure is so sweet you sleep for a day. It still hurts, and the others make fun of your ruined face, and then you are feverish and then you are more feverish and then you are dead.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same. You can remember the whole of that lived life, as fine-veined and perfect as a single glossy leaf from a tree with a trillion leaves. You hold the whole memory in your mind. The light comes again.

You are reborn, and live long enough to develop a sense of yourself, of your mother and your siblings, of heat and shade, of the difference between bitter food and sweet, and then you die – a day and a night of diarrhoea and you’re gone.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same.

‘I can remember all of them,’ you say. ‘I suppose you do, too? Is it the same for you?’

The other person there smiles. ‘Are you sure,’ this other person asks, ‘you’re not collating numerous similar life-memories into a smaller number of manageable memories?’

You say: ‘That’s a good question.’

The light, again. There is more brightness than darkness in this life, too. It’s like that for almost every life. You grow up by a pool, and there are fish to eat as well as what the tribe hunts in the forest. You and your brothers and sisters and cousins are a tribe within the tribe, and you like mischief. One day, when one of the community’s Big Men is washing himself in the pool, you and your siblings all piss into the pool for a joke. The Big Man is very angry, and his anger does not settle as anger usually does. He surprises the group of you all later that day – you’d already forgotten the prank, and are picking and eating berries. But the Big Man has not forgotten, and though most of your sisters and brothers run off screaming, he catches you and punches you on the side of the head. His is the Big Fist, so its blow breaks the bone and you lie on the ground sobbing and passing in and out of consciousness. Over the course of evening and sunset the shadow of the bush slides over you like a blanket. Your mother finds you and tries to lift you up, but the movement dislodges something inside you and you start fitting furiously. Vomit comes up one way and goes down another and you’re dead.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same.

‘Does it just go on and on?’ you ask. ‘I mean, I suppose what I’m wondering is … are we on our way anywhere?’

The other person smiles. ‘You mean, enlightenment? Zen and spiritual evanishment and all that? I don’t know anything about any of that.’

You tell them your name.

They tell you theirs: Abby something.

‘Abby Normal?’ you laugh, and Abby laughs, too, so that’s a joke you share, it seems. A cultural reference you have in common. At the time this doesn’t strike you as strange, but later, when the sheer scope of … well – everything … comes home to you, it sounds a more discordant note. I mean, what are the odds? That you both recognised the reference, that you had cultural knowledge sufficiently in common to both laugh? An old black and white comedy movie. Pastiche monster-mash.

Where did you start this process? Which was your first life? You wonder about yourself. You ask Abby.

By way of reply Abby smiles a Serenissima smile.

This time there is no flash, and this life is more darkness than light: you live underground, and when you come up the light hurts your eyes and you don’t like it. But you bring up the ore and you eat your meals, and you play, and when you get older you fuck, and you don’t know any different. Then you’re dead and you do know any different and you think: That wasn’t much of a life.

Bright light. You live by the river and your life is a habitual matter: prayers, scooping the water into your irrigation channels, growing your food, passing your due to the rulers, making small trades with your neighbours. You marry four times and have six children, two of whom live to adulthood and are present at your deathbed.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

‘There’s a degree of monotony,’ you note.

Abby shrugs.

Darkness this time: you are blind, all your long life. You never see the sunlight, although you can feel it on your face.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

Brightness swells again.

You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are a farmer. You are pressed into the army and die of dysentery far from home. You are a farmer, pressed into the army and spiked with a spear from behind on a battlefield whose name you do not know. You are a farmer and you die by the sword. You are a farmer and you die of disease.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

‘That phrase keeps occurring to me,’ you tell Abby, as you stretch your limbs and settle once more, yet again, into the calmly eternal rhythm of the Bardo. ‘And I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why. Or what it means.’

‘Let’s say,’ Abby suggests, ‘I. Let’s say, you. You’re your subject. Subject, verb, object. For example – I eat the apple.’

Apple, you think. Adam, you think. Was Adam the first life? Was Adam your first life?

‘So in the world of living and dying I eat an apple, but in the Bardo I and the apple are the same thing?’

‘Search me,’ says Abby, grinning.

‘I don’t feel very apple-y.’

‘Golden,’ says Abby. ‘Delicious.’

The brightness swells again.

You are a nobleman – afterwards, when you’re back in the Bardo and can remember it all, you’re struck by how rare this is. A nobleman! You dress in fine clothes, and slaves attend your mundane needs, and you own a fine house with flat roofs and a carp pond. A man you trust absolutely, a man you have known all your life, shoves you hard, and keeps shoving you until your back is pressed against the wall. You’re so astonished you don’t say anything, because this is a man you trust absolutely. He breaks the skin of your chest with the point of his dagger, and sets his foot back to brace himself as he pushes hard, and the whole blade of the dagger slides into your chest. It is intensely painful, a bursting nova of pain. The dagger goes right through you and the point sticks in the plaster of the wall behind you.

‘Thus perish all traitors!’ your friend shouts, right in your face, and bits of his spittle land on your mouth and your nose and go into your eye, and despite the intensity of the pain the main thing of which you are conscious is … surprise. Traitor? You? Traitor?

In the Bardo subject is object.

‘I’m one point closer to appleness,’ you tell Abby. ‘I know now what it’s like to be sliced with a knife.’

‘You approach applitude,’ says Abby.

‘Appleosity,’ you agree.

‘Snip snap,’ says Abby, with a strange smile.

You herd cows. You follow the plough. You are a weaver. You are a fisherman and you drown when a storm capsizes your boat. You fall sick. You are stretched on a rack. You learn to read, which means, since you are the only person in your village who can read, you become a de facto priest. You plough. You carry seaweed from the coast up to a walled field to fertilise it. You build a dam. You clean the house, over and over, over and over. You are the most successful farmer in your district and people come to beg you for charity when their crops fail, and then one year the rainy season does not come, and then it does not come for a second year and you and the rest of them all starve to death together. You give birth but the child will not come, and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing until you die of exhaustion. You climb a tree to pick fruit, and fall from the tree, and break your leg, and your leg grows three times as fat overnight, and becomes ghastly squishy, and goes black and you die in agony. You farm. You farm. You farm. You are burnt to death when your barn catches fire – foolishly you rush inside to try and save your horse, and both you and the horse die in agony. You are cut to death by a man with an axe during a time of war. You are raped by eleven men, and it kills you. You die of cholera. You die of dysentery. You die of sepsis. You give birth and it feels like you are being torn in two and then you are dead. You accidentally kill a man and have to abscond from your village, and you live in the woods for half a year, growing wilder, driven to more desperate crimes by hunger, until winter comes and you freeze to death.

In the Bardo subject is object.

‘I get the impression,’ you tell Abby, ‘that things are speeding up.’

‘It’s wider, in terms of human population,’ Abby agrees. ‘But shorter in an absolute sense. The timeline, I mean.’

You are evicted from your farm because the nobleman wants the land for his sheep. You trek to the coast, and your wife and two of your children die on the journey, and then you make a new life as a fisherman with help from your cousin. You marry again. Prayer and work help you overcome your grief. You get a tumour in your testicle and it grows to the size of a football. A surgeon comes from the town to cut it out and you die of postoperative sepsis.

The Bardo’s subject is its object.

‘I get the feeling I’m getting closer to something.’

You farm. You farm. You dedicate your life to God. You are a miner. You are a dock worker. You are a railwayman. You farm. Your farm is mortgaged and lost and you move to the city where you get work in a factory, and then you develop a cough and the cough won’t go away, and your lungs fill with gunk and you die. You go to school and the schoolmaster beats you, and then, when you are limping home with blood dripping down your trouser-leg into your shoe, a street dog bites you, excited by the smell, and the wound goes bad, and you die. You work in a factory. You work in an office. You are pressed into the army and die when your troop carrier sinks on its way to the land where the fighting is. You work in an office. You die of influenza. You work for a bank. You work for the council. You are a teacher. You are a mechanic. You are a nurse. You are an agricultural labourer. You are a jeweller. You work in an office. You die of old age. You take an overdose of recreational drugs. You are crushed to death when the crowd at Mecca becomes overexcited. You die of an asthma attack at the age of seventeen. You drown in your bath when your carer leaves you alone for five minutes to take a call from her boyfriend. You crash your car. You die when your life support malfunctions and the temperature in your pod plunges to equalise with the temperature of deep space beyond the hull. You remotely operate an areoforming robot, and die when the feedback is maladjusted by a viral e-infection and crashes your heart. You work for an AI in AI–human liaison and die of old age, rich and self-satisfied. You live on Mars. You spend all your life in an artificial habitat in orbit around Jupiter. You mine ice. You think up clever advertising strategies to sell blackseed food products.

In the Bardo: sub/ob/ject.

‘I feel I’ve shot past something. Is this the future now?’

‘You keep talking like time has any meaning in this what-for-want-of-a-better-word-I-have-to-call place,’ laughs Abby. ‘Quaint!’

You live as a prince of the solar system in an augmented body and are assassinated by one of your rivals. Your whole life is lived inside a generation starship. You are one of a fan-religion living in a series of serried shells around Bluestar 44. You are a soldier, bringing one thing only – your capacity for aggression – to an autoarmy that lacks that quality. You live on a purple-red world under a diamond-coloured sun. You live in a foam-matrix on a deep space trajectory. You are part of a cult that uses enhanced sexual pleasure to crystallise the transcendental. You extend your life with a combination of artificial supports and a time-dilation algoractivator. You upload your consciousness into a series of insectorgs and swarm for the sheer joy of swarming. The stars are running out of fuel and one by one they flare and sputter and go dark. You—

—are in the Bardo.

You’re in the Bardo again.

‘Was that it?’ you ask.

There were an inestimable number of people in the Bardo before (as if before has any meaning in this place!) but now it seems empty (as if now has any meaning in this place!) – is it empty? You are the subject of this story, you suppose, after all. It’s a common enough human supposition.

‘Abby?’ you say. ‘Abby, are you there?’

A breath is drawn, as if Abby is about to reply to you, and that miniature crescendo of white noise breaks off sharply and—

—you’re born. You’re gasping in the light. You’re clinging to the hair of your mother’s pelt as she lopes through the grassland. The dry fields chuckle in the wind, strands of grass like sticks rattling together. You spend hours every day picking grain from the grass and chewing it in the chunky knucklebone teeth at the back of your mouth. Night swallows day and then is itself swallowed by the sun. As the year goes on the trees on the high hill become nude, and the air acquires a sterile chill, and you and your people huddle together. When spring returns, and warmth, you are sick of their company, so you take to sleeping in a nook by the stream. A wolf grabs you by the throat in the middle of the night and drags you away and you are dead in moments. Round and round again. You die a day old. You die a year old. You live to thirty. You die of sepsis. You choke on a nut. You die of dysentery. You live to become a great-grandfather and a tribal elder and then take your own life because the darkness that has been inside you all your life becomes too much. You are trampled by some bison and your leg is left mashed and bloody, and for months you drag it behind you, covered in a seething sock of flies. But it heals and you limp on, and your tribe becomes convinced that you are a holy man. You die old and are buried in a fine chambered tomb.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

‘Are we really going through the whole thing again?’

Abby says: ‘You don’t think you haven’t already done the whole thing again? Again and again?’ That distinctive Abby laugh. ‘Don’t fret – things speed up. There’s a kind of spiritual momentum to it all.’

You farm, you fish, you farm, you fight. You are high status, one of the political and spiritual leaders of your community, but young people are little bastards these days – not like when you were young. Back then children respected their elders. But thismorning? Let me tell it: you went into the pool to pray to the gods and wash yourselves and the little shits pissed all over you– fucking little brats. Oh, you caught up with them and gave them a smack round the ear, teach them a lesson, but really it’s the mothers – the mothers are too soft on them.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

‘How many times have we been through all this?’ you ask Abby.

‘Now you’re using the right word.’

‘What word is that?’

‘The we word – that’s the ticket. We is I and you, subject and object, in one handy little packet.’

‘Now hold up for just one second there, partner—’ you say.

But there’s no waiting. Light flashes and you’re a farmer, and a farmer, and a farmer, over and over. You fight in the army. You rape. You cut someone down with an axe. You are one of the god-king’s most trusted advisors, and live in a fine palace with a carp pool and orange trees growing in the courtyard; but you discover that your best friend is part of a palace faction that aims to promote the god-king’s sister to the throne. Your closest friend! – with whom you have hunted and feasted since you were both children. You are so angry you can barely breathe. You go to his house and his slaves let you in – of course they do – and you confront him in his bedroom and kill him with your own hands. ‘Thus perish all traitors’, you yell, right in his face. As he dies the look of guilt and remorse on his face entirely vindicates your action.

You’re a tobacco farmer. You’re a yam farmer. You’re a rice farmer. You join the imperial army and are killed. You join the imperial army and survive, and then when the war is finished people arrest you and lock you in a prison and then they hang you by the neck until you are dead. You program computers. You present television documentaries. You build a model of the Taj Mahal, taller than a man, entirely out of used Coca-Cola bottles.

‘The earlier lives,’ Abby says, ‘occupy an external epoch that lasted hundreds of thousands of years, and that’s long, sure, sure. But there’re only a few lives at any given moment during that epoch, so you’ll find you’re through with them soon. But with the later lives … the external time period is much briefer, but there are very many many more people, so that’s the experience that will tend to predominate.’

It’s dawning on you (in the Bardo, where subject and object is the same thing) that you’re going to reincarnate into every single human being who ever lived.

I mean, really?

I mean … seriously?

You are an airline pilot. You’re a street kid. You die when an allergic reaction collapses your throat. You are shot by a cop. You plant rice. You mine notional gold by playing video games all day in a dingy building and die of heart disease in your fifties. You beg on the streets. You beg on the orbital run. You are a lunar shuttle pilot. You are an asteroid kid, scraping a living and eating vat-gunk. You are poor and volunteer for a new treatment that splits your consciousness between your organic brain and two drones – a military surveillance experimental programme, is what it is – but the experience induces psychosis, and you kill seven people with the drones and two more with your bare hands before you are shot dead yourself. You mastermind the terraforming of Venus by releasing vast amounts of heat from the planetary core, subliming the highly acidic atmosphere almost entirely into space; and then you replace it with a bombardment of shepherded cometary bodies. You do grunt work on the Martian elevator cable and die when the foundations collapse and debris breaks your airpack.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

You work remotely via photbugs tweaking vacuum grass on the lunar side. You work remotely operating clamberdogs as they decommission the astonishingly poisonous and dangerous tubes of vitreous radioactive waste the twentieth century left buried in vaults, hoiking them into orbit inside magchutes and firing them at the sun. You are the first human to walk on the surface of Gliese 581c. You are the first human to convert their entire skeleton to smartdiamond. You compete in the Sex Olympics but your gold medal is stripped from you when it is discovered that your genitals were being remotely controlled by an accomplice back in the training camp. You live a religious life. You life an atheistical life. You game, you work, you mourn. You almost glitch the whole process when, exploring the event horizon of a local black hole, your buffered consciousness is smeared into a declining parabolic recovery feed – it takes you over eight hundred years to die, and after the first decade you lose your mind so comprehensively that there’s nothing meaningfully ‘you’ left by the end of the whole ghastly, unexpected process. But you do eventually pass below the threshold we can call life; and the Bardo wipes away all insanity, psychosis, misery or elation.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

You clone yourself into a thousand iterations and explore the Andromeda galaxy. You live for a thousand years in an endlessly reconfiguring pleasure-sim, and then one day commit suicide on a whim. You are the messiah of a planetwide religious movement and you die when your (planned, staged) apotheosis converts all your cellular matter into rose petals, using nano-organon engines. You surf gravity waves in a spaceship eight kilometres wide but only a metre high. You die when your laser-rifle malfunctions and explodes in your hand. You are a mentat. You are a pod-person. You are an intergalactic trader in rare mathematical proofs. You upload your consciousness to the diamond core of a gas giant.

In the Bardo, Abby is looking at you in a funny way.

‘Where is everybody else?’ you ask. ‘This place used to be humming with …’ but you’re not sure what the word is. People? Is it people?

‘Where,’ says Abby, ‘is not a very good word when applied to the Bardo.’

You are a bilge-kid on an interstellar liner. You grow up on Koronagrag 3 and, together with two dozen like-minded individuals, you decide to reproduce the life of Isaac Newton: machines recreate seventeenth-century London and Cambridge down to every detail, and you and your friends dress the part, speak the words and inhabit the roles as fully as possible, one hour per hour, for decades. You are a beast. You are a nanomechanic. You are Führer of the Diaphanous Oort League. You explore quantum miniaturisation and colonise the shell of a helium atom, only to discover the descendants of people who had discovered such technology a thousand years earlier, and whose discovery had been forgotten. You watch the last stars go dark.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same thing.

‘Is memory infinite?’ you ask Abby.

‘Mortality means that it need not be,’ says Abby. ‘I mean, I can’t deny that it’s part of the structure of human consciousness to tend to confuse the very big with the infinite. But actually and literally, those two things couldn’t be further apart from one another.’

‘Okey,’ you say. ‘Dokey.’

In the Bardo subject and object are the same.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same.

In the Bardo subject and object are the same.

‘It’s not Abby Normal,’ you say. ‘Your name, I mean.’ It’s taken you some time to reach this realisation. Better late than never, you suppose. ‘I talk to you. I am the subject and you are the object.’

‘Now I’m getting it,’ says Abby.

‘Abby Solute,’ you say. ‘I mean – what kind of a name even is that?’

‘Resolve the addition and average out, and there’s a modicum of humour left over, I guess,’ you say. ‘That’s personality,’ you say. ‘The Absolute is not a merely mathematical equation, after all,’ you say.

‘There are a few more lives to live,’ you note.

You are an engineer. There are ten thousand varieties of engineer in the future, on a thousand different scales, from reshaping electron shells to building Dyson Spheres and linking planet-sized orbital bodies with chains of matter threaded with spacetime absence to make them unbreakable. You build spaceships and superspaceships and hyperspaceships that themselves contain many spaceships. You mould faces out of the surfaces of red giants. You submerge your individuality in a thousand varieties of hive mind, or split your solitary consciousness into a thousand shards. The engineer is a kind of farmer. The farmer is a kind of engineer. You live. You die.

In the Bardo.

Abby Solute is the sole inhabitant of the Bardo now. Every life is behind you at last.

‘Now,’ you say. ‘To begin.’