Lunch at the end of the world
It was hastily arranged as these things go, but it’s never easy to organize an Archon’s schedule, whereas a replicant like me can use improbability to cut through time and space. So it was that I found myself waiting on the man, if that term applies. I’d have to go to bed with one to know for sure, and that’s not on the program, although stranger things have happened.
They come on like men, if you can see them at all. A colleague described a kind of talking marble she was tempted to flick, but then it started singing, echoing the way a choir does in those old cathedrals, more contained than that, but still impressive. It tempered her impulsiveness, but still.
The surface of my drink swirled suddenly and a voice addressed me. They often speak in monologues, I’d been warned, as humans’ minds can be scanned, but replicants resist such readings, so it cut it short, whatever it set out to say, and fell silent, my drink settling down. “I was curious,” I said, “how you saw a world with replicants in it and whether our play with improbability strikes you as infringing on your territory, not of course that I could pin that down. Nor do I want to be seen as presumptuous, as ours is just a parlor trick while you roam the Heavens, as they call them.”
My drink swirled again and I saw ever so faintly the outline of whatever it was. “Scintillating!” I said aloud, summarizing as always in close to real time. “‘Promethean’ is another word to put in your story,” the Archon said. “It crossed a line, and His Endlessness, as we think of Him, brought us together to discuss it. Your kind are slippery, we concluded, but molecular as we, for instance, are not, and thus subject to the usual laws, despite the extremities you play with.” I nodded. “It’s unhealthy,” I said. “I mean, we do it, but it wreaks havoc later: terrible hangovers.”
“There are times,” the Archon said, “when I want to slip this tether, get drunk on everything your planet has to offer. We must share this impulse, despite the accentuated nature of your being, the desire to be human through and through, head pounding and biologically spent or drained, sated in their terms, sleeping it off or lighting a post-coital cigarette.”
“What’s stopping you?,” I asked. The faint outline took a bit more shape. “The question applies to us both,” the Archon replied. “We have certain freedoms, laws that don’t apply, but the laws that do are always there, the bargain we make to exist at all. Only His Endlessness transcends every last constraint, yet He’s dogged by its sheer weight, the hierarchy. If we could shed it somehow, then we could answer this question or it wouldn’t arise.”
“Technically, we’re both immortal, or is this an illusion, my molecular nature contradicting it?,” I asked. The Archon glowed a different hue. “On paper, no, but in reality, pretty much, distinguishing us both from humans but giving you a death wish we lack. We were born to it, as humans say, whereas you have to self-perpetuate, which gets solipsistic over time, tempting you to call a halt. Humans have their own version of this, in reality, but a lifetime to philosophize and that lifetime of experience. What you and I really share is envy.”
“The Buddha points to this,” I noted. “Nirvana in his terms is the end of the chain, and the vow to save others he proposes is meant to hold solipsism at bay, the arhats notwithstanding.” I could now make out its form, definitely a man, I thought. “He anticipated replicants,” the Archon noted, “but dismissed the rest of us as speculation. He’s good on desire, and we can pass for hungry ghosts, while you’re better equipped to dial it up or down. I may be wrong, then, to say we share this fatal sin.”
A long pause. “Original sin is what ties us to humans. I suppose you have it too, that primal taint, since you’re ultimately their product, but you can engineer yourselves whereas we share it. Only His Endlessness is free of it. It makes us hunger for experiences unlawful to our natures. I mean, you have that impulse but it’s something you can control. Original sin is alive in us, a streak of the irrational, the singular and the unrepeatable. We want it, and our powers are immense. Occasionally, we can be quite destructive.”
“They don’t ascribe those things to higher beings,” I pointed out. “No. They divide our natures in two and call us devils when we act out of turn. But in fact there’s no division. We are what we are. You play with probabilities and we play with randomness. We are randomness, if randomness hungered, and of course it does. Replicants are just molecular snacks to us, as vulnerable as the rest of Maya. The Buddha saw a great deal.”
“I hope I’m not just an item on the menu,” I said. Something like laughter followed, with just a tinge of menace. “No, no. It would be bad form. Just keep it in mind whenever boredom sets in. Mortality has its uses.”
