A picture of a Successor: two round toothed feet bracket the mouth, which is under gills and pair of eyes, oriented one over the other. The body above the eyes is broad like the mantel of a squid. At the top of the body there is a pair of tentacles. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/0b018c5e22ea13b1272de924a8193f87/43758fc90ad8985c-4b/s2048x3072/680713296b3924db14032b2a71095de056115d6c.pnj]
Picture by Tim Morris
Almost all the earths in the multiverse have at least one thing in common; they are oblate spheroids illuminated by the star Sol.1 This being the case, most sophonts are familiar with the concept of the "time zone." It should come therefor as no surprise to anyone that while Laura was having her excruciating conversation with the Tensor dentist in a small accelerator port in the Quotidians' version of Asia, Mark was waking up in the UN embassy.
An hour before the all-hands meeting, Mark spent an hour in his bathroom beating himself. He focused his attention on his chest and belly (places whose bruises he could hide under his clothes) punching, pinching, and scratching.
"Do it," he whispered with each blow. "Do it. Do it!"
He couldn't scream. He'd used to, but that had attracted attention from the neighbors. A pillow over his mouth had stopped that problem, but then he'd screamed himself hoarse and hadn't been able to talk for a day. He'd claimed a flu, but he couldn't do that again. And this whispering to himself was better in a way. More intense.
"Go, go, go!"
Mark drove himself from his bathroom and into his kitchen. It was spotless, as it had to be. There were cameras in this room, and Yoshida's cleaning robots were certainly bugged. All information had to go though Steiner before it went to Earth. Mark thought he had her under control, but that control depended on the sysadmin not being disgusted with how Mark kept his apartment.
Today's meeting was his shot. High level strategy. And he'd be there. Someone Mark's age would never be invited to a meeting like this on the human Earth, but on the human Earth there were more than nine humans.2
It was bad luck that Laura wasn't here, Mark thought as his apartment door bleeped shut behind him. He had a better handle on her than on Ambassador Li. Most of Mark's barbs rolled off the man, either because he was older and more cunning than his assistant, or because he was less quick on the uptake.
But Mark knew a few things. Li enjoyed telling Mark what to do, both because it was proper for the old to mentor the young, and because it felt good to humiliate America. The man needed every point he could accumulate, because while he was stuck here in the embassy, the political ground in Beijing continued to shift. What would be left of Li's position when his tenure was over?
That common thread of anxiety and shame ran through almost everyone in the Embassy. Either they were the most powerful humans in the multiverse (because they were closest to the nonhumans), or they were proud of their species (and sidelined from the real corridors of power back on home Earth.) You were either humble and strong or proud and weak. It should have been an easy choice.
Mark's plans and fears whirled in a vortex of what might be called stable anxiety. It drove down the hall and into the conference room.
***
The United Nations Embassy to the Convention of Sophonts consisted of a cluster of metal shipping containers, bolted together, insulated with foam, and trussed together in the boughs of a half-natural mangrove tree, now nearing its tenth anniversary.3
With Laura off picking up Koen, the Embassy currently held 4/5 of the total human population on Quotidia. They were all in the meeting room.
Meeting lack-of-room. There was barely space for eight people around the wide, blonde-wood table. The institutional gray walls held a large digital whiteboard and pictures of the current leaders of the UN Security Council members (plus Somalia and Japan). The ficus plant in the corner near the window had died. The window itself had a curtain over it to hide the squirming view of the city outside.
Mark had managed to arrive neither too late not too early. He seated himself at the corner of the table where Laura usually sat, smiling and nodding and thinking about the divisions between the people already there.
Consul Qani Mohamed Ahmed was friendly with Ambassador Li (they both liked to eat), and Deputy Chief Said Farrokh Wilson Chadwell was cold to them both. Defense Attaché Antonieta Severo seemed to think the UN Embassy and everyone in it, including herself, was a joke. Dr. Tejaswini Kaliannan played the jolly uncle, but kept his real opinions to himself. Maybe he knew better than to have any public opinion of his Chinese boss, or maybe the doctor really only cared about healing people. Certainly, Science Attaché Nelly Steiner and Management Consul Yoshida Fumihide ignored everything but their computers and robots. That made them valuable pawns.
Mark reached for his glass of water and found it missing. Laura wasn't here to arrange the meeting room ahead of time. Which meant the task would fall to…
A small frisson. The task might well fall to Mark. But since he had obviously not brought the water or the coffee, it couldn't be his job. And Chadwell was already looking at him.
Mark leaned across the table toward Steiner. She was peering into her laptop and didn't catch his eye. He cleared his throat and said, "Steiner, did Laura leave a message with you about the refreshments?"
Steiner was looking into her laptop, but her translator beeped at her until she said, "non."
"No," said Mark's translator.
"Would you mind getting them? You're closer to the door." It was always good to have a reason for a request.
"I'm busy."
Mark didn't press. At this point, he could get up and do the task, and everyone would think he was the gracious one and Steiner was the fuckup. But he was on the wrong side of the table, and Yoshida was watching. Mark gave the old man a half smile.
"You got a robot that can deliver water? And coffee."
Yoshida laughed and shook his head. "Not yet. Not made by humans. Don't worry. Leave the job to me."
He rose and slid out of the door, bowing past Ambassador Li.
Mark stood and bowed as well as the ambassador entered and took his place at the table's head (back to the window).
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They exchanged good-mornings and explanations and apologies about the coffee. Yes, Laura was efficient, wasn't she. The Embassy ground to a halt without her. Soon they'd have someone making real food, though. That famous Dutch coffee.
"Dutch chocolate," said Steiner, and the Ambassador inclined his head at her.
Yoshida bowed his way back into the room, followed by, indeed, a cleaning robot with a tray balanced on its top. More thank yous and polite nothings.
"Now, to business," said Ambassador Li eventually, holding up his tablet. "Strategy. Long-term human/nonhuman relations. In keeping with the informal nature of this posting, I shall be blunt. My predecessors have worked with diligence and courage for the benefit of all humanity. However, we who stand on their shoulders can do more. In nine years, this embassy has managed to organize an export of timber, an import of energy, and waste storage services. What more can we do?"
"My suggestion is always other bio-products," said Chadwell. He was a tall, thin, bald man with spidery fingers, which he flared now. "Chocolate, coffee, tea."
"Chocolate again," said Li. "I would like to see more ambition from this embassy."
"I agree," said Ahmed, "with respect to Mr. Chadwell, this isn't the 14th century. We don't have to sell our spices in exchange for glass beads."
"I take it you want manufacturing jobs?" asked Chadwell. "Something better than those Christmas decorations for the Monumentals, I hope?"
Mark worked to suppress a flare of irritation. Where had Chadwell been while Digeridoo was devouring the contents of the fish tank?
"Manufacturing is the best way to build up a technological base quickly," Li informed them all. "Why are we not making more progress on this?"
"We're too primitive," said Steiner, who had decided it would be a good idea to take the rhetorical question for a real one and skip over several more useless items on the meeting agenda.
"Oh. You, uh, have the presentation I asked for?" Li asked the Technology Attaché.
She shrugged. "It doesn't need a presentation. As far as the Convention is concerned, our Earth has no manufacturing infrastructure. The Convention state of the art is to grow machinery in space from self-replicating machinery and organics, then transfer it to the surface with accelerators built in a version of the solar system where the earth was…" she checked her notes, "…demolished."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," said Chadwell with a smile that communicated his irritation.
"They build stuff better than us," said Steiner. "We can't compete."
"We could always put on funny costumes and dance for them," said Severo.
Mark was distracted by her for a moment. All that blonde hair. But the uncomfortable silence that followed the Defense Attaché's joke was long enough for his brain to start working again. There was an idea there.
"Like tourism?" he asked.
Li, Ahmed, and Chadwell all grimaced. They had all already explained the many reasons why opening their Earth to nonhuman tourism in their home countries was not, at this time, a viable strategy.
The real reason Li, Ahmed, and Chadwell consistently vetoed tourism was because each of them had been told to. Their respective governments all had secrets that they did not want exposed to nonhuman scrutiny. The Convention had a charter outlining basic universal rights for sophonts, and it did occasionally enforce them.
"You can't depend on tourism," said Ahmed.
Yoshida raised his hand. "If I may, my belief is that our technology will catch up."
"We're already making enormous leaps based on what we've learned from what is publicly available in nonhuman textbooks," said Steiner.
"Only the fact that we know metal hydride recycling is possible…" said Yoshida.4
Mark waited for either of the techs to mention the Monumentals' pyramids again. Maybe their manufacturing process might teach humanity valuable new techniques. And even if it didn't, the techs should say so, because that deal had been Ambassador Li's idea in the first place.
But neither Steiner nor Yoshida mentioned the toy pyramids. Li looked at them coldly. "We are members of a proud species, not servants knocking our foreheads on the factory floor."
"We cannot allow our relationship with the nonhumans to become any more extractative than it already is," Ahmed insisted. She was as short and round as Chadwell was tall and skinny, wrapped head to toe in folds of luxurious blue silk. Mark feared her eyes, which made him feel hollow.
"For example," she said. "I would like to see that LiBor being manufactured and recharged on Earth."
Chadwell leaned back in his chair and spread his piano-player's hands. "So would I, but what's the alternative? We can't compete technologically without the money to buy technology."
Ambassador Li gave a grave frown. "Under my leadership, competitiveness and money are not this embassy's highest priorities."
"Then what are?" Chadwell fired back.
Mark felt like hiding. Things never got this heated when Laura was around. Or wandered this far from the agenda.
"Our priority is esteem," said the ambassador. "Every nonhuman must give us the respect we deserve."
Severo giggled. "You mean, 'none at all?'"
Chadwell rolled his eyes and Mark decided he had to speak before things got worse.
He didn't know what exactly to say, but that wasn't a problem. Just repeat the last thing with different words.
"Soft power?"
They all looked at him. Mark welcomed the sensation of his heart speeding up. Some people skydived, others spoke up at meetings that decided the future of their species.
"We export human culture," he said. "We show the nonhumans…" not 'what we're made of.' That teed up an obvious joke for Severo "…what beautiful things we can make."
They were listening. Mark forged ahead. "Soft power isn't just tourism. It's videos, music, even dance."
"I knew we would come back to dance eventually," said Severo.
But the rest of them ignored her. Their attention was focused on Mark, warm with approval. He basked. "Soft power isn't hard to transport, it's respectful, and it isn't extractative."
Ahmed snorted. "Exporting culture is respectful? I've eaten American pizza.
Everyone laughed, including Mark, who had uncles who ran pizza parlors in Boston. At least, he appeared to laugh. It would be more accurate to say that breathed rapidly through stretched lips while suffering an intense and blinding flare of rage.
His nostrils, pupils, and skin capillaries dilated, very much as if Mark were in terror, or in love.
Except that in this case his orbitofrontal cortex was also activated. It kept Mark smiling as his anterior cingulate cortex demanded do something.5 Anything!
How dare Ahmed. How. Fucking. Dare she?
1 The exception is a very convenient solar system occupied by the Tensors, whose earth was demolished.
2 At this precise point in time, Koen's precise position was inherently uncertain, so he doesn't count.
3 Here "mangrove" should be understood as a description, not a taxonomy. The tree-shaped organism was actually a kind of hardened jellyfish.
4 This is why humans weren't using lithium borohydride to store energy before the Swiss Signal. They couldn't recharge it.
5 Frederike Beyer, et al. Orbitofrontal Cortex Reactivity to Angry Facial Expression in a Social Interaction Correlates with Aggressive Behavior, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 25, Issue 9, September 2015, Pages 3057–3063. DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhu101