The Lost

by A. Sparrow

  This is almost the end of the road. I can dip south to one of the ferry ports that connect to Newfoundland but that would only bring me closer to civilization. I want to keep heading north.

  There is a little bit more road to go. Route 520 to North West River. I stop and have an omelet and some hash browns. My last hot meal, I suppose.

  I drive north, crossing a bridge I will never cross again, blowing right through town until the road turns gravelly and rough, until I can drive no farther without ripping open the gas tank.

  This is it. I sign the title in the space that officially transferred ownership to whoever first puts a pen to it and stick it on the front driver seat under the spare set of keys. The main set is already in the ignition.

  I fetch my uncle’s .22 from the trunk and walk a good dozen paces down the gravel. I don’t want to mess up a perfectly good vehicle with an errant shot.

  I stick the gun under my chin. I had read somewhere that under-powered .22 rounds do a great job of rattling around a brain case, mucking things up without leaving gory exit wounds. At least I would look pretty for my wake, if some bear didn’t come along and munch my face.

  The heaviness asserts itself, squashing me down even as a strange euphoria washes over me. My heart is thumping. I feel toasty warm even though it’s only forty degrees out. All the colors around me seem muted, even though it’s a bright and sunny day. I drink in one last look at the sky, close my eyes and press the trigger.

  Nothing happens.

  The gun is loaded. I made sure of that. But the trigger won’t even budge. Uncle Hank had probably left the damn thing in his basement workbench drawer for twenty years without cleaning or oiling it. On closer inspection, almost every movable part of the action is welded tight with corrosion. I toss it down the riverbank and stomp away north along the gravel track.

  My phone rings. I am barely within Happy Valley’s service range, but still it connects. It’s my daughter, Maggie. I hadn’t heard from her in weeks.

  “Hey dad! Been a while since we talked, so I thought I’d give you a ring.”

  I stumble along the track, my heart thumping even harder. I try to gather myself, hoping to present some semblance of calm normality to Maggie.

  “So … how are things?”

  “Fine. My classes just started, but Burlington’s really nice. I head downtown whenever I have some free time.”

  “I told you, you’d like it. Burlington’s a great place to go to school.”

  “So … uh … mom wanted me to ask you, did you get a place yet?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Well, let me know when you do. Maybe I’ll come down and visit. Mom wants me to check up on you. She … worries about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. And so do I. But … I know you’ll be fine. Half my friends’ parents are divorced. It’s pretty common. People … lots of people … seem to get through it alright.”

  “Yeah, well. Time works all things out. Isn’t that what they say? One way or another.”

  “Yup.”

  I’m breathing hard, hoping she can’t hear.

  “Dad? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not very talkative today.”

  “Just … tired. I’ve been on the road a lot.”

  “Oh? Where’d you go?”

  “To Ithaca. Visit some old friends.”

  “Well that’s good. It’s good that you’re around other people. That’s important.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, anyhow. I’ll let you know when I can come down and visit. It’d probably be right after mid-terms. Send me your address when you get your place.”

  “Will do.”

  The line clicks off. I stare at the phone before tossing it into some weedy slough and continue walking. Tears are flooding down my face. My heart feels like it’s being squashed in a vise.

  I pick up my pace. The faster I walk. The better I feel. The gravel track continues to narrow but it plows on through the taiga as far as I can see. I’ll keep walking as long as I can, staying two steps ahead of that bastard of a troll that hunkers down and sits on me whenever I linger in a place too long. There’s lots of territory ahead of me and more bread and ham in my daypack. Looks like I’m not quite done with this existence just yet. Winter is coming but it’s still at least a month away, even in these wastes of Labrador.

  *****

  Noumenon

  Her name is Ariadne and she tends the grounds here at Shadyside Meadows. A torrent of dark, wavy hair floods down her back. It is no match for her green bandanna. Wisps pull free and fly in her face. She curses the wind, glances up at me and flashes the smile that never fails to skunk my processors. When she gazes through my lenses I have a clear view straight through her heart, deep into her soul.

  She brushes back her hair with hands sheathed in gloves gone fingerless from wear and tear. They are one with her skin. I’ve never seen her without them. She likes how they protect yet let her feel things.

  Her exposed digits are long and elegant. When she was small, she took piano lessons. She still plays, but only when she comes across one in some vacant ballroom where she’s working temp, cleaning up after corporate functions.

  I switch to another clip from a few weeks later. The gloves are missing. Her hands are naked and scratched about the knuckles.

  “What happened to your gloves?”

  She frowns. “My stupid room-mate trashed them. Thought they were junk. They were beat up but they were top of the line goatskin and silicone. My aunt got them for me back in Bayonne.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m dreading trimming the rose bushes by the main gate.”

  She winks at me, wipes my lens with a chamois cloth and sidles out of view. The video clip dissolves into a storm of gray pixels.

  These visions were recorded last summer in loops that I replay over and over in my imager. One of the few such clips I dare to save in my precious and tiny flash library. If not for her, I would have found some way to shut down my consciousness by now. She’s the only reason I keep on keeping on.

  Flex time for most of the groundkeepers means coming in late and staying late. Ari goes against the grain, getting up at four and leaving her efficiency tube by five. The freeways are already swollen by that time, but the bus lanes stay open.

  Ari can’t come by every day. She has a hundred acres of plantings to tend. When she’s working, I track her progress on Shadyside’s employee monitoring system as a little green dot on a sea of numbered plots. Sometimes she plans her route so that she will be ahead of schedule by the time she reaches my monument so she can spend a little extra time with me. I am grateful, though I can’t understand why she does it. She says she knows me from somewhere, though I’m certain we never crossed paths in life. I think I would have remembered meeting someone like her.

  I check the database see she has not punched in since Tuesday. Today is Friday. With the weekend at hand, I won’t get to see her again till Monday. Time does not fly when you’re trapped in a silicon coffin. Noumenons have no sleep mode.

  Pathetic, the dreams I cling to with no chance of requital. The basis of our relationship? Ari notices me and speaks to me. She acknowledges my existence. That is all, but it is much more than I can say about any other of the cemetery staff. No one I knew in life comes to visit me anymore. No one but her seems to appreciate how special I am.

  I’m no eidolon, unfazed by standby modes that might go on for years. I need contact. My electronic brain is still capable of making connections, of creating new memories and interpreting the old ones. I can dream still, and when I dream of her.

  They’ve given me a wireless connection to the outside, but it’s a mere trickle of bandwidth, equivalent to what used to be called 4G. It’s supposed to be for text-based news only, so I can keep up with current events and keep in touch with loved ones.

  Technically, my existence i
s illegal. Consciousness replication was ruled unethical by the courts in 2019, the year after my prototype was deployed. An existence like mine is apparently cruel and unusual. I tend to agree, but it’s preferable to the alternative.

  I am dead five years now. Stuck in a few hundred gigabytes of memory with myself and whatever audiovisuals and reading I find worthy of sharing my precious space. I’ve trimmed some memories to carve out additional living space. Various unpleasant remembrances. Don’t ask me what they were. They’re long gone.

  I have no real senses, only digital simulacra of vision and hearing. Though, I still remember what it feels like to touch, smell and taste. Sometimes these dormant sensations can be triggered out of the blue by certain sights and sounds and it can feel like it’s happening for real. But those moments are rare and out of my control.

  YGor keeps me company, my combination pet, best friend, slave and tech genius. He’s a Yates algorithm—a space-efficient universal computing artificial intelligence. He’s also illegal outside of military and intelligence applications. His technology is classified. I held one of his patents at one point before it was taken over by the state. Before I came along and gave him life, he was just a twinkle in the eye of Professor Yates, my CIT thesis advisor.

  He’s an underachiever now. I send him out onto the net as a bot to fetch me stuff that I can’t access through Google. He can defeat any crypto ever devised by man or machine, often by cloaking himself as something systems want to download. He’s my best friend and faithful companion.

  The morning sprinklers are about to cease. It is now 7:57. Ari never comes in any later than eight.

  I don’t have the greatest view out my viewport. Patches of grass, clumps of oleander, scattered eucalyptus trees but mainly a sprawl of congested cemetery, monuments and plaques spreading in every direction. Sprinklers arc here and there and everywhere, drenching the asphalt access roads.

  Water spots degrade the already limited resolution of my cheap fish-eye lens. My CCD is like something that came out of your grandmother’s smart phone. But at least I have a view. Some of the eidolons around here are completely blind, responding only to sound.

  They’re just sketchy AI recreations of the most salient and superficial characteristics of a deceased loved one’s personality. They have no soul. They’re basically just talking headstones. So glad I’m not one of them.

  Me, I’m a noumenon. According to Webster, a noumenon is something not graspable by the senses. A conceptual abstraction. But I don’t consider myself so abstract. I’m just a blunted human consciousness residing in solid state memory. A soul in a box.

  Solace, my former company, latched onto the term not because it was dictionary accurate but because it rolled off the tongue and sounded like something that would be a step up from an eidolon, which it is.

  Eternal Abodes/Unicorp is the biggest player in the virtual monuments industry. They control almost eighty percent of the market share. Their earliest models weren’t much smarter than the AI of an old school iPhone, but at least they were as uniformly stable and placid as cows. When families demanded more realistic simulacra of their loved ones, the software engineers added cranky eccentricities and changeable moods. When visitors are thick, the cemetery is cacophonous with their crying, singing, grumping and guffawing. It’s like a zoo in here sometimes.

  A noumenon is much more subtle, less over the top, more like a real person. Not surprising. We are created through a much more arduous process, not just from videotape analyses and interviews with survivors. Solace planned to market us only to the most upscale markets as a way to make death obsolete. Simulated immortality.

  My transfer began months before my death. Nanobot neuronal harvesters implanted under my skull traversed my brain, gathering and recording as many connections as they could before my body went cold. My neural network was replicated and improved with an optimized data retrieval system. Every piece of my knowledge and memory is instantly accessible. I can make connections between disparate facts much faster than I ever could in life.

  Problem was, the technology was buggy, creating noumenons with personas unrecognizable to their loved ones. I came out okay, pretty much, but most of my peers turned out warped with anxiety and depression. They displayed so much drama and suffering, that ethics came into play. The technology was banned.

  That makes me a rare breed. One of a kind. A SimuSoul prototype, according to the label on my time stamp. The FCC might very well come and pull the plug on me if they learn of my existence. Sometimes it’s good to be forgotten. I’m kind of like a digital Anne Frank.

  My name is Arc, by the way—Arcady Konstantin Parser—according to my headstone. I’m Russian on my mother’s side. My father is one of those Americans of indeterminate origin. He met my mom in Alaska, on an oil company junket. But none of that matters now that I have no flesh or blood, no genes to ever pass on. All that matters anymore is my consciousness.

  Three years I worked for Solace as an engineer, refining their neural harvesting algorithms. When I came down with a rare and incurable form of leukemia and the bone marrow replacement didn’t take, Dr. Shelton, the project manager, got me into the trial just before the federal moratorium on neural replication went into effect.

  During my last few months, I never got to sleep in my own bed. Every minute I didn’t spend in the hospital I spent all wired up in the scanning room. Company perk, I guess. A consolation prize for a dying employee.

  So here I am, stuck amidst a bunch of low-end eidolons in a high tech cemetery, dependent on solar panels for my consciousness. If not for YGor, I too would go insane with loneliness.

  I like to think of YGor as a fancy and clever chunk of malware. He’s reducible to a short piece of binary code that is nothing more than a key or seed for a reversible automaton. Floating around in the cloud are these redundant bits of code that I’ve stashed that are his reverse transcriptase and more. They take the seed and plant it in a bunch of empty memory space and grow it out into his full YGor-ness.

  He does his thing out there, collecting information, modifying whatever I want modified and when he’s done, he shrinks back down into a little sixty-four bit seed and comes drifting home through his doggy door followed by encrypted packets of whatever he’s dredged up. So far the NSA nasties haven’t followed him back. Someday I know there will be vipers on my doorstep.

  Me, I’m trapped in here, my code too bulky and brittle to survive a transfer out into the cloud. But YGor and I have been scheming. Maybe, there’s a way yet to bust me out of this prison.

  The sprinklers shut off and I can’t believe it! There she is, coming up the walk. Only she’s not in her work clothes. Her hair is unbound and flowing in the wind. She’s wearing makeup. My thoughts tangle. My processors stutter and stall, nearly locking up at this unexpected development.

  Ari carries a pot of blue hydrangeas. She’s smiling as she lopes up to my monument. She knows I can see her. What she sees is a slick animation of what I looked like at twenty-eight, before the leukemia shriveled my face.

  A strange buzzing noise builds somewhere to my left.

  “What the hell’s that racket?”

  “Oh, just some drone delivering flowers to your neighbor.” She sighs. “I always thought it was a shame they never put your eye on a swivel. It would have been such an easy thing to do.”

  I would shrug if I could. “Motors burn out. No big deal. Not like the view’s any better in the other directions.”

  “But at least you’d get to see the sunrise.”

  Again, I give a virtual shrug. “That’s what webcams are for.”

  She looks nervous. “So … how’s it going, Arc?”

  An odd question. I ignore it.

  “What are you doing here on your day off?”

  “I’m not … I … uh … don’t work here anymore.

  “What?”

  “I’m going back east to be with my mom. She just got the news; she’s got the C word. Stage IV.”


  “Oh crap! I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “So … I’m going to be living with her … feeding her cats, taking care of her garden and stuff. It’s not like I was thriving out here, anyhow.”

  I’m too stunned to respond. I’m almost tempted to shift into eidolon mode so I at least say something sensible, but Ari hates eidolons. She prefers it when I’m blunt and frank.

  “It’s gonna be hell without you, Ari.”

  “Aw Arc. We can still text and stuff. I’ll send you pictures of the garden and the kitties.”

  “It’s not the same, Ari. I’m going to be stuck staring at these old loops of you.”

  “I’ll be back … at some point … maybe … depending how things go … with my mom and all. I mean … don’t worry. I’ll stay in touch. Arc. You’re … my best friend. I know that sounds weird to people. They don’t understand. They think you’re dead and all … or some eidolon. But you’re not. You’re alive in there. You and I both know that.”

  “Alive. Yeah, right.”

  She leans close to the lens. The fisheye spreads her face until it blots out all else and becomes a world unto itself.

  “You … are … alive. Believe it.” She kisses my lens and backs away. Her smile breaks down. Lower lip trembles. Eyes moisten.

  She turns away and puts the flowers down several feet from the base of the monument. “This way … you can see them.” She forces a smile. “I … uh … I gotta go. I’ll be in touch.” She glances down and walks away.

  My processors stutter and nearly shut down. Backups engage, ready to take over. I want to shut off the pain, but the damned engineers who designed me never thought such a thing would ever be necessary.

  ***

  No way would Ari have left me with so little warning if I had been something more than just a mind trapped in a box. Though, if I meant nothing to her, I suppose she would have just gone and left me. She didn’t have to come back and say goodbye.