A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  “You did fine, Pops. I have no regrets. Neither should you.”

  “Well ….” But there was no point bemoaning the issue. “Thank you.”

  “Then what’s next in this bizarre affair you’ve dragged me into? Are we stuck out here or can Lovely Pebble get the navigation system working again.”

  “I can get it working well enough to get you back home to your family but we have a more immediate problem first. What would you like as compensation for your trouble—which has turned out to be considerable?”

  I explained the payment system and how it was ingrained into the virtual world to help keep darker forces from taking it over. Jimmy sat back down and thought. Eventually he arrived at the same point I had. “I don’t even know what to ask for. Can you give me a suggestion of something that would keep your books straight?”

  “I understand you’re an engineer. Would you like an upgraded mathematical ability?”

  Jimmy brightened immediately. “You can do that? I love math. I’ve just never been able to get past the minimum required for an engineering degree. I would really enjoy following the work being done on string theory or prime numbers—Reimann’s Hypothesis with the Zeta function has eluded me for years. I know there’s a hidden world out there beyond calculus. A world, so far, inaccessible to me.”

  “Excellent. That should work out for both of us,” Ell said.

  A moment later Jimmy jumped up again, ramrod straight. “Wow! I see it now. How was I missing it before? How’d you do that?”

  “It wasn’t hard. The glider now has a well-defined map of the human brain after uploading your father. It just had to download a smidgen of neural changes to open up your mathematical capabilities. It took only milliseconds.”

  Jimmy stood looking into the distance, obviously enthralled. I finally pulled him from his reveries. “You can work on the Zeta function later, James. We’ve got to get you back to Earth in your own time and make the necessary adjustments so you’re not implicated in what happened at the crater. Maybe you can use some of that new brain power to help Ell recalibrate the nav system.” I knew she didn’t need any help, but I always hated to see people just standing around.

  Chapter 9

  The glider finally determined from the offset of expected star positions that we were about 150 years in the past. On the next jump the glider picked up radio signals again. Those indicated we were still a few years back. The jump across space, however, was still off by nearly twenty percent.

  Ell shook her head. “I need to run a calibration routine on both the spatial and temporal jump actuators. Something’s clearly not right. But the glider has a built in safety return that can get us back to the exact place and time we left on the last saved hop. That would be just above the crater in your front yard.”

  “Well, how about this,” I suggested. “We just go back and let the glider sort through their camera equipment to wipe out any images of the chopper’s tail number. Right after that we drop James and the helicopter at the office.”

  “Won’t that NEST team see the glider when you go back?” Jimmy asked.

  “That’s not a problem. She can cloud men’s minds.” Jimmy stared blankly at me. “You know. Like Lamont Cranston.” Jimmy frowned. “The Shadow?” He looked even more confused. “Never mind. Before your time. You can see and hear both of us now because the glider puts our images into your nervous system. Neither of us is material, though. The glider uses the same trick when it doesn’t want to be seen in the real world—which is where it lives …”

  “This thing is alive?”

  “I’m conscious and living in its circuitry so I’m guessing it must have consciousness, too, if it can host consciousness.” I glanced at Ell who nodded. “Anyway, the team will see something perfectly normal instead of the glider.”

  Jimmy looked at Ell. “You can actually do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then how did they see us at the bottom of the crater?”

  “They caught me in a moment of inattention,” Ell said. “I knew there was a high probably of the NEST team returning but I was distracted by the wonderful possibility of getting my glider fixed. Live and learn as you humans say. So now I’ve screwed up twice on this mission. Left the glider door open and let the NEST team sneak up on us. I don’t know what’s become of me. I’ll have a lot of explaining to do when I get back.”

  It took Ell about five minutes to wipe the NEST team’s camera records, and get Jimmy and the helicopter back to the office landing pad. Meanwhile the NEST team was left to discuss the strange cloud that had descended over them only to vanish a moment later in a ground shaking crash of thunder to leave them kicking at the dirt where there had been only moments before a yawning crater.

  Chapter 10

  So much for my plans for killing myself. Instead of being dead, I was now immortal in Ell’s virtual world. And it was a world beyond anything I had ever imagined. Peaceful. Beautiful. Stimulating. One evening Ell and I were hanging out over the mountain’s edge in the still-warm air on one of my home’s cantilevered red, stone terraces. We had just returned from a virtual exploration of the stored ruins of a lost civilization that had abandoned its home planet for some reason, and I was introducing her to wine as the day’s warmth radiated out of the stone. I wasn’t quite sure the glider knew how to handle the neurological effect of the alcohol, though. It had produced a collection of various wines from my memory and even gotten the body and bouquet right. But I wondered if Ell tasted the same thing I tasted. It was an age-old conundrum. Do others see the color red as you do, or do they see it as green or blue? When I brought it up, Ell solved the problem immediately by adopting my input signals for herself for a few seconds.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “You are a sly dog. Is that the effect my image has on the human male? No wonder you told me to get rid of the clown suit.” She looked horrified. “I feel so violated.”

  “Ah, you’ve finally caught me. Not mad are you?”

  “Ha. Gotcha. Why would I care? I never looked like this to begin with.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think the wine was having the intended effect on you.”

  “What on earth are you droning on about?”

  Was the glider able to rifle through my memories and use the material there to degrade Ell’s presence of mind as though she had become a little tipsy? I noticed my own reaction to the illusory liquid. I did actually feel its effect now. Perhaps the glider was figuring it out as it went along. Maybe this virtual existence was closer to reality than I had realized. But my thoughts were interrupted as Ell climbed into my lap.

  “Relax, Cager. You’re tense as Schrodinger’s cat in a cyanide factory. You’re a crewmember on the glider now. Crew share everything. And I’ve never interfaced with a virtual human before. I never even suspected something like this existed. There are some real possibilities here for high quality mission diversions.”

  ***

  I spent the better part of three months with Ell. It was bliss. For the first two months. Then a vague sense of unease began to seep into my psyche. Nothing concrete. Just an uncomfortable feeling something was missing. One day I decided to learn the piano. The glider scanned through my memories and refurbished some virtual neural pathways in the music area. When I checked, a music room complete with a grand piano had appeared as an addition to my home. I sat down and played several pieces from memory as well as any real-world concert pianist could have. But, on reflection, not requiring years of practice didn’t exactly seem to be my unnamed disquiet. It was merely a benefit of this paradise. The uneasiness was deeper, more subtle and it would take me decades before I realized just what it was.

  But whatever gnawed at me came to a head as I woke up next to Ell one morning. There was a thing that needed to be undone. And I was pretty sure I was now in a position to undo it. I lay there for a time considering what I was about to say.

  When I looked over at Ell her blue eyes were regarding me from less than
a foot away. “You look pensive, Cager. Have a strange dream?”

  “Morning, Ell. No, more like a bad memory.”

  She sat up in the morning sunlight and I almost forgot about my plan. It was madness to leave such a creature. Such a world. But then I had already proven myself flawed in judgment. I had had a good life in the real world and had been within minutes of jettisoning it in a final act of capitulation to all my little failures, real and imagined. Now I was about to do it again and I hardly understood it myself. How could I explain it to Ell.

  “We can fix that,” she said with a sly smile. And for a time the discontent faded into the background of my magnificent, new world.

  The following week found us once again on one of the terraces sipping after-dinner wine and watching the sun fade to evening ember when I finally just blurted it out.

  “I want to be downloaded again.”

  “What?”

  “I want to go back.”

  Ell drew back in disbelief. “You’re not making sense, Cager. Downloaded to what? Back to where? And to what purpose?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for days. Ever since you were about to upload me from my dying body. It was my last thought in the real world. I want to go back and be ten years old again but I want to have all of my current knowledge when I go.”

  “I can’t do that, Cager.”

  “You can’t download me back into human form? Real human form?”

  “Oh, I could arrange that. Theoretically. I’m just not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re talking about replacing yourself at age ten. The glider won’t let me leave you there with your original self. The only other option would be destroying the ten-year-old you. I can’t do that either. Think about it. My god, Cager. Now you’re talking about killing yourself when you were a boy.”

  “No. You aren’t listening. I don’t want to kill myself.”

  “Well, at least we’re over that hurdle.” Then after a moment’s reflection she added, “Okay, I see where you’re headed with this. The ten-year-old is you.” She considered that for a moment. “It’s permitted to backload to yourself at an earlier time. That has always been considered a short-term recovery when a database got corrupted. But that was back in the early days of virtual existence. There is never a need for it today though the capability still exists and is allowed since it doesn’t undermine security or end lives.”

  “Then you can arrange it?”

  Ell was silent for the length of a sigh. “I can’t stay around here forever, Cager. The glider won’t let me go rogue. It will return to its docking port after it recharges whether I tell it to or not. And it’s in recharge mode right now. It lost a lot of reserve power during the time it was broken. The crater business alone used up most of its stored energy. But its accumulators will be fully charged in another few days. That gives us a little more time together to work out these issues.”

  “Issues?”

  Ell drew in a virtual breath for effect. “Well, yes. Like convincing you this is where you belong, for one.” She tightened the corner of her mouth. “I can’t figure out why you would want to leave all this to go back to a real body. Is it just a delayed version of your desire to kill yourself the night we met? Because going back is permanent. I’m sure I won’t be trusted to operate a glider after this trip. That means I’ll never see you again. I don’t think you fully comprehend what your going back to the real world means.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it means everything will be different this time around. Jimmy will never be born even if Barbara and I get married. In fact a lot of people who were born after I was ten won’t be born. But others who were never born will get a chance in their place. It’s no different than the first time through. Every action a person takes affects those not yet born. I understand that. Reality is indifferent. It changes course at the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. It doesn’t care who gets born and who doesn’t. Who lives and who dies. But I do.”

  “But what do you hope to change?”

  “Just one thing. After that I don’t care what happens.”

  “You’re starting to worry me now. What thing is so worth changing that you will give up all of this?” Ell asked waving a delicate arm around the vast world laid out before us. “And you will be giving up your own son’s existence if you go back. Everything will change no matter how careful you are. Everything. You can’t stop it. And in the end you’ll die.”

  “I know. But I can’t continue on here either now that I know there’s a way to set something right again.”

  Ell and I spent the following days together working out the details. For all the differences of two separate species from half a galaxy and millions of years apart, we became as close as any humans I ever knew. I think she could detect the deep sadness in me at the thought of leaving her. We were now more than just friends; a situation made possible only by the projection abilities of her virtual world. Yet the vast difference between Ell and me was brought home when she asked me to visit her own virtual habitat with her before I left. We stayed in our human projections at her insistence, but her world hinted at the utterly alien divide between us. She lived in a dismal swamp filled with rotting carcasses of creatures from a nightmare. I couldn’t even imagine the purpose of some of the appendages I saw on what was obviously partially eaten carrion. When I asked where her home was she said, “You’re in it.”

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  “We didn’t have houses. We were semiaquatic. Air breathing but too heavy to move about on land. We lived along the water’s edge. Some of us in the small seas of our planet. Others like me in the vast swamps that covered most of the land area.”

  “You need fire to start a technology. I don’t see how fire could have played a role here.”

  “It didn’t. We had no technology. But we had large brains. And, much like your whales, we lived a long time. We were thinkers. Mathematicians for the most part. We didn’t go out and find the rest of the galaxy. The rest of the galaxy eventually found us.”

  “But without technology you had no books. How did you pass all that mathematical knowledge on to the next generation?”

  “We reproduced asexually by budding from an ovary-like structure tied closely to our neural system. The offspring stayed inside of us tied in to our nervous system to absorb what we knew. Once they broke free, they were passed around to others. They rode on their backs fastened by neural ties and learned what the others knew. Living like that we developed mathematics far beyond anything other known cultures had. We changed everything once we were discovered by the technological civilizations already established in our sector of the galactic arm. We had much to offer and agreed to be uploaded. Our mathematics made time travel possible and we have been with them ever since.”

  “Then I take it you’re a copy.”

  “You mean compared to how we uploaded you? Yes. My real self died long, long ago. I’m only its memories evolved into a citizen of the virtual world. Though I may be a copy, I’m still as real as you. It’s just that you were uploaded differently. The end result in this virtual world is the same, though. And I still like my home here when I revisit my original real-world form. Old memories are hard to shed. They are who we are. And all memories, true or false, are equally real.”

  I stood admiring Ell for a long time. She seemed to have no problem being human. At least in projected form. I wondered how she liked that. “Suppose I took on your form. Would I be comfortable here with you?”

  “No.”

  “You seem pretty sure.”

  “I am. You’re from a technological race. Your distant ancestors left the swamps hundreds of millions of years ago and you have since changed the world around you to suit your needs. It’s clean and neat. And I kind of like it. But it doesn’t work the other way around. While a pig can live quite comfortably with humans, humans can’t live comfortably with pigs. The comfort factor only works in one direction. The direction wit
h the least muck.”

  Then the glider notified us it was approaching full charge.

  It was Ell’s turn to study me for a long moment. “You’re still planning on leaving aren’t you?”

  I took her hand and we waded out into the mire and sat there for a time listening to the burblings and thumpings of swamp creatures large and small.

  “I have to go. If things weren’t what they are, I would stay here with you forever. But I have to set something straight now that I have the chance.”

  “Then we need to act quickly. The glider will be compelled to return home in another few days and I still have a lot of recalibration to do on the navigation system. But thanks to you and Jimmy I’m out of the bind I let myself get into.”

  “I can stay a while longer and help you with that.”

  “No. It’s just a matter of plotting out the differences between the response of the original rod and the rebuilt rod.” Ell looked rather abruptly up into the tangle of vines that canopied the swamp and added, “I can do it alone.”

  Chapter 11

  The glider hung over the house most of the night, its faint, bluish glow enveloping the roofline and surrounding trees. During the download I maintained my former awareness of all the glider’s actions and perceptions. The house remained quiet. Only Fred, the family cat, noticed anything unusual, but after a few minutes he tucked his head under a sofa cushion and went back to sleep.

  The ten-year-old me was also aware of the transfer but thought it was a dream. I watched my consciousness peel away bit by bit from the virtual world as my biological neurons fired at near epileptic frequency absorbing the new memories. I was aware of it all, the download, the surroundings, everything except for one lone eye watching with great interest from across the river.

  It took six hours to complete, and at the end, Ell leaned across that unfathomable divide that would now separate us forever and kissed me.