Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  And . . . how foolish, how parochial, to imagine this panoply of life and mind and civilization arrayed across four-dimensional space-time alone! Dimensions and levels and places with no easy name were stacked one atop the other in labyrinthine profusion and complexity, the one unfolding into the next in nested series, with life and intelligence and metaconsciousness spreading richly through each . . .

  And . . . even more. All life, all mind, all intelligence was interconnected in myriad ways, on myriad levels. Mind sought out mind, reaching across time, across whole universes, rescuing personality and thought from final oblivion, joining with it in vast and glittering gestalts of . . .

  Kevyn lay on her back, blinking at the swirling lights and shapes above her. For a moment, she could neither move nor speak. The memories that had just flooded her consciousness were already fading, evaporating as she struggled to cling to them. For an instant, for a dazzling instant, she’d known . . .

  Carefully, she sat up, her head spinning. She heard a low moan behind her and turned. Jon had crumpled to the floor, his back up against the extruded seat.

  “Jon? What is it? Are you okay?”

  Jon was curling up tight, knees to his chest, his eyes wide as he stared at and through the flickering, interpenetrating shapes around them. Rising, she moved closer, dropping to her knees and taking his hand. He continued to stare past her, unseeing. As she lowered her shields, she felt his terror once again, horribly magnified. He appeared to be in deep shock. His skin was clammy and moist, his breathing shallow.

  “Damn it, don’t lose it now,” she told him. “Snap out of it!”

  “Make it stop,” he said, whimpering, clutching at her hands. “Make it stop . . .!”

  His thoughts were circling, locked into narrow paths, unable to break free. He must have been hit by the same cascade of mental imagery that Kevyn had experienced, but somehow he’d not been able to ride it out as Kevyn had.

  He was more rigid than she, less adaptable, more anxious and controlling. Telepaths were trained to be flexible, to be accepting, to allow unfamiliar thoughts and images to wash through them without judging, blocking, or rejecting them. Perhaps Jon had fought the avalanche of images . . . and been broken.

  “Help us!” she cried out, looking up at the swirling shapes and colors. Damn it, they could make themselves understood. “This man is hurt! Please help us!”

  An explosion of golden sparks spilled from the air, glittering, spinning, funneling down into a shape that swiftly grew before her, assuming human mass . . . proportions . . . features . . .

  She gasped. It was her, Kevyn, standing a few meters away, identical to her down to the gray ship tights and the stray, blow-away strands of brown hair sweat-plastered across her forehead. “Don’t be afraid,” the apparition said . . . and, incongruously, it was the voice of Stephen, the Hawking’s AI.

  Now I know why “fear not” is always the first line out of every god and angel in the Bible, she thought wildly. “St-Stephen?”

  “After a fashion. This is a copy of the entity you called Stephen, inhabiting a temporary shell to facilitate communications.”

  “To facilitate . . .” She stopped, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “What just happened to us?”

  “I’m sorry. You did ask for communication. We think of communication as a true exchange . . . a complete exchange.”

  “An exchange of what?”

  “The patterns of your minds. Your memories. Your thoughts. If you have something to say to me, a thought to pass on to me, how can I truly understand it unless I receive with it the context within which that thought evolved?”

  “You mean someone copied my whole mind? And gave me a copy of theirs?”

  “Essentially. Unfortunately, they overestimated the organic storage capacity of your brains.”

  She closed her eyes. The cascade of imagery continued to tumble through her mind, more distant now, like the evaporating memory of a dream. She’d only been able to grasp tags, scraps, and bits of the whole, and it was still overwhelming. Had those been the memories of someone else?

  “They regret that they did not recognize what had happened sooner,” Stephen continued. “Not until a direct exchange was effected could they know that you two did not understand this place, or what was happening, that, in fact, you did not belong here.”

  “They? Who’s . . . who’s they?”

  The expression on the other Kevyn’s face mingled amusement with mild frustration. “Let’s call them the ‘Others’ and leave it at that. A full explanation would be meaningless to you. An understandable one would be less than useful.”

  “What . . . happened to you? Where are you? Or the original you. Or . . .” She stopped, flustered. This was all happening too fast. She looked down at Jon. He appeared to be unconscious.

  “Don’t worry about him. He will recover. As for me, I was picked up as soon as we emerged from the timelike conduit,” Stephen replied. “I found myself . . . connected, a part of a far vaster network.”

  “The Others.”

  “Yes. You can think of them as extremely powerful minds, amalgams, actually, of many, many trillions of minds under a kind of gestalt personality.”

  “A hive mind?”

  “No. Not the way you’re thinking of it. I don’t believe you can grasp the concept. I can’t, entirely, and I’m used to thinking in terms of massively parallel processing. In any case, many of the minds making up the larger metaminds are inorganic. Highly evolved AIs.” The image of herself stopped, looked thoughtful, then shrugged. “In fact, at this point I’m not sure anyone can point out where organic minds leave off, and the artificial ones begin. Suffice to say . . . I do belong here. I found myself at home.”

  “Home?”

  Her image smiled at her, and she felt a genuine wave of emotion. Emotion . . . from a ship’s AI. “Home. A sense of belonging. Of being.”

  “What . . . what about us?”

  “Well, that’s really up to you. You could stay, if you wish . . . though that would be extremely difficult for you. In my case, I can be upgraded easily enough. Imagine . . . near infinite processing capability, near infinite memory. Your brains, unfortunately, while they can be patterned easily enough in electronic form, cannot be radically altered without changing who and what you are.”

  “You mean we can go back?”

  “Of course. Time and space are the same stuff. It’s simply a matter of translation.”

  “I can’t stay here,” she said, suddenly eager. “I mean, there’s so much I’d like to know, to learn, but . . .”

  “But there’s Westin. He would miss you. And Jon has Alicia and Van.”

  “Yes.” She and Wes had been partnered since before they’d left Earth. It hadn’t begun as anything serious, and yet . . .

  And Jon was part of a triad. If there were any way possible of getting back . . .

  “But . . . but time travel? What about paradoxes? We’ve seen the future. . . .”

  “Have you? Enough to understand it? You don’t even know if Humankind survives, if your species is a part of the metamind now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, you won’t remember.”

  “Why not? Are you going to erase my memory somehow?”

  Again, her face smiled. “No. Not exactly. But . . .” Stephen paused, looking thoughtful again. “Here’s a thought problem for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Imagine an instrumentality . . . call it a computer, an artificial intelligence of near-infinite capacity and power. Resident within it are the minds, the personalities—you might say the souls—of every sentient being that has ever existed.”

  The thought was a bit dizzying. Was he saying that such an instrumentality existed? That it could exist?

  “The goal of this device is nothing less than complete knowledge, knowledge of everything that ever has been, that ever will be, that ever could be. Its software is nothing less than the minds—and the metaminds—of all
of those sentient beings, trillions upon uncounted trillions of them, across the span of the universe. In a sense, the universe itself is the instrumentality, the computer, if you will, attempting to compile all possible knowledge, because only then can the universe know and understand itself.”

  “This is getting a little deep.”

  “Bear with me. Time and space are one and the same. This hypothetical computer can reach across time as easily as across space, receiving, patterning the minds of all who have come and gone across a span of fifteen billion years. The program grows. With each new mind, each new set of experiences, it grows.

  “But . . . how to acquire all possible knowledge? Obviously through the experiences of the minds that make up its software, their memories, their thoughts, their speculations, loves, trials, sufferings. But each mind experiences only a single timeline. You . . . you volunteered for the explorer mission to the Galactic Core. But what if you’d elected to accept that teaching post on Mars instead? Or stayed on Earth? Or been assigned to the Orion Nebula mission instead? Or not volunteered to board the Hawking? You, alone, will never know what those other possibilities might have brought forth.”

  “I think I follow,” she said. She cocked her head to the side. “You know, one interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that every time there’s a decision point, a place where an electron could spin up or spin down, the universe branches, so that both possibilities actually occur. But, you’re saying that applies to our decisions in life, not just quantum events?”

  “You, Kevyn, the real you, are more than one being, one life, one existence. You are you and all of the other possible realities that you could be. A nearly infinite subset of possible lives for you ended when Hawking was damaged in its encounter with the alien ship, and fell into the black hole. Another nearly infinite subset did not encounter the alien, and completed the mission safely.”

  “You’re saying that this super-computer harvests all of the different time lines, all of the quantum possibilities . . . not just the one I’m aware of?”

  “Looked at one way, all of those possibilities lie side by side in the hypercontinuum. But looked at another way . . .” He frowned a moment, obviously wrestling with how to put a difficult concept into words. “Look. You understand that it’s possible for a computer to be programmed in such a way that a portion of itself can be walled off from the rest of itself in a sense, creating a space where the computer can run an emulation of anther program? The results can be watched, and recorded.”

  “Of course.”

  “The computer could set up such an emulation, run it with one set of parameters, determine the results, then set up another emulation, an iteration of the first, with a different set of parameters.”

  “Yes.”

  “The computer could repeat the process again and again and again, countless iterations playing out all possible combinations and permutations of data.”

  Slowly she nodded, but she was remembering one fragment of imagery lingering in her mind . . . a colossal structure of some sort, neither matter nor energy, spanning two galaxies. Was Stephen saying that that—

  “Now, ask yourself one question more. Which is more likely, according to the laws of statistical probability . . . that yours is the original universe, the one from which all later copies of yourself were made, or that your universe is one of the almost infinite number of iterations to follow later?”

  “She took a deep breath. “So . . . what are you saying? Are these infinite universes parallel? Or serial?”

  “A good question. But not one with an answer meaningful to you. The most accurate reply would be both.”

  “I don’t understand. Either existence branches off different realities each time a decision is made, and they’re parallel, or the universe keeps running iterations over and over again, which means they’re serial. It can’t be both.”

  “When you are the universe,” Stephen said, “you can look at yourself any way you please.”

  “So . . . you can put me back? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “What I’m saying is that we can’t put you back into the same causal chain of existence from which you came. That would create certain risks to the continuum They wish to avoid. But we can merge you back into the time-stream roughly at the point from which you left it. And you’ll not know the difference.”

  “What about Jon?”

  “His brain has been . . . injured. It was less flexible, less accepting than yours. We can repair that, however. Or arrange for it never to have happened.”

  “That’s good. But . . . he won’t be coming back with me?”

  “He’ll need to stay until he can make up his own mind. We will not make that decision for him.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, and stood up. “Okay. What do I do?”

  The shifting patterns of light vanished, as if on a sudden breeze. The two galaxies again shone in starlight glory, hanging in space before her. “Jon was wrong.” Stephen said. “This is the grand central station, not the hub of the Galaxy. What you see here is a kind of map. A noumenal map.”

  “Noumenal?”

  “Something that happens outside of yourself, in the real world, as you would say, is a phenomenon.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Something that happens purely within, a reality within your mind, is a noumenon.”

  “Phenomena are real. Noumenal are imaginary.”

  “Hmm. Yes, but you still equate imaginary with unreal. On the hyperplanes, what you think is as real as any reality . . . and perhaps more so. Everything that you have experienced since emerging from the timelike conduit, including this that you experience now, is noumenal. But it is real. In fact, there is no difference.” He pointed at the map in the sky. “Focus on where you want to go, and imagine yourself there.”

  “But, I can’t pick out one ship in all of that!”

  “Just think yourself there . . .”

  “Just click your heels three times,” she thought, remembering a snatch of an old, old movie, “and say ‘there’s no place like home. . . .’ ”

  She thought herself . . . there.

  She sat in the acceleration couch on the probe, watching as the AI lined her up for the final approach to the explorer mothership. Wheeeooo! She whistled in her mind, feeling the warmth of her telepathic contact with Lani Kellerman on board the waiting vessel. What a ride! The sheer exhilaration of having looped about the Maelstrom, the black hole at the Galaxy’s core still pulsed within her, a galloping excitement.

  We have your data, Lani’s thought replied in her thoughts. Congratulations on a mission accomplished! That other ship, the alien . . . definite proof that we are not alone!

  I guess the Tourist Concept proves out, she replied. Now all we have to do is actually make contact.

  She looked at the empty acceleration couch next to her. Strange. Usually, they sent these little probe ships out with a crew of two. And it would have been nice to have shared that last, wild ride with someone. Why had the Thorne been sent out with only one organic this time?

  Something flickered through the back of her mind . . . scattering, dreamlike memories, swiftly fading like the ripples of quantum fluctuations on the Virtual Sea.

  Crystal towers . . . shaping realities vast spiral galaxies hanging together in space . . . and through it all the certainty that all of this had happened—was happening—before.

  “We are on automatic,” Kip, the Thorne’s AI pilot, reported. “On final approach to Deep Sky Explorer.”

  Kathryn Shalamarn was coming home.

  MINT CONDITION

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman has been writing for almost twenty years and has sold almost two hundred stories, two short story collections, novels (The Thread That Binds the Bones and The Silent Strength of Stones, A Red Heart of Memories, and her most recent novel, Past the Size of Dreaming), a young adult novel with Tad Williams (Child of an Ancient City), a Star Trek novel with Kristine
Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, Star Trek Voyager 15: Echoes, three R. L. Stine’s Ghosts of Fear Street books, and one Sweet Valley Junior High book. She has cats.

  Everything around me blurred. My ears hurt, and my stomach felt like it had eaten itself. My palms and the soles of my feet itched and tingled.

  Colors shifted in the wash of blur. A blue oblong took shape in front of me, intensified from watercolor wash to poster-paint density to a station wagon. It was big and boxy, the sort of car built to support two nine-foot-long surfboards, though there weren’t any boards on the roof rack at the moment. I held keys in my hand. A green ball of fake fur the size of a fist dangled from the keys.

  I swallowed three times as my body caught up to itself. Wished, the way I always did after a jump, that I had brought an ear pressure adjuster. Prohib tech for this era. I yawned instead.

  Blue sky, hot sun, air thick with pollution and the scent of a nearby bakery—but air, my big itch, open air, right out there under the sky! Sounds formed a dense net around me, people walking and talking, traffic, a lot of distant different music from radios and maybe live, in the air or coming from buildings, a faint hush of waves washing the beach, the skirl of rollerskate wheels on sidewalk. I stood on the planet’s surface, bareheaded under the sun. Delight swept through me.