Foresight

by Graham Storrs

  He looked down at himself, raised his arm. It was fine. No pain. No pain anywhere, in fact. Which was impossible.

  And there was another impossible thing. Both he and Sandra were wearing lightweight, blue coveralls. “Sandra …?” She was staring at something behind him. “I think I’m having a dream.”

  “We’ve got company,” she said, ignoring him.

  He turned and saw a woman approaching across the grass. She too wore a simple jumpsuit. He stared. She seemed familiar. She was a woman of about his own age, tall, attractive, with a slim, athletic build, rather like Sandra’s.

  “Cara?” Sandra said. It was as if the woman suddenly came into focus. Of course it was Cara. And yet …

  The woman’s—Cara’s—face lit up. She ran towards them, arms out. “Mum! Dad! It’s so good to see you again. It’s been so long.”

  She rushed up to them and embraced them both. Cara! But she was in her mid-to-late thirties. Had they gone forwards a whole twenty years?

  Sandra was the first to step back from the embrace. “What’s going on?” she said. There was a wildness to her eyes that gave away her distress. “Where are we? What happened to the sphere?”

  Jay realized that the sphere was nowhere to be seen. If they’d landed twenty years in the future, why wasn’t it there? In fact, where was London? And how come their bodies were healed and their clothes had changed? He realized that even the cuts and scratches that had been on Sandra’s face before they got into the sphere had gone. Her skin was as smooth and healthy as it had ever been. Perhaps even more so.

  “How long have we been here?” he asked.

  Cara looked from one to the other of them, still beaming. “I’ll explain everything. Don’t worry. Oh God, it’s good to see you. I’ve missed you so much.” She laughed. “And I’d forgotten how young you both were! Come on. Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you all about it. This place is just like a reception area. Somewhere nice to wake up.”

  She linked her arms into theirs and led them towards an archway in a shady spot between two trees. It was a rustic wooden arch with wild roses climbing up and over it, flowering in great profusion. Jay had been looking right there a moment earlier and he had not seen it. He felt a tiny curl of fear in his stomach. He didn’t understand what was happening and he didn’t like it. But the sunny day, the gentle breeze, and Cara’s arm in his were all reassuring. Cara would not lead them into danger. Cara loved them. Above all, she loved her mother.

  They passed through the arch—Jay caught the scent of roses as they went—and found themselves on the edge of a large cobbled piazza. He stopped dead. Medieval buildings rose around the piazza on three sides. On the fourth side, there was a wide expanse of water with more buildings beyond. A river? No, the Lagoon. He was in Venice. Not the Venice of 2068, half-drowned by rising sea levels and pretty much abandoned as it crumbled into the sea, but the Venice of a hundred years earlier. Still intact. Still beautiful.

  “A virtual reality,” Sandra said. She reached behind her and touched a stone wall. Jay saw that the arch they had passed through was now a doorway in the same wall.

  “Let’s get a coffee and talk,” Cara said, tugging them towards a group of tables outside a little café.

  “How are you doing this?” Sandra asked. “I’ve used VR. It’s not like this. Even Cara’s—your—best immersive games are not a patch on this. I can smell the sea. I can feel the fabric of my clothes pull as I walk. You can’t tell me it got this good in just twenty years.”

  “Twenty ye—? Oh, I see. Because of my age. No, no.” They reached a table and Cara ushered them under a sun umbrella and into seats. “Look, let’s sit down and I’ll tell you all about it. Isn’t it lovely here?”

  It certainly was. Jay looked out across the sparkling water. He’d never visited Venice—what would be the point in his day?—but he’d seen it in vids and read about it in novels. It was just as he had imagined it would be. He touched the surface of the table beside him, noticed the textures, touched one hand with the other, felt the warmth and softness of his own skin. The illusion was so good, it may as well have been reality.

  A small servitor appeared and Cara ordered cappuccinos and cannoli for each of them. She spoke in Italian and the little robot answered in the same language.

  “When did you learn Italian?” Jay asked. Cara had never shown an interest in learning other languages.

  “I didn’t. It’s just …” Her eyes went from Jay to Sandra and back. “I should start at the beginning.”

  “Where are we?” Sandra asked. “I mean, our real bodies. Where are they?”

  Jay could see that Cara didn’t have good news by the way she bit her bottom lip. It was one of her tells. Sandra must have seen it too because she tried to lighten the mood, saying, “Well I know we’re not dead because, if this were Heaven, you’d be six again, not a woman my own age.”

  The servitor reappeared and distributed the coffee and cannoli. Jay could smell the coffee and chocolate. He wondered if the VR was good enough that he could drink it.

  “This is one of my favorite cafés,” Cara said. She picked up her pastry and bit into it, closing her eyes in enjoyment. Jay saw crumbs fall and white icing sugar stick to Cara’s fingertips.

  He felt Sandra stiffen and he looked across at her. She was growing tense and angry. To head off an explosion, he said, “Maybe you could start explaining things, Cara.”

  His grown-up daughter swallowed her mouthful, looked at Sandra and grinned. “Sorry, Mum. You really should try them. They’re to die for.” Perhaps Sandra’s expression was more eloquent than he had been. Cara put down the confection, brushed the icing sugar from her fingers and sat back in her chair.

  “OK,” she said. “The first thing you should know is that you’re not twenty years in the future, you’re more like two thousand.”

  Jay felt the news like a slap. “What? No, that’s impossible.” He turned to Sandra. “Is that possible?”

  Sandra kept her eyes on Cara. “How come you’re here then?” Which Jay realized was a very good question.

  Cara bit her lower lip again. “The thing is, I died in 2137.” Jay did the sums. She would have been eighty-seven or eighty-eight by then. So what was he talking to? A recording? A simulation? “I was an old woman, but I’d spent much of the latter part of my career researching ways to upload human minds into computers. I became one of the first post-humans.” The pride in her voice was unmistakable.

  Jay was too stunned to ask a sensible question but Sandra said, “So, you’re a copy of Cara’s mind, running on a computer.”

  Cara smiled. “If you like. As far as I’m concerned, I’m Cara. I never stopped being me. I simply transferred myself from one kind of existence to something superior.”

  “Superior?” Jay couldn’t see how living inside a box was in any way superior.

  “I’m immortal, Dad. I have …” she gazed out at the Lagoon “… all of this, and so much more, an infinity of worlds and places and times. I can even be corporeal if I want to—put on an artificial body and walk the Earth like a mortal soul.”

  “God-like,” Jay said, not because he thought that’s how she was, but because that’s how her tone suggested she saw herself.

  She seized on the idea eagerly. “Yes! That’s it exactly. We moved beyond being merely human, and, since then, we’ve moved so much farther.”

  “You were expecting us, weren’t you?” Sandra asked. Jay was still processing the astonishing revelations, trying to imagine the world his daughter now lived in, but Sandra remained focused on their own situation.

  “You told me, when you got back … That is, you will tell me, when you get back to your own time. I gave you … I will give you a set of coordinates in a spatio-temporal system that has not been invented in your time, so that you can give them to me, so that I will be waiting for you.”

  “Sounds like a paradox,” Sandra said.

  “Yet it worked. You turned up just where and when I expec
ted you to. I even knew to expect you to be—” She stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry, but this is going to be a bit of a shock. When we found the sphere, you were both dead.” She held up her hands to prevent them interrupting her. “But don’t worry, we got to you in time to get a good clean read from both your brains. We didn’t lose a thing.”

  “Holy crap!” Jay said.

  “So we’re stuck here?” said Sandra.

  “We’re programs? In a computer?”

  “But you said we went back.” Sandra sounded almost pleading.

  Cara must have picked up on what that implied because her tone grew a little impatient. “Yes. Don’t worry. You’re not going to end up like me.”

  “I didn’t mean …” Sandra began, but, of course, that’s exactly what she meant.

  “So we’re dead,” Jay said, trying to understand it. “And you copied our brains. And now we’re programs in a computer?”

  “Not a computer like you’re used to, but yes. That’s about it.”

  “So how do we get back?” Sandra was growing insistent.

  “What’s wrong?” Jay asked. Her concern was making him feel it too. What had she seen about their situation that was worse than he had understood?

  She addressed herself to Cara. “No offence, but we’ve got a daughter, a real daughter, waiting for us in 2068. I want to know how we get back to her.”

  Cara looked hurt, stung by what Jay saw as Sandra’s callous disregard for her feelings. “What your mum means is—”

  Cara cut him off before he had to think up something consoling. “It’s all right, Dad. I understand.” She turned to Sandra and reached out to take her hand. Sandra let her, which surprised Jay. “I do understand, Mum. I know you, don’t forget. I know how fiercely you love. And I know that, for you, Cara is and always will be the version of me who shares your timeline.” A tear ran down her cheek, perhaps the most surprising thing Jay had seen yet. “That fierce love was always the bedrock of my life. The memory of it still is. If I didn’t know how much you would want to go back to her—to me—I’d be begging you to stay here.” She reached out and took Jay’s hand too, smiling at him. “Both of you. You’ll never know how much I’ve missed you.”

  Jay felt tears pooling in his own eyes. Even Sandra seemed to soften. “I’m glad you understand. You were always such a bright kid. So tell me, if we’re dead, how do you get us home?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. We’re rebuilding your bodies. We’ve got them in a repair shop right now. They’ll be as good as new in a couple of weeks.”

  ***

  After a short tour of Venice, Cara took them to another world. They sat in a natural amphitheatre on a soft, red carpet of some mossy plant. The sky was black—almost no atmosphere, Cara explained—and in it a gigantic blue gas giant hung, subtly striated, partially obscured by a gray, pock-marked minor moon. “This is a moon too,” Cara said, looking around at the bright mountains that surrounded them, steep, their sharp peaks all skirted in red. “It’s a real system. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  There were other people on the slopes with them—in fact, a large crowd had gathered.

  “Are any of these people real?” Jay asked. He’d wondered the same thing about the people they’d seen in Venice. “I mean, real like you, not real like …”

  Cara seemed happy to ignore his faux pas. “I don’t know. Most of them are sims, put here to create the right atmosphere—some of our realities just don’t feel right without other people and there aren’t enough of us, or at any rate enough of us wanting to see this play right at this second, to make up an audience. But there might be a few post-humans among them. I could make them show up, if you like.”

  At the focus of the curving slope, a flat area that was clearly meant to be a stage, its set a building, a shabby little hut, materialized out of the air. The crowd became silent. A group of women walked onto the stage and formed into a chorus. An old man came on and stood alone, declaiming to the audience, “O Argos, ancient land, and streams of Inachus, whence on a day king Agamemnon sailed to the realm of Troy, carrying his warriors aboard a thousand ships.”

  So they were going to see a play. A Greek drama, Jay supposed, though he did not recognize it. He looked at Sandra and she looked back at him. Despite the fact they were sitting—albeit virtually—on a moon in a distant star system, two thousand years in the future, watching a performance of a play that was well over four thousand years old, in the company of their immortal daughter, Sandra didn’t seem happy. He pulled a “What’s up?” face which she dismissed with an irritable shake of the head and turned back to watch the play.

  Ten minutes later, Sandra leaned in to Cara and said, “I’ve had enough. Can we go now?”

  Cara was on her feet in a moment. “Of course,” she said. “Come on.”

  They walked up the slope to the rear of the amphitheatre. Jay was not surprised to see that there was a clear path for them, even though the crowd behind them seemed randomly spread. Cara led them to a cave mouth in the rocks. They walked in and were immediately somewhere else. A concourse in a futuristic city of delicate glass towers and flying cars.

  “Couldn’t you just click your fingers or something and teleport us between places?” Sandra asked.

  Cara seemed taken aback. “I thought this way would be easier for you to cope with. I didn’t mean to be patronising or anything.”

  “You could stop treating us like idiots then and tell us what’s going on here.”

  “Sandra!” Jay saw the hurt flicker across Cara’s face. “Why are you being so …?”

  “It’s all right, Dad. It’s just, Mum … being Mum.” She turned to Sandra. “I only wanted to show you what an amazing place this is, let you know how happy I am here. There’s so much more I could show you but … well … you’d find it hard to take in without certain augmentations. This is just the tip of the iceberg: we can travel to any place or time in the known universe—or even the imagined universe. We can literally invent any world we want to, just by thinking it up. Would you like to be mermaids, ride a spaceship at near the speed of light, visit Odin in Asgard? It’s no trouble at all.”

  Sandra looked unhappy and Cara was becoming tight-lipped and irritated.

  “I’d rather meet your friends,” Sandra said. “I’d rather talk to you, to hear what it’s been like these past two thousand years, to hear about your hopes and dreams for the future. If I wanted a tour guide, I could probably ask one of these sims to do it, couldn’t I?” She pressed her lips together, as if angry with herself, as if trying to stop herself from going on. She clearly lost the struggle because she said, “All this sight-seeing just makes me suspicious. It makes me wonder what you’re hiding from us, why you’re trying so hard to distract us.”

  “Distract you? God, I’d forgotten how completely paranoid you are. I’m showing you something wonderful, here, something so astonishing …” She had raised her voice and seemed suddenly to realize it. She took a calming breath and said, “I should have known. All this freedom, complete and unfettered freedom, is wasted on someone who spent her entire life jumping at shadows and making her own daughter afraid of the neighbors, her teachers, the other schoolkids!”

  Jay was shocked all over again. “Cara, that’s not fair.” And it wasn’t, though it was probably all true.

  Cara turned quickly and walked three brisk paces away from them. Sandra stared after her. Her mouth opened but she did not speak. Nobody spoke for several seconds. Then Cara turned back to them.

  “Maybe we should all take a break,” she said. “I’ve got you a room …” she snapped her fingers, watching Sandra, and the building beside them morphed into a glittering hotel “… here for the night.” She raised a hand as if to forestall their objections. “I have no idea if you two are having sex at the moment. I was always confused by the way you both carried on. I often thought you were secretly having it off behind my back.” Jay began to protest but she stopped him with the same hand. “So you’re in the Pre
sidential Suite. It’s got so many bedrooms you’ll need a map. I’ll pick you up after breakfast …” again, she looked pointedly at Sandra “… And I’ll take you to visit a friend of mine. Goodnight.”

  With a click of her fingers, she was gone.

  ***

  The Presidential Suite was about as splendid as a set of rooms could be. Decorated in a style that was part Versailles, part botanical gardens, it had enough room to house a large, extended family and came complete with two servitors to fetch and carry. Sandra didn’t even look around but stomped over to the nearest sofa—its gigantic proportions dwarfed by the broad expanse of the room it was in—and threw herself down to brood. Jay was left alone to fend off the attentions of the manager, another bot, hell-bent on demonstrating every one of the room’s ten thousand luxurious features, and shoo it out of the door.

  He took a chair opposite Sandra and studied her while he worked on what to say. He’d been upset by the sudden antagonism between Sandra and their daughter. He felt it was all Sandra’s fault but the important thing was to broker some kind of peace between them.

  “Are you going to sit and stare at me all night?” Sandra asked.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Try not to break anything.”

  He sighed. “What’s got you into such a bad mood?”

  “Why don’t you go take a shower or something instead of wearing out your two good brain cells trying to understand things?”

  Jay refused to rise to the taunt. “Virtual body,” he said. “No showering necessary.”

  “Heaven.” Her tone said it was anything but.

  “Look, Sandra, I—”

  “It’s not Cara,” she said, looking at him for the first time.

  Jay knew immediately what she meant. “It’s Cara who grew into an eighty-seven-year-old woman and then lived for two thousand years in Wonderland.”