by John Varley
This story is another personal favorite. It came about as a case of one thing leading to another. In the Eight Worlds, I wondered, where there was no “natural” environment humans could survive, what would they do if they wanted to go outside? Some people, I figured, would prefer the security of artifice, as many city dwellers do today. Rooms, corridors, limited open spaces like stadia and arenas, none of those messy plants and animals.
But there would be the adventurous, just as there are today, eager to venture out into the “wild” on their bikes and be mauled by mountain lions (as two people were just a few days ago, not far from where I live). These could be the people who cherished hopes of someday reclaiming Lost Earth from the invaders. They would like parks.
Why not some very big parks?
I assumed the existence of a vast genetic library so that the big underground bubbles I came to call “disneylands” could be populated with the appropriate flora and fauna. But you wouldn’t go on simulated rides or roller coasters in these disneylands. The terrain and the wildlife and the sheer novelty of being able to use the long-range vision evolution had adapted your primate eyes for would be the thrill here.
And it need not be the kind of place adventurers or vacationers go today. A prairie could be as exciting to them as simulated mountains or jungles. And where are the most boring prairies I’ve ever seen? Why, Kansas, of course, home of Dorothy and Toto.
You’d need weather in a place like that. Rain and sunshine . . . and why not tornadoes? If people will pay good money to get the wits scared out of them at Magic Mountain, why not a carefully controlled, safe and sane, sanitized-for-your-protection twister? And thus the story grew.
When I first began in the movie business I decided to write a screenplay, just to see if I could do it. I asked John Foreman for copies of screenplays, since I’d never seen one. I watched the movies on video, pausing as I read the screenplays. Didn’t look too hard, to me. So I sat down and, in four feverish days, wrote a 120-page adaptation of “The Phantom of Kansas.” I loved it. I mean, I loved the process; the screenplay itself could have used some work, it was full of beginner’s mistakes. But John liked it, too, and I think to this day that with a rewrite it could make a darn good motion picture.
It has been optioned several times, without result (not at all unusual in the movie business), and as of now the man who wrote Changing Lanes has been working on it for five years. His option expires in July 2004, and if he throws in the towel I hope somebody else will step in and take another crack at it.
THE PHANTOM OF KANSAS
I DO MY banking at the Archimedes Trust Association. Their security is first-rate, their service is courteous, and they have their own medico facility that does nothing but take recordings for their vaults.
And they had been robbed two weeks ago.
It was a break for me. I had been approaching my regular recording date and dreading the chunk it would take from my savings. Then these thieves break into my bank, steal a huge amount of negotiable paper, and in an excess of enthusiasm they destroy all the recording cubes. Every last one of them, crunched into tiny shards of plastic. Of course the bank had to replace them all, and very fast, too. They weren’t stupid; it wasn’t the first time someone had used such a bank robbery to facilitate a murder. So the bank had to record everyone who had an account, and do it in a few days. It must have cost them more than the robbery.
How that scheme works, incidentally, is like this. The robber couldn’t care less about the money stolen. Mostly it’s very risky to pass such loot, anyway. The programs written into the money computers these days are enough to foil all but the most exceptional robber. You have to let that kind of money lie for on the order of a century to have any hope of realizing gains on it. Not impossible, of course, but the police types have found out that few criminals are temperamentally able to wait that long. The robber’s real motive in a case where memory cubes have been destroyed is murder, not robbery.
Every so often someone comes along who must commit a crime of passion. There are very few left open, and murder is the most awkward of all. It just doesn’t satisfy this type to kill someone and see them walking around six months later. When the victim sues the killer for alienation of personality—and collects up to 99 percent of the killer’s worldly goods—it’s just twisting the knife. So if you really hate someone, the temptation is great to really kill them, forever and ever, just like in the old days, by destroying their memory cube first, then killing the body.
That’s what the ATA feared, and I had rated a private bodyguard over the last week as part of my contract. It was sort of a status symbol to show your friends, but otherwise I hadn’t been much impressed until I realized that ATA was going to pay for my next recording as part of their crash program to cover all their policy holders. They had contracted to keep me alive forever, so even though I had been scheduled for a recording in only three weeks they had to pay for this one. The courts had ruled that a lost or damaged cube must be replaced with all possible speed.
So I should have been very happy. I wasn’t, but tried to be brave.
I was shown into the recording room with no delay and told to strip and lie on the table. The medico, a man who looked like someone I might have met several decades ago, busied himself with his equipment as I tried to control my breathing. I was grateful when he plugged the computer lead into my occipital socket and turned off my motor control. Now I didn’t have to worry about whether to ask if I knew him or not. As I grow older, I find that’s more of a problem. I must have met twenty thousand people by now and talked to them long enough to make an impression. It gets confusing.
He removed the top of my head and prepared to take a multiholo picture of me, a chemical analog of everything I ever saw or thought or remembered or just vaguely dreamed. It was a blessed relief when I slid over into unconsciousness.
The coolness and sheen of stainless steel beneath my fingertips. There is the smell of isopropyl alcohol, and the hint of acetone.
The medico’s shop. Childhood memories tumble over me, triggered by the smells. Excitement, change, my mother standing by while the medico carves away my broken finger to replace it with a pink new one. I lie in the darkness and remember.
And there is light, a hurting light from nowhere, and I feel my pupil contract as the only movement in my entire body.
“She’s in,” I hear. But I’m not, not really. I’m just lying here in the blessed dark, unable to move.
It comes in a rush, the repossession of my body. I travel down the endless nerves to bang up hard against the insides of my hands and feet, to whirl through the pools of my nipples and tingle in my lips and nose. Now I’m in.
I sat up quickly into the restraining arms of the medico. I struggled for a second before I was able to relax. My fingers were buzzing and cramped with the clamminess of hyperventilation.
“Whew,” I said, putting my head in my hands. “Bad dream. I thought . . .”
I looked around me and saw that I was naked on the steel-topped table with several worried faces looking at me from all sides. I wanted to retreat into the darkness again and let my insides settle down. I saw my mother’s face, blinked, and failed to make it disappear.
“Carnival?” I asked her ghost.
“Right here, Fox,” she said, and took me in her arms. It was awkward and unsatisfying with her standing on the floor and me on the table. There were wires trailing from my body. But the comfort was needed. I didn’t know where I was. With a chemical rush as precipitous as the one just before I awoke, the people solidified around me.
“She’s all right now,” the medico said, turning from his instruments. He smiled impersonally at me as he began removing the wires from my head. I did not smile back. I knew where I was now, just as surely as I had ever known anything. I remembered coming in here only hours before.
But I knew it had been more than a few hours. I’ve read about it: the disorientation when a new body is awakened with transplan
ted memories. And my mother wouldn’t be here unless something had gone badly wrong.
I had died.
I was given a mild sedative, help in dressing, and my mother’s arm to lead me down plush-carpeted hallways to the office of the bank president. I was still not fully awake. The halls were achingly quiet but for the brush of our feet across the wine-colored rug. I felt like the pressure was fluctuating wildly, leaving my ears popped and muffled. I couldn’t see too far away. I was grateful to leave the vanishing points in the hall for the paneled browns of wood veneer and the coolness and echoes of a white marble floor.
The bank president, Mr. Leander, showed us to our seats. I sank into the purple velvet and let it wrap around me. Leander pulled up a chair facing us and offered us drinks. I declined. My head was swimming already and I knew I’d have to pay attention.
Leander fiddled with a dossier on his desk. Mine, I imagined. It had been freshly printed out from the terminal at his right hand. I’d met him briefly before; he was a pleasant sort of person, chosen for this public-relations job for his willingness to wear the sort of old-man body that inspires confidence and trust. He seemed to be about sixty-five. He was probably more like twenty.
It seemed that he was never going to get around to the briefing so I asked a question. One that was very important to me at the moment.
“What’s the date?”
“It’s the month of November,” he said, ponderously. “And the year is 342.”
I had been dead for two and a half years.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t want to take up any more of your time. You must have a brochure you can give me to bring me up to date. If you’ll just hand it over, I’ll be on my way. Oh, and thank you for your concern.”
He waved his hand at me as I started to rise.
“I would appreciate it if you stayed a bit longer. Yours is an unusual case, Ms. Fox. I . . . Well, it’s never happened in the history of the Archimedes Trust Association.”
“Yes?”
“You see, you’ve died, as you figured out soon after we woke you. What you couldn’t have known is that you’ve died more than once since your last recording.”
“More than once?” So it wasn’t such a smart question; so what was I supposed to ask?
“Three times.”
“Three?”
“Yes, three separate times. We suspect murder.”
The room was perfectly silent for a while. At last I decided I should have that drink. He poured it for me, and I drained it.
“Perhaps your mother should tell you more about it,” Leander suggested. “She’s been closer to the situation. I was only made aware of it recently. Carnival?”
I found my way back to my apartment in a sort of daze. By the time I had settled in again the drug was wearing off and I could face my situation with a clear head. But my skin was crawling.
Listening in the third person to things you’ve done is not the most pleasant thing. I decided it was time to face some facts that all of us, including myself, do not like to think about. The first order of business was to recognize that the things that were done by those three previous people were not done by me. I was a new person, fourth in the line of succession. I had many things in common with the previous incarnations, including all my memories up to that day I surrendered myself to the memory recording machine. But the me of that time and place had been killed.
She lasted longer than the others. Almost a year, Carnival had said. Then her body was found at the bottom of Hadley Rille. It was an appropriate place for her to die; both she and myself liked to go hiking out on the surface for purposes of inspiration.
Murder was not suspected that time. The bank, upon hearing of my—no, her—death, started a clone from the tissue sample I had left with my recording. Six lunations later, a copy of me was infused with my memories and told that she had just died. She had been shaken, but seemed to be adjusting well when she, too, was killed.
This time there was much suspicion. Not only had she survived for less than a lunation after her reincarnation, but the circumstances were unusual. She had been blown to pieces in a tube-train explosion. She had been the only passenger in a two-seat capsule. The explosion had been caused by a homemade bomb.
There was still the possibility that it was a random act, possibly by political terrorists. The third copy of me had not thought so. I don’t know why. That is the most maddening thing about memory recording: being unable to profit by the experiences of your former selves. Each time I was killed, it moved me back to square one, the day I was recorded.
But Fox 3 had reason to be paranoid. She took extraordinary precautions to stay alive. More specifically, she tried to prevent circumstances that could lead to her murder. It worked for five lunations. She died as the result of a fight, that much was certain. It was a very violent fight, with blood all over the apartment. The police at first thought she must have fatally injured her attacker, but analysis showed all the blood to have come from her body.
So where did that leave me, Fox 4? An hour’s careful thought left the picture gloomy indeed. Consider: each time my killer succeeded in murdering me, he or she learned more about me. My killer must be an expert on Foxes by now, knowing things about me that I myself do not know. Such as how I handle myself in a fight. I gritted my teeth when I thought of that. Carnival told me that Fox 3, the canniest of the lot, had taken lessons in self-defense. Karate, I think she said. Did I have the benefit of it? Of course not. If I wanted to defend myself I had to start all over, because those skills died with Fox 3.
No, all the advantages were with my killer. The killer started off with the advantage of surprise—since I had no notion of who it was—and learned more about me every time he or she succeeded in killing me.
What to do? I didn’t even know where to start. I ran through everyone I knew, looking for an enemy, someone who hated me enough to kill me again and again. I could find no one. Most likely it was someone Fox 1 had met during that year she lived after the recording.
The only answer I could come up with was emigration. Just pull up stakes and go to Mercury, or Mars, or even Pluto. But would that guarantee my safety? My killer seemed to be an uncommonly persistent person. No, I’d have to face it here, where at least I knew the turf.
It was the next day before I realized the extent of my loss. I had been robbed of an entire symphony.
For the last thirty years I had been an Environmentalist. I had just drifted into it while it was still an infant art form. I had been in charge of the weather machines at the Transvaal disneyland, which was new at the time and the biggest and most modern of all the environmental parks in Luna. A few of us had started tinkering with the weather programs, first for our own amusement. Later we invited friends to watch the storms and sunsets we concocted. Before we knew it, friends were inviting friends and the Transvaal people began selling tickets.
I gradually made a name for myself, and found I could make more money being an artist than being an engineer. At the time of my last recording I had been one of the top three Environmentalists on Luna.
Then Fox I went on to compose Liquid Ice. From what I read in the reviews, two years after the fact, it was seen as the high point of the art to date. It had been staged in the Pennsylvania disneyland, before a crowd of three hundred thousand. It made me rich.
The money was still in my bank account, but the memory of creating the symphony was forever lost. And it mattered.
Fox I had written it, from beginning to end. Oh, I recalled having had some vague ideas of a winter composition, things I’d think about later and put together. But the whole creative process had gone on in the head of that other person who had been killed.
How is a person supposed to cope with that? For one bitter moment I considered calling the bank and having them destroy my memory cube. If I died this time, I’d rather die completely. The thought of a Fox 5 rising from that table . . . It was almost too much too bear. She would lack everything that Fox
1, 2, 3, and me, Fox 4, had experienced. So far I’d had little time to add to the personality we all shared, but even the bad times are worth saving.
It was either that, or have a new recording made every day. I called the bank, did some figuring, and found that I wasn’t wealthy enough to afford that. But it was worth exploring. If I had a new recording taken once a week I could keep at it for about a year before I ran out of money.
I decided I’d do it, for as long as I could. And to make sure that no future Fox would ever have to go through this again, I’d have one made today. Fox 5, if she was ever born, would be born knowing at least as much as I knew now.
I felt better after the recording was made. I found that I no longer feared the medico’s office. That fear comes from the common misapprehension that one will wake up from the recording to discover that one has died. It’s a silly thing to believe, but it comes from the distaste we all have for really looking at the facts.
If you’ll consider human consciousness, you’ll see that the three-dimensional cross-section of a human being that is you can only rise from that table and go about your business. It can happen no other way. Human consciousness is linear, along a timeline that has a beginning and an end. If you die after a recording, you die, forever and with no reprieve. It doesn’t matter that a recording of you exists and that a new person with your memories to a certain point can be created; you are dead. Looked at from a fourth-dimensional viewpoint, what memory recording does is to graft a new person onto your lifeline at a point in the past. You do not retrace that lifeline and magically become that new person. I, Fox 4, was only a relative of that long-ago person who had had her memories recorded. And if I died, it was forever. Fox 5 would awaken with my memories to date, but I would be no part of her. She would be on her own.
Why do we do it? I honestly don’t know. I suppose that the human urge to live forever is so strong that we’ll grasp at even the most unsatisfactory substitute. At one time people had themselves frozen when they died, in the hope of being thawed out in a future when humans knew how to reverse death. Look at the Great Pyramid in the Egypt disneyland if you want to see the sheer size of that urge.