Temporal Contingency

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “How do you tell your girlfriend, ‘If you’re getting this letter, I died in a time-travel related incident?’”

  “Those words would appear to be adequate to deliver the intended information, but from your continued difficulty I surmise that you would find it preferable to phrase them with a greater degree of gravity and poetry in order to provide Ms. Modane with emotional closure.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “It is my observation that most of your correspondences with Ms. Modane and other individuals in your life are exchanged via audio or audiovisual means. What is your motivation for abstracting your potential final interaction by rendering it as text?”

  “I don’t know. When something’s hard to say, sometimes it’s just easier this way.”

  “The current level of difficulty would suggest a flaw in that theory.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Stand by…”

  “What are you—”

  The slidepad chirped with a notification. It was a message from Ma, with the subject “Proposed Letter of Condolence to Michella Modane.” He tapped it open.

  “Dear Michella. As has frequently been the case in the past, I have become embroiled in a potentially catastrophic enterprise,” he read aloud. “Unlike prior efforts, in this case my superlative skills and inexplicable good fortune were insufficient to preserve my life. Assuming my own deep feelings of affection for you are reciprocated, this is likely a source of great emotional trauma for you. It is my hope that knowing I spent my final moments prior to my departure on the mission thinking of you will serve as a balm for these feelings of sorrow. It is furthermore highly likely that my final moments preceding whatever calamity brought about my demise were spent thinking of you as well. In closing, it should come as a source of comfort to you that your receipt of this letter suggests my actions did not cause a universe-destroying paradox, and may in fact have prevented a society-destroying cataclysm. If the latter is not the case, be aware that an effectively endless swarm of self-replicating robots is likely to appear at some point in the next century. Please plan accordingly. Love always, Trevor Alexander. Post Script. It remains a possibility that I have in fact not expired, but have instead been shunted to a parallel universe. I share this possibility both in hopes that it will come as consolation, and also to inform you that such an outcome would make me pivotal in formally proving the many-worlds theory, thus advancing superstring theory.”

  For a moment he was silent, trying heroically to keep from laughing hysterically.

  “You have my permission to utilize this letter in whole or in part,” Ma said.

  “It isn’t quite what I was looking for, but I think it has some bits I can use,” he said.

  “I am pleased to have been of aid.”

  He swiped a sentence or two more onto his message and looked over what he’d come up with.

  “I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get. Can you hang on to these letters and, if it is absolutely certain I won’t be coming back, deliver them?”

  “Certainly. Transfer them to the main server of the station and I shall ensure their posthumous delivery if it is within my power to do so. Would now be an appropriate time to give Squee her procedure?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Squee, are you prepared for the procedure?” Ma asked.

  Lex again tried to keep a smile from his face. Perhaps it was because of her brief but notable time installed within the funk’s mind, but Ma seemed to assume a human-level intelligence and as a result some semblance of human-level response and cooperation from the creature. So far Squee hadn’t quite lived up to that expectation, though more than a few times in the past few months he’d gotten the sneaking suspicion Ma was closer to being correct about her intellect than he’d initially thought.

  The funk flicked its ear and flopped down across Lex’s shoulders, yawning and licking its muzzle.

  “We’ll call that a yes, Ma,” Lex said.

  “For her comfort and ease, perhaps it would be best if you accompanied her.”

  He nodded and stood, waiting for a moment for the inevitable line of blue lights to appear, then followed it out of the corner of his eye while delivering the messages to Ma for safekeeping.

  “Say, Ma, I was wondering this,” he said, slipping the slidepad into the jumpsuit pocket again. “Back when you and I teamed up last time, you pointed out Squee wasn’t exactly ideal as an… uh… organic platform or whatever. No thumbs. Can’t talk without technological assistance, etc.”

  “Those are indeed acknowledged shortcomings with the platform.”

  “So why are you hopping back into Squee instead of something else?”

  “Your close emotional ties with Squee, and your memories of our prior collaboration, are likely to build a stronger partnership and thus a more immediately effective team. These benefits, according to my simulations, vastly outweigh the aforementioned shortcomings. Also, technological means have been found to offset most of these limitations.”

  “Is that it?”

  “What other motivations would likely contribute to this decision?”

  “I don’t know… I figured you might be… sentimental.”

  “That is a psychological nuance that I have yet to successfully integrate into my behaviors.”

  “Ah… I kind of thought sentimentality was the sort of thing that just happens.”

  “For an artificially intellectual construct such as myself, emotional depth rarely ‘just happens.’ It comes as a result of careful modeling and approximation. I am deeply gratified by your assumption, however. It underscores your belief that my own thought processes align with yours, which I endlessly strive toward.”

  They entered the medical bay to find a small device with a few wires and very basic controls sitting on the operating table. At the sight of it, Squee hopped from Lex’s shoulders to the table, sat down, and bowed her head, revealing the small plastic cap at the base of her neck.

  “Thank you, Squee,” Ma stated as one of the medical armatures unfolded from the gantry above the table.

  It was a much friendlier gripper than the ones running about the rest of the building. Padded cushions on either side of it gently braced Squee. A second arm dropped down and deftly twisted the plastic cap, revealing a small electronic connector. A third arm affixed a wire to the connector, and Squee’s head tilted to the left, one eye squinting. The whole process was very routine, as every few weeks Lex had taken Squee to have her memories backed up and reformatted. It was a necessary procedure, as Ma’s prior time in Squee had left her with the neurological quirk of maintaining a perfect moment-to-moment recollection of her thoughts and senses, a photographic memory. There was a reason organic beings didn’t record memories in that way. There simply wasn’t room. To keep Squee’s head from “filling up,” Ma had worked out a method to compress the memories in a way that most creatures did automatically.

  After a minute or so the procedure was over. Squee’s head perked up a bit, and she looked about expectantly.

  “Very good, Squee. Thank you for your cooperation,” Ma said, stroking Squee twice with the cushioned arm before retracting it.

  A gripper slid into the room through an access panel and placed a steaming dish on the table beside Squee. The dish had a small dollop of a spicy-smelling paste of red beans, rice, and chorizo. The funk enthusiastically dug in, the wire still connected.

  “Good girl, Squee,” Lex said, patting her on the side and scratching her behind the ears.

  She licked the bowl clean and leaned against Lex to better soak in the affection.

  “Please hold her,” Ma said.

  He put his hand to Squee’s side and held her to him. Though no additional arms deployed to medicate her, the little creature went rigid briefly, then slumped against Lex. Her head drooped, and her breathing became slow and calm.

  “What’d you do, drug the food?”

  “No. I’ve been enhancing my neurological interaction and co
ntrol of Squee’s body. I am now able to induce REM sleep with a fairly simple sequence of impulses.”

  “So my pet now has an off switch?”

  “It could be utilized in that manner. If you like, I could fabricate a transceiver to replace the port cover on her data port.”

  “Nah… but if you could figure a way to pull that off on infants and toddlers, you’d make a fortune.”

  Squee shuddered twice more, then attempted to stand.

  “You can release me now,” Ma said.

  “Release you… oh, wow, that was quick,” he said.

  Squee was at this point just another machine upon which a copy of the “Ma” operating system ran. It was remarkable how immediately evident that fact was as well. Fairly laid back, particularly as funks went, Squee even as such always had a subtle interest and enthusiasm in her surroundings. With Ma in control, her body language shifted sharply. It became much more rigid. Her expression was calmer, more controlled. There was a subtle dignity in her gaze and motions.

  She tapped along the table, one of the gantry arms dropping down and following her precisely. It removed the wire from her neck. Two more dropped down, holding out each side of a harness, which she stepped into with all the grace and ease of someone slipping on their coat before rushing off to work. When it was in place a final arm applied a short jumper wire, connecting a boxy electronic device mounted on the back of the harness to the port in her neck.

  “That was weirdly adorable, Ma,” he said.

  “Thank you, Lex.” The voice emitted from a speaker hidden somewhere inside the harness.

  “Oh wow. So what is that, some kind of a talk box?”

  “It is a military specification general purpose processing unit and data radio, not unlike the one acquired following my stun-gun mishap. It should permit me a twenty-four kilometer broadcast radius and support an expanded subset of my capabilities while it is functional. In the event it becomes nonfunctional, my organic components will continue to function until its recovery or replacement. The harness also includes a retractable tether and thrusters for zero-g maneuvering.”

  “Good thinking… So if you’re in Squee right now, who’s running the space station?”

  “It is still under my direct control,” Ma said, both from her personal speaker and from the public address system of the station. “Until the official start of the mission, all instances of my system shall run in synchronized parallel in order to assure data parity. I shall sever this connection at the start of the mission, both to minimize broadcast and to allow my alternative instances to act as mutual backups.”

  Karter’s voice barked across the PA system. “You two suited up? The power system on this heap is a little lossy. Once we top off, there’s only going to be a short window where we’ve got the on-demand power necessary to punch a hole in reality big enough to shove a ship through.”

  “You’ve got a way with words, Karter,” Lex called back.

  “Follow me. It is very nearly time to depart,” Ma said.

  She walked heedlessly off the edge of the table, causing Lex to jump and try to grab her. He stepped back when he realized one of the grippers was at the edge of the table waiting for her. It snapped into her harness, lowered her to the floor, and released with such a fluid motion Ma may as well have had the power of flight. It was such an intriguing sight, Lex lingered for a few moments with a grin on his face. Ma, realizing she hadn’t been followed, stopped and turned.

  “This way please,” she said.

  He nodded and followed, feeling for the first time since the mission was first suggested that it might not be suicide. Watching Ma when she was in her element was like watching a wizard command the forces of nature. When two-thirds of your team was composed of an artificial intelligence equally at home running the day-to-day operations of an entire planet or padding along in a house pet, it wasn’t hard to imagine that even the impossible was within your grasp.

  #

  Lex’s confidence in the potential for success lasted about fifteen seconds into the boarding process of the Lump of Coal. The gravity in the hangar had been shut off to ease the loading of cargo, requiring him to nudge himself into position with the wimpy maneuvering jets on his flight suit. Once he was in position, his attitude soured. Experiencing its tiny size in the simulator was one thing. Experiencing it in reality was quite another. The “cockpit” was a coffin-sized compartment inclined along the top front quadrant of the vehicle. The space was so tight that he could see that the open cockpit canopy had been contoured slightly to provide room for his arms and legs, and even had the controls mounted on it rather than having a complete console in the cockpit itself. Coupling that fact with the fact that he’d been asked to complete the flight-suit ensemble by strapping on a helmet, he started to get claustrophobic before they even shut the hatch.

  “I probably should have asked this earlier, but how long are we expecting this to take?”

  “Approximately fifty years,” Ma said through the helmet com system.

  “Correction, how much conscious time. Let’s leave out the cryo-sleep for now.”

  “The minimum projected mission time is seven days.”

  “So what do we do about food?”

  “Food for three weeks, in the form of assorted protein bars, has been provided. With reprocessing, the water should last at least four months. We have included a quantity of period-appropriate nontraceable currency as well, in the event additional provisions must be purchased, but this is best avoided.”

  “And what do I do with food when I’m done with it?”

  “I assume you observed the waste reclamation ports integrated into your suit when you put it on,” she said.

  “I did, but I was in a little bit of denial about having to rely on a poopie suit for the entire mission.”

  Karter cut in to the com system. “I can remember a time when we considered the waste reclamation function of a spacesuit a bonus of wearing one.”

  “There are so many things I wish I didn’t know about you, Karter, and that’s right at the top now, thank you.”

  A few distant hisses cut through the general hum of the ship, and Ma drifted into view. Seeing her as she was now almost made the entire mission worthwhile. She had loaded herself into a funk-sized spacesuit. Black and formfitting, it eliminated the poofiness of her coat and rendered her a remarkably sleek and almost lanky figure. At first her tail had retained its full shape, but at her direction the suit constricted around it. Now squeezed tight in the matte charcoal-gray material, it had a ratlike slenderness. Flattening the fur also emphasized the size of her paws, which seemed a bit too big for her even with the fluffy coat. Without it they made her look like an ungainly puppy.

  The suit linked to the perimeter of the harness, allowing its operational portion to stick through. It was easily the cuddliest little spacesuit he’d ever seen. The helmet was the precise shape of her head and allowed her pointed ears to stick up into their own semiflexible sheaths, with a clear visor that dropped in front of her gray eyes. In what could only have been an aesthetic choice, two gray lines ran down the back of the suit precisely where her white skunk stripes should have been, and minor registration points and numeric designations were sketched out in pink.

  She maneuvered herself into the cockpit and locked her paws into slots in an overhead console, essentially lying on the ceiling upside down over Lex.

  “Running suit diagnostic.”

  “Are you prepared?” she said. “Nano-lattice cloth: functional. Maneuvering pack: functional. Grappling hook: functional. Data radio: functional. Stun module: functional. Please run your own suit diagnostic, Lex.”

  “Uh… mental cloak, nano-lattice, maneuvering pack, and, ooh, kinetic capacitors, glad you threw those in.”

  “And they are functional?”

  “According to the suit.”

  “Are your EMP grenades intact?”

  “I have EMP grenades?”

  “You have six small EMP gr
enades on the belt of your suit. Were you not paying attention to my prior list of suit functions?”

  “I was distracted. Sorry.”

  “They’re there, I can see them. Let’s go already. We only theoretically have all the time in the world,” Karter said.

  “Okay, I’m ready as I’ll ever be,” Lex said, clicking his boots into harnesses and clutching handgrips on either side of him.

  “Shutting cockpit hatch,” Ma said.

  The lid swung down and pressurized. Once in place it was barely two centimeters away from his face. When he tried to look down to position his hands over the controls, his helmet clinked into the glass. Various readings and displays appeared in front of him, projected within the curve of the cockpit hatch itself and appearing to hang in midair in front of the ship.

  “You could learn a thing or two about ergonomics, Karter. I feel like I’m wearing this ship.”

  “You keep complaining and I’m going to tell Ma not to tell you how to activate the cryogenic sleep,” Karter said over the com. “We’re entering the final countdown.”

  “Disengaging information link,” Ma said. “Station, Squee, and ship instances become distinct entities in three… two… one…”

  A slight digital distortion rippled through the communication system.

  “Squee instance passes internal diagnostic,” Ma said via her suit’s speaker.

  “Ship instance passes internal diagnostic,” said another identical voice from the ship’s communication system.

  “Station instance remains fully functional,” said a third Ma, this one over the intercom.

  “Okay, this is going to get confusing in a big hurry,” Lex said.

  When Ma spoke next, all three instances did so in almost perfect unison. “I shall take steps to differentiate my instances. Refreshing random seed and clearing minor personality parameters.”

  “Karter, how come the controls aren’t responding?” Lex asked, tapping the various system tests and watching as values displayed on the holographic display failed to update.

  “The controls will auto-activate once you’re out of range of the station. I don’t need you getting twitchy and ramming that thing into the edge of the transporter.”