Gregor poured every ounce of himself into the object, forcing whatever residual spark into a brighter psychic flame. Dizziness grew more dominant even as it faded, as everything faded. The feel of the lighter became faint, fainter, gone. Gregor bore down—
—and blinked to find himself standing on a hillside composed of rubble and metal, with walls of the same towering over him.
A man, broken and covered in blood, sprawled on the debris. He gargled out blood, then winced. When he relaxed, he looked at Gregor, his eyes narrowed.
Gregor staggered back into a wall. He’s looking at me. But that wasn’t possible. This was 200 years ago.
His fingers splayed against the rock behind him and he felt its rough solidness. What was this? It made what he’d experienced with Amelia seem like a vague daydream.
“Ya …” the man said and, like a switch had been thrown in Gregor’s head, he knew who the man was: Jerry Davis. Was he speaking to Gregor? “Ya … rescue?”
Davis’s eyes were slowly opening, slowly losing focus. His face relaxed and, in the center of Gregor’s head, he heard Davis’s final thought: ‘Cause they’re not there. Just Jerzyck’s …
Jerry Davis died trying to think of the word ghosts.
And nothing changed. He touched the wall, himself. Still solid, still present. What was this?
“I’m still here,” Gregor said aloud. Typically at the end of the final moment, the world, as the MC saw it, went dark, the doorway closed, and the MC, back in the Hall, pulled the studs from his temples. Something like this did not happen.
“But it did,” Davis said.
Gregor jerked. Davis pushed himself into a sitting position against the wall. His eyes were sharper than they’d been an instant before. “Is this what you wanted?”
“What happened? Am I really,” he gestured vaguely, “here?”
“Your consciousness merged with the remaining psychic energy on the Zippo lighter, amplifying it. You threw everything you had at it and this is the result. You are the first Memory Coordinator to go all in, as the saying goes.”
“How do you know all that? You died two hundred years ago!”
Davis’s face never changed, but, for all of that, he looked at Gregor as if Gregor were simple. “Jerry Davis died two hundred years ago, but the energy remained and whatever energy it has merged with you just as much as you merged with it.”
“You’re not Jerry Davis?”
“I am and I’m not,” Davis said. “I’m the residual. The ghost.”
“And you’ve been around all along?”
“Not for much longer,” Davis replied, and the sky darkened, throwing the narrow passage into deep gloom.
Gregor recoiled from the wall as the feel of the stone changed, become somehow artificial, almost plastic. “What’s happening?”
Davis’s face was lost beneath the flickering glow of his headlamp. “The last of the energy’s giving out. You gave it a shot in the arm, but you aren’t in tip-top shape.” He heard the shuffle-rumble of Davis moving. It sounded like a recording of a recording of a recording. “Come here. You deserve a rest.”
Gregor did, his legs slightly numb. He felt for Davis’s shoulder and, when he touched fabric—like paper—he sat down.
“What happens now?” he asked. The details of the rocks visible in the glow of Davis’s lamp were softening, disappearing at the edges. The feel of solidity beneath him was fading.
“We’re going,” Davis said, then sighed. “It’s the end.”
“For me, too?”
Davis didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
“I just wanted to see the people,” Gregor said. “Feel them for what they were instead of what I and the others made them.”
“I know,” Davis said, and his voice grew distant, as if he were walking away. The darkness sucked the life from his headlamp. “And I thank you for it, as I’m sure Amelia and Roger and the others would.”
Gregor couldn’t feel the ground beneath him. The light softened further, becoming gray, then winked out.
Before the darkness took him, Gregor felt Davis’s hand on his.
And then that was gone, too.
Security found Gregor’s body the next morning, Jerry Davis’s Zippo in his hand. According to clinic doctors, he died of massive cerebral hemorrhaging.
All the artifacts Gregor used were resealed and put back on the shelf.
Gregor’s body was cremated, of course. Like other Memory Co-ordinators, he lacked many personal belongings. Because of this, his Memory Coordinator identification card was sealed.
When it was finally unsealed, seven years later, the Memory Coordinator handling it reported a weird doubling in the psychic energy. He told his supervisor that, instead of one mental doorway—the way he imagined his way into the core of an artifact’s energy—he saw two, superimposed over each other, with one brighter than the other. However, he caught nothing but darkness beyond the doorways and a queer sense of emptiness.
The supervisor, concerned, gave the MC the rest of the week off. Too much strain, apparently. The poor son of a bitch was crying when he came out of the flash.
Gregor’s identification card was resealed and never opened again.
In the Nothing -
Space, I Am What
You Made Me
I
A Reflection of a Reflection
Of a Reflection
Alan watched his fingers in the mirror push feeling back into his face. The rubbery, skin-tight upload cap, with sensors like pencil-erasers, covered his head.
His attention slipped and he jammed his thumb into his right eye. He recoiled, cupping the socket. “Goddammit!”
At least you felt something, an interior voice murmured. He shook it off; interior voices had become entirely too common recently.
He pulled his hand away. The eye was bloodshot, only partly open, giving him a leering quality. His view out of it was warped, discolored. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
Where had he heard that? Some cube-vid, probably. When hyper-sleep had become impossible, he’d gone through every film the Auxiliary Drive, the waystation’s backup, had stored. Anything to avoid staring at the scrap of unknown galaxy—the nothing-space—the team had been assigned to.
He canted his head. The mirror reflected the outpost’s overlook-view: chaotic star-splatter against inky black. The glass was reflective and, depending on the angle, the mirror and the glass reflected over and over again, bouncing off one another.
For a moment, he could imagine getting pulled into that, elongating and replicating, over and over, as he traveled infinity.
He forced him to look away. Like the interior voices, thoughts like that had become entirely too common recently.
He pulled off the upload cap, thinking of the bundle of memories, education, and personality—his digital imprint—waiting in the AD.
“I hope this works,” he told his reflection.
He stepped into the main room on legs that felt like water. The outpost was just a large dome—much of it dominated by the overlook-view—with the white, monolithic Auxiliary Drive at one end and the access-tunnel hatch at the other with his useless hyper-sleep console and the bathroom perpendicular to the rest. Wires littered the floor.
He glanced at the hatch as he passed, thought of the team at the hub, hyper-sleeping. Unconsciously, a moue of distaste, as if he’d smelled something rancid, crossed his face.
He approached the AD and pulled out the keyboard. Above it, the plasma Drive-screen was lit green with the legend UPLOAD COMPLETE. Uploading himself to the Auxiliary Drive was easier than he’d thought; it was simply a matter of splicing and cross-patching the outpost’s measuring equipment. The human mind took only seven-point-six tetrabytes when properly organized.
It just left you feeling … a little numb.
Before the team Jumped to this nothing ice-dwarf, before he and the others came to play lookout while the rest of the UPF went to play war,
he’d read about personality-upload; military leaders uploaded specific thoughts and memories for the benefit of posterity and museums.
No one had uploaded an entire mind before, however.
He typed:
RUN AD://TC-CODE-00841-ME.
“One moment,” a digital voice said from hidden speakers. Alan had spent seventy-two fruitless hours searching for them.
He sat down in the command chair, rubbed his throbbing eye. The dome hummed around him—a soft, efficient sound.
The Drive-screen resolved to show himself sitting in the chair.
“The fuck?”
He got up and his reflection did the same.
They both approached the screen.
The recorder? How?
Where the hell was his goddam file?
Alan rubbed his face and his mirror-image did the same.
Then his mirror-image blinked the bloodshot eye away. “Hullo, Alan,” his voice boomed and Alan shrieked.
The distance between the outpost and the hub was two klicks, so a small med-unit was attached to his hyper-sleep console.
Alan reached for the switch to open it and his mirror-image said, “Let me get that.”
He glanced at the screen. His double remained seated on his version of the command chair.
A click and the panel opened, revealing the med-unit.
Frowning, Alan took a stim-patch and slapped it on the side of his neck. Immediately, the throbbing in his eye dwindled.
“Better?” his double asked.
He shook his head. “Are you really me?”
His double frowned. “How do you mean?”
He gestured vaguely. “Like, are you human—are you really Alan Michael Wahnsin—”
His double interrupted, smiling. “—Tech-Core C-562, assigned to Operation Back-Door by Major Douglas Foster, for a period no less than three years or Official Recall?” His double shook his head, smiling wider. His grin made Alan uncomfortable. It was almost a leer. “Sorry—I perused the Drive files.”
Alan sat down. “How can you do that?”
“What?”
He pointed at the AD. “That. You’re a file. You’re not software. You accessing personnel files is like one of the cube-vids running diagnostics.”
His double stared at Alan for what felt much longer than it could’ve been.
And then the screen blinked and his double was smiling again.
“For the purposes of what I am,” he said, “the way the Drive works is to reorganize the information you uploaded into patterns lacking in an actual human mind. So I am you and I’m not you. Clear as mud, right?”
He laughed, a tinkling digital sound that set Alan’s teeth on edge.
“Call me Alan-2, by the way. It has a nifty sci-fi feel I like.”
That’s not an answer, an interior voice murmured.
Alan’s hand wanted to go to his eye, bring the pain back. It was the only thing, at the moment, which felt real. His thoughts were scattered—they were always scattered anymore—and it seemed incredibly important that he focus. Something was off—in the upload, in what he was experiencing, something. He just needed to think—
And then Alan-2 said, “I have a question—maybe it was lost in the upload, but why haven’t you hyper-slept?”
They were lookouts for the war effort. If the Enemy—the vague, euphemistic term the UPF had used—tried to outflank the Alphas fighting, it was their job to raise the balloon. If that were to actually happen, they’d be awakened early from hyper-sleep. Otherwise, they maintained their mission as scientists, rising every quarter to collect data of this uncharted galaxy, send the reports, and go back to hyper-sleep.
“Correction,” Alan-2 said. Both he and Alan sat identically, separated by the Drive-screen. “They’re scientists. You’re—we’re—the hired help. Keep the wires unkinked, keep the hard drives humming.”
“Well … yeah.” Alan hadn’t thought of it like that. “But we have a Beta soldier here, too.” He licked his lips. “We’re just as much a part of the team as Dr. Murphy and the others.”
Alan-2 waved a hand, dismissing this. “But you need hyper-sleep, Alan. You can’t stare at that—” He pointed at the nothing-space.“—for three months, all alone.”
“That’s why I uploaded you.”
“Talking to me is the same as talking to yourself.”
Not when you grin like that, Alan thought. “The circuits were fried. A cross-patch between two unequal powers, probably. It’s in the installation walls, and I don’t have the equipment for that.”
“Quality plummets when the UPF’s distracted,” Alan-2 said. “Why not shoot a message home?”
Alan bunched his fists. “It’s coded and only Dr. Murphy has it. By the time I realized it was broken, the rest had gone into hyper-sleep.”
Alan-2 leaned back in the chair with an arm thrown over the back, obviously thinking. He had a very affected way that reminded Alan of ancient silent films.
“Well, I can check it out,” Alan-2 said, as if coming to a conclusion.
“I don’t see what you—”
A sharp bing resounded. “Sorry—already did.” Alan-2 leaned for-ward in his chair. His face was that of someone who didn’t want to know what he did. “And—uh—Alan …” He looked away.
“What?”
It appeared that Alan-2 forced himself to look at his creator. “Here—lemme show you.”
The screen resolved to show a narrow conduit hallway, gray and black, filled with lengths of banded wires and pipes.
“Diagnostic cameras for the station’s machines,” Alan-2 said. “They didn’t tell us about this, did they? A bit important for the tech-crew to know all the tech, don’t you think?”
Before Alan could respond, his double said, “Now, look in the upper left corner.”
Knitted throughout the lengths were intersections of other pipes and wires. One band of wires appeared shredded away from the connection point.
Alan leaned forward. “The hell?”
“A person did that,” Alan-2 said. The screen changed to a blank wall, lined with thick insulation. “It’s accessible here—two feet from the console.”
Alan stood. “Why would someone do that?”
“You were always meant to be stationed here?” Alan-2 asked.
“You know that.” He approached the console and ran his hand over the panel, the paper-thin seam.
Alan-2 said, “Did your team know you were going to be out here?”
Alan turned back. “What’s your point?”
“Because I’m accessing the files. Dr. Murphy was head of the psychiatric unit on Ellis-7.”
Alan sat. “So?”
Alan-2 took an unneeded breath. “There’s a condition called Interstellar Personality Disorder, where long-term space-workers suffer a psychotic break after so much time out. It begins with loss of focus, insomnia, aggression, echo voices. Violence is common, with a mindset of persecution among the afflicted. It’s why hyper-sleep was invented in the first place.”
He paused. “Murphy’s discipline is IPD.”
Alan’s fists were shaking. “What are you saying?”
His double disappeared, replaced by a black-and-white high-angle view of the hyper-sleep chamber back in the hub. The doctors and soldier lay swaddled in their high-tech geltabs.
“When was the last time you slept for more than an hour, with anything to look at but the outside?”
Alan stood with his nose almost to the screen. His fists clenched and unclenched. His thoughts uncorked, but they were a mess, threaded with echoing interior voices. He could only zero in on two things, both maddeningly meaningless:
What do you call a sick file?
I uploaded him now, not when I first arrived.
“Why are you showing me this?” he asked.
Alan-2 didn’t answer.
II
Birth, Death, Rebirth
For Matheson, coming up from hyper-sleep was like swimming up from gr
eat depths: a pinprick of light, growing infinitesimally as he pushed at the membrane separating consciousness from unconsciousness …
The console casing opened as he awoke and he flinched. He did this always—since the hazing back on Ellis-7.
Just the computer, reading his lifesigns.
He unclipped his surface-catheter—wincing at the prick of leaving—and sat up. He swung his bare feet over the console side and stood, a wiry man in boxers. Why the hell was he thinking of Ellis-7? Jesus, he hadn’t thought of that in ages.
Absently, he moved down the aisle, rubbing the jagged hook-shaped scar that stretched down his left side. At the end of the chamber, he checked the readouts, checked the perimeter-scans. He was still more than half asleep. This was nothing more than training kicking in. And then the light above him went out.
At the same time, the overhead at the other end of the chamber went on, illuminating the main hallway hatch.
Matheson turned. “The fuck?”
He started down, his body tense, then stopped, looking over the life monitors blinking biorhythmically above the other consoles. None of them were green, showing the set-down of hyper-sleep chems. Betas got up roughly three hours before the rest of the assigned crew, but the life monitors should’ve still showed green.
The light at the other end of the hatch brightened, as if to say, Are you coming or not?
He moved the rest of the way down the aisle on the balls of his feet, shoulders tense. The hatch irised open when he approached.
He stopped again. You needed a code to activate any hatch in the waystation. Security measure.
The hub’s main hallway was dark, as it should’ve been during periods of inactivity. A soft overhead lit up halfway down the hall, over the message-room hatch.
“Hello?” he called, feeling stupid.
He stepped out into the hallway, the metal tile cold. The moment he thought of going back and grabbing his clothes the hatch irised shut, nearly taking his foot with it.
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 23