by David Brin
“I beg your pardon?”
“Clay play. Kneading slip. Do I have to spell it out, Albert?”
“Oh … dittosex. Ritu, you surprise me.”
“Because I’m being forward? Unladylike? We don’t have time to be demure, Albert. Or do you follow some neocelibate creed?”
“No, but—”
“Most of the men I know — and lots of women — subscribed to Playdit or Claymate Monthly in their tweens, getting that plain-wrapped package once a week containing an imprinted ‘expert.’ Even when they’re older—”
“Ritu, I have a steady girlfriend.”
“Yes, I read your profile. A warrior. Impressive. Have you exchanged total vows, or partial?”
“Clara’s no prude. We reserve true-true contact for each other—”
“That’s sweet. And prudent. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“Dittosex. Yeah, well. A lot depends on whether you inload.”
“Which neither of us seems likely to do tonight.”
“I see your point.”
“About distraction. I mean, what’s the point of inhibition when the world will end in an hour or so. Whatever life can be salvaged—”
“All right! I concede the point. Come here already.”
“… ”
“… ”
“Oh my.”
“… What?”
“Albert, you spend extra on your grays!”
“You do, too.”
“UK offers supertactile enhancement on employee discount — that’s nice …”
“Yeah. Let’s—”
“Uh, wait, there’s a rock under me … There. Better. Now, give me your weight. Feel good, Albert. Forget everything.”
“All right. It’s so …”
“… so real. Almost as if …”
“… as if … Ah … ch-phlwef!”
“What was that? Did you just … sneeze?”
“I thought you did. I mean the dust …”
“You did! You’re real, dammit! I can tell!”
“Ritu, let me explain—”
“Get off, you bastard.”
“Sure. But … what’s this dye rubbing off your neck?”
“Shut up.”
“And the contacts in your eyes have slipped. I thought your texture was too perfect. You’re real, too!”
“I thought you were dead. A ghost, about to melt away. I was trying to console you.”
“I was consoling you! What was all that talk about needing distraction?”
“I was talking about you, idiot.”
“It sounded like you were talking about yourself.”
“A likely excuse.”
“Hey! Do you think I’d have touched you if I knew? I said, Clara and I—”
“Damn you.”
“For what? We both lied, okay? I’ll tell you my reason for coming disguised, if you tell me yours. Deal?”
“Go to hell!”
“Aren’t you glad I wasn’t in my house when that missile hit? You’d rather I were dead?”
“Of course not. It’s just—”
“I could have started walking hours ago. I stayed to—”
“Take advantage!”
“Ritu, each of us thought — aw, what’s the point?”
“Damn right!”
“…”
“…”
“What?”
“… What?”
“Did you just mutter something?”
“No! That is …”
“Yes?”
“I only said it was … real nice … while it lasted.”
“Yeah … it was. Oh, now what are you laughing at?”
“I was just picturing us, lying here afterward, feeling pleased having ‘consoled’ each other … then waiting for the other one to start melting. Then waiting some more …”
“Heh. That is kind of funny. It’s kind of too bad we found out so soon.”
“Yes. But, Albert?”
“Yes, Ritu?”
“I really am glad you’re alive.”
“Thanks. That’s sweet to say.”
“So, now what?”
“Now? I guess we start walking. Get a plastic jug from the car, fill it from the pool, and head west.”
“Back to town. Are you sure you don’t mean southeast?”
“Southeast?”
“To my father’s cabin.”
“Urraca Mesa. I don’t know, Ritu. I’m in big trouble back home.”
“And you have lots to figure out before trying to solve it. The cabin is private, with shielded net-links. You could send out feelers, find out what’s going on before you emerge to confront Aeneas … or whoever’s behind all this.”
“I see your point. Can we make it there on foot?”
“There’s one way to find out.”
“Well …”
“And we’ll pass near the battle range. Was that why you came in person, instead of sending a ditto?”
“Am I that obvious, Ritu?”
“I’m realistic enough to tell — and be envious — when someone is in love.”
“Well, Clara and I … we’re both shy about commitment. But—”
“All right, then. Let’s make your soldier-lass our goal. It’s getting dark, but the moon is up and I’ve got a light-amplifier in my left eye.”
“Me too.”
“We can do it at a jog. Our ancestors crossed this desert long ago. Anything they could do, we can do, right?”
“If you say so, Ritu. In my experience, people can talk themselves into just about anything.”
24
Psycho-Ceramic
… Tuesday’s surviving gray makes an impression …
I never imagined that being a mad scientist’s experimental guinea pig could be so interesting.
It’s been about ten hours since my protein clock starting running down, triggering the salmon reflex … that familiar urge to swim or run or fly back home, overcoming any obstacle to spill memories from this mini-life into the copious storage of a real human brain. But that nagging reflex soon fell away. Every golem-reflex that was pressed into my pseudoflesh, back at the factory, has been worn down by a physical and spiritual pummeling.
“You’ll get used to the renewal treatments,” ditMaharal explained after putting me through torments of steam, hot jets, and tingling rays, leaving torso and limbs all puffy, quivering like those first moments when you slide out of the kiln.
“It only hurts the first few times,” he said.
“How often can you do this, before—”
“Before inevitable wear and tear makes it futile? Clay is still far less enduring than flesh. This prototype apparatus has done up to thirty renewals. My old team at Universal may have pushed that higher by now. If Aeneas hasn’t terminated the project — which seems rather likely at this point.”
Thirty renewals, I pondered.
Thirty times the normal ditto span. A pittance next to the many tens of thousands of days you feel entitled to in a modern, multibranched life. But with fresh élan surging through my clay body, I answered Maharal frankly.
“You’d have my thanks, if this weren’t just your way of extending my captivity.”
“Oh come, now. Where there’s continuity, there is hope. Just think of it — thirty days, to hope and scheme for escape!”
“Maybe. But you say I’ve been here before. Ditnapped and experimented on. Did any of those other Alberts escape?”
“As a matter of fact, three found clever ways to get away. One was stopped by my dogs, just outside. Another melted crossing the desert. And one actually made it to a phone! But you had already zeroed out the poor ditto’s credit code, after it was missing for a week. My robotic hunter caught up before it managed to format a message through one of the free-nets.”
“I’ll be sure and leave the codes active much longer in the future.”
“Always the optimist!” Maharal laughed. “I told you about those others in orde
r to show the futility of escape. I fixed the security flaws you exploited those times.”
“I’ll have to come up with something original, then.”
“I also know how you think, Albert. I’ve studied you for years.”
“Yeah? Then why am I here, ditYosil? Something about me bugs the hell out of you. Something you need, is that it?”
He looked at me, trapped immobile in his stony laboratory-catacomb, and I swear his golem eyes seemed to glint with a look that lay somewhere between avarice and fear. “I am getting close,” he says. “Very close.”
“You had better be,” I answered. “Even restorative technology can’t keep you going forever without a real body. I hold the key, don’t I? Some kind of secret that will solve your problem. But I’ll wear out too, in a matter of days.
“You’re in a race against time.
“Then there’s Aeneas Kaolin. He was awfully anxious to see you taken to the lab for dissection, Tuesday morning. Why? Does he suspect you’ve stolen equipment and set up your own clandestine lab, using it to cheat death?”
Maharal’s tense expression turned haughty.
“You are clever, as usual, Albert,” he replied. “But always there’s something missing from your sharp guesswork. You never quite catch onto the truth, even when I lay it all in front of you.”
How do you answer when a body says something like that to you? When another person claims to know what you will do even better than you do? Because he remembers many past episodes like this one, tense encounters that you don’t recall?
Having no answer, I lapsed silent. Renewal had given me some time, so I bided it.
He pulled a switch and the containment vessel quickly flushed clear of sustaino-fluid, then split open. While my body still quivered, regaining full levels of catalysis, he slipped powered manacles over my wrists and ankles. Using a controller, he used them to force me, marionettelike, onto a machine that looked like a souped-up imprinting unit. Round a corner of the apparatus, I glimpsed a pair of legs, colored bright crimson. A ditto blank. Rather small.
“You want me to make a copy?” I asked. “Let me warn you, ditYosil—”
“Just Yosil. I told you, I am Maharal, now.”
“Yeah right, ditYosil. It’s obvious you want to make dit-to-dit copying work. How else can you survive past the thirtieth renewal? But honestly, what kind of a solution is that? The second-order copy always has a flawed soul-imprint. And it gets worse when you copy that one. Errors magnify. By the third transfer, you’re lucky if it can even walk or talk.”
“So they say.”
“So they say? Listen, half of my work involves catching copyright violators who ditnap the golems of movied stars and courtesans and such, in order to sell bootleg knockoffs. Force-imprint counterfeiting may work for sex toys, if the customer has low standards, but it’s no solution to your problem, Yosil.”
“We’ll see about that. Now please try to relax and cooperate.”
“Why should I? It’s hard to make a really good imprint from a resisting subject. I can make things more difficult for you.”
“True. But consider. The better the copy, the more it will share your abilities, your drives, and especially your low opinion of me!” Maharal chuckled. “A quality copy will be your ally in trying to defeat me.”
I pondered.
“Those other Alberts you captured … they must have tried it both ways.”
“True. Only when the copy was poor, I just tried again. And again, till you chose to cooperate. Then we made real progress.”
“Your idea of progress doesn’t sound like mine.”
“Perhaps. Or maybe you can’t grasp the long-range benefits of my program, though I tried to explain on other occasions. In any event, your problem now is a pragmatic one, Albert. Shackled, there’s little that just one of you can do. Two of you might accomplish more. The logic is inescapable.”
“Damn you.”
He shrugged. “Think about it for a while, Albert. I have plenty of ditto blanks to experiment with.”
Maharal’s gray departed, leaving me there to ponder, frustrated because he clearly must have had the same conversation many times before, with other me’s, learning through experience which arguments worked.
Man, I wish I’d been more careful to track my missing dittos over the years! I simply assumed that a high rate of loss was unavoidable in this line of work. As long as each case went well, some casualties seemed worthwhile. It’s not quite as hard core an attitude as Clara has — sending herselves again and again to gladiatorial battlefields for the sake of PEZ and country, with scant likelihood they’ll return unscathed. Even so, I vowed to try harder in the future.
If I ever get out of here.
If I get another chance.
Well, all right. I gave in to Yosil’s logic. Concentrating during imprint would ensure my brotherdit emerges from the kiln filled with loathing for all mad scientists.
And I turned out to be right about that.
As if it would make any difference.
Well now, for the record, this isn’t the first time I remember doing a ditto-to-ditto transfer.
Come on, everybody tries it. Most people are unhappy with the product, which often emerges as a pitifully shallow caricature. It can be painful to watch, like seeing a version of yourself that’s drunk, stoned, or damaged beyond medical help. Back in college, some of the guys used to make frankies for laughs. But I never got into that kind of stuff.
Partly because my second-order dits never showed overt signs of degradation. No tremors or apparent memory gaps. No comic reeling or slurring. Boring! I might as well make all my copies directly. It felt more comfortable that way. Anyway, why violate the UK warranty? They can repossess your kiln.
I always knew I was a good copier. A small fraction of folks are gifted that way. I was even part of a research study when I was younger. So? It makes no practical difference. What’s the point in dit-to-dit transfer, even if you do it well?
Besides, it feels odd. Not at all like inloading. To lie on the original side of the machine in clay form, especially when the soul-sifter starts probing through you with tendrils that are better tuned to scanning neurons. The tetragramatron has to work harder to grasp the Standing Wave, delicately plucking all the chords of your inner symphony, borrowing and amplifying every note in order to start an identical resonant melody playing in another instrument, nearby.
Funny thing. This time I definitely felt something like an echo coming from the new ditto — still a lifeless lump on its warming tray. The sensation of déjà vu that our grandparents used to find so eerie — that we now call a “ripple in the Standing Wave” — swarmed over me then like a chilly breath. A whirling-ghostly wind. A feeling of intimate familiarity with myself that I did not like at all.
Was this part of the experiment? Part of what Maharal was trying to achieve?
“Two centuries ago, William James coined the term ‘stream of consciousness,’ ” Maharal commented happily, while he twiddled dials. “James was referring to the way each of us invests our sense of identity in an illusion. The illusion of continuity — like perceiving a single river, flowing from one source to the sea.
“Even dittotech didn’t change this romantic delusion. It only added multiple side branches and tributaries to the river, all of them still flowing back into a single soul, an entity that each person arrogantly chooses to call me.
“But a river is nothing in itself! It’s amorphous. A mirage. An ever-changing churn of individual tumbling molecules and moments. Even ancient mystics knew that stepping twice into a stream, from exactly the same spot, will immerse you in completely different ‘rivers.’ Into different liquids that were peed into the flow by different elephants, at different places and times upstream.”
“You make philosophy so refreshingly earthy,” I muttered, lying there helpless under his monologue.
“Thanks. In fact, that particular metaphor was yours. Another Albert Morris golem exp
ressed it, years ago. Which goes to prove my point, dear fellow. The Standing Wave is something much more than just continuity of memory. It has to be! There must be some kind of connection to a higher — or a lower — level.”
I knew his game. Maharal was trying to distract me, so my anger wouldn’t interfere with the imprinting process. Yet his voice conveyed something sincere. He cared about the crap he was uttering.
Anyway, the weird sensations had me wanting some distraction from those strangely powerful resonant echoes. Though my head was clamped between the sifter probes, I turned my eyes to meet Maharal’s.
“You’re talking about God, right?”
“Well … yes. In a manner of speaking.”
“Isn’t that just a bit odd, Professor? You’ve spent your life encroaching on the province of religion, helping make it practical for anyone to duplicate the soul-field, like a cheap photograph. There’s hardly anyone the old church conservatives hate more than you.”
“I’m not talking about religion,” he answered with a biting tone. “All that I and others have done, by introducing this technology, is take another step in a long campaign, pushing back a confused muddle of contradictory superstitions in order to let in more light. First Galileo and Copernicus battled to free astronomy from priests who declared the entire cosmos off limits to human understanding. Then Newton, Boltzmann, and Einstein liberated physics. For a while, religions claimed that life was too mysterious for anyone but the Creator Himself to understand — till we analyzed the genome and commenced designing new species in the lab. Today, most babies get some kind of optimizing gene therapy, before or after conception, and nobody objects.”
“Why would they?” I asked, momentarily puzzled. “Never mind. Let me guess. You’re about to extend this historical trend to consciousness—”
“And the human soul, yes. It was the last bulwark of twentieth-century religion. Let science explain nature’s laws, from quasars down to quarks! From geology to biology! So what? Those laws were mere recipes and background scenery, concocted long ago by a creator who cares far more about matters of the spirit! That’s what they said.
“Only then Jefty Annonas found the soul’s vibrating essence, weighed it, measured it—”