This is my first true memory, inscribed in the metaneural lattice of the probe’s tertiary bank, etched in electrons spinning their mysterious way through the molecular nodes of a crystal the size of a shoe-box. It is these electrons that comprise the being I prefer to call my “self”. Without these subtle singularities, these mere points in space-time, I would have nothing but hearsay to carry me through eternity, one moment at a time.
But it is not this memory that comes to me after Emmett leaves the beach, a thousand years after my awakening. It is the one in which, for the first and only time, I met myself.
The conversation was brief. He asked me how I felt, and I replied that I felt fine. He looked tired, and I commented on that. He said that yes, he was feeling drained. The process of creating an engram took many weeks of examination and interrogation in order to ensure that the copy matched the original as closely as possible. He had been on-site for the last month, every waking hour spent in a cocoon of instruments, and was only gradually readjusting to normalcy.
My original had requested that we be allowed to talk before he returned to his home in Paraguay. He was curious to see what it would be like – as was I, although I think I felt the existential significance of the moment more keenly than him.
I asked him if he had found inspiration in the experience. He said that he had sketched a series of pieces incorporating some of the mathematical techniques of the early twentieth century. Variations based on inversion and retrograde movement were a good musical metaphor for reflection, he thought, and I agreed.
He asked me then if I, too, had had any ideas, and I replied that I hadn’t.
He nodded distantly, looking down at his shoes. I could tell what he was thinking with an ease that surprised me. After all, I had never watched myself engage in conversation before.
“I expect it’ll take time to settle in,” I said.
“I expect so, too.” He looked up at that, eyes meeting the lenses of the camera through which I viewed the world, and laughed. “No surprise in that, I guess.”
I laughed with him, and for an instant we bonded. He was me and I was him: closer than brothers or lovers, our essences were identical. Technology had teased out of him the threads that held him together and woven them anew in me. We were more alike than any other couple on Earth, apart from those formed by the few hundred other humans who had had engrams made in the last two years. And half of half of those were already in space. For the first time in our lives, we truly felt as though we had soul-mates.
I realize now how illusory that thought was. Minds can only be deciphered so far: the processes underlying consciousness can be simulated, as can the way emotions and other impulses ebb and flow throughout the body – but nothing can be done about memory. Holographic and elusive, memory has defied all attempts to record it directly. The only way it can be captured is second-hand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions can be attached later, to colour the recollection correctly even though the details may still be slightly askew. Pre-awakening memory in an engram is, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.
That might have been enough for me then, on the verge of joining humanity’s latest exploratory venture. Now, I am never sure.
There is little else to recall about that first and last meeting. We bade each other farewell, feeling slightly foolish, and went our separate ways. He was headed back to his home in Paraguay, and I, in my mind, was already halfway to the stars. I wasn’t to know, then, that neither of us would make it.
The probe is thirty metres long and four wide – a stubby needle tumbling at thirty-five per cent of the speed of light through the interstellar void. Its main drive has been inactive for centuries now, but the rest of it still functions. Through sensors mounted on its pitted hull, I could, if I wished, watch distant suns drift slowly past, trickling like raindrops down a window. Rarely these days do I avail myself of the opportunity.
It takes me a while to track down the others. We are all located in the same place, near the probe’s centre of gravity, but physical reality has become less and less important over time. We all have our unique virtual locations, and each has become increasingly isolated in his or her own way.
I confront security foils and barriers. I barrage input ports with messages. I insinuate myself into virtual worlds that, like mine, have rarely held more than one occupant. I decrypt strange codes and untangle logical puzzles designed to keep intruders occupied. I harangue.
In the end, I have their attention.
We gather in a neutral environment – a grey room large enough to hold us all with plenty of empty space between. We look exactly the same as our originals did when their engrams awoke, although some of us have assumed idiosyncratic modes of dress. I am barefoot and robed in the manner of a fifty-year-old beach-dweller; others have opted for more formal garments.
There are only twenty of us left, not counting Emmett, who will keep his distance until the general assembly has been called. The remainder are either inactive or unapproachable. I avoid the word “dead” when explaining their absence to the small crowd before me. One I know of – Elizabeth Li, the probe’s resident poet – is trapped in a perpetual loop, cycling forever through one brief, final stanza. Is that death? I do not feel qualified to judge.
“We are not allowed to commit suicide,” complains Letho Valente, a swarthy man with thinning grey hair. His original was a crystallographer specializing in structures that form in microgravity. “I have tried many times. Do you know what happens?”
“There is a discontinuity,” nods Exene Gill, former linguist. Her face is finely lined and nobly beautiful, preserved at the age of sixty-five. “We cease for an instant, then return unharmed to our previous state as though nothing has happened. The core program will not permit voluntary termination.”
“You mean euthanasia,” says Cuby Kleinig, once a youthful student of geology.
“No.” Exene casts him a look of disdain. “How can something that has never been alive be granted an ‘easy death’?”
“You don’t think you’re alive?” asks Tiger Coveny, our resident expert in religious theory.
“Of course I do,” Exene snaps.
“But are we?” asks Letho Valente, stabbing a finger into the argument.
“That’s the question.” Exene folds her arms. “And I am tired of living without an answer.”
I stand apart from them, appalled. Twenty of the most renowned minds of the human race who have not been in the same room together for untold years – and all they can talk about is killing themselves? There is so much bitterness in the air that I feel as though I am choking.
But the greater part of my dismay is reserved, not for the topic of conversation, but for the fact that their thoughts have so closely mirrored my own.
“We have come a long way,” I say, trying to shift our attention elsewhere.
Exene turns to face me, snaps: “No we haven’t.”
I am rescued by Cuby. “How far exactly?”
“I don’t know. Jurgen?”
Jurgen Follows moves forward. Despite being of relatively small stature and unprepossessing with it, he is instantly the centre of attention. He opens his hands as though to embrace us all and a starscape appears between them. Sol is in the bottom right right corner. Our course is traced in white. Relatively close to Sol, the white line has a slight kink in it. Not long after that, it just misses one particular star. I avoid looking at that point. The white line ends nowhere in particular, many hundreds of light-years from its source.
Letho’s gaze estimates the extent of our journey so far. “Not bad,” he muses. “I guess we were lucky to make it anywhere at all.”
“That’s true.” I nod. The probe could just as easily have been cracked wide open by the dust-particle that slipped through the anti-impact detectors and destroyed the main drive. Being knocked off-course instead of kill
ed outright, even with no way to return to our planned trajectory, had once seemed like an enormous stroke of good luck.
“Is this what you wanted to talk about?” asks Tiger. From the expression on her face I can tell that she hopes it isn’t.
“No. I’d like to call a general assembly.”
“We aren’t already having one?” Exene encompasses the room with a wave.
“Not quite. One of us is missing.”
Several of them exchange glances. Exene says: “If you mean who I think you mean –”
“Yes: Emmett Longyear is still active.”
“Well, you can forget it. If he’s there, I won’t be.”
Letho touches her elbow, as though to calm her down, but his attention is fixed on me. “It’s a decision we made a long time ago, Peter. You can’t expect us to go back on it now.”
“Why not?”
“He betrayed us.” Tiger Coveny’s voice is taut with spite.
“How? He didn’t force us to come.”
“You know the answer to that.” Exene moves away from Letho. “The program abandoned us. They left us to die.”
“And Emmett ran the program,” Cuby finishes. “It was his responsibility to help us. He let us down.”
“He killed us!”
I hold up my hands, noting that only Jurgen is disagreeing with them. The silent shake of his bald head is heartening, but barely encouragement. The elderly astronomer hasn’t spoken aloud since the accident.
“Our Emmett, the engram, disagrees with you,” I say over the babble of protest. “He thinks there’s still a chance someone will come to bring us back.”
“They’ve had – how long?” Letho shakes his head. “When was the last time we received a transmission from Earth? When we slipped out of the maser feed? If we’d heard anything at all since then, I’d let myself hope. Can you give me another reason?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, choosing not to answer his first question. Letho must have an idea how long from the plot Jurgen is still holding between his outspread hands. “But time really isn’t the issue, here, is it? We could freeze if we wanted to.”
“Has anyone?” Exene asks.
“A couple. Not many. I didn’t want to bring them up to speed.”
“No.” She nods approval. “it wouldn’t be fair.”
“But we can only slow-mo so far,” Tiger says. “That’s not fair.”
“Actually, I disagree. I wouldn’t even call it bad design.” Letho concedes the point with his usual sense of fair play. “We were only supposed to be in transit thirty years. Over that length of time, the difference between freezing and the slowest rate available would’ve been academic.”
“Quite.” Exene purses her lips. “But there we are anyway.”
“Going nowhere fast,” Tiger mutters, and more than half of them nod agreement.
I realize then that we could argue for ever. The thought depresses me more than our predicament: we’re a diverse bunch and are supposed to be able to solve problems; that’s why we were chosen. But all we do is quibble like schoolkids.
“Emmett has been real-timing it,” I say, hoping facts will impress them more than arguments about ethics. “I want him in on this because he deserves to be. He’s more a part of this mission than we are. He orchestrated it, and he’s persisted with it. If anyone should be at a general assembly, it’s him.”
“Why not tell us now,” Letho suggests, “and fill him in later?”
“No. We should be together – all of us, in the same place.”
“Why?” asks Tiger. “What is it?”
“It’s important,” I say, echoing Emmett’s own words. “You’ll find out if you attend the assembly.”
Exene smiles at that. “Blackmail, Peter?”
I smile back. “Why not?”
“I always said you’d find something to take the place of music.”
The barb, unexpected as it is, strikes deep, right to the core of my self-doubt. I turn away from her, deciding at that instant to forget the whole thing. The more I push, the more they resist. I don’t need this on top of everything else. I’ll tell Emmett I gave it my best shot, but failed, and that will be that.
I call up the location for my beach and prepare to leave.
Then I feel Exene’s hand on my shoulder, kneading my virtual flesh with unexpected sympathy. “Peter, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
“No.” I am unable to keep the pain of loss from my voice, even after so long. “I don’t.”
“Listen, I –”
“And neither does Emmett.”
Her hand falls away, and I turn to face her. We are still so close we are almost touching. The others watch us in uncomfortable silence.
“You’re asking too much,” she says.
“Just be there, Exene. That’s all I ask.”
“But –”
I cut her off in mid-sentence. The beachscape enfolds me and I am alone again.
“Thanks, Peter,” he says. “I knew I could count on you.”
I shrug in reply, not entirely certain what I have done or why I did it. Ordinarily, I would have required at least a token explanation before putting my head on the chopping-block. But not this time. That perplexes me as much as his desire to call the assembly in the first place.
He intrudes upon my private space as casually as he might have done when we first left Earth, before the accident. I find his presumption slightly annoying after so long, but not enough to make me angry.
“Why haven’t we been contacted?” I ask.
“There could be a number of reasons.” His gaze wanders to the sunset. “We were fifteen light-years out when the accident occurred. By the time our distress call reached Earth and their reply reached us, we would have passed our target system and been heading away.”
“But they still could’ve made the effort,” I retort, dredging up the argument as though there remains a chance it will make a difference. “They knew exactly where we were heading. It wouldn’t have been hard to make sure the message reached us.”
“That’s assuming they received our distress call in the first place, Peter. Anything could’ve happened back there – war, disease, resource shortages, you name it. Earth may have been forced to forget about the slowboats in order to survive.”
“The entire program? There were over a hundred ships!”
“Maybe they all had problems, and they had to choose the ones they could fix most easily.”
“They wrote us off as a bad loss, then.”
“Maybe.” It is his turn to shrug. “Or maybe they just didn’t know what the hell to do. We certainly didn’t.”
I nod silently. My stick pokes a row of three dots into the sand: an ellipsis, symbol of our fate.
“What do you think, Peter?” he asks.
“That your original abandoned us,” I say, avoiding his gaze.
“I hope you’re wrong. The prospect of rescue has, after all, kept me going for so long.”
“But if he did,” I go on, choosing my words with care, “then I’m hardly obliged to help you, am I?”
His stare burns like a brand on my cheek. “Is that what’s bothering you, Peter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m your friend. Isn’t that enough?”
“It might once have been,” I say, finally looking him in the eye. “I can’t understand why it should still be, now.”
“Exactly.” He smiles in the same way my father might have, once – at a small child who’s missed the point completely. “Odd, isn’t it?”
I shake my head, angry enough to take some of it out on him. “Damn you, Emmett. I don’t owe you anything!”
“And I respect you for helping me anyway. What more do you want?”
“I want to know –”
“What?”
I can’t answer him. What do I want to know? Why Earth abandoned us? Why we aren’t allowed to die? Why the only lasting emotions I can recall feeling in the last t
wenty years are confusion and sadness?
I might as well ask how we came to be on the probe in the first place.
“Peter?”
“I want you to tell me why you’ve called this assembly.”
He says nothing for a long time. “Are you afraid you’ve done the wrong thing?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t. Believe me, Peter. You’ll see. When the time comes, everything will be clear.”
“Don’t talk like that.” I shake my head. “You sound like you did back on Earth, and I don’t believe that kind of talk any more.”
“I know, and I hate it as much as you do.”
Before I can respond, he turns his back on me and begins to walk away.
I am suddenly fearful that I might have pushed him too far. “Wait, Emmett –”
“Pick a time that suits you best,” he calls over his shoulder, “and I’ll be there. Until then, I’ll be waiting.”
“For what?” I call after him.
His reply is barely audible: “For something new!”
Then he is gone.
I pick an hour at random, one real-time month from now. That should give everyone in deep slow-mo enough time to absorb the message and to meet the appointment – if they intend to come at all. I have no way of knowing if anyone will turn up. I deliberately don’t include a request to RSVP; my job is done for now.
I pass the time in my usual way: writing in the sand and thinking the same things, over and over. Words are a poor substitute for music, just as doubt is a pale shadow of life. But I have nothing else to do. I have long since exhausted the dubious pleasure of listening to the works of Peter Owen Leutenk, and confronting my disability.
My original was one of the great living composers of the twenty-first century – yet I haven’t written a note for a thousand years. I wonder how he would’ve felt, as the hydrogen tanks of the plane carrying him to his home in Paraguay exploded fifteen thousand metres above the South Atlantic Ocean, if he had known that the music inspired by the creation of his engram would go forever unwritten.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13 Page 94