Ivan nervously stroked the spot on his upper chest where metal met flesh. The interface had absorbed several of Dr. Kemp’s felt pen marks, leaving no trace of discoloration in the metal. The disappearance of each mark felt like a further loss of his humanity.
They were now close enough to Earth for a live video chat with his wife. He’d been dreading this moment. Email was impersonal, a step removed from contact. You could think about what you wanted to say, phrase things to give a desired impression, avoid or ignore uncomfortable questions. Not so with a live call.
A quick email to Judy had ensured that he’d be talking to the children first. Not that there was any hope of holding them off—Josh and Suzie were about as patient as any other kids their age. He was wearing his coveralls, and he would make sure not to bring his hands into frame. The children would see only the face of their father, entirely normal. But if he could satisfy them, have Judy hustle them off—then came the hard part. Judy would see any attempt to deflect and would zero in on whatever he was trying to avoid. There was no point in trying to soft-pedal or spare her the gory details. And she deserved better. She deserved his trust, and she deserved the truth.
Ivan reached for the connect button yet again, hesitated, and with a snarl of frustration, stabbed down on it with his finger.
There was the usual delay for a space-to-ground call, then the screen filled with the faces of his children. “DADDY!”
Ivan smiled, almost sobbed, and his eyes welled up. His throat constricted and he couldn’t have made a sound if his life depended on it. Not that it mattered. Josh and Suzie were both talking in a steady stream, neither seemingly bothered by the fact that the other was speaking about something entirely unrelated.
Finally the verbal assault petered out, and his children stopped to draw a collective breath. Ivan grinned and said, “Sorry, did you say something?”
“DADDY!” Twin frowns of mock disapproval answered him.
The next several minutes were a blur. Ivan luxuriated in the sight and sound of his family; the children competing for maximum face and voice time, while Judy hovered in the background, trying to look patient and calm.
Finally, his wife stepped in. “Okay, enough. I have to talk to your father. And you have homework. Move it.”
There were groans of frustration and then a flurry of “Bye, Daddy,” before the children left the room. Ivan watched Judy close the door to the bedroom, then turn back to the phone. Here it comes.
“All right, Ivan. Spill. What’s this all about?”
In as calm a voice as he could manage, Ivan told her.
* * *
Judy’s eyes had that look—lots of white, pupils dilated, the shine of incipient tears. Shock. Her mouth moved a few times, but no sound came out. Finally she said, “Show me.”
Ivan had decided to be as matter-of-fact as he could. The more he acted horrified, the more Judy would feel that. Without comment or buildup, he held up a hand into frame.
Judy’s hand went to her mouth and a whimper escaped. Unbidden, tears began to flow. Ivan felt his own eyes well up in response.
“Ivan, I’m scared. Will it stop? Will you be able to come home?”
Ivan gazed at his wife, the only woman he’d ever loved. He had no answer.
Consternation
Seth came into the common room. “Word is we’re going to be quarantined at one of the military stations.” He sat down and plunked his coffee on the table with a thump. “Probably the Lagrange Four Navy station.”
“So the military is taking over?”
“Naw,” Aspasia answered. “The ICDC has a number of canned protocols for different scenarios. Some of them involve getting help from the military.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “For an incoming ship that needs to be quarantined, the ICDC doesn’t have any standing space assets. The military steps in, in these situations, and provides hardware and facilities.”
“How do you know about this stuff?”
“Friends in high places,” Aspasia grinned. “Actually, relatives in the Navy. You learn a lot at Christmas dinners.”
Tenn looked over from where he’d been nursing his coffee. “If that moron noob hadn’t touched the thingamahooie, we’d be heading home as heroes. Rich heroes.”
“Oh for chrissake, Tenn,” Seth retorted. “We all went over to the Baby Rock. You invited yourself over. You placed a bet with him. Hindsight is wonderfully convenient.”
Tenn sneered. “That’s all very moral and everything, Robinson. But some people can’t seem to stay out of trouble. They’ll always choose the riskier action, they’ll always stick their hand in to test something, and they’ll always be there when trouble happens. The sprout is turning out to be a bit of a Jonah.”
“Say, aren’t you a billionaire, nowadays?”
“Yeah, nothing to do with him, Robinson.”
“But the presence of an alien artifact is all his fault. Nice cherry-picking, Davies.”
“Tenn’s not entirely wrong, though,” Will interjected. “About some people, I mean, not necessarily about Ivan. In high school, we had a couple of guys who always seemed to be in the middle of any mess that happened. One day in Chemistry class, the prof passed around sealed ampoules of various chemicals for students to examine. One was pure elemental chlorine. As I looked at it and passed it to the next student, I said to myself, ‘The idiots will drop it. Just watch.’ The chlorine ampoule got to the idiots and sure enough. Couldn’t have taken even five seconds. We had to clear the room and bring in hazmat.”
Seth shook his head and glared at Will. “And how the hell does that tie in to this situation?”
“Some people,” Will replied, “when given a choice of caution or impetuousness, will always go for the latter. Some people will always try to show their bravery by juggling the dangerous vial in the air. Some people will always poke the unknown thingy with a finger. They’re not unlucky. They make decisions that are more likely to be dangerous.”
“And you think that’s Ivan? When did he ever give you that impression?” Seth gave Will a look of disbelief.
“How bad can it be?” Tenn said. “Those were his exact words, just before he touched the thing.”
“Yeah. Right after you bet him his desserts against you prepping meals. Way to preach caution, there, Major Safety. What are you really after, Davies?”
“What I’m really after, Robinson, is going home. I hope the ICDC concentrates on Pritchard and lets us go. And I don’t particularly care about some yammering about loyalty. Pritchard made a choice when he reached for that thing. I don’t feel like paying for that choice.”
Aspasia glared at Tenn for five long seconds. “What you really want is to hate the noob so you don’t have to feel bad about going home and leaving him to the wolves.” She got up. “Well, I do feel bad about it. But I also know there’s not a damn thing we can do. Assuming,” she swept the room with her gaze, “that they let the rest of us go at all. Something that is not guaranteed.”
A heavy silence settled over the room, and no one would meet anyone’s eyes.
The Chrome Man
Dr. Kemp stood outside the sick bay door, trying to control his breathing. He had to be prepared for whatever he would find on the other side. He absolutely must behave professionally, with a doctor’s detachment. Above all, do no harm. That included not only treatment of the patient, but how he dealt with the person.
Assuming he was still dealing with a person.
Dr. Kemp thrust that last thought away, and reached for the door.
Ivan was sitting on the cot, elbows on his thighs, slouched forward and looking at his hands. At Dr. Kemp’s entry, Ivan looked up and Kemp looked into his eyes.
Silver eyes. In a chrome face.
“I looked in the mirror this morning,” Ivan said. “I wanted to cry, but I can’t. I don’t think my new head supports the function.”
“That’s an odd way to phrase it,” Kemp said, sitt
ing down on a stool.
Ivan gave him a sad smile. “Small joke. Very small. Apparently the transformation hasn’t improved my humor.”
Dr. Kemp attempted a quick smile in return. “You sound like you’re still Ivan. That’s something, anyway.”
“I’ve been going through my memories, which seem to be all there. There are no obvious holes or gaps, anyway. I’ve been thinking about stuff, and how I acted, and whether it seems to make sense now. I’m embarrassed about the same stupid things that I’ve done, proud of the same things, and so on. I still love my wife. I’m still worried about my family. All my past behaviors and attitudes seem to be consistent with how I think and feel now. I still seem to be me. But I can’t be, can I? There’s nothing left of me. I’m a machine that thinks it’s Ivan Pritchard.”
“Ivan, there’s an old saying that you replace every atom in your body every seven years. Reality isn’t quite that simple, of course, but if you could actually tag atoms, most of me wasn’t me a decade ago. Cells die, get replaced. Food comes in, builds more cells, and so on. I’m literally not the same person I used to be. So it’s not the specific matter that makes you, you.”
Kemp sat back. “There’s a thought experiment about this. Let’s say you suffer a stroke, and it affects, oh, I dunno, your sight. They’ve invented an artificial neuron, and it’s a drop-in replacement, so they replace the damaged part of your brain and your vision is fixed. But are you still you?”
Kemp tapped the side of his head. “Part of your brain is now artificial. But you’re still you. Now, a few years later, the same thing happens to a different part of your brain, with the same fix. Do that a few dozen more times over the years. Now thirty percent of your brain is artificial. Are you still you? Keep it going until ninety percent of your brain is artificial. At what point do you stop being you? There was no discontinuity. You didn’t wake up a million miles away. You were you from one moment to the next, you have continuous memories of everything, except when you’re sleeping, of course.
“The philosophical thinking is that it’s the continuity that is telling. If you can trace a continuous path through four-dimensional space-time from your birth to you right now, then you are, in a very real way, still you.”
Ivan smiled. “Cool. I’m not sure if it makes me feel better or not, yet. But I’ll think about it.”
Kemp nodded. “We’ve contacted ICDC about this whole thing. We’ll be quarantined, and they’ll probably take the ship apart bolt by bolt. Eventually, probably they’ll let us go. I don’t know what’ll happen with you. This is kind of a first for all of us.”
“I understand,” Ivan said. “But the claim? The money? Is that still safe?”
“Absolutely. Everything to do with that is proceeding well. The winning bidder, Consolidated Industrials, has already launched their own ship to assay the rock. In two weeks, they’ll confirm the deal, and we will all be—and I say this without any trace of exaggeration—billionaires. The strike is all over the news on Earth. They’re calling it the biggest find in fifty years.”
“I can put up with almost anything as long as my family will be okay. I accepted the possibility of dying up here. I even, at one point, did a calculation of whether my family would be better off if I could have an accident. The insurance is pretty good.”
“You’d probably have run afoul of the exclusions.”
“Yep. Fail. Anyway, the idea of a big strike was a lot more attractive, even if a long shot. And, meanwhile, the pay was good.”
Kemp looked closely at Ivan. He seemed a lot calmer than he had been at any point leading up to this moment. Was that fatalism? Relief that it was over? Relief that it wasn’t worse? Or was there a fundamental difference in his personality?
“What made you decide on asteroid mining, Ivan?”
“Life. Life on Earth. It’s stacked against you, you know? If you aren’t born to a well-off family, so you have a head start, you’re screwed. If you’re born in the wrong place, one of the areas that’s going under water soon, you’re screwed. If you can’t get a good education, then a good job with one of the multinationals, you’re screwed. Meanwhile, the habitable area of Earth shrinks and shrinks, driving the population into a smaller space, and driving the price of a home up every year, even if all you can do is rent.”
Kemp nodded. “Even being in the medical profession doesn’t guarantee a better life, these days. We’ll all be living in domes soon, whether you’re on Earth, the moon, Mars, or floating in the atmosphere of Venus.”
Ivan continued after a moment. “My wife, she’s an actuary. She can do the numbers. We would be falling farther behind every year. Further in debt, fewer assets, never catching up. The mining thing, it was short-term pain, but it could have reversed the flow. We could break even, then even get slightly ahead. Better pay, the ship absorbs my living expenses for most of the year, the guild takes care of life insurance… In the worst case, paying off the debt for the training and the share might have taken the rest of my life and then some, but any strike at all would be a bonus.”
He gave Dr. Kemp a brief, rueful smile. “She even had the chances of that worked out. Actuary, right? It was a reasonable risk. Except now, I may die up here without ever touching her or my kids again.”
The two men were silent for a few moments. It was a common topic of conversation, as predictable and well-worn as politics or the ongoing cold war with the SSE.
“Am I news all over Earth?” Ivan asked.
“I’m not privy to everything that goes on, Ivan, but I don’t think it’s been made public. The captain would have played everything very close to the vest in order to not screw up the bid process. The ICDC doesn’t want a panic over the possibility of extraterrestrial contact, or even just a lot of armchair generals telling them how it should be handled. Not that you’re actually an alien in the normal sense of the word.”
“I do feel something, though. Something there. It started this morning, when I woke up. I think it’s because my conversion is complete.”
Kemp’s eyes widened. He tried to remain as outwardly calm as possible. “How do you mean?”
Ivan sighed. “I can’t put my finger on it, quite yet. It might even be just my overheated imagination. But I feel as if there’s something in the background. It’s like when you can’t quite remember a word, or someone’s name, or what you did last Wednesday. Except I’m having that just-out-of-reach feeling about things that I don’t know anything about. It’s like tip-of-the-tongue times ten.” He scrubbed his face with his hands, an act that created a strange scritch sound. “And a couple of times, I’ve gotten a picture of a bear cub. Why a bear? And why a little one?”
“If what you’re saying is true, Ivan, that may just be something poking the neurons that contain your concept of bear. Like when surgeons are mapping a patient’s brain using electrodes.”
“I’ll have to ask it if it can find the coffee neuron, then.” Ivan smiled briefly, but he seemed to have run down, for the moment. The resigned expression on his face reminded Kemp of patients who had just come to terms with a terminal diagnosis.
“Uh, does caffeine still affect you?”
“Don’t know. I hope so, or I’m really going to be pissed.”
Kemp chuckled and stood. “All right, Ivan. Let me know if anything comes into focus for you, okay?”
“Will do, doc.”
Kemp walked slowly out of the sick bay. Not since his first days as an intern had he felt so completely helpless.
The Way Things Must Be
Ivan reached for the keyboard for perhaps the tenth time. After a second, he withdrew his hands. He read what he’d written so far.
Dear Judy,
Well, it was a start. Of sorts.
How do you tell your wife that you’ll probably never see her again? How does she explain to your kids that daddy won’t be coming home, ever? Millions of people had faced this or similar dilemmas through history. Maybe not exac
tly these circumstances. But still.
Maybe start with facts.
We’ll be quarantined at the Lagrange Four Naval base. So far, no one else has caught it. I might end up being the only victim.
Victim. There had to be a better word. He didn’t want to make it sound like he was dying. But did it matter? He wouldn’t be going home. Even if he did, how would she react when she saw him? How would his children react? Would they cower? Run? Scream? Ivan put his face in his hands. He’d rather be dead, right now, than have to experience that.
At least he wouldn’t be leaving them destitute. He had to hold onto that. He could endure anything if they were okay. Even never seeing them again.
Ivan looked up at the ceiling and took a shaky breath. He missed crying.
He flipped to another window, one showing the official paperwork from the auction house and the Mad Astra. The number was staggering. Not quite infinite money, but unless Judy wanted to buy an island or something, there would be no more worries.
The thought brought peace, of a sort. He’d always said he would die for his family without hesitation. In a backhanded way, this situation could be looked at like that.
He resolved to hold onto that thought as he continued writing.
The process is complete. There’s no ME left. Judy, I don’t know what they can do at this point. Maybe if they can contact whoever did this. But how?
We can still talk, and we can still email. But I remember the look on your face when I showed you my hand. I can’t bear to see that look again. I want you to remember me with the face you’ve always known. I don’t want this new face to be how you think of me.
He stared at the display for what felt like forever. Nothing more came to mind. Or too much. If he started typing again, he might never stop. It already sounded like one of those letters you compose to be read after your death.
Finally, he signed it…
Love forever,
The Singularity Trap Page 10