by Rick Boling
“How do you remember things like that?” I said. “There must be thousands of famous quotes from thousands of famous people, and I couldn’t remember one of them if my life depended on it. Let alone who said it.”
“I remember quotes the same way you remember the words and arrangements to songs. Your brain is wired to respond to music and lyrics, whereas mine is wired to respond to science and philosophy. In those categories I have an almost photographic memory, but when it comes to music, I couldn’t find middle C on a piano, let alone identify musical notes simply by hearing them.”
“Yeah, well, different strokes for different folks, I guess. My point is that money and fame also corrupt. If I’d gotten rich off writing commercial junk, who knows how that would have changed my perception of what was important? I could very well have fallen in love with the idea of being rich. In which case I probably would have continued writing junk, and you would never have become a fan. I managed to write a few fairly commercial songs, but I never once set out to write with the idea in mind of sacrificing my musical integrity to sell a million records. Which, of course, is why I never sold a million records.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked down at her drink. “You know, Rix,” she said, “that’s one thing we’re not going to be able to help you with. There’s no way we can predict the long-term consequences of changes you choose to make. We could say this or that should result in something specific, but the consequences will depend upon how you deal with the reverberations of those changes. Heyoka can help you understand the process, but he can’t predict the long-term outcome.”
“You mean he can’t step out of time and see what the results will be?”
“Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. I’m sure he told you he can’t see into the future, for the simple reason that the future doesn’t exist until … well, until it happens.”
“He mentioned that,” I said. “I thought it was weird given all the other things he says he can do, but it does make a kind of logical sense. I mean, how could anyone see something that hasn’t even happened yet?”
“I know almost everything we’re talking about seems impossible,” she said. “But that’s one thing that actually is. Tell you what, let’s go over and get a drink. I need a few minutes to clear my mind, and when we get back I’ll try to explain.”
I followed her to the bar, where she grabbed a bottle of Jack and held it up for my approval. I thought about it, then decided she might be right about their concoction helping me to think better. Surprisingly, she poured us both a drink from the same bottle.
We returned to our alcove and clinked glasses before sitting down. “In case you’re wondering,” she said, taking a sip of her drink, “I happen to be a fan of Jack Daniel’s myself, especially this particular variety. Like I said, it helps sharpen the general thinking process, and we’re both going to need every bit of help we can get in that department.”
“No argument here,” I said, tilting my glass and draining it.
She spent the next few minutes trying to explain the theory of alternate realities and multiple universes, but she might as well have been speaking Greek. When I finally told her to forget the explanation and just tell me what it meant, she shrugged. “What it means is, your new reality will split from the life you have already lived, and you will begin an alternate existence starting at that point in time. From then on you’ll be creating a new future, and we can’t observe the future. Any future.”
“That’s a scary prospect, you know. Real scary, in fact. I’ve never been much of a gambler, and I’m not sure I want to start by rolling the dice into a future I can’t foresee.”
“But you’ve been doing that all your life,” she said. “We all have. Every choice we make involves a gamble. Granted, some are educated choices, but there are never any guarantees. Life would be an unmitigated bore if we knew the outcome of every move we made before we made it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a very good track record when it comes to making choices. And I doubt I’d be much better at it in a new existence.” I stood and walked to the bar, returning with the bottle of fake Jack. I filled our glasses, then sat down and studied the window scene, which now showed a crystalline mountain lake. As I watched, raindrops began to fall, creating multiple overlapping circles on the otherwise-still water. I was trying to see a pattern in those complex interactions, when Aurélie broke the silence.
“With all the experience you have under your belt, don’t you think you’d be able to make better choices? How many times have you said things like, ‘If I only had …’ or ‘Damn, I wish I’d …?’ The alternatives could turn out to be just as bad, but I doubt it. You already know the consequences of one course of action, so at least those dice you’re rolling will be loaded in your favor.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “However, there’s one thing you’re not taking into consideration, and that is how badly I’ve treated my brain over the years. I don’t have a tenth of the mental capacity I had when I was twenty, and my memory is about on a par with that of an Alzheimer’s patient. So taking this brain back to an earlier time would probably result in more of a disaster than the first time around.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “For one thing, though you may not realize it, your brain is already under repair.” She held up her half-full glass and smiled. “And although we won’t be transferring the actual organ, in Stage Two you’ll be reliving many periods in your early life, which will make those faded memories seem like they happened yesterday. After the actual transfer, your mind—which is separate from your brain—will not only retain those memories, but will also retain the wisdom you’ve accumulated over the years.”
“My mind is separate from my brain?”
“Yes,” she said. “Strange as it may sound, the mind or consciousness is an independent entity. That two pounds or so of gray matter in your skull is only a rather sophisticated repository. If you think of the brain as a computer hard drive and your consciousness as the software and database, the transfer process would be similar to moving all the software and data from one computer to another. Except in this case we can’t use a direct connection. Instead, we have to extract your consciousness, creating a sort of disembodied persona, then move that persona into an alternate universe where we can implant it in the brain of a younger you.”
“A disembodied persona …” I said. “Sounds like a ghost or a soul.”
“You could use that analogy,” she said. “However, belief in the afterlife is a matter of faith, not science, and to say such a thing as a soul exists would mean jumping into a quagmire of differing theologies we would rather avoid. Consciousness, on the other hand, is something we know exists because it is evident in the transition between life and death. Defining it beyond that is virtually impossible. Knowing consciousness exists and can be manipulated does not mean we know what it is.”
“You guys are a trip,” I said. “You con me, drug me, then have the audacity to ask me to let you experiment on a nebulous thing in my head you can’t even define? Why should I trust you? You haven’t even proven your claims about the drug cocktail you’ve been feeding me. Except for a few interesting flashbacks—which are nothing new for me—I have yet to notice any overall improvement in my memory. In fact, a few minutes ago I tried to remember how to find my way back to the villa and realized there wasn’t a chance in hell.”
“That’s short-term memory, Rix. It will be the last to come back because it’s the most difficult to restore. Your long-term memory should already be filling in at a pretty rapid pace.”
“According to you.”
“You don’t have to take my word for it,” she said with a condescending smirk. “Test it out for yourself. I know you have to use cheat sheets nowadays to remember most of your repertoire, so pick out an obscure song from the ‘60s, one you may have only played once in your life, and see if anything comes to mind. Better yet, how about something from
your childhood as a boy soprano, like La Donna È Mobile.”
“Oh, sure, like I’m supposed to remember an Italian aria from half a century …” But before I could finish the sentence, I heard that song playing in my mind, with all the words and music clear as a bell. Sung by Mario Lanza, no less. From there, I went on to some of the earliest rock and folk music I could think of, the lyrics and arrangements flowing through my head like a medley. I must have gotten lost in the memories, because they didn’t stop until I heard Aurélie calling my name. When I looked at her, she was smiling like a Cheshire Cat.
“The woman is fickle,” she said. “In case you didn’t know, that’s what La Donna È Mobile means in English. You probably haven’t thought of that song since you were forced—against your will, I might add—to sing it at a recital when you were eleven years old.”
She was right, not only about my age, but about the fact that I hated having to learn the song. Back then, before I rebelled against classical music and opera, I’d been forced to sing more songs in Italian and Latin than in English. And I had to memorize them phonetically because I never could learn to speak any foreign language. In Spanish class, I was always called on to read out loud because my accent and inflections were perfect, but I failed the subject just the same.
“What does fickle mean, anyway?” I said.
“Fickle? I don’t know, shifty? Ephemeral? Flirtatious?”
“Sounds kind of like this French-Canadian-Inuit girl I know.”
“Come on,” she said, pulling me to my feet. “I think we’d better call it a night before we get into a verbal battle you are sure to lose.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, following her unsteadily into the hallway. “I wouldn’t count on that. I may be no match for you in the brains department, but I’m pretty damned good at arguing. Hell, I drove off two loving and faithful wives using nothing more than sarcasm and nasty rhetoric. And, yes, I am intimately aware of what the word rhetoric means, he says with artificial eloquence.”
I awoke with my arms wrapped around Robin’s soft body, hoping for a nice session of morning sex. Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, I realized the reason she seemed so soft was because she was a pillow. As the events of the night before tried to push through the cloud of a simulated hangover, I began to recall a few details from my conversation with Aurélie, none of which were encouraging. It wasn’t only the fact that I had to go into this mind trip blind, with no way to know the consequences of any changes I might try to make, she’d told me it was going to be a one-way street; no do-overs or coming back. After that, my recollection of the conversation degenerated into a drunken haze.
“You mad at me?” said a voice, barely audible over what sounded like the hum of an air conditioner. I rolled over to see Aurélie leaning on one elbow in a bed about three feet from mine.
“Mad?” I said, looking past her at an open door, through which I could see the blurry outline of a sink. Hotel room. I thought. “Where are we?”
“You don’t remember?” she said, sitting up and wrapping the bedspread around her.
“Remember what? Hey, I thought that stuff was supposed to turn me into a memory savant.”
“It will, Rix, but you sort of overdid things last night, so it’ll take a while for the hangover effects to wear off. In case you’ve forgotten, you brought the bottle back here and, by the time we got through wrestling, you’d emptied it.”
“Wrestling?”
“Give it a while,” she said. “How about some breakfast?”
Breakfast at the Second Chance Café brought back memories of the Waffle House, my favorite after-hours eatery in the States. After scarfing down a waffle, a side of sausage, and a glass of ice-cold milk, I felt almost human again. Between bites I managed to drag a few details of our alleged wrestling match out of Aurélie. She didn’t call it attempted rape, and she wasn’t upset with me, but I did find out why my nuts were aching; apparently it had something to do with her knee.
Back at the lounge, we were joined by Heyoka, who apologized for bailing out on us the night before. “It’s the damned money,” he said as we sat under a scene of a forest glen with grazing deer and foraging squirrels. “If I didn’t have to screw with that, I’d have all the time in the world. So, did you pump my little friend here?”
I looked at Aurélie and she shrugged. “He knows not of what he speaks. I’m sure he meant pump me for information.”
“I meant it both ways, my dear. But I won’t press you on your bedroom antics. Rix, I assume you got her to answer some questions?”
“Some,” I said.
“And the answers only added to your discomfiture?”
“Good guess.”
“Don’t let that discourage you. It’s always darkest before the dawn. Or maybe I’m thinking of the calm before the storm. I’m not very good with quotes and sayings like our human data bank here.” He winked at Aurélie. “In any case, there are important things we need to discuss that I doubt she got into last night. Things you’ll need to think about before you make a decision.”
“There’s more?” I said. “Having to draw to a metaphorical inside straight isn’t enough?”
“Oh, I can assure you the odds of success are far more favorable than that. In fact, I would give the process at least a ninety-nine-point-three-percent chance of working perfectly. We’ve done all manner of preliminary experiments and calculations and—”
“I’m not doubting what you can do,” I said. “I’m doubting my ability to make the right choices the second time around. Aurélie told me I’ll only have one shot, that I can’t come back and try again. She also made it clear that you can’t help me because you can’t see into my new future any more than you can see into my current one.”
“That’s true, Rix. However, I can give you some insight into things you’ll have to deal with.”
“And those would be?”
He looked at Aurélie. “What do you think Ms. Kunayak? You want to take this one?”
She frowned. “I don’t know, Mr. Diddlybust. What are we talking about? The frustration factor?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, great. On top of everything else, there’s a frustration factor?”
“To be perfectly honest, yes,” Heyoka said. “And the severity of that frustration will depend on how far back you choose to go. If you were to go back to yesterday, or even last year, there would be little if any. If, on the other hand, you choose to go back to your childhood … But here, let me illustrate.” He nodded at Aurélie, who flicked her fingers over the panel in her chair. “Tell me,” he continued, “are you familiar with the film Bicentennial Man?”
“Based on Asimov’s novelette The Positronic Man. Seen it many times.”
“Good. Then let me use Andrew the robot as a metaphoric example.” He directed my attention to the video window, where the forest glen had been replaced by an early scene from the movie showing Andrew being uncrated. “This is Andrew as we first see him, primitive but certainly humanoid. Note the artificial appearance, the jerky mechanical movements. Now let’s compare the primitive version to the technically evolved model.” Half the scene was replaced by a clip from later in the film, showing Andrew as he looked toward the end. “Here he is at his most advanced. As you can see, his physical appearance and movements are exactly like those of a real human being. Likewise, his positronic brain has evolved considerably.”
“Okay, so what does this have to do with me?” I asked.
“I’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s say we do this.” The head of the later Andrew opened and his brain floated out, inserting itself into the head of the earlier model. “Transplanting Andrew’s advanced computer processing capabilities into his more primitive body would create a robot with all the computational power and memory of the later version. However, that robot would be limited by the earlier model’s less sophisticated physical abilities and appearance, which could lead to problems. For example, even though its new brain might think it can,
this hybrid Andrew probably wouldn’t be able to handle delicate objects without breaking them. And he certainly couldn’t pass as a human being, either physically or intellectually.”
As he said this, the robots were replaced by an image of me as a young boy holding my first guitar. “What we’ll be doing,” he continued, “is essentially the same thing. When we transplant your older human consciousness into a younger version of yourself, you’ll find you are limited by your less-mature body.”
“Limited?” I said, trying to imagine such a scenario. “How exactly?”
“One example would be the disappearance of the years of musical training and practice that have conditioned your voice and fingers to do certain things almost autonomically. Think about it. What if you went back to the day you picked up your first guitar? Imagine the frustration of knowing how to play, but not being able to get your fingers to do what you wanted them to. Not only would your hands be smaller, they would lack the strength and dexterity to execute the complex chord changes and fingerstyle patterns you perform today without conscious thought. Even though your brain is sending the correct commands, those neurological signals would be going to appendages that could not obey them.”
I watched my younger self struggle to play a simple bar chord, remembering the months of practice it took before my aching fingers became calloused and the muscles in my hands grew strong enough to press all six strings against the frets at once.
“In addition,” he said, “gone would be the years of private voice lessons that conditioned your vocal chords and taught you how to eliminate the break between your falsetto and your normal tenor voice, giving you a nearly four-octave range. You would remember how to do all these things, but it would take years of maturing and practice to raise them to their current levels of perfection.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I’ve always practiced a lot, and I enjoy the process of perfecting my technique.”