Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  “I process re-versioning requests,” she said. “I collect profile information and connect the clients to –”

  “You collect all the lies they tell you. The algorithms do all the real work, and you know it. You’re just there to get them talking, so the sensors in the room can pick up an accurate reading.”

  Anika wished she could blame her silence on the stupid new body. The mouth kept working and nothing came out. Her tongue felt heavy and her lungs felt empty. At least it couldn’t cry. That was something.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “The technician said... I have to...”

  Horst made no move to help her as she rolled out of the gurney. He remained silent as she touched her new toes to the floor gingerly. They didn’t even have toenails. They looked like the infant mice fed to pet snakes. She focused on them as she made the legs take the steps toward the door. It felt like walking against the tide. It wasn’t until her hand reached the doorjamb that Horst spoke.

  “Did you two think it was funny?” he asked. “You and Jesse? Lying to me, this whole time? Living in my house, eating my food, spending my money?”

  “I never lied to you!” Her new voice was too shrill. “I couldn’t lie to you, because I didn’t know anything! Someone tried to kill me, and I have no idea why! And you don’t give a shit!”

  She wrenched open the door and slid through it. Outside, Horst’s campaign manager Suzette stood carrying an extravagant bouquet of pink lilies. She wore the kind of body that looked good on camera. Her skin seemed thicker than flesh; opaque and poreless and just as uniformly golden as Horst’s own. In fact, she looked a great deal like the feminine version of Horst – his white hair swept into a gleaming chignon, his silver eyes set deep in owlish sockets accented with blue liner. It was the latest thing in branding. Re-versioning to look just like your boss. Staying emblematic. Staying on message.

  “I’m not dead yet,” Anika said, eyeing the bouquet.

  “I know.” Suzette made no effort not to sound disappointed.

  “Did you hire him? The man who tried to kill me?”

  If possible, Suzette’s gaze became even more avian and predatory. “You’re not well, Anika,” she said. “I understand paranoia is a side-effect of crossover; you should talk to a doctor about it.”

  “It would have been good for the campaign.” Anika picked one of the lilies from the bouquet. Its petals felt reassuringly genuine as she ripped them from the blossom. “Tragic murder of councilor’s wife fuels new anti-crime platform.”

  “Anika, you need help.” Suzette gave her a look that momentarily betrayed a profound exhaustion. “You’ve always needed help. It’s why you latched on to Horst. It’s why you’ve never remembered anything.” Suzette reached up and stroked her dull, loaner-body hair. She let it fall through her fingers like dry, stale seed. “Nobody who actually enjoys being alive makes the choices you have. You’re just a suicidal girl who doesn’t have the balls to really end things.”

  Anika said nothing as Suzette breezed past her. As the door to her room swung open, she watched relief flicker over her husband’s face. She heard him say something in an apologetic tone. Something about how sorry he was that his wife was so emotional.

  Anika turned away from the door and bumped into a technician.

  “Anika,” John Smith said, from behind a paper mask.

  Her new mouth opened to scream. It moved too slowly – he covered it before she could make a sound. “Don’t.” He shook his head. “If you come with me now, I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

  “There’s a backup,” she whispered against his fingers. “They backed me up before my crossover, you can’t –-”

  “This?” He held up a plastic pillbox with a thick yellow gem inside it. Almost like a canary diamond. He rattled it like a cereal box prize. “I know about this, already.”

  Suddenly she wished that the loaner could actually cry. Maybe it would make a difference. She lurched for the door, stupid doll fingers scraping its surface harmlessly. John Smith bent the arm behind her back. Something jabbed into her back. It stung.

  “Anika, Anika,” he muttered. Her arm went around his neck. Her feet left the floor. “You really do love making things difficult for me, don’t you?”

  “HOW DID YOU recognize me?”

  He’d strapped her to a gurney, and put the gurney in an ambulance. At least, it looked like an ambulance. She imagined he had everything he needed to kill her right here in the vehicle; if nothing else, he could just insert a drip and let her bleed out.

  “I’ve followed three versions of the same woman,” he said. “I can spot you coming a mile away.”

  For the tenth time, Anika tested the straps. The loaner body still felt weak. They couldn’t have gone far; she was still awake. The clinic’s loaners only had a thirty-mile radius. Whether John Smith knew that, she had no idea. But she certainly wasn’t about to volunteer the information. Let him try to make off with her. See how far he got.

  “Am I really that much the same, every time?”

  Something like a laugh emerged from the driver’s seat. “You have a certain way of walking.” The ambulance stopped. “And you tend to wear the same things. Your bodies. Your clothes. Even your perfume.” He turned in his seat and looked at her. “You know how I found you, this time? I checked with your personal shopping algorithm.”

  “You went to Edith?”

  He unbuckled himself from the seat and crammed his height into the back of the ambulance. He started releasing the locks on the gurney. “Of course I went to Edith,” he said. “You’ve been going to Edith for decades, now. You know your favorite coat? The grey one?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, you liked it just as much thirty years ago.”

  Her mouth fell open. “I bought it...”

  “From yourself. In an estate sale.”

  Belatedly, Anika realized that she couldn’t feel the sensation she was waiting for, that of gooseflesh pimpling up along her arms and legs. The loaner body couldn’t quite do it, though. Perhaps for the same reason, she felt no rush of adrenaline. No terrible gnawing fear. Or perhaps she had re-versioned too many times. There was a law of diminishing returns, to re-versioning. She saw it in long-term subscribers to re-versioning plans. Every life grew shorter and shorter, the urge to start again stronger and stronger each time.

  “I had no idea I was so boring.” Her borrowed voice hadn’t the powers to accurately convey her bitterness.

  “Well, you did ask me to kill you when you got to be predictable,” John Smith said, and wheeled her out of the ambulance and into the parking bay of her own reversioning studio.

  THE HALLS OF the studio stood empty. Emergency lights bathed them in a cold violet glow. “Why isn’t anybody here?”

  “Battery leak,” John Smith said. “Next door. Could start a fire. Had to evacuate.”

  He winked.

  “Fuck you.” Anika thrashed against the straps. It was a loaner body; who cared if she tore it up? She rolled from side to side, trying first to wriggle up and then to slide through, hoping for a weak point in the straps. But the straps were smart, and every time she moved they tightened, gently but firmly, until she felt her fingertips begin to tingle. “Let me go,” she whimpered. “Please, please just let me go. I know you think we have this connection, or something, but we don’t. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. I want you to leave me alone. Please.”

  John Smith paused the progress of the gurney down the hall. His fingers drifted over her face and swept her hair to one side. “I don’t know why I let you hurt me like this, Anika.”

  Anika bit down on his hand. The skin was tough and durable under her teeth; she waited for blood and none came. He pried her jaws apart gently to remove his hand, then sucked her saliva off his skin, smiling.

  “I do need your lip print, but not on my hand.” He reached over to the wall and fetched down the reader. He pressed its cold flat surface to her mouth. He made a k
issing noise as he mashed it down. “Good.”

  Anika heard the doors to the archives whisper open. He rolled her inside and stopped her under a massive, ornate chandelier strung with pearls. Why had her lip-print worked? She’d never even been in this room, before.

  Had she?

  “Do you remember, now?”

  “Remember what?” Anika’s voice had never sounded so small.

  “We picked this chandelier out, together.”

  She shook her head furiously. “No. I don’t believe you.”

  His hand rose, palm up, and two of his fingers plucked the air. “Request File Sierra Whiskey Zero Zero Zero Zero Two.” The air above her swarmed with clips. The dates went back at least forty years. John Smith unfolded one clip and she watched a man and a woman at what had probably been a birthday party – his – on a backyard patio somewhere with a lot of empty pitchers and platters of barbecue. The other guests had apparently left. The two of them were cleaning up. They reeled a little, on their feet. The woman wore a pretty white sundress tailored to suit her shape. Exactly the sort of thing Anika would choose. Her hair was styled like Anika’s, too – her ice-blond waves had frizzed with summer humidity, but Anika could still see the hints of their former shape. Anika watched the woman push a tiny box over to the man. He gave her a querying look – you got me something already – and he opened the box.

  A tiny glass slipper.

  Her shibboleth.

  “The thing about life extension,” he said, “is that it’s hard to set goals. In other centuries, friends would say if we don’t have someone by the time we’re thirty, we’ll get married. Or I’ll start that business. Or I’ll see the world. Then thirty became forty, and forty became fifty, and fifty became retirement, and retirement became an illusion.”

  He was petting her hair.

  “We wait so long for the things we want, Anika. And now that we can delay death indefinitely, we have an indefinite waiting period. We have entire lifetimes to procrastinate.”

  He began unbuckling the straps. Feeling flooded back into her fingers.

  “That’s why you built this place. Your studio was among the first to offer people a truly blind crossover.”

  What had Horst said? That her job was useless? The algorithms do all the real work. And at other studios, they did. But hers was special. Boutique. Bespoke. Custom. Like Anika’s own personal style. Which of course was why she’d been such a good fit. Or so they’d said. They’d been so nice to her, during the interview. So friendly and accommodating. Like she already belonged there.

  “I...” She tried to sit up. John Smith helped her the rest of the way. Pins and needles pricked her feet. “I invented my own job?”

  A smile quirked one corner of his mouth. Suddenly he looked like a person, and not a chassis. “Now you get it.”

  She looked at the clips hanging overhead. “Where are mine?”

  John Smith reached up to the bowl of the chandelier and unscrewed it. Inside was a stunning crystal. Anika had never seen one so large. Carefully, he inserted the canary diamond from the clinic into one of its open slots. He screwed the bowl back into the chandelier.

  “I had to get a taller body, just to pull this off,” he said. “I hope you appreciate that.”

  The room darkened, and then filled with light. Images and clips from the past century filled the room. “I’m so old,” Anika said.

  The images coalesced into a single window depicting the woman with the ice-blond hair twisted back into a spiraling bun. She wore a grey suit and a high-necked white blouse, now. She looked like the kind of woman Anika would want to be, when she grew up. If she ever grew up. “Hello,” she said. “If you’re watching this, it’s because you’ve been wasting our life.”

  The woman opened one perfectly-manicured hand and showed her the glass slipper.

  “If you’re watching this, it’s because we’re not truly happy.”

  “How could she know that for sure?” Anika turned to John Smith. “How can you know that for sure? You’ve never asked me anything about my life. You’ve never asked me how I feel.”

  His head tilted. “Would you know what to say, if I did?”

  “Whatever we’ve been doing, it’s been the same thing, day in and day out. Year after year, life after life. If we’re here, it’s because we’re stuck.”

  “Lots of people get stuck.” Anika wasn’t sure who to address, her killer or her older self. “And who said I was stuck, anyway?”

  “We have children, you know. We have a whole family, out among the stars.”

  “What?” Anika tried to pull apart the mosaic in front of her, and divide it back into its component images. It didn’t work.

  “We knew this place was going to turn into a museum for the human race. What we didn’t know was that we would become one of the exhibits.”

  “I want to see them,” Anika said. “Show them to me.”

  “We believe in the power of death to create meaning for life. You have avoided death long enough. All things come to an end, even the mediocre things which have endured merely out of habit.”

  “You’re a real bitch, you know that?” Anika stood shakily on the gurney. She reached for the chandelier, and succeeded only in ripping down a fistful of crystal and pearls as she fell to the floor. Above her, the crystals tinkled and the woman she used to be droned on.

  “Anika!” John Smith knelt at her side. “Anika, please. We have time, you’ll see, it’s the right choice –”

  “There is no we!” Anika pushed him as hard as she could and scuttled to the other side of the room. “You don’t know me! And I don’t know you!”

  He stood. He held his open palms up to her as he crossed the room. He moved slowly. Non-threatening. She watched him ignore the open door behind him. “Anika,” he said. “You saw yourself give me the shibboleth. You know we were close.”

  “What is your name?”

  His brow furrowed. “What?”

  “Your name. Nobody’s just named John Smith. It’s an alias. Tell me your real one. Tell me who you really are, and –”

  His mouth closed over hers. He felt oddly, feverishly hot. Like he’d been on a slow simmer all day. He held her face in his burning hands. “I’m the man who loves you,” he said. “And I’ve loved you across four different lifetimes. And I’m not going to stop. Ever.”

  She placed one hand over his. This felt like talking to a child. Had he always been like this? Was that why she’d left him? Was it why she’d forgotten him? How could she be certain that she wasn’t another woman in a long line of women stalked by this man? She couldn’t. There was no way. There was nothing he could say that would ever satisfy her. Part of her would always doubt. If she lived that long.

  “If you love me so much, then why are you trying to kill me?”

  “Because you asked me to. You assigned me to. You trusted me enough to do it. You said it was the greatest intimacy we could ever share.” He pulled her up under his chin. “It’s going to be fine. We’ll go together. I’ve been waiting for this for such a long time, Anika. I know how to make it quick.”

  His grip tightened around her. His hand was on her neck. She swallowed hard. “Can’t we just... start over? Together?”

  He pulled away and gave her a smile that reminded her very much of Horst, which made his next words all the worse. “I know you’re not happy with him. You haven’t been happy with any of them. Not since me.”

  She was going to die, here. In this room, in this body. Unless she did something about it. She made the new body smile up at John Smith. She made it stand on its toes to kiss him back. She made its lips move against his.

  She made its right hand swing up hard and jam the shard of crystal deep in his neck.

  She tasted his blood, first. His blood and then his tears. When he stumbled away there was a sucking sound of their lips parting. He tried to say her name. It came out like a wet cough. For a single terrible moment she wasn’t sure she could leave him in ther
e with her memories hovering in the air. Then he lunged for her, and she screamed, and she shoved the gurney at him. Ducking out the door, she slapped her hand on the reader three different times, hard. That was the emergency signal. The door locked. John Smith pounded on the door. He moaned. He retched. His whole body hit the door. Slowly, she backed away.

  She had almost called the police when she thought better of it. John Smith probably had a backup, somewhere. She could find it. She could find her own memories, too. And her family. Her other family. If they truly existed. But first, she had another call to make.

  “I was on the beach,” Jesse said. “I was making progress.”

  “I’m thinking of leaving Horst.”

  “I wondered when you’d start thinking of that.”

  She examined the blood on her hands. It was drying tight and brown, now, like a well-made glove. “And I’m thinking of finding out who I used to be.”

  “Who you are is good enough, Anika. At least for me.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. I think so, too.”

  WHAT DO I remember?

  This is what I remember.

  WE MET AT the New Petersburg memorial, where our grandparents’ names were carved into a sparkling granite wall. Cate’s grandmother was right next to my grandfather, so close our index fingers tracing the columns actually touched.

  Sudden snow whipped up around us, and we blinked back tears and laughed in an embarrassed way. It felt like a cliché, the two of us being there at that exact moment. Both on a quest to figuratively meet the past, both single and about the same age, both maybe thinking a little about the future as well.

  Our eyes met once. Twice. The third time it felt as though they didn’t look away for a year.

  Thirteen months, one week, two days, to be precise.

  Cate Beauchamp liked to be precise. She was small and hippy, with blond hair she kept shorter than mine. When she laughed, you could see her tonsils. I liked kissing her eyelids because her long lashes tickled my lips. She thought ‘pusillanimous’ was the best word in the English language, and would fight to defend it.