Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  So maybe he had been back for a while, months even. But he didn’t remember any of it. The last thing he remembered was the portal and the grenade. How could he have survived? And, if this was a hospital, why the pressure suit?

  He found himself staring at a wall a few inches from his face.

  There was a notice stuck there. He leaned forward and squinted to read it. It was written out in clumsy block capitals.

  ABOUT THE GRAVITY. THEY MADE SOME ADJUSTMENTS TO YOUR SORRY ASS SO YOU DON T PASS OUT AND SO FORTH. IT SEEMED THE SIMPLEST WAY.

  It was in his own hand.

  He growled, exasperated, and reached out for the notice with a gloved hand — a glove still stained dark with Cruithne dust — and ripped the notice off the wall. It had been stuck there with tape. On the back was another message, again in his own hand.

  GO WITH THE FLOW, MALENFANT.

  He crumpled up the paper and threw it aside.

  For a few heartbeats he just sat there. He ran his gloved hand over the carpet, leaving a grimy streak. Seemed like good quality, a thick pile.

  Impulsively he reached up and cracked the seal of his helmet. As the seal broke there was the softest hiss of equalizing pressure. Not a vacuum, then. The air seemed neither warm nor cold, a neutral temperature. He held his breath. His heart beat a little faster — after all, if the atmosphere wasn’t exactly right he was about to die, probably painfully, and despite his determination to do just that he was afraid — but he gripped his helmet and pushed it up.

  The enclosed, magnified noises of the helmet were replaced by a remote, deeper hum. Air-conditioning?

  He gasped, releasing the last of his suit air, and dragged in a lungful of whatever filled this room.

  Well, he didn’t start gagging or choking and his lungs didn’t hurt. That didn’t mean there wasn’t something else, something colorless and odorless like carbon monoxide lingering here to kill him, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

  At least he could see clearly now.

  He was in what looked like a small hotel room: a single bed, a table and chair, a TV on a wall bracket, a little corridor with a bathroom and a wardrobe, a door. He could see into the bathroom. There was sanitary tape on the toilet, fluorescent light panels in the ceiling.

  It wasn’t the kind of place he’d choose to stay. But it looked clean, and at least it didn’t look like a prison cell.

  He got to his feet. He felt a little stiff, and his suit was heavy in the full gravity. He walked to the door, wrapped his gloved hand around the handle, and twisted. It felt like he was dragging at a

  concrete wall.

  There was an in-case-of-emergency notice stuck on the door in front of his nose, another note scrawled on it. ONE STEP AT A

  TIME, MALENFANT. YOU OBVIOUSLY AREN’T IN A REAL HOTEL

  ROOM, AND THIS IS NOT EARTH. BUT YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT.

  And of course that was true. After all, he had jumped into a time-hopping, universe-breaching alien portal with a grenade clutched to his chest; it wasn’t your conventional way of checking in. Anyhow he thought he knew what must have happened to him.

  “I don’t think I’m me,” he said aloud. “I think I’m some kind of reconstruction in a giant computer in the far downstream. Tell me I’m wrong.” He scanned down the notice.

  SOMETHING LIKE THAT, IF YOU MUST KNOW. ALL WILL BE REVEALED. IN THE MEANTIME, CHILL OUT, HAVE A DRINK, TAKE A SHOWER.

  “A shower?”

  There was one more line on the notice.

  MALENFANT, IF ANYBODY CAN TELL YOU THIS IT’S ME. YOU STINK, BUDDY.

  Malenfant stalked back into the bedroom, leaving more dusty boot prints, and sat on the bed, which creaked under the combined weight of himself and the suit. He said, “On.” The TV didn’t respond.

  He looked at his gloved hand, its gritty texture. His hand wasn’t real. None of this was. He was completely powerless. He could be turned off, changed, distorted, reprogrammed, whatever the hell they wanted, whoever they were.

  He tried to lie back on the bed, but his space suit backpack was in the way.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “What a mess.”

  He didn’t want this. He didn’t want any of it. He ought to be dead, or grieving for Emma, in that order. He had seen enough. He looked around the room, hoping for another notice, a couple of lines from himself to himself, telling him what to do, how to feel. But there was nothing.

  What would he tell himself, if he had the chance?

  Get a grip. Don’t worry about what you can’t change. In the meantime take the shower.

  With a sigh, he started to peel off his suit: his boots and gloves first, then his zips. He dumped the suit in the middle of the floor. Cruithne dust and flakes of charred fabric — scorched by multiple Big Bangs, for God’s sake — fell to the bright purple carpet.

  When he got down to his skinsuit, life got a lot more unpleasant. The stink of his own body, exposed, hit him like a smack in the mouth. He had been living in the suit, after all, for days. In places the suit stuck to him, and when he tried to peel it away he found himself pulling the skin off blisters and half-healed friction rubs. In a couple of places he found edema patches and busted blood vessels.

  He picked up the pieces of the battered, grimy suit, folded them up, and crammed them into the cupboard. He brushed at the bedspread, but he only succeeded in grinding Cruithne dust deeper into the fabric.

  He gave up and went to the shower.

  It turned out to be a power jet. When it first hit his damaged skin it hurt, but he stuck with it, bathing the wounds gently. He just ran the spray for a while, and dark dust ran out of his hair and skin and down the plug. He kept the water running until it ran off him clear except for traces of crimson blood from his broken skin. Even so he still had Cruithne dirt buried under his fingernails and worked deep into his fingertips; he suspected it would be a long time, if ever, before he was rid of the stuff.

  Then he used shampoo and soap, stuff that came in bottles and wrappers and boxes in a little wicker basket. There was no manufacturers’ logo, no hotel title.

  There was no bathroom cabinet in here, no place he could see where there might be a resupply of his cancer drugs. Well, maybe he wasn’t going to be here long enough for that to matter.

  The shower actually felt good. He was feeling pleasure.

  Emma.

  He tried to explore his feelings, tried to find regret, a sense of loss. And failed. And now here he was washing his damn hair.

  If they did reconstruct you, Malenfant, they didn’t take time to put in a soul.

  When he came out of the shower, wrapped in a fat white bathrobe (no monogram or label), the dusty mess he had left on the carpet had vanished. Not only that, a shirt and slacks, socks, and slip-on leather shoes had been laid out, nice and fresh. Neat touch, he thought; that much unreality he could stand.

  He went around the room. The minibar turned out to be tucked under a desk near the TV bracket. The desk held a writing pad and pencils. There was no heading on the paper. The minibar wasn’t locked, which was definitely a touch of unreality, and the bottles and cans and packets, while looking authentic enough, weren’t labeled either.

  He pulled out what looked like a miniature of whiskey, broke the seal, threw the liquor into his mouth straight from the bottle. The heat hit the back of his throat. He may be one computer simulation sucking on another, but that felt authentic enough, and the spreading of the warmth through his chest and head were welcome.

  He reached for another bottle, then thought better of it. Maybe now wasn’t the time to get smashed.

  If it was even possible. If they, whoever had reconstructed him, permitted it. He wondered if they would let him hurt himself. What if he busted one of the bottles and started to saw at a wrist? Or—

  There was a knock at the door. It made him jump, and he dropped his miniature. He got up, checked his robe was closed around him (why, Malenfant? — like your mother, they have sure
ly seen it all before), and padded across the carpet. The bristles were sharp under his cleaned feet. He grasped the door handle. This time, of course, the door opened easily.

  There was a corridor beyond, but it was somehow blurred, as if he couldn’t see it properly. “Imperfectly simulated,” he muttered.

  Something like that. A Seattle accent.

  “Yow.” He looked down.

  It was Michael.

  The boy was just standing there, hands at his sides. He was wearing a gold-orange jumpsuit with a blue circle at his breast, just like in those damn schools.

  “You’re Michael,” he said.

  Yes. The boy looked fresh scrubbed, healthy, his eyes bright, even happy. Eerily, the voice coming out of his mouth was that of the old softscreen simulation, the nasal Seattle matron, slightly distorted, like an airport announcer’s.

  “What I mean,” Malenfant said, “is that you’re a simulacrum of Michael. A program running inside some hideous end-of-time God-type computer.”

  The boy looked puzzled.

  Malenfant leaned out into the corridor. He couldn’t see farther than a few feet in either direction, though he couldn’t figure out why. The same purple carpet lay on the floor. There were no other doors. “What if I run off down this corridor?”

  I don’t know.

  “Will they have to create more of this virtual stuff? Will the room disappear?

  Try it if you want.

  Malenfant thought about it, sighed. “Ah, the hell with it. You’d better come in.”

  Michael looked around the room, for all the world like any curious kid, and he jumped on the bed and bounced up and down. Malenfant shut the door. Then, immediately, he tried it again. Naturally it had melted into seamless wall again, and wouldn’t open.

  “The TV doesn’t work,” Malenfant said.

  Michael shrugged. He was toying with the empty whiskey bottle.

  Malenfant said, “You want something from the minibar?”

  Michael thought for a long time, as if the choice were the most important he had ever made. Peanuts, he said, in his eerie middle-aged voice.

  “Plain or roasted?”

  What have you got?

  “Jesus Christ.” Malenfant got on his hands and knees and rummaged through the bar. He dug out a couple of foil packets. He tossed one to the boy. Michael’s turned out to be plain nuts, Malenfant’s roasted. Michael pointed to the roasted, so they swapped over.

  Malenfant threw a nut into his mouth. “Too much salt,” he said.

  Michael shrugged. These are okay.

  “This is kind of a cliche, you know,” Malenfant said. “The virtual-reality hotel room.”

  You had to get out of that space suit.

  “True enough. So,” Malenfant said, “here we are. Where the hell?… No, forget that. We’re programs running on a huge computer at the end of time. Right?”

  No. Yes. This is, umm, a substrate.

  “A substrate?” Malenfant snapped his fingers. “I knew it. The lossless processors we saw in the far downstream. The dreaming computer.”

  Michael frowned. But you are Malenfant.

  “The same person I was before?”

  Of course. Which other?

  “But I can’t be. That Malenfant blew himself to bits. I can believe the portal stored information about me, sent it to the far future, and here I am reconstructed in this—” He waved a hand. “ — this virtual reality Bates motel. But I’m not me.”

  Michael looked puzzled. You are you. I am me. Information is the most important thing. There was a German called Leibniz.

  “The philosopher? Never heard of him.”

  Entities that cannot be distinguished by any means whatsoever, even in principle, at any time in the past, present, and future have to be considered identical. This is called the Identity of Indiscernibles. It really is you, Malenfant, just as it feels.

  Malenfant stared at him. All this was delivered in that ridiculous, scratchy, middle-aged woman’s voice. The illusion of kid-hood seemed suddenly thin, Malenfant thought, and he wondered, with some dread, what arrays of shadowy minds lay behind this boy, feeding him, perhaps controlling him…

  Can I finish your peanuts?

  “Have them. So how didyou get here?”

  All Michael would say was, Differently.

  Malenfant got up, prowled around the room. There were curtains on the wall. When he pulled them back there were no windows.

  “Who did this, Michael? Who brought me back?”

  The downstreamers. The dreamers. The boy frowned again. The people in the lossless-processing substrate —

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Whatever you want. You must only, umm, exist. The information that defines you was stored by the portal, and therefore is part of the substrate.

  Malenfant frowned. “You’re telling me I don’t have some kind of mission? That the decadent beings of the far future don’t need my primitive instincts to save them?”

  I don’t understand —

  “Never mind.” Malenfant looked down at his hand, flexed it, turned it over: a monkey paw transmitted to the end of time, a perfect copy… No, if Michael was right, this really was his hand, as if he’d been teleported here. “I can live on here? Like this? How long for? No human of my era lived beyond a hundred and some years. So when I reach two hundred, three hundred…”

  Your brain can store around a quadrillion bits. That corresponds to a thousand years of life. After that —

  “I stop being me.”

  You could be enhanced. There would be continuity. Growth.

  “But I wouldn’t be me.”

  You aren ‘t big enough to think the thoughts you would become capable of.

  Malenfant hesitated. “Is that what happened to you?”

  / have lived a long time.

  “Longer than a thousand years?”

  Michael smiled.

  “And so, you aren’t Michael any more.” Of course not. How could he be? “Don’t you regret that?”

  Michael shrugged. My people, in Zambia, believed that we, on Earth, are the dead. Left behind by the true living, who have passed through their graves.

  “And that’s what you believe?”

  The boy I used to be was partial. Very damaged. He was a husk I gladly discarded. He studied Malenfant, and Malenfant thought there was a trace of accusation in his eyes, accusation over crimes long gone, buried in the glare of the Big Bang afterglow. Michael said, reasonably gently, A thousand years isn ‘t so bad, Malenfant.

  “It’s more than I deserve.” He glared at the boy. “If you can do all this, bring Emma back.”

  lean’t. I mean, they can’t. They don’t have the information.

  “Emma passed through the portals. There must be records.”

  But she would only be, umm, a simulation. The identity principle only works if the information is perfect. And because of the explosion as you went through —

  Malenfant held his head in his hands. “Now,” he said, “now it hits me. If I’d known I could have saved her… Emma, I’m sorry. Somehow I managed to kill you twice over…”

  You sound like you think it’s your fault.

  “People around me tend to die, Michael. Cornelius. Emma. You, unless you count this as living on.”

  The kid was nodding. / understand.

  “You’re just a kid,” Malenfant snapped. “I don’t care how aug mented you are. You can’t understand. If I hadn’t screwed up her life, if I’d left her on Earth—”

  Would you have wanted that?

  “Yes. No. We wouldn’t have made love, floating between planets. She wouldn’t have followed me across universes. She wouldn’t have learned the truth, about the cancer, about us. I’d have lost …well, everything. My life would have remained meaningless, like your damn downstreamers. But she wouldn’t have died. All I had to do was push her away, in that scramble at Mojave…”

  Then make it so, Michael murmured.

  “
What?”

  Michael held his hand. Malenfant, the universe has many values. There is no one single path. Do you understand? The future can’t be determined. Nor can the past. Therefore we are free to choose. . .

  Malenfant spoke slowly, carefully. “What you’re telling me is that I could change the past. I could spare Emma.” The thought electrified him. “But I’m no downstreamer.”

  You are now, said the Michael thing.

  “I pushed her away before, when I learned about the cancer, and it didn’t do a damn bit of good. And if I lost her, I’d lose everything. I was ready to die.”

  But you would spare her, Malenfant. Give her years of life, maybe. Let go.

  Michael was watching him, wide eyed, chewing nuts. There is something else, Michael said. The eschatos.

  “The what?”

  The end of things.

  “The Carter catastrophe. My God…”

  We could go back. Become part of it. If you wish.

  “I don’t understand any of this, Michael.”

  You will.

  What the hell are you doing, Malenfant? If you reject this you’re throwing away immortality. A thousand years of life, recognizable human life, followed by… what? Transcendence?

  But, if I lose myself, I’ll lose Emma. And that, surely, would be the final disrespect.

  You always were decisive, Malenfant. If there was ever a time to make a choice it’s now.

  Malenfant closed his eyes. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  You’re sure?

  “Hell, no. Let’s do it anyhow.”

  The boy pulled him toward the door.

  Malenfant’s heart was thumping. “You mean now?”

  Will your decision be different later?

  Malenfant took a deep sigh. “Do I need to dress?”

  Malenfant went to the bathroom. He washed his face, had a leak, a dump. He had time to be impressed by the faithfulness of the mysterious processes that had restored him here, that had even, presumably, reconstructed the contents of his stomach after his last meal.

  He looked at himself in the mirror, studied a face that he had known all his life. The last time for everything, even for the simple things. Here, in his body, in this place, he was still himself. But what was he about to become? He’d built up his courage to blow himself to bits once today already, and his reward had been this, this Alice in Wonderland bullshit. Could he go through with it again?