Love and Other Thought Experiments

by Sophie Ward

  ‘Arthur, what happened?’

  Baby. She put her arms around him.

  ‘They said you were fine. They said I could see you tomorrow. But I waited here.’

  He pulled back, fought for a new breath, looked at her.

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Did you hit your head? What’s with “Rachel”?’ She held on to his shoulders, searched his face.

  ‘Where’s Eliza? Mom.’ Maybe he had. He had hit his head and his body was still on the Spirit in a shallow crater on a small moon near Mars.

  ‘Who’s Eliza?’ Rachel put a hand to her son’s cheek. ‘Funny.’

  In the distance he heard a shout.

  ‘They’re going to come and help you. I won’t leave. It’s going to be okay. That was a long trip, the longest you’ve done.’

  Another shout. Above, from the window of his room. In the glass corridor, a nurse watched them at the door. He felt the coldness in his fingertips, the nausea, the flutter of his heart against his chest. Darkness. He held on tight. Gripped the woman in front of him. The longest trip he’d done.

  At the same time, another Arthur took the stairs down to the reception area of the rehabilitation unit at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The steps were a challenge to his wasted leg muscles and every breath caught in his chest but he had been informed that his mother was waiting to see him and he took the opportunity to greet her away from the hospital room. The sooner he was released from rehab, the sooner he could figure out what had happened on his trip to Deimos. All he knew for sure was that not long after he entered the crater, there had been a comms blackout and he had lost consciousness. When he awoke he was on a rescue boat in Florida. Over a year had passed.

  Rachel would be worried. She had her own life; work and a following at Comic-Con where she designed costumes for the Hymenoptera characters. People travelled the country to have Rachel make their bug outfit, ever since she’d kitted Arthur up as an ant for his tenth-birthday Ant Man party and Instagrammed the result. After that, he’d learned to share his mummy with all the sci-fi geeks and soon he’d become one of them. When he was seventeen, she had moved to the States to help him pursue his aeronautical dreams and she had never missed a launch or a landing.

  ‘You can let go of the whole single-mother-precious-only-child thing now, mom,’ Arthur told her when he had finished his pilot training. ‘I have a plane and all.’

  ‘Hey, you can’t take away my job.’ Rachel let her son put a muscular arm around her shoulders. ‘A kid isn’t just for Christmas. Don’t let Hal hear any of that single mother bullshit, either.’

  Arthur rounded the corner of the steep staircase in the hospital and stopped to catch his breath. His father hadn’t made it to a single parents’ day at school, let alone an earth re-entry. He got it. Hal was there for him as a symbol, the idea and the biology of a father but not the physical presence. That had never been the deal and a few years after he was born, Hal had married a gardener and moved to Somerset. Which had meant some great feral summers in the Quantocks but a distinct absence of dad in Hackney.

  It would be Rachel in the visitors’ room, and Rachel who had stayed up every night since … however long he had been gone. No one had offered an explanation for the missing six months, all he had to go on were his own mental inaccuracies. A failure of memory that the company had yet to repair with the OS information, since the OS was exhibiting some inaccuracies of its own.

  From the bottom of the stairwell, Arthur could see the glass reception area beyond the courtyard. A tall, blonde woman stood behind the desk, her arms resting on the counter while the receptionist spoke on the phone. There was no sign of Rachel. The effort of walking seemed to take its toll on Arthur and his legs began to fold under him. He landed on the concrete floor, the hard-won breath knocked out of him as he hit the ground.

  ‘Arthur?’ The tall woman paused at the end of the corridor. ‘Arthur. What happened?’

  She hurried forward and knelt beside him.

  ‘You’re okay? Oh, wait … I’ll get some help.’

  In the distance, he heard a shout.

  ‘They’ll come and help you. Oh, thank god you’re alright. You’ve been gone such a long time.’ She wrapped her arms around him. ‘You’re home now. You’re home.’

  8

  New to Myself

  The Ship of Theseus

  Based on a story from Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, this thought experiment asks at what point a ship is no longer the original ship if all the components have been replaced. And if you build another ship from all the parts you have replaced, which ship could best claim to be the original?

  The river

  where you set

  your foot just now

  is gone –

  those waters

  giving way to this

  now this.

  Heraclitus Fragments

  Rachel stared at her reflection while she cleaned her teeth. One side of the mirror displayed her vital signs for the day; blood pressure, sugar and hormone levels, weight, bone density and blood analysis. The house was a rental or she would have torn out the tech. Most days she felt fine and would have felt even better if she hadn’t had to watch herself deteriorating in the mirror, statistic by unrelenting statistic.

  ‘The writing’s on the wall,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Thank you,’ the system replied.

  Her temples were solid grey. She could measure out her years by the sundial of her follicles, her life well past midday. How strange that her body now made a coarse steel fibre instead of the liquid copper of her younger self. Had she changed as much as her hair? Probably. She wondered if she could even be considered the same person now that every cell in her body had been replaced, more than once. It didn’t seem to matter so much when the effect was growth and health but now that shrinkage and damage were the order of events, it mattered a lot. Was it possible that her mind could escape the same process? Those connections had also been replaced, many times over. Her memories, too, were different, shaded by the events that had taken place since. If you were made of remembrance and your memories changed, did you, who remembered, change too?

  She was grateful the bathroom mirror didn’t measure her mental acuity with the same rigour that it analysed her bodily functions.

  She should have dyed her hair. Arthur might not recognise her.

  She was sixty-eight, five years older than her mother had been when she died. Her mother hadn’t been old, and neither had she seemed to change at all in Rachel’s lifetime. Maybe that was the secret, hold on to every flaw and foible, all the qualities that make you impossible to live with. Forget personal improvement and remain your stubborn self, instantly recognisable, forever remembered.

  ‘First thing in the morning,’ the hospital administrator had told her. No time for hair dye. She turned away from the mirror and closed all the doors in the house. The windows were hermetically sealed to preserve the climate control and limit radiation levels. At the front door, she refused to use the iris recognition software and the alarm flashed until she locked up by hand. It was a short walk to the nearest shuttle. She sat on the hard plastic seat and watched the impending day brighten outside the cabin windows, the life below the gleaming Hyperloop that banded the city.

  Of course, her father had managed to live with Elizabeth most of his adult life. Until he killed them both after a party in Brazil. An accident, if being too drunk to drive on a notorious coastal road could be called an accident. Their bodies, having sailed out of the jeep windows on the precipitous cliff descent and been recovered after several days at sea, were not suitable for more than a cursory autopsy at the Fortaleza mortuary but Rachel had little doubt they were both as inebriated as each other. That was how they lived and that was how they died. It made perfect sense on paper and yet, to Rachel, it was difficult to comprehend. She could only see the life they should have had ahead of them, their work, their passions, a grandchild who needed the
m. In the end, the one thing that mattered to her parents was the moment, the now. There was a good time or a bad one. No regrets, no planning for the future.

  ‘Such free spirits,’ Hal said when Elizabeth and Nicholas had decamped to the remote fishing village in Brazil. ‘Nothing holds them back.’

  Rachel, who could only think how they should have held back enough to be there for their grandson in a way that they hadn’t been there for her, struggled to see her parents from Hal’s point of view. She was supposed to be the free spirit after all, young and heedless, making bold, modern life choices. Where was the pat on the back for her?

  Her bracelet buzzed and she pressed the panel on her earpiece.

  ‘Ms Pryce? Rachel Pryce? This is Dr Crosby from the base.’

  Rachel peered at the small projection from her wrist. The doctor was at a desk. He seemed to be wearing a suit.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I met with Captain Pryce this morning and I’d like to speak with you when you arrive.’

  So she wasn’t to be first thing after all. That had already happened. Doctors’ visits and breakfast, tests and results. Expensive suits.

  ‘It’s nothing serious.’ Dr Crosby couldn’t see Rachel, who wore external comms without cameras, but he seemed to have registered her hesitation. ‘He’s a little disorientated. I’d like to talk with you before you see him.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good.’ He leant back in his chair and now the projection was all suit, his face a tiny prawn on a navy serge sea. Rachel made a note for a future costume idea. She might expand into crustaceans now that Arthur was back. The next Comic Con was in three months and sea monsters would tie in well with the resurgence of Jules Verne.

  ‘They’ll notify me when you reach reception.’

  She turned off the earpiece.

  The night her parents had driven off a cliff, Rachel had called her mother and left a message. They didn’t speak often, and when they did they either misunderstood each other, or understood all too well. In any case, Rachel had been relieved when she had heard the phone’s automated voicemail and could relay her little story about her trip to Disneyland with Arthur for his birthday. How much fun the two of them had, and the strange incident with the Turkish man who thought he recognised her and then turned out to have met Elizabeth when she was not much younger than Rachel.

  ‘He sent his love,’ Rachel said. ‘He lives in Paris now with his wife who you know, too. Celena, is it? Lovely people, mum. They said you were so kind to them when they first moved to London. They lived with you?’

  Had her mother heard the message before she died she would have detected the note of reproach in Rachel’s voice, the unspoken accusation that Elizabeth had never introduced her to the couple or even mentioned them. As a younger woman Rachel had wanted her parents to be fixed entities, and the introduction of a kinder, more open-minded version did not conform to type. Now that Rachel was older she was still torn between admiration and resentment of them both, though it helped that they were dead and at least fixed in that particular way.

  The Hyperloop stopped at another suburban station and a man wearing a full headset boarded. The headset would be linked to his cerebral cortex and his body driven like a car while his mind engaged with a virtual situation. Rachel shuddered. Inside the set, you could hear and speak without being overheard. Most of the time, the users were conducting business, their companies determined to utilise every possible moment of the working day sending them around the city on foot instead of by e-car to keep them active. They reminded Rachel of the poor cockroaches, wired up to micro-processors, that she had seen on television as a child. Just looking at the headsets made Rachel feel claustrophobic. She scratched her scalp for reassurance and turned back to the window.

  Arthur would never use a headset. He wouldn’t even wear a connected OS though Space Solutions had insisted he undergo several tests to determine whether he could function as efficiently without the implant. Of course, he had performed better without the device and the company had even reversed some of their policies on exterior operating systems.

  ‘Optimal processing happens with a human in charge,’ Arthur insisted when Rachel had asked if he was going to lose his job. ‘Well, some humans anyway,’ he added with a head tilt at his mother.

  Rachel hadn’t laughed. Her idea of hell was to become semi-automated, like the man in the headset. She had nightmares about being downloaded on to a hard drive.

  ‘Uploaded. And we’re a long way from that, mum. And even if we could store you, think of the possibilities. Your memories, your personality, your thoughts and emotions all preserved. Eternal life without the inconvenience of planetary destruction. Pure existence. For all you know, it’s already happened.’

  Like a religion without any of the benefits. Rachel couldn’t really see the difference between a scientist who believed that human consciousness was just a construct of artificial intelligence, and the plodding instruction from the Sunday school teacher her parents had sent her to so they could spend an hour in the local pub. She supposed there was some sort of absolution in the bottom of a glass but you couldn’t be forgiven or blessed by a computer. Or loved. She knew Arthur felt the same but he liked to have the discussion anyway, pushing her to come up with ever more outlandish reasons to justify humanity in its meat form.

  ‘You’re the keeper of the flame, mum. The eternal hippy. If you worked at the company you’d have them weaving digital tapestries in no time.’

  The doors closed at her stop for the second time and she sat still as the carriage began its next loop of the city. She’d just take one more trip around.

  Something had happened to Arthur. Of course something had happened, she had known it immediately, but as she sped around once more towards the hospital the exact nature of the ‘something’ became increasingly less abstract. Soon, she would be confronted with the details of her son’s condition and the events preceding her summons. For the first time since she had spoken to the low-ranking officer on the base, she allowed herself to consider the possible reasons and consequences for Arthur’s sudden arrival back and the reality of his ‘disorientation’.

  He was supposed to be on a two-year mission to the smaller of the Mars moons, Deimos. Rachel had read about the cold lump of rock, and Phobos its sister, with little enthusiasm when Arthur first told her of the expedition. Dread and Fear. Arthur seemed to think it was funny that Rachel set such store by these names.

  ‘Some old professor thought it up,’ he said, ‘they probably were pretty scary hundreds of years ago.’

  Rachel doubted space travel would have been so competitive if the first mission landing had been for ‘Terror’ or ‘Death’. Less celestial poetry, too. Once Arthur’s trip was confirmed, Rachel found it impossible to discuss his impending visit to ‘Dread’ and decided to concentrate on the specifics of the Voltaire crater, Arthur’s landing point. At least that was a destination she could appreciate. She’d spent a term at the Working Men’s College in Camden studying the Enlightenment as part of a deal with her parents when she left school early.

  ‘You can be plain or stupid, but you can’t be both.’ Her mother hardly needed to repeat what almost amounted to a family motto. It was part of the reason Rachel never gave up studying. It wasn’t as if ageing improved your looks.

  The carriage glided into her stop for a third time and Rachel looked up to see the base stretching for several blocks below the station. She stepped onto the platform and stood for a moment in the chill of the spring air.

  In the years since Arthur had decided to train as a pilot, she had learned much about the effects first of flying and then of zero gravity on the body but her son had always batted away the psychological effects with apparent ease. What did it mean that he was now ‘disorientated’? Rachel understood the subtext of medical professionals, had lived with a doctor in her twenties, and knew how they attempted to manage the expectations of next-of-kin. Arthur was hurt. A concussion, or a fev
er, or simply the loneliness of nearly four hundred days with only an OS and delayed video messages for company, had disturbed the balance of his mind. Had her son’s practical, brilliant, creative and loving mind been broken?

  If Arthur was in any danger, she wouldn’t have been asked in for a chat, a team would have come to the house before the TV crews arrived. She knew that much. In the early days, she had sat with other families as the tin cans containing their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, blasted out of the atmosphere. When anything went wrong, really wrong, the family disappeared. Days later, a brave relative would show up on a morning news show and nod along with the anchor while their ‘pioneering’ child or spouse was honoured. Rachel would talk at length to Arthur, challenging the official version of events.

  ‘Mom, you know what the funding is like. We’re this close to being shut down. All the time.’

  Arthur was a trained pilot, an adventurer. He saw his job as an extension of all the world’s explorers and he wanted to be part of that history. Except they weren’t pioneers any more, they were drones, sent off by the company to tie up new territories for mining rights and repair satellites and space stations. Rachel couldn’t help thinking her son had been sold The Right Stuff but had bought a plastic flag and a metal detector. ‘Extreme camping’, Arthur called it, more to reassure his festival-going mother than to understate his love for the work. But there was no disguising the economic culture of the twenty-first century where a string of code bought you entry to the world’s unelected parliament. The technocrats decided which diseases were cured, which countries got enough food, and which planets her son colonised for them. Rachel knew the world had never been a fair place, but she wondered exactly how qualified the boys who had gone straight from their teen bedrooms to Silicon Valley boardrooms were to run the world.

  ‘Just as good as anyone,’ Hal said from his Somerset idyll the last time they had spoken. ‘At least they weren’t born into it, or chosen by a corrupt government.’