Complete Short Fiction, page 52
7
Click-click-click.
Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!
The two sounds alternated.
Gaddis opened his eyes. He was lying across the alien. The other’s eyes and mouth were open. Snakes danced inside the mouth.
Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!
Click-click-click.
The mouth moved, as if trying to swallow the snakes. Gaddis pushed himself away from the face, afraid that the snakes would dart at his throat.
He stood up slowly. The alien’s arms and legs twitched as the head rolled to one side and the eyes looked up at him. Gaddis squatted down on one knee. The large eyes watched him. The mouth trembled. A milkiness was veiling the alien’s eyes as the eyelids flickered, closed, then opened slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Gaddis said, trying to show that he cared. “I don’t know what happened. What can I do?” He stared across the silence, trying to see into the alien’s brain. It was there, behind the eyes, thinking about him, judging. I’ve cracked up, Gaddis thought. Just a wild animal. What will I tell them back home?
The alien’s arm went up, beckoning.
Gaddis nodded. “Yes, I know. No point in letting you suffer more.” He stood up and crushed the other’s neck with his boot, sure of having understood something at last.
He wandered out of the chamber and searched the compound, but he was alone.
8
Maybe it had been a test of some kind? As the red dwarf had approached the solar system, the aliens had put an intermediary of sorts here, as bait. The entire confrontation had been recorded and was whispering between the stars to alert some alien civilization to the fact that humankind’s brain was still dipped in slime, despite a promising cortex.
The alien had sacrificed himself, Gaddis thought. He had come here knowing that the dwarf was too near the sun of Earth to be ignored; sooner or later it would be visited, and the aliens would not have to reveal the location of their home world. Clever. And I’ve gone paranoid-schizophrenic.
Sad. He had longed to be taken into the other’s mind, there to be shown around and made to understand. He had always demanded to know more than any teacher could give, often triggering resentment; this had been no different. Perhaps nothing less than seeing the face of God would ever satisfy him. What else could ever sort out his small divided nature and understand what he had done here?
The alien, he realized, had communicated by putting me in his place, but I panicked at the empathic joining and killed him.
Black clouds brushed across the red sun on the main screen as Gaddis prepared the ship for departure; there was no longer any reason to stay. For an instant he saw the homestar, bright above the wandering dwarf. Was there any reason to go back? Two solitudes had met here, two motes of awareness precipitated from a cosmic unconsciousness, but they had failed to cross the bridge of silence between them.
The alien’s body was in the freezer; it would speak worlds to human biologists. He checked the temperature controls and set his sleep period the return into the trillion-mile whirlpool of the sun’s family. Sleep stiffened his body, and he was only dimly aware of acceleration when it kicked in.
“We didn’t do a good job of it,” he said softly to his companion in the cold.
1987
This Life and Later Ones
Some things have traditionally been strictly the province of religion. But when people get the ability to create their own options . . .
“Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”
Woody Allen
Most people knew, by the turn of that first decade, that their lives would come to three choices: death with nothing after: death with the religious or mystical hope of a new existence; or translation into a manufactured afterlife. This last choice, which had to be acted upon well in advance of clinical death, was. a service offered by AFTERLIVES UNLIMITED, a group of creative associates working out of Atlantic City since the end of the last century.
The first beyonds on the market were blank, limbo-like holding spaces where the dead waited, often crying out on the monitors to be erased, as they sat in what seemed to be gray pastures, or on flat plains and jagged mountainsides, under empty skies. Electronic souls massed in the afterworlds to decide how to live, and to test how much say they still had over their existence.
But as the programmers applied their ingenuity to the problems of world-creation, better interactive backgrounds were brought into play for the waiting departed. Things seemed to have improved somewhat by the time my father began to think of being placed, but I was worried about more than the technology.
“You disapprove, don’t you son?”
I shrugged. He was past ninety. Who was I to deny him further life of any kind? “I don’t know what I can say.”
“Go ahead, there’s not much I haven’t thought myself.”
“It’s just that it scents to show, well, a lack of character on your part. Here you are, trembling at the edge of your grave, and you want this. If you had any convictions about life-after-death, you wouldn’t hedge.” I felt cruel.
He smiled and scratched his nose. “We haven’t talked lately. I don’t have any religious convictions left. This is the only remaining road for me, this or the dark. I suppose the technology isn’t great, but I won’t last long enough for the improvements to come in. Gotta go while I can still make the transfer without complications.”
He went that same week. They used the actual atoms of his brain to form the transfer pattern, for metaphysical reasons of conserving identity, they said; otherwise we might consider him only a copy of himself. I went to the warehouse and saw row upon row of solid-state modules housing the electronic dead in what amounted to old age homes beyond the grave.
Visitors were allowed a week after transfer. I arrived in a bad mood, feeling guilty, expecting the worst. They ushered me into a small private room with a three-dec tank monitor on one wall.
I sat down and peered into the next world.
“Pop, are you there?” I asked, straining to see into the tank.
A shadow moved across a barren landscape, and suddenly a face gazed out at me. Its eyes seemed blind, but it was Pop.
“Pop, it’s me! Can you hear?” My heart was pounding.
“Stop shouting! Do you know what you sound and look like in here? A big cloud with a nasty voice. Can’t you do anything about that?”
“I’ll try to talk lower. Is that better?”
“Not much. You still look awful.”
“Is there anything you need?” I asked stupidly.
“Well, you could ask them to program some shaving utensils. Beards keep growing in here, don’t ask me why.”
“I’ll ask, but what do the, uh, programmers say?”
“The dummies don’t know how to do that very well yet, and they claim it’s not in their budget! They surmise that there’s some deep mental reason why the beard detail persists. Something to do with the method they used to transfer us. I’m glad your mother didn’t live long enough to get in here, thank God.”
“You wanted this . . .”
“I know, I know, there was no choice. But tell them that they have to make improvements!”
“What kind of improvements. Pop?” I asked, thinking that he couldn’t just cut off payments from his Afterlife Trust.
“This place just isn’t real enough. It’s like living on a bare stage set. Worse—even that seems phony!”
I looked into his eyes, but he seemed to be looking inward, as if into a hidden mirror. He appeared defeated, resigned, despite his protests. After a moment the face turned away from me, and I saw a small shadow creep away across the dark landscape.
“Shit,” I muttered as my stomach turned over and tried to fall out. My own face stared back at me from an abyss.
I got up and went in search of the administration office.
“You must realize.” the local manager said, “that these facilities were pressed into service before the technology was fully developed. People forced us to open. The funding pressures were enormous—open or lose it to a competitor.”
“I know, but can’t you do something about provisions—about, well, landscaping, putting a bit more reality into these places?”
He shook his head and smiled, forming two dimples and a second chin. “Let me introduce you to our ace programmer. He’ll explain better than I can.”
We came to an open door. Inside the room, a wiry man sat at a giant screen, staring at some mathematical symbols.
“Felix, this is Mr. Canetti. He has a relative inside.”
“Please.” Felix motioned me to a chair as he swiveled around from the screen. “What is it you wish to know?” he asked as I sat down.
I explained my father’s complaints.
“There’s not much we can do right now.”
“But why not?” I demanded.
He sighed. “I’m sorry, but we can’t do better on the scenery right now. I know it’s not much better than cut-outs pasted onto cardboard, but we’re working on it.” He sounded weary, but still interested in his work.
“What about provisions?”
“They don’t need them. In fact, they don’t need anything, not even food. All we have to do is keep their matrix support power steady, maybe boost it once in a while.”
“But they also have mental needs, aesthetic needs.”
He shook his head. “We’ve tried sketching in details, but it’s dangerous. Can’t seem to put inanimate things in with any degree of accuracy, where they would be needed. There’s a basic uncertainty built into dealing with these worlds, involving our ways of measuring energy inputs. I don’t fully understand it myself. I’m a programmer, not a physicist.”
“But you’ll solve it, won’t you?” The sound of hope in my voice was pathetic.
“In time we might be able to land provisions in a kind of storybook fashion. You know, program a phantom ship filled with luxuries, have it approach from the sea, dock and unload. They could come to it in safety, you see, by stages, without the danger of differing energy levels that we can’t measure, and take what they need. We’d bypass the danger of erasing people or disfiguring them with arriving informational artifacts.”
“How long before you can do it?” I asked impatiently.
“Depends on subscriptions, on grants, funding from the government, the number of researchers we can recruit. Not many are being trained for this kind of work. It’s too new. It’ll take years, Mr. Canetti. Would you rather we just erased him?”
I thought he was making a bad joke, but one look at his face convinced me he was serious and had meant no offense.
“Can you?” I asked.
“We’re not even sure of that, since we’ve never tried it. We could probably do it. But don’t mention it to—it’s your father, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Why not?”
“He might demand it, and that might start something if others joined him. They might think they could die and pass on to still some other afterlife. Some of these people have gotten religion since they died.”
I almost laughed, except that I felt like crying. “No one filled us in on any of these problems before I signed him up.”
He looked at me sternly. “What choice did you have? Would you have let him die?”
“No,” I said helplessly, feeling useless.
“There is one other choice, for now. Want to hear it?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“We could store him until the worlds are improved. But it’s very expensive. Only the very wealthy have taken that option.” Are you wealthy, Mr. Canetti, his eyes asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “the rich knew these worlds were bad. Who tipped them? Don’t tell me, they bought the info.”
“Quite right. This is a cutthroat business. But you can console yourself with the hope that it won’t be more than a few years before better worlds come on the market. It has to happen.”
“Only a few years?”
“Five at the outside. We’ll perform miracles by then. People in the prime of life will want to live inside. It’ll be better than life.”
“Oh?”
His eyes lit up. “Well, as one possibility, you’ll be able to visit people inside.”
“Sure—I could sail in on the phantom schooner you mentioned and land smuggled supplies on my father’s dream island.”
“Why not! It’s not impossible, in principle.” He seemed a bit hurt by my remarks. “Of course he could come out in a cyber-body and spend time with you right now, or even permanently.” But I knew that cyber-bodies were ruinously expensive, available only on a custom-made basis, and that the service contracts were ridiculous. “We do have a. sub-contracting arrangement for this option that we’re still negotiating, if you’re really interested. In your case we would need various guarantees and a financial statement.”
“You sound as if you don’t place much faith in the technique,” I said.
He nodded. “Too many fatal malfunctions. Prosthetic embodiments can’t ever be better than our environments. Consider the choice—the real world again or anything you can wish for!”
His company was clearly hedging its bets. “Send me some literature on the hardbodies anyway,” I said, standing up to leave. It was no use trying to sound decisive; he had made me feel utterly naive.
“There’s nothing I can do right now, Pop,” I said at the next visit. “You’ll just have to wait. Things will improve.”
“You’ve marooned me here!”
“Don’t you have any friends in there? Haven’t you met anyone?” I bit my tongue, not daring to ask about what sexual opportunities existed for him now, if any.
“Yeah, in here is right. Even you know it’s just a damn box.”
Flashes of light appeared behind him as I tried to explain what I had learned—what the difficulties were in the various technologies, the costs involved, the dangers of malfunction, the lack of an effective repair and service network—but it did no good. I decided not to mention what Felix had told me about the legal problems of identity transfer. Waivers of dubious legal value were being signed all over the place to circumvent inheritance laws. There was talk of limiting the rights of hardbody recipients; periodic sanity tests might be required. No one was sure nowadays when they had been born, how long they lived, or when they were dead. I felt drained by guilt when Pop finally turned away from me.
I watched his shadow move off into what seemed to be low black hills. The sky was made of red lead. Other shadows were moving around inside the tank. I strained to see, punishing myself with the hellish sight, then got up and went home.
I suppose most people have collaborated with the enemy where death is concerned. Dying can’t be helped, so accept it as best you can, rationalize it as necessary and inevitable; above all, don’t poison what time you have by worrying about the coming end. In with the new and out with the old. Just imagine how terrible it would be if people you hated or had done you harm could live forever. There’s solace in knowing for sure that one day they’ll rot, even if you will. too.
It could have been worse. I thought of all those people who had invested in freezer immortality, going for the grim hope of gross preservation when electronic survival was just around the corner. Attempts were being made to transfer the mental patterns of some corpsicles, but without much success to date.
I became a brochure and prospectus hound, hungrily searching for some way to improve Pop’s lot. But it all came down to one conclusion: he had gone too early; the technology was only just getting started. To make matters worse, there were few psychologists in the field of identity transfer—you died and woke up in another place, where your experience of a well-made world told you that this was no world at all. It had been made by an idiot god, or a devil attempting to mimic reality. And you couldn’t even be sure that you were yourself. I was afraid of what I would learn each time I went to visit.
“How’s it going. Pop? Made any more friends?”
He’d been in for six weeks. This time, he didn’t speak to me at all. He wouldn’t even come forward so I could see him.
“It is a big change,” Felix, the ace programmer, explained to me. “We didn’t quite understand how big until we pulled in a few psycho-biologists. It seems that the loss of the body’s emotion-producing systems begins to show up. The brain tries to go on as before, out of habit and memory, but then the coldness sets in. No glands for anger, love, hate, just remembrances of what those feelings were.”
“Can’t you adjust inputs to make those emotions possible for them?” I asked, struggling with my own feelings.
“We’re working on it. It takes endless details to create the experience of a world. Too many details for anyone to handle. Reality goes on. layer after layer of structure, both in the environments and in the human mind. Maybe it just can’t be faked, ever. At least not in the way reality fakes it.” He smiled.
“What about their sex lives?” I asked.
“Uh, we don’t know. We don’t watch to see, I mean.” He sounded nervous.
“But you’re telling me all this is failing!” I shouted.
He nodded. “Could be, could be.”
“Then what’s going to happen to all your . . . tenants?”
He shrugged. “Any number of things. We don’t know yet, exactly. There’s a chance we could give the subs—I mean subscribers—exactly what they want, by linking their minds to the modeling processors, so that they would just conjure up whatever they wish. Connect their output to their input, so to speak. The closed loop would give them the sense of omnipotence, actually.” He paused. “But then again, the lack of limits might be bad for the human mind, some of the psychs are saying. God knows what hells of torment and degradation might appear in the tanks.”
