The Downloaded, page 8
“Login,” she said. “Letitia Garvey.”
“Hello, Letitia,” replied the puck. “What can I do for you?”
“Initiate downloading of the Hōkūle‘a astronauts,” she commanded over top of the pounding of the makeshift battering ram. “And, for the love of God, hurry!”
Chapter 5
Interview with Captain Letitia Garvey
As soon as the computer acknowledged that the downloading of my starship crew had begun, Jürgen, Penolong, and I hustled over to the astronaut cryonics chamber. Of course, my cryo-coffin was open, and so was Jürgen’s, and—
—and shit! In all the commotion, I’d forgotten about Mikhail Sidorov, our ship’s roboticist. His open coffin really was a coffin, with his desiccated corpse and its smashed-in skull lying inside. There was no way any consciousness could download into that.
Jürgen was a physician; he was needed here as defibrillators were going off like popcorn popping. But I could be spared. I ran back into the corridor, hoping to talk the seven prisoners who were trying to bash in the door to the quantum-computing chamber into stopping. But, just as I arrived, they succeeded in knocking it down. The three female ex-cons and the four male ones burst into the room that held the giant computer.
I followed them in. “Please!” I called out. “Please don’t. There’s a man trapped inside!”
The same surly guy who’d confronted us before looked at me. “Against his will?” he sneered. “Unable to get out even though his time is up? Cry me a fucking river.”
Although their minds had each spent twenty-four subjective years inside it, I suspected none of them had ever laid eyes on this, or any, quantum computer before. The other three men were walking around the tetrahedron’s base, which measured fifteen meters on a side, presumably looking for some external component they could easily wreck. Meanwhile, a thick-bodied woman had taken a fire extinguisher off its wall mount and was slamming the heavy tank against one of the computer’s mirrored triangular faces.
I was about to yell “Stop!” when, by a split second, another voice—a male one—beat me to it. I pivoted, and there was Roscoe Koudoulian, accompanied by six other people who I presumed were also recently downloaded prisoners. “You heard the lady,” he said. “There’s at least one person left in there.”
“Who cares?” sneered the same man, whose name, I discovered later, was Caleb.
The guy immediately behind Roscoe was enormous, maybe a hundred and fifty kilos; I eventually learned that he went by the name Alan Smithee. “I care,” he growled. “The only intact technology for miles around is right here in this building. Who knows what we’re going to need to survive?”
The woman with the fire extinguisher had made a sizable dent in the triangular side of the computer, but she hadn’t ruptured its housing yet. The banging of metal against metal was echoing loudly in the chamber.
Caleb was defiant. “We’re not going to need this fucking thing.”
“Maybe not,” said Roscoe. “But you might need a doctor at some point.” He indicated me. “Her friend Jürgen is one.”
I nodded emphatically. “And we have another MD downloading right now.”
“So,” said Roscoe, “it’s better not to piss them off.”
“Get the hell out,” Caleb sneered at Roscoe, “or it’s you who’ll need a doctor.”
Alan Smithee lumbered forward. “You think you can take me?”
Caleb was the same height as Alan Smithee but probably only massed half as much. Still, he looked like he was seriously considering taking a swing at Alan. For his part, Alan made beckoning come-and-get-it gestures with both hands.
The three men had finished circumnavigating the quantum computer’s base; they appeared ready to give Caleb backup. Meanwhile, the others who had come with Roscoe fanned out behind Smithee.
I didn’t want a brawl, especially between people who had murdered before, but at least this was buying time—maybe not enough to save Mikhail, but precious seconds that might still be needed to complete the downloading of my crew.
The woman who’d been pounding on the reflective side of the computer’s shell was still at it, and—
—and there’s a reason a quantum-computing center and a facility for cryogenically freezing human bodies were housed in the same building. Both depended on supercooling materials, the former to minimize atomic vibrations so qubits don’t accidentally flip quantum states, the latter to preserve body tissues against decay.
When I first saw the white cloud, I thought the woman’s fire extinguisher had gone off, but, no, that wasn’t it. Rather, she’d succeeded in putting a crack in one side of the computer’s housing, and liquid nitrogen, at almost two hundred degrees below zero, came shooting out in a geyser. The woman staggered backward—and slipped on what was now an icy floor. The stream of nitrogen fire-hosed onto her face.
Meanwhile, one of the three men behind Caleb dropped like a sack of potatoes. I knew what was happening, but I doubt they did: liquid nitrogen has an expansion ratio of almost seven hundred to one; a single liter of it boils off to seven hundred liters of nitrogen gas, and that displaces the oxygen in any confined space.
“Get out!” I shouted even as I started running for the exit. “Get out!”
Roscoe and Alan were hot on my heels, but I saw Caleb fall unconscious to the floor. It turned out to be a good thing that the mob had knocked the large door to the chamber completely off its hinges. White clouds were billowing out into the corridor, and I suspected enough breathable air was moving back into the chamber that no one who’d fallen would asphyxiate to death. Still, as soon as I felt it was safe, Roscoe, Alan Smithee, and I went back in and pulled Caleb and the other man, both of whom were still unconscious, to safety.
But the woman who had caused this mess was dead, dead, dead. She hadn’t shattered like a goldfish dropped in liquid nitrogen, but her body was as frozen as any of ours had been during hibernation—and without the benefit of her bodily water and blood first being replaced by antifreeze. Throughout her body and brain, cells must have burst wide open as they froze.
We’d been revived for less than a day now, and we’d already had our first death, not to mention our first mob violence, plus the attempted rape of Sarah, the Mennonite girl. It was a pretty poor start to our lives in this, our brave new twenty-sixth-century world.
Interview with Valentina Solomon
No, don’t call me that. My name is Valentina. It’s in honor of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. And, no, of course I wasn’t going to be the first woman to Proxima Centauri; half the Hōkūle‘a’s crew is female. But I would have been the first person like me to travel to another star—if, that is, our so-called starship had ever gotten underway.
Four years is a long time to spend . . . well, to spend with yourself. You learn a lot about who you are. And you’ve got the power, in your personal silo, to shape reality any way you wish.
Sure, we were all leaving our families behind. In my case, that meant my mother, my father, and my brother. But I admit I re-created them—or at least versions of them—in my virtual world. It’s intoxicating, editing the characteristics of other people. My mom’s judgmentalism? Gone. My father’s prejudice? Out the window. Even my brother, who is—who was—pretty cool, got his frenetic energy taken down a notch, not to mention his booming voice. Noah—that was his name—always spoke too loudly, as if he were on some imaginary stage playing to the back row. Well, on my imaginary stage, he talked like a normal person.
And, in my silo, my family was exactly as supportive as I wanted them to be. All in all, I was pretty happy in there. I hear some of my crewmates went for wild existences during the time we thought we were en route to Proxima b—endless orgies, apparently, and bloody gladiatorial combat, too, and they say Per Lindstrom started his own religion and spent most of those four years being worshipped by parishioners he’d conjured up. But me, I just wanted peace and quiet, you know? No tsuris, as my bubbe would say. Just acceptance.
So you can imagine how I felt when I was ripped without warning from all of that.
I’d been playing chess. I’m a good chess player—not great, but good—and I’d conjured up an opponent who had exactly my skill level. He was playing white and had just taken one of my bishops. I was irritated but thought I could get his queen in three moves. And then, suddenly, I felt a tingling all over and my vision flashed between negative and positive images: the black chess pieces becoming white, and vice versa, maybe three times a second. My first thought was that I was having a stroke, but I couldn’t be; I was an uploaded consciousness, not a physical brain, and there were no blood vessels to rupture.
My vision stabilized and I saw that my simulated opponent looked as shocked as I felt. His mouth was hanging open and his eyebrows had gone way up. I had no idea what he was seeing as he stared at me, nor did I yet have any idea what was happening.
And then the world around me—the world I’d made, the world I felt safe in—fragmented into tiny pieces, pixels of unreality, and suddenly I found myself back in the physical realm, inside—
They call it a cryo-coffin out of a kind of bravado, I suppose, but it really did feel like a coffin just then. It wasn’t as though I was coming back to life; it was like I was dying.
My heart was already beating at this point, and I felt cold. My head pounded, my mouth was parched, and my skin itched—sensations I hadn’t had even once in the last four years. And . . .
And damn.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.
I was naked, of course, and as I pushed the thermal blanket off and tipped my head down, I took in the sight of the body I’d woken up in. The flat, hairy chest; the muscular arms, also hairy; and, between my legs, shriveled from the cold, a penis.
I sat up in the coffin, like Dracula come dusk, and took in the scene. I wasn’t the only one being yanked back to reality. All the other coffins were open, too. Some of their occupants had already hauled themselves to their feet and were getting dressed. Others were still sitting or lying down.
Dr. Haas was making his rounds, checking on each of the newly awoken. He looked steady on his feet, so I assumed he’d downloaded a while ago. As he passed my coffin, he said, “You okay?” I nodded, removing the leads plugged into this body, and he continued on to the next person.
But I was far, far from okay. I was furious. How dare they pull me back from my heaven? How fucking dare they?
The whole room was freezing, I suppose as a result of all those cryochambers splitting open at once; I desperately wanted to put on clothes. I managed to clamber out of the coffin and, holding onto it for support with one hand, I worked my way to the footlocker. There was a loud pop as I broke the vacuum seal. My olive-green astronaut jump suit was in there, neatly folded. I shimmied into it, looked down, and—
The Hōkūle‘a wasn’t a military vessel; it was a purely civilian one, and so our jumpsuits didn’t have our last names on them. I’d once joked that we looked like garage mechanics, because our fabric nameplates instead gave first names. But I wasn’t laughing now. There, over my lack of a left breast, was the one I hated, the one I loathed, the one I’d never wanted to hear again.
I dug my short fingernails under the edge of the fabric and spent the next ten minutes tearing the nameplate off. Like I said, my name is Valentina now, even if I’m stuck in this goddamned male body, and I’ll thank you to never, ever deadname me again.
Interview with Dr. Jürgen Haas
I slept like a sack of shit that first night. All but one of the two dozen members of the Hōkūle‘a’s crew were now revived, the exception being our expert in robotics, Mikhail Sidorov, whose mind was still stuck inside the quantum computer with no place to go. And the thirty-five surviving prisoners were out raising havoc, too.
Besides the attack on the computer, those thugs managed several fistfights among themselves, and there were a few punch-ups between some of them and a couple of our pricklier astronauts. Of course, the institute had an infirmary, and, although the pharmaceuticals and anesthetics there had expired centuries ago, I was pleased to see that some of the supplies were still intact. I stitched up one prisoner’s face, and I made a splint for Per Lindstrom, who I guess didn’t find the ex-cons as pliant as his made-up worshipers. But at least for the time being, the eruption of liquid nitrogen had cooled the convicts on the idea of further smashing up the quantum computer. Ha! See what I did there? “Cooled them.” Thank you, thank you, I’m here all millennium.
Anyway, although the rest of our crew had just awoken, Letitia and I had been up for hours and were both frankly exhausted. The cryo-coffins were no good for sleeping; they had no padding. Letitia found a musty couch, most of its stuffing decayed to dust, in the office of the institute’s director, and I made a little bed in another office out of a row of chairs. But sleep didn’t come easily; I kept thinking one of those damn prison-types was going to slip a shiv between my ribs. Fortunately, Jameela Chowdhury, our British astrophysicist, agreed to stand watch for a few hours, and then someone else would relieve her.
The next morning, as planned, Letitia and I headed out to rendezvous with Sarah, the Mennonite teenager. Our convict buddy Roscoe wanted to come along. He’d read up on Mennonites and many other societies while in prison and said he wanted to see what Sarah’s community looked like. Well, why not?
It was another scorchingly hot day; I never thought I’d miss old-style Canadian winters! But at last we reached the point where we’d parted from Sarah yesterday. She was sitting on some rubble, just staring into space. It wasn’t so much her clothes—a demure light gray dress today, with a white bonnet—that struck me as strange. Rather, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen someone killing time who wasn’t doing something on their phone.
As we approached, a big man emerged from behind some trees; I think he’d been taking a leak. He was dressed in rustic black pants and a simple off-white shirt and had a full blond beard.
Sarah introduced him as her “brutter,” and said his name was Joshua. Of course: she hadn’t wanted to come meet us on her own, knowing Hornbeck was out there somewhere. I introduced Roscoe as our friend.
We all headed off toward their home. Sarah and Joshua leapt easily from one pile of rubble to the next. Letitia, Roscoe, and I had trouble keeping up.
We’d hiked for about an hour, the sun beating down from a cloudless blue sky, when Letitia suddenly came to a stop. I guess Sarah previously had no reason to be on the lookout for people following her, and Roscoe, Joshua, and I were utterly oblivious, but Letitia had lived that wary existence of a woman on pre-disaster Earth. Something alerted her, and, as she swung around, I saw him, too: Hornbeck, the same prisoner who had attacked Sarah yesterday. He quickly lowered himself behind a pile of glacial erratics, but my guess was that he’d figured where there was one pretty young woman to attack there was bound to be another and another. Sarah hadn’t spotted him before he hid, which I suppose was a good thing; if she had, she might have run off, never to be seen again.
But I wasn’t going to let the motherfucker get away. I ran in his direction, and Roscoe and Letitia followed. The bastard must have heard me coming because he popped up again from behind the rocks and took off. Roscoe blocked his only escape route, and I slammed Hornbeck to the ground—for the second time in twenty-four hours.
He looked terrified, and well he should have. I was ready to do to him what had been done to Mikhail Sidorov—smash his skull in. “Are you out of your mind?” I shouted into Hornbeck’s face. “Soon as I get my hands on a scalpel, I’m going to castrate you.”
He spit at me, getting gob on my chin. And that was it. I started whaling on the asshole with both fists. Yeah, I’d left her behind five hundred years ago, but my sister had been raped once—I’ve got no use for human garbage who does that.
“Who are you?” demanded Hornbeck. “The fucking police?”
I kept pounding and pounding. Blood poured out of his nostrils and the sides of his mouth.
It was Roscoe—yeah, Roscoe Koudoulian, the convicted murderer—who finally pulled me off the guy. I fought against his grip for a bit, but he was right; this was no way to deal with Hornbeck. As I caught my breath, I turned around and saw Sarah and Joshua, the pacifist Mennonites, standing there with their mouths hanging open in absolute horror.
Interview with Sarah Good
Dear God, this is hard. No, no, I’ll be all right, but . . . just thinking about what happened to me is so upsetting.
And—my goodness! You’ve done something to my voice, haven’t you? Making my English sound like Jürgen’s. Well, okay, I guess, but please do put it back to normal when we’re done.
Honestly, though, I don’t even know if I should be talking to you. No, it’s not because you’re an outsider, even though that name hasn’t really meant anything for a long time now. It’s because you’re not really here. I can see you, and you look real, but I’ve—God, that was terrifying! My hand passed right through you!
I’ve never heard that term before. “Hollow gram?”
Oh, yes, naturally, I’ve seen myself in pools of water. You’re saying you’re like that, a reflection? Hmmm. I guess.
Forgive me, but you look so odd. I thought it was weird that Letitia’s skin is brown—but yours is blue! And, my goodness, your height! None of this makes sense to me.
You want to know about my community? Well, we’re Mennonites. Deacon says, way in the past, we were called “Old Order” Mennonites, or “horse-and-buggy” Mennonites, because there were others who claimed they belonged to the same faith but used fancy machines and such. But all those other Mennonites are gone, along with everyone else—well, everyone except those like Jürgen from the past who are with us now. And, no, I don’t understand any of that, either!
