Bel wasn’t sure.
Upton took a sip of his brandy. “Nick, are your wife and son still–”
“They’re dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bel hadn’t told Upton everything as they’d worked out the details of her plan. She wanted his reactions to be unrehearsed and genuine wherever possible.
“Dealing with that kind of guilt can be devastating,” Upton said. “Not just emotionally but physiologically. A person can suffer a wide range of serious ailments. Anyway, since you’re opting for stasis, you might want to consider eliminating your suffering once and for all. Are you familiar with SATSI? Synaptic Alteration Through Surgical Induction?”
“Still somewhat controversial from what I hear. Mainly being used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, right?”
“Those sufferers are certainly candidates but so are many other groups of patients troubled by upsetting memories, including those afflicted with incessant guilt. SATSI is a more specific and directed method than the various psychological and pharmacological treatments often used to treat the syndrome. Techniques such as mnemonic cursors can work but they require the reshaping of consciousness into a new personality. With SATSI, the patient retains his or her core identity. They simply no longer recall certain people, places or things that are the causative factors underlying their guilt. They make a conscious decision to have them excised. In your case, you could choose to eliminate the memory of your wife and son.
“SATSI has proven to be incredibly effective. In essence, the patient informs us of the exact memories to be removed and we perform a series of noninvasive neurological procedures. Selected synapses are carefully recalibrated through electromagnetic induction in order to remove the troubling thought patterns.”
Bel could tell that Nick was giving Upton’s pitch serious consideration. Over the past year, the medical community had come closer to accepting SATSI as a legitimate technique, lifting it from the abyss of quack science. She threw in some reinforcement.
“You should really think about it. You’d be able to wake up in the future with a clean slate, freed from those things that have caused you pain for so many years. Liberated from all your demons.” She turned to Upton. “Frankly, I’m surprised everyone’s not doing it.”
“There is a rather long waiting list. But Nick, if this is something you might be interested in, I could get you to the front of the queue.”
Nick stood up with his brandy and walked to the window. He stared out into the gloom. Bel traded looks with Upton.
So far, so good. Yet even if Nick accepted Upton’s proposal, it was only the appetizer of her plan. The main course, a more challenging thing to swallow, was yet to come.
Nick finally turned back to them. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I agree to do it. But no form of neurological alteration, and certainly not one so relatively new, can offer a hundred percent guarantee.”
“True enough,” Upton said. “But SATSI comes incredibly close to that level of perfection, with better than a ninety-seven percent success rate. Still, your point is well taken.”
“I presume there are side effects.”
“Mild ones, yes. There are trillions of synapses in the human brain and no technique can hope to impact them all. A patient can experience occasional ghost memories, similar to the common sensation of déjà vu. I would stress that in the thousands of post-SATSI cases we’ve tracked, the effect is quite minimal. Most patients hardly notice it.
“The more frequently experienced effect has to do with a natural process called neuroconsolidation. For example, if the recollection of a specific person is deleted, the brain will automatically bypass and/or reconfigure those synaptic junctions. However, this can occur somewhat erratically, leading to a modification of certain memories that were peripherally related to the deleted ones.”
“You’re talking about false memories.”
Upton nodded. “In some cases, the impact of neuroconsolidation can lead to recalling events that never happened, or people or places that never existed. The more common scenario is that certain memories blend together, leading the patient to experience mild distortions of what really occurred.”
“I’m not going to forget my own name, am I?”
“Unlikely.”
“But not impossible.”
Upton shrugged. “From a certain way of looking at things, nothing is impossible. But to my knowledge, aftereffects that severe have never occurred. Again, I would stress that any of these side effects are minimal, and far outweighed by the benefits. Also, since you would be going into stasis, you would have a natural advantage over most SATSI patients. You’d be removing yourself entirely from familiar touchstones, people and places that might serve to trigger ghost memories.
“As for false memories, they might not matter much in whatever future time and place you awaken. They likely would have little or no contemporary relevance to you. They would simply be historical inaccuracies, kinks in your personal mnemonic chain. No one’s memory is perfect. It’s the sort of thing that everyone experiences from time to time.
“Also, for what it’s worth, there is no practical upper limit to how many mnemonic deletions can be accomplished during a single session.” Upton paused. “If there are other painful memories, they could be excised as well.”
Bel was impressed with Upton’s presentation. It had just the right tone to appeal to Nick, a blend of persuasiveness and logic.
“You make it all sound so easy,” Nick said.
“To a remarkable extent, it is.”
“And no other side effects?”
“Not really. I would have to remove any implants, however, such as an attaboy. Braincom devices can create harmonics that interfere with SATSI modifications.”
“I’m sure it would be an easier removal than the last time,” Bel added with a smile.
Nick swallowed the rest of his WeBoys and put down the tumbler. He turned to Bel.
“Could I talk to you alone?”
“Of course. Upton, would you excuse us for a minute?”
“Take your time.”
She followed Nick into the bedroom and closed the door.
“OK, so what’s really going on here?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“C’mon, Bel. You’re going to play dumb? I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’ve set up a great pitch here. You and your ex convinced me that SATSI might be worth doing. But that’s not really the point of all this, is it? You want something more.”
“I do.” She braced herself for the big moment, the key revelation of her plan. “I want you to give me a baby.”
His initial reaction was as expected, a scowl and a weary sigh. They’d been over this ground many times.
Bel’s desire to get pregnant had continued to escalate. These days, merely encountering an image of a baby or hearing someone mention their new offspring could jar her from whatever task she was undertaking, incite fantasies of giving birth, caring for an infant, raising a son or daughter.
She’d tried everything to reroute Nick’s attitude about the B word, tried to get him to see that new and better feelings might be possible if they had a child together. She’d made it clear to him that she didn’t want to get pregnant by other means, that she wanted him to be the biodad. But all such efforts had been in vain. The issue remained a nonstarter. And when he’d begun talking seriously about going into stasis, she’d nearly given up.
But the idea of his retreat into stasis germinated an idea. Gradually, she’d shaped that idea into the contours of a plan.
“Hear me out,” she said. “I want you to get me pregnant before you do the SATSI. And then I want you to arrange with Upton not just to eliminate Weldon and Marta from your memories, but me as well. I want you to forget all about Annabel Bakana. Which means you’ll also be forgetting about my baby.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. It lowered her height just enough to bring them face to face.
Those last three words caught in her throat. She fought back an urge to shed tears. Another of Doctor Emanuel’s sayings flickered through consciousness. Emotions versus intellect. The ancient wellspring of most of the human animal’s internal conflicts.
Mentally, Bel had accepted the fact that Nick was leaving. But her emotional response to that reality was going to take far longer to process.
Stay in control, she told herself. Save the tears for when you’re alone.
Nick sensed her mood, sat down beside her. “If I decide to do this, what about you? After I’m gone, would you also go the SATSI route? Get rid of any lingering pains by excising all your memories of Nicholas Guerra?”
“Not a chance. I’ll never forget you, nor would I want to. For me, pain is part of life. It keeps me real.”
Nick went silent, mulling over her proposal. His face was unreadable. She had no idea what his decision would be.
Finally, he took hold of her hand. A faint smile came over him. “I’ve never told you, but you’ve gotten very good at this.”
“Good at what?”
“Using sneaky methods to get people to do what you want.”
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, I learned from the best.”
Sixty-Six
Stasis facilities had been upgraded since the last time Nick had been frozen. Back in 2010, his body had been huddled in ice and then transfused with a cryo-protective agent to limit the worst damage before being vitrified with dry ice and liquid nitrogen. That primitive means of cryonic preservation had produced serious tissue damage, nonrepairable by the era’s technology.
But by 2086, cellular restoration had been perfected. A group of cryohistorians, fascinated by a man who’d been under for so long and who might provide them with firsthand stories of life in the late twentieth century, had petitioned the courts for Nick’s awakening.
Today in 2097, the stasis facility where he was about to undertake his second big sleep was cleaner and more sophisticated than the clandestine basement where his first freezing had taken place. Another huge difference was that in the first half of the twenty-first century, the process required a genuine corpsicle. Assisted by his cryo team, Nick had committed suicide. Today, going to that extreme wasn’t necessary. He’d be alive when the stasis drugs kicked in and, hopefully, in a similar condition when some distant future called out for his awakening.
“You should lie down now, Mr Guerra. The sedatives and relaxants will be taking effect momentarily.”
The male voice came from ceiling speakers in the near-freezing chamber in which Nick stood. The man was the induction supervisor, in charge of the stasis team. He occupied a more comfortable environment, the warm control booth behind a glass wall overlooking the chamber. Two female stasis technicians waited with him, ready to enter the chamber and seal the capsule.
Nick approached the two meter long ivory egg cradled in netting. Gillian was already lying inside the capsule, on his back, naked. His eyes were shut and his arms rested at his sides. He looked peaceful, all troubles slumbering, all worries suspended. Even though they’d be sharing a capsule, differences in their metabolisms had required Gillian to be given the stasis drugs a few minutes ahead of Nick.
He noted the small ID number printed on the side of the capsule, MH-785462. It was a simple enough set of letters and numerals, random and meaningless – exactly what was required. The small data brick to be secured in the ice as they were cocooned would be equally nondescript. It would provide only scant revival instructions and a fabricated story that their capsule held a single occupant, an older man.
The decision to be put to sleep in the same capsule and deliberately misidentified had been mutual. The plan was for him and Gillian to be awakened in some future era where the Paratwa were again a dire threat, and where their expertise could be utilized. The false data was to lessen the possibility of being brought from stasis for some other reason.
It was unlikely that a future civilization would consider a sixty year-old E-Tech financial adviser by the name of Austin Rudolph a priority awakening. The loose rule for selecting which individuals to be revived favored the selection of younger people, who in general were more adaptable to change.
The selection process also focused on those with a range of skills that might best enable assimilation into a new era. Financial adviser seemed limited in that respect. And by choosing to be frozen in the same capsule, the possibility of Nick and Gillian being separated by some bookkeeping error and revived in different places and times was eliminated.
Still, they both knew they were taking a chance. Down the line, the rules could change, society undergo drastic alterations. In truth, they were consigning their fates to the great unknown.
So what else is new? Nick figured that when all was said and done, the future was always a big question mark anyway.
He stripped off his robe, climbed the short stepladder propped against the capsule and nestled himself beside his traveling companion. He didn’t feel tired yet. No doubt the stasis drugs would kick in momentarily.
As he did when preparing for a normal trip, he mentally reviewed his checklist of things that needed to be done before setting out. He was pretty sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, at least nothing of genuine importance. Still, there was always that nagging feeling that something had been overlooked.
He’d given Sosoome his freedom, disengaged all the mech’s overrides. For reasons that still puzzled roboticists, non-biologicals with quantum circuitry didn’t take well to organic stasis and often emerged with random damage to their higher-level processors. And Nick had decided against attempting to preserve Sosoome’s basic personality by downloading it into a data brick.
In the current environment, advancements tended to render mech minds obsolete every three to four years. And Nick had a hunch he’d be going much farther into the future than that. Even if the entire Earth ended up being destroyed, there was no guarantee that future generations of survivors in the Colonies would heed E-Tech’s lessons, put limits on scientific and technological development. It wouldn’t be right for Sosoome to awaken into a realm where he might be little more than a primitive curio.
Besides, the mech was still having regular sex with that cheetah-walking drudge, Whammo. Nick didn’t want to be the one to break up a good relationship.
That last notion made him frown. He seemed on the verge of remembering something, a vague pattern at the farthest edge of consciousness. But whatever the thought was, it remained tantalizingly beyond his reach.
His attention was snared by movement in the control room. A woman had entered. He recognized her instantly. Annabel Bakana was the director of E-Tech. She’d once been his boss.
Nick wondered why she was here. Was there was some new policy within the organization whereby the director was required to witness a former employee being put into stasis?
The idea struck him as ludicrous even as he considered it. A more likely scenario was that she was here for some reason unrelated to him. It could be anything at all. Hell, maybe the induction supervisor was Director Bakana’s boyfriend.
He returned his thoughts to the checklist, to the most important item of all. In order for him and Gillian to be reawakened at the proper time, he’d created a sophisticated program and inserted it into multiple locations of the E-Tech archives. In essence, the program would perpetually scan the archives for any indications that Paratwa assassins had emerged from whatever holes they’d crawled into and were again threatening the human species. If certain parameters were met, the program would urge that capsule MH-785462 be brought from stasis.
&
nbsp; Nick had taken the added step of linking his program to the one created by Doctor Emanuel, which he’d only learned about after the man’s death. It was odd that he couldn’t recall the exact circumstances of that but he supposed it didn’t matter. What was important was that the program provided a path to unlock the mnemonic cursors hidden in the deepest recesses of Gillian’s mind. In theory, they could awaken his true self.
Six hundred years. The remarkable lifespan of the Royals was the reason Doctor Emanuel had created the program. He’d hoped that Gillian’s false persona might someday be succeeded by the real tway of Empedocles, and that the secrets of long life be passed on to humanity.
Long life notwithstanding, Nick had mixed feelings about whether the second program was a good idea, remembering those crazed final moments of Jannik Mutter. Still, Doctor Emanuel had been one of history’s brilliant minds and a personal hero, one of the rare individuals Nick had looked up to. It seemed wise to follow the great man’s posthumous lead.
“How do you feel, Mr Guerra?”
The induction supervisor’s words drew his attention back to the control room. Nick was about to say he felt fine and ask when the drugs could be expected to take effect when a wave of dizziness hit him. Moments later, an immense drowsiness seemed to afflict every muscle in his body. It was a sensation as far removed from somnolence as light was from dark.
His eyelids felt heavy. The big sleep was about to begin. Just before his eyes closed, his attention was again snared by Annabel Bakana.
He couldn’t be certain but she appeared to be crying.
Sixty-Seven
“Thirty minutes to docking,” the bot announced, its unisex voice crafted to project serenity and reassurance. “All passengers should allow at least one hour for customs processing.”
Bel looked up from her book, a vintage paperback from Nick’s collection. He’d left her his entire bookcase but she’d only selected a handful of titles for the journey, including this novel, The Dispossessed, about two radically different cultures on neighboring worlds. She’d noticed it the first night she’d visited his apartment and had been intrigued.
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