Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  Gladdys shivered a little. “Maybe. But he ruined it for Jared. He broke them up.”

  “Oh, Jared was never that serious about Maddy. He was dating you within a week of the break-up.”

  “Mac, do you know what ‘on the rebound’ means? He settled for me. How do you think I’ve felt all these years, knowing that I was second choice?”

  “Isn’t that better than being Kyle’s nth choice?”

  “Don’t you think I’ve noticed how similar ‘Maddy’ and ‘Gladdys’ are?”

  “Fifty percent correlation,” I muttered. The names had half their phonemes in common. But I don’t think she was listening to anything I said.

  “I almost wish he would moon after her. I almost wish he would make secret, late-night phone calls. At least he’d be honest with himself.”

  “Gladdys, I don’t think you’re being fair to Jared; and I don’t think you should be telling me this.”

  She finally relinquished the napkin, dropped it on the table. “That’s right. You’re Mac. You never get off the fence. When you’re not agreeing with Jared, you’re agreeing with Kyle.”

  “You can’t pick a fight with me, Gladdys. And you shouldn’t pick a fight with him, either.”

  She rose from the table, and I rose with her. “I’m sorry I came,” she said. “This was a mistake. Forget everything I’ve said.”

  “If you can’t vent to a friend, Gladdys…”

  “Is that what you are?” Then, she crumpled in on herself. “No, I’m sorry. You really have been. It’s just…Did you ever wonder whether everything might have turned out different?”

  “We all reach a point,” I assured her, “where we start to wonder about our lives.”

  “But…I heard a ‘but’ in there.”

  “But we only have one, and it is what it is. You can only go forward with what you have. Sometimes I wonder what it might have been like if Beth and I had connected years ago. Looking back, I can see how lonely I was all those years. But I never realized that when I was living through them. Yet…What if she and I had gotten together back in the commune, or straight out of college? Who can say but that might not have been a catastrophe? She wasn’t then who she is now, and neither was I.”

  “So it all works out for the best?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But it does all work out for what is.”

  She smiled briefly, and I noted that when she smiled it was hard to notice the plainness of her features. “Thank you, Mac,” she said, and took my hand briefly before turning and walking from the restaurant.

  A LEAP OF FAITH

  Both Jared and I were elected chairmen of our respective departments and spent the next few years in the Great Dismal Swamp of administration and bureaucracy, which proves that if you stick around long enough you eventually get handed the short end of the stick. I would rather have been doing mathematics than dealing with departmental kabuki, but what can you say when you are the last person to duck? I think Jared felt the same way. We both received polite congratulatory cards from Kyle; but I think he knew that while it was an honor just to be nominated, it was a pain in the butt to be elected.

  In any case, new duties kept both of us busy. Seasonal greetings circulated as usual, and Kyle would occasionally drop us a personal message just before some new breakthrough hit the science newsblogs. But he no longer asked either Jared or me for our opinions.

  I contacted him one time on some pretext and asked him in passing how Jared was doing. He looked away from the computer camera. “We haven’t spoken much lately.”

  “Really? You two were always so close.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I outgrew him.” It was characteristic of Kyle that the other possibility did not occur to him. But it was also characteristic of him that he could hear what he said, and he added, “I still love the guy. I send e-cards. But…Our interests don’t intersect that much anymore. Even track meets. I mean, it’s not even track anymore. It’s who has the best exoskeleton. Aah, nothing stays the same anymore.”

  “It never did,” I assured him. “But why don’t you give him a call, maybe drop in and see him? I’m sure he’d like that.”

  Kyle grimaced. “I’m sure he would. He hasn’t told me I’m full of crap for some time now. Must hurt to hold that in for so long.”

  We chatted for a while longer. We had both heard that Jared had swum the Tiber a couple years before, and Kyle was certain that Holtzmann ancestors must be spinning in their Lutheran graves. He surprised me by revealing some awareness of my recent work in the new field we were calling cliology, mathematical history, and even wondered if some sort of app could be developed that would project possible path bundles for historical development. He asked about Beth, who was doing field work in Gujarat.

  But the conversation soon dried up and we eventually logged off with promises to stay in touch. I wondered if it might have been different if we had met in the flesh for drinks or dinner. There is something distancing about the Intergrids.

  When I contacted Jared, he was entirely different, all full of Mac-it’s-great-to-hear-from-you and It’s-been-too-long. I didn’t point out that the grids worked both ways. After all, I was always a marginal figure in his world and Kyle’s. Then too, he had always been the quieter one and it was quite possible for him to go weeks or months without communicating with anyone at all. If Kyle needed Jared to damp his oscillations, Jared needed Kyle to excite his quantum state.

  Since his work tended not to make headlines, I was less aware of what Jared was up to than I had been of Kyle. He had drifted out of metaphysics into moral philosophy, and when I asked him what he thought of Kyle’s neuristors, he was non-committal. “I don’t know if they can do what he wants them to do. But I think I’ve said all I needed to say about AI.”

  An arm reached into view handing Jared a cup and saucer. Then Gladdys leaned in front of him and waved at the camera. “Hi, Mac. Long time, no see.” She disappeared, and I took her cue and let it go at that.

  “You haven’t heard from Kyle lately?” I tried to make it sound like a guess.

  A puzzled and vaguely hurt look passed across his face. “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t. I’m afraid I must have offended him in some way.”

  Maybe by calling his life’s work a fool’s errand? But I did not voice that thought. “Have you contacted him?”

  “If he doesn’t want to talk, I won’t force myself on him. I think he must be pretty busy, judging by the newspapers. Dashing from one thing to another, as usual.”

  It seemed to me that Kyle had remained remarkably focused over the years on creating machine intelligence and downloading minds into computers. Living forever as software. If that was not a marathon, what was? I suggested as much to Jared.

  “No, he’s still rushing into things. He’s making a terrible mistake. He seems to conceive of the mind—the soul, life—as a distinct substance. But there is no Cartesian theater; there is no ghost in the machine.”

  “I thought you, of all people…”

  “Look, Mac. When you see a basketball, do you see rubber and a sphere? No. Even if Kyle can record and copy his brain patterns into a computer, they won’t be him, any more than copying the sphere into granite or into algebraic equations will be the basketball.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

  “You think not? It’s what he has been yearning for his whole life.”

  “But the technology is…”

  “Immature? Of course it is. But do you think he will wait until it is mature? No, it’s a, it’s a religious desire with him. It always has been. Immortality. A new body. But humans are rational animals, Mac. Animals. Form and matter. And formal systems cannot capture the material side. Whatever he obtains—if he ever does ‘download’ a mind into a computer—it won’t be human, and it won’t be Kyle Buskirk.”

  I was holding a graduate seminar on Thron’s theory of grills, addressing Flynn’s “pitted filters,” which were the duals of grills satisfying t
he Π-closed property, when Patsy, one of the departmental secretaries, slipped into the conference room with a note. She leaned close over my shoulder as she handed it to me and whispered, “He says it’s extremely urgent.” I glanced at the note: Private. Urgent. Call now. And it gave Jared’s private pix number. An unfocused dread whelmed up within me. Jared used words precisely, and would not have told Patsy extremely urgent unless in fact it was.

  Turning the seminar over to my post-doc, I excused myself and hurried to the department offices. I told Geetha to hold all other calls and closed the door to the private office behind me. Within moments, I was connected to Jared over the pix.

  He seemed drawn and his eyes were dark-rimmed. He was at home and in the background I saw Gladdys at the dining table weeping into her hands. “Jared!” I said. “What’s happened?”

  Jared had been standing when the pix went through, turned away from the camera and looking at Gladdys. Now he faced me and slid into the desk chair. “Mac,” he said. “It’s Kyle. Ling-ling called and…”

  “Ling-ling?”

  “Mac, listen. Ling-ling works for NM at River Rouge. She called me and told me that Kyle has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma…”

  I called up a summary window on the disease before Jared had finished the sentence. “What stage?” I asked.

  “Stage one; but Mac…”

  “Good. The median prognosis is five years with chemo and hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation. With luck…”

  “Mac, listen to me!” Jared had to pause and visibly control himself. “Mac. Ling-ling said that Kyle has come to River Rouge. He’s come to the NM lab. Do you understand?”

  For a moment I could not speak. “My God. He’s going to flash himself.” Almost unbidden, my hands called up the mag-rail schedule, then the air schedule. “Maybe we can head him off, stop him.”

  “Stop him? Then you don’t believe it will work, either.”

  “I…That’s…Beside the point. Even if it does work, he’ll be throwing away five goddamn years of his…his somatic life. Maybe more. How soon can you reach Detroit?”

  “I can catch a commuter train to Thirtieth Street Station in time to make the Long Rifle and change to the Michigander at Toledo.”

  “Jared, that’s four hours by mag-lev. Break down and fly. Flight time’s only an hour.”

  “Plus travel time to the airport, two hours for security screen, and boarding and flight delays. Even if there is no delay getting out of Detroit Metro, trust me, it’s just as fast by rail. Besides, Mac, he’s already there. He was there when Ling-ling called. I think he told her to call us. Do you really think he would have summoned us if there were any chance we could have stopped him?”

  THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

  When I added ground time to a nominal half-hour flight time, I found the Midwest Rambler put me in Detroit faster than air travel as well; so I made arrangements, went home to pack a few things, and called Beth and told her what was happening. She remembered Kyle less fondly than some, but she promised to follow the next day. “I’m not exactly sure,” she told me. “Is this supposed to be a wake or a rebirthing?” Then I took the Green to the Loop and a cab across town to Union Station. The Rambler was not as fast as the Twenty-first Century, but it made the circuit several times a day and I found myself on the train platform in Romulus half an hour before Jared was scheduled to arrive. I occupied myself by renting a car and getting ground directions to the Labs.

  When Jared showed up, Gladdys was with him; and to all appearances had cried herself out on the four-hour trip. She was dry-eyed, but stood limply by his side as he scanned the station for me.

  We shook hands silently and said nothing about the reason that had brought us together once more. I told them I had a car and had confirmed both our reservations at the Turing Towers. “You have a beard,” Jared said irrelevantly. “And it’s white.”

  I glanced at his hair, but said nothing. “This way. Beth is coming out tomorrow. Does Ling-ling know we’re here?”

  Jared patted the jacket pocket where he carried his pix. “She will meet us at the main entrance. Do you know the way? Of course, you do.”

  Tall and thin and garbed in an immaculate white lab coat, Ling-ling greeted us at the main door, along with some of the researchers involved in the project. I remembered a few faces from my earlier visit. Some appeared grave or troubled; others were grinning or bearing a look of satisfaction. They greeted me with handshakes, Jared with wariness.

  Jared took Ling-ling’s hand. “It seems you and Kyle parted on friendly terms,” he said.

  Ling-ling endured his attention. “We enjoyed each other, and when our time was up, the time was up. Why nurse hard feelings? Follow me, and maybe now you’ll believe.” I noticed that her years in the States had wiped away her accent.

  We followed her down a long hallway, escorted by a cloud of witnesses. I heard some of them talking among themselves. Some saying “we’ve done it,” others murmuring “maybe.” Jared, his eyes turned inward, head tilted slightly downward, hands again thrust in jacket pockets, must have heard the same sotto voce commentary, but he showed no reaction. Gladdys walked on my other side. She seized my hand and squeezed it.

  The room to which Ling-ling escorted us was broad and dimly lit by translucent display screens that tiled the walls. At the far end, two high-backed chairs of blond wood and padded black leather faced an empty holostage. I heard Gladdys catch her breath, and her hand tightened.

  Ling-ling said, “We’ll get an extra chair for the woman.”

  “No.” The voice issued from hidden speakers, but seemed to come from the space over the holostage. “I’ll speak with Jared and Mac alone.”

  It was Kyle’s voice. The overtones were different—the acoustics of speakers versus those of larynx and mouth—but it was his voice.

  “Everyone leave now,” the voice said. “And, while I can’t physically stop you, I ask that you not record this session for study.”

  “Kyle?” said Gladdys.

  “Is that you, Gladdys? Just a moment.” There was a faint whirr. Cameras pivoting somewhere. “Ah, yes. You shouldn’t have come. I told Ling-ling to call Jared and Mac. Hello, Jared. Hello, Mac. What do you think now?”

  “Kyle!” Gladdys wept, her cheeks gleaming with tears. “How could you do this?”

  “It’s just a radical make-over, is all. How we accomplished it is not something you would understand.”

  That was Kyle’s wit, too. But Gladdys sobbed uncontrollably. Jared gathered her in his arms, but she shook him off. Ling-ling took her by the shoulder and she seemed to deflate and followed her meekly. “There’s no cause for tears, Mrs. Holtzmann,” Ling-ling told her. “You see. Our friend is transformed, but not gone.”

  Jared and I stood dumbly while the research staff filed out. One of them paused by a control panel, but the voice said, “No recordings, Bob. I said I couldn’t stop you, not that I couldn’t feel it.” The researcher grimaced and gave us a sheepish look before following the others.

  When the door clicked shut, Jared and I remained motionless in the center of the room, Jared staring at the door; I, at the holostage. Uneasily, I lowered myself into the left-hand chair. Kyle’s voice said, “Jared, have a seat.” Flashing lights caught the corner of my eye and for a moment I watched one of the panels flickering. Perhaps it monitored the voice synthesizer. I don’t know.

  Jared took the right-hand chair and slumped forward in it. He and I faced each other at an angle, and I could see now that Jared too had been crying, in that tight, stoic way of his. I have only known him to let loose a handful of times in our acquaintanceship, and sometimes I wished he would do so more often, save I am afraid of pressure contained so long.

  “Well,” said the voice. “I’ve done it.”

  “Yes,” Jared told the floor in front of him. “But the question is what have you done?”

  I swallowed. “You’re looking well, Kyle,” I said. Jared turned a red-rimmed, accusing gaz
e on me.

  “Let me show you,” Kyle said. The holostage took on a pearly glow. Ruby lasers rastered the volume. A wire-frame human took shape, then garbed itself in flesh and clothing. Furniture appeared around him: a chair, a lamp, a side-table. The figure sat as Kyle so often sat—long legs thrust out before him, crossed at the ankle; hands steepled under his chin. The Kyle Buskirk grin split his features. “Hi, guys.”

  Jared rose from his chair and slowly circumnavigated the holostage, examining the image from all sides. The Kyle-image turned and followed Jared with his head, causing an eerie tingle down my spine. Jared noticed the same thing, straightened, and looked around the room. “Cameras,” he said. “They enable the computer to triangulate on any object in the room and adjust the image accordingly. Probably, the software gives first priority to moving objects.”

  The Kyle image spread its hands. “Duh?” he said. “You use binocular vision; I use cameras. Different bodies, different physiques.”

  Jared had finished his examination. “Different bodies,” he said, “different persons.”

  Kyle cocked his head. “How so?”

  “Because the person is a complete substance, composed of matter and form. The same form applied to different matters is different substances. Fido and Spot both have the form of ‘dog,’ but Fido is this matter and Spot is that matter.”

  “Trust a philosopher,” said Kyle with an exaggerated sigh, “to take something hard and fast and make it all fuzzy and conceptual.” Then he sat up in his chair. “You’re right, of course, to some extent. I’ve lost almost all my somatic functions. I can see and hear; but I can’t smell and taste.”

  “Then I guess we’re not going out to dinner tonight,” I said. Jared froze, then looked away from the holostage and from me.

  “Mac,” he said. “Please.”