by Jack L Knapp
#
Waking up went faster this time and was much more alert than before. The bath worked as I remembered, so I showered before returning to the bedroom and dressing in the clothing I found there.
I now remembered a lot more about my previous life. As soon as I finished dressing and turned around, I saw the same man, standing against the wall as he had done before.
“We will now continue your orientation. This is your second waking period and much of the physical work on your body is complete. There will continue to be mental changes, but the additional physical changes will be so small as to be undetectable by you. The transformation, once it is complete, will add strength and coordination as the body and brain adjust to each other. You must accomplish this task yourself.”
I had a lot more questions this time. “You mentioned that my body was breaking down and that I would die. Am I about to die now?”
He answered slowly, “That body was unfortunately terminal. It was necessary for us to follow an alternate plan. We got little from your original body except your genetic code and a record of your memories. We retained most of those, although some we considered unimportant were excised. We then grew your current body using your genetic code, modified to delete certain mutations, then instilled your own memories plus others designed to better fit you for your new life. Your memories are the most important part, for our purposes; we provided them to your new body, the one that we'd grown. This happened while the body was growing to its current state of maturity.
"You’re physically equivalent now to what you were at age twenty. Mentally, I estimate that you will be approximately equal in cognitive ability to someone in his late thirties once the integration is complete, although your memories will be those of a man who has lived a long time as your culture measured such things. We augmented your memories to add knowledge that we deem important for your survival, so what you remember is an amalgam of your own memories and those we added. But no, you are not about to die of the causes that were killing your original body.”
"You may die after being transplanted, but we cannot estimate when that will happen. It may be that you will live much longer than you ever expected to, or you may die during the first day after being transplanted. Many others have done so since we began the program.
“For our purposes, it does not matter. Remember that you were terminal when we harvested you, so every day that you survive now is a day of life you would not have had if we had not intervened.”
“You said approximately twenty as far as my physical development?” I asked.
“Just so,” he responded. “The concept has little meaning to us. It’s simply where we stopped development, at an age nearing the end of adolescence. In your time, such changes began at birth and continued until eventual death; early development made you larger and stronger and your body morphed from baby to toddler to child and adolescent before becoming adult. You are physically adult now, but barely so.
“From that point in your earlier life, you added experience and learning, but most of the other changes were harmful. Your cells accumulated damage, and some of the changes altered the genetic code you were born with. Your muscles became weaker, joints became stiff, cartilage ripped and atrophied. Over time the changes became so overwhelming that life was no longer sustainable. We could have repaired much of the damage, but I deemed it easier to simply regrow your body and proceed from there.
“There were also mental changes that took place as your body aged. Physical changes within your brain caused your later memories to fade, although your earliest memories remained nearly intact. We supplemented those memories with generic knowledge. Some of the memories are highly specialized. It would not have been possible for you to acquire all the memories you now possess in a single lifetime. However, your memories of your personal history are yours alone.
“As a part of preparing your body to make you more suitable for transplanting, we removed the tendency of your cells for programmed death. The changes you experienced and the death that was inevitable were the result of accumulated damage to weak areas within your genetic code, weaknesses that we corrected, but you should know that we cannot prevent future mutations from such things as solar radiation. Other influences may also be encountered after you leave here, influences from naturally-occurring radiation and chemicals. We cannot predict what will happen to you except to repeat that your current DNA sequence contains no known weaknesses. Another way to state this is to tell you that you are less susceptible to genetic change than others from your time, but less susceptible does not mean you are immune to the things I’ve mentioned.
“It is no longer certain when you will die. Disease is unlikely to kill you in the near term, but we cannot be certain that a disease may not evolve in future which will terminate your life. Still, your own body will no longer kill you unless an accumulation of damage cancels the work we’ve done.
“You can die from a multitude of other causes. Trauma, blood loss, drowning, a broken neck, any of these can kill you. A knife or spear that pierces your heart, lungs, or brain will cause death. Given time, your body will heal from lesser injuries, but there’s no certainty that you will have the necessary time for this to occur.”
"Why me?"
"Our analysis of your personality, gained initially from examining records but later by examination, persuaded us that you would be a suitable candidate. We have been more selective recently because so many of the early transplant efforts failed.
I thought that over. “You keep saying that you’ve ‘harvested’ me and that you intend to ‘transplant’ me? Can you explain?”
“Certainly. I came here from your future. Our science is far more advanced than yours, as you might expect, yet despite all we’ve done or perhaps because of it, humanity is dying.
"We have conquered death from what you knew as 'natural causes', yet our people continue to die. Most commonly this occurs from suicide.
"People don’t die from age or disease, but we also no longer reproduce. There is no incentive to do so now, and the practice became uncommon when it became clear that we must reduce the population of humans lest the Earth be unable to support us. Numbers declined naturally thereafter and this process has continued for more than a century.
"A much smaller population now inhabits the planet. The human population of your time numbered around seven billions, but there are now less than one hundred million people alive and the number continues to decline. We estimate that humanity will become extinct within a century, possibly less.
“We have explored the solar system but found nothing that was of more than transient interest. There was nothing on the other planets that are within our reach that we needed. We transform ordinary matter as needed, and we conserve and recycle what we cannot transform. We had the ability and might have established viable colonies throughout the system, but we lost interest in doing so. We never got beyond the outer boundaries of the home system. Einstein’s limit prevented that at first, and by the time we reached the level of knowledge to evade that limit and colonize planets beyond the home system, it no longer seemed important to do so. The Earth now provides all that we need.
“Our people have no future other than continuing decline and eventual death. Almost all now alive accept that. However, a few of us refuse to believe that extinction is inevitable, so we are attempting to change the future of our species. There are less than a hundred of us currently engaged in this project.
"Because of the advances made in science, we now have the equipment and knowledge to harvest a specimen such as yourself from the past. Each of us accepts responsibility for harvesting and preparing a subject for transplant. There are similarities in what each of us does, but also differences. The differences in method may be beneficial, but we cannot yet say.
“We place our transplants into a dimension that we’ve selected, on an Earth where humans did not survive. We chose this because the Earth of that dimension is physically similar t
o our present world.
"Life there will be hard, and there will be danger. Survival will not be easy, and the unfit will not survive. We prepare you to face the dangers and give you the ability to overcome hardships, but whether you do so is up to you. We believe that some of the transplants will succeed, but we accept that some, even the ones we are transplanting now, will not. We cannot say which transplant will have the qualities necessary for success.
“I have sent more than a hundred specimens to the selected dimension. Others have sent as many and some may have sent more. I have not yet begun harvesting the offspring of my transplants yet, but I will do so shortly. I will then prepare the selected individuals for transplanting here in my own world and time.
“We do not know what the eventual results of our experiment will be. The harvested and transplanted specimens may adapt to life here and become as the rest, content to live out their lives without ambition. We cannot say. However, we hope they retain the drive and curiosity that we have lost. If we are fortunate, the transplants will instill the qualities we seek in our own highly-evolved population.
"We will continue the transplanting process and hope that it succeeds. It is worth noting that none of us who are engaged in harvesting or transplanting specimens have terminated our own lives.
“In the meantime, humans are now on a dimension where they did not naturally occur, humans of our type, and they may survive even if all humans on Earth Prime do not.
"Some of the dimensions we’ve explored have humans much changed from what you are and what I am. We leave them to work out their destiny in their own way and hope they feel the same once they develop the ability to cross dimensions. This, too, was a part of our reasoning when we decided to begin the transplant program. An aggressive population may resist attempts from cross-timeline invaders when a passive population would not.
“We hope that your descendants will possess an enhanced sense of survival. There will also be other qualities that become emphasized by the environment on the destination Earth, and some of those qualities may not be advantageous. We will be as careful as possible regarding which specimens we harvest for transplanting here.
“You’ve said that I could die from any number of violent processes. Will you assist me to avoid that?”
“No. We give you a healthy body, a mind that is well developed for your time and culture, and then we release you on an Earth that has no naturally occurring humans. The only other advantage we provide you is that we select a location where survival is possible. We avoid transplanting specimens into extremes of weather and places we suspect of being geologically unstable. You may choose to seek such places on your own, but that is a choice for you to make.
“You will be alone when I transplant you, but there are other humans within a reasonable distance. You may seek them out, or not. The choice is yours. Some will be male, some female. Some will have been there a considerable length of time, others will have been transplanted after you. I cannot say, because I do not know what the others engaged in this activity have done or what they will do in future.
“The time period on that alternate dimension is between glaciations. According to your reckoning, the conditions are similar to the late Pleistocene period on Earth Prime, the time you refer to as the 'Ice Age'. However, some geological processes took place there in a fashion that is different from what happened on our Earth. Your knowledge of the past will be useful, but you should expect differences.
“Humans will be transplanted to each of the major continents and they will be released within the zone that lies between 40º north and 40º south of the Equator.”
I was beginning to feel drowsy, and I watched him for a moment. Then, with no further speech, he simply disappeared. I wondered if he was perhaps a hologram or if his appearances were ‘in the flesh’, so to speak. I fell asleep while wondering.
#
I soon fell into a routine; I would wake, use the bathroom, have breakfast, then use the well-equipped gym that opened off the bedroom. It was accessed through a door that I hadn’t noticed before.
My schedule was to work as much as I could, then take a break, have lunch, and work again. Break for supper, shower and sleep, then do it again.
There was no way to tell how long this went on, but it probably lasted for weeks. After the first two ‘weeks’, I was stronger and more agile than I’d ever been. I expected muscle soreness, but that never happened. After a time I stopped gaining strength; from that time on, I worked on developing coordination and agility.
At the end of one of my workouts, the man appeared and looked at me. After a moment, he disappeared again.
The next awakening found me in possession of more memories. Some I thought were my own, but some I was certain were of things I’d never done. Still, they were there; I wondered how long it would take to integrate them into my own memories, the ones I’d acquired at the cost of joy, sorrow, and pain before the Futurist had found me.
#
There was something new when I awoke the next time. A table now stood in the ‘bedroom’ and a knife and axe lay on the table. The knife had a blade that was a bit less than a half-inch at its thickest and about ten inches long, two inches wide and tapering to a wickedly sharp point. The knife had wooden grips with a small cross-guard in front of them. A heavy pommel behind the handle provided balance. I picked the knife up and examined it; I liked the feel of it, and the edge was sharp. I tried shaving my arm and it easily removed the hairs.
The blade had a clouded or mottled appearance. I concluded that this knife was made by repeated forging and folding to produce a strong blade that would take and hold an edge, while retaining some flexibility. It was a tool, but also a weapon.
The axe was larger than a hatchet but smaller than a standard woodsman’s axe. The haft was wood and about two and a half feet in length. The back of the blade was flat, so it would be useful as a hammer. Call it a camp-axe, more useful than a hatchet but still not heavy enough to be unwieldy.
I had nothing better to do, so I examined the knife and axe carefully. Some of my memories had to do with knives and axes, and some of them clearly were of places I’d never been and people I’d never met. For whatever reason, the memories left me pleased with the appearance and apparent usefulness of the tools.
How would I use that axe and knife after being ‘transplanted’? Pioneers in North America had considered themselves adequately equipped if they had an axe, a knife, and a shovel. I had no shovel, and the axe was small, but the knife was superb.
Still, some primitive societies had lacked metal shovels. They’d made do with sticks or carved branches and those had worked well enough, so perhaps I could do the same.
I hoped that the knife and axe would go with me when I was transplanted. I couldn't think of any other reason the Futurist had left them on the table.
The two were fine weapons, but too valuable to risk unless there was no other choice. I would need weapons that could be risked, even used up in an encounter. Those weapons would necessarily be things I’d made and that I could make again if they broke. A club, a spear, and eventually a bow and arrows would be needed.
Meat or fish would provide protein; vegetable protein would help, but I couldn’t count on finding it where the Futurist placed me. I would have to hunt or trap. I would also need to defend myself. I finally placed the camp-axe and knife on the table, then noticed that the Futurist was back.
“Our work with you is done. It is now up to you to make your way as best you can when you are transplanted. This will happen after your next awakening, and the tools you see will go with you. We will also provide a sturdy costume consisting of undergarments, shirt, trousers, a belt, socks, and boots. The items are similar to what you are familiar with, and both the shirt and trousers have pockets for carrying things. There is also a leather scabbard for each of your tools; you may choose to carry them in your hands or wear them when you are transplanted.”
“How long before I’l
l be released?”
“You will sleep first, and when you wake you will be fresh and prepared for your first day in your new timeline. You will be provided food before you depart. Transplanting is painless and does not cause disorientation. You should consider what you will need to do immediately on arrival. While there will be no immediate danger, I caution you that it may not be far away so you should plan accordingly.”
I was getting drowsy again as he disappeared. I wondered how he did that; I supposed that it was not important, but it would sure be a handy ability to have.
#
I woke up energetic and hungry. There was a meal ready, the same type I’d had before, and the clothes I’d been told about lay on the table. I ate the meal, whatever it was. I had never been able to identify the ingredients; the meals had been tasty and that’s all you could say for them. If one of the dishes was meat, I hadn’t recognized it as such. There were no obvious muscle striations or the connective tissue that separates individual muscles. Just…something.
I then got dressed, hatchet on my left side, blade facing to the rear. The knife hung at my right hip. The tools felt comfortable hanging from my belt, and I didn’t want to chance them being left behind. Regardless of what the Futurist had said, I did not intend to take unnecessary chances. He had mentioned the Pleistocene epoch, and I knew from memory that the time featured apex predators such as dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. Even the huge bison, ground sloths, and mammoths were dangerous.
As soon as I’d finished dressing, the man appeared.
“It is time. Come with me.”
He walked toward a different part of the wall and another door opened. Beyond the door was a small chamber with no discernible features. It was simply blank; a floor, a ceiling, three walls, and a door that closed behind me as I walked through.
Another door immediately appeared where the opposite wall had been. Beyond it was grass, and three hundred yards away there were large trees. I stepped through the door, then glanced back but there was nothing there.
