Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  What stopped it was the realization that his mate no longer had the power to decide which of the molecules she inhaled might have her leave to remain, and which must depart.

  Well, irrational antitobacco hysteria was currently epidemic in this ficton anyway, part of the general paranoia inevitable in a large complex society of innumerates and scientific illiterates. It would actually be good for his cover to quit smoking, at this juncture in history, make his persona even less interesting. And their home less musty—not that either ever smelled anything they didn’t choose to. He mentally accessed the housekeeping nanobots’ controller, and added cigarettes and related materials to the list of objects defined as “trash,” to be disassembled for parts the next time it was convenient.

  —and was surprised to feel a pang, almost as sharp as an addict might have felt. The small change in habit was his first overt acceptance of the great change that had come into their lives, his first tacit admission that he was helpless to cure, and must endure, this thing.

  Myrna caught all this, of course, and instantly took over as morale officer. “Honey,” she said, referencing a book they had both enjoyed, “let’s go and look at the kids.”

  He hesitated a fraction of a second. Was it appropriate to comfort a dying woman by taking her to visit one of the world’s great mausolea? But he knew her intuition was superior to his own. “Sure.”

  The Lifehouse lay less than half a kilometer from their home. They walked the distance, as humans would (under an umbrella Myrna would actually have needed if she’d been alone), not just for the sake of their cover, but simply because they wanted to walk in the forest in the rain together. It was always best, they had found, to approach the Lifehouse slowly, and with humility.

  The rain had dwindled for a time to a barely visible mist, that did not so much fall as roil. This should have been frustrating—for if it would only clear up that last little bit, even for a few minutes, they could inscribe their quartz beacon with a requested delivery date of now, stomp it into the mud, and receive an instant response from the future. But one of the first principles of Waiting is that there is no such thing as almost done. The rain would stop when it stopped; very sensitive detectors would alert them the instant that occurred; meanwhile downpour or mist were the same.

  The damp forest was full of trapped ozone; they allowed it to mildly exhilarate them. Everything had that strange muted vividness that comes of poor light passed through a billion tiny prisms. The rain-sound that had been blanketing the high frequencies like a treble filter was suspended now; viridescent trees still dripped their accumulated moisture, but those sounds arrived with crystal clarity. So did a rich stew of smells. The rain forest ecology could be felt going about its business all around them, industriously making hay while the sun didn’t shine.

  And so, hand in hand beneath their umbrella, mud sucking shamelessly at their boots, the scent of sweet rot in their nostrils, they came to the place where the mook Angel Gerhardt had recently tried to bury two ounces of something laced with cocaine.

  They perceived that the repairs they had made to the site were holding up. The great elm was vertical once more, the bank on which it stood rebuilt to a convincing naturalness. They stepped up detector range and sensitivity to the maximum, satisfied themselves that the most intelligent life-form besides themselves within a kilometer was a bull raccoon—and, this time, that there were no electronic devices save their own functioning anywhere within the same range. Then Johnson gestured, and a yonic tunnel gaped in the side of the bank with a lewd wet sound, opening like a man-sized mud sphincter to reveal the stainless surface of—

  —the Lifehouse.

  Their Lifehouse.

  Their child, in a sense. Many children and children’s children, in another. In yet another—just as valid—merely a highly evolved descendant of a hard disk, packed with a great many zeros and ones.

  It was a crystalline sphere two meters in diameter, externally identical to the Eggs used to travel back through time, but it had never carried a living passenger—in that direction. Now, after a millennium of creeping forward through time again in the only way possible—like everything else, at the rate of one second per second—it held millions of passengers…albeit only potentially living, at present.

  This particular Egg, like all the other Lifehouses on earth, was packed absolutely full of the most dense and stable information storage medium permitted by the laws of physics. Its capacity was most meaningfully expressed not in giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, or even zettabytes, but in yottabytes, or sextillions of bytes. It could hold a lot of yottabytes—so securely that the society which designed it had actually abandoned, presumably forever, the concept of data backup.

  Paradoxically, this sphere of ultrastable memory visually resembled nothing so much as a translucent model of Jupiter: a slow, majestically churning globe of chaotic milky fluids, that appeared dimly lit from within, as if for the convenience of the student.

  Suspended in those roiling fluids, as incorruptible patterns of data, were virtually all the human beings who had died in the Pacific Northwest since the dawn of time.

  There in the Lifehouse, if all went well, they would wait safely, in something very like the Christian concept of Limbo…until the day came when their descendants were ready to grow them new bodies and resurrect them to life eternal.

  And if, through Myrna’s and Johnson’s failures as guardians, that day should never come…

  Well, the dead would never know they had died a second time, at least.

  Was there any consolation in that? Or not?

  Myrna had always loved to visit the Lifehouse, always wished they dared do so more often. It did not put out any trace of any field that any instrument could detect…but it always seemed to. Whenever she felt overwhelmed by that profound melancholy which sooner or later must come to any immortal, who watches everything around her dying in pain and needless terror, she would come to the Lifehouse and put her hand on its cool surface and feel better. This was part of the antidote to Death. A monument to monkey defiance of entropy, to the stubborn, eternal refusal of the human spirit to surrender to fate.

  She had wondered if it would feel any different, any less comforting to be here, now that she knew in her guts she might well end up in that glowing milky swirl herself one day. She found that it did not. Mentally she compared the Lifehouse to every popular human conception of afterlife, including utter nothingness, and found it a reasonably congenial place to be dead for a few decades. No hymns to memorize, no harp lessons. No hellfire. No petulant paranoid demanding hosannas. No houris forcing figs and camel milk on you. No grinning Krishna with a rampant erection. No Great Wheel, no Eightfold Path. Absolutely no sensation of the passage of time at all, by all reports. Simple suspended awareness, like a paused CD.

  She found herself picturing the way it would probably be.

  One silly thing or another would kill her. Whatever the proximate cause, her heart would cease to beat, and decline to restart. Blood pressure would fall to zero, along with cranial oxygen supply. Brain temperature would begin to drop. At some point, an indetectably tiny but quite sophisticated nanocomputer in her medial forebrain bundle—precisely like the one to be found in the brain of every living human being older than minus eight months—would conclude that she was a goner.

  And, as with everyone else who had ever died, her whole life would pass before her eyes…as a high-speed data dump.

  Forewarned, and used to thinking at computer rates when necessary, she would probably be one of a bare handful who had ever been in a position to fully appreciate that particular show—and hers would last considerably longer than was customary. Even at the ferocious speeds that would be employed, and even though she had been in the habit of making regular deposits in the Lifehouse’s memory bank every century or so, it would take nearly five whole seconds of realtime to squirt a perfect copy of her self from her played-out body—wherever it happened to die—to the indetectable satell
ite that was always in the sky, and another ten seconds for the satellite to perform integrity tests and relay-bounce her back down to…here, to this very Lifehouse.

  Where she would remain in stasis, in the form of Read-Only Memory, along with all the other dead. Until the time—subjectively, only an instant after her death—when she would come to awareness again, to find herself floating down a long tunnel diode, toward a bright light…being greeted by departed relatives and loved ones…being welcomed (in her case, back) into The Mind, the telepathic family of nearly all the humans who had ever lived…

  It didn’t sound that bad, actually.

  Oh, the dying part itself would doubtless be unpleasant. But she had known unpleasantness before, in her near-millennium of stewardship. And it would probably be the last unpleasantness she would ever know. In effect, she would be trading some moments or days or weeks of pain for the privilege of fast-forwarding through some history that was becoming increasingly oppressive: the final darkness before the dawn of the Great Change. It might almost be worth dying, to miss the rest of the Nineties—let alone the decades that would follow.

  But poor Johnson would be so lonely in the meantime!

  “I keep wishing we could just talk to them,” she said aloud.

  “To Paul and June, you mean?”

  “Yes. If we could just explain to them…bring them here, show them this, explain the stakes…perhaps they’d submit voluntarily to editing. You never know.”

  In her mind she constructed the argument.

  Elsewhere in this country, right now, a man is learning to decipher the information storage code of the human brain. Before long he will know how to erase memories…and shortly after that, how to read and write them. In time he will have technologically assisted telepathy. By great good fortune he will be an ethical man: he will exercise the resulting power to conquer the world undetected—but only long enough to successfully give away his secret to everyone, everywhere, at once. Soon thereafter, inevitably, nearly all men will be telepathic, and nontelepathic man will join Neanderthal. The Mind will form: several billion brains, all equal, all forever free, all able to transcend solitude and death and pain and the need to sleep, working together without friction or language barrier. Soon, inevitably, they will understand the universe well enough to travel backward through time. Soon, inevitably, they will realize that almost as many brains’ worth of memories as the Mind began with were trashed unnecessarily before it formed—and they will decide to conquer death retroactively. They will come back and make pickup on all their fallen comrades who will consent to live again in a different way. They will tailor a nanovirus that makes backup copies of human beings, and stores them in Lifehouses until there is a Mind to restart them, and they will release it ten thousand years ago. And the very hardest and most necessary part of the whole project will be concealing that knowledge from terrified ancestors, who needlessly believe themselves doomed to extinction.

  Johnson knew her thought. He did not even bother to disagree. They both knew it was wishful thinking. Though they had never physically met either Paul or June, they knew both of them very well: they knew June at least as well as she knew herself, and knew Paul a little better than she knew him. Each human had the kind of fiercely independent, paranoid temperament that would find The Mind—the author and point of all this—a thing of horror. Both believed deep down that identity was a thing made of borders and limits; both would flatly refuse to believe that an ego could blend with any other without losing its integrity. To them, a self-cherishing telepathic species-wide family would seem an ant-like hive mentality: inhuman rather than superhuman. If they were apprised of all the facts, and given a simple choice—forget this ever happened, and wake one day to life eternal in the company of everyone you ever loved, liked or respected…or sound the alarm, and vanish forever along with the whole universe—well, humans could never be perfectly predicted, but the strong probability was they would proudly choose the latter.

  When and if they were tracked down, they would have to be mind-raped: both were incapable of surrender. The irony was biting.

  As Myrna and Johnson stood there in silence, contemplating the Lifehouse together, souls of the recently deceased rained down invisibly from the sky at random intervals, striking the receiver at the peak of the elm and racing down the heart of its trunk to the Egg beneath. Each time this occurred, a short report was generated and squirted to a database in the attic of their caretaker’s cottage, a process designed to come to their conscious attention only in the astronomically rare event that the report read “file could not be written and was skipped.” Idly, now, perhaps feeling that it would bring her into a slightly more intimate contact with the whole ongoing process to which she’d dedicated her life, Myrna tuned a fragment of her mind to that “channel,” and monitored the names and vital statistics of the incoming new dead.

  Just as one byte in particular tried to claim her attention, an alarm went off. Think of the alarm clock you’ve hated worst in your life, surgically implanted in your skull. Even as she and Johnson flinched, their hearts leapt with joy and relief.

  The humidity had finally fallen below the critical value.

  Johnson whirled and gestured toward home. The chunk of coruscating quartz crystal arrived in less than a second, decelerating smoothly to a dead stop in midair at a point precisely equidistant from them both. Their eyes met around it. Together they mentally inscribed it with the tick that described this particular instant of sidereal time. Johnson gestured again, and the crystal slammed down into the earth and buried itself deep.

  At once, both began to back away from the spot.

  The air became electric. A prickly scent, like toasting basil and cinnamon, came from everywhere. A faint, high, vaguely metallic sound converged slowly from all directions at once. Local temperature rose. Tendrils of steam rose from the damp grass. The sound swelled and contracted, like an explosion played backwards—

  At the last moment, Myrna remembered to avert her eyes.

  CRACK!

  “Oh, shit,” Johnson said.

  She opened her eyes again. An Egg sat on the earth, directly above the spot where the quartz beacon had buried itself.

  “Oh, shit,” she agreed.

  They had not, in their wildest dreams, expected to see two actual, corporate passengers in that Egg. A person could exist only once in any given ficton. But they had hoped—hoped hard—to see a chunk of quartz very like the one they had used to summon the Egg here/now: a memory-crystal containing the best advice of the future June Bellamy and Paul Throtmanian on how to track and capture their past selves.

  What had arrived instead both looked and was considerably less impressive.

  “Well,” Johnson said philosophically, “like they told us back in training, the operative syllable in ‘Anachrognosis’ is the next-to-last one. Can’t fight a big paradox with a little one. We should have known The Mind would turn us down.”

  Myrna said nothing.

  “Look on the bright side,” he said. “The situation just improved: from ‘hopeless’ to ‘outcome uncertain.’”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “That is good news.”

  “We’re going to get to repair our own mistake after all.”

  She noticed, just at that moment, that her neck hurt, and automatically tried to fix it herself so she wouldn’t have to ask Johnson for a rub. And failed. For the first time in her long life…and not the last. “It’s purely a coincidence those things usually home on shit,” she said, suppressing a wince.

  “Well,” he said, apparently deciding that sardonic humor was better than none at all, “at least nobody can say we don’t give a fucking fly.”

  The humor was metaphorical, of course. The thing that hovered in the center of the new Egg—its sole contents, save for air—was not in fact a housefly. It just looked and acted precisely like one.

  Externally, at least. But not superficially. If, somehow, it had fallen into the hands of a drosophil
ist, he might have needed several days of study to notice there was something distinctly odd about that particular specimen. He would probably never have identified the weaponry, would certainly never have located either the detection gear or the onboard computer, and could not have comprehended the power source if it had been explained to him. His best guess at its top speed would have been short by at least an order of magnitude or two.

  For a climate so kind that even in November a single passing fly would elicit only mildest surprise, it was the perfect tracking device. The ultimate snitch: in cop slang, a shoo-fly. Or perhaps “gumshoe-fly” was more accurate.

  If time travelers had the luxury of being allowed to alter the historical date of anyone’s death, it might also have made a perfect Terminator. It was quite capable of saying “No problemo” in a German accent if the need should arise…and could not be stopped or destroyed by anything currently living or manmade. But while it would fight like a wolverine to avoid capture, it could not kill any life-form as advanced as another fly, even to save itself.

  Given enough time, however, it could locate any life-form whose DNA parameters it knew, anywhere on earth or in its atmosphere, clear out to Low Earth Orbit.

  It already had DNA and gross physical descriptions of June and Paul in memory. It could identify their skeletal profiles under any conceivable disguise, their retinal patterns through even opaque contacts, their fingerprints on a car door handle from treetop height. It knew every pheromone or sebaceous volatile their bodies were capable of emitting, far more intimately than the lovers themselves did, and could positively identify them in concentrations of less than one part per octillion. Like a Bussard ramjet, its high speed made it an excellent molecule collector. If either grifter were presently in Vancouver, it would have them pinpointed in less than a day. If they were within the Lower Mainland area, two days, or three at the outside. Perhaps a week, if they were somewhere in China. Worst case—say, a nominally airtight enclosure buried deep on the other side of the planet, with sophisticated countermeasures—call it ten days.