Foresight: Timesplash 3

by Graham Storrs

  Jay knew immediately what she meant. “It’s Cara who grew into an eighty-seven-year-old woman and then lived for two thousand years in Wonderland.”

  “Maybe. It’s still not my Cara.”

  “Is that what this is all about? Why you picked a fight with her?”

  “I’ll be glad to get home.”

  Jay didn’t feel the same way at all. He was in the future—a future, anyway—and he had a million questions he wanted to ask. He wanted to make the most of it. He struggled to find a way to say that without driving Sandra into a rage.

  “If we can go home,” she said.

  “What do you mean? Why shouldn’t we go home? They’ve got the sphere. They’re going to fix up our bodies. Cara said—”

  Sandra became animated. “Who’s ‘they’, Jay? Cara kept mentioning them, but she hasn’t told us a damned thing about this society. Who runs it? How’s it organized? Why are they being so kind and generous? They’re fixing up our bodies. What does that cost? Who’s paying? What do they even use for money here? What has value? Computer cycles? Information? Novelty?” She leaned forwards. “And where is here, anyway? Are we in London still? We’re in a computer, she said, but where is it? Its servers? Its power source? In a bunker? In orbit? We don’t know anything about these people except that they’ve kept themselves hidden while Cara keeps us distracted.”

  Jay had to admit he hadn’t considered any of that. He opened his mouth to start speculating about how a post-human society of immortal uploads might work, but Sandra cut him off.

  “You think I’m paranoid. Cara thinks I’m paranoid. Did you hear what she said? That I isolated her and made her life miserable? Do you think that’s what I did? Do you think I’m some kind of crazy woman who can’t see what’s real any more?”

  Tears sprang from her eyes. The sight of them made Jay’s heart pound. Before he knew it, he was out of his chair and beside Sandra on the sofa. He took her by the shoulders, turned her to him. Her eyes were wide and distraught, seeking something in his face, some sign of betrayal, perhaps, or of understanding.

  “Everything you’ve done has been for Cara. I know that. And she knows it too. And it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And, God knows, the world won’t seem to leave you alone. Washington vindicated you. So did this little business with the FORESIGHT machine. If anything, you’ve never been quite paranoid enough. But you’ve kept her safe and look, she lives to a ripe old age—at least in one probable future.”

  The need faded from her eyes. A small smile played on her lips. “So you think I didn’t do enough then?”

  He smiled back at her. “Did you dig a moat around your house? Did you wrap her in cotton wool, with barbed wire on the outside? No, I didn’t think so.”

  For a moment, her smile lingered, then it fell away. “I didn’t give her the father I should have. I kept her a secret from the one person in the world who would have helped me protect her.” The tears were falling again. Jay’s heart was a solid lump in his throat.

  He heard himself saying, “You remember, after Washington, you gave me a chance to be with you and Cara?” She nodded, watching him intently. “And I told you you’d hurt me too much and I couldn’t forgive you?”

  “I know. I understand. You don’t have to explain.”

  “It was true. You’d taken so much from me by excluding me from Cara’s life. I couldn’t see past the hurt. All I wanted to do was get away somewhere and wallow in my misery.”

  She turned away, on the verge of flight. “I’m sorry, Jay. I was a child when Cara was born. I was so screwed up.”

  He took hold of her again and turned her back to face him. “I know. I see it now. I’ve had more than two years to think about it and, even with just two good brain cells, I finally got there. It was wrong of me to turn my back on you. Wrong of me to walk away from the only woman I’ve ever loved. Could ever love. What I’m saying is …” God, what the hell was he saying? His heart was pounding like splashmusik, he was light-headed with the utter giddifying momentousness of what he was saying. A small frown crossed her brow as she waited for him to find the words.

  “What I’m saying is, I love you. I want you. Will you marry me?”

  She convulsed in what might have been a laugh, or a sob. He blinked at her in astonishment at what he’d said. Yet, now it was out there, he knew it was exactly what he wanted.

  With a quick shrug, she shook off his hands and stood up. She took a few paces across the room and stopped, her arms wrapped around herself, her gaze fixed on the far wall. He closed his eyes, misery sweeping through him. “God, I’m such an idiot,” he said aloud.

  “You think?” She turned back to face him. She looked more sad than angry.

  “It was a stupid thing to say. Here. Now. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You had two-and-a-half years of perfect moments, and you pick today.” She closed her eyes, head down, opened them and lifted her chin. “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I meant it,” he said to her retreating back. “Every word.” Yet he didn’t try to call her back, or prevent her leaving. The inappropriateness of the situation bore down on him like a great weight. Why hadn’t he just kept his mouth shut, waited for a better time and place? Had he expected her to throw herself into his arms, let him carry her off to the bedroom? No, not her, he realized, a simulation of her. Then what? Two programs locked in rapture. The ultimate cybersex. The whole idea was impossible. A joke.

  He groaned and flopped back into the sofa’s embrace. A part of his mind was saying “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid …” But another part was exultant. He knew now what he wanted. Knew it with his whole heart. It was monumental. It dwarfed everything, his work, his life, even being here in the future. He wanted to marry Sandra. He wanted to be with her, for the rest of his life. Every moment he wasn’t with her from now on would be wasted. In a sense, he’d always known it. It had been his destiny since that night in his flat in London when he was nineteen and she’d cried on his shoulder. Maybe before that, even. Maybe from that night at the splashparty in Ommen when he’d seen her up on the stage, so young and beautiful, so scared, and he’d tried to save her.

  All right. He was an idiot and he didn’t deserve her, but he was going to marry her. All he needed now was for Sandra to agree.

  Chapter 15: Apocalypse

  Sandra woke to sunshine pouring through the hotel windows. She’d lain awake for hours in the night, thinking about Jay and his ridiculous proposal, about the fight in London they’d escaped from to end up in that disturbing unreality, about her virtual daughter and what the millennia had made of her, about her own virtual self and her real body lying in a real hospital somewhere. In the end, the transition from fretful night to bright morning had come in the blink of an eye. She knew from many, many such nights that she should be feeling exhausted and hungover, but she didn’t. She felt great. It made her wonder if post-humans needed sleep at all.

  She had slept in her clothes on top of the bed. She thought about washing her underwear in the bathroom. How long was it now that she’d been wearing the same clothes? With an irritated shudder, she remembered these weren’t the same clothes. They weren’t even real clothes. Everything here was an illusion.

  She found Jay sitting on the sofa as if he hadn’t moved at all since the last time she’d seen him. He turned and smiled. He looked cheerful. She’d expected sulks, or recriminations, or grovelling apologies, but not cheerfulness.

  “OK,” he said, not to her. “Room service, we’ll have that breakfast now, thank you.”

  On a table across the room, an assortment of foods and crockery appeared. The smell of bacon and coffee filled the room. He bounced out of the sofa and crossed to it. “How about something to eat? I’ve ordered everything I could think of, eggs, bacon, bread, cold meats, cheese, croissants, coffee, tea, fruit juice, cereal, but you can get anything else in an instant if you want it. Do you fancy kippers, or devilled kidne
ys, or pancakes, or something?” He was helping himself to scrambled eggs and hash browns, toasted muffins and coffee.

  “How come you’re so perky?” she said. She tried to sound gruff, but she was secretly pleased. The day could have started out much worse. He was waiting to take her order so she said, “I’ll have some of that coffee,” and he grabbed up the pot to pour it.

  “I’ve been playing with the facilities here,” he told her, handing her the cup. He took his plate to another table to eat. “I hope you don’t mind room service. I thought eating in a restaurant full of sims might not go down too well.”

  “Good thought.” She joined him at the table. “I’ve been thinking—”

  “If it’s about what I said last night—”

  “Can I speak?”

  He closed his mouth around a forkful of eggs and signalled with his eyebrows for her to go on.

  “We’re both dead. You realize that, don’t you?”

  He blinked at her. “Pardon?”

  “Cara said it. We died in the sphere. Then, thanks to some process I can’t even imagine, they copied our minds out of our dead brains and set them running in their virtual world. That’s us. Copies of dead people.”

  He screwed up his face with the effort of taking it in. “I don’t feel like a dead person. I feel like I always feel. Like me. Only more …”

  “Perky?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Yeah, well. We’re just very good copies. And, of course, we think we’re the originals but we’re not. And, here’s the thing. When they put us back into our bodies—those dead bodies that they’re ‘fixing’ somehow—we’ll be copied again. Then we’ll be copies of copies, in bodies that might well be copies of the originals.”

  “Like clones, or something?”

  “If we’re lucky, they’ll at least be flesh and blood. For all we know, they’re going to put us into robots.”

  He pulled back in surprise. “Jesus. I never thought of that. Surely they’d —”

  “Tell us? Maybe that’s what the meeting’s about this morning. You know, with Cara’s friend?”

  “Ah, yes. When I spoke to room service they passed on a message to say he’d be arriving at nine.”

  Sandra checked the time on her commplant. It was eight-thirty. It gave her a jolt of irritation that they’d faithfully simulated her neural implants too.

  “And here’s some more paranoia for you,” she went on. “Since our minds are just programs running in the bloody Matrix, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be watching everything we do. For all we know our conversation is being broadcast across the galaxy to a trillion novelty-hungry post-humans who get their kicks eavesdropping on mugs like us.”

  “Surely not. Cara would—”

  “And not just watching us and listening to us, but also hearing our thoughts, too. Why not?” She thought Jay looked a little alarmed by that. And could it be he was blushing slightly? There were plenty of times she’d have loved to know what was going on in that head of his, but maybe today was not one of them. “I tell you, this whole thing creeps me out. We need to speak to someone in authority and get assurances that we’re not the latest reality interactive.”

  “It’s probably not as bad as all that.” Jay sounded more hopeful than convinced. “They’ve probably got all kinds of privacy laws, like any society would.”

  “Maybe, but would they cover humans as well as post-humans? What kind of privacy do we allow monkeys when we put them in zoos?” The whole night’s worrying was pouring out now and she felt the same tension that had kept her awake so long. “And what if it’s worse than that?”

  “Worse? What could be worse?”

  She shook her head in dismay. “You and Cara think I’m paranoid—”

  “We don’t!”

  “—but you’re just so naïve and trusting. Since we’re bits of software running inside Multivac, what’s to stop them modifying our code, tweaking our subsystems, controlling every thought we have even? Our endocrine systems are simulated too, obviously, so are our neurotransmitters. Maybe your outburst last night was them screwing with your oxytocin levels?”

  “Sandra!” He looked hurt and she regretted it immediately.

  “I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying, how can we trust anything we see, or hear, or think, or feel? If I wasn’t paranoid before I came here, I’m sure I’ll be a twitching, gibbering wreck before I leave. How do I know you’re even you and not some sim? It would explain your bloody cheerfulness in the face of all this.”

  He grew defensive. “I’m cheerful because … well …” He cast about for a distraction. So transparent. “What did you mean last night when you said we might not be able to go home?”

  She shook her head and walked away. She could see right through him. Always could. He was happy this morning because he’d asked her to marry him and, even though he’d had no answer, it had resolved things for him. Jay was a man who liked things to be clear. Problems made him unhappy, especially the intractable problem of what his own feelings might be. And yet, obvious as he was, he always managed to surprise her. She always underestimated the depth of his feeling, the goodness of his heart. It was her own failure, she knew: her own inability to truly understand him, or to trust anyone. She needed to work on that.

  So she said, “The sphere was meant to return to our own time after two hours. If they’ve still got it, maybe it isn’t working. Also, Hong said something about following the sphere’s own path back, but that the path decays eventually. We might be trapped here.”

  Jay was silent for a long time, then he said, “Two thousands years. Who knows what adv—”

  A knock at the door stopped him. They both checked the time. It was nine. They exchanged suspicious looks. Surely a whole half hour had not passed.

  “Ready?” Jay asked her. She nodded and he went to open the door.

  Cara came in looking youthful and breezy in a bright summer frock of the kind she had favored as a teenager. The man with her was tall and handsome, dressed in a style that emphasised his deep chest and athletic build, yet also proclaimed him as a man of substance and importance. His brows were smooth and his eyes dark and penetrating. Cara introduced him as Ashley Raines. Sandra thought the name sounded like he should be a writer of serious fiction. Indeed, there was something of the deep, brooding intellectual about him and she could easily imagine he’d copied the look from the black-and-white author photo in a 1930s novel.

  She wondered if he and Cara were lovers but even in the small actions of offering and declining coffee, taking seats, making introductions, Cara treated the man with far too much admiration and respect for there to have been any real intimacy between them.

  “The good news is,” Raines told them, “you can go home in about two hours.”

  “Two hours?” Sandra was surprised but not unpleasantly. The sooner the better. “I thought Cara said a fortnight.”

  Raines smiled. It was a beautiful smile, but condescending. “It’s both, actually. We have the concept here of r-time and e-time. Real and experiential. Where your bodies are, in Base Reality, about two weeks will have passed. Here, time is running at a fifteenth of the speed. So, for you, just one day will have seemed to pass.”

  Sandra looked at Cara, who seemed to see nothing odd about what he’d just said. “Why?” she asked. Cara let Raines answer.

  “We thought you’d be keen to get back home. Of course, we had to offset that against letting Cara spend some time with you. We thought a day might be a reasonable compromise.”

  “We’re a little concerned,” said Jay, “that the sphere might be damaged. It should have returned automatically after two hours. Also that a fortnight might be too long for it to be able to retrace its route.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Raines, and Sandra imagined him patting Jay on the head. “We know an awful lot more about time travel now than you did back then. Out technical people had no problem disabling the auto-return timer and they
have made modifications that will allow it to find its way back despite the path degradation.” He sighed. “One small caveat, I’m afraid. I asked them to make sure the new technology destroys itself as soon as you get back. Nothing explosive. Don’t worry. It will simply decay once it has completed its job.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Jay said. “We’ll have enough trouble trying to contain our own tech when we get back.”

  Raines smiled politely. Sandra hated the feeling that he saw them as children, or primitives.

  “Speaking of technology,” he said, “I’d like to ask you both a favor.” There was a twinkle in his eye as if he had an exciting game he was about to let them join. “There’s a little something you can do for me and my people. And for Cara, of course. Did Cara tell you about the Apocalypse?”

  Sandra glanced at Cara as Jay exploded with, “What?” Cara was looking calmly at Raines. He already knew she hadn’t mentioned it and Sandra thought she had not been meant to mention it. This conversation—every conversation since they’d woken up—had been carefully planned.

  “Your people?” she asked, not rising to his bait.

  He was unfazed. He smiled his irritating smile. “My people. Cara’s people. All the people.”

  But why should he be fazed? It was quite possible that a part of his mind was running fifteen times faster than hers. Perhaps thousands of times faster. Even so, she didn’t want to let him steer the conversation wherever he liked.

  “What about the humans?” she asked.

  His expression became sombre. “That’s why I mentioned the Apocalypse, and why your help is so important.” It was quite possible that anything she said would lead back to the Apocalypse and Raines’s script.

  “What apocalypse?” Jay asked and Sandra could have kicked him for it.

  “Just after I died,” Cara said, as smoothly as if she and Raines had rehearsed it, “back in 2140, tensions between Europe and China grew worse. Through Arab and African proxies, they’d been skirmishing for decades but, finally, full-scale war broke out.”