by S. J. Ryan
“Nothing.”
“What about in his office?”
“There wasn't much artwork there. There was an herb garden by the window. A gift from Athena. I remember that the rows of plants had little signs telling what they were. Do you suppose they could be passwords?”
“Try.”
“I can't quite remember – hold on.”
Suddenly the password-planet and indeed the entire data base galaxy shifted. It wasn't a cosmic upheaval, but when one's entire universe moves at once for any distance, one tends to notice.
“What was that?” Matt asked.
“I'm accessing my telemetry archives for scenes of Eric's office. I had to activate AI functions.”
“I thought you said – “
“Low-level, just for a few seconds. And the walls are solid down here. I don't think the booby-traps go beyond the shaft into the tunnel. Shouldn't make a diff – ah, there, the images are coming up.” She recited the herb names as she willed them into the password canyon: “Saint John's Wort . . . Thyme . . . Valerian . . . Whoa!”
The planet rumbled with a violent earthquake. The password-request mountains and canyon were both leveled. Volcanoes erupted, rising into a new mountain range of words. These read: PASSWORD ACCEPTED.
“It worked! Matty, yer a – “
“Don't say it.”
She didn't reply, for both their attentions were fully absorbed by the rearrangement that was occurring among the constellations of the data galaxy. Labels appeared beside the stars, which apparently were metaphors for file folders. Planets themselves were evidently sub-folders, islands on the planets represented individual files.
Synth, who was much more accomplished at navigating within the blob's data-verse, took him in tow on a tour of the star systems. She was immediately attracted to a bright red star whose name was 'Confidential.' The nearest planet was named 'Security Video.' Several islands were marked in bright red. She zoomed on the brightest; it was labeled, 'Nakamura.'
“That's your mother's surname.”
“Yeah. The file date . . . it's the day her template disappeared.” He murmured, “Go ahead and open it, please.”
“Right,” she said softly. “Of course.”
And so they witnessed the hangar security camera video from that distant evening in the late twenty-first century. Sheila Nakamura – the template of the archival clone that was Matt's mother – entered the hangar, approached the containment where the seeder probe was kept, emerged minutes later, hid while Eric and Athena entered. Athena called her out, they confronted. Sheila had a gun of some kind, but Athena raised her palm and something streaked from it and hit Sheila and Sheila collapsed before she could shoot.
A few minutes later, Athena lifted Sheila’s inert body into a star pod and Eric sealed the pod hatch. They rolled the pod out of the hangar to a waiting surface-to-orbit shuttle.
“This is murder,” Sheila said. “They murdered her.”
“Her body would have frozen solid in deep space,” Matt said. “She could be retrieved and revived. It wouldn't be as easy as if she had been preserved in biogel, but people have been revived from cryogenic suspension. So it doesn't count as murder because technically she's not 'really' dead.”
“Okay, Matt. But this incident still counts as abduction and kidnapping. Do you agree?”
“Yeah.”
“Then there's no need to look further. Kidnapping is a felony, and this file on blob substrate is admissible evidence. We've got them.”
Synth brought them out of VR, back to the tunnel beneath the Star Seed Project operations complex. Matt Three rose shakily from his knees, stretched his back, only half mindful of the soreness.
Mom's still alive, he thought. Maybe she wasn't Matt's mother, but then so what? He wasn't Matt. Still, half of her genetic code was inside him. Maybe, in a way, she was his mother. If there was a way to retrieve her, to revive her, then he at last would be part of a real family.
Synth had been speaking, but he hadn't been listening.
“ – and so, Matt, what we'll do is go to the authorities and present our telemetry, and then they'll probably want to find a way to move this . . . what's that?”
His head had automatically twisted to face the length of the tunnel that led back to the shaft. He had heard a click like a door latch, a loud noise made faint with distance and that echoed against the hard rock sides of the tunnel. Their hard hat beams stabbed into the darkness. Nothing but tunnel and black, no sign of movement.
He turned back to Synth. She was still kneeling before the blob, her outstretched palms flat against its pulsating surface. She was looking up to him with eyes wide, her mouth half open as if she were about to speak but for some reason the words were taking forever to rise up her throat.
“We may have company,” Matt Three said. He stooped and picked up the shot gun. “I'll go investigate. Stay here.”
“Matt, we're guilty of trespassing and vandalism. If you go waving a gun at a security guard's nose . . . .” She started to rise. “I should go and see if I can talk our way out of – “
Another noise echoed down the length of the tunnel. This one was prolonged and sounded like the flurry made by the flipping of pages of several old-fashioned, physical-type books at once, if the books were coffee-table-sized and very agitated.
“This could be trouble,” he said. “If there is, you won't be able to help, you'll just get in the way. If it's just a security guard, I'll drop my weapon and invite him back here for a nice chat, okay? Stay here.”
Another noise, this one machine-like in its regularity. Fe-dump, fe-dump, fe-dump . . . like a multitude of brooms swatting the floor of the tunnel, or like the gallop of a herd of tiny horses. The noise was getting louder, echoing less, still too far for the hardhat beams to detect the source.
“Stay here,” he said.
He would always regret those words. He would always regret not taking one last look at her face.
He strode resolutely, just as he had spoken firmly, though inside he was quaking. This, he knew, was no security guard.
He cradled the gun and wrapped his finger around the trigger, remembering the instructions that he'd read on the offnet the night before when he'd had the manual downloaded and illicitly printed. Click safety, check. Brace for recoil, check. Squeeze trigger smoothly, check. Don't shoot unless intending to kill, check. Visualize dispersion pattern and avoid inclusion of anyone or thing you don't want to hit . . . .
The extra shells rattled his pocket with every wobbling step. He wished he had test-fired the gun, but he couldn't have gotten away with that anywhere on this crowded planet without attracting notice and questioning by police. The VR simulation that Ivan had provided had been intimidating enough, though. After virtually blowing off several body parts, he had learned that mishandling the gun could be his biggest enemy.
The galloping halted, resumed, halted again. Each time closer.
“Hello,” he called. “Anyone there?”
The galloping was as loud as a shout and continuous. He saw first out of the darkness a horizontal rain of pairs of tiny dots, reflecting pale yellow in the hard hat beam, bounding down the tunnel like elastic balls. Then he felt the rush of the air pushed by the fluttering of their wings. Their glistening fangs parted and a multitude of furious squeaks assaulted as they stretched their spike-like claws.
Matt raised the barrel and pulled the trigger. The gun thundered and in the flash he saw their fist-sized furry humanoid faces contorted with rage. Then the wave of scattering shot slapped into their flesh and flung them backward. But there were more behind them, leaping over the corpses, charging at his face.
He fired again, taking down half a dozen more as he staggered with the recoil that in his panic he'd forgotten about. They were still coming. He fumbled in his pocket for a shell, spilling several before his shaking fingers grasped one and brought it out and stuck it into the chamber – and before he could cock the gun they were on him, razor cl
aws slashing at his limbs and icepick teeth gouging into his flesh as they clung to his clothes and climbed toward his face.
While he spun uncontrollably the gun went off and the scattering shot ricocheted off the tunnel wall and struck his foot. He swung the gun stock and they dodged. He dropped the gun, screamed and yelled and grunted and body-slammed the three creatures on his back, crushing them against the wall.
Still more took their place, seeking to mummify him in writhing fur – and then he remembered.
“Ivan! Activate!”
“I am here, Matt. You are being – “
“Yes!”
Starting at his neck, they fell from his body, until they were all off, forming a circle of twitching paws and wings about his feet. He limped out of the circle, moaning with the application of weight on his injured foot until Ivan damped the throbbing pain. Then he looked down the tunnel and thought: Synth. If any of the creatures had gotten past –
“Synth!” he called. “Synth! Watch out for the – “
And then came the blinding flash and the deafening boom and the wall of hot gas that knocked him off his feet and flung him meters across the fur-and-blood covered floor. He remembered pushing himself up, choking on the dust, collapsing into blackness.
As Matt Three's head drooped and his eyes shut, Matt Four said, “Ivan, end simulation.”
And he was back in the airship cell a century and a half later, pulse racing and breaths hard, skin icy and eyes full of tears and soul full of grief and hate.
“What happened?” Matt the boy asked. “Was Synth all right?”
“No.”
Matt Four knew he had to say something to the kid. He tried to arrange words, but re-living the experience had been harder than he thought it would be. Stay here, he thought. With those words, he was complicit in killing her, as much as were Roth and Spencer.
“The blob was designed to self-destruct,” he said. “In fact, it was practically made of a material similar to high explosives. I don't know what activated it. Maybe it was when Synth turned on her AI for just those few seconds. I'm sure that's what released the monkeys from stasis. Maybe it was the detection of my gunfire that activated a countdown for the blob's self-destruct mechanism. I don't know . . . I've gone over it again and again . . . it haunts me every day . . . wondering what I could have done differently.”
“They couldn't revive her? There wasn't anything they could do?”
“Kid, there wasn't enough identifiable material left of her to fill a cup. There wasn't a piece larger than a fragment of a molecule. They did an epigenomic scan of what DNA there was to determine that every part of her body had been in the blast, consumed by the thermal . . . there was nothing of Emmy either, other than broken filaments of silicon, germanium, just little strands. I know you. You're young. You think there's always hope. You think there's always an escape route, one more trick to cheat death with – “
“I don't think that way anymore. Not since coming to this planet.”
“Well, then maybe you understand. Death can be final.”
I'm old, he thought. I want final.
Matt asked, “You stopped the file, but Ivan says there's more video. What's in the rest?”
“You can view it by yourself if you want. I'll summarize. I went to the authorities and they questioned me and investigated the tunnel. I kept hoping there was a secret passage from which a robot opened a trap door and reached out and grabbed her away at the last instant so that she was somewhere alive so that we could find and rescue her – but that was delusional fantasy. It was solid rock all around.
“The police lieutenant was sympathetic, but told me that even though they weren't pressing charges for trespassing and vandalism, my visa would be revoked and I'd have to leave the planet. I didn't have a problem with that.
“The rest of the file . . . her sister Theodosia – you don't know Theo, she was born after you left – she gave a wonderful eulogy. Someone at the wake, a distant cousin I think, got drunk and mad and complained that Synth hadn't archived herself, that she'd deprived us of her and it was so thoughtless and irresponsible. I wanted to hit him, but they took him away and told him to shut up and then I sat in the corner and sobbed and felt ashamed because I felt the same way as he did. People came and talked to me, tried to comfort me. She has a good family.
“Her parents weren't there, they're on Tian. I never found out how they took the news. Bad, I suppose. Synth never told them why she left Star Seed, but they had reconciled . . . .”
In the silence, Matt said, “You were married.”
“Yes, for seven months. We were talking about having a baby. But we'd have to emigrate off-world and probably out of the Inner System because of population restriction laws. She wanted to finish her investigation first.”
“What . . . what happened to Eric and Athena? Were they brought up on charges?”
“Well, the prosecutor looked at my implant telemetry about the security video of Mom's abduction and said that as it was secondary substrate, it wouldn't hold up in court. If we'd been able to show them the telemetry direct from the blob, maybe that would have been valid. But implant telemetry is too easy to fabricate.”
“So they got away with it again.”
“No, it's a felony to make an unlicensed booby-trap, even on private property. Of all things to finally catch Roth on. The cops got a warrant and entered Roth's house. It's way up north in Manitoba, in the woods with no one around for klicks. A huge place. Really nice and self-sufficient, he could have lasted there for centuries more, but the authorities had jammed his internet and if it was me I'd go crazy from the isolation. Anyhow, the house was empty. The robots kept it in repair, and printers printed new parts for the robots, I suppose it could have gone centuries more without decay.
“It was a mystery to the police as to how he'd escaped, because they had the place under total surveillance the whole time. But I figured it out. According to the household appliance logs, he disappeared the last time that Athena came to visit. She must have taken him with her.”
“How did she do that without the police noticing?“
“I have an idea. Not a good idea. But then, Eric Roth is good at having bad ideas. Anyhow, if Athena's still around, maybe she can answer your questions with more certainty than I can.”
“Okay. You sound tired. Do you want to rest?”
I want to go to sleep, he thought. And never wake up.
“Yeah, but I didn't answer your original question. You wanted to know why I came here. Well, because of Synth. You see, she came here and I followed her. Only I'm in the lead now. Well, let me explain.
“She left a message for me on the internet that was timed to be delivered exactly a month after . . . after she was unable to reset the delivery time on account of being dead, I guess.
“Ivan woke me one night and said she had sent a hologram and I told him to run it. I have the telemetry at the end of my file. We should watch that together. I don't think you'll need explanation. Synth explains herself better than I can.”
And so they ran the tail end of the VR file. The airship cell shimmered away and there were swirls once more and Matt Three was sitting up on his half of the bed, aware of the emptiness on the other half, staring longingly at the three dimensional image of his dead wife hovering above the sock-and-underwear-littered floor.
“Hello Matty,” the ghost said. “If you're receiving this, it means that I died the real death. I'm very sorry about that. Every day with you was wonderful and I curse myself for being so stupid when we were younger and were afraid to talk to each other. You may not believe this, but there were times I was terrified of you when I was a kid. Harmless, sweet little Matty! I was so dumb, so much time wasted.
“Anyway . . . this message isn't about the past, it's about the future. My future, and maybe yours too if you want.
“You see, I've always felt that an archival clone is a different person than the template, and I guess I still believe that, t
hough most of the time I end up thinking of you and the Matt I knew as a kid are the same person. I don't know how to reconcile that, to be honest. I just went with it, and it was fun, and I was happy. But again, let's talk Future. Mine and yours.
“So, to begin with: I'm still not convinced that cloneporting is philosophically valid, but as long as I'm dead anyway, why not check it out? That was my thinking before I died and that's my thinking now, and since I'm recording this while I'm still alive I guess I'm being silly about it because after all these centuries I can't really believe I'll ever die, and neither will you. We'll probably live together thousands of years and you'll never see this, and that'll be great.
“Aaaaanywaaaay . . . if you're seeing this, that's not how it worked out. And so, without further meandering, let me just come out and say it.”
She took a deep breath, and said:
“I've called in favors with my friends at the U and Ascendancy and Star Seed. And of course, Random too. I've been secretly archiving myself on a monthly basis, and when I die they'll send the latest file to the cloneporter station orbiting DP3, which I finally have the security codes for. My body will be printed there, I'll go down to the planet and explore, and if the world needs saving and it probably will considering that Roth made it, then I'll try to save the world. Or my clone will. Whatever.
“The station cloneporting buffer has room for two archive files. Please live out your life, but statistically, you know, death is inevitable even for immortals, even with robots watching our every step. So when you die . . . before you die . . . if you want . . . think about making plans to come and join me. Take however long you want before you come, I'll be waiting.
“Talk to Random, he'll give you the details and codes.
“I think we could have a wonderful adventure. I hope to see you here, but of course you may remarry or something so I don't hold you to any obligation. But it would be something, wouldn't it? I think it would be amazing. New experiences are what keep us young and make life worth living, and there's a whole planet full of new experiences that we could have together over centuries to come. It would be amazing, wouldn't it? I'm rambling and repeating, I know. This is as bizarre for me as it is for you.
