How helpless I am, Kaeti thought. She lay down on her bed of moss, brooding about her uselessness. She and those she had known had made no history of their own, nothing to match the accomplishments of their ancestors; history had long been a mere entertainment, only a source of details for their diversions.
She drifted, not fully conscious and yet not asleep. With her channels closed, silence enveloped her, a silence so complete that the only sounds she heard were her own breathing and her heartbeat and a soft but oddly soothing throbbing inside her ears.
“How did we come to be as we are?” A voice was coming to her from memory, and she realized that it belonged to the person she had known as Erlann. “When one looks back, it seems fairly obvious,” he continued. “First our ancestors created diversions that distracted them from reality. Once the technology became available, they developed even more sophisticated diversions that became far more pleasant than reality. By then, the actual world had become decidedly more unpleasant for many people, which of course tempted those who were able to do so to retreat from the world outside themselves even more.”
“I have always thought of the past as a more heroic age.” That was her own voice, objecting. “Humankind was embarking on great deeds and accomplishments. There was all of our solar system to explore, and after that–”
“That time was a heroic age only for the few,” Erlann said, “for those who were willing to risk their own lives and safety by leaving Earth. It was, however, a time of accomplishment for those who created and wove the earliest strands of what would become our Net of Minds, and for those who uncovered the secrets of life extension. But even they, in the end, surrendered to the experiences the Net offered them. Even they turned inward at last.”
“All of them?” Kaeti asked.
“I asked the Net that very question. Is there anyone who resisted the experiences the Net offered in order to contend with reality? Were there human beings who chose not to live that vicarious existence? And my Link informed me that the Net could not recall any such people.”
“That’s an ambiguous answer,” Kaeti said. “They are not remembered. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t or do not exist.”
“But consider this,” Erlann continued. “Contemplate your own life, Kaeti. How often have you retreated? How often have you chosen to face what lay outside?”
How often have I? Kaeti asked herself as she rested inside her tent. She had left safety before, she had gone on other searches, but she had always retreated again, shedding her memories.
More was coming to her; that was the trouble with trying to rid herself of certain recollections. Echoes were left behind, troublesome fragments that drifted inside her and could not be connected into anything coherent. She had searched for other people, and somehow she sensed that at least one such search had been successful. But she had lost whomever she had found afterward, and had become a solitary again. She lived with the constant feeling of having misplaced familiar things.
A howl cut through the night. Kaeti sat up. She would be safe inside the tent, but her heart beat faster for a few moments before slowing again. She heard another howl, lower and softer this time, the sounds of an animal.
She got to her feet and crept toward the front of the tent; the flaps lifted as she stepped outside. The Moon was up, fat and yellow in the sky, and another memory came to her of the people who had gone there long ago and tunneled out dwelling places under the Lunar surface and observed the heavens with the great dishes of their telescopes. Where were those people now? Had they left to embark on a great voyage across space? Or had they retreated into the world that the Net could create for them? Perhaps they had done both, closed themselves off in an interstellar vessel and then turned inward even as their ship carried them out into the universe. Whatever had happened, no people remained on the Moon now; of that she was certain. She had known it as soon as she caught sight of Earth’s dead satellite.
The gray cat was outside, prowling, visible in the moonlight. The animal howled again, then turned to the south. “Look over there,” the cat whispered.
She looked south and saw a patch of flickering light. A fire, she thought, and hurried away from the tent, picking up her pace until she was running. A thought came to her of another fire, of people huddled around the flames, seeking warmth and safety as their earliest ancestors had done. There might be people out here; she would no longer be alone.
When Kaeti was still far from the fire and had slowed to a walk, she saw a dark two-legged shape moving toward her across the plain. She had not even considered any possible danger to herself, but suddenly sensed that she had nothing to fear from this apparition. She stopped and waited until the creature was only a few paces away from her, and knew that she was looking at another like herself.
“You are a person,” she said, “a man,” for she saw now that the other wore a beard on his face.
He made a sound that might have been a greeting, or only a sigh.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
The man was clothed in a garment that resembled her own protective skin, but his seemed looser, as though the garment did not quite fit him. He waved one arm in an arc, and then turned away; she realized that he wanted her to follow him.
She kept behind him as he led her toward the fire. A patch of land around the fire had been cleared of growth, and a hollow dug in the ground to hold the fire. Others sat around the fire, a person with long pale hair and another smaller one with hands stretched toward the flames; both of them wore the same kind of ill-fitting coverall as the man did. Kaeti kept her Link closed, knowing already that she would not be able to speak to them through it, that these people had no Links. How long had they been out here? How had they survived without being able to call on the Net for food and shelter?
The bearded man went to the other two people, then squatted near them. Kaeti hesitated, then knelt on the other side of the fire. Objects were scattered over the ground, shiny pieces of metal, shards of what might have been pottery or plates, torn rags. Apparently they had sustained themselves by taking whatever they could find in abandoned sites, in the cities and parks and isolated refuges where people had once lived. The three stared at the fire, keeping their heads bowed, refusing to look at her.
Kaeti said, “I thought that I might be all alone, that there was no one left, but my Link–”
The man thrust out an arm, as if warding her off.
“I came out here to find others like myself,” she said in a gentler voice. But she could do nothing for them without opening a channel and calling out to her Link. Steadying herself, Kaeti reached out through her Link to the Net of Minds –
– and remembered.
The three humanlike creatures and their fire vanished. Kaeti stood on a rocky ledge, holding out a hand to a shadowy form hiding in a cave. “Come with me,” Kaeti called out, even knowing that the woman could not understand her, that she would have to summon a vehicle to carry them both to safety.
The ledge disappeared –
– and she was standing in a windswept desert as dunes shifted before her like waves. The funnel of a dust storm was sweeping toward her and the five frightened people huddled nearby. Kaeti waved at them with her arms, trying to tell them with her gestures to come to her, so that she could protect them from the storm with the force field that her vehicle could project around them. The wind rose, blinding her for a moment with a veil of sand –
– and she was sitting with Erlann at the edge of a forest, watching as two men ran from them across a plain of tall grass. Occasionally the men turned, shook their spears in Kaeti’s direction, then hurried on their way.
Erlann said, “They’ll die if they stay out there.”
“I know,” Kaeti murmured.
“I think that this is the last time I’ll come looking for unchanged people with you.”
Unchanged people, she thought. The term was not entirely accurate. Some of the people she had discovered in the
course of her earliest searches were unchanged, the last survivors of those who had never been Linked to the Net, but she had found no such people for a long while. The human beings she hunted for now were creatures who had been made as they were, playthings for those who had grown bored with simulated experiences, human beings who meant about as much to the people who had asked for them as did their talking dogs and cats and other pets. Their creators always tired of such pets in the end; unlike the people in simulated experiences, such beings usually became defiant, their earlier placidity overwritten by sullen resentment or even outright hostility. When they were abandoned, some of them would ask for Links, and become a full part of the human community sustained by the Net of Minds, but others fled to untamed regions, becoming bewildered and lost. Those who ran away were usually those who had been so dominated by their creators that they had no sense of what they might become, no knowledge of the Net of Minds, no realization that they were anything other than beings entirely dependent on the Linked people around them for their very existence. By the time Kaeti had found such people, their lives were controlled by fear and despair.
“What have I done?” asked those who could grasp some of Kaeti’s words. “What is wrong with me? Why was I loved and then cast out?”
“Unchanged people,” she said aloud to Erlann. “Call them what they really are, people who were thrown away. It makes me disgusted with my own kind.”
“I pity them, too,” Erlann murmured, “but I won’t come looking for them anymore.”
“Why not?” she asked, hearing a harder and flatter tone in his voice that she had not noticed before. “Don’t you still care about them?”
“Of course I care,” he replied. “It’s only that there probably aren’t that many of them left. Any whom we find now are going to be the most fearful, the most recalcitrant creatures, who perhaps can’t adapt to what we want to give them.”
“You’re so certain of that,” Kaeti said. “Surely anything we can do to help them is better than what they have.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Look at them,” she said, “living as they do, suffering, facing death after too short a time–”
“ – living as most people once did,” Erlann finished. “Eventually, any who are left will either die out, or they’ll have to learn how to survive on their own, when there’s nothing left to scavenge or steal. And maybe their descendants will make another history for themselves.”
“You don’t believe that. You’re just finding excuses for giving up our search.”
“Farewell, Kaeti.” He turned away from her and moved toward the forest. There was a finality in his voice that told her that she would not see him again.
The memory vanished. She was once again sitting by the fire with the three creatures she had found. The man’s narrowed eyes watched her warily, but he showed no fear of her. A memory came into her then, overlaying this scene with a vision of two people walking away from her across a flatland of high grass. She had followed those two people, calling out to them, wishing that Erlann had been with her to advise her on what to do.
“I followed them,” Kaeti said aloud, “and when I realized that they wouldn’t willingly come with me, I called on the Net for help, and then I stunned them until a craft was sent to carry them to a secure environment. I stayed with them, but I wasn’t of much use. The woman kept screaming and the man withdrew into himself, refusing to move or do anything to sustain himself. Finally I had to let them go.”
The three strangers were silent. The man seemed to understand her, but she might only be imagining that.
“You see,” Kaeti continued, “forcing you to come with me wouldn’t do any good. You have to decide that for yourselves.”
She stood up, noticing that the sky was growing lighter. Perhaps these lost people would follow her to the tent. “Please come with me,” she said, feeling that the soft tone of her voice might draw them. “You may feel frightened at first, but when you’ve eaten, when you’ve had some rest, you’ll see that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“When they’ve eaten,” another voice said, “when they’ve rested, when they realize what they are, they’ll leave you.”
“Erlann,” Kaeti whispered, knowing his voice, and then she opened a channel and braced herself, waiting for the dammed up memories to flood into her.
At first she heard only a sigh, and then sensed a tendril of the Net through her Link. “Forcing you would not do any good,” her Link murmured. “You must decide what to do by yourself.” Already she could feel her emotions being dampened; the fear that had started to rise inside her was fading.
No memories rushed into her; instead, she found herself sitting in a room, alone, thinking of Erlann and all of the others who had left her, whom she would never see again.
The Link said, “We can give you Erlann, and anyone else you remember.”
“No, you can’t,” Kaeti replied. “They’re gone now. They might as well be dead.”
“But they are not dead. They are a part of the Net, a part of us.”
“No,” she insisted. “You have only fragments, memories, bits and pieces of what they once were. They’re no longer alive.”
“But they are alive, woven into the strands of the Net. They chose to join us. You could do the same.”
“They didn’t choose to join you,” Kaeti said. “They chose to die. Maybe some of them didn’t realize that that was what they were deciding to do, or maybe they knew and didn’t care, but they’re dead all the same. Their memories, their experiences, their innermost feelings, everything they’d ever known or ever done – you preserved all of that, but that doesn’t mean that they themselves are part of you.”
“They are alive,” the Link said.
“They may seem alive to you, but they’re not. Whatever is there, whatever you may call it – an essence, a soul, or whatever obsolete and inaccurate term you prefer – what is left in you is not what was. Those constructs inside you, those bits you’ve preserved – those aren’t the people I remember. Their bodies, their brains – they aren’t a part of the Net. I’m a materialist in these matters – if the bodies are dust, if the brains in which their thoughts were first formed have been lost, then those people no longer truly exist. What the Net holds is no more than a host of simulacra.”
“Or ghosts,” the Link said.
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Every one of them chose to join the Net completely. All of them chose to give up the rejuvenated and rebuilt carbon-based shells that were their bodies. Much of what they were was already woven into the Net. They were simply shedding the vestiges of bodies that were no longer necessary.”
“I don’t accept that,” Kaeti said. “Maybe some of them had lived so long that they mistook indefinitely extended life for immortality, but I suspect that many of them, maybe even most of them, were well aware that they were choosing to die.”
“They are with us, part of the Net.”
“Those are only echoes, copies of what they were,” Kaeti said. “I asked you if there are any of us left, and you told me that there were. I probably asked that question many times, and every time you assured me that there were others of my kind. I knew that you wouldn’t lie, that you would not deceive me, but I didn’t consider that you might have been misled, or drawn the wrong conclusions, or simply chose to think what you wanted to believe.”
“We were not thinking of the human memories woven into the Net,” her Link murmured, “when we told you that your kind still lives on.”
Kaeti sighed. “Then you must have meant people like this, the strays.” She glimpsed the shadowy forms of the three lost people squatting near the fire, all of them watching her now.
“We were not thinking of those creatures either.”
“Am I alone?”
“No, you are not alone. We are with you. Now ask yourself this – how much of what you once were long ago is left?”
“I don’t underst
and,” Kaeti said.
“But you do understand, you have asked this question of yourself many times before. How much of your former physical self remains? The answer, as you have said many times, is almost nothing. Every cell in your body has been re-created, all of your physical capacities are aided and amplified by microscopic machines. More of your memories live in the Net than inside your own brain. If you are the strict materialist that you claim to be, you might claim that the entity known as Kaeti died long ago, since so little of what was her remains in you.”
“No,” she whispered, “I am still myself.” She remained connected with her past self, still the same conscious being, persisting through all of her body’s changes. But perhaps the continuity she felt was an illusion imparted to her by the Net; a restored Kaeti might have no memory of her earlier self’s death.
But she had not died; she was certain of that. She knew now that she had gone through all of this with the Net before, and come to that same conclusion.
“Your kind still lives on,” the Net sang through her Link, “in you, in all of those whose memories are part of the Net, in all that we hold.”
Kaeti said, “I am seeking other people.”
“But we are here. We are your children. The Minds of the Net, the Links that connect us, all of that is the progeny of humankind. That is what is left of your kind. You have come to this knowledge many times before, and then you choose to forget again.”
“Not this time,” Kaeti said, growing aware of all the past times she had come to this realization, of how frightened she had been to know yet again that she was the last to inhabit the form of a human being – except of course for the unchanged and abandoned creatures like those who sat with her by the fire. “I won’t forget this time.” She was no longer afraid to remember what she had been told so many times before, but felt a twinge of despair.
The man made a noise in his throat; one of his companions held up a hand. Kaeti forced herself to look at them as revulsion rose inside her. “I keep looking for people like you,” she said, “because I can’t bear the thought that I’m all alone. Then I find you, and take you to safety, and watch over you as you acquire Links of your own, and sooner or later, all of you decide to weave yourselves completely into the Net, and I am left alone again.” For a moment, she seemed to be viewing her three companions through a veil, and had the sensation that she was coming to the end of another simulation, and then the sense of a reality outside herself returned.
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