Traces of Us

by Vanessa Fogg

  She finished the radiation and chemo. The scans were clean. She went back to work.

  Her cancer would likely recur within a year. Both she and Daniel knew the statistics. They knew what the median survival times were.

  But for now, she was alive and healthy. She could do physically everything she'd done before. What was there to do now but enjoy their time together? What else could they do but take pleasure in whatever days she had left?

  They flew out to San Francisco to see her brother get married. Visited friends. Went on a road trip. They went to Yellowstone, a place she'd never been. They watched Old Faithful erupt, and marveled at the mud pots and bubbling springs. They walked under stars—more stars than he'd seen in years, the Milky Way a hazy arc above them. On that same trip they stopped in Jackson, Wyoming and hiked a mountain trail in Grand Teton National Park. She was tireless, more fit than him. They stood on the roof of the world together, the land falling away under them: open grasslands, a river twisting silver in the distance. They didn't say anything. They merely stood together, looking out at the world.

  She never thought seriously about abandoning her work. As soon as she could, she'd returned to the lab. And now her research took a turn upward –results in place of the frustrations of an early-stage project. She'd moved from mice to humans, using new functional imaging techniques to study mechanisms of visual attention and awareness in people. It was a kind of model of consciousness—is the subject aware of a picture flashed on a screen? How does brain activity differ between conscious awareness and unconscious visual processing? She collaborated with other scientists in the development of new computational algorithms for the processing of images. Her lab was interdisciplinary, wildly ambitious, nearly spread too thin with projects in seemly disparate areas of biology.

  In the first months after her diagnosis, Daniel’s research had seemed pointless, uselessly abstract. It would never cure his wife's cancer. Despite the grandiose statements in his grant proposals, he doubted that it would ever cure anything at all, that it would ever lead to treatments to improve memory, to manage Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases. His research was indulgent, probably doomed to failure, and there were armies of postdocs to take his place if he left.

  Yet she had always been interested in his research. Even when she was too ill to make it into work herself, she’d asked after his experiments, about the fine details. Their interests had converged more than ever; he was using many of the same techniques that she had used in grad school to now study memory circuits in mice. She was doing well, and he began to get results, and slowly the old question regained its power for him: how do transient patterns of electrical signals result in the long-lasting changes that encode memory? He and Kathy talked of it over dinner. She put him in touch with useful collaborators she knew. Their conversation wound in the loops that he loved, from science to books to stories of the eccentric coworker who seemed to eat only oranges and cheese; funny things seen on the street and on the Internet, the little jokes they shared, an article read, the conversation winding back to where they'd started.

  They made love. As often as they could, they made love.

  A year had passed. Her monthly brain scans were still clean. Two more years. She'd already beaten the odds. Maybe she would continue to do so. She had an interesting new research collaboration with a group in L.A. And one night, tentatively, she brought up the idea of starting a family.

  The next scan showed that her cancer had returned.

  At first, he thought she was talking about another clinical trial to treat the cancer. Then he realized that she wasn't.

  "No," he said. "Absolutely not."

  Her eyes filled but her voice was calm as she said, "It's my decision, Daniel."

  He stood up, turned his back to her, and fought for air. He turned around again. "You're talking about killing yourself."

  "No." Her mouth quirked at the corner. "The cancer is doing that."

  It was. It had crept back; microscopic cells that had lain dormant had exploded into new growth. A new drug treatment held it back, arrested it, until the cancer cells did what cancer cells do: mutated, evaded, developed resistance to everything the cancer doctors had.

  But she was still here. She was still with him, still able to walk and talk and laugh and move, still herself, still Kathy, despite the growing tumor in her brainstem.

  He couldn't speak. He knelt before her. She was seated on their bed, and she took his hands in hers. She stared into his eyes. "I promise," she said, "that I won't go any earlier than I have to. I won't leave a day earlier than I need to. But when"—and now her control finally broke, her breath catching in sobs, the tears spilling, but she pushed forward, kept speaking--"but when the time comes, before the tumor spreads too far, before it disrupts my thinking and personality and who I am and makes the procedure useless—before that, I want to do this thing."

  "Kathy." He swallowed. "Do you really believe it will work? That they can really preserve your brain this way?"

  "I'll be the test case." Through her tears she smiled. "I always wanted to make a big splash in science."

  Los Angeles. The last stop. Past Kathy's shoulder, Daniel watched as the plane passed over the San Gabriel Mountains and descended into the basin; he saw the dry, flat plain resolve into a sprawling grid of buildings and roads. After her cancer recurrence they had crisscrossed the country for her treatments, radiation at one famous medical center and consultations at another—Duke in North Carolina, M.D. Andersen in Houston, and back again to the Dana Farber in Boston. She had promised her family that she wouldn't give up too soon, that she would keep "fighting"—how she hated that term!—until nearly the end. It was nearly the end.

  She stirred and blinked beside him. Even before her illness, she'd always fallen asleep on planes. She looked blearily at him, and he smiled. He kissed her forehead, and gently he smoothed the hair from her eyes.

  No more medical treatments. They would spend a week here with her sister. Kathy would kiss and hold her nephews, and the rest of her family would come, and maybe Daniel would take her some place where she could see the sea. And she would undergo a final round of brain scans at a private research institute in Pasadena. She'd collaborated with this group, had been working with them to refine their algorithms. Now they would use those algorithms to collect all they could of her active thoughts, the patterns of her cognitive processing, before the very last procedure.

  It was through these research colleagues that Kathy had gotten in touch with the second group at the institute, and the man who wanted to preserve her physical brain. He had an experimental technique to fix every protein and lipid in place before decay. He'd performed it in multiple animal studies, but not yet in a human. The catch was that the preservatives had to be pumped through a living brain, before the first steps of decay could occur. The subject would be anesthetized, of course, but still alive.

  Ridiculous, Daniel had once said of this man and the private institute's most famous goal. Ridiculous, he'd once said of what Kathy proposed. Minds cannot be preserved and understood in digital form. They can't even be understood in their native states. Immortality is a pipe dream. The only real immortality is in the memories we leave behind for our loved ones.

  But she wanted this. And so she and Daniel had flown out to L.A. two months ago for the first set of brain scans. When complete, the full set of scans would be useful to science as a progressive study of her mental functioning, even with the brain cancer. And there was a scientific rationale, and value, to the next step of the process as well. A physical human brain perfectly preserved. Preserved so that it could be sliced and studied in unprecedented detail, the ultrastructure of neuronal connections traced with the most advanced of microscopic imaging techniques. A map of an inner universe. Her gift to the world.

  And maybe, in a far-flung future, a promise as well.

  The plane rolled to a stop. The seatbelt sign overhead blinked off with a chime. Around them passe
ngers were standing, retrieving overhead baggage, pushing into the aisle. Kathy and Daniel stayed still. Over the last few weeks the left side of her body had markedly weakened, and she now needed help to stand and walk. They waited while the other passengers moved past. She rested her hand on his knee. He covered her hand with his own.

  The two ships had traversed light-years and millennia before meeting one another. They were each composed of over a thousand active consciousnesses, intelligences which were both melded and distinct. Some of these intelligences rode the violent windstorms of the gas giant below; some had sensors trained on the planet's moons and the other worlds of this system. But most were focused on interior worlds of memories and dreams.

  The part of the first ship which communicated with the second was intrigued by the final proposal laid out. Despite the difficulties and ethical quandaries, there was a pleasing aesthetic appeal to it. There was, perhaps, still a trace of human romantic feeling left in the ship's programming.

  Agreed, it told the second ship. The final barriers were lowered. Data sets were shared. Collaboration flowed. Parts of the two ship-minds became, in essence, a single new mind. Here, it said, pondering a technical detail, and There! Got it! it crowed as it solved a vexing issue, and then it wondered, Now what if we tried adjusting this . . .

  "I know that it will never work," Kathy said in the darkness. They lay curled together in bed, her head on his chest. "But I want to hope that it will work, you know? The way we still hoped when they first found my cancer. . ."

  He knew. His arm tightened around her.

  "And anyway, it's still important. Just like that clinical trial I tried was important, even if it didn’t work out for me. It still resulted in useful data for others. It perhaps still lay down the foundation for something in the future. And you know, in the far future, if this new study ever does work out the way that they want, I'll get a free mind upload!" She laughed a little.

  "I'll have to get one, too," he said lightly.

  "You can. They promised to set up a free account for you. Perk of me being an early adopter and all that."

  "I'll be sure to write them a Yelp review from cyberspace of what the afterlife is like."

  "Do that. Gunther would be so pleased."

  Dr. Gunther was the director of the project at the private research institute, as well as founder of the spin-off company that hoped to sell immortality to its customers. Years ago, Daniel had mocked an article on mind-uploading which Dr. Gunther had written for the popular press. Life contained too many ironies for Daniel to keep track.

  Kathy took a breath. "At least. . . at least it feels like I'm leaving something behind, you know?"

  You are, he thought. Oh, you are.

  She traced his face in the darkness—his cheek, the line of his jaw. "If it did work—if I could—if there was some kind of me in the future, I would come back for you. I would find you."

  He kissed her hand. "Do that," he said.

  There were many issues to consider. The original mind under study had lived for 96 Earth years, and it was possible to resurrect that mind at any time point of that life. The exact timing would be critical. It would set the parameters for the reunion. And there were modifications to be made to the second mind, too. An iteration of this second mind spoke now through the second ship, but she/they wanted a reconstruction closer to the original. The melded Ship-Mind considered carefully. . .

  Memories. Her hand in his as they walked under autumn trees. The feel of her bare skin against his. The first night he saw her, in a crowded restaurant in St. Louis; her eyes had lifted to his, large and curious and open. The first time that he met her parents. The first time that she met his. Their stupid little spats, and the messes that she made in the kitchen. Quiet evenings at home, cooking together and then reading or watching TV. A vacation that they'd taken in the Florida Keys, staying in cheap motels on the fly. They drove the Overseas Highway down the chain of islands, the ocean stretching away to either side. A limitless sky curved overhead and touched the water. All that land was so flat and so full of light.

  The day they learned that she had cancer. The day they learned that it had recurred.

  The stars at Yellowstone.

  Last memories. All those people in Kathy's sister's house; Kathy's nephews running and shrieking and then climbing up beside her for a cuddle and story. Her parents breaking down and pretending not to. He and Kathy spent the last night alone, in a nearby hotel. In the morning her family all gathered at the clinic: her sister, her brother, her parents and him. If they hadn't felt it intrusive, his own parents would have flown to be there. They had loved Kathy, too.

  When it was time, he alone went with her to the room where the procedure was to be done. He held her hand as the anesthesia was started. Her eyes looked calmly into his. Then they closed.

  They didn't let him stay for the rest. They took him away. He tried to watch through the glass, but his eyes were so blurred with tears that he couldn't see.

  Right there. It had identified the time point at which to start the simulation.

  It was a beautiful summer day in southern California and he was thirty years old and his wife was dying. He couldn't do anything about it. So he was walking down a street in search of a bakery that sold macarons because Kathy loved those French pastries. She was several blocks away, undergoing her last brain scan at the research institute. In two days she planned to take the next step, and then she would be gone.

  Gone. He still couldn't understand it. It was a blank space in his mind, the edge where the world ends, a rip in space-time. Gone. No. His mind stuttered and stopped. Pastries. The travel website claimed that the best macarons in Pasadena were sold at this particular bakery. So Daniel was going to find it for Kathy. He could do that much.

  He'd been walking for a while, it seemed, trying not to think past the moment, not to cry or shake. He passed a bakery that sold only cupcakes, then a shop that sold only fair trade chocolates. There were charming cafes crowded with beautiful young people. The women wore sundresses or spaghetti strap tank tops and shorts. He couldn't mark when he first sensed the change. The sun was still bright, but the air felt chill. The bakery was supposed to be right here; he had his phone out to check. There was something wrong with the phone. The map on its screen wasn't possible.

  He looked around him again. The neighborhood was still chic and charming, but all else was changed. Yet he knew this place.

  In a daze, he put away his phone and kept walking. Yes, there were cobblestones under his feet. Yes, there was the Greek diner where he and Kathy used to sometimes grab breakfast. There was the bagel shop where they had sometimes gone instead. The palm trees of L.A. were gone. In their place, autumn trees burned in reds and golds. People walked by in light jackets. He was wearing one, too.

  He knew, without looking, that if he turned around he would see the towers of the medical research center where he and Kathy had earned their degrees. Ahead and to his left he saw the building where she had rented a tiny apartment, where he and she had lived together so blissfully, unofficially, before their marriage.

  His heart pounded. His steps turned.

  But before the apartment building there was a stretch of little shops and restaurants, and there was a coffee house right there. He didn't need to go in. A young woman was standing just outside, waiting for him. She stood easily, straight-backed, glowing with health. She wore a black pea coat and a red tartan scarf and a smile that cut open his heart.

  "How--?" he said. And even as his pulse raced, he was aware of some external force helping to calm him, regulating levels of adrenaline and shock.

  She looked into his eyes. "I made a promise," she said. "I told you that I would come back and find you."

  He found himself laughing as the realization set in—the absurd, wondrous, astonishing explanation for it all. "We're both dead, then," he said.

  She laughed, too. "Long dead. And we've both lived dozens of iterations of lives since. But th
is is the first one where I found you again. Some of the record keeping on Old Earth was just terrible."

  He just kept smiling at her stupidly, drinking her in.

  "Thank you for the macarons," she added. "They were delicious. Would you like to know about the rest of your life?"

  The door to the coffee house opened, and he caught the scent of dark roast as a customer walked out. Cool air filled his lungs. Sunlight limned all the edges of the world.

  He was real, he was alive, and so was she. They were here together, now. She had come back for him.

  "No," he said. "Not now."

  He stepped toward her, and she stepped toward him. Her arms came up around his neck. He bent his head. Her lips were warm and soft, and parted beneath his. She kissed back hard. It was fall, he had just met the love of his life, and all around them the trees of autumn were blazing.

  ____

  Copyright 2018 Vanessa Fogg

  Vanessa Fogg dreams of selkies, dragons, and gritty cyberpunk futures form her home in western Michigan. She spent years as a research scientist in molecular cell biology and now works as a freelance medical writer. Her stories have appeared in Bracken, Metaphorosis, Mythic Delirium, The Future Fire, and more. Her fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn, is available in print and ebook from Annorlunda Books. Vanessa is fueled by green tea. For a complete bibliography and more, visit her website.