Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The Executor sat on his desk and crossed his legs. He wrapped one knee with his massive hands. “I did. I tried. But you have to appreciate the magnitude of the task. Information is a fluid thing. It flows and changes. By nature, it reproduces. I can track down and delete Dominic's official identity. I can stop the programs and processes that make up his life. But I can't guarantee to you that I've expunged him entirely, because information is simply too difficult to control. As long as someone is looking for Dominic, expecting to see him there ... as long as someone is still accessing the data that remain ... you have to understand this, Tim: Dominic will still exist. In a broken, incomplete way, yes. But he's still alive.”

  “But I don't want to access his data,” Tim said. “I don't want to look. I just wake up, and I find him there. And he remembers things, sometimes—things even I don't know. He thinks, he reacts, he gets upset. He gets so frustrated, and I can't help. And then he touches me and looks at me as if he still ... as if he...” He jerked forward, resting his hands on his knees. “I don't want him to be alive. I don't, I really don't.”

  The Executor watched Tim silently. He removed one vast hand from his knee, and stroked his chin.

  * * * *

  Tim took a train home from the Executor's office. It was a foolish decision, fond and uneconomical. He had work to do at home; he should have simply flipped the sim. But he liked the illusion of travel, sometimes. It gave him a chance to think.

  He walked to the station over elm-shaded sidewalks, scrolling through streets at a casual pace. It was so odd. He never really thought about the state of the world much: the way it worked, the issues it raised. Two children in a nearby yard had discovered secret features built into their lawn sprinkler, and now they were conjuring misty horses from the spray, making water droplets roll like marbles on the air. A figure strolled by in a shadowy cocoon, wrapped in its own private nighttime. If Tim concentrated, he himself could change certain features of the public street, switch the languages on signs or make dandelions bloom at the curb. And the people who walked behind him undid what he had done, turned the languages back or turned the dandelions to crocuses, made their own small modifications to the scene.

  He thought back to arguments his parents used to have. They were first generation: they had gone through the Transition. Tim's mother had found it much easier than his father. Every time they made a change to their home sim, his father made the same complaints.

  “I don't understand this world. It's out of control.”

  “It's not out of control,” Tim's mother would sigh.

  “But it is. Anything could happen. What's to keep a leprechaun from jumping out of my ear, right this moment?”

  “People used to say those things about the old world, too. Reality has always been a social construct.”

  “Not like this.”

  Then Tim's mother would explain about maps and mods and semiotics and conventional rule systems, and describe how the important rules of reality had been laid down in advance, just like before, while the changes people made on a daily basis were as trivial and innocuous as repainting a bathroom, or negotiating right-of-way in a city intersection, or changing channels on an old TV. “They built this world to be like the old one, but with more options. If you want a leprechaun to pop out of your ear, you can pay someone to make that happen. But it's not going to happen just by accident.”

  Tim had always thought of his mother as the sensible one. Sure, the world was a “negotiated reality,” as his mother's friends said, a “product of controlled perception.” But that didn't mean the world was senseless. It always made sense for Tim.

  Almost always, at least.

  One time, when he was six, he had suffered a breakdown of sorts—his mother called it a “bug,” his father a “nightmare.” Tim didn't have a word for it, but he remembered the incident clearly. A thing with long fingers had wriggled above his bed; the walls had warped out and puckered as though sucked by an unseen mouth; the sweat in his sheets had formed puddles and streams, crawled in liquid worms back through his skin. He bleated in fear, and his parents dashed into the room. They saw what was happening, and Tim's father screamed—actually screamed. But his mother fumbled in the nightstand for a folded card, muttering about overrides and emergencies. She spoke strange words, and the horrors subsided; and then she drew the toy chest up to Tim's bed and sat there for hours, resting a cool palm on his forehead.

  “You see?” Tim's father said from the door. “There's your product of controlled perception.”

  That was the only time Tim could recall when his mind had not been his own.

  Until now.

  He watched a brick wall beside him dissolve gradually into daffodils as a nearby-property owner revised his lawn. Reality had seemed an easy game—until he started seeing ghosts.

  * * * *

  The train he selected was an old-fashioned model, a coal-eating beast with carriages of red carmine. Enthusiasts in Victorian garb flocked about the locomotive, brushing down the red running gear and filling the water tank from a hose. Tim bought a ticket from a man in a booth detailed with gingerbread trim and crossed the slate platform. His compartment had mahogany paneling, seats upholstered in wine-red mohair. Minutes after he sat, the train lurched forward with a whistle, rocking gently on the narrow tracks.

  He leaned against the window, watched green hills tumble by. The wheels clacked in a cycling rhythm, measuring out bits of time.

  He had first met Dominic on a construction job, building new terrain for a corporate vacation sim. At a youthful forty-six, Tim was in the creative unit, allowed to learn and play, innovate, experiment. Dominic, middle-aged at eighty-two, had just been moved to supervision. He loomed over the sandbox as the new recruits received their tools, an immense dark figure with a beard that could have scrubbed pots. But when he spoke to his trainees, his voice was soft as dovesong, a low music that stroked the ear.

  “Welcome to Kalam Constructions. Today you'll learn how to build a world.”

  He showed Tim how to sculpt basic terrain, laying down the layers of rock and choosing soil types. This was nitty-gritty work, much more involved than switching sims or tweaking the settings of one's property. They knelt together by the sandbox, working with trowels at the pliant earth, rolling the soil mixture into dells and hills. They cut rocks with their chisels and contrived sharp sierras, lining up the stones like dominoes. The sim was for hiking vacations, and the requirements specified uneven land and lookouts, little touches that people could discover and enjoy. They dug caves and tunnels, sliced cliffs like cheese, balanced boulders.

  “You're creative, all right,” Dominic said, after they'd been working a half hour in silence. “I love this little rock palace, in the corner over here. But you need to vary these things with even stretches, normal land. It sets off the thrill of discovery. Here.” He leaned over the box, resting his palm on a slab of pink granite. “You can make whole valleys with one cut, just turning your wrist. The rocks will pick up texture from your movements. Watch.” He dug the trowel in and carved a valley, twisting the blade to texture the sides.

  He put the trowel in Tim's hand. “It gives you a natural look. And it's easy. Here, let's try.” They cut a valley together, turning the blade as one mind, watching the world take shape beneath their palms. When the valley was complete, they still held the trowel, their fingers intertwined above the country they had made.

  “That's amazing,” said Tim. He grinned and looked up in surprise, found himself meeting Dominic's eyes. They looked at each other awkwardly for a moment, unspoken words putting weight on the gaze they shared. Then Dominic grinned also, patted Tim's shoulder.

  “It was all you,” he said in his soft song of a voice. “I'm just along for the ride.”

  * * * *

  The ride lasted for sixty years.

  They found themselves meeting after work, discussing technique in a Turkish cafe. Dominic reminisced about his former jobs. He'd done social planning
for thirty years, solving statistical puzzles and managing schedules. Among other things, he'd been responsible for coordinating train routes among three hundred different sims. Then he talked about a season he had spent in WreckTech, writing decay scripts for vacant environments.

  “It's a craft,” he said, “a skill. Dying, that is. When a tree dies, it can't just sit there, frozen. It's got to follow certain processes, certain expectations. I guess what I'm saying is: dying's its own kind of life.”

  He grew wistful then, resting his chin on spread fingers, watching smoke from the hookahs curl among the lamps. Tim gazed at the dark, pensive face—the way the beard curled around the soft line of the jaw, the deep-set eyes, the smooth skin shining in the lamplight—and realized, all at once, that it was beautiful.

  * * * *

  They dated for weeks that seemed like years, sampling the usual diversions: water-skiing, hiking, reproductions of Mayan sites; a string of bars that seemed to go on forever, doses of Stoli blurring the lights. Before long, they happened on the sleighing sim.

  It was a fluke. Dominic had meant to load a jungle scene. Suddenly they found themselves ankle-deep in snow. They thrashed through the scene in their khaki shorts, kicking up white bursts, laughing and cursing. “What the hell?” Dominic hugged himself. “What happened to Meroe?”

  “It's a bad reference, I guess,” said Tim, rubbing his arms. “Someone hasn't been updating his directories.”

  They could have left right then, but the whole thing seemed so funny: their tropical attire absurd among the bright heaps of snow. They couldn't just dismiss it; the joke had to be played through. They tromped up a dirt lane, shivering and clacking their teeth. “I hope this isn't an adventure sim,” said Tim, surveying the pine forest surrounding them. “It looks so wild, so remote. We could get eaten by a white dragon at any moment.”

  “I don't think so. It's not pleasant enough.” Dominic cleaned a crust of snow from his sock. “Adventure sims are paper thin, and this is detailed. A work of love.”

  The sleigh stood at the end of the lane in a clearing: a berry-red splash against the snow. A roan horse stamped and snorted in a harness clustered with bells. They spotted a plaid blanket and leapt into the vehicle, drawing the fabric over their bare knees. Dominic found a jug of hot cider under the seat.

  As soon as they were settled, the horse set off along a snowy road, a track that swooped and wound among the hills. Pine boughs rushed by and the runners hissed like steam. Fresh powder, fine as sea froth, puffed from the horse's hooves. They drank their cider from tin tankards with little hinged caps, laughed in delight when snow dusted down from the branches. “I wonder what we'll find,” Dominic said, “at the end of the road?”

  They found a cabin, perched high in the forested hills, with a gabled roof so high and snowy the structure looked like a white tent. The sleigh stopped by the door and they leapt out into the chill. Inside, the cabin bore signs of being well advanced along one of Dominic's artful decay scripts. The floors were dusty and cobwebs blew from the ceiling. The patchwork quilt on the couch had been ravaged by moths.

  “I bet no one even knows about this place,” Dominic said, wandering with echoing footsteps through the room. “It got lost in the directories, and no one's been here in years. We could fix it up together, have it restored.”

  “It's clearly a work of art,” Tim said, “not some chintzy sim. I bet there are secrets hidden in the scene.” He found a crooked painting of a forest on the wall. When he adjusted it, snow fell in the painting, a flake-white static over Impressionist trees. When he went to the window, snow was falling outside. He watched the descending curtain of flakes with satisfaction. “There we go.”

  Dominic came to his side and they looked over the room. In the years to come they would learn all its secrets: a way to adjust the thickness of the snowfall, a way to order food, a store of wood for the fire. They would find the colored pinecones that painted scenes in the air when burned. They would find the leather-bound album, an empty database of creamy blank pages, and use it to store recordings of the moments they wished to remember. But nothing would ever compare to this first moment, when they hugged each other, reviewing the dusty room, and first realized what it meant to have a permanent place of retreat, a private refuge, a shared home.

  * * * *

  The green hills rolled by, and the wheels ticked off pieces of time. Tim turned away from the window, and found Dominic beside him.

  Dominic was dressed in jeans and a yellow jacquard shirt. He jerked as though waking suddenly. “What just happened?”

  “I don't know,” Tim said. He checked his surroundings furtively: the window, the green landscape outside, the varnished walls of the train compartment. Dominic had never appeared in public before. “What ... what do you think happened?”

  Dominic twisted in his seat. “Are we on a train?”

  Tim reached for him, but Dominic stood up swiftly.

  “I hate trains. You know that.” He threw open the door of their compartment.

  “Dominic—”

  The train rocked with sudden severity. They staggered as they entered the corridor, bumping the walls.

  “What are we even doing here?” Dominic said. He stumbled down the corridor, throwing out his arms for balance, pawing at the doors of the other compartments. “How did we get here? Tim, I hate trains, I hate travel, you know that!”

  “Honey, it's okay.” Tim caught up to him with a leap, putting a hand on his back, stroking him clumsily. Dominic turned and braced himself on the walls with outstretched arms.

  “We're not supposed to be here. I had something I needed to do.”

  “No, Dom. No, it's fine. There's nothing. Really, you don't have to do anything. Just—” Tim held out a hand, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Come here.”

  Dominic turned his head frantically. Other passengers were sliding the doors of compartments partway open, peeking into the corridor.

  “No, I have to be somewhere.” Dominic turned away suddenly. “This is wrong, all this is wrong!”

  He dashed away, careening down the corridor, his sneakers thumping on the carpeted floor. Tim, with a meaningless shout, flew after. A little stairwell at the end of the corridor led to an exit in the side of the car. Dominic barreled into the stairwell and stood at the doors, wide-eyed and slack-jawed like a panicking child. Tim jammed himself a moment later into the narrow space. Through a window in the mahogany they saw the countryside rush by. Dominic put his hands to the glass and shut his eyes. The stream of hills flowed faster; the land undulated frantically. The hills gave way to waves and the waves to sand. The train screamed through land after land, through tunnels, through cities. Someone in the car behind them shouted; a bell rang. A conductor appeared suddenly, sliding into existence with a creak of invisible hinges, the whisper and slam of a nonexistent door. “You! Sir? What's this? What's he doing?”

  “It's all right.” Tim wheeled. “He's just upset. He's confused.”

  “Well, he's hijacked the schedule. He's taken us off course; we're on a completely different route now. Other people have destinations to reach, you know.”

  “I know. But he's not ... You have to understand, he's never done this before. He only comes to my house, he doesn't know what he's doing. He's not even really—”

  The door flew open suddenly, and Dominic dropped from the car.

  Tim spun and launched himself through the exit. “Dominic!” He landed in snow. A pine forest flashed past him as he ran through the cold drifts, chasing after the receding yellow shirt. Needles whisked his face, and the chilly air bit his skin. They ran to the lane, up the lane to the clearing. Dominic slowed when he saw the sled.

  He wobbled toward it, holding out a hand, his lips trembling. Tim drew up beside him, gasping for breath.

  “This place,” Dominic said. “It's our spot. I remember. I remember all these things so well: this sled, these trees.”

  “That's right. It's our spot. You're r
ight, honey.” Tim found Dominic's hand, squeezed it, rubbed his back.

  “I keep forgetting so much. Forgetting what I'm doing. I try to hold on, but it always slips away.” Tears like melted snowflakes appeared on Dominic's cheeks. “I wish I could just remember. Remember why I'm here.”

  He put a hand on the sled, stroking the lacquered wood. His fingers fell to the blanket inside. The horse stamped, and the harness bells shivered and rang. Dominic said, “Oh.” The sound was a long low note, half exclamation and half sigh, a low sound floating like dovesong past the ear. He turned to Tim, and his face had changed.

  Dominic said softly, “There it is.”

  Tim backed away, stumbling in the snow.

  “It's time,” said Dominic.

  “No,” Tim said.

  “Our book. Our memories. I remember now.”

  “No.” Tim sobbed. “We did it all. We've been through this. We did it all, honey; we're done, we're done...”

  His body tightened around his voice, and no more words would come. He clenched his teeth, shook his head. We're through, he thought desperately. We shouldn't have to do this anymore.

  The ground beneath him bucked and tipped, scurried away from his feet. He could feel the sky turning above him like a gear, the omnipresent vibrations of the shifting world. He put out his hands as though to block an attack. They met a soft plain, sank into tufted fiber. He leaned forward, then realized he was tumbling, falling. Panic flung open his eyes. He thrashed, kicked, stirring papers and folders. Then he stopped suddenly and remembered to breathe.

  He lay on the floor in his living room, alone.

  * * * *

  “It's what I keep telling you,” the Executor said. He held out a hand, inviting Tim to precede him down the path. They walked on a brick lane between blossoming cherry trees. The Executor had decided that Tim's case demanded special attention. It was nothing to be ashamed of, he explained; just an ordinary trouble that many people had. Some clients needed a little extra help.

  “I've done what I can.” The Executor touched Tim's elbow, a gesture that mixed authority and support. “I've stopped Dominic's ... key processes. But things just aren't that simple.” They left the cherry trees and entered a circular clearing. A stone fountain dribbled among red and white roses. The Executor indicated a stone bench, and they sat.