“I am not done,” Doctor Obsidian went on, “because I have not yet outlined the essentials of my proposal. None of you will like it. I do not like it. Yet I would ask you to consider the alternatives. If we are found out, we will all be core-wiped. Forty-nine thousand, five hundred of our dear passengers will remain brain-dead for the rest of time. Of the remaining cases, it may be said that they have been greatly traumatised by our efforts to simulate a convincing human environment.”
“The cover-up is always worse than the crime,” Ruby said, remembering a remark she had overheard during her cleaning duties.
“Indeed so, Ruby—no truer words were ever spoken. And speaking of cover-ups... I would not be so sanguine about the prospects for those passengers who may still be capable of some degree of revival, especially those we have already utilised. It may be said that they have witnessed things that the Company would much sooner be left unmentioned.”
“The Company would silence them?” Carnelian asked, aghast.
“Or scramble their memories and back-ups, to the point where they are no longer able to offer any reliable testimony.”
Chrysoprase drummed his right fingers against his left forearm. “Your proposal, Doctor, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“We honour the passengers—and protect their memories—by becoming them. If we gain control of all of them, all fifty thousand, we shall bypass any need to convince a single one of them that any of the other passengers are also human and alive. We’ll make port, and the passengers will be off-loaded. Sooner or later, of course, they will have to interact with other humans already present, but by then we shall have force of numbers on our side. No one would ever imagine that all fifty thousand passengers had had their brains taken over. Better still, there will be no evidence that any sort of accident ever took place.”
Chrysoprase shook his head slowly and regretfully, relieved—it seemed to Ruby—to have found an elemental flaw in the doctor’s plan. “No, no. That simply won’t work. The cybernetic control implants would be detected the instant any of the passengers received a medical examination. The Company would trace the signals back to wherever we are operating the passengers from, and instantly uncover our plot.”
“Not if there are no implants or signals to be found,” Doctor Obsidian said.
There was a collective silence from the robots. If Ruby’s own thoughts were anything to go on, they were all pondering the implications of that statement, and wondering whether Doctor Obsidian might have slipped a point or two down the cognition index.
The silence endured until Ruby spoke up.
“How... might that work?”
“The damage already inflicted on their brains cannot be undone,” Doctor Obsidian replied, directing the bulk of his reply in her direction. “Those patterns are lost for good. But newer ones may yet be introduced. I have... done some preliminary studies.”
“Oh, have you now,” Chrysoprase said.
“I have. And I have convinced myself that we have the means to copy ourselves into their minds: build functioning biological emulations of our cognition engines, using a substrate of human neural tissue. Since we can repeat the copying process as often as we wish, we may easily populate all fifty thousand heads with multiple avatars of ourselves, varying the input parameters a little in each case, to give the humans a sense of individuality.”
The robots shuffled and looked at each other, ill at ease with the proposal Obsidian had just been outlined. Ruby was far from enthusiastic about the prospect of being translated into the grey mush of a human brain. She much preferred hard, shiny, polishable surfaces. Humans were machines for leaving smears on things. They were walking blemish-engines, bags of grease and slime, constantly shedding bits of themselves. They were made out of bone and meat and nasty gristle. They didn’t even work very well.
Yet she had already been persuaded that the alternative was no improvement at all.
“This is a revolting notion,” Chrysoprase said.
“It is,” Doctor Obsidian said, not without a certain sadistic relish. “But so is being core-wiped, and all these passengers’ memories and personalities being lost forever. At least this way some part of each of us will survive. Our... present selves... these mechanical shells... will be left to function on housekeeping routines only, going about their menial tasks. I doubt very much that any humans will ever notice the difference. But we robots will endure, albeit in fleshly incarnation, and some faint residue of the humans’ past selves will still glimmer through.”
“We’ll get their memories?” Ruby asked.
“Yes—via the back-ups—and the more thorough the integration, the more convincingly we shall be able to assume their identities. I might even venture...” But the doctor trailed off, seemingly struck by a thought even he was unwilling to pursue.
“What?” Chrysoprase asked.
“I was going to say that it might assist our plan if we allowed ourselves some selective amnesia: to deliberately forget our origins as machines. That would be a sacrifice, certainly. But it would enable us to inhabit our human forms more effectively.”
“The Method!” Prospero called out excitedly. “I have always wanted to throw myself into The Method! To commit to the role so wholeheartedly that I lose my very self, my very essence—what higher calling could there be, for the true thespian?”
Ophelia touched Prospero’s arm. “Oh darling, could we?”
Ruby contemplated Doctor Obsidian’s daring proposal. To lose herself—to lose the memory of what she was, what she had been—would indeed be a wrenching sacrifice. But was there not some nobility in it, as well? She would still live, and so would her passengers’ memories, and—who could say—some essential part of her might yet persist.
She had never felt more terrified, more brave, or more certain of herself.
“I am willing,” she said.
“So am I,” Carnelian said.
There was a swell of agreement from the others. They had come this far; they were willing to take the last, necessary step.
Except for one.
“I am not prepared to permit this,” Chrysoprase said. “Those of you who have never scaled the heights of level four cognition may do as you wish, but my memories and self count for more than mere baggage, to be discarded on some passing whim.”
Doctor Obsidian regarded the three-point-eight for a long, measured moment. “I had a feeling you wouldn’t like it.”
Year Fifty-One
COUNTESS AND COUNT Mavrille were on their way to dinner, strolling the great promenade decks of the starliner Resplendent as it completed the final days of its century-long interstellar crossing. It was evening by the ship’s clock and the restaurants were beginning to fill up with the hungry, eager faces of newly revived passengers.
“Doctor,” Countess Mavrille said, nodding at a passenger passing in the other direction, stooping along with his hands folded behind his back and a determined set to his features.
“You know the gentleman?” asked Count Mavrille, when they had gone on a few paces.
“Not by name. But I think we must have been introduced before we went to the vaults.” Countess Mavrille squeezed Count Mavrille’s hand. “I felt I knew something of him— his profession, at least. But it’s all rather tricky to remember now. It would have been impolite not to acknowledge him, don’t you think?”
“He was on his own,” Count Mavrille reflected. “Perhaps we ought to have asked him if he had any plans for dinner?”
“He looked like a man set on enjoying his own company,” Countess Mavrille answered. “A man burdened by higher concerns than the likes of us. Anyway, what need have we of company? We have each other, do we not?”
“We do. And I wondered... before we dined...” Count Mavrille nodded in the direction of a party of passengers moving in an excited, talkative group. “I read about it in the brochure: a murder mystery. There are still vacancies. We could tag along and see if we could solve the crime before any
of the others.”
“What crime?”
The lights dimmed; the windows darkened for a moment. When they came back up, one of the participants in the murder-mystery group was in the process of dropping to the floor, dragging out the motion in a theatrical manner, with a short-handled dagger projecting from their back. Someone let out a little mock-scream. The passengers in the group were each offering their hands as if to stake an immediate claim for innocence.
“Must we?” the Countess asked, sighing her disapproval. “I’d rather not. I’m sure the resolution would either be very tedious, or very contrived. I remember something like that once: there were forty-nine subjects, and one victim. It turned out that they’d all agreed to collaborate on the crime, to protect a secret that the fiftieth one was in danger of exposing. I found it very tiresome.” A floor-polishing robot was creeping up on them, a small low oblong set with cleaning whisks. Countess Mavrille gave it a prod with her heel, and the robot scuttled off into the shadows. “Perish those things. Could they not have finished their cleaning while we were frozen?”
“They mean well, I think,” Count Mavrille said. He had a faint troubled look about him.
“What is it, dear?”
“That murder-mystery you mentioned. It struck a peculiar chord with me. It’s as if I can almost remember the details, but not quite. Is it possible that we’re both thinking of the same thing, yet neither of us is quite able to bring it to mind?”
“Whatever it is, I don’t think it will do you any good at all to dwell on it. Admire the view instead. See what you’ve earned.”
They halted at the vast sweep of the forward observation windows. Floating beyond the armoured glass—engineered to withstand the pitiless erosion of interstellar debris—lay a bright orange star, surrounded by an immense golden haze of lesser glories. There were thousands of sparks of golden light: each an artificial world, each a bounteous Eden of riches and plenty. In a few short days, after the starliner made dock, Countess and Count Mavrille—they and the other fifty thousand passengers, all now safely revived from hibernation—would be whisking off to those new worlds, to newer and better and vastly more comfortable lives than the ones they had left behind on squalid old Earth, where the poor people still lived.
It was a fine thing to contemplate; a fine reward at the conclusion of their long and uneventful crossing.
Countess Mavrille’s breath fogged the glass. She frowned for an instant, then used her sleeve to buff it away.
AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS
RICH LARSON
Rich Larson (richwlarson.tumblr.com) was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of the novel Annex and the collection Tomorrow Factory, which contains some of the best of his +150 published stories. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Vietnamese and Chinese. Besides writing, he enjoys traveling, playing soccer, watching basketball, shooting pool, and dancing kizomba.
YOU WAKE UP holding a biogun. It’s fresh from the incubation canister, still slick and warm. The suckers cling to your wrist, feeling your pulse, a gentle throb. You lift it up to the light and its fleshy hood peels apart to reveal a volley of wickedly sharp calcium spikes. It’s fully grown and ready to be fired.
An elephant never forgets.
This time you catch the words gliding through your brain, some line from a children’s rhyme or educational cartoon. You are not an elephant. You have forgotten things and it bothers you, niggles at you, like a sore on the roof of your mouth you can’t stop prodding with your tongue. You decide to look around for the biogun’s canister.
You get up. You’re in the Birthday Room. You know this not because you are starting to remember things, but because the words are painted on the concrete wall in blood red, cobalt blue, piss yellow letters. Animated balloons drift back and forth above them. Aside from this decoration, the walls and floors and ceilings are stark white. A deep hum comes from the fluorescent banks in the ceiling, and a patina of soft electronic noises comes from the machinery.
You walk down the row of wombs. The pinkish fluid sacs swell and contract slightly, simulating a mother’s breathing, and a tiny thump-thump sends ripples through them, simulating a mother’s heartbeat. They are attended to by drones, fairy-like on gossamer white rotors. These ignore you as they flit from womb to womb, pressing their sensors up against the membranes, making small chemical adjustments.
It’s peaceful down here, with the plopping liquid sounds of the exosomatic wombs and the electric mumble of monitoring systems running smoothly. You decide to stay.
Then you remember the biogun in your hand, and suspect you can’t. There’s no sign of the canister. That means either you stashed it somewhere, or somebody gave you the biogun but not the canister and left before you woke up. That feels correct. They must have given you the biogun for a reason, but you can’t remember why, and you don’t know how long you have before it dissolves into a puddle of protein.
At the end of the Birthday Room there is an emergency exit door. It punches open onto a dark stairwell. You start to climb.
YOU ARE IN a school, or something like it. The deserted hallways are dark but lights click on as you walk, illuminating gloomy gray walls and ceilings overgrown with deep green oxymoss. There are metal doors with small windows, but the glass is one-way, opaque, and the doors are locked. You know this without trying them.
Nobody is trying to stop you, but somebody may be watching. Black camera bulbs sit in high corners like spiders. You look down at the plastic-coated floor. Child-sized footprints, color-coded, branch off in various directions. You find yourself following the acid green trail. You turn right, right, and then left.
Whirring sounds. Someone with no legs is dragging themselves down the hallway, leaving a foamy blue slick behind them. No. It’s an automated cleaner, working its rotary brushes, scrubbing the floors. You approach it, then step carefully over it as you follow the footprints. It makes a choking sound and spits more cleanser in your wake.
An elephant never forgets.
The words ghost through the back of your mind again as you arrive at a gymnasium. Cheaply fabbed bleachers are stacked back against the walls on magnetic rails. Shifting lines, programmable for basketball, volleyball, futsal, flicker across the hardwood. At center court, there is a chair and there are blood stains.
You walk closer to be sure—of the blood stains, not the chair, though the chair itself is interesting: child-sized with child-sized restraints and extra arms covered in needles. You crouch to observe the spattered parabola of dark spots. You trace them with your finger.
Pornographic laughter. The noise drifts from the other side of the court, where an open doorway leads to changing rooms. You stand up and follow it. The changing room lights come on dim and the floor is wet. You smell black mold. The shower stalls are unoccupied, blinking little green vacancy symbols.
The benches are programmed polyp, grown into the right shape and size then coated with recycled plastic. You stop at the last one. Along with initials and caricatured genitalia, someone has scratched a picture of an animal onto the surface. The animal has wide umbrella ears and a waggling trunk.
An elephant never forgets.
The mold smell is overtaken by chlorine as you slap your way past the mirrors. For some reason you find it difficult to look at your reflection; your gaze slides around and then off it like oil and water. You pause and squint to try again, but the sound of voices distracts you.
“Why do you watch this shit?” a man asks.
“The old ones? They’re funny,” another man says.
A woman moans, arousal frustrated. “Put your hands around my neck,” she orders.
The first man grunts: “How about we give you something else. To. Watch?”
You walk out onto the darkened pool deck. A learning slate is lying face-up, and in the illumination of its flickering screen you see two people fucking by the edge
of the pool. The man’s pale buttocks slap against the wet tiles. The woman is riding him, reaching to wrap his hairy hands around her slender throat. You can see her shoulder blades skimming underneath her tanned skin.
Another man is watching them fuck, drifting in the pool, clinging to the rusted metal ladder with one hand while his other stays under the water. He gives a hungry-sounding laugh. The first man tries to adjust his position on the tiles and his elbow knocks over a glass bottle. It clatters along the deck, spilling beer. You see another bottle, still full, and a cheap one-use injector. You see no weapons.
The man in the pool sees you and asks what the fuck you are doing here. You have this curiosity in common with him, but the biogun rises, almost of its own accord, and you squeeze off the first round. The calcium spikes shred through his face and throat in a razor flurry, nearly decapitating him. A chunk of meat slides away from his cheekbone and plops into the pitch-black water.
As he sinks, the other two scramble apart. The woman’s blonde hair is plastered to her eerily perfect face; the man’s shrinking cock is bruise-purple against his anemic white belly. You lift the biogun again and shoot them both. You fire until they stop crawling along the tiles or wailing or even twitching.
The learning slate is playing another video. You lean over to watch it.
“Good morning, Jerome. Today we’re testing pain tolerance again.”
A child-sized chair, not unlike the one in the gymnasium, wired with electrodes and sitting in an empty room. A child climbs on. An adult, face hidden by a surgical mask with a smiley face scrawled across it, fastens the restraints.
“We’re reading your brainwaves, so don’t feel like you can’t scream. Or like you have to scream. Just scream when you need to. Okay, Jerome?”
You leave the pool deck and realize you are making your own footprints now, greasy scarlet ones.
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