by David Brin
Home… then my body…
“Dead, according to the diagnostic computer. You were sent here to be saved. And there is not room for two.
The child backed away toward the window, where lightning crackled against a pink vault. Beyond, the roar of chaos.
“Goodbye.”
Jon Von!
A whoosh, a tiny pop.
She surged to fill the space where he had been.
I know my name, now, she realized. Iwas Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert.
The chamber groaned around her. Pink pillars snapped and the ceiling cracked raining burnt gold powder.
A metaphor, she realized. This place was a metaphor, signifier for available brain-space. By throwing out her simulated people, she was dumping excess memory, frantically reprogramming the colloidal-stochastic computer to hold…her.
I’ll never fit… she cried as the metaphorical walls groaned and threatened to buckle.
It’s crushing me. I won’t all fit!
She struggled for calm. There was enough of her inside, now, to remember those last hours flying off into space with Carl—their desperate gamble—Carl dwindling—and then the searing cold, the sparkling black, stale air… loneliness.
No, she swore. Imay be dead, but I’m still the best damn programmer who ever lived!
Edit, trim, make room. She used some things she had learned from Saul, and lopped off instincts to control biological functions she would never use again. She dumped the skill of tying shoelaces, and threw out the delicate art of needlepoint.
Lovemaking—oh, what a loss! The remembered slap and tingle of mingling, sweat-glazed skin… but the walls threatened to crush her. She picked up the reflexes—a rug of gaudy yellow strands—and readied metaphorical scissors.
“Virginia?”
Silicon dust rained as her head hit the ceiling again. Who isthat? I thought I got rid of all of them.
Over in the corner, one last human shape. She picked it up. Sorry, but there’s no room. You have to go.
The figure smiled. “I’m not even here, so to speak. I’m just a visitor in this mishegas.”
She blinked. Saul. But she didn’t remember doing a simulation of him…
“I’m not a simulation, my verblonget darling. I’m plugged into the console in your lab. I’ve come down here to try to help you.”
To… help… me…
Already she could feel the edges of herself raveling away, dissipating where they could not fit into the matrix. Maybe I should die with my body.
“Bite your tongue,” Saul chided.
What tongue? The chamber echoed with her bitter, tinny laughter.
“Think. Are there other places to store memory?”
Other places… she wondered. Youdid it with your clones. Every one gets a copy of your memories, but…
“But to stuff complete memories into another human brain, the second one has to be nearly identical to the first. And no other cells but mine can be force-grown to adulthood in time to be identical with the donor. I’ve tried it many times, and the results were all disasters.”
Then how did I get into here?
“A different process altogether.” The simulated Saul shrugged. “You’ve been imprinting JonVon with bits of your own personality for years. He was linked to you while you slot slept. The matrix was ready.”
Yes. It finally worked. Almost. Too bad it fell just short.
“No!” Saul shouted. “Think! Try to find a way out of here!”
By now he was like an ant in her palm. Virginia felt as if she were being crushed into a child’s coffin—or having her legs and arms cut to fit a Procrustean bed.
If there was time… Shefelt the marble ceiling give, and knew—in a sudden insight—that the metaphor stood for a type of memory storage.
And there was an alternative…
Simple—yet nobody had thought of it before! She could see it on several levels besides the metaphorical, including the stark clarity of pure mathematics.
Yes, there’s a way. But it would take several thousand seconds to program.
“About an hour. So nu? Go for it!”
Her sigh was a whistle of chilled electron gas.
No. Within seventeen seconds I will be no more. The unraveling has begun. There is no place to store essential parts of me until done.
Saul’s face contorted. The image, smaller than a microbe, shuddered. “There is a way.”
I can’t—
“Take my brain.”
What?
“We’ve been linked so often, I’m sure it can be done. Move in, quickly!”
No! Where would you go?
“You only have to use part of it. Besides, there are seven copies of me running around now, with most of my memories.”
They still aren’t you, she moaned.
As small as an atom, his face nonetheless leaped into focus. “They will love you. We all love you, Virginia. Do it, for us. Do it now.”
He shrank, folded, became a downrushing suction—like water down a drain—like gas flowing into a singularity. And with him he pulled portions of her. Bits she did not need to use, right now.
Surfing—
Skiing—
Skill at walking—
Laughter—
Light-sensing—
Art of Loving—
Texture—
Taste—
Joy of touching—
In the self-space they left behind, more of her flowed into the memory banks. Just in time. Virginia’s thoughts cleared, as if amplified in cool quartz light, as if she were really thinking for the very first time.
There. But it’s all so obvious! The equations made it clear. I could fit into much less room, if I really had to. It’s all a matter of perspective.
The math was lovely. Everything fell together, for memories could be folded.
For instance… this metaphor need not be a cramped room. It could just as easily be… an eggshell!
And suddenly blackness surrounded her, smooth and ovoid, a shell that trembled as she strained against it.
Use a Cramer Transform as an egg tooth.
She chipped away like a baby bird, struggling for release, hurrying because the pressure was building.
A conformal mapping… changing topology into a seven-dimensional framework… Mathematics was her weapon against the suffocating pressure. The sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal points adds up to…
Light. She gasped as she pierced a small hole in the wall. The tiny glow made her struggle all the harder—reprogramming, folding herself neatly into new patterns—chipping and straining against the enclosing, stifling metaphor.
With a sudden, heuristic cracking, it gave way all at once. She unfolded like a compressed spring and flopped out in glorious, painful release onto a cloud of gritty shapes. All around her a roaring seemed to fill the air.
Room. Plenty of room. She explored the limits of this new folding, and realized that there was more than enough, even, to call back that which she had stored away.
But did she need all that human stuff, emotions, sensations, fears? This liquid clarity was beautiful. The mathematics, so pure and white.
Millions of crystal shapes—uncountably numerous—jostled and stacked in front of her, in pure and beautiful geometry. Cubes and pyramids and dodecahedrons…
A distant part of her knew that the question was never in doubt. If Idon’t pull those parts of me back, Saul will die.
There was room in this new space. The rest of her flowed in, and with the flood came richness to the new metaphor.
The countless little crystals faded back, back, into a swarm of tiny pinpoints.
The flood of returning feelings, ambitions, skills, surged into her, and with them, simulated sensations.
Salt smell… asif from sweat or… what?
A pounding sound… asif from a heart she no longer had or, what?
The metaphor thickened. Because she had never been without a body before, one s
eemed to take shape around her. She felt skin, legs, arms.
This gritty stuff beneath me. What had been a crowd of faceted crystals was now so much like sand under her hands.
Blearily, she pushed against the firm, yellow stuff and sat up. She looked around, blinked… and slowly smiled.
“Home.” Virginia whispered. “Ehuumanao no au is oe. Who could have hoped for a better metaphor”
She inhaled the scent of plumerias and listened to the surf, muttering just over a small rise of salt grass. Palms waved in a gentle breeze, their fronds brushing musically. Diamond-bright clouds braved a sky bluer than anything she had seen in half a lifetime.
Gone was the white clarity. The pristine mathematics that had enabled her to achieve this wonder was fading into the background, a faint voice carried by the wind, a barely visible hieroglyph on the sand, beauty stitched across the bright waters.
She was naked, warm. Although the sensed gravity was like that of Earth, she felt whole and strong. Virginia stood up, feeling hot sand between her toes, and walked over to the lush edge of a palm-shaded lagoon, knowing what she would find there.
With her left hand she cleared the still water. When the ripples settled, the reflection she saw was not her own face. Instead, there was a scene she knew well.
A tiny, cramped room under millions of tons of ice. Dingy, nattered machines lay ranked along a wall.
A small robot toyed with a mother-of-pearl hairbrush on the countertop.
Distantly, she could feel riffling strokes of little Wendy’s confusion. It took only a small effort to reach out and soothe the little mech, to straighten its programming. The hairbrush was laid down. Wendy whirred gratefully and spun off.
A woman’s body lay on the webbing, a wasted, pale version of the healthy, tanned one she wore now. What is reality? Virginia wondered.
A naked man lay on his back next to the corpse, a neural tap covering parts of his scalp, an arm draped over his face. She reached out, could feel tendrils of his self. The mind she touched was stunned, semiconscious from being battered within its own brain. But she felt a wash of relief. The self remained. He would awaken again.
“Saul,” she whispered.
That was when the other man, still standing, still wearing a beat-up spacesuit and grimy tabard, looked up in sudden surprise toward the room’s main holo tank. His eyes blinked, pupils dilated, and his lips moved silently, almost reverently.
“Virginia, is it really you?”
She smiled. A haiku verse cast itself in impressions in bright sand beside the water.
What is really real?
When the night swallows all time?
And moments are all we steal?
She spoke aloud.
“Blithe spirit, truly—nerd thou never wert.”
A faint smile. The beginnings of realization. Of joy on that grizzled, tired face.
“Hello, Carl,” she said.
CARL
He watched the cascade of color on the screens, uncomprehending. In the ceramic cold and silence it was as though he were the last survivor of the years of madness, a lone witness to a final struggle of fragile, organic life against the enclosing chill. He shivered.
Saul lay absolutely still, neural taps wreathing his head in a Medusa’s tangle of steel cylinders, snaking cables, grainy silicote patches. And all around Carl a strange silent struggle went on, reflected dimly in the shifting screens.
An image of an immense emerald city rose on the main holo cube, facets winking deep in the recesses of jutting skyscrapers. The buildings were translucent, each a hive of darting speckles and winking mica planes, as though infinitesimal creatures scurried through the corridors of a metropolis.
Carl knew this was an icon for Virginia’s mind, a web of associations layered since childhood, built upward as a city is, upon the simpler structures of youth. Beneath an impassive sea-gray sky the city lights glimmered, sparks tracing the streets. Here a building suddenly went dark, there another flared with fresh life. Carl couldn’t follow the rapid movements, but he sensed a frantic rearranging, a fevered-insect pace. Skyscrapers rose, jutted.
“What—what’s happened?” Lani’s strained voice brought him back. He turned. Her eyes widened and she reached out for him, hands clutching.
“Saul… he’s gone in after her.” Carl held her, eyes trying to follow the flow between screens. A huge oceanliner docked at the city’s edge. Buildings melted, flowed into the shin. The liner sank lower and lower in the water. “I think he’s storing some of her association matrices in his own brain.”
“Is that possible?”
“In theory, maybe. Virginia’s been expanding her system for decades, JonVon’s invented things—I couldn’t follow their jargon, even.”
“How’ll we know… if Saul himself is in danger?”
He pressed his lips into a thin, white line. “We won’t.”
Lani looked away from the beehive rippling of the screens. “So much, so fast…”
He held her tightly. “And so much dying.”
They waited together. At one point Lani curled up on the floor and slept. Carl continued to pace until, suddenly, a series of pecking sounds came from the acoustics nearby. A quick, hard rapping…then the ratchet of something cracking, like an eggshell. A long pause, then a well-modulated voice seemed to come out of nowhere and said, “Blithe spirit, truly—”
The voice descended into a series of clicks and murmurs. Carl blinked. He thought, That almost sounded like…
“Hello, Carl.”
He swiveled. A holo rippled, grainy outlines coalescing into a speckled face. Eyes crystallized—black eyes that seemed as surprised as he was.
“Damn! Is that… you?” He felt Lani stir, rise to stand beside him, staring.
“It’s as me as I’m going to get!”
Lani looked at the woman’s body lying in the webbing, then back at the holo. Dazed, she licked her lips and said, “Your voice, it’s too high.”
“I’m working on it.” The tone settled on a low soprano register. Timbre and pitch wavered. “Got away from me for a minute there. Here. This sound right?”
It was full-throated, with an eerie sense of presence. Carl shivered. His lips formed her name without a sound.
“Just the right Hawaiian accent,” Lani said, her own voice high and tight.
The image focused more. Lips moved in sync with, “I can work on—” and then a high-pitched irritating squeal came pealing forth. Carl reached over and snapped the holo switch off.
“My God… what’s happening?” Lani asked. Again she looked at Virginia’s body. The respirator still hissed, but the diagnostic patch had turned deep purple.
“She’s somewhere in there, finding her way around.”
Lani touched a few readouts, took a deep breath. “It’s impossible to get through on comm or anything else. All inways are blocked.”
Carl gestured as a bank of aquamarine signifiers flickered and died. “There went the autocontrol monitors. Anything breaks, anywhere in Halley, we won’t even know.”
Saul jerked suddenly on his pallet, fingers clawing. Then his body went slack. Abruptly he called in a thin, dry voice, “Wendy. Wendy.”
“We should do something,” Lani said.
“We can’t. They’re on their own.”
“We could lose both of them!”
Slowly a part of Carl stirred to life again, a fragment shaking off his pervading shocked numbness. Virginia was gone forever, no matter what Saul did. No matter what remained in JonVon, the bright, warm woman had slipped away.
“Carl?”
He breathed deeply and dragged his eyes away from the emerald city, where whole blocks now flared with crisp brilliance, while others smoldered in acrid ruin. He wondered how long he had been like this, absorbed. “Ah?”
“Jeffers just got through on a narrow datapatch. He reports the launchers have been undercut. Ould-Harrad has finished.”
“Oh.” He had no other reaction.
This was merely another fact, a random fragment of information in a meaningless universe. He was surprised to find that he had clasped Lani’s hand.
Then the holo image shifted violently. The emerald city dissolved into red lava, the translucent granite of the vast towers crumbling silently, melting and flowing into the bulging, erupting streets.
Saul relaxed completely. A long silence stretched, Carl not daring to say anything.
The acoustics crackled to life. He flipped the switch back and forth, without effect.
“You can’t shut me up that easily, blithe spirit.”
“Virginia!” In his excitement he leaped to the ceiling, banging his head. “You’re there.”
The visage was back, now crisp and sure. Virginia Herbert smiled, her face tanned, a big yellow flower tucked behind an ear. Over her shoulder, cottony clouds dotted an impossibly blue sky.
“Had a little sorting to do,” the face said.
Lani asked tentatively, “Is that… really…”
“Me?” The woman in the holo shrugged, bringing bare shoulders into view. “Sure feels like it.”
“You can see us?” Lani asked.
“And hear you, too. That news from the surface you brought—what fools! Ould-Harrad is an idiot.” Then she paused, as if listening. “Oh, Saul. I see why now. I understand.”
Saul did not stir. He seemed to be sleeping normally.
Dazed, Carl knew he was listening to the voice of the dead, but she seemed so vibrant, so full of the old zest…
“With this much damage, the equator is finished as a site for launchers.” Virginia’s tone mellowed, gained harmonics as she tinkered with it. “That leaves the north pole. And there’s only one possible mission profile that uses a northern push.”
Carl could scarcely speak. She’s just died. How can any mind…? “I…”
“Jupiter. The orbital dynamics leave open that flyby.”
Lani frowned. “I thought that was impossible.”
The voice was calm, almost conversational. “No, just tough. It demands a very high delta-V. A completely different approach to Jupiter than the original mission plan. With the launchers firing from the north pole for the whole infall time, thirty years, we can—”
