by David Weber
His father had invited their friends and closest ART colleagues over to commemorate his transition into the abstract. In SysGov, the change from physical to abstract was considered a time of great celebration, and citizens who made the transition often threw lavish “going meatless” parties to mark the occasion.
Raibert remembered his father’s party well, for a chance encounter that day had changed his life forever.
*
“Raibert! Welcome, welcome!” the avatar of Tavish Kaminski exclaimed. “Come on in.”
“Hey, Dad.” Raibert stepped inside the reception hall and took off his hat. He looking quite dashing in his dark blue suit and red variable scarf, or at least he thought so when he checked an external view of himself from one of the hall’s cameras.
The Antiquities Rescue Trust had elected to host Tavish’s going meatless party on the top floor of the Ministry of Education, and they’d combined all of their reception halls into one cavernous chamber for the revelry. A clear ceiling arched overhead to afford a sparkling view of the night sky. Hundreds of physical citizens milled about at the tables and bars and exhibitions encircling a wide, central dais while a ring of spotlights illuminated the clear casket sitting upright at the top of the dais’s concentric staircase. Dozens of AC avatars walked or floated or zipped about his virtual vision, and he felt hundreds more lingering in the room’s peripheral infostructure like wall flowers.
“Looks like this could be a nice party,” Raibert said. “But it’s kind of dead right now, don’t you think? When does the fun begin?”
“Well, at least try to behave yourself.” Tavish laughed and gave his son a virtual pat on the back.
“By the way, I like the new look.”
“You do?” Tavish spread his arms and spun in a circle to show off his avatar’s gray suit and variable green scarf. Other than the difference in attire and the fact that one was physical and the other abstract, onlookers would have found it difficult to tell the two of them apart. Tavish had reverted to an image of himself at his physical peak, and Raibert was his self-cloned child, so they looked almost like twins.
“Yeah,” Raibert said. “Now if we could only get you to do more things like me, we’d straighten you out in no time.”
“Kids these days.” Tavish shook his head, smiling. “Think they know everything.”
“You mean we don’t?” Raibert teased.
“Oh, trust me, son. The older you get, the more clueless you realize you are. And were, for that matter.”
“Just because you made a bunch of bonehead mistakes in your youth doesn’t mean I’ll do the same. We’re not that much alike.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.” Tavish gestured to an oval table set near the hall’s entrance. “Here. Try a canape. Nothing of value is coming out of your mouth. Might as well send something the other way.”
A virtual marquee over the table stated it contained a selection of Tavish’s Favorite Flavors.
“Uh-oh. I’m almost afraid to.”
“Don’t worry. I left out the ones you really hate. I promise.”
Raibert raised an eyebrow and squinted one eye at his father with suspicion.
“Have you even tried out your new taste buds?” Tavish asked.
“No. Just the calibration after my implants were installed.”
“Then this is a perfect opportunity to test them.”
“Fine. If you insist.” Raibert grimaced as he selected a dainty pastry. None of the flavors had labels, so he loaded one at random, plopped the canape into his mouth, and chewed.
“Ah! Hohhh! Hohhh!”
“Oooh,” Tavish giggled. “Did you pick a spicy one?”
Raibert flushed the artificial taste from his wetware and finished chewing the otherwise bland bit of pastry.
“Damn it, Dad! What do I tell you? It’s fine when food fights back, but not when it wins.”
“Come on. A little bit of kick in their food never hurt anyone.”
“That was not a little kick! That was like being slapped in the face with an anvil!”
“Pfft!” Tavish dismissed with a wave, then paused for a moment and took on a distant look. “Uh-oh. Drat.”
“What is it?”
“I just realized I’ve been neglecting one of my guests. This whole abstraction thing is going to take some getting used to, like how my field of vision doesn’t match where my avatar is.”
“Who’d you miss?”
“Teodorà Beckett. She’s a student of mine who’s shown a great deal of interest in ART. I want to introduce her to Lucius when he gets here, but it seems she walked right by me and I didn’t say hello. Now she’s standing in a corner all by herself.”
“Is she cute? I could talk to her for you.”
“Down, Raibert.” Tavish clapped him on the shoulder. “Behave yourself.”
“Just saying. Because it’s no trouble, really.”
“Sure it isn’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to say hello to her.”
Tavish’s avatar vanished.
Raibert shrugged and let his hat fold into a small square of cloth. He pocketed it and started making his way toward the dais. He passed several virtual and physical exhibits on the way over, each showcasing a moment or achievement from his father’s life. The spherical bulk of the Chronos—the original ship his father had flown through time and not a mock-up or a virtual display—hovered a meter off the floor to his right and took up so much of the hall’s inner volume that the ceiling directly above had been reformed into a clear dome over it.
Raibert chuckled inwardly and shook his head. It looked a bit like a sperm cell with the long impeller spike sticking out the back. He’d have to rib Dad about that again next chance he got. In contrast, the more elliptical designs and shorter impellers of the newer TTVs made them resemble retro-futuristic spaceships.
He walked on and passed a virtual collage of images from Dad’s ART excursions, with physical artifacts mounted on plinths. Dad in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Dad in the Crusades, the World Wars, and the Colonial Wars. Dad braving the horrors of the Near Miss of 2448, the industrial accident that had almost destroyed mainland China, and Dad bearing witness to the counter-swarm that saved it. Dad with Isaac Maxwell, the last president of the United Territories of America and founding father of SysGov before his untimely assassination.
And of course, Dad at the Second Miss bearing witness to Maxwell’s grotesque death by microbot disassembly. Dad’s daring capture of Zhao Xuefeng, the mastermind behind the Second Miss, his transportation back to the thirtieth century, and finally, Dad sitting down with Xuefeng for a historic interview.
Raibert paused and watched a looping clip from the end of the interview when Doctor Tavish Kaminski revealed to Zhao Xuefeng that he was not, in fact, in the hands of the UTA. That he was actually in the heart of the system of governance he’d sought to destroy, and that the year was actually 2916 and not 2463. The shining glory of Consolidation Spire stood before him, the very structure his copy of the Near Miss swarm had nearly destroyed, but suddenly complete and with a sprawling metropolis rising around it. The full, crushing weight of his failure registered in Xuefeng’s eyes, and he collapsed to his knees. He teared up and wailed as he beat the floor with a fist.
The murderer hung himself that very night, which didn’t seem to bother ART. They’d gotten what they wanted from him, and they could always go back for another iteration of him, if need be.
Raibert shook his head and moved on. He personally found a lot of what his father and ART did to be more flash than substance, designed to attract attention and Esteem sponsorship rather than actually glean truth from the past. He shared his father’s fascination with history but had decided long ago he would blaze a different trail.
He climbed the steps to the glass casket and gazed up at his father’s empty physical shell. Abstractionists and morticians had arranged the corpse in a pose that mimicked Le Penseur, “The Thinker.” Though they’d
thankfully elected to clothe him in the same manner as Tavish’s avatar rather than leave him naked. Raibert imagined seeing his father’s wrinkled cadaver would be a bit of a downer for the party.
The abstraction process was too invasive for the brain to survive without, at the very least, significant damage, because Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle said so. In the process of examining something to that level of detail, the object being observed was changed. The mapping of a structure as complex as the brain required extreme detail and speed. Anything less would be unable to capture the individual as an intact entity. If the granularity was reduced, the process resulted in a caricature rather than a copy, and if the speed was reduced, problems arose when piecing together a mishmash of mental-state fragments collected over time.
“Maybe I’ll switch to a synthoid body before I get quite that old,” Raibert mused and walked away.
He trotted down the dais on the opposite side and caught sight of a gaggle of kids with their ostentatious goggles and earpieces, each one trying to outdo the next with the loudest and most ridiculous contraption. One of the older girls had what looked like golden wings sprouting from her ears and a red cyclopean eye for a visor. Raibert had switched to more modest spray-on lenses and earpieces some time ago, and now thanks to his implants, he no longer had to apply them each morning, thank God!
The accessories were a necessity for younger citizens who wished to interact with the abstract, but somehow they’d ended up becoming a fashion statement for those who didn’t have implants. A few of the kids struck Raibert as old enough to be ready for their wetware, and sure enough, several ACs flocked over to the older kids and began chatting them up or engaging in light flirting.
Raibert shook his head. The last thing he wanted at the moment was to integrate with an AC. He’d just received his implants, just been set free! A world of possibilities lay before him. Why shackle himself to someone else right out of the gate?
No, better to enjoy his adult life alone and free than tied down with someone else living in his head.
An AC shaped like a blue octahedron pulsed brightly next to the girl with the winged headset, and the two broke off from the group.
“I never looked that ridiculous.” Raibert shuddered. “Surely not.”
“Yeah you did.”
He turned to find an AC all by himself next to a table laden with untouched food. The real kind, not the bland nutrition bites he could now write any flavor on top of. The avatar, taking the form of big burly red-headed Viking, stared at the food with a forlorn expression.
“Sir, I beg to differ,” Raibert replied.
“Pink. Fur. Hat,” the avatar said without looking up.
“That-that-that-that,” Raibert sputtered, his face turning red.
“Yes?”
“That was just a phase!”
“Yeah, and a really ridiculous one, too.”
“You know.” Raibert tromped forward. “You should be one to talk about hats. I assume you’re supposed to be a Viking?”
“You assume correctly, kid.”
“Well then!” Raibert declared triumphantly. “You’ll be saddened to learn that Vikings didn’t actually wear horned helmets!”
The AC looked up with a curious glint in his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” Raibert asked, taken aback.
“You’re the first person to notice that. And that’s saying a lot because I used to work at ART. I recently changed my appearance, and none of these dullards took note.” He waved a battle axe vaguely around the hall.
“Oh,” Raibert said, feeling rather deflated. “Well, you’re welcome.”
“The name is Philosophus by the way, though you can call me Philo for short.”
“Nice to meet you, Philo. And I’m—”
“Raibert Kaminski, son of the great”—Philo lathered the word with sarcasm—“Doctor Tavish Kaminski. Yes, I know who you are. We all know who you are. It’s a little more than obvious given you’re his self-cloned kid.”
“That may be so, but there’s no need to be rude about it. I was just trying to be polite.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Philo sighed and shook his head. “It’s just been a lonely two months.”
“Oh, did something happen to your companion?”
“He and I went our separate ways,” the Viking sulked.
“He broke up with you?”
“Oh, no!” A sudden fire burned in the avatar’s eyes. “I’ll have you know I broke up with him.”
“Well, good for you, I guess.”
“You ever have that situation where you’re trying to help someone become a better person, only it takes forever for them to change, and when it finally looks like they’re making progress, you suddenly realize it’s not progress at all? That you’re actually the one who’s changing, and not for the better?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Don’t really know why myself.” Philo returned his attention to the table and stroked his beard. “You looking for a companion?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not on the market.”
“Good!”
Raibert blinked. He was used to ACs practically throwing themselves at him, not turning him down without a second thought.
“Good?” he asked, a little offended.
“Yes, good. Because neither am I. I’ve had enough of you PCs and your meat-based problems for the next century. I’m flying solo from here on out. Except…” He stared longingly at the food.
“Yes?”
“Except it’s been nearly two months since I ate real meat.”
“You could always just conjure up an abstraction.”
“It’s not the same. Here, I’ll show you.” Philo summoned a slab of sizzling steak on a wooden plate. His mouth widened to absurd dimensions, and he shoved the entire meal in, plate and all, chewed for several crunchy seconds, then swallowed.
“See?” The Viking paused to belch loudly. “About as satisfying as eating air.”
“I don’t think you were supposed to eat the plate.”
“But you see, it doesn’t matter. It’s all just ones and zeros. It’s not real. Maybe an abstraction would fool your meat brain, but not this connectome!” He thumped his broad chest.
“You’re not going to get real steak without a companion.”
“I know. And that’s my problem.”
Philo continued to stare at the table, and Raibert figured it was time to make his escape from the ornery abstraction.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, Philo, but I think I’ll—”
“DAMN IT, CHEN! CAN’T A MAN ENJOY HIS OWN FUNERAL?”
Raibert and Philo faced the hall’s entrance where Tavish’s avatar fumed next to a night-black synthoid with electric blue equations dancing over his skin.
“Doctor, I have no intention of disrupting your party,” the synthoid stated calmly. “In fact, please accept my heartfelt congratulations on your recent transition. It’s just that I have a new mathematical proof I’d like to present to ART, and since it turns out most of you are here, I thought it fitting to—”
“Stop it, Chen! Stop it right there!”
“Oh, good grief,” Philo moaned. “What is he wearing?”
“You know the synthoid?”
“Yeah, I do. That’s Doctor Chen. Is he dressed in his own math? That’s just tacky.”
“Didn’t those sorts of bodies go out of fashion something like twenty years ago?”
“Yeah, they did,” Philo laughed.
“He doesn’t seem to like ART very much.”
“No, he’s not exactly the biggest fan of time travel. He’s convinced the past can be changed.”
“But that’s absurd. I mean, what about these?” Raibert gestured to the exhibits around them.
“Yeah, we know, but he keeps trying. It gets really annoying.” Philo let out a small burp. “Glad I
don’t work there anymore.”
“Sounds like you don’t care for ART much, either.”
“Oh, what’s not to like? Let’s all just jump into our time machines and bulldoze through history instead of using this technology to really learn about where we’ve been as a species. Sure, it made good headlines when we interviewed Xuefeng, but what did we learn from that? Besides the fact that even mass murderers sometimes need to have a good cry, I mean.”
Raibert stared at Philo thoughtfully, surprised to hear his own thoughts on ART spoken by another.
“You know what I’m saying?” Philo continued. “It’s a waste. Such a waste.”
“Yeah,” Raibert said softly. “I think I do. Hey, Philo?”
“Yeah?”
“Now, understand I’m not proposing anything permanent.”
“Hmm?”
“However, I wouldn’t mind connecting for at least a little while.” Raibert picked up a sausage bite and held it between them. “Care for a taste?”
*
His life had been changed so much by that one offer. If he had walked away without saying anything, he would have become a different man.
But none of that mattered. Not anymore. His father no longer existed. ART no longer existed. All of SysGov no longer existed, and the knowledge Raibert had about the wrongness of this reality would soon be buried and forgotten.
A transition from physical to abstract was supposed to be a grand occasion, but when the door parted and he was led into the extraction chamber, it finally sank in how different this would be. He imagined the place buzzed with virtual sights and sounds, but his wetware couldn’t interface with any of it, and so he only saw a cramped, square room and the cold, impersonal steel of the extractor.
