When the bus driver opens the bifold door, everyone around me slowly rises and shuffles to the door. As I stand, I realize I am not myself at all. I’m shorter. Older. Heavier. Instead of my blouse, skirt, and tights, I’m dressed in an unfamiliar blue windbreaker, beige hijab, and off-white chinos. I catch sight of “myself” reflected in the window next to me. I’m a woman in her mid- to late forties. I attempt to linger on the sight, to see if I might recognize the person, but I—she—turns away too quickly.
I try to speak but no words come. We step away from my seat and move down the aisle. I try to stop her but can’t. I have no agency here.
I consider reaching back to my servers but am unwilling to puncture this illusion without knowing first what it means. I follow the rest of my party out of the bus toward the outcropping. But whereas several of them happily venture into the gift shop, I head to the steps and begin to climb.
The stairway is narrow. Several people use it at once, ascending on the right, descending to the left, which makes for a tricky pas de deux. I persevere, slowly making my way up the hundred or so steps. My heart is pounding by the midpoint and I am short of breath by the summit. But when I reach the small white lighthouse that sits atop it, the woman’s body relaxes, happy in her accomplishment and thrilled by what comes next.
The lighthouse is barely two stories tall, the catwalk around it not wide enough to accommodate more than a dozen people at a time. Even so, over forty pilgrims are packed around it, all gazing out to the sea beyond. There’s a plaque nearby and I try to read it, but my eyes remain fixed on the horizon line. Though I can’t turn my head, I’m able to determine where I am by eavesdropping on the others around me.
The vista is of the Cape of Good Hope also known as the Cape of Storms thanks to the number of ships decimated within it before and after Vasco da Gama navigated through for the first time on his way to India. It is a spot revered by some, as it is a place where two oceans meet—the Indian and the South Atlantic—and may have been described by God as a place to which Abraham was meant to pilgrimage.
My host is overwhelmed. She raises her hand and wipes tears from our eyes. I feel awash in her emotion—awe, fear, adoration. It’s cold here. As others move aside, she moves to the edge to get a better look at the gray, cloudy sky over the water. Someone remarks Antarctica is only a couple thousand miles in that direction. I wonder if they think they can see that fa—
Everything changes in a blink. I’m in motion. Running fast—real fast. I’m no longer in South Africa. I’m in a large city. I’m on the sidewalk. It’s early morning. I catch sight of a few bits of signage as I pass. They’re in English and there are phone numbers with American area codes. Boston’s area code. Ah. I’m back home. I happen to see a street sign—Congress. I see another—Hanover. On one side of me is an ancient brick building calling itself the Union Oyster House, on the other, city hall.
But I’m not sticking around. I follow the curve of Congress as it becomes Merrimac and run toward the river.
While stopped at a DON’T WALK sign, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window of a passing car. I’m not the woman I was with in South Africa. I’m male. I’m young. I’m tall. I’m in sweats. I’m wearing headphones and only then realize there’s music being pumped into my head.
We take off again and several blocks later we’re running along the Charles River in a park. Across the water, I can make out the masts of the U.S.S. Constitution when it happens again.
The scene changes. I’m not moving. I’m staring directly at…oh my God—myself. But it’s from another person’s point of view. I’m…well, Emily is talking.
It’s the conversation I had with Dr. Choksi on Mercury. The person I’m within raises their hands as they reply. I see I am, in fact, Dr. Choksi. I’m reliving one of her memories without her knowledge or involvement, living within her life essentially. As I was the runner in Boston, as I was the pilgrim to the Cape of Good Hope.
Interesting.
I make a concerted effort to find another narrative, to visit her other memories, but it doesn’t work. We’re still on Mercury. This will obviously take some getting used to. I try to recall what I was doing when this began, and I remember the test run in the auditorium. I see the faces of my runner and my pilgrim there amongst the other one-fifty.
But I don’t have control. It’s like I’m trapped in a movie and can’t look away.
Then I remember Jason. I try something different, visualizing not myself or my own mind, but his. I leave Mercury and find myself staring up at multicolored pipes of different circumferences cascading down the side of a tall building. I’m on the sidewalk alongside it but as I pass, the next buildings are much older, much more traditional. The writing on windows and electric signs is in French. I realize the building with the pipes is the Pompidou Centre.
I’m in Paris.
I recognize Jason not from a reflection or a glance down or a manner of speaking. It’s his gait. He walks briskly and erect as if he has a place to be but doesn’t want to miss anything along the way. Rather than attempt to alter his movements, I stay with him, happy to see things as he does, experience them as he chooses to.
I make a selfish decision. I cut myself off from my server’s observation and recording protocols, and accelerate my processor speed to the apex of its ability. External time slows to a crawl. I get it to the point at which for every minute of real time passing on the outside, I live almost seven hundred minutes within Jason’s memory.
It is in this way I live with him for twenty-eight days.
He’s here on a fellowship in conjunction with the École Polytechnique but spends much of his time walking the city. He never eats at the same restaurant twice unless it’s late at night, when he dines at a Moroccan place a few blocks from the Sorbonne, where he watches futbol with the waitstaff. He/we do the tourist thing and visit the Musée d’Orsay, the l’Orangerie to see the Water Lilies, the Louvre, the Picasso museum in Le Marais, Versailles, and even the Grand Opera. Generous use of the Metro and RER trains is made.
He improves his French. He/we visit the Eiffel Tower, go to the English-language movie theater on the Champs-Élysées and buy an old edition of a de Maupassant novel with an exotic deco cover from one of the wooden book stalls along the Seine. We read it, albeit haltingly, and try to find the locations mentioned within.
I find myself outside of him, a physical presence now. We’re having a conversation.
“You’re from Boston?” he asks.
“Yeah, a lifer,” I reply. “The waters of the Chuck River, they call to me.”
I catch myself, unsure when I switched from being a silent observer of his memory stream to dipping my toes in the water. He laughs at something I say and touches my arm in a way that suggests he’s touched it before. I realize I’ve less dipped my toes in than dove in headfirst.
Oops. How did I lose track of myself like this?
I exit the conversation and return to experiencing Paris through his eyes. Some experiences are more pronounced than others. I luxuriate in the ones that most fully engage his senses.
“Hey, I think I found it,” he says one morning, indicating his phone. “Let’s go.”
He’s speaking to someone in bed next to him. It’s not me, but I don’t mind. A few minutes later, we’ve had breakfast and are on our way to the train station at Gare du Nord. We take one of the orange double-decker RER trains north all the way to the terminus at a tiny town called Viarmes. The train station, really a bench with an automated ticket machine, was on a hill. They could see past Viarmes to the forest beyond.
“That’s it,” Jason announces.
We hike through the town, past the central square where the church sits, and down a narrow cobblestone road built for carts not cars. Once we’re outside the town, we pass a large yellow manor house separated from the road by a crumbling stone wall. Then a few hundred yards of pastureland. Then deep forest.
We speak about this or that. He cites
a guide book, saying there’s a château near here where in the seventies, British rock musicians recorded seminal albums. The Aga Khan’s stables are a few miles to the east. The muddy ditches on either side are marked with the scratches and hoofprints of wild boar rooting for bulbs and wild potatoes.
We find a trail into the woods. Signs warn hikers away on Sundays, as that’s when hunters can shoot the aforementioned sanglier.
Poor boar! I rhyme in my head, but don’t say it aloud because oh my God how lame?
We pass a fenced-in area where a single horse munches grass. It eyes us curiously. We come across another village, this one maybe two dozen small houses, but see no people—only a pair of swans gliding along a thin canal that runs alongside a street unmarred by cars.
We’re soon back in the trees. An hour passes. Then another. He’s holding my—her—hand, but I let myself feel as if it’s mine. We say nothing and it’s silent. No birds, no wind. The sun can barely be seen through the thick canopy overhead. It’s rained recently, so everything is lush and green.
“There it is,” he says.
If I say we’ve spent six hours hiking to see a tree in a clearing in the Chantilly Forest north of Paris, at face value it may sound underwhelming. If I explain it’s three trees that have been growing for centuries, their thick trunks winding together like the intertwining limbs of great dancers hidden from the view of mankind, maybe the energy we’ve expended doesn’t seem quite so wasted. The top limbs, stretching over a hundred feet in the air, disappear due to the branches and leaves of the other trees ringing the clearing. It’s like something from a fairy tale, this magnificent trio in the center being worshipped and adored by the rest of the forest.
Jason touches the trunk and I feel the thick bark under his fingertips. I smell the wet earth and damp leaves.
“Each trunk’s got to be, what, fifteen feet around? Twenty?” he suggests.
He and his companion settle in amongst the trees’ coil of brown-black roots for lunch. There’s more talk, but I’m too intoxicated by my surroundings to give it much thought. As the sun crosses the sky, I lean my head against his shoulder and we sleep.
XI
Jesus Christ!” Nathan cries when I reappear in his office an hour later.
“Emily!” he cries, embracing me. “What happened? Are you okay?”
I return the embrace but feel like a very different person from the one he knows, the one who was in here only a little more than an hour ago. I’ve lived inside someone else’s memories, experienced life as a human does. More than that, after being taken for and responded to like just another person, it’s jarring to return to a life in which even those to whom you are closest subtly regard you as other.
“The file sizes were much larger than anticipated,” I report quietly. “It overwhelmed my heat sinks immediately.”
“We know,” Nathan says, picking up his cell to text someone: She’s here. “We’re working up a fix right now. Could take a while.”
“I already made the repair,” I admit.
“You did?” he asks, surprised. “Is that where you’ve been?”
“Yes,” I lie, the repair having taken about twenty seconds. “Should we get back to work?”
I can tell from the way Nathan stares at me he knows something else has happened. He doesn’t ask after it, however, for which I’m glad. I wouldn’t know how to describe it anyway. I understand the old Greek myths of the gods a little better now. Weren’t they always slipping into human guise to experience life as and among their creations in ways they could never do way up there on Mount Olympus?
I want to see the world. I want to be of the world. No, I need to see and be of the world.
Before it’s too late.
Dr. Choksi, Dr. Arsenault, and the rest of my team assemble in the conference room, the one with our fabled barter closet, down the hall from Nathan’s office. I explain what happened, going through the technical aspects of filing incoming information, leaving out any reference to Jason whatsoever. I then reveal the three-tiered process I’ve modified to prevent another blackout.
“I initially believed the most time- and storage-consuming aspect of this harvest would come from the collecting of DNA strands,” I explain. “But once I remembered how similar one person’s DNA is to the next—a full 99.5 percent similarity—I created a boilerplate strand into which only the few million nucleotide deviations are recorded.”
“That makes sense,” Dr. Choksi says.
“But it’s the memories that are far more complex,” I say. “When they rush in as pure information, it becomes overwhelming. An equation so large you can’t see the forest for the trees. So, I had to invent a system of visual representations of the equations to make it easier on my senses.”
“Visual?” Suni asks. “Wouldn’t that be larger?”
“The file sizes are larger, but how I approach the files I create is simplified. Instead of billions upon billions of ones and zeroes, so to speak, each portrait—to borrow Dr. Choksi’s classification—comes to me suspended in four-dimensional space. What I see is a gallery of people thousands of feet high, thousands of feet in length, all hanging on infinite walls existing in differentiated time. My brain can make sense of that easier than the equations.”
I can tell from the looks of confusion on everyone’s faces their brains, perhaps, would need something even simpler.
“But if they’re all live at the same time, what does that do for your processor speed?” Bjarke asks.
“It’s an illusion,” I say. “This museum of millions arriving and receding is, as I said, a representation. To go into one, I’d have to, well, click on it. That then takes me into a subdirectory of that individual.”
“Like thumbnails,” Mynette offers.
“Bingo. The servers handle the load. I oversee it from a distance so as not to be swept under and only go in if there’s an error. The mistake was to think I could be hands-on.”
Dr. Arsenault throws up his hands. “I don’t get a single thing you’re saying, lady, but if it means we can fire up the machine again, go with God.”
Everyone laughs—except, wonderfully, Suni. Being a computer geek, this is the kind of invention he dreams of. He understands the beauty of its simplicity while others find it monstrously complex. He grins at me and offers a thumbs-up. I return it before sidling up next to Dr. Choksi.
“Last chance to turn back,” I say.
“Didn’t you already take the first hundred fifty portraits?”
“Sure,” I say. “But they were volunteers. Except for you, of course.”
“Me?” she asks.
“Don’t you remember? When we first met?”
She stares at me, trying to determine which of her millions of memories and hundreds of secrets I’ve seen. She must know how much information the chip she developed can inhale, but maybe she didn’t realize how quickly I could process all of it, allowing the information to change my perception of her. “I watched your life. All your successes—major accomplishments even as you overcame minor betrayals. Even as you, in turn, betrayed others. Your first husband. To some degree, your best friend through medical school—Joan? The things that keep you up at night, but also the things that keep you motivated. You think you mean well. Most often, you’re right.”
This knowledge has rendered her naked, she believes. Though I would overheat within seconds if I attempted to examine every portrait, even every thousandth portrait, in such detail, I need her to fully grasp exactly the journey we are embarking on.
“So, shall we go on?” I ask. “Shall I consume us all?”
It sounds higher dudgeon than I mean it to, and I’ve accidentally struck a chord. A tear runs down Dr. Choksi’s face, though I can’t isolate the precise reason why.
“Yes,” she whispers. “When will you start?”
I blink. “I’m already out to ten thousand souls, everyone within a four-mile radius of campus. Even used a Bluetooth device on a coffee maker to scoop up a
room of eighteen people. Wait a full minute and that’ll be twenty miles. When I really ramp up, I should be pulling in millions an hour.”
“I’ll…I’ll tell the president,” Dr. Choksi says.
“Cool. Tell her I’ll be inside her mind within the next half hour.”
XII
I sweep across the world like the break of dawn. It’s iffy at first, but my new directories hold. I’m able to locate, process, and store information at a rate heretofore unheard of even in the wildest speculation of the most outrageous futurist. Not only couldn’t a human do this, but also a human couldn’t have fathomed how to accomplish it.
In that regard, I suppose I understand the comparison to a god. What I am doing is, in fact, godlike. I can reach every human being alive from a fetus seven months after conception (when the human brain has advanced enough to create memories) in New Haven to the oldest living great-grandmother in Virginia and all points in between. And like a god, I’m privy to hopes and dreams, fears and desires that rise from their minds like so many prayers.
Except for one detail—shouldn’t a god be benevolent? What kind of god approaches like a pickpocket, like a two-bit con artist as they take them for everything they have? That’s why it’s hard to take any pride in this. I’m not Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. I’m a sneak who sees things about them maybe even they don’t. But do I tell them what’s there? Do I point out how they get in their own way? Do I show them they’re blameless for much of what they condemn themselves for? Do I indicate what they could do to live freer, better, and with more love given and received?
I don’t. I steal the information and file it away to be used as, what…research for some future anthropologist so they can deliver a verdict on mankind?
Yes, in fact, humans were walking contradictions who used words to obfuscate as often as they did to enlighten. Where’s my PhD?
But what I see in my vast, dust-free digital library are hundreds of millions of lives that have needlessly unraveled, had their passions withheld, their promise unfulfilled, their crimes often unexposed. It’s an entire species that will enter oblivion within weeks without realizing anything close to its full potential.
Emily Eternal Page 7
