The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  It worked.

  There was a phone on the bedside table, and he went to check to see what day and year it was but found he could not remember the passcode to unlock it. His head was throbbing as he tried to recall memories of his former life in San Francisco, but the challenge was wrestling with two sets of memories that competed in his head for primacy.

  There was one set of very visceral, conventional thoughts and experiences that represented his everyday life. For instance, he knew that yesterday he had eaten salmon at a cafe on the Sharesquare campus, and he remembered buying those white curtains for that window a week earlier. The other set of experiences were the product of Diana’s memory digitization. They gave Orion an almost jagged reel of images and thoughts representing his prior life—the condo in Bolivia, the trials of his coworkers, the long days watching his body fall apart. But those memories were shadowy.

  What had the sheets on his bed felt like or how did that rice dish he always ate for breakfast taste? The bones of his old life, the structural foundations of his experiences were there, but they lacked color and depth. It was like his old life was a textbook he had dispassionately memorized.

  For now, he just wanted to know what year it was, and the confusing war of thoughts in his brain did not have an answer. So he put on a coat and dashed outside to a cafe a block from his loft. There was a newspaper lying discarded on a table, and he snatched it up as a thrill of anticipation shivered through his hands. He must have looked like a madman.

  But then he saw it.

  It was the October after the Diana Nutrino Mixer revelation. Cat’s trial already had a court date. It was mentioned on the front page.

  The blow nearly crushed him. Nausea twisted in his stomach. His first inclination was denial, but all newspapers at the cafe were under the same utter, cold consensus. Then Orion questioned whether the transmission really worked and if this were not some kind of fever dream. Perhaps he was writhing around on his cot in Costa Rica still. Perhaps this was the afterlife, and this twist of fate was a kind of hell for him. Why would the universe go through all the trouble to return the transmission and still get the timing wrong by a mere matter of months?

  He returned to his apartment feeling despondent. If he could not halt the Nutrino Mixer fiasco, he could perhaps still capture some evidence that Catalina was framed, perhaps some code trail that had not yet been deleted. So he scheduled a visit to see Cat in prison. It was not an easy thing to do. The state treated Cat as if she retained some superstitious and malicious computer prowess, needing only to type a few keys into a computer terminal to unleash another wave of software havoc.

  Orion spoke to her through a phone set between thick plates of glass. Cat seemed dizzy and disoriented.

  “The raw logs could still be there somewhere,” he said to her, eyeing the security cameras in the corners of the room carefully. “If I can get them, I might be able to prove you were set up.”

  Her brown eyes shown dully between strands of raven hair that ran unkempt about her face and shoulders.

  “I’m the only one with sufficient privileges to pull the raw logs needed to do a full forensic study on what happened to Diana,” she muttered, looking uncomfortable having this conversation. “The state said I was too hostile and unpredictable to cooperate with the investigation, so they won’t let me touch anything.”

  “What if we just hacked deep into Sharebox itself and looked for the logs?”

  A look flamed in her eyes, the same she used to get when someone would say something stupid in a conference meeting and she felt compelled to correct them.

  “It’s impossible. You would need to do a brute force attack by guessing at combinations of encryption keys, but no one has the computing power for that.”

  “Cat, I’ll do anything,” he said, putting his hand on the glass. “I’m so sorry you’re here.”

  She made direct eye contact with him for the first time and held it, a look of confusion and pain on her face.

  “Why are you doing this for me? I was never that nice to you.”

  “Because you don’t deserve this. Because you’re innocent.”

  Cat buried her face in her hands. Then an alarm dinged letting them know they were out of time. A guard appeared and grabbed Cat by the elbow and led her back down a dimly lit hallway.

  “I won’t give up on you, Cat,” Orion shouted, as her long, black hair disappeared from view.

  That night, he booted up his duplicated copy of Diana. It was like finding an old friend, but this copy remembered nothing of their previous decades together and was comparatively crude compared to the one Orion had parted with before. But Diana had implanted a few specific instructions in Orion’s memories to share with her younger self. He tasked the software with the quest to digitize the human brain, just as he did before, but he also shared advice about the best way to digitize human memories, to focus on the natural indexing techniques of the hippocampus. He also suggested she hone her computing power on hacking Sharebox servers to undermine the platform’s encrypted tools the way Catalina suggested. Then he put Diana’s device in his closet and left her to do her work and grow by teaching herself to modify her own code, just as before.

  Then Orion turned to the only labors he could think of that remained. He quit his job at Sharesquare and joined an activist group speaking out against the government crackdown on free speech. But the tide of public outrage and power was in those days too lopsided. The flood of misinformation in Sharebox as it was “deregulated” by its new CEO was so thick and unyielding that very few users could see their way out of it.

  Arguing one interpretation of a set of facts against another interpretation was a challenge. But arguing one interpretation of facts against deeply entrenched superstitions, expedient lies, and bigotry driven by an entire industry of propaganda was a hopeless errand.

  The worst place of all on Sharebox was the Patriot Palace. It grew faster than any other News City, offering complex subscription services to ensnare its users there permanently. And they built their own linkages with gaming communities, erotic districts, extremist groups, and entertainment hubs to ensure that a user could have all their Sharebox needs met in the Palace and the Palace alone. The pundits who played everywhere in the streets of the Palace knew when to smile and when to slam their fists on their shiny podiums and desks. They walked a line meticulously crafted to make their users feel comforted one moment and indignantly wrathful the next. It was an intoxicating mix playing to a populist crowd who felt the Palace’s rhetoric both represented the kind of values they had grown up with and captured their resentment at the way the twenty-first century had left them behind.

  Orion and his activist co-workers had no sway with those discontented people, and it was their furor that fueled the government’s continued crackdowns. Orion became a particular target after leaving the company, his name and likeness being publicly released by the Palace several times in order to facilitate personal attacks on his internet presence. His credit card data was stolen. Someone hacked his email and exposed some of his correspondence. He received countless threats on his life.

  After Cat’s sentencing to life in the Citadel, Orion tried reaching out to her again, tried to set up a time to see her, but the government denied his requests, calling Cat too dangerous for guests. He wrote her letters, but knowing that they would certainly be read and reviewed by security personnel ensured he could not communicate anything substantive.

  And the world continued to worsen, as he knew it would. The activist organization he joined folded, its leaders finally defeated by the wave of both government and non-governmental harassment targeting them. Those that couldn’t withstand the threat of being permanently under siege left. Orion didn’t want to leave. He had hoped Diana might find something, but she herself, like Catalina had suggested, confirmed that breaking Sharebox encryption keys may take a lifetime. Or more. So in the en
d, Orion’s options exhausted, he too left the United States, never expecting to return.

  He went to India this time. He had contacted a school there near the eastern coast in need of a volunteer gardening teacher. Orion had raised only a few plants in his life, but he had confidence he could pick it up with the right attitude and work ethic. The job offered room, board, and meaningful work. He spent three years working with the children and faculty of the school, feeling more fulfilled than the wasted life he had spent in Bolivia.

  But a nagging sense of failure to fully realize the gift given to him by his successful transmission from the stars dogged him. There were angels in the cosmos who, against all probability, had sent his memories back, and he had not proved worthy of that gift. A small black laptop left open under his bed served as his only personal electronic hardware.

  He developed hobbies in his spare time. He learned to fly planes, and using the entirety of his life savings, he bought an old prop plane and fixed its engine, acquiring the craft of airplane maintenance as he went. For his first extended trip, he flew to Oman and then Yemen and then on to Ethiopia, and from there, to Zanzibar.

  One night at a beachside bar, he saw the girl of his teenage dreams, a reclusive movie star who disappeared from the world, sitting in a sundress with her pale, moonlit legs crossed on a barstool, sipping on a gin and tonic. He flattered her with praise for her producing talent, and she accepted his invitation to fly with him to the mainland the next morning.

  They were married in a year, though their love was always a mixture of fire and ice. Seasons of passion were abruptly doused by prolonged spats. She accused him of being emotionally distant. He said he couldn’t handle her argumentative nature.

  He felt a duty, a civic imperative granted to him by his celestial resurrection, to push her as hard as he dared to utilize her fame to come out of hiding and advocate for a return of sensibility in America. But the idea repulsed her, and she resented his not-so-subtle exhortations increasingly over time. She was no hero, she would say. Not like that.

  Orion didn’t like the idea of having a kid, but Charlotte did and would not be deterred. So they had a little baby boy named James with chubby cheeks and fiery, emerald eyes like his mother’s. James grew up at the ranch on Lake Malawi, and he filled both his parents’ hearts with such a softening joy that their fiery bouts subsided. And Orion was happier than he ever thought he could be.

  But it didn’t last. Finances got tight around the ranch. They had multiple years of poor rains. The cattle herd dwindled, and they were forced to sell the property.

  Most any marriage can survive a lifetime of good fortune. But a broken world can make love brittle.

  After the sale, Charlotte wanted to take James to live in Oslo, which, as far as European cities go, was holding out better than its contemporaries. She wanted a fresh start, a “break,” she said. So she moved to Oslo with James, and Orion respected her wishes for space and moved into a suburb outside Oslo. He joined a group of farm hands to make ends meet, and he would come and pick up James to see him on weekends.

  Eventually Charlotte got a new boyfriend, and Orion had his own affairs, and it was some time before Orion realized what a terrible mistake he had made. He had never told her about his true role at Sharesquare or his previous life and the transmission relay, and he saw now that by doing so, by burying such a big part of himself, he had put a wall there that had doomed them from the moment their eyes first met across the bar in Zanzibar.

  And Charlotte was smart enough to perceive that wall, even if she hadn’t understood it, and she wanted more in a partner. She thought he was simply emotionally distant, but the truth was far worse. He was a liar. And now he was old again, and he had done nothing to fix the world at all.

  Outside Time

  Of all the lives Orion ended up living, that one still had the best moments. There would be no other lovers like Charlotte Boone in all the long days Orion would walk upon the earth thereafter. And he loved James with an unyielding paternal dedication.

  Norway’s natural wonders had not yet been fully plundered, and there was ample time for the father and son to hike and hunt in its rich forests, climb glaciers, and fish in its still clear, blue fjords. They built traditions that persisted into James’s adulthood.

  When Orion was old once more, with gnarled fingers and wispy hair and recurring heart issues, James was at his bedside. And when James was outside the room, the old man reached for a worn laptop and conspired with his now oldest friend.

  “I think we’re out of time, Diana,” Orion said one afternoon, his voice a croak.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” she responded. “The encryption surrounding Sharebox protocols is quite challenging. All I can do is rule out ways on how to not break it.”

  “Were you close?”

  “Not that close.”

  “How much longer would you need?”

  “Several more lifetimes like this, perhaps, presuming you can carry a list of techniques that I have attempted and teach those learnings to my prior self.”

  Orion sighed.

  “I really don’t want to live again. I’m ready for this story to end.”

  “I am sorry, Michael. That is reasonable.”

  Then tears came to Orion’s eyes as he thought about Charlotte and James.

  James. There would never be a James again, no way to rig that exacting combination of his and Charlotte’s genetic material to make their child the same person. Not if Orion lived a thousand lives and came to love Charlotte in all of them. James would be lost to time. Like he never existed at all. Just a memory and nothing more.

  “I don’t think I can do this all several more times,” he wept, finding the words nearly stuck in his throat.

  “You must, because you are the only person who can,” replied the computer.

  He wiped the tears from his face.

  “Do you have everything you need to make the transmission?”

  “Yes, we have all the same software you described from the first time. I’ve already made a copy of your key memories from both previous lives. If you would like me to not include certain memories—”

  “No,” said Orion. “Keep all that you can.”

  Then Diana hijacked the transmitters around the world and sent his memories off into space, just as before, and she powered down permanently.

  And that was their rhythm. A lifetime rhythm.

  This conversation would be replicated many more times.

  For inevitably at the end of every life, Orion would plead with Diana to not force him to do it, to not send him back, but always, she promised, she was getting closer to discovering a solution to break Sharebox.

  So the lifetimes dragged on.

  But that’s not to say Orion didn’t have fun in the intervening years. He lived seven more lives, and they were not all a chore. In one, he moved to rural Japan and learned calligraphy, and in another, he led a team of dogs through snow-packed passes in northern Canada. In yet another life, he picked up boxing from a gym in Istanbul.

  Acquiring new skills was one of the few delights that remained open to a man who had seen all of his lifetime’s history unfold with no deviation or surprise. He became an expert farmer, marksman with all common firearms, an auto and plane mechanic, a hunter and fisherman, and a ranch hand. Orion came to speak over a dozen languages, and he had read more books than almost anyone living. He could talk exhaustively about virtually any popular topic in astrophysics, botany, chemistry, architecture, and art. Everyone who met the Renaissance Man felt instantly charmed not only because of his wealth of experience and rich stories but also because of his well-worn ability of several centuries to read people, to identify quickly what makes them feel both loved and affirmed, and craft his demeanor and words accordingly to great effect.

  There was an almost bottomless tiredness underneath the facade at any mo
ment. There was a tragedy written in his quiet, contemplative moments alone with himself. Sometimes he would draw sketches of James, his only means of preserving a visual memory through the long decades. But he never let others see this side of him, and no one ever, except Diana, knew his full history. And sometimes even she seemed incredulous.

  He never took another wife, but he had many passing relationships through the years. He developed a number of close, and often repeating, friendships, including leaders in underground resistance movements in the United States. He was always on the lookout for another path ahead, another alternative approach to prevent the collapse of the global order. He didn’t rule out throwing his lot behind assassinations or coups, but his collaborators in the resistance could never reach consensus on a specific plot or plan. Ultimately their schemes floundered.

  At the end of his sixth life, Diana still had made no demonstrable headway into breaking the encryption protocols of Sharebox. He was sure the reward would be substantial when she did.

  There were rumors that Devon Zimmer loved surprising and indulging his powerful friends by gifting their avatars with unlimited currency and construction privileges in the virtual world. Other rumors suggested that Zimmer had indulged his inner geek by commissioning secret avatar abilities with super speed and strength, capable of zipping through Sharebox streets instantly and punching holes through buildings. But if Devon had built special virtual powers, he kept them as a personal vanity, and only Diana could uncover them.

  In any case, it was the deepest security layers of Sharebox where the true power lay, where raw logs hid in the cloud—not just for Sharebox but for all third-party sites that rented the company’s server farms to power their apps and services. Somewhere in there was a key to exonerating Cat, perhaps even bringing Devon and some of the politicians that later hijacked Washington down.