Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  “Just keep the license on you,” she warned him before she left. “I had to fill out more forms to get it than I would to clear a drone’s flight path twice around the world, so if you lose it I’m not coming to rescue you from the scrapyard.”

  “Who’s going to put me there?” Adam spread his arms and stared down at his body. “Are you calling me a Ken doll?” He raised one forearm to his face and examined it critically, but the skin around his elbow wrinkled with perfect verisimilitude.

  “No, but you talk like a foreigner, and you don’t have a passport. So just … stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The old man had only visited the city once, and with Carlos leading him from nightspot to childhood haunt to some cousin’s apartment like a ricocheting bullet, he’d made no attempt to navigate for himself. But Adam had been disappointed when he’d learned that Beatriz was now living in an entirely different part of town; there’d be no cues along the way, no hooks to bring back other memories of the time.

  Colonia Layco was half an hour’s drive from the hotel. There were more autonomous cars on the street than Adam remembered, but enough electric scooters interspersed among them to keep the traffic from mimicking L.A.’s spookily synchronized throbbing.

  The car dropped him off outside a newish apartment block. Adam entered the antechamber in the lobby and found the intercom.

  “Beatriz, this is Adam.”

  “Welcome! Come on up!”

  He pushed through the swing doors and took the stairs, ascending four flights; it wouldn’t make him any fitter, but old habits died hard. When Beatriz opened the door of her apartment he was prepared for her to flinch, but she just stepped out and embraced him. Maybe the sight of wealthy Californians looking younger than their age had lost its power to shock anyone before she’d even been born.

  She ushered him in, tongue-tied for a moment, perhaps from the need to suppress an urge to ask about his flight, or inquire about his health. She settled, finally, on “How have things been?”

  Her English was infinitely better than his Spanish, so Adam didn’t even try. “Good,” he replied. “I’ve been taking a break from work, so I thought I owed you a visit.” The last time they’d met had been at Carlos’s funeral.

  She led him into the living room and gestured toward a chair, then fetched a tray of pastries and a pot of coffee. Carlos had never found the courage to come out to Adelina, but Beatriz had known his secret long before her mother died. Adam had no idea what details of the old man’s life Carlos might have confided in her, but he’d exhausted all the willing informants who’d known the old man firsthand, and she’d responded so warmly to his emails that he’d had no qualms about attempting to revive their relationship for its own sake.

  “How are the kids?” he asked.

  Beatriz turned and gestured proudly toward a row of photographs on a bookcase behind her. “That’s Pilar at her graduation last year; she started at the hospital six months ago. Rodrigo’s in his final year of engineering.”

  Adam smiled. “Carlos would have been over the moon.”

  “Of course,” Beatriz agreed. “We teased him a lot once he started with the acting, but his heart was always with us. With you, and with us.”

  Adam scanned the photographs and spotted a thirty-something Carlos in a suit, beside a much younger woman in a wedding dress.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” He pointed at the picture.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make it.” He had no memory of Carlos leaving for the wedding, but it must have taken place a year or two before they’d moved to L.A.

  Beatriz tutted. “You would have been welcome, Adam, but I knew how tight things were for you back then. We all knew what you’d done for my mother.”

  Not enough to keep her alive, Adam thought, but that would be a cruel and pointless thing to say. And he hoped that Carlos had spared his sister’s children any of the old man’s poisonous talk of the windfall they’d missed out on.

  Beatriz had her own idea of the wrongs that needed putting right. “Of course she didn’t know, herself. She knew he had a friend who helped him out, but Carlos had to make it sound like you were rich, that you were loaning him the money and it was nothing to you. He should have told her the truth. If she’d thought of you as family, she wouldn’t have refused your help.”

  Adam nodded uncomfortably, unsure just how graciously or otherwise the old man had handed over paycheck after paycheck for a woman who had no idea who he was. “That was a long time ago. I just want to meet your children and hear all your news.”

  “Ah.” Beatriz grimaced apologetically. “I should warn you that Rodrigo’s bringing his boyfriend to lunch.”

  “That’s no problem at all.” What twenty-year-old engineer wouldn’t want to show off the animatronic version of Great Uncle Movie Star’s lover to as many people as possible?

  #

  When Adam got back to the hotel it was late in the afternoon. He messaged Sandra, who replied that she was in a bar downtown having a great time and he was welcome to join her. Adam declined and lay down on the bed. The meal he’d just shared had been the most normal thing he’d experienced since his embodiment. He’d come within a hair’s breadth of convincing himself that there was a place for him here: that he could somehow insert himself into this family and survive on their affection alone, as if this one day’s hospitality and good-natured curiosity could be milked forever.

  As the glow of borrowed domesticity faded, the tug of the past reasserted itself. He had to keep trying to assemble the pieces, as and when he found them. He took out his laptop and searched through archived social media posts, seeing if he could date Beatriz’s wedding. Pictures had a way of getting wildly mislabeled, or grabbed by bots and repurposed at random, so even when he had what looked like independent confirmation from four different guests, he didn’t quite trust the result, and he paid a small fee for access to the Salvadorian government’s records.

  Beatriz had been married on March 4th, 2018. Adam didn’t need to open the spread-sheet he was using to assemble his time-line for the gaps to know that the surrounding period would be sparsely annotated, save for one entry. Nathan Colman had been bludgeoned to death by an intruder on March 10th of the same year.

  Carlos would hardly have flown in for the wedding and left the next day; the family would have expected him to stay for at least a couple of weeks. The old man would have been alone in New York, with no one to observe his comings and goings. He might even have had time to cross the country and return by bus, paying with cash, breaking the trip down into small stages, hitch-hiking here and there, obfuscating the bigger picture as much as possible.

  The dates proved nothing, of course. If Adam had been a juror in a trial with a case this flimsy, he would have laughed the prosecution out of court. He owed the old man the same standard of evidence.

  Then again, in a trial the old man could have stood in the witness box and explained exactly what it was that he’d gone to so much trouble to hide.

  #

  The flight to L.A. wasn’t until six in the evening, but Sandra was too hung-over to leave the hotel, and Adam had made no plans. So they sat in his room watching movies and ordering snacks from the kitchen, while Adam worked up the courage to ask her the question that had kept him awake all night.

  “Is there any way you could get me the specifications for my targeted occlusions?” Adam waited for her response before daring to raise the possibility of payment. If the request was insulting in itself, offering a bribe would only compound the offense.

  “No,” she replied, as unfazed as if he’d wondered aloud whether room service might stretch to shiatsu. “That shit is locked down tight. After last night, it would take me all day to explain homomorphic encryption to you, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: nobody alive can answer that, even if they wanted to.”

  “But I’ve recovered bills from his laptop that mention it,” Adam
protested. “So much for Fort fucking Knox!”

  Sandra shook her head. “That means that he was careless – and I should probably get someone in account generation to rethink their line items – but Loadstone would have held his hand very, very tightly when it came to spelling out the details. Unless he wrote it down in his personal diary, the information doesn’t exist any more.”

  Adam didn’t think that she was lying to him. “There are things I need to know,” he said simply. “He must have honestly believed that I’d be better off without them – but if he’d lived long enough for me to ask him face to face, I know I could have changed his mind.”

  Sandra paused the movie. “Very little software is perfect, least of all when it’s for something as complex as this. If we fail to collect everything we aim to collect …”

  “Then you also fail to block everything you aim to block,” Adam concluded. “Which was probably mentioned somewhere in the fine print of his contract, but I’ve been racking my brain for months without finding a single stone that punched a hole in the sieve.”

  “What if the stones only got through in fragments, but they can still be put together?”

  Adam struggled to interpret this. “Are you telling me to take up repressed memory therapy?”

  “No, but I could get you a beta copy of Stitcher on the quiet.”

  “Stitcher?”

  “It’s a new layer they’ll eventually be offering to every client,” Sandra explained. “It’s in the nature of things, with the current methods, that the side-load will end up with a certain amount of implicit information that’s not in an easily accessible form: thousands of tiny glimpses of memories that were never brought across whole, but which could still be described in detail if you pieced together every partial sighting.”

  “So this software could reassemble the shredded page of a notebook that still holds an impression of what was written on the missing page above?”

  Sandra said, “For someone with a digital brain, you’re about as last-century as they come.”

  Adam gave up trying to harmonize their metaphors. “Will it tell me what I want to know?”

  “I have no idea,” Sandra said bluntly. “Among the fragments bearing implicit information – and there will certainly be thousands of them – it will recognize some unpredictable fraction of their associations, and let you follow the new threads that arise. But I don’t know if that will be enough to tell you anything more than the color of the sweater your mother was wearing on your first day of school.”

  “OK.”

  Sandra started the movie again. “You really should have joined me in the bar last night,” she said. “I told them I had a friend who could drink any Salvadorian under the table, and they were begging for a chance to bet against you.”

  “You’re a sick woman,” Adam chided her. “Maybe next time.”

  10

  Reassembled back in California, Adam took his time deciding whether to make one last, algorithmic attempt to push through the veil. If the truth was that the old man had been a murderer, what good would come of knowing it? Adam had no intention of “confessing” the crime to the authorities, and taking his chances with whatever legal outcome the courts might eventually disgorge. He was not a person; he could not be prosecuted or sued, but Loadstone could be ordered to erase every copy of his software, and municipal authorities instructed to place his body in a hydraulic compactor beside unroadworthy cars and unskyworthy drones.

  But even if he faced no risk of punishment, he doubted that Colman’s relatives would be better off knowing that what they’d always imagined was a burglary gone wrong had actually been a premeditated ambush. It should not be for him to judge their best interests, of course, but the fact remained that he’d be the one making the decision, and for all the horror he felt about the act itself and the harm that had been done, his empathy for the survivors pushed him entirely in the direction of silence.

  So if he did this, it would be for his benefit alone. For the relief of knowing that the old man had simply been a vain, neurotic self-mythologizer who’d tried to leave behind the director’s cut of his life … or for the impetus to disown him completely, to torch his legacy in every way he could and set out on a life of his own.

  #

  Adam asked Sandra to meet him at Caesar’s Diner. He slid a small parcel of cash onto her seat, and she slipped a memory stick into his hand.

  “What do I do with this?” he asked.

  “Just because you can’t see all your ports in the bathroom mirror doesn’t mean they’re not there.” She wrote a sequence of words on a napkin and passed it to Adam; it read like “Jabberwocky” mis-transcribed by someone on very bad drugs. “Four times, and that will take the side of your neck off without putting you to sleep.”

  “Why is that even possible?”

  “You have no idea how many Easter eggs you’re carrying.”

  “And then what?”

  “Plug it in, and it will do the rest. You won’t be paralyzed, you won’t lose consciousness. But it will work best if you lie down in the dark and close your eyes. When you’re done, just pull it out. Working the skin panel back into place might take a minute or two, but once it clicks it will be a waterproof seal again.” She hesitated. “If you can’t get it to click, try wiping the edges of both the panel and the aperture with a clean chamois. Please don’t put machine oil on anything; it won’t help.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  #

  Adam stood in the bathroom and recited the incantation from the napkin, half expecting to see some leering apparition take his place in the mirror as the last syllable escaped his lips. But there was just a gentle pop as the panel on his neck flexed and came loose. He caught it before it fell to the floor and placed it on a clean square of paper towel.

  It was hard to see inside the opening he’d made, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to, but he found the port easily by touch alone. He walked into the bedroom, took the memory stick from the side table, then lay down and dimmed the lights. A part of him felt like an ungrateful son, trespassing on the old man’s privacy, but if he’d wanted to take his secrets to the grave then he should have taken all of his other shit with them.

  Adam pushed the memory stick into place.

  Nothing seemed to have happened, but when he closed his eyes he saw himself kneeling at the edge of the bed in the room down the hall, weeping inconsolably, holding the bedspread to his face. Adam shuddered; it was like being back in the servers, back in the interminable side-loading dream. He followed the thread out into the darkness, for a long time finding nothing but grief, but then he turned and stumbled upon Carlos’s funeral, riotous in its celebration, packed with gray-haired friends from New York and a dozen of Carlos’s relatives, raucously drowning out the studio executives and sync-flashing the paparazzi.

  Adam walked over to the casket and found himself standing beside a hospital bed, clasping just one of those rough familiar hands in both of his own.

  “It’s all right,” Carlos insisted. There wasn’t a trace of fear in his eyes. “All I need is for you to stay strong.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Adam backed away into the darkness and landed on set. He’d thought it was a risky indulgence to put an amateur in even this tiny part, but Carlos had sworn that he wouldn’t take offense if his one and only performance ended up on the cutting room floor. He just wanted a chance to know if it was possible, one way or the other.

  Detective Number Two said, “You’ll need to come with us, ma’am,” then took Gemma Freeman’s trembling arm in his hand as he led her away.

  In the editing suite, Adam addressed Cynthia bluntly. “Tell me if I’m making a fool of myself.”

  “You’re not,” she said. “He’s got a real presence. He’s not going to do Lear, but if he can hit his marks and learn his lines …”

  Adam felt a twinge of disquiet, as if they were tempting fate by asking too much. But maybe it was apt. They’d pr
opelled themselves into this orbit together; neither could have gotten here alone.

  On the day they arrived, they’d talked a total stranger into breaking through a fence and hiking up Mount Lee with them so they could take each other’s photographs beneath the Hollywood sign. Adam could smell the sap from broken foliage on his scratched forearms.

  “Remember this guy,” Carlos told their accomplice proudly. “He’s going to be the next big thing. They already bought his script.”

  “For a pilot,” Adam clarified. “Only for a pilot.”

  He rose up over the hills, watching day turn to night, waiting for an incriminating flicker of déjà vu to prove that he’d been in this city before. But the memories that came to him were all from the movies: L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Drive.

  He flew east, soaring over city lights and blackened deserts, alighting back in their New York apartment, hunched over his computer, pungent with sweat, trying to block out the sound of Carlos haggling with the woman who’d come to buy their air-conditioner. He stared at the screen unhappily, and started removing dialog, shifting as much as he could into stage directions instead.

  She takes his bloodied fist in both hands, shocked and sickened by what he’s done, but she understands—

  The screen went blank. The laptop should have kept working in the black-out, but the battery had been useless for months. Adam picked up a pen and started writing on a sheet of paper: She understands that she pushed him into it – unwittingly, but she still shares the blame.

  He stopped and crumpled the sheet into a ball. Flecks of red light streamed across his vision; he felt as if he’d caught himself trying to leap onto a moving train. But what choice did he have? There was no stopping it, no turning it back, no setting it right. He had to find a way to ride it, or it would destroy them.

  Carlos called out to Adam to come and help carry the air-conditioner down the stairs. Every time they stopped to rest on a darkened landing, the three of them burst out laughing.

  When the woman drove away they stood on the street, waiting for a breeze to shift the humid air. Carlos placed a hand on the back of Adam’s neck. “Are you going to be all right?”