Idempotency (2 page)

“Real soon, now. Real soon.”

“Cool, man.” Jimmy paused and took a few sips of his drink. He had obviously had several already. If Jimmy’s image hadn’t been virtualized, Garrett could have smelled the booze on him a Martian mile away. Instead, somewhere Jimmy lay quiescent on a couch, wired into illegal, unapproved, black-market tech, known as darkTech. The tech would simulate the taste of liquor while dispensing alcohol into his bloodstream. Ocular implants, known as ocImps, would project the nearly perfect real-time images from Mars into Jimmy’s easily fooled brain. Many of the First Seventy-Three were wired into various forms of illegal darkTech. The government looked the other way, ostensibly due to the public reverence they received, but truly due to their relationship with the corporation that held the patents to much of the darkTech, not to mention everlasting life: NanoRegenSoft, or NRS.

Jimmy piped back up, “Haven’t seen you virtTripping in a while. You been busy?”

“Yeah, I guess I have—been doing this and that. Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of realWorld traveling. I was trying to stay out of the virts for a while.”

“Cool, man. Kind of dangerous to be realWorlding it, but cool. Where you been?”

“Eh, nowhere great. Went back and visited some distant family in the Midwest, mostly. I did get over to Europe for a while to see some of the old war sites. Trying to rekindle some lost memories.” Garrett’s smile faded. “I don’t know why I wanted to remember any of that, though.”

“That’s right! I forgot, man. You actually fought in that war, right? Was that the first war?”

“Sure did, Jimmy. Nope, it was the second one.” His atmospheric visored helmet shook slowly. “You know, most of my pre-stemgineering memories are blurry. As if they happened in some flat movie I saw as a child. But, the memories of the war—those memories—those are still as vivid as the knife I used to cut my stem steak with earlier tonight.”

The bottom of the sun had touched the horizon. Both men became quiet while taking in the expansive view. Even after witnessing a Martian sunset dozens of times within the virts, it still served to remind Garrett of how small the human race was. The hue of the lights from the domed encampment near the western edge of the Amazonis Planitia could now be seen, the sun sparkling off the hexagonal panels of the dome. It was the largest of the Martian encampments, one of the first ten domed settlements on the planet; one million people resided there now. A monolithic cruise ship docked next to the dome. The logo of the travel corporation flashed on the side of the ship in bright, neon colors:
EGC, Earthwide Gaming
Corporation
. The entirety of the massive ship and the encampment it was docked upon still appeared merely as a piece of fuzz when compared to the expansive Martian horizon, as if it could be easily flicked into space by God’s forefinger, should he so choose.

“Hey Gar—sorry, man, I really thought at least some of the First Seventy-Three might stop by tonight.” Jimmy had never been comfortable with silence.

Garrett merely grunted a response.

“You know, I saw Ellie just a few months ago. She went Japanese blonde—I didn’t even recognize her. I always preferred her trueElderly look, but I guess that’s out of style now. Hell, that's been out of style for fifty years.”

Garrett perked up, glanced at him, smiled, then looked back toward the horizon while adding, “Glad she’s doing well. Haven’t seen her since the divorce. Well, aside from my two hundredth birthday party last year. But she avoided me there.”

“Oh, shoot man. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up. I always forget it was a divorce and not an expiration. Sucks, dude. She shouldn’t’ve left you.”

Along with Jimmy and Garrett, Ellie had been part of the initial trials for both stemgineering breakthroughs (organ creation and cell regeneration). Ellie was the youngest of the group; she had been twelve during those initial organ trials. Her heart was failing, and the scientists had grown her a new one. Garrett had been one hundred years old during those trials, and they hadn’t spoken much, but the elder Garrett had often checked in on the little girl, rolling his walker into her room to bring her small gifts in an effort to comfort her during the painful surgeries.

Twenty years later the same group was back together, taking part in the stemgineering 2.0 cell regeneration trials. Ellie was now an attractive woman of thirty-two, and Garrett was an impossibly old man with cracked and bloodied skin and a body that could barely function in a mechanized-assisted chair. As the NanoRegenSoft cell regeneration trials got underway, Ellie would bring Garrett flowers each week: a small token of her appreciation toward his largesse when she had been a child. At first, Garrett didn’t have the ability to speak his appreciation, but as the weeks progressed, the NRS trials elicited incredible results. Garrett began to speak, to move, to see, to hear, and even to walk again. Eventually, his appearance began to reverse; he started to resemble the attractive man he had once been, back when wars were still fought by men instead of bytes. He was average height, muscular, and had a large frame around his shoulders with smaller legs and sandy brown hair to top him off.

As Garrett grew younger, Ellie grew fonder. They shared a strange bond, one that few humans could relate to. Marriage followed one year after their NRS trials ended. Garrett loved her deeply and, he supposed, she had loved him, too. But time and age—or the lack thereof—changes people. Given the potential of an infinite life, Ellie had decided she wanted to live as many experiences as possible. Those infinite possibilities were impossibly limited while married to Garrett. He became a burden to her, and she left him with a simple, prerecorded two-minute vid message.

Garrett snapped back to the present. “It’s okay, Jimmy. I don’t blame her. Who wouldn’t get bored of someone if you had to live with them forever?”

“Hey!” Jimmy quickly changed the subject. “I heard Randy nearly bit it in the realWorld!” Randy Dansby was another of the First Seventy-Three trueElderly. “The rumor is . . .” Jimmy’s voice lowered an octave. “The rumor is that NRS tried some experimental memory backup-and-restore procedure they’ve been tinkering with for a while now. They’ve been keeping these experimental backups on us for just this kind of thing. You know—recording everything we see and do in our ocImps. I dunno, man. That’s
scary shit
.” Jimmy whistled and shook his head. “I ain’t chancin’ that shit, man, I’ll tell you what! No way. Who knows what we’d be coming back like; too much of our trueElderly past is not in memory backup. I heard through a virt friend that Randy’s totally scrambled now. Not the same guy."

Jimmy’s voice dropped another register to reflect the gravity of the issue. “This guy says that he knows Randy Dansby ’cause he was Randy’s ex-five-year-wife’s brother. But it was just a five-year marriage commit, so I never met this girl, so I dunno how reputable this dude’s information is . . . But, anyway, so this guy, he says Randy babbles semi-understandable nonsense most of the time, but if pressed for information from
before
his memory backups started, he starts
speaking in tongues
; basically anything before NRS started keeping those memory backups on us. Guess that’d be about fifty years ago now, right? Makes me superjealous of the foreverYoung.”

Garrett nodded silently without turning toward Jimmy. The pair sat on a concrete bench atop the hill. Red dirt tickled at their feet. A wind kicked up some dust from below the hill’s lip, and the cloud swept upward and danced around the two men. Through his own ocular implants, Garrett watched the dust fly through the virtual projection of his friend Jimmy—a drunken ghost atop a Martian mountain. Had he been less distracted, Jimmy might have noticed the dust bouncing off of Garrett’s atmospheric suit.

Jimmy continued: “Right. And like I said, even the backups from present days don’t really work. There are these rare times where Randy musters the words to talk about something from his past, but he’ll start mixing his own memories with other people, like friends or family, but sometimes just random people. He mixes things up with movies he’s seen, or famous people’s lives.” Jimmy paused to catch his breath; it didn’t take long. “So this guy tells me this one story where Randy actually started talking about how he was the president of some multinational corporation. Randy was dead-set convinced that he had hired a small army of employees to do his bidding. But Randy
didn’t even stop there. At this point in the story he starts getting confused with some famous flat movie of the time, and he goes on to describe how he single-handedly battled some alien in the middle of the jungle, while covered in mud with only a knife and a bandana!"

Jimmy could contain himself no longer and he broke out into a capricious combination of chortles, snorts, and giggles. In between, he exclaimed: "Randy the action hero! Can you
imagine
that? Randy Dansby as a
CEO
action hero?”

Garrett smiled wanly. He nodded and turned in Jimmy's direction. He liked Jimmy and didn't want to be rude, but he was beginning to wish he had celebrated alone tonight. At least then he could have rationalized his loneliness as a choice rather than whatever this night was turning out to be. He mindlessly checked his corpNet status; he was correctly listed as available. He ignored several new-message notifications to the right of his periphery; meaningless automated birthday wishes, no doubt. He then checked his darkNet status and noted that the standing invitation to join him on the Olympus Mons darkVirt for his “Bicentennial Plus One Birthday Extravaganza” was still correctly posted.

Garrett had, of course, heard rumors and innuendo surrounding their old friend Randy Dansby within the unfiltered corners of unlicensed darkNets, where anonymous users mingled with surreptitious data. There was no news of Randy’s plight on the corpNets—unsurprising, given how many filters corpNet data traveled through; NRS would gobble that data up in a heartbeat. The trueElderly were provided less mass respect as time blurred their relevance, but in the stemgineering interest groups of the darkNets, news of a failed experimental backup-and-restore procedure on a trueElderly spread like wildfire. In the greater field of extended life engineering, the idea of backing up memory through stem cells specifically engineered to have logic, and transmitting that data back into a brain grown in a lab, was hailed as the final goal in procuring never-ending life for the human race. The seemingly unobtainable third generation of stemgineering, the Holy Grail of infinite life.

Many of the population’s upper class were now taking part in hourly—if not real-time—backups by companies purporting to have discovered a way to copy memories, with the promise of one day restoring those memories when the technology became available. But Garrett and the technologists across the darkNets knew better: These backups were mere snake oil, akin to the popular fad of freezing bodies immediately after death in the early twenty-first century. The prevailing theory was that NRS was the only company close to cracking the code to memory duplication. And even if they could duplicate memories, there remained serious doubt in the darkNets as to whether NRS would be able to restore those memories into a newly minted mind.

Garrett had spoken to Randy himself in realWorld after the hubbub had died down a bit. And though not all of the hearsay was accurate, the facts that were misrepresented had generally been done so in a positive light. Randy's situation was not a good one. But Randy didn't—rather, couldn't—comprehend this. He was scrambled beyond comprehension. The backup-and-restore procedure had clearly failed.

“I dunno, Jimmy. What’s the point, anyway? What’s so good about living forever? I feel like . . .” Garrett paused, he tilted his head upward to look at the stars through the reflective visor in his helmet. “I feel like maybe we’re losing something we’re not supposed to lose.”

Jimmy squinted dubiously. “Okay. Uh, what does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess I mean that I’ve seen horrible images of death in real life—in war—that I can never unsee, no matter how much I wish I could. And yet, people see similar images now while playing virt war games and they don’t even blink. But I sure blinked when my friends died. And I’d like to believe they died for
something
. So, I guess what I’m saying is: If people died for something back then, then what
something
are we going to miss out on in the future when people stop dying? Or did my friends in the war die for nothing?”

“Wow. Buzzkill, buddy. You’re starting to sound like some bioligious protestor. I don’t know that I follow. I, for one, want to be alive forever. What’s not to like? Especially these days? I can drink and not get hung over; I can screw fifty virtual girls tonight and another hundred tomorrow; I could fly over this landscape like I’m
goddam
Superman on
Mars! How is this
not
heaven? What else could you ask for? What
can’t
we have now?”

“Death. We can’t have death.”

Jimmy blinked hard, then shook his head. He started to speak, but Garrett cut him off. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’m just an old man prattling nonsense on my birthday. I don’t mean to bring you down. Guess I’m just getting a little philosophical in my old age. Look—I’m going to get out of here soon. We should meet up in a few months, maybe go virtTripping in Vegas? I hear there a few casinos that are catering to virtTrippers now.”

Jimmy’s smile was quick to reappear. “Yeah, cool, man. That sounds great. And hey, don’t be so down. You’ve got friends; you’ve got me. I’m gonna head out, log out back to realWorld and order some food . . . You going to be all right?”

“Yeah man, ’course.” Garrett’s helmet pivoted, allowing him to catch Jimmy’s gaze through his reflective visor. “Hey, do me a favor?”

Jimmy’s eyebrows raised up in acceptance.

“If you run into Ellie again, tell her . . . Aw damn, I dunno, tell her . . . tell her that I loved her more than life.”

Jimmy looked confused. “Okay. Cool, man, whatever you say.”

“Just promise me you’ll tell her that, okay?” Garrett’s helmet turned back to the horizon.