Authors: Guy Haley
Omega Point (45 page)
"When it does become manifest, it is too late to provide anything other than palliative care," the surgeon said. "Had we caught it earlier, a complete removal of healthtech and the cerebral implant would have been recommended, but that is a complex and risky operation, far more so than the installation procedure, as it involves actual ganglionic separation of nerve from machine. If it is successful, the patient has to readjust to the life of the unenhanced, which provides a great shock and many inconveniences. If this is overcome, they suffer from many infirmities, and a greatly shortened lifespan. Most of them suffer profound mental problems." Her accent was soft but still apparent, and Otto wondered which part of Brazil she'd fled. "This is all academic. I am sorry, Mr Klein. It is too late. The best we can do is boost her tech from a base unit, prepare her for the end and make her comfortable. The hospital computer is running her mind now."
"There are other options." Otto looked at the consultant.
"Yes. There is one more option: neural patterning. It needn't be painful; we can gather much of her information from her mentaug."
"Copy her? A post-mortem simulation?"
"Together with her soul-capture data from the mentaug, a pattern taken directly from her mind now would be her entirely, to all intents and purposes. She would have her memories, right up to the moment we moved her across. We would cease life functions in your wife's original body at the same moment we brought the AI unit online, to avoid confrontation between the two. From there, she can operate a variety of sheaths, and interact with the world normally."
"Would it be her?"
Dinez shrugged. "I am not a philosopher. In effect, yes. In actuality? Some say no. This is new technology."
Newer than him. New technology every damn day. "What do we need to do?"
"First," said Dinez, "we need to ask her."
• • • •
"No," she said. She was small, Honour, but she had the heart of a lion, one of the reasons Otto loved her. "Absolutely not. Don't make me into a machine."
Otto gripped his wife's hand "There is no other way. You'll just go to sleep and wake up in a new body and we can carry on like before."
Honour spoke levelly and with force, although her voice was weak. A unit by the bed boosted it, investing her objections with a quality of digital perfection; too smooth, fake, like a damned number. "Don't you see? You
will
lose me, it won't be me! It'll be a copy, not me, a facsimile, a Frankenstein."
will
lose me, it won't be me! It'll be a copy, not me, a facsimile, a Frankenstein."
"It is the only way."
"Don't you dare do it, Otto Klein, don't you dare! If you ever loved me like you say…"
"I still do, I always will." He meant it, he hoped she could see that.
"Then don't soil my memory by having me copied, like a, like a spreadsheet! I'll be dead, and you will be being unfaithful to me with something that is not me. It will only think that it is, something with my memories. Can't you see that that would be horrible? A sex toy, a monster."
"That's not true."
She looked deep into his eyes, her sclera reddened with clots. "Darling Otto, you know it is." She struggled up onto her elbows. Slowly, painfully, she leaned forward, moving the tubes aside like a curtain so she could hold him as best she could. "You don't have to be alone. Find someone new, but don't try to keep me. It is my time, don't you see?" She turned her head from him, painfully. She was getting weaker. "Ms Dinez, how long do I have?"
The consultant moved out of the shadows, where she had been keeping a discreet watch. "I am sorry, but it is not long. We had to amplify the healthtech input and reactivate your mentaug so your husband could talk to you. As the technology is the cause of your condition, your wakefulness is accelerating it. If we put you back under now, you could have another few months, but you will be rarely conscious, and the level of dementia would be such that you will have little idea of who you are."
"And if you let the machines run?"
"Then you have hours, a day at most. I am sorry."
"Don't be, we all have to die. Even you will, Otto, but not for a long time, not for the longest time. Promise me that, won't you, Otto?"
"Yes," he whispered. "I will try."
"I love you," she said. They held each other for a long while, then she pushed him away a little. "Ms Dinez."
"Yes?"
"Let the machines run."
It took, in the end, less time than Otto had expected, and that time galloped by. He told Honour over and over again how much he loved her, whereas she seemed intent on reliving all the things that had made them laugh together. It annoyed him that she did not share his sense of gravity, his anger rising, and that shamed him. He was always so angry. But that was her through and through, contrary to the last, and she scolded him fondly for his tendency to melodrama.
"You know that I love you, and I know that you love me. So why lie in each other's arms crying like babies? I want to remember our life. It has been a good life, a happy one. I would not change a moment of it."
So they did, the good and the bad. The long nights together, their travels. She confessed that she had never liked his mother, and he wasn't surprised. They talked, and they giggled, and they cried. And then the end came, so suddenly, a tremor, a cry from Honour: "I am frightened, Otto, don't let me go."
"Don't be frightened," he said, though he was more scared than he had ever been before, and he had seen things that would test the sanity of most.
"Don't let me go." Her real voice was nearly inaudible, the ghost of a voice, overwritten by the smooth boosting of the hospital machine.
"I won't." And he didn't. A harder shudder passed through her, as if she were about to have a fit. She became limp. Her chest continued to rise and fall, pushed in and out by the machines, but Otto had seen enough of death to know that she was gone. For an hour he held her, then gently he laid her down, smoothed her hair and stepped away.
"We have all of her post-augmentation data, all soul captured, together with impressions of her pre-mentaug organic memories," said Dinez to him, entering quietly through the door. "What shall we do with it?" She hesitated, examined his face, then went on carefully. "I, I am not inclined to lose life, Mr Klein, not when there is a way of preserving it. All lives… they are precious, every one. I have seen a lot of death." Her words hung on the air between them.
"The war?"
"The war."
A lifetime of memories. Every waking minute, every dream, recorded. And within, like a phantom, perhaps an echo of what Honour had been. He considered asking Dinez if she was really proposing that he break the law, and was tempted to say yes, upload her; only for a second, but that was long enough.
He exhaled a shuddery breath that tasted of tears. He tried to sound strong. He had never felt weaker, a weak child in a titan's body. "Archive it," he said.
Dinez raised an elegant eyebrow.
"I will keep the memories; her imprint. But I will not bring her back. It is not what she wanted."
"As you wish," said the surgeon.
• • • •
Otto disengaged the mentaug, and realised with some embarrassment that his face was wet. The barman looked at him as if to ask if he were OK, but the returning glare Otto favoured him with changed his mind.
Otto downed his drink and left.
He'd left the hospital with nothing of Honour but a plastic lattice containing a terabyte of soulless events. It wasn't enough. It never would be.
It was not what he had wished. He wanted her back. If he had had his own way, he would have had her uploaded into a pimsim. In the course of the years to come, he would often wonder if he had done the right thing, putting the temptation there in front of him. That the pimsims he'd met seemed to be as real as the people they once were had made feeling that worse.
If he couldn't have her, at least he had his memories, and the mentaug helped with that. He knew why he ailed when he could simply turn the mem-refresh function off. As painful as it was to wake up to Honour's absence, the mentaug let him see her every night. While he slept, she lived. Ekbaum was wrong, to an extent. It wasn't the trauma of losing her that was fucking him up; he was doing this to himself. He couldn't let go.
Maybe it was time, finally time to lay her to rest.
He ascended the arco in a fast lift, using his and Richards' subscription key. To get to his apartment he had to go past the floor the office had occupied. He stopped off to look. The AllPass got him through the exclusion barriers. That part of the arco was dark, windows black. Light came from far below, glimmering from the active markings of construction drones repairing the damage. Otto stopped at the edge of the blast zone. They had a lot to do. He clambered over buckled floor plating, past main structural beams exposed to the air. Where the bomb had gone off was a radioactive void. The walls and floor glittered with tiny biolights, monotasked nanobots scouring the area for residual radioactives, lights going from green to red once they had retrieved dangerous particles, trooping dutifully off into shielded containers to patiently await disposal.
Otto looked into the blackness of the hole in the arco for a while. Amazing, he thought, that the whole damn thing hadn't come down. But away from where their office had once been the damage was minimal. A testimony to modern construction and woven carbons and, he thought, perhaps to k52's genuine but misguided attempts to work for the human race – he could have employed a much bigger bomb.
Otto doubled back, let himself be screened for contamination. He underwent a nanobot wash at the edge of the construction site, and went back home.
His apartment was neat, as he'd left it several weeks ago, keeping itself clean and biding its time, far away enough to be unaffected by the micro-nuke.
Otto caught a smell of himself. He hadn't changed in days. He decided there and then to have a shower, and then call Ekbaum. Damn the hour – if he was going to force him into his lab, he could lose a little sleep in return.
First there was one thing he needed to do.
He had to say goodbye.
He went into his room and opened the closet. He pressed the security switch to his gunlocker. It slid open.
Honour's memory cube was where it always was, ensconced in a specially cut recess lined with felt, like his guns.
He smiled, wondering what Honour would think of the man who kept his wife in the gun closet.
He hefted the cube in his hand. It was slightly smaller than Honour's fist, opaque and faulted in the way that memory cubes were, mysterious with potent fractals.
It was all he had of her.
That, and the memory of a Jerusalem built of trumpets upon a December night, and a smiling face, happy in the candlelight.
He closed his eyes and pressed the cube to his forehead for a moment, the memory of her strong in his mind. He stood like that for a long time.
He wiped his eye with the back of his hand and pushed the cube gently back into its recess.
He would call Ekbaum. Later.
About the AuthorAn experienced science fiction journalist and critic, Guy worked for SFX magazine as deputy editor, where he still freelances, he edited gaming magazine
White Dwarf
and was the editor of
Death Ray
magazine. He lives in Somerset with his wife, young son, an enormous, evil-tempered Norwegian forest cat called, ironically, Buddy, and an even bigger Malamute dog named Magnus.
Writing the FutureIt seems apposite at the end of this, the ultimate conclusion of the first Richards & Klein investigation, to give thanks to all those who have contributed to my growth as a writer.I must say a big Northern ta to the original team at
SFX Magazine
, Dave Golder especially, who took in an angry young Yorkshireman in 1997 and turned him into something less angry. I'd like also to give a great deal of gratitude to famed editor Jo Fletcher, who gave much-needed commentary and tough love on my earlier works, similarly to John Jarrold and all those agents and fiction magazine editors who sent me back handwritten rejections, not the wished-for "yes", but vital encouragement. To my parents, to whom
Reality 36
was dedicated, I say thanks for my creation, my brothers, my upbringing, all those
books
, and for listening to my stories. More gratitude to the men of the now defunct short story group The Quota, Matt, Gav, my brother Aidan, Jes and Andy, whether long- or short-serving, all of whose comments helped me improve when I became really serious about writing, and to Marco and Lee at Angry Robot, for giving me the chance. In the best twenty-first-century tradition: cheers one and all.Lastly, to my beautiful wife Emma. You're at the heart of my Reality, I love you, and I thank you for, well, everything.
I've heard it said that some writers get sort of uptight when you ask them where their ideas come from. I'm not one of those people. Writing is one giant steaming compost heap of ideas in the headspace. Chuck information, opinions, and whimsy on there, let it mulch down for a few weeks, and spread it upon the fields of thought and pray something pretty or useful comes up out of it. That's the basics, you might decide to add a bit of alcohol to speed the process. I find long dog walks help.
In this manner, the world of Richards & Klein came about. In writing
Reality 36
and
Omega Point
, I tried to create a plausible future reality. Of course, every science fiction writer who attempts this gets it hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. For every Arthur C Clarke's geostationary satellites, there are a hundred pipe smoking misogynists piloting atomic rocket ships. No one saw the mobile phone coming, or even the microchip revolution. Look back at the SF of the past, and it looks suspiciously like the past writ large, and not the future at all.
Reality 36
and
Omega Point
, I tried to create a plausible future reality. Of course, every science fiction writer who attempts this gets it hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. For every Arthur C Clarke's geostationary satellites, there are a hundred pipe smoking misogynists piloting atomic rocket ships. No one saw the mobile phone coming, or even the microchip revolution. Look back at the SF of the past, and it looks suspiciously like the past writ large, and not the future at all.
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