The Soul Consortium (2 page)

Everyone except me.

The walk to the genoplant took twenty standard minutes, the process of gene infusion a little less than three, and my sauntering through gray corridors to the fifty-klik observation dome another twenty. I run a hand along the back of my favorite seat, ready to watch the cosmos perform. Like me, the universe will never die.

I sink into the body-molded chair, and the vast crystalline walls of the sphere surrounding me fade from view like melting ice. Beyond the invisible walls an eternity as fathomless, dark, and empty as my life is revealed. Although that emptiness threatens to swallow the small part of me that remains, I am still drawn by it, still awed by its patient beauty as it waits for the next phase of its eternal evolution. Perhaps it’s because I think of the universe as my echo that I subject myself to this for the third time. I too keep hoping for something new, some sign that there is more to life than … life.

A spark ignites in the distance like a glinting eye opening in the darkness. The big bang it was once called. An anarchy of dazzling particles warring with each other to bring poetry out of chaos. Gluons, photons, antiporyons, demi-praxons expanding in one glorious blink to fill the waiting void. I drink that moment in as if tasting a breath of mountain air after a decade of imprisonment in a Ceti-9 sewer. Cold adrenaline lifts me from my seat, and my eyes swell with the sudden sweet emotion of it all as I spread my arms. How could I want to leave this?

How could they?

But I know this euphoria is only a grain of sand in a desert of apathy. Just like the pearl of light at the gates of death, disappointment will follow.

I would smile at the irony of my thoughts if there was someone real to share the joke. I’m watching the universe on the brink of rebirth, and at such a monumental event … I am restless. Irritated and dissatisfied, as if a maggot had infiltrated some hidden fold of my brain to squirm there unnoticed. But I’m not really all that different from those who came before me. They grew tired of continual existence too and chose to brave the final barrier—the one my teacher told me had to come eventually. But I am still not ready; I have to know there’s something beyond.

“Let there be light!” Qod’s voice fills the sphere like thunder.

After my initial shock, I sigh, irritated by the intrusion. “Most amusing. Next time would you mind adding some music?”

Before the birth of this third universe she made a similar comment. I watched the final days of the second cycle several trillion years ago. Most of the universe was cold by then, but I was privileged to see one of the few remaining areas collapse into a supermassive black hole. I fell to my knees, cowering at the incredible violence of it as energy and matter screamed its way to annihilation, and Qod quoted T.S. Eliot’s final stanza of “The Hollow Men.”

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Back then I was grateful for the remark; it pacified my terror. Today her attempt at humor grates me.

“Exit.”

A passage opens in the darkness, inviting me to leave the Observation Sphere.

I walk slowly away from the light and head to the labyrinthine bowels of the Soul Consortium. Time for change.

T
he Soul Consortium is an electronic tomb: a shrine to all the human lives who ever lived throughout the span of the universe’s existence. Every life is archived here—from the lowest Neanderthal child who died after two days of exposure to the flamboyant Zad Neibrum XVI who arguably had the fullest, most enjoyable, and most productive life in his twenty-thousand-year journey. The lives are stored as trillions of organized photons within vast Soul Spheres categorized for the perusal of anyone with an inclination to share their experience.

I have spent most of my own life walking these spheres, browsing the dead, searching for the ultimate experience. There is something about the human condition that leaves one continually lacking—an evolutionary curse driving us to forever want more, to always seek new things. I strive for happiness, knowing it is the water that trickles through my fingers when I grasp for it—it can never be contained, only fleetingly appreciated, and when drained away, all that is left is the wetness of skin reminding me of a brief pleasure. Even when I live the lives of the happiest people on record, this yearning stays with me, as though I am haunted by my own mourning ghost.

I am not the man I was.

The time has come to break the addiction—to stop searching for the ultimate thrill and begin my pilgrimage for the definitive answer. Qod knows I have delayed this too long. She taunts me when I wake from each life, asking me if I have found what I’m looking for, seemingly knowing I never will until I make the final journey beyond the veil. But what does she know? She is just a machine: the last AI—the only survivor from the Techno-Purge at the end of the universe’s first cycle. She endured because she is unreachable, hiding within the tiniest gaps of quantum space.

But Qod has been my only genuine companion through the long years. I don’t know if she really feels anything for me, but she stays anyway.

“I want to see something new,” I tell her as I stop at the end of the corridor, my hand resting against the door.

“You don’t want to enter the Bliss Sphere?”

“No.” My hand drops from the cool metal.

“Why?”

“I … I haven’t found …” I stare at the floor.

“Salem?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know
what
I’m looking for anymore. I just know it isn’t in there.”

“Why so sad? Three hundred and twenty thousand billion years pass, and you have an epiphany. Surely you should be elated.”

“Hardly. An epiphany is exactly what I
haven’t
had. Not my own, anyway … Has it really been that long?”

“You could think of it as one hundred and fifty-nine million lives you’ve lived if you prefer. Does that sound more appealing?”

The thought nauseates me. “So many.”

“Indeed.”

“What am I still doing here? The others left centuries ago.”

“Is that a real question?”

“No.” I look back at the door, resisting the urge to enter. It’s safe in there. Every life filed in the Bliss Sphere has been traveled countless times by countless people before me, bringing them exquisite pleasure on every occasion.

The happiest people of history were easy for Qod to identify—analysis of the left prefrontal cortex indicated who the best candidates were, and those with low readings on the right cortex were excluded from consideration. The best result was a child by the name of Salomi Deya who was born with a defect that caused a permanently stimulated pleasure center, but she lived for only twelve years. I lived as Salomi seventy times, but nothing gave me greater pleasure than experiencing the life of Frederick Ruchard, an Old Earth fourteenth-century Buddhist monk who mastered the art of meditation. I became Frederick over eight hundred times before deciding to move on.

“You are sure you won’t enter the Bliss Sphere?”

“Talk to me about some of the other spheres. List them for me.”

“Any particular order? What do you have in mind?”

“Death. I want to know about death.”

“Recordings end at the point of death. I cannot help you.”

Even after trillions of years, some things never broke free from the list of impossibilities. Inverse time travel was one, and transdimensional stabilization was another, but most unfortunately, looking beyond death was at the top.

“Then I need to find people who might have known. Something that slipped through, pseudoscience, obsession, anything at all. List me some sphere categories at random—categories that might be related.”

“IQ Icons, Suffering Servants, World Leaders, Love Legends, Aberrations, Spiritual Activists, Maniacs—”

“Wait! What did you say?”

“Maniacs.”

“No, before that and before Spiritual Activists, did you say Aberrations?”

“I did, yes.”

“I’ve never heard of that category before.”

“That’s because no aberrations existed before you entered the last life.”

I look around, wishing for the thousandth time there was a face to the voice that spoke to me. Then I realize the significance of what she said. “How can there suddenly be aberrations? What are they?”

“I began inspecting the algorithms used by the Calibration Sphere while you were in the WOOM. The Codex protocols don’t allow me to examine the souls themselves, but I saw ways in which to improve the calibration checks, just to make sure routine maintenance wasn’t missing any discrepancies within the soul recording. It seems I was right—”

“You were checking the checkers?” I smile despite myself. “Could the mighty Qod actually be … bored?”

“—because during the third universal cycle, inconsistencies, some greater than others, have emerged in the patterns of many souls.” There is no humor in her voice this time.

I wait a moment, hoping she will elaborate, but she doesn’t. “Inconsistencies? Explain. Is it data corruption or degradation?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

No reply.

“You don’t know? Seriously?”

“Analysis is incomplete. And as I said, the Codex protocols don’t allow me to examine the data myself. If you—”

“I want to go there.”

“My analysis is incomplete. The aberrations might be dangerous, Salem. Please reconsider.”

All at once, as the thought of danger—
real
danger—presents itself, I feel a chill of excitement. Until now I have drifted from life to life, walking through the memories of multitudes, knowing deep down I was safe, my psyche buried within, saying, “It will never happen to me.” But this will be different. “I said I want to go there.”

“Very well. Would you like to walk?”

“Yes, and can you brief me on the lives with the ten most significant aberrations as we go? I used to like the surprise in the Bliss Sphere, but I’d prefer to know what I’m getting into with these.”

“Processing.”

T
he new sphere opens before me. It looks much like the Bliss Sphere, but instead of the soothing pulse of aquamarine, a naked glare, like a nova shining through emerald glass, bathes me as I step inside. I shield my eyes until they adjust. The smooth walls glitter like the inside of a geode; each glint of light is the electron pulse of a human ghost waiting to tell me their story, and I survey them, wondering which of these I would become intimately familiar with in the next few minutes.

“Have you made your choice, Salem?”

Qod gave me the summaries by the time I reached the sphere, but I already made up my mind before she reached number five. “Yes. Select subject 5.64983E+30, Orson Roth.”

“Interesting. Why him?”

“Anyone with an obsession that powerful must surely see something there that I haven’t, don’t you think?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I have to start somewhere,” I say, stepping through the oval door. “And I want to look inside people nobody else would ever consider. Remember the others?” I twirl my hand in explanation. “They were searching for the answer in all the obvious people—Jesus Christ, Albert Einstein, Nietzsche, Shaphad Seth, theologians, scientists, visionaries, and philosophers through all history. And what did they find, hmm? Nothing! But I will.”

“In men like this?”

“As I said, it’s a start. I’ve made my choice.”

Subject 5.64983E+30: Select.

Subject 5.64983E+30: Aberration detected.

Subject 5.64983E+30: Override authorized—ID Salem Ben.

Subject 5.64983E+30: Activate. Immersion commences in three minutes.

The smell of freshly cycled oxygen perfumed with summer jasmine fills my nostrils as the sphere welcomes me, but I sense disapproval in Qod’s silence that nullifies its pleasure. She rarely stays quiet for long, though. The loneliness would be unbearable if she did.

“Need I remind you,” she lectures me, “that once you have been immersed you will not be able to withdraw until the moment of the subject’s death. Protocol forces me to dictate that whatever you experience, however terrible, you will have to endure it without possibility of extraction. You will know each and every moment as if it were your own, and until it’s over, you will have no suspicion at all that you are not that person. Any lasting memory of trauma …”

Qod’s redundant legal chatter echoes in my peripheral thoughts as I wait. Ironic that I should feel such impatience after being alive so long. Of course there is no need for her to remind me. Doesn’t she know how many lives I’ve lived? Does she somehow forget that the extended human brain can retain and recall any moment from the past with instant and precise clarity? Perhaps I do need reminding, though. I have never known of an aberration before today; I have no idea what could be waiting for me once I enter the recorded life of Orson Roth. The thought prompts another ripple of enticing fear across my skin—better this than going back to the Bliss Sphere.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” I smile. “Plug me in.”

“Remember. I warned you.”

“I’m incapable of forgetting, or don’t you remember?” I reply flatly.

“What
I
remember is that there are some things you
choose
to forget. If this goes wrong, I’ll make sure this isn’t one of them.”

Suspended twenty feet above by invisible fields of force, the machine waits for me like the shiny wet cocoon of an enormous insect. The wheeze of miniature hydraulics and the hiss of ancient gravity valves echo around the sphere as the machine makes its preparations for my long stay, but to me it sounds like Qod is sighing with resignation over my decision.

A flow of silver glides down to me from the curved walls, microscopically thin fibers carrying me gently upward to the center of the sphere, as if my timeless companion were gathering me up in her hair to hold me against her breast. The tiny fibers dig through my flesh, penetrating my nerves, weaving through the hills and valleys of my brain as I am pulled into the WOOM. Energized with a new sense of adventure, I ponder a moment on who eliminated the human body’s need for pain, replacing it with a simple internal alarm mechanism. But pain is undoubtedly a sensation I will be reacquainted with in the next few minutes as I emerge wet and gasping from between the thighs of my new mother.