Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Page 10

  The idea of reduction is fairly simple. Human adults may have as many as 500 trillion synaptic connections in their brains; a brainy three-year-old may have as many as a quadrillion. Given the fact that electronic circuits are more than a million times faster than neural connections, and that quantum circuits are exponentially faster than electronic ones, once we learned how to make quantum computers that safely exceeded a quadrillion calculations per second, we started thinking seriously about moving our minds out of our bodies and into these hard drives. And once we had computers that performed 20 quadrillion calculations per second, it was inevitable that the early adapters would try. Those early adapters all died, but they paved the way for the rest of us to be immortal via migration.

  Sort of. The fact is that neural circuits are neither electronic nor quantum circuits. A computer does not—yet!—create pathways based on what you experience or how you feel about that experience. You can have a circuit ready and waiting to receive an already-created connection, but that's a matter of transference, not generation. We don't know yet how we can use our computers to grow a mind, to allow migrated consciousnesses to expand and increase into the larger potential of their quantum circuitry. All we can do right now is move them and store them. Once they arrive, they become static, incapable of further development: in a way, neither alive nor dead.

  They're working on it. There are at least a half-dozen new models in clinical trials right now that hold the promise of better allowing migrated minds to continue to grow post-migration. Eventually someone will get it right. And there are triple the amounts of money being invested in creating sustainable robotic bodies for the reduced. I'm sure that someday we'll be fully replicable, recoverable, both in mind and body, that we will all live in a Kurzweilian world of boundless spiritual machines. I did say Kurzweilian, right, and not Orwellian?

  My father was taking well to his reduction lessons. He was a natural; it almost seemed as if he would be better off as a mind in a monstrance than he'd ever been as a human. It took him less than a day—less than a day!—to gain command over his prosthetic leg, the one they attached after his first amputation. Dr Trebuchet was very excited; she told my father that progress like that was worthy of a medical journal. And that just set him off on a histrionic flight of ego from which I knew he would never recover: “You know how I did it?” he said to Dr Trebuchet and her retinue of sycophantic surgeons-in-waiting, who wrote down every word he said, in case he happened upon some insight indeed worthy of a medical journal, “I just took a deep breath and said to myself, ‘Okay, Timmy-boy, no more fooling around. You've got to get in there and spread like the plague! Because if you don't, buddy-boy, then instead of that beautiful monstrance your son bought you, it's just a vase full of ashes and sayonara!'” And he smiled and looked around and, when he didn't get the laugh he was expecting, repeated, “Like the goddamn bubonic plague!"

  Whether or not it was funny, it worked for him. He spread like the plague through each new prosthetic limb—left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, torso. The torso they connected in stages, organ by organ: they started, ceremoniously, by excising the cancerous pancreas; then they removed his bladder, colon, rectum, then up through the middle organs like the liver and kidneys left and right, pulling his small intestines out like a child gloriously unraveling a ball of yarn; and then, following the line up the gastrointestinal tract, they removed his esophagus, lung one and lung two, and then, on a day like any other, his heart. Each time, a humming spherical machine took the organ's place. They left the spine intact, feeding it into the neck hole of the somatum where it lay in a special sleeve, preserved in a green chemical bath—there it lay waiting to be destroyed along with the brain, should migration succeed.

  At each stage, my father took to his new body with gusto, claimed each new Magic 8-Ball organ as his own. But he was even better at the VR exercises that would prepare him to live without any kind of body at all. He began, back when they hadn't yet removed any limbs, by wearing an inverted spaghetti-strainer of a hat on his head and moving a cursor on a screen with his thoughts. But monkeys have been doing that for decades: in the next lesson, he was asked to turn the cursor into a blossoming flower with just the power of his mind. That leap, apparently, was one of the most difficult that migration patients had to make. Many people never learn to change the cursor into anything but a cursor; some people get so far as to change its color; some people may make a flower, but not a very realistic one, only one that looks blocky, pixilated, unreal and ultimately untenable for a sustained disembodied existence; some people make cars or ships or suns or cats or lovers or anything but what they were asked to, a simple flower. Some people, frustrated, defeated, explode the cursor in the attempt. They are dismissed from the program immediately.

  Dad made a bouquet of roses for Dr Trebuchet. When he did, the whole room gasped appreciatively, and Dr Trebuchet turned to me and asked, “Well, Mr Otero, why haven't you gotten me flowers yet?” which was good for a laugh from those toadies. Pro forma, she asked my father to follow the instructions and make a single flower—which he did with ease—but everyone knew after that little show that Mr Timothy Fagin was going to be a star student. And he lived up to every expectation: he could create a tromp l'oeil likeness of himself on screen, or exaggerate the features on a whim, and there were plenty of tummy-tucking and pec-inflating and penis-enlargement jokes to go around. He spent months learning how to shrink or grow his likeness, or teleport it around the screen, or even duplicate himself, two, three, ten, fifty, an infinite regression of onscreen fathers. That was my least favorite exercise.

  And he also learned how to alter the program itself, so that his entire existence became subject to his whims. Any period in history, or any blend of history, or any place he could imagine, possible or not in a world governed by physics and time, he could now create, inhabit, master. All things considered, this was a much better deal for my father than your typical hereafter could ever be. To get into heaven, after all, you have to be a good. Or at least confess your sins.

  * * * *

  I was trying to sound nasty to cover up other things, but Travis saw right through me. He gave my knee an ironic squeeze and, with a gentle, almost oneiric voice, said, “It's not like you ever loved him."

  We looked at each other. Then I humphed. And said, “True. But what kills me is I never really got a chance to hate him."

  We both laughed a little at that. And then, on the heels of that merry-go-sorry joke, Travis, looking to change the subject and lighten the mood, perked up and said, “I think Dr Trebuchet likes you."

  "I like her too,” I said charily. “She's a very good doctor."

  "No. I mean she likes you."

  "Oh grow up."

  "I'm serious! I've seen the way her eyes linger over you, how she's always pressing her card into your hand. You must have fifty of her business cards by now."

  "She's just being professional. And in her line of work, being a nice, approachable person comes with the job."

  The look of consternation on Travis's face reminded me of a braying donkey: all teeth and insult. “Are you insane? Have you ever even met a doctor? They're jerks! They're scientists! They don't give a shit about you as a person. You're like a side of beef to them. Unless they like you."

  "Sorry Travis, but you're way off on this one. She's just going through the motions: asking me how I am, how I'm holding up during this very difficult time—hell, she even offered to give me a free physical once all this was over."

  Travis's jaw dropped like a sabotaged elevator. “You are the stupidest man I've ever met in my entire life. Really. The absolute stupidest. She is a surgeon! She is one of the premiere experts on consciousness migration in the entire world. She does not give physicals! My God man. Do you need her to do a pole-dance or something before you ask her out?"

  "That'd be nice. Got a stripper pole around here somewhere?"

  "Yes. In the doctors’ lounge. They all strip for each other betwe
en saving peoples’ lives."

  We both laughed. When we were done laughing, we fell silent for a few moments before I asked, “So you think she really likes me?"

  "Yeah, I do."

  "Is she available?"

  "She's always available. She's more stray than I am."

  I just shook my head and smiled. “What do you think, Travis? Wouldn't it be better if everyone was exvisible? No more lies, no more head-games, no more loves lost or misunderstood fathers. We'd all just know the truth. Act on true information. Maybe everyone should go get reduced, right now."

  Travis patted my back. “Yeah, that'd be nice. But people wouldn't go for it. People like to be invisible."

  "There'd be less wars if we were all exvisible."

  "Hmm. I don't know. There might be more."

  "Well, at least they'd be fought for the right reasons."

  "Now you're just reaching."

  "No I'm not! Think about it. What would be lost if we just knew everything about what everyone was thinking and feeling?"

  Travis surprised me with the seriousness of his response. “Mystery."

  I didn't miss a beat: “Mystery is overrated."

  "So is truth."

  We laughed again. “Yeah, I think I'm coming to believe that. But if both mystery and truth are overrated, what's left to us?"

  Travis was just about to answer with some no doubt witty rejoinder when I saw his eyes catch sight of something. I followed them to a phalanx of lab coats heading toward us. Leading them was Dr Trebuchet; in her hands, she held the kelly-green, Celtic-knotted monstrance my father had chosen as his final resting place. She held it aloft like Galahad marching into Camelot, bearing the Holy Grail for his king.

  Travis and I both stood. The phalanx stopped before us, and, after a few seconds of ceremonious silence, Dr Trebuchet, beaming, beautiful, and suddenly on my sexual radar, said, “Mr Otero, the migration was a complete success. It is my great honor to present to you the new Mr Timothy Fagin."

  I did not refuse to take it from her. I did not smash it on the ground. I did not chuck it in the Hudson or shatter it with a hammer or take a chainsaw to it or just refuse to plug it in and let the back-up battery expire. I truly did not want to love this man, but this time it didn't matter what I wanted. I took my father home and, little by little, I got to know him.

  Copyright © 2007 Carlos Hernandez

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  DEER FLIGHT—Aliette de Bodard

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Stefan Olsen

  * * * *

  Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, France, where she works as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time she writes speculative fiction inspired by her love of history and mythology. Her short stories have sold to Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future and other publications (visit her website at aliettedebodard.com for more information). ‘Deer Flight’ was inspired by the numerous fairy tales Aliette read during her childhood.

  * * * *

  For fifteen years after his wife found her doe-skin under the floorboards and ran away, Lesper waited for her to come back. He would go from pool to pool in the dark places of the forest, and watch the deer herds gather, hoping one of them would turn human. Hoping it would be her, smiling at him, telling him she had been wrong to return to the forest. He knew it was foolishness, but still he waited.

  On the third day of the fifteenth year, he found a lone doe-girl in human shape near the edge of the forest, slumped against a tree. She was breathing hard, and her discarded doe-skin lay at her feet.

  She was not Tarra. For a while he did not know what to say. He had hoped, so much, that it might be his wife, but the girl before him was far younger. And so different.

  She raised her eyes, and saw him. Huge almond eyes bored into him as if searching his soul. She was utterly naked; her human skin was brown, gleaming with russet reflections, and he knew it would be soft and pliant under his fingers, knew she would smell musky, of the herd, and of the earth with its mantle of fallen leaves.

  "Lesper,” she said. “Sanctuary—I claim sanctuary."

  "From whom?” he asked, still trying to recover from the shock of seeing one of her kind.

  Her mouth stretched in a bitter smile. “Hunters. I have shaken them off, for now.” She focused on him for the first time. “I am sorry for your loss."

  He started to say he had not lost anything, and then it occurred to him she had known his name, and where his house was. “What do you mean?” he asked. But her head had fallen back against the trunk, and her chest barely moved.

  He carried her to his house, through the last trees of the forest. Her doe-skin lay on his shoulder, tingling with magic. She weighed little, a thing of dappled light and endless afternoons by the pool. The horn bracelets on her arms were cold at first, and then warmed against his skin. Her legs were crisscrossed with red weals. Running through brambles, he guessed, and wondered how long they had before the hunters, whoever they were, caught up with them.

  No use worrying. His wife had fled, and years at the edge of the forest had dulled his magic. Lesper was as defenceless as the girl he had in his arms, a greying wizard with little magic of his own, and no knowledge of weapons.

  Once in his house, he laid her on the bed, her doe-skin by her side. Then he rummaged through the chests, and found his old book of magic. He opened it to a healing spell, stared at the faded, alien words on the page. They tasted sour in his mouth as he pronounced them: it took him three tries before he managed to get the spell to work.

  Some wizard, he thought, wryly amused, watching the lacerations on the legs knit together. Wustan, his former liege, would have laughed at such a feeble healing. He felt light-headed, as if his own veins were open, pouring blood on the floor. A healing always took its toll out of the wizard's strength, but his unfamiliarity with the spell meant it was much worse than usual.

  He reached, shakily, for a chair, pulled it near the bed, and waited.

  After a while she opened her eyes. He saw her tense at the unfamiliarity of the surroundings. Her whole body straightened as if she wanted to wrap the doe-skin around her, shape-change into a doe, and leap back into the forest.

  "Lesper,” she said, at last, sinking back against the pillow.

  "You are safe,” he said. “For now."

  She nodded. “My name is Naraya. I owe you—"

  "Nothing,” he said. “Just tell me who they are, and why they hunt you. And why you should share my loss."

  Her eyes grew distant, as if she were remembering the depths of the forest, and the herd she had left behind. “They came upon us at dawn. Near the pool where we take off our skins and bathe. We scattered—we thought if we went far enough into the forest we would lose them. I ran—it hurt so much, my legs were burning, I could not think of anything else but escape. I—” The eyes focused on him again. “Lesper, I'm sorry. They killed Tarra."

  Her grief, her weariness, were audible. “Why?” he asked.

  "I don't know. I don't have answers. I only saw hounds, and horsemen, coming into our secret place as if all the wards meant nothing to them."

  "And Tarra?"

  Her face froze, as if she were seeking words of comfort. “Tarra—Tarra wanted to come back to you. She had told us; we knew it would be one of her last baths with us. Gods,” she said, closing her eyes, “how she laughed as she discarded her skin and took her human shape. I—They shot an arrow, and it hit her in the back."

  He thought of Tarra, of her hair, carelessly tossed back as she stood before the pool. Of her gone, and fifteen years of waiting reduced to ashes.

  "I have to see her."

  "Don't be a fool,” Naraya said. “They knew where the pool was. If you go there they will find you."

  "I need to see her,” he repeated.

  "You did love her,” Naraya said at las
t. “For all that you stole her skin in the first place."

  I stole her skin as she bathed by that pool because I saw her, and knew she had to be mine. I realised that if I could prevent her from changing shapes she would not run away. And later I fell in love. He knew Naraya would not understand.

  "It changes nothing,” Naraya said. “It is folly, to go back to that place."

  "You do not know who hunts you."

  Her eyes were wary, those of a doe before it bolts. “No."

  "They have found your secret place. They have followed you through the breadth of the wood. What makes you think you are safe here?"

  "You are a wizard,” she said, with such hunger in her voice that he felt ashamed of what he had sunk to.

  "I am poor protection against your hunters, especially if I do not know what spells they use, and where they come from. They may have left something by the pool. And,” he said, “I was told that the place could not be found twice in the same way.” I could not find it. I was lost for fifteen years in the forest, listening to its voice, but hearing nothing.

  "They may know all the ways.” Naraya did not speak for a while, watched him, with what seemed like pity to him. “For your healing, then. And we will not tarry there."

  "No. You should rest now,” he added.

  "We are both tired."

  Yes, we are. But he did not move. He watched her until the huge eyes closed, and she breathed evenly, abandoning herself to sleep.

  The horn bracelets on her wrists caught the light. On impulse, he reached out, touched them. They tingled with magic. Like everything of hers, most likely; like her tunic, like the doe-skin on the bed. He laid his hand on the skin, let its magic rise in him, speaking of another time, a time when he had walked through the forest, losing himself in its song, and had seen otherworldly women bathing in a pool that should not have been there.

  He slept on the floor near the hearth that night, and dreamt of deer running through the forest, russet shadows soon swallowed by the trees. And the hunters came, casting their darkness over his little world; the hunters came, bearing bows and barbed arrows, and they laughed at his pain.