Echoes of Earth (34 page)

2.2
PURIFICATION

2.2.1

Caryl Hatzis continued pacing the room, trying desperately
to think clearly. Her mind felt like a hand that had lost its lingers—or, worse, a finger that had lost its hand. Truncated, fragile, dangerously weak, she was afraid it might fall apart at any moment, leaving her senseless.

She hadn’t realized until now just how much of herself relied on the greater being that had surrounded her. So many of her thoughts began in her, migrated beyond, then returned at a later date. Emotions likewise: a feeling of happiness might begin halfway across the solar system, only to merge with regret or anger at different points as data spread at the speed of light, generating an entirely new feeling in the process. Her whole mind had been a landscape of textures in multidimensional space. Now she was just a point. Everything began and ended with her alone.

She had always regarded herself as an individual, pricklier than her greater self and more likely to buck the trends. An outlier. But now she saw that it was an illusion. She had been an integral part of the whole, if the way she missed it was anything to go by.

But how much did
it
miss
her?
How important to the whole Caryl Hatzis was she? It was impossible to tell. Maybe she didn’t miss her at all. It had shed plenty of povs before, after all. Maybe she had kept her original out of nothing more than sentimentality. Had it been too difficult to keep her alive or her attitude been too contrary to the others, might she then have been shut down decades ago?

It took her an hour to recover from the argument with Alander. Irritation and frustration had built up in her to the point where she could barely respond to him, and she’d had nowhere to dump it. She had forgotten how to deal with emotions within herself and rapidly found herself hating the self-containment. The dissatisfaction similarly fed back upon itself, like a snake eating its own tail and somehow getting bigger in the process, until she felt certain that her brain would explode with unanswered thoughts.

Where am I? Who am I? Help me!

She threw herself onto the couch and buried her head in her arms.
This is despair,
she thought, sobbing with great gulping breaths into the soft fabric of her dress.
Where do I go from here?
If it had at all been possible, she might have seriously considered opening the airlock to bring an abrupt end to the debilitating emotions.

But the release of tears seemed to bring a clarity to her thoughts. The primitive flushing of hormones from her system still had its uses. When the rush of grief had passed, she found herself thinking in closed loops rather than open-ended arcs that terminated in aching emptiness.

Not since her acceptance of the inevitability of the Spike had she existed solely within one skull, but it seemed that she could still do it. It was just a matter of getting used to it again. Some part of her, some primal region left dormant those long decades, had remembered what to do, and for that she was grateful. She didn’t care how it had happened, just that it had happened.

And besides, it wasn’t as if she would need to do it indefinitely. In a couple of days, she would be back where she belonged, part of herself again.

She sat up and smoothed herself out, breathing deeply and evenly. The couch beneath her was sodden, as was her gown. She felt as though a fever had burst, leaving her weak and sweat-logged. The gown would have to go; it was a simple matter to rearrange its self-organizing fibers into something more suitable. When she stood up, she was dressed in an environment suit not dissimilar to Alander’s, only cleaner and better fitting. She stretched and felt the fabric tighten around her midriff.
Much better,
she thought.

Alander was elsewhere in the hole ship. His memories of the trip from Upsilon Aquarius revealed the existence of a number of berths tucked away in the walls of the ship, along with refreshment and ablution facilities. She was sure the ship could provide for just about any eventuality, even serious injury, if Alander was prepared to share that high-tech suit he was wearing. Despite having been heavily modified down the years, she was still essentially a creation of flesh and blood, and, newly aware of just how isolated and vulnerable she was, considerations like safety reasserted themselves. In Upsilon Aquarius there was no benign Vincula to keep an eye on her, no pooled awareness ready to ensure that she didn’t walk into danger or to accept her final memory dump if she did. There was only danger and the unknown. As uncertain as Sol politics were, it had been a long time since she had faced such a void.

Or such a period of inactivity while she waited for the hole ship to arrive. Fortunately, not every resource she had grown accustomed to had been left behind at Sol. She had an extensive library of books and music, along with many other forms of passive art, at her disposal. She could also participate in something more interactive, should she wish, slaving her senses to one of the many experiential simulations produced in recent years. Given her circumstances, though, she didn’t think diving too deeply would be appropriate. A book, perhaps. Something light.

She had finished the first two volumes of Eva Sallis’s
Memoirs of an Arsonist
and was partway through the third, tapping idly as she read to a very old recording of Kalevi Aho’s “Insect Symphony,” when Alander emerged from his cubicle. She looked up from where she lay on the couch and instantly saw the confusion in his eyes. It didn’t surprise her. Although she could no longer delve into his mind the way her greater self had, she could guess what he was going through.

He came to a halt in the entrance to the main chamber. “Caryl?”

She mentally put aside her book and stood. “Hello, Peter.”

“What are you doing here?” He looked around. “I thought... The
Tipler... How...
?”

She felt a great deal more sympathy for him now than she had at any other point in their exchange. “It’s okay, Peter. You’ve been to Sol, remember? I’m Caryl’s original. We’re on our way back to Adrasteia.”

The fog parted; his expression changed to one of relief, then, almost instantly, shame. “Of course. I’m sorry.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “I don’t know why I forget these things so easily.”

“I do.”

He looked up at her with a gaze that was suddenly very intense. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I know why it happens. I know all about your breakdown and why it happened.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s not easy to explain—”

“I’m not stupid.”

“No, I
know
that.” She forced herself not to snap at him; she had to be patient. “Basically, it’s because you’re an engram, Peter. You’re a copy of person programmed to think it’s that person. Because you’re
not
that person, that causes an immediate and constant conflict.”

He gestured irritably. “So? I’m no different than anyone else in the survey program in that regard.”

“Not essentially, no. Your problem could have happened to anyone. But it’s a definitional thing, as opposed to a fundamental thing, and it expresses itself differently depending on personality. Your engram is
defined
as Peter Stanmore Alander, even though it fundamentally cannot be. In some people, the definition imposed by the engram architecture is enough to overcome the conflict—they want to believe in it, perhaps, strongly enough to make it seem true—but in others, like you, the definition isn’t enough to erase the obvious discrepancy. The memories that you are told are yours belong to someone else; key concepts that you are supposed to believe no longer ring true; people you once knew and maybe even loved now seem like strangers. All because, deep down, you don’t believe it when you tell yourself—or are told from the outside—that you are the same as your original.”

He was staring at her now with an expression that made him look inhuman, almost robotic. “You’re saying it’s a scripting error? That somewhere in the program that’s supposed to make me
me,
there’s a line saying the opposite?”

She shook her head. “You know as well as I do that engrams aren’t simple software agents. They’re tremendously complex, even if, ultimately, they aren’t as complex as the real thing. You are not so much the victim of a slight text error as...” She clutched for a metaphor. “... as a shortcut that went wrong. Some people made very successful engrams; others did not. Peter Stanmore Alander did not, I’m afraid. Something about him broke the mold every time it was applied to him. The definition has been undermined by your personality. So it’s not just
this
version of you that’s been having problems, Peter. As far as we’re aware, nine out of ten of his engrams failed.”

He blinked a few times and turned away, an expression of both shock and pain on his android face. She thought for a moment that he might be angry with her, but he just stood with his back toward her and was silent.

“I could try to repair you,” she said. “There might be something simple I can do to—”

“Keep your goddamn head out of mine.” His voice was low, but its tone was sharp and menacing. A vein pulsed on his gray-skinned skull. “You’re as bad as the one I knew on the
Tipler.
She was always poking around in my mind. And your so-called ‘higher’ self, lifting my memories, taking something that you had no
right
to touch!”

“But Peter, I wouldn’t be taking anything from you. All I need is—”

He spun around sharply, the anger in his expression alarming. She took a hasty step back.

“You wouldn’t be taking anything
from
me? Is that what you just said?” He stepped forward, compensating for the distance she had put between them. “You’d be
repairing
me, right? Fixing the problem like I was nothing more than a broken fucking appliance. You’d put me back the way I was, regardless of who I am
now.
You’d erase
me.
”

He stopped for a moment, trembling, then dragged the back of a hand across his mouth as he stepped away from her once more. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be taking anything away from me,” he said quietly.

She waited a few moments before speaking.

“I... I don’t understand,” she said nervously. “Are you saying you
don’t
want to be like your original?”

“Of course I don’t!” The admission seemed to surprise him as much as it did her. “I’m not just some dog you drag out to a paddock and shoot because it’s got rabies. I’m not
wrong,
Caryl. I’m just...” He waved his hand frustratingly before him, as if trying to find the right word. When it finally came to him, his arms dropped to his side and his body seemed to sag. “I’m just different,” he said, and slumped onto the couch. “That’s all.”

He sounded like a petulant teenager. She waited to see if he would add anything else, but he was silent for a long time, sitting on the couch with his eyes closed.

“Are you inside me now?” he asked after a while. He kept his eyes shut.

“No,” she replied honestly. “On my own, I don’t have the ability to do that without you knowing. The rest of me examined you, with the Vincula’s help, and distributed the knowledge.”

He shook his head slowly, then straightened in the seat, as though consciously pulling himself together. Then he looked at her with an expression of determined objectivity. Whatever he was feeling, he was burying it deep from her eyes.

“You’ve changed,” he said, indicating her environment suit. “Do you need anything else? Food? Sleep?
Arachne
can give you anything you want along those lines, you know.”

She did know. They had already had that conversation, although she wasn’t about to set him off again by pointing that out. She didn’t need any of the things he offered, either. Her greatest problem was the lack of
herself.

“A room,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want me under your feet the entire trip.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “
Arachne—
”

“A room has been arranged,” said the hole ship.

Despite the smooth, quiet tone, both of them jumped at the sound of the AI’s voice. Alander’s expression mirrored her own astonishment.

“You will take instructions from me?” she said.

“Of course,” came the emotionless response. “I have been programmed to—”

“But I thought you could only take instructions from me,” said Alander, with an edge of panic. “I thought I was the only one you would speak to!”

“That arrangement was between you and the Gifts, Peter. I operate under a separate command protocol.”

Of course,
she thought. While it was one of the gifts, it wasn’t one of the
Gifts.

“I don’t want her doing anything without me knowing,” Alander told the AI. “She’s not to change our course or be permitted to call anyone. If she tries, you’re to check with me first. Understand?”

“I assure you that none of her commands can in any way conflict with your own, Peter.”

“You don’t trust me?” she asked him, feigning indignation.

He didn’t honor the jibe with a reply, nor did she push the matter any further. For now, it was enough to know that the hole ship would answer her questions. Maybe it would do more than just obey her orders, since she, unlike Alander, was prepared to explore other forms of communication.

“I’ll leave you alone with your suspicions,” she said. Then: “
Arachne
, you said you had a room for me?”

“Yes, Caryl. You will find it on your left as you pass through the egress corridor.”

Ignoring Alander’s look of annoyance and frustration, she left the cockpit and followed the short corridor along to the room the AI had indicated. It was tiny and contained little more than a narrow cot and a wall-mounted bench, but it suited her needs. Had she required toilet facilities, she was sure the Gifts would have provided them, too, but, like Alander, she was very nearly self-contained in that regard.

She stretched out on the bed. The scenes she had just endured with Alander were among the most intense she had experienced for many decades. She wasn’t used to physical exchanges on the whole, let alone ones so emotionally charged. She was feeling drained but not tired. It would be a relief to finally arrive at Upsilon Aquarius, where she would be able to converse with someone who wasn’t likely to fragment at the wrong phrase.