Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

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The Downloaded 2

by Robert J. Sawyer

Ghost in the machine: term used by philosophers for the concept of the mind existing separately from the body.

       Seven years had passed since I’d found the child’s corpse, but I still had nightmares about it.

       Shortly after we’d all downloaded out of our individual virtual silos, we’d split into teams and searched inside the Quantum Cryonics Institute for items that might increase our chances of survival. Back then, the astronauts were still suspicious of us ex-cons, so I was accompanied by their captain, Letitia Garvey. I’m an old-movie buff — well, I guess they’re all old movies now — and Letitia reminded me of Whitney Houston, the singer who starred in The Bodyguard. I wish I could say I looked like her leading man Kevin Costner, but I’m more what you’d get if you stuck Peter Lorre’s head on a linebacker’s body.

       In the institute’s security office, we found a cabinet sealed with a padlock. Letitia held up a finger — the “just a minute” one, not the “up yours” one — and scooted out the door. When she returned, she was brandishing a crowbar. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

       “It’s the one that cracked open Mikhail’s skull,” she replied. Her crew member Mikhail Sidorov hadn’t yet been able to download because ages ago someone — back then, we didn’t yet know who — had smashed open his cryo-coffin and staved in his skull. Letitia used the crowbar to pop off the bracket holding the padlock. Inside was a box of ammunition and a pistol, but God only knew if it would work after all these centuries. Funny thing: I’m a convicted murderer, but I hate guns; Letitia, though, had no compunctions about picking the damned thing up. “In honor of poor Mikhail,” she announced, “henceforth this shall be known as ‘Chekhov’s gun.’” I gave her a small smile, and we headed down the corridor to continue searching.

       We knew there were two cryo-chambers at the institute: one had housed the bodies of me and my fellow prisoners, and the other had held Letitia and her crew. But she and I were surprised, after we managed to force open a heavy door, to be confronted by a third cryo-chamber. It looked like we were the only people to have entered it since the twenty-first century. I found the light switch — the institute has solar panels on its roof — but only a few of the fluorescent tubes spluttered to life, two of them blinking wildly.

       Cobwebs were everywhere, and dust lay thick on the half- dozen cryobeds; Jordan Peele couldn’t have done a better job staging a spooky scene. Letitia began rummaging through the cupboards, and I went over to the coffins. The first five were open, their curved covers retracted into the sides of the units, revealing the emptiness within. But the sixth —

       — the sixth was closed, or, well, mostly closed. There was an inch-wide gap where the two covers were supposed to join up, as if over the centuries a seal had failed and they’d slipped back slightly. In the flickering light, I could make out something inside.

       I called Letitia over. We yanked the covers down, and my heart jumped. Empty eye sockets stared up at us from the desiccated body of a child. What little skin remained was shriveled and gray. The longish dark hair, mostly still attached to the skull, made me think this might have been a girl.

       “We’ll have to give her a proper burial,” I said.

       Letitia glared at me like I was an idiot. “We can’t bury every damn skeleton we find. There are thousands of them in the ruins of Waterloo.”

       “For Christ’s sake!” I snapped. “This was somebody’s daughter!”

       She scowled, looking like she was going to object some more, maybe pointing out that all the corpses we’d stumbled upon outside had been someone’s son or daughter. But then her face softened. “Roscoe ... did you — did you have a little girl of your own?”

       And that did it. Tears filled my vision. “Annabelle,” I said softly.

       “I’m so sorry,” Letitia said looking at me now with compassionate eyes, but then, uncomfortable with the moment, she tipped her head down, peering again at the tiny corpse. “This place didn’t take commercial clients,” she said, sounding baffled. “Why on Earth would they freeze a child?”

       I’d had no idea then, and here, now, seven years later, it’s still a mystery — almost as much as how a convict like me ended up being the mayor of Phoenix, which is what we call our little community of survivors. That certainly wasn’t the trajectory I thought my life would take.

       Nor did I think I’d ever find love again. My first marriage, to Darlita, had only lasted a couple of years before she wisely dumped me. And, yeah, I’d fallen — too hard, maybe, and too fast — for Valentina shortly after we’d all downloaded; decades without any real human company makes a man desperate to form attachments. But, even if it happened quickly, it was real. It was as real as it gets.

       But Valentina was only here for a month before she decided to re-upload back into the pyramid-shaped quantum computer at the heart of the institute. Since then, she’s been living virtually as the woman she couldn’t be in this postapocalyptic world.

       And, no, I haven’t forgotten her and never will. But seven years is a long time, and, miracle of miracles, I eventually did find love again. Marie and I got married last year; Reywan, one of the genetically modified descendants of the original human settlers on Mars, officiated via telepresence. I’d always liked Marie, but it had seemed insane to pursue a relationship with another astronaut. I’d lost Darlita; I’d lost Valentina — I couldn’t take being left again, and Letitia Garvey was mustering the crew of the starship Hōkūleʻa to finally head off on an interstellar voyage.

       I didn’t mean to overhear the fight between Marie and Letitia about that, but they’d been having lunch together in the institute’s basement cafeteria, and I was eating nearby. Dishes clattered as Letitia slapped the top of their table. “Damn it, Marie!” she’d said. “You spent years training for this mission!”

       Marie had a French accent. Her volume was softer but her tone was firm. “No, I spent years training to go to Proxima Centauri b — a mission that never got off the ground.”

       Letitia snapped, “You know what I mean! You trained to be an astronaut!”

       “No,” Marie said again. “I trained to be a planetary geologist. And next year, a thousand-kilometer-wide extrasolar asteroid is going to slam into Earth —”

       “Which is why you need to leave!”

       “Leave, yes. But only to go to Mars. When Brimstone hits, the transfer of kinetic energy will liquefy Earth’s surface. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study such a huge impact and see how a planet forms a new crust. I can’t pass it up.”

       Letitia never forgave her, but Marie’s decision to stay, which I learned about from that cafeteria argument, piqued my interest, and I soon found myself falling in love again. And, to my absolute delight Marie — that’s Dr. Marie Dubois, graduate of the Sorbonne, speaker of four languages, champion archer — fell in love with me.

       And now there are just four weeks left until Brimstone hits. Although some of my constituents are getting antsy — what if the Martians don’t really intend to relocate us to Mars in time? — most simply want to stay as long as they can on the mother planet, knowing that we’ll soon be swapping blue skies and green fields for existence under a dome on a rocky and almost airless world.

       Those of us going to Mars, that is. The others — the reconstituted crew of the starship Hōkūleʻa — will be departing soon for Zeta Tucanae. I’m going to miss Letitia’s gung-ho enthusiasm and Dr. Jürgen Haas’s thank-you-thank-you-I’m-here-all-millennium schtick. I’ll miss swapping old-movie trivia questions with Jaxon David Fingerlee, even though he’d grumble, “I’ll cut you!” every time I stumped him. I’m even going to miss astrophysicist Jameela Chowdhury and her daft conspiracy theories, not to mention Penolong and Wiidooka and the other robots.

       But at least they were going to survive. Outside Waterloo, there’s a community of Old Order horse-and-buggy Mennonites who had sailed through the collapse of technological civilization just fine. But they’ve all decided to stay on Earth rather than be relocated to Mars, accepting that their world is coming to an end, something the Bible had always told them would happen.

       Mennonites are famous for their pacifism, but they’re also known for their generosity, and we’d all eaten well thanks to them sharing beef, pork, poultry, eggs, baked goods, and more with us. In exchange, we helped out on their farms, and I’d been doing that today. As I hiked home in the twilight with a rucksack full of corn cobs, I came to the very spot where Valentina and I had stood years ago when she’d shown me the faint smudge of the Andromeda galaxy, taking my hand to point it out.

       She had assumed a female body, she’d told me, during the last of the four subjective years she’d been uploaded, but when Letitia had initiated the downloading of her crew, Valentina had been forced back into the male body that had been kept frozen for her. So, yes, when she took my hand in hers, it was one male hand holding another, a first in a romantic setting for me. Maybe you have to have lived an uploaded life yourself — as I did for what had seemed like twenty-four subjective years — to fully appreciate that the container is not the person. And that person, Valentina, was smart and sweet, and she accepted me despite the horrible thing I’d done, and so I found it easy to accept her.

       Yes, I love my wife Marie. But here, under the stars, on a warm July night, I did think wistfully about Valentina and what we might have had if she’d stayed here in the real world. But she couldn’t; she had to go, had to upload, had to return to a realm in which she didn’t feel like she was in the wrong fucking skin.

       I don’t blame Captain Letitia Garvey for initiating the downloading of her crew that forced me back into my original male body — but it had left me completely traumatized. And, to make matters so much worse, even after I explained that I’d transitioned, my fellow astronauts kept slipping and calling me by my deadname.

       I’d hoped it’d be easier dealing with the prisoners, none of whom had ever met me before, but the first one I introduced myself to — a guy whose name turned out to be Jaxon David Fingerlee — kept calling me “Valentino” instead of “Valentina.” Given that he’d killed people, I didn’t push back, but I decided to just tell the other prisoners I was “Dr. Solomon,” dodging the first-name issue and the question of Mr. versus Ms.

       But then Roscoe Koudoulian — God, I miss him! — came over and introduced himself as I was seated all alone in the institute’s cafeteria. He was tall and muscular, with a touch of gray at his temples, and there was something so open and kind about his face that I figured I’d give it another go. He didn’t bat even one of those soulful brown eyes when a male face I couldn’t stand to look at in the mirror said, in that deep voice I so wished I could get rid of, that my name was Valentina. He simply sat down opposite me, smiled that lopsided smile of his, and said, “Pleased to meet you, Valentina.”

       All of us astronauts were aware that five hundred years would pass while we were uploaded; we knew we were leaving behind everyone we’d ever known — and, from my point of view, that was perfectly fine. But poor Roscoe had only expected ten months to pass, and he was devastated at the thought that, no matter how things had gone after he’d uploaded, his daughter Annabelle, the person he’d been desperate to get back to, must have been dead now for centuries.

       As he told me about her, I wanted to reach across the table to pat the back of his hand, but, here, under the harsh fluorescent lights, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Still, starting then, and growing over the coming days, I fell in love with that man.

       If only I could have completed my transition there in the physical world! But neither Dr. Haas nor Dr. Chang was qualified to do gender-reassignment surgery, even if we’d had any anesthetics — although Chang sure as hell tried to talk me into it. Nor were there any suitable hormone treatments to be found in this postapocalyptic world; yes, a famous older one was made from pregnant mare urine, and, yes, the Mennonites have horses, but it was contraindicated for people like me with even a minor history of blood clots.

       I’d asked Roscoe to also upload again so we could be together. In my strong moments, I believed what he’d said — that having spent twenty-four years in a virtual prison, including the excruciating final four after he was supposed to be released, he just couldn’t bring himself to ever upload again. But in my weak moments, I told myself it was because he didn’t love me enough — and, really, how could he, after so short a time?

       Just before I re-uploaded, the Martian who had been interviewing us came to me with a bizarre proposal. Since I wasn’t going to need that old male body anymore, would I give it to Mikhail Sidorov, my friend and colleague whose mind was still stuck inside the quantum computer? I’d scoffed, saying it was impossible to transfer a consciousness into a different body than the one it had come from. But Martian technology was half a millennium more advanced than ours; for them, it was doable. Well, I’d always been a registered organ donor; why not give the whole damn thing to someone who could use it?

       Roscoe and I said our goodbyes in the astronaut cryo- chamber, with us both tearing up as he recited Robert Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” to me. But then my cryo-coffin’s lids drew together, plunging me into darkness — a darkness soon punctuated by points of light that reminded me of the nighttime sky the one time I had worked up the courage to take his hand — as my consciousness moved into the quantum computer, and —

       — and, Jesus Fucking Christ, I was not alone!

       There, in front of me, looking as absolutely shocked as I felt, was me. Male me. The body I’d just left — the body I was donating to Mikhail Sidorov — was standing there, plain as day, stark naked.

       “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

       I’d have thought it would have been obvious, but — no, no; I’d re-uploaded as my avatar had been when I’d left here, the female form I’d spent the last year refining, currently in a cornflower blue summer dress. My simulated heart was pounding, and I felt like I was going to vomit. With a thought, I eliminated those ersatz physical feelings — but my mind, which was all there was of me in here, was reeling.

       I flicked my hand, trying to dismiss the male body in front of me, but nothing happened, damn it all. I next tried to wish some clothing onto it, but again nothing happened, and so, in desperation, I snapped, “For God’s sake, put on some clothes!”

       He made a gesture, and suddenly he was in his olive-green astronaut jumpsuit, and —

       — and Hōkūleʻa jumpsuits have our first names on them — until I’d torn it off mine after downloading. But the one he’d conjured up still had that name on it. “Something else!” I shouted, panicking. He looked perplexed, and I managed to get out, “Different clothes!”

       He shrugged, and the jumpsuit was replaced with denim jeans and a deep-blue hoodie from the Technion.

       “Who the hell are you?” he asked again.

       I had no idea what was going on, but something inside me — not that I had any insides anymore! — told me not to reveal the truth, so I needed a name he wouldn’t recognize, and —

       And Jaxon David Fingerlee had originally told us his name was Alan Smithee, a pseudonym used by movie directors. Well, I sure as hell didn’t want to be an Alan, but —

       “I’m Alanna,” I said.

       “Pleased to meet you,” he replied. “I’m —”

       I cut him off. “You’re Solly,” I said, the nickname people sometimes used for me back in high school.

       His eyes narrowed. “How’d you know that?”

       “I, uh, I saw that interview on Canada Today with you and Jürgen Haas, the two Canadians going to another star.”

       “They didn’t call me that.”

       The interview had been four subjective years ago for me; I barely remembered it. I quickly pushed on. “What an adventure!”

       He looked even more puzzled. “The interview?”

       “No, no. A trip to Proxima Centauri!”

       “I certainly hope it will be,” he said. “But it’s only just started.”

       Oh, shit. “Umm, what’s today’s date?” I asked.

       “Out in the real world? November twenty-ninth.”

       “And the year?”

       “Pardon me?”

       “The year?” I snapped.

       He shrugged, the way you — the way I — do when something’s not worth fighting about. “Twenty fifty-nine,” he replied, which of course was wrong; that was five hundred years ago.

       I was still completely disoriented — and it was made worse when our surroundings suddenly dissolved from the forest glade, which is what I’d left it as when I’d downloaded, to the astronaut training facility in Kyoto. Sure, it was a familiar, even safe, environment, but I hadn’t wished for it to appear. Was the quantum computer responding to his whims? A nonplayer character shouldn’t have any whims!

       I switched my clothes to a leather jacket and black slacks, conjured up a motorcycle, and took off down one of the roads, cherry trees in full bloom along the sidewalks, the engine roaring as I cranked the throttle. When I’d gone a solid kilometer, I hit the brakes, the motorcycle spun halfway around, and —

       — and he was still there, just ten paces back, standing with hands on hips. What the absolute fuck? This made no goddamn sense, and I couldn’t take it, not for another second! “Computer!” I shouted, as I dismounted from the motorcycle. “Open communications with the quantum-computer control room.”

       There was a bleep, then a flat male voice replied, “Opened.”

       “Emergency!” I said. “Shut down this silo and —”

       “The fuck!” shouted the man. “Computer, log out of communications subsystem!”

       “Logged out.”

       I glared at him; this could go on all day. “Computer,” I said, “log back into communications subsystem.”

       “Specify user name.”

       God fucking damn it. I had never logged off in all the time I’d previously been uploaded, and so the system still only knew me by my birth name — my deadname. And now all I had to do was stand there, in front of this male version of myself, and declare loudly and clearly that I was ... that name. I open my simulated mouth and shaped it to form the first syllable, but —

       But no. No, no, no. I just couldn’t fucking do it. “Computer,” I said, my voice shaking, “cancel login.”

       Sure, I was pissed when Roscoe Koudoulian beat me in the race all those years ago to become mayor of our little community in Waterloo. But I wouldn’t have had time to do the job, anyway. Shortly after the election, Reywan — that courtly, quirky Martian — had offered to upgrade the Hōkūleʻa so it could take a much longer interstellar voyage than originally intended. I’d spent a lot of the last seven years in Earth orbit helping with the refit, including installing the twenty-four empty astronaut cryo-coffins — I made damn sure they were safely aboard the starship this time!

       Yesterday, the giant quantum computer had been extracted from the institute building and loaded aboard an automated freighter that had immediately headed to Mars; since no people were aboard, the freighter was pulling three Earth gees for its sustained initial acceleration and would get to Mars in under a week.

       For the past seven years I’d had the quantum computer running at just 1/120th of normal speed. But for its passage to the Red Planet, I’d adjusted the clock so that a day in there equaled one out here. Although the freighter was heavily shielded against electromagnetic interference and radiation, the bombardment of cosmic rays during the voyage to Mars put it at high risk of decohering. Resetting the clock meant a hundred and twenty times as many error-correcting cycles were running each minute.

       The freighter’s shielding had the unfortunate side effect of cutting off radio communication with the computer, but quantum entanglement is unaffected by shielding or distance. Once the freighter’s fusion engine — also a potential source of interference — was finally shut off tonight, my crew and I would upload our consciousnesses into the computer, our bodies would be frozen, and the Hōkūleʻa would set sail for Zeta Tucanae.

       Which meant it was time for those members of my crew who had been working here in orbit to shuttle down to Earth one last time and say goodbye not just to our friends but to the planet we’d all been born on, the planet we’d never see again, the planet whose entire surface would soon be molten. Roscoe

       Despite initial frictions, our combined community had grown tightly knit over the years — something, if I may be so bold, that I take a lot of credit for — and we couldn’t let two dozen of its members leave without a bon voyage party.

       Reywan attended via holographic telepresence from orbit. They — that’s their pronoun; Martians long ago merged into a single gender — make an impressive sight: eight feet tall, hairless, the color of a fresh pair of jeans, Reywan looked like a member of the Blue Man Group who’d been stretched on the rack.

       Extracting the giant quantum computer and all the cooling gear from the institute had meant removing one whole exterior wall and several interior ones from the five-story building. Robotic Martian excavating machines had done all that, and, big kid that I am, I’d stood with Noah and Akihiko, two of the boys who had been born in our community, and watched as all the bricks and concrete came tumbling down.

       The removal of the walls had left a large part of the institute building structurally unsound, and so we now slept in the cramped quarters of the ship that was going to take us to Mars; it had landed under remote control in the parking lot shortly after the freighter with the quantum computer had taken off.

       Earlier today, people had gathered around as my wife Marie smashed a five-hundred-year-old bottle of now-flat champagne against its curving green hull. She christened it Noah’s Ark, while I, as mayor, declared that Noah, who had been the first child born in our community, would be its honorary captain. And when Letitia had arrived for the party, she’d pinned her astronaut wings on Noah’s shirt, and they’d saluted each other, captain to captain.

       The party was being held outdoors by the fire pit we’d made all those years ago. The moon, nearly full, hung high overhead, and Marie and I stood under its glow, upwind from the bonfire, and kissed.

       When we were done, she looked skyward and said, “You know, most of the Apollo landers carried plaques showing the way Earth looks now. But Brimstone’s impact will boil off the oceans and liquefy a lot of the crust. Aliens finding those plaques a million years from now might not even realize that they’d come from this planet.”

       “You,” I said, “are an incurable romantic.”

       She laughed, her blue eyes twinkling in the firelight. “Are you looking forward to getting to Mars?”

       I shook my head. “Honestly, no. I’m going to miss this place. Our Mennonite friends. The trees. The birds. Swimming in Silver Lake. The baseball diamonds in Waterloo Park.”

       “Yeah,” she said. “But as mayor, you’ll get to do all sorts of ceremonial things as we settle into our new home — you know, the equivalent of throwing out the first pitch.”

       “`He’s got an MBA in sales and marketing; she’s a planetary geologist. They fight crime — on Mars.’”

       “Not that kind of pitch, goofball.”

       “But speaking of diamonds ...” I took a hinged box out of my jacket pocket and opened it, revealing the ring I’d scavenged from the ruins of a jewelry shop. “Happy first anniversary!”

       Marie’s eyes went wide. “Isometric carbon crystal!” she declared. I laughed, slipped the ring onto her finger, and we kissed once more.

       Jaxon David Fingerlee was sitting by the fire, playing a guitar he’d lovingly restored. He was singing “Dancing in the Moonlight” in his gravelly voice, so I said, “Want to do what the song says?”

       She took my hand and we moved closer to the flames. “Just remember,” she said, “anything you can do, I can do backwards — and in high heels.”

       As we slowly rotated, I got a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view: the institute building with its missing exterior wall and insides revealed; the parking lot, which we had so painstakingly cleared of rubble and rusted-out vehicles to make the landing pad that now held both the shuttle and the much larger ark; the fire pit; the Henry Moore sculpture that had seemed melted and twisted even before the apocalypse; and the stand of trees that had grown up out of the cracked asphalt of Erb Street.

       And, yes, I really was going to miss all this, strange as that seemed. Sure, we were surrounded by ruins, and we periodically had to fend off bears, bobcats, wild dogs, and wolves, but after twenty-four subjective years behind virtual bars, the freedom to move around, to explore, had been wonderful.

       It was getting late, but parents were allowing the older kids to stay up. Of the dozen original crew members who’d chosen not to go on the Hōkūleʻa’s new mission, half were staying behind specifically because they now had children. While Marie and I — and several others, including Letitia and Jürgen — continued dancing, holographic Reywan stood listening patiently as six-year-old Noah told a story that involved lots of gesturing.

       Reywan and the other Martians had built a community for us on Mars; none of us had visited it yet, but we’d seen plenty of pictures while it was under construction. It was sealed under a transparent dome and very deliberately situated on the opposite side of the planet from where the Martians lived. They were willing to save a few Homo sapiens from being killed by the doomsday asteroid, but they didn’t want such nasty, brutish, and short creatures anywhere near their peaceful, civilized city.

       “But what if we prove ourselves over time?” I’d said way back when Reywan had first told us the plan. “What if we show that we can live in peace? Do we — do we get paroled? Will you let us join your city then?”

       Reywan’s blue lips had curved in a smile beneath his solid black eyes. “As you used to say to your daughter Annabelle,” they’d replied, “perhaps someday all your dreams will come true.”

       Everyone in Reywan’s Marstown was under constant surveillance; that’s how they kept their community free of violence. But Caleb and several of the other ex-cons had petitioned me as mayor to convince the Martians that if they put cameras to spy on us inside our dome, we’d feel like prisoners again — and this time, unjustly so; it would do more psychological harm than good. Reywan had finally gotten their people to relent. Only the dome’s exterior would be kept under observation, just to be sure no ravening horde of damn dirty Earthlings was heading out to invade.

       “Last dance of the evening,” announced Jaxon. “Ladies’ choice!”

       Marie smiled at me and said, “I’ve already made mine,” and, as Jaxon did his best with a Piper Selassie song, she added, “Kiss me.”

       Which, of course, I did — but the problem with being a movie nut is that even two simple words can bring a quote to mind — and Ilsa’s line from Casablanca popped into my head: “Kiss me,” she’d said to Rick their final night together in Paris. “Kiss me as if it were the last time ...”

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