Asgard's Heart

11

At this point in my story, I fear, the narrative flow becomes slightly confusing, for reasons which the reader may already have figured out.

I must admit that I did not anticipate any considerable confusion myself, even when I realised that I had tacitly given way to the Nine’s demand that I be copied. I had interfaced with the Nine on several previous occasions, and I supposed that this special interfacing would not feel significantly different. At the end of it, I knew, that creature of flesh and blood which I thought of as the real me would simply get out of the chair and continue with my real life. The fact that there would be a ghostly entity drifting through the vast labyrinth of silicon neurons and optical fibre sinews that was Asgard’s diffuse “brain” which would also think of itself as Mike Rousseau, sharing all my knowledge, all my memories, and all my hang-ups, did not strike me as an item of any great relevance to the flesh-and-blood Rousseau’s future experience of self.

It turned out that I was wrong.

Exactly how and why I was wrong will become clear in due time, when my story—perhaps it would now be more appropriate to say stories—approaches its—or their—climax. For the moment, I need only say that the person who is recording this story has two sets of memories to draw upon, and must—if the story is to make sense—describe two independent series of events.

It might perhaps be easier for the reader if I were simply to shift one of the continuing narrative threads into the third person, possibly referring to the software copy as “the other Rousseau” while retaining “I” for the flesh-and-blood appellant which held the sole entitlement to it until the crisis in my affairs made division essential. But that would misrepresent to you the nature of the entity that is now telling the tale, and I cannot help but feel that such a move would be misleading, if not tantamount to self-betrayal.

I must, therefore, ask my readers to forgive me for exposing them to the possibility of mild disorientation. From this moment on, the perpendicular pronoun will be applied without discrimination to two very different entities—but given the fact that those two persons embarked upon very different adventures in what appeared to them to be very different worlds, I do not think it likely that the reader will ever be in doubt as to which of the two is the referent of any specific passage of prose. In the interests of simplicity, I shall present the two narratives in two series of alternating chapters, although there is a certain arbitrariness about the parallels thus produced. Software time is no more like clockwork time than software space is like the kind of space that is to be found in a cupboard or a cosmos.