Why Didn’t You Think of that Before We Left?

We had already been in trouble for a couple of weeks before we realized it. We were up to about 90 percent of light-speed by then, coasting along toward Alpha Centauri in our skeletal framework of a starship and feeling pretty smug about life.

Well, OK, not “life,” since all three of us had traded in our bodies to become standing waves in Tilbey’s experimental mass eliminator, but we were feeling pretty smug all the same. We had outsmarted the UNASA bureaucrats who had tried to confiscate our starship once we’d proven the technology, and whether they liked it or not we were going to be humanity’s first emissaries to the stars. We’d worked for it, we’d lived for it, we’d died for it, and by god the honor was going to be ours.

Or so we thought, right up until the moment Tilbey began singing old Necrotic Nuisance songs in squeaky falsetto.

We were in the “day room,” which was really just the payload housing for the original Orion class cargo rocket we’d cannibalized to make our starship, the Spook. Since we were the payload on this flight, we figured using that for our living space would be appropriate. We’d put our book readers and video displays in there, and cut windows in the walls so we could see out, but we hadn’t bothered to glass them in and pressurize the space since we didn’t need to breathe anymore. That meant Tilbey’s song came directly through the mass eliminator interface, straight into our holographically stored minds.

I heard Liam grunt the way he does when he’s disgusted with something. I looked up from the comp screen on which I’d been reading news from the Solar System—two years old due to the speed-of-light lag, but still fresh to me—and saw him looking at Tilbey. Liam had been reading, too—probably another military action/adventure novel about the Ganymede uprising. A frown spread across his milky white lace as he watched Tilbey, who was tinkering with another of his unfathomable electronic projects on the workbench he’d set up inside the now-useless airlock.

“That’s not funny,” Liam said.

Tilbey stopped singing. “What?” he asked.

“ ‘Deathwish’ may not have been the best song of the twenty-first century, but you don’t have to mock it like that.”

“Like what?” Tilbey cocked his head, puzzled.

“Falsetto. Screwing with the lyrics. It’s ‘Europa’s icy shores,’ not ‘You grope its spicy whores.’ ”

Tilbey reached up to scratch his head, a habit left over from the old days when he still had a head to scratch. “I… I don’t think I know that song. By either set of lyrics.”

“You were singing it just now,” Liam pointed out.

“Must’ve been subconscious, then.” Tilbey said. “I didn’t even realize I was singing anything. How does it go?”

Still frowning, Liam cleared his throat—another habit left over from the old days—and sang, “ ‘The shuttle’s engine sprung a leak/A hundred miles high/We knew…’ ” He paused. “ ‘We knew…’ something, something ‘…we were apple pie.’ No, dammit, it’s ‘we were gonna die.’ ” He turned completely around, holding onto the grab handle on the wall beside his reader so he wouldn’t drift away. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“What do you mean?” Tilbey said. “You forgot a song. Big deal.”

“It is when I wrote it. And performed it about twenty thousand times in concert. That song was burned into my brain.”

I looked at Liam in surprise. He’d been a janitor on Freeport when we first met him. Ninety years old if he was a day and shuffling along even in zero-g. I knew he’d been a fighter pilot when he was younger, but even so I couldn’t imagine him in a band called Necrotic Nuisance, jumping around on stage and singing about apple pie—or anything else.

“When were you in a band?” I asked.

“When I was…” he began. “When I was…” He looked to the left, and then the right, as if he might be able to catch the elusive memory, but he couldn’t track it down. “Damn it, that’s gone too.”

“You were sixteen,” Tilbey said. “Summer of ’23. You and Gina and Tweed rented a—how do I know this?”

He parked the test probe he’d been using back in its loop on his tool board and pulled himself into the day room. The motion caught my attention, because Tilbey never put his tools away. We’d tried and tried to train him, and to make him more careful about tripping over—and through—things, but he seemed physically incapable of neatness. We’d had to Tilbey-proof our living space the way new parents kid-proof an apartment, and we’d had to put nets up around the windows to keep his things from drifting off into space. But now that I looked, I saw all his tools arranged neatly on the board, and the gadget he was working on clamped down as well.

I got up from the comp to take a closer look, but when I went to push off from the table my hand slipped and went through the monitor, which promptly shorted out and spit sparks out the back. “Hell,” I said. That was the second time today I’d blown something up by moving through it. I was getting as clumsy as Tilbey.

Then the implication hit me. I was as clumsy as Tilbey. “Uh oh,” I said. “I think we’re in deep trouble.”

The problem had to be in the mass eliminator. It used holographic memory to store the information that described everything it duplicated; theoretically that had near-infinite capacity, but in practice there were limits. The more data you stuff into a holographic web, the less definition you get between similar items, and since the beginning of our trip we’d done little besides squirrel away information.

What else is there to do on board a starship? You read, listen to music, watch movies, tinker. You learn. And everything you learn gets stored in your brain, which in our case was an ever-more-densely packed one-teralink synaptic neural net. Memories that were similar to one another were starting to blend together, just like in an old person’s brain. And it wasn’t restricted to memories, either. The information that made up all three of us, from our hat size to our habits, was being stored in the same device. I had inherited Tilbey’s awkwardness, and who knew what else?

“Can’t we just hook up another web and keep going?” I asked Tilbey. We had gathered in the belly of the ship, the safest, most heavily shielded area, the best place to store the gadget that kept us going. As I looked at the desk-sized mass eliminator with its holographic control panels sticking out so we wouldn’t have to touch anything we could short out, I realized that the image in my mind was being stored inside that very cabinet, adding yet another degree of complexity to the information web. I closed my eyes, felt ridiculous, and opened them again. If we were that close to the edge, we were doomed anyway.

“It’s not that simple,” Tilbey said. “I can’t just splice on memory any more than you could just splice an extra head onto a live body and expect it to work. It’s got to be integrated into the design.”

Liam snorted. “Well, you’d better start redesigning this piece of junk, then. We can’t go on cramming more memories together. I mean, I might start remembering things from your life, and I don’t think I could handle that.” He was putting up his usual sarcastic front, but I could hear the fear in his voice. Brain cancer! Dementia! And maybe he was afraid of what we might remember about his past. He’d been in a rock band around the millennium, after all; he must have done a lot of things back then he’d just as soon people not know about now.

“You want me to tinker with it?” Tilbey asked incredulously. After the first few near-disasters involving Tilbey and essential ship’s systems, Liam had forbidden him to touch anything vital.

“He’s got a point,” I said to Liam. “This is us. If he blows it up, we’re dead.”

“We’re dead already,” Liam growled. He opened one of the cabinets full of replacement parts, closed it, and said, “Why don’t we have a backup mass eliminator?”

Tilbey stuck an arm through the wall to hold himself in place. The overhead lights flickered for a second until he shifted over to avoid the embedded switch wires. “Why don’t people have spare bodies?” he asked. He answered his own question. “Because if the first one quits working, they’re out of luck anyway. A clone would be its own person the moment it was born. Same situation here. I could build another mass eliminator, and even imprint it with the information in the first one’s memory. But the moment I switched it on we’d just get another set of astral astronauts. And a corresponding drain on our power supply.”

“What about separating us out into different machines?” I asked.

“That would have been a great idea if we’d thought of it from the start,” Tilbey said, “but we didn’t. To be perfectly honest, I never even considered the possibility that we could fill a teralink web in less than a millennium. I don’t think we’re actually filling it up now, to tell you the truth. I think we’re just overlaying similar thought patterns and then having trouble pulling them out again. But it’s the same problem either way; we’re trying to use the same memory device for three different people. The big question is, how are we going to separate things out again?”

“You’re the electronics genius,” said Liam. “You tell us.”

Tilbey tried to. Over the next few days he breadboarded another unit and started experimenting with it, but our deterioration continued with every new thing he learned. Liam and I quit reading, and I even spent most of a day watching the public video feed from Earth, hoping to lower my intelligence a notch or two, but it didn’t seem to help. The only noticeable result was that Tilbey began humming the theme to “Amazon Women from Venus” instead of Liam’s old music.

Something else I saw stuck with me, though, and after I mulled it over for a while I decided to share it with the others.

“You know they’re calling this mind-recording stuff the ‘Tilbey Effect’ back home? They’re using it to record people’s thought patterns and transfer them into animal bodies for research. When the test subjects get back into their own bodies, they can remember some of the things they experienced from the animal point of view.”

Tilbey laughed. His test equipment completely obscured him from sight, but his voice still came in clearly through our link. “I would never have thought of doing that with it,” he said. “I built it so I could make a massless spaceship. I never even considered using it to talk with dogs and cats. That’s amazing. What sorts of things do they think about?”

“Who?” I asked.

“The dogs and cats.”

“Who cares about the dogs and cats?” Liam said. “If Danny’s right, then they’ve already figured out how to shift minds back and forth from place to place. If we can learn how they do that, we could do it to ourselves.”

Tilbey stuck his head around the side of his equipment. “Like I told you earlier; I could copy us anywhere you wanted to go. It’s separating us from each other that’s the problem.”

“They must have some way to keep the cat and the researcher separated when they transfer them,” Liam said. “Don’t they, Danny?”

I tried to remember. I came up with a fuzzy image of a cartoon cat eating a bird ten times its size, something I vaguely remembered from childhood until I realized I was a black kid at the time. We were all white as… well, white as ghosts now, but that had to be one of Liam’s memories. Apparently it was similar in some way to the one I was looking for, but it wasn’t what we needed.

“Uh, actually, I don’t remember that bit,” I said.

“Pointer fault,” Tilbey said. He’d taken to saying that in a sing-songy voice when one of us dredged up the wrong response.

“Well, remember, damn it,” Liam commanded me. “If we knew how they do it, we could do the same thing here and our problems would be over.”

“Wrong,” said Tilbey. “I already know how to keep things separate if they start out that way. That part’s simple. You just load them into separate memory nets to begin with. Our problem is we didn’t think to do that until it was way too late.”

I said, “Then what we need is a way to switch one or another of us off for a minute. If we could do that, we could read the state of the system and subtract out the difference, and that would be the pattern for whoever was switched off at the time.”

Tilbey sighed in exasperation. “You still don’t get it. There aren’t three separate beings anymore. We’re all one entity now.”

Liam snickered.

“What?” I asked.

“How does a Buddhist order a hot dog?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a joke.”

“Oh. I dunno, how?”

“ ‘Make me one with everything.’ ”

I chuckled, but Tilbey howled with mirth. “Wow, that’s great!” he said. “I’ve never heard that one before!”

Liam shook his head. “You ’roid, I heard it from you.”

“Oh.”

“Pointer fault,” I said.

We went back to what we were doing, which in my case wasn’t much. I was bored with video, didn’t want to get into an argument with Liam, and I felt too clumsy to trust myself helping Tilbey. So I stretched out and stuck my feet through the deck, closed my eyes, and tried to nap. It wasn’t physiologically the same as sleeping had been when I was alive, but maybe it would take up fewer resources.

“That’s it!” I jerked forward in my excitement, pulling free of the floor and tumbling head over heels into the ceiling light, which exploded with a spectacular flash.

I caught myself before I plowed on through the ceiling. “Sorry,” I said.

“This had better be good,” Liam threatened. The pale glow of his book reader and Tilbey’s work light provided the only illumination in the day room now.

I swallowed vacuum. “I hope it is. Look, what if Liam and I both go to sleep, and Tilbey records the system that way. Then Tilbey and I go to sleep and you record that. Then you guys go to sleep and I record that. When we were done, we’d have three separate minds, wouldn’t we?”

“Oh, sure,” Tilbey said sarcastically. “Each with two spare subconscious components influencing every aspect of their psyche. Asleep doesn’t mean ‘off.’ ”

“Well, what does, then?” I demanded.

“Go trip over the main power line and you’ll find out,” Tilbey replied. He was sounding like Liam now.

He’d meant to shut me up, but his words triggered another memory, a true one this time. I was back on the Intrepid, the Earth-Mars cargo ship Tilbey and I had served on together when we were alive, and for a while afterward. Right after I’d died and been captured by Tilbey’s prototype gadget, our navigator, Gwen, had killed the power to it, not realizing what would happen to me when she did.

What happened was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I went where dreams go when you wake up.

But when she flipped on the power again, I came back. The information pattern that defined me had not dissipated. We had proven, by accident, what most people suspected all along: some indefinable part of us persisted after death, some part that the mass eliminator latched onto when it created its shadowy copies of the original article.

Which meant that down on that very basic level, we were still three separate individuals.

“All right, then,” I said. The spectral hair stood up on the back of my spectral neck as I thought out the implications. “Here’s what we can do.”

Looking at your own ghost is not an experience I’d recommend. I didn’t even like mirrors since my untimely demise, but to see an animated phantasm with my features on it, pale and translucent and adrift in zero-g, was something I could definitely have done without.

He couldn’t even communicate at first. Just mouth “Man, you look strange,” at me, which was pretty much what I was thinking about him. Then Tilbey patched a comm link between the original mass eliminator and the duplicate he’d just turned on and we were able to speak. All six of us, since Tilbey and Liam each had a doppelganger of their own.

“Hi,” I managed.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, I’m the duplicate!” the other me cried. Then he grinned. “Sorry. I just had to say that. I mean, how many times does a person get the chance?”

“Let’s get this damned show on the road,” both Liams said in unison. Neither one smiled at the coincidence.

Tilbey A and Tilbey B just looked at one another for a long moment, and then Tilbey B said, “Boo.” Tilbey A flinched, and we all laughed.

“Liam’s right,” I said. “Let’s get moving.” I reached out to grasp the hand of my duplicate for a good-bye handshake, but we slid right through each other with only the faintest resistance. We both knew that’s how it would be—when something that’s only half there meets something else that’s only half there, the result is a quarter of the normal interaction—but it was the thought that counted. “Bye,” I said. There should have been more to discuss, but if this worked the way we hoped it would, anything we told each other would just be wasted words. He didn’t really exist, not down at the basic level on which existence mattered. He was just an echo. Ether that or he existed just as well as I did, and we’d have plenty of time to hash things out when I got back. We’d find out soon enough. I turned away and pushed myself out through one of the holes in the wall into interstellar space.

We’d installed the second mass eliminator in the landing craft. I went in through the airlock, not trusting myself to miss any vital electronics if I slipped in through the hull, and positioned myself inside the magnetic cage that would hold me in place during acceleration.

“Command, undock,” I said to the navigation computer. I felt a bump, and the lander drifted away from its mooring. “Command, accelerate along current flight path at twenty gs for one hour.” That would put me almost 800,000 miles away. Over four light-seconds; probably overkill, but we were operating by the seat of our metaphysical pants on this, and I wanted to be sure we had enough time to do what we needed to do without the two machines interacting.

The shuttle leaped away from the Spook. Without my magnetic containment field it would have shrugged me off like a raindrop, but I stayed with it. In moments the starship wasn’t even visible on the heads-up display. I shivered at the thought of all that nothingness around me; two light-years from Sol, another two to Alpha Centauri, and now I couldn’t even see the metal and cobweb canister I called home. There was no way I’d be able to find my way back without a signal beacon.

But even so, this was a crowded freeway compared to the nothingness that awaited me in an hour.

I spent the time trying not to think about it. This was going to be like doing brain surgery with a hatchet. If I hadn’t thought of it myself I would have gone into hysterics at the very idea. That Tilbey and Liam had gone along with it attested to how mixed-up our consciousnesses had become.

The farther away I got from the Spook, the easier it became not to think. Speed-of-light lag was making communication difficult between my “body” and my “brain.” My standing wave existence allowed some degree of autonomy, but not enough for complex thoughts. I felt like Hal in 2001, A Space Odyssey: “I can feel my mind going, Dave…” Even so, the acceleration stopped and the navicom said, “Maneuvers completed” long before I was ready for it. I was now officially A Long Ways Away.

The confinement cage switched off automatically. I looked at the instrument panel to make sure the radio was on. It took slow, deliberate action to move at all. “Hello, Spook,” I said, laboring over the words. “Ready when you are.”

“Synchronizing our clocks,” Tilbey said nine seconds later.

“Ready,” he said a few seconds after that.

I looked at my timer readout. It counted down from sixty seconds. When it got to five, Tilbey started counting down from his side, “Ten… nine… eight… “ I panicked for a moment and would have aborted the countdown if I could have moved more quickly, but then I realized that was right. When Tilbey’s light-delayed voice reached “Four,” it was actually zero in both places.

Both mass eliminators switched off.

I didn’t disappear. It took four seconds for my image to realize the props had been kicked out from under it. Then I disappeared. At least I assume I did. From my point of view, the universe did. But I was counting on one thing staying put, at least for the few seconds that it would take for the mass eliminator on the Spook to lose its lock on it. I was counting on the essential spark of life that was me, my soul, if you want to call it that, to hang around where I had last been using it, at least for a little while. I was half afraid there would be a bright tunnel of light to draw me away, but it hadn’t happened the first time I’d been switched off, so I didn’t really expect it now. I was much more worried that neither mass eliminator would pick me up again when we turned them back on.

Back on the Spook, the other five ghosts ceased to exist as well, the two originals first, then the three duplicates when the signal from my end stopped. The empty ships drifted along on their own while timers counted down another ten seconds for good measure, just to let everything settle down to its ground state. Then the mass eliminators switched on again.

I looked at the lander’s controls. I could see and think again. I reached out and grasped the edge of the control panel. I could move and touch and feel again, in real-time. No speed-of-light lag. The essential packet of information that defined “me” had been captured and enhanced by the mass eliminator, just as it had the first time I had died. Only this time I was in a different machine.

“I’m in the local unit,” I reported, and waited for a reply. It was a long nine seconds.

“We’re up and running here,” Tilbey reported. He sounded surprised.

“How many of you?” Wait, wait, wait, wait. Had the copying process actually created three more “souls”? I was betting it wouldn’t, but if it did we had an even bigger crisis on our hands, metaphysical as well as physical.

“Just two,” Tilbey said. “You can come home now.”

I let out an imaginary breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. “Command, take me back to the Spook,” I said.

I smiled most of the way. Laughed aloud a time or two. Even sang an old Necrotic Nuisance song I found still rattling around in my new, expansive electronic cranium. We had succeeded in separating out one ghost from the others because of that tiny spark of identity that persisted after death, but we couldn’t undo the mixing that had already happened to our holographically stored memories. Only time would erase those neural pathways as other, newer experiences overlaid them, but that was still better than what we had faced otherwise.

We had one more split to make. Tilbey had to build a third mass eliminator, and next time it would be Liam in the lander and Tilbey and me back on the Spook, but when we were done we would each have our own separate hardware generating that peculiar brand of software we called “us.” And without all those overlapping memories and multiple retrieval efforts to cause “pointer faults,” we probably wouldn’t fill up our nets again for a long, long time.

After I docked with the ship, I stayed outside for a moment to look at the stars. There was no hint of motion; the ship just hung there against its velvet-and-snow backdrop. But I knew we were going somewhere. I looked ahead, along the axis of the ship, to the bright star directly ahead.

Alpha Centauri beckoned us onward, the only light at the end of the tunnel I needed.

Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business” (October 1996), “The Spectral Stardrive” (November 1996), “Holiday Spirits” (January 1997), and “Cease and Deceased” October 1997.