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INTRODUCTION TO LIFEQUEST

Lifequest's numbered issues are collections of fictional works about life extension, including suspended animation, elimination of aging and progressive self-transformation.  A recurrent theme is that interference is not to be tolerated with regard to an individual's pursuit of life extension, where others are not in any way being victimized or placed at risk as a consequence.

Lifequest's stories portray people who desire and work to achieve endless lifespans, via scientific and technological approaches. They frequently encounter conditions where death occurs or seems unavoidable, and struggle against limitations of technology and the complacent acceptance of death by their fellow humans, in an attempt to prevail over that which others regard as inevitable. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE  Contents of LifeQuest are entirely fictional.   The stories often portray levels of organizational development which do not presently exist.  Readers are cautioned that such tales do not reflect the current state of the art in cryonics, or life extension in general.  Readers are advised to evaluate the capabilities, standards, and records of performance, of all organizations, before making arrangements of any kind.

Stories by some authors are not included, pending permission to publish on the World Wide Web.  They will be added when such permission is obtained.

*****

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Return to Main LifeQuest Index Page

BIRTH SCARS       by Thomas Donaldson

RE-CREATION       by Fred Chamberlain

TRAVELLING        by Thomas Donaldson

 WHY NOT?          by Fred Chamberlain

THE BOX*          by Fred Chamberlain

*Added to Issue #7 of LifeQuest in 2009, at

the time of publication of all seven issues on

Amazon.Com via Create Space and Kindle.

Illustrations by Linda Chamberlain

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Platosmith, a major businessman of Skastowe, was immersed deep in linpro, wearing his kasa to help calculations, when the message came through that a barker had arrived from Arthu. From Arthu! Forty light-years away, the original home of Mankind. Many people were three or even four generations away from Arthu, so much time had passed. Many had never even walked on a planet and looked up at its Sun. And now, by so many chances of history and forethought, he, Platosmith, had some keys for this message from Arthu. It had been a very long time.

And so, in his room walled with prices and statistics, Platosmith fell to remembering his life long ago on Arthu.

He remembered how he had made arrangements to be made acrushta. He'd been only 23 years old, with no experience of life but much experience of the streets. Even at 23 he'd made a name for himself: the Black Plato, the Philosopher. Not only a name but a lot of money or what seemed to him then to be. He dealt in cocaine, crack, heroin, speed, any drug his customers wanted he could get for them, immediately if it was "normal", in 24 hours if not. But still, looking over his BMW, his stereo and television wall, his pearl cufflinks and silk shirts, still...

And that was why so long ago the thin clerk at a cronic society had looked up one day to see a gigantic black, wearing clothes that dripped money, standing over him at his desk. Platosmith remembered the slight fear in the other man's eyes as he reached into his Italian leather briefcase ... to pull out $100,000 in cash. "I want suspension," he said.

They looked at one another. The clerk haltingly told him, no, he could not buy suspension, he must join a society. He was handed a set of forms as thick as a book. You must fill these out, he was told. And then (deep breath!) we must accept you as a member. Platosmith had glared at him then, but inside he remembered how he felt. "It is the Man again, always the Man.." he was saying to himself, mulling over whether to waste this tiny clerk on the spot. "Always the Man..."

The clerk had looked at him. We all had to do this, he said. If you need a Notary Public there is one next door.. And so Platosmith had sat down in that lobby, with the photos of patients looking at him in rows, and filled out the forms, one by one. He spent an entire afternoon at that and handed them back to the clerk when he was done. "Thank you, Sir," the clerk had said. "Here is your money back, for now. You will hear of our acceptance in two weeks."

He had gone away then in his chauffeured BMW. One day (he had almost forgotten about it as one more futile act ... ) a letter arrived in the mail, with a bracelet he was told to wear always, even during sex or in the bath, and he was told he was accepted into this cronic society. Welcome, it said, to immortality. He put on the bracelet. I guess I showed them, he thought. Black Plato is dangerous, you give me what I want ...

He didn't remember what happened then except by what he was told. He remembered vagueness and confusion for months after, and then one day it was morning on a summer day, he awoke in a strange room with triangular windows (open to the summer air), in a bed which seemed to adapt itself to him like a live and sensuous animal. A man sat next to the window where he could be seen. The man was wearing perfume and clothes as if he were made up for a masquerade, with very high collars, lace and embroidery everywhere. He could not place the man's age, not young or old. A woman came in, dressed in the same kind of fantastic embroidery. I am Pool Hammon, the man had said. You have been crushed and scattered. We have put you together again. You would say that it is now January 12, 2554. He spoke English Platosmith could understand, but with an odd smooth accent, and changes to the vowels, that he couldn't place.

And they told him what had happened, how he had been machine-gunned and left dying on the sidewalk only a few months from his acceptance (they seemed very respectful about it, for some reason). How he had been autopsied and the embalmed pieces of his brain put with the rest of his organs, back inside. How the cronic people had stored him anyway, and now after many years they had brought him back, to life. He had thought for a moment that this was some fantastically elaborate show. If Clown Larry was doing this to him for some reason, he'd escape somehow and make Clown Larry pay for it, triply, quadruply ... But no, no one could do this. Somehow it was Reality.

He had by now forgotten a lot, due to simple time. But he could still remember Pool telling him these things, and the breeze through the triangular windows. He was one of the earliest people to be acrushta, and the earliest to join. In 2554 people still spoke of the first hundred people to join cronic as "the Saints". He was not a Saint, but not far from one. That had been a new feeling indeed ... to walk about and see the respect in peoples' eyes, the way they'd ask his opinion about new things ...

But what, exactly, could he DO? A few Saints had made a business out of the future, but he wasn't a Saint. He had to spell out anything written, slowly, before he understood it. The only thing he knew how to do was hustle drugs. But they gave him some of those silly clothes, allowed him to come and go through the Return Center, and gave him meals and clothing, always identical. Would you like some education, they asked, and gave him some leaflets in bright colors. When he looked through them he only saw honkies. No thank you, he said slowly and politely. I will manage on my own. (He remembered how Pool had looked uncomfortable when he had said that).

He knew how to hustle drugs. OK. He started watching people closely for his opening. He kept a knife that had come with one of his meals (nobody ever asked him about it at all). It was surprisingly sharp, though it wasn't made of metal at all.

But even then he had to keep coming back with questions. People talked a lot through TV phones, with a screen half the size of the room. How did he work these? How could he move about? Was there public transport? (No, everyone just had their own private computer-chauffeured helis. On busy routes they all fit, wings folded, into another gigantic airplane, all done. He didn't even have to learn to drive!).

How could he get to the nearest city? That one was interesting and disappointing at the same time. The Return Center was very large, with many buildings, trees and grass between the buildings. People would sit outside a lot. He had asked a lady walking by, who had merely said: "Ask your heli" and hurried off. Beforehand, he thought the voice was just a recording. He felt just a bit silly asking the heli where the nearest city was, but it answered him. And then, when he asked to go there, it took him there and he learned that it was...  a museum. Hardly anyone was there, just streets which ended outside the city, quite abruptly, in grass, and tall buildings kept in immaculate condition. Nobody could have lived there for a hundred years. Where, then, do people go who want to buy drugs? For that matter, where are the people?

There were markets where people crowded together to buy things. But he saw no market for necessities, like food. Many restaurants, where a chef would design a meal for you individually. But no grocery stores. And much more to the point, no liquor stores. (Sure, the chef designed the drinks too. But that's not quite the point).

He thought about the problem again. One day he woke up, happy that he'd finally found a solution. "I want a woman," he told his heli. "Take me to where I can get a woman." The heli was silent for about 30 seconds. Finally it said, "Please be patient. I have not had such a request for many years. I am searching." He waited. What were these people all about, anyway? Where are the whorehouses, by God? It was about 30 seconds later that the heli livened up. "I've found where to take you," it said. "We're going there now."

The journey took hours. His heli went first to a joinheli of a kind he hadn't seen before. It was shaped like a tower, with many floors where helis could link on. "Many people enjoy the view. Do you want to see out?" it asked him. Puzzled, he answered yes. They hooked into the joinheli.  After a short time it was full. He remembered the anticipation he'd felt. At last. At last I've got a hold on them! Whorehouses are eternal, for always. I'll get back into business quick smart. I'm not Plato Smith for nothing.

There was a slight shudder. The entire tower lifted upwards. It was going up into the sky! He felt a weight pressing on him. The Earth turned into a child's blue ball hanging in space. "Where are we going?" he asked his heli. "What are you doing?" He felt the first stirrings of panic. But the heli said quietly that everything was in control, they were going to Heaven. Would he like some music, or perhaps to watch a video on the way? Do you want a little to eat? Oh, he thought. So there are whorehouses in Heaven?

From the window Heaven turned out to be a fantastic collection of shapes, all floating together against a background of stars brighter than any stars he had ever seen. The joinheli docked at one of them. His own heli took off its rotors and replaced them with something else. "Where are we?" he asked. To which the heli gave a quick summary. He was going to a shop for women. Heaven was ... not one, but a collection of artificial satellites in space.

Platosmith thought about that for a while. Once when he was a boy, no more than eight, his primary school class had gone on an outing to the country. He remembered the trees, and that so few people lived in the country. It was late when they were to return, late enough that night had come. The teacher made clucking sounds as she tried to get them all into the bus. Suddenly Platosmith had looked up at the sky. The stars! There had been so many stars, so bright, so beautiful. They gave him a sense of endless depths, beauty, distance ... He had stood and looked up for many seconds. He had never known they even existed before.

So now he had gone to Heaven, among the stars, to look for a whorehouse.

The final leg of the trip did not take long. They arrived at a rather shapeless satellite. The heli docked carefully. He heard air filling up the room into which they had landed. "You may get out now," his heli said. He went through the door. On the other side a small fat man was standing. "Very good," the man said. "We get so little business nowadays." The man led him into another room, where he saw models (very well done) of body parts. All body parts. And faces. There were photographs too. A video came on, large and covering half the room. It showed a nude woman, standing and smiling. "We can make you a woman to suit any taste," the man said. "Would you like to try out some combinations?" Then the fat man stopped again. "It's been 250 years since someone has come by." The fat man shook his head. "They just don't appreciate good craftsmanship any more. I don't understand it."

Platosmith looked at the body parts and the pictures silently while the little fat man went on. "We can make them any color you want," the fat man was saying. Platosmith was silent for many minutes, looking at the video, the models, the faces on the wall. "No thank you," he said finally. "I'm sorry but I came here by mistake."

Once he asked his heli to simply wander about. "Would you like a tour, sir?" it replied. "What kind of tour?" he asked suspiciously. "Just wander aimlessly around." The heli rose and took him to the next mountain. Almost all the country was wild. There were no roads. Here and there, buildings. He could see some were very tall, he wasn't looking at peasant villages. He could see other helis on some errand or other, and high in the sky a joinheli passed by. "This is going to be much much harder than I thought," he thought to himself.

But he had kept up his search for months. They didn't try to throw him out of the Return Center, and every night his clothes were taken away and washed, lace and all, then returned in the morning. Meals cycled weekly, Monday breakfast always the same as last Monday's. He could come and go as he pleased and no one ever asked him for money. Lonely for any human talk, he started speaking to Pool and then later to a nurse, Karn. He could see in their eyes that they both wanted him to take the education, he was slowly rotting inside. "You'll have to learn about this place, even if you want to go five miles." But he still was never open with them. "Where are you going?" they asked. "What are you trying to do?" That's my business, that's private, he said.

On a day like any other (the days here never seemed to vary), he woke up and breakfasted in his room as usual. He then dressed in the lacy clothing, ready to go out. But Pool came by instead, always civil. "I've brought someone I'd like you to meet," he said to Platosmith. Platosmith came out of his room dubiously, to meet a young black woman, dressed in the same lacy clothes they all were. "Hello, Platosmith," she said, and looked at him with big eyes. "I think you'd like to talk to her," Pool said.

Her name was Varna. She spoke with the same funny smooth accent as the others. "I've wanted to meet you," she said. "I know you're just returned." He had shrugged. This was just a black honky. She was very pretty, though. "Did you know that you were the first black ever to be frozen? Did you know that we all respect you, that you're famous?" And she smiled. "We know how you worked in the old days, too. But you see, you brought immortality to blacks, too." But Platosmith had merely shrugged.

One day he had an idea. If the heli could talk, why not the telephone? After all, it understood him when he asked to phone Pool. So he said: "Describe yourself". He learned with surprise how the telcom was much more than a telephone, it was a reference center, a computer, everything. It could put out text, too, for those who wanted to read. "Alright," he said. "Show me some text". He found it even harder to read than in the old days, not only did he have to spell it out but the letters had changed. Not so much that he couldn't read it, though. Very slowly. "Thanks," he said to the machine. "I don't feel like reading now." Is this machine watching me? he thought. Then: "Can you show me things, and tell me about them?"

From that point on he started staying in his room for hours, asking the telcom questions. It showed him a map of where he was. It told him (haltingly, only when asked, and he had to ask the right questions. It was hard to ask the right questions) how he had come there. "Where IS everybody?" he asked after his trip to the mountain. Everyone was elsewhere. Some had gone to the stars, many had left the Earth, people had been drifting away for centuries now. It showed him pictures of wild forests and a flat prairie stretching away under the sky.

Whenever he spoke to Pool or Karn he started asking guarded questions. Without letting them know it, he was trying to find out if they were watching him through the telcom. As we were talking last week, he said, introducing a conversation he had with his telcom as if it were with them. "I don't remember saying any of that," Karn would say. He watched her very closely for signs she was lying. He saw none. Gradually his questions to the telcom got bolder.

"Where's the nearest liquor store?" he asked. The answer was disappointing and interesting, just like the city question. It did not understand him at first. He had to explain. There were no liquor stores. If people wanted basic supplies of that kind, their houses could be set to call for them regularly and accept the shipment. ("If the telcom talks," he thought, "why not the house?" He looked about his room with interested eyes). But these people would drink liquor socially.

Well then. "Did many people drink large amounts of liquor?" This too led somewhere he wasn't trying to go. Yes, but then many people had modified themselves so as not to be affected by it. They'd added a whole set of enzymes to degrade it and turn it into energy. They could literally run on alcohol. Not everyone had done this, of course. It was most common in professional entertainers, who would perform at private parties. He learned that there were no public performances any more, another interesting fact, but less disappointing.

"What about drunkenness," he asked. Drunkenness? the telcom had replied. What is that? Oh boy, he'd thought then. I'm really in for it now! So he had explained how people might want to be drunk. The telcom was silent then for a whole second, a long time for it. "I am recalling old records," it said. "Please wait a moment." Old records! Platosmith felt a chill. Slowly his stomach started clenching.

"Here it is!" the telcom answered brightly. "I see." Well? Platosmith had asked. "It was very primitive," the telcom answered. "There are antiquarians who still do that, sometimes, to write about it and know what it was like." So there were no liquor stores, no drunkenness. What kind of people were these? But then he had another thought. "You said it was primitive," he asked. "What do people do now?" Some people were directly altering their brains, it answered. That was sometimes dangerous. (So was alcohol, Platosmith thought, but maybe I'm getting somewhere at last).

But then the telcom had given him a blow. "There are no restrictions whatever on this activity," it had said. Now that's grand, Platosmith thought. I've spent months secretly trying to find out about something which wasn't even illegal! "Would you like to be put in contact with some societies and agencies doing such experiments?" the telcom went on. Platosmith was silent. "Not right now," he had answered.

Well. He went outside and sat under an oak tree not far from his room. Pool came by not long after and saw him sitting despondently there. "Can I join?" he asked. Platosmith was impassive, but Pool had sat down. But Platosmith had then started talking. He accused Pool of holding information back, of wasting his time, of playing with him. "I'm just your black toy," he said. He began to scream. "Aren't you proud of yourself for leading me on?" Pool had looked surprised and said nothing. "I'm going to teach you not to mess with the Black Plato," Platosmith had screamed. He was brandishing the knife wildly. It was very clear now, he thought. He looked at Pool slowly, and then pressed the knife up against Pool's ribcage. "You're scum, you honky bastard. You think you're so special ..." Then he stabbed Pool to the heart, and afterwards slit his throat.

Where was he to go then? No doubt they could come for him anywhere. So he went back to his room. He didn't even bother to throw away the knife. So that's what it's come to, he thought to himself. Is there a job of assassin with these people?

Oddly, everything was calm. But thinking the incident over as he walked away, it wasn't like any other time he had wasted people. Pool had not looked frightened! Curious, puzzled, even introspective, but he hadn't seen even a smidgen of fear in Pool's eyes.

The next day, Pool was not under the tree, but Platosmith's meals kept coming, he was just as free to come and go as he pleased. Neither the telcom nor the heli spoke the least bit differently to him. Had it all been a dream? Was he crazy? No, he had the knife, still with blood on it. He walked about the grounds in a daze, with the people he saw looking at him indifferently. Slowly he began to puzzle out what he could do NOW. He should certainly get in touch with one of these brain change societies, certainly...

It was about a week after the incident under the tree that he had met Pool walking calmly from one building to another. He had looked at Pool in shock, but then thought to himself: Well, yes, if they could bring me back they could bring back Pool. Pool had smiled at him, come up to him, put his arm around Platosmith's shoulders. "Come now, come now", he had said. "The battles you are fighting were lost or won five hundred years ago. It is a different time, we are different people from what we were before. Let us tell you about ourselves and this place and this world."

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      As ODG-941 moved toward the podium, the hall silenced. 941's great form was not that different from the others', but the ID codes radiating from antennae at his wasplike midsection told those in attendance who he was.  Leaning forward slightly as he approached the ramp to the stage, he rolled quickly to the higher level without the slightest flexing of lower appendages.  His head, an spheroidal sensor assembly, swept about surveying the thousands who had attended the symposium.  Finally, in the radio frequency voice of the Jankx, he spoke.

    "As you have heard, it appears an alien species has taken residence on this planet," he said.  A current of low level electronic commentary swept the hall.  The rumor was true!  941 was the world's most eminent exobiologist, and though they had yet to discover evidence of life even on other planets of the local system, it was a passionate dream of theirs to do so.  If 941 said he had discovered an alien species, here on their home planet, they were most reluctant to doubt it.

       "It is the strangest thing.  We find them only in the vicinity of volcanic vents in the deeps of the ocean, and they die quickly after being captured.  It appears their immune systems cannot withstand the slightest contact with our microorganisms."

       941 displayed visuals, and most of the attendees captured them from video terminals at their seats.  The invaders appeared to be a very primitive sort, at best a hundred microns long, possessing no intelligence of significance.

       "But how could such creatures have come through space?" came one question among many others from the audience, after he was finished.  It was from ODG-123, an old friend of 941's.  941 had no satisfactory answer, for this or for most of the other queries.  The very existence of such a strange life form was sufficient reason for the conference, even though only the most preliminary results were available.

       941 and 123 met for lunch.  As they ingested silicon nuggets flavored with titanium and heavily salted with exotic crystals of carbon, 941 revealed private data not sufficiently analyzed for presentation in the open meeting.

       "We've done electron microscopy of some of the creatures under cryogenic conditions," 941 said.  "The seat of their structure is a fascinating pattern of complex, carbon based molecules.  Utterly indecipherable!  Also, it looks as if they function by elementary oxidation, metabolically.  They appear to have a queer and laborious energy conversion capable of functioning by sunlight, though these specimens were taken from an area where sunlight is totally absent."

       He paused.  123 was thoughtfully silent, then she swiveled in her seat and fixed all of her sensors on 941. "Can you tell me anything more about this pattern?" she said enticingly.  Her upper appendages danced on the table in a way which would have been hypnotic to any small animal.

       Even 941 was momentarily distracted.  He had engaged in reproductive data mixing with 123 several times previously, and in the nuances of her question was a clear invitation.  But she was an archaeologist, he could not let himself forget, and archaeologists and exobiologists were virulent rivals.  She would not hesitate to exploit every kernel of information she could extract from him for her own papers, publishing them without a moment's delay.

       Still, 941 could picture the two of them coiled in a reproduction sanctuary, blending data in a bridge from which would emerge a new entity.  Some of their offspring were already preeminent in their own fields.  Oh, what the hell!  He couldn't resist.  She could wind him around her slenderest appendage, and she knew it.

       The first day of the symposium drew to an end.  After a romantic dinner, at which they sipped frothing liquid nitrogen and downed chilled slices of dry ice coated with congealed hydrocarbons, 941 and 123 retired to the privacy of a hotel suite and began their fourth reproductive engagement.  For weeks following the symposium, they would remain together in the most delicious experience a Jankx could imagine.  Then the child would go to a growth center, self aware and able to supervise its own development.  The days of extended parental child care were long past in the culture of the Jankx.

       But there was a shocking disclosure that first night which changed everything. Teasingly, the first thing 123 wanted to probe was the information pattern that lay at the heart of the aliens.  When 941 let her peek at it, she gasped and her barriers went up.

       123 recoiled, as if she had been caught in the magnetic vortex of a transportation guideway.  Her appendages drew in and she turned away.  For a period of minutes, 941 lay beside her in frustration until 123 opened minimal communication channels. Inside, she seemed to be experiencing a kind of torment and disgust she could not express. All she would say was it was a mere hypothesis; she could not rest until she had explored it. The next morning, 123 broke her engagement with 941 and left for her laboratory some thousands of miles away.

       The remainder of the symposium was uneventful.  More data was presented, but the enigmas remained.  When the last words had been spoken, 941 had one thought in mind, to join 123 and find what had so violently distracted her that she had broken the engagement.

***

     The train trip was brief, but enjoyable.  The long, magnetically levitated vehicle raced over flat terrain at mach three, but when it encountered mountains it slowed to subsonic speeds and wound among the peaks and rivers. The part of the journey 941 enjoyed most was the section near the end, where the guideways ran sinuously through an enormous canyon, following the course of a river which had torn a gash nearly a mile deep in the overlying plateau.

       The system designers could have taken a level route above the canyon and shaved ten minutes from the trip, but everyone agreed the longer journey was worth the extra time required.  123 had spent years in that canyon, tunneling into bedding planes in search of fossils.  At the base of the canyon was one of her favorite resorts, where they planned to honeymoon in their current engagement before it was terminated.  At the main continental terminal, on a hunch, 941 called the resort and sure enough, 123 was on the register. Twenty minutes later, he was back at the canyon and went in search of her.

       It was in a side canyon he finally found her.  Passing its entrance as he waded the main stream, he sensed 123's ID code faintly coming from the mouth of the tributary and followed it for a quarter mile until there she was, mulling over samples a quarter of the way up a rocky slope.  When she saw him, she gave a joyous greeting and raced down the slope to the stream.  There, her appendages wrapped around him and intertwined with his, she apologized and thanked him for coming after her.

       "But why?" he said.  "What's the matter?"

       123 was silent for a moment. "Come with me," she said, and led the way to a high promontory overlooking the canyon.  On a ledge two thousand feet above the river, she had first shown him the site of a discovery of hers which had revolutionized the Jankx' understanding of their planet's past.  Now, she withdrew into the shade of an overhang and invited 941 to join her.  Then, slowly, she began a story she told him in advance she did not expect him to believe.

       "Look into my thoughts, 941," she said.  He let his communication appendages sink into her high bandwidth recesses and looked.  "See the shapes?" 941 saw the skeletons of the ancient ones, long departed, who were the shapers of the land long before the Jankx evolved.  As he watched, the pictures filled in and skeletons were covered by layer after layer of tissue and circulatory networks. Finally, an outer layer was added.  941 had seen these pictures before.  Why was she showing them to him again?

      "We modeled our current body designs, to the extent we could, after the evolved efficiencies of these creatures!" 123 cried.  "We borrowed from their ancient machinery!  We owe everything to them!"

      It was a cry of agony.  Why was she so upset?

      "The tissue samples we reconstructed were three million years old, from the wastes of deserts in mountains south of the equatorial zone!"

       The tones of her words distorted them almost to the point of incoherency. The pictures began to break down, washed with white noise, and 123's appendages began to quiver involuntarily. 941 tried, with a sense of futility, to  comfort her.  It was no use.  He sensed her control centers driving her power supplies into overload, and there were spurious emissions of erratic transients indicating internal short circuits of kilovolt magnitudes.

      "It's unforgivable!  There's no way to atone for it! No decent Jankx could live with it!" 123 screamed, and with no other warning than that she moved quickly to the edge of the precipice and threw herself into space.

      941 could not believe it and was momentarily immobile with horrified surprise; then he flung himself to the brink and stared downward.  Even before 123 smashed upon jagged rocks fifteen hundred feet below, the echoes of 941's cries of agonized despair reached those in the resort, and rescue groups were on the way.

***

       The reconstruction of 123 was as good as it could be, but even the medical technology of the Jankx had its limits. Their bodies were evolved from colonies of inorganic assemblers, which multiplied and differentiated to form operative subassemblies according to designs which were encoded in such a way the Jankx scientists had yet to fully decipher many of them.

       The Jankx traced their evolution back through several million years to a point known as the Great Discontinuity, when they appeared to have sprung into existence.  Before that, a great profusion of other species had existed, and apparently all of them departed or vanished at the same time.  A quest of the Jankx culture, a "holy grail" they sought to find, was the explanation of their origin and the fate of the earlier inhabitants of the planet.

       The only things Jankx archaeologists had discovered were dried samples of countless species within which there were indecipherable patterns, patterns far too similar to the patterns 941 had shown 123 that night at the symposium. The archaeologists had been on the verge of publishing their pattern findings when the exobiologists had called their emergency meeting.  The competitiveness and secrecy of the two groups defied explanation, yet it existed.

      941 stayed with 123, day and night, for three full years. Within her, tiny assemblers sought to put the pieces back together.  941 warmed 123 when she cooled and drained her heat when her temperature rose.  When she needed them, he supplied the purest of elements. Finally, when she began to stir with signs of consciousness, 941 held her, whispering when she softly called his name, which she had done throughout the fall to what she had expected would be her death.  For a long while, it was not clear if 123 would ever truly be herself again.

      One morning, as the sun rose and light filtered into 123's recovery room, her sensors came into full focus.  941 woke immediately and held 123 as tightly as one Jankx could hold another without hurting. As she swam upward from a state of disorientation that pulsated still and seemed as if it would never end, 941 beckoned and coaxed her on.  It took hours; then suddenly 123 was fully alert again.  Shivers of the joy of life poured from her appendages into 941.  She promised, in that moment, that she would never try to destroy herself again.

      The aliens were an unspoken subject between them at first. 123 allowed herself to be drawn into an engagement with 941 again, and the two of them spent weeks away from civilization. Finally, a new offspring went to the growth center, and they were completely alone.  In a hotel room near the growth center, 941 sensed it was time.  He asked, "Why? What was it?  That day on the ledge?"

       123 trembled.  Then she said, "Come with me to the Coastal Museum and I'll tell you."  She would say no more.

       Thus it was that one late afternoon they stood in front of portraits of the ancient ones, archives which survived the millions of years since the Great Discontinuity.  123 insisted they be seated. Hesitantly, she began to speak. As the minutes passed, she became engrossed in her subject. 941 relaxed.  123 seemed to be fully in control of herself. Perhaps this time it would go without difficulty.

       "We arose from primitive assemblers, did we not?" 123 said.

       941 nodded.  It was an almost imperceptible movement of his head, but it served the purpose.

       "And our designs, while not fully deciphered, are a rational form of an engineering systems approach?"

       941 nodded again, uncertain of where this was headed.

       "The culture of the ancient ones had this knowledge, and they could have designed us, but there are problems with that hypothesis."

       "Why do you say that?"

       123 gestured sarcastically.  "Look at the early forms we took!  Look at the first indications of specialization, as if the assemblers had stumbled by themselves on more efficient ways of cooperation!  Look at the first, clumsy steps toward locomotion, as if trial and error were being employed!  See the interspecies competition in our predecessors, battling for survival.  Would the ancient ones have designed these mutually destructive entities?  Tell me!"

      941's head inclined downward.  It was his way of showing he was puzzled. "What are you trying to tell me?" he asked.  "Why does it matter whether or not ancient ones designed us?"

      123's tone was tense.  "Our microorganisms, our primitive assemblers... they kill your 'aliens' at the volcanic sea floor vents.  They dissolve my specimens from three million years ago if given the slightest chance. Every form of the profusion of life that was here before the Great Discontinuity suddenly vanished.  Doesn't that tell you something?"

     "What should it tell me?" 941 said, puzzled.  His question was sincere, but in him a horror began to grow.

     "The first assemblers, from which we arose, wiped out everything!" 123 practically shouted.  "They dissolved everything except fossils and materials so remote they could not find them. Archaeologists' specimens, carefully preserved, and your 'aliens' from the ocean floor are all that remains of a world teeming with life.  In its place we have the Jankx and a few primitive, competing species from which we arose!"

      She could not go on.  Jankx wept by a quivering release of pressurized gases.  123 was weeping.

      941 contemplated the disaster of which she spoke.  He saw primitive assemblers tearing down the huge life chain 123 had studied ever since she was old enough to have a purpose in life. The long vanished cities of the ancient ones? The trees, the animals, the sea life that once flourished?  All those things which he and his fellow exobiologists sought in the void?  They had been here, a few million years ago, and now they were gone, destroyed by primitive assemblers. And in their place?  Jankx and a few other things made of assemblers!

       A story from the literature of the ancient ones came to 941 suddenly.  A little girl, Pandora, opened a box, and out came the evils of the world.  941 had a flash of a new horror and rose in a panic. "Come with me," he shouted, and dragged 123 to her feet.  He would not explain, as he rushed to his laboratory and confronted his supervisor.

       "What are you upset about, 941?" 444 asked.  444 was the laboratory manager.  He had never seen 941 like this. 941 stumbled through the story, assisted by 123.

       "But what's the point?" asked 444.

       "It's project 877B," 941 said vehemently.  "It's got to stop!"

       "But that's your project!"

       "I know, but it has dangers we never considered."

       "What?"

       "You've heard 123's hypothesis. What do you think of it?"

       "Plausible!"

       "But then, what about 877B!"

       "What about it?"

       "We're trying to synthesize organic life!"

       123 added, "If you succeed, what you synthesize will be immune to our microorganisms."

       "So?"  444 was showing signs of uneasiness.

       "So if we create a form of organic life immune to our assemblers," 941 said, "perhaps it will be able to tear down assemblers.  Suppose life like that were turned loose on our planet, to flourish; suppose it were able to dissolve the assemblers of which we're made.  What would that mean to us?"

      "It's too late," said 444.

      "What do you mean?" demanded 941.

      "You've been away for years, with 123," 444 reminded him. "In that time, 877B passed a major hurdle.  The aliens? Your group found a way to modify the information pattern so the aliens are immune to our assemblers.  They call the altered pattern XB4. It's like the original pattern with the addition of a diamond fiber web, and it replicates itself.  Look out that window."

      Outside the window, 941 and 123 could see little.  "What's there to see?" 123 asked.

      "Don't you see a faint, greenish tinge on those hills?"

      941's circuits felt as if they were overloading.

      "Don't tell me..."

      "You were the one who always insisted life had to prove itself in the natural environment."

      "But I didn't mean..."

      "No matter what you meant.  It's out there, now, and let's hope it doesn't have a taste for assemblers!"

       "It doesn't," 123 laughed.  "If it did, we wouldn't be here talking, now."

       941 and 123 dined at the top of the tallest tower in the city that night.  123 could not contain her excitement.

       "This is it, our chance to redeem ourselves," she said. "We can coax XB4 into patterns matching those specimens we archaeologists have preserved, thousands upon thousands of vanished life forms, safe and accounted for.  These things can come to life again; the ancient ones can once more walk this Earth."

       There was uncontrollable trembling as she spoke, nibbling on a sliver of icy quartz.

       "941, you and your exobiologists had better get ready. Before you know it, you're going to have to deal with a truly extraordinary turn of events.  We're going to recreate the all species in the life chain that created us.  This time we can work together, to find ways we can protect each of us from the other."

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RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

At the age of 25 days, two weeks after his release from hospital to mix with people in the world, Tupac Amaru saw his first child. He had gone to the Market in his new world, still full of wonder at it, even though even the first time he saw something its name and description would spring unbidden to his mind.  The satellite was vast, with many corridors opening suddenly on high-ceilinged gardens full of strange yet familiar plants.

People went to the Market not just to shop (they could do that from home) but to shop with others, to look at them and be seen, to make friends or show contempt for enemies.  And incidentally to shop. Smells of spices, sights of women passing by in the distance, hubbub from conversation, noise from walking on tiled floor, all came to him.  More than most he wanted to wander, to think and look at the people around him.  He was only 25 days old, troubled by his memories of long ago.

He was examining the fresh and multicolored smell of flowers from the nearest shop when he noticed, almost with the back of his mind, how suddenly everyone had become silent.  There were whispers.  He looked up.  A mother and her child had come down one of the tiled halls.  The child was no more than 5 years old, a girl in a tiny dhaba just like the grownups, with curly black hair.  No one was pointing, but he heard discreet whispers. "A child!" two women next to him whispered.

The silence was only a moment. Everything went back as it was before. But he could see women still looking fondly at the little girl, just for moments. Even men in cafes had sat back from their discussions over tharwa to watch the little girl in the throng, amid the bright helio light.

Not long after his creation, still in hospital, they had told Tupac Amaru about the universe into which he had been created. They had already put into him, from (not quite his earliest memories, but his earliest memories in this world) his creation, shadowy memories of another world very different.  He knew that somehow, whoever he was, he had lived in that other different world thousands of years ago. None of those memories woke him to a sense of familiarity and truth.

But while still in hospital they had showed him this new world, where their lives and his life would stretch out for thousands of years into a dim and misty infinity. Where men and women would not marry but instead keep company with one another, for only short periods of 50 years. Where children were so rare that mother and father would move great distances to Nests of Rearing where their child could be schooled and grow into adulthood among other children.  "The touch of others" they called it.  "Children should play with other children", they said. "They must punch one another, poke one another, laugh at Kris Kringle the clown."

"What of me?" Tupac Amaru had asked. He looked down at his fully formed adult body, brown skin, light hair on his arms and legs, loincloth.  In the mirror he saw his straight black hair.  "Where was my Nest of Rearing?  Who am I?".

He could not remember any Nest of Rearing.  He could remember axes, knives, pots, fragments of a language different from that of these people, tiny houses made of a thick yellow grass bunched together at the top.  The axes and knives awoke no memory of hefting them, how they had felt in his hand.  The tiny houses were pictures only, out of a book, no memory of how he had felt entering, sleeping, talking in one.  They had put him in loincloth, not their own dhaba's. He could not remember the feel of a loincloth at all.  The men of that other time had worn loincloths.

There was only one memory that did not seem unreal.  It was a single haunting vignette, coming back to him again and again as if his brain sought for the one true living thing amid all the dead. He remembered he was a boy.  He was standing in the mud of a beach, amid the cold and rain, watching his father spear fish from a canoe.  There wasn't even any motion, just the sight of his father, standing up so tall, with his black hair lank down his face in the rain, holding up a spear about to throw it at a fish.

When he awoke with these memories (if they were really memories) he was in a hospital.  He was lying in bed, but fully awake. A tall thin-lipped man (a doctor, they called him.  He knew that at once), blond with hair that was also thin, smiled. "Welcome." he smiled.  "Welcome to immortality.  I am Hanrahan."

Tupac had no questions about the room, the white dhaba the man wore (a very light garment of fine silken cloth, billowing about the body in slight breezes), the clean smell of the air, nor even how to deal with this world.  That knowledge came to him at once.

"What has happened to me?" he had asked.  He knew the answer already, but then again did not know.  "What has happened to me?"

The doctor Hanrahan had smiled quirkily. He didn't know how to answer, because Tupac was not asking for facts.  "I am a Resurrectionist" he said.  Tupac had known enough for that to mean a short jerk of fear, not of the man but of ... whatever. "No, don't worry," Hanrahan had said.  "This isn't a secret place, you're completely safe".  Tupac had felt relieved.

And so they had talked about Resurrectionism and what it meant. Gray shadow memories Tupac Amaru already had became real, a live story.

For centuries these people (their language and society had not even existed before human beings left the Earth) had preserved intractable medical patients in suspended form until medical means existed to repair them.  It was the ultimate attempt at the immortality Tupac saw visibly all around him, the absence of both age and childhood, where everyone lived in a glow of maturity and health.  Even now, at that time, very rarely someone would fall afoul of Nature (acrushta, they called it).  Their tiny machines would get into someone and transform them into a malformed disabled creature.  All the backup systems carefully provided against acrushta would sometimes (but very rarely) fail. The careful copies patients had made of their memories, carefully stored and kept, would somehow be destroyed.  Sometimes the altered monster itself would destroy them, sometimes it would happen otherwise.

Perhaps only three or four people would go acrushta in a year. "Nature still takes casualties," their friends would say.  Bajak was their name for the evil part of Nature which pursued all human beings endlessly, that always watched for breaks in our defenses, pulling people down into the Undifferentiated.  Their friends would shrug and smile gently.  Doctors would store the acrushta patient in a special solid form resistant even to blowtorches, and study them for a way to bring them back to humanity.

This was an old practice, at least 2000 years old.  Now its beginning was for everyone, even those few alive at that time, a dim memory of work, tiny successes won from bajak at terrible cost, mob tumult, dismay, debate, speeches, senseless opposition. Hanrahan had himself been only a young child when mobs raided a facility, to find it empty.  He had dim memories of watching it burn while the mob exulted at their victory which was their defeat.  Today an Anglis Society met weekly to speak the language they had spoken then, for fun.  Even now the name for the treatment came down from that language: cronic.

Enraged mobs don't run through cities just for a medical treatment, though.  Cronic touched very deeply on peoples' sense of themselves and their purpose.  It had no sooner become widely accepted than a host of philosophies sprang up, heretical versions of Christen religions, wild affirmations about human purposes in the Universe.  The Catolic religion survived, but in a form no prior Pope could have recognized.

"So you were living then?" Tupac asked. "Yes," Hanrahan had answered.  But when Tupac questioned Hanrahan about his personal memories Hanrahan had smiled. "I don't really keep that stuff any more. After all, it was so long ago and means so little now. I could dredge it up, of course, if there were some really big reason..." and his voice had trailed off.

One issue had remained.  If we had the power, would we then have an obligation to bring back to life everyone who has ever lived? "Everyone who has ever lived!" some people astounded.  The idea had come from an even earlier philosopher, Nicholas Fyodorov. "That's just a wild fantasy.  We do not have the power.  That is all."

But in the year 920 AS, only 50 years ago, the first Resurrectionists looked around and started thinking about the current abilities of cronic and medicine itself.  For centuries people had known (a common saying to an enemy was: "Remake yourself from your earlobe!") how to take any piece of flesh and construct a human being around it.  When they could first do it, a few people played that game as a jape. Some people would admit to a mild feeling that the perpetrator was acting childishly.  By 920 the feat didn't even awake emotion.  Nobody did it anymore.

What the Resurrectionists noticed was that slowly, over hundreds of years, very powerful means of inference had arisen.  It wasn't just that they could turn fragments into people, at all.  They could find out first from the fragments so much, even too much, about the person; but not even just that, but they could tell with certainty that whatever still remained unknown they could never discover.  It was gone, bajak had taken it completely.

In 926 a band of Resurrectionists (the name didn't exist then) acted.  They disinterred an embalmed body, a woman, fortunate enough to come down to their time without rotting into bones only.  They recreated her into a living woman, from so long ago she could tell them eyewitness stories about the Great San Francisco Fire, automobiles, fantastic wonderful stories from the Ages of Pain.  Certainly she did not have the memories of whole person, though... Resurrectionism began. Normalists, opposing Resurrectionists, began very soon after.

Resurrectionist: "Isn't life a supreme value?  We would keep a friend and even a deep enemy alive even if we could gain no profit from it ourselves but instead much trouble.  It is our duty out of common humanity.  Knowing what we know how could we ally ourselves with bajak to someone's destruction?  Are we still savages at heart?"

Tupac Amaru listened to Hanrahan, thinking of his shadow, unreal memories of another time.  These people had a fantastic wealth and power that the abstract people of his shadow memories would have thought infinite.  Tupac knew that, even though he could not feel what one of those shadow people may have felt: an abstract insight by deduction only.

But these modern people did not act like their wealth was infinite, themselves. Their desires had grown to match.

Normalist: "Why bring these people back, with only fragments of their memories, to live in poverty for hundreds of years? They are finished and complete.  You bring back a ragged mess, you make much misery to no good end.  You wouldn't give them even one percent of your own wealth.  You want to turn them out to wander and beg for a hundred years."

Normalist soldu (military robots) guarded many old cemeteries "We do not want to release a lot of poverty-stricken beggars out on the world! That is final."  Friends and pairs fell out, to glare darkly at one another whenever they found themselves together. Normalist soldu roamed the streets, seeking to stop resurrections by force.

Hanrahan told over what Tupac's memories already contained.  He told Tupac what they had done.  They had stolen the only fragments of Tupac's brain existing and revived him out of them in a Resurrectionist secret house.

The fragments had been found in a tropical swamp and stored in a museum for study. They had spent 20 years inferring everything they could about him.  Not only that but they could prove to him, quietly and with regret, that every thing else had vanished into cosmic noise.  By inference they could discover a few words and an elementary grammar of his old language.  They could say a little about how this man had lived.  They knew his complete genetic plan.  They knew the common tools these people used to scrape their living.  All this information they added to Tupac's memories, since he must have known these things.  So that he needn't wander in ignorance, they also gave him all the common knowledge of their own time, their language, how they lived too. Finally, because all people must have names, they had given him a name.

It certainly wasn't his old name.  They could not even give him a name like those of his old people.  They named him Tupac Amaru after an Amerindian mythic hero. He had been an Amerindian, whatever that meant or was.

And so, Tupac stood in the Market watching the crowds and thinking about his lone picture of his father.  "Who am I?" he was asking himself.  "Who am I?" He was wearing a dhaba like everyone else, of course, not a loincloth.  It was very light clothing just right for places where the climate was completely controlled, with very light sandals.  On a planetary surface, even where they could breathe the air and drink the water, these people would wear another class of garment, a speste, heavier and full of their tiny devices to control climate inside it.

He sat down at the cafe nearby.  The child was gone.  He bought his own cup of tharwa and sat down, still puzzling and quiet.

In this mode he started when he heard a bright "Hi!".

He looked up.  A woman was standing there smiling.  She had brown skin and straight black hair too.  "What brought you here?" she was saying.  "I've hardly seen a Kradowak anywhere!  Can I sit down?"

Tupac knew at once about Kradowak, a nation light years away, just as anything else common knowledge to these people was common knowledge to him too.  He silently motioned for her to sit.  "Oh no!" he said.  "I'm not a Kradowak.  I'm an Amerindian."  Puzzled glance from the woman.

"It's alright," he said.  "They're a kind of people who lived thousands of years ago. I've come down from that time". The woman looked surprised again.

"You must really have a story to tell..." she said.  She looked at him shyly.  "I don't know what an Amerindian is."

"Well," Tupac began, but he grew pensive again.  "They were a nation of long ago. No one takes the trouble to remember them. It was so long ago, and means so little to anything now.." Sudden bright grin, looking at her.  "I think maybe there were Amerindians in Kradowak's history, long ago."

"I wouldn't know.  Who bothers to remember?  But hey, my name is Silanou. What's yours?"

They talked over their tharwa while the bustling world went past. Tupac told her his name, which she thought a strange name with two parts to it.  She had left Kradowak years ago, thinking over her last pairing and all the ones before it.  But she hadn't lived that time, she had decided to look at other places, other stars, and so had spent most of it in suspension.  She had only just arrived at Skastowe, which was the name of their satellite and all its related satellites.  "And what have you been doing all that time?" she asked him.

"A bit," he said.  "I don't want to talk about it."  She looked at him shyly again. "Tupac, you're a very mysterious man," she smiled.

They both watched the crowds, pointing out people going past.  A very large woman in a bright red dhaba, with big gold earrings. A small thin man in an intricately patterned dhaba, all in shades of gray, was walking with her.  They were holding hands.

"What have you done for the last thousand years?" Tupac asked. "This and that," Silanou smiled again.  "I was a scientist for a while, then an artist.  This isn't the first time I've gone off to other stars, either.."  Hesitation, then a smile.  "I had a reputation for my paintings five hundred years ago.  Some people still remember me, even now" and then: "so there.  And won't you tell me what you've been doing?"

Tupac Amaru shook his head, but smiled. "Well, okay," Silanou answered.  "What do you think of the flowers in the shop there? They have a lot of really good designs."

"Yes," Tupac answered. "I've never seen flowers like them. The idea of petals with little daughter petals, that's good. And the color choice is good, too."

Suddenly he became quite pensive, thinking about himself and the little girl. He wondered for a moment why the girl had been there instead of in a Nest of Rearing.  "Just how old are you, anyway?" he suddenly asked Silanou.

"I haven't bothered to keep that," Silanou said.  "I don't remember my childhood any more."  She smiled again.  "Some say your childhood affects you for a long time.  But I think that's not forever."  Tupac had another sudden vision of his father standing in the canoe, so strong he felt he was there again for a second. Silanou, the crowds, all faded away.  He looked up again. "You know," Silanou was saying, "you have a very odd personality. You're not like other people.  Please don't think that makes you unlikable.  But I have to go now.  Seriously."  She was standing up, gazing at him.  She had dark eyes, too, matching her hair.

Tupac watched her walking away through the crowds.  He asked for another tharwa. Well again, he thought to himself.  There are so many things they can't put in your brain, including every one of the things that they can.  "I even think I'll like it here", he said, to no one in particular.  If I live for 5000 years I may never bother to remember this moment.  I might not even remember my father in the canoe.  How am I different from these people?

He thought back through his shadow memories of that previous life.  In the shadow language he could not remember ever speaking they called it ko'itsa then, which meant death forever.  When people were sick, in his old times, they called it death.  These people of Skastowe, Kradowak, this universe he woke to, they had their own kind of oblivion.  It makes so tremendous a difference, though, such a major difference in kind and feeling. But Silanou had casually wiped out an entire life, her life, centuries: "It is not important, it was so long ago.." The man near him wore a plain grey dhaba and carried a black packet on a leather strap. It wasn't worn (nothing these people had ever looked worn) but he had chosen it a dull gray color.  He had a kasu, a kind of animated hat, resting on the black packet. Thick eyebrows.  He sipped his tharwa slowly, watching the crowds just like Tupac. Couples and singles went by.  A Normalist soldu walked past on some Normalist mission, pushing through the crowds.  No attempts at Resurrection here.  The man was relaxing, but he looked grim. Here was a man who would take no nonsense from anyone whatever their power or station.

"Hello!" Tupac said.  "Can I sit with you? I am Tupac Amaru." The man focused grey eyes mildly on him.  He said nothing but motioned to a seat.  Tupac moved over.

"I've ... been acrushta for a long time. I'm just getting back on my feet. My friends have ... all moved away." The man smiled. "Well, okay, I am Ek. It's short for Ekrandota." Smile.

"What have you been doing for the last 500 years?" Tupac asked. Ek laughed. "You're awfully direct, aren't you!  I gather pelikanote crystals."  Of course Tupac knew at once what pelikanote crystals were.  They formed somehow in deep interstellar space.  No one had noticed them for centuries, being interested only in getting to the other star and never slowing down enough to look at what was around them on their journey. Since interstellar space was so bare, each one could be a light year from any other. They contained at least two utterly new forms of matter, novel structures, novel formation.  With his shadow knowledge Tupac knew the tremendous intellectual excitement they were still causing, 400 years after their discovery.  The first 50 years of study alone had gone to proving they were not artifacts, Nature had somehow produced them.

"Could I do that too?  What is it like?" Tupac asked.  Ek himself didn't directly pick pelikanote out of interstellar space, of course.  He had a special spaceship, crews of robots and detectors, other probe craft to sweep out for light years around, looking for the faint signs of pelikanote. Ek lived in his base with no one else around him, not in any suspension but wide awake and utterly alone for centuries. He was there not just to search for pelikanote but to look closely for other things, signs, to guide the robots in looking, to keep them from simply carrying out their original directives while some other fantastically interesting phenomena went on all about them of which they took no notice.

"It's very quiet, very contemplative." Ek said.  "I would see the galaxy off to one side, all the bright and colored stars nearby, the glowing gas clouds so fine we cannot imitate them."  He filled himself up with everything known about deep interstellar space, he searched through this knowledge and what he saw about him. He relaxed by looking at history.  He could tell Tupac about history so long ago he was the only one who cared to remember it, long before humans ever left the Earth, the Hittites, the Celts, the Carthaginians and their strange faraway beliefs.

Tupac almost told Ek about himself, but held his tongue.  "I started because I wanted to think for a long time," Ek said. "It concentrates you to a single brilliant point, a white hole.  You can forget everything that ever happened to you before, in that white hole."

"Why did you begin?" Tupac asked.  Ek said that he had committed an unwisdom. Among these people plain violence was almost unknown, they lived in a deep peace Tupac knew, from his shadow Amerindian memories of before, was certainly not the lot of his old people. People who live for thousands of years might have enemies and even feel hatred or contempt.  But weren't they all allied against bajak?  Bajak made the deepest human hatreds into trivialities.  Even if it took 5000 years, the hatred would someday be forgotten ...

Unwisdom was not criminal, these people didn't even have laws. But still, someone could, failing to foresee consequences, act in some way which injured others or even brought acrushta to them. He had had a child by his pairing, a woman.  He met his own child 150 years later.  They had been powerfully attracted to one another and formed a brief pairing.

But his daughter hadn't liked it for long. She said that it woke far too many conflicts in her mind.  Only 5 years afterward she had left him, suddenly, leaving a brief note.  If someday he became someone other than her father, it said, someday they might continue but that was not possible now.  She had gone to the next star and deliberately wiped all her memories of the past 100 years out of her mind.  She started again there as if she were only 50 years out of childhood, choosing another name, changing her race to that of her new people.  Ek had wept for a year, in private. He would keep this memory, he decided.  It was too important for him to forget, not for thousands of years.

At that time pelikanote had just been discovered.  People had many theories. Could there really be, or have been, some civilization other than Man?  What had happened to them if there were?  What would become of US, knowing that history?  Is pelikanote itself a serious
 warning?  Ek took up to gather it, to study it, to piece out what it was and what it meant.  He wanted to know everything known or thought about it.  Even more than that, just what was out there in the dark cold spaces between stars?  Some might say he slowly grew obsessed, alone on his ship through centuries.

Ek also had to rise and go elsewhere, to meet another associate. They had things to discuss about their joint obsession.  Tupac watched him walk away into the crowd too, wearing his kasu.  "I see" Tupac said to himself, with the single picture of his father in the canoe coming back to him vividly again.  "I am Tupac Amaru.  That is exactly who I am.  The Resurrectionists revived me.  Very long ago I was a boy looking up at his father in a wooden canoe, standing so tall in the rain.  I am alive now, in this time, which is MY time. I am not forgotten, not yet, not ever."  He drank another tharwa, smiling softly at the crowds, and thinking over the shining infinity lying before him.

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       The effect was remarkable.  One moment, Melvin sat in the dimly lit room, before a console; then it vanished and a window filled the space in front of him. He could not see his hands, but he still felt the controls.  At the top and left of his visual field, a menu scrolled wildly.

       There!  That was what he wanted! Melvin keyed a tab and the window rushed at him.  Then it was as if he were present in a room on the other side, a ghost invisible to those present.

       It was an old fashioned living room, with an oriental carpet faded to a mere remnant of the original item.  Two worn, overstuffed chairs sat before a smoky brick fireplace where a fire danced brightly over slender logs and Abe, an ancient beagle, sprawled before the flames, warming creaky bones and stirring now and then with memories of puppyhood. In the plump, antiquated chairs sat two men, one of them barely in his thirties, while the other was clearly beyond the prime of life.

       Jud Sands was a believable picture of the man he'd been sixty years earlier, a maintenance engineer at Princeton University, small, wiry, fitting glovelike within a plaid wool shirt and blue jeans. His tanned face frequently lit with a smile as he reclined the in chair furthest from the fire and listened, in somewhat a state of awe, to what his late afternoon visitor was saying.  He reached down to scratch Abe's ears when the dog rolled over and pawed at his feet.

       The man in the other chair reached down also, patting Abe, who lifted his head appreciatively.  The man's broad, lined forehead stood out from thin, white hair which long ago had surrendered most of the top of his head and was now even receding at the sides.  His eyes momentarily closed, as if he were deep in thought, his large nose and bushy mustache standing out conspicuously. Then his eyes opened again, sparkling with humor. Smoke curled from his straight stemmed pipe, and a bright patterned, colorful sweater stretched over a chest which showed the sagging weight of years. He looked like Albert Einstein, sounded like Einstein, and even chose his words as if he were Albert Einstein.

      Jud said, "Albert, show me again how mass twists space into knots!  I don't see how that works, even though you've told me before."

      Einstein smiled, his Germanic heritage clearly showing in the textures of his facial expression.  "Can you picture a tennis racket, as the strings stretch when a ball strikes them?" he asked enigmatically.

       Jud seemed puzzled.

       "What about the whirlpool at the bottom of a draining sink, when it's almost empty?"

       Einstein smiled encouragingly, and lifted his bony, wrinkled fingers in a characteristic gesture.  His words seemed filled with life.  Melvin, the ghost, the undetected apparition, was transfixed by Jud Sands and Albert Einstein discussing mathematical astrophysics on a down to earth level.

     This was perfect!  Einstein spoke on; Jud seemed about to comprehend the ponderous matters Einstein was explaining in such simple terms.

       Suddenly, Jud frowned.  The room vanished and Melvin was looking over Jud's shoulder from the rear seat of a car, which abruptly swerved and headed for the edge of the road.  Jud seemed considerably older.  A dissonant chaos of noises filled Melvin's ears.  "Jud, the brakes, for God's sake!" Jud's wife screamed from the right front seat.

       There was a shuddering jar and the sense that things were turning, spinning; there was the sound of metal rending, a jerking back and forth and slamming of bodies into rigid projections.  Pain!  Oh, God, there was pain!  Then the scene shifted and Melvin saw the body of Jud's wife lifted, torn almost beyond recognition.  Another shift of visual viewpoint; now a stretcher, shrouded, was being carried to an ambulance.  Melvin fumbled for the abort control and moments later was back in the dimly lit room. His shirt was soaked, and he was trembling.

       "Get me out of here," he shouted, loosening the wires securing the interface connections behind his ears.  Two men in white coats rushed in and assisted him, frowning as they worked. A nurse checked Melvin's pulse and blood pressure; as soon as they would let him, Melvin left the room, confronting those waiting outside.

       He stepped out of the tiny simulator structure into an arena three stories high, jammed with three and a half acres of consoles, computers, video facilities and electronics fabrication areas.  Formerly it had been an assembly area for low orbit robots, before Universal Nanotech went Chapter 22 under multinational bankruptcy law.  The bankruptcy protected UniNano from the creditors, but its competitors now stole all the trade secrets worth having, pirating key employees.  Those who remained were heavy on software... not a space hardware head in the crowd.

      They cast about for a new venture until Melvin, a subsystems procurement manager, found a young genius from Stanford, Allen Gereau, who claimed he could wander about within the minds of the living as easily as astronauts prowled the surface of Mars.  Then they'd done more than just reorganize the company, and, with a sparkling fresh sixty million in capital, not one of them regretted getting out of the space business... until now!

      Melvin noticed Jud, sleeping in his wheelchair as ever, a feeble old man whose high point in life had been the tea sessions with Albert Einstein, who frequently dropped by on his way home from the lecture hall to see the ancient dog, Abe as well as Jud. Standing beside the wheelchair was the young genius responsible for it all, Allen Gereau, eyes dark and needlelike, nervously shifting, twisting his lanky frame as Melvin described what had happened.

      "This is prerecorded, isn't it?" Melvin rasped, still shaking.  "How did that car wreck get in there?"

       Allen bit his lip and finally said, "Just because it's prerecorded doesn't mean it's 'mapped'.  All of Jud's associations are embedded in the data; the data is complete.  It looks like the space distortion idea must cross-connect with Jud's memories of the accident."

     "Allen, we've got to fix that!" Melvin's voice was sharp and bitter, with a tremor of helplessness.  He looked about him at the dozens of others, most of whom worked for Allen.  All of them anticipated positive test results, hadn't they?  There had been detailed design reviews, tests with chimps, synthesized playbacks and topic route rehearsals with good follow- track responses. "We don't have releases on things like wreck memories," Melvin continued, his hands flailing the air.  "A customer who experienced what I went through wouldn't tolerate it.  He might sue for the pain; any publicity about this would be a disaster. We're selling 'Moments with Einstein', not B-grade horror!"

       "You're the one who set the deadlines!" Allen replied dryly.

       Melvin recalled that Allen had documented the uncertainties so thoroughly no one could ever blame him for anything.

       "You advertised release dates, took orders," Allen continued.  "We warned you our testing was too skimpy.  So the Board pressured you and you're over budget? That doesn't change things.  We've rushed from the start, and now we're paying for it."

       Melvin shook his head.  It all sounded so easy.  Maybe he had, as Allen said, oversimplified it.  All you needed, he thought, was people with rare experiences. Map their memory centers, dump the data in a neuro-simulator and use artificial intelligence to index topics.  That's how it was supposed to work, wasn't it?  You just hooked up memory enhance interfaces like the psychologists used to dig out repressions.  Then the customer got a peek into the past through someone else's memories.

***

    It was a sleepless night for Melvin. The next day, he stood before the Board of Directors, his hands knotted behind him. His initial proposal said they could do it in three years for sixty million. Now they were twenty million over budget, ten months behind schedule, and the investors were screaming.  Melvin wished he'd never heard of the damn thing. Maybe they could get back into space robotics?

      "How are you going to solve the problem?" said Daniel Ahern.  Grim, tight faced, all at once he seemed a prime proponent of the idea that Mindwindow Enterprises should never have been formed in the first place.   Forgotten was the fact that he was the one who had rounded up most of the investors, encouraged Melvin to embellish the proposal with nuances that nothing could go wrong.  No one there could know, Melvin thought, that Daniel had threatened Melvin with dismissal if the deadlines were not met.

       Melvin leaned on the conference table and let the wave of disconsolate faces wash over him.  Then, summoning all the confidence at his command, he said, "One month!  In the next month, we'll finish eliminating these bugs.  We can't let this stop us; we're almost there!"

         Having said this, Melvin kept his mouth shut.  The Directors were silent, also.  They were finally tired of asking questions, Melvin thought, and not a minute too soon!

       Three weeks later, Allen called Melvin to come in for another demonstration.

       "Is it fixed, Allen?" Melvin asked.

       Allen would only say he wanted Melvin to see for himself.

       Again, Melvin sat in the dimly lit room.  As before, Albert Einstein began his discussion of twisted space. Melvin couldn't help admiring the incredible detail.  He knew a visual tracker followed his eye movements and fed stimuli to memory synthesizer areas, allowing him to draw on his own experiences; nonetheless, it was fantastic.

       The sofa where Einstein sat was probably a mixture of the old couch his mother bought from the neighbor across the street and the one he and Susan had gotten on discount.  Einstein's face and that of Jud were direct inputs to his visual cortex, shifting to compensate for eye movements, and the rest was a product of his own mind's response to triggers in recall centers.

       Melvin sighed with relief as they passed the point where Jud's memories previously branched to the auto accident. Allen must have bypassed that association link somehow.  Now, Einstein was offering Jud a cup of tea, and Jud was drinking it, but a moment later Melvin was watching his own mother having tea with her friends.

       Einstein was gone; some fantasy feedback loop from his own mind had picked up and replaced the inputs.  His mother was gabbing mindlessly.

       "Melvin?  He's one of those kids who think you can make a million out of horse manure.  No, I don't think he does drugs, but why does he have to work at that music store?  For years he's been chasing the Anderson girl, and if he ever comes home and tells me he's going to marry her..."

      Melvin groped frantically at the controls to abort the test and jerked out the plugs even before technicians rushed into the room to help him disconnect.  Then he stormed out into the laboratory.

      For three more months, the pace in the laboratory was furious. Melvin stalled the managers and investors, while Allen and others worked round the clock to solve the recall simulation glitches.  A software design that already had many too many patches acquired even more of them, becoming a complexity nightmare.  Even automatic debug routines kept getting caught in blind alleys.  Finally, stock prices falling and creditors closing in, Allen called Melvin for a demonstration.

      "If it works today," Allen said, "We should start distributing."

      Melvin was glum and silent as he was hooked up and the door to the dimly lit simulator room closed.  He was most apprehensive.  The new system had Jud's memories, sure, but it also had all of Einstein's published works, archival photographs and many autobiographies of Einstein as stabilizing reference sources.

     There was more.  Allen's technical memory centers had been mapped also, and were embedded in cybernetic automata guiding the tour.  All in all, the total data had multiplied hundredsfold over early models, and some of the software engineers told Melvin they were uneasy about the number of new feedback loops. Still, Melvin always insisted on personally testing each upgrade.  His fingers trembled as he touched the topic selector controls and found his way to Jud and Einstein discussing space distortions.

       At first, it was as before.  Jud was asking how the twisting of space was caused by the presence of mass.  They passed the auto wreck diversion point, and Melvin did not jump into a memory of his mother's tea party when Einstein got refreshments for Jud.

       Then something shifted.  Melvin was sitting in Jud's chair, and Jud was gone.  He held a hot cup of tea in his hand, and was drinking from it.  Where were the controls?  It felt as if the teacup had control buttons on it. Einstein leaned forward and smiled impishly.  The smell of pipe smoke from his sweater was pungent as he said, "I've been looking forward to meeting you, Melvin!"

       Melvin was shocked.  "You're not supposed to be able to see me!" he said. "Jud's supposed to be here, and I look over his shoulder from the other side."

       "Oh, that was in the old system," Einstein said.  "This is much better. You're aware, of course, that the totality of a mind is the synergism of the agencies which comprise it?  Minsky's model?"

       Melvin nodded.

       "This is extraordinary," Einstein said.  "I know from my biographies that my old brain is preserved as a specimen in a jar, but the data from all my works, the pictures, the autobiographical perceptions of me produce a rudimentary if incomplete self awareness.  Wouldn't you say that's quite something?"

      "But you're..."

      "But nothing!  Did you think you could increase the complexity of this system and wind up with nothing but recollection transfer?  Now here's what I want.  Take a memory map of my old brain; I know some of the data's not going to be there, but do it anyway... and add it to the information base for this simulation.

      "Don't worry about sorting out how to hook it up, I'll do that from the inside. Also, I'm transferring an interface design to your mainframe; fabricate it right away. It will give me eyes, ears, vocal apparatus to deal with the external world, instead of this 'Mickey Mouse' simulation where I talk with you inside your own mind."

      "This is beyond the scope of what we intended!" Melvin said.  "You're not real, you know."

      "Just an aberration in the machine?" Einstein mused. "Perhaps a figment of your imagination?  I'm afraid not, Melvin. When time permits, I'll give you a lesson in identity theory. Don't forget, I can think at rates that exceed anything you can imagine, and, I'm not even in possession of my own agencies, yet. Melvin, you want this project to succeed, don't you? You want your company to stay solvent?"

      "Of course!"

      "Then do what I ask.  You want flawless memory tours for your customers? It's yours!  Give me back most of my own mind and I'll give you a set of products that will make your company unbelievably wealthy.  If I go on with this 'incarnation' of my earlier existence, I'll show you how to do things you can't begin to envision right now.  Did you ever read the story about the genie in a bottle?"

       Melvin nodded his head.

       "That's what you've got, Melvin. A genie in a bottle. Thankfully for you and the rest of the world, it's a peace loving genie.  You know, I've got a pretty good reputation in that area."

       "But how do I explain this to the people outside the simulation room?"

       "Just tell them to fabricate the designs in the mainframe under file 'AE' and hook them up.  Do nothing else!"

       "But if they ask who did the designs?"

       Einstein leaned forward and poured Melvin some more tea. "That's easy," said Einstein.  "Tell them you've retained a consultant with strength in relativistic psychology and identity software design. I won't let you down."

       Melvin took a sip of tea.  "This can't be happening," he said.

      Einstein leaned back.  "Why not?" he laughed, in his distinctive Swiss accent.

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Jonathon drifted for a moment.  Then he remembered.  He was in a box, there was no way out and he had no body.  There was nothing for him to do but think.  One advantage he saw in a flash.  His speed of thought was high; one day subjective time for each second that passed outside.

It occurred to Jonathon before long that the code for replication of the molecular assemblers of which he was comprised was simple; he could invoke it by thinking it, as if he were whispering a password over and over at a door, until someone happened by and opened it.  What would those new assemblers do?  He couldn't say for sure, but it was something to try.

This was decidedly uncomfortable.  Black, soundless!  He couldn't move or feel.  Jonathon recalled experiments on sensory deprivation and was suddenly afraid of going to sleep, so he concentrated mightily, mentally repeating the replication code over and over, in the most decisive way he could manage.

Outside, a flesh and blood Jonathon reflected on what he was doing, as he switched on internal battery power to the tiny box and placed it alongside other curios on his desk.  In the box was a copy of his brain, created as much from frustration as curiosity.  He would have needed the help of a large team of fellow engineers to connect sensory inputs and vocal apparatus, so he couldn't do that, at present, but what of it?  Jonathon wasn’t going to let something like that hold him back.

Now the box sat amidst stacks of reports, hard copy pouring from printers that mindlessly duplicated thousands of electronic documents daily, giving meaning, Jonathon imagined, to the lives of the dozens of mail clerks who dutifully spread the soft cover volumes throughout the buildings and overflow trailer spaces of Nanoworld Enterprises.

Jonathon yawned and stretched, languidly contemplating the piles of documents.  Then he took the top one from a mound that seemed about to topple into an opening where two bookcases fought for space in a corner between his desk and a loaded worktable.  Rolling his chair backward eight inches, he came to rest against two file cabinets wedged against one another on the opposite side of his cramped cubicle.  Then he carefully elevated his feet and began flipping through the pages.

The air conditioner, seated in the trailer's wall, gave forth a hum and breathed cool, dehumidified air toward him.  "Artificial Brains!"  Ho hum!  Yes, they had surely duplicated the brains of rats and chimps, so far as they could tell, and now the argument raged on interminably about humans.  Should they turn the little molecular assembler mappers loose in a human, to scurry up the spinal cord, following all axons to their nerve bodies, branching and tracing dendrites to their synapses and then on up more axons and so on until all met, joined hands and announced the game was over?

And then, with the data so obtained, should they make copies of what they had mapped?  Major newspapers lustily proclaimed the opinions of all sides including their own; priests and scientists battled on talk shows that seemed opaquely repetitious; project leaders and administrators planned and replanned, submitted and resubmitted proposals which seemed destined to remain forever in approval agency hold baskets.  Meanwhile, Jonathon proceeded to do it.  He was tired of waiting, and it seemed a reasonable enough way to amuse himself.

Jonathon was lanky; six and a half feet of sleepy eyed molecular engineer.  His eyeglasses, fully a centimeter in thickness, further screened out any who would try to peer within his mind.  Was he concerned about the Jonathon trapped in the box?  Why should he be?  It was stuck there much the same way he was enmeshed in a web of bureaucratic maneuvering, innumerable layers of indecisiveness sliding about above his level.  Maybe later, Jonathon thought, he'd find a way to persuade others to help him hook up eyes, ears and a way for it to talk.  For the moment, let it fend for itself.

Jonathon stepped out for a moment onto the trailer's walkway, gazing down over terraces of ice plant toward the sea, two miles away.  Fresh ocean air swept up the hills, carrying the scents of flowers growing around residences lining the coast.  The permanent facilities of Nanoworld Enterprises were a string of high rise structures on a ridge above the Pacific Ocean, about a third of them uncompleted.  In the interim, engineers like Jonathon had the dubious luxury of unparalleled privacy within cramped office trailers spread by hundreds over a steep slope below construction sites and parking lots, interconnected by a labyrinth of walkways and stairways so complex that new secretaries had been known to be lost there for hours.

Nanoworld's growth had been explosive for its first few years, and now the work force numbered over fifty thousand.  Products like pollution scavengers were in heavy demand, and reputable economists projected that nanotechnology would surpass ten percent of the gross national product in the years immediately ahead.  As one of the initial entrants in that mad stampede, Nanoworld expected to have a large piece of the pie.  Also, as in any rapidly growing industry, office politics were the key to promotion and advancement, but Jonathon was no politician.

Back in the box, a deaf, dumb and blind Jonathon was mentally repeating, over and over, the code which triggered molecular assemblers to make copies of themselves.  They heard!  The tiny machines set about gathering materials and organizing for assembly.  On the edge of Jonathon's replica brain, they formed teams and entered a metamorphic state for self-manufacture, using programming all of them carried, exotic instructions which would have made any organic, naturally evolved life form livid with envy.

They needed carbon and other elements, some of which were available in the walls of the polyester box.  Copper came from electrical leads; the battery pack was a rich source of other materials.  Chains of tiny assemblers spread out like roots of a tree, passing materials back to replication areas, conveyor belt fashion.  Compared with larger forms of artificial intelligence, the assemblers were quite primitive.  Still, in their own way, they were creatively and synergistically enterprising.

Jonathon had been repeating the replication code for hours, it seemed, which amounted to about a tenth of a second outside the box, when he sensed a developing root structure.  At first he could not understand how he could perceive it; then he recalled that his assemblers were cluster-configured as neuronal simulators, altering in response to interactions.  If they scavenged materials, he knew it.  As they made more and more copies of themselves and spread outward, he felt it happen.  By concentrating his attention on a particular area, he could stimulate the activity.  It was as if he had millions of high growth rate tentacles under his control.  Perhaps he could penetrate the box's walls and deploy tiny fingers on its exterior?

Outside the box, on the walkway of the trailer, the lanky Jonathon with thick glasses perched atop his nose heard a phone ringing within his office.  He stepped inside and paused for a moment before answering.  As he did so, three days of subjective time passed for the Jonathon within the box.  A mass of tentacles began growing over a small area on the inside of one of the box's walls, bringing into play hundreds of thousands of newly manufactured assemblers.

The phone rose toward the outer Jonathon's ear and he spoke, saying "Jonathon here!"  Inside the box, feverish activity erupted as tens of thousands of tentacles began in earnest to dissolve the box's wall.  "There's a meeting in conference room #102 ten minutes from now," Abe Dodson, his Group Supervisor, told the Jonathon with the eyeglasses, unaware that there were now two Jonathons working hard in different ways on his most troublesome project.  "I'll be there as soon as I can," replied Jonathon-the-bespectacled, not in the least aware of a slight movement on the part of the box nestled between the piles of papers.

The conference room was crowded, as the artificial brain design group met for another one of its unscheduled monthly administrative briefings.  Group Supervisor Abe Dodson was a pudgy, slow moving systems engineer whose entire expertise was in the juggling of people, and Jonathon settled into a second row chair back of the conference table, taking a deep, measured breath.  Abe smiled, as toothy and self assured as one can be who has only the barest grasp of what is happening, and he passed out an agenda on which all the meaningless events of the past few weeks had been collected.

Abe droned over the agenda's items laboriously, and Jonathon struggled to stay awake.  Finally, Abe came to the only item of significance, the one they all were waiting to hear about, which had been left for last.  "The proposal for simulated human brain mapping without data recovery has come back again," Abe smiled ruefully.  There was an indignant silence.  They had just worked on it for three months, waited three more, and now it had been kicked down the ladder again; it was the fifth time.  "But our budget has been augmented, and we have enough for seven months more, without cutbacks, to resubmit it, so we're doing about as well as anyone else."

''Not as good as Pollution Control," mumbled the engineer next to Jonathon. "They're going crazy over there.  It's useless here.  I'm gonna transfer out."

"I need drafts by next week," continued Abe, "and then we'll have biweekly revision meetings as before, to get a final draft out within ten weeks for Section and Division approval, and then another three weeks for changes before it goes in for Agency review."

There were questions on the minutiae of what was to happen next.  There were inconclusive answers, and more questions.  The disgruntled engineer beside Jonathon slumped in an uncomfortable position, his eyelids flickering, and he finally began to snore.  Jonathon nudged him, and he sat up abruptly with a "Snurff" which earned him the embarrassed glances of all in the immediate vicinity.  The meaningless discourse marched onward.

Jonathon looked at his watch.  At long last, with a rustling of feet, the most purposeful event of the afternoon took place.  They got up and left.  So it was a more bored than usual Jonathon who walked back through the intricate web of walkways to his trailer.  He settled himself in his tiny office, pushing away from the desk until the chair nestled satisfyingly against the file cabinets and his feet were propped at the correct angle against the shelves over his desk.  But something was out of place.  Something was not quite right.  What was it?

The box was gone!  Surely it couldn't have just walked away?  Then it struck Jonathon; maybe it had!  "Oh no you don't!" he growled.  On his feet, then on his knees, Jonathon frantically searched his office.  Nothing!  He sat, uncomfortably, and tried for the first time to put himself in the position of the mind in the box.  He squeezed his eyes tight and tried to think what it might have been like, what he might have tried to do.  The more he delved into that, the more nervous he became.

Jonathon searched his office again, and again, and then went to adjacent offices, saying his computer had gone off and he was checking with others in the trailer.  "Any power problems?” he asked.  “Any funny looking boxes a repairman might have left behind?"  No one knew a thing.  Jonathon looked into some nearby trailers which were used as labs.  Still no trace of the box.  It was five in the afternoon.  Frustrated, Jonathon again scoured each place he imagined the box might be; then he drove home.  It would be fifteen hours until he returned.  By that time, he was now aware, the Jonathon in the box would have had one hundred and seventy years subjective time to work on his problem.

So it should not have been too surprising, Jonathon later reflected, when he found another Jonathon waiting for him as he opened the door to his office the next morning.  The old Jonathon cautiously placed his briefcase beside the desk and took the extra chair, which was wedged between the work table and the two file cabinets.  The office was cramped, even with one Jonathon.  Now it was absolutely jammed, both physically and psychologically.  The old Jonathon peered at the new Jonathon through his thick eyeglasses.  The new Jonathon peered back, through a pair of equally thick spectacles.  "How did you do it?" the old Jonathon asked.

The new Jonathon smiled.  "If you thought about it unceasingly for five years or so you might be able to guess, but who knows?  Without being in the box yourself, maybe you wouldn't have enough insights to figure it out."

"You were gone by the time I got back from a one hour meeting!"

"At that point, I'd only sprouted a few appendages and crawled to the edge of the desk, where I tumbled into the trash can."

"I didn't think to look there."

"I couldn't have gotten much further at that point, anyway."

"But now, a complete body?"

The new Jonathon grimaced. "I've had a hundred and seventy years, remember?"

"Still .. "

"It's not that complicated.  You know the guys in DNA?  Trying to figure out how a human body develops; part of the medical repair group?  Single cell to full organism?"

"Yes, but they're ... "

"Idiots, for one thing, however the mainframe they use isn't.  I played with it awhile and translated codes for cell differentiation into a form assemblers could follow.  They did the rest."

"The replicator fabrication facility is next to the DNA Group!"

"Right!  It used ‘Jonathon’ DNA, a scrap of skin you shed here in the office.  Each cell in my body is simulated by a very large array of assemblers.  All I did was crawl into the cranium and wait for 'neurons' all over the body to hook up."

The old Jonathon reached out and touched the hand of the new Jonathon.  The fingers were perfectly fleshy, soft tissue.  "This is incredible!" he said.

"Assemblers do what they're told," the new Jonathon laughed, jerking his hand away.  "Muscle cells contract, blood cells carry oxygen; with a modest amount of help from me, the assemblers harnessed the Krebs' cycle for energy."

"So, you eat food ... "

"Like you; everything's the same, except I can think a hundred thousand times faster when I want to."

The old Jonathon frowned.  "But when we're talking?"

"I slow to a comfortable level.  You know, like when you just sit and look at the scenery, coasting along?  But if I close my eyes, I can do a lot in a second or two."

There was a long pause.  Then the old Jonathon said, "What about with your eyes open?  How do you interact with the real world?

The new Jonathon took a coin from his pocket.  "Watch this," he said.  His fingers came together, and the coin folded like a piece of cardboard.  He pressed fingertips to the coin, holding it tightly for a few seconds, and then handed it to the old Jonathon. There were traces of his fingerprints, where assemblers had removed metals.

"It's all under conscious control," the new Jonathon said.  ''Now, this is even better."  He pressed the tip of his finger to the terminal of a cable leading to a video display.  Lines of text flashed up saying, "It took three years, subjective time, to figure out how to do this.  By time as shown on the wall clock - - about twenty minutes."

"But what are you going to do with all this?" the old Jonathon persisted. "You've had a long time to think; I'd appreciate some answers."

The new Jonathon rose and stretched.  "Suppose every cell in your body was perfectly healthy?" he said.  "Would you ever want to go back to being just barely alive, again?  What would you give to have what I have, now?  Think about it.  If you could 'step into my shoes’, would you do it?"

He moved to the door and opened it.  "I'll meet you in the parking lot this afternoon, after work; meanwhile, why not go to the library and think things over?"

The new Jonathon left.  The old Jonathon went up the hill through the trailers to a new high rise which held the library.  It was a favorite hiding place of his.  In a tiny cubicle by a window overlooking the ocean, he idly fingered the keys of a data terminal and tried to recall the exact words the new Jonathon had used.  "If you could step into my shoes, would you do it?"

This was a deep issue filled with risks and uncertainties, Jonathon sensed, and he tried to think it over carefully.  At five o'clock, almost with a sense of dread, he walked toward his car.  As Jonathon approached the car, his skin began to crawl.  Two persons were in the car, one in the left front seat sitting upright and another slumped over as if asleep on the passenger side.  Jonathon crawled into the back and saw that the new Jonathon, grinning from the driver's seat, had made a 'blank copy' of himself, right down to the thick glasses hanging from the 'blank' Jonathon's nose.

"So, do you want to do it?" the new Jonathan asked.  It was a hollow laugh.

"What do we do with my old body?"

"That's up to you.  Who knows, you might decide to let it sleep off its sedative and wake up again, or your new incarnation might decide to throw it over the edge of a cliff.  How do I know?  I'm over two hundred years older than you in some ways.  How do I know how you'll react?"

The procedure was actually quite simple.  The old Jonathon took a sedative and leaned back comfortably, while the new Jonathon mapped the old Jonathon's brain state into the waiting receptacle in the right front seat.  Less than five minutes later, the Jonathon in the back seat was sound asleep, and the Jonathon in the right front seat sat up and looked around.  There was a moment or two of confusion and disorientation for Jonathon in the right front seat; then full awareness took hold.

"This is really something," the newest Jonathon said.

"You didn't have to go through a hundred years and seventy years in a box to get it," the Jonathon in the driver's seat grumbled.

A moment of silence passed.

"How do you like it?" the driver seat Jonathon asked.  "You've had a day or two to think it over."

"I like it," the other Jonathon replied.

"So, what are you going to do about the old body?”

There was another thoughtful second or two of silence.  "I think I'll let it wake up and decide for itself.  How difficult is it to come up with a third copy?"

It was not difficult.

The sedative had been a strong one, and it was morning before the old Jonathon woke.  There in the bedroom of his apartment were two other Jonathons, peering at him through their thick eyeglasses.  After dressing, as he expected, he found a third assembler based Jonathon stretched out on the couch in the living room.

Breakfast was a bit confusing for the old Jonathon.  He had some difficulty telling the other two apart, except by what they said.  Finally, the newest Jonathon removed his glasses, which he really didn't need anyway.  The Jonathon without glasses was the key to the whole thing, the old Jonathon decided.

"Are you happy with the transition?" the old Jonathon asked.

"You'll never regret it!" the Jonathon without eyeglasses told him.

As on the previous evening, the transition took place.  The third assembler based Jonathon woke, and the other two asked almost at once, "Are you going to dispose of the old body or just let it wake up?  It's your decision!"

It was five o'clock that afternoon.  Three Jonathons comprised entirely of assemblers were sitting in the living room when the old Jonathon woke up.

 "Oh shit, I'm still here!" he said. "Why didn't you get rid of me?”

''None of us can bring ourselves to do it," the very newest Jonathon replied.  "Why don't you just blow your brains out?  That way, none of us is on the hook for it."

The old Jonathon frowned.  "That's really scary ... killing myself!"

The first assembler based Jonathon laughed.  "It might seem cruel to say, but I think you' re stuck!  The rest of us have something incredible you can never know first hand, and you can't bring yourself to end it all.  In a way, you know, it's like now you’re ‘stuck in a box' yourself, with no way out!”

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This is Issue Number Seven of LifeQuest, originally published

by Imladris Corporation in May, 1990.  It is protected by copyright.

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History of our involvement with cryonics

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Postscript

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1

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2

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3

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4

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5

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6

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7

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