“I’ve always had a sneaking regard for crabby, antisocial bastards,” Floyd said.
“Whatever happened,” Auger said, “it was a human life. He was born, he lived, he died. He probably made some people happy and other people unhappy. He was probably remembered for a few decades after he died. After that, he’d just have been a face in old photographs—the kind that come out when you spring-clean, and you can’t quite remember where they came from or who’s who. And that was it. Wendell Floyd. He lived. He died. It was a life. End of story.”
“Why do I have the feeling that someone just walked over my grave?”
“Because someone probably did,” Auger said. “Or they would have, if your grave wasn’t buried under a few hundred metres of ice.”
“Where did the ice come into it?”
“I told you the Earth got screwed up. But never mind the ice. What matters is that at some point during the late nineteen thirties, something happened to Wendell Floyd.”
“A lot of things happened in the late nineteen thirties,” Floyd said.
“But the main event is one that you won’t remember at all. No one does. But the funny thing is that it happened to everyone at the same instant, and it was the most important thing that ever happened to them in their whole lives. And yet it went utterly unremarked.”
“It happened to everyone?”
“To everyone who was alive whenever exactly it happened. Every thing that was alive. Every animal and plant on the planet. And every inanimate thing as well—every grain of sand on every beach, every blade of grass, every drop of water in every ocean, every molecule of oxygen in the atmosphere, every atom in every rock, all the way to the Earth’s core.”
“So what was this incredible thing that happened?”
“It was like a photograph,” she said. “Like the instant when the flash goes off and the image is burnt on to the plate. Except it wasn’t a simple picture. It was a three-dimensional one, an image of astonishing, mind-blowing complexity. A photograph of the entire planet, down to the quantum horizon of information capture. Maybe even beyond Heisenberg… who knows? Our physics doesn’t even hint at how they did it. We call it a quantum snapshot, but that doesn’t mean we have clue one about what was involved in producing it. That’s just a name we give it to hide our ignorance.”
“But no one could have done such a thing,” Floyd said. “We’d have heard about it. It would have been all over the headlines.”
“It wasn’t done by any agency on Earth. The snapshot was taken by an external power. Beings from another planet, or another dimension, or another time. We have no idea what they were like or what motivated them to do this. Only that it happened.”
“Martians, again?”
“Not Martians. Probably not even anything we’d recognise as an intelligent entity. They must have been far ahead of us, Floyd. About as far ahead of us as we’re ahead of sponges, or beetles. Godlike, in every sense.”
“And they came along and took this photograph—”
“The snapshot. Like I said, we don’t know how. Maybe they built a structure around the entire planet, in a matter of hours. A clever, subtle structure, which was somehow able to make the recording in an eyeblink without anyone noticing—and, more importantly, without significantly affecting the planet itself in any way. Or maybe they just kissed something against the planet, another object that became entangled with the quantum identity of the Earth, encoding all that information into itself, ready to be deciphered again in the future. We could speculate about the ‘how’ for ever and never get close to the truth. What we can guess at more successfully, perhaps, is the ‘why.’ We think their motives were fundamentally benign. They were interested in preservation, in creating a record of the Earth that could be used to recreate the planet in the event of a future catastrophe. We call that the ‘backup copy’ theory. According to that view, the entities that did this are like cosmic archivists, or system administrators. They go around the galaxy, visiting worlds that are at a sensitive stage of evolution, and they make copies using the quantum-snapshot process.”
“And what happens to these ‘copies?’ ” Floyd asked.
“That’s the big question. Our best guess—and there is some intelligence to support this—is that the copies are dispersed throughout the galaxy, preserved in a kind of storage media. Think of these storage media as safety-deposit boxes, each of which contains a single photograph. One might be the image of Earth at a particular moment in the late nineteen thirties. Another might contain a snapshot of Earth from sixty-five million years ago, or the ancient history of another planet entirely. We think we’ve found some of these boxes. We call them anomalous large structures, or ALS spheres. They’re stellar-sized objects of obvious alien origin: huge armoured spheres vast enough to contain entire planets and a sizeable volume of space around them.”
“Have you looked inside any of these boxes?”
“The best anyone has been able to do was take a fuzzy image of the contents of one sphere. Embedded inside, coincidental with the geometric centre, was a dense object with just the kind of neutrino-absorption cross section that you’d expect from a rocky world. It wasn’t any planet we recognised, based on its implied density and size.”
Floyd risked a contribution. “A snapshot of another world?”
“Yes. Frozen inside the structure like a perfect three-dimensional photograph. Of course, if we scoured the galaxy thoroughly enough, we’d eventually find the original—the world from which the copy was made. Assuming we were able to recognise it when we found it.”
“Tell me how all this fits together. Why would anyone want to make copies of planets and put them inside giant eggshells? And what the hell does it have to do with me?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” she said, with a snarl of irritation. “Floyd was copied: him and every living person on the planet. After the snapshot was taken, he went on to live whatever life it was he lived. History rolled on and the world ended in twenty seventy-seven. And that should have been the end of it. But now Floyd’s copy has come back to life somehow, hundreds of years later, and I’m talking to it at this exact moment, trying to explain to it why it isn’t who it thinks it is.” She said each and every “it” with deliberate, wounding emphasis.
“I can’t be a copy,” Floyd said. “I remember everything. I remember what I did when I was a kid and everything I did afterwards, until now.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. You were copied with all of Floyd’s memories intact, down to the last detail.”
“Wait a minute. If the copy was made a few hundred years ago, why isn’t the copy dead by now?”
“You should be dead,” Auger said. “And you would be, if the copy had been allowed to live immediately after the snapshot was produced. But it wasn’t. The copy—the complete three-dimensional image of the Earth and its inhabitants—appears to have remained frozen until about twenty-three years ago, held in some kind of suspended quantum state.” Floyd saw her close her eyes, as she groped for a simile. “Like an undeveloped photograph,” she offered.
“But someone came along and developed it.”
“Yes. Quantum states like that are very fragile, and a copy of an entire planet must be astonishingly fragile: a house of cards just waiting to collapse at the merest sneeze. But somehow whoever created it was able to isolate it to a sufficient degree to preserve it for a while. The weak radiation signals that came through the shell—the gravitational and neutrino emissions—obviously weren’t enough to upset the stasis, or whatever you want to call it. But still there was some kind of trigger. By your calendar it was nineteen fifty-nine when we met, agreed?”