If they did reconstruct you, Malenfant, they didn’t take time to put in a soul.
When he came out of the shower, wrapped in a fat white bathrobe (no monogram or label), the dusty mess he had left on the carpet had vanished. Not only that, a shirt and slacks, socks, and slip-on leather shoes had been laid out, nice and fresh. Neat touch, he thought; that much unreality he could stand.
He went around the room. The minibar turned out to be tucked under a desk near the TV bracket. The desk held a writing pad and pencils. There was no heading on the paper. The minibar wasn’t locked, which was definitely a touch of unreality, and the bottles and cans and packets, while looking authentic enough, weren’t labeled either.
He pulled out what looked like a miniature of whiskey, broke the seal, threw the liquor into his mouth straight from the bottle. The heat hit the back of his throat. He may be one computer simulation sucking on another, but that felt authentic enough, and the spreading of the warmth through his chest and head were welcome.
He reached for another bottle, then thought better of it. Maybe now wasn’t the time to get smashed.
If it was even possible. If they, whoever had reconstructed him, permitted it. He wondered if they would let him hurt himself. What if he busted one of the bottles and started to saw at a wrist? Or—
There was a knock at the door. It made him jump, and he dropped his miniature. He got up, checked his robe was closed around him (why, Malenfant? — like your mother, they have surely seen it all before), and padded across the carpet. The bristles were sharp under his cleaned feet. He grasped the door handle. This time, of course, the door opened easily.
There was a corridor beyond, but it was somehow blurred, as if he couldn’t see it properly. “Imperfectly simulated,” he muttered.
Something like that. A Seattle accent.
“Yow.” He looked down.
It was Michael.
The boy was just standing there, hands at his sides. He was wearing a gold-orange jumpsuit with a blue circle at his breast, just like in those damn schools.
“You’re Michael,” he said.
Yes. The boy looked fresh scrubbed, healthy, his eyes bright, even happy. Eerily, the voice coming out of his mouth was that of the old softscreen simulation, the nasal Seattle matron, slightly distorted, like an airport announcer’s.
“What I mean,” Malenfant said, “is that you’re a simulacrum of Michael. A program running inside some hideous end-of-time God-type computer.”
The boy looked puzzled.
Malenfant leaned out into the corridor. He couldn’t see farther than a few feet in either direction, though he couldn’t figure out why. The same purple carpet lay on the floor. There were no other doors. “What if I run off down this corridor?”
I don’t know.
“Will they have to create more of this virtual stuff? Will the room disappear?
Try it if you want.
Malenfant thought about it, sighed. “Ah, the hell with it. You’d better come in.”
Michael looked around the room, for all the world like any curious kid, and he jumped on the bed and bounced up and down. Malenfant shut the door. Then, immediately, he tried it again. Naturally it had melted into seamless wall again, and wouldn’t open.
“The TV doesn’t work,” Malenfant said.
Michael shrugged. He was toying with the empty whiskey bottle.
Malenfant said, “You want something from the minibar?”
Michael thought for a long time, as if the choice were the most important he had ever made. Peanuts, he said, in his eerie middle-aged voice.
“Plain or roasted?”
What have you got?
“Jesus Christ.” Malenfant got on his hands and knees and rummaged through the bar. He dug out a couple of foil packets. He tossed one to the boy. Michael’s turned out to be plain nuts, Malenfant’s roasted. Michael pointed to the roasted, so they swapped over.
Malenfant threw a nut into his mouth. “Too much salt,” he said.
Michael shrugged. These are okay.
“This is kind of a cliche, you know,” Malenfant said. “The virtual-reality hotel room.”
You had to get out of that space suit.
“True enough. So,” Malenfant said, “here we are. Where the hell?… No, forget that. We’re programs running on a huge computer at the end of time. Right?”
No. Yes. This is, umm, a substrate.
“A substrate?” Malenfant snapped his fingers. “I knew it. The lossless processors we saw in the far downstream. The dreaming computer.”
Michael frowned. But you are Malenfant.
“The same person I was before?”
Of course. Which other?
“But I can’t be. That Malenfant blew himself to bits. I can believe the portal stored information about me, sent it to the far future, and here I am reconstructed in this—” He waved a hand. “ — this virtual reality Bates motel. But I’m not me.”
Michael looked puzzled. You are you. I am me. Information is the most important thing. There was a German called Leibniz.
“The philosopher? Never heard of him.”
Entities that cannot be distinguished by any means whatsoever, even in principle, at any time in the past, present, and future have to be considered identical. This is called the Identity of Indiscernibles. It really is you, Malenfant, just as it feels.
Malenfant stared at him. All this was delivered in that ridiculous, scratchy, middle-aged woman’s voice. The illusion of kid-hood seemed suddenly thin, Malenfant thought, and he wondered, with some dread, what arrays of shadowy minds lay behind this boy, feeding him, perhaps controlling him…
Can I finish your peanuts?
“Have them. So how didyou get here?”
All Michael would say was, Differently.
Malenfant got up, prowled around the room. There were curtains on the wall. When he pulled them back there were no windows.
“Who did this, Michael? Who brought me back?”
The downstreamers. The dreamers. The boy frowned again. The people in the lossless-processing substrate —
“What am I supposed to do?”
Whatever you want. You must only, umm, exist. The information that defines you was stored by the portal, and therefore is part of the substrate.
Malenfant frowned. “You’re telling me I don’t have some kind of mission? That the decadent beings of the far future don’t need my primitive instincts to save them?”
I don’t understand —
“Never mind.” Malenfant looked down at his hand, flexed it, turned it over: a monkey paw transmitted to the end of time, a perfect copy… No, if Michael was right, this really was his hand, as if he’d been teleported here. “I can live on here? Like this? How long for? No human of my era lived beyond a hundred and some years. So when I reach two hundred, three hundred…”
Your brain can store around a quadrillion bits. That corresponds to a thousand years of life. After that —
“I stop being me.”
You could be enhanced. There would be continuity. Growth.
“But I wouldn’t be me.”
You aren ‘t big enough to think the thoughts you would become capable of.
Malenfant hesitated. “Is that what happened to you?”