Why Didn’t You Think of that Before We Left?
by Jerry Oltion
We had already been in trouble for a couple of weeks before we realized it. We were up to about 90 percent of light-speed by then, coasting along toward Alpha Centauri in our skeletal framework of a starship and feeling pretty smug about life.
Well, OK, not “life,” since all three of us had traded in our bodies to become standing waves in Tilbey’s experimental mass eliminator, but we were feeling pretty smug all the same. We had outsmarted the UNASA bureaucrats who had tried to confiscate our starship once we’d proven the technology, and whether they liked it or not we were going to be humanity’s first emissaries to the stars. We’d worked for it, we’d lived for it, we’d died for it, and by god the honor was going to be ours.
Or so we thought, right up until the moment Tilbey began singing old Necrotic Nuisance songs in squeaky falsetto.
We were in the “day room,” which was really just the payload housing for the original Orion class cargo rocket we’d cannibalized to make our starship, the Spook. Since we were the payload on this flight, we figured using that for our living space would be appropriate. We’d put our book readers and video displays in there, and cut windows in the walls so we could see out, but we hadn’t bothered to glass them in and pressurize the space since we didn’t need to breathe anymore. That meant Tilbey’s song came directly through the mass eliminator interface, straight into our holographically stored minds.
I heard Liam grunt the way he does when he’s disgusted with something. I looked up from the comp screen on which I’d been reading news from the Solar System—two years old due to the speed-of-light lag, but still fresh to me—and saw him looking at Tilbey. Liam had been reading, too—probably another military action/adventure novel about the Ganymede uprising. A frown spread across his milky white lace as he watched Tilbey, who was tinkering with another of his unfathomable electronic projects on the workbench he’d set up inside the now-useless airlock.
“That’s not funny,” Liam said.
Tilbey stopped singing. “What?” he asked.
“ ‘Deathwish’ may not have been the best song of the twenty-first century, but you don’t have to mock it like that.”
“Like what?” Tilbey cocked his head, puzzled.
“Falsetto. Screwing with the lyrics. It’s ‘Europa’s icy shores,’ not ‘You grope its spicy whores.’ ”
Tilbey reached up to scratch his head, a habit left over from the old days when he still had a head to scratch. “I… I don’t think I know that song. By either set of lyrics.”
“You were singing it just now,” Liam pointed out.
“Must’ve been subconscious, then.” Tilbey said. “I didn’t even realize I was singing anything. How does it go?”
Still frowning, Liam cleared his throat—another habit left over from the old days—and sang, “ ‘The shuttle’s engine sprung a leak/A hundred miles high/We knew…’ ” He paused. “ ‘We knew…’ something, something ‘…we were apple pie.’ No, dammit, it’s ‘we were gonna die.’ ” He turned completely around, holding onto the grab handle on the wall beside his reader so he wouldn’t drift away. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“What do you mean?” Tilbey said. “You forgot a song. Big deal.”
“It is when I wrote it. And performed it about twenty thousand times in concert. That song was burned into my brain.”
I looked at Liam in surprise. He’d been a janitor on Freeport when we first met him. Ninety years old if he was a day and shuffling along even in zero-g. I knew he’d been a fighter pilot when he was younger, but even so I couldn’t imagine him in a band called Necrotic Nuisance, jumping around on stage and singing about apple pie—or anything else.
“When were you in a band?” I asked.
“When I was…” he began. “When I was…” He looked to the left, and then the right, as if he might be able to catch the elusive memory, but he couldn’t track it down. “Damn it, that’s gone too.”
“You were sixteen,” Tilbey said. “Summer of ’23. You and Gina and Tweed rented a—how do I know this?”
He parked the test probe he’d been using back in its loop on his tool board and pulled himself into the day room. The motion caught my attention, because Tilbey never put his tools away. We’d tried and tried to train him, and to make him more careful about tripping over—and through—things, but he seemed physically incapable of neatness. We’d had to Tilbey-proof our living space the way new parents kid-proof an apartment, and we’d had to put nets up around the windows to keep his things from drifting off into space. But now that I looked, I saw all his tools arranged neatly on the board, and the gadget he was working on clamped down as well.
I got up from the comp to take a closer look, but when I went to push off from the table my hand slipped and went through the monitor, which promptly shorted out and spit sparks out the back. “Hell,” I said. That was the second time today I’d blown something up by moving through it. I was getting as clumsy as Tilbey.
Then the implication hit me. I was as clumsy as Tilbey. “Uh oh,” I said. “I think we’re in deep trouble.”
The problem had to be in the mass eliminator. It used holographic memory to store the information that described everything it duplicated; theoretically that had near-infinite capacity, but in practice there were limits. The more data you stuff into a holographic web, the less definition you get between similar items, and since the beginning of our trip we’d done little besides squirrel away information.
What else is there to do on board a starship? You read, listen to music, watch movies, tinker. You learn. And everything you learn gets stored in your brain, which in our case was an ever-more-densely packed one-teralink synaptic neural net. Memories that were similar to one another were starting to blend together, just like in an old person’s brain. And it wasn’t restricted to memories, either. The information that made up all three of us, from our hat size to our habits, was being stored in the same device. I had inherited Tilbey’s awkwardness, and who knew what else?
“Can’t we just hook up another web and keep going?” I asked Tilbey. We had gathered in the belly of the ship, the safest, most heavily shielded area, the best place to store the gadget that kept us going. As I looked at the desk-sized mass eliminator with its holographic control panels sticking out so we wouldn’t have to touch anything we could short out, I realized that the image in my mind was being stored inside that very cabinet, adding yet another degree of complexity to the information web. I closed my eyes, felt ridiculous, and opened them again. If we were that close to the edge, we were doomed anyway.
“It’s not that simple,” Tilbey said. “I can’t just splice on memory any more than you could just splice an extra head onto a live body and expect it to work. It’s got to be integrated into the design.”
Liam snorted. “Well, you’d better start redesigning this piece of junk, then. We can’t go on cramming more memories together. I mean, I might start remembering things from your life, and I don’t think I could handle that.” He was putting up his usual sarcastic front, but I could hear the fear in his voice. Brain cancer! Dementia! And maybe he was afraid of what we might remember about his past. He’d been in a rock band around the millennium, after all; he must have done a lot of things back then he’d just as soon people not know about now.
“You want me to tinker with it?” Tilbey asked incredulously. After the first few near-disasters involving Tilbey and essential ship’s systems, Liam had forbidden him to touch anything vital.