“He’s got a point,” I said to Liam. “This is us. If he blows it up, we’re dead.”
“We’re dead already,” Liam growled. He opened one of the cabinets full of replacement parts, closed it, and said, “Why don’t we have a backup mass eliminator?”
Tilbey stuck an arm through the wall to hold himself in place. The overhead lights flickered for a second until he shifted over to avoid the embedded switch wires. “Why don’t people have spare bodies?” he asked. He answered his own question. “Because if the first one quits working, they’re out of luck anyway. A clone would be its own person the moment it was born. Same situation here. I could build another mass eliminator, and even imprint it with the information in the first one’s memory. But the moment I switched it on we’d just get another set of astral astronauts. And a corresponding drain on our power supply.”
“What about separating us out into different machines?” I asked.
“That would have been a great idea if we’d thought of it from the start,” Tilbey said, “but we didn’t. To be perfectly honest, I never even considered the possibility that we could fill a teralink web in less than a millennium. I don’t think we’re actually filling it up now, to tell you the truth. I think we’re just overlaying similar thought patterns and then having trouble pulling them out again. But it’s the same problem either way; we’re trying to use the same memory device for three different people. The big question is, how are we going to separate things out again?”
“You’re the electronics genius,” said Liam. “You tell us.”
Tilbey tried to. Over the next few days he breadboarded another unit and started experimenting with it, but our deterioration continued with every new thing he learned. Liam and I quit reading, and I even spent most of a day watching the public video feed from Earth, hoping to lower my intelligence a notch or two, but it didn’t seem to help. The only noticeable result was that Tilbey began humming the theme to “Amazon Women from Venus” instead of Liam’s old music.
Something else I saw stuck with me, though, and after I mulled it over for a while I decided to share it with the others.
“You know they’re calling this mind-recording stuff the ‘Tilbey Effect’ back home? They’re using it to record people’s thought patterns and transfer them into animal bodies for research. When the test subjects get back into their own bodies, they can remember some of the things they experienced from the animal point of view.”
Tilbey laughed. His test equipment completely obscured him from sight, but his voice still came in clearly through our link. “I would never have thought of doing that with it,” he said. “I built it so I could make a massless spaceship. I never even considered using it to talk with dogs and cats. That’s amazing. What sorts of things do they think about?”
“Who?” I asked.
“The dogs and cats.”
“Who cares about the dogs and cats?” Liam said. “If Danny’s right, then they’ve already figured out how to shift minds back and forth from place to place. If we can learn how they do that, we could do it to ourselves.”
Tilbey stuck his head around the side of his equipment. “Like I told you earlier; I could copy us anywhere you wanted to go. It’s separating us from each other that’s the problem.”
“They must have some way to keep the cat and the researcher separated when they transfer them,” Liam said. “Don’t they, Danny?”
I tried to remember. I came up with a fuzzy image of a cartoon cat eating a bird ten times its size, something I vaguely remembered from childhood until I realized I was a black kid at the time. We were all white as… well, white as ghosts now, but that had to be one of Liam’s memories. Apparently it was similar in some way to the one I was looking for, but it wasn’t what we needed.
“Uh, actually, I don’t remember that bit,” I said.
“Pointer fault,” Tilbey said. He’d taken to saying that in a sing-songy voice when one of us dredged up the wrong response.
“Well, remember, damn it,” Liam commanded me. “If we knew how they do it, we could do the same thing here and our problems would be over.”
“Wrong,” said Tilbey. “I already know how to keep things separate if they start out that way. That part’s simple. You just load them into separate memory nets to begin with. Our problem is we didn’t think to do that until it was way too late.”
I said, “Then what we need is a way to switch one or another of us off for a minute. If we could do that, we could read the state of the system and subtract out the difference, and that would be the pattern for whoever was switched off at the time.”
Tilbey sighed in exasperation. “You still don’t get it. There aren’t three separate beings anymore. We’re all one entity now.”
Liam snickered.
“What?” I asked.
“How does a Buddhist order a hot dog?”
“Huh?”
“It’s a joke.”
“Oh. I dunno, how?”
“ ‘Make me one with everything.’ ”
I chuckled, but Tilbey howled with mirth. “Wow, that’s great!” he said. “I’ve never heard that one before!”
Liam shook his head. “You ’roid, I heard it from you.”
“Oh.”
“Pointer fault,” I said.
We went back to what we were doing, which in my case wasn’t much. I was bored with video, didn’t want to get into an argument with Liam, and I felt too clumsy to trust myself helping Tilbey. So I stretched out and stuck my feet through the deck, closed my eyes, and tried to nap. It wasn’t physiologically the same as sleeping had been when I was alive, but maybe it would take up fewer resources.
“That’s it!” I jerked forward in my excitement, pulling free of the floor and tumbling head over heels into the ceiling light, which exploded with a spectacular flash.
I caught myself before I plowed on through the ceiling. “Sorry,” I said.
“This had better be good,” Liam threatened. The pale glow of his book reader and Tilbey’s work light provided the only illumination in the day room now.
I swallowed vacuum. “I hope it is. Look, what if Liam and I both go to sleep, and Tilbey records the system that way. Then Tilbey and I go to sleep and you record that. Then you guys go to sleep and I record that. When we were done, we’d have three separate minds, wouldn’t we?”
“Oh, sure,” Tilbey said sarcastically. “Each with two spare subconscious components influencing every aspect of their psyche. Asleep doesn’t mean ‘off.’ ”
“Well, what does, then?” I demanded.
“Go trip over the main power line and you’ll find out,” Tilbey replied. He was sounding like Liam now.
He’d meant to shut me up, but his words triggered another memory, a true one this time. I was back on the Intrepid, the Earth-Mars cargo ship Tilbey and I had served on together when we were alive, and for a while afterward. Right after I’d died and been captured by Tilbey’s prototype gadget, our navigator, Gwen, had killed the power to it, not realizing what would happen to me when she did.
What happened was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I went where dreams go when you wake up.
But when she flipped on the power again, I came back. The information pattern that defined me had not dissipated. We had proven, by accident, what most people suspected all along: some indefinable part of us persisted after death, some part that the mass eliminator latched onto when it created its shadowy copies of the original article.
Which meant that down on that very basic level, we were still three separate individuals.