“All right, then,” I said. The spectral hair stood up on the back of my spectral neck as I thought out the implications. “Here’s what we can do.”
Looking at your own ghost is not an experience I’d recommend. I didn’t even like mirrors since my untimely demise, but to see an animated phantasm with my features on it, pale and translucent and adrift in zero-g, was something I could definitely have done without.
He couldn’t even communicate at first. Just mouth “Man, you look strange,” at me, which was pretty much what I was thinking about him. Then Tilbey patched a comm link between the original mass eliminator and the duplicate he’d just turned on and we were able to speak. All six of us, since Tilbey and Liam each had a doppelganger of their own.
“Hi,” I managed.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod, I’m the duplicate!” the other me cried. Then he grinned. “Sorry. I just had to say that. I mean, how many times does a person get the chance?”
“Let’s get this damned show on the road,” both Liams said in unison. Neither one smiled at the coincidence.
Tilbey A and Tilbey B just looked at one another for a long moment, and then Tilbey B said, “Boo.” Tilbey A flinched, and we all laughed.
“Liam’s right,” I said. “Let’s get moving.” I reached out to grasp the hand of my duplicate for a good-bye handshake, but we slid right through each other with only the faintest resistance. We both knew that’s how it would be—when something that’s only half there meets something else that’s only half there, the result is a quarter of the normal interaction—but it was the thought that counted. “Bye,” I said. There should have been more to discuss, but if this worked the way we hoped it would, anything we told each other would just be wasted words. He didn’t really exist, not down at the basic level on which existence mattered. He was just an echo. Ether that or he existed just as well as I did, and we’d have plenty of time to hash things out when I got back. We’d find out soon enough. I turned away and pushed myself out through one of the holes in the wall into interstellar space.
We’d installed the second mass eliminator in the landing craft. I went in through the airlock, not trusting myself to miss any vital electronics if I slipped in through the hull, and positioned myself inside the magnetic cage that would hold me in place during acceleration.
“Command, undock,” I said to the navigation computer. I felt a bump, and the lander drifted away from its mooring. “Command, accelerate along current flight path at twenty gs for one hour.” That would put me almost 800,000 miles away. Over four light-seconds; probably overkill, but we were operating by the seat of our metaphysical pants on this, and I wanted to be sure we had enough time to do what we needed to do without the two machines interacting.
The shuttle leaped away from the Spook. Without my magnetic containment field it would have shrugged me off like a raindrop, but I stayed with it. In moments the starship wasn’t even visible on the heads-up display. I shivered at the thought of all that nothingness around me; two light-years from Sol, another two to Alpha Centauri, and now I couldn’t even see the metal and cobweb canister I called home. There was no way I’d be able to find my way back without a signal beacon.
But even so, this was a crowded freeway compared to the nothingness that awaited me in an hour.
I spent the time trying not to think about it. This was going to be like doing brain surgery with a hatchet. If I hadn’t thought of it myself I would have gone into hysterics at the very idea. That Tilbey and Liam had gone along with it attested to how mixed-up our consciousnesses had become.
The farther away I got from the Spook, the easier it became not to think. Speed-of-light lag was making communication difficult between my “body” and my “brain.” My standing wave existence allowed some degree of autonomy, but not enough for complex thoughts. I felt like Hal in 2001, A Space Odyssey: “I can feel my mind going, Dave…” Even so, the acceleration stopped and the navicom said, “Maneuvers completed” long before I was ready for it. I was now officially A Long Ways Away.
The confinement cage switched off automatically. I looked at the instrument panel to make sure the radio was on. It took slow, deliberate action to move at all. “Hello, Spook,” I said, laboring over the words. “Ready when you are.”
“Synchronizing our clocks,” Tilbey said nine seconds later.
“Ready,” he said a few seconds after that.
I looked at my timer readout. It counted down from sixty seconds. When it got to five, Tilbey started counting down from his side, “Ten… nine… eight… “ I panicked for a moment and would have aborted the countdown if I could have moved more quickly, but then I realized that was right. When Tilbey’s light-delayed voice reached “Four,” it was actually zero in both places.
Both mass eliminators switched off.
I didn’t disappear. It took four seconds for my image to realize the props had been kicked out from under it. Then I disappeared. At least I assume I did. From my point of view, the universe did. But I was counting on one thing staying put, at least for the few seconds that it would take for the mass eliminator on the Spook to lose its lock on it. I was counting on the essential spark of life that was me, my soul, if you want to call it that, to hang around where I had last been using it, at least for a little while. I was half afraid there would be a bright tunnel of light to draw me away, but it hadn’t happened the first time I’d been switched off, so I didn’t really expect it now. I was much more worried that neither mass eliminator would pick me up again when we turned them back on.
Back on the Spook, the other five ghosts ceased to exist as well, the two originals first, then the three duplicates when the signal from my end stopped. The empty ships drifted along on their own while timers counted down another ten seconds for good measure, just to let everything settle down to its ground state. Then the mass eliminators switched on again.
I looked at the lander’s controls. I could see and think again. I reached out and grasped the edge of the control panel. I could move and touch and feel again, in real-time. No speed-of-light lag. The essential packet of information that defined “me” had been captured and enhanced by the mass eliminator, just as it had the first time I had died. Only this time I was in a different machine.
“I’m in the local unit,” I reported, and waited for a reply. It was a long nine seconds.
“We’re up and running here,” Tilbey reported. He sounded surprised.
“How many of you?” Wait, wait, wait, wait. Had the copying process actually created three more “souls”? I was betting it wouldn’t, but if it did we had an even bigger crisis on our hands, metaphysical as well as physical.
“Just two,” Tilbey said. “You can come home now.”
I let out an imaginary breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. “Command, take me back to the Spook,” I said.
I smiled most of the way. Laughed aloud a time or two. Even sang an old Necrotic Nuisance song I found still rattling around in my new, expansive electronic cranium. We had succeeded in separating out one ghost from the others because of that tiny spark of identity that persisted after death, but we couldn’t undo the mixing that had already happened to our holographically stored memories. Only time would erase those neural pathways as other, newer experiences overlaid them, but that was still better than what we had faced otherwise.
We had one more split to make. Tilbey had to build a third mass eliminator, and next time it would be Liam in the lander and Tilbey and me back on the Spook, but when we were done we would each have our own separate hardware generating that peculiar brand of software we called “us.” And without all those overlapping memories and multiple retrieval efforts to cause “pointer faults,” we probably wouldn’t fill up our nets again for a long, long time.