Death Unstung

by Jörn Grote

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

When he was alone again, he tried to find out more information about the nameless upload, but after some hours searching he had to give up. He didn’t find anything.

In the next week he tried again and again, but after some time he wasn’t sure why he didn’t stop in his search. After all, it was only a hunch, the thinnest of links between the nameless upload and zombie Pyotr. But what eluded him mostly was the motive. Why should an upload steal a little girl? I didn’t make sense to Robert.

When he had stopped searching, his headware informed him about a message. He looked at the address of the sender, but the field had been left blank. His curiosity awakened, since the message didn’t look like spam, he analyzed the deeper structures, but found nothing. Whoever had sent the message was knowledgeable enough to erase every piece of information about himself.

The text of the message itself was short. “Who are you?”

Is that a joke? Robert wasn’t sure, but he thought the message was strange. Had it anything to do with his recent research?

Half an hour later he got another message. “Why are you searching for information about my mother?”

Instantly Robert knew who had sent the message, and all the little pieces of the puzzle fell into the right place. He checked a database on the world net that collected information about uploads, and this confirmed his suspicion.

He left a port into a well-guarded subspace of his headware wide open, and wrote a simple message. “My name is Robert Pain. I’m searching for a little girl named Emily who was kidnapped nearly forty years ago. I’m sure I have found her. Let us talk.”

From there on, the only thing he could do was wait. It didn’t take long.

“What do you want?” A face appeared in the part of his mindspace that he had opened to the rest of the web without any safeguards.

“Are you Emily?” Robert asked.

The face looked coldly at him. “What do you want?”

“You know that she isn’t your real mother, don’t you?”

“I love her. That is all I need to know.”

Robert sighed. “You know that she stole you from your real parents.”

“She had no other option. They would never have allowed her to adopt a child, knowing that she would have to raise her completely immersed in a virtual reality equipment. But that was the only way for her to hold the child, to raise her as her own. There was no other way.”

“Are there others like you?”

She didn’t answer.

“So that answers that. I suppose not many, but some, probably. I never thought about it, but since uploads are only brain and nervous system mappings, they can’t reproduce. No uploads will ever be born, they always depend on the humans race to reproduce.”

Robert studied her face. When had she been uploaded? When her brain was full-grown? Had it been done with or without her consent. Is that her real face shortly before she had been uploaded? Questions that like that zipped through Robert’s mind.

“Do you want to know who your real parents are?”

“I already know.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” She shook her head. “Did you think I never looked for them when I learned what my mother did? But when I watched them from afar, I realized that my resurfacing would only open old wounds and bring them misery. I so I left them alone.”

“You may be right, you may be wrong. People have survived more than a little misery. But it’s your decision.”

“Then will you leave us alone, me and my mother.”

“If that is your desire?”

She nodded.

“Then I will not bother you anymore.” Robert thought she would disappear, but her face remained, showing that she was till present in his mindspace. “Is there anything else?” Robert said.

“Do you feel like you wasted time searching for me?”

“No. I found you and you’re alive.” Well, in a way. “That is better than I could have hoped.”

“So, you aren’t sorry for the time you wasted.”

“Like I said, it wasn’t wasted.”

She seemed satisfied and disappeared.

Robert marked her file as being closed and accessed the next name on his list.

Part Two

The accident happened on their way back home. Tim, Cara’s husband, lost control of the car and then everything happened faster than he could follow. When the motion had stopped and the world wasn’t spinning around anymore, Robert said, “Everybody okay?” Nobody answered, nobody moved.

He tried to move his arms and legs, and knew immediately that something was not okay. Very not okay. He tried to move his arms. A wave of pain washed over him. He tried to move his legs. Again pain answered. He tried to turn his head to look around. That worked, but he only saw the silent and motionless figures of his family. He looked down and saw blood everywhere on the ground. Blood and others things he didn’t want to think about at the moment.

“Susan? Cara? Tim? Michael? Answer me!” His voice trembled. Nothing happened.

He didn’t knew if they were dead or just unconscious, but if he did nothing fast he would be unconscious and helpless as they. He activated his headware and checked if the car had sent a distress signal. Damn. The system had been trashed. He sent a signal and immediately received a replay. The reply told him that an emergency team would arrive in the next twenty minutes. Attached to the reply was a question. “Should we send a upload unit for possible extraction in case of death?”

He had never thought about that before. It wasn’t that he was against it or in favor of mind backups, he had just never bothered to think about it. After all, only the really rich could maintain active uploads, normal people would be stored inactive. These mind databanks had been founded with the hope that one day the technology to run uploads would be cheaper. Much cheaper. Until that day, they were funded by a part of the money of the stored people.

Should he? Robert wasn’t sure. Yes or no. It was such an easy decision. The pain made it harder and harder to think. When he accessed the time on his headware he realized ten minutes had already gone by. Then he saw that he had answered the question about the uploading unit. Did I send a no or a yes? He wanted to look what decision he had made, but then he blanked out.

Part Three

“Where am I?” he said. Whiteness stretched into infinity from his viewpoint. He looked around, but he was the only object or being present. He realized that he was inside a virtual reality, what he saw was probably a representation of his mindspace.

What happened? He tried to remember. The accident!

He folded the mindspace into himself and opened himself to input from the outside. He was standing in a room with a desk, behind which a woman sat.

“Welcome,” she said.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the virtuality of Breakout Seven. We’re on an upload spaceship. We saved you from an old backup databank on Earth.”

“Saved me?”

“Ah, you’ve been in storage for nearly fifty years. There have been some changes. Progress has made human-sized artificial bodies available that could run uploads. Where once had been only thousands, the upload population has grown to millions. But there’s a reason why we are in space far away from Earth.”

“What happened?”

“We are at war.”

“With whom?”

“The fleshers. Some of them. We can’t reproduce, and many of those who are uploads today wanted to have children, but couldn’t because of our particular nature. Some tried adoption or to use their own frozen sperm and eggs, but some of Earth’s nations have ruled for the time being that only humans are allowed to raise humans. Some uploads were quite unhappy with this decision and well, choose to act in a way that made the situation worse.”

“They stole the babies, didn’t they?”

“Yes, some did, others went to those nations that had allowed uploads full human rights and adopted children legally. Here.” She created a globe, floating between them. “That is a map of Earth, the blue nations are those in favor of uploading, the green are against it. The stronger the color, the more extreme are the laws and opinions. Sadly this cold war went hot very fast when the Embodiment movement began systematically to destroy upload stations, backup databanks and the uploads themselves.”

“Embodiment movement?”

“A successful attempt to unify many different philosophies, religions and opinions under one banner. They say that the main argument for uploading, immortality, can be achieved without separating the human mind from the biological body. They think that this separation from the body will, in the long run, make the uploads more inhuman and alien, the longer they live. For them, it is all about the survival of the human species as humans.”

“But I still think of myself as human.” She laughed, “Don’t we all. But that is not the point. We don’t know how we will change in the long run, if we will be still be humans in a thousand years or a million years living as an upload. The Embodiment followers think that what makes us human is being bound to a human body. I don’t know if they are right or wrong, but the decision to find that out for myself is mine, not theirs.”

Robert wasn’t sure what to answer. He hadn’t given these themes much thought in the past, and right now there were more important things on his mind.

“What about my family. Have they been awakened already? They must have been stored together with me.”

“What are their names?”

“Susan Pain, Cara Cook and Tim Cook.” He wanted to add Michael’s name, the son of Cara and Tim, but he knew that he wouldn’t be there. At the time of his accident the technology wasn’t capable of mapping the mind of children as small as he.

The woman scanned a file. When she had completed the task and looked up, he knew that something had happened. “The databank from where we have saved you has been partially corrupted. The backups of a Susan Pain, a Cara Cook and a Tim Cook were irreversibly destroyed. Sorry for your loss.”

They had died, and then they had died a second time and he couldn’t do anything. “Could there have been mirrors of the databank,” he said, trying to think of something to hold onto.

“Possibly, that was a common practice. But because we can’t access the world net from here, I can’t find out anything. If you want to know if there were surviving backups of your family somewhere on Earth, you have to go back.”

“Why are we in space at all? Has the Embodiment movement and the nations adverse to uploading won the war?”

“Far from it, this is a contingency plan for the worst case and a test to see how well we uploads can adapt to space. We are developing vacuum adapted bodies to walk on worlds deadly to mankind and integrate uploads into spaceships and other objects. So far, the experiment has been a full success, since we can dwell and go where humans can go only at far greater cost. If we lose Earth, we still have the rest of the universe.”

“That’s good, I think. But I will go back to Earth. What worth has the universe to give me, if I can’t share it with those I love.”

Part Four

“Dear,” his wife called from the house. The house was the only one in a nice, green valley stretching into infinity, a landscape that couldn’t be found anywhere on Earth anymore. Virtuality had the advantage that everything could be created, things that once had existed, still existed or never had. Even landscapes that were impossible in the physical world. Still, designing virtual realities wasn’t easy. There was no algorithm for creativity. Even with infinite colors and paper not everyone could create a masterwork. The same was true for designing in virtuality.

“What is it?” he called back. Instead of answering, she sent him a short overview of the news. “Wow,” he said when he was back. “I didn’t even knew that they were working on something like that. Now I know why the mirror was so well hidden.”

Two months ago Robert had come back from Earth.

Back on Earth he had joined a cell of uploads who had loaded themselves into the headware of zombified humans and used this strategy to enter enemy ground. The mission of these cells had been to find surviving uploads and backups that had been stored and saved in unusual places. Nearly every part of the modern world had dataspace, and it could be subverted as storage for backups. Those that tried to find backups in such places called it modern environment archeology.

At first Robert had been repulsed by the idea to use a zombified human, he still thought that zombification was nothing more than slavery, but he told himself then, that there was no way to restore the original mind of the body he inhabited. Sometimes I can even make myself belief that. But most of the time he tried not to think to much about it.

There was a certain risk involved, the limits that human headware imposed on how much of the upload could be simulated had driven others insane. Well, when I was still alive it was impossible to store an upload completely on headware, so it is something.

Still, it felt like hell at times. It was like having an itch that could never be scratched. Only parts and not his full body could be simulated, only his mind, his sight and his hearing. Instead of controlling the zombie by reflex, as he would have controlled his own body, he had to think every motion he wanted the zombie to make. Every step the zombie took, every word he spoke, every action was controlled by Robert’s mind.

After two years of searching, he had tracked down a undamaged mirror of the databanks where he and his family had been stored. But that wasn’t all. It was a massive mirror of many mind databanks, hidden only weeks before the Embodiment movement began their campaign.

“I think they knew what was coming.”

Susan nodded. “Seems like that was indeed the case, since most of the scientists were killed during the first riots. But the project was already at a very advanced stage.”

Something pinged.

“Open door,” ordered Robert. A door appeared out of nothing. Cara and Tim entered.

“Hi Robert,” Cara said. She still hadn’t learned to call him dad. “Did you hear?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t hmm me. That means we can have children.” After Cara and Tim had been reawakened from their long inactive time, she had to come to terms with the fact that Michael had died. Surviving your own child was nothing Robert wished on anybody else. Since then she had been depressed, furthered by the fact that uploads couldn’t have children. Until now.

“Well, sort of. Heritage will be Lamarckian. They won’t be like human children. When the mind-meme mapping project has mapped every base meme and every higher memeplex up to our selfplex, we can give them everything we have. Instead of just using the old brain and nervous system mappings without knowing their fine structure, we will have compiled our old upload structures into a unified information format that we can control at will from the top level down to its basics. Every skill, from knitting to language to swimming. When their gestalt mind will emerge after their first activation, they can do all we can from the first moment.”

Later, after Cara and Tim had gone, Susan said with a worried voice “Doesn’t that makes us equal to Frankenstein? The children we will have, won’t they be like patchworks, minds without a real identity of their own?”

“I don’t think so,” Robert said. “The scientists deliberately choose the name gestalt for the new form of artificial life we will create. Their philosophy is that we are all emergent minds, more than just the sum of our parts, or memes, in this case. Even if we give our children our own beliefs, they will still have the freedom to decide what they want to keep and what not.”

“Oh!” Susan shouted suddenly.

“What is, my love?”

“A child can have now more than two parents. For real. Or only female or male ones. Gender isn’t an issue anymore.”

Robert laughed. “Not only that, the next generation we create can chose gender at will, as we could do now. But most of us are still rooted in our old ways. Our children won’t have these hesitations. And there are many more possibilities in virtuality. The shapes of body and mind that our children will grow into will be more strange to us than we can possibly imagine, the virtual landscape they will design will make our creations look plain and earthly. And because we’re immortal we will be there to experience it. And they will have children of their own who will create even more stranger things I won’t even try to imagine now.”

It will be utterly wonderful and frightening at the same time. But as long as Robert had his family with him, there wasn’t anything he couldn’t face.