For this Christmas season I have prepared a special present.
It's a novel. My latest novel. Serialized, as it might have been done in Charles Dickens' day, if I were famous and this were a newspaper.
Into the Cloud is the story of Dave Blanks, an 82-year old man who finds he is going to die soon. But the story does not involve his death. It involves what comes after.
The "conceit" of this sci-fi story is that human souls are needed to act as the "software" powering cloud computing. In exchange for immortality, people agree to serve others, from inside the cloud — acting as interfaces between what's stored in the cloud and what people want to know.
In the cloud, or the Cloud Community as it is known, Dave meets an old friend named Martin Bexar. He learns about a distinguished scientist named Dr. Emile Hoskie, who has gained immense power after his own death from within the cloud. And he meets other people.
The characters to appear in this novel and the locations of the story are contained below, and you can return here to read them again-and-again. From there the story will proceed each day, one or more chapters at a time, until its (hopefully) thrilling conclusion.
Hope you enjoy it. Merry Christmas every one.
Dana
Characters
Dave Blanks – The narrator. He dies in the first chapter. Or does he?
John Willis – The guide to the Cloud, called The Cloud Community in its brochures. He leads the narrator across into The Cloud in the first chapter.
Liza – Willis' assistant
Martin Bexar – Someone who has been in The Cloud for a while, and has suspicions about how it's being run.
The Doctor (Emile Hoskie) – The ghost in the machine of a famous scientist, who has absorbed souls, wants more, who is hungry for more, and wants power within Meat Space as well.
Dr. David Cornwallis – A former graduate assistant for The Doctor. Makes the narrator more suspicious when he goes to meet The Doctor.
Sophie Napoli – A ghost known in life for her beauty.
Tory Blaine – A ghost who has tried to do what the Doctor did, only it drove him mad.
Sheri Blaine – The wife of a ghost, who helped him go mad
Tiffany Williams – A middle-aged housewife whom Willis and Bexar contact as a way to learn about The Doctor's plans.
Susan (Stone) Blanks – Dave Blanks' ex-wife. Died refusing to go into the Cloud Community.
The Librarian (Marian) – Offers access to interfaces leading to the outside. Also knows plenty about The Cloud. Will tell you if you ask nicely.
Locations
The Cloud Community – A collection of global servers, based on the Internet, into which souls thought dead can live online in the service of humanity.
Meat Space – Also known as the Real World. The living Earth, where life is transitory and death is real.
Acknowledgement
To Martin Bayne, my teacher and friend
One
I made the call.
It was moments after I had taken the call I could never forget. October 30, 2037.
The biopsy showed Gleason Grade 5 prostate cancer.
“You're dying” my doctor had said. Just like that. Period, the end.
I'd asked him to give it to me straight and he sure did.
“I understand,” I said quietly.
But I didn't understand, I thought as I hung up. I was sitting, as I usually did, in my home-office. It had been my refuge and workspace for a quarter-century. I sat in it alone, as I'd been for a few years now.
Maybe I understood it. I was 82, after all. Trouble is, I didn't accept it. Since death doesn't give you the option, since acceptance is always at the end of the Kubler-Ross train, I made another call. While I was still in enough denial to do it.
“People have been doing this for years,” I told my brother later, as I talked to him on PC video from the other end of the country. “It's quite painless. I'll be immortal.”
“No you won't,” he said immediately. “You'll be software. You can't be both alive and be a video game.”
It was a common refrain among Cloud Community critics. You can't possibly be alive if you're actually composed of magnetic bits and software running on a computer cluster.
“I know joining the idea of the Cloud Community remains controversial,” I said. “But what's my alternative?”
As we spoke I looked over at the mantlepiece where the ashes of my beloved Susan lay in an urn shaped like the text on her college diploma, which hung above it on the wall.
“Dave, people have been dying since the dawn of time,” he said.
“Easy for you to say. You're just 74,” I responded with a lighter air than I felt. “I know there will be ashes. I'll have them sent to you,” I added. “I'll have them packed with Susan's amphora, get them both to you in California, and you can pretend we're spending eternity together.
“Or toss them in the ocean. It really doesn't matter to me. Because I won't be there.” I closed the connection.
The intervening call had been almost as quick as the one made to the doctor.
Since its launch in 2025, after the successful emergence of Sir Emile Hoskie's personality from within a computing cluster located deep inside an abandoned Utah salt mine, thousands of people had been injected into the Cloud Community at prices that had steadily declined from $1 million down to the cost of a standard funeral.
The Community's online brochure made very clear what awaited us. An eternity of service, handling the computing and research tasks that would take mankind to the stars, terraform the planet, and bring prosperity to our grandchildren.
“You'll see it all,” the brochure promised, inside a picture of the Crab Nebula.“You'll be part of it.” The brochure emphasized how the Cloud Community now stretched far beyond the salt mine, into every Internet-linked cluster on the globe. It would all be available to us. We would be its residents and guardians.
In my own online application to join the Community, which I had sent months before and was now making formal, I was offered a variety of possible “starter tasks,” serious problems souls pulling from the Cloud's other computing resources might solve over the next decade or two.
The next decade or two. Did they know how magic those words were? I had shaken my head ruefully on reading them. They had been tossed in so casually…
Aging, I have found, is a game of constantly narrowed focus. In my youth, during the 20th century, I'd been encouraged to think of my life in terms of decades. Where do you want to be in 10 years, in 20? That time seemed far away, but eminently within my reach. Then, after passing 50, and whizzing past 60, I found myself thinking in terms of 5 years, then 2, then 1. Suddenly, with the doctor's call, there was a blank wall in front of me.
In that moment I was determined to hurdle it. I had gone at the application like I was trying to enter Harvard, gilding the lily at every turn and pledging my future to the Cloud Community as though it were my second marriage. Which it was.
Amazing. The weeks had flown by and here I was. Give me immortality or give me death!
Or give me both, I thought with a wry smile.
The local offices of the Community were in Midtown, where they were steadily taking space from the old Internet search engine they were spun-out of. I walked across a vast silvery atrium which led to several banks of elevators. Most of those elevators stopped at law firms and accounting companies. Only one car went straight to the top. What had been a private club for the search firm's elite was now heaven's waiting room.
The guard knew what I was here for. There was an old-styled book he turned around for me to sign in on. He handed me a pen. I hadn't held a pen in my hand for 10 years, but I took it gratefully. The guard looked to be nearing 70 himself, I noticed, so we shared no small talk. I felt a solemnity in that silence which I appreciated.
The guard pressed a few keys, then looked at the screen in front of him, tilted so we could both see my smiling face, my personal identifiers, and the appointed hour of my death, all neatly arranged on the screen, like a passport. The guard glanced at me once more, comparing the image to my visage in a perfunctory manner, then nodded slightly, smiled, and motioned me behind him, toward my car.
“Thanks,” I said. I usually add “see you later” to such statements, but this time I stifled the urge. He understood, and nodded.
“Good luck,” he said. The guard offered his hand to me for a shake.
How many times he does that each day, I wondered. How many people does he meet for the first time, who go up the elevator and never come down?
There is a failure rate on the Cloud Injection procedure, I knew, which made the guard's “good luck” feel just a little poignant, gave me a pang of fear deep in my heart. Sometimes, either because of network problems, software glitches, or patients just waiting too long before coming in, the transfer doesn't work. There is no personality found on the other side, or maybe there wasn't enough soul left on this side. The Alzheimer's epidemic meant a slowly rising failure rate, but that wasn't my problem.
After all, I thought, I'm lucky – I'm a cancer patient! Yes, cancer had indeed become a lucky death in 2037. Where before it had been the occasion of suffering, round-after-round of chemotherapy putting off the end by weeks or months, while you wasted away eating yourself alive, now you could just make an appointment and avoid the whole ghastly business, as I had. What do you do if you have a heart attack, or get shot, or just hit by a bus? I shuddered at the thought.
These considerations made the words from the guard sweeter to hear. Good luck. I'd nodded in response to the handshake, smiled, I walked in the elevator door, I let it close, I pushed the single button and rose toward the sky.
The doors opened on an airy, glass-enclosed office with a window opening out to a blue sky and the green Atlanta treescape. A receptionist sat behind a desk, but quickly stood up, walked around it, and offered her hand. She was a young woman, obviously trained in therapy and the grieving process. She smiled her sunniest smile and seemed happy to make a little small talk with an old roue'.
I remembered my father, who loved flirting even in his extreme old age. I'd lost the knack during my long marriage, but I gave her a fatherly smile in response to her query.
“You alone?” she asked, as thoughtfully as she could. Most people, I was certain, would come here with family, at least an old friend. I hadn't spent more than a few moments with my own son in a decade, the old friends I'd had over the previous evening were generally in worse shape than I was, and Susan…
“”Yes, ma'am,” I said, stifling the lump in my throat and the tears in my eyes. She smiled wider at the old colloquialism.
“That's unusual,” she said, “especially for those with families in town.”
“Well, we had a little party last night,” I replied. A few old men around a table sharing a bottle of the 2015 Deerstalker I'd put up was a party these days. Then, cheering up a little for the receptionist's sake, I quoted an old movie, in an Irish accent as fake as my own Irish heritage. “What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front, and hear what was said. Maybe to say a few things yourself.”
Her smiled broadened, especially on hearing me put on a mild Irish brogue. “Your file says most of your ancestors are from Germany,” she pointed out.
“Aye,” I replied, “but at times like this the Irish does come out.”
“I suppose it does,” she responded. Her eyes moved toward her desk, then back. “Did you bring your things?”
I pushed my right hand into my pants and pulled out a memory stick, containing all the files on my local drive – photos, old articles going back to the dawn of the Web, everything personal I might want to take with me, assuming there was a way to find it on the other side.
“I don't entirely understand it,” I said. “I won't have eyes, or ears.”
“Not as we understand them here,” she said soothingly. “But, in a way, you will. Members of the Community have analogs of all their old physical senses. 20-20 vision, perfect hearing. All drawn from the same program. So you'll be able to call all this in from within a local cache.” She took the stick from my hand, then held it a moment, our hands nearly touching. A small intimacy passed. I wasn't just an old man, I was a man, and she was a woman.
“Come with me.”
She released the hand, went back around the desk, then took offered her hand to shake again. I gave it a squeeze, more fatherly this time, and won from her another smile, almost in acceptance of the apology I'd just felt a need to make in that previous intimate moment.
A door opened behind her and we walked through it as a couple going onto a dance floor. I dropped her hand as she led me through, but as I reached for it again on the other side it was gone.
“This is Mr. Willis,” she said, motioning toward a colored gentleman in a black suit and a well-tied tie who was approaching from down the hallway, his arm now stretched toward me in greeting. “He will be your guide. Now I have to get back,” she added. “Another client is due any second.”
“I understand,” I said. “It was good to meet you.”
“You'll see me again, someday,” she responded drily. “I not only work for the Cloud Community. I'm also a client.”
“Not TOO soon,” I responded.
“It's too soon for all of us,” she responded, as the door closed behind her. I could almost feel her shuddering at the thought of her own death, and the possibility of what was about to happen to me happening to her. Time is the distance between you and me, I thought.
“Mr. Willis,” I said, turning back to face the new arm.
“”Yes, sir,” he said. “John Houston was my great-grandfather.”
“No kidding,” I said. John Houston had been my first neighbor in Atlanta, over 50 years ago. “I went to his 100th birthday party. He was a wonderful, wonderful man.”
“I know,” he replied, “although I'm afraid he was well before my time. Although I was named for him. John Houston Willis at your service.”
I shook his hand more warmly then, giving it my full attention. “Let's get going, then.” We walked a few paces and then I had to add, “I really like your receptionist.”
“We have many guides, but only one Liza,” John Willis said warmly. “She is one of a kind.” His body relaxed a moment, then became a little more formal. “I'll be with you all the way. You will be a great addition to the community.”
I followed John Willis down several hallways. From the inside, the office looked like a large medical practice. Most doors were closed tight, but they were all fitted with nameplates. One door was open and I saw a woman inside, working hard at a keyboard.
“I know most computing companies use open office plans, but we are working with private, personal data so often we went this way,” Willis explained. “Turns out productivity goes up. I'm going to have to write a paper on it.” He chuckled lightly, and moved on.
The light seemed brighter now as we walked along the building's side wall. Not much brighter – solar power systems on all the windows accepted much of the light and heat, leaving us with a warming glow instead of the Atlanta swelter of my youth.
“Here we are,” Willis finally said, opening a door to his left, motioning me inside.
“This is where we do it, then?” I said.
“This is my office,” Willis replied. “Sit down.” He motioned toward a recliner on one side of the space, which was laid out like a psychiatrist's office, with a desk against one wall, photos of a happy black family, childrens' art work and an old poster I recognized.
“Murphy's Laws of Computing,” I said. “I haven't seen one of those in over 50 years.”
“I collect tech industry memorabilia,” he replied with a smile. “I even have a Kaypro at home. You're a living legend.”
He was referring to my career writing about computers and the online world, which I first embarked on in 1983. “Not for much longer,” I responded, sitting gingerly on the recliner, facing his desk.
He took the back of the rolling office chair from in front of the desk, and sat down facing me. “That's not true at all, Dave,” he said. “That's the common misconception. You're moving here to live, not to die.”
It was something I told my mom when we finally put her into assisted living, a little lie we tell all old folks headed for the last round-up, I reminded him.
“Only in this case it's really true.”
I seated myself more comfortably, lying on the couch as though visiting a 20th century psychiatrist, as Willis went into his spiel.
“What's the body, really?” he asked. “Some inputs, some outputs. A host for the mind and the soul, but not the soul itself. You kill the body and you kill the soul, but you open the body and there's nothing there. That's what makes moving to the Cloud Community different. Your mind is going. Your soul. The real you. The whole you. The you that matters.”
I squirmed a little. “I suppose so,” I said. “That's the hope. That's the promise, the ad copy. That's what I'm paying for. But mine is a pretty lonely soul, you know. My late wife completely rejected this approach to death. We had some nasty arguments about it.”
“I know,” he said. “I've read your file. But back in the '20s this was a lot more primitive, a lot more controversial. With reason. Clouds were primitive by today's standards.
“Most contained only a few souls, their interfaces were poor, and they weren't interconnected as they are now. It was like moving into your own private jail cell.” He shuddered at the thought.
“Today's Cloud Community is more like a vast heavenly host, and as you'll recall from our last e-mail to you there are many of your old professional friends who have already made the journey.”
I nodded, unconvinced, but willing to concede the point. I was here, wasn't I? I was dieing, I was going. I was sold. For better or worse, it was too late for buyer's remorse.
Willis exhaled slowly, notice how tense I was lying there. “We don't have to do this today,” he said. “Many people don't go over on the first visit. Especially cancer patients. Your body will continue to function for some months if you want it to. Come in when it starts to hurt.”
“I don't like pain,” I said quietly, with as much earnestness as I can muster. “I've made my decision. It's time to go. As Gary Gilmore said, 'let's do it,'” I replied smiling. I explained that Gilmore was a famous murderer put to death when I was a young man.
Willis smiled and nodded, comforted by my humor. “OK, then. Let's play ball.” I smiled at another bad analogy, he shrugged. He stood up briefly, grabbed something from behind the couch, then came up with what looked like an soccer helmet, cloth and bumpy, with a wire coming out one side. He attached it to my head with Velcro straps.
“This is it?” I asked, incredulous. “I mean, you can do it here? Now?”
“That's it,” he said. I felt it over my head and ears. Willis spent a few moments adjusting it, fitting it so it was straight.
“Lean back and relax,” he said.
“Not easy,” I said. “I've never died before.”
Willis smiled. “You're not going to die now, either. You're just going to another plane of existence.”
I grew philosophical a moment. “Isn't that what death is?”
“So some say,” he said, seeming to push some buttons below the couch cushioning. “The difference is no one has come back from death to tell us anything about it. Virtually everyone on Earth has communicated with the Cloud Community, in one way or another. Often directly with loved ones, who appear on screens like his one.” He pulled down a flat screen I hadn't seen, hovering on a frame like you'd see in an optometrist's office. The screen came on immediately.
“Wow,” is all I said. There, smiling, was a face I recognized from my past, a face I never expected to see again.
It was the face of my old friend Martin Bexar. Gone from his body how long now, 5 years? He smiled at me. He winked.
“This won't hurt a bit,” Martin said. “All you have to do is lean back, close your eyes, relax. You'll be here before you know it.”
(to be continued.)
