Three
Go? What is this go of which you speak?
All this food had simply appeared as if by magic. “How do I go anywhere,” I asked?
“The same way you got the food,” said Martin. “You will it.”
“How like a God,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I've actually given this some study.
“A God can fully define his own environment. He makes the rules. We learn the rules, and act in ways that may have seemed god-like in life, but we're not Gods in fact. We're just living in a different ecosystem under different rules, and with different needs. We consume electricity like air, we need it to survive. Compute space is like our universe – we can't live outside it. Software is like food, it defines all we can do and what we can be.”
I gave that some thought. “Then we may sleep,” I said. “Sleep gives the system time to do diagnostics on us, make certain no computer viruses are living inside us. Just as we process our day by sleeping at night, the system can maintain us only when we turn off.”
Martin shrugged. “I hadn't thought of it that way, but you may be right.
“So what do we do now?”
“We decide where to go, and when.”
“Let me sleep on that,” I said.
It was time.
The best analog to my feeling was that of going out into a strange town for the first time. A really strange town, like Hong Kong. When you're from Iowa. You've never been outside it. And you don't know the language.
Or maybe this was worse. I was going into a place that wasn't a place, from what felt, for now, like a real place. The only real place I'd been to since my “death.”
The implications were stark, and chilling. I was truly going to be leaving my body, living only in my mind and in senses Martin promised would be there for me. Promised. Would I be able to deliver?
“How do we go about this?” I asked nervously.
Martin was nonchalant. “Since this is your first time, we'll just open that door,” he said. “Just remember you can come back here at any time by focusing on something inside it. It's just like going into Oz, and you're Dorothy.”
I panicked. My mind didn't see Oz. I couldn't be the Wizard. My mind saw the void Warren Beatty walked through in “Heaven Can Wait.”
“But it's just a white room.” I almost screamed it. Was that blood I was tasting, sensing, from my fingernails digging into my hands?
Martin's response was infuriating. He chuckled. “It's simple enough. Think of that veal parmigiana. Tastes and smells are better memory anchors than sight anyway.” He opened the door.
We walked out. Into…nothing?
No, wait a moment. Not nothing. Something, all right, but nothing I could see, only hear and sense. A cacophony of sound without sights. I felt Martin's presence next to me, then saw what seemed to be his disembodied head before me. Like the Cheshire Cat.
“I know you're jumping into the deep end, but think,” the head said. “Think of where you want to be, and concentrate on who or what you want to see.”
“The center,” I said. “I want to see what the center of this looks like.”
I imagined then that it looked like the center of the world from the movie Tron.
“That's an optical illusion,” Martin said cheerfully. “Let me demonstrate.” He stood beside me like a magician, one arm crooked into mine, the other outspread toward the scene before us. “If you prefer it can look like this.” The scene shifted, it became Times Square in New York. “Or this.” It shifted again, became the scene outside of a Tokyo train station. “Or this.” Now I was in the center of a sprawling pack of rats, which disappeared as quickly as it appeared, leaving me back in Tron.
“The point is, the world you visualize may be an illusion to everyone else. It's all a product of your mind. Everything you just saw or experienced is something you lived, either directly or in a movie you saw, a book you read.”
He was right. That wasn't the Times Square of 2037, but one from 1972, one I'd seen. That wasn't the Tokyo of 2037, but one from 2009. Again something I'd seen. Damn. Why did I let Susan take me to see Willard?
The good news is that you choose your own illusion. Choice is important, because I know what you're thinking, what if you choose a nightmare? Just don't make that your conscious choice. If it occurs, wipe it away as you would a bad dream.
Once you become accustomed to things, as I am, the illusion becomes a little less firm. What you'll eventually 'see,' although not with your eyes, are what will look like small shapes of intensified energy, each representing a different mind, a different soul, that has come through recently.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Most of them are working.”
“Working?” I asked. “Working at what? And why?”
“These are collections of thought patterns, real minds like yours, engaged in input-and-output functions with the core that you're sensing all around us. That's why the scene is crowded – a busy street, a mass of rats. I could make it a beehive if you wanted.” I shook my head. No thanks.
“The degree to which someone's own thoughts are connecting with the core, the amount of attention they're giving that connection, defines how close they are to it, how much of them you can sense, the intensity of their shape. You'll learn to distinguish these shapes, to sense someone being at your side, as I am, or brushing by you…” I felt what was almost a breeze passing by.
“So all these are reporting in to some center,” I said. “And who or what is the center?”
“Not what, any more. Who. For now, let's call it The Doctor,” said Martin, with somewhat less surety.
I felt his presence on mine then, felt it moving, leaving my arm, and I followed it. I felt my senses adjust, creating a scene, which I took to be a large library reading room. Hundreds of forms gradually reshaped themselves into actual people, most of them about my age, male and female, looking intently at individual screens and engaged in typing, reading whatever was on their screens, or talking at the screens. As I watched, those who were most actively engaged seemed to grow telephone headsets, like operators standing by in a help desk.
“I've adjusted this to a view you can understand and accept it more easily,” Martin said quietly. “It's a work space. Each one of those screens is connected to another screen in Meat Space, which is our name for the outside world. Each figure you see here is a mind like yours, working on some problem with an outside researcher, or a computer program, something in Meat Space that has accessed the Cloud for help with a problem.”
“What is that I see on the screens?” I asked.
“The screens you see are each an exact replica of what a researcher is describing on the other side, or what a program there is displaying” he said. “It's reversed by software, so you can see what the person opposite is seeing, not the mirror image.
“They could be showing you a representation of a complex structure being designed by an architect. Or a molecule being designed by a scientist. It could be DNA. Every type of academic research can be represented through the display software, because researchers in all fields come here when they're stumped.
“But here's what's cool. Because everyone here has access to the larger resources of the Cloud, or in an emergency direct messaging to The Doctor, every soul in here can understand each screen in front of them.”
“So every one of us knows the answer to everything?” I asked.
Martin chuckled. “Not exactly. “But every soul here can interface, and thus each one of us can mediate, through the Community, between Cloud resources and the outside world. We don't have the answers, but if they can be calculated using the Cloud we can find the answers.
“Instead of people having to access a computer through an understanding of the computer, they're accessing it through an understanding given to them by a human mind, mediated by resources that are behind them. They give what they can, the other side gives what they can, so what's on each screen is the common understanding of what the person on the other side wants to have done, as the one on this side conceives it.
“It's a tremendous advance on the human-machine interface, Dave, because the Cloud has made the human-interface into a machine-human-human-machine interface. And that's what we do here. It's fascinating work.”
“What do you mean, that's what we do?” I asked.
“Well, it's one of the things we do,” he said. “It's what passes here for work. We act as guides for people on the outside, first as general librarians, as you see here, then within an area of specialization, whatever we choose to concentrate on. The interface will jump between souls when other human expertise is needed, just as you won't actually see when someone's help desk question is escalated in a call center – it's just the lower-level person may get up and get some coffee.
“Since you spent so much of your life online, and I know you have broad interests, I suspect you'll enjoy a job in front-line support, at first, just as a way to get your feet wet.”
“Martin, is this all reality is, just one giant call center?” Instantly the view shifted from that of a great library to an Indian-based software support center, only with people from every land working the phones.
“It could be,” he said. “You can look at it this way. The point is that your view of it is what you conceive it to be.” I felt him holding what I took to be my hand. “Or you may prefer to think of it this way.”
Instantly the view changed to a series of corporate boardrooms, all viewed from overhead, as we zoomed down into one and “stood” invisibly in a corner. There, at the head of the large, polished oak table stood a flat screen on a stand, and a keyboard. Behind that interface – which had suddenly gone translucent – sat a man who looked like Steve Jobs. Or was it a woman who looked like Judi Dench? Michael Caine? Warren Buffett? Shirley MacLaine? As I thought of the names, the face morphed into the person I was thinking of.
“Who is it?” I asked finally, flustered
“Who do you want it to be?” Martin replied calmly. “As I said, everything is just a visualization tool, an interface between your conception of what is happening and what is actually happening deep in a machine. Which is really just a dance of electrons on chips, and fiber cables, densely packed and connected into thousands of ports through the Internet you first worked on as a young reporter.
“Of course, that's the way it is in Meat Space as well,” he added. “It's only the interface controlled by our minds that determines the scene we think we perceive. Dogs can't see color, children can hear pitches higher than adults, insects and birds all use what would seem to us to be different senses in different ways, and perceive the world to be quite different in their own minds. Reality is just its representation, in the end.”
He sighed heavily. “The images you see, the sounds you hear, they're just what your internal computations decide they will be. They could be anything. Because, if you look at anything too deeply, they're nothing.
I suddenly felt very tired. “Let's go,” I said. I closed my eyes
I opened my eyes. I was back in my room.
My real room. Back home. The home I'd lived in most of my life. The room I'd shared with Susan all those decades. The red paint on the wall, the bookshelves whose contents only went up in value after e-books took over early in the century, a painting done by my great aunt a century earlier. The windows, sunlight streaming in. It was 2008, and I was waking from a nap.
It was all a dream, I thought. A wave of relief swept over me.
Then I saw, sitting on the side of the room where the entrance to my bathroom should have been, Martin Bexar. He had one eye on a TV that had never been in that room during my lifetime, and one eye on me.
“You're feeling better?” he asked. The TV disappeared.
“I was, until I saw you,” I said. Then he disappeared, replaced by the old bathroom entrance which had been there in 2008. The cell phone sitting on my dresser rang. I picked it up. There was Martin's picture and a phone number, staring back at me. I switched it on.
“It's not necessary,” I said sadly.
Instantly the phone disappeared, along with the entrance to the bathroom, and there Martin stood, at the foot of my bed.
“You've had quite a shock,” Martin said. “I threw you in the deep end, you took all your mind could stand, and then you shut down.
“I thought I could do this alone.” He sighed. “But I can see they were right. I can't.”
Do what alone, I thought.
But, just as suddenly, we were not alone. A beautiful woman stood next to Martin, dressed in a diaphanous gown showing every curve of her body. A Roman goddess.
Shocked, and not a little bit embarrassed at what I was feeling down below, I pulled the covers up to my chin. “You look just like Sophie Napoli,” I strangled out. “But you can't be.”
“Why can't I be?” the second apparition said. “Because Sophie Napoli died in the year 2026? Because she was an old woman by then?”
She looked at Martin. “Did he just get here?”
“It was just a cycle ago,” Martin said to her. “But as I was just saying, I kind of threw him in the deep end of understanding here. Perhaps he wasn't ready. Perhaps it was a mistake.”
Sophie brushed Martin's arm, and his body warmed to her. “He's my friend,” he said. “It's the first time I've brought someone new to The Cloud. Forgive me.”
“I understand,” she said softly, patting his hand, and in a voice that made my knees weak. She looked just like she had in Desire Under the Elms. She'd made it at age 24, her dark smoldering beauty at its height, eyes that drove right into my soul, and a body that…sproing! The dead don't think like that, I thought. The dead don't have that. Do they?
She just smiled her broadest smile. “Thank you so much for remembering me,” she said with a laugh. “Now let's see if we can't bring you down to something truly real. ” I could swear she purred it as she moved toward me.
Martin disappeared, and the gown came off.
A half hour later, as I reckoned such things, I lay in bed crying in Sophie's arms, my mind wracked with newly-found guilt. “Sixty years of marriage and I'd never even thought of that!”
She lifted my chin, from her naked breast to stare into my eyes, my eyes staring deep into those eyes. “You were a good man. You are a good man. I wish I'd met someone like you when I first owned this body. My life would have been so much better!
“But here's the truth. Your wife is gone and, technically, so are you. So am I. There is no cheating life in death” And with that, I was holding a white, long-haired cat in my arms.
The cat spoke. “What is this besides heaven?” Sophie's voice asked.
I tried to smile, but only found myself crying harder.
The cat disappeared. And now it was Susan who was standing by the bed. As beautiful as the day we'd met, with her Coke bottle glasses, those light blue eyes, the rounded face and impossibly long auburn hair.
“How can I possibly be gone when I'm standing right here? How can you possibly cheat on me when we just made love” she asked. The voice was hers, but the words were not.
“How? What?”
The woman I recognized as my wife now knelt by my side. “So long as you exist, and you exist here, I exist. So long as you can imagine me, I can be here with you. Whenever you want me, or need me. Just call for me. Imagine me. I'm here.”
“No, you're not. But thanks, Sophie.” Instantly Susan became the movie star, and I felt disappointed.
“You forget. I am missing a husband.” The thought came to me. Carlo Rozzini, the director and love of Sophie Napoli's life, had passed away in 2007, almost two decades before the Cloud came into being.
“We all have people we miss, friends and lovers and family who didn't make it here. There will be millions more such people, because the Cloud is still a western upper class affectation, an exception and not the rule.
“So we have much work to do,” Sophie said, holding my hand in hers and holding my attention with her eyes again.
“We need to serve mankind so this life can become the rule. We need to be here for one another so we can be here for others. We must make every soul feel welcome here to build a future that can hold the whole world. That is what I believe.
I nodded, grieving over for the moment, approaching the stage of acceptance.
“Just one request. Can I see Susan again?” I smiled then. Sophie smiled. And all at once, it was Susan who smiled.
“Any time, lover.”
