by John Ayliff
The first question you will no doubt have is why you are reading a static document rather than hearing this story first-hand from a simulated person. As post-mortem transference comes to be seen as a basic right, it must seem strange that I would deliberately avoid it. But I hope that by this account I will persuade you, if you still have the option, to forego technological immortality and settle for the oblivion that was good enough for our ancestors.
No thoughts of death were in my mind when, in the sweltering summer of 2027, Susan and I were given a grant to conduct experimental research into wormholes. The possibility of wormholes had, of course, been implied in Einstein’s theories, but experimental research had only recently become practical.
Our first two trials had showed that the high-voltage parallel plates, the centrepiece of the gleaming monstrosity of technology that filled our lab, could be used to create measurable distortions in space. Unfortunately our work had caught the public imagination, and we were forced to open our lab to several TV crews. Once I had wearily explained to them that a wormhole was not a black hole and that our experiments were (as I thought at the time) perfectly safe, they were invariably disappointed that we could not produce a man-sized gateway through space. Instead Susan showed them Louis the white mouse and enthusiastically explained how he would be the first wormhole traveller when we created a large enough opening. I did not see the point in keeping Louis in the lab; I suspect Susan simply wanted a pet.
Perhaps without the media attention we would have been able to conduct more preliminary tests and our first full-scale wormhole attempt would not have met with such tragic consequences. As it was, the university all but demanded that we make our third experiment an attempt to produce a fully-formed wormhole.
Louis the mouse would have to wait, however, since the first wormhole would be microscopic. He watched from his cage as I set up the laser whose beam would be the only wormhole traveller that day. From the target room Susan reported that the sensors were ready to detect the faintest ghost of success. The generators reached full power and I pulled the lever. Machines crackled mightily, readings jumped on the screens, and the laser beam scattered for a moment before vanishing into thin air.
Total absorption! We had not dreamed of that kind of success; we had expected perhaps one photon in a thousand to find its way through the twisted little wound we had punched in the skin of reality. Louis scampered around his cage, and I think he could sense my excitement as I got up from my terminal and walked to the machine. The laser beam was a perfectly straight ruby wire stretched weightlessly between the emitter and a point in mid-air between the plates. Apart from that the wormhole was invisible.
Behind me, Susan’s voice came through the intercom. “I’ve got zero spacial distortion and zero photon reading. Can you confirm you’ve activated?”
I tore my eyes away from the glowing needle. This was impossible: the wormhole had to lead somewhere and our machine did not have the power to send it far. “I’m reading one hundred percent absorption,” I said. “Are you sure you aren’t getting anything?”
“Nothing.”
“All right. I’m deactivating now.” I pushed the lever back; the laser flicked off and the generators throbbed down through the octaves towards rest. We had enough readings to puzzle over, and the creation of a stable wormhole was an important success despite the mystery of its destination. I began a print-out of the sensor logs, but then noticed, with a chill, the data still scrolling across the screen.
The generators were powering down as normal, but the sensors meant to detect the presence of the wormhole were reading as strongly as before. Incredulous, but grimly certain of the result, I pressed the switch to activate the laser. The beam sparkled briefly between its fixed points, still vanishing in mid-air.
Decades of scientific training cried out that what I was seeing was impossible. Energy was vanishing, being destroyed. Not only the laser beam: a wormhole could only be kept open with a constant supply of energy, and none of ours was being expended. I shut the laser off again and moved closer There it was, impossibly but irrefutably there, a tiny vortex in the mist that my breath formed as I peered between the cooled plates. I shivered, and not just from the cold.
Susan joined me and we began running all the tests we could think of on the wormhole. We had definitely created a wormhole entrance, as the energy of the laser beam disappeared without a trace. Where it led was a mystery, as was the means by which it stayed open. After two hours all we had learned was that the distortion in space had slightly but measurably increased–that the wormhole’s aperture was widening.
***
After that discovery I left the lab for a few minutes. We were making no progress. Susan and I were both becoming irritable. Louis was running in circles in his cage and his every movement grated on my ear. I told myself that a walk in the summer sunshine and a few minutes thinking about something else would let me approach the problem afresh. But even in the sunshine, the mystery seemed to sit clammily on my chest: not the wholesome, exciting gap in knowledge that is the joy of the scientist’s calling, but the sneering mystery of something that cannot possibly be and yet is. I turned back, resolving to force myself to find answers through sheer stubborn determination, but as I reached the lab door I heard a scream of fright.
I rushed into the wormhole chamber and found Susan standing frozen in shock. On the floor of the lab, in a rectangle of light that streamed from a high window, was Louis’s upturned cage. The mouse’s body was motionless inside. I put my hand on Susan’s shoulder and was about to offer some word of consolation, when I noticed what was wrong and my stomach turned.
Louis’s head had melted. On the floor beneath the cage lay spots of blood. The head itself was flat like a deflated balloon, and pink goo oozed out of its eye sockets and mouth.
Susan could not say what had happened. She had heard a clatter and looked up to see the cage on the ground, with Louis exactly as I had found him. She thought she had seen another movement near the wormhole, but she was not certain.
I swept Louis’s remains into a bag and stored it in a freezer for analysis later. The wormhole had expanded noticeably since I had left the lab, and was now visible as a faint swirl in the air. Even with the main lights turned on and the sunlight pouring through the windows the centre of the lab seemed dark, as if the wormhole were sucking light from its surroundings. In my frustration I could not help anthropomorphising it as a glowering eye.
The wormhole aperture was now two or three centimetres across. Some kind of repulsive gravitational field prevented air from streaming through the opening, but without any other barrier I thought it should be possible for an object to be forced through. We decided to seek a more solid wormhole traveller than the laser beam, and found a wooden metre-rule discarded after the construction of the machines. Guiding it into the wormhole was like pressing two similar magnetic poles together, but once it was in place the repulsion kept it in the centre of the opening. I held it there for a moment and then withdrew it. The ruler had suffered no damage, but the wood was cold to the touch and adorned with tiny ice-crystals where moisture on the surface had frozen. Next we taped a small camera to the end of the ruler and pushed it through once more. I fixed the ruler in place with a standing clamp and joined Susan at the monitor.
I have watched the camera footage more times than I can remember. Watching it now, knowing what would come next, the images fill me with hopeless dread. It is hard to believe that at the time my main feeling was elation at the first progress we had made that day.
The picture was dark and we had to increase the brightness to full before any details appeared. Even then we did not know–I still do not know–exactly what we saw. A structure, an irregular lattice of thin struts, like spider-webs or neurones. It must have been large, since the probe’s little light was lost on it, but how large it was we could not tell. Beyond it were pinpricks that might have been stars, although they too were only visible under the increased brightness.
I was about to move the ruler to see another angle when Susan pointed out an area of indistinct movement. At first I thought it was an artefact of the camera’s high light-sensitivity, but then I saw that it was definitely localised, crawling across part of the structure. It stopped in the middle of a triangular node and then began to grow larger. No, not larger, I realised–and this is where I felt the first rush of fear–it was coming closer. The moving body came within the probe’s lamplight and changed from a sparkling blackness to a seething grey cloud. It lunged, and for a moment the screen was awash with tiny swirling particles, before the camera failed and they were replaced by the more familiar snowstorm of static.
I stood up and tried to withdraw the useless camera from the wormhole, but the ruler resisted my pull. Then I dropped the ruler in shock. A ghostly black tentacle had emerged from the portal and was pulling itself caterpillar-like along the wood towards my hand. The ruler shuddered, and the part closest to the wormhole began to disintegrate, crumbling into fragments that dissolved into the substance of the tentacle. In a sudden panic I ran for the door, past the monitor where Susan was rising frantically from her chair. The thing lunged, extruding metres of dark substance with incredible speed.
Susan ran after me, but in her hurry she tripped over her chair and fell headlong, right under the apparition that stretched like a sinister black ribbon in the air. I rushed back to her but was too slow: the tentacle had wrapped around her legs and I could not pull her free. It thinned and widened, for a moment engulfing her whole body and choking her screams with tiny black particles. Then it seemed to find what it was looking for and re-formed around her head. She stopped screaming but began to convulse and flail horribly, as if she were a marionette and the black tentacle were jerking harshly on her strings.
The convulsions ceased and she lay still for several seconds, the tentacle forming a taut, pulsating cord between the back of her head and the wormhole. I started to move towards her, but froze again when she clambered to her feet. She moved awkwardly, and I was already sure that it was not Susan who was controlling her movements but the obscene apparition whose tiny components were penetrating her skull. She stood erect, her face blank and her arms hanging limply at her sides. Her head turned slowly left and right as if the thing were using her head as I had used the camera.
“I remember this,” she said. Her voice began as a rough whisper that seemed to force its way up her throat, but as she continued it became clearer, as if her possessor were working out how to use her vocal cords. “I remember this. I remember being me, this moment. I can feel her squirming inside…”
She fixed me in her gaze, and then her blank face melted into anguish. For a moment I thought Susan had regained control, but when she spoke her voice was still that of the possessing entity. “I promised I wouldn’t do it again but you don’t know what it’s like!” she blurted. “To, to have a body, eyes, skin. I waited and I promised I wouldn’t do it again but I couldn’t resist and it all happens like it did before only this time it’s me…” She glanced for a second at the wormhole control panel. “You do what you have to do. I…” She took a fluttering intake of breath and her gaze focused on the doorway behind me. “I shall see the sun!”
She lurched forward and ran, swaying and nearly falling as if her head were being propelled forward and her legs could barely keep up. The tentacle trailed behind her, a shadow cast by nothing onto thin air. I started after her, but then remembered the wormhole controls and the way she had glanced at them.
In a panic I threw every switch. The generators still retained a little of the charge they had built up earlier that day, and I sent every Joule of it at the wormhole in a single unfocused blast. There was a clap of metallic thunder and blinding light flashed between the plates. I looked away, but through the corner of my eye I could see the tentacle writhing. Then the machine gave out, leaving the air smelling of burnt metal. The wormhole began to contract, and the tentacle thinned as the black particles streamed back through.
Stumbling, still half-blind from the light, I ran out of the lab. Susan was just outside the door, standing tall with her neck craned back as she stared at the sun that blazed high in the clear summer sky. Her eyes were wide open, tears tracing silver paths down her cheek-bones, and her hands were trembling. Then the last wisps of the black tentacle pulled away, and she crumpled to the ground.
***
I held Susan’s hand as the ambulance took her to the hospital. She did not regain consciousness, and her eyes did not close. She stopped breathing during the journey, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.
Scans in the hospital’s post-mortem upload unit revealed an unknown type of brain damage that baffled the doctors. I kept quiet, but I was sure that her brain was beginning to disintegrate as had that of the mouse. But there was enough of it left for a personality imprint to be saved, and soon the process of weaving the raw neuronal data into a conscious virtual entity was under way.
I wish now that I had found some way to stop the upload. I wish I had delayed calling the ambulance, or pulled a plug out of the upload machine, or smashed her skull to prevent that vital pattern from being stolen before it dissolved. But at the time I had not pieced together what I now believe, and as I numbly watched the death of my friend I derived some consolation from the thought that she would live on as a ghost in a digital repository.
The wormhole machinery was beyond repair, but the data that we had collected would bear many years of scrutiny, and I set about the task with a heavy heart. For a while Susan attempted to help me in the limited capacity that was available to her, but she found any reminder of her death traumatic, and, like many of the recently-uploaded, she decided to have nothing to do with her previous life. The last I heard was that she had joined one of the electronic ‘heavens’ in which the uploaded live simulated lives with no contact with the physical world. I do not know whether she has come to the same conclusions as I have and I have not tried to contact her, for, if I am right about what happened, her fate is already sealed.
Subsequent wormhole experiments were never able to replicate whatever freak set of circumstances caused that day’s tragedy, but years of analysis of the data have led me to a conclusion of which I am absolutely certain. Our wormhole’s second opening appeared very close to where we intended, but around ten billion years in the future.
With that knowledge the other pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together. That bizarre structure, shrouded in the darkness of a dead sun, was an artifact of humanity’s descendants, and the shadow tentacle was their creature. The being that possessed Susan was Susan herself, or a gestalt consciousness of which her personality came to the fore, preserved across the unimaginable aeons by the lattice. For ten billion years it must have waited for the moment it knew to be coming, when, for a few minutes, it could experience real light and sensation.
That is the reason that I fear the post-mortem upload technology, and developments which others see as benign have filled me with dread. Already, in the years since my wormhole experiment, the upload is coming to be seen as a basic right and moves are being made to have it provided by the State to those who cannot afford it. Already I have heard tales of the barriers placed in the way of those digital personalities who wish to end their existence. Already I have heard computer scientists and necropsychologists whisper of an emergent consciousness living in the personality stores, growing stronger with every death.
And worst of all is to know that the future I saw is inevitable. My experimental success validates the modern theory of the nature of time, which in turn refutes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. There is only one timeline, and the lonely black lattice lies ten billion years hence just as surely as Europe and America lie on opposite sides of the Atlantic. My only free will, if I can be said to have it at all, comes from ignorance. The only person I know for certain to be part of that gestalt is Susan; I can still avoid that fate myself.
I have made it clear in my living will that I want no post-mortem upload or any procedure involving the same equipment, and I carry a card at all times with a notice to that effect. But such wishes are increasingly being ignored, and life-loving society has come to regard them as a mental aberration to be cured. Robotic ambulances patrol the skies, able to swoop down and claim the escaping spirit of any accidental death. I can no longer be sure that, if I die unexpectedly, my wishes will be respected.
Perhaps my experience, which still haunts me, has led me to take a more extreme measure than is necessary, but I do not wish to leave anything to chance. You will find my remains in the incinerator. I am confident that there will be nothing left to preserve.
About the Author
John Ayliff is a writer in the computer games industry and lives in Cambridge, England.
©2009 John Ayliff
