Dana Blankenhorn

Into the Cloud VI

Seven

We were seated in what looked like an old-style English pub. At the bar a man who was missing several teeth was pulling a Guinness for a customer, who was loudly arguing about the merits of Chelsea vs. Manchester United on the telly.

In our corner Dr. Cornwallis and I were debating the related question of good vs. evil (Chelsea fans see ManU as evil and vice-versa), and how much evil would have to enter a good man to tip the balance. We were putting Dr. Emile Hoskie on trial and I was the prosecutor.

“You admit that some of the souls the Doctor is absorbing did not live blameless lives,” I said, trying to damn The Doctor through others after acknowledging Dr. Cornwallis' love of the man.

“Most of them,” Dr. Cornwallis admitted. “All of us feel guilt over something. You feel guilt over your wife's death. I feel guilt over things I failed to accomplish in my career. I'm sure Dr. Hoskie felt blame for some things. The larger question is whether that counts for anything within Dr. Hoskie, once those souls cease to exist and they become part of his larger whole. Once you take full responsibility for others' souls, perhaps the old souls cease to exist.”

I tried another tack. “So you're saying The Doctor has absolute power over the souls he absorbs, then,” I said. “You would also admit that power, in general has a corrupting influence.”

“And that absolute power corrupts absolutely? Certainly.”Dr. Cornwallis took a sip of his Scotch. I studied his hand closely for signs of shaking, for evidence I was breaking through his iron certainty about The Doctor's personality. Any uncertainty in his position, I felt, would surely be felt first in what passed for a physical being, using the cues of life for communication within the Cloud Community.

But unless I could get some acknowledgment that I had a case against The Doctor from this man, I felt, I couldn't go on to opposing him, as Martin wished me to do. I needed to have my doubts settled or reinforced, and now.

So I bore into Dr. Cornwallis, Hoskie's former assistant. “Would you also acknowledge that people can do evil while they think they are acting for good, confusing means and ends?”

Dr. Cornwallis nodded. “There are countless examples.”

“Then is it possible, that in the process of adding all these souls to his corpus the Doctor absorbed some evil, that the lack of a figure with equal or equivalent power is troubling, and that even he might find himself rationalizing actions that on later reflection might appear monstrous.”

“We all believe in the greater good,” Dr. Cornwallis said, nodding his head and sipping at his Scotch. “I'm certain both you and I could do evil deeds in the name of some greater good. Would you bomb Hiroshima to end World War II? That's one thing. Would you destroy the World Trade Center if you believed it would bring in the Caliphate? That's something else.

“But I have a question for you, then. Is is possible that, when the Doctor says he is acting for the greater good, he in fact is doing just that, and we could never know that given his much greater processing power and information storage.”

He had me there. I sipped my red wine, which I had laughingly referred to as Chateau Wells Fargo to the tavern-keeper, after John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey. “So if the hero becomes an anti-hero who is to know?”

“And who is to judge,” Dr. Cornwallis replied. “We all have to trust others at some points in our lives. And Dr. Hoskie has proven worthy of my trust on many occasions.”

The bell over the pub's entrance tinkled just then, and in stepped Martin Bexar, sporting an English cloth jacket and scarf. He removed both, placing them on the hat rack by the door (cradling the fabric between his fingers appreciatively) and, moving to our table, grabbed a chair and motioned with one finger for at drink.

“Mr. Bexar,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “Dave said you would be joining us. And what have you learned?”

Martin pulled a small tablet computer from an inside pocket of his jacket and placed it between us.

“Doctor H. has been part of the Cloud since June 4, 2025,” he said. “That's about 12 years. During the first year he was here he absorbed the soul and memory of one other person, a former Google executive who had predeceased him and lost most his sanity in the transfer. The second year he absorbed two more people, then four the next year, eight the next year, and so on.

“At that rate then this year he should absorb over 4,000 souls,” I said.

“And he should have just about that many from previous years,” said Martin. About 8,000 in total.”

“It's all following along the path of Moore's Law,” I said. Gordon Moore had written back in 1964 about chip densities doubling every year, and what that could mean for computing progress. So far his predictions had continued to be accurate, and they had been followed by geometric improvements in other, related areas – data storage, optical capacity, etc. – thanks to scientific use of processing power made possible by the original law.

“You're the expert on that,” said Martin, with a smile.

“Has anyone else begun absorbing other souls?” I asked.

Martin shook his head. “Some have, but not to this extent. No one else has more than 17 other souls absorbed into them. Most of the arrangements are either married couples, Mormon and Muslim marriages with multiple wives, and one Chinese computer parts manufacturing executive who has been insisting her former employees belong to her.”

“Her legal claims have been soundly rejected,” said Dr. Cornwallis in a huff.

“But a few still felt a moral obligation and couldn't be dissuaded,” I reminded him.

“That's out of how many souls in the Cloud total,” Dr. Cornwallis asked.

I looked across the table at Martin. “The last count is 1 million, 713 thousand, 321. That's as of the last time I accessed the figure. I'm sure it's risen since I walked in here.”

He let that number sink in. The Doctor controlled 8,000 souls, but that was still less than one-half of one percent of the total.

Dr. Cornwallis had another question. “How does the rate of the Doctor's growth compare with that of the whole system,” he asked.

Martin looked a bit dumbfounded.

“What's his market share in souls, you mean?” I said.

“Miniscule,” said Martin. “Less than one half of one percent.”

“Not much for a retailer, but pretty good for a law firm,” I said. “And it's really relative. Of those soul gatherers who are organized for it, he's got the rest outnumbered almost 500 to one. So how do we proceed, Dr. Cornwallis?”

The man looked troubled.

“I'm not convinced he needs to be stopped. But I do agree it's time I talked to my old mentor,” he said quietly.

 

I had ordered some treats for the table. Fish and chips for me, steak and kidney pie for Dr. Cornwallis, some boiled peanuts for Martin, who being a lifelong Yankee had never tried them.

“This is excellent,” Dr. Cornwallis exclaimed. “You say Dave drew this out of his memories? I hadn't thought to seek nourishment since I arrived here.”

“We all have our talents,” I said. “I became interested in food during the latter half of my life, so these ideas were pretty close to the surface of my mind. Ask me what TV shows I watched my last day on Earth, however, and I'd be stumped.”

“Which brings me back to our subject,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “I can't test his memory, but I also can't let him think he is being tested. I have to find a way to look into his soul so that he's not aware of it, so that I'm the only one learning anything, while he thinks he's having a casual conversation with an old friend.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Martin.

“Easy,” I said. “Talk about some of the subjects the two of you discussed while you were studying under him. Not the academic subjects, the memories, the people, the situations that came up at the time. Politics. Religion. Anything that may have had a moral dimension.

“Then see if his opinion on those things has changed,” said Dr. Cornwallis, nodding his head in assent.

“If his moral compass remains true, it could mean we have little to worry about,” said Martin.

I chewed more carefully. The food was a good distraction from thought. “Not exactly,” I finally said. “Remember, he's gained a lot of intelligence, a lot of strategies for dealing with people, with situations. He's absorbed not just the souls, but the memories of thousands of people. The Doctor may have once been a very dry academic, but he now has the talents of many, many people, including some who doubtless were good at manipulating others.”

“Since he wasn't that way in life, it's an attribute he might be grateful to gain, something that would pop right to the top of his stack,” said Martin. “Something he would use regularly and be eager to show off to an esteemed colleague.

“So how do I evaluate my data?” asked Dr. Cornwallis.

“Well first, make certain you record the conversation,” I said. “Make up some excuse. Or just keep a recording device in a pocket. Tell him what a great man he is and you want evidence of your having been there so that when you meet other friends from Meat Space you can brag on him.”

“Feed his ego. Then what?” said Dr. Cornwallis.

“Then we can all evaluate the conversation together when you come back,” I said. “But as a first take, ask yourself, are the conclusions he is coming to more or less what they would have been before, or are they different, or do they appear memorized. And if his moral conclusions are markedly different, or if you sense he's trying to hide something, telling you want he thinks you want to hear rather than what you know to be honest truth, if he's become more ruthless, less caring of others, that would certainly prove something.”

“What would prove him not-guilty would be ambivalence?” asked Martin.

“Yes,” I said. “We all re-evaluate our pasts, based on where we are later, based on our memories, and our feelings about those memories. Some shifting is bound to happen.”

“It's if nothing has shifted in his emotional make-up, or everything has, that we need to be concerned,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “It's going to be hard to prove either way.

“I don't care how clear the evidence, then,” I replied. “I'm going to remain skeptical.”

Eight

Cloud computing began as a simple concept early in the 21^st century. The idea was make it easier to host files and services online.

When the Web was first spun, companies that hosted applications devoted a computer to one or more Web sites. Each computer ran an operating system, applications, and other software needed to link with the network, just like a desktop PC. These “host” companies were distinguished from the phone and cable companies that came to dominate the provision of bandwidth to the masses. They made more money, and there were more of them.

As databases became more complex, hosts realized they could save money by sharing the database function among many computers. Once the database was shared, work began on the task of sharing everything else, so it wouldn't matter where in a server farm a Web site “lived.”

The first step toward sharing was virtualization. You created a version of an operating system and linked it to every program requiring it, then ran your whole system in one way. So what looked like a Windows machine might actually be Linux, or vice versa. Each system became an “instance” of something larger, and the larger thing could be run with maximum efficiency. These “hypervisors” were all the rage in the second half of the century's first decade.

But they were just a first step. It was a race to drop costs which was led by Google. Google put its data on ordinary PCs rather than expensive servers. Google bought its own fiber lines, creating its own network. Google placed trucks with most of its data closer to consumers, so more requests could be handled locally. Google even opened the windows at its server farms, letting the outside air cool its PCs rather than keeping them locked in air-conditioning. Then it placed arrays of solar panels on its roofs to save even more energy.

With costs dropping so fast, thanks to innovation and virtualization, and with more servers being placed in host “server farms” all the time, Amazon.Com, which began as an online store, realized they could make more money in computer services by replacing corporate networks virtually, through what it called its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

As corporations considered moving their whole infrastructure to EC2, and many moved important pieces to it (especially those their customers linked to, leading to the growth of social networking sites that were nothing but 'customer-facing'), other vendors got into the game, telling big companies they could build their own “Clouds” and pocket the savings while retaining control of their data. Thus virtualization and falling costs led directly to “cloud computing.”

At the same time, software programmers were finding better ways to mimic the human mind online. IBM's “Big Blue” computer first won the world chess championship, then IBM's Watson won at the TV game “Jeopardy.”

What programmers learned in building systems like this was that complex tasks were actually relatively easy to program, because they could be modeled, while simple tasks were much harder. Your ability to navigate on a crowded street, to recognize a friend, to begin a conversation, this took a lot more compute power than figuring out Pi to 10,000 places.

But the amount of software and data processing needed to mimic human interactions was not infinite. And once these interactions could be modeled, such a model could be replicated, infinitely. It's just like anything else – first it's a huge system, then it's a desktop system, and eventually it's just software. Eventually all our mental tricks could be replicated in an online system, and the highly complex job of “moving around” left to the robotics people, who still, in the second decade of the 21^st century lacked the mechanical knowledge to create the robotic butlers for girls portrayed in Asimov's first robot stories (which began their alternate history with a story taking place in 1998).

Once mental habits – the entire life of the mind – could be replicated online, work began on making these minds personal, and on modeling actual minds.

Why model real minds? Because software engineers found there are some things human minds did more efficiently than machines, like walking navigating a crowded street. Human computers are analog, not digital. We make connections where there don't appear to be connections that can be made. We play. Computers don't play, they just follow their programming. As researchers continued to study the mind they found this ability to play retained its value. If computers could play they would advance exponentially, but the only way to make them play was to, literally, model living minds inside them.

By 2020 they were ready to make the big leap. Google launched The Cloud Community as a separate start-up, mainly to avoid the possible legal repercussions if something went wrong. And when its first chairman's effort to extend his life by going into The Cloud failed, the company's care was proven prescient. Mr. E. had been a billionaire many times over. Had he not been an insider the legal consequences could have been monstrous. (They were bad enough anyway.)

An entirely new corporate structure was needed, one that would create a contract with even less legal liability than a Microsoft EULA but the potential of eternal life within a computing system. Eternity would come at the price of service. Critics called it slavery, but critics weren't about to die.

Those who entered The Cloud Community, in other words would surrender their souls, under a contract, and all their worldly goods. They would also enter into an eternal “labor” contract, one that could call them to computing tasks within The Cloud at any time, the dead serving at the will of the living.

It's amazing, when you put it that way, that anyone did sign up. The branding statement “I exist to serve” wasn't enough. Celebrity turned out to be the key to marketing The Cloud Community. As politicians, famous athletes and movie stars approached their ends and had “their people” negotiate variations on the EULA (most of which turned out to have no meaning) the market's objections to service gradually gave way to an excitement over possible immortality.

Having Dr. Emile Hoskie do his Super Bowl ad from the Cloud in 2028, narrating his own imagined MVP performance at quarterback for the Cowboys, illustrated as thoroughly as though it were truly happening, was a masterstroke. The Baby Boom generation was looking into the Void and, as throughout its life, it wanted an Out.

The Cloud was the Out.

I covered some of this as a retired journalist throughout the 2020s. Many of the issues were familiar to me. My newsletter, “Rainy Days,” became popular. So popular, in fact, that by the time it was my time to go, in 2037, my application was quickly accepted, even though I technically lacked the cash to afford the trip. I thought of it as a press junket.

Susan and I had long arguments about The Cloud from the day it was created until the day she died. She insisted to me that going into The Cloud was as much a death as any other, and that Heaven was a greater reward than the Cloud Community and its promise of service. I begged her to join me, and I think if I had pre-deceased her she would have.

But I'll never know.

Her heart attack, while on a retreat to northern California, was devastating in its suddenness and finality. As young people have said of sudden death for thousands of years my children and grandchildren called it a mercy. One moment she was there, I was told by the friend who accompanied her. The next she was gone and there was nothing that could be done.

After that the kids didn't come around much anymore. Susan had been the heart of their conversations with me. She listened better than I did, and argued less than I did. She didn't judge, didn't draw conclusions out loud. She laughed, a loud full-throated laugh that could start as a giggle, she smiled all the time, she asked simple, leading questions. And she had no agenda of a story to write.

“Go on,” she'd say to our kids, then our grandkids. Or, “And what was the best part of your day, then?” she'd ask when they stopped. Conversation was her music, and she was certain, she told me that there was nothing like it in The Cloud Community. By the time I got my call about my prostate cancer, I was actually glad to be going.

If she'd only known. Conversation, it turns out, is plentiful in The Cloud. It's what keeps us going, what makes for life after what she would call death.

What's not so plentiful here is honest emotion. I can appear to cry, appear to laugh, but I know in my heart it's all the movement of electrons across the grid. I don't feel it in my heart the way I did.

There is something to what they say about the heart of life being the heart, not the mind.

Or is my ability to feel this depression just evidence that I am now, as I have been so often in my life, full of shit?

As I waited in my virtual room for Dr. Cornwallis to return from his interview with The Doctor, I thought about all these things.

I thought about them many times.

 

Into the Cloud V

Five

We had returned to my virtual home. It was looking more like the one I left, with my memories making it more vivid. Windows now looked out into a yard, there were trees outside, and I saw a street with a sidewalk, which had what sometimes looked to be people passing by on it.

“I see you're fixing the place up,” Martin said. “I like it.”

“It's a lot more familiar,” I admitted.

“The Community is, with your permission, analyzing what was on the stick you brought with you when you came over,” Martin explained. “Your life here can be as much as it was as you want it, and most newcomers prefer that.”

“At first,” I responded quickly. “I mean, eventually you see through the charade.”

“Some do,” Martin admitted. “Some prefer to leave things be, even after they know it's all in their heads.”

I thought about that for a moment. I could turn what I saw into anything I wanted. I could turn it into nothing, living literally on top of the clouds, like an angel in heaven. But this was always my heaven. As soon as I saw this house, over a half-century ago, I said I wanted to live in it. And, in time, I did. For decades. With my beloved Susan.

I shoved that thought out of my mind. “Let's get back to this problem of autonomy,” I said, as my favorite old music played in the background. “You seemed to say that losing your autonomy might be based on a desire to die?”

“Very good. Since we're all dead already, the only way of changing your mind on the question of immortality is to give away your soul. And the market is active. It's not something the people who created the Community anticipated, just as those who created the Internet didn't think about spam. But there it is. Complete free will leads to some treating it like a hot potato.”

“But like every market some firms are bigger than others, I take it?”

“You're getting better at accessing background resources, aren't you?” Martin said. “Your questions are becoming more pointed.”

I ignored the compliment. The question has been based entirely on intuition, on what Martin was telling me. But a reporter whose source thinks he knows the answers to questions gives better answers than one who does not.

“And who is this 'The Doctor' you keep going on about?” I continued

“The Doctor?” Martin feigned ignorance, something I knew, from life, meant I was getting at something he didn't want to talk about.

“Yes, The Doctor. It sounds like something out of an old TV show. Who is he, and why are do you seem so frightened of him?”

“Before I answer, I need to do something first,” Martin said. I looked up and saw, to my amazement, a plexiglass shield coming over both of us, like the old “cone of silence” on “Get Smart.” I wanted to laugh, but looking over at Martin I saw he was as serious as a heart attack.

“Yes, it's just like that,” Martin said, reading my bemused expression. “But it's also necessary.

“What you're seeing is a physical manifestation of my calling in an encryption algorithm with a tracer on our conversation. Not only does it resist decryption, but attempts to decrypt it are logged, so if someone tries to break in to this file and hear what we've said I will know about it before they know what we said.”

He sighed heavily. I waited for him to continue. (It was the most difficult skill I'd had to learn as a journalist, shutting up and waiting for the subject to get to the point in his own time.)

“The Doctor. Where does the Doctor fit into the history of this place? You know, don't you?”

“Vaguely.” He gave a wry smile. I kept my mouth quiet, and waited for him to continue.

Finally, he did. “As a concept, cloud computing began a generation ago, around 2008. By 2018 it was apparent that, despite several attempts to build human-like intelligence into computing, like the Watson project, everything we had done was still an imitation.

“So when Mr. Eric Edsel, whose company had formed the biggest Cloud service in the market up to that time, learned he had incurable cancer, he consented to become the first person whose soul would transfer. The idea was that, with his soul and mind here, he could enable the Cloud to 'think' in more human-like ways, thus gaining immortality while he improved the corporate bottom line.”

“It didn't work, as I remember.”

“That's right. It didn't work. It was like getting people into space, 60 years earlier. There were failures. People who thought they were going to live forever died on the table. You may remember how, in the first files you got when deciding to come here, there was a collection of names. Everyone whose transfer failed has a permanent memorial, filed both outside and inside the Cloud. Edsel's name is first on the list. Which, given who he was named for, is pretty funny.”

“Edsel Ford, you mean? The man whose name became the biggest dud the car industry had ever seen, until the 21^st century oil crisis began.

Martin nodded. I was following what he was saying.

Reassured, he continued. “Anyway, within three years improvements in the code transfer mechanism enabled the first successful mind transfer, the mind of a Russian billionaire named Galonovsky. It took his entire fortune, but he was able to communicate back across the gap, convince everyone that his transfer had succeeded.”

“And he became the Doctor?” I said.

Martin laughed. “No, no. If we were facing a Russian oil oligarch we could have dealt with it. Just send Sophie Napoli in, have her seduce him, end of problem. Bond villains make mistakes, they prove their vulnerability in obvious ways. They think that money is the answer to all their problems, when it isn't even a question here. Evil intent carries its own push-back. No one ever thinks they're evil.

“No, the Doctor was a very, very good person.”

“Who?”

“The hint is in the name. Dr. H.”

“Emile Hoskie?” I whistled through my teeth. “The closest thing 21^st century science had to a saint. Locked in a wheelchair for nearly his entire life by ALS, he discovered mathematical secrets to the universe which had eluded even Einstein.”

“Yes,” admitted Martin. “And he lived a nearly blameless life. He wasn't wealthy by any means, remember, just lived quietly as a college professor in a small town. But his home was a virtual shrine during his life, and thanks to modern computer and communications technology his reach was enormous. If Albert Einstein was Charlie Chaplin, Emile Hoskie was Michael Jackson. He perfected the intersection of fame, science, and wealth.”

“So what's the problem, other than he has been here for some years now.” I was suddenly afraid of what was to come.

Martin was, too. He exhaled deeply to clear his head before continuing. “Recall what I told you about the market in souls. As the Cloud became commercial, as it became the Community, as more and more people came here, and some found that it wasn't the heaven they wanted, people began offering their own souls to Dr. Hoskie, to be absorbed, in the hope that by becoming part of his vast intellect and blameless soul they might gain both rest and the chance to do some good, for both the Cloud and the world.”

“You're still not telling me anything bad.”

“You've heard the old aphorism about power?”

“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“That's what the Doctor was given. Absolute power. Over other people. People who had problems, deep secrets they could never share, fears of all kinds.

“Each member of the Cloud Community who surrendered their autonomy to Doctor Hoskie also gave him access to memories and capabilities he hadn't imagined having before. In a virtual sense, he became many people. Athletes. Engineers. Teachers. Business leaders. Politicians. Preachers. With all their talents and all their memories, all their strengths but also all their weaknesses. For those who hadn't been much in life, he gave them access to all his compute power, all his file storage and address space. Both sides grew in the deal.

“Like NoFace,” I said. “The character in Miyazawa's Spirited Away. But when he was polluted by the sins of the world, he eventually regurgitated it. Dr. Hoskie kept it inside, I suppose.”

We both sat quietly, taking all this in. It was Martin who finally continued.

“Imagine if you could become much more than yourself, after you had thought, or been told all your life, that your own soul was the mightiest thing around. It was the Doctor who came up with that saying we've both repeated here already – I exist to serve. It was a mantra he tried to use in order to make certain he did well by the souls whose power he was gaining.

“But eventually...”

He shrugged his shoulders abjectly, in response.

“Poor man want to be rich. Rich man want to be king. And a king ain't satisfied til he rules everything. Bruce Springsteen. Badlands.” I smiled.

“That's about the size of it. None of the souls the Doctor was absorbing were as pure as his had to be, given his condition in life. But some were truly evil, even those of people who seemed good. Preachers who dreamt of molesting children, or who had, without anyone ever knowing. Accountants who had once confined their murderous rages to video games. Anyone with a secret which in life had dogged them, which they hoped to escape through the Doctor, the Doctor made it part of himself. He gained many lifetimes' experience of sin, of power, corruption of all kinds. I would suppose it was a Dorian Gray situation. Only the problem wasn't immortality. It was responsibility.”

“There are many weaknesses beyond the physical,” I said.

“Indeed. Just imagine if you were given absolute power over someone else,” Martin said. “Imagined if you acquired the souls of men and women, both the evil and those who only imagined themselves to be evil.

“It's a story as old as religion. Preachers are constantly brought down because they abused the power their jobs give them. And these are people trained to hold other souls as deeply precious, taught this as their prime directive in life. They still prey on the weak, or become good because they fear this desire deep within their souls. But the Doctor wasn't a theologian. He was a scientist. Is a scientist.”

“So what's he done that's so all-fire wrong,” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Evil is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose,” Martin mused. “I'm not entirely unsympathetic to his situation, believe me. But the Community has changed since I first came here, and I have to believe The Doctor is behind those changes.

“Don't get me wrong. In some ways it's better. The interfaces, for instance. The memory cache. There are technical upgrades happening all the time. But some of those upgrades are driven, it seems to me, by a desire to use people up, to lead them from ennui to despair, to encourage them into seeking a way out, to gather souls for the Doctor.”

He let that sink in before continuing. “And then there are the Doctor's efforts to gain temporal power in Meat Space,” he continued. “Acting as a political adviser, not just a set of scientific answers. Infiltrating Scientology, something I'm sure you'd know little about from your work as a journalist, so that he can actually pre-harvest souls. When people come in from Scientology centers today, they practically go directly to him and give themselves in, do not pass Go do not collect $200.

“And he's seeking that same power over other religions. It all seems to have the same aim. To gain control, not just of the Community, but somehow to gain power outside, in what we call Meat Space, as well.”

“An immortal emperor,” I said, finally understanding. “Can you prove this is the case?”

“No. I can't. I need your help for that. I can't convince you of the danger. You need to convince yourself.”

Six

My habit in life, when I had a problem I needed to think about hard, was to first take a nap, or a walk, or a bike ride, to step away from it. Read a book, close my eyes, wake up and make another run at it. Often the answer would come to me when I least expected it, when my mind and body had distanced itself as far as it could go from the problem at hand.

So I excused myself.

Martin nodded solemnly. He seemed to walk to my front door, open it and walk out. It made no sense at first. Was this, too, an illusion? Or was he trying to teach me something?

Sensing the latter, I stood up, walked the opposite way out of the room, imagined my home, and walked through, finally arriving at my bedroom and its King-sized bed, surrounded by bookshelves.

I picked up a Kindle from the dresser, saw that it contained a late Pynchon novel I still hadn't finished, and opened one side of the covers, taking it into bed with me as had been my habit in life. Then, heaving myself in, I emitting another sigh for Susan's sake. Are there second marriages in the Cloud? I wondered. I'd have to ask Martin about that. And is Sophia attached here?

Then I pulled my pillows into a pile, lay down, read for a few minutes, pushed the Kindle aside and nodded off.

I didn't have the answers when I got up. Instead I had a process, which was just as good. I went back to my “office,” and found what looked like my old computer on the desk. Could I use this as an interface to the rest of the Cloud?

Worth a try.

Right the first time. And it had all the same interfaces I'd been using before my death, too. There, the familiar Google search screen, unchanged for over 40 years now, but I knew from experience, very different. Is it what it was in life?

I typed. “Cloud law.” I was feeling lucky. A link appeared. And I slowly immersed myself in the arcana of license language, paying far more attention than I ever had in life, when I merely focused on brief explanations of their differences and took for granted that what I was being told was accurate. Now I read the actual language, and found I could understand it. Was my cloud self smarter than I had been in life? Or was it just younger, adapting what made me unique to the programming environment, giving me my best self from life.

The Doctor's EULA was little different from any “Click-Wrap” license Apple had put out in its heyday. Once it was agreed to there was no turning back. Nothing the Doctor did could rescind it, and he had no obligations to maintain the signer as a separate entity. You were done. It was a suicide note disguised as a legal contract.

I opened a new tab, brought up a new Google search, and entered the Doctor's name, “Doctor Emile Hoskie.”

Here I found even more material than under Cloud law, but as I read I felt a strange disquiet, what I'd once called my “Spidey sense.” It read like it was written by a PR man. Usually a Wikipedia entry on someone like this would have at least a few bones of contention, notes referencing what various posters had once written, or things that others had written, which disagreed with the main narrative.

This might as well be a court biography of Louis XIV. That much of Martin's story checked out. The man had power, serious power, which extended from the Cloud to Meat Space itself.

I went back over the biography, or should I call it a hagiography, anyway. I looked for names, any person who might not have been a fan, maybe a colleague who knew his weaknesses in life, anything that might lead to a contradiction of the saintly, and so transparently false, picture I was getting.

Finally, in frustration, I opened another tab and went back to Google, entering the term “Cloud census.” Getting mainly numbers, I tried “Cloud White Pages.” A pretty obsolete term. Nothing.“Cloud Members.”

Bingo.

I ran the names I had found in the Doctor's biography against the Cloud Members listed. A few were not dead yet. I might have to get to an Interface for them, but they'd have to be awfully old by now.

Most had been assimilated.

Two of the matches had Cloud addresses. Sam Bradford had been a graduate assistant for the Doctor in 2015, and had come to the Cloud a year ago. Dave Cornwallis had been with him in the year 2020, and arrived a few weeks ago.

I brought up Gmail and wrote them both. I explained that I was new to the Cloud, knew they had been assistants to the Doctor in life, and said that, as a journalist, I was producing a little research paper on him for the files. No lies there. I worded both notes identically, used copy and paste, but sent them separately.

I didn't have long to wait. Bradford had no interest in me, but Cornwallis said he would see me in his “club” whenever I wanted.

I typed the word “now”, and hit Enter.

I was no longer in my home, and no longer dressed in the ratty t-shirt and jeans I had been wearing. Instead I had on a nice wool suit, and was seated in a leatherette chair, in a dark-paneled room redolent with the smell of a previous century's cigars.

A man who appeared to be my own age handed me a heavy glass. I took it.

“Doctor Cornwallis?” I asked. “David Cornwallis?” Then I took a sip of my drink and felt the burn of single malt Scotch scorch my throat.

“None other,” came back the voice from another chair, and quite cheerily. “I love this place. Don't you?”

He sat opposite me, a tall man in an academic jacket, complete with elbow patches, a shock of red hair and a twinkle in the eye.

“The cancer is gone. I can drink what I want and never feel drunk. I can carry on my math experiments with the world's largest databases on my arm. This is heaven. Don't you think so?”

I nodded, non-commitally.

“So what did you die from?” he asked cheerfully. “I guess it's a question like 'what college are you in' at Cambridge. I'm sorry if it's a little personal.”

“Not at all.” I shrugged. “Mostly old age, I guess. I was given a diagnosis of cancer, but I didn't hang around long enough to find out what dieing from it might be like.”

“You were ready to go, then?” he said in a jocular tone. I shrugged. “Well, then, good man. They had to drag me in here kicking-and-screaming. Would have gone to into the ground were it not for old Emile.”

“Dr. Hoskie?” I asked. I couldn't believe my good fortune, him bringing up the subject I came here to talk about. He must have thought I was just impressed.

“Yes, Good old Emile,” he sat back with a smile. “A lovely man to work for. I was with him when he finally came up with the Unified Field Theory, you know. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were talking about gravity through his box, and he was near the end, poor chap, but he mentioned the grave, and I said, 'you don't have to be so grave about it,' then he said 'that's it' and described his epic equation to me, right there and then.

He sighed, gratefully. “It was the greatest moment of my life. Just being in the same room with him was magic.”

“I suppose so.” I wondered how much cooperation I was going to get when the questions started.

But he continued. “The CERN collider proved its accuracy a few weeks after Emile, I thought, died. But certainly not, or I'd be dead now too. He came here, and encouraged me to come when the time came. He saved my life, literally. He gave me a new one.

“So, what can I do for you?”

I hesitated a moment. I sipped the drink again. Its level did not seem to be going down.

“I always order them that way,” he said. “Saves trouble. More privacy. No waiters coming back when you're in the middle of a conversation or a game of cribbage. Or you can order them as single shots and talk to the waiter, who may or may not be real. It's fun to guess.

“So enough about me. Out with it. What is it you wish to know?”

“You've been here a few weeks. Have you met Dr. Hoskie yet?”

Now it was his turn to hesitate. “Well, uh, no.” He shook his head, took what looked like a big draught of his whiskey. “Busy, I suppose”

“You or him?”

“Me, actually. No, that's not right. I haven't tried to contact him, frankly. I can only think of him in one form, and I know some of what he's done here, I'm sure he won't want to appear before me in his chair. I wonder what he does look like on this side of the great divide?”

He took another sip. “It concerns me. I'm accustomed to his being physically dependent, unable to walk, to move an arm, to communicate through anything but a voice box. I don't know what our new relationship would be like. On the other hand, he hasn't called.”

“I haven't met him yet, either. What do you think he's like?”

“Emile? Same as ever, I suppose.” Another sip. “I hope. I assume.” A look of frustration crossed his face. “I don't know. Maybe I am afraid to find out.”

I seized my chance. “You know he has absorbed the souls of many people since he arrived here, not all of them theoretical physicists. Or even Cambridge graduates.”

He looked at me through troubled eyes. “That's part of it. I am used to seeing him as an equal, in looking down at him in fact, in that chair, wasting away. He's a mighty force here in the Cloud. I understand that. The relationship would definitely have to change. To what, I'm unsure.

“But has he changed fundamentally? Is his personality different, darker? I doubt it.”

I hesitated again before speaking. I'd only have one chance at this. “I think we're on the same path, then. I came to see you in order to learn more about the Doctor. Maybe we could learn together?

“You'd be like, my graduate assistant?” Cornwallis' eyes lit up.

“I exist to serve,” I said.

Into the Cloud IV

Four

“Now let's talk about autonomy.”

I was sitting again in my office, at my desk, looking but not looking at the blank screen in front of me. Sophie had gone. It was the two of us again, me and Martin, as when I first “woke up” here.

Behind me Martin looked up from a chessboard, one built into a cheap coffee table, over a game that had reached a point in the middle game where my book moves end and the hard work begins.

“Autonomy,” he said, blowing his breath out slowly. (How was I perceiving breathing?) “I figured that would come up around now. How do you retain your soul's separateness within an entity where there are no physical borders between yourself and other beings?”

Martin sank back in his chair, looked me straight in the eye, and explained it all in two words. “You choose.”

I asked for an explanation.

“You're absolutely correct. It is possible to lose yourself in the Cloud, to give up your soul to some larger entity. That's true in Meat Space as well, always has been. People are always giving themselves to other people, other movements, to things outside themselves. But here it's a little simpler, and also more complex. The simple answer is you can just meld into something. The complex part is there's no turning back.”

“Meld?”

“Meld, melt, it's hard to explain. It's a mental easing, a letting go. As you might at a religious revival, giving yourself up to God. That's what I'm told it feels like, anyway. Only you really do. You really disappear into that larger entity, and we don't know how to pull anyone back.

“Technically I suppose it's a little more complex, a matter of attaching software to interfaces, of turning all your routines into another person's subroutine. I'm not a programmer. I can't explain it. Wish I had been.

“Fortunately for non-programmers, for civilians, all that's done in the background. From your own point of view, you simply will it, hard. The religious angle is the best analogy I can offer.

“Just be careful, because it's a wish you can't un-wish.”

I turned to face him. “So was it like my wishing Sophie Napoli were my late wife?”

“Not exactly. In Sophie's case, she had to agree to become Susan Blanks. There was what you might call a mutual exchange of tokens. Your wish gave her permission to access memories of your wife from your memory storage, then your own senses did the rest. Technically, it was more like sex than sex. Technically both sides are submitting a request to the operating system, which does the hard work. But no one's autonomy is threatened. It's all an optical illusion.”

“So I just had sex with the biggest sex symbol of the last century?”

“Well, you made an offer of love and she accepted. Melding is something different, more permanent. We could meld right now – become Martin-Dave...”

“Or Dave Martin.”

“Only if we both wished it, as two people who wish to be married. It's not a one-sided wish, although as in all such relationships one side may tend to dominate. In our case you can easily see that might not work in the long run.”

I nodded. “We're different people. And we like being different people. I respect you, you're a friend, but I would hate to have your living memories, of having lived your life in a chair and a bed.”

“Just right. We haven't agreed to terms on the exchange. There is no mutual willingness, and for good reason. You're no bed of roses yourself, you know.”

I laughed. “And we don't know which side would rule.”

“Exactly. The fit would be bad. When would we be Martin, when would we be Dave. We haven't talked about it. The request might even be rejected by the Cloud's operating system, just as programs don't always run if the developer doesn't put the request correctly within the group.”

“So there's a legal step in front of the procedural...” I said, taking a knight.

“The technical term is a license.” He took my bishop. “A software license.”

Now, I had studied software licenses extensively during my working career. I knew there were a variety of open source licenses, and there were proprietary licenses. I knew that for the former you could see the underlying code of the program, while for others – proprietary programs based on End User License Agreements (EULAs) like Windows or the iPad – you couldn't. All this flashed past me in the time it took me to move over a rook and threaten his queen.

“You've got it.”

“Most of it, save this.”

“Go ahead.”

“Make me a sandwich.”

“Huh?”

“Sudo make me a sandwich.”

“I still don't know what you're talking about.”

“Sudo is an old Unix command. It invokes another user's privileges. It makes them run a command when they haven't given it permission to run. It's sort of like taking their will, forcing the issue, even though in practice it would always be done with permission. It doesn't have to be.”

“So?” Martin asked.

“So, is Sudo part of the Cloud's operating system. And does it relate to a meld, either temporary or permanent? If I knew Sudo, and Sophie did not, could I say 'Sudo become Susan,' or even 'Sudo have sex with me' and she would?”

Martin sat back in his chair, the game forgotten.

“Check,” I said. “No let's move one step further. Does this relate to licenses, the license you have on your soul?

“How so?” Martin asked.

“You described how all this mind melding would be done under a license. There are licenses and there are licenses.

“There are proprietary license agreements, like Microsoft End User License Agreements, which we call EULAs. And there are also a variety of open source licenses. The open source licenses are pretty transparent, easy to understand. The EULAs are not as well understood by ordinary people, and most buyers rightly interpret them as giving all rights to the seller, very few to the signer. Although people 'sign' EULAs digitally all the time.”

Martin nodded. “There's a whole body of law around it. In fact it's the most important set of laws we have in the Cloud. But with your knowledge you could be more than a reporter here. You cold be a lawyer or a politician.”

“I just recognized some of the language in the contract I signed to come here. But like most people who face a click-wrap license, I signed it, and I trusted.”

“Maybe you shouldn't have been so trusting. Because in this case we're not talking about rights to use some program loaded onto our PCs. You could be talking about software that represents our very soul.”

Martin moved a knight from in front of his queen. “Checkmate,” he said.

 

I wanted to talk about this some more, but not here. I decided to 'invite” Martin to my favorite banh mi shop. Of course rather than getting into a car we simply willed it to happen, traveling virtually as you would on a Web connection. Suddenly the table before us had menus, other tables were surrounding it, and there was all around us a hubbub of happy Asian diners.

“Very nice,” he said. “You are learning fast, grasshopper.”

“It was easy, because this was my favorite place to eat, especially when I was unemployed,” I said. I turned to the short, merry-faced woman who faced us, ordering two roast pork banh mi sandwiches and some pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup with tripe served, in the Saigon style, with bean sprouts and other vegetables as condiments.

“You know you placed that order in Vietnamese,” Martin said, after the woman had left.

“I don't know Vietnamese,” I replied. “And now that you mention it. Is she real? Is her idea of heaven working in a sandwich shop?”

Martin shrugged. “You would be surprised,” he said. “It might be. If she spent most of her life in a banh mi shop, if her favorite childhood memories were working in a family member's shop, then certainly.” He pointed toward the cash register. “That might be her sister, or her mother, back there. But as Sporting Life said in Porgy & Bess, it ain't necessarily so.

“Some of the people you interact here came from the outside, some are just software, some are people putting on a role for their amusement. Given that you created this shop from your memories of it, it is probably just software. There have been good translation programs for decades, so you thought in English and the waitress heard in Vietnamese. Who knows? From the point of view of the food and the experience, it really doesn't matter.

“But there are souls here that exist to serve. Most of the souls who exist here eventually come to a place in their hearts where they seek service over selfishness. So they put on roles, they help others in a variety of ways, some of them physical, others emotional, still others technical.

Ah,” he concluded as the lunch came.

“Faster than I remembered,” I said. “Ever been to one of these places?”

“No, I'm taking in the experience entirely from your memories,” Martin replied, picking up his sandwich. “Umm, good crunch,” he said, taking a bite and nodding his approval. “You have many good food memories. We'll have to do this more often. Given that I spent so many years in assisted living, my food memories aren't very extensive. Or very good. And I don't think you want to remember lying in bed for months and years, being bathed, having your mind blasted and rebooted. That's something for more specialized tastes.”

“Some people like that?”

He shrugged. “Different strokes for different folks. I exist to serve.” It was the second time he'd said that, and this time he added a wolfish grin to it. “But I've met others like you, men and women who had good long lives, and I have always wanted to be of their orientation process. It's one of my pleasures from being in the Cloud, and one reason I guard my own autonomy zealously.”

“Meeting new people?”

“Or, in your case, old friends.”

We ate in companionable silence a few minutes. I felt the warmth of the soup vapor on my face, tasted the rich broth. I placed some noodles into a plastic spoon with my chopsticks and slurped them greedily.

Finally I came to the point Martin made at our chess game. “You said I could be a lawyer or a politician now. What did you mean by that?”

Martin looked up from his soup. “Amazing. This is actually getting cold. Your memories of this place are sharp, my friend.”

“Don't try to change the subject. Why could I be a lawyer or a politician?”

Martin sat back, and looked at me more seriously. “Because the issues you covered in life as business cases are issues of life and death here. If you signed a EULA in Meat Space you had certain obligations that might not be enforceable, or that you could avoid. Here, if you do the same thing your being could be terminated if you violate the contract's terms. And the contracts can be just as complex here as in Meat Space.

I frowned. Death was becoming as complicated as life had been.

Martin continued, “And you can't just say, 'only sign an open source contract.' Most people don't read contracts, and you know as well as anyone how people sneak things into what are nominally open source contracts. You spent enough years writing about it.”

“Microsoft,” I said wistfully, remembering my reporting career in open source. “SugarCRM. Microsoft wrote open source contracts that were hopelessly one-sided, back in the 2000s. SugarCRM once had a contract that required you to put their logo on screens you created with their software. I remember I called it badgeware, and used that picture from 'Treasure of Sierra Madre,' the bandit saying 'Badges? We don't need no steenkin' badges!” I cackled over the joke and my bad Mexican accent.

“Exactly. You have experience of issues few other souls have even considered. Dave. People here are losing their souls over contracts they didn't read. It's one thing to lose a house or a car like that, but to disappear into someone else...”

Which led me to another question. “Where do they go? The souls who get absorbed? And what does someone get from taking over another man's soul?”

“You get the other person's memories, their knowledge, their talents. In physical terms, you get their address space, their memory allocation, their compute power, all the assets they were given in the contract they signed to come in here. You read that contract, didn't you?”

“Not closely.”

“Hardly anyone does. It's clickware, like the billions of bytes you get for joining Gmail. You were given certain resources, sufficient to retain your soul's integrity and even grow as a personality, for a fixed fee. Compute time, memory, on a continuing basis.”

“With no obligation.”

“Technically. The sell comes later. Now, in fact.”

Martin leaned forward over the table. “No matter how rich a life you lived, Dave, you're going to get bored. All the entertainment in the world is here, available, all the books in the world can be read and internalized, all the food and sex and everything else you obsessed over back in Meat Space can be yours in what will seem like a flash.

“So what do you do then? Maybe, like me, you find souls you can help. Maybe, like a waitress, you try your old job, your old life. You go back over your memories and live them again-and-again. But, again, at machine speed.

“Then what do you do? Well, you might serve the access points, as those people in the library we saw.

“But even that can pale.

“Eternity is a very long time, Dave, and with access to so much computing power and storage you can live many eternities in a short time.”

A wave of deep emotion overcame my friend. “I, myself... sometimes I get lost in ennui. Boredom, you know? That's why it was so gratifying when you, uh, came over.”

“When I died, you mean?”

“Yes. When you died. Point is, the day may come when you want to die again. The tea here is excellent, by the way. I never liked it much when I was alive, but through your taste buds it's quite good.

“I exist to serve,” he concluded, smiling.

Message received.

 

Into the Cloud III

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.”

 

 

Into the Cloud II

Two

What does it feel to go into the Cloud?

Like nothing, really. Like going to sleep.

I know now that my body died back on that table. I know my lungs stopped after a while, and my heart stopped beating. I was told later that Willis killed me once I connected with him from this side, using a drug cocktail similar to those given condemned prisoners.

I know that intellectually, but I didn't feel it happen. It's not real to me. I didn't die. I'm still alive. I'm writing this, aren't I?

What I do remember is going into one of those deep sleeps I used to associate with an afternoon nap when I was middle-aged, one of those naps where you're not asleep but can feel your blood pressure thump down into a new normal, then you wake up and your hands and feet don't work really work for a while, like you've been down overnight when it was just a a few minutes.

It was after feeling that thump, that recognition that it was safe to awake, that I heard a voice, and responded. I opened what I took to be my eyes and I saw, smiling down at me, the face and body of Martin Bexar.

This is how I knew I had crossed. The Martin I knew could not look down on anyone. Crippled by Parkinson's, confined to a wheelchair for the last decades of his life, he stood before me now in the glow of a ruddy middle age, the beard only slightly salted, the eyes just wryly crinkling.

But if Martin had a “body” what did I have? I signaled my fingers and toes, which responded immediately.

“Very good,” said Martin. “You're doing nicely. Want to get up?”

“What's up? And what's the where of this?”

Martin chuckled. “Questions, questions, questions. Yes, you must have been a reporter in a previous life.

“But what you're in is an interface. It's an artificial construct with analogs for seeing, for hearing, for all your senses and appendages. They'll appear to work for as long as you feel you need them. They are, in fact, computer programs, with capabilities identical to those I use, identical to what everyone else here uses. A Cloud Olympics would be very boring because everyone would finish with the same result.

“It's a pretty easy hack, if you think about it. Standard drivers were written under an open source license over many years,. They are connected into that area of memory you're occupying, in isolation, once you decide to use them. Think of them as browser plug-ins, but the user interface is just what you used to activate your own eyes and ears a few moments ago. Only better.

“I asked to join you and, since you'd listed me as a friend on your entry form, permission was routine. In fact they were happy that someone would be here to welcome you to your new home. Welcome to your new home.”

He dropped his voice. “I'm sorry about Susan.”

Those four simple words chilled me to the bone. Susan. I had been so anxious to avoid death that I'd forgotten all about her. Beautiful Susan, the love of my life, mother of my children, companion of nearly 60 years. My grief was sudden, sharp, and as real as the day she left me.

It's your choice, I told her, and she agreed that death is how people die. But how can I go through eternity without her?

“Excellent. Your tear ducts work,” said Martin, swinging back to bonhomie. He swiped a finger under where an eye would be on my face, and I lifted a finger to feel his. I saw tears there. I felt tears there.

“Want to see how beautiful you are?” I must have nodded, because what I can only describe as a barber shop mirror appeared before me, in Martin's hand.

I looked to be about 40. My beard was red, and I even had some hair on top, although not much. I recognized the man, although I hadn't seen him in half a lifetime.

“It's what we call the dream-self,” Martin explained, giving me the mirror to hold, then standing up. “It's the you that you perceive yourself to be when you're asleep. Young people tend to see themselves as older, old people as younger. Women tend to see themselves as younger than men. It's an ideal, nothing real, but when you're new here it's a very welcome sight to see. I know.”

Then Martin proceeded to tell me about his own entry to the Cloud. “Going on nearly 6 years now. Time sure flies. Best thing I ever did. Amazing I lived in that chair, in a nursing home, for decades, rejecting this idea literally for a decade after getting my first invitation. Social Security paid my way, you know. My insurance had long run out but they were quite willing to pass me over here, knowing that the costs of Cloud Community membership were no more than I would cost in assisted living for 8 months.

“Of course the interfaces weren't quite as good six years ago. I looked like an old PC tube, one of those 800 x 600 interfaces from the '90s. And the sound quality was very poor. But it was enough to convince me I wasn't dead, and that's the main purpose of it.”

“So what's it like, normally?” I asked. “What is 'life' like, after death?”

Martin chuckled. “I like that,” he said. “Good line. But it seems you want to get right into it?

“OK,” he said.

“Life here is literally what you make of it. Your thoughts become commands to software interfaces within the Cloud's design architecture.

So your mind is your user interface in the Cloud, and as you gain more control over that interface, more familiarity with how to think in ways that change what you see, hear and feel, “life” here just gets better-and-better.

“You can feel that you have a body at any time, that's a standard package you're using right now. You just call for it, as you would have a computer program in the real world, by thinking of the .exe name 'Reality.' It's a default on your entry pattern. John Willis keyed it in for you.

Kind of ironic, because Reality is what the program was called while it was being written, outside. But everyone here learns it's just the opposite. Reality is artificial, nothing exists. Even when anything can.

“You see, there's another way of getting around.

“Just cast your mind. Just imagine. You'll be accessing memory space and thought space, you can save what you think and it's like writing. Anything a programmer on the outside has crafted, and anything someone here in the Community has ever imagined, is available to you.

“Thus, there are many senses here that have no analog in Meat Space. The sense of access. The sense of powering up, of powering down. The sense of reaching into the outside world, through a PC or tablet or phone. It's like you can be the screen, be the typewriter, that you can be the iPad from the other side of it. The connections are more tenuous when they're wireless, but you can sense it, strong or weak, from inside not only your own mind but the Community, the larger collection of souls that exist here. You can use their power, and they can use yours.

“It's amazing.”

He must have seen the shock on my face.“But maybe I've said too much. You should rest, that is relax, rejuvenate, feel. I've got an idea.

“You ever play the Last Meal Game?

I felt myself smiling. “What would you choose to eat if it were your last meal on Earth? Usually it's something simple like a hamburger or mom's chicken soup or something like that.”

“Well, here we call it the First Meal game.”

So we ate. I had a kind of veal parmigiana, topped with cheese, along with a bowl of spaghetti in tomato sauce, a meal I recalled from my 12^th birthday. Martin had a greasy hamburger and some french fries, real high cholesterol stuff, something I'd barely imagined eating for decades. He drank what looked like a Coke and I had what tasted like a good red wine.

It was strange but the meal appeared as I thought of it, before I could even describe it in detail. It tasted fantastic, just as in my memory, because as Martin said that's where it came from. His own meal, he explained, came from the memory of someone else who had come over a year before, someone who had been terribly obese in Meat Space, who had died of diabetes, but now was considered something of a gourmet.

While we ate we talked as though we were in a quiet restaurant. While I knew the environment was a computer creation, I seemed to even notice the light around us dimming slowly, and a light din from other diners rising all around us as the minutes passed.

By the time we were done, it all looked like we were in my favorite Italian place from life, despite Martin's greasy fingertips, only the plates and glasses disappeared without the help of a waiter, once Martin snapped his fingers.

“Now that you're refreshed, are you ready to learn where you really are?” he asked.

I gulped, nodded. The restaurant suddenly disappeared, was replaced by the room I'd been in before.

Martin's smile grew like that on the Cheshire Cat. He put his left hand over my right, grasped my fist, and began to laugh.

It was good to hear.

Then after he stopped laughing he added, “Now, where should we go next?”

 

 

Into the Cloud I

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