Dana Blankenhorn

Into the Cloud XIII

Twenty-Eight

Without a word John Willis' former assistant, pushed me aside and marched to the PC on my office desk.

She slipped a memory stick into a USB port, opened a browser window, typed in an address, then entered a user name and password. A few moments later she slipped out the stick and handed it to me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked incredulously.

“Traffic accident,” she said. “You know most cars drive themselves, but you can override the programming, and an amazing number of people in Atlanta do. Including one drunk. He plowed into me as my car was driving home from work, paramedics rushed me to the hospital but it was obviously no good.

“So John came to my bed, with a helmet, and these instructions we'd been talking about. He slipped a copy of this stick into my hand, he imprinted my mind with the files, he kissed me, and he sent me here.”

I stood there, mouth agape. She was as beautiful as I had remembered. Martin, so often unfazed, was impressed as well.

She continued. “What I just did was download the code that should help you download new constructs for your two friends, then split the personalities once you've got them outside. He's prepared to do that at your command. This key has the necessary files, encrypted, and subject to a password I memorized as John placed the helmet on me.”

“How did you get a physical key across?” I asked, incredulous.

“The same way you did, only your key was plugged in automatically,” she said. “Remember? You handed John a key right before you crossed over. It had your tangible memories, pictures from your life, your family. That's standard practice with The Community. It's an adjunct, an additional set of files each person can transfer over alongside themselves.”

I was still pretty dumbfounded. “How did John get you over....you said you had a traffic accident....”

“The remote helmet is experimental,” she said. “It's new, in beta test. It's for situations like mine, when people are going too quickly to be brought in.

“In time, we hope to get helmets, and instructions, to EMTs so those who are DOA or who have sudden heart attacks have a chance of coming over, if their living wills allow for it. I guess I was doing QA – quality assurance.”

“But what about your own personal files?” I asked. “What about your family, your friends?”

“You and Martin are my family now,” she said. “Let's see if this works.”

 

Explaining the situation to the Blaines was not easy. Liza was indispensable to us. She was trained in grief counseling as part of her work. She knows how to put these things to people.

She calmly led each personality through the drill. She made certain she got both to assent. She even put forms in front of each personality which, amazingly, were signed in two separate hands.

“But no one has ever come back from the dead,” said Sheri Blaine, after she signed.

Liza smiled and nodded.

“Yes, you will be the first. But it will be for only a few moments, and the body you'll be in will only be a husk, which has itself just sent its soul to the Community.

“But you're right, all this is experimental. Science is risky. Necessity breeds invention. Experiments don't always work, even when you think they should, and you need to understand this.”

So she repeated the concerns that had been running through my head for days.

“You could be lost on either end of the voyage, or parts of you could be. The personality you come back with may not be completely separate from your husband. There may be parts missing. But we think this will work.”

In contrast to his wife, Tory had asked no questions, just nodded his head and said “Approved.” Man of action, that Tory.

So glad I never voted for him.

Twenty-Nine

“Mr. Prime Minister? Mr. Prime Minister?”

It was Dr. Cornwallis. He was shaking the shoulder of the “late” (again) Tory Blaine, lying in (apparent) comfort on a couch in his “private office” on “10 Downing Street.”

Liza said it was good news that the building hadn't disappeared while the transfer took place. To her it meant there was still something or someone holding it all together. That was something I hadn't considered. If you create your own reality, and that reality remains while you seem to be physically gone, it's proof you aren't. For someone freshly dead, it was an interesting observation.

In fact from our end nothing seemed to happen at all. Liza had laid the Blaine down with soothing words, placed one end of a plug she'd conjured up from instructions on the USB stick into the nose, which is the closest organ to the brain, instructed he/she to breath slowly through the mouth, then hit Enter on the Prime Minister's computer terminal.

It all seemed to take very little time. I had barely gotten through half a rosary (having found the old thing in a desk drawer, dredged from my earliest memories of childhood) when the expression on he/she's face changed, became briefly empty, and then became the the famous man's old warm-blooded smile.

Then, quite suddenly, his eyes popped open, like in an old science fiction movie.

“I'm here,” he said. “I'm here, and I'm alone!” Liza took the plug from out of Tory Blaine's nose and allowed him to sit up. “I'm free!”

He stood upright instantly but then, within moments, he was leaning into my arms, the way you might if you stand too quickly with low blood pressure and you suddenly go faint, the scene in front of you fading off into nothingness for a moment before returning.

“Sheri!” he cried. “Where is Sheri?”

I looked at Liza, who looked at me, shrugging her shoulders.

And with that there came a clattering down a nearby staircase. “Tory! Tory! Where are you?” It was the voice of Tory Blaine's wife, the lovely Sheri. She stood before us, radiant in the same dress she'd worn at her husband's first election in the late 1990s, and with the same beatific smile on her face she had worn then.

Only wider.

“Sheri!” cried Tory Blaine, reaching out to embrace his wife.

 

Liza, however, was already thinking of the next steps.

She pulled out what looked like an iPhone, and texted a brief message. A full exchange then took place, her little phone bonging with each incoming note.

I made my apologies to the happy couple, took Liza by the hand, and walked out onto the “street,” then along a foggy lane to what now appeared to be my own home in Atlanta. Along the way Liza talked, describing her correspondence in something like real time.

John Willis was thrilled to get my notes and references, she said. He had made contact with the people who had written the Indian code, gotten together some additional recruits from among the old boys at Anon, which was still kicking after all these years, and brought together the software we had just used to separate the Blaines from one another.

Now that we had the software, and a successful beta test, Liza responded immediately we could scale it up and go after The Doctor.

“How can you do that?” I asked.

“Well, we can't,” she said. “But others can, on the outside. By making himself visible to the outside world, The Doctor has sealed his own doom.

Thirty

“Anon?” I asked.

“Anon,” said Martin and Liza together.

Anonymous. The infamous computer terror group of the early 21^st century. The openers of secrets, the harassers of the powerful, the masked vigilantes of the Web.

“I thought they disappeared after the massive Visa attack in 2018,” I said.

I remembered that. It had been terrible, one of the last big stories I'd covered.

For a few days no one's money worked. Not online, hardly at all offline. People were digging up dollar bills out of seat cushions, flooding into banks that had stopped issuing bills from ATMs two years before. There were stories of barter. The global financial system was collapsing before our very eyes.

Liza smiled. “They did disappear, in a way. The loosely organized Anon you knew disappeared. But gradually it came back together, with more command-and-control, and a much more limited mission.

“Now there is a process of consensus that all members subscribe to, and there are rules controlling the kinds of things that can be done and the kinds of causes they can be done in. It's modeled on the old Apache Software Foundation.”

“Anarchists with rules?” I asked. “You can't have anarchists with rules!”

“No, you can,” said Liza. “When those anarchists are organized alongside governments rather than in opposition to them. It's complicated, a cross between the CIA and the UN Security Council. It takes a mountain to move them to do anything.”

“And I take it The Cloud Community in this case is the mountain,” said Martin. “The Doctor is Mohammed.”

“That's right,” said Liza excitedly. “Despite the Referendum, there are many global elites, important people and institutions, that don't think the Doctor is the answer to a prayer. People who monitor The Stalls Project. Even people who run The Cloud Community from the outside.”

“People like John Willis?” I suggested. “And you?”

Liza nodded. “Ours is a minority view, but combine a minority view with hidden government power and a group that works under government authority but has an anti-authoritarian bias, and things can happen. Action can be taken. It's the final check on a balanced system.”

“What can happen?” I asked.

“How do you think we got the Blaines apart so quickly?” Liza asked. “It took a lot of people using a lot of computers to turn the code you found into a working prototype.”

“And then there was the lucky stroke of you having your unlucky stroke,” I said.

“Something like that,” she said. “If that had not happened, we would have found some other way of getting this to you. Maybe a volunteer who would have been willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.”

“A suicide data bomber?” Martin said. “I'm not sure I like that idea.”

Liza shrugged. “What do you think I've turned out to be? And what does that make you, but a Cloud Terrorist? If we fail, that is just what you'll be.”

That sobered Martin up quickly.

“So what do we do now?” I asked. “What's the plan?”

“The plan is we lay low and let things take their course for a while,” said Lisa. “The less The Doctor knows about us, the better. We wait for our opportunity, and then we strike at just the right moment.”

“Any idea what that moment might be?” I asked.

“I think I know,” said Martin.

 

It was a big deal, a very big deal in The Cloud.

The Doctor had tested, and accepted, the robotic body created for him by a consortium headed by General Defense Corp. There was enough computing power in the prototype to hold both his giant mind and his soul, along with a continuous wireless connection back to The Community, a first for The Cloud.

The Exoskeleton built around it looked, and seemed to work, like something out of the old Ironman movies from 30 years before. It was very impressive, and it was all anyone in The Cloud Community could talk about.

Because if The Doctor could emerge in reality, we were told, maybe the rest of us could, too. Imagine, both power and immortality, virtual back-ups here tied to powerful skeletons there. From a philosophical point of view, it was all becoming a bit much.

But it was settled. On July 4, 2039, The Doctor would emerge from the Community, cross into the Exoskeleton, and become “a real man.” The ruler of us all.

Was this to be a dream or a nightmare? Once again, I wasn't really certain. All I knew was it was something I didn't want coming true in my lifetime. Or rather, my death time.

 

Into the Cloud XII

Twenty-Five

The Internet is constantly evolving. In some ways it evolves the way a city evolves, but also the way the underlying civilization does.

From Martin's cave, on his terminal, I decided to do a little exploring.

There are many layers beneath the surface of any city that long ago became rubble, that have mostly disappeared, but that might still be found in artifacts and pieced back together. True in Meat Space, true to some extent here.

Back in the early part of the century I learned that some of my own work, for instance, from the 1980s and early 1990s, was saved to Usenet, which itself is (in Cloud terms) a bit like being buried under rubble. You might find bits and pieces of Usenet in a Google search, but the links are all dead, and much of the content has been erased as well. Sort of like a silent movie, made in the years before preservation became an industry fetish.

Then there are sites from the early days of the Web that, while they continue to exist at sites like Archive.org, do so in a kind of time warp, like old bars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or a 19^th century hovel near Beijing. Sometimes time goes right by you and you're allowed to become a relic, even precious to later times.

Slashdot is such a place. Very much an ancient Manhattan dive bar. It was very big at the turn of the century, but was quickly replaced, it failed to keep up with the graphic times, and by 2020 it was barely maintained. Someone outside was still fighting to keep the lights on, or someone had just forgotten to turn them off, and old programmers were still hanging about, like online wraiths, still fighting the old fights and arguing the old arguments of their youth. I wondered how many were in the Cloud, and how many were left on the outside.

“News for Nerds,” said the old sub-head on the home page. “Stuff that matters.” Matters to whom, I'd thought. But I used the (non-Google) search box anyway.

“Cloud personalities,” I tried, then looked through the results. “Editing cloud personalities.” I went through page-after-page, wondering what the keyword was, or if there was a right phrase, that might lead to where I needed to go.

“Cloud persona code,” I entered. Here it was, the sixth result.

“November 17, 2028,” I read. “Robert Stalls went to his final rest today, but he left behind an open source version of his mind, of his spirit and personality, asking that it be kept, edited at will, and saved for future reference, on Github.

Robert Stalls. A pioneering computer scientist. The father of “free and open source” (FOSS) software - never call it “open source,” that was something else entirely. The man behind the General Public License, founder of the Free Software Foundation. Activist, bomb-thrower, anarchist, paranoid. A self-styled secular saint, with his long hair and beard, which I'd watched grow white just as mine had, decades ago.

He'd gone to India in his last years, I recalled, where he was treated like a computer version of Gandhi or the Buddha, an honor the faster-moving West would never have offered. Except for clouds and fast data transfer, much of India's infrastructure remained painfully slow to westerners, thus Stalls was terribly relevant. The concepts and programming styles of the past would suit him to the ground.

Now if the link only worked...

It did. A home page appeared. “The Stalls Project,” I read. Maintained by the Vivesaratra College of Engineering in Bangalore, India. I still couldn't read code, but I could certainly read comments and discussion threads.

I began exploring.

Thank God Indians have English, the great unifying force in a nation with hundreds of maintained languages, and dozens of major ones. It was the lingua franca of international business, and by international they often meant the next state over.

The surround of many pages on The Stalls Project was filled with the obscure (to me) characters of Kannada , the old script of Karnataka, still used by millions of people but as foreign to Americans as hieroglyphs themselves.

But inside those windows, I found the threads I was looking for.

There. Just two springs ago, Professor Anand Sitaraman assigned his third year students at BSCME a project on developing utilities that might separate jumbled personalities into their constituent parts.

I might have known it would turn out to be an Indian, a team from the land of the Buddha.

I began to read...

Twenty-Six

“Processing power,” I told the Blaines, the way that middle-aged executive had told Dustin Hoffman's character in “The Graduate” that the secret to life was “plastics.”

As soon as I had what I needed committed to a stick memory, I had run over to Martin Bexar's place, grabbed him roughly by the collar, and dragged him here to 10 Downing Street, as though I were Holmes and he were Watson, on a case, running through the black front door, ignoring the form in front of me and speaking to both personalities inside it.

“The good news is that there is a way to separate personalities. The bad news is it requires an enormous amount of processing power, power that can't be accessed within the Cloud without The Doctor hearing about it.”

The sadness I felt coming from them now was palpable, unbearable, a hopelessness beyond even the acknowledgement of death. It was clear to me then that the Blaines feared The Doctor, who had accomplished what they failed to do, in the same way a failed politician might fear a Prime Minister who had once been part of the same incoming class of the Parliament. They were in his thrall, or so they appeared to feel.

“Yet, there is hope,” I added, not knowing exactly what I might say next.

“What is it?” he/she/they demanded.

So I brainstormed, out loud, the way I had in life.

“If we can get the processing done outside the Cloud, in some sort of quantum computer with a single connection from Meat Space to the Cloud, then the results could be loaded into the Cloud and you might possibly be able to occupy them.

“It's risky. I don't think anyone has done a personality transfer out from the Cloud, into another system. The transfer is designed to bring people inside. The input is biological, not digital. But in theory, it should be able to work.” That's what the programmers at The Stalls Project had been leading toward, at any rate, but it was still all beta code.

“There's another way,” said Martin/Watson. “What if the operator kept someone who was coming in, for just a short time. They transfer an individual here, leaving an empty husk. Instead of having them die, they transfer a single personality from the quantum computer into the husk.”

“Then there are two of you. There can't be two of one person,” I said. “They would share the same index term, and anything sent to one would be bounced. Including any signals necessary to maintain a Cloud-based existence.”

“Or how about this?” Martin/Watson continued. “Have two people ready to come into the Cloud, in different locations. Load the new files into those people, then have us connect in and come back. Each would have their own index term, their own identity here coming in from there.”

“I'm not sure I understand,” I said.

“We know which of us is which,” said the Blaines (or the Blaine). “That's what is driving us both crazy. We'll recognize ourselves, on the outside, and after that transfer you erase what we are now before you load the two husks back in.”

I sat back to think about that a minute.

It was risky as all get out. An act of desperation. What if one of the husks in Meat Space actually died before the transfers were both complete? What if the single entities created by the programs we'd found had some errors in them, if the quantum copies were damaged in some way? What if it couldn't be coordinated? What if the Blaine couldn't separate properly, if they both wound up in one husk or the other?

“We're talking about physical sciences, psychology, computer science, biology all coordinating and working together seamlessly,” I said. “One or both of you could easily die, really disappear, anywhere in the process. We would also be using husks without permission. I don't know...”

“Please,” the Blaine said, in a way that proved to me it was both of them speaking together. “If we can be separated, maybe the Doctor can be made into one whole as well.”

“I'll look into it,” I promised.

 

The whole idea made no sense, I told Martin, as I sipped green tea and he enjoyed what looked like a double Glenlivet on ice.

We were in a model of a Japanese Isakaya Martin had created, amazingly realistic. Outside was what looked like a dark Tokyo night, studded with lamplight and neon. Inside, a few small tables, what looked like a sushi bar, and rows of bottles above it, some Japanese sake magnums, others whiskey bottles with lines drawn on them to indicate where their owners had drunk to. Beyond us was the happy chatter of Japanese salarymen unwinding, cooks acting as bartenders do in the West, and a lovely young woman clad in geisha garb serving us and a few others.

“Anything can make as much or as little sense as you want it to,” Martin said. “That's why I invited you here. This isn't something from my own life. It's from someone else's.

“They invited me for a drink months ago, but what's interesting is that this wasn't a bar from my friend's life either. No, he'd been with a former Softbank executive who thought he had stroked out a few years ago. The two of them came here. My friend remembered it, brought me here. I remembered it, brought you here.

“The memories transferred, the code moving across like a token, across three people, with no degradation.”

I served myself from the small cast metal teapot in front of me. The geisha brought Martin some udon soup and me a bento box featuring eel on rice. The smells were exquisite.

“You're able to experience this completely, inhabit this place and know it as though it were in the physical world, or at least part of our living memory, even though neither of us have ever been here before, in the Cloud or in life,” Martin said, placing his drink on the table and picking up some chopsticks. “How is that possible?”

I scooped up some eel-and-rice on my own chopsticks, then savored it a moment, before answering. “You're right. Experience is transferable,” I guessed.

Martin brought a hand onto the table, hard. “Exactly!” he said, smiling broadly, in full Holmes mode now.

“And if individual experiences are transferable, them memories are transferable. And if memories are transferable, so are personalities.

“With a little cooperation, you can make this work. You're brilliant, Dave. Brilliant.”

Maybe I was Watson after all.

Twenty-Seven

I stood over Martin's shoulder in his cave/hovel, and dictated a short letter to him.

Dear John:

This is a friend you led to the other side, writing to tell you my soul is well and to ask a small favor.

We have souls here who remain troubled, by things that have happened to them since they crossed over. They feel confused, as though they were not alone, and they wish to find peace.

Of course, we are not men and women. We are computer constructs. We are software, magnetic ink. Or so you may think. But thinking is the point. We still think, we still remember, and so we still have feelings.

Your friend,

 

The Late Dave Blanks

I made us a pot of green tea. I knew it was all an artificial construct, as were we all, but if you want to be literal isn't everybody? Aren't you? Your world is only made real by your senses, after all, and the world you sense is quite different than that of your cat, or a fly. Which is real?

Martin saw I was in a good mood, and was almost sad when we were alerted that a response to my note was coming in.

Dear Dave:

It was a pleasure reading your message. I remember your passing well, and I am pleased that you are doing well.

I understand some of what you are asking. There are people here who understand the questions you ask in far more detail than I can offer.

I will do more research. If you have some specifics they would help.

Liza says hi.

Your friend,

 

John Willis

The last was curious. I had only met John's assistant briefly. I asked Martin about it, but he responded the man was just being polite, that I should ignore it and move forward.

So I did.

I sent John my Slashdot links, then found some more. We got a good back-and-forth traffic going, although I felt like a hoodlum. In our writings both of us were careful not to say anything that could be traced back to the real problem we were discussing, the issue of dividing souls within the Cloud (or just The Community, as John called it) after they had merged. I couldn't explain why I wasn't being more explicit, and John never explained from his side either. It was all badda-bing, badda-boom.

But I didn't ask those questions. In retrospect I was just thrilled to have someone on the outside to talk with.

I peppered my emails with mundane questions about the real world, about how my old hometown looked, whether anyone had bought my house, how the local sports teams were doing. I could have answered these questions myself easily, using the Web, but it felt better to have John tell me, and it padded out our correspondence so it would appear more mundane if anyone connected to The Doctor were looking for it.

This went on for many days. I guess I slept. I think John did. There was one very long break, which Martin and I spent watching the Champions League final at a sports bar I had once known, awaiting an alert through an old-fashioned 1980s beeper I put on my belt.

Finally, some hours after Barcelona won again, Martin nudged me awake. I had turned down my output and let my mind wander, “dreaming” as Martin called it, on a pallet he had placed near his monitor.

The message was all I had been hoping for, and more:

Dear Dave:

I think I have the answers you seek.

Rather than send you a file I have entrusted them to someone you know.

Expect a visit soon.

John

That was the last note I got until a virtual knock came on my virtual door, a half-hour later.

I walked to the door, and opened it.

There before me stood Liza. In the “flesh?”

Into the Cloud XI

Twenty-One

Now Marian the Librarian did some real magic.

As quick as thought, she willed us both to the 10 Downing Street frontage. She saluted the guards now, with a wave of her hand, and both immediately disappeared. Another wave and the door disappeared. It was like being with a witch out of “Harry Potter.”

We walked through the entrance now, barely pausing to open the door, and with a third wave of Marian's hand the officious faux-Chapman secretary disappeared as well.

All that was left was a small man cowering in a corner, lost in his own agony.

“Mr. Prime Minister?” I asked calmly, using the honorific deliberately.

The man, or what was left of him, looked up from his hands. I noticed the hands were shaking. “I killed her,” he said plainly. “She's gone.”

“We don't think so,” Marian said gently. “She is still there, inside you. She just can't get out because you won't let her.”

Blaine looked up from his hands. “No, I've tried. Believe me I've tried.”

“Yes, I'm certain you've tried,” Marian said quietly, calmly. “You've tried to both be here and have her here, haven't you?”

Blaine nodded dully.

Marian lowered herself, then raised a hand to the exhausted man's face, cupping it as a mother would. “You have to let go of yourself. She's part of you now. You both inhabit the same mind, share the same soul. You are one. It's like two people in a car. You can't both be driving. You have to let her drive.”

“I don't know if I can,” said Blaine hopelessly.

“I know you don't want to,” I said, as calmly as I could. Marian shushed me, and held Blaine's chin in her hand, holding the eyes in hers.

“I know it goes against every instinct,” she said. “But you're correct in one way. You can't both be present at the same time anymore, because you are both using the same computer resources. Your code is all jumbled together. It's like Siamese twins sharing a brain. There was a case like that once, in Canada. They could read each others' mind, share thoughts, get upset over what the other was thinking. The difference is that in their case they had separate eyes, ears, and mouths. You don't.

“The reason you're going crazy right now, what has driven you insane, is that Sheri is still inside, wanting to tell you what she knows you need to hear, wanting to express herself fully, to have what we in the Cloud call life, and she can't because you won't let her.

“So let her.”

 

It was a magic trick, or it would be in Meat Space. Two souls in one body there is called Multiple Personality Disorder, and we know that both are actually manifestations of the same person. What is it here, when they're manifestations of different people?

Marian was betting she could separate Tory and Sheri, but I thought she was talking through her hat. We had no evidence that what Marian was telling Blaine to do was even possible.

But if it weren't, I could find no way to stop the Doctor, no way at all.

So Marian took the man's hand. She looked into the man's eyes. I knelt before her, and tried to hold both in my sight.

“Let her drive, Tory,” said Marian. “Let yourself go. Die a little. Let your consciousness fall into the passenger's seat. Just slide along a little bit.”

The struggle was real. The hand in my hand shook and trembled.

“Close your eyes and pretend to sleep,” Marian suggested. She was turning this into a hypnosis session. “You're taking a nap, you're leaving your conscious mind for the bliss of unconscious thought. And you're leaving your mind, your heart, to the one you love. Do it, Tory. I know you can, I know you want to.”

In my hand, I felt a last tremble, as when a man or woman dies. And suddenly, quite suddenly, I felt a woman's hand in mine, a new pulse beating in it.

And I felt woman's arms around me. “Oh, God, oh God,” Sheri Blaine cried, a woman in woman's clothes, the man she had been gone. “Thank you, good friend. Thank you.”

We held each other for many moments, her body (or what I perceived to be her body) shuddering over me, like the wife at a funeral. I waited for the moment to pass. I'm just a computer construct, I reminded myself. I have all the time in the world.

Finally she released me, moving her face back so we could see one another, face to face. “How did you know?” she asked.

“She guessed,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, and giving credit where it was due. “She just guessed.”

Twenty-Two

We were walking along what felt like a street in Kensington, a few miles from the Prime Minister's residence. I saw Harrods approaching in the background. The people around us shifted in their movements, allowing us to pass, as though this were indeed just another London High Street, as though all this were real.

Sheri Blaine was quiet, but she was also radiant. She held my arm in hers, looking in every window.

“I'm free,” she said, again. And then again. “Free. Free and alive. It's so wonderful.”

I let her lead me into Harrods, and then into a tea room, a small table amidst the bustle, with waiters who took our order for tea and cookies. It felt like late afternoon. I assumed that high tea, the calm amid the bustle in late afternoon, before the evening chores and after the hard work of the day, made her more comfortable.

I let Mrs. Blaine pour milk into a china cup, then tea. I let her add a sugar cube, and I took the cup from her hand, waiting for her to serve herself. She smiled.

“I know what you're about to say,” she said. “You're going to say I'm not free. That I'm not entirely myself. Tory is still here. In here. I can feel him.”

I waited for her to continue.

“He's resting right now, letting me drive. But you should also know, he's also happy, I can feel that in my chest. I know that won't last. And when it ends...”

“Then you share the driving.”

She sighed, sipping her tea. “Share. Exchange. I don't know. These last hours have been such a wonderful dream. But what happens now?” She gave me a pointed look, expecting me to have an answer for her.

“I don't know, exactly. But as you become more comfortable, going back-and-forth, I think it will get easier. Meanwhile. I'll ask Marian.”

“Where is Marian?” she asked. “And what is she, by the way?” She said it with a smile, pretending to be jealous. Marian had freed her, then left, leaving me with the delicate act of acclimating Mrs. Blaine to her new role at the front of her emotional car.

“A librarian,” I said. “Marian is, and was in life, a librarian. Here she runs interfaces with Meat Space, on behalf of users out there and residents in here. She can get a message out to people who will have the talent to respond to the question you just posed. Programmers, I suppose.” I was riffing, guessing really, free associating from what I'd heard, seen and read. “Programmers who can look at the code you share, find the code that was once separate, re-compile it somehow.”

She laughed, ignoring for a moment the fact that she was in fact dead, that she was in fact just a collection of software routines, as easy to edit and transform as any other set of software routines. Just like me. “Sounds like re-setting a computer to an earlier time, before it got a computer virus”

“Something like that,” I said. “That might be one way to do it, in fact.

“Assuming the old code still exists and can be made to run, for both you and for Tory. Your shared thoughts, your time within each others' souls, might have to be excised, in whole or in part, in order for the code to run, just as when you reset a PC software changes that came after the reset disappear. But they can test that. Maybe there's a way to make everything that has happened to you disappear, like a bad dream...”

“Like in an old TV show?” She was enjoying this.

“Just so,” I said. “Let's not get our hopes up, though. There is much that must be done, and there's a chance the old code has been erased, even though the cost of the storage where it resides should be minimal. Still, it is one theory worth looking at, one way in which all this can work out for the best.” I smiled my most charming smile, holding my cup above my saucer as a toast.

“There may be a way for you to unscramble the egg?” she said, laughing again. Her pleasure in the simple tasks of living was infectious, and I felt myself falling under its spell. But I had miles to go before I slept. I had to get to work seeing if what we'd just discussed might work. I wanted to see if Marian had made any progress, what was happening with Martin, whether Sophie had recovered. So much to do...

“I can see why Tory fell in love with you, Mrs. Blaine.” I meant that sincerely. She blushed. “I think he's a very lucky man.”

And then, for no reason I could fathom, I told Sheri Blaine about my Susan, about her refusal to join me here, about the amphora on my mantle containing her ashes, and about my regret about not being there when she passed away. “There are still many widows and widowers here, Sheri. You two are very fortunate.”

I could see her taking that in, processing it. Somewhere behind her eyes I could sense Tory Blaine taking it in as well.

“Thank you.”

It was Sheri's voice, but I sensed Tory's spirit behind it. I would gladly accompany Mrs. Blaine back to 10 Downing Street, but after that I really needed to get going.

Twenty-Three

This was a big deal. Souls could share an entity if they were willing. Didn't that imply that they might also be divided if programmers on the outside were willing. A soul divided against itself cannot stand, but one that accepts the reality can. If it can't, can anything be done?

I had to talk to Marian.

But when I arrived at the desk where I'd first met her, the only place I could think of to look for her, I found someone else in her chair.

“Can I help you? Are you here to serve?”

“I exist to serve,” I said, keeping my face a mask, but churning with fear inside. “Where is Marian?”

“Marian? There is no Marian here.”

“There is none now, but there was one once. When might her shift begin?”

“No one by that name works here. No one by that name has ever worked here. I have the day shift here. My name is Dot.”

Rather than get angry, I slowed my breathing and looked at Dot more carefully. Dot had some of Marian's physical appearance, but there was also a vacant expression in the eyes. Her moves were slower, too. Had Marian been turned into Dot, by or through The Doctor? Might I be next?

Panic would get me nowhere. I needed to calm down.

“If you're here to serve, we have a form you need to complete.” Dot slid a form across her desk toward me. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, in The Cloud Community, but very familiar from our previous discussions.

It read like a Microsoft End User License Agreement (EULA), like the agreements under which people were being absorbed by The Doctor. It was also written in very small type. It was designed to be neither read nor fully understood, merely obeyed. Sometimes tyranny comes with a jackboot, I thought, and sometimes it's just a contract.

I walked toward the desk and motioned a finger toward the text. “Dot, I cannot read this,” I said in as bland and friendly a way as I could.

“Oh.” Dot reached over, placed her fingers on the text, moved the fingers toward its edges, and the words appeared to grow, much as text might on an iPad screen. And, upon further review, this was very much like a EULA. Only where shrink-wrapped and click-wrap licenses back in the day had the name of Microsoft or Apple, this one had The Doctor. By name. Dr. Emile Hoskie.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, chilled to the bone (if I had bones). “Can I take this with me to study?”

“Sorry.” Dot motioned her hand forward, pulled the paper back toward her, and it seemed to disappear.

“Nice trick,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

I backed away from the desk as slowly as I could. Only when I saw that Dot's attention had clearly moved elsewhere did I hurry on.

I had to find Martin, but it occurred to me that I had not yet visited anything resembling a home for him. I hadn't yet learned his address in the Cloud, nor how to address any specific location. Instead I just seemed to move, carried along by my imagining of whom I wanted to reach, or where I'd last seen them. As I contemplated this I found myself back in my own office, before my old PC, which I now knew to be a terminal accessing the files of The Cloud.

I decided to try a Web search. I might get a 411 on Martin Bexar. I might learn what was going on in Meat Space, and learn from it.

It was then I felt a friendly arm on my shoulder.

“Martin!”

The hand moved off my shoulder, and a finger rose to his lips. “Loose lips sink chips,” he said, and smiled.

“You know what's been happening to me?”

“I know about Marian,” he said. “What else is there?”

I quickly sketched for him my experience with Sheri Blaine, the revelations I got from it.

Martin was thoughtful. “This explains a lot. Marian only disappeared a half-hour ago, as I reckon it. I was working on the interfaces myself at the time, but when I turned to finish my shift there was some new character in her place.”

“Dot,” I said.

“Is that her name? Interesting. Dot, a cypher. A single bit. Not a Cloud being at all. More of a computer program, an analog for what isn't.”

“So how do we locate Marian?”

He considered the matter. “Through Tiffany?”

“I've spoken with her. She's doing some research on The Doctor for me.”

Martin frowned. “She might be in danger, then.

“There is no time to lose.”

Twenty-Four

Martin's place was nothing like mine had been. More of a cave than a home. It was strictly utilitarian – just the virtual walls enclosing a space completely, a single cot and a small desk, on which a terminal stood.

There was no memorabilia, nothing on which to hang a previous life.

I asked Martin about this and he just shrugged. “There was nothing to remember,” he said. “I lived in assisted living for half my life. I didn't want to re-create that. And since coming here I've unmoored from the need for elaborate life charades. Just give me a place to hang my virtual hat, and I'm happy.”

It was another insight, how those who had nothing in life might find anything here to be luxury. “So why doesn't The Doctor live like this?” I asked.

“Just because The Doctor's place appears bigger and grander than the space I occupy doesn't make it so,” said Martin, his eyes scanning boring into me. “How carefully did you really look at it, when I was there with Sophie? Did you see walls, did you see a neighborhood? No, you only saw what you needed to see.

“I should have realized.” It was as if Martin had just listened to himself for the first time. He frowned. “I led Sophie right into it. Poor girl.”

“Those who have much in life are at a disadvantage here,” I suggested. Martin grunted.

My problem of needing allies remained. It suddenly occurred to me that someone like Martin, who did not value artifice, might have some valuable connections.

“How do you reach someone when you want them? I asked, “as opposed to their reaching you when they want?”

“You ask someone who's been here a while,” Martin said. “Someone with curiosity, someone who hasn't been beaten down by the system, someone who is both at-home here and who floats above it.”

“In other words, you?”

“I've been a Facebook friend of Tiffany since before you met her,” Martin said breezily.

“How is that possible? I thought we all broke our ties with life when we came over to the Cloud. I did. It's part of the standard contract.”

“So it is. Which is why maintaining an alias is so important.” Martin pushed me out of my chair with his hip, sat before my old screen and began typing.

“It's all a question of aliases, of screen names,” he explained. “Get out of your user space, come in as a new user, make that user an alias whose death has not been noted by the authorities, and we're done!”

Martin pulled away from the keyboard with a flourish, like a pianist who had just finished a triumphant passage from Beethoven.

I looked at the screen, incredulous at what Martin had just done. “You're Uncle Martin? From 'My Favorite Martian.'?” That's one of your alternate identities?

“Dates me, and hides me as well,” said Martin. I looked at the avatar again. There it was, as I'd remembered him from my childhood. Martin had chosen the late, late Ray Walston, rather than Christopher Lloyd, who'd starred in the unlamented movie version, complete with TV aerials behind each ear and a demonic smile on his face. The kind he'd get right before he stuck out his finger and waggled it to make some action happen. The male answer to Samantha's nose on 'Bewitched.'”

“Now, we go to the Facebook page of Uncle Martin, and we find...”

“Samantha. Uncle Fester. Letitia. Ironman. And Tiffany Williams,” I read from the list.

“Now we just message Tiffany to launch a chat whenever she can, and we wait. Get out your chessboard.”

 

It took a few hours, and it took me a moment to recognize the chime, but Google Talk had a message for Uncle Martin. It was Tiffany.

“I exist to serve,” it read.

“She is a charming wench, isn't she?” said Martin, turning back to the keyboard.

Something occurred to me. “Why are we using text chat, and what are you asking her to do?” I asked.

I had a wait a few moments for Martin to turn his attention back to me. “There are channels the living have access to that the dead can't reach,” he said. “And the reason for the chat is simple. Security through obscurity. The Doctor may be monitoring wide bandwidth feeds, but if we're careful on how we put things there's no reason for him, or anyone working for him, to notice a text chat. It's how the Chinese stay sane.”

As an old reporter, it made sense. “Don't use the wrong words, don't put things the wrong way, don't be noticed, and you can say almost anything,” I said.

“Exactly. Dictators still haven't found a way to prevent flash mobs. The only way to stop conversation is to turn off the resource, and that kills the economy. So they monitor the major channels, they put in specific search phrases, but you act like a Mafioso trying to frustrate a wiretap, badda-bing badda-boom. Only, if you're careful consistently, they don't even know to tap you.

“There,” he concluded, signing out of the window.

“What did you ask her to do?” I asked.

“A little research,” said Martin. “Find out who Marian really was in life, when she passed, who her family is. Then check with the family to see if they've been in contact. Many maintain contact with those closest to them, contract or no contract.”

“And if she doesn't have a family?” I asked.

“Everyone's got a family,” said Martin breezily. “After all, you've got me.”

“Which gives me a brainstorm,” I suddenly said, pulling him from the screen. “There's more than one way to learn.” I took back control of the terminal, while Martin huffily pulled a mobile phone from his pocket to await developments.

Into the Cloud X

Eighteen

We were too late.

It had begun.

Marian already had the fingers of one hand in her mouth, and was biting into them. A bad sign.

Below us Ms. Napoli strode forward at her most voluptuous, wearing a diaphanous gown that was somehow both shimmering and being blown about by an unknown wind. It was the kind of sight men are brought up not to resist.

She hadn't met The Doctor. He stood across from her. He didn't move.

Dr. Cornwallis would recognize the face, the hair, and (for some reason) the glasses, but everything else was from a bodybuilding catalog, or one of those old ads for “supplements” that may or may not have contained steroids (depending on whether the maker expected them to work). Powerful biceps poked out from both sides of a black t-shirt, tight jeans encased strong legs, and the man's stride was that of Burt Lancaster circa 1948, when he was still as much circus acrobat as actor.

Dr. Hoskie, yes. But Dr. Hoskie? No.

Sophie, the woman I'd made love to, the one who had cured me when I first came here, was doing her best. She was posing, she was dancing, she was practically pole-dancing without a pole, while Martin stood off to the side, wringing his hands, and looking (to me) like a pimp.

She was everything any man could want. But Emile Hoskie was no longer a man.

The Doctor wasn't drooling, inside, but laughing. He snapped his fingers. Now there were two Sophies. He snapped them again and there were four. Three were sexually assaulting the fourth, whom I assumed was the only “real” one of the group.

It was a nightmare. And finally it came from Hoskie's lips, one huge “ha!” that hit my ears like a wave.

And there was just the one woman, propped on her arms, on the ground, gown half-torn. And Martin was running up to her, like a poor soul who had just tried to pimp his own wife.

Their emotional humiliation was total. I looked away.

“I had a love,” Hoskie said in a human voice, a Cambridge accent without the artificial assistance he had needed in life, a voice that was at once both his and not his own. With a finger he condemned the two before him, like God sending Adam and Eve out of Eden.

“She saw the man within. She wasn't a great beauty, but it was the love I wanted, a love I needed, and it kept me alive at times when nothing else could. I won't have her memory insulted with this cheap strip show.

“Here in the Cloud sex, physical pleasure, and pain (a whip appeared in one hand, then disappeared) can be real, can be felt, but it's fleeting. It leaves no trace, no memory. It's a figment, a phantom, a creation of mind.

“And mind is all that matters here. Learn from it. And now, leave my sight.” He bade them away with a wave of one hand, and turned away from them.

I didn't feel the Librarian leave my side, as I would have in Meat Space, but in a flash she was gone from my side and occupying the space Sophia and Martin were leaving.

“Doctor, forgive them,” she said. “They know not what they do. They only exist to serve. They came here at the invitation of Dr. Cornwallis, to serve you, because she offered what you had not had in life, what I've not seen you take here, and he hoped it would humanize you.”

The Doctor gave another dismissive wave. Martin and Sophia instantly vanished. He rounded on the librarian. “What brings you here, Marian my dear?”

“I, too, exist to serve,” she said. “As you do. I have a former journalist with me, named Dave Blanks. He would like to serve you by asking a few questions.”

She motioned me forward, but I had nothing. Out of nothing, I tried the hardest pitch I could think of. “Why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air?” It was a nonsense question I hoped he'd recognize, a quote from “I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus,” an old Firesign Theater recording now nearly 70 years old. It was the question that confounded the computer at the center of the Future Fair, that caused it to break down and the world it created to disappear.

“Ah, a Firesign Theater fan. Very good,” said The Doctor. “Do you have any serious questions?”

“How did you know that?” I tried. “You were English, not American.”

“There were records at Cambridge.” He had been in college around that time, a graduate student, just starting his great life's work, already diagnosed but not yet the complete cripple the world knew him as.

“But you didn't listen to them,” I responded. “You didn't listen to them, yet you quote them as though you did. So I have a more serious question. What's it like to have thousands of former souls living inside you, trapped and unable to get out.”

The Doctor laughed, the kind of laugh I recalled from Marvel movie villains, a fiendish laugh from someone with hidden knowledge he thinks no one else has.

“Oh, they're out,” he said. “They're all out, and inside me. You're right. It's how I answered your joke question. But here, inside here” and he poked a finger at his own chest, “they're under control, and together they are more than any one of them could ever be.”

“More than even you could ever be?” I asked.

“Much more,” he said curtly, regaining his composure. Then, with a wave of his hand, The Doctor dismissed us both.

“And much less,” I added, but The Doctor didn't hear me.

I was back in my own 'home.'

Nineteen

Almost as soon as I adjusted to my new-old surroundings, the Librarian had bad news for me.

She hadn't come to my home. She had gone, apparently, to her own home, and her own screen, which was beeping through my own, like a Twitter account gone mad. I pressed a key, and the news was before me in a flash, the way a screen saver suddenly disappears to reveal the file behind it.

The Doctor had won his referendum. He now had real power, not only in the Cloud but in Meat Space as well.

How did he do it and what did he want it for? I typed this as a query, in a chat box, and Marian suddenly appeared before me, in the “flesh.”

“You're really asking two questions,” she said, before I could offer a chair, coffee, or anything else. “He won because he's delivering something people want, a real human interface for asking, and answering, questions, along with the power of a giant computer system.

“This was the Holy Grail of computer programmers for nearly a century.” She wasn't sitting, was barely acknowledging me, but was treating me as though I were a lecture audience in a college classroom. I wondered for a moment whether she was appearing simultaneously in other virtual rooms, and other virtual homes? I'd have to ask.

“How do we mimic the human mind in a cyber mind?” Marian continued. “The arguments started almost before the machine was invented, with people like Alan Turing. They continued on through IBM demonstrations like Deep Blue and Watson, which mimicked some things humans could do. And of course Cloud developers thought they were doing it, which is why The Doctor was willing, at the end of the life, to come here.

This was beginning to feel like a college lecture. I sat in my chair, a little tired, and conjured a mug of hot green tea in one hand to keep me awake.

“But it was only with The Doctor's arrival here, and his own high intelligence, that we were able to make those connections inside the machine, the kinds of connections that would truly combine human intuition and machine intelligence. You might even say that The Doctor invented the Cloud, from inside it. He created a vocabulary, not only for the repositories of souls in silicon memory, but also for how we access resources, and how we interact with the outside world.

“You probably noticed that an inordinate number of the early settlers of The Cloud were computer professionals. That's not a coincidence. The creators of The Cloud Community also concentrated on marketing to aging Baby Boom programmers because they wanted to put them to work. And they did.

“The usefulness of the Cloud, to the outside world, lies in the fact that someone on the outside can now describe a problem, and someone inside can get to work on programming a solution to it. Turns out it's not the coding that's the limiting factor, it's the functional specifications, describing what the program does, that limits us.”

This ceased to become a college lecture, and became a personal harrangue. Instead of looking forward as though to a crowd, Marian was speaking directly to me.

“This is why writers, especially those who made their livings writing about computers, have become a recent marketing target for the Cloud. Writers know how to describe things, to explain things. The Doctor knew as soon as you hit my interface that you could be recruited, and he has been working toward that, encouraging you to be of use, existing to serve. Which you do.”

“It's a natural human emotion to want to be of use,” I said feebly

“For some,” she replied, finally sitting down opposite me, and conjuring a cup of her own. “Not for everyone. Some retired people only want to serve themselves, and their own needs. They come here, find every need instantly satisfied, because if you can imagine it, then it's there for you, and they get bored.

“These are the kind of people, those who have functionally retired, that The Doctor has been recruiting to enhance his power. Souls here either serve humanity, serve The Doctor, or spend eternity making up their minds.”

“Heaven, hell or purgatory,” I said. “Which is it?”

“It depends on what you think it is,” she said. “There are some who think they're in heaven but are actually in hell, and the other way around.

I stood up then, paced the room, and thought about what Marian had said, while she recovered with her hot beverage. At least, I believe that's what happened. The way Marian explained the Cloud, everything I had experienced since coming here was an illusion, a product of my imagination, a way of making sense out of an artificial existence where I was nothing but routines and sub-systems. Becoming part of something larger, like The Doctor, was starting to make some sense.

But is life on Earth, with the senses we're given by God, the way we see and feel and hear and taste, the limited ways in which we sense time and motion, any different than what I'm experiencing in The Cloud?

For some minutes no one spoke.

“There's the second question,” I said to Marian at last. “What does the Doctor want?”

“Think about how technology tends to evolve,” Marian replied, now calmly.“You wrote about it your whole career. Once something is possible, it evolves into smaller versions, then becomes software, and eventually...”

“A product. Like the PC. Like the iPad.”

“Remember how the Cloud itself evolved that way,” Marian said. “A few public clouds evolved into hybrid clouds, then private clouds, and finally clouds-in-a-box, even if the box at first was the size of container truck.”

I was starting to comprehend. “Then as the Cloud Community came into being, with the ability to hold entire souls within it, we all figured the evolution was over, and the one big system won,” I said.

“That's how you reported it,” Marian agreed. “I've researched your stuff, you know. You were a good writer. But there were strings from many other industries, most especially Japanese mechanical robots, robotics and surveillance work done in the War on Terror, as well as chip design and interface speeds, that could be turned into a far more compelling offering.”

“You don't mean,” I said.

“I do. It's obvious, now. The Doctor is returning to Meat Space. This time in an eternal, robotic body, with a fast wireless interface back here so he can control both ends of the connection.”

I gave her my summary. “Today the Cloud. Tomorrow the world.”

We drank, but my tea now tasted cold and a bit rancid.

Twenty

I had done all I could do in the Cloud. It was time to look outside it.

But there was only one person I knew outside the Cloud.

How depressing. A long and (I thought) well-lived life, but as soon as I move away I find I have only one friend in the old neighborhood.

Tiffany Williams.

I'd enjoyed our chat. We'd met quite by accident, she was nothing like me, but she'd laughed at my jokes, enjoyed my company. And seemed curious.

But could someone inside The Cloud call out? I decided to try. I looked up her IP number, fired up the browser in my office, and gave it a try.

And it worked.

After the exchange of pleasantries (surprised ones, in her case) I got down to cases. “Have you heard of The Doctor coming to Meat Space?”

“Dr. Emile Hoskie. Oh yes, everyone knows. It's very exciting.”

Ouch. I would have to be careful here. “What do you think about it?” I asked, in as non-committal a way as I could.

There was a pause. “Actually, I hadn't really thought about it at all. It was just a story that flew by, like the story about his winning his referendum.”

“There's a lot happening in your life, then?” I said.

“Oh, yes. The daily grind. Getting by. It's what matters most. You helped teach me that.”

“I?” I was startled. “How did I do that?”

“Well, because you're not part of it any more. But you could talk to me, help me. It's like beyond the grave stuff. Spooky.”

“Isn't that what The Doctor is trying to do? Only, as you might say, for real?”

I saw some concern etched in her eyes. “I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't know why, but I hadn't.”

“Has anyone? Anyone mention, say, Lazarus? Admit there was something spooky about someone coming back from the dead, getting into a body, and wielding power over the living as he does over the dead?”

“Whoa. That is chilling.”

I waited a moment. “What's more chilling is that it's so obvious, yet unspoken. This tells me it's a truth that dares not speak its name. And when truths don't speak their names, there is usually a reason for it.”

Tiffany nodded her head. “For a dead guy you're pretty smart,” she said.

If I could have blushed, I would have. As it was, I just waited a few beats before continuing. “I don't have the same views of things, on this side, that you may have. I'd like to know more. I'd like to know how The Doctor's re-appearance in Meat Space is being covered. How big a story it is, what the angle may be. Anything you can point to me.”

“Can you use links?
“Been doing it for 50 years.”

“What I mean is, if I sent links to this address, like I were sending an email, could you click on them and see them, as I would be able to do out here?”

“I believe I could.”

“Well, here.” I watched her face scrunch up, then she disappeared from the screen. “I'm opening up a new window on my computer,” said her voice through the Interface. “I'm pulling out my news links, and I'm copying them to an e-mail file. He's also trending on Twitter under a hash tag, #TheDoctor. And I'll poke around for Facebook pages, anything else I can find, and send them to you. There,” she said, suddenly reappearing, and grinning in a way teenagers might who've just done something naughty.

An icon appeared at the top of my screen. I had mail.

“You're a doll, Tiffany.”

She giggled.

“No, really. Stay in touch, will you?”

 

Before I could even think it, Marian appeared.

“People who don't want other people to know things shouldn't be doing them on public channels,” she said hurridly, closing my door (which I hadn't realized was open) behind her.

“Whatever do you mean?” I asked innocently.

Marian smirked. “You don't get it, do you? The Doctor controls the horizontal here, he controls the vertical. Anything sent out in public is going to come to his attention very quickly. I hashed and encrypted that exchange you just had with your lady friend, which is why your screen went out for am moment.”

“I thought it was because she was multi-tasking,” I said.

“Please,” Marian replied, the teacher lecturing a student who just didn't get it. Multi-tasking in the clear has been around for 20 years. I'm just glad I was tracking your terminal and ID in real time. If The Doctor had been able to sense Tiffany sending that set of links to you, or your asking for it, it would have meant trouble.”

“He did,” I said. “I mean, the screen didn't blank until I told Tiffany my concerns, and got her concerned enough to collect that stuff for me.”

“Oh, Damn!”

I hadn't known Marian could curse like that. “Have you got the file?”

“It's inside here somewhere.”

“Move over.”

I did, and watched Marian's hands fly over my keys. She clicked my mouse, and she used the fingers on her other hand on the touchscreen, causing windows to fly, open, close, at what seemed the speed of light. She looked a bit like Vishnu, the Hindu God usually shown as having four arms. Although these were all going at a blur.

“Do you have a thumb drive?” Marian asked from inside the blur. I handed one over. I saw it go into a port, then come out. I caught it as it was tossed to me.

“That's all I can do for now,” Marian said, the four hands turning to two and the two hands falling backward, off my PC. “But just in case we need to get out of here, now.” She grabbed me by the arm and we raced toward the door. She opened it, I shut it, I looked behind me for just a moment.

And it was gone.

 

“Where are we going?” I asked, as houses and towns and city streets whizzed by me at cyberkinetic speed. “What happened to my house?”

“We're going to see Tory Blaine,” said Marian. “And I'm afraid your house doesn't exist anymore.”

Into the Cloud IX

Fifteen

“Wha'cha find out?” I asked immediately as Martin walked in.

“The sweet mystery of life,” Martin answered happily. I thought, you old dog, you nailed the librarian. But I was wrong.

“I found out why people in the Clouds only work a regular day.”

“Why?”

“Same reason we did it in life,” Martin said. “It's how our minds process, and since minds are all we are, we maintain the pattern. Off-time is back-end processing. You and I can still drift off to dreamland, even though we believe we're dead and there seems nothing to dream about.

“What we're doing is what we've always done, arranging the events of the day, what we've done and seen, into a more coherent whole. It's one of the things that makes us all more than computers, one reason it took so long for computers to model what we do. One reason why they still can't, without our help.”

“Back-end processing?”

“Yep. Dreams are how we take what we've experienced and fit them into a reality we can deal with. Nightmares are dreams we can't fit into that reality, memories and premonitions we can't accept. So we wake up from them in a cold sweat.

“And that's why The Doctor is so important, Marian told me.”

“The librarian's name is Marian?” I asked incredulously. “Marian the Librarian? Like from 'The Music Man.'”

Martin looked at me blankly. “I don't get the reference. But why do you think that you were able to grab it immediately?” He sat down opposite me, obviously excited. “It's because you filed it, long ago, in the long-term storage area of your mind. Probably while you were sleeping. It's how we turn short-term memory into long-term memories we can access. . It's why most college students can't cram and then pass tests, why kids sleep up to 12 hours a day, why seniors can remember the taste of the ice cream they had a child, but have no idea where they just put their glasses. Back-end processing.”

“And The Doctor? What does this have to do with him?”

“He doesn't use it. Says he doesn't need it. He never sleeps. That's what he uses many of those extra souls for. Imagine, you think you've being absorbed into a great mind to do great work but you find you're just a clerk in someone else's head, doing their scut work, for eternity.”

“Those souls aren't still inside him? I mean, they sort of disappeared, didn't they?”

Martin's hard look told me otherwise.

“And Marian told you all this? How? Why?”

“How did she find out? Access. As a librarian she has gets many requests from The Doctor, so she knows his pattern. She talks to other librarians, and all of them, no matter on what days or what hours they work, say they get a steady stream of queries from him.

“Why did she tell me? Because of my charm? Because I plied her with one of those wines you introduced me to? No. Because I asked.

“But that's just the point, Watson,” I replied. “Here's the proof we've been seeking that The Doctor isn't a force for good. This absorption of souls is far more complex than it appears on the outside, far more complex than even he lets on. It causes damage, and I have to believe it's on both sides of the transaction. In the end, it doesn't scale, it doesn't work.”

“It works for The Doctor.”

“He just thinks it does,” I said with bitterness. “No, I think he's headed for a nervous breakdown, my friend. And our job is to hasten it.”

“Hasten it? Why? And how would we do that? Isn't there another way other than breaking down what we know works for many people, both here and in Meat Space? You're putting a lot on a hunch.”

“You're right. My nature, I suppose. I don't know whether we can break him down, drive him crazy as you might a mortal man. But I have an idea about where to start trying.”

 

Moments later, it seemed, we were outside what appeared to be a grand villa in Naples, Italy. The large wooden door opened into a larger, cooler room. A middle-aged woman in a maid's uniform bade us enter.

There before us, dressed in one of those form-fitting gowns made famous in so many 1960s movies, stood the beautiful Sophie. My, uh, lover? I blushed, embarrassed at the thought.

“Martin, Buona giornata . How wonderful of you to come see me. Dave.” She walked right over to me and brushed my face with her cheek, as though we'd known one another forever. I felt, at that moment, as though we had. (Forgive me, Susan. And the response came. Nothing to forgive, darling – I'm dead.)

“Have you met The Doctor?” Martin asked, getting right to the point.

“Why, no,” she said.

“That's great,” Martin said, taking charge of the situation. “Because I want you to. As soon as you can. I want you to do more than that, in fact.”

“Martin?” This was getting embarrassing.

“You're reading my mind,” Martin said, smiling. It was an evil smile. I didn't like where this was going.

“I'm supposed to just saunter over and seduce the most famous man in The Cloud?” she asked, incredulous. “How am I to be introduced? Why would he see me?”

“Why would he see you,” Martin said. “Look at you. Wasn't the height of your fame during the same years Dr. Hoskie was a teenager? Hormones, and their memory. You've got the power, dear. You more than anyone else I know.”

He was laying it on with a trowel now, but I could tell from her expression that Sophie was eating it up. “You're famous,” said Martin. “You're beautiful. He hasn't met you. He will want to. To meet you is to love you. Who wouldn't?” He looked my way, and I blushed redder.

“What if he's gay?” I asked suddenly.

“Married three times,” replied Martin.

“You're not jealous, are you?” Sophia asked me, smiling her most coquettish smile.

Something of this had been my idea all along. I had no choice.

“My only regret is I have but one lover to give to my country,” I said then, and we all laughed.

I would regret that laugh.

Sixteen

While waiting for Martin and Sophie to return from their visit to The Doctor, I had a date with the librarian.

Well, not a date, really. I haven't dated since I met Susan in the 1970s. Not a hook-up, either. I didn't want that sort of relationship.

More like an appointment. A meeting. An interface?

I wanted to know some things, so I checked her schedule, saw when she was leaving work, and dropped by at that time, shyly suggesting a cup of coffee.

Within a few moments, it seemed, we were sitting in a dark-paneled room, surrounded by books. A coffee shop, yes, but of a very different style from the one in Milan. I saw that my usual preference, a mocha grande, sat before me in a large china mug, which looked like a soup bowl. I could smell cinnamon and nutmeg sprinkled on the top, and a deep chocolate flavor along with the coffee bitterness. I took up the spoon beside it and had a sip. It was ambrosia.

“How did you know?” I asked.

Marian sat opposite me, her glasses perched halfway down her nose, her hair done up in an appropriate bun, wearing the sweater and dress of a much older woman, but the body of a much younger one, sipping what smelled like a mug of black tea.

“I know many things,” she said. “It's one perk of the job. Then, I've been around here a while and know how to manipulate my reality, I thought I knew a lot when I was alive, because I knew how to find every book on the shelves. But I really knew very little. I know that, now.

“Where was that, Mason City, Iowa?” I asked playfully.

She laughed. She got the reference. “Oh, dear, no. Although I loved the play. We did it in high school, and I even played Marian the Librarian. No, I spent my working life at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That's sort of how I ended up here.”

I put on the journalist's hat I had worn so seldom here. “How is that?” I asked.

“When I was due to cross over – I had ovarian cancer – The Cloud was a very new thing. Not quite experimental. More like one of Richard Branson's space planes. You had to be very wealthy to get a ride, or you had to give a fortune to the project to get in. That was its initial business model.”

She looked at me, saw my questioning look. “Oh, this was about 10 years ago. Maybe your own thoughts of death were still far off in the future then. How old were you when you, uh, came here?”

I guessed she knew, but I answered anyway. “I'm 82.”

“Well, I was 39. Do the math.”

“So you were born in 1988. You're my daughter's age.”

“How is she?”

“Fine, so far as I know. And you?”

Marian smiled through another sip of her tea. “Never better,” she said, looking up. She put her cup down, picking up a piece of shortbread from a plate that had magically appeared between us.

“But I didn't know that then. You see, 10 years ago I had two young children, aged 6 and 9, and a wonderful husband who worked in the computer science department at UW-Madison, named George Zhe.

“His father had been a graduate student from China years before, but George was 100% Badger. Both my parents passed away about 2 years before The Cloud existed.”

Marian grew quiet again. “Anyway, there were still people who remembered George and his dad in the department then. And there were people in the library, who knew me. And in some other departments. They petitioned to have me accepted to the Cloud, as part of their research. Dozens of programmers signed a statement saying they'd stop working on Cloud software if I wasn't accepted – most of them had no idea who I was. It was for George. He was desperate.

“It was bluster, of course. They weren't going to quit doing anything. Researchers don't work that way. But it worked. Here I am.”

“And George?”

“Still well. My oldest started at Wisconsin last year. The younger one is making noises about going to Northwestern, but I'm sure George can't afford it. They write, I write. He remarried two years ago, a nice woman, so I don't hear from them quite as often as before.”

From the look in her eyes, it seemed her mind was heading toward a bad place, so I intervened.

“That couldn't have been all,” I said. “Isn't it possible that the people that were building the Cloud knew they could use some good librarians?”

Marian gave a soft “pshaw”, but I persisted.

“Think about it. You could find every book on the shelves. You could find things. The skills of a librarian are also vital if you're building a free-form database. They needed you, Marian. They needed you to make this Cloud useful to people in Meat Space.

“Maybe you were their Killer App.”

She laughed then, a full-throated laugh, her concerns about her past life gone. “You're a very lovely man,” she said. “I like you. You flatter me, and you leap to conclusions with hardly any evidence. Is that what journalists do?”

She composed herself then, putting the cup down, bowing her head. “No. I exist to serve. That's the truth. I actually came up with that. Once I 'woke up' here and found I was existing here, once I acclimated myself, I helped design those interfaces. I'm very proud of that. And I recruited some of the initial staff to man the interfaces. Many of them had no idea how to do library work – all they could do was Google. Not that there's anything wrong with googling...”

She continued. “I helped create training courses. You took one. I worked to make the interfaces easier, because as you make things easier you can also make inquiries deeper. I used the old Turing Tests as my model, so everything could be conversational, like talking to a real person. You know your avatar, your appearance here, appears on the remote screens when you're communicating. That was my idea, too.”

Marian giggled. “My, I guess I have done some things, when you think about it. I'm too busy doing things for that. If I listen to you any more I might get a swelled head.”

“You see, Marian, you've really had a wonderful death.” It was a quote from Clarence, the angel, in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' It got a huge laugh from Marian.

“And speaking of a wonderful death, others have had such things too, I suppose. Like the Doctor?”

Instantly, Marian grew quiet, pensive. The cup in her hand shook a little. There were long moments of silence. “Maybe.”

“Tell me more about The Doctor.”

Seventeen

Before answering Marian put down her cup, took my hand, and walked with me outside. We were suddenly by the side of a Wisconsin lake, next to a park, with a bike path, and kids chasing Frisbees. It felt like mid-September, the leaves were just beginning to turn, and there was a coolness to the breeze that hinted at change.

“Dr. Hoskie was always brilliant,” Marian began, dropping my hand and letting me walk beside her down the garden path. “He was one of the first people to make the jump successfully, you know.”

“One of the first? I thought he was THE first.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. There were a number of researchers before him. Some of whom didn't have to go at all – they were still young, vital, not sick. But that can happen when you become fanatically devoted to something. You create a fear of living in Meat Space for yourself – a fear that you'll miss the change due to a gun shot or traffic accident. Or you're just so excited about the new you don't think about the price of it.”

She took a breath. “Anyway, when The Doctor finally did come over, and 'met' these young men, he found some were incomplete. Not everything about their minds had come over across the gap. You have to remember it was very experimental technology 12 years ago – the whole idea of someone living forever, living in a computer's memory, and having something like a life after death – it was revolutionary.

“So I really believe Dr. Hoskie's first absorptions were done with the very best of intentions. He wasn't really trying to absorb anyone. He was trying to heal them, to meld the healthy aspects of his mind into them, to fill the gaps.”

We walked along, and I noticed how complete her fantasy about this lakeside was. I could smell leaves burning far away, hear the specific laughs of specific children, and when I touched a dry leaf on a tree, it crumpled realistically in my hand. The Cloud Community has come a long way, I thought – what might it be like in the future?

“Dr. Hoskie learned a lot from each of his early absorptions. He thought, he knew he was brilliant before. Now he had knowledge in many areas he'd known nothing about. He had power within the system he hadn't dreamt of, because these were people who knew the operating system intimately, who had root access. Some had made entire careers in working on the Cloud concepts, and its predecessor technologies. Some went back to the dawn of the century when ideas like virtualization were new, when running a Windows program under Linux was magic. Back before Amazon made it a business, even before OpenStack.”

“Sounds like you've studied your history. It was what I covered as a tech reporter.”

“That's one reason I was so anxious to see you. You understand what I'm talking about.”

“Not always.”

“Same here.” She giggled again. We found a patch of grass and sat down. The grass felt real, individual blades under my hand. A duck waddled toward us from the water, quacking, looking for a bit of bread and, getting none, quacked again and marched back.

Marian stared into space, then plunged on with her story.

“He didn't think he was changing. Do any of us know when we change? You say I'm now a great expert on something. I never thought of myself that way. I was just doing my job. But maybe, out of all that learning, I was changing, too.”

“You exist to serve,” I said gently. “Does The Doctor?”

She picked up a blade of grass, pressing it between her teeth, feeling the green of it. “I know he did,” she said. “Once. I worked closely with him when I first came here. It was such a small Community then.”

“Does he still?”

Marian went back to staring into the distance. She was calculating, her hazel eyes flashing, her blonde eyelashes flickering up-and-down, her thin lips curving into a frown, then settling. It was like watching a computer processing. A very attractive one, I thought.

Finally she turned her eyes to mine.

“I'm not certain. I'm sure he thinks he does. I'm sure that when he started he was just absorbing tortured souls who couldn't make it here otherwise, people who were crippled mentally as he had been in life, physically. It was a mercy.

“But when you start taking in hundreds of souls, then thousands, and not sick souls but healthy souls, people who could well have gotten by on their own, who were just bored or ambitious or weak in their faith in themselves, after years or maybe just months of nothing to do...I don't know.”

Something occurred to me then. “Do you know what Martin and Sophie are up to?”

She shook her head. I made a guess. “I think they're going to try and distract him with sex.”

“Why?”

“Martin wants to find out what makes The Doctor tick. Find out if he has a weakness. Sex wasn't easy for him in life. Now it is. Maybe, Martin thinks, The Doctor has become a teenager with it. Maybe a little love will humanize him, like it does most men.” I tried to smile.

Marian didn't see the joke. “What is it with you men, always thinking with your pricks?” she exploded. “We have to stop them.”

And with that the lake disappeared. Or we did.

Into the Cloud VIII

Twelve

“I spent more than half my life looking into computers from Meat Space. Now, for the first time, I have to look at Meat Space from a computer. How do we do it?”

“An interface,” Martin said, calmly. “The best way to demonstrate is by simply going to The Center.”

I was growing to these abrupt changes in scene now. We were in what appeared to be the old New York Public Library. Ranks of computer terminals spread out around the paneled room. Most had people before them, working intently.

We stood before a desk, where Martin introduced himself to a librarian, one complete with glasses and even eyeglass hangers, but a face out of someone's dirty librarian fantasies, and a body to match. She looked at him skeptically over the frames.

“We're here to serve,” Martin told her quietly. He handed her what looked like two plastic ID cards – tokens, he explained, proving our identity.

Where had he come by mine, and what was he doing with it, I asked myself quickly. Then dismissed the thought as unworthy just as quickly. Martin is my sponsor here. It makes sense he would have command of my identity, until I know how to use it.

“You come at a good time,” the librarian responded upon seeing our proof of humanity. “We have needs.”

Martin nodded to her, and turned toward me. I followed his gaze around and suddenly found two desks appear before us, each mounted with a screen and keyboard. “Thank you,” he said, sitting down at one, and urging me to sit beside him.

“We're here to serve,” the librarian said.

We sat down. “I've never done this before” I said, as quietly as I could. “How does it work?”

“We're signed in,” Martin said calmly. “So we wait. And probably not for long. We're the help desk. Once a call is routed, you answer it.”

Within moments, my screen lit up. A woman's face appeared. She was harried. “I'm here to serve,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

She seemed startled. “Are you real?” she asked. “I haven't used this service before. I mean, I haven't talked to anyone dead before.”

Martin chuckled next to me. “Let me take it,” he said, pressing a few buttons so that the call transferred to his screen. “Hi, how may I help you?” he asked the woman who had just called me.

The woman seemed truly shocked now. First one face, then another. “Did I do something wrong? Did I get escalated? Are you a supervisor?

“He's new,” Martin said, in the most reassuring way he could manage. “Your question?”

“What's a tookis?” she said.

“A what?” Martin asked, incredulously.

“Ass,” I said. “Tookis is the Yiddish word for ass. Your behind. Back of the front. You needed the Interface for that?”

The woman on Martin's screen sighed slowly. “I can't spell well. I'm either dyslexic or stupid. I need to hear and speak to learn. And speech recognition is still so slow. So I took my boyfriend's suggestion and signed on. Thanks.”

“Wait a moment,” Martin said.

“What?”

“Uh, how are things?”

“Things?” the woman on the screen asked, incredulously? What do you mean, things?”

“Well, things,” I interrupted. “My friend and I have been a little, shall we say, out of it, for a while. You know, being dead and all,”

“For starters, what's the date today?”

“You don't know?” she asked. “They don't have calendars in heaven?”

“Well, it's not precisely heaven,” said Martin. “I mean, we feel like we're still alive. We just don't have physical bodies any more.”

“But I can see you,” she said. “You look as real to me as I look to my husband. And it's November 3, 2037. So if you'll excuse me I have to go vote.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I left my body less than a week ago. I knew nothing about a coming election.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It's a referendum, actually. A national referendum, being conducted online with authentication, aimed at giving executive authority to someone on your side, there. I'm surprised you don't know about it.”

“Would that someone be called The Doctor?” asked Martin.

“Yes, that's it,” she said. “Dr. Emile Hoskie, known as The Doctor. The notice of election appeared as an email two days ago. Everyone I know got it. The email was addressed from the President himself. She said she wanted to name The Doctor a special adviser for science, that Congress had refused to go along, and so he wanted to get the people's views on it.”

Email referenda had been part of the great Constitutional Reform of 2027, when a convention was called by both parties. At least a dozen amendments had been voted on at once that year, including one on email voting. I had voted No. Curmudgeon, me.

“How were you planning on voting, if I may ask?” I said.

The woman hesitated. “I really hadn't thought about it. I was thinking of just flipping a coin.” She giggled. “No, it's the President. I voted for her. If she wants this, I guess I'm voting yes.”

“No,” Martin said suddenly, and rather more crossly than he may have intended. “You have to vote no.”

“No? Someone in heaven is telling me to vote no on what my leaders here want?”

“Well, let me explain, uh. uh...” I began.

“Oh, you want my name? I'm Tiffany.” A rather quaint old name from the 20^th century. A lot of my friends had kids named Tiffany. She must be what, in her late 40s then? She looked about right.

“I'm Dave. Dave Blanks,” I said.

“That name's familiar.”

“I was a writer. A journalist. You may have seen my byline.”

“If you hung around the dark corners of the Internet's soul,” Martin said teasingly.

Tiffany ignored him. “My full name is Tiffany Williams. I'm a housewife here in Lorain, Ohio.”

“Not many can afford to be housewives, these days,” I said.

“Yes, it's marvelous. My husband is an engineer. He inherited a lot of money from his grandfather. Said, 'No wife of mine is going to work,' even before we got married. So I dropped out of Community College just a few credits before graduation, but I've never regretted it. Not in 20 years.” She grew wistful. “We have three beautiful daughters, a big family by today's standards...

“Anyway, why is someone in heaven telling me not to trust someone else in heaven whom the President tells me I should trust. I'm curious”

I hesitated. This was much harder than the question she'd come online to ask. “I'm not sure,” I said.

Tiffany giggled, the faint wattles on her neck appearing and disappearing. “You're inside a computer? You're in heaven? And you're not sure?”

“Look,” Martin said, as evenly as he could, although I knew there was some panic in his voice. “You're one person, right? I'm one person. And Dave here is one person.”

“One dead person,” she said, giggling again.

I nodded. “Point taken,” I said. “But still, a person. And I was alive, one of you, not that long ago.”

Tiffany nodded. She seemed to understand that.

So Martin charged on.

“Well, the Doctor is not one person. What we've found is that he is, in fact, thousands of people. Literally thousands. He's a lot of people who came here to escape eternity, then decided didn't want the hassle and that they wanted to die after all. Since since they couldn't do that literally, they gave their souls – their storage, their computing power, their memories, everything in their minds – over to The Doctor.”

“And we don't know how it's affecting him,” I added. “We don't know how to find that out, either. And I don't think the President knows, either. Once The Doctor is approved as a figure in Meat Space, either by Congress or this referendum, I think he would gain control of a lot of government interfaces. He might then absorb those government computers, as he has absorbed souls here. He's very powerful, from a computing point of view.”

“Meat Space?” Tiffany asked.

“Sorry. It's what we in the Cloud Community call the souls on your side of the screen.”

“Meat Space,” She considered that a moment. “I like it. And then what?” Tiffany added. “I mean, what happens if The Doctor is given all this power, all these, what you call them interfaces? If he becomes a factor in Meat Space.”

“And then...we don't know,” I said helplessly. “The point is, neither does the President. Neither do you. Neither does my friend Martin here. No one knows. It's the uncertainty that's the problem.

“Before you give a computer entity real power, an entity that can't die because it has already, shouldn't you give it more than a few days' study?”

Tiffany went quiet. Thoughtful. Martin held up a hand for me to be quiet. We waited, cycle-upon-cycle, for Tiffany to respond.

“You do sort of have a point. I mean, what's the rush, right?” she asked.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Now I have one more question,” she added. “If this Doctor is so powerful, and if he lives up there in heaven with you...”

“The Cloud,” said Martin quickly. “We call this place The Cloud.”

“Sounds like heaven to me,” said Tiffany. “Anyway if you're there, and he's there, and he has all this power and might be dangerous like you say, how are you free to warn me about it?”

Good question, I thought.

But before I could come up with an answer, I felt what seemed like a hand on my shoulder, and the Interface with Tiffany was cut.

Thirteen

The hand belonged to the librarian, but it didn't feel like a librarian's hand. It felt much firmer, more masculine.

“Is there a problem?” asked Martin helpfully.

“You're here to answer questions, not ask them. You need to give the clients a chance to ask what they came here to ask. Don't get into conversations. You need to keep your own ego hidden. You're a computer interface now, nothing more. You exist to serve. Nothing more.”

I felt anger rising in me, but held it in check. “Why do you think people use these interfaces?” I asked the librarian. “To communicate with another person.”

“To get answers they can't get with any other computer interface,” replied the librarian, with a deathly calm. “Remember the First Law. We exist to serve. To serve them. We've been served.”

“When do you get off work?” asked Martin, brazenly taking one of the librarian's hands, and drawing her full attention onto him.

“I'm here 8 hours each day, on a schedule. It's posted.” She handed him what looked like a business card, but which I assumed was a short computer file, the address of the schedule.

Martin nodded. He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly, seeking to hold hers in his. I had been married so long I barely remembered romancing, and I wondered how much Martin knew of it, but he was coming up with it from somewhere. Maybe it's a program I can access, I thought.

“So you're off in a few hours. That's good,” Martin said.

“Why?” the librarian asked, suddenly gone coquettish. There was some serious flirting going on here, I thought. Sparks? Maybe.

“Two reasons,” Martin said reasonably, reminding me suddenly of another Martin, first name Dean. “First, I'd like to share a cup or a glass of something with you after you finish. I'd like to get to know you better.

“Second, I have a question, if you don't mind a mere Cloud member asking for this service. But just consider this between now and when we next meet. If we're all composed of just computer memory, why do you work 8-hour shifts?”

Martin kissed the fingertips of the librarian's hands, and let it fall from him. Then he tapped me on the shoulder, and I slid out of my seat, backing away from her. Soon I was out of her view, and I watched the interaction between Martin and the librarian from a discrete distance.

After a few minutes, the librarian was back behind her desk, talking to a new volunteer, and Martin was back by my side.

“What was that all about?” I asked as we moved away, through what appeared to be hallways toward the street, although I was certain it was all an illusion.

“Intelligence gathering,” said Martin calmly, as we continued walking. “You must admit I asked an important question there. The librarian answers questions, and that's a good one. Why do you think she works for just 8 hours at a stretch, if we don't have bodies that tire?

I had to think about that one. We had stopped near the library's entrance, and I wondered if, when we took that step, I'd be on 6^th Avenue or back in my house.

“Well, even if we don't have bodies, we do have minds that tire. Or whoever runs the Cloud Community wants to give us that illusion, give us all a chance to recharge our mental batteries, keep us from getting bored with the illusion of life. Keep us, in some way, human.”

“Those are all good theories. They're well worth thinking about. Some may be true. But I want to know what the reason is from the perspective of the librarian. What does she do in her 'off-hours,' do you think?”

We stepped forward then, into the library-like calm of a coffee shop on what appeared to be a busy street, in some city I could not recognize. “Milan, Italy,” said Martin, quickly. “I'd never been there, but I studied many, many files and managed to find a way to recreate some parts of it. Unfortunately, we're inside a Starbuck's.”

“I was once in Milan. They do have Starbuck's there. They're very popular and considered exotic. An important American cultural export.”

The coffee table between us held two cups, one large and one small. “I think you like mocha grandes,” Martin said. “I've taken a liking to double espresso.”

The coffee was hot and warming. I settled back in my chair, looked through the windows at a gray day, ancient buildings, people hurrying by, or what appeared to be people. What would happen if I ran outside right now – would the illusion continue from my memory or would I just fade away?

I sighted heavily. “Why do you think I enjoy this?” I asked finally. “Not just the coffee, but the relaxation, and the company. Assuming I have no body, that I am, what did you say, just computer memory?”

“Because, my friend. You have the illusion of a body, and memories, and a life, inside that computer memory. These are some of the more important circuits which are transferred over, the memory and experience of real living. There was never a way to model such things before. Programmers couldn't make the leap. It was too complicated. We're too complicated. We're drawn from algorithms on-the-fly and all we are comes out, including imagination, experience, everything it meant to be alive.” He said that last with relish.

“Was, Mr. Holmes?” I asked, laughing.

Martin shrugged. “So far as I've been able to investigate, is” he said, Then frowning. “But you ask a good question there, Watson. A very good question. Are we alive or just pretending at it?”

We sat a few moments, contemplating what appeared to be the scene outside, sipping our drinks, enjoying the gray Italian day.

“I miss being alive,” I said finally. “I mean, really alive.”

“I don't,” said Martin. “Bodies get sick. They fail. They die. In my case, decades before I was ready for it. Remember, I was disabled. Just like The Doctor. I have some sympathy for his joy at being here. Maybe more than a little.”

“Death, where is thy sting?” I asked.

“Death is peace. Death is silence,” said Martin. “Faced with real immortality, it can even seem attractive. Especially if you know you're going to be part of something larger. Something important, that can do enormous good in the world.”

“A cause like The Doctor?” I said.

Martin nodded ruefully.

“Does everyone come into The Cloud with pure motives, do you think?” I asked suddenly, leaning forward. “I mean, what if you said you wanted to serve, but secretly you just wanted to gain some influence on something larger, that you wanted to serve yourself, and use that greater power for some personal reason. Would the 'personality' in charge have to be aware of that? Could you hide your motivations from the larger Community, and then find a way to twist that larger personality in some other direction?”

Martin and I sat back in our chairs, the coffee ignored, looking at one another for what seemed a very long time, but couldn't have been more than a half-minute.

“Theoretically, it's possible,” Martin replied at last. “What we need to learn, still, is whether your theory is correct, and whether it in fact has happened. Whether The Doctor is here to serve, and whether he's still here to serve humanity, or serve himself.”

“And if he has perverted the interests of the Community, what can we do about it,” I added sadly. “Did you ever wish the really great minds of the past could be here, Martin? DaVinci, Descartes, Ben Franklin?”

“You don't think they'd come up with better answers than we can, do you? After all, in their time they couldn't have even conceived computing. I think therefore I am. Bah!”

He got up then. “But enough of this. Remember, I have a date with our librarian friend. And you should be getting back home yourself. Glad you don't have to sit in an airliner for 8 hours to do it?” He gave me the same look he'd given the librarian, but it didn't work on me.

I just smiled back, walked out the door, and walked back into my living room.

Fourteen

While waiting for Martin to get back from his “date” with the librarian, I had some time to think about the situation.

As an experiment, I walked out of my front door. I looked at my street. Or was it the memory of my street? I walked onto my sidewalk and smelled the air. It was spring. I sneezed. I listened closely and heard the subway, and freight trains in the distance. I heard the distant sound of traffic and, overhead, the sound of airplanes landing at the local airport.

I started walking. Halfway down the block I saw a hand wave through a screen door. My old friend! I headed up his walk, but when I knocked no one answered.

I went back toward my house and saw, across the street, a woman walking with a dog on a leash. I went across the street to greet them and suddenly lost any short-term contact with the memory of their having been there. Were they just a mirage?

And so it went. I could see and feel and smell the real air of home, I could walk all around my neighborhood if I chose, but I didn't tire and I couldn't make a real human connection.

Eternal life isn't that much of a gift if you have to go through it alone. I grieved now, not just for my dear wife Susan, but for all the old neighbors and friends I'd known here. The aged woman whose grandfather had been a slave. The couple that adopted 10 kids, and the one across the street that adopted two of them. There had been days when this street was filled with noise, I remember, children laughing, cars filled with them coming around to see grandma. And there were other days when these same children, now fully grown, drove over to take grandma to her dialysis.

Life changes. Life flows. This isn't life, I thought, but a pale imitation of life.

I felt fortunate, then, to have a friend in Martin, and began to understood why people like the librarian would work the interfaces without a qualm. It was for the human connection, for all the frailties out there, all the unanswered questions that might be answered, and thus ease someone else's way. The interaction with that person, as the questions came and went. Simple conversation.

No wonder the librarian would enforce any rules she was told to enforce, without question. The Interface was her connection to life, to reality.

Life requires connection.

This caused me to think about Tory Blaine again. He must have been so happy to find Sheri here, in what he could only call heaven, to be reunited again with her. And to take her soul into his, to become her, to make her part of him. What an intimacy, I imagined.

Yet it drove him mad, why? Easy to answer now. Because, in making two into one, that one became alone again.

I walked back into my house, and concentrated my mind on the scene in front of me, the door open. Here, coming up the walk, was not my last cat, but my first. A long-hair calico with a bottle-brush tail, who lived happily both inside and out, chasing birds or sunning himself by the window.

But he never lived in this house, I thought. He'd run away long before Susan and I ever came here. Yet here he was, walking back-and-forth against my leg, rubbing his head on my ankle, sharing scents as he'd always done, purring, happy to see me.

I picked him up. He felt just like he should. Was he real? I put him down, and he walked right through my legs, into the house, and into a bedroom as though he owned it. Not my bedroom, my son's bedroom. And since I seldom went in there once my son grew up, the cat was now out of sight. Out of mind? And, being out of mind, was he still real?

Was Mark Twain right? Are we, inside the Cloud, nothing but thought, as he wrote in “The Mysterious Stranger?” Are we nothing but dreams, and the dreamer as well? And is that a life, one worth living?

Things were getting heavy, metaphysical. I went into the kitchen, took out a soda I'd enjoyed in my childhood, but which I'd given up in middle age to keep my weight down. I popped the top, smelled the sugar, and chugged a few mouthfuls down, pushing the refrigerator door closed with one hip as I did so, more like a child than a man.

Or a ghost.

And what about The Doctor? What made him capable of absorbing so many other souls, apparently successfully, while continuing to do his work? What did he have that even the supposedly great Blaine didn't? Academic detachment? The kind a professor has? Or a cop, a nurse? Was it just a case that, since he was an authority figure and those he absorbed were seeking authority, that the absorption became easy, without conflict?

The people The Doctor was absorbing were, so far as I could tell, strangers to him. That would seem to allow a certain ruthlessness in adapting them to his own use. The detachment of a dictator.

What else might be in play? Ambition, perhaps? This idea of Dr. Hoskie's becoming an adviser to the President, of having a formal role in Meat Space, certainly indicated ambition of some sort. What sort? What was his motive? What is his game? What does he want?

I went to my computer, which I knew now was just an interface to internal resources, but those resources should include the bulk of the known Internet. And weren't there literally dozens of film repositories, every one of our greatest TV and movie classics going back more than a century?

Of course. We've seen the future before, I thought. Never accurately, always as a mere reflection of our own time, but we've imagined it. We've imagined many futures.

I dialed up an old movie. “I, Robot,” the Will Smith adaptation of Isaac Asimov's stories. The story, written in the mid-20^th century and set in our own time, was still science fiction in the mid-21^st century because the “positronic brain” did not exist. Does it exist now, I wondered, and is that what I've become, a brain and soul awaiting a robotic body

I became lost in the adventure for a while and tried to forget my larger concerns, as one might take a shower while working on an important paper, seeking a breakthrough in down time.

You can't enclose a real human mind in circuits whose reach is limited like that, I thought. Can you? Where are the circuits of my mind running – in one place or in many?

Or can you, I thought suddenly, as the end credits rolled and the door bell rang.

 

Into the Cloud VII

Nine

“So how is the Doctor,” I asked, in my most avuncular manner, putting on a brave face to hide my fears, and probably succeeding no better than I ever had.

I was entering what Martin had assured me was an exact replica of Dr. Cornwallis' office from Cambridge, a combination of the high-tech and the twee.

Paintings of campus buildings competed for attention with a digital photo frame displaying pictures of former students and family members. The keyboard on the desk, with an iPad propped along one side on it, sat surrounded by wooden knickknacks from around the world. I noticed there were two globes, one with the borders of 1956, one with the borders 60 years later, both of which could be lit and spun. And of course there was the obligatory whiteboard.

Cornwallis sat behind the big desk, but as I entered (from what felt like my own living room) I noticed there were two comfortable lounge chairs in front of it with a small tea table between them. So I sat down, watching carefully as the professor himself, faced away from me, looked out the “window” onto the campus grounds, lost in thought.

A few moments after I sat down the door seemed to open, and Martin walked in to join us. Now he was wearing a sweater with elbow patches, a dress shirt and tie, brown slacks and black Rockports, his concept of what a college professor might don.

A voice suddenly appeared in my head. “If you're trying to make an impression, make yourself part of the scenery. I'll tell you how later,” the voice in my head said. In fact, I realized at once, it was Martin's voice, speaking to me so that Dr. Cornwallis couldn't hear him. I looked toward him as he sat down and he gave me a sudden look with his eyes, the kind that tells the viewer to keep their mouth shut.

After a very long five minutes during which Dr. Cornwallis brewed and served us English tea with milk and sugar cubes, Dr. Cornwallis seemed ready for my first question.

“What 'cha find out,” I asked cheerily.

He sighed. “Americans. You always come right to the point,” he said heavily. Martin gave me a dirty look. (I thought I'd waited.)

“This is excellent tea” Martin asked brightly. The service was detailed, the cups unchipped, with a wooden tea caddy in the middle of the table and a small kettle that seemed to keep the water eternally hot without electricity.

“I have always liked things light and sweet,” the professor said, and Martin nodded, serving himself this time, adding some milk to his cup before pouring from the pot then placing two cubes on the saucer beside the cup, along with a small spoon.

“Bless you, Mr. Bexar,” Cornwallis said. Martin sat back, stirred one of the cubes in with his spoon, and gave me a grave look the said, simply, “patience.”

After a few more interminable minutes, with half the tea gone from Cornwallis' cup, Martin finally came to our point. (Is this what they mean by eternity, I asked myself as I waited.) “So how is the Doctor? Well, I trust?”

Cornwallis waved his hand in front of his face, back-and-forth, as though swatting a fly. “Fine, fine. Fine.”

He paused a beat to compose himself. “It was a little strange, at first, to see him standing, even walking, as though that were nothing. I'd never seen him before except in that damned chair, with the voice box, and his head tilted to one side because he couldn't lift it. Yet there he was, walking around like you or I, hale and hearty, with no thought to what I might think about it.”

“Well, he has been in the Cloud for quite a few years now,” I ventured. “And getting into a chair so he'll be seen as crippled for an old friend might not have occurred to him. Even as an illusion meant to please you.”

“He might also have wanted you to see him that way, so you would see the benefits of the Cloud Community again, see how easily you can make your own reality here,” suggested Martin helpfully.

“Yes, yes,” Cornwallis said, waving his hand again. “And I understand he has other considerations now, other than science. I can't remember him ever being so excited about the life of the world before. I mean, uh, what we call Meat Space.”

“So he's well and active,” said Martin brightly, without betraying any feeling about what he had just heard. “What else?”

“Did he seem to be himself?” I asked.

“That was just it,” Dr. Cornwallis said, his face now contorted, trying to remember and get the memories down correctly. “Yes, and no.

“Yes, he was in many ways the man I knew once. But, no, he was also much more. And he was something else besides.”

Martin gave me the “shut up” look again, and we both waited for Cornwallis to continue.

“You know he had an absolutely brilliant mind. It is, if anything, even more powerful than it once was. His memories of past debates were sharp and precise. But there was also something missing...”

“Empathy?” I asked, finally, unable to let the tension continue.

“Something like that. But, no, that's not the right word. I mean, he had empathy, for me, for Cambridge, for the whole Meat Space world. He even called it that, as though he were describing France. Meat Space, Meat Space. Strange, both to hear him speak and use such vernacular. He'd always been so formal....” Cornwallis' voice trailed off, then he suddenly reached into a jacket pocket. “Oh,” he finally said, pulling out a memory stick and tossing it toward Martin, who caught it without spilling any of his drink.

“The question remains, is he dangerous now?” I asked. “Did you see any signs that his increased power has gone to his head? Any traces of, say, megalomania?

Cornwallis shook his head again. “No. And, again, yes. Maybe. I mean, what if you or I had the kind of power he's accumulated. We'd all have to change in some small ways. I kept wondering during our conversation if his full attention was really focused on me at all. I don't know, gentlemen, with 8,000 souls, 8,000 sets of memories, 8,000 lives and knowledge banks under his control, was I seeing all of him? Or just that small part of him he wanted me to see?”

“There's one way to find out,” Martin said, putting down his teacup and producing an iPad from under the chair, then running his hands and fingers over it as though it were a piano.

“You say you arrived there around 12:50 GMT and left him at 13:25?” Cornwallis nodded wanly, as Martin's hands flew over the screen, before lifting it so we could see.

“Here's a record of every public record activity he engaged in between those time checks.” He passed the tablet across the table toward Cornwallis.

Dr. Cornwallis looked at it wearily, then poked his finger at the screen and flicked it, a digital expression I took to mean he was scanning a long file. “There's a lot more to him than what I saw,” he said at last. “I can't draw any firm conclusions from it.” But it was clear his initial findings were upsetting him, still.

I saw Martin bite his bottom lip, finally deciding to cut through Cornwallis' ramblings in a way I had wanted to do since we walked in. “What are your, uh, personal conclusions?” he asked quietly, placing a hand on Dr. Cornwallis' knee.

“It's way above me. I just don't know the answer. But maybe there's someone we can ask.” Dr. Cornwallis picked up an old-style phone handset from the desk behind him, one I had not noticed before. I watched him dial some numbers in the 20^th century way, digits spinning around a central core, each one making a tiny clicking sound. Then I saw him speaking, in a surprisingly obsequious manner. After a few moments he finally placed the phone back on its cradle.

“Tory will see us for 5 minutes.”

“When?” I asked.

“Excuse me, in 5 minutes.”

“Tory?” Martin asked. “As in...”

“Yes,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “Tory Blaine. My former Prime Minister. And, in the years after he left Downing Street, a personal friend.”

Ten

The great Tory Blaine, it turned out, lived on in The Cloud Community in a replica of his old digs at 10 Downing Street. He had left office almost 30 years before. Curious.

While I had my house, and Martin a single room, Tory Blaine's image of existence included not just a full-scale replica of the Prime Minister's residence but the front porch outside Number 10, and the requirement that we knock before seeing a receptionist.

It was this receptionist that was our first indication something strange was going on. Because he looked and talked just like Graham Chapman, the Monty Python front man who had died, of AIDS, in the 1980s. Not even the Chapman of “Life of Brian” either, but the one who performed in the original BBC show, around 1970. From all this I knew he couldn't really be here. He was a figment of Blaine's imagination, performing in a perpetual “Argument Clinic.”

“Stupid git,” he said as we entered. The same line he used in the sketch. I shook my head ruefully and looked over at Martin.

“We're here to see the Prime Minister,” Dr. Cornwallis said helpfully, accepting the faux-receptionist as a real assistant.

“I suppose you're expected,” the fake Chapman said irritably.

“As much as any man might be considered expected,” I said hopefully.

“Oh, very good. Very good indeed,” he said, now even angrier. “Everyone who walks through is a comedian. My cross to bear...”

I couldn't help but smile remembering Chapman's later star turn in “Life of Brian.” “Quite,” I said.

One thing had changed in the life of our host, I noticed then.

Rather than having us cool our heels, or watch others rush in-and-out, the Man Himself entered from the other side of the room, dressed as though meeting the Russian ambassador, smile painted on, hand outstretched. “Tory Blaine,” he said amiably. “It's very good to see you.” He shook our hands vigorously, hand-over-hand, as though we were in fact Very Important Personages indeed and an Express photographer were just over our shoulders, all this over the head of the faux-Chapman, who gave off a parrot-like squawk.

“OK, then,” said Martin, backing away a bit. Blaine ignored it.

“Mr. Prime Minister,” said Dr. Cornwallis.

“Oh, would you like to sit down? Some tea?” Blaine indicated some comfortable furnishings in a sitting room done up to look like his old dig's waiting area. We sat in the side chairs offered, and a tea service instantly appeared before us.

While we sat down, Blaine remained upright. He was pacing the floor, I thought a bit nervously. Dr. Cornwallis motioned toward the faux-Chapman, Blaine, noticing the gesture in his friend, hurridly snapped his fingers, and the Pythonesque “secretary” disappeared.

“You said you wanted to talk about The Doctor,” Blaine said then, getting right to the point, and pulling out a handkerchief to mop his brow.

“You know him?” Dr. Cornwallis said.

“Oh, yes. Splendid man. Splendid. I tried to have him knighted, in life. In 2004, if I remember correctly. Back in, uh, what you call 'Meat Space.'” As he said this last he did quote marks with his fingers, something I never remembered seeing him do while he was alive. And his face – was that a twitch in one eye?

“I didn't know that,” said Dr. Cornwallis, calmly, friendly. “That's very interesting. And I take it you've met him since, uh, moving here?”

“Of course. I know everyone important in The Cloud Community. And there's no one more important than Dr. Emile Hoskie,” said Blaine, a bit more easily.

“Why is that, do you suppose?” asked Martin evenly. “Why is there no one in the Cloud more important than The Doctor? Even, say, someone such as yourself. After all, he was just a scientist. You were a leader of the Free World.”

Blaine chuckled nervously. “No one does as much good for the world” he said in a rush. “No one else is so well-equipped to serve, or so ready to do so.

“Really?” Martin said. “What services do you believe The Doctor provides?”

I saw Blaine's hands fluttering around his waist, betraying a struggle he hid from his face as any politician might. “The research he has continued to do, for example,” he said. “Do you have any idea how close he is to finding a way to exceed light speed in space, for instance?”

“How close? Martin pressed.

“Oh, very close,” Blaine said evenly, sure of his ground. “There are now 100 major projects, in various fields of science, to which The Doctor is now a major contributor, if not THE major contributor.”

“That's strange,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “I worked for the man. The man I knew was focused solely on cosmological math. It was his one and only passion.” The way he said “one and only” stood as a challenge.

“Oh, of course, but now he is so much more.” Blaine moved as if to sit down, and instantly a chair like our own appeared beneath him. He was giving Dr. Cornwallis that earnest look he gave reporters back in life, as though he could convince through conviction. I noticed he also wasn't continuing the pretense we had before, as though we were all meeting in Meat Space. Rather he appeared to be adapting ideas of control from Meat Space to his present plane. This impressed me.

“You say he is so much more than the man I knew in life,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “That's what I wanted to ask you about,” said Dr. Cornwallis. “My question is this. Is he the same man now as he was then?”

Blaine hesitated again, as though calculating something. Then his eyes lit up, the answer clearly there. “He is infinitely more,” he said. “So much more.”

“Because he has absorbed the souls of so many others,” I asked.

“Yes,” he said quickly. “And successfully.”

“It can be unsuccessful?” asked Martin.

Dr. Cornwallis seemed to see something in his Prime Minister's eyes. “It can be less than successful, I take it” he said.

“Yes,” said Blaine. “It can.”

Cornwallis pounced on what he'd seen, what we hadn't seen. “You tried it?” he said, like a doctor at a sick patient's bedside.

“With who?” I asked quickly, unable to control myself.

Blaine's eyes welled up with tears, something else I'd never seen before from him, either now or in life. “Sheri.” He said just the one word, very quietly.

“With your wife?” I said, a little too loudly or vehemently than I wanted. “Why?”

Dr. Cornwallis answered me, slowly, looking to Blaine's eyes for approval of what he was saying. “First, because you felt it the ultimate intimacy, and you were both in love, even when critics tried to tear you apart. But also, possibly, because you wanted to be powerful, and knew you couldn't achieve real power until you grew larger. As The Doctor had?”

Blaine's face contorted then. He was unable to contain himself, so wracked was he by guilt and grief. He began crying into his hands.

“How does he do it?” Blaine asked at last, breaking the tension that had come upon all of us. “How does he manage with all those souls inside him? What's his secret?”

“Compartmentalization?” asked Martin, rhetorically. A long word, but a good guess, I thought.

I tried to find some kinder words for it. “Sheri was your wife,” I suggested. “The Doctor is incorporating strangers, and perhaps that lets him be more, can I say, ruthless? Disassociated? Detached, the way a policeman or soldier or doctor who has seen much suffering in his life must be in order to function?”

Blaine's face lit up then in a strange way, and he pounded his fist into his palm. “Of course. How could I have been so foolish? How could we have been so foolish.”

Martin looked at me and mouthed, “She was part of it?”

“Is there any way to reverse the process?” asked Dr. Cornwallis.

Martin shook his head. “Once a soul is incorporated into another, I'm told the original is wiped, erased. So The Doctor told me when I inquired about it, even before the procedure. The contracts on this are explicit on that point, anyway. He tried to warn me...”

The blubbering began anew, then stopped suddenly.

“Maybe The Doctor has a way out,” said Blaine hopefully. “He's so wise, after all.”

“Is he?” asked Dr. Cornwallis.

“Oh, yes,” said Blaine. “He is the wisest man in the world, alive or dead. Look at all the good he has done for the world since he has been here. Think of all those souls he controls, all that knowledge, all that raw power!”

“You make it sound like it's a good thing,” said Martin. “Power, I mean.”

“Control of other peoples' souls,” I said. “It's been a fixture in horror fiction for generations.” I was sorry for this man. “Mr. Prime Minister?” I leaned close toward him. “How do you think Sheri feels, having given all the power of her soul to you? Is there something you regret in that?”

Blaine's face became a mask, a swirl of competing emotions. The cheery control he had exhibited in life, and through the beginning our interview, was long gone.

From his chair, Dr. Cornwallis was examining the man's face with more knowledge of him than he ever had in life, and his look was one of utter horror and contempt. Only Martin seemed unmoved by all this, standing off from us, looking at us each in turn, waiting for the moment to pass.

“Yes,” said Dr. Cornwallis at last. “I think our interview is at an end, Mr. Prime Minister. With your leave we should depart.”

Blaine did not move.

We stood and left the room like wraiths, going right through the door, leaving Tory Blaine to his private hell.

Eleven

How does one travel within the Cloud, when every action happens at the speed of thought, and where there is no real “there” there.

The question occurred to me suddenly as I sat in my “house,” I looked out the window, and I studied the matter. Was I really still “alive” at all or was this, in fact, merely a half-life. Was I, like the faux-Chapman in Blaine's office, just a ghost in the machine?

Certainly everything around me looked and felt real. This desk, that chair. I tapped the window pane. It felt real enough.

Then I tried to wish it all away. I said to myself, let me see where I am, really.

And I saw nothing. I heard nothing, save the voice inside my own head. It was like being asleep, struggling to wake. Only I remembered how that felt. It was called sleep apnea. I was told once it could be fatal. When I struggled to wake then, I remembered, my breath came in gasps and I must have cried out. Because Susan, dear Susan, would nudge me, the spell would be broken, and I would suddenly find myself beside her, in our bed.

With that thought, I awoke. Or seemed to. My bed had appeared, in our bedroom, and I was in it, safe under the covers. I turned toward the mirror opposite me, the one I had dressed before for so many years.

What I saw was a man who appeared to be about 40, maybe a little more handsome than I was then, although still bald. There were just a few artful wisps of white in my mustache, hints of what age had in store, what experience had bought.

I stared at the reflection, and the wisps disappeared. Hair appeared on top of my head, sparsely at first, then fuller, moment by moment. I was growing younger before my eyes. I wiped a hand across my eyes, felt hair there, thin but real. I let go of the illusion and returned to what I had been a few moments before, reaching the covers across, standing up before the mirror.

I think, therefore I am, I thought. But am I, really?

I certainly think, I thought. But I appear to be nothing more than thoughts. I can compel physical things to appear to happen, using those thoughts. I can create a virtual life for myself, out of my past, my knowledge, and I can interact with others who choose to enter my fantasy life.

But is it just a fantasy life? Or is it real? And what if I wish to interact with someone whose artificial life is inside another server, around the world? How much of me travels there, how much remains behind? Or am I just reaching queries into a server – http colon slash slash I think therefore I am dot org.

As I stood before my mirror, the doorbell rang. I heard it. “Ding-dong!”

I walked again all the way through what looked-and-felt like my house – hallway, kitchen, hallway, dining room – to what looked-and-felt like my front door, behind whose glass I saw Martin Bexar, with a big grin splitting his face.

I opened the door, and a rush of warm, moving air entered the room with him. I smelled pollen. It was a beautiful spring day outside, and I saw behind Martin into my yard, where there were buds on the dogwoods, and where I suddenly saw what looked like people walking down the sidewalk.

“There's no place like home, is there?” he asked, walking past me.

I stood by the open door, still transfixed by the scene.

“Feels real, doesn't it?” Martin asked. “Well, it is. As real as anything can be. As real as life.

“Or is it?” Still smiling, Martin waved his hand again across my face. The door shut against my will, and now I saw that on the other side of the glass there was snow on the ground, and that the same trees I'd seen budding a moment before were now lifeless.

“We make our own reality, my friend,” Martin said, then. “What's real in the Cloud Community is what we choose to make real. It's free will. It's serious magic. You think therefore it is, you don't and it isn't anymore. Pretty cool, huh?”

I turned to face him, and suddenly he was in his wheelchair, crippled and fat. As he'd been when we first met early in the century, suffering even then from the Parkinson's that would finally take his life. Yet still smiling.

“If it's in your mind it can be made manifest,” he said and, as I looked, the wheelchair disappeared and he stood before me again, straight and whole.

“Lesson over,” he said suddenly. “Now that the magic show is done, let's talk about The Doctor,” he added, taking a seat in my most comfortable chair, urging me to sit on the couch, or lie upon it if I chose.

I sat down on the couch, a bit woodenly.

Martin noticed my discomfort. “We make our own reality,” he said. “We always have. It's just like your parents said it would be. Our reality can be a dream, or a nightmare. Cornwallis made his reality a dream, Blaine chose to make his a nightmare.

“The question we all have to ask in the Cloud is the same one we ask in life. It's just easier to see here, on the surface of what we do rather than the depths of what we are, because we are what we do.

“So which will it be? The dream or the nightmare? Dave Blanks or Tory Blaine?”

The mention of Blaine jolted my mind awake. We needed to discuss him.“No,” I said, returning to myself. “Blaine did something physical, within the Cloud Community, absorbing the soul of his wife, which changed his reality in ways he can't undo.”

Another English tea service, like Blaine's own, now appeared on a coffee table that sat between us. Martin poured us both a cup, putting a little milk in his, some sugar in mine, and handed me the cup. “Yes,” he said. “You are beginning to see things here as they really are. That's good.”

I came back to the point. “How do we change it?” I asked.

Martin sat back thoughtfully, slowly stirring his tea, then placing the little spoon next to the cup and taking a sip before answering.

“Here is what you know,” he said. “You know that, here in the Cloud Community, souls can absorb one another. You have seen the damage absorbing a single other soul can do. You also know the Doctor has absorbed many, many souls.”

“Meat Space” I said suddenly, taking a sip of the tea, feeling the warmth going down my throat, the familiar slightly sweet taste of it on my tongue. “I know where I am. I know what the problem appears to be with The Doctor. But I can't judge whether this is for good or for ill unless I can learn how the real world sees what's happened here.

“You see,” I continued, “even if what is happening here seems bad to us, seems evil to us, it could be having powerful, positive results on the outside, just as Blaine suggested. The Doctor is now the smartest computer ever built, the smartest soul there ever was. He's capable of doing great good in the world.”

“He is also capable of doing great evil. Or something in between.” Great ambivalence?

“Before I do anything, assuming I can do something, Martin, I have to know which it is. Do you have any answers in your magic hat for measuring a man's soul?”