Dana Blankenhorn

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 – https 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?”

Into the Cloud VI

Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin looked a bit dumbfounded.

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

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

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

The man looked troubled.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cloud was the Out.

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

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

But I'll never know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought about them many times.

 

Into the Cloud V

Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It didn't work, as I remember.”

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

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

Martin nodded. I was following what he was saying.

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

“And he became the Doctor?” I said.

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

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

“Who?”

“The hint is in the name. Dr. H.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But eventually...”

He shrugged his shoulders abjectly, in response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six

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

So I excused myself.

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

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

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

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

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

Worth a try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingo.

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

Most had been assimilated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded, non-commitally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So, what can I do for you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You or him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I exist to serve,” I said.

Into the Cloud IV

Four

“Now let's talk about autonomy.”

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

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

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

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

I asked for an explanation.

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

“Meld?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or Dave Martin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You've got it.”

“Most of it, save this.”

“Go ahead.”

“Make me a sandwich.”

“Huh?”

“Sudo make me a sandwich.”

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

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

“So?” Martin asked.

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

Martin sat back in his chair, the game forgotten.

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

“How so?” Martin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah,” he concluded as the lunch came.

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

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

“Some people like that?”

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

“Meeting new people?”

“Or, in your case, old friends.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not closely.”

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

“With no obligation.”

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

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

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

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

“But even that can pale.

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

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

“When I died, you mean?”

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

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

Message received.

 

Into the Cloud III

Three

Go? What is this go of which you speak?

All this food had simply appeared as if by magic. “How do I go anywhere,” I asked?

“The same way you got the food,” said Martin. “You will it.”

“How like a God,” I said.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “I've actually given this some study.

“A God can fully define his own environment. He makes the rules. We learn the rules, and act in ways that may have seemed god-like in life, but we're not Gods in fact. We're just living in a different ecosystem under different rules, and with different needs. We consume electricity like air, we need it to survive. Compute space is like our universe – we can't live outside it. Software is like food, it defines all we can do and what we can be.”

I gave that some thought. “Then we may sleep,” I said. “Sleep gives the system time to do diagnostics on us, make certain no computer viruses are living inside us. Just as we process our day by sleeping at night, the system can maintain us only when we turn off.”

Martin shrugged. “I hadn't thought of it that way, but you may be right.

“So what do we do now?”

“We decide where to go, and when.”

“Let me sleep on that,” I said.

 

It was time.

The best analog to my feeling was that of going out into a strange town for the first time. A really strange town, like Hong Kong. When you're from Iowa. You've never been outside it. And you don't know the language.

Or maybe this was worse. I was going into a place that wasn't a place, from what felt, for now, like a real place. The only real place I'd been to since my “death.”

The implications were stark, and chilling. I was truly going to be leaving my body, living only in my mind and in senses Martin promised would be there for me. Promised. Would I be able to deliver?

“How do we go about this?” I asked nervously.

Martin was nonchalant. “Since this is your first time, we'll just open that door,” he said. “Just remember you can come back here at any time by focusing on something inside it. It's just like going into Oz, and you're Dorothy.”

I panicked. My mind didn't see Oz. I couldn't be the Wizard. My mind saw the void Warren Beatty walked through in “Heaven Can Wait.”

“But it's just a white room.” I almost screamed it. Was that blood I was tasting, sensing, from my fingernails digging into my hands?

Martin's response was infuriating. He chuckled. “It's simple enough. Think of that veal parmigiana. Tastes and smells are better memory anchors than sight anyway.” He opened the door.

We walked out. Into...nothing?

No, wait a moment. Not nothing. Something, all right, but nothing I could see, only hear and sense. A cacophony of sound without sights. I felt Martin's presence next to me, then saw what seemed to be his disembodied head before me. Like the Cheshire Cat.

“I know you're jumping into the deep end, but think,” the head said. “Think of where you want to be, and concentrate on who or what you want to see.”

“The center,” I said. “I want to see what the center of this looks like.”

I imagined then that it looked like the center of the world from the movie Tron.

“That's an optical illusion,” Martin said cheerfully. “Let me demonstrate.” He stood beside me like a magician, one arm crooked into mine, the other outspread toward the scene before us. “If you prefer it can look like this.” The scene shifted, it became Times Square in New York. “Or this.” It shifted again, became the scene outside of a Tokyo train station. “Or this.” Now I was in the center of a sprawling pack of rats, which disappeared as quickly as it appeared, leaving me back in Tron.

“The point is, the world you visualize may be an illusion to everyone else. It's all a product of your mind. Everything you just saw or experienced is something you lived, either directly or in a movie you saw, a book you read.”

He was right. That wasn't the Times Square of 2037, but one from 1972, one I'd seen. That wasn't the Tokyo of 2037, but one from 2009. Again something I'd seen. Damn. Why did I let Susan take me to see Willard?

The good news is that you choose your own illusion. Choice is important, because I know what you're thinking, what if you choose a nightmare? Just don't make that your conscious choice. If it occurs, wipe it away as you would a bad dream.

Once you become accustomed to things, as I am, the illusion becomes a little less firm. What you'll eventually 'see,' although not with your eyes, are what will look like small shapes of intensified energy, each representing a different mind, a different soul, that has come through recently.”

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Most of them are working.”

“Working?” I asked. “Working at what? And why?”

“These are collections of thought patterns, real minds like yours, engaged in input-and-output functions with the core that you're sensing all around us. That's why the scene is crowded – a busy street, a mass of rats. I could make it a beehive if you wanted.” I shook my head. No thanks.

“The degree to which someone's own thoughts are connecting with the core, the amount of attention they're giving that connection, defines how close they are to it, how much of them you can sense, the intensity of their shape. You'll learn to distinguish these shapes, to sense someone being at your side, as I am, or brushing by you...” I felt what was almost a breeze passing by.

“So all these are reporting in to some center,” I said. “And who or what is the center?”

“Not what, any more. Who. For now, let's call it The Doctor,” said Martin, with somewhat less surety.

I felt his presence on mine then, felt it moving, leaving my arm, and I followed it. I felt my senses adjust, creating a scene, which I took to be a large library reading room. Hundreds of forms gradually reshaped themselves into actual people, most of them about my age, male and female, looking intently at individual screens and engaged in typing, reading whatever was on their screens, or talking at the screens. As I watched, those who were most actively engaged seemed to grow telephone headsets, like operators standing by in a help desk.

“I've adjusted this to a view you can understand and accept it more easily,” Martin said quietly. “It's a work space. Each one of those screens is connected to another screen in Meat Space, which is our name for the outside world. Each figure you see here is a mind like yours, working on some problem with an outside researcher, or a computer program, something in Meat Space that has accessed the Cloud for help with a problem.”

“What is that I see on the screens?” I asked.

“The screens you see are each an exact replica of what a researcher is describing on the other side, or what a program there is displaying” he said. “It's reversed by software, so you can see what the person opposite is seeing, not the mirror image.

“They could be showing you a representation of a complex structure being designed by an architect. Or a molecule being designed by a scientist. It could be DNA. Every type of academic research can be represented through the display software, because researchers in all fields come here when they're stumped.

“But here's what's cool. Because everyone here has access to the larger resources of the Cloud, or in an emergency direct messaging to The Doctor, every soul in here can understand each screen in front of them.”

“So every one of us knows the answer to everything?” I asked.

Martin chuckled. “Not exactly. “But every soul here can interface, and thus each one of us can mediate, through the Community, between Cloud resources and the outside world. We don't have the answers, but if they can be calculated using the Cloud we can find the answers.

“Instead of people having to access a computer through an understanding of the computer, they're accessing it through an understanding given to them by a human mind, mediated by resources that are behind them. They give what they can, the other side gives what they can, so what's on each screen is the common understanding of what the person on the other side wants to have done, as the one on this side conceives it.

“It's a tremendous advance on the human-machine interface, Dave, because the Cloud has made the human-interface into a machine-human-human-machine interface. And that's what we do here. It's fascinating work.”

“What do you mean, that's what we do?” I asked.

“Well, it's one of the things we do,” he said. “It's what passes here for work. We act as guides for people on the outside, first as general librarians, as you see here, then within an area of specialization, whatever we choose to concentrate on. The interface will jump between souls when other human expertise is needed, just as you won't actually see when someone's help desk question is escalated in a call center – it's just the lower-level person may get up and get some coffee.

“Since you spent so much of your life online, and I know you have broad interests, I suspect you'll enjoy a job in front-line support, at first, just as a way to get your feet wet.”

“Martin, is this all reality is, just one giant call center?” Instantly the view shifted from that of a great library to an Indian-based software support center, only with people from every land working the phones.

“It could be,” he said. “You can look at it this way. The point is that your view of it is what you conceive it to be.” I felt him holding what I took to be my hand. “Or you may prefer to think of it this way.”

Instantly the view changed to a series of corporate boardrooms, all viewed from overhead, as we zoomed down into one and “stood” invisibly in a corner. There, at the head of the large, polished oak table stood a flat screen on a stand, and a keyboard. Behind that interface – which had suddenly gone translucent – sat a man who looked like Steve Jobs. Or was it a woman who looked like Judi Dench? Michael Caine? Warren Buffett? Shirley MacLaine? As I thought of the names, the face morphed into the person I was thinking of.

“Who is it?” I asked finally, flustered

“Who do you want it to be?” Martin replied calmly. “As I said, everything is just a visualization tool, an interface between your conception of what is happening and what is actually happening deep in a machine. Which is really just a dance of electrons on chips, and fiber cables, densely packed and connected into thousands of ports through the Internet you first worked on as a young reporter.

“Of course, that's the way it is in Meat Space as well,” he added. “It's only the interface controlled by our minds that determines the scene we think we perceive. Dogs can't see color, children can hear pitches higher than adults, insects and birds all use what would seem to us to be different senses in different ways, and perceive the world to be quite different in their own minds. Reality is just its representation, in the end.”

He sighed heavily. “The images you see, the sounds you hear, they're just what your internal computations decide they will be. They could be anything. Because, if you look at anything too deeply, they're nothing.

I suddenly felt very tired. “Let's go,” I said. I closed my eyes

 

I opened my eyes. I was back in my room.

My real room. Back home. The home I'd lived in most of my life. The room I'd shared with Susan all those decades. The red paint on the wall, the bookshelves whose contents only went up in value after e-books took over early in the century, a painting done by my great aunt a century earlier. The windows, sunlight streaming in. It was 2008, and I was waking from a nap.

It was all a dream, I thought. A wave of relief swept over me.

Then I saw, sitting on the side of the room where the entrance to my bathroom should have been, Martin Bexar. He had one eye on a TV that had never been in that room during my lifetime, and one eye on me.

“You're feeling better?” he asked. The TV disappeared.

“I was, until I saw you,” I said. Then he disappeared, replaced by the old bathroom entrance which had been there in 2008. The cell phone sitting on my dresser rang. I picked it up. There was Martin's picture and a phone number, staring back at me. I switched it on.

“It's not necessary,” I said sadly.

Instantly the phone disappeared, along with the entrance to the bathroom, and there Martin stood, at the foot of my bed.

“You've had quite a shock,” Martin said. “I threw you in the deep end, you took all your mind could stand, and then you shut down.

“I thought I could do this alone.” He sighed. “But I can see they were right. I can't.”

Do what alone, I thought.

But, just as suddenly, we were not alone. A beautiful woman stood next to Martin, dressed in a diaphanous gown showing every curve of her body. A Roman goddess.

Shocked, and not a little bit embarrassed at what I was feeling down below, I pulled the covers up to my chin. “You look just like Sophie Napoli,” I strangled out. “But you can't be.”

“Why can't I be?” the second apparition said. “Because Sophie Napoli died in the year 2026? Because she was an old woman by then?”

She looked at Martin. “Did he just get here?”

“It was just a cycle ago,” Martin said to her. “But as I was just saying, I kind of threw him in the deep end of understanding here. Perhaps he wasn't ready. Perhaps it was a mistake.”

Sophie brushed Martin's arm, and his body warmed to her. “He's my friend,” he said. “It's the first time I've brought someone new to The Cloud. Forgive me.”

“I understand,” she said softly, patting his hand, and in a voice that made my knees weak. She looked just like she had in Desire Under the Elms. She'd made it at age 24, her dark smoldering beauty at its height, eyes that drove right into my soul, and a body that...sproing! The dead don't think like that, I thought. The dead don't have that. Do they?

She just smiled her broadest smile. “Thank you so much for remembering me,” she said with a laugh. “Now let's see if we can't bring you down to something truly real. ” I could swear she purred it as she moved toward me.

Martin disappeared, and the gown came off.

A half hour later, as I reckoned such things, I lay in bed crying in Sophie's arms, my mind wracked with newly-found guilt. “Sixty years of marriage and I'd never even thought of that!”

She lifted my chin, from her naked breast to stare into my eyes, my eyes staring deep into those eyes. “You were a good man. You are a good man. I wish I'd met someone like you when I first owned this body. My life would have been so much better!

“But here's the truth. Your wife is gone and, technically, so are you. So am I. There is no cheating life in death” And with that, I was holding a white, long-haired cat in my arms.

The cat spoke. “What is this besides heaven?” Sophie's voice asked.

I tried to smile, but only found myself crying harder.

The cat disappeared. And now it was Susan who was standing by the bed. As beautiful as the day we'd met, with her Coke bottle glasses, those light blue eyes, the rounded face and impossibly long auburn hair.

“How can I possibly be gone when I'm standing right here? How can you possibly cheat on me when we just made love” she asked. The voice was hers, but the words were not.

“How? What?”

The woman I recognized as my wife now knelt by my side. “So long as you exist, and you exist here, I exist. So long as you can imagine me, I can be here with you. Whenever you want me, or need me. Just call for me. Imagine me. I'm here.”

“No, you're not. But thanks, Sophie.” Instantly Susan became the movie star, and I felt disappointed.

“You forget. I am missing a husband.” The thought came to me. Carlo Rozzini, the director and love of Sophie Napoli's life, had passed away in 2007, almost two decades before the Cloud came into being.

“We all have people we miss, friends and lovers and family who didn't make it here. There will be millions more such people, because the Cloud is still a western upper class affectation, an exception and not the rule.

“So we have much work to do,” Sophie said, holding my hand in hers and holding my attention with her eyes again.

“We need to serve mankind so this life can become the rule. We need to be here for one another so we can be here for others. We must make every soul feel welcome here to build a future that can hold the whole world. That is what I believe.

I nodded, grieving over for the moment, approaching the stage of acceptance.

“Just one request. Can I see Susan again?” I smiled then. Sophie smiled. And all at once, it was Susan who smiled.

“Any time, lover.”

 

 

Into the Cloud II

Two

What does it feel to go into the Cloud?

Like nothing, really. Like going to sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“OK,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It's amazing.”

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

“You ever play the Last Meal Game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was good to hear.

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