interiormonoblog

A cosmonaut awakens in a drifting spacecraft that he cannot remember how to operate. He could be forgiven for his nervous ineptitude on this day, what with that brain surgery, and his having broken the cosmic speed limit, and having killed his dream date, and having attained his dream job, all on the same day a comet was scheduled to extinguish life on Earth.

This short story was completely rewritten to make it into the humorous prologue to a longer work-in-progress. It is available on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook websites for a trifle.

Here’s a preview:

Earth was gone, as was the Moon and the comet, all having vanished in the few seconds it had taken for the ship to blast out of orbit and cut power. Mikhail was not yet aware that his home planet was missing, because he could not remember how to operate the ship’s telescope. Who is Mikhail? Well for starters, he was at the helm of said ship when its A-drive had expanded space at many times the speed of light in a narrow path toward his destination, Neptune, whose lovely shade of blue matched the color of his eyes.

His eyes were his best feature, perhaps the only feature that might have attracted the woman he had fallen in love with, the beauteously buff Dr. Amber Lee Hart, exobiologist, one of the
cosmonauts he had personally selected for this mission in his capacity as Mission Director. Having murdered her in pursuit of his life’s dream to be a cosmonaut, the 53 year old, portly, and dangerously de-conditioned bureaucrat of Rosaviakosmos, the Russian space agency, was able to take her place as a disembodied mind uploaded to a computer in the spacecraft currently spinning slowly in the neighborhood of Neptune.

Try to stay with me, the story gets pretty complicated, but since we’re talking about the extinction of life on Earth and the propagation of human DNA throughout the universe, it is well worth the effort. You may scoff and say that the story is already unbelievable because, for example, only in pulp science fiction, not real life, would it be possible for Mikhail’s ship to have traveled faster than the speed of light. And you would be right. That speed limit applies to objects that are moving, not space that is expanding toward a new and distant location and incidentally carrying along with it whatever objects happened to be at its original location, like Mikhail’s ship. The Alcubierre drive moved space. Mikhail’s ship remained stationary within its protective bubble. Never moved an inch, which suited him just fine.

That flight was smoother than Aeroflot.

After his ship, which bore the name Gardener on its hull but should have been renamed the Walter Mitty or perhaps the
Raskolnikov when he confiscated it from Amber Lee, emerged from the bubble in which it made its first four billion kilometer “jump,” ending up next to a gas planet that the A-drive would soon repurpose as fuel for the next leg of the journey, to Proxima Centuri, Mikhail had found himself disoriented and light-headed. Whew! As he fought his way through the daze, he asked the obvious questions, Where am I? and Who am I? but was unable to answer them.

He vaguely recalled having been told to expect such symptoms as an after effect of his recent brain surgery, but it still frightened him to actually be experiencing them. He forced himself to calmly take the questions one at a time. Where am I? He had only to peer out a porthole, or hull cam, to answer that one. Near Neptune. Who am I? That was more challenging. After a struggle that could be likened to extracting an impacted molar from the back of his brain, he produced the name Mikhail. It had taken the better part of the first hour of the mission for him to remember that much. But gradually he was able to recall scenes from his life.

They replayed shakily, as if an old Betamax videotape machine were mangling them. He watched images from his boyhood, slopping pigs on the farm near Kaluga and visiting the Space Museum, where he was inspired by the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “The Father of Space Flight,” and scenes from his career flying desks at Rosaviakosmos, and from his service during the last year as Mission Director, and from the operating room earlier that day, and the first hour or so after his inaugural flight as the latest in a long line of courageous cosmonaut heroes, which brought him up to the present. He knew who he was and what he had to do. The future of the human race depended on him and him alone!

He fumbled with the elementary task of pointing a telescope toward Earth. He wanted to see if the comet, or more precisely, the cometary fragments, if one could call things the size of Caribbean
islands “fragments,” had yet impacted. He could be forgiven for his nervous ineptitude on this day, what with that brain surgery, and his having broken the cosmic speed limit, and having killed his dream date, and having attained his dream job, all on the same day the end of the world was scheduled, but none of those, nor all of them combined, explained his inability to make the scope do what he wanted it to. The simple fact is that he had forgotten how to do it. The scope itself had to tell him that the ship was spinning, slowly, but enough that its image stabilizer could not cope with it. He remembered there were jets for just such a contingency, but when he tried to use them he just made things worse. Helpfully, the ship suggested he try Attitude Control, which he took as a personal insult, until he realized it was a system to do automatically what he had been unable to do manually, bring the ship to a motionless state. Then the telescope, not he, found the third planet from the Sun. Mars. Mars? He didn’t have to be an astrophysicist to know that was wrong. Very wrong.

He was surprised that Earth had gone missing, but it wasn’t like the planet had much of a future anyway, with that immense comet, or convoy of massive cometary fragments, closing in on it at the time he had departed. And, after all, he was a disembodied mind on a one-way mission into the cosmos, so he had already begun to put some mental distance between himself and terra firma. No, the thing that really concerned him at the moment was his memory loss. How could he have forgotten to operate those devices? When all you are is mind, mental lapses take on great significance. And just when he had, as was his habit, started to minimize his performance deficits, thinking to himself that he couldn’t be troubled to remember such trivial details anyway, especially since those appliances practically ran themselves, he got hit with the biggest unwelcome surprise of the day.

“MEMORY FULL. DELETE UNNEEDED DATA AND
TRY AGAIN.”

The block red-lettered message had popped into his consciousness without his realizing he was trying to save something to memory in the first place. That’s the way the human mind works. If something is memorable enough, it gets temporararily shelved for possible future reference. While something else, that doesn’t pass the memory-worthy test, gets thoughtlessly tossed away, never again for you to recall, no matter how hard you try. As memories pass the test of time, they become part of your special collection, carefully curated right up to the day you die, or in the case of an uploaded mind, forever after.

The warning message sent a shudder through his neural net. If something was wrong with his memory, he was in big trouble. He lived in memory. He was memory. He had to be able to read from it and write to it constantly, or he might as well be embedded in a huge
iron ingot, floating in space, which some might say described his current situation even if his memory were performing faultlessly. How could he be out of memory on the first day of the mission? There should be enough unoccupied long term memory to save hundreds of years of experiences to come, thousands with compression. If that memory were damaged, he would have no future. And if his historic memories were also at risk, which his erratic reminiscences a few minutes before had suggested, then he might lose touch with his past. That would leave him with only the present. But what if his short term memory were also deficient? It seemed to be working, but then how could he be sure? He may have already forgotten things that happened a few minutes ago. Important things. His consciousness might be trapped in a shrinking range of short term memory! He had been feeling dizzy and disoriented already from his operation a scant three hours ago – the so-called “upload,” in which his brain was infused with nanoparticles, which made electronic copies of his neurons, which were transmitted to the ship’s computer – but this, this memory emergency, made him positively panic stricken.

He knew he wasn’t doing himself any good by running scared, so he tried to remember what the instructors back at Tyuratam, the great Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan, had told the cosmonauts to
do in moments of agitation and distress. How had they put it? It was a mnemonic or a little phrase. Something about slowing down. Slowing down and standing up? Standing down and suiting up? Close. Slow down and suit up? That was it. He reduced the speed of his mental processing to that of a biological human, and he activated his avatar. Now you might ask, what is the point of copying a human mind to a computer capable of overclocking it to run many, many, many times faster, thereby multiplying its cognitive output to that of a virtual football stadium-full of egghead professors, if you end up having to dial down its processing speed to that of the original human donor’s brain because the uploaded mind is dizzy? Good question.

Not just another story about an uploaded mind wreaking havoc, and an ex-girlfriend who wants to erase him, and a surviving donor who dates a lady detective who’s chasing him. No, this tale adds assassin sharks, hijacked aircraft, Chinese cyber-soldiers, men in black, classic sci-fi film clips, and useful tips for dealing with an assertive subconscious and a heart arrhythmia. Oh, and two love stories. Make that three. No, four. In the Poirot-style ending, The Man gathers together all the suspects, biological and computer-based, to unravel the mysteries and finger the guilty.

This story was completely rewritten and expanded into a novella, which is available on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook websites for a pittance.

Here’s a preview:

One

In total darkness and silence, he floats, weightless.

What is this place?

The upload procedure was no longer fatal, they had assured him. Really. But they still made him sign a 15-page “Consent and Waiver.” He knew that several chimp “donors” had not survived, prior to that last one. It seemed to be normal. As a prank, he put a sign, “Abby Normal,” on its cage. They were offended. He said, “Young Frankenstein? Get it?” “Who’s young frankenstein?” they asked. People rarely got his references to movies or TV shows anymore.

I want out of this dream.

Philip Traum said the reason he had funded the project with his own money rather than investors’ was to claim that first upload for himself. But it took too many years to perfect the technique. Now he was 69, and although his mind and personality were as strong as ever, his physical limitations were becoming increasingly apparent. He never talked about that, but the rumor was he had a weak heart. It was obvious that he was no longer a good candidate. He might not live through the upload. So he had approached a select few of his staff, Bill and two others, discreetly. Within 24 hours, every employee, a temp secretary, and a FedEx driver had stopped by his office to apply.

I must be in one of those sensory deprivation tanks…

[No. You’re not.]

He ignores the voice.

…except that I should be floating on top of the water instead of…

He panics, tries to lift his arms to feel for the surface, realizes he doesn’t have arms, or hands, or legs. Strangely, that calms him.

…So it’s a dream…

He panics again when he tries to breathe. But it was just force of habit. He feels no need to breathe.

…definitely a dream…

Bill might have volunteered even if the upload were a one-way trip. The last year had been that bad. First there was the death of his mom, attributed to a tire suddenly delaminating on a busy freeway, and Bill’s subsequent unsuccessful lawsuit against the manufacturer, the same one involved in the accident that killed his wife and left him seriously injured years earlier.

…I’m dreaming I’m a fish… I don’t really like fish…

And then, three months ago, there was his painful breakup with Syd, the effects of which both of them still struggled to hide.

…except for tuna fish… I like that… But I don’t want to be something I would eat…

And finally, there was Bill’s hereditary heart condition, which had troubled him during the year, until he changed medication. The medical tests for the upload didn’t catch his condition, but now he feared his condition had caught up with him.

I must not have made it through the upload. The long QT got me. My heart gave out. I’m in the hospital, with tubes plugged into me, sedated, near death. I’m a vegetable.

[Wrong again.]

He realizes that he can do more than simply float. He can maneuver, roll to either side with his fins, glide by swishing his tail.

I hope I’m a dolphin. I like dolphins. I’m dreaming I’m a dolphin.

[No. You’re not.]

Do you have to contradict EVERYTHING I say?

[You can hear me?]

Of course I can hear you, but I’ve been ignoring you, since you’re obviously a hallucination. Which means I’m crazy. Bat shit crazy.

[You are not crazy, but you’re not supposed to hear me, either, so something has gone...]

WHO ARE YOU?

[Well, Freud would say… No, you’re a fan of John Lennon, and he said it better, ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.’]

Right. You are the walrus, and I am the dolphin, kew kew ka-choo. Totally bat shit crazy.”

[If you would just take a minute to think about the significance of that reference…]

Over there, lights…windows! A row of windows. I’m in an aquarium.

[Wrong.]

Yeah, like you’re my trusted adviser.

[Exactly.]

He swims toward the windows, but when he gets closer, he sees that they are free-floating, like him, big windows gliding along in a procession, like a school of fish swimming single file.

Maybe if I get close, I can see my reflection, I can see what I am.

[You’re wasting precious time. Look through that window on the end.]

As he swims by the windows, he sees that they’re open, but the water isn’t rushing through, it merges seamlessly with what must be air on the other side. He sees himself in each window, at a different time in his life. In the last one, not far below, he sees Billy, himself as a child in Chicago. He’s delivering papers, pulling that two-wheeled wire cart his mom uses for shopping, pulling it down the snow-covered sidewalks, going from apartment house to apartment house. A couple of boys are coming up to him. He remembers them. The big one is Paddy.

[Swim through that window.]

He swims through that window and circles above the boys. He floats as easily in the air as he had in water. He remembers this moment.

Billy takes a wadded up dollar bill from his pocket and holds it out. “I’ve got it. Here.”

The shorter of the two boys starts to take it, but the bigger one swats him and says “I’ll do this.”

He stands over Billy and looks down at him. “The price went up. It’s two bucks this time.” He puts his open palm in front of Billy’s face.

Billy feels his heart beating wildly. He doesn’t have two dollars. Paddy’s palm begins to form into a fist, but he suddenly stops and cocks his head, as if he senses something. The others are still waiting to see what he is going to do, but he has forgotten them, because he is afraid, something is coming. He looks up and sees a gaping mouth, bristling with rows of teeth. They all see it now, a great white shark, big as a bus, its jaws closing around Paddy…

Two

“You were in that exact position when I went home at five o’clock yesterday” she says, more like a scolding parent than a colleague. 

She is posing in the doorway, so that her curvesome figure is silhouetted in the light from windows beyond. The two techs in the room are transfixed by the sight.

Vijay doesn’t look up from his computer monitor. “Good morning, Dr. Beckett.”

She scrunches her forehead at his greeting and a blonde strand falls over it.

Ten years in this country, and he still sounds like he just got off the boat from Bombay. Kind of cute, though, if you like darkly handsome, socially repressed nerds.

Approaching him, “Well, have you moved from that chair in… fourteen hours?”

Still not looking up, “Yes, of course. I got a tuna fish sandwich around midnight in the break room.”

“Vending machine food? I wouldn’t eat that crap on a bet. I’ll bring food from home when it’s my turn to babysit.”

Finally, Vijay glances toward her.

Why are the pretty ones so often disagreeable? 

He turns back to the screen. She comes close to look over his shoulder, and in leaning forward a breast beneath her blouse presses against his ear, “There’s activity.”

He stiffens and says, “Yes… for hours. I’m glad I took the first night, to see this. It’s history.”

She looks across the room, through the window into the adjoining computer center. Lights are flickering on the panels, but Bill is nowhere in sight.

“You just missed him.”

“He’s in this early?”

“He never left. Sat next to me all night. Probably having one of those tuna sandwiches in the break room right now.”

“You still blocking I/O and limiting CPU and memory?” she asks, sharply.

Annoyed, “I am following your protocol to the letter. He’s been totally isolated since the upload. Nowhere near conscious, but not powered off, either. Just enough juice to allow him to dream.”

“It’s working? He’s actually dreaming?”

“Indeed he is. See, that’s REM, or what virtual REM looks like on a monitor,” he says.

“So his mind made it through? Intact?”

“Sleeping like a baby. There could not have been too much data lost, or his wave pattern would not look so… healthy,” he says.

They stare at a graph whose plotted line looks like waves out of which a pointed head, all mouth, with jagged teeth, is rising straight up.

She points, “What are those… spikes?” This time it is her hand that brushes against his ear.

He twitches as if a bee buzzed by his head.

“Probably just having a nightmare.”

“Poor baby,” she says, sweetly.

But Vijay thinks she sounds just like his aunt Prisha, who always smiles and says nice things to children when their parents are around, but who admitted to him recently that she can’t stand the “little monsters.”