Kalypso’s Envy

Chapter 15

2010-11-11T20:41:00.010+01:00

“It started pretty soon after you left, although it wasn’t noticeable at first. The kooks who had opposed broadcasting human beings began growing in number and influence. They started arguing that it removed a vital element of life, something that people have had historically, and that without it we were weren’t fully human, we weren’t experiencing the full richness of life. Some crap like that. Anyway, it really caught fire in society, and people began protesting against broadcasting, which just made the movement even more influential. Then three things happened, one right after the other: there were some violent confrontations, the protests multiplied tenfold in response, and then they managed to get some kind of governmental injunction against broadcasting. Not just broadcasting; to ensure that no human being was broadcasting, they forbade any use of synthesis and any use of SHF radio signals. Theoretically, that would only prevent broadcasting a person, but since you were so far away, all of your information was broadcast over SHF as well. When they cut it, your connection stopped.

“As you could guess, forbidding all synthesis caused civilization to collapse. The only way to travel from one planet or moon to another is via old-fashioned rockets. But there have been revolutions, wars, battles, and skirmishes all over the solar system. There have been droughts, famines, epidemics, you name it. Entire populations have been wiped out. Some people refused to obey the injunction against synthesis, primarily to synthesize food and water. That’s the main thing that led to the skirmishes. They would either be attacked by the Liddils, or, more frequently, their neighbors who were desperate for food and water.”

The two men had untied Marc and let him sit in a chair, while the one speaking sat in another, facing him. The other man alternated between pacing back and forth in the small room, and standing behind the first man, glaring at Marc. Marc’s eyes had grown wider and wider with horror as he listened to the kinder—or at least less hostile—of the two men. But at this point, he interrupted. “I’m sorry; ‘attacked by littles’?”

“Liddils. L-I-D-D-I-L. That’s the anti-synthesis nuts. ‘Liddil’ is their slogan.”

“What does it mean?”

“Who the hell cares? They’re murderers. They’re responsible for all the death, all the pain, all the suffering that’s taken place over the last 35 years.”

Marc did some quick addition in his head. “35 years? But you said they started five years after I left.”

“They did.”

“But that doesn’t add up. I took eight and a half years getting to Sirius, spent 15 years there, and another eight and a half getting back. That’s 32 years total. If you subtract the five years from it, it’s only 27.”

“That assumes that we synthesized this nice, new body for you as soon as we received your broadcast. We didn’t. You’ve been in storage for the last eight years.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Who do you think? The Syndicate.”

“I thought you said that civilization collapsed. But the Syndicate is still in control?”

“Well, if by ‘in control’ you mean we still have the power we used to have, then obviously the answer is no. But we still wield more power than any other group in the solar system. We’re at war with with over 20 different factions right now, but only a few of them are serious contenders.”

“But, wait a minute, how could you synthesize me at all? You said there was an injunction against it.”

“There is. We’re violating it, putting ourselves at great risk incidentally, to synthesize you. It seemed an acceptable risk.”

“Acceptable? Why?”

“On the off-chance you could tell us where your girlfriend is. Since you can’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, it turns out that you’re completely useless.”

“Emma? Why in the world would finding her be so important to you?”

“Because she’s the head, the chief, of the Liddils.”

Marc looked at the man in shock. “No. Not her. No, not her.”

“Yes, her.”

Marc looked down at the ground and struggled to keep from openly weeping. Such a display in front of these men who had shown such naked hostility toward him could only give them an even more negative view of him, and that could put him in danger. Danger; he remembered a conversation before he left—was it with Hartman?—about how there was no such thing as danger in a world where you could be resynthesized from your last neural scan if anything happened to you. Now he was actually afraid, although he wasn’t sure of exactly what. Fear of the unknown.

When he was confident he could keep his emotions under control, he raised his head and looked at the two men. “So. You put yourself in danger in order to synthesize me, and then you realize I can’t help you. What are you going to do with me now?”

The second man, the more hostile one, laughed and said, “Well we thought about killing you. You know, so no one would find out what we did. But then we thought death is much too kind for the great Marc Tornsen! Better we should let him live!”

“What? What do you mean?”

The less hostile one held up a hand and said, “Maybe it would be easier to show you.” He stood up, walked over to a table on the other side of the room, picked something up from it, and walked back, holding the object out to Marc as he approached. “Look into this.”

“A mirror? Why?”

“Look.”

Marc, confused, looked into the mirror and then gasped as he saw a face he had never seen before. The image in the mirror gasped with him, turned its head with his. After several long moments, Marc managed to tear his eyes away from the mirror to look at the two men again. “What … why have you done this to me? Why have you given me a different face? I thought you couldn’t alter someone’s face that much.”

“You can, it’s just that the DNA asserts itself, and forces the face and body into the pattern it dictates. It will probably be three years before your face will start looking like the old you. But this will give you plenty of time to hide.”

“Hide?” Marc shook his head. It seemed everything these men said made no sense. “Why would I have to hide?”

The angry one spoke up again. “Because you’re Marc Tornsen, the symbol of everything that’s wrong with the world.”

Marc stared at him for several seconds, then finally, in utter bewilderment, said, “What?”

The less hostile one spoke: “When the Syndicate announced your arrival at Sirius, it was taken over by the Liddils as the representation of everything wrong with synthesis and broadcasting. You are the face of the ‘evil’ they’re fighting against. For us, it’s different. For us, you’re the excuse the Liddils used to commit genocide. We gave you a different face so you wouldn’t be torn apart the moment anyone lays their eyes on you.”

“Congratulations Tornsen,” said the angry one. “You’re the most despised human being who’s ever lived.”

Chapter 14

2010-08-22T20:25:00.000+02:00

Marc woke up suddenly, unsure of where he was. He saw three faces hovering over him, and this made him realize that he was lying down. Then it came back to him: he had been broadcast back to the Sol system. He did a very quick mental inventory to see if he could tell if anything was wrong with his mind, but everything seemed fine. He began to smile from the comparison of how gently he had awoken here versus the violence of being awoken back on Sirius 15 years ago (23 years ago: don’t forget the dead time). But the smile died before coming to fruition because of the sternness of the faces above him. Not just stern, almost angry or offended, like he had done something wrong. He couldn’t imagine how he could have done anything to offend them in the few seconds since he had woken up. Maybe they were waiting for him to tell them what his object was that constituted his last memory before being transmitted.

He looked up at them, shrugged slightly, and said, “Red sphere, right?”

One of them made a rude noise and walked out. The others looked as if they were being patient with him, but their patience had limits. “Marc Tornsen. We need to ask you some questions.”

“Umm, OK, sure, just let me …” he tried to stand and discovered he couldn’t move his arms. He looked down at them and saw that he was in restraints. That didn’t make sense. Perhaps they weren’t expecting the synthesis procedure to be as smooth as it had been. But … no, that still didn’t make sense. He had never had a negative synthesis experience that he could remember except when he woke up at Sirius. And that was because it was done with centuries-old technology.

“What is this? Why are my hands tied down?”

“Calm down. We need to ask you some questions and then we’ll let you loose.”

“What? The hell with that, let me loose right now!”

“Shut up.”

Marc looked from the first man to the second who had just spoken. He was starting to get angry, but he was acutely aware of how helpless he was. “What did you say to me? Who the hell are you? What makes you think you can …”

The second man stepped forward and grabbed Marc’s face violently with one hand. “I told you to shut up, so shut up!”

Before he could react, the first one who had spoken pulled the other man away from Marc and started telling him to calm down, that they couldn’t get the information they needed if the subject didn’t cooperate. Marc was hopelessly and helplessly confused. He tried again.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is Earth, right? Or at least the Sol system? Where the hell am I?”

The first man turned back to Marc while the second kept his distance. “This is Earth.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“Answer our questions and we’ll tell you.”

Marc shook his head in confusion. Then: “Fine, ask me whatever you want.”

“Do you know Emma Habibi?”

“Emma? Yes, of course. I was with her on Roen before I was broadcast to Sirius.”

“Do you know where she might be?”

Marc looked at them like they were crazy. “Are you kidding? I’ve been in another star system for 15, no, 30 years if you include the dead time there and back. You seriously think I might know where she is when I haven’t seen her for 30 years?”

The second man growled and made a move towards Marc, but the first man stopped him. “Where was the last place you saw her?”

“I told you, Roen.”

“And that was where you left her?”

“No, no she left while I was still there. She went to Mars, I think. But again, that was 30 years ago!”

“Where on Mars?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Well, she might have, but I don’t remember now.”

“If that’s the case we’re going to subject you to a battery of hypnosis sessions and drugs to help you remember. You can avoid that by remembering and telling us.”

Marc looked back and forth between the two men, astonished and scared. “What the hell is going on? What happened over the last 30 years?”

“We’ll tell you if you tell us where she went on Mars.”

“I … I don’t know. She was going to meet someone. She …” he thought back. “She was going to meet a man. I think it was someone from her past, an ex-lover or something. He had contacted her …” he shook his head. “This is hard, it was a long time ago.”

“Try.”

Marc sighed and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine Emma’s face. “She received a communication from someone who had known her and it upset her for some reason. Really upset her. But—it didn’t make sense—it was too long ago for her to remember him. I don’t know. So she communicated back and forth with him for a few days, and then she decided she wanted to meet with him. He was at Underhill, in …” he started, as he realized that was the answer. “Underhill! He was in Underhill in Isidis Planitia!”

The first man nodded. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone after that meeting?”

“What? No, of course not. I was expecting her to come back to Roen, but I got my orders to broadcast to Sirius before she did.”

“Got dropped, eh?” That was the second man.

Marc tried to give him a withering look, but was sure that it was lessened by the fact that he was tied down on a table. “Believe whatever you want about it. That was the last I heard of her. Because, you know, I’ve been out of the damn solar system for three decades! Look, I’ve answered your questions, now let me loose and tell me what the hell is going on!”

So they did.

Chapter 13

2010-06-21T11:18:00.001+02:00

Marc walked into the common area and nearly had a heart attack. Before he could even turn on the light, dozens of people jumped up from behind the various pieces of furniture and yelled, “Surprise!” When they saw the shock in his face, they laughed. After breathing deeply a few times, Marc shook his head and laughed with them. “You people. You’re going to drive me crazy.”

“Yeah, well, we only have another 12 hours to do it then.”

“Very funny.”

Marc had finished his ten-year stint and then re-upped for another five years. There were several good reasons for this. First, even though he wasn’t the official leader of their community, he was still one of the more important people there—“important” in the utilitarian sense. He could get a lot more things done than most others could. After ten years, there still seemed to be too much work to do that only he could do right; or at least, so he thought.

Second, there was something deeply attractive about being a member of a small community completely separated from the rest of humanity. The trillions of people in the Sol System, contrasted sharply with the hundreds here. It was refreshing to be recognizable by everyone on sight. And he loved the people. They all got along fairly well, not perfectly of course, and it was going to be hard to leave them.

But there was another reason he had stayed five years longer than his term: Four years after he had first arrived here, after several hundred people had been transmitted, without any warning or indications, all communications with Earth and the entire Sol System shut down. No other transmissions had been received for over ten years. They had sent multiple transmissions of their own, of course, to ask what happened; but given the distance between Sol and Sirius, the soonest they’d hear a response would be another six or seven years—assuming that Earth could and would respond, which was almost certainly not the case.

Because their line to Earth had been cut off, they had never received upgrades to their computer and mechanical systems. This wasn’t usually a problem, but given how incredibly unpleasant synthesis was with this old technology, no one had chosen to do it again since they had arrived. Yet this didn’t mean they hadn't expanded. They had seven bases on this moon, two of which were manned by rotating teams, and they had unmanned stations on two other bodies in this system—one moon orbiting the same gas giant they were, and one planet closer to Sirius which could theoretically be a better location. But since no one wanted to broadcast themselves there, the only way to get there was with old-fashioned rocketry, which took time. In fact, by broadcasting himself back to Earth, Marc would be the first one to do it.

Of course, everyone had tried to talk him out of it. “We don’t even know if Earth is still there,” “What if there’s been some sort of societal collapse and they can’t synthesize you,” etc. But Marc had waited long enough, and it was time to reap the benefits. It was funny; his overriding goal for as long as he could remember was to be a first, and now that he was one, it was very hard to leave all of his friends. He felt like he was giving up genuine intimacy for the fake intimacy of celebrity.

He walked among the partiers, shaking hands, being embraced and kissed, while everyone told him how much they loved him and would never forget him. Several were even crying. It really was going to be difficult. But he was now the most famous man who had ever lived, the first person to travel beyond the Sol System. His name would be known by everyone for thousands of years, and here he was living in a small community of just under a thousand people. In many ways he didn’t want to leave, but the attraction to go back to Earth, the desire for universal recognition, was too strong for him.

Later that night, he was alone in the observation lounge, looking up at the stars. Emery came in with two bottles, sat down next to him, and handed him one of the beers. “Three hours until your jump.”

“I know.”

They sat there in silence for several minutes. Then Emery said, “I’m going to miss you Marc. You’re one of the best friends I can remember having.”

“Yeah, me too. It rots. I want to stay here, I really do. But I want to go back to Earth too. And it’s not that one want is stronger than the other; they can’t be compared, they’re two different kinds of wanting.”

“Then why are you choosing to go back?”

Marc shook his head and looked down. “I don’t know. I just want to be known. Do you know what I mean Emery? I want to be famous.”

“You are famous. Everyone here knows you, and most of them even like you.”

Marc laughed and drank some of his beer. “Yeah, I know. It’s just … I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“You don’t have to. I understand it. We all do. The reason we volunteered for this in the first place was to be famous, to get our names written down. I used to fantasize about people wishing they were me.”

“Used to?”

“Yeah, I haven’t thought that way for a while. Here it just seemed so pointless. So immature. I mean, we used to live our lives surrounded by technology. Maybe if you were in the Syndicate and were chosen for some remote outpost before it had been developed, you could get a sense of …” he gestured up at the night sky, “… this. But it was too easy to look away from it. Here we don’t have that option, and I’m glad of it. It woke me up.”

“Woke you up to what?”

Emery grinned at him. “You know, that’s the funniest thing. I don’t know exactly. I’m just aware of something that I wasn’t aware of before, but I can’t quite get a hold of it. I just know that I feel a sense of belonging here that I can’t remember ever feeling. You?”

Marc looked at him for several seconds, then looked down at the floor. “Well I think I felt it before. With a woman. But I know what you’re talking about. This place just seems right and in retrospect, the Earth doesn’t.”

“OK, so why are you choosing to go back?”

“I guess I just haven’t … matured as much as you. I still want people to look up to me. I want everyone to know me and …”

“And what?”

“And love me.”

Emery nodded. “Yeah that’s the desire to be famous all right. But you’re bypassing something important. You don’t really want people to know you and love you; you want people to love you without getting to know you. That was the way it was for me. Once I discovered that, I realized I was afraid that if people actually knew me they wouldn’t love me. My desire for fame was based on fear.” He paused, then, raising his beer to his mouth, said, “The hell with that.”

“That’s a pretty cynical view of it.”

“Is it an incorrect view?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, there you go. And that raises the question once more: why are you choosing to go back?”

Marc sighed. “I guess my desire to be loved is greater than my desire to be known.”

Emery nodded. “Well, I didn’t mean to come here and give you a sermon. You just take care of yourself and know that there are people who know you and love you.” He stood up, put a hand on Marc’s shoulder, and then walked out.

Marc sat there looking up at the stars for a long time.

Chapter 12

2010-05-29T16:50:00.000+02:00

Marc forgot about the sample of ice he had managed to get before almost dying for several weeks. Once he had returned to the station, he proceeded to explore the world and solar system in which he found himself virtually rather than directly.

One of the planets closer to Sirius was larger than the moon he was on, and looked like it had temperatures much closer to bearable. He had learned of the primitive computer’s weaknesses during his solitary sojourn, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that it hadn’t found the best possible body on which to establish a station.

One night when he knew the planet would be visible to the naked eye, he suited up and went out to look at it, although he brought along telescopic lenses so he could get a closer look as well. It wasn’t until he returned to the station, the planet having set behind the mountain range he had seen on his first day, that he noticed the storage pocket still had the sample tube inside. He immediately ran tests on it to determine what it was.

It only took a few moments for the computer to figure it out. “Sir, the sample contains a significant amount of water, but not very pure. It is mixed with several other compounds. Would you like me to list them and their relative percentages?”

“No, no. Water! That’s amazing! That means there’s a real possibility that there was life here!”

“No sir, it does not.”

Marc look at the computer speaker, puzzled. “What do you mean? Water is one of the preconditions of life right?”

“Yes sir.”

“So water means it’s possible that there was life.”

“No sir.”

Marc sighed. These old computers were very different from talking to people. “Explain.”

“The presence of liquid water is one of many conditions for the occurrence of life. This water is solid, not liquid. And this moon fails to meet most of the other conditions.”

“How many other conditions are there?”

“Five hundred seventy-six.”

He paused, not able to wrap his mind around it right away. “Did you say five hundred and seventy-six?”

“Yes sir.”

“Five hundred and seventy-six separate conditions have to be met in order for a planet or moon to be able to support life?”

“Not all of them are separate conditions, sir. Some of them are connected, so that not meeting one automatically means not meeting others.”

“Well, factoring that in, how many distinct conditions must be met for life?”

“Three hundred thirty-seven.”

“That’s still … incredible. Are these conditions common?”

“Some are, sir, but most are fairly rare.”

“Well, what are the odds of a planet meeting all of these conditions?”

“Just planets, sir? Or moons as well?”

“Oh for God’s sake! Any planetary body! You know what I meant!”

“I’m sorry, sir. The odds of any planetary body meeting all conditions necessary for life is zero.”

“Wait, what?”

“Zero.”

“But … wait a minute.” Marc tried to think. “How could it be zero? Isn’t there even a remote possibility?”

“Yes sir. But I am programmed to treat any possibility below a certain threshold as zero.”

“Ummm, OK. So you mean the odds of a planet in the Sirius system being able to support life is zero?”

“Not the Sirius system, sir.”

“My God. You mean the entire galaxy?”

“No sir. The universe.”

“But … the universe … the universe is huge. I mean, huge. Unimaginably huge. How could the odds be zero?”

“The odds are specifically calibrated to the size of the universe, to the probable number of galaxies, stars, and planets.”

Marc paused again, this time in shock. When he began again, his voice was more subdued. “Are you telling me that the odds of there being any planet, anywhere in the universe, that’s capable of supporting life, besides Earth, is zero?”

“No sir.”

Relief washed over him. “Oh thank God! That’s … you know, I don’t really know why that’s such a relief, maybe it’s because I've been out here by myself for so long, but the idea that we’re alone is just, well, unpleasant. Very unpleasant.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but you misunderstood. I’m saying the odds of there being any planet, anywhere in the universe, that’s capable of supporting life, including Earth, is zero.”

Marc blinked several times. He went over the computer’s words in his mind, trying to make sense of them, but finally gave up. “I don’t understand that. The odds of Earth being able to support life is one, because it does support life. What exactly are you saying?”

“I’m sorry sir. You specifically asked what the odds were of there being any planet in the universe that meets all of the necessary preconditions for life. The answer to that question is zero. However, when you include the fact that Earth is capable of supporting life, that of course changes the calculation.”

“Of course, but then, I still don’t understand what you were saying.”

“I was saying that simply given the preconditions and their probable fulfillments, the odds that there would be a planet anywhere in the universe that supports life is zero. The fact that Earth supports life is inexplicable. It shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because the odds of natural processes bringing it about is zero.”

Marc thought to himself. If the odds of natural processes bringing it about is zero, then—he didn’t like the direction this thought was going—the only other option is … other-than-natural processes. Which means you’re not alone after all.

“Computer I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Yes sir.”

“You know, I’ve lost track of what day this is back on Earth. Can you tell me how long before I’ll have some human company?”

“I received a transmission while we were talking sir, but I decided to wait until the conversation was over before telling you. The Syndicate has decided to start sending people earlier than originally planned. We will receive the first person in twenty-four hours.”

Marc’s solitude was coming to an end.

Chapter 11

2009-08-20T01:43:00.002+02:00

At first, he was confused. He was so cold, he was unable to think clearly. Why can’t I slide across the ice anymore? This led him to ask himself, Why was I sliding across the ice in the first place? It didn’t come to him in a moment of clarity. It took nearly a minute before he was able to remember.

He stood up, slowly, and looked around. There, only several meters away, was the rappelling line. He walked over to it, his body aching from the movement, and took the end from under the rock he had secured it with. He tried to attach it to his suit, but his hands were shaking too hard. He’d have to warm up before he’d be able to do it.

He started walking around, away from the ice sheet, still holding on to the rappelling line. As painful as it was to use his muscles, it was getting some warmth to return to his body. And while his suit had used up most of its energy trying to keep him warm while he was laying on the field of ice, there was still some left. His head was foggy, but after a few minutes he remembered: he wanted to attach the line to his suit so he could tell the computer to pull him up. But he had no way to communicate with the computer. He’d have to climb.

It wasn’t too far up, but these were not ideal circumstances. He wasn’t sure how much strength he had left. He walked over to the rock face, looped the line around one foot a couple of times, and then put his other foot on top of the line. He reached up and pulled himself with his arms. Then he used the tension from the loop around one foot to push against the line with the other and move up about a half meter. He reached up with his arms again and repeated the maneuver. And again.

He was surprised. At first, he didn’t think he’d ever make it all the way to the top. But as he continued, it became easier; as he used his muscles, the warmth returned to them, and he was able to go faster. He was almost surprised at how quickly he approached the top.

Suddenly, a strong wave of dizziness took him, and he barely had enough power to keep from falling. He looped his arm around the line several times to secure himself. After resting for a minute, breathing slowly, he regained his balance. He checked his oxygen levels.

He had five minutes left.

He began to climb again, making sure his arm was fully looped around the line so he wouldn’t fall. He would have to go slowly and steadily; if he went too fast, he would get dizzy again. Even with his precautions, he found himself getting light-headed.

About five meters from the top he felt another wave of dizziness. He stopped and made himself breathe slowly, but it didn’t go away. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to climb the rest of the way in this state.

It seemed to take forever. He checked his oxygen levels three times, and was surprised at how little time had passed. But it was still slow-going. By the time his hand reached over the top of the cliff, his suit had only thirty seconds of breathable air remaining.

He pulled himself over the edge, and rolled over onto his back, allowing himself a single breath. Then he tried to get to his feet. He couldn’t. The vehicle was only fifteen meters away, so he began crawling. When he was almost there, an alarm went off inside his suit. He was out of oxygen.

He reached up and pulled the lever to open the door into the vehicle’s tiny airlock. When the door dutifully opened, he crawled inside and then closed it behind him. Now all he had to do was tell the computer to re-pressurize the airlock and remove his helmet. He opened his mouth and then froze in horror.

He could not communicate with the computer. His communications were out. He had made it all the way back to the vehicle and would die within it.

He tried to think, but whatever it was he was taking into his lungs now was not oxygen and he was unable to think clearly. When he tried to focus his mind, he'd start day-dreaming. Eventually, he would just day-dream his way into death. Will the dream continue? he asked. Will I notice if the day-dream stops? If I stop?

He thought again about Emma. How his love for her had changed him into a different person. Even though the computer would reproduce him as soon as it realized he had died, it would not be the same person. Help, he thought again. I need help.

He was unable to concentrate. He remembered his time with Emma at Roen. He remembered walking around outside the station in suits with her one time and how they touched helmets to talk. It was a very intimate act; since it didn’t take place over the communication bands, their conversation was completely private. He wished he could be there with her again. His faceplate touching hers and the vibrations produced by their voices being transferred from his suit to hers and vice-versa.

His eyes widened. He tried to think it through, but couldn’t. He had tunnel vision and was about to lose consciousness. There was only enough room in his mind for one thought. He rolled over and pressed his faceplate against the door leading to the main cabin of the vehicle. He took as deep a breath of the carbon dioxide that his suit had been filling with as he could without coughing and shouted.

“Computer! My communications are out! Re-pressurize the airlock immediately!”

He fell to the floor. He wanted to tell the computer to signal him somehow to let him know it had heard. Flash the lights or something. But he could no longer raise himself up. He would have to remove his helmet and hope that there was breathable air. With the last of his strength, he put his hands on either side of his helmet, pushed the release buttons on either side and twisted as hard as he could.

The seal broke and he pushed the helmet over his head. He inhaled and began coughing violently. His body began taking short, shallow breaths, and for a moment he thought the computer hadn’t heard. Then he realized his vision was clearing. His mind was clearing. He could breathe, he was going to live.

This time he didn’t pass out. But being as exhausted as he was, he decided to stay where he was and sleep for a bit.

Chapter 10

2009-07-22T09:35:00.000+02:00

The cold brought him to.

He opened his eyes and moaned. His head hurt. He tried to get up and found he couldn’t. He was laying on his left side, and while he could move his right arm and leg, his left arm and leg were immobile. He was able to turn his head down so he could see them through the faceplate. Somehow, they had sunk a little into the ice. The heat from the suit must have melted the ice, making it viscous enough for the weight of his body to sink into it a little bit.

He rocked back and forth, swinging his right leg and arm, trying to break free. Back and forth. After a half minute, he felt some movement on his left side, but it took another two minutes of rocking to finally snap himself away from the surface he had sunk into.

The next step was to stand up. But the ice was too slippery. That’s why he had fallen in the first place. He was unable to keep his feet. He looked about him, on his hands and knees, trying to find a way back up to the solid ground, about 30 meters away. But except for the small patch of ice he had disrupted by melting into it and breaking free, it was smooth, too smooth to walk on. Micrometeorite impacts tended to polish ice this way.

Well, time to call in the cavalry. “Computer? I’m on the ice and it’s too slippery for me to get back to the line. See if you can find a place nearby where you can land, and send something out to get me.”

Silence.

“Computer? If you’re receiving this, acknowledge.” Nothing. “OK, I don’t know if you can hear me and I just can’t receive your transmissions. If you can hear me, take off from the edge of the cliff, and begin looking for a place near me where you can land.”

He looked up at where the rappelling line went over the top of the cliff, where the vehicle would be sitting. He stared for five minutes. Nothing happened.

Apparently when he hit his helmet on the ground, his radio was damaged. So the computer was unable to assist him. He rolled over onto his back and looked at the sky. What now? The worst that could happen is that they would have to re-synthesize him back at the jump station, and he’d lose his memories of the last two weeks. Not that bad. He’d just lose the experience of driving around on an alien world by himself, but he’d be able to do it again. Nothing had happened that he wouldn’t be able to reduplicate.

Except recognizing that he loved Emma.

His eyes opened wide as he realized this. Recognizing that he loved Emma didn’t just enrich his life by itself; it changed the way he looked at life. When he first got here, all he cared about was making a name for himself, being a celebrity, being famous. Now he knew that focusing on himself was a stunted, shallow way to live. Not just stunted, but twisted. It was a twisting inward of the self so that it couldn’t see anything or anyone else. It was ugly. And if this body died here, he would be re-synthesized with that ugliness.

Of course, he might realize that he loved Emma again, and he might draw the same conclusions. It was a particular place and line of thought that led him to discover that about himself, and it was ridiculous to think that he might end up at that same place with those same thoughts. But something might spark it. Might.

Synthesis meant that he lived in a world where death never took place. If your body stopped working, they would just synthesize you with your most recent neural map. He had never feared dying because you couldn’t die.

But if this body died here and now and they re-synthesized him without everything he had learned in the last several days, who he was—how he thought of himself, his identity—would die. He would live in a sense, but the meaning he now had for his life would not.

He panicked. He scrambled on all fours over the ice in a desperate attempt to get to the rappelling line, but he could only make a few movements before he slid back down. He kept trying. And kept sliding. Eventually he realized that he had been crawling and sliding for over an hour, and hadn’t accomplished anything. There really was no way for him to move across this surface. He rolled over on his back and wept. After a few minutes he found himself staring up at the stars and thinking, Help. I need help. He was trapped with no way to get back to his vehicle. Soon, his suit would use up all its energy and he’d freeze to death, or all its air and he’d suffocate.

He tried to roll over onto his hands and knees again, and found that he was stuck. The heat from his suit had frozen the ice slightly, and he had sunk into it. This time, however, he hadn’t been lying there that long, so he was able to break free easily. As he got on his hands and knees, he saw the rough section of ice that his suit had melted and, not knowing exactly why, he crawled over onto it.

The rough section of ice wasn’t as slippery as the rest. It gave him some traction. If he were able to create a path up off the sheet of ice…

He rolled back over onto his back and pushed himself up, towards the rappelling line until only his feet were still on the rough patch. Then he just lay there for a few minutes. It took about eight minutes before he had become slightly stuck in the ice again. Then he checked his bearings, and pushed himself further up until his body was on smooth ice and his feet were on the newly formed rough patch. And waited. Another eight minutes and he was able to do it again. And again.

He was about halfway there when he noticed that eight minutes wasn’t enough time to melt the ice. Then he noticed that he felt cold. The heater in his suit was running out of energy. He tried not to think about it, and just gave it another couple of minutes and pushed off.

Now he was really cold. And nervous. But as his temperature continued to drop, he found himself unable to concentrate on anything but letting the suit melt a path and pushing off, pushing off. It became the only thing he was aware of. There was nothing else in the world except laying there, testing the ice to see if it had melted, and then pushing off.

So he was startled when the smoothness of the ice was suddenly replaced with rough gravel.

Chapter 9

2009-04-19T11:25:00.001+02:00

Marc looked out over the canyon. He was most of the way around the planet with only 600 kilometers to go to return to the jump station. The maps the pioneer had made before it landed and set up shop had included this canyon, but it was much wider and longer than they recorded. That wasn’t too surprising, since the maps were preliminary. But it did leave Marc in a moderately inconvenient position.

He realized this was going to be the first time in several days that he had asked the onboard computer for any information, but it was necessary. “Computer.”

“Yes sir.”

“Are we able to drive around this canyon?”

“According to the preliminary reports...”

“The preliminary reports were obviously wrong. I’m asking if we can tell from the information we have obtained by actually sitting here on its edge.”

“The answer is speculative, sir. But an estimation would be that it would require a minimum of 2,144 kilometers extra driving.”

A speculative estimation. “OK, so we have enough fuel to fly over the canyon, don’t we?”

“Yes sir.”

“Would that present any problems?”

“None that are significant sir.”

“Well, let’s go then. You drive.”

“Yes sir.”

The vehicle he was in was light but sturdy. In order to leave the ground, it would have to use small rockets which used much more energy than simply driving, but it still wasn’t that much. He distracted himself by looking over the map for the remainder of the drive, and after a few minutes felt the rockets fire, and looked out of the front windshield to see the ground drop about fifty meters below him. He stared down at the canyon as they passed over it, but it didn’t look very interesting -- it was just an obscenely long crack in the ground, caused perhaps by some ancient tectonic process long since ceased or a meteor hit that shattered the crust. He was about to look away when he saw a reflection from the canyon floor.

“Computer!”

“Yes sir.”

“What was that reflection?”

“I’m sorry sir, I don’t know what...”

“I saw a reflection from inside the canyon.”

“When did you see it, sir?”

Marc sighed. “Immediately before saying ‘Computer.’”

They swung around and returned to their earlier trajectory. “Please let me know if you see it again, sir.” It didn’t take long.

“There it is again! Did you see it?”

“Yes sir. I am unable to determine what it is from this distance.”

He thought about it. He was getting anxious to return to the jump station and begin his work in earnest. If he programmed the onboard computer to drive through the night, he could be there by tomorrow morning. But this was intriguing enough that he put his plans to the side. “Can we land?”

“I do not recommend that we land on the area that is reflecting light sir. I suggest we land on the far side of the canyon.”

“Fair enough. Let’s go.”

Several minutes later, they were back on the ground. “OK, so what’s the plan? Can we send some sort of probe down there to determine what it is?”

“We could sir. I’ve just completed a spectroscopical analysis and determined that it may be water ice. But the results are uncertain.”

“Water?” Marc paused for a moment. The presence of water was one of the necessary preconditions for physical life, so if there was water down there, there might be some kind of microbial life as well. Humanity had yet to discover any evidence of extraterrestrial life. There had been microbes discovered on Mars, but they were determined to have originated from Earth, either from the solar wind blowing them out of the upper atmosphere, or from meteor impacts jettisoning them out of Earth's gravity well and into Mars'. The possibility of discovering life in the Sirius system was, of course, something everyone had considered. But no one had really expected anything. This could be huge.

“Computer, I’m going to rappel down the canyon to pick up a sample.”

“That carries some hazards with it sir. The potential...”

“Yes yes yes, I know. But I think this is significant enough for a closer look. Cycle the airlock, I’m going to suit up.”

“Yes sir.”

It took about five minutes to get his suit on, test it to make sure the communications in it were operable, and finally step out onto the surface of the planet. The computer had brought the vehicle as close to the edge as it dared, and Marc went around to the front of it to start pulling out the fullerene line that would hold his body as he descended into the canyon. He attached it to his suit and approached the edge.

From here, it just looked, again, like a large crack in the ground. Uninteresting. He couldn’t see any reflection on the bottom, but the computer helpfully told him the patch of ice was directly below him, in the center of the canyon. He turned back around to face the vehicle, leaned back, and gingerly backed off the edge. He had rapelled before, but only in training situations. It wasn’t too difficult though, and he soon found himself approaching the bottom of the canyon.

Once he touched down, he took a few breaths, then called the computer. “I’m at the bottom. Which direction is the patch of ice?”

“It should be in front of you, about sixty meters, and slightly to your left sir. About eleven o’clock.”

“Got it.”

He took off in the direction the computer indicated, but the bottom of the canyon was not smooth, so it involved a great deal of climbing up and down obstacles. When he climbed to the top of a large outcropping, he reached the end of the fullerene line.

“I’ve reached the end of the rappelling line. Do you have any idea how much further the patch of ice is?”

“It should be directly in front of you sir.”

Marc looked down. Below him, he could see a large, dark patch, covering over a hundred square meters. He could easily climb down to it if he had more line. “Is there any way to extend the line?”

“No sir. The vehicle is as far forward as it can go.”

He thought about it. Disconnecting from the line was the cardinal sin of rappelling, but it was agonizing to be this close to such a potential discovery and have to turn back. Finally he decided. “Computer, I’m going to disconnect from the line and climb down to the ice patch. It’s only about fifteen meters away. I should be able to reconnect within a few minutes.”

“Sir that is extremely unwise and against regulations. You are not authorized to disconnect from the line.”

“Yes I know, but I’m going to do it anyway. If I get into any trouble, I’ll just contact you, and you can come get me.”

“Sir it is uncertain how feasible a landing would be.”

“We can figure that if we need to. Right now I’m disconnecting from the line and climbing down to the patch to retrieve a sample.”

Amidst the computer’s further objections, Marc detached the edge of the fullerene line from his suit, secured the end of it to the outcropping by putting a rock on top of it (advanced technology, he thought), and began to clamber down. He reached the patch, pulled out a sample tube, and scraped some of the ice into it. He stood up and looked over the patch, and saw a slight discoloration about five yards further down.

“Computer, I’m going to get a sample a little further out on the patch.”

“Sir you should return to the vehicle.”

“I’ll return to the vehicle when I want to return to the vehicle! Now shut up!”

The computer fell silent, and Marc stepped out onto the patch. The area it covered was smoother than the canyon bottom he had already traversed, but it was on a slope. He put one foot out onto the ice and gingerly put some weight on it. It seemed to hold, so he began to pull his other foot onto the ice. Suddenly his feet came out from under him, and his helmet violently hit the surface. He didn’t even have time to realize what had happened before he lost consciousness.

Chapter 8

2009-03-30T09:39:00.001+02:00

One of the first things Marc had had to do was synthesize another synthesizer -- or the parts of another synthesizer -- and then move it to another place on the planet. That way, in case there was some disaster which destroyed the first one, he wouldn’t be stranded alone. Although he found the isolation very... “comforting” wasn’t the right word, but he enjoyed it. There was a stillness, a silence, that reminded him of why he got into this business in the first place. Earth, Luna, Mars, Ganymede, Oberon, basically the entire Earth solar system, was noisy, busy, people moving everywhere and doing nothing, talking without saying anything. Here, he could be alone with his thoughts.

After he had set up the second jump station, he was supposed to return to the first. But he decided to go the less direct route. He was now on the opposite side of the planet from both of them (they were only about 500 clicks apart) in a vehicle that doubled as a set of living quarters. It was a ground vehicle, but it had limited airborne capability in case he found some barrier he just couldn’t get through. He had synthesized a bunch of meals, which he was slowly working his way through, and was just enjoying the scenery.

He was eating a dinner of meatballs in mushroom sauce, looking down at a crater from its edge. It was fairly large. He doubted they would be able to cap it and create an atmosphere underneath the cap for people to live in, but you never know. It was right on the verge of being too big. It didn’t look like this planet was going to be able to be terraformed, which didn’t surprise him. They had yet to discover a planet that could be terraformed, although Mars was an interesting project. They had terraformed it, and then the atmosphere was slowly lost because its surface gravity wasn’t enough to prevent it from boiling away into space. So they did it again, and lost it again, and they were currently working on lucky number three. It just looked like they would have to constantly replenish its atmosphere with comets from the Oort Cloud in order to make it stable and breathable. There’s a reason why it didn’t have a breathable atmosphere already.

He took a swig of beer, and this took his eyes off the crater and onto the sky. The Sun was not in it. The only time he faced the Sun was during the day, and the light from Sirius blocked it out. The plane of this solar system was not pointed directly to the Sun, however, so there was a constant radio feed, which the computers kept track of. There wasn’t enough atmosphere for the sky to have a color, but the Sun was close enough to the Dog Star right now that it couldn’t be seen. It wouldn’t be for a few months, when the planet’s orbit swung it around so the Sun (you should probably just call it “Sol” now, or find some arbitrary name for it) would be in the night sky.

He started inventing constellations, reveling in the opportunity. A group of stars could be seen as a kayak with a stick figure sitting in it, except one end of the kayak pointed down instead of up. Maybe that’s some mythical sailor going over the edge of the world to see what’s on the other side. Another group of stars could be seen as a panther battling a snake.

He returned to his meal. Someday there’s going to be people living here. But right now, I’m the only one. Eating my mushroom sauce and drinking my beer.

So far, he was enjoying himself.

Suddenly, he thought, There’s only one other person I wish were here with me. The realization surprised him. As much as he relished the solitude, he actually wished someone else were there. Emma. Why, how had this woman come to mean so much to him? She’s just a woman, a ’lyte. She probably didn’t even remember him now, it had been nearly ten years (for her) since she’d even seen Marc. And yet, here he was, wishing he could be with her.

And with that, he realized what it meant. I love her. Crap. I love her. He knew he’d probably never see her again, and that she almost certainly didn’t feel the same way. But somehow that didn’t bother him. He felt enriched by the fact that he cared so deeply for another person. He’d probably loved other women, but his memories didn’t go back far enough for him to remember any. But sitting here, right now, looking up at the stars from another solar system, he felt like he had become complete, that he had become a whole person by having someone to love.

This shattered Marc’s entire worldview. The things that he had been pursuing for as long as he could remember seemed like straw. He had always put himself first in everything. Now he understood that part of being human meant learning to put others first. It’s not really life until you live it for someone else.

This made him laugh out loud. Hell of a place to discover that life is about other people, Marc. There are no “other people” within eight a half light years of you. Still laughing, he looked back up at the stars. Well, I can still enjoy the solitude. While it lasts.

Chapter 7

2009-03-08T12:30:00.001+01:00

The ease with which he came out of consciousness the second time stood in stark contrast to the violence of the first. He realized that he had been coming to for several minutes before becoming aware of it and of himself and his thoughts.

He opened his eyes. The room he was in was dimly lit, but not so bad that he couldn’t see. He moved his head to look around, and as soon as he did, something in the corner of the room moved and came towards him. An android. “Are you feeling better, sir?”

“Yeah. Yes, thanks. Here, let me...” He sat up (the constraints were gone, he noticed), and while his head was pounding, and he felt a little dizzy, he didn’t have much trouble swinging his legs over the side of the jump couch and standing up. Then he realized that one of the walls was transparent, and was facing the outside.

He had seen “untouched worlds” in the past, before they had been developed. They were dead worlds, although “dead” implied the cessation of life, whereas such worlds had never held any life in the first place. They were just dirt and rocks, the only variables being color and consistency. This planet looked like one more dead world.

But the other worlds had always been in the solar system. You can’t really call it “the” solar system anymore. He stood up and walked over to the wall, looking out at the fine dust that covered the landscape. Then he decided.

“Have you synthesized a suit?”

“Yes sir,” the android replied. “It is ready as soon as you’ve broadcast your arrival back to Earth.”

“I’m going outside first.”

“That goes against protocol, sir, and it is strongly recommended that you follow protocol at this juncture.”

Marc looked over at the android and grinned. “No. I’m going outside. Where’s the suit?”

“Please follow me, sir.”

It led him out of the small jump room into a small hallway, and then into an even smaller room, which led to the airlock. “The suit is in the corner behind you, sir. Do you need assistance putting it on?”

“No. You can go back inside the main cabin.”

“Thank you sir.”

He took the suit off the wall -- so primitive! It provided much less mobility than the suits he was used to -- and began to put it on. It took him longer than he wanted at that moment, but soon he was breathing the flavor of air that only a suit provided. “Close inner door,” he said, and the door he entered the air lock through closed. Then he took another breath and said, “OK. Now open the outer door.”

The outer door opened. He looked at the world he was about to step onto. He was about to take the first step onto a planet outside the Earth’s solar system. He walked up to the edge and looked out. He stood there for several seconds. You’re trying to grasp the moment. Don’t bother. You can’t. Remember? An event can never be grasped in its full significance when it happens, because it doesn’t get all of its significance at that moment. At least, that’s what Emma had told him. Emma! For her, eight and a half years had passed since she last saw Marc. He wondered where she was and what she was doing at that moment.

Idiot! Where are you at this moment? What are you doing at this moment? You’re standing on the edge of a new world, about to take the most important step in human history! And you’re wondering where she is? He started to get angry at himself, but then laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

An android’s voice came through his headset: “I’m sorry sir. Could you please repeat that?”

He laughed again. “I didn’t say anything! I laughed!” And smiling broadly, he stepped off the ship and onto the planet.

He was profoundly shocked by the mundanity of it. He took several more steps, and then was outside of the splash zone, where the ship had disrupted the surface when it first landed. 17 years ago. Not much atmosphere, but the nightlife is great! He walked in a fairly straight line, looking further out to the horizon. It was flat, but there were mountains off to his left. Mountains he was going to explore. He looked up and saw the beautiful panoply of stars. The same stars he had always seen, but arranged in a way that no one ever had. He had hoped to see the Dog Star itself, but it was apparently night. He turned around and looked back at the small station he had walked from, looking very alien from the surrounding landscape. I made it. I’m a first. I’m the first.

“Sir, do you need assistance?” The android spoke quickly but calmly, indicating that it was very concerned. Or at least the android equivalent of concerned.

“No, I’m fine!”

“Sir, you are moving erratically. I suggest that you return to the station.”

“I’m dancing a jig!”

The android paused, although this was another aspect programmed into it to make it seem more human. Then it said, “Sir, may I inform you that this event is being recorded for posterity?”

Well, crap.

Chapter 6

2009-02-13T13:22:00.001+01:00

He sat up suddenly, straining against the constraints. Every muscle in his body was tensed, and he was unable to relax them. Slowly, they relaxed on their own, he fell back against the jump couch, and his mind cleared. What the hell... An android “face” appeared above him, one he had never seen before, and said, “Greetings, sir. Can you tell me what your object is?”

“Blue...” he said, then turned his head and dry heaved. What’s happening? He tried to take a breath and speak, but he was unable to.

“I’m sorry, sir, could you please repeat that?”

Tornsen concentrated on relaxing his breathing patterns. “Blue...blue pyramid!” he said, although it came out more like “bloopmid.” He took another breath and said, “What’s happening?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why do I feel so bad? What’s wrong with...” he began dry heaving again.

“Your symptoms fall within the normal parameters after a jump, sir. I will give you a shot to lessen the effects.”

Normal parameters? “What are you talking about? I’ve never felt like this.” A sharp pain in his arm distracted him. “What’s that? What’s going on?”

“That is a shot, sir. I’m giving you a shot to ease your symptoms.”

“A shot? What is this, the Middle Ages? If my reaction is within the normal parameters, why didn’t you just synthesize the drug directly in my system?”

Then it dawned on him. The pioneer had been sent 530 years ago. (538, he thought to himself.) He was dealing with old technology. It simply hadn’t occurred to anyone to synthesize upgrades. This is what it felt like to synthesize all the time 500 years ago. It’s amazing anyone was willing to do it more than once.

“Is that better, sir?”

He was about to say no, when he realized that his nausea was much less. He still felt like he had been severely beaten, though. “Yeah, I think it is.”

“Now can you tell me your object?”

“Blue pyramid.”

“Thank you sir. Because of potential of signal degradation, I will ask you a few more questions to determine whether the transference was completely successful. Can you tell me your name please?”

“Marc Tornsen.”

“And what was your last assignment?”

“Roen.”

“I’m sorry sir, could you be more specific?”

Marc sighed. “Backup technician, Roen.”

“What is the cube root of 343?”

“Seven.”

“Who was the fifth leader of the Syndicate?”

“The fifth?” He counted off. “Uh ... Perry. Clive Perry.”

“Who is your favorite composer?”

“Berlioz.”

“Why?”

“Why? Have you ever listened to Symphonie Fantastique?”

“I’m sorry sir, could you be more specific?”

“Because he communicated the futility of life through his music.”

The eclectic conversation continued for a few minutes, the android asking Marc obscure and unrelated questions, checking all the general functions of the brain to see if they came through the transfer correctly. Or at least adequately.

Just when he felt he may have recovered enough to get off the jump couch, and to tell the android that he had answered enough questions, he felt another quick stab in his arm. “What was that?”

“Another shot, sir. The drug will render you unconscious for several hours, while your body recovers from the effects of synthesis.”

“Wait, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’ve been asleep for eight years, I want to be awake.”

“It won’t be for long sir. All readings are within normal parameters.” It began to move away, but he thought it might just be himself losing consciousness. “Welcome to Sirius, sir.”

His eyelids were too heavy to keep open. He was almost asleep when he had a sudden shock of clarity: a computer had just given him a Turing test. I hope I passed, he thought, and passed out.

Chapter 5

2009-01-29T13:16:00.001+01:00

Marc walked through the corridor, next to the attendant who was clearly awed by the fact that he was walking next to the man who would be the first person to travel to another solar system. As he thought about this it suddenly occurred to Marc that he wouldn’t see the Sun for 27 years, over a quarter of a century. Not close up, at least. It would only be ten years for him, but the Sun itself will have burned for 27 years before he would be in this solar system again. He had the urge to turn around and run back outside to see it one last time, but he fought it down. He wished he had thought to look up before he walked in the building, but he was, understandably, distracted at the time. The last time he had seen the Sun had probably been yesterday. He wished he could have recognized it at the time, but doubted it would have made much of a difference. You can never grasp the importance of a moment at that moment. That really rots. Why did it have to be that way? You could never just grab a hold of a moment and keep it, it was always slipping away. You couldn’t keep anything; you were just drifting through time, naked and alone, forever.

Synthesis made this point even more poignant. You didn’t keep the same clothes, the same furniture, you didn’t even keep the same molecules. Nothing was permanent.

He blinked and shook his head. Why am I thinking like this? I’m about to go on the most historic journey any human being has ever taken, and I’m depressed! He immediately recognized it as Emma’s influence, and felt frustrated that she had managed to permeate herself into his innermost thoughts. She was a Buddhist, and would sometimes talk about how our mere existence is a kind of cosmic fall. We should seek oblivion, the absence of experience, and thereby the absence of pain. Marc thought it sounded like spiritual suicide.

“Mr. Tornsen! Hello! Come in!” The jump station techs greeted him and shook his hand as he entered the room. He never felt comfortable around them, but he could never put his finger on why. Perhaps it was because their job involved taking people’s brains apart, and they seemed to enjoy it entirely too much. But they weren’t the only ones in the room; it was filled with execs and people he had never seen before, each lining up to shake his hand and congratulate him on the momentous trip he was about to take. They had explained to him already that they weren’t going to announce it until they had heard back from him at Sirius, so it was something of a secret. They were filming it for posterity’s sake, and Tornsen realized that his facial expressions, his words of thanks to the multitude greeting him, and everything that took place in the jump station that day, would be scrutinized down to the last detail for millennia. I’m making history. He quietly muttered Shepherd’s prayer and smiled widely at his accolades. I hope when they wonder what was going through my head at this moment, they won’t find out that I was depressed and thinking of my last companion who dropped me.

After a few minutes, the number of people in the room was much smaller than it had been when he first came in; he realized that after they had shaken his hand and congratulated him, they were all leaving. Several minutes later, he was alone in the room with the jump techs. He looked at them quizzically, and asked, “Where is everybody going?”

“Oh, no one is allowed in the jump room at the time of the jump except the techs. And, of course, the traveler!” They both laughed, and Tornsen smiled thinly.

“I’ve never noticed that before.”

“Well, it has to do with liability issues. Or something along those lines. I’m not exactly sure. Should we get started?”

Tornsen disrobed and sat on the jump couch. It was metallic and ice cold. All jump couches were. He remembered that he had often wanted to ask about this, after the jump, but his mind had always been occupied with other things. So he looked up at the techs and said, “Can I ask you something? Why are the jump couches so uncomfortable?”

The techs looked at each other and laughed again. “You have no idea how often we hear that, sir. Unfortunately, there isn’t any good answer. Early synthesis technology required that the couches be metallic, but it’s become so advanced since then, there’s no need for it anymore. It’s just something that no one has corrected.”

“Once you’ve broadcast me, why don’t you synthesize a comfortable couch for the next traveler?” Tornsen said, and they laughed politely. From their faces, he got the impression that they’d heard that joke before.

“All right sir,” the other tech said, “why don’t you lay back and put the mouthpiece on.” He leaned back against the couch, shivering a little as his back came into contact with the metal, then reached over to the little table beside the couch and grabbed the small plastic cup that covered his nose and mouth. It contained a small amount of a drug that would "kill" this body so the jump techs could then dissect his brain in order to make a neural map of it.

“Good. Now, Mr. Tornsen, can you tell me what your object is?” The second tech was holding a blue pyramid up so he could see it. In order to make sure that the neural scan had read everything, they would have a simple object (or sometimes, a simple two-dimensional shape) in one of the primary colors that would function as his last memory. The techs would broadcast what the object was just prior to broadcasting the traveler on a separate bandwidth. When the traveler arrived at his destination, the first thing he would be asked is what his object was.

“Blue pyramid.”

“Excellent sir. Now please take deep breaths. When you wake up, you’ll be at Sirius. Have a pleasant trip!” They laughed again. Of course, there was no question of having a pleasant trip, since one didn’t exist during the trip.

Tornsen inhaled deeply, and felt the immediate effects of the drug. He still had several seconds of consciousness left, he knew, so he looked at the room, trying to fully appreciate the moment. This is the last time I’ll be in the solar system for nearly three decades. This is the first time a human being will leave the solar system. The next moment for me will be eight and a half years in the future. I wish I could really grasp the significance of those things. It’s Emma’s fault...

And then the darkness took him.

Chapter 4

2009-01-17T13:12:00.001+01:00

“Training” was basically committing as much information to memory as possible. Theoretically, the information could be broadcast as well, but when it was sensitive information, they preferred to encode it in someone’s mind. Neural maps could be easily duplicated, but no one could “read” them, determining what the memories, beliefs, and thoughts actually were. Despite extensive efforts, no one had found a way to reduce the structure of any given brain’s neurons in such a way as to decipher what it meant to that brain.

Eight and a half years... He tried not to think about it. No one had ever spent more than several hours in dead time, the distance between the furthest outposts at opposite ends of the solar system. Eventually, there would be outposts further away so that it would take a day, or days, of dead time to reach one from another.

But eight and a half years? It would be like traveling to the future, but without any way of getting back. He’d blink, and the universe would be eight and a half years older, eight and a half years of events having transpired on Earth, eight and a half years of people he knew going on with their daily lives in a universe in which he, for all practical purposes, did not exist.

You’re thinking about it. I thought you weren’t going to think about it.

He returned to his “studies.” Once Marc arrived at Sirius, he was going to have to explore and analyze the body the pioneer had settled on to map it and see if it could be terraformed, and to find locations for additional stations. Then he’d have to start mapping the Sirius system to see where additional hop stations should be set up. Usually, these things were done by a team of people, but he was going to have to do it by himself. The isolation he was going to experience terrified and thrilled him. And he could explain away the terrified part: there would be plenty of machines to talk to, even though that wasn’t the same thing as a person.

He called up the info on the comp again. The pioneer had spent several months trying to determine which of the several planets and hundreds of asteroids to land on. From the limited information available, it looked like the pioneer had chosen the best spot. Most of the planets had orbits that took them too close to the star for human beings to survive. The body it had chosen managed to keep its distance. At least there, the temperature would waver between too damn cold to live and cold, but survivable, rather than between too damn cold to live and too damn hot to live.

Marc also thought about the info the pioneer would send during his dead time. He’d arrive and have to spend many of his waking hours going over, verifying, and re-broadcasting all the new info it had obtained from its position on the planet, some of which would undoubtedly conflict with the preliminary reports that he was now committing to memory.

Even exploring a new solar system was going to have its boring aspects.

He sighed and realized he was having difficulty focusing. Understandably so. They’d given him two weeks to memorize two months’ worth of info. He’d managed to look at all of it, but there was going to be plenty he’d forget. Right now I’ll be happy if I remember Morse code. Every tech had to know Morse.

Marc looked down at his comp again, and wondered why he resisted ever being synthesized with internals. Most people didn’t; there was just something about having comps in your head that was...unsettling. There were those who tried to do everything short of becoming mechanical, but biology had a way of returning everything to a happy medium. If you wanted to have a completely different face or body when you synthesized, you could do it, within limits. But the longer you went before your next synthesis, the more your body or face would grow into the shape dictated by your DNA. And DNA was one thing you couldn't change: in order for your mind to be reproduced, the brain that it was reproduced in had to have precisely the same code as the body it came from. Otherwise, the synthesis simply wouldn’t work. If you took out one brick, the building would collapse. And the body in general had to have the same DNA as the brain attached to it; any alteration in any particular organ merely reduced its shelf life with no benefit to the individual.

He shook his head, realizing that he had, once again, failed to focus on the info on his comp. Why can’t I concentrate? But he knew why. He was in the green room, waiting for someone to come tell him it was time. Actually it was already past time; he was supposed to have been broadcast to Sirius five minutes ago. He’d been waiting here for nearly an hour. He felt like a criminal waiting to be taken to the guillotine.

He heard footsteps approaching in the hallway. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and put his comp on the table in front of him. The door opened.

“Sir? They’re ready for you in the jump room. Could you follow me please?”

Marc nodded. As he stood up and walked out the door into the hallway under the gaze of the attendant, he suddenly felt more weary than he could recall ever feeling.

Chapter 3

2009-01-06T09:04:00.001+01:00

“Marco! Come in!” Marc walked into the office, where all of the execs were, and took a seat at the oval table. The execs sat down at the table as well. All on the opposite side of it. “Marc, thanks for coming at such short notice. All the way from Roen!” That was Hartman, the one exec he knew pretty well. He was a little too boisterous and had the annoying habit of tapping whatever writing untensil he had in his hand, but he was still a good guy and Marc considered him a friend. As this was an official meeting, however, he'd have to address him formally, even if Hartman was under no such obligation to return the favor. “You know, for an Oort Cloud Object, Roen is ridiculously close to the sun. That's largely why we chose it as the first station in the OC. But we have a dozen pioneers going out from there, so in twenty years Roen will only be one of several OC stations. We’re moving quickly.”

Marc smiled, and pretended like he was intrigued by what Hartman said. But he already knew all of this. And Hartman knew he knew it.

“Well, enough small talk. I’m sure you’re wondering why we called you all the way back here. In fact, I’m sure you’re wondering why we sent you out to Roen as a backup. Am I right?”

He shifted in his seat, surprised at how transparent everything had suddenly become. “Well, yes, to be honest.”

“Of course you are. You’re one of the best techs we have, and for all practical purposes, we publicly humiliated you. And yet, despite this, you performed every duty according to the highest standards. Even the most pointless ones.”

He was looking at Hartman more closely now. He was obviously building to a point, but Tornsen could not imagine what it was.

“I’m going to tell you something about the Syndicate’s projects. Of course, you realize that this is highly sensitive, and you are not to talk about it outside of this room. For the length of this meeting, your security clearance has been upgraded to yellow.”

Marc blinked. Yellow was the highest classification. Immediately, his perspective shifted; if they were giving him a yellow clearance, even if it was only for half an hour, it probably meant he was not going to get dropped after all. In fact, it probably meant something closer to a promotion. But that didn’t resonate with giving him a crap assignment on Roen.

“You have a question.”

“Well, yes sir. What exactly does this have to do with my being sent to Roen as a backup?”

Hartman grinned. “We’ll get to that. First, let me tell you why you're here. 530 years ago, the Syndicate initiated a long-term project. It was controversial among the execs, but it managed to get the votes necessary. The project was to secretly send a pioneer out further than any had gone before. In fact, it was sent out further than any pioneer has gone since then as well. The reason this is significant is because it only arrived several years ago. Yesterday we received a transmission that it had a hop station set up. It took a while for this transmission to reach us, but the hop station is just sitting there, waiting for us to transmit. Would you like us to tell you where it is?”

Marc nodded, holding his breath, not knowing what to expect.

“Sirius.”

There was a pause as he absorbed the information. “Sirius? You mean the star?”

Hartman grinned again. “Yes, Sirius the star. We sent it there rather than somewhere closer since there was a greater chance of finding a planet or moon in the Sirius system that could eventually be terraformed. We’re still not sure about that, but the pioneer managed to find a place to set up shop. So that means that we have to find someone to transfer to Sirius. That person has to be completely loyal to the Syndicate. It has to be someone who would not respond negatively to being mistreated by the Syndicate. Do you understand now why we sent you to Roen as a backup?”

Marc nodded, thinking he might pass out. “How far away is it? I mean, how much dead time?”

“A little over eight and a half years.”

Eight and a half years. “So, when you say you’ve been in contact with it...”

“Yes. It means it arrived there eight and a half years ago. We received transmissions when it first entered the Sirius system, again six months ago when it had found a planetary body to build the station on, and then, yesterday, when it had the hop station set up.”

“What kind of body did it find?”

“It’s a moon orbiting a gas giant, a little further away from Sirius than Mars is from the Sun, although its orbit is much more eccentric. Any more questions?”

“Hundreds.”

“How about an answer first? Will you do this? Will you be the first person to leave the solar system? Will you spend eight and a half years in dead time, and spend your first six months completely isolated from every other human being?”

“There has to be some danger here. I mean, transmitting all the way through the Oort Cloud?”

“Worse than that. Sirius has a comet cloud of its own. And yet, we were able to receive the pioneer’s transmissions with only a minimal amount of signal degradation. The OC isn't that dense, you know, even though it has billions of bodies. Besides, what is ‘danger’? If we don’t hear from you in 17 years, we’ll just reproduce you here, with the neural scan we’ll take right before you leave.”

“Yeah, well, losing 17 years seems like a danger to me.”

“Marc, you’ll be losing 17 years anyway. Whenever you come back to this solar system, you will have spent eight and a half years in dead time going out there and eight and a half years coming back.”

His head was still swimming when he recalled something Hartman had just said. “Six months alone? Why would I have to spend the first six months by myself?”

“Well, you know that we usually send the second as soon as the first contacts us from the new station. Obviously, that won’t be possible here. So we won’t be able to know whether your broadcast was successful before we send out more techs and mechs. We’ve debated this, and settled on the following scenario: we’ll send another signal at the same time as yours, but we’ll aim it at a body three light-months out to bounce it back. Once that signal arrives back here, we’ll know whether there were any difficulties that far out. It’s not much, of course, but it will have to do.”

“I know a lot of ‘lytes who wouldn’t want to even try it.”

Hartman was shaking his head and his smile had completely vanished. “Marc, the Syndicate has voted on this. There won’t be any ‘lytes. Only techs and mechs. There’s just too great of a chance that the signals won’t get through. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

Marc furrowed his brow. Being alone for six months was bad enough. But to not have any ‘lytes was like not getting paid. They were the reason why anyone wanted to be a first. “Uh, sir, with all due respect, this venture has suddenly become much less attractive.”

“Think of it this way. You’ll still be the most famous person in history. People will be talking about you for millennia. And the ‘lytes will be here waiting for you when you finish your tour.”

“That’s ten years, plus 17 years of dead time!”

“The latter of which you won’t even experience.”

As much as he tried to be offended by this, he had to admit that the glory heavily outweighed the inconveniences. He would be the first person to reach another star! He thought of Yeager again, and wondered what the next stage beyond this would be. After someone had reached another star, the next big step would be...reaching another galaxy. And that’s millennia away. This is the most important step that humanity will take for thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years. And they were asking him to take it.

He looked up at Hartman. “When does the train leave?”

Hartman’s grin immediately returned. “Not for a couple of weeks. We have some training for you to go through first. We’ll call you tomorrow to start the process. In the meantime, why don’t you go out and celebrate?”

Chapter 2

2008-12-23T21:20:00.001+01:00

Humankind had finally discovered how to travel at the speed of light: by becoming light.

It actually took a long time for anyone to apply synthesis technology to transportation. Synthesis was significant enough by itself: the ability to form any piece of matter into any other piece of matter, provided that they had equivalent amounts of subatomic particles. On a practical level you didn’t even need a piece of matter. The air molecules in the vicinity usually provided a sufficient amount of electrons, protons, and neutrons.

Like many discoveries, synthesis was discovered by accident, and so was not fully understood. Three free electron laserbeams were triangulated, and at their focal point a wave was initiated that caused normal matter to “vibrate.” Synthesis disrupted the nuclear and electromagnetic forces, making it possible to reorganize the particles into whatever configuration was desired. The new configurations were rough and unstable until the wave was turned off and the nuclear and electromagnetic forces took hold again. Then the atoms just “snapped” into the form they had been reorganized into.

It almost caused society to self-destruct. The alchemist’s dream had finally come true, only to mean that gold was now worthless. Poverty was eliminated after a violent uprising made access to synthesis technology a basic human right. Priceless works of art could be reproduced, precise down to the molecular level. Some traditionalists tried to keep track of which masterpieces were the originals, but human nature being what it is, thousands of the “original” Starry Night cropped up, and since they were all virtually identical, the hold-outs just gave up. The only originals that mattered anymore were personal belongings that had sentimental value.

Society did manage to survive, however, and synthesis technology advanced. The only limitation to it was that the size of the object being synthesized -- about two square meters. Eventually, it became possible to synthesize complex machines with many moving parts, including microscopic parts. After this, it didn’t take long for it to occur to some enterprising young technicians and mechanics to try to synthesize a human being. They developed a computer program which could read DNA and extrapolate the information into an adult. When fed into a synthesizer, it was therefore able to produce an adult body based on the DNA.

It worked perfectly, except for the fact that it was dead: just a body without life. After several tries and no luck they were about to give up, when it occurred to them to dissect a “used” brain, make an exact neural map of it -- exact down to the molecular level -- and have the synthesizer reproduce the brain according to the map, rather than just based on the DNA of the brain in question. Once again, the body had no life; but when they gave an electrical shock to the cerebral cortex, all of the body functions jumped into being.

The relevance to transportation was immediately seen: now, instead of building a ship to send a person from planet A to planet B, you just had to “read” their DNA and neural map and broadcast the information to the place of arrival, whereupon a synthesizer would reproduce the body and the mind, complete with all of its memories, give the cortex a shock, and the person would (after a brief recovery time) get up and walk out.

There were also a few side effects that were generally seen as positive. Eternal life, for example. As long as someone’s DNA was on file, they could be reproduced using their most recent neural map. Because of this, it was recommended that everyone have a fresh map made at least every few months.

Eternal youth was another one. The standard setting for any DNA analysis program was 20 years. If you just broadcasted once every decade, you’d be in your 20s forever.

It also provided a somewhat elaborate method for removing scars, both physical and emotional. Since physical scars would not affect the DNA, every new synthesis was a fresh body. Painful memories, as long as they were recent, could also be wiped out. Just synthesize with a neural map from before the event you don’t want to remember, and poof! It’s like it never happened.

Synthesis allowed human beings to explore their solar system much more safely. Robotic pioneers were sent out to various places, and once they arrived, would set up a hop station. Then people’s DNA and neural maps could be broadcast there, and their bodies and minds reproduced. The only problem was the original travel time: you still had to send the robotic pioneers there the old-fashioned way. But once you got to a certain point, you could build another pioneer to go further out from there, like island hopping. There were literally dozens of pioneers going to places in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.

There were some people who refused to synthesize themselves. They were generally considered cranks, and usually changed their minds once they reached a certain age, and realized that they really were going to die if they didn’t. But they were an extreme minority. Some people used synthesis every few days. It was estimated that the average person synthesized himself 30 times a year.

Marc, as a tech, averaged lower than that. This was because he hopped around in the solar system, but many of the off-earth stations were so small that they usually only had one hop station each. So once you were there, you didn’t broadcast again until you left that station. He had been all over the solar system, and hadn’t been to Earth in several years, so it was a surprise to receive sudden orders to return to Portland, where the Syndicate’s headquarters were located. He wasn’t aware of their procedures in dropping employees, and so didn’t know if this was a part of it -- but it didn’t look good.

Chapter 1

2008-12-12T18:45:00.001+01:00

Marc Tornsen enjoyed going to the observatory deck and looking up/down at the sky. They were on an asteroid named Roen in the innermost part of the Oort Cloud, above the plane of the solar system. On his off-hours, he would come here and look “up” at the sky when the asteroid had revolved so that the station was facing “down” towards the solar system. Of course they were too far away for the inner planets to be visible. Jupiter and Saturn could be seen with the naked eye; and the Sun and the canopy of stars was breathtaking, as always. The sublimity of it all was usually sufficient to get his mind off his troubles.

Today, however, he was particularly frustrated. For several months he had been falling deeper and deeper into depression and self-pity. He had hoped to be the first one here, but the Syndicate had chosen Jaspers instead. The people who managed to be chosen as the “firsts” were essentially celebrities, and Tornsen was the most senior tech who hadn’t been a first. Roen was a big deal too. It was the first settling in the Oort Cloud, and represented the furthest point of the solar system. Of course there would eventually be further settlings further out, but they wouldn’t be as significant. It was like the first guy who broke the sound barrier, Yeager. Not long after, another guy went out and went just a little bit faster, but who the hell remembers his name? Everyone knows who Yeager was.

This had been his last chance to be a first, and he knew it. He had devoted everything to someday being a first, all of his hopes and plans were based on it. When they chose someone else, he had been devastated. But then, six months ago, when they ordered him to Roen to be a part of the backup team, he was humiliated. A backup team? He couldn’t remember the last time he had been a backup, his memories didn’t go back that far. They were publicly sending him out to Roen, where everybody knew he had hoped to be the first, as one of the lowest techs.

But that wasn’t really why Tornsen was depressed. One of the perks of being a tech was that he didn’t have much difficulty obtaining female companionship. Civilians, not associated with the Syndicate, followed the projects, and were essentially fans of the techs and mechs, who had dubbed them “acolytes” or “‘lytes” for short. The woman that he had been with since his arrival on Roen, named Emma, had suddenly, without any warning, left last month. She said she had to meet someone on Mars and it was important, but that she would be back within a week. Now it had been five weeks, and there was no word from her. Since she left in such a hurry, she hadn’t left any way for him to contact her. Basically, he had been dropped, and it just brought his insignificance to a head, making it even more obvious than it had already been.

Suddenly his comm beeped, bringing him partially out of his self-pity. When he looked at it, the screen read, “report to hop station / transfer to portland immediately / respond.” He pushed the “received” button, then called the message back up to read it again. Now what have I done? While he had been thinking things couldn’t get worse, is it possible that he was being taken off the backup team? He wasn’t even competent enough for that?

He started walking to the hop station. He didn’t have to get his clothes or belongings. Everything he had here was synthesized, and he hadn’t had anything sent by snailboat, largely because it would take several years before the first boat would arrive. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. He looked down at his comm and punched in earth time. Fourteen hours away; that meant fourteen hours of dead time. During that time he would be neither dead nor alive. He would just skip over it. He wondered if that was really what death was like, the time during a hop when you just weren’t there. It certainly was like what it was before you were born: no experience of it, and for all you know, it may not even have happened. Except it would be difficult to account for world history otherwise.

Oh well, he thought. It’s not like death is something I’ll ever have to worry about.