BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS

LIFEBOAT ON A BURNING SEA

Deserters.

When I can't see the next step, when I can't think clearly about the hardware
changes that TOS needs in order to become the repository, the ark, the salvation
of my soul, I think of deserters.

I think of men on the rail of a sinking tanker. For miles around, there are no
lights, only water black and icy. A lake of flame surrounds the ship. Beyond the
edge of the burning oil slick, a man sits in the lifeboat looking at his
comrades. The angle of the deck grows steeper. The men at the rail are waving
their hands, but the one in the boat doesn't return. Instead, he puts his back
into rowing, rowing away. To the men who still wave, who still hope, the flames
seem to reach higher, but it's really the ship coming down to meet the burning
sea.

Or this:

The arctic explorer wakes from dreams of ice and wind to a world of ice and
wind. In the sleeping bag, his frostbite has thawed and it feels as though his
hands and feet are on fire. It is almost more than he can endure, but he tells
himself he's going to live. As long as his companion is fit enough to drive the
sled, he's going to live. He hobbles from the tent, squints against the
sunlight. When he finds the dogs and sled gone, he watches for a long time as
the wind erases the tracks.

In these fantasies of mine, the dead bear witness.

From the bottom of the sea, dead sailors wave their arms.

Frozen into the ice, a leathery finger points, accuses.

There must have been a time when I wasn't aware of the relentless tick of every
heartbeat, but I don't remember it. My earliest memory is of lying awake in my
bed, eyes open in the blackness, imagining what it was like to be dead.

I had asked my father. He was a practical man.

"It's like this," he said. He showed me a watch that had belonged to my
grandfather, an antique watch that ran on a coiled spring instead of a battery.
He wound it up. "Listen," he said.

Tick, tick, tick, I heard.

"Our hearts are like that," he said, handing me the watch. "At last, they stop.
That's death."

"And then what?"

"Then, nothing," he told me. "Then we're dead. We just aren't any more -- no
thought, no feeling. Gone. Nothing."

He let me carry the watch around for a day. The next morning, the spring had run
down. I put the watch to my ear, and heard absence, heard nothing.

Even back then, lying awake in the dark with my thoughts of the void, I was
planning my escape.

Tick, tick, tick, went my heart, counting down to zero.

I wasn't alone. After my graduate work in neuronics, I found a university job
and plenty of projects to work on, but research is a slow business.

Tick, tick, tick.

I was in a race, and by the time I was fifty-six, I knew I was falling behind.
In fact, I felt lucky to have made it that far. We were living at the height of
terrorist chic. The Agrarian Underground and Monetarists were in decline, but
the generation of bombers that succeeded them was ten times as active, a hundred
times as random in their selection of targets. Plastique, Flame, Implosion. . .
. They gave themselves rock-band names. And then there were the ordinary street
criminals who would turn their splitter guns on you in the hope that your chip,
once they dug it out of your skin, would show enough credit for a hit of
whatever poison they craved.

Statistically, of course, it wasn't surprising that I was still alive. But
whenever I tuned in to CNN Four, The Street Beat Source, the barrage of
just-recorded carnage made me wonder that anyone was still alive.

Fifty-six. That's when I heard from Bierley's people. And after I had met
Bierley, after I had started to work with Richardson, I began to believe that I
would hit my stride in time, that Death might not be quite the distance runner
he'd always been cracked up to be.

I had known who Bierley was, of course. Money like his bought a high profile, if
you wanted it. And I had heard of Richardson. He was hot stuff in analog
information.

Bierley and Richardson were my best hope. Bierley and Richardson were magicians
at what they did. And Bierley and Richardson -- I knew it from the start -- were
unreliable.

Bierley, with his money and political charm, would stay with the project only
until it bored him. And Richardson, he had his own agenda. Even when we were
working well together, when we were making progress, Richardson never really
believed.

In Richardson's office, he and I watched a playback of Bierley's press
conference. It had been our press conference, too, but we hadn't answered many
questions. Even Richardson understood the importance of leaving that to Bierley.

"A multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor," Bierley said again
on the screen, "but we prefer to call it TOS." He smiled warmly. "The Other
Side."

From behind his desk, Richardson grumbled, "God. He makes what we've done sound
like a seance."

"Come on," I said. "It's the whole point."

"Are you really so hot to live forever as a machine consciousness, if, fantasy
of fantasies, it turns out to be possible?"

"Yes."

"Your problem," he said, pointing a finger, "is that you're too damned scared of
death to be curious about it. That's not a very scientific attitude."

I almost told him he'd feel differently in another twenty years, but then I
didn't. It might not be true. Since I had a/ways seen death as the enemy, it was
possible that someone like Richardson never would.

"Meanwhile," Richardson continued, "we've made a significant leap in machine
intelligence. Isn't that worthy of attention in its own right without pretending
that it's a step toward a synthesized afterlife?"

On the screen, Bierley was saying, "Of all the frontiers humanity has
challenged, death was the one we least expected to conquer."

"As if, Christ, as if we'd already done it!"

Bierley peered out from the screen. He had allowed only one video camera for the
conference so that he'd know when he was looking his viewers in the eye. "Some
of you watching now will never die. That's the promise of this research.
Pioneers of the infinite! Who doesn't long to see the march of the generations?
What will my grandchild's grandchildren belike? What lies ahead in one hundred
years? A thousand? A million?" After a pause and another grandfatherly smile, a
whisper: "Some will live to know."

Richardson blew a raspberry at the screen.

"All right," I admitted. "He oversells. But that's Bierley. Everything he says
is for effect, and the effect is funding!"

On the screen, the silver-haired Bierley was rephrasing questions as only he
could, turning the more aggressive queries in on themselves. Wasn't this a
premature announcement of a breakthrough bringing hope to millions? Would
Bierley himself turn a profit from this conquest of humanity's oldest and
cruelest foe? Would he himself be among the first to enter the possibly
hazardous territory of eternity to make sure it was safe for others?

Then he was introducing us, telling the reporters about my genius for hardware
and Richardson's for analog information theory. We had sixty technicians and
research assistants working with us, but BierIey made it sound like a two-man
show. In some ways, it was. Neither of us could be replaced, not if you wanted
the same synergy.

"Two great minds in a race for immortality," Bierley said, and then he gave them
a version of what I'd told Bierley myself: Richardson was always two steps ahead
of my designs, seeing applications that exceeded my intentions, making me run to
keep up with him and propose new structures that would then propel him another
two steps beyond me. I'd never worked with anyone who stimulated me in that way,
who made me leap and stretch. It felt like flying.

What Bierley didn't say was that often we'd dash from thought to thought and
finally look down to see empty air beneath us. Usually we discovered
impracticalities in the wilder things we dreamed up together. Only rarely did we
find ourselves standing breathless on solid ground, looking back at the flawless
bridge we had just built. Of course, when that happened, it was magnificent.

It also frightened me. I worried that Richardson was indispensable, that after
making those conceptual leaps with him, I could never go back to my solitary
plodding or to working with minds less electric than his. All minds were less
electric than his, at least when he was at his best. The only difficulty was
keeping him from straying into the Big Questions.

The camera had pulled back, and Richardson and I both looked rumpled and plain
next to Bierley's polish. On screen I stammered and adjusted my glasses as I
answered a question.

Richardson was no longer watching the press conference video, but had shifted
his gaze to the flatscreen on his office wall. It showed a weather satellite
image of the western hemisphere, time lapsed so that the last 72 hours rolled by
in three minutes. It was always running in Richardson's office, the only
decoration there, unless you counted that little statue, the souvenir from India
that he kept on his desk.

On the press conference tape, Richardson was answering a question. "We don't
have any idea how we'd actually get a person's consciousness into the machine,"
he admitted. "We haven't even perfected the artificial mind that we've built.
There's one significant glitch that keeps shutting us down for hours at a time."

At that point, Bierley's smile looked forced, but only for an instant.

"The best way to explain the problem," the recorded Richardson continued, "is to
tell you that thoughts move through our hardware in patterns that are analogous
to weather. Sometimes an information structure builds up like a tropical
depression. If conditions are right, it becomes a hurricane. The processor
continues to work, but at greatly reduced efficiency until the storm passes. So
we're blacked out sometimes. We can't talk to . . ." He paused, looking at
Bierley, sort of wincing, ". . . to TOS, until the hurricane has spent its
energy."

"You don't like the name," I said in Richardson's office.

Richardson snorted. "The Other Side." He leaned back in his chair. "You're right
about the money, though. He charms the bucks out of Congress, and that's not
easy these days."

On the tape, I was telling the reporters about the warning lights I had rigged
in the I/O room: They ran up a scale from Small Craft Advisory to Gale Warning
to Hurricane, with the appropriate nautical flags painted onto the display. I
had hoped for a bigger laugh than I got.

"Can we interview the computer?" a reporter asked.

I had started to say something about how the I/O wasn't up to that yet, but that
TOS itself was helping to design an appropriate interface to make itself as easy
to talk to as any human being.

Bierley's image stepped forward in front of mine. "TOS is not a computer," he
said."Let's make this clear. TOS is an information structure for machine
intelligence. TOS is interfaced with computers, can access and manipulate
digital data, but this is an analog machine. Eventually, it will be a repository
for human consciousness. If you want another name for it, you could call it a
Mind Bank."

"No one gets it," Richardson said, "and this press conference isn't going to
help." He looked at me. "You don't get it, do you, Maas?"

"I don't even know what you're talking about."

"Trying to synthesize self-awareness is an interesting project. And putting
human consciousness into a box would be a neat trick, instructive. I mean, I'm
all for trying even if we fail. I expect to fail. Even if we succeed, even if we
find a technical answer, it begs the bigger question."

"Which is?"

"What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? Until you get a
satisfactory answer to that, then what's the point of trying to live forever?"

"The point is that I don't want to die!" Then more quietly, I said, "Do you?"

Richardson didn't look at me. He picked up the Indian statue from his desk and
leaned back in his chair to look at it. When he put it down again, he still
hadn't answered.

The statue was a man dancing inside an arc of flames.

The next week, Bierley deserted us.

"Brain aneurism in his sleep," one of the old man's attorneys told me via video
link.

There had been no provision in Bierley's will to keep seed money coming. If he
went first, we were on our own. The attorney zapped me a copy of the will so I
could see for myself.

"Makes you think," the attorney said, "doesn't it?" He meant the sudden death. I
thought about that, of course. As strong as ever, I could hear my pulse in my
throat. Tick, tick, tick. But I was also thinking something else:

Bastard. Deserter.

He had left me to die.

Weeks later in the I/O room, I said to Richardson, "We're in trouble."

He and a technician had been fiddling with TOS's voice, and he said, "TOS, what
do you think of that?"

"I don't know what to think of it," said the machine voice. The tone was as
meaningfully modulated as any human voice, but there was still something
artificial about the sound -- too artificial, still, for press exposure. "I
don't know enough of what Dr. Maas means by 'trouble.' I'm unsure of just how
inclusive 'we' is intended to be."

"My bet," Richardson said, "is that he's going to say our project has funding
shortfalls up the yaya."

"Yaya?" said TOS.

"Wazoo," Richardson said.

"Oh." A pause. "I understand."

Richardson grinned at me. "English as she is spoke."

I waved off his joke. "There's talk of cutting our funding in Congress. I've
been calling the reps that were in Bierley's pocket, but I can't talk to these
people. Not like he could. And I sure as hell can't start a grass-roots ground
swell."

"How about that lobbyist we hired?"

"She's great at phoning, full of enthusiasm, to tell me how bad things are. She
says she's doing her best." I dropped into a chair. "Damn Bierley for dying."
And for taking us with him, I thought. Didn't those bastards in Washington
understand what the stakes were here? This wasn't basic science that you could
throw away when budgets were tight. This was life and death!

Tick, tick, tick.

My life. My death!

Richardson said, "How desperate are we?"

"Plenty."

"Good." Richardson smiled. "I have a desperation play."

We played it close to the edge. Our funding was cut in a House vote, saved by
the Senate, and lost again in conference committee. Two weeks later, we also
lost an accountant who said he wouldn't go to jail for us, but by then we had
figured out that the best way to float digital requisition forms and kite
electronic funds transfers was with TOS. We couldn't stay ahead of the numbers
forever, but TOS, with near-human guile and digital speed, bought us an extra
week or two while the team from Hollywood installed the new imaging hardware.

The technicians and research assistants kept TOS busy with new data to absorb,
to think about, and I worked to add "rooms" to the multi-cameral memory, trying
to give TOS the ability to suppress the information hurricanes that still shut
us down at unpredictable intervals. The first rooms had each been devoted to a
specific function -- sensory processing, pattern recognition, memory sorting --
but these new ones were basically just memory modules. Meanwhile, Richardson
paraded people who had known Bierley through the I/O room for interviews with
TOS.

The day of the press conference, I deflected half a dozen calls from the
Government Accounting Office. Even as the first reporters were filing into our
press room, I kept expecting some suits and crewcuts to barge in, flash badges,
and say, "FBI."

I also worried about hurricanes, but TOS's storm warning lights stayed off all
morning, and the only surprise of the press conference was the one Richardson
and I had planned. While stragglers were still filing into the room --
security-screening and bomb-sniffing that many people took some time -- the
video behind the podium flicked on.

"Bierley, regrettably, is dead," said Bierley's image. He was responding to the
first question after his prepared statement. "There's no bringing him back, and
I regret that." Warm smile.

The press corps laughed uncertainly.

"But you're his memories?" asked a reporter.

"Not in the sense that you mean it," Bierley said. "Nobody dumped Bierley's mind
into a machine. We can't do that." Dramatic pause. "Yet." Smile. "What I am is a
personality construct of other people's memories. Over one hundred of Bierley's
closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley,
specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings
of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley
as he saw himself, but I'm Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others."

Bierley chose another reporter by name.

The reporter looked around herself, then at the screen. "Can you see me?" she
said. "Can you see this room?"

"There's a micro camera," said the image, "top and center of this display panel.
Really, though --" he flashed the grandfatherly Bierley smile "-- that's a
wasted question. You must have had a harder one in mind."

"Just this," she said. "Are you self-aware?"

"I certainly seem to be, don't I?" said the image. "There's liable to be some
debate about that. I'm no expert, so I'll leave the final answer up to Doctors
Maas and Richardson. But my opinion is that, no, I am not self-aware."

A ripple of laughter from the reporters who appreciated paradox.

"How do we know," said a man who hadn't laughed, "that this isn't some kind of
fake?"

"How do you know I'm not some incredibly talented actor who's wearing
undetectable makeup and who studied Jackson Bierley's every move for years in
order to be this convincing?" Undetectably, unless you were looking for it,
Bierley's pupils dilated a bit, and the effect was to broadcast warmth and
openness. We had seen the real Bierley do that in recorded addresses. "I guess
you have to make up your own mind."

Then he blinked. He smiled. Jackson Bierley didn't intend to make a fool of
anyone, not even a rude reporter.

"What does Bierley's family think of all this?" asked someone else.

"You could ask them. I can tell you that they cooperated -- they were among
those interviewed by TOS. They have me back to an extent. I'll be here to meet
those great-great grandchildren I so longed to greet one day. Unfortunately . .
." and suddenly he looked sad. "Unfortunately, those kids will know Bierley, but
Bierley won't know them. Only much more research can hold out the promise that
one day, a construct like me really will be self-aware, will remember, will be
the man or woman whose life he or she extends into eternity."

He didn't mention the licensing fee his family was charging us for the exclusive
use of his image, any more than Bierley himself would have mentioned it.

"Are the Bierleys funding this project?"

"I know a billion sounds like a lot of money, but when it's divided up among as
many heirs as I have . . ." He paused, letting the laughter die. "No. They are
not. This project is more expensive than you can imagine. In the long run, it's
going to take moon-shot money to get eternity up and running."

"And where's that money going to come from, now that your federal funds have
been cut off?"

"Well, I can't really say much about that. But I'll tell you that it will be
much easier for me to learn Japanese or Malay as a construct than it would have
been for the real Jackson Bierley." He smiled, but there was a brief tremor to
the smile, and it didn't take a genius to see that Jackson Bierley, personality
construct or not, was one American who didn't want to hand yet another
technological advantage across the Pacific.

"In these times, it's understandable that the American taxpayer wants his money
spent on hiring police," Bierley went on. "Why think about eternal life when
you're worried about getting home from work alive? It's too bad that both can't
be a priority. Of course, with the appropriate hardware attached, a machine like
TOS could be one hell of a security system -- a very smart guard who never
sleeps." As if a TOS system could one day be in everyone's home.

Richardson and I stepped to the podium then, and for once I was happy to have no
public speaking skills. The Bierley construct jumped in with damage control
whenever I was about to say something I shouldn't. He made jokes when Richardson
dryly admitted that in all honesty, the construct was closer to a collaborative
oil painting than it was to the real Jackson Bierley. Of the three of us up on
the platform, the one who seemed warmest, funniest, most human, was the one
inside the video screen.

After the conference, we got calls from the Secretary of Commerce, the Speaker
of the House, and both the Majority and Minority Leaders in the Senate. Even
though they were falling all over themselves to offer support for funding,
Richardson and I knew we could still screw it up, so we mostly listened in while
the Bierley construct handled the calls.

It was Richardson who had pulled our fat out of the fire, but even I was caught
up in the illusion. I felt grateful to Bierley. * * *

Once we'd restored our funding, I expected things to return to normal. I thought
Richardson would be eager to get back to work, but he wouldn't schedule meetings
with me. Day after day, he hid out in his office to tie up what he said were
"loose ends."

I tried to be patient, but finally I'd had enough.

"It's time you talked to me," I said as I jerked open his office door. I stormed
up to his desk. "You've been stalling for two weeks. This project is supposed to
be a collaboration!"

Without looking up from his phone screen, he said, "Come in," which was supposed
to be funny.

"Richardson," I told him, not caring who he might be talking to, "you were
brilliant. You pulled off a coup. Great! Now let's get back to work. I can sit
in my office and dream up augmentations for TOS all day, but it doesn't mean
squat if I'm not getting your feedback."

"Have a seat."

"I'd prefer to stand, damn it. We're funded. We're ready to go. Let's get
something done!"

He looked up at last and said, "I'm not a careerist, Maas. I'm not motivated by
impressing anyone."

"And I am?" I sat down, tried to catch his eye. "I want to get to work for my
own reasons, all right? The Bierley construct is incredible. Now what can we do
next?"

"What indeed?"

"Yes," said the voice of Jackson Bierley. "I'm going to be a pretty hard trick
to top, especially once you've got me in 3-D." The phone screen was at an acute
angle and hard for me to see, but now I noticed the silver hair.

"Is that it?" I said. "You spend your day on the phone, chatting with the
construct?"

Richardson said, "Bye, Jackson," and disconnected. "The construct is
interesting. This is a useful tool we've invented."

"It is," I agreed. "It's something we can build on."

"It's something lots of people can build on." He folded the phone screen down.
"A week ago I got a call from a Hollywood agent. He wanted to talk to me about
some ideas. Constructs for dead singers -- they could not only do new
recordings, but grant interviews. Dead actor constructs. TOS-generated films
scripted by dead writers and directed by Hitchcock or Huston or Spielberg or any
other dead director you'd care to name. TOS is getting so good at imaging, you'd
never need to build a set or hire avid crew."

"Is that what you've spent all this time on?"

"Of course not. It's a good idea from the agent's perspective -- as he sees it,
he'd represent all of the virtual talent and practically own Hollywood. But it
sounds to me like a waste of resources."

"Good."

"I'm just pointing out that everybody who hears about what TOS can do will see
it in terms of meeting his or her own needs. The agent sees dead stars. You see
a stepping stone to immortality. I see a tool for making my own inquiries."

"What inquiries?"

"We've had that discussion." He pointed at his wall. "They've always had a
better handle on it than we have."

I looked where he was pointing, but just saw the usual time-lapse satellite
image of weather systems crossing the globe. Then I realized that something was
different. The display wasn't of the western hemisphere, but of the eastern.

Richardson picked up the statue on his desk. "Shiva," he said. "This arc of
flames that surrounds him is life and death. Flames for life. Spaces between the
flames for death. The one and the zero. Reincarnation."

For once it was my turn to be the skeptic. "You find that consoling? An
afterlife that can't be verified? It's superstition, Richardson."

"It's religion," he said, "and I don't have any more faith than you do that I'll
be reborn after I die. Maybe I don't disbelieve it as much as you do. Since it
can't be falsified, it's not subject to any scientific test. But as a metaphor,
I find it fascinating."

"What are you talking about?"

"Maas, what if you really knew death? What if you and death were intimate?"

"I still don't follow you."

"You're so interested in synthetic consciousness. What about synthesized death?
If you knew more about death, Maas, would you still have this unreasoning fear
of it?"

I snapped, "What do you mean, 'unreasoning'?"

"Forget it. I guess it's not your cup of tea. Why don't you think about this
instead: Could a TOS construct replace you?"

"Replace me?"

"The way we replaced Bierley. The Bierley construct works for us every bit as
well as the original did. So what about you? If I built a Maas construct, could
it work on augmenting TOS as well as you do? It could sound like you, it could
interact with other people convincingly, but could it think like you, design
like you?"

"I don't know," I said. doubt it. A construct mimics social impressions"I The
pattern of thought that produces the behavior in the construct isn't sequenced
quite like the thought in our heads. But you know that. Hell, what are you
asking me for? You're the information expert."

"Well, if the behavior is the same, if the behavior is the production of good
ideas, then maybe all we'd have to do is teach the machine to go through the
motions that produce that behavior. We'd get the construct to act out whatever
it is that you do when you're producing a good idea. Maybe it would kick out
quality results as a sort of by-product."

I chewed my lip. "I don't think so."

"Works with Bierley."

"That's social skills. Not the same."

"You doubt the machine intelligence is sufficiently sophisticated, right?"
Richardson said. "You're investing all this hope in TOS as a repository of
consciousness, but you're not sure that we can even begin to synthesize creative
thinking.

"Bierley makes for some interesting speculation," he went on. "Don't you think
so? The original is dead. Jackson Bierley, in that sense, is complete. What
we're left with is our memories of him. That's what we keep revising. And isn't
that always true?

"My father died fifteen years ago," he said, "and I still feel as though my
relationship with him changes from year to year. A life is like a novel that
bums as you read it. You read the last page, and it's complete. You think about
it, then, reflect on the parts that puzzle you. You feel some loss because there
aren't any pages left to turn. You can remember only so many of the pages.
That's what the construct is good for -- remembering pages."

He smiled. "And here's the metaphysics: While you're trying to remember the book
that's gone, maybe the author is writing a new one."

He put the statue of Shiva down on his desk. "Give me some more time, Maas. I'm
not sitting on my hands, I promise you that. I'm working on my perspective."

"Your perspective."

"That's what I said."

I exhaled sharply. "I've been thinking about your suggestion that we tie
building security into TOS. I could do that. And I guess I could work on getting
rid of the hurricanes once and for all. But that's not just a hardware problem."

"All right. I'll give you an hour a day on that. Okay?"

I didn't tell him what I really thought. If I thoroughly pissed him off, who
knew how long it would take for us to get back to our real work? I said, "Get
your perspective straight in a week."

In a week, he was gone.

One of the research assistants, somewhat timidly, brought me the news. She had
been watching CNN Four and saw a bombing story across town, and she was certain
that she had seen Philip Richardson among the dead.

She followed me into my office, where I switched on the TV. CNN Four recycles
its splatter stories every twenty minutes, so we didn't have long to wait.

The bomb had gone off in a subway station. Did Richardson ride the subway? I
realized I didn't know where the man lived or how he got back and forth from
work.

The station would have channeled the energy up through its blast vents --
everything in the city was designed or redesigned these days with bombs in mind.
But that saved structures, not people. Images of the station platform showed a
tangle of twisted bodies. The color, as in all bomb-blast scenes, seemed wrong;
the concussion turns the victims' skin slightly blue.

The camera panned across arms and legs, the faces turned toward the camera and
away.

"Three terrorist groups, Under Deconstruction, Aftershock, and The Last Wave,
have all claimed responsibility for the bombing,"said the news reader.

There, at the end of the pan, was Philip Richardson, discolored like the rest.
At the end of the story, I ran back the television's memory cache and replayed
the images. I froze the one that showed Richardson.

"Get out," I told the research assistant. "Please."

I called the police.

"Are you family?" asked the desk sergeant when I told her what I wanted. "We
can't make a verification like that until the next of kin have been notified."

"His goddam face was just on the goddam TV!"

"Rules are rules," she said. "Hang on." Her gaze shifted from the phone to
another monitor as she keyed in the query. "No problem, anyway. This is cleared
to go out. And, yeah, sorry. The list of fatalities includes your friend."

I broke the connection.

"He was no friend of mine."

Deserter.

At first I dismissed the thought of making a Richardson personality construct.
It wasn't the personality I needed, but the mind. Substance, not surface. But
how different were they, really?

Maybe, Richardson had said, all we'd have to do is teach the machine to go
through the motions. Maybe it would kick out results as a by-product.

I went to the I/O room where the hologram generator -- Richardson's idea -- had
been installed. I called up Bierley.

"Hello, Maas," he said.

"Hi, Jackson."

"First names?" Bierley arched an eyebrow. "That's a first for you." Except for
distortion flecks that were like a fine dust floating around him, Bierley was
convincingly present.

"Well," I said, "let's be pals."

His laugh was ironic and embracing at the same time. "All right," he said.
"Let's."

"Jackson, what's the product of 52,689 and 31,476?"

"My net worth?"

"No. Don't kid. What's the product?"

"What were those numbers again?"

"You're shading me, Jackson. You can't have forgotten."

About then, the Small Craft Advisory light came on, but I ignored it. Chaotic
disturbances hardly ever built to hurricane force anymore. Sure enough, the
light went out soon after it had come on.

"What's this about?" Bierley asked me.

"Did you calculate the product on the way to deciding how you'd respond to the
question?Or did you jump straight to an analysis of what Bierley would say?"

"I did neither," Bierley said. Which was true. There wasn't an "I" there, except
as a grammatical convention. "Don't confuse me with your machine, Dr. Maas.
You're the scientist. You know what I'm talking about." He brushed the lapel of
his jacket. "I'm an elegant illusion."

"Would you give me some investment advice, Jackson?"

The hologram smiled. "My forte was always building companies," he said, "not
trading stocks. Best advice that I could give you about stocks is some I got at
my daddy's knee. He said you don't go marrying some gal just because another
fool loves her."

I smiled, and then I wondered if Bierley's father had actually said that. If it
sounded good, that's what would matter to the construct. But that's just what
would have mattered to the real Bierley, too.

That is, what had mattered to the real Bierley and what mattered now to the
construct was that the story have its effect. He had made me smile, made me
think that Bierley the billionaire was just a regular guy.

What if a Richardson construct could work the same way? The effect that
Richardson had produced, the one I wanted to duplicate, was an effect on me. I
wanted to stretch my thinking. What if that depended more on the emotional state
he generated in me than on his actual ideas?

No, I thought. That was ridiculous.

What decided me was the phone call.

"Are you Maas?" the woman said. Her hair was long and black, but disarrayed. Her
eyes were red-rimmed. On her face was the blankness that comes after too many
days of anger or grief or worry, when the muscles can't hold the form of feeling
any longer, but the feeling persists. "I'm Phillips," I thought she said. That
is, I thought she was saying her name was Phillips. But she was only pausing to
search for the next word.

"I'm Philip's . . . widow," she said.

I hadn't known Richardson was married. I wasn't the only one he had deserted.

"Yes," I said, and then again, more gently: "Yes, Mrs. Richardson. I'm Dr.
Maas." An infant wailed in the background, and Mrs. Richardson seemed not to
have noticed. "I'm Elliot Maas."

"Do you know where he is?" she asked.

Was she really asking what I thought she was? I opened, then closed my mouth.
What would I tell her? He's dead, Mrs. Richardson. Death is not a location.
Where is he? He isn't anywhere. Mrs. Richardson, he is not. Mrs. Richardson,
your husband doesn't exist. Where he used to be, there is nothing. Mrs.
Richardson . . .

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not being very clear." She put her hand to her
forehead and closed her eyes. "The ashes, Dr. Maas. Have the ashes been
delivered to you?"

I stared stupidly at the screen.

"The coroner's office says they had the ashes delivered to me, but they didn't.
I thought perhaps they had made a mistake and sent them to Philip's work
address." She opened her eyes. "Did the coroner's office make a delivery?" In
the background, the infant cried more lustily.

"I don't know," I said. "I could check, I suppose."

"They used to . . ." Her mouth trembled, and she pursed her lips. Her eyes
glistened. "They used to let you make your own arrangements," she said. "But
they don't do that anymore because there are so many bombs and so many . . . I
never saw him. I never got to say goodbye and now they can't even find his
ashes."

"I'll make inquiries."

"His mother's been here, trying to help out, but she . . ." Richardson's wife
blinked, as if waking. "Oh, God. The baby. I'm so sorry."

The phone went black, then the screen showed the Ameritech logo and the dial
tone began to drone.

I made sure that the ashes hadn't been delivered to us, and I called the
coroner's office where they swore that the ashes had been processed and
delivered to Richardson's home address days earlier. They had a computer record
of it.

When I called Mrs. Richardson back, it was the other Mrs. Richardson--his
mother--who answered. She looked worn out, too. One more person that Richardson
had abandoned.

But she would manage to get by in whatever way she had managed before. I was the
one he had hurt the most. I was the one with the most to lose.

When Richardson's wife came to the phone, I told her that I'd struck out with
the coroner. "But I think there is a way that I can help you," I said. I even
admitted that it might be of some use to me, as well.

Who knows whether the construct brought Sharon Richardson any consolation? She
came by from time to time as the construct evolved, and she usually brought the
baby. That actually caused a problem the first time she did it -- I had cleared
her through the building's recognition system, but TOS didn't want to let
Richardson's infant daughter, a stranger, inside without my authorization. The
door refused to open. TOS-mediated security still needed some tinkering.

In the I/O room, Sharon Richardson told the construct, "We miss you."

"He loved you," the construct told her.

"We miss you," she said again.

"I'm not really him."

"I know."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know. There's something that never got said, but I don't know what it
is."

"Everything passes away. Nothing lasts," the construct said. "That's the thing
he carried with him every moment. Nothing lasts, and that's the thing we have to
hold on to. That's the thing we have to understand, that we're as transitory as
thoughts. Butterflies or thoughts. When we really understand that, then we're
beautiful."

Defeatist, I thought. Deserter.

"That's not it," she said. "I heard him say that. More than once."

"What do you want me to say?" the construct repeated.

She looked at me, self-conscious, then turned away.

"He was selfish," she said to the floor. "I want to hear him . . . I want you to
say you're sorry."

The construct sighed. "Do you think he died on purpose?"

"Did he?" she said. "I loved him!"

"Nothing lasts."

"Say it!"

The image of Philip Richardson closed his eyes, hung his head, and said, "Death
comes. Sooner or later, it comes."

Sharon Richardson didn't leave looking any more prepared for life without Philip
than she had looked when she first called me, looking for his ashes.

I wasn't any more satisfied than she was. That the construct wasn't finished yet
was the one thing that gave me hope. But not much.

Using the Bierley construct as the interviewer, TOS had talked to Sharon, to
Richardson's mother, his brother, and his two sisters. The interviews took place
in the I/O room where the hologram made Bierley more convincingly warm, caring,
and real. He extracted insights, anecdotes, and honest appraisals from every
technician who had worked with Richardson on TOS. I flew in Richardson's grad
school peers and colleagues from his stints at MIT and Stanford. They all talked
to Bierley, and Bierley interviewed me, too. I was as exhaustive and as honest
as I could be in conveying my impressions of Richardson. Everything about him
mattered -- even whatever had irritated me. It was all part of the pattern that
made him Philip Richardson. After the interviews, I'd stay in the I/O room
talking to the construct as it developed. That made for late nights.

Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in
the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in
the morning regularly.

"It's like you're too much contradiction for TOS to handle," I told the
construct late one night. "A scientist and a mystic."

"No mystic," Richardson said. "I'm more scientist than you are, Maas. You're in
a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the
fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that
you'd never understand how it worked, you'd jump at the chance. Science is a
means to you. You want results. You're a mere technologist."

"I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track."

"You have an obsession," the construct countered. "You're right that I can never
resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that's what matters
to me. What does all of this --" He swept his hand wide to encompass the
universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. "What
does it all mean?That's my question, Maas. I never stop asking it."

"You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are."

"I'm a dead loss, that's what I am," the construct said with a smile. "I
probably argue as well as Richardson, but when it comes to conceptualizing, I'm
just TOS. Not that the machine is chopped liver, but you haven't resurrected
Philip Richardson."

The Small Craft Advisory light had been on for an hour, but now the next light
in the sequence came on. Gale Warning.

"We'd better talk fast," said Richardson. "I don't have much time." He smiled
again. "Memento mori."

I said nothing, but stared at him. The hologram generator had been improved a
bit recently, and for minutes at a time, I could detect no flaw in his
appearance. The eye was so easy to fool.

This was the fifth night in a row with a hurricane. They always came after
midnight. Tick, tick, tick. Like clockwork.

But TOS hurricanes were a function of chaos. Why would they suddenly behave so
predictably?

And then I thought again, The eye is so easy to fool.

The ashes never had turned up.

"Son of a bitch!" I said aloud.

That's when the hurricane light came on and the hologram of Philip Richardson
winked out.

I sat thinking for five minutes in the quiet building, the building that was
down to just two overnight guards -- a skeleton crew -- since TOS oversaw
security and controlled all the locks inside and out. A big, silent building.
For five minutes, I considered what I needed to do. Then I went to the part of
the building that housed the TOS memory.

The multi-cameral design of TOS made it relatively easy to isolate various
functions from one another. I could pull all the sensory "rooms" off-line and
make changes in them, and the rest of TOS wouldn't know what I was doing. It
would be like slicing the corpus callosum in the human brain the left hemisphere
wouldn't know what the right was doing, wouldn't know that things were being
monkeyed with in the other hemisphere. But TOS was self-programming, so I needed
instructions from the left hemisphere to reprogram the right. Getting the job
done without tripping whatever safeguards Richardson had programmed in meant
pulling out one room at a time, giving it a function, downloading the result of
the function as a digital record, then emptying the room of any traces of what
it had just done before I connected it back to the whole. One room at a time, I
captured the instructions that would let me generate false data for the sensory
rooms.

The process would have taken thirty seconds if I could have just told TOS what I
wanted to do, but it wouldn't have worked that way. Doing it the slow way took
an hour.

I went back to the I/O room and said, "I'm going home." TOS started to process
the words, and the phrase tugged at the tripwires I had just programmed.

To the rest of TOS, the sensory rooms sent sounds and images of my walking out
of the room, closing the door, walking down the corridor, down the stairs, out
of the building, and across the parking lot. TOS saw me get into my car and
drive away.

And TOS didn't just see this. It heard, felt, and smelled it, too.

Meanwhile, the sensory rooms suppressed the data that was coming from the I/O
room, data that said I was still there, at the back of the room, hiding behind
file cabinets with the lights out. Otherwise, everything ran as it normally
would.

The eye was easy to fool. Yes, and so was the ear. So was the motion detector.
So was the air sampler.

He came in at about four o'clock. The hall lights at his back showed that he was
dressed in something baggy. He said, "Lights," and the lights came on in the
room. It was a sweat suit. A gray one. He said, "The one and the zero," his
code, I suppose, for "System Restore," and the Hurricane, Gale Warning, and
Small Craft Advisory lights clicked off in quick succession.

He called up the construct and said to it, in a flat voice, "Hello, Richardson."

And the construct answered, mimicking the tone, "Hello, Richardson." The
construct shook his head. "You sound hollow." Then he smiled. "Death warmed
over, eh?"

The man in the sweat suit sat down with his back to me and watched the construct
without answering.

"So tell me what it's like," said the construct. "You give me some information
for a change."

"It's more real than you could believe. He's more dead than you can imagine."

"Of course." Big smile. "I'm a construct. I only seem to imagine."

"Richardson is more dead than even Richardson could have imagined."

"Wasn't that the point of this exercise?"

The man in the sweat suit didn't answer.

"I don't understand why you're not excited. This is a breakthrough!"

"I suppose it is." He took a deep breath and let it out. "Give me Bierley."

"Cheer up," the construct said. "It's the great adventure. You'll make the
journey with your memory intact."

"Shut your trap and give me Bierley."

The Richardson construct hesitated a moment longer. Then, without transition, it
was Bierley in the hologram.

"Hi," Bierley said.

"Hi, Jackson."

"You don't look so good."

"So I've been told."

"Want to start with easy questions?" asked Bierley. "His favorite color, that
sort of thing?"

"I'm through with the construct. It doesn't interest me anymore." He stood up.
"I just came by to tell you that it's time for me to move on." "That's enough,"
I said.

He jumped at the sound of my voice, but he didn't turn around . . .

"Richardson," I told him, "you are a son of a bitch."

"Richardson's dead."

"So you've told me," said Bierley.

"I was talking to Maas," he said, his voice still flat.

"Maas went home over an hour ago," said the construct.

"Turn the construct off," I told him. "I built a sensory barricade. TOS doesn't
know I'm in the building, and won't know it until I leave this room."

"Clever."

"What is?" said Bierley.

I said, "No more clever than splicing yourself into the image bank at CNN Four.
No more clever than hacking your way into records at the coroner's office and
police department."

"TOS did most of the work."

"Most of what work?" said the construct.

"Turn it off," I said again.

"Bierley," he said, "give me Richardson again."

The hologram flipped immediately to the other man's image.

"You want Richardson? There he is. That's the closest anyone can get. Not the
real thing, of course, but more Richardson than I am." But then he did shut the
construct down. Again he said, "Richardson is dead."

"You used me. You planted the idea. You knew I'd build the construct."

"I'm not him. I'm the space in between. I'm the void." He edged toward the door
as I stepped closer to him, close enough to see his profile. He still didn't
turn to face me.

"I want to kick your living, breathing ass," I said. "We've lost a lot of time
on this."

I nodded at the empty space above the hologram projector. I said, "So you've met
him. You've had a chance to see yourself as others saw you. Was it worth it?"

He said nothing at first. "The curious thing," he said at last, "was that the
construct wasn't surprised to meet me."

"Nothing much fazes you, Richardson. Why should your construct be any
different?"

"I don't think that's it," he said. "I think it was something others knew about
Richardson, that he would do anything to know . . ."

"What do you do during the day? Do you watch the building?"

He was silent.

"Have you seen your wife come here? Doesn't look good, does she? She paid a
price for your little experiment, wouldn't you say? Have you been keeping up?"

"Every day," he said, "I'm aware of the zero where Richardson used to be. Every
day, I'm face to face with his absence."

I clenched my fists. "Do you have any idea what it's been like for me to think
that you were gone?"

"I know she "For a moment, he was at a loss. "He loved her very much."

"What about me? I can't bring TOS to its potential on my own. You left me
without hope!"

"Richardson did that," he said. And again, flatly: "Richardson is dead."

"Why did you have to do it like this? We could have made you a construct! Do you
think you need to be dead for people to say what they really think of you?" I
pounded my fist on the hologram console. "Damn it, I'd have done whatever you
wanted me to. Whatever it takes, whatever you need. But it didn't have to be
like this!"

"Richardson wanted to bring you along," he said. He took another sideways step
toward the door. "He thought it would help you if you had a closer look at what
you were afraid of."

I sat down. I tried to take the anger out of my voice. "Whatever you need," I
said, "however strange, you just ask for it from now on. Understand? After we
get this straightened out, assuming I can keep you out of prison, you tell me
about how you want to use TOS, and we'll do that. Just so you give some
attention to the things that I am interested in."

"I don't think you understand. You can't bring him back from the dead. The
construct was for the bardo."

"The what?"

"The in-between time. Before its next life, the soul looks back, understands.
Looks back, but there's no going back. There's only the next life, and
forgetfulness."

He turned his face to me. His expression was blank, so blank that in truth he
didn't look like himself.

"I'm the soul who doesn't forget. I'll have a new life, the life of a man who
understands death. I have died. I am dead. And I will live again." He looked at
his hands. "What a thing to long for."

He was right. I hadn't understood. I had thought this whole thing was like the
story of the man who stages his own funeral so he can hear what the mourners
will have to say about him. But there was more to it than that.

I said, "You're not going anywhere."

He stepped closer to the door. "I'll have another life."

"Got TOS to make an electronic funds transfer, did you? You're a rich man?"

"It's not like that. I'm going naked. I'm taking nothing along."

"I see. Taking no baggage but your worthless skin and your newfound wisdom."

"Memory."

"How about your wife, then? Did you and TOS arrange some little windfall for
her?"

"Richardson's wife!" he shouted. "I'm not him! Richardson is dead!"

He ran, then. I followed him out of the I/O room, but I didn't bother to run.

As soon as I was out in the hallway, TOS did what I knew it would do. I had just
materialized out of thin air, and TOS could only conclude, recognizing me or
not, that some sort of security breach had taken place.

All over the building, doors locked. The alarm rang at the security guards'
desks. Through the glass wall along the corridor, I could see one of the guards
in the other wing looking up at the lights on our floor.

Richardson tried the stairwell door. It wouldn't budge.

"Richardson," I said gently as I approached. "Philip."

He ran down the side corridor, but was blocked by a fire door.

"It's over," I said when I had turned the comer. "Let it be over."

He whirled to face me. "I won't bring him back!" he said. "Forever is your
obsession, not mine!" Then, pleading: "I can't bring him back! It can't be done
!"

"Surely," I said, "you've seen whatever you needed to see. Surely you have come
to understand whatever it is that you needed to understand."

"I won't help you!"

I grabbed the front of his sweat shirt. "When they arrest you, Philip, when the
truth comes out . . ."

He masked his face with shaking hands and slumped against the fire door.

"When the truth comes out, I can help you or I can hurt you, Richardson."

"Dead," he said through his hands. "He's dead."

"You can get your life back. It's going to be a bit smashed up. It's going to
take some piecing back together. But you can have it back."

He pressed his hands hard against his face.

Bierley saved his ass.

The construct was making calls to our politicos before the police had taken
Richardson from the building, and before sunrise, there were thirty spin doctors
in different parts of the country finding ways to put what Richardson had done
in the best possible light.

The press verdict, basically, was genius stretched to the limit. He'd pushed
himself too hard doing work vital to national interests. The courts ordered
rest, lots of psychological evaluations, and release under his own recognizance.
Eventually, he received a suspended sentence for data fraud.

And Sharon Richardson took him back. I wouldn't have, if he'd been replaceable.
It was hard to imagine an infidelity worse than his. I had to welcome him back.
But she chose to.

Deserters.

When the work is hard, I think of deserters. And the work is often hard. We've
been at it again for months now, but Richardson and I don't throw off sparks the
way we once did. We talk about technical problems with TOS, and we bounce ideas
off each other, but something's gone.

No more conceptual leaps. No more flying from breakthrough to breakthrough.

I think of men on the rail of a sinking tanker. I think of the arctic explorer
stranded on the ice.

I think of deserters. What are they afraid of?

Maybe they are afraid of the wrong thing.

The dead bear witness.

From the bottom of the sea, dead sailors wave their arms.

It's not that Richardson has gone dull. If anything, his mind has more edge than
before. But we'll be arguing some point of memory structures and I'll happen to
catch his eye and see . . .

There's someone else looking back.

"Philip Richardson," he likes to remind me, "is dead."

I'd be a damned fool to believe him.

There are a lot of damned fools in the world.

I still hear the tick, tick, tick of my heart, the one, one, one that counts
down to zero. I still believe that there's a chance, just a chance, that I can
find a door into eternity. When Richardson and I were at our best, there were
days when I thought I had glimpsed that door.

But I don't work with the same focus I once did. Whatever I'm doing, there's
something that flutters at the edge of my consciousness.

When, at quiet moments, I hear the blood rush in my ears, when I feel my heart
thumping in my chest, it's not just the numbers counting down that I think of.
It's also the numbers already counted. Bierley, gone. Richardson . . .
different.

I am fifty-nine years old.

What if I succeed? What if I reside in TOS, eternal, separate, watching the
living die and die and die?

Often, I think of the man in the lifeboat. He has rowed himself to safety,
beyond the burning oil, beyond the fire's reach. Through the smoke and flames,
he can see the others waving to him, holding out their arms. Do they think he'd
row back across the fire in a wooden boat?

Crowded at the rail, the sailors wave and sink. Each drowns alone, but they sink
together.

There's no comfort in a common grave, I tell myself.

But on days when I can't think clearly, I sit and look at my hands, the hands of
a man who is rowing himself to safety, and I know that the sea around him is
wide. And black. And cold. And empty.