Tears in Rain Part 2

"What's new?"

"Nothing. Apart from the rep deaths."

Another thing Bruna liked about fat Oli was that she wasn't given to prudish euphemisms. She always called reps reps, but she was always much more friendly and respectful than those who never stopped talking about technohumans.

"And what are they saying about that, Oli? About the guy on the tram, I mean. Why do you think he did what he did?"

"They say he was on something. A drug. Dalamina, maybe. Or an artificial memory."

"There was a similar case last week, do you remember? The techno who yanked out her eye. And I know she had a memory implant."

Oli put a sandwich down in front of Bruna, then she leaned forward, her abundant b.r.e.a.s.t.s spilling over the counter, and lowered her voice.

"People are scared. I've heard there could be many more deaths."

"What's happening? Has there been a s.h.i.+pment of adulterated mems?"

"I have no idea. But they say this is just the beginning."

Bruna s.h.i.+vered. It was an unpleasant topic, something she found particularly unsettling. Not only because she still hadn't managed to rid herself of the alarming incident with her neighbor, but also because she had always found anything to do with memories repugnant. Talking about memories with a rep was like mentioning something dark and dirty, something unspeakable that, in the light of day, seemed almost p.o.r.nographic.

"Do you know who's handing out the defective goods?" she asked, intrigued despite herself.

Oli shrugged her shoulders.

"No idea, Husky. Does it interest you? Maybe I could ask around."

Bruna thought about it for a moment. She didn't even have a client who might pay her bills, so she couldn't afford to waste time digging into something that wouldn't bring her any return.

"No, it doesn't really interest me at all."

"Well then, eat your sandwich. It's getting cold."

It was true. The sandwich tasted delicious, the algae perfectly fried and crunchy, not at all greasy. Merlin had loved algae and pine nut sandwiches. His face, a face distorted by illness, floated into her memory for an instant, and Bruna felt her stomach churn. She took a deep breath, trying to untie the knot in her gut and push her memories of Merlin down into the abyss again. If she could at least remember him happy and healthy rather than always trapped in pain. She bit angrily into her sandwich and returned to the problem of her lack of work. She decided to put her cards on the table.

"Oli, I'm out of work," she mumbled, her mouth full. "Have you heard of anything that might suit me?"

"Like what?"

"Well, you know, someone who wants to find something-or someone. Or vice versa. Someone who doesn't want to be found, or someone who wants to find out something, or who wants me to check out someone. Or someone who wants to put together evidence against someone, or wants to find out if there's any evidence against him."

Oli had interrupted her slow, majestic ministrations behind the counter and was looking fixedly at Bruna, her dark face impa.s.sive.

"If that's your line of work, it's a b.l.o.o.d.y mess."

Bruna smiled halfheartedly. She didn't smile too often, but she found fat Oli amusing.

"Messy or not, if you find me a client, I'll give you a commission."

"You don't say, Bruna," she heard from behind her. "It just so happens I have a job for you. And you don't have to pay me anything."

The android turned around to face the recent arrival. It was Yiannis. As almost always seemed to be the case where he was concerned, Bruna felt torn. Yiannis was the only friend she had, and she sometimes found the emotional weight somewhat asphyxiating.

"Hi, Yiannis, how's it going?"

"Old and tired."

He really meant it, and he looked it, too: old like before; old like always; old like the self-portraits of the elderly Rembrandt that Yiannis had taught her to appreciate in the marvelous holographs in the Museum of Art. There were not many people who, like Yiannis, entirely dispensed with the countless treatments for old age on the market, from plastic or bionic surgery, to gamma rays and cellular therapy. Some refused treatment out of sheer resistance to change because they were recalcitrant retrogrades, nostalgic for a golden age that had never existed. For the majority of those who didn't use these therapies, it was because they couldn't afford them. Given that people typically opted to pay for treatment rather than for clean air, having wrinkles had become a clear indication of extreme poverty. Yiannis's situation was somewhat different, however. He was neither poor nor a reactionary, although he might seem to be a somewhat old-fas.h.i.+oned and anachronistic gentleman in the twenty-second century. If he didn't make use of rejuvenating therapy, it was mainly for aesthetic reasons: he didn't like the havoc wreaked by old age, but he considered artificial alterations even worse, and Bruna understood him perfectly. She would have given anything to be able to age.

"You said you've got something for me?"

"Could be, but I'm not sure you deserve it."

Bruna furrowed her brow and looked at him, surprised.

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

"Don't you have something to tell me?"

The rep felt little wheels of ill-humor-serrated cogs of irritation-starting to grind inside her. Yiannis always did the same thing to her: he interrogated and goaded her; he wanted to know everything about her. He was like her father. The nonexistent father whom a nonexistent murderer had killed when she was nine years old. Nine equally nonexistent years. She looked at her friend. He had a gentle face with indeterminate features. He had been quite handsome in his youth-Bruna had seen images of him-but not an overtly good-looking man, with small eyes, a small nose, and a small mouth. Time had left him looking as if someone had melted his face, and his white hair, pale skin, and gray eyes had fused into a faded monochrome. Poor old man, thought Bruna, noticing that her annoyance was dissipating. But in any case, there was no way she was going to tell him anything.

"Nothing in particular that I can recall."

"You don't say. You've already forgotten about Cata Cain?"

Bruna froze.

"How do you know about that? I haven't told a soul."

And as she was speaking, she thought, But I gave my details to Samaritans, and I spoke to the police and with the caretaker of the building, and I had to identify myself to get into the Forensic Anatomy Inst.i.tute; and we live in a d.a.m.n society of gossips, with instantaneous and centralized information. She began to sweat.

"Don't tell me I made it onto the news or the public screens."

The corners of Yiannis's mouth turned down. Bruna knew that that was his way of smiling.

"No, no. Someone who came looking for my help told me. Someone who has asked me to speak to you. She has work to offer you. I'll pa.s.s along her details."

Yiannis touched the mobile computer on his wrist, and Bruna's mobile computer beeped as it received the message. The android looked at the small screen: Myriam Chi, the leader of the RRM, was expecting Bruna in her office tomorrow morning at ten o'clock.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Courage is a habit of the soul, Cicero used to say. Yiannis had grabbed hold of that thought by his favorite author like a person clutching at a dried branch when he's on the point of falling over a precipice. He had spent years trying to develop and maintain that habit and, in a way, that routine of courage had been hardening within him, forming a type of alternative skeleton that had managed to keep him upright.

Forty-nine years had pa.s.sed. Almost half a century since the death of little Edu, and he was still carrying the scars. Of course, time had dimmed-or rather dulled-the unbearable intensity of his grief. That was normal; it would have been impossible to live constantly in that paroxysm of suffering. Yiannis understood this and forgave himself. He forgave himself for continuing to breathe, for continuing to enjoy food, music, or a good book while his son was turning to dust under the earth. Yet he sensed that in some way, a part of him was still in mourning. It was as if the disappearance of Edu had created a hole in his heart, so that he had only half-experienced everything since then. He could never totally concentrate on his reality because the pain buzzed nonstop in the background, like one of those maddening ringing sounds that some deaf people hear. Something inside him was definitely broken, and that seemed right to Yiannis. He found it necessary, because he would have been unable to bear his life continuing as usual after the death of his son.

Over time, however, something terrible had happened; something that Yiannis refused to believe could happen. First, his child's face began to fade in his memory; by resorting to that memory so much, he had worn it out. Now, he could only visualize Edu as he was in the photos and films he had kept of him; all the other images had been erased from his mind as if they had been wiped clean from a blackboard. The worst thing was that at some stage during the course of those forty-nine years, the internal thread that linked him with the father he had been had broken. When the old Yiannis of today remembered the young Yiannis, aged twenty, playing and laughing with his child, it was as if he were recalling an acquaintance from that long-distant era of his youth-a close friend perhaps but definitely someone else, and someone whom he had last seen a long time ago. The result was that he saw all those events from the outside: the pleasures of fatherhood and the horror of the unnecessary death; the slow death agony of the two-year-old child; the stupid illness that could not be treated because of shortages arising from the Rep War. It was a very sad story indeed, so tragic that he sometimes became teary when he recalled it. However, it was a story that he was no longer able to feel belonged to him; rather, it was a drama he had maybe once witnessed, or something someone had once told him.

And it was that remoteness that was so devastating, so unbearable.

The inner remoteness was the second, and definitive, death of his son. Because if he couldn't keep his little Edu alive in his memory, who else would?

How weak, how untruthful and unfaithful was human memory. Yiannis knew that during those forty-nine years that had gone by, each and every cell in his body had renewed itself. Not a single original organic particle remained of the Yiannis he had once been, nothing save that transcellular and transtemporal current of air that was his memory, that spiritual thread woven by his ident.i.ty. But if that thread, too, were broken, if it were unable to remember itself continuously in time, how did his past differ from a dream? To stop remembering was to destroy his world.

It was for that reason-because he always felt that dizzy lack of trust in memory-that Yiannis decided to become a professional archivist. And for that same reason, from time to time he would really try to remember Edu from within. He would close his eyes and, with an enormous effort, endeavor to re-create some distant scene. Visualize again the old room, the outline of the furniture, the precise density of the shadow; feel the heat of the afternoon, the stillness of the air right against his skin; hear the silence barely broken by a calm, diminutive breath; smell the odor-so warm and so carnal-of that delightful little creature. Then and only then would he see again the child sleeping in his cot, and not even the whole child but maybe a reconstruction of his chubby little hand in all its purity and veracity, still baby soft; that perfect hand with its fingers curled, abandoned in repose and ignorant of its total vulnerability. With any luck, having reached this point, the memory would emerge from the past like a flash of light that pierced Yiannis, suddenly activating the suffering in all its intensity and making the old man cry. Cry from pain but also from grat.i.tude, because somehow, and for just a moment, he had managed not simply to recall Edu, but to sense again that Edu had once been alive.

Central Archive, the United States of the Earth.

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Madrid, January 19, 2109, 13:10

Good afternoon, Yiannis

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Teleportation Keywords: history of science, TP disorder, Cosmos Fever, Robot Wars, Day One, Other Beings, Human Peace, Global Agreements of Ca.s.siopeia, sentient beings.

#422-222.

Entry being edited Teleportation or teletransportation (TP) is one of humankind's oldest dreams. Although quantum teleportation had been attempted in the twentieth century, the first significant experiment took place in 2006, when Professor Eugene Polzik, of the Niels Bohr Inst.i.tute at the University of Copenhagen, succeeded in teleporting a tiny, but macroscopic, object a distance of eighteen inches using light as the means of transmission of information about the object. It was not until 2067, however, with the discovery of the unsuspected light-boosting attributes of astatine-an extremely rare element on Earth but relatively abundant in the mines on t.i.tan-that teleportation took a giant leap forward. In 2073, thanks to so-called dense light, capable of transporting 100,000 times more information in a manner that is 100,000 times more stable than laser light, Professor Darling Oumou Koite was teleported-or TP'd, as they say today-from Bamako (Mali) to Saturn's moon, Enceladus. It was the first time that a human had been TP'd across outer s.p.a.ce.

As of that moment a genuine frenzy of exploration and conquest of the universe by the nations of Earth was unleashed. Given that teleportation eliminated distances and traveling a mile was thus no different from traveling a million miles, Earth's governing bodies became locked in a race to colonize remote planets and exploit their resources. This was referred to as Cosmos Fever and became one of the princ.i.p.al triggers for the Robot Wars, which devastated Earth from 2079 to 2090. Teleportation was always prohibitively expensive, and for this reason it was general practice to TP exploration teams of no more than two or three people. Given that credible information was available for scarcely a few hundred planets with colonizing potential, it was not unknown for envoys from various countries to coincide at a particular target, either by chance or as a result of espionage, often resulting in violence. Numerous explorers died in combat or were a.s.sa.s.sinated, and the ongoing recurrence of diplomatic incidents heightened tensions worldwide. As the better-known destinations were seized or converted into bitterly disputed territories, the powers of Earth began to take more and more risks and to send their explorers to ever more remote and obscure places, which increased exponentially the already high loss of life among those being teleported. In 2080, the last year of Cosmos Fever, 98 percent of the explorers from Earth died (about 8,200 individuals, almost all of them technohumans). The majority of them simply disappeared during the transfer, perhaps disintegrating through error in deep intergalactic s.p.a.ce, perhaps instantly volatilized while being TP'd to an unexpectedly fiery planet.

By that stage, something that the scientists and governments had known since the earliest days of this technology had become public knowledge: teletransportation is an atomically imperfect process that can have grave side effects. This is a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, according to which not all the characteristics of a particle can be measured accurately. The very act of teleportation subjects particles to infinitesimal but essential changes. This means that any teleported organism experiences microscopic alterations; thus, what is reconstructed at its destination is not exactly the same as the original subject. Normally these alterations are minimal, subatomic, and imperceptible, but in a significant number of cases, the changes are important and dangerous: eyes moved to cheeks, defective lungs, hands without fingers, and even skulls lacking brains. This destructive effect of teleportation is referred to as TP disorder, and those individuals afflicted by visible deformities are colloquially known as mutants. It has, moreover, been established that repeated instances of teletransportation inevitably lead to organic harm. The likelihood of suffering a serious TP disorder increases exponentially with each transfer, reaching 100 percent as of the eleventh TP. The Global Agreements of Ca.s.siopeia (2096) are currently in force, and these restrict to six the number of times living things (humans, technohumans, Other Beings, and animals) can be TP'd during their life span.

The risks involved in transfers, the deaths and numerous disappearances of explorers, the prohibitive costs, and the beginning of the Robot Wars all combined to put an end to Cosmos Fever and to the enthusiasm for teleportation. As of 2081, TP was used solely to support the exploitation of the distant planet Potosi, the only heavenly body beyond the solar system discovered during Cosmos Fever whose resources proved sufficiently profitable to develop a mining industry. In the early years, owners.h.i.+p of Potosi was shared by the European Union, China, and the American Federation. Post-Unification, it belongs to the United States of the Earth, although the most productive mines have been sold to the Kingdom of Labari and the Democratic State of Cosmos.