Bones Are Made to Be Broken by Anderson Paul Michael

Author:Anderson, Paul Michael [Anderson, Paul Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Written Backwards
Published: 2018-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

IN THE NOTHING-SPACE, I AM WHAT YOU MADE ME

I

A REFLECTION OF A REFLECTION OF A REFLECTION

Alan watched his fingers in the mirror push feeling back into his face. The rubbery, skin-tight upload cap, with sensors like pencil-erasers, covered his head.

His attention slipped and he jammed his thumb into his right eye. He recoiled, cupping the socket. “Goddammit!”

At least you felt something, an interior voice murmured. He shook it off; interior voices had become entirely too common recently.

He pulled his hand away. The eye was bloodshot, only partly open, giving him a leering quality. His view out of it was warped, discolored. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Where had he heard that? Some cube-vid, probably. When hyper-sleep had become impossible, he’d gone through every film the Auxiliary Drive, the waystation’s backup, had stored. Anything to avoid staring at the scrap of unknown galaxy—the nothing-space—the team had been assigned to.

He canted his head. The mirror reflected the outpost’s overlook-view: chaotic star-splatter against inky black. The glass was reflective and, depending on the angle, the mirror and the glass reflected over and over again, bouncing off one another.

For a moment, he could imagine getting pulled into that, elongating and replicating, over and over, as he traveled infinity.

He forced him to look away. Like the interior voices, thoughts like that had become entirely too common recently.

He pulled off the upload cap, thinking of the bundle of memories, education, and personality—his digital imprint—waiting in the AD.

“I hope this works,” he told his reflection.

He stepped into the main room on legs that felt like water. The outpost was just a large dome—much of it dominated by the overlook-view—with the white, monolithic Auxiliary Drive at one end and the access-tunnel hatch at the other with his useless hyper-sleep console and the bathroom perpendicular to the rest. Wires littered the floor.

He glanced at the hatch as he passed, thought of the team at the hub, hyper-sleeping. Unconsciously, a moue of distaste, as if he’d smelled something rancid, crossed his face.

He approached the AD and pulled out the keyboard. Above it, the plasma Drive-screen was lit green with the legend upload complete. Uploading himself to the Auxiliary Drive was easier than he’d thought; it was simply a matter of splicing and cross-patching the outpost’s measuring equipment. The human mind took only seven-point-six tetrabytes when properly organized.

It just left you feeling … a little numb.

Before the team Jumped to this nothing ice-dwarf, before he and the others came to play lookout while the rest of the UPF went to play war, he’d read about personality-upload; military leaders uploaded specific thoughts and memories for the benefit of posterity and museums.

No one had uploaded an entire mind before, however.

He typed:

RUN AD://TC-CODE-00841-ME.

“One moment,” a digital voice said from hidden speakers. Alan had spent seventy-two fruitless hours searching for them.

He sat down in the command chair, rubbed his throbbing eye. The dome hummed around him—a soft, efficient sound.

The Drive-screen resolved to show himself sitting in the chair.

“The fuck?”

He got up and his reflection did the same.

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