Complete Short Fiction by Wil McCarthy

Author:Wil McCarthy [McCarthy, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

2.

Xerography, Complicated

Generally speaking, keeping old copies of yourself was like keeping anything else. Found objects, hobby collections, treasured letters or artifacts from childhood—whatever. You could only fit so many on a shelf or in a cabinet, so at some point you boxed them up and stuck them in the attic, or fed them into the fax to be stored as data. And once that happened, chances were you wouldn’t see those things again, nor ever miss them.

Archive copies were exactly the same way: there were people who kept only one, the latest and greatest incarnation of their perfect selves. There were even those who, for financial or aesthetic reasons, stored only the differences between themselves and some idealized manikin of human perfection.

But with either strategy it was possible to make a mistake, to internalize and record some experience that weakened or cheapened or traumatized the soul. And you couldn’t always know that this had happened, and if you’d overwritten your earlier backups then you were pretty much stuck with the results for eternity. You could also, in the same way, lose track of what you were supposed to look like, lose track of your God-given body, which had been really good at baseball or algebra, which had just felt right somehow. Most people had a bit of this disconnection in their lives—it was pain of an ordinary sort—and admittedly the real horror stories were rare.

But they happened, and in fact I’d encountered enough victims in my practice—their circumstances ranging from tragic to absurd—that for more than half my life I’d been following the cost her and more restrictive change control regimen favored by the various mental health councils. This involved archiving my entire self every five to ten years, and storing each copy, with annotations, alongside the previous ones in a facility that was guaranteed to remain uncorrupted by natural forces for a minimum of 10 million years. Effective infinity, in other words, because even if I somehow lived that long, I reasoned that I’d be unlikely to care what I’d thought or felt or looked like as a mere centenarian.

Theddy had apparently followed a similar practice, though in some dangerous and backward-looking way. “Being unhappy with your life doesn’t mean you necessarily want to scrap the whole decade and start over. We all have our troubles. I like the wisdom I’ve accumulated, but along the way I seem to have lost the spirit I had as a younger man. Some of it—enough of it. And shouldn’t we, as immorbid beings, have both? I guess I was mixing and matching.”

“You guess?”

“Listen, I was attending a matter programming conference on Mars. The rest of me were all back home, taking care of personal and professional minutia. Or so I presume. So I infer from the circumstances, as an outsider. As for what I was thinking, what exactly I was doing, I can only speculate.”

I thought that over. People had different viewpoints on plurality; some even claimed that every copy of them had its own unique soul.

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