Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

“You’re seeing her in her simulation,” Ada informed him proudly. “Later on she’ll learn how to simulate any surround she likes, and how to interact with others in the simulation.” Then she whispered again into the thing on her wrist. The screen went black once more. “We aren’t being fair to her, though. Let’s let her have her privacy while she gets used to what’s happened to her. You and I can get a cup of tea, and I’ll try to answer all your questions, assuming you have some.”

Oh, Ranjit had questions, all right. The tea in his cup, undrunk, grew cold while he tried to make sense of what had happened. At last there was another tiny bell and Ada smiled. “I think you can talk to her now,” she said, and nodded toward the screen, which abruptly displayed Myra again. “Hello, Aunt Myra,” Ada said to the screen. “Has the briefing program told you all you need to know?”

“Almost.” Myra touched her hair, untended since she’d come out of the water that had killed her. “I need to know how to fix myself up a little, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. Hello, Ranjit. Thanks for saving my—well, my meta-life, I guess, or whatever you can call it.”

“You are very welcome,” was all Ranjit could find to say. And then, as Ada got up to let the two of them talk in private, he said to Ada, “Wait a minute. You don’t have to be dead to be stored like this, do you? I mean, if I wanted to, you could put me right in the scene with her? And then it would be just as though we were flesh-and-blood people together?”

Ada looked alarmed. “Well, yes,” she said. She would have gone on, but Myra, speaking from the screen, was ahead of her.

“Dear Ranjit,” she said, “forget it. Much as I’d like to have you here with me, you mustn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Tashy, or to Robert, or—Hell, let’s face it. It wouldn’t be fair to the world.”

Ranjit stared at the screen. “Huh,” he said. And then, after a moment’s pondering, “But I miss you already,” he complained.

“Of course. And I miss you. It’s not as though we could never see each other, though. The briefing program says we can talk like this as often as we like.”

“Huh,” Ranjit said again. “But we can’t touch, and I may live for years.”

“Many years, I hope, my darling. But it will give us something to look forward to.”

That is the end of our story of Ranjit Subramanian.

This is not to say that he didn’t live—or “live”—for quite a long time after that. He did, first in his “normal” life and then in machine storage. What’s more, he had many fascinating and colorful occurrences in that postmortem “life” as a collection of electronic patterns. Most of these, however, we will not set down here. It isn’t that they aren’t of interest, for they are. It’s just that there were so many of them. There are other things for us to do that are more significant than recounting everything that happened to what incorporeal fragment of the original organic Ranjit Subramanian was stored and continued to live during the next large number of years.

There was, however, this one thing.

It happened much later in his machine-stored life, at a time when Ranjit had already done most of the touristy things he had always wanted to do. (That is, explored nearly all of the surface of Mars, as well as its even more interesting network of subsurface caverns, plus most other planets and major satellites of the solar system and a number of the larger objects in the Oort cloud.) At that particular time Myra had gone off on a trip to the core because she had always wanted to see a black hole close up. For the few thousand years she would be gone, Ranjit himself was occupying a virtual spun-glass mountainside while relaxing. (The way he was relaxing was by considering the theorem P = NP. This had kept him entertained for a fair number of decades already, with no end in sight.) Ranjit had created that virtual mountain within his surround in order to be alone, and it was a surprise to him to observe someone trudging up its slope in his direction.

The intruder was not only a stranger but a very odd-looking one. His eyes were tiny, his facial bone structure deeply carved, and he was a good three meters tall. When he reached the outcropping where Ranjit waited, he threw himself onto a deck chair (which had not existed before the stranger’s arrival), drew a couple of exaggeratedly deep breaths, and said, “Let me see. ‘That was quite a climb, wasn’t it?’ Was that the right thing for me to say?”

Ranjit had been bothered by too many strangers over the last few millennia to have much courtesy left over. He didn’t answer that. He simply asked, “Who are you and what do you want?”

The stranger looked both surprised and pleased. “I see,” he said. “You go directly to the point. Very well. Then I suppose I must say, ‘My name is—’”

He didn’t actually say a name, though. He simply emitted a blast of inarticulate sound, followed by, “but you may simply call me ‘Student,’ as I am here to study your thought processes and mannerisms.”

Ranjit considered throwing this interloper out of his carefully constructed private surround, but there was something amusing about him. “Oh,” he said, “all right, study away. Why do you want to do that?”

The stranger puffed out his cheeks. “How do I explain this? It is a sort of commemoration of the return of the Grand Galactics—”

“Wait,” Ranjit said. “The Grand Galactics did finally come back?”

“Of course they did, after—let me see, in your counting—some thirteen thousand years. Not very long in terms of Grand Galactic time, but enough for some major changes for human beings like me. Oh, like you, too, of course,” he added graciously. “Therefore we have begun a recreation of those events, and as you were a minor figure in some of them, I have been chosen to re-create you.”

“You mean you’re making a kind of movie about it and you’re going to play me?”

“Oh, certainly not a ‘movie.’ But, yes, I am to ‘play’ you.”

“Huh,” Ranjit said. “I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to events lately. I didn’t know the Grand Galactics had come back, even.”

The stranger looked surprised. “But of course they did. They had told the Nine-Limbeds and the One Point Fives that they would be gone for only a short time. So they were. Of course, although thirteen thousand years was only a short time by their standards, it wasn’t by ours. The Grand Galactics were, it seems, quite surprised to find that we had developed so fast. They had had no experience of a sentient species’ being allowed to evolve at its own pace, having methodically prevented any such evolution with every other species they’d discovered. But I don’t think they minded being relieved of their burden.” He moved his lips experimentally for a moment, and then said, “Would you say ‘huh’ one more time for me, please?”

“Huh,” Ranjit said, not only to grant the request but because he could think of no other response to what he had just heard. “What do you mean? Relieved of what burden?”

“Oh, running things,” the stranger said, studying the look on Ranjit’s face and trying to reproduce it on his own. “Not that they didn’t do a good job, mostly. But it was wrong to prevent the development of so many interesting species. And although the technical stuff was generally all right, you have to admit that what they did with the cosmological constant was simply embarrassing.”