Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

I couldn’t move from the clinic seat. I sat there with my head in my hands, not believing what I’d just seen. It had to be faked. The Locketts had developed false memory implantation techniques. They’d corrupted our institute AIs. Christine had repeated the alibi to herself for so long it had become stronger than reality. Aliens travelled back in time to alter the past.

‘Edward.’

When I looked up, Christine Jayne Lockett was staring down at me. There was no anger in her expression. If anything, she was pitying me.

‘I wasn’t joking when I said I knew people on our elder council,’ she said. ‘And let me tell you, you arrogant bastard, if this… this mental rape had been in connection with any other case, I would have kicked up such a stink that your whole family would disown you. The only reason I won’t is because I loved Justin. He was my friend, and I’ll never forget him for bringing a thread of happiness into my life. I wanted his murderer caught back then, and I want it just as bad now.’

‘Thank you,’ I whispered feebly.

‘Are you going to give up?’

My smile was one of total self-pity. ‘We’re reaching what Bethany called the plateau, the end of scientific progress. I’ve used every method we know of to find the murderer. Every one of them has failed me. The only thing left now that could solve it is time travel, and I’m afraid our physicists are all pretty much agreed that’s just a fantasy.’

‘Time travel,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You just can’t see beyond your fabulous technology, can you? Your reliance is sickening. And what use is it when it comes down to the things that are genuinely important?’

‘Nobody starves, nobody dies,’ I snapped at her, abruptly infuriated with her poverty-makes-me-morally-superior attitude. ‘I notice your happy stone-age colony isn’t averse to using our medical resources any time something nasty happens.’

‘Yes, we fall back on technological medicine. We’re neither ignorant, nor stupid. We believe technology as sophisticated as ours should be used as a safety net for our lives, not as an integral part, or ruler, as you choose. The simple way we live allows us to return to nature without having to endure the struggle and squalor of the actual stone age. For all things there is a balance, and you have got it badly wrong. Your society is exploiting the universe, not living in harmony with it. The way we live allows our minds to prosper, not our greed.’

‘While the way we live allows dreams to become reality. We are a race without limits.’

‘Without physical limits. What use is that, Edward? What is the ultimate reason to give everyone the power of a god? Look at you, what you’re doing — you hoard entire planets in readiness for the day when you can dismantle them and fabricate something in their place. What? What can possibly need building on such a scale? Explore the universe by all means, I’m sure there are miracles and marvels out there just as great as the one we’ve created for ourselves. But at the end of the day, you should come home to your family and your friends. That’s what’s truly important.’

‘I’m glad you’ve found a way to live with what we’ve achieved. But you’re in a minority. The rest of us want to grab the opportunity this time has gifted us with.’

‘You’ll learn,’ she said. ‘After all, you’ve got eternity.’

My flyer ripped up through the ionosphere like a fish leaving water. The gravitonic and magnetic flux lines which knotted around the little craft tugged a braided haze of auroral streamers out behind us, looking for all the world like some ancient chemical rocket exhaust. Once clear of the atmosphere’s bulk, I increased the acceleration to twenty gees, and the slender scintillating strand was stretched to breaking point. Wispy photonic serpents writhed back down towards the planet as we burst free.

I extended my perceptual range, tracking the multitude of flyers falling in and out of the atmosphere all around me. They blossomed like silver comets across my consciousness, dense currents of them arching up from the Earth in a series of flowing hoops with every apex reaching precisely six hundred miles above the equator. The portal Necklace itself, which occupied that orbit, was visualized by nodes of cool jade light sitting atop the hoops. Each of them was nested at the centre of a subtle spatial distortion, lensing the light outwards in curving ephemeral petals.

The flyer soared round in a flat curve, merging with the traffic stream that was heading for the Tangsham portal a thousand miles ahead of me. Africa’s eastern coastline drifted past below, its visual clarity taking on a dreamlike quality, perfectly resolved yet impossibly distant. I watched it dwindle behind the flyer as all the wretched old emotions rose to haunt me again. Although I’d never quite had the courage to deactivate the Justin Ascham Raleigh file in the wake of the debacle which was Christine’s memory retrieval, I’d certainly abandoned it in my own mind. I couldn’t even remember giving my cybershadow the order to tag all the old suspects and watch for any status change within the global dataspace.

Yet when the information slipped into my mind as I awoke that morning I knew I could never ignore it. Whatever would Francis have said?

I kept the flyer’s forward perception primary as we approached the portal. The circle of exotic matter had a breadth of nine hundred yards, the rim of a chasm that could be seen only from one direction. Its pseudofabric walls glowed green where they intersected the boundaries of normal space-time, forming a tunnel that stretched off into middle-distance. Two lanes of flyers sped along its interior in opposite directions, carrying people to their new world and their hoped-for happiness.

I wished them well, for the next portal led to Nibeza, one of the Vatican-endorsed societies, with complex proscriptions built into its biononics. Essentially they were limited to medical functions and providing raw materials for industry, everything else had to be built the hard way. A society forever frozen on the cusp of the nineteen sixties, where people are kept busy doing their old jobs.

Fully half of the new worlds were variants on the same theme, the only difference being in the level of limitations imposed on their biononics. There were even some deactivated portals now; those that had been used to establish the Restart worlds. There were no biononics on such planets, nor even the memory of them. The new inhabitants had their memories wiped, awakening on arrival to the belief they had travelled there in hibernation sleep on an old slower-than-light colony ship that left Earth in the nineteen forties. They remained free to carry on their lives as though the intervening years had never happened.

I believe it was our greatest defeat that so many of us were unable to adjust naturally to our new circumstances, where every thought is a treasure to be incubated. It was a failure of will, of self-confidence, which prevented so many from taking that next psychological step. The adjustment necessary was nothing like the re-education courses which used to mark our race’s waves of scientific progress; an adaptation which could be achieved by simply going back to school and learning new skills. To thrive today you had to change your attitude and look at life from a wholly new perspective. How sad that for all its triumphs, the superb society we had constructed and systematically laboured to improve for two thousand years was unable to provide that inspiration for everyone at the end.

But as I’d been told so many times, we now had the time to learn, and this new phase of our existence had only just begun. On the Earth below, nearly a third of the older adults spent their time daysleeping. Instead of the falsehood of enforced technological limitation on colony worlds, they immersed themselves in perfectly activated memories of the old days, trading such recollections amongst themselves for those blissful times spent in a simpler world. The vast majority, so they said, relished the days of childhood or first romances set in the age of horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships.