James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World

Warily, she lets her thoughts open, lets herself be known to herself, and finds astonishment.

It is true! The pain and tension that hammered at her nerves are gone. Nothing hurts her now.

She can scarcely believe it. For so long she lived in lacerated shame, her body an aching agony without release. Her only desire was to hold the psychic wound quiet, to escape to levels of the mind beyond its reach.

Now it is gone. Feeling herself deliciously unbodied she stretches immaterially, as one would stretch exhaustedly upon cool sheets. Yes! Yes! The relief holds, exquisite as bare limbs lapped in eiderdown. Whatever remains of her has left her body and its pain behind forever. She does not know or care what or where she is, marvels only at the sweetness of release.

The-memory of the brief bliss she had once felt from a drug brushes her, but that was far-off and unreal. This, whatever this spectral half-life is, is real. Exultance, amazement floods her.

She is dead—and free!

Letting herself sense it fully, she would laugh aloud in this place of death if she had anything to laugh with. But laughter is unnecessary here, the emotion itself suffices. Relaxed as she had never been in life, she exists as a substanceless smile.

How long the simple joy of no-pain lasts she has no idea; here time is not. But finally a human curiosity of place stirs in her. She is, she knows, totally alone. That does not trouble her, she had always been locked in loneliness. Now she wishes simply to understand this place, if she is in a universe where place has meaning. Specific memories come to her; she recalls her wild flight through the void among incarnations flashing like dreams, her final plunge toward the deathly blackness. It had seemed to her then to be a lethal hole in space, a sure and ultimate extinction. Is she now somehow alive in that?

The thought does not frighten her in her new comfort. But the desire grows in her to know more. Without material senses or receptors she quests around herself, aware that she must not let go of the strange cold pinpoint of energy that sustains her life. What can it be, what is she based on? She has heard of superconductors, of circuits that cycle forever near the cold of ultimate zero. Perhaps she is drawing strength from something like that. But what is out there? The strange small sense she has never let herself think of is still with her; she gathers it and tries to outreach, a feeling-outward of inquiring life.

Nothing, She reaches farther—and touches real death.

The contact is dreadful. She cowers in upon herself, knowing that something cold, alien and terrible is out there, nearby. Is it aware of her?

She waits. Nothing happens. The coldness she had touched does not seem to be moving, comes no closer. She listens without ears, attends with all her being for something, anything to tell her more. Still nothing. But the void has dimension now. There, along that direction, is danger.

She must recoil, get farther from it, but she dares not let go of the anchor-source of her strange life. She strains away to her utmost, searching, probing. Still nothing. But wait—now she senses, fainter than silence, an impalpable tendril of presence just at the margin of her ken. She attends hungrily, trying to tune herself to it.

And a conviction grows: it is not hostile. It has in fact a reassuring ordinary quality, like some familiar small comfort of her lost life. What can it be? It seems—yes—it is somehow beckoning her, like a hand outstretched to lead her away from the dangers of this place.

With all her small might she focusses out toward it. And the fringes of her being touch a gossamer point. A density, another of the strange contacts lies there. Dare she try to transfer to it? Come, the faint summons urges from beyond.

She gathers her courages, marshals her being. Her mind enacts the image of a woman leaping from stone to stone across an immense dark river: I dare! She lets go her base and sends herself wholly across the void to coalesce around the new support.

Success! She knows now she has moved physically, in whatever space this is. She has moved away from the deadly touch, over what distance she has no idea, an atom’s width or a light-year. And the act of will has strengthened her. She feels her own intricate existence triumphant in the dark, and tries to scan around.

The faint beckoning something is definitely stronger here. Come! This way.

Can she continue? Again she reaches with her mind, and again finds contact. Another of the cold life-sources is there. Without hesitation she leaps to it and begins to search anew. Yes! There are more. And the friendly call is clearer. In marveling excitement she leaps, or flows or hurls herself again and again. She is mastering the rhythm, she can move here in abyssal night.

The image of stepping-stones has vanished. As she moves she knows herself as nothing woman-shaped, but a pattern of energy flashing along charged points. Flow, gather, surge—she is energy discharging through capacitors, perhaps. But a structure, she thinks; a very complex configuration; the spectral texture of a human mind. And as she moves another image comes to her, so that she pauses for a moment in wonder. Is she something like a computer program? A ghostly program prowling the elements of some unimaginable circuitry?

The thought delights her. She does not believe in heaven or gods or demons or any hell beyond the life she had known, but she has seen real ghosts in her computer read-out screens. She knows she is dead and she had never been very human. To be a free, untormented ghost-program is not frightening.

Perhaps the danger she had felt was some design to cancel her, to flush her out of existence as they had attempted to flushout TOTAL’S ghosts?

No, she decides. I will not be evicted. I will remain this new sweet life awhile, even as nothing in the cold and dark. But what is this small calling presence or energy which she has been following? It is very close now, she can sense its urgency. What is it? Is it perhaps another like herself here in the paths of death?

The thought displeases her. She thinks toward it demand-ingly, striving to shape interrogation. Who are you? What is there?

Nothing answers her at first, only the ever-stronger summoning, an almost tangible directional desire. Like a dog tugging at her coat, willing her to follow.

What are you? Tell me! No answer. But she realizes abruptly that an image has formed in her mind’s eye, a glimmering vision like a pallid rectangular shape rising through black water. It is a computer console.

Is she imagining this? As she attends to it the image strengthens. She can make out the keyboards, the dials, the read-out screen and reel decks above. Why, it is her familiar office console, she has spent years at those grey, red, blue keys; there is even the stain where ditto-fluid was spilled. It is hallucinatory, it quivers or shimmers like an after-image, floating on the darkness that presses around and through it. But it is no ordinary vision; she wills it away, but still it will not go.

Puzzled, the thought comes to her to activate it. Instantly there is a vivid kinaesthetic sensation of her own arm moving, she sees the long dark fingers that are no longer hers float out and press the toggle. On.

At the same moment the screen flickers to life. The symbol is clear, a tiny blue arabesque in black immensity.

It is the integral of time to plus or minus infinity, the “signature” of TOTAL’S unquenchable ghost!

Half-amused, half-annoyed, she probes at her own thought. Is she recreating memory or is this some real manifestation of the condition she has waked to? It holds; it seems so real. Well, if she is herself a ghost-program, what more likely than that another should be here? Has her mind somehow got into TOTAL? She hopes not; she had been sure that she was far from Earth. No matter, she decides. It’s all fantasy, a dead mind dreaming.