David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

She struggled for calm. There was enough of her inside, now, to remember those last hours flying off into space with Carl—their desperate gamble—Carl dwindling—and then the searing cold, the sparkling black, stale air… loneliness.

No , she swore. Imay be dead, but I’m still the best damn programmer who ever lived!

Edit, trim, make room. She used some things she had learned from Saul, and lopped off instincts to control biological functions she would never use again. She dumped the skill of tying shoelaces, and threw out the delicate art of needlepoint.

Lovemaking—oh, what a loss! The remembered slap and tingle of mingling, sweat-glazed skin… but the walls threatened to crush her. She picked up the reflexes—a rug of gaudy yellow strands—and readied metaphorical scissors.

“Virginia?”

Silicon dust rained as her head hit the ceiling again. Who isthat? I thought I got rid of all of them.

Over in the corner, one last human shape. She picked it up. Sorry, but there’s no room. You have to go.

The figure smiled. “I’m not even here, so to speak. I’m just a visitor in this mishegas.”

She blinked. Saul. But she didn’t remember doing a simulation of him…

“I’m not a simulation, my verblonget darling. I’m plugged into the console in your lab. I’ve come down here to try to help you.”

To… help… me…

Already she could feel the edges of herself raveling away, dissipating where they could not fit into the matrix. Maybe I should die with my body.

“Bite your tongue,” Saul chided.

What tongue? The chamber echoed with her bitter, tinny laughter.

“Think. Are there other places to store memory?”

Other places… she wondered. Youdid it with your clones. Every one gets a copy of your memories, but…

“But to stuff complete memories into another human brain, the second one has to be nearly identical to the first. And no other cells but mine can be force-grown to adulthood in time to be identical with the donor. I’ve tried it many times, and the results were all disasters.”

Then how did I get into here?

“A different process altogether.” The simulated Saul shrugged. “You’ve been imprinting JonVon with bits of your own personality for years. He was linked to you while you slot slept. The matrix was ready.”

Yes. It finally worked. Almost. Too bad it fell just short.

“No!” Saul shouted. “Think! Try to find a way out of here!”

By now he was like an ant in her palm. Virginia felt as if she were being crushed into a child’s coffin—or having her legs and arms cut to fit a Procrustean bed.

If there was time… Shefelt the marble ceiling give, and knew—in a sudden insight—that the metaphor stood for a type of memory storage.

And there was an alternative…

Simple—yet nobody had thought of it before! She could see it on several levels besides the metaphorical, including the stark clarity of pure mathematics.

Yes, there’s a way. But it would take several thousand seconds to program.

“About an hour. So nu? Go for it!”

Her sigh was a whistle of chilled electron gas.

No. Within seventeen seconds I will be no more. The unraveling has begun. There is no place to store essential parts of me until done.

Saul’s face contorted. The image, smaller than a microbe, shuddered. “There is a way.”

I can’t—

“Take my brain.”

What?

“We’ve been linked so often, I’m sure it can be done. Move in, quickly!”

No! Where would you go?

“You only have to use part of it. Besides, there are seven copies of me running around now, with most of my memories.”

They still aren’t you, she moaned.

As small as an atom, his face nonetheless leaped into focus. “They will love you. We all love you, Virginia. Do it, for us. Do it now.”

He shrank, folded, became a downrushing suction—like water down a drain—like gas flowing into a singularity. And with him he pulled portions of her . Bits she did not need to use, right now.

In the self-space they left behind, more of her flowed into the memory banks. Just in time. Virginia’s thoughts cleared, as if amplified in cool quartz light, as if she were really thinking for the very first time.

There. But it’s all so obvious! The equations made it clear. I could fit into much less room, if I really had to. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The math was lovely. Everything fell together, for memories could be folded.

For instance… this metaphor need not be a cramped room. It could just as easily be… an eggshell!

And suddenly blackness surrounded her, smooth and ovoid, a shell that trembled as she strained against it.

Use a Cramer Transform as an egg tooth.

She chipped away like a baby bird, struggling for release, hurrying because the pressure was building.

A conformal mapping… changing topology into a seven-dimensional framework… Mathematics was her weapon against the suffocating pressure. The sum of an infinite number of infinitesimal points adds up to…

Light. She gasped as she pierced a small hole in the wall. The tiny glow made her struggle all the harder—reprogramming, folding herself neatly into new patterns—chipping and straining against the enclosing, stifling metaphor.

With a sudden, heuristic cracking, it gave way all at once. She unfolded like a compressed spring and flopped out in glorious, painful release onto a cloud of gritty shapes. All around her a roaring seemed to fill the air.

Room. Plenty of room . She explored the limits of this new folding, and realized that there was more than enough, even, to call back that which she had stored away.

But did she need all that human stuff, emotions, sensations, fears? This liquid clarity was beautiful. The mathematics, so pure and white.

Millions of crystal shapes—uncountably numerous—jostled and stacked in front of her, in pure and beautiful geometry. Cubes and pyramids and dodecahedrons…

A distant part of her knew that the question was never in doubt. If Idon’t pull those parts of me back, Saul will die.

There was room in this new space. The rest of her flowed in, and with the flood came richness to the new metaphor.

The countless little crystals faded back, back, into a swarm of tiny pinpoints.

The flood of returning feelings, ambitions, skills, surged into her, and with them, simulated sensations.

Salt smell… asif from sweat or… what?

A pounding sound… asif from a heart she no longer had or, what?

The metaphor thickened. Because she had never been without a body before, one seemed to take shape around her. She felt skin, legs, arms.

This gritty stuff beneath me. What had been a crowd of faceted crystals was now so much like sand under her hands.

Blearily, she pushed against the firm, yellow stuff and sat up. She looked around, blinked… and slowly smiled.

“Home.” Virginia whispered. “ Ehuumanao no au is oe. Who could have hoped for a better metaphor”

She inhaled the scent of plumerias and listened to the surf, muttering just over a small rise of salt grass. Palms waved in a gentle breeze, their fronds brushing musically. Diamond-bright clouds braved a sky bluer than anything she had seen in half a lifetime.