David Brin: Kiln People

The few you had left.

True enough. Philosophically speaking, my original was me. Our memories differed by just one awful day. A day that he spent barefoot, in boxer shorts, doing officework at home while I went rooting through the city’s proxy underworld, where life is cheaper than in a Dumas novel. My present continuity mattered very little on the grand scale of things.

I answered the small voice in my usual way.

Screw existentialism.

Every time I step into the copier, my new ditto absorbs survival instincts a billion years old.

I want my afterlife.

By the time my feet touched the slimy river bottom, I was determined to give it a shot. I had almost no chance, of course, but maybe fortune was ready to deal from a fresh deck. Also, another motive drove me on.

Don’t let the bad guys win. Never let them get away with it.

Maybe I didn’t have to breathe, but movement was still tricky as I fought to get my feet planted, getting headway through the mud, with everything both slippery and viscous at the same time. It would have been hard to get traction with a whole body, but this one’s clock was ticking out.

Visibility? Almost nil, so I maneuvered by memory and sense of touch. I considered trying to fight my way upriver to the ferry docks, but then recalled that Clara’s houseboat lay moored just a kilometer or so downstream from Odeon Square. So I stopped fighting the heavy current and worked with it instead, putting most of my effort into staying near the riverbank.

It might have helped if I’d been made with variable-setting pain sensors. Lacking that optional feature — and cursing my own cheapness — I grimaced in agony while pulling one foot after another through the sucking muck. The hard slog left me time to ponder the phenomenological angst faced by creatures of my kind.

I’m me. As little life as I have left, it still feels precious. Yet I gave up what remains, jumping in the river to save some other guy a few credits.

Some guy who’ll make love to my girlfriend and relish my accomplishments.

Some guy who shares every memory I had, till the moment he (or I) lay on the copier, last night. Only he got to stay home in the original body, while I went to do his dirty work.

Some guy who’ll never know what a rotten day I had.

It’s a coin flip, each time you use a copier-and-kiln. When it’s done, will you be the rig … the original person? Or the rox, golem, mule, ditto-for-a-day?

Often it hardly matters, if you re-sorb memories like you’re supposed to, before the copy expires. Then it’s just like two parts of you, merging back together again. But what if the ditto suffered or had a rough time, like I had?

I found it hard to keep my thoughts together. After all, this green body wasn’t built for intellect. So I concentrated on the task at hand, dragging one foot after another, trudging through the mud.

There are locales you pass by every day, yet hardly think about because you never expect to go there. Like this place. Everyone knows the Gorta is filled with all sorts of trash. I kept stumbling over stuff that had been missed by the cleaner-trawls … a rusted bike, a broken air conditioner, several old computer monitors staring back at me like zombie eyes. When I was a kid, they used to pull out whole automobiles, sometimes with passengers still inside. Real people who had no spare copies in those days, to carry on with their smashed lives.

Those times had some advantages. Back in Grandpa’s day, the Gorta stank from pollution. Eco laws brought the stream back to life. Now folks catch fish from the quay. And fish converge whenever the city drops in something edible.

Like me.

Real flesh is supple. It doesn’t start flaking after just twenty-four hours. Protoplasm is so tenacious and durable that even a drowned corpse resists decay for days.

But my skin was already sloughing, even before I fell in. Expiration can be held off by willpower for a while. But now the timed organic chains in my ersatz body were expiring and unraveling with disconcerting speed. The scent swirled, attracting opportunists who came darting in from all sides for a feed, grabbing whatever chunks seemed close to falling off. At first I tried batting at them with my remaining hand, but that only slowed me down without inconveniencing the scavengers much. So I just forged ahead, wincing each time a pain receptor got snipped off by a greedy fish.

I drew a line when they started going for the eyes. I was going to need vision for a while yet.

At one point warm water shoved suddenly from the left, a strong current pushing me off course. The flow did drive off the scavengers for a minute, giving me a chance to concentrate …

Must be the Hahn Street Canal.

Let’s see. Clara’s boat is moored along Little Venice. That should be the second opening after this one … Or is it next?

I had to fight my way past the canal without being pushed down into deep water, somehow finally managing to reach the stone embankment on the other side. Unfortunately, persecuting swarms reconverged at that point — fish from above and crabs from below — drawn by my oozing wounds, nipping and supping on my fast-decaying hide.

What followed was a blur — a continual, shambling, underwater slog through mud, debris, and clouds of biting tormentors.

It’s said that at least one character trait always stays true, whenever a ditto is copied from its archetype. No matter what else varies, something from your basic nature endures from one facsimile to the next. A person who is honest or pessimistic or talkative in real flesh will make a golem with similar qualities.

Clara says my most persistent attribute is pigheaded obstinacy.

Damn anyone who says I can’t do this.

That phrase rolled over and over through my diteriorating brain, repeating a thousand times. A million. Screaming every time I took a painful step, or a fish took another bite. The phrase evolved beyond mere words. It became my incantation. Focus. A mantra of distilled stubbornness that kept me slogging onward, dragging ahead, one throbbing footstep at a time … till the moment I found myself blocked by a narrow obstacle.

I stared at it a while. A moss-covered chain that stretched, taut and almost vertical, from a buried anchor up to a flat object made of wooden planks.

A floating dock.

And moored alongside lay a vessel, its broad bottom coated with jagged barnacles. I had no idea whose boat it was, only that my time was about up. The river would finish me if I stayed any longer.

Using my one remaining mangled hand, I gripped the chain and strained to free both feet of the sucking mud, then continued creeping upward in fits and jerks, rising relentlessly toward a glittering light.

The fish must have sensed their last chance. They converged, thrashing all around, grabbing whatever flaps and floating folds they could, even after my head broke surface. I threw my arm over the dock, then had to dredge memory for what to do next.

Breathe. That’s it. You need air.

Breathe!

My shuddering inhalation didn’t resemble a human gasp. More like the squelch that a slab of meat makes when you throw it onto a cutting board and then slice it, letting an air pocket escape. Still, some oxygen rushed into replace the water spilling from my lipless mouth. It offered just enough renewed strength to haul one leg aboard the planking.

I heaved with all my might, at last rolling completely out of the river, thwarting the scavengers, who splashed in disappointment.

Tremors rocked my golembody from stem to stern. Something — some part of me — shook loose and fell off, toppling back into the water with a splash. The fish rejoiced, swirling around whatever it was, feeding noisily.