Stephen Baxter - Ring

Uvarov walked forward briskly — hoping, it seemed, to catch the Virtual projectors of this illusion off guard. But the chamber moved past him fluidly, convincingly, shadows and hidden aspects unfolding with seamless grace.

The four of them were in a dome, a half-sphere a hundred yards across. At the geometric center of the dome were tipped-back control couches. A series of basic data entry and retrieval desks clustered around the couches. The rest of the floor area was divided by shoulder-high partitions into lab areas, a galley, a gym, a sleeping area and shower. The shower was enclosed by a spherical balloon of some clear material — obviously designed for zero-gee operation, Louise thought.

The sleeping zone contained a single sleep pouch. There was a noticeable absence of decoration — of any real sign of personality, Louise thought. There was no concession to comfort — no sign of entertainment areas, for example. Even the gym was functional, bare, little more than an open coffin surrounded by pneumatic weight-simulators. The only color in the chamber came from the screens of the data desks, and from the slice of Jovian cloud visible through the dome.

Serena Milpitas strolled toward Louise, her footsteps clicking loudly on the hard floor. She ran a fingertip along the surface of a data desk. “It’s a high quality Virtual projection, with semisentient surface backup,” she said. “Feel it.”

“I don’t need to,” Louise groused. “I’m sure it is. That’s not the bloody point. This is obviously meant to be the life-dome of a GUTship — a small, limited, primitive design compared to my Northern, but a GUTship nevertheless. And — ”

Light, electric-blue, flooded the dome. The explosion of brilliance was overwhelming, drenching; Louise couldn’t help but cower. Her own shadow — sharp, black, utterly artificial — seemed to peer up at her, mocking her.

She lifted her head. Beyond the transparent dome above her, an artifact — a tetrahedron glowing sky-blue — sailed past the limb of the Jovian planet. It was a framework of glowing rods: at first sight the framework looked open, but Louise could make out glimmers of elusive, brown-gold membranes of light stretched across the open faces. Those membranes held tantalizing images of starfields, of suns that had never shone over Jupiter.

“A wormhole Interface,” Milpitas breathed.

“Obviously,” Uvarov said. “So we’re in a Virtual GUTship, sailing toward an Interface in orbit around Jupiter.” He turned to Louise, letting his exasperation show. “Haven’t you got it yet?” He waved a hand. “The meaning of this ludicrous stunt?”

Louise smiled. “We’re in the Hermit Crab, aren’t we? On Michael Poole’s ship.”

“Yes. Just before it flew into Poole’s Interface — just before Poole got himself killed.”

“Not quite.”

The new voice came from the control couches at the heart of the lifedome. Now one of the couches spun around, slowly, and a man climbed out gracelessly. He walked toward them, emerging into the glaring blue overhead light of the Interface. He said, “Actually we don’t know if Poole was killed or not. He was certainly lost. He may still be alive — although it’s difficult to say what meaning words like ‘still’ have when spacetime flaws spanning centuries are traversed.”

The man smiled. He was thin, tired-looking, with physical age around sixty, Louise supposed; he wore a drab one-piece coverall.

The face — the clothes — were startling in their familiarity to Louise; a hundred memories crowded, unwelcome, for her attention.

“I know you,” she said slowly. “I remember you; I worked with you. But you were lost in time…”

“My name,” the man said, “is Michael Poole.”

Lieserl wanted to die.

It was her ninetieth day of life, and she was ninety physical-years old. She was impossibly frail — unable to walk, or feed herself, or even clean herself. The faceless men and women tending her had almost left the download too late, she thought with derision; they’d already had one scare when an infection had somehow got through to her and settled into her lungs, nearly killing her.

She was old — physically the oldest human in the System, probably. She felt as if she was underwater: her senses had turned to mush, so that she could barely feel, or taste, or see anything, as if she was encased in some deadening, viscous fluid. And her mind was failing.

She could feel it, toward the end. It was like a ghastly reverse run of her accelerated childhood; she woke every day to a new diminution of her self. She came to dread sleep, yet could not avoid it.

And every day, the bed seemed too large for her.

But she retained her pride; she couldn’t stand the indignity of it. She hated those who had put her into this position.

Her mother’s last visit to the habitat, a few days before the download, was bizarre. Lieserl, through her ruined, rheumy old eyes, was barely able to recognize Phillida — this young, weeping woman, only a few months older than when she had held up her baby girl to the Sun.

She could not forgive her mother for the artifice of her existence — for the way understanding of her nature, even data on Superet, had been kept from her until others thought she was ready.

Lieserl cursed Phillida, sent her away.

At last Lieserl was taken, in her bed, to the downloading chamber at the heart of Thoth. The chamber’s lid, disturbingly coffin-like, closed over her head. She closed her eyes; she felt her own, abandoned, frail body around her.

And then -

It was a sensory explosion. It was like sleeping, then waking — no, she thought; it was more — far more than that.

The focus of her awareness remained in the same functional hospital room at the center of the Solar habitat. She was standing, surveying the chamber — no, she realized slowly, she wasn’t standing: she had no real sensation of her body…

She felt disembodied, discorporeal. She felt an instant of panic.

But that moment of fear faded rapidly, as she looked out through her new eyes.

The drab, functional chamber seemed as vivid to her as the golden day she had spent as a small child, with her parents on that remote beach, when her senses had been so acute they were almost transparent. In an instant she had become young again, with every sense alive and sharp.

And, slowly, Lieserl became aware of new senses — senses beyond the human. She could see the sparkle of X-ray photons from the Solar photosphere as they leaked through the habitat’s shielding, the dull infra-red glow of the bellies and heads of the people working around the shell of her own abandoned body — and the fading sheen of that cold husk itself.

She probed inwards. She retained her memories from her old body, from prior to the downloading, she realized; but those memories were qualitatively different from the records she was accumulating now. Limited, partial, subjective, imperfectly recorded: like fading paintings, she thought.

She had died, and she was reborn. She felt pity, for the person who once called herself Lieserl.

The clarity of her new senses was remarkable. It was like being a child again. She immersed herself, joyously, in the objective reality of the Universe around her.

He — it — was a Virtual, of course. The realization brought Louise crushing disappointment.

Uvarov snorted. “This is an absurdity. A pantomime. You’re wasting my time here.”

The Virtual of Poole looked disconcerted; his smile faded. “How so?”

“I’ve read of Michael Poole. And I know he hated Virtuals, of all kinds.”

Virtual-Poole laughed. “All right. So this simulacrum is offensive; you think Poole would have objected. Well, perhaps. But at least it’s got your attention.”