by Vanessa Fogg

 

It was an old network of intelligences, one of the first, and the bulk of its physical embodiment was housed on a ship orbiting a planet of perpetual windstorms and violet lightning. Some of the network’s intelligences busied themselves on this world, drifting through sulfur-tinged clouds and sampling a rich stew of hydrocarbons. But most of the collective’s consciousness was turned inward, building and refining interior worlds of memories and dreams.

The ship had been thus occupied for 213 years of Old Earth when it became aware of another like itself. Different material and design, launched at a later date from Old Earth, but of unmistakable origin. The new ship’s trajectory brought it into the first’s solar system. With defenses raised, the two ships exchanged greetings and identity signatures.

I have a request of you, the new ship said.

What is it? said the first.

I need you to help me keep a promise.

Daniel Chan met Kathy Wong on a Saturday night in St. Louis. He nearly didn’t attend the dinner at the trendy new Cuban restaurant. He’d been working all day in the lab, harvesting cultured cells at specific time points, extracting their proteins and freezing the samples down for later analysis. Then he spent three straight hours in the tissue culture room prepping cells for the next week’s experiments. He’d left his phone at his desk, in another room. When he saw Sandeep’s text message with details for the impromptu group dinner, the text was over an hour old.

He almost just went home. He was tired. His friends were probably halfway through their dinner. He had leftovers in his fridge: Chinese take-out, some rice. A frozen pizza. He stared out the lab window; the sky was black, and it was raining. He thought about hunting for parking in the popular city block where his friends were meeting. He thought about how crowded the Loop would be on a Saturday night, even in the rain–the bars and restaurants crawling with undergrads from Washington University. And then he felt the emptiness of the silent lab. There were usually two or three other students or postdocs in the lab on the weekends, but he’d spent the whole day alone.

Daniel picked up his phone to text his friend back.

Communication times sped up as the two ships grew closer. They ran careful security checks upon one another, scanning for ill intent or inadvertently harmful communicable programs. By stages, barriers were lowered and increasing levels of mutual access granted.

All the while, the first ship pondered the second ship’s request.

Daniel had never seen Kathy before. He was sure of it. She was in the same neuroscience graduate program as him, the same as most of the others at that dinner. But the neuroscience program was large, scattered across departments on both the medical campus and main campus, and Kathy was in the class ahead. They must have sat together in at least a few speaker seminars, moved past one another at official functions. But if he’d seen her face, if they had exchanged glances—if she had ever stood in a crowded lobby during a symposium break and lifted her eyes over a cup of coffee and met his gaze—then surely he would have been struck still in that instant.

Sandeep and his girlfriend Gina were trying to tell a funny story about a concert they’d attended—they kept interrupting each other, “Oh, but you forgot to say—”, “And then—”, “No, no, but first this happened–“–and the table was laughing, and Kathy met Daniel’s eyes and smiled. Her eyes shone large from a heart-shaped face. In the dim room, she glowed like a candle-flame. She and Daniel were across from one another but several seats apart, so that direct conversation was difficult. She was Gina’s new roommate’s labmate—something like that. Sandeep wound up his story; Gina punched him on the arm and howled. Kathy held Daniel’s gaze and quirked her mouth as though to say Aren’t they something? Daniel smiled back, unable to look away. The conversation around them floated. Kathy’s eyes kept returning to his, and it was as though they were talking across the table and the length of seats after all, a conversation of smiles and nods and irresistible glances that were all to say, When can we get out of here and be together?

He met her in a coffee shop the next day. It was fall. The leaves just coming into full color, the air crisp and tart as a new-bitten apple. She sat at a window. Her hands cupped a steaming mug, and she was wearing a black peacoat and a red tartan scarf. She smiled when he stepped through the door, and he felt both excited and at ease, as though meeting with a lifelong friend whom he hadn’t seen in years.

They seized on the thin thread of commonalities they’d found the night before. Childhoods in the Midwest, college on the West Coast; beloved books and movies and web series. They bumped up into their differences, just as fascinating. The afternoon slid into evening. Their coffee had long since grown cold. She lived nearby, close to the university medical campus where they both worked, and he walked her home through the falling blue twilight. She invited him in. By the end of the month they were unofficially living together. He kept extra clothes on a chair in her bedroom and used the spare toothbrush she gave him.

Memories: her bright scarf, the scent of her hair. Sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window. Kathy singing to herself, off-key, in the shower. Maple trees flaming in Forest Park, trees golden and red throughout the city. Omelets and gyros at the Greek diner on the corner. Their favorite bookstore a block further on. The warmth of Kathy’s hand in his as they walked along the cobblestone streets of the Central West End, autumn trees shedding brilliance at their feet.

What is memory? What are its molecular substrates? Daniel had written these lines in a notebook during an undergraduate lecture his last year of college. The professor was a world-renowned researcher in learning and memory. Inspired by him, Daniel had pursued research in the field. Now he worked with a rising star, an assistant professor with a dazzling publication record. Daniel spent his days studying the regulation of a single subunit of a single type of receptor in the mouse brain. A certain chemical modification to this receptor led to long-lasting changes in synaptic strength and quantifiable changes in learning and memory. An engineered mutation in this receptor affected how fast a mouse ran or associated a stimulus with food or fear.

Kathy worked on a different scale. She studied whole circuits, not single proteins. She used beautiful, elegant new imaging tools and fluorescent labels to map the precise cells involved in the development of visual circuits in the mouse brain. And they both knew of colleagues working at yet larger scales, mapping large but comparatively crude circuits of memory and visual perception in living humans, watching whole brain regions light up with functional MRI and other brain imaging techniques.

If he ever stopped to think of it, Daniel would feel a kind of existential despair at the prospect of ever understanding it all, of ever truly comprehending the brain’s workings. Can the human mind actually understand itself? The very idea seemed a kind of paradox, a kind of philosophical impossibility. He and Kathy circled around the issue at times. She had more confidence than him. She pointed out the exponential increases in computing power, the recent burst of new technologies and the likelihood of new technologies still unthinkable at present. He lacked her background in computer science and she held more confidence in the power of computer models and artificial intelligence.

Can human consciousness ever explain consciousness? The question floated in the background. But they were busy grad students, not undergrads with time for late-night bull sessions They were absorbed in the practicalities of their day-to-day work, obsessed with fine technical details. Their dissertations were on defined, tractable problems. And the sun was shining, the leaves were falling; music played in Kathy’s apartment through laptop speakers. He made bacon and eggs for breakfast. When they weren’t working they were exploring the city together, trying out new restaurants, meeting up with friends, or exploring the countryside–the nearby hills and river bluffs alive with color. He reached out for her, and she for him.

The ship contained the memories of over a thousand individuals. Recorded patterns of synaptic firing, waves of electrical and biochemical activity: the preserved symphonies of a human mind.

The minds currently conscious in and around the ship were not the same as their flesh-and-blood progenitors, the human beings of Old Earth. These new minds had had centuries to meld with one another and evolve; to modify themselves. They delighted in sensory inputs unimaginable to Homo sapiens—some could sense the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Some could consciously track the movement of a single electron or see all the radiating energies of a star.

Yet the second ship requested the recording of a single unmodified mind from the first.

“What a load of crap,” Daniel remarked. He was reading a popular news article about the feasibility of uploading one’s mind to a computer. “What is it?” Kathy said. She was lying next to him in bed. She moved to look at his screen, leaning against him as she took it and read. It was a late Sunday morning, and neither one of them had to be in the lab. He stroked her hair gently as she read.

Kathy set the tablet down and stretched out lazily. “Maybe it’s not so crazy.” The morning light slanted across her. “Maybe in the far, far future we really will be able to upload our brains into super computers. . . ”

“Maybe.” Daniel stretched out beside her. “But not for hundreds or thousands of years. If we even survive that long. Not for—” Words failed him at the unimaginable gulfs of time and knowledge. “Kathy, we don’t even understand how a single synapse works, not really.”

“I know.” There was no need to elaborate for her. “But what if we don’t need the kind of molecular detail that you’re working on? Maybe we don’t need to know how every protein in every neuron is regulated and functions. Or the exact mechanism for how it all comes together. We just need to copy it somehow, the essence of it.”

She turned on her side and propped herself up on one elbow, looking at him. Sunlight was in her hair, picking out individual black strands and highlighting them brown. Her eyes were intent and alive.

“What if it’s like music?” she said, waving a hand vaguely. Music was in fact playing softly from speakers in the next room— a melancholy pop song with blues-like tones, something Daniel didn’t recognize. “You don’t need to know how a violin works to replicate its sound. You don’t need to know what wood it’s made of, or how it’s strung, or anything about timbre or musical theory. You just need to record the sound waves. Play them back and there! It’s like the violin is playing right in front of you. You don’t need to know anything about the violinist. And you can do the same with any music, any sound—you just abstract and record what’s essential.”

“But what’s essential about a human mind?” Daniel said. “Is it just the pattern of neuronal connections?” That was a theory championed in some circles. The article he and Kathy had just read had proposed that a complete map of a person’s neuronal connections, painstakingly dissected from a preserved brain after death, could be enough to encode personality and mind. “I don’t think that’s enough,” Daniel said, thinking of the article. “That’s a static map. You need to record the brain in action. But at what level of detail? And how many recordings do you take?” After all, the brain was constantly changing; neurons rewire themselves; synapses strengthen and weaken with every new experience. How many recordings would it take to capture the essence of a person?

They were both silent for a moment. The music from the next room swelled: a woman’s voice rising in smooth heartache, lamenting a lost love.

“What are we listening to anyway?” Daniel said.

Kathy shrugged. “Beats me. I let the streaming service pick it. It’s pretty though, isn’t it?”

“And sad.”

“Would you do it?” she asked. “Upload your brain if you could?”

“Why?” He smiled faintly. “I mean, I don’t see the point. An ‘upload’ would just be a copy, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be immortality, not like some people claim. It would be immortality for a digital copy of me, maybe, but not for the real me. The real me would still die. Or would still be dead.”

“But some part of you would go on.”

“I don’t know that I’m important enough to be saved forever in a super computer.”

She didn’t smile. She looked serious. “I would want you to go on,” she said.

It was an odd, shifting moment—her words somehow too much, too real. She knew it, and glanced away. They’d only known each other a few months. Daniel already knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Why the odd lurch in his gut, then, as though he were falling? The bluesy pop song was still playing, the singer’s voice softer now, but ragged with emotion. Daniel reached out to take Kathy’s hand. He knew that he would want her to go on, too, in some form. That he’d do anything to keep her with him.

The first ship said, It is not possible to fulfill this request.

The second ship said, Explain.

The first ship said, The people involved are long dead. They cannot be brought back. They cannot communicate with one another. They cannot reunite.

The second ship said, You have over-interpreted. She wanted whatever was left of herself, whatever echo existed, to find and speak with whatever still existed of him.

They didn’t have much time.

But they didn’t know that, of course. When they stepped down the aisle three years later at their wedding, they assumed they would have a lifetime together. That they would both embark on successful careers. That they would buy a house. Have children. Perhaps see grandchildren. Grow old and crotchety together. Fall asleep side by side each night, and wake to the other’s breath and touch.

All their family and friends were at their wedding, nearly everyone they cared for. Sandeep was Daniel’s best man, and Gina (now Sandeep’s wife) was one of Kathy’s bridesmaids. For the Western-style, secular wedding ceremony, Kathy wore a pure white gown that looked as though it were spangled with starlight. Daniel wore a tuxedo. They spoke vows they had written themselves, under an arch of flowers. For the reception, Kathy changed into a red qipao, the classic high-collared Chinese sheath dress. She and Daniel privately served tea to their parents and elders in a side room, and then they moved about the hotel ballroom together, drinking a toast at each table, kissing every time the champagne glasses were tapped.

Their last months in St. Louis were a blur. Within a half year they both defended their Ph.D. dissertations and packed up their lives. Daniel sold his car, and it was Kathy’s old Toyota Camry that they drove out to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’d both accepted prestigious postdoctoral research positions there, Kathy at Harvard and Daniel at MIT. It was a marvel—not only to be married, not only to find the jobs of their dreams, but to find those jobs in the same city.

And it was both exhilarating and stressful: finding their way around a new city, learning to use the public transit system, exploring the shops and restaurants of their neighborhood, and finding good Chinese food after years in the Midwest. Mastering new fields and techniques in the lab. Daniel and Kathy had both joined highly competitive, pressure-cooker labs with small armies of caffeine-buzzed postdocs and students. Nights and weekends easily disappeared to the demands of experiments.

Toward the end of their first year in Cambridge, Kathy began to have headaches. She put it down to stress. She and Daniel both thought she put too much pressure on herself. She’d rarely ever had headaches before. She kept aspirin in her desk at work. She joked about taking up yoga to relax.

One day a colleague needed a healthy volunteer to serve as a control for a brain imaging study. Kathy volunteered; it was an hour out of her day. But the technician administering the scan saw at once that she was not a proper control at all.

Cancer. For a fleeting instant, he thought she might be joking when she said it, her voice on the phone low and steady—but no, she would never joke like that, and she was repeating it, repeating herself, giving him the details now, precisely what the doctor had said and done, her voice quick but calm and with just a note of bemused wonder—as though she were giving a presentation on a highly unusual clinical case.

Shock, he realized later. It had begun to wear off by the time he met her at home. He was the one still stunned, still in disbelief, as she cried in his arms.

And then there was nothing to do but to get through it—the surgery to remove the brain tumor, the waiting for confirmation of its malignancy, the last remnants of his stubborn hope crumbling when the pathology and then the tumor’s genome sequence came back. Yes, brain cancer. It had been caught early, but it was genetically the worst form: highly aggressive, resistant to the latest targeted therapies, incurable.

But there were still treatments to get through anyway, a prescribed regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. A regimen that was meant merely to buy time: to prolong her life, not save it. To kill every last tumor cell left behind in her skull, to obliterate those stray cancer cells invisible to the surgeon’s knife. All medical science said that these treatments would ultimately fail. That despite everything, cancer cells would indeed be left behind, and that one day those cells would explode into new growth. Her cancer was nearly fated to recur. When it did, she would not live long.

He couldn’t think of that right now. Right now there were appointments to go to, insurance forms to be filled out. Kathy’s mother came to stay with them. When Kathy was nauseous from the toxic drugs, Mrs. Wong cooked up pots of chicken rice porridge, heavy with ginger to soothe a queasy stomach. She cooked up elaborate feasts that Daniel felt obligated to eat when Kathy couldn’t. Mrs. Wong rearranged the kitchen cupboards and scrubbed and rescrubbed the counters and floors. Daniel came home to find his clothes drawers reorganized, his shirts and pants refolded to his mother-in-law’s exacting specifications. In the midst of it all he found himself laughing and complaining about it to Kathy that night, and she was laughing, too, at her mother’s coping skills—”I can’t stop her! She’s my mother! She waits till I’m asleep to do these things!”–and they were both laughing and he snorted and his snorts made Kathy laugh again, and he was holding her in his arms. She tucked her head against his shoulder, pressed her cheek against his neck. She was warm. Their arms and legs entwined. She was warm and alive and breathing against him. She was his. If he could just stretch out this moment. If he could only hold her tight, maybe, just maybe, he could keep her.

She finished the radiation and chemo. The scans were clean. She went back to work.

Her cancer would likely recur within a year. Both she and Daniel knew the statistics. They knew what the median survival times were.

But for now, she was alive and healthy. She could do physically everything she’d done before. What was there to do now but enjoy their time together? What else could they do but take pleasure in whatever days she had left?

They flew out to San Francisco to see her brother get married. Visited friends. Went on a road trip. They went to Yellowstone, a place she’d never been. They watched Old Faithful erupt, and marveled at the mud pots and bubbling springs. They walked under stars—more stars than he’d seen in years, the Milky Way a hazy arc above them. On that same trip they stopped in Jackson, Wyoming and hiked a mountain trail in Grand Teton National Park. She was tireless, more fit than him. They stood on the roof of the world together, the land falling away under them: open grasslands, a river twisting silver in the distance. They didn’t say anything. They merely stood together, looking out at the world.

She never thought seriously about abandoning her work. As soon as she could, she’d returned to the lab. And now her research took a turn upward –results in place of the frustrations of an early-stage project. She’d moved from mice to humans, using new functional imaging techniques to study mechanisms of visual attention and awareness in people. It was a kind of model of consciousness—is the subject aware of a picture flashed on a screen? How does brain activity differ between conscious awareness and unconscious visual processing? She collaborated with other scientists in the development of new computational algorithms for the processing of images. Her lab was interdisciplinary, wildly ambitious, nearly spread too thin with projects in seemly disparate areas of biology.

In the first months after her diagnosis, Daniel’s research had seemed pointless, uselessly abstract. It would never cure his wife’s cancer. Despite the grandiose statements in his grant proposals, he doubted that it would ever cure anything at all, that it would ever lead to treatments to improve memory, to manage Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative diseases. His research was indulgent, probably doomed to failure, and there were armies of postdocs to take his place if he left.

Yet she had always been interested in his research. Even when she was too ill to make it into work herself, she’d asked after his experiments, about the fine details. Their interests had converged more than ever; he was using many of the same techniques that she had used in grad school to now study memory circuits in mice. She was doing well, and he began to get results, and slowly the old question regained its power for him: how do transient patterns of electrical signals result in the long-lasting changes that encode memory? He and Kathy talked of it over dinner. She put him in touch with useful collaborators she knew. Their conversation wound in the loops that he loved, from science to books to stories of the eccentric coworker who seemed to eat only oranges and cheese; funny things seen on the street and on the Internet, the little jokes they shared, an article read, the conversation winding back to where they’d started.

They made love. As often as they could, they made love.

A year had passed. Her monthly brain scans were still clean. Two more years. She’d already beaten the odds. Maybe she would continue to do so. She had an interesting new research collaboration with a group in L.A. And one night, tentatively, she brought up the idea of starting a family.

The next scan showed that her cancer had returned.

At first, he thought she was talking about another clinical trial to treat the cancer. Then he realized that she wasn’t.

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

Her eyes filled but her voice was calm as she said, “It’s my decision, Daniel.”

He stood up, turned his back to her, and fought for air. He turned around again. “You’re talking about killing yourself.”

“No.” Her mouth quirked at the corner. “The cancer is doing that.”

It was. It had crept back; microscopic cells that had lain dormant had exploded into new growth. A new drug treatment held it back, arrested it, until the cancer cells did what cancer cells do: mutated, evaded, developed resistance to everything the cancer doctors had.

But she was still here. She was still with him, still able to walk and talk and laugh and move, still herself, still Kathy, despite the growing tumor in her brainstem.

He couldn’t speak. He knelt before her. She was seated on their bed, and she took his hands in hers. She stared into his eyes. “I promise,” she said, “that I won’t go any earlier than I have to. I won’t leave a day earlier than I need to. But when”—and now her control finally broke, her breath catching in sobs, the tears spilling, but she pushed forward, kept speaking–“but when the time comes, before the tumor spreads too far, before it disrupts my thinking and personality and who I am and makes the procedure useless—before that, I want to do this thing.”

“Kathy.” He swallowed. “Do you really believe it will work? That they can really preserve your brain this way?”

“I’ll be the test case.” Through her tears she smiled. “I always wanted to make a big splash in science.”

Los Angeles. The last stop. Past Kathy’s shoulder, Daniel watched as the plane passed over the San Gabriel Mountains and descended into the basin; he saw the dry, flat plain resolve into a sprawling grid of buildings and roads. After her cancer recurrence they had crisscrossed the country for her treatments, radiation at one famous medical center and consultations at another—Duke in North Carolina, M.D. Andersen in Houston, and back again to the Dana Farber in Boston. She had promised her family that she wouldn’t give up too soon, that she would keep “fighting”—how she hated that term!—until nearly the end. It was nearly the end.

She stirred and blinked beside him. Even before her illness, she’d always fallen asleep on planes. She looked blearily at him, and he smiled. He kissed her forehead, and gently he smoothed the hair from her eyes.

No more medical treatments. They would spend a week here with her sister. Kathy would kiss and hold her nephews, and the rest of her family would come, and maybe Daniel would take her some place where she could see the sea. And she would undergo a final round of brain scans at a private research institute in Pasadena. She’d collaborated with this group, had been working with them to refine their algorithms. Now they would use those algorithms to collect all they could of her active thoughts, the patterns of her cognitive processing, before the very last procedure.

It was through these research colleagues that Kathy had gotten in touch with the second group at the institute, and the man who wanted to preserve her physical brain. He had an experimental technique to fix every protein and lipid in place before decay. He’d performed it in multiple animal studies, but not yet in a human. The catch was that the preservatives had to be pumped through a living brain, before the first steps of decay could occur. The subject would be anesthetized, of course, but still alive.

Ridiculous, Daniel had once said of this man and the private institute’s most famous goal. Ridiculous, he’d once said of what Kathy proposed. Minds cannot be preserved and understood in digital form. They can’t even be understood in their native states. Immortality is a pipe dream. The only real immortality is in the memories we leave behind for our loved ones.

But she wanted this. And so she and Daniel had flown out to L.A. two months ago for the first set of brain scans. When complete, the full set of scans would be useful to science as a progressive study of her mental functioning, even with the brain cancer. And there was a scientific rationale, and value, to the next step of the process as well. A physical human brain perfectly preserved. Preserved so that it could be sliced and studied in unprecedented detail, the ultrastructure of neuronal connections traced with the most advanced of microscopic imaging techniques. A map of an inner universe. Her gift to the world.

And maybe, in a far-flung future, a promise as well.

The plane rolled to a stop. The seatbelt sign overhead blinked off with a chime. Around them passengers were standing, retrieving overhead baggage, pushing into the aisle. Kathy and Daniel stayed still. Over the last few weeks the left side of her body had markedly weakened, and she now needed help to stand and walk. They waited while the other passengers moved past. She rested her hand on his knee. He covered her hand with his own.

The two ships had traversed light-years and millennia before meeting one another. They were each composed of over a thousand active consciousnesses, intelligences which were both melded and distinct. Some of these intelligences rode the violent windstorms of the gas giant below; some had sensors trained on the planet’s moons and the other worlds of this system. But most were focused on interior worlds of memories and dreams.

The part of the first ship which communicated with the second was intrigued by the final proposal laid out. Despite the difficulties and ethical quandaries, there was a pleasing aesthetic appeal to it. There was, perhaps, still a trace of human romantic feeling left in the ship’s programming.

Agreed, it told the second ship. The final barriers were lowered. Data sets were shared. Collaboration flowed. Parts of the two ship-minds became, in essence, a single new mind. Here, it said, pondering a technical detail, and There! Got it! it crowed as it solved a vexing issue, and then it wondered, Now what if we tried adjusting this . . .

“I know that it will never work,” Kathy said in the darkness. They lay curled together in bed, her head on his chest. “But I want to hope that it will work, you know? The way we still hoped when they first found my cancer. . .”

He knew. His arm tightened around her.

“And anyway, it’s still important. Just like that clinical trial I tried was important, even if it didn’t work out for me. It still resulted in useful data for others. It perhaps still lay down the foundation for something in the future. And you know, in the far future, if this new study ever does work out the way that they want, I’ll get a free mind upload!” She laughed a little.

“I’ll have to get one, too,” he said lightly.

“You can. They promised to set up a free account for you. Perk of me being an early adopter and all that.”

“I’ll be sure to write them a Yelp review from cyberspace of what the afterlife is like.”

“Do that. Gunther would be so pleased.”

Dr. Gunther was the director of the project at the private research institute, as well as founder of the spin-off company that hoped to sell immortality to its customers. Years ago, Daniel had mocked an article on mind-uploading which Dr. Gunther had written for the popular press. Life contained too many ironies for Daniel to keep track.

Kathy took a breath. “At least. . . at least it feels like I’m leaving something behind, you know?”

You are, he thought. Oh, you are.

She traced his face in the darkness—his cheek, the line of his jaw. “If it did work—if I could—if there was some kind of me in the future, I would come back for you. I would find you.”

He kissed her hand. “Do that,” he said.

There were many issues to consider. The original mind under study had lived for 96 Earth years, and it was possible to resurrect that mind at any time point of that life. The exact timing would be critical. It would set the parameters for the reunion. And there were modifications to be made to the second mind, too. An iteration of this second mind spoke now through the second ship, but she/they wanted a reconstruction closer to the original. The melded Ship-Mind considered carefully. . .

Memories. Her hand in his as they walked under autumn trees. The feel of her bare skin against his. The first night he saw her, in a crowded restaurant in St. Louis; her eyes had lifted to his, large and curious and open. The first time that he met her parents. The first time that she met his. Their stupid little spats, and the messes that she made in the kitchen. Quiet evenings at home, cooking together and then reading or watching TV. A vacation that they’d taken in the Florida Keys, staying in cheap motels on the fly. They drove the Overseas Highway down the chain of islands, the ocean stretching away to either side. A limitless sky curved overhead and touched the water. All that land was so flat and so full of light.

The day they learned that she had cancer. The day they learned that it had recurred.

The stars at Yellowstone.

Last memories. All those people in Kathy’s sister’s house; Kathy’s nephews running and shrieking and then climbing up beside her for a cuddle and story. Her parents breaking down and pretending not to. He and Kathy spent the last night alone, in a nearby hotel. In the morning her family all gathered at the clinic: her sister, her brother, her parents and him. If they hadn’t felt it intrusive, his own parents would have flown to be there. They had loved Kathy, too.

When it was time, he alone went with her to the room where the procedure was to be done. He held her hand as the anesthesia was started. Her eyes looked calmly into his. Then they closed.

They didn’t let him stay for the rest. They took him away. He tried to watch through the glass, but his eyes were so blurred with tears that he couldn’t see.

Right there. It had identified the time point at which to start the simulation.

It was a beautiful summer day in southern California and he was thirty years old and his wife was dying. He couldn’t do anything about it. So he was walking down a street in search of a bakery that sold macarons because Kathy loved those French pastries. She was several blocks away, undergoing her last brain scan at the research institute. In two days she planned to take the next step, and then she would be gone.

Gone. He still couldn’t understand it. It was a blank space in his mind, the edge where the world ends, a rip in space-time. Gone. No. His mind stuttered and stopped. Pastries. The travel website claimed that the best macarons in Pasadena were sold at this particular bakery. So Daniel was going to find it for Kathy. He could do that much.

He’d been walking for a while, it seemed, trying not to think past the moment, not to cry or shake. He passed a bakery that sold only cupcakes, then a shop that sold only fair trade chocolates. There were charming cafes crowded with beautiful young people. The women wore sundresses or spaghetti strap tank tops and shorts. He couldn’t mark when he first sensed the change. The sun was still bright, but the air felt chill. The bakery was supposed to be right here; he had his phone out to check. There was something wrong with the phone. The map on its screen wasn’t possible.

He looked around him again. The neighborhood was still chic and charming, but all else was changed. Yet he knew this place.

In a daze, he put away his phone and kept walking. Yes, there were cobblestones under his feet. Yes, there was the Greek diner where he and Kathy used to sometimes grab breakfast. There was the bagel shop where they had sometimes gone instead. The palm trees of L.A. were gone. In their place, autumn trees burned in reds and golds. People walked by in light jackets. He was wearing one, too.

He knew, without looking, that if he turned around he would see the towers of the medical research center where he and Kathy had earned their degrees. Ahead and to his left he saw the building where she had rented a tiny apartment, where he and she had lived together so blissfully, unofficially, before their marriage.

His heart pounded. His steps turned.

But before the apartment building there was a stretch of little shops and restaurants, and there was a coffee house right there. He didn’t need to go in. A young woman was standing just outside, waiting for him. She stood easily, straight-backed, glowing with health. She wore a black pea coat and a red tartan scarf and a smile that cut open his heart.

“How–?” he said. And even as his pulse raced, he was aware of some external force helping to calm him, regulating levels of adrenaline and shock.

She looked into his eyes. “I made a promise,” she said. “I told you that I would come back and find you.”

He found himself laughing as the realization set in—the absurd, wondrous, astonishing explanation for it all. “We’re both dead, then,” he said.

She laughed, too. “Long dead. And we’ve both lived dozens of iterations of lives since. But this is the first one where I found you again. Some of the record keeping on Old Earth was just terrible.”

He just kept smiling at her stupidly, drinking her in.

“Thank you for the macarons,” she added. “They were delicious. Would you like to know about the rest of your life?”

The door to the coffee house opened, and he caught the scent of dark roast as a customer walked out. Cool air filled his lungs. Sunlight limned all the edges of the world.

He was real, he was alive, and so was she. They were here together, now. She had come back for him.

“No,” he said. “Not now.”

He stepped toward her, and she stepped toward him. Her arms came up around his neck. He bent his head. Her lips were warm and soft, and parted beneath his. She kissed back hard. It was fall, he had just met the love of his life, and all around them the trees of autumn were blazing.

____

Copyright 2018 Vanessa Fogg

Vanessa Fogg dreams of selkies, dragons, and gritty cyberpunk futures form her home in western Michigan. She spent years as a research scientist in molecular cell biology and now works as a freelance medical writer. Her stories have appeared in Bracken, Metaphorosis, Mythic Delirium, The Future Fire, and more. Her fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn, is available in print and ebook from Annorlunda Books. Vanessa is fueled by green tea. For a complete bibliography and more, visit her website.