Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [54]
“The apartment sloth will know where it is,” he told her while he continued to move hither and yon uncertainly, “but if I ask it, I’ll be giving in to erosion.
Sloths never forget, but that shouldn’t tempt us to rely on them too much, lest we lose the ability to remember. A good memory is one that’s as adept in the art of forgetfulness as it is in the art of remembrance.” He realized, somewhat belatedly, that he was losing the thread of his own argument—and that he still had not found the vase.
“I’ll put them down here,” the woman said, laying the flowers down on the table beside the food dispensary. “They’ll be fine for an hour or two—longer, if necessary. You can look for the vase later, if you really want to.” “Yes, of course,” Paul said, trying not to sound annoyed with himself lest she take the inference that he was also annoyed with her. He resolved to start the encounter again, and went back to greet her for a second time, in a better way.
The young woman was extraordinarily beautiful, in an age where ordinary beauty was commonplace. Her eyes sparkled, and her hair was a delight to eye and hand alike. The touch of her lips seemed to Paul’s old-fashioned consciousness to be a sensation which not even the most elaborate and sensitive virtual experiences could yet contain.
“Sometimes, when I emerge into the daylit world,” he told her, “I feel as if I had passed through a looking glass into a mirror world which is subtly distorted. It seems very like the one I left behind, but not quite the same. I always need the touch of a human hand or a kiss from human lips in order to be sure that I’m really home.” “You can be sure of that,” she told him. “This is the world, and you’re certainly in it.” And so he was, for a while.
By the time death came to claim him, Paul Kwiatek was deep in yet another waking dream, and it seemed to him that he was in a very different body, in a very different world. Even before the seeds began to germinate within his flesh, he was a ghost among ghosts, in a world without light, adrift on a black torrent pouring over the edge of a great cataract, falling into an infinite and empty abyss.
The memory of the kisses he had so recently shared had already been stored neatly away, ready to be forgotten. Now, like the elusive vase, they would be forever lost.
So far as most people were concerned—even others like himself—Paul Kwiatek had been a mere phantom of the information world for years. His extinction passed unnoticed by any kind of intelligence, human or artificial, and the fact of it might have remained undiscovered for months had no one found a particular reason to search for him. It was not until a dutiful silver linked his name to those of Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Walter Czastka that anyone thought to wonder where he actually was, or what he had actually become.
Investigation: Act Three: Across America
By the time she had installed herself in the maglev couchette, Charlotte was exhausted. It had been a long, eventful, and mentally taxing day. Unfortunately, her head was still seething with crowded thoughts in Brownian motion, and she knew that sleep would be out of the question without serious chemical assistance. She knew that her disinclination to avail herself of such assistance would undoubtedly punish her the next day, when she would doubtless need chemical assistance of a different kind to maintain her alertness, but that seemed to her to be the dutiful way to play it. There was plenty of work she could do while she stayed awake, even if her powers of concentration were not at their peak.
The couchette had a screen of its own, but it was situated at the foot of the bed, and Charlotte found it more comfortable by far to plug her beltphone into the bed’s head and set the bookplate on the pillow while lying prone on the mattress.
At first she was content to scan data which had already