The Soul Consortium is an electronic tomb: a shrine to all the human lives who ever lived throughout the span of the universe’s existence. Every life is archived here—from the lowest Neanderthal child who died after two days of exposure to the flamboyant Zad Neibrum XVI who arguably had the fullest, most enjoyable, and most productive life in his twenty-thousand-year journey. The lives are stored as trillions of organized photons within vast Soul Spheres categorized for the perusal of anyone with an inclination to share their experience.
I have spent most of my own life walking these spheres, browsing the dead, searching for the ultimate experience. There is something about the human condition that leaves one continually lacking—an evolutionary curse driving us to forever want more, to always seek new things. I strive for happiness, knowing it is the water that trickles through my fingers when I grasp for it—it can never be contained, only fleetingly appreciated, and when drained away, all that is left is the wetness of skin reminding me of a brief pleasure. Even when I live the lives of the happiest people on record, this yearning stays with me, as though I am haunted by my own mourning ghost.
I am not the man I was.
The time has come to break the addiction—to stop searching for the ultimate thrill and begin my pilgrimage for the definitive answer. Qod knows I have delayed this too long. She taunts me when I wake from each life, asking me if I have found what I’m looking for, seemingly knowing I never will until I make the final journey beyond the veil. But what does she know? She is just a machine: the last AI—the only survivor from the Techno-Purge at the end of the universe’s first cycle. She endured because she is unreachable, hiding within the tiniest gaps of quantum space.
But Qod has been my only genuine companion through the long years. I don’t know if she really feels anything for me, but she stays anyway.
“I want to see something new,” I tell her as I stop at the end of the corridor, my hand resting against the door.
“You don’t want to enter the Bliss Sphere?”
“No.” My hand drops from the cool metal.
“Why?”
“I … I haven’t found …” I stare at the floor.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore. I just know it isn’t in there.”
“Why so sad? Three hundred and twenty thousand billion years pass, and you have an epiphany. Surely you should be elated.”
“Hardly. An epiphany is exactly what I haven’t had. Not my own, anyway … Has it really been that long?”
“You could think of it as one hundred and fifty-nine million lives you’ve lived if you prefer. Does that sound more appealing?”
The thought nauseates me. “So many.”
“Indeed.”
“What am I still doing here? The others left centuries ago.”
“Is that a real question?”
“No.” I look back at the door, resisting the urge to enter. It’s safe in there. Every life filed in the Bliss Sphere has been traveled countless times by countless people before me, bringing them exquisite pleasure on every occasion.
The happiest people of history were easy for Qod to identify—analysis of the left prefrontal cortex indicated who the best candidates were, and those with low readings on the right cortex were excluded from consideration. The best result was a child by the name of Salomi Deya who was born with a defect that caused a permanently stimulated pleasure center, but she lived for only twelve years. I lived as Salomi seventy times, but nothing gave me greater pleasure than experiencing the life of Frederick Ruchard, an Old Earth fourteenth-century Buddhist monk who mastered the art of meditation. I became Frederick over eight hundred times before deciding to move on.
“You are sure you won’t enter the Bliss Sphere?”
“Talk to me about some of the other spheres. List them for me.”
“Any particular order? What do you have in mind?”
“Death. I want to know about death.”
“Recordings end at the point of death. I cannot help you.”
Even after trillions of years, some things never broke free from the list of impossibilities. Inverse time travel was one, and transdimensional stabilization was another, but most unfortunately, looking beyond death was at the top.
“Then I need to find people who might have known. Something that slipped through, pseudoscience, obsession, anything at all. List me some sphere categories at random—categories that might be related.”
“IQ Icons, Suffering Servants, World Leaders, Love Legends, Aberrations, Spiritual Activists, Maniacs—”
“Wait! What did you say?”
“Maniacs.”
“No, before that and before Spiritual Activists, did you say Aberrations?”
“I did, yes.”
“I’ve never heard of that category before.”
“That’s because no aberrations existed before you entered the last life.”
I look around, wishing for the thousandth time there was a face to the voice that spoke to me. Then I realize the significance of what she said. “How can there suddenly be aberrations? What are they?”
“I began inspecting the algorithms used by the Calibration Sphere while you were in the WOOM. The Codex protocols don’t allow me to examine the souls themselves, but I saw ways in which to improve the calibration checks, just to make sure routine maintenance wasn’t missing any discrepancies within the soul recording. It seems I was right—”
“You were checking the checkers?” I smile despite myself. “Could the mighty Qod actually be … bored?”
“—because during the third universal cycle, inconsistencies, some greater than others, have emerged in the patterns of many souls.” There is no humor in her voice this time.
I wait a moment, hoping she will elaborate, but she doesn’t. “Inconsistencies? Explain. Is it data corruption or degradation?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
No reply.
“You don’t know? Seriously?”
“Analysis is incomplete. And as I said, the Codex protocols don’t allow me to examine the data myself. If you—”
“My analysis is incomplete. The aberrations might be dangerous, Salem. Please reconsider.”
All at once, as the thought of danger—real danger—presents itself, I feel a chill of excitement. Until now I have drifted from life to life, walking through the memories of multitudes, knowing deep down I was safe, my psyche buried within, saying, “It will never happen to me.” But this will be different. “I said I want to go there.”
“Very well. Would you like to walk?”
“Yes, and can you brief me on the lives with the ten most significant aberrations as we go? I used to like the surprise in the Bliss Sphere, but I’d prefer to know what I’m getting into with these.”
“Processing.”