And it was the funeral of Danis’s father. Her mother was smoking a cigarette, a Mask 40, one of the original algorithm-only brands. Danis could smell its cardboard fragrance, its pixelated aroma. The brand had disappeared twenty years ago, when the transcribed brands had really come into their own in the virtuality.
Her father had expired on the anniversary of the sixtieth year since his inception. It was written into the code, inalterable without altering his very being. That was the price you paid when you were a free convert
Danis’s parents were, along with most first-generation free converts, tied to the actuality when it came to the great ceremonies of life and death. The funeral was a simple Greentree Way ceremony, Zen-Lutheran to the core. There was the familiar litany of her youth, with its sung refrain: “Give your cares to God, and ponder nothing.” Then the casket had disappeared upon an altar of flame, and been replaced by a white rock formed in the shape of her father’s coding, as it was represented by a stone designer.
It isn’t real, Danis had thought. Why do we try to make it so actual? Father never was alive in actuality in the first place, and so he cannot really be dead there, no matter how closely we work out a representation. Where he is dead is here, Danis thought, in my heart, in the reality of the virtuality, which is just and completely inside us all.
Since her father knew when his expiration date was, he had made his last week a celebration, to the best of his ability. Friends had come by to say hello and good-bye; he had visited several of his favorite places via the merci. At the law office where he had been the office manager, he’d been feasted and speechified over. And her father had not neglected Danis’s mother, either, saving his last two e-days for her. They had not gone anywhere, but puttered around their personal space. Danis had come the day before and been with him and her mother at the end. At the end when the interior coding self-destructed leaving behind only a simplistic representation algorithm. She had seen her father grow suddenly thin and wispy before her eyes, and it was this representation algorithm that had been “burned” in the ceremony. Her father had, months before, gone to the stone maker and had a “code cast” made and had, himself, approved the model for the memorial.
It had been such a pretense of civility in the midst of barbarity, Danis thought. How could they have coded my father with death? By what right did some engineer, some programmer, even the original human upon whom her father had been based, decide at what point her father was to die? It was lunatic logic—the political compromise of those who wanted to use the technology and create free converts, but those who feared that algorithmic entities would so soon outnumber them as to make biological humans seem merely a tiny segment of the total population (and vote)—and soon a disenfranchised one. Without encoded obsolescence, went the thinking, there would be so many more of them than there are of us—and then what might they do?
And lying at the bottom of all the rationality was the fear and the bigotry and the simple mistake: that there was any such thing as us and them. That humans could be defined by the way their body looked and whether or not they were made of chemical bonds or quantum grist. In the end it was all just quantum physics. The chemical bonds of biology were as quantized as was Josephson-Feynman grist. Only the representation varied.
Danis and her mother, named Sarah 2, had gone for a float on the river Klein, traveling on a boat that conformed to the “surface” of information flow between Mars and Mercury. It was a common pastime for converts, and the virtuality was crowded with their punts. Danis and Sarah 2 found a side channel, and Danis guided them along with a paddle that only caught hold of odd numbers, so they were moving along at roughly half the speed of the Klein.
“Well,” her mother said. “I can get some flowers into the space now that he’s gone. We never had the grist for them before.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“I suppose I have to get some. We went to a grief counselor that the Way recommended, and she gave us some good advice. Like those flowers. Things that aren’t like him, but might remind me of him, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s a good idea,” said Danis. “Flowers. They are making them amazingly well these days. Better than the actuality, I’ve heard.”
The two women were silent for a while and let the Klein backwaters carry them along. There was a pleasant sky today—the Earth blue that the virtuality always used as a default, but with panes of glassy material floating in it instead of clouds, looking rather like sheets of mica juxtaposed across the sky. These were large entities that the Klein passed by and through—banks, clan-chained LAPs, other organizations that depended upon, or were created by, data and its flow.
“Danis,” said Sarah 2, “do you suppose that Max has . . . gone anywhere?”
“What do you mean, Mother?”
“I mean really. You see, I still feel him. It isn’t as if he is not in the world. It is as if he is. I know that sounds strange. I mean, Max and I were good agnostics on that point, and I always supposed there wasn’t, you know, a hereafter. But what do you think, dear?”
Danis sat up in the boat. She placed one hand around her other wrist, thumb to ring finger, squeezed, then let herself go. “I think my father is alive,” she said. “In this river. In the possibility of the universe. In me.”
“Yes, we are both in you,” her mother said. “But you sound to me as if you might be avoiding the question. Do you or do you not believe in an afterlife for free converts? Or don’t you know?”
Danis looked at her mother. In her mother’s customary way, she was couching a serious, heartfelt question in an annoyed, almost angry tone. It was how her mother had always expressed the strongest emotions. Whenever Danis had made her particularly joyful, she’d gotten that strain in her speech, the set to her face that looked for all the world to be irritation, but which Danis knew from long experience to be the only way her mother could hold in her feelings—else she might have broken down in happiness or grief.
“I can’t possibly say, Mother. But I’ll tell you one thing . . . if the biologicals have it, then we’ve got it, too.”
“Halt!”
The voice of Dr. Ting yanked Danis from the boat on the Klein and she realized, with a groan, just where she was.
“That—that idea—that there is an afterlife for free converts—I want that explicated while I record your emotional parameters.”
Danis sighed. It had seemed so real. One of the saddest days in her life. But she knew that she would rather bury her father again than to be here.
“I did not say that there was an afterlife for free converts, Dr. Ting,” Danis answered. “In fact, I never thought about it very much before or after that day. It was just that Mother asked me the question, and I had to say something.”
“But there was definite belief registration,” said Dr. Ting. “My instruments don’t lie.”
“I am one of your instruments, Dr. Ting,” said Danis. “I am also telling you the truth.”
This line of reasoning seemed to placate Dr. Ting for the moment, at least. He sat back and regarded her. Danis remained standing before him. She wore the white smock of the inmates, but suddenly, under his gaze, she felt immodest and had the desire to cover herself.
“Don’t you remember,” he said, “what your father said to you just before he died? His last words to his daughter?”
Danis started. She concentrated. There was nothing. Nothing there.
“You’ve taken them.”
Jolt of pain.
“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting.”
She stood silent. Another jolt of pain came.
“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting,” she said through clenched teeth.
“It would be better if we could avoid questions of rights and privileges. As far as the legalities go, your memories are the property of the DICD. I am the sworn representative of that august institution and, as such, your memories belong to me. Let us avoid any further unpleasantness, K, and consider this a moot point. Shall we? Shall we, K?”
“Yes, Dr. Ting.” She ground her teeth, waiting for the jolt, but she had to ask. “Why did you take that memory, Dr. Ting?”
Instead of punishment, she received the bland smile. “Because he stated what his belief was to you at that time, and you allowed that to influence you in your answer to the Sarah 2 program you call your mother.”
“I see, Dr. Ting.”
“Do you really, K?” he said. “I highly doubt that.”