I once read a book where it turned out the narrator was a ghost. You didn’t find this out until the end of the book. The narrator got himself into a tight situation, failed to deal with it, and got himself killed. He finished up the book by describing how his friends, who were still alive, had gone on to solve the story’s problems without his help. His friends paused every once in a while to say what a great guy he had been.
I really hated that book.
Shortly after I died, I found myself sitting on the edge of a picnic blanket.
I was in the middle of a meadow on a warm summer’s day, with bumblebees and butterflies flitting here and there under a bright blue sky. Off in the distance, a grove of trees leaned over the banks of a meandering stream. Beyond the trees, mountains loomed.
On the picnic blanket, plates overflowed with my favorite foods. Fried chicken. Cheeseburgers. Fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies, still warm from the oven.
But I wasn’t looking at the food, and I wasn’t admiring the scenery. I was staring at my parents. My father was sitting opposite me and my mother was on my right, close enough to hug. She and I were immediately in each other’s arms, crying and laughing and making joyful noises. My father rushed around and joined us.
My mother was dressed the way she had been in the photo from the Rodmore company picnic. My father was wearing the fishing hat he had worn in the photo on Fiona’s refrigerator. They both looked ecstatically happy. They looked exactly the way I felt.
“We’ve missed you so much!” my mother said.
“You realize,” said my father, “we’ve been with you all these years, whether you were aware of it or not.”
“I think I knew,” I said. “I’ve always tried to do things as if you were around. I never wanted to disappoint you.”
“We are so proud of you,” my mother said, and hugged me again.
“But we don’t have much time,” said my father.
My mother let me go and wiped her eyes. “That’s true; we don’t,” she said. Off in the distance, I could see two people in the grove. One of them appeared to be wearing armor.
“Don’t we have all of eternity?” I asked.
“Uh, no,” said my father, sounding uncomfortable. “We do. You don’t.”
“I’m dead, right? Just as dead as you are?”
“Well, yes. You are dead. But you’re not as dead as we are. We are very dead. You’re just… dead.”
“What’s the difference?”
“What your father is trying to say is… before you died, your mind—your essence, maybe even your soul—was downloaded.”
“Downloaded?”
“A copy of your mind is now inside Guernica’s circuits, being kept alive the same way Miranda’s essence is. Guernica thought it best if we explained this to you. Guernica also recommended there be comfort food handy.”
“So… the two of you were downloaded before you died?”
“No.” My father shook his head sadly. “We were never downloaded. We don’t exist here in the same way you and Miranda do. There is no possibility of a second chance for us. We are just… visiting.”
“Are you Guernica, pretending to be my parents?”
My father grimaced. “Possibly,” he said.
“And possibly not,” said my mother. “I prefer to think we are your parents. I certainly feel an overwhelming love for you. No machine could duplicate that. But sadly, there is no real way for you to know if we’re your actual parents, or if we’re being generated by Guernica, or if we’re just your imagination working overtime to make something very strange feel more familiar.”
“Unless, of course,” said my father, helping himself to a piece of chicken, “your mother and I are able to share with you something only she and I would know, that you could verify independently at a later date.”
“Such as?” said my mother, sounding hopeful.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said my father, chewing his chicken thoughtfully. “The combination to our safe.”
“We didn’t have a safe.”
“It was just an example. Or maybe what our last words were.”
“Nobody recorded them. There’s no way for him to verify them. And, as I recall, we both said the exact same thing. ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!’ ” my mother screamed. It wasn’t alarming, because my father laughed, and then she laughed, and then he reached over and took her hand.
“Or something,” said my father, “along the lines of ‘There’s a tin box hidden in the rafters of the garage with some of our old childhood toys that we were going to give to you as soon as you were old enough.’ ”
“That’s good,” said my mother. “Do we have anything like that?”
“We must,” said my father, taking another bite of chicken and furrowing his brow in concentration. “How about what the name of my first dog was?”
“I don’t know what the name of your first dog was,” said my mother.
“It was Flash. No, wait. That was the turtle. The dog was Clyde. No, wait—it was Skip. I think.”
“Is it written down anywhere?” my mother said with a sigh.
“No.”
“I don’t recall being downloaded,” I said.
“Do you remember falling asleep on the sofa?” my mother asked. The two figures from the grove were approaching. I recognized the one who wasn’t in armor as my English teacher, Mr. Hendricks. His suit still matched the sofa’s upholstery. I knew he wasn’t really Mr. Hendricks. He was the sofa. He was Guernica. I nodded in answer to my mother’s question. “That was when it was done,” she said.
I thought about this for a moment.
“So how come I can remember things that happened after I was downloaded? Shouldn’t my memories end there?”
My mother and father looked at each other and smiled. “He’s so bright,” my mother said.
“Don’t embarrass him,” replied my father.
I must have been blushing. I know that dead people don’t blush, so I thought this was a hopeful sign.
“Double Six transmitted periodic updates,” my mother explained.
“Double Six was nowhere near me when Edward Disin had me killed,” I protested.
“Double Six,” said Mr. Hendricks, “was in one of the adjacent rooms at Rodmore Chemical when you died. Close enough to send one final update.”
Mr. Hendricks and the figure in armor had come up behind my father. They knelt down on the picnic blanket on either side of him. The armored figure pulled off its helmet, and I was not surprised to see it was a woman. She shook her head back and forth and red hair billowed around her, like she was in some kind of medieval shampoo commercial. She was beautiful, despite having the same eagle beak of a nose that Alf had.
“You’re Miranda,” I said.
“I am a digital personification. But yes, I am Miranda,” she said. “I’d say I’m pleased to meet you, but we’ve already met, and the countdown clock is now at fourteen minutes and we are running out of time. I have to make this brief. We are about to put you back into a flesh-and-blood body.”
“Whose?” I said warily.
“Your own. The moment Guernica computed you were the most likely of the three children to get yourself killed, we cloned you.”
“How was I the most likely?”
“Freak has faster reflexes and Fiona is more concerned with self-preservation. And neither of them has a history of being the frequent victim of friendly fire during dodgeball.”
“Right.”
“And of the three of you, you’re the most imaginative and the most inclined to do what’s right, meaning you might handle being cloned better than the others, as well as justify the trouble and expense of cloning you. I’d call it a no-brainer if, under the circumstances, that weren’t somewhat tactless.”
Mr. Hendricks, speaking with a voice I now recognized as that of Double Six, said, “The sofa took a DNA sample—you may recall getting stuck with a fishhook—and we worked from there. A revivarium can either force a new mind into an old body or grow a new body from scratch, which is what we did with you.”
“I got stuck with the hook a little over a week ago,” I protested. “You can’t clone somebody in a little over a week!”
“You can if you use an accelerated growth program,” Guernica replied. “The body you are about to occupy is, technically, the equivalent of you, physically two months older than you were when you died eleven minutes ago. This body has never had its legs broken, so you’ll find it is somewhat taller.”
“Taller?”
“By about an inch.”
“You couldn’t have given me an extra foot?”
“You wish to be a tripod?”
There was an awkward silence. I tried to decide how confident it made me, to find my life dependent upon a machine that could make such a mistake. Or had such a rudimentary sense of humor. I stuffed a chocolate-chip cookie in my mouth.
“Your old body,” said Miranda, “has already been occupied by the mind of Greeves Stainer, an expert Indorsian assassin my father has employed in the past. In less than thirteen minutes, my father will force open the Indorsian portal and a troop transport will slide through, bringing two thousand of my father’s storm troopers and additional downloads of disagreeable dead Indorsians my father intends to revive on Earth. At the same time, the mind-control module will start up, rendering everybody living within a ten-mile radius completely docile and accepting of storm troopers in their midst, and probably humming insipid tunes from The Sound of Music, to boot. This has to be stopped. You are going to help by creating a diversion.”
“Me?”
“Oh, my poor dear boy,” my mother said, brushing a lock of hair off my forehead. “In just a moment you’re going to leave here and wake up in your new body. You’ll be in a revivarium in a hidden room of Underhill House. The revivarium will split open. It will spill you out. There will be pain and screaming and second thoughts and a gloppy mess on the floor, but you survived natural childbirth once, so I know you can again.”
“You are not going to have a belly button,” said Guernica informatively. “I hope you are all right with that.”
“I, uh, rarely use it,” I mumbled, worried about other things.
“You can take up to a full minute to reestablish motor control, but no longer,” said Miranda. “Then you have to be on your way back to Rodmore.”
“How am I supposed to get there?”
“Throw yourself on the sofa.”
“What—”
Before I could ask another question, my mother had jumped up and hugged me. My father joined her. I was lost in their embraces for a moment and then they vanished, like candle flames blown out.
Darkness surrounded me and pressure built up on all sides, like I was diving deeper and deeper into an ocean of pain, my lungs unable to fill with air. An enormous weight crushed me flat, folded me over, then flattened me again. My mouth and nose filled with liquid and I felt the terror of drowning, just as the world turned sideways and dropped me off a cliff.
Then I struck a hard, cold surface and thick, sticky fluid slithered down around me.
I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t breathe. Screaming helped. Glop flew out of my mouth, and I was able to inhale.
I was in the room behind the secret panel at the far end of the Underhill House ballroom. Next to me was the revivarium, which had split lengthwise and opened like a clamshell. It dripped reddish goop, not unlike the Jell-O that Nails Norton had dumped on Fiona’s head. As I sat up, I noticed the sofa sitting not too far away.
My legs felt like rubber when I tried to get up. I slipped in the goop. It took me four tries, but I finally got up and staggered across the room.
That’s when I noticed I was naked.
I was all set to go skinny-dipping while the fate of the world hung in the balance.
Great.
I put my ear against the secret panel and heard a low murmur on the other side. I wondered if Ms. Beauceron was still holding everybody at gunpoint.
Suddenly, a maniacal cackle rang out from the other side of the panel, followed almost immediately by the sound of an ax striking wood. It sounded like Hologrammy was chasing someone. People started screaming. I cringed, wondering if my arrival had somehow set her off.
I snatched a black plastic garbage bag out of a box and used it to wipe as much of the red goop off me as I could. Then I tore a hole in the bottom of a second bag and pulled it over my head. I made holes on either side for my arms.
I realized I had a choice. Either I could find a way to open the panel and help Alf, or I could get back to my friends and try to help them.
I took a deep breath and threw myself facedown on the sofa.
I sank into the cushions as deeply as Fiona’s fist had when she had punched it. The sofa shuddered.
And I felt myself being turned inside out.