Tomorrow and Tomorrow

credit? All that I know may be without value, but I would volunteer for any function that might allow Ana to remain in the cryowomb.”

“You misunderstand. Maintenance of the cryowomb will shortly cease, but not because of any problems of maintenance. Each tank has its own long-lived power source, able to preserve a cryocorpse for an extremely long time without external support. Long enough, in fact, that we do not know its true lifetime, except that it would be measured in billions of years. The cryowomb with its cryotanks is already at the extreme edge of the Oort Cloud, and it is steadily drifting farther out to interstellar space. You and Ana have long been its only occupants. That, however, is not the reason why the cryowomb is increasingly irrelevant. The problem is far more basic. Look at this.”

The window did not move, but the scene outside it changed. Drake found that he was staring through the glass at a naked body — his body, as it was stored in its cryotank.

“Again, we are in derived reality,” Ariel said. “This time for a different reason. Watch closely.”

Drake’s cryocorpse did not move, but the flesh and bones gradually became translucent. Drake, staring uneasily at his own fading body, saw sparks of light appearing within it. They came randomly and infrequently, one every few seconds.

“One thing we cannot do,” Ariel went on, “is control the probabilities that determine quantum processes. What you are seeing are changes to atoms or molecules within your own real body and brain, the result of quantum transitions. To minimize such events, we long ago dropped the temperature in the cryotanks from the original liquid helium ambience, all the way to a fraction of a microkelvin. As a result, changes of atomic and molecular states became far less frequent. They did not, however, cease totally. Nor will they, no matter how close to absolute zero we take the temperature. Vacuum fluctuations guarantee it. There is no way to prevent or control such quantum effects.”

Drake saw two more sparks of light, one in his cryocorpse’s belly and one at the base of his brain. “You’re telling me that I’m changing, even in the cryotank; and there’s no way to stop it.”

“You are changing — but very slowly. We are showing you quantum events at a greatly accelerated rate. Fifty years passed in real time, for each second shown on this display. However, your general conclusion is valid. There is no way to stop the changes. Left in a cryotank, at no matter how low a temperature, your body must inevitably be altered. Quantum state transitions will eventually affect your memory and your mind.”

The scene outside the window flickered gray, then returned to show Naples and the clouded bay. Milton had been waiting silent at Ariel’s side. Now the Servitor rolled closer to Drake. “You will appreciate my dilemma. On the one hand, your direct order was to leave you unchanged in the cryotank until such time as there was new learning that might affect our ability to reanimate Ana, as she was in your time. On the other hand, it proves impossible to leave you unchanged in the cryotank, since your very presence there inevitably produces change. Therefore I, whether I followed action or inaction, was unable to obey your command. We decided to interact with your cryocorpse, as we are doing now, to explore another option.”

“You have one?”

“Of course: downloading. The conversion of the complete contents of your brain to electronic storage.”

“You mean, become some sort of computer program? Forget it.”

“Listen a little longer, before you reject. If you are downloaded, and at some future time you wish to function again in fleshly form, that can easily be done. It calls only for the storage, along with your brain’s contents, of somatic information. Such information is contained in the nucleus of every cell of your body. From your genetic blueprint, your new body can be grown. You would then be uploaded to the new brain from electronic storage.”

“That can really be done?”

“Can be, and has been, a billion times. It is the standard procedure for establishing research teams on the planets of other stars.”

“But isn’t electronic storage just as subject to change as storage in my frozen brain? It’s not immune to quantum processes. You just said there’s no way to prevent or control quantum effects.”

“Quite true; there is, however, a way to compensate for them. It is done through simple redundancy and comparison. After we perform an electronic download from a brain, we create three identical copies. Each of those copies, as you observed, is subject to statistical change because of quantum effects. Periodically, we therefore perform a complete bit-by-bit comparison of all three copies. Occasionally, one copy will show a difference from the other two. We attribute that change to a quantum fluctuation, and we correct the variant copy at that point to agree with the other two. It is, of course, mathematically possible for two quantum changes to take place in the stored brain map, on the same element of information and at the same time. That would produce three different versions, and there would be no way to decide which one was true to the original.

Fortunately, the probability of such an event is so small as to be of no concern.”

“I assume you’ve done all this to somebody?”

“More than that.” The Servitor lacked the means for a physical expression of embarrassment, but the voice slowed and changed. “For the past fourteen million years, I have been applying the technique to you. As soon as the technology permitted a complete download, I performed one of you. Since it was held in a totally dormant condition, and since you were still in the cryowomb, I felt that I had not violated your instructions.”

“You mean I’ve been downloaded already, without ever being asked? You’ve got a nerve.”

“What other option did I have? You ordered me to leave you unchanged in the cryotank, but leaving you there would itself change you. The only way to guarantee that you remained unaltered was to monitor changes in your frozen brain through triple redundancy checks on the downloaded versions, and then correct you appropriately in the cryotank. I can vouch for the effectiveness and reliability of the method, since it is close to the one that I employ on my own composite.”

“How do you know that you don’t change, Milton? You might be different than you were yesterday.”

“And you may not be the Drake Merlin who went into cryosleep, or the same person who met with Trismon Sorel. No one can prove that they are what they were. I can say only this: uploading represents your only chance of remaining unchanged into the far future.”

“What about my body?”

“Your original body?” Ariel answered the question. “It becomes of no interest. Its performance, without electronic update, must gradually degrade. We would propose to leave it in the cryowomb.”

“My body is of no interest?”

“Certainly. You were disposing of your body, cell by cell, every hour and minute that you were alive. Ask yourself, where is the body that you wore when you were five years old? Where is the body in which you first met your beloved Anastasia? They are gone, stranded far back upon the banks and shoals of time. It is only your mind, the essential spirit of Drake Merlin, that floats free toward the uncharted ocean of the future.”

“Ariel, I don’t know you at all; but if you were back in my own time I’d be worried. I once had a teacher who told me, ‘Watch out when the talk gets molto legato’ — very smooth. Too smooth, and too flowery. What are you leaving out?”

“You had a suspicious-minded teacher, Drake Merlin. Very well. There are several other things that should be said. The first concerns Ana. Her full genome is already in electronic storage, so future cloning would be trivial. But there is no ‘complete Ana’ available for electronic download. Her brain can yield no more than a random chaos of disconnected elements. Their transference would be pointless.”

“If I move to electronic form, whatever remains of Ana must move with me.”

“I suspected that would be your reply. But it is really quite illogical. If her personality could ever be restored, the existence of primitive brain residues will not be a factor.”

“So you say — now. But I’ve heard too often that nothing can be done for Ana. Both of us get downloaded, or neither one.”

“We hear you.” Ariel nodded in resignation. “Milton?”

“It will be done.”

The Servitor vanished. Ariel looked more pensive. “We have debated the wisdom of mentioning this next item,” he said. “We do not wish to arouse in you hopeless and unrealizable expectations. In fact, had it not been necessary to contact you concerning your removal from the cryowomb, we would have remained silent.