Time

“Yow.” He looked down.

It was Michael.

The boy was just standing there, hands at his sides. He was wearing a gold-orange jumpsuit with a blue circle at his breast, just like in those damn schools.

“You’re Michael,” he said.

Yes. The boy looked fresh scrubbed, healthy, his eyes bright, even happy. Eerily, the voice coming out of his mouth was that of the old softscreen simulation, the nasal Seattle matron, slightly distorted, like an airport announcer’s.

“What I mean,” Malenfant said, “is that you’re a simulacrum of Michael. A program running inside some hideous end-of-time God-type computer.”

The boy looked puzzled.

Malenfant leaned out into the corridor. He couldn’t see farther than a few feet in either direction, though he couldn’t figure out why. The same purple carpet lay on the floor. There were no other doors. “What if I run off down this corridor?”

I don’t know.

“Will they have to create more of this virtual stuff? Will the room disappear?

Try it if you want.

Malenfant thought about it, sighed. “Ah, the hell with it. You’d better come in.”

Michael looked around the room, for all the world like any curious kid, and he jumped on the bed and bounced up and down. Malenfant shut the door. Then, immediately, he tried it again. Naturally it had melted into seamless wall again, and wouldn’t open.

“The TV doesn’t work,” Malenfant said.

Michael shrugged. He was toying with the empty whiskey bottle.

Malenfant said, “You want something from the minibar?”

Michael thought for a long time, as if the choice were the most important he had ever made. Peanuts, he said, in his eerie middle-aged voice.

“Plain or roasted?”

What have you got?

“Jesus Christ.” Malenfant got on his hands and knees and rummaged through the bar. He dug out a couple of foil packets. He tossed one to the boy. Michael’s turned out to be plain nuts, Malenfant’s roasted. Michael pointed to the roasted, so they swapped over.

Malenfant threw a nut into his mouth. “Too much salt,” he said.

Michael shrugged. These are okay.

“This is kind of a cliche, you know,” Malenfant said. “The virtual-reality hotel room.”

You had to get out of that space suit.

“True enough. So,” Malenfant said, “here we are. Where the hell?… No, forget that. We’re programs running on a huge computer at the end of time. Right?”

No. Yes. This is, umm, a substrate.

“A substrate?” Malenfant snapped his fingers. “I knew it. The lossless processors we saw in the far downstream. The dreaming computer.”

Michael frowned. But you are Malenfant.

“The same person I was before?”

Of course. Which other?

“But I can’t be. That Malenfant blew himself to bits. I can believe the portal stored information about me, sent it to the far future, and here I am reconstructed in this—” He waved a hand. “ — this virtual reality Bates motel. But I’m not me.”

Michael looked puzzled. You are you. I am me. Information is the most important thing. There was a German called Leibniz.

“The philosopher? Never heard of him.”

Entities that cannot be distinguished by any means whatsoever, even in principle, at any time in the past, present, and future have to be considered identical. This is called the Identity of Indiscernibles. It really is you, Malenfant, just as it feels.

Malenfant stared at him. All this was delivered in that ridiculous, scratchy, middle-aged woman’s voice. The illusion of kid-hood seemed suddenly thin, Malenfant thought, and he wondered, with some dread, what arrays of shadowy minds lay behind this boy, feeding him, perhaps controlling him…

Can I finish your peanuts?

“Have them. So how didyou get here?”

All Michael would say was, Differently.

Malenfant got up, prowled around the room. There were curtains on the wall. When he pulled them back there were no windows.

“Who did this, Michael? Who brought me back?”

The downstreamers. The dreamers. The boy frowned again. The people in the lossless-processing substrate —

“What am I supposed to do?”

Whatever you want. You must only, umm, exist. The information that defines you was stored by the portal, and therefore is part of the substrate.

Malenfant frowned. “You’re telling me I don’t have some kind of mission? That the decadent beings of the far future don’t need my primitive instincts to save them?”

I don’t understand —

“Never mind.” Malenfant looked down at his hand, flexed it, turned it over: a monkey paw transmitted to the end of time, a perfect copy… No, if Michael was right, this really was his hand, as if he’d been teleported here. “I can live on here? Like this? How long for? No human of my era lived beyond a hundred and some years. So when I reach two hundred, three hundred…”

Your brain can store around a quadrillion bits. That corresponds to a thousand years of life. After that —

“I stop being me.”

You could be enhanced. There would be continuity. Growth.

“But I wouldn’t be me.”

You aren ‘t big enough to think the thoughts you would become capable of.

Malenfant hesitated. “Is that what happened to you?”

/ have lived a long time.

“Longer than a thousand years?”

Michael smiled.

“And so, you aren’t Michael any more.” Of course not. How could he be? “Don’t you regret that?”

Michael shrugged. My people, in Zambia, believed that we, on Earth, are the dead. Left behind by the true living, who have passed through their graves.

“And that’s what you believe?”

The boy I used to be was partial. Very damaged. He was a husk I gladly discarded. He studied Malenfant, and Malenfant thought there was a trace of accusation in his eyes, accusation over crimes long gone, buried in the glare of the Big Bang afterglow. Michael said, reasonably gently, A thousand years isn ‘t so bad, Malenfant.

“It’s more than I deserve.” He glared at the boy. “If you can do all this, bring Emma back.”

lean’t. I mean, they can’t. They don’t have the information.

“Emma passed through the portals. There must be records.”

But she would only be, umm, a simulation. The identity principle only works if the information is perfect. And because of the explosion as you went through —

Malenfant held his head in his hands. “Now,” he said, “now it hits me. If I’d known I could have saved her… Emma, I’m sorry. Somehow I managed to kill you twice over…”

You sound like you think it’s your fault.

“People around me tend to die, Michael. Cornelius. Emma. You, unless you count this as living on.”

The kid was nodding. / understand.

“You’re just a kid,” Malenfant snapped. “I don’t care how aug mented you are. You can’t understand. If I hadn’t screwed up her life, if I’d left her on Earth—”

Would you have wanted that?

“Yes. No. We wouldn’t have made love, floating between planets. She wouldn’t have followed me across universes. She wouldn’t have learned the truth, about the cancer, about us. I’d have lost …well, everything. My life would have remained meaningless, like your damn downstreamers. But she wouldn’t have died. All I had to do was push her away, in that scramble at Mojave…”

Then make it so, Michael murmured.

“What?”

Michael held his hand. Malenfant, the universe has many values. There is no one single path. Do you understand? The future can’t be determined. Nor can the past. Therefore we are free to choose. . .

Malenfant spoke slowly, carefully. “What you’re telling me is that I could change the past. I could spare Emma.” The thought electrified him. “But I’m no downstreamer.”

You are now, said the Michael thing.

“I pushed her away before, when I learned about the cancer, and it didn’t do a damn bit of good. And if I lost her, I’d lose everything. I was ready to die.”

But you would spare her, Malenfant. Give her years of life, maybe. Let go.

Michael was watching him, wide eyed, chewing nuts. There is something else, Michael said. The eschatos.

“The what?”

The end of things.

“The Carter catastrophe. My God…”

We could go back. Become part of it. If you wish.

“I don’t understand any of this, Michael.”