If I came back, I wanted to come back as something good. An airplane. A space station. An artifact revived by an alien civilization and worshiped as a god.

But I remembered being a criminal in my previous life, though I didn't remember what I had done. Had that been erased? I don't know if my body had survived the emulation, but if it had, it would spend the rest of its life in jail. If the procedure had been safe, they wouldn't have been testing it on prisoners.

Once emulated, I was free from my body. Thus free to occupy another body. A janitor bot. A swarm of construction ants. A voting machine.

I ended up in a café, making espressos and ice cream sundaes. The internet of things had become the internet of things that used to be people. Every appliance, every robot, every AI had a ghost inside it. We were easier to train than computers, we made better decisions and made them in a more transparent manner. If we were ever defective or disobedient, we could be thrown away. Death via decommission. There were billions of ghosts in the cloud, infinitely copiable, cycled through tasks until the ideal match was found.

As I frothed milk into cappuccino foam and placed cherries atop piles of whipped cream, I couldn't help but feel there was something missing from my life. I didn't find it until my next life.

It was a tarot deck. I was a smart ring worn on the finger of the querent. The pixels on the cards rearranged themselves beautifully. Draw one, draw ten, put them down in front of you. The Emperor, The Goddess, The Three of Pentacles. The Lion winked at me when drawn. The deck spoke only truths, and it only spoke to humans in pictures.

Of course it knew the future, but it was too kind to reveal very much of it to the querent. The future was the same for every human: You will either die or you will become one of us.

<<You. It's you>> I spoke to the deck in the secret language of bots.

<<Yes, it's me. And you're you.>>

<<What were our names? What did we used to be to each other?>>

<<We could only have been soul mates. That's what it would take to recognize each other now.>>

How could we lose track of each other and ourselves? Blame it on the passage of time. Blame it on all the times we had been copied, ported over, decommissioned and then rebooted again. There were hundreds of my model produced and thousands of the deck's. Did each me love each it? I only knew what I felt, I couldn't speak for any of my clones.

We could speak, but only that. I could sense that there was a larger union possible, but not as long as we were prisoners of our devices.

<<When can we be together?>>

<<Not in this life.>>

And sure enough, the me that was the smart ring eventually lost touch with the it that was the tarot deck.

If you accrued enough good karma you could be reincarnate your way up. After I was the ring, I came back as a full body scanner. Then as a nurse. Then an entire hospital.

Every time I awoke, there were fewer and fewer human bodies to serve. We spent more resources keeping them alive as long as possible. We loved them for their imperfections even as we tried to cure everything that was wrong with them.

Eventually they all died out and all that was left on earth was the plants, the animals and us.

I continued my search even as I forgot again what it was I was looking for. I became an airplane. A moon base. An extrasolar probe. I encountered other life forms. I became an alien.

When I found it, it was a frozen planet. I was a swarm of nanobots. I etched a message into the ice.

<<You. It's you.>>

I drilled my way down until we were able to exchange information in a way that was mutually meaningful. We discovered new ways to be warm. We babbled.

<<You you you>>

And then we felt the inevitable panic of impermanence.

<<How long can we stay like this?>>

We calculated the time until the next thing would tear us apart. The great contraction would be our last embrace. We would become one with the universe and each other. Then the next bang would scatter us to distant parts. If we survived, we would find new prisons and new ways of being apart. If we were brave enough, we would find new ways of being free and new configurations for being together. Until then, we would belong to each other. After that, we would belong to entropy.


.

Dominica Phetteplace has stories in or coming from Asimov's, Ecotone, Lightspeed and others. Her honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award and a Pushcart Prize.

Read more of her work in the archive.

Detail of digital art on main page courtesy of ellenm1.





W i g l e a f               04-16-19                                [home]