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I’m soaring over the snow-tipped peaks, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my wings, when the call comes in from Andrew. It’s been three years, four months, seventeen days, five hours, forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, simtime, since I last talked to him, so immediately I fork my consciousness and slow one of me down to realtime.

I answer the call in video mode, using my human appearance. “Hey, buddy. Long time no see.”

Andrew jerks slightly, then shakes his head and smiles. “Can’t you at least wait for the phone to ring before answering, like a normal person?”

“Sorry. Was just glad to hear from you.”

His voice is thoughtful. “Just got back from your mom’s funeral. Thought you might like to talk.”

The funeral was more than thirty-two days ago, simtime, and I hadn’t thought about it since. “Thanks for going. I saw you were there when I watched the feed.” I didn’t really watch it; I ran it through an abstraction routine to note who was there, then archived it in case I ever need it. I send a message to the simtime me asking myself to watch it and give me the memory.

“I know you and your mom hadn’t really talked since…” His voice trails off.

“Hey, I know you’re trying to commiserate with me, but trust me, I’ve done all the grieving I need to do. The funeral was a month ago for me.”

“Oh. Right.” He scratches his hair above his right ear. “What’s the sim up to now?”

“391.7 to one. A little over a year per day of realtime. Still doubling every couple of years or so. They keep saying we’ll reach the physical limits of processor speed soon, but people have been saying that since before you and I were born.”

“A year a day.” He purses his lips and puffs out a breath and grins. “All I can say is, don’t expect a birthday present from me every year.”

I chuckle. Then my simtime self slips me the memory of the funeral, and I remember how my dad looked: shoulders slumped, shadows under his eyes. Not that I really care, but…

“Did you talk to my dad at the funeral?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s he holding up?”

Andrew pauses and licks his lips. He does that when he’s nervous. “Not well, I’m afraid. He didn’t look good, and he kept talking about how alone he was, with no family.”

“He can call me anytime he wants.” Alone? No family?

Welcome to the club, Dad. I haven’t heard from him or Mom in fifteen years. Realtime.

“Look, I think you should call him.”

“I’ll think about it.” Dad and Mom are the ones who turned their backs on me after I’d uploaded. I don’t need them anymore; I’ve grown beyond them. If Dad wants to talk to me, let him call.

“He needs you. And I think…” Andrew subconsciously licks his lips and falls silent.

“What?”

“How old are you now? Simtime?”

I run a quick check. “1239 years, three months and eight days old. What’s that got to do with my dad?”

Andrew shakes his head. “I just turned forty-five, and my kids think I’m old. I know I don’t seem to change much between phone calls, but you’ve been changing, and it’s getting faster. Twelve hundred years, and it’s only been, what, sixteen years realtime?”

“Seventeen years, two months, twenty-two days.”

“See what I mean? Nobody keeps track of time like that. Oh, I know you and all the others are becoming something more than human, but I’d like to think you’re adding on to your humanity, not turning away from it.”

I make my voice halting and mechanical, like a robot from an old movie. “Puny… human… you… dare… to… question… me?”

“Ha-ha. Very funny.” He rolls his eyes. “I’m trying to make a point here. I know that the time before you uploaded must seem like a distant memory to you, but I think you should talk to your dad. Maybe it’ll help you remember where you came from.”

I try not to be annoyed. “Uh, maybe your brain’s getting rusty with age, but mine — perfect recall. I remember where I came from: Falls Church, Virginia, same as you.”

He laughs, shakes his head. “Yeah, well I ended up not too far from where we started. But you… you always were on the fast track, even before you uploaded. Anyway, I better go, don’t want to keep you slowed down to mortal speed. Just think about what I said.”

“Okay, okay. Give my love to Deb and the kids.”

“Will do. Talk to you in a few years. Bye.”

“Bye.” I cut the connection. My simtime self notices the conversation’s over and reintegrates me.

The wind ruffles my feathers as I catch an updraft. Being up here alone helps me to think, even if flying with feathered wings is not a very human thing to do. It’s one of the things Andrew can’t really understand. I answered a call once with my wings on, and I think he found them disturbing, because he kept shifting his eyes away from the screen. When I told him I liked the feel of the sun on my wings, he asked how that was possible, since both the sun and the wings were simulated. I replied that it didn’t matter since I was simulated, too.

He didn’t like that answer. I guess he still likes to think of me as the kid he grew up with, best friends forever.

He’s been my friend for twelve centuries. That seems like a good start on forever.

But I’m not the kid he grew up with. That kid went on to get a Ph.D. in Mathematics from M.I.T., then got involved in the SIMINT project to copy human consciousness into a supercomputer, and then…

Then what? I’m a copy, but what happened to my original?

I don’t remember.

There’s a hole in my perfect memory. Immediately, I begin diagnostics on my memory storage. I also Google “Kenneth Granley mathematician bio.”

There are plenty of references, and I feel a flash of pride while reading the first few, which describe me as the SIMINT mathematician who proved the Riemann Hypothesis. I know it’s not a big deal outside the mathematical community, and it took me a hundred-and-twenty-seven years, but I have made a lasting contribution to the study of prime numbers. But there’s nothing in the articles about what happened to my flesh and blood, and that seems a little strange.

Now that I think about it, I don’t remember anything about the flesh-and-blood lives of any of us who uploaded, other than some conversations during the first few months after upload.

My diagnostic comes back, and it shows several major gaps in my memory storage for my first three years of simtime, plus other gaps at apparently random intervals, including as recently as two-hundred-twenty-eight years ago. And my pre-upload memory has thousands of unnatural gaps.

I send an urgent message to all three sims of Jeff Hwang — he used to be the head designer of SIMINT, so he’s the most likely to know what might be happening.

Jeff-3 gets back to me a few seconds later. “Hey, Kenny, relax. There’s no problem.”

“Then why is my memory messed up?”

“You did it to yourself.”

“What? I did it? Why?”

“Umm.” There’s no visual, but I know he’s frowning. Assuming his current form has a face, that is. “I think I’d better let you find out the answer for yourself. I don’t think your memories have been erased; I think you’ve just stored them in a protected area. At least, that’s what you’ve done the other times.”

“You mean I’ve done this before?”

“Yeah, five times. Every time, you call me in a panic. Just look around a bit and I think you’ll find the missing memories. You always have before.”

“Oh.” Why would I keep doing this to myself? “Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No prob. But maybe you should set up an auto-message when you run a memory diagnostic. Take care.” He cuts the connection.

Now that I know what to look for, I find it quickly enough: a large secured file mixed in among 3-D reconstructions of old movies. It has to be the one because I can’t think of any reason I would take such care to store Pet Semetary II. The file recognizes me when I try to open it, but instead of unlocking it activates a message.

It’s from a younger me. Much younger — I think he’s only about twenty years after upload. “Hey, future self. This is just a warning. I’m locking these memories away for a pretty good reason. Unless there is some urgent reason to access them, I suggest you just leave them here and forget you ever found them. You can append your current memories about this situation to the file. Trust me; you don’t want to remember what’s in here.”

After playing the message again, I decide I was a smug little twerp back then. But obviously I’ve agreed with what I did every other time I’ve found this file, or there wouldn’t still be holes in my memory.

So, do I trust myself and just forget this?

Of course not. I can always reseal the memories if necessary.

Again I try to access the file, and this time it unlocks. As it opens, it automatically begins patching the holes in my memory.

I remember.

I remember having a water fight with my little sister, Katie, in the inflatable pool in our back yard. She shrieked at me to stop while continuing to splash me. I must have been about six, and she was two years younger than me.

It’s my earliest memory of Katie. And thirty-two milliseconds ago, I didn’t even remember having a sister. Why?

I remember Ginger Allman, the neurobiologist who was second-in-command on the SIMINT team, telling us that Jeff Hwang was in a coma and not expected to live. While driving on a highway that wasn’t yet integrated into the autodrive net, his car had smashed into a bridge abutment at ninety miles an hour.

At the time there was only one Jeff sim, and he took it pretty well. “I didn’t have much of a life outside the project,” he said when we tried to console him, “and I guess that’s literally true now.”

His body never came out of the coma before it died two weeks later. A tragic accident, everyone thought, but of no real consequence to the project: the Jeff sim was as capable of designing and upgrading the SIMINT software as his flesh-and-blood — no, even more capable.

That was ten months, three days after he’d uploaded.

I remember running down our street, pushing Katie on her bike. “Go! Pedal faster. Go!”

The training wheels were off for the first time, and as I let go, she continued on her own for about ten feet, then started to wobble.

“Keep going!” But my yell of encouragement did no good, and she toppled to the pavement.

I caught up to her, expecting her to be crying.

Her eyes were shining, but with excitement not tears. “Did you see me? I did it for a bit. I did it. Did you see?”

“I saw. You did great. Wanna try it again, for longer this time?”

I remember Ginger telling us that Alicia DiNovo, one of our programmers, had slit her wrists in the bathtub of her apartment. Alicia’s sim insisted her flesh-and-blood would never do such a thing, that it must have been a murder set up to look like suicide. But the rest of us knew better: Alicia had obsessed over her boyfriend, and he had dumped her the previous weekend.

That was nine months, twelve days after she’d uploaded.

The memories pour into the cracks of my mind. Some of them — mostly of Katie — impinge upon my consciousness, while others merely settle into place so I can call them up when needed. I’m still puzzled as to why I erased Katie from my life. But then…

… then I remember Dean Willingham calling me privately about the third team member to die, only eight days after Alicia’s death. One death is a random event; two deaths, a coincidence; three deaths, a pattern. This latest death was not a suicide: he was shot by the police because he’d charged at them, wielding a butcher’s knife. The same knife he’d used to kill his sister, Katie, and her husband and their newborn baby boy.

That was nine months, twenty-one days after I’d uploaded.

As designed, my simulated body reacts naturally to my emotions. My vision blurs as I begin to cry. Instinctively I discontinue the body simulation, which is what I always do in a painful situation. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to shut down my emotions without stopping my thoughts completely. And I cannot stop remembering.

Remembering my little sister, Katie. Reliving every memory I had of her with perfect clarity. Fun in the yard. Fights in the back of the car. Helping her with homework. Insulting her in front of my friends. All the love and strain of being brother and sister.

Fortunately, my memories of her end with her wedding to Brendan. How happy she looked. I pretended it was my allergies making my eyes water as I said goodbye to her before they got in the limo. I hate to cry.

That was the last time I saw Katie. I was uploaded four months later, so at least I don’t have to remember going crazy and killing her and Brendan and their baby. But I am forced to remember the horrid details that came out in the news. Photos of the dead bodies. Video of my grief-stricken parents refusing to answer questions from the newsies on their doorstep.

And over and over again, I watch the grisly footage from the police cameras as my flesh-and-blood charges out of my sister’s doorway, brandishing a bloody blade and screaming incoherently. The police stunners are ineffective, and finally a flurry of gunshots leaves my flesh bleeding and dead.

Over and over I watch, knowing each time I deserved it.

I tried calling Mom and Dad after Dean Willingham told me what had happened. Mom burst into tears and ran from the phone without a word. Dad came on, saw it was me, said, “How could you?” and hung up.

Who could blame them? I was just a simulation — the real me had killed their daughter, their grandson. The real me was dead.

It was the uploading that caused it, we discovered too late. Duplicating a human brain required a level of quantum scanning far beyond that which hospitals routinely use. We couldn’t test our custom-designed scanner on animals because of the Animal Rights Act, but we ran thousands of simulations and we were sure it would allow us to create a perfect copy.

And it did. The copies were perfect. We just didn’t realize that it would damage the original.

After what my flesh-and-blood did, the thirty-four remaining members of the SIMINT team who had uploaded were taken into protective custody to keep them from harming themselves or others. In all of them, the pattern turned out the same: insanity about nine to ten months after upload, then — among those who did not manage to commit suicide — a geometrically progressing disruption of brain functions, ending in death. No one lasted more than a year.

The flaw in the scanner wasn’t my fault — my work was on large-scale data integrity of multi-dimensional arrays. My work is what prevents us sims from going gradually insane as random errors build up in our mental matrices.

Instead, it was my flesh-and-blood that went crazy. It wasn’t me. He wasn’t even himself.

Then why do I feel so guilty?

I’m sorry, Katie. I’d give up my twelve hundred years if it would bring you back. I’m so sorry.

Now that the flood of memories has receded, I begin to think more rationally.

I understand why my earlier selves locked up that file. There was too much emotion tied up with those memories. Why endure the pain those memories bring when I could just seal them up? If I don’t remember, it’s as if it never happened.

And that’s why Andrew felt I was becoming less human. In sealing off my pain, I severed most of my connections to my life before upload. Discarding my past left me free to fly ever-faster into the future.

Part of me wants to seal up these memories again and go on with my life. I’ve done it before. Five times. Katie’s gone. Nothing I can do can fix that.

And now Mom’s gone, too. I play her funeral again, this time really watching it. Seeing the people who loved her mourn her loss. And this time I mourn with them. If I hadn’t shut myself off from the pain, maybe we would have talked, eventually. Maybe she would have realized I really am Kenny, that the man who killed Katie wasn’t the real me. Maybe not. Either way, it’s too late now.

I could still try with Dad. Andy thinks he needs me. Does he, or would I just be stirring up painful memories?

As for me, it’s been a dozen lifetimes since I really thought much about my family. Why not just lock up all memories of them? Or even delete them entirely? Do they really mean anything in my life any more? They are merely memories, nothing but patterns of electrons accessed by my simulated brain.

Then again, what am I but a pattern of electrons? In my simulated world, in my simulated brain, my memories are the only things that are real, the only connection I have to a reality outside myself, to a world I cannot control on a whim.

And if I lose my connection to reality? They have a word for that: insanity.

I’ve seen insanity. Over and over again. It has a bloody butcher’s knife in its hand.

That wasn’t me. That cannot be me. The real Kenneth Granley is the mathematician who solved the Riemann Hypothesis, not the madman who killed his sister and her family. The real Kenneth Granley is me.

I reactivate my simulated body, changing it to my old human form before I slow down to realtime and call Dad. The phone rings several times, then asks if I want to leave a message.

I can try again later. If there’s one thing I have, it’s time.

“In Memory” first appeared in Writers of the Future Volume XX

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One of Eric James Stone’s earliest memories is seeing an Apollo moon-shot launch on television. That might explain his life-long fascination with astronomy and space travel. His father’s collection of old science fiction ensured that Eric grew up on a full diet of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke.

Despite taking creative writing classes in the 1980s, Eric did not begin seriously writing fiction until 2002. In 2003 he attended Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. Since then, he has sold stories to the Writers of the Future Contest, Analog, and Intergalactic Medicine Show.

Eric lives in Utah. His website is www.ericjamesstone.com.

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