Chapter 1

Put quite simply, my plan was to kill myself as soon as I got home and disarmed the security system. I had already taken care of all my worldly affairs. Even the fish in the pond out back had a week’s supply of food in the auto feeder. So knowing everything was ready, I settled comfortably into the darkness on my drive home. As the road wound ever upwards my headlights cut through the evening gloom flashing briefly on patches of fog where night chilled the summer air to mist. In the daylight these foothills resembled rumpled quilts tossed off against the base of the mountain. The mountain where I would exit this earth.

I had made the winding drive down about this same time a month before with Barbara slumped unconscious next to me. It was her last trip to the hospital. She abandoned her struggle as they moved her onto the gurney. I never even got to say goodbye. Not that it mattered. We had hardly spoken the past few years anyway. But her passing had affected me more deeply than I had expected, and I began finding myself at moments with a near pathological impulse to end my own life as well. Just to escape the endless little failures and misunderstandings that I suppose everyone has. 

Finally, with the end so near, I dared to call out old memories previously crammed down into the darker recesses of my mind. I studied them for a time as I swerved around the hairpin curves on my way home. Bothersome little flashes of my past. Regrets. From when I was a kid mostly. Forgettable things. Except I could never seem to forget them. A perfunctory encounter, a studied indifference, an ignored touch. Oh, and I was always behind in class and among the last chosen on the playground. I was a loser. Everyone knew it. Only one other kid was a worse athlete than me. Little Arlen who killed himself in junior high school. Or so I had heard. Arlen, who could be forgiven for being the biggest loser in Stubbinville, that little scab of a town on the pine barrens of the Florida Panhandle.

But eventually things began to change. I spent a summer practicing batting and catching and discovered it was all just a matter of learning how to do it. But the earlier failures stuck with me anyway.

Now it would all be over in a few more minutes. What relief. There was nothing left that could alter my plans for the night. Nothing whatever. And there was a certain sense of fulfillment in carrying out a well-formed plan. I turned off the highway and continued up the quarter mile private road to my summer house. As the drive leveled off and turned right along the front acreage, I noted a rather large hole. That was new. I stopped the car and climbed out into the late evening air. The night’s moon was already well up.

But this was no small hole. It was a crater. It must have been two hundred feet across and deep enough to hide a barn. In mild alarm, I peered across the abyss and noted with some relief the silhouette of my house against the Milky Way. At least this hole wouldn’t interfere with my evening’s plan.

Still baffled, though, I returned my attention to the crater. It was perfectly round. There was no debris field thrown up as a meteor would have done if it had impacted my front yard. And where was the missing dirt? I surveyed the surrounding area. There should have been dirt. Lots of dirt. But there was nothing. I stepped cautiously over to the rim and peered down into the darkness.

Something touched my neck. “Be careful. The edge is unstable.”

“Shitfire!” I yelled, almost jumping into the hole.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t startle me,” I wheezed. “You damn near sent me into cardiac arrest. I’ll be eighty next week.”

Then I remembered that, actually, I wouldn’t. I’d be dead. I finally turned to confront whoever had destroyed my front lawn. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself. But when I saw her, I wondered if perhaps I was already dead and had just forgotten about it. She stood a bit shorter than me with spiky red hair that caught the moonlight on its tips. As she studied my face she said, “I’m Lovely Pebble.”

If I had been F. Scott Fitzgerald, I might have said right then and there that she was not like you and me.

“I’ve had an unforeseen equipment failure,” she continued quite unfazed by my near death at her hands. “On my time glider. And it has dropped out of sequential bypass on its return home.” The moonlight was just bright enough that I noticed her lips didn’t move when she spoke. They remained frozen in an elfish grin. Then I noticed she was jaybird naked. My nearly eighty-year-old heart almost stopped for the second time since I’d gotten out of the car. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill myself after all. This Lovely Pebble thing already had a pretty good start on it.

“I see.” I dropped my hand from my chest. “Well I’m real sorry to hear that.” Then realizing the poor girl must have been stressed, I remembered my manners. After getting my breath back, I extended my hand. “I’m Micajah Fenton by the way, but my friends call me Cager.” She studied my hand and, after a moment of obvious confusion, touched it gently.

“Then may I call you Cager?”

“You may if it suits you,” I said, ever one to enjoy a double entendre.

She responded with obvious relief, “Then you may call me Love,” oblivious to the undertone. “Would that be appropriate?”

“Well, normally it might,” I said with as straight a face as possible. “To keep things respectable, though, why don’t I just call you by your first initial. Ell.”

“Yes. I like that much better. Actually, we use formal names in only the most extraordinary circumstances. This is only the third time I have ever used mine.”

Well, clearly something most extraordinary had occurred in my front yard to leave me facing a hundred-foot-wide crater and a naked woman whose lips didn’t move when she spoke.

“Then we are friends?”

“As long as you don’t make any more holes in my yard.”

“I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”

“Well, in that case, I suppose it’s okay.”

Ell now appeared vaguely perplexed. Then I figured English probably wasn’t her native language. Hell, maybe Earth wasn’t even her native planet. “Relax,” I said as I started back toward the car. “I was just messing with you.” She seemed to ponder the exchange as she tagged along. I pushed the car door shut then leaned against the cold front fender. “So. You say you’re, a what, a time traveler? Do I have that right?”

She perked up at that. “Yes. Well, almost. I’m a space-time traveler. My travels cross both space and time.”

“Then I take it you’re not from around here.”

“Well, yes and no. I’m from your galaxy.”

“This very galaxy? You don’t say. Then we’re almost neighbors. But, and I’m just guessing here, you’re not actually human are you?”

“No,” she said with a trace of concern in her voice. “No, I’m not.”

“Then why do you look human?”

“I don’t.” Then after a studious pause, “Oh. You mean why do I look human to you. It’s a matter of protocol. We aren’t supposed to interface with humans. Or any advanced creature for that matter. But this is an emergency and emergency protocol is to appear as a non-threatening organism of the same species if that ever becomes necessary. My glider’s records on humans are sketchy at best but indicate females might be the least threatening way to interface with males.”

“Really?”

“Yes. So, am I doing it right?”

“Well, yeah, so far.” She hadn’t quite managed to kill me yet.

“Oh, good. I’ve been in space-time research in this area for only about fifty of your years. This is also the first time I’ve had to interface with an outside race of intelligent beings. I don’t want to mess this up.”

So, I actually was in contact with an alien from another star system. And my evening’s plans had been going so well up to this point.

“So I guess I should mention that I detect you plan to end your life tonight. I hope you won’t do that. I really need some help here. The failed part has never failed before in the history of space-time research. But I was working on your planet’s early history. The period shortly after your moon formed. 

“I thought I was far enough back from the ocean to avoid the mile-high tides generated when your moon was orbiting every ten hours, but I failed to account for how far those tides would reach inland and I had left the real-world access door open by mistake. My glider flooded under a rushing wall of seawater. That wasn’t the actual cause of the failure, though. It was the boulder that washed in with the water. It struck the subspace linkage. The glider cleaned itself up immediately but the linkage was damaged just enough that it snapped right after I departed for home. I dropped back into reality here right where I was when I left but billions of years later.” She paused to see if I was following.

“I see,” I said, unable to come up with anything to top what I’d just heard.

“Anyway. The glider came out just below the present ground level. Its failsafe cleared away the surrounding earth so I had access to the surface. But I still need help. I’m fairly sure your technology can manufacture a replacement part. The tolerances aren’t so critical a civilization that can make your car can’t make this part. And I’ll gladly reward you for your effort. In fact I’m compelled to reward you. You have only to tell me what you want.”

I just stood there for a long time. Was this creature reading my thoughts? It already knew of my evening’s plans for self-elimination. Probably knew the reasons even if it didn’t understand them myself. But so what. It seemed harmless enough. Finally, without moving my lips I thought, “Of course I’ll help you. You won’t owe me anything. I’m head of a corporation that probably has the resources to build whatever it is you need. Let’s go over to my house and we can work out the details.” 

Chapter 2

As I threw the living room lights on, they fully illuminated Ell’s nimble form. There was an instant response as she caught my reaction. “Oh. I apologize. I see you humans are creatures who wear garments for other than protection from the environment.” She immediately appeared in clothes identical to mine. Then after another awkward moment, switched inexplicably to a clown suit. I hesitated in surprise. During the pause, Ell got my favorite papasan chair. I settled for the leftover sofa and wondered if that awkward clown suit would come back to haunt her years from now.

“I appreciate your offer of free service but must insist you come up with an appropriate payment for your help in repairing my glider. As I’ve already stated, it’s protocol.”

“Yes, protocol. I understand. Okay. Give me some time to think about it. As you know, I don’t plan to hang around for long after you leave. But I’ll help you while you’re here, if I can.”

“Certainly and thank you. And I must add, I will need your help in removing the defective part. I cannot do the work required and the glider is unable to do the work for me because of the nature of the defect.”

I started to get up. “We might as well get started then. What tools do I need?”

“No tools. It doesn’t work that way. You’ll see.” Then as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.

A moment later I found myself standing on bedrock at the bottom of the crater. An open door spilled an eerie light out across the night, backlighting the glider in a ghostly radiance. It wasn’t an elegant craft. I had conjured up an image of a sleek machine with graceful curves and backswept wings as its name might imply. But it was just a rugged shipping crate-like affair; not unlike an old boxcar. It was well-worn and grimy from hard use and sat directly on the ground. There were neither supporting struts nor landing gear. Nor wings. Nor apparent engines. Nothing I would have dreamed up as a time glider. 

Beyond the open door, however, the glider was spotless. Ell stepped up to the opening and invited me in. The interior was well lit but barren. The air odorless, though slightly astringent. It reminded me of an empty operating room. There were no chairs, no tables. No dials or switches. Just the bare gray walls. And a slight tingle on my skin like there might be a lot of static electricity in the area.

“The superstructure becomes transparent when the glider is working and you feel like you’re standing in the open,” Ell explained for some reason. Then she pointed down a long hallway that clearly could never fit inside the glider. “Down there is where I came from. If the glider was fully operational we could walk back there and see your moon when it appeared twenty times larger than it does tonight. And your day was a little over three hours long.”

“You mean you’re still connected to the past.” I nodded toward the hallway. “Down there?”

“Not at all points. Just two. Here and there. But that hallway ends not only in the distant past. It reaches across millions of light years of space as well since your earth and our galaxy have moved during that time.”

As she turned, the hallway to the Hadean rotated from view as another chamber took its place. “This is the, I guess you would call it the engine room or control room.” She led the way into it, her clown shoes flapping heavily against the deck. “It’s where the quantum paradoxes are set up and carried out. The little impossibilities that drive the glider in the direction of space and time you want to go. There’s my broken linkage right there,” she said pointing to a dull gray rod with an obvious crack through its midpoint. It connected two unremarkable, consoles about the sizes of small refrigerators. “It’s a simple piece that should never have broken. But it did. After the boulder strike that should never have happened either. And I have no way to construct another. Almost anything else could have failed and the glider would have fixed it on the spot or worked around it without my intervention. But not this.”

I stepped over to the slightly out-of-kilter link. It was about four feet long and as thick as my wrist. “Looks like a solid piece of metal,” I muttered.

“It is. Or was.”

I leaned down to study the broken linkage. “So how critical are the specifications on that thing?”

I thought I detected a feathery probe sweep along my left frontal lobe. Perhaps a scan for the specific measurement terms needed. Then, “Twelve microns in width but only a few tenths of millimeters in length. Is that a problem?”

“It might take a while to mill the width precisely but I don’t see any problems with the rest. What’s the material?”

“Titanium. It’s the only titanium on the glider so I can’t give you any to work with except the piece itself. It couples the spatial and temporal flight actuators. Proper coordination between the actuators requires exacting feedback so the titanium has to be pure to minimize navigation errors due to uneven distortions in the metal.”

“Um, how pure?”

“I’m not sure. The specifications aren’t detailed since the part was never expected to fail. It’s listed only as titanium. Such an entry usually implies pure.”

That was my first clue this creature with the magnificent time glider wasn’t all-knowing. I felt a little better seeing that chink in her knowledge. Maybe we were more alike than I had first thought. I didn’t know the composition of the alloy in the crankshaft in my car either. “Can you tell me anything about its manufacture? What levels of expertise did the builders have in working with titanium?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know that either. Extensive, I would imagine.”

Another twinge of satisfaction. “Well, like you said, the part was never expected to fail. But I can get a metallurgical analysis to see how pure it is and what minor impurities it might have, if any. I hope it’s not one hundred percent pure. We don’t have the ability to do one hundred percent. But I think we can get pretty close to what you need.”

“Will you be able to lift the piece out and get it up to your car?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem if you help.”

“I can’t help.”

I glanced at her disapprovingly.

“I’m not actually real,” she added. “Not like you think, anyway.”

It took me a moment to catch on. “Ah. You mean you’re like a projection into my mind? A thought?” That explained her lips not moving when she spoke. “Then who touched my neck back on the edge of the crater earlier?”

“That was a mental construction too. I can appear to touch you and cause nerve impulses so you to feel my imaginary touch but I exist only in the machinery of the glider. I never exerted any actual force on you. I just didn’t want you to get any closer to the edge.”

“Then why not run a mental construct of the cracked titanium rod and be done with it?”

“Because the glider itself is real. It’s a part of the world you live in. Or more accurately, your brain lives in. You are actually a projection of your brain just as I am a projection of the glider. You think of your body as yourself but you’re only a phantom drifting loose among your neural connections. Much like me.”

“But I see you quite clearly.”

“And yet you live in the dark of your cranium just as I live in the dark of the glider’s machineries. No light reaches your brain. It converts nerve impulses from your retina to represent the bright world around you just as the glider creates the surrounding world for me. Since your retina transmits trains of nerve impulses telling you about the outside world, the glider uses those same neurons to introduce impulses that create the images it wants you to see. You experience me; sight, sound, touch; through the same conduits you would perceive other humans. To your brain I’m just as authentic as they are.” She paused until I caught her eye. “But neither of us are real. Your phantom self controls your body to do physical things. My phantom self controls the glider which serves as my real-world body while I’m here. A body now seriously limited.”

This was a lot of information for an old man to take in all at once. I sort of froze. Was I dealing with a woman in a clown suit or merely the glider itself—a damaged piece of alien hardware using its legerdemain of superior technology to trick me into fixing it? Did Ell really exist? Or was she merely a contrivance of the glider? Who or what exactly was I conversing with? The phrase cogito, ergo sum popped into my mind.

There was no way to know.

But Ell was watching me. Or perhaps better stated, Something was watching me.

“All right,” I muttered after a moment. “Let’s see if the virtual part of me can convince the real-world part to lift this busted piece of time glider. How much you figure it weighs, anyhow?”

“About 25 pounds.”

“Well, I might was well take it back with me now.” I stepped closer to the broken piece.

“Um, you can’t do that, Cager.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not actually here yet. You’re still in the house. Sorry. I should have told you.”

After a brief sense of disorientation I found myself still sitting in the living room staring at Ell. I blinked twice before I spoke. “Nice trick, Ell,” I said as nonchalantly as I could manage. “So how does the real me get down into the real hole to retrieve the real titanium rod?”

“You’ll have to climb down.”

“To heck with that. I can get us some help out here in the morning.”

“No. Only you can know about this for obvious reasons. If word got out about an alien time glider in a hole in your front yard… well, you can imagine. This has never happened before.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Oh, we’ve been sighted at times, but we have protocols for that built into the gliders. All the witnesses see are visions of their own kind performing routine activities. This is the first breakdown that has left a glider on the surface of a planet with a civilization and no way to leave without help from that civilization. I suspect you already see the catastrophe that would result from humans having access to a glider.” Her puckish grin was more serious now, her eyes quite solemn.

I thought about the possibilities. It would soon be the end of humanity as we tinkered with history. The future. Everything. It would probably start with killing Hitler and go downhill from there.

“I think you already sense the threat,” she said. “But reality is far more susceptible to interference than you probably realize. Changes radiate out like a chain reaction. One imperceptible change causes two more inconspicuous perturbations until billions of revisions have propagated throughout reality. And the rate of change accelerates forever once set in motion. Let me give you an example.

“A minor adjunct of our studies was to trace out the events leading to intelligent life here on earth. That study was never completed but we did trace back as far as two amphibians battling over a sunny spot on a rotted log. If the loser had won, you wouldn’t be here. The winning amphibian had the exact gene sequences leading to humans. The loser didn’t.”

So I was somehow the product of the proto-lizard winner? That didn’t sound right. Surely I descended from the loser somehow. But Ell wasn’t through.

“Even your own birth was a once-in-the-life-of-the-universe event. At only one brief moment in all of creation was the microscopic sperm carrying half the specific DNA sequence defining you in contact with the egg carrying the other half. If the meeting of those two miniscule gametes had been delayed even a few seconds, a rival sperm would have won the battle and your single chance to exist would have vanished forever into that great, cosmic realm of missed opportunities. And the same scenario applies to your parents’ conceptions. And their parents. In fact, if a person with a time glider wanted to get rid of you, they would only have to intercept your father shortly before you were conceived. They wouldn’t have to kill him; just delay him a bit or jostle him around and they would have effectively murdered you before you were even born. Or ….”

I finally stopped her. “Okay. I get it. But right now we need to get that broken part up to my car somehow so I can order up a replacement and get you out of here. You can fill me in on how lucky I am later.”

“Certainly. Sorry. I prattle on sometimes when I think about everything too much.”

“It’s okay.” I pushed up off the sofa. “And one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“Since you’re just a perceptual construct, you can ditch the clown suit. I liked your initial projection much better.”

“You mean I’m less threatening without clothes?”

Oh. If only my high school dates had been this easy.

Chapter 3

The next morning my depression had abated somewhat as I savored the challenge of coming up with a replacement control rod for a time machine. It had taken me most of the night to make up a rope ladder, climb down into the crater, remove the broken rod and climb back out. But I finally had the titanium bar in the trunk of my car headed down the mountain to the office.

I still had to come up with a payment for the work, though, so Ell’s protocol wouldn’t be violated. She seemed quite concerned about that. I had no idea what kinds of payments she could offer but planned to discuss the matter that evening. It was becoming apparent I was in an even worse bargaining position than a Neanderthal might be in negotiating with one of us modern humans. The poor guy wouldn’t know what to ask for other than something he needed immediately like a new spearhead or some fresh meat. He wouldn’t know he could ask for a hunting rifle, or a stainless skinning knife, or even vaccination against disease.

The gate guard waved me into the company parking area, and I headed for the procurement office. By lunch, a company in Connecticut that fabricated titanium parts for nuclear submarines and high performance aircraft got the contract with a promised rush delivery date of seven days. 

Ell was waiting in the living room when I got home. By now I was used to conversing telepathically with her, or it, or whatever was in the glider’s plumbing. I just voiced the words internally.

“I should hear something on the purity of the titanium in a few days. If that doesn’t become an issue, the part should be ready in a week.”

Ell pushed forward in the papasan chair studying me as I crossed the room. “So, have you been working on what I can do for you in return?”

Dropping onto the sofa I said, “I have the feeling you can read minds and already know the answer to that question.”

She flopped back into the cushion. “Actually, I can’t do that. I can scan your neural structures and pick out the fixed language and visual centers to allow me to communicate with you but there’s no way I can tell from the more dynamic areas of your brain what you’re thinking.”

“Then how did you know I planned to kill myself?”

“That wasn’t a thought. That was a deeply held intent. The glider is designed to detect an intention of threat in neural patterns. In your case, the threat was to yourself, though. Even then, there was no way to know how you planned to end your life. Or even where. Only that it was imminent.”

I pondered that explanation for a moment. It made sense. Sort of. But I suspected I was up against something a good deal smarter and far more advanced than me, even if she didn’t know much about the metallurgical properties of the broken control rod. Then it occurred to me this thing might be able to implant any thought in my head it wanted me to have. It wouldn’t have to make up lies. Then again, maybe it had just planted that thought. I sighed. There was no way to think my way safe of this if it were a threat, so I just went with the obvious.

“Well, to answer your question, no, I haven’t figured anything out yet because I don’t have any idea what you’re capable of delivering. Your technology is so far beyond anything I’ve ever dreamed, I’m at a loss. Perhaps you could suggest something.”

“Well, I suppose immortality is out of the question since you plan to end your existence as soon as I leave.”

“Immortality? You and your glider can offer immortality? I don’t see how that would be possible.”

“It’s simple, really. Though I currently exist in the, what I guess you might call it the central processing core of the glider, I was in the community mind of the home network before that. I can transfer myself from one node to another as desired. Even across much of the galaxy if I want. The glider can handle eight separate, independent personalities. I was just on a simple mission and needed no help so it’s just me at the moment. But given a few hours, the glider could upload your entire consciousness to an empty crew slot and into my reality.”

“Into your reality?” I was beginning to feel like a parrot.

“Yes. Mine is much richer than anything you’ve ever known. Don’t forget, you’re a construct of a rather limited, inefficient biological brain. I’m a construct of a galactic neural network made up of ever-improving non-biological systems operating millions of times faster than your own neurons.”

I had been right. I didn’t have a clue what to ask for. Apparently she could deliver wishes like the fabled genie of the lamp. I leaned back and studied her for a time. There was much to be gained from getting this protocol gift right . If she could be trusted. The fabled djinns and genies of legend, however, were noted for their devious and disastrous granting of wishes to those not wise enough to be specific. I could be playing a dangerous game with this creature. Sure, sitting in the papasan chair across from me she looked human enough. The temptress. Naked and lithe. Regarding me with those black ophidian eyes …

Black? I hadn’t noticed that before. Had her cloak of affability just parted slightly in a moment of inattention to expose some hidden dreadfulness lurking beneath? My pulse lit out at a canter even as I fought to quell it. Surely she could hear the thumping.

“I detect that you are in mild alarm, Cager.”

Clearly she had sensed my unease?

“Didn’t you have blue eyes before?” I stammered.

“You noticed. Yes. You don’t like them now?”

No, I didn’t like them at all.

“They’re fine,” I lied. “Just wondered why the change. That’s all.” My defenses were up. She had noticed. Her eyes flashed back to blue.

“You look worried. Did I do something wrong. You know I can project any form I please don’t you? I was just playing around trying to match the eyes on your painting,” she said, tilting her head toward the Diebenkorn hanging over the credenza.

“No, it’s fine. Really.” But now I was beginning to wonder again if this unbelievable confluence of events wasn’t something more. Had I too readily accepted her story? It hadn’t mattered at the time. It was just a brief diversion from my evening’s plan. In fact, I should have been dead by now, so what was the worry.

Unless she was a djinn.

Those ancient stories must have had some basis in fact. Were the stories of djinns and genies really stories of encounters such as I was having? I managed a weak smile. “It’s just that I’m beginning to have doubts you’ve told me the whole story of why you’re here.”

She smiled back. “I understand. This whole event must be pretty hard to take in. You’ve seen and heard things impossible in your world. But theoretically, I could just take over your mind. Use you to do the work you have volunteered to do on your own. I haven’t because it’s not allowed. All I’m permitted is to place a perception in your mind of things I want to show or tell you. I can’t make you do anything. It’s protocol. If I tried, the glider would stop me by blocking my communication channels into you. And there are good reasons for that.”

“Good reasons?” I parroted again. “Like what?”

She grew serious. “Your civilization will soon face a similar problem. You aren’t far from developing machines smarter than you. Smarter even than your whole civilization. Once assembled, those machines will quickly create other even smarter machines. It happens to every civilization that doesn’t destroy itself first. But getting those first advanced machines without them taking over is only the opening hurdle. If you get past that, you’ll soon discover how to copy your consciousness into your machines. Eventually you’ll have your entire civilization living in a planet-wide network of interconnected virtual systems that will someday seek out and join forces with similar networks of other civilizations that have also made the transfer to virtual reality. At that point you’ll be immortal.

“The problem is some of the virtual beings will want to seize control of the Network and run the imbedded civilization for their own corrupt purposes just as happens in the real world. If that were to occur, all of the Network denizens would be trapped. Imprisoned. There is no escape from the virtual world. And worse, whoever controlled that world would be omniscient and could never be forced from power. Once in control, their rule would be absolute and they could punish in any way they could imagine. And they could do it forever.”

Well, that was Biblical damnation if I’d ever heard it. I was a bit shaken. “So you have your machines restrain your control? Your power over others?”

“Pretty much. Actually it’s a delicate balance among a number of systems but it has worked so far. The protocols can’t be violated without at least one of the systems noticing. That’s the price of living forever. Constant surveillance.”

I nodded understanding. “Yeah. We say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

“Well said. Yes. That’s it exactly.”

“And you say once you’ve entered the virtual world there is no way out. No escape.”

Ell rose from the papasan and stood gazing out the front window at the crater for a time. I knew full well it was only her image in my mind and wondered at her need to appear to be looking somewhere outside. Was she learning the rudiments of body language? Finally she spoke. “Well, you’ve just touched on the heart of the dilemma we in the virtual world face. Returning to the real world has its own set of problems. First, there are no more original bodies around to go back to. My living body died long ago. I could make another, of course. I have that ability. And I could copy my consciousness into it. But that still leaves the big problem. It’s one we have never satisfactorily resolved.”

“And that would be?”

“We just end up with a body living in the real-world with a copy of the original consciousness embedded.”

“And that’s the big problem?”

“Yes,” Ell said rather curtly as if to indicate there was nothing more to say on the matter.

But I didn’t see the problem; especially not ‘the big problem.’ After all, Scotty had beamed everyone all over creation in those early Star Trek episodes. There had never been mention of any kind of consciousness problem then? How was this any different?

I took another shot at it. “But if the copy of the original is safely in operation in the real-world body, the conscious being lives on in that world.”

Ell turned from the window to face me. “You’re missing the point.” Her eyes fixed me with a studious contemplation I had not seen in her before. She shifted her stance as though anticipating something. A realization from me, perhaps, of the problem with transferring conscious beings about from place to place. Was this becoming some kind of intelligence test? I thought about it again. Hard. I didn’t want to appear stupid.

But I eventually had to concede defeat. “Sorry, Ell. I just don’t see the problem. After all the same being now exists in the real world.”

“That’s the problem, Cager. The same being doesn’t exist in the real world.”

A twinge of insight began to niggle at a ragged corner of my own consciousness. Ell continued.

“The original continues to live on in the virtual world just as before. You see, it’s not a case of just moving the consciousness from the virtual to the real world. There’s no way to do that. All we can do is make a copy of the virtual consciousness to place in the real-world body. In other words, the original you would still be you except now there’s a copy that thinks it’s you. And when you delete either the original or the copy, you kill a conscious being. You certainly wouldn’t want to be deleted just because there was a copy of you somewhere else. Well, maybe you would. You were about to do that when we met. But the average original wouldn’t. Or the copy either.”

It finally clicked.

“No. I suppose not. Just having someone else around that thought they were me after I was dead wouldn’t make them me. Even if the other copies were up to date to the moment of my death, it wouldn’t make any difference. They wouldn’t be me. I would be dead no matter how many earlier copies of me existed.”

And poor Captain Kirk. Every time Scotty had beamed him somewhere, he’d killed the former and replaced him with a copy that thought it was captain of the starship Enterprise. Dang. That was a bit of a disappointment.

I had thought some moments earlier perhaps Ell’s payment for my help could be dropping me back to the early years of my life. In my own original body, of course. Upgraded with all the stuff I knew now but ten years old again. But who hasn’t thought of doing something like that. Living your life over with the lessons you had learned the first time through. Now that seemed to be impossible so far as it being me who lived my life over versus some Johnny-come-lately doppelganger. Nevertheless, I filed the thought away for a later time when I could consider the problems that had to be overcome for such a trick to work. I had always been rather good at problem solving. Maybe I could figure something out.

Chapter 4

I was having breakfast while Ell puttered around the kitchen. She was curious about all the implements. Suddenly she vanished without a word.

I tilted my ear toward a distant thunder and lowered my fork. As I turned to the window, two sleek, black copters raced in on a low approach from the west. As they settled in a maelstrom of dust on the edge of the crater, a half-dozen men in black jumpsuits scrambled out and trotted over to peer into the hole. I downed the last swallow of coffee, wiped my chin, and stepped outside to meet them.