Coming Home Again — an excerpt

PROLOGUE

TEARS GLISTENED IN Pam’s eyes, but she stubbornly held them back. Pam never cried — not then, and not even later, when we buried Sam among the whispering trees. Her pride shielded her grief, yet her heart seemed endlessly torn, a wound that bled silently. I could see it in her eyes that morning by the lake, and as summer stretched on, the shadows of pain never faded from her gaze. I pitied myself, but even more, I pitied her. I had lost my closest friend, lost him to this world and to the mysterious expanse we called the Inside — a realm where he had chosen to dissolve his essence.

She sat poised at the lake’s edge, where the three of us had once lounged in the early, hopeful days of our research. Her posture was erect, her gaze fixed across the water toward the distant blue ridges. Her elegant and controlled hands rested neatly in her lap. I lingered a few steps behind, shifting uneasily under a sparse pine, words failing me. There seemed nothing left to say.

Initially, guilt consumed me for Sam’s fate — a death, yet not an end. It was irrational; had I not set him free, to Unlatch him from his body, he would have soon found his own path to what he sought. None of us truly comprehended the consequences of our pursuit, not even Sam. To become one with nature was his aspiration; in that, he excelled, merging his essence with the vastness of the Inside. And now, he was irreversibly scattered, a part of it all, a part of the enigmatic and alluring Inside.

I had been halfway there, witnessing — or rather, perceiving — his transformation. The Inside isn’t a physical place; it’s more of an omnipresent dimension, and senses as we know them don’t apply. As Sam spread his existence thin across this plane, some part of him seemed to merge with me, though we still don’t grasp how. He had achieved our goal, albeit not as we had anticipated. Now, he was an inseparable part of the cosmic ether, forever lost to individuality. Once dispersed, it appeared his consciousness couldn’t coalesce back into a singular form. He was effectively gone.

With a special permit, we buried what remained of him in the natural parkland by the serene, crystal-clear lake at the edge of our facility. The funeral was small and subdued — our once close-knit group dwindled after six years of relentless toil. No eulogies were spoken; we each held a profound understanding of Sam that words could hardly encapsulate. After the ceremony, Pam left her solitary rock and approached me silently. Her mourning eyes met mine, looking through and beyond me as if I were just another fragment of her shattered world. That hurt, perhaps more than anything else. My love for her had once rivaled Sam’s, and even though he had won her heart with an effortless charm I never resented, her distant gaze now told me she was further from my reach than ever.

Her face, marked by a faint resignation yet underscored by a nascent resolve, almost whispered a promise to mend or mask the void left by lost love. “Well, life goes on … anyway, doesn’t it?” she murmured, her voice a fragile wisp of sound.

A lump formed in my throat, choking off any response but a meager, “Yeah.”

We turned together and walked back to the center, each step a silent testament to the persistence of life and the inexorable march of time.

1

THE FIRST PAINS of labor were setting in. The birth would come easily. Moto-sensors massaged the bulging abdomen, a mechi-medic hovered close, and the Delivery-monitor recorded and directed the activity. Soon, the plump female body, covered only in sterile white, would bring forth a new child. The machines of Maternity waited patiently, as machines of their sort must, ready to rush the newborn into its own life support. The surrogate’s body lay reclined amidst a maze of heart-stimulators, intravenous tubing, cortical attachments, and respirators — devices designed to instill life in the body while it had no mental occupant. Childbearing was not a popular time to make use of a body; the pain and hardship were not endured simply for pleasure. In the long run, it was more manageable and wiser to let the machine intelligence of a Center handle the care of a female body during pregnancy. No occupant was necessary to bring a new child through birth — bypassing the physical senses.

When the child was born, the body would be installed in a permanent hold tank to accommodate the growth of the infant’s physique. During that time, it would be monitored and regulated, with no occupant allowed to remove the body from its hookups or use it at all other than as a sensory trip. When a few years had passed, the patient machines would stand aside and release the body into limited usage and semi-permanent hold. They would continue to carefully guide the child-body’s physical development until after puberty and early adolescence. Finally, bodies were released into general circulation in the Main of the Life Center.

At birth, there was always a person on the Inside watching, preparing to release the new mind from its initial enslavement in the body being born. It wasn’t easy to select the correct time to Unlatch the baby’s mind. The best time directly coincided with the actual birth, necessitating more care. The pain spasms of the surrogate could readily seep through the delicate tentacle of the guardian’s thought and block the path to the Inside, hampering the Unlatching of the child’s formless mind. It was critically important to shift the new mind into the Inside before the birth was completed to avoid external stimuli of the outside world filtering through the body’s primitive sensory system.

If those first harassing impressions could be avoided, then an adult guardian could immediately rear the child through an entire lifespan simply by melding into the empty mind and transferring the total knowledge of his and others’ lives, holding back only what he deemed unimportant to the new member of humanity. The child would be, in all respects, an instant adult, having lived as much or as little as was transferred to him.

The body would be left mindless until someone searched it out and decided to use it.

On the Inside, the guardian’s mind tensed in anticipation. The tentacle reaching across the boundary between the Inside and the outside real world pulsed rhythmically, testing for the right moment to Unlatch the psychological ties holding the baby’s mind in the infant brain.

On the outside, the moto-sensors retracted as genuine labor began to follow its course. Another body was on the way for use by the rest of humanity, and another mind was about to join the ranks of those billions living in and out of the Inside.