The Sum of Our Lives

conclusion

by Jörn Grote

In silence we walked through the lighted streets of my city. For the first time in my life I really saw the houses. Even here each one was different, unique. Was it that hard to imagine that each could have a mind, a personality? The seedship that had populated our world had had a very advanced program, but no self, no awareness. Only complex algorithms. Had humans really transferred their minds into computers? Was the story he had told me true?

I didn’t really know. Maybe that was the crux of the whole problem. I didn’t know. And the only thing I could do was to trust. Optimistic people could trust, but age had eroded my optimism. I wasn’t sure I had enough trust in me, enough faith in the dreams of my younger self to believe my visitor. But if I couldn’t believe in that, what else was there for me to believe in at all?

“So tell me more about the Diplomacy. What is it?” I asked him. Maybe if I learned more about him, trust would come easier.

“The Diplomacy began with one man and would end as many.”

“One sentence, and you have lost me.” Could he be any more cryptic than that?

“Then I will try to make it simple. At the start of the second wave of seedships, one man saw the problems that could arise. The speed of light is still an unbroken barrier, and the seeded colonies would be separated by a gap of hundreds or thousands or more years of travel time. They would be isolated, ignorant of each other. Ignorance breeds fear and mistrust, and you know what the outcome of that can be. The man I mentioned saw these problems. He wasn’t the only one who saw them, but he was the one who did something.”

He stopped, maybe to think what to say next. I looked at him. I knew that he wasn’t human in the strict sense. I had learned what it meant to be human, but his body was a perfect illusion. If I hadn’t seen earlier that he had an artificial body, I wouldn’t believe it. Did he even breathe, did he eat?

Another thought occurred to me. How had he landed undetected on our world. Where was his ship?

“What he did,” he continued his story, “was to make copies of himself, for every ship. And then he made a set of rules for his many selves. Whenever a new world was colonized, one copy was to be left behind with the new colony, to be one of them, to live like them, to learn their way of life, while another copy was sent into space to found other colonies, to found another version of himself.”

You could even make copies of yourself. I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t wanted to think of the implications that could have. Who was the real person and who the copy? Who got what the original had owned, who got the old friends, or the family?

“When two copies of this one man met, they merged their memories and minds, to make one what has been two. Can you imagine what that means, even for the copies of one man? Living apart for thousands of years and then to merge with someone you may have never seen? How much trust these copies had to have, to perform this one simple act. How much fear they must overcome every time they merged with someone. Because, every merger was death and birth at the same time; old personalities died and a new one was born.”

“And this new personality was to be a bridge, a bond between two cultures who were isolated from each other. That is what the Diplomacy is. We bring understanding, we fight ignorance. I don’t know how many of us are out there, flying from world to world, living on every world, merging, trying to built connections between cultures. I have the memories of living on six worlds, of cultures so radically different that you can’t even imagine it.”

“Does it always work? Your system. The merging.”

“No. Nothing is perfect. You need much trust to merge with someone you may have never seen. You must believe in the same goal, and when you live long enough, that can change. Some copies change so much that they won’t merge, they only give their memory. At that point they are no longer part of the Diplomacy, and a new copy must take their job.”

He fell silent again. Maybe he remembered some more unpleasant memories of his many lives.

“But you wanted to know why I have come to your world. When the people from Safe Home sent a ship to your world, they informed nearby colonies that they had found a successful colony of the first wave. When your ship arrived at their world nearly six hundred years later, it was a time of celebration. They all looked up into the sky, to see the ship of their new friends. But your ship rained death upon them, killing all. What will the other colonies think of your world, when they find out what happened to Safe Home?”

I could think of some possibilities, but none was pleasant.

“I can see on your face what you’re thinking. You’re right. The same ignorance that let your culture destroy Safe Home may in the end destroy your world. Most colonies may think that your culture is simply violent or destructive, other will think you have other, more sinister motives. But all will agree that your culture is too dangerous to be left alone. They don’t know you, but they have seen what you did to Safe Home. But there is one way to avert that fate.”

“How?”

“Let’s go to my house. I will explain my plan there.”

From the beginning I had had the feeling that we weren’t walking only at random through the streets. The rest of the way, both of us were silent. When he stopped, I saw an old building. Strange architecture. Beautiful. And then I knew somehow, that this was not really a house, it was someone from Safe Home.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” my visitor said.

“Is this a house from Safe Home?”

“Yes and no. I had a survivor on my ship. When I came here she began to root in this old building and is growing around it, with it. Rebuilding it.”

He opened the door. “Come in, she won’t kill you.”

It was a strange feeling to enter a living house, to know that you were inside something that was alive. Someone that was alive and maybe had a grudge against you and your people.

“How do you communicate with her?”

“Simple radio links, part of my headware.”

With unease I found a place to sit down. “You never told me how you escaped from Safe Home unharmed.”

“Safe Home had its own copy of the Diplomacy. He thought it would be a good idea to send someone to the newly discovered colony. This copy was on the first ship you destroyed. When they discovered your arriving seedship, he sent a copy of himself into orbit, to depart for the colony to merge with his older self. To forge a bond between the two cultures. That was me. On my ship I had a very young and bold girl, who wanted to see the other world with her own eyes. The first thing she saw in space was the destruction of her world.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

Silence followed.

“Your plan?”

“Yes, my plan. My first hope when I arrived on your world was that the first copy of the Diplomacy was still alive. That would have made things easier. We could have merged, and then sent copies to every nearby human world. There the copies could have merged again with the native copies. People in most human colonies trust the system of the Diplomacy. The memories of the copy that would have lived for around six hundred years on this world could have been enough to convince most of them that your culture isn’t dangerous. If I went with the knowledge of what I have learned here, it wouldn’t be enough. They would think your people had deceived me, or that violence is part of your culture and could only be seen after living long enough on this world. But if I merged with someone from this world, who had lived his whole live here, that would be enough.”

“No!”

“What, no?”

“You want me to merge with you!”

“Yes, that is the only way.”

“Why me?”

“Why you? Someone must do it. You seemed to be the best choice.”

“I don’t see why I would be the best choice for that.”

“No? You have lived your whole life for the weak hope that maybe some day someone would visit your world. You’ve driven your life against a wall hoping for contact with others, making bridges to other cultures. In your own way you have always been part of the Diplomacy. I have observed you. I know you. But I won’t force you. The merger must always be voluntary, or the emerged mind would go mad, or worse.”

“But I’m alive. I have no artificial body or head, where you could easily extract the mind.”

“Yes, you would need to sacrifice your body. I won’t lie to you. If you allow me to upload your mind, your body will die, your brain will be destroyed. But someone must do it, to save your world. To save other worlds from the same mistake your people have made.”

To save my world, he said. Nothing against a little pressure. First he wanted me to let him strip my mind, then he wanted to merge his mind with my own to create a new one. Two deaths in one day: first my body, then my mind. Whoever would be created after that would have my memory but wouldn’t really be me. He would be something new.

On the other hand, wasn’t that what happened to every human every day? We learn something new, we change a little, take a step in this or that direction. Our future self has the memories of our past self, but the two aren’t really the same. What the members of the Diplomacy did was to take only bigger steps toward their future selves.

“The house wants to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure. I believe it’s about her world, her people. She says, on their world, everyone grows to be a beautiful house. But at one point the house is complete. That is the time when they leave, when they shed their old house like a skin and build a new one. The process can be very scary, if you have lived for hundreds of years in one body, it can be hard to begin anew. Some haven’t the strength to do this. Their houses grow on and on, until they are distorted and warped beyond repair. To go on, to leave your old shell, you must have trust in yourself that there is more to yourself than only the old house. If you can’t find that trust, then you are trapped. That’s all she told me.”

Did I have trust in myself? I realized the girl was right, but to know that in the mind and in the heart is two different things. I feared the merging, but my mind told me it was the only way, and that I wouldn’t really die. My heart said otherwise.

My visitor had lived so many lives, made countless memories. What did I have? A lonely, empty nothing of a life. I feared that after the merging my personality would be no more than a figment, forgotten and alone in the corridors of the newly emerged mind.

But I had something. The driving force within me had always been the belief in contact with other cultures. And even if age had somehow mellowed this belief a bit, it was still there. Burning my life. It had to be enough. It was enough. I had trust in my dreams above all, because I needed to have trust in something. I needed to be more than a hollow shell. “I will do it.”

The rest was easier done than I had thought. Mind upload. Mind merging. Mind copying. Seven copies were sent to near colonies. Their travels would take between five hundred and two thousand years. And after they arrived, the memories of my life on Mark One would travel even farther, from one end of the human expansion to the other.

I examined my other memories. How I have lived on Earth, seeing how the second wave of seedships was built. My life as a shark on Deep Blue and when I was a gravity-defying spider-like thing on Hard Rain, then a balloon form living in the gaseous world of Jupiter Maximum and a jumping jack in the asteroid fields of Needlefield. My last life as a house on Safe Home. That all was me. More or less.

I wasn’t sure if I was still myself. Was my mind a patchwork or a combination of all the different selves, of all the lives I had lived, all the things I had seen? Was it the sum of all these lives and more? Maybe there is no definitive answer; maybe I am who I believe I am and who I want to be in the future, like everyone in this universe. I have faith that that will suffice.