A room

Sunshine woke me up. I looked around, and figured that I was in some glorified farm house: the walls were whitewashed, the dark massive beams of the roof were visible under the tilted ceiling and there was a large, empty fireplace. Girls would have loved the frilly “country” style of the furniture. I made a face, and imagined myself ripping off all the lace and cross-stitching and bric-a-brac and tossing them into the fireplace. The room would have been handsome without them. I threw aside the white frilly blankets and sheets, discovered that I was wearing nothing but white underwear and my Roman coin, and climbed down from the large mahogany bed to have a look out of the window. I was on the second floor. The sky was quite restless, with clouds and lots of ragged blue patches, and as I watched yet another cloud glided in front of the sun and raindrops started pattering against the window. The landscape was nothing but rolling green hills, no houses or roads in sight, and I thought I saw a few sheep in the distance. This place could only be Ireland.

How I´d gotten in the middle of these green pastures from Italy was a mystery, and more pressingly, I had no idea who had brought me here. Alex had sold me to the Axiom, then there had been that vague interval in the clouds and a movie theater, and now I was here. I quickly backpedaled to the clouds and the theater. Now that I was clear-headed, the only explanation for what I´d seen was having been in some kind of an orbital facility, watching the Earth through a large window or a porthole. How lame was that, having been in orbit and not remembering it? I could have kicked myself.

There was a knock on the door, and with my heart suddenly thumping I turned and said, “Please, come in.”

I was half expecting one of the Axiom accountants, but to my great relief it was none other than Mauro.

“Hi Jonatan. How are you feeling?” he asked, with a barely discernible undertone of worry.

“I´m fine. Surprisingly fine,” I answered. “Recent memories are a bit fuzzy though. How did you get me away from the Axiom?”

Mauro let out an unhappy sigh, and sat down in the only armchair in the room. I climbed back into the bed, leaning my back against the headboard, and pulled up the covers. They didn´t seem to have central heating in Ireland.

“We didn´t.”

“I don´t get it. I´m here, aren´t I?”

Mauro let out another sigh, looking unsure how to go on.

“The Axiom killed you,” he said finally. “You are in a clone body, with Jonatan´s personality and almost all of his memories.”

I let it sank in for a few seconds, and realized that somewhat surprisingly I wasn´t all that upset about the clone part. What threw me was the ´almost´. I did a quick memory scan and everything seemed to be all right. But then, I wouldn´t know about the parts that were missing, now would I?

“All your memories from between the activation of the neural mesh and the destruction of your uplink relay transmitter are perfectly intact. Everything was recorded and now has been re-coded into your brain,” Mauro explained, keeping an eye on me. “What happened-”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “I have memories about what happened after Alex smashed the coin, up until I was taken into the ambulance.”

“They are a construct, created from the most detailed account Alex could give us. I´m so sorry, Jonatan.”

So Alex had come out of the situation all right. “What happened in the ambulance?”

“We don´t know.”

I could see he wasn´t telling the whole truth. “You can do better than that.”

“We know what the procedure is, but not what actually happened, so it really makes no sense to-”

“Tell me.”

“The procedure is to anesthetize the subject and perform a vivisection to study the mesh in vivo. The subject is then terminated before the extraction.”

“You are saying I was conscious during the vivisection.”

“Yes.” Mauro let out another sigh. “I´m so sorry.”

A silence ensued. At a certain point, I thought I was going to throw up but got hold of myself in time.

“Listen, I need some fresh air. Can we go and take a walk?” I asked, and Mauro nodded.

“Sure. There are clothes in the cupboard. I´ll wait for you downstairs.”

I pulled on a pair of jeans, a thick cable-knit sweater and a windbreaker, and followed Mauro, with new questions popping into my head all the while. The rain had stopped, but another shower would catch us any moment. We started along the country road even though there was obviously nothing else to see but the gently rolling hills and a sheep or two if we were lucky.

“My memories from the time before the mesh seem to be intact, too,” I started. “How is that possible?”

“Everything that crossed your mind while you had the mesh – while you have the mesh, I really should say – was recorded, so all your most important memories are there. But if you try to remember, say, what your junior high school physics and chemistry classroom looked like, you might draw a blank.”

I tried a few things, and realized that he was telling the truth. It was starting to really hit me now that I was someone else. The real Jonatan was dead. I was nothing but a slightly imperfect copy. We trudged along the muddy road for a while.

“How long was I in orbit?”

“Cloning your body took six months, and then the real work started,” Mauro said. “A virtual model of your brain had been created, and it took almost a year and a half to rebuild your central nervous system, molecule by molecule.”

I´d been dead for two years. Or I was just two years old, depending on the point of view.

“Does Alex know?”

Mauro shook his head. “It´s your call to decide if you want to tell him or not. As of now, he thinks you´re dead.”

That served the bastard right. I would have to tell him, though.

“Where is he?”

“He took a liking to Italy during the time he spent there looking for you. He´s working for a financial institution in Milan these days.”

It seemed that another rainshower was about to hit us. “Let´s turn back, shall we?” I said.

We headed back for the thatched cottage, which looked quite nice from the outside.

“Where are we?”

“Ireland,” Mauro answered to my satisfaction. “Of course the exact location is need-to-know.”

“Of course.”

We were halfway back to the house when Mauro glanced at me and said, “We owe you. From now on, you´re retired with full benefits.”

“Full benefits?” I was surprised.

“Yes,” Mauro said. “Your DNA modifications will remain online, and no one is watching your signal any longer apart from a quasi AI program which will alert us when you get into trouble. If you get hit by a bus, we clone you again. And there will be a generous allowance.”

“That sounds nice.”'

Mauro gave me a long look. “You don´t sound too happy about it.”

“It´s just...” I started, searching for words. “I´ve been feeling useless.”

“Useless?”

“Did they tell you that I spent the last spring, well, I mean two years ago, just moping around the house?”

“No, that would have been none of my business. I only get told if you´re in real trouble.”

“It´s just that I feel like I want to do something instead of just uploading raw data. And now I won´t be doing even that any longer.”

We had reached the house, and tried to get rid of the mud in our shoes before going in.

“I´ll see what I can do,” Mauro said. “But now, let´s get some lunch.”

The cottage had a small but efficient staff, and after lunch Mauro said his goodbyes and told me he´d be back within a couple of days. In the meanwhile, I was to relax and figure things out. I´d need some time for that, he warned.

He was right. The rain was beating down hard now so there was nothing else to do but climb back to my room to discover that someone had thoughtfully built a large fire in the fireplace. Apparently, psychologists couldn´t imagine a better place for introspection than watching fire slowly burn itself out, in an isolated cottage in Irish countryside, with rain softly tapping on the roof. Once I had turned the armchair to face the fire and discovered how comfortable it was, I had to agree that the psychologists probably were right. I kept my mind wandering for a bit as there were too many things I didn´t want to think about, but eventually I would have to face them. Even though I considered myself Jonatan, I couldn´t help asking myself what the original version would have thought of me and the answer was that I wasn´t him, I was someone else. And who else would have known better what he´d have thought of me than myself? The crux of the matter was what had happened after I´d been taken into the ambulance. Who cared if a few irrelevant childhood memories were gone when no one even knew how long I´d lived after my memories ended. An hour? Two? A week, in a cellar that had been turned into a clinic? Mauro could not give me definite answers. Jonatan was dead.