Iterations

  The Stranger continued to approach, and so did Kart.

  And then Kart opened his mouth, and in the faint light they saw his teeth—long and pointed, like the Stranger’s.

  The men were unable to run, unable to move. They seemed transfixed, either by the Stranger’s gaze, or by Kart’s, both of whom continued to approach.

  And soon, in the dark, chill night, the Stranger’s fangs fell upon one of the guard’s necks, and Kart’s fell upon another…

  Eventually, thirteen more skulls were found, all of which had the strange elongated canine teeth, and all of which had their foramen magnums artificially widened. Also found were some mandibles and skull fragments from other individuals—but there was almost no post-cranial material. Someone in dim prehistory had discarded here the decapitated heads of a group of protohumans.

  Brancusi sat in Weidenreich’s lab late at night, looking at the skulls. He ran his tongue over his own sharp teeth, contemplating. These subhumans doubtless had no concept of mathematics beyond perhaps adding and subtracting on their fingers. How would they possibly know of the problem that plagued the Family, the problem that every one of the Kindred knew to avoid?

  If all those who feel the bite of the vampire themselves become vampires when they die, and all of those new vampires also turn those they feed from into vampires, soon, unless care is exercised, the whole population will be undead. A simple geometric progression.

  Brancusi had long wondered how far back the Family went. It wasn’t like tracing a normal family tree—oh, yes, the lines were bloodlines, but not as passed on from father to son. He knew his own lineage—a servant at Castle Dracula before the Count had taken to living all alone, a servant whose loyalty to his master extended even to letting him drink from his neck.

  Brancusi himself had succumbed to pneumonia, not an uncommon ailment in the dank Carpathians. He had no family, and no one mourned his passing.

  But soon he rose again—and now he did have Family.

  An Englishman and an American had killed the Count, removing his head with a kukri knife and driving a bowie knife through his heart. When news of this reached Brancusi from the gypsies, he traveled back to Transylvania. Dracula’s attackers had simply abandoned the coffin, with its native soil and the dust that the Count’s body had crumbled into. Brancusi dug a grave on the desolate, wind-swept grounds of the Castle, and placed the Count’s coffin within.

  Eventually, over a long period, the entire tribe had felt the Stranger’s bite directly or indirectly.

  A few of the tribefolk lost their lives to ravenous bloodthirst, drained dry. Others succumbed to disease or giant cats or falls from cliffs. One even died of old age. But all of them rose again.

  And so it came to pass, just as it had for the Stranger all those years before, that the tribe had to look elsewhere to slake its thirst.

  But they had not counted on the Others.

  Weidenreich and Brancusi sat in Weidenreich’s lab late at night. Things had been getting very tense—the Japanese occupation was becoming intolerable. “I’m going to return to the States,” said Weidenreich. “Andrews at the American Museum is offering me space to continue work on the fossils.”

  “No,” said Brancusi. “No, you can’t take the fossils.”

  Weidenreich’s bushy eyebrows climbed up toward his bald pate. “But we can’t let them fall into Japanese hands.”

  “That is true,” said Brancusi.

  “They belong somewhere safe. Somewhere where they can be studied.”

  “No,” said Brancusi. His red-rimmed gaze fell on Weidenreich in a way it never had before. “No—no one may see these fossils.”

  “But Andrews is expecting them. He’s dying to see them. I’ve been deliberately vague in my letters to him—I want to be there to see his face when he sees the dentition.”

  “No one can know about the teeth,” said Brancusi.

  “But he’s expecting the fossils. And I have to publish descriptions of them.”

  “The teeth must be filed flat.”

  Weidenreich’s eyes went wide. “I can’t do that.”

  “You can, and you will.”

  “But—”

  “You can and you will.”

  “I—I can, but—”

  “No buts.”

  “No, no, there is a but. Andrews will never be fooled by filed teeth; the structure of teeth varies as you go into them. Andrews will realize at once that the teeth have been reduced from their original size.” Weidenreich looked at Brancusi. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way to hide the truth.”

  The Others lived in the next valley. They proved tough and resourceful—and they could make fire whenever they needed it. When the tribefolk arrived it became apparent that there was never a time of darkness for the Others. Large fires were constantly burning.

  The tribe had to feed, but the Others defended themselves, trying to kill them with rock knives.

  But that didn’t work. The tribefolk were undeterred.

  They tried to kill them with spears.

  But that did not work, either. The tribefolk came back.

  They tried strangling the attackers with pieces of animal hide.

  But that failed, too. The tribefolk returned again.

  And finally the Others decided to try everything they could think of simultaneously.

  They drove wooden spears into the hearts of the tribefolk.

  The used stone knives to carve off the heads of the tribefolk.

  And then they jammed spears up into the severed heads, forcing the shafts up through the holes at the bases of the skulls.

  The hunters marched far away from their camp, each carrying a spear thrust vertically toward the summer sun, each one crowned by a severed, pointed-toothed head. When, at last, they found a suitable hole in the ground, they dumped the heads in, far, far away from their bodies.

  The Others waited for the tribefolk to return.

  But they never did.

  “Do not send the originals,” said Brancusi.

  “But—”

  “The originals are mine, do you understand? I will ensure their safe passage out of China.”

  It looked for a moment like Weidenreich’s will was going to reassert itself, but then his expression grew blank again. “All right.”

  “I’ve seen you make casts of bones before.”

  “With plaster of Paris, yes.”

  “Make casts of these skulls—and then file the teeth on the casts.”

  “But—”

  “You said Andrews and others would be able to tell if the original fossils were altered. But there’s no way they could tell that the casts had been modified, correct?”

  “Not if it’s done skillfully, I suppose, but—”

  “Do it.”

  “What about the foramen magnums?”

  “What would you conclude if you saw fossils with such widened openings?”

  “I don’t know—possibly that ritual cannibalism had been practiced.”

  “Ritual?”

  “Well, if the only purpose was to get at the brain, so you could eat it, it’s easier just to smash the cranium, and—”

  “Good. Good. Leave the damage to the skull bases intact. Let your Andrews have that puzzle to keep him occupied.”

  The casts were crated up and sent to the States first. Then Weidenreich himself headed for New York, leaving, he said, instructions for the actual fossils to be shipped aboard the S.S. President Harrison. But the fossils never arrived in America, and Weidenreich, the one man who might have clues to their whereabouts, died shortly thereafter.

  Despite the raging war, Brancusi returned to Europe, returned to Transylvania, returned to Castle Dracula.

  It took him a while in the darkness of night to find the right spot—the scar left by his earlier digging was just one of many on the desolate landscape. But at last he located it. He prepared a series of smaller holes in the ground, and into each of them he laid one of the grinning skulls. He then
covered the holes over with dark soil.

  Brancusi hoped never to fall himself, but, if he did, he hoped one of his own converts would do the same thing for him, bringing his remains home to the Family plot.

  Iterations

  Author’s Introduction

  In 1999, the Canadian SF magazine TransVersions, which had previously published my story “Lost in the Mail” (elsewhere in this collection) changed hands. The new editors were good friends of mine: the husband-and-wife team of Marcel Gagné and Sally Tomasevic. They asked me for a story to help them relaunch the magazine.

  A nonfiction book that had a huge impact on the SF field was The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler (1994). Tipler’s theory suggested the core of this short story, as well as that of many SF novels of the last few years, including my friend Robert Charles Wilson’s terrific Darwinia. Indeed, when I told Bob that I’d done a story for TransVersions, he asked me what it was about. I said it was a riff on Tipler. Bob smiled and replied, “I love being part of a community in which a phrase like ‘a riff on Tipler’ actually means something.”

  So do I.

  Iterations

  “I’m going to have to kill you,” I said to myself, matter-of-factly.

  The face looking back at me across the desktop was my own, of course, but not the way I was used to seeing it; it wasn’t flopped left-to-right like it is in a mirror. The other me reacted with an appropriate mixture of surprise and disbelief. The shaggy eyebrows went up—God, why don’t I trim those things?—the brown eyes widened, and the mouth opened to utter a protest.

  “You can’t kill me,” he—I—said. “I’m you.”

  I frowned, disappointed that he didn’t understand. “You’re a me that never should have existed.”

  He spread his arms a bit. “Who’s to say which of us should have existed?”

  One of the interesting things about working in the publishing industry in Canada is this: it’s full of Americans who came here during Vietnam. And, even if they didn’t want to go to war, some of them do know how to get guns. “Who’s to say which of us should have existed?” I repeated. I took the Glock 9 mm that Jack Spalding had procured for me out of my pocket and pulled the trigger. “I am.”

  I was at home with Mary, my wife and, until everything had fallen apart, my business partner. We were in our bedroom, and I was trying to get through to her. “Don’t you see?” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “None of this is real—it can’t be.”

  She sat down next to me and began brushing her hair. “What are you talking about?”

  “You. Me. This bed. This house. This planet. It’s all faked. It’s all a computer-based simulation.”

  Mary shook her head slightly. She hated it when I talked like this.

  “It’s true,” I said. “It’s true—and I can prove it.”

  She pressed her lips tightly together, and blew air out of her nose. She didn’t say “How?” She didn’t say anything.

  I wished there were a more obvious way. I wished I could grab hold of—of that wall there, say, and pull it aside, revealing the machinery beyond, but, of course, I couldn’t. The wall was simulated perfectly; the rest of Toronto was simulated perfectly, too. So was all of Canada, of North America, the entire planet. There was no place I could take her where she would see that corners had been cut, see scaffolding propping up a false front to a non-existent building. This Earth—at least all of its surface, and its atmosphere thinning out to almost nothing a few hundred kilometers up, and its rocky crust, and maybe even some portion of its mantle—were flawlessly reproduced.

  But even they had limits. Yes, they could reproduce Earth, or as much of it as humans could ever access, but—

  “Look,” I said. “Imagine a space probe that could travel at one-tenth the speed of light.”

  She was staring at me as though I wasn’t even speaking English anymore.

  I pressed on. “Imagine that space probe, taking decades to get to the next star. And imagine it finding raw materials there to build ten duplicates of itself, and then sending those duplicates, at the same speed, to ten other nearby stars. Even if it took fifty years to find the raw materials and make the duplicates, and fifty more years for those duplicates to travel to their target stars, if the process continued, how long do you think it would take for such probes to colonize the entire galaxy?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Mary again.

  “Sixty thousand years,” I said, triumphantly. “Give or take. One single probe, launched into space by any civilization anywhere in the Milky Way, could colonize this whole giant galaxy in just sixty thousand years.”

  Our little publishing company had been called CanScience Books; I’d been editorial director. Mary didn’t know much about science, but she was a wiz at accounting. “So?”

  “So,” I said, “the universe is maybe twelve billion years old.” I grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t you see? Someone somewhere must have launched self-replicating probes like the ones I described. This planet should have been visited by them…but it hasn’t.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any other civilizations.”

  “Of course there are. There must be.” It drove me nuts that she never read the books we’d published. “Everything we know about physics and chemistry and biology says the universe should be overrun with life. But none of it has come here.” I shifted my weight; maybe I shook her slightly. I so much wanted her to see. “And what about SETI? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence? We’ve been listening for half a century now and haven’t picked up a thing. We shouldn’t need to do anything more than point a radio dish up at the night sky to pick up thousands—millions—of alien signals. But there’s nothing.

  “And think about the moon. Do you know how many people have gone to the moon? Twelve! That’s all, in the total history of our race—twelve people have stood on its surface. And no one has gone back; no one even has plans to go back. And what about Mars? We should have landed on it within a few years of going to the moon, but no one’s made it there—and, again, no one is planning to go. And the space probes we send there keep failing. The Mars Climate Orbiter, the Mars Polar Lander—complete write-offs! I mean, let’s be real: an important mission to Mars junked because some engineer couldn’t convert between imperial and metric measurements? It’s unbelievable.”

  “I still don’t see—” began Mary.

  “Let me spell it out, then: it’s one thing to simulate the Earth. That’s a big computing problem, sure, but it’s doable.”

  “Not on any computer I’ve ever seen,” said Mary.

  “Well, no, of course it’s not doable yet. But it will be. Eventually, the Earth and everyone who ever lived on it will be simulateable on sufficiently advanced computers.”

  “When?” said Mary.

  “Who knows? A million years from now? A billion? Ten billion? Or maybe—Frank Tipler wrote about this—maybe at the very end of time, as the universe is collapsing back down in a big crunch. Eventually there will be sufficient computing power to simulate the entire planet and everyone who ever lived on it.”

  “How would they know anything about us?” asked Mary. “How could they possibly simulate you and me without records of what we were like?”

  “They won’t need any records.” Why couldn’t she see this? “A human being consists of about thirty thousand active genes. That means that there are about three-to-the-millionth-power possible genetically distinct humans. And there are about 2-to-the-10th-to-the-17th power possible human memories. Multiply it all out, and you’ll find that you could reproduce all possible versions of our world—including every possible combination of human beings, with every possible set of memories—in 10-to-the-10th-to-the-123rd bits.”

  “Ten to the tenth to…”

  “To the 123rd, yes,” I said. “And that amount will surely eventually be computable. Meaning that you could—well, Tipler used the word ‘resurrect,’ and that’s as good as any—you could resurrect every
one who ever lived as computer simulations, without knowing anything specific about them.”

  Mary looked at me. “And you think that’s what we are? Resurrected versions of people who died billions of years ago?”

  “We have to be. It’s the only thing that explains the absence of extraterrestrial probes here, or of radio signals from other civilizations. To simulate Von Neumann probes—that’s what those self-replicating robots are called—and the chatter of alien races would mean simulating the rest of the universe, with its billions of different lifeforms. But they don’t have enough computer memory—or, if they do, they consider it wasteful. So, yes, this world seems real to us, but it’s fake. It has to be.”

  “Oh, Erik,” said Mary, shaking her head, then letting out a sigh. “Go to sleep.”

  She kissed me and lay down.

  I lay down too, but it was hours before I fell asleep.

  If I’m a computer simulation, created millions or billions of years in the future of what I think of as the present, and if I was created simply as one possible human being with one possible set of memories, do other versions of me exist?

  Did the simulators—whoever they are—pick one state of humanity at random for their experiment? Maybe. But Tipler said they would actually simulate all the possible states.

  And if they did—

  If there are other versions of me—

  All the horrid things I’d ever thought about doing: the stealing, the cheating, and, yes, the murders. In other parts of this vast computer simulation, there must exist other Erik Hansens who had done those things. Some, of course, will have been arrested for their crimes, and will be paying their debts to their simulated societies.

  But others…

  I once heard a statistic that ninety percent of men would commit rape if they felt sure they could get away with it. I’d never believed that figure; rarely did I meet an attractive woman that I didn’t have at least a passing thought about having sex with, but never would it occur to me to force myself upon her.