Yours Truly, 2095

Day 1: Here is the News-4

I just stood there motionless and held my breath. I waited for something, anything, to give me an explanation of what was really going on.

“Did you eat something?” she asked casually.

She walked past me into the kitchen. I followed her with my eyes. I still didn’t dare move.

“Jeff. Have you eaten today?” she repeated, as she turned toward me. She sounded annoyed.

“Um, yes,” I said. “I had a sandwich.”

She walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room. She headed for the bedroom and then halted abruptly. I panicked. She was staring at something. I followed her gaze. She was looking at the ViewPaper.

She turned, and her stare burned right through me.

“How much do you know?”

“What do you mean, how much do I know? How much do you know?” I tried to add some authority to my voice. I wanted to be the one asking the questions, not her.

“How did you get that ViewPaper?” she asked, pointing accusingly at the small device.

“What the hell is going on here?” I waved my arms around for dramatic effect.

“I want to know how you got that ViewPaper. I want to know now,” she insisted.

I then realized that Julie was, somehow, indigenous to this 2095 version of Isabella Creek. I was clearly the stranger here.

“I’ll tell you, but only if you start talking first,” I demanded.

She sighed in defeat and sat down on the couch.

I approached the vinyl wall and let the tips of my fingers dance slightly over the black material. I crossed my arms, waiting for her to say anything.

Julie slapped her knees with the palms of her hands and stood up.

“That’s the TeleSkin.”

“Come again?”

“It’s a TV.”

“You mean this entire wall of the room is the TV? How do you turn it on?”

Julie approached the wall and gently touched the bottom left corner. A circle appeared in the middle of the wall and exploded outward until it covered the entire surface. The detonation happened so fast that I instinctively took a step backward. The default channel was some news broadcast that was already in the middle of a story.

“The Justice Computer delivered verdicts to ten Euro-technicians earlier today. Nine of them will be banished to Penal One. Sociologists argue that sentencing nonviolent criminals to that specific prison satellite could only—”

The channel changed abruptly. A daytime soap opera appeared on the wall instead.

“Whoa, whoa!” I said, as I took a step toward Julie and the wall. “I wanted to hear that. What the hell’s a Justice Computer? What’s a prison satellite?”

“Eh, that’s all scuttlebutt, anyway. That channel is notorious for stirring up bleeding-heart liberals to vote against the Justice Computer through hogwash propaganda.”

“Fine. But I still don’t know what a Justice Computer is.”

“Okay. Let’s sit down and talk about what you need to know.”

As we took a seat on the only couch in the living room, I had an unbelievable urge to kiss her. Since she had come home, she hadn’t made one affectionate gesture toward me. I decided to bring some normality to the situation. As soon as I leaned in, however, Julie backed away like I was on fire.

“Jeff! That is totally inappropriate!”

“Not appropriate?” I interrupted. “You’re my wife.”

“Just give me some space. Okay?”

I sighed and glanced at the clock. I was definitely not going to be able to keep my rendezvous with Bruce—time was slipping away. This was far more important and intriguing. I also felt that I might get more concrete answers about what was actually going on here from my wife, than I would from a stranger who used the ViewPaper as a melodramatic way to tell me that I was in the future somehow.

“Julie, I—”

“My name isn’t Julie. I’m not going to say anything else until after you tell me how you got that ViewPaper.”

I placed a hand on my forehead and thought I could finally believe my original theory that this was all just a dream. Still, something made me continue talking to her honestly. I shook my head slightly as I spoke.

“I went downtown this morning, and somebody saw me. At first I didn’t know he was watching me. He must have seen the confusion on my face because he explained to me how to turn on the ViewPaper and …”

I took a deep breath and stared at the muted television. Images were painted across the entire wall. It was hypnotic and soothing at the same time. The actors on the wall seemed just as surreal as I felt. It almost felt like they were watching us watch—

“Jeff!”

“Huh?”

“You were saying that this man helped you turn on the ViewPaper.”

Suddenly I felt compelled to lie to her. Something made me think that the truth would come back to haunt me later.

“He told me that it was on the house, and he let me take it home.”

She bit her bottom lip and squinted suspiciously. I could tell she didn’t believe me. For some reason though, she went along with the charade.

“What happened after that?”

“When I got back here, I read some of the articles on the ViewPaper, and some scientists apparently found a cure for rocket lag.”

“I see.”

“So what should I call you, if my wife in 2095 isn’t named Julie?”

The sarcasm just oozed out of me. I have never remembered feeling both lambasted and cynical all at the same time before. Certainly never toward Julie. I wanted my words to be able to destroy her, rip her apart, and put her back together again the right way. The way she was supposed to be.

“My name is actually a binary code. It’s spelled J and then the number zero. It’s pronounced ‘Jo’. I’m an IBM Man-Delay. My serial number is JTLA-823-L2.”

“Whoa, okay. That was just a whole bunch of scary gibberish to me.”

“There are a lot of things I need to tell you. I need to make sure you can handle hearing everything first. Now that you’re awake, I can see your comprehensiveness is intact, if not your memory.”

“Yeah, okay. I think I’ve handled 2095 fairly well so far.”

J0 finally reached toward me, and our fingers interlaced. It was a comfortable gesture, even if she wasn’t exactly Julie.

“I’m a semi organic automaton that you built after Julie passed away.”

The words hit me in the gut. I felt the immediate urge to break down. To cry. Yet in front of me appeared to be Julie herself. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “You mean to—”

“Please, let me finish. After she died, you convinced IBM to make a duplicate version of her. You’ve told me before that you didn’t know if it was due to your grief, anxiety, or a mix of the two. Whatever it was, you presented a strong pitch to IBM. If you were to succeed, not only would IBM have the first semi organic cyborg on the market, but you would have your wife back as well. IBM agreed to fund the project. However, they went bankrupt shortly after I was completed. My operating system consists of all Julie’s memories and some of yours as well. My memories start from the day we met, up through the morning of Julie’s death. My body was replicated from the period of time that you were the most attracted to Julie. Do you understand me so far?”

I wanted her to quit talking about Julie being … “I think I follow you, yeah. I don’t know if I really believe you yet, but okay. How did Julie … pass on?”

“I don’t know because you didn’t program that into my memory. You also refused to talk about it with me. That brings us to your current situation. You were found one morning by the rocks in the bay, n***d, and unconscious.”

“I was what?” At least this part of the conversation stopped me from lapsing back into a depression.

“You were taken to the hospital and cared for there. Then you were released to me. I’ve been caring for you ever since. The police thought it was attempted murder, but—”

“Who would have wanted to kill me?”

“Actually there were quite a few groups of people who protested my assembly. They believed that the creation of an automaton that so closely resembled a human being could only lead to one thing as technology eventually progressed.”

I was unsure whether or not this was a statement or a question. Was I supposed to guess the answer? I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She looked as beautiful as ever. With that in mind, I knew the affection I felt toward her was fraudulent. She wasn’t Julie.

Finally I realized that she had been waiting for me to guess what it was that she was hinting at. She spoke before I could muster up a response.

“Religious groups knew that you were close to perfecting a cloned human being. Ramifications for being able to clone a deceased loved one were too much for most people to handle.”

“So, that’s why…”

“That’s why what?”

I thought about Bruce warning me earlier to stay safe. Was this really who I was?

“When I took that walk downtown, I felt people watching me. I just assumed that it was because of the pajamas I was wearing.”

“You went downtown in your pajamas? You are in worse shape than I thought.”

When she tried to laugh, I could hear something calculated and robotic about it. I could finally see how it wasn’t really Julie sitting next to me but only a shell of her.

“The doctors told me that you could wake up from the coma at any time,” she said quietly. “They warned me that you could be suffering from either amnesia or a delusional disorder—or both.”

“Everything I know about my life was fabricated inside a coma induced dream? I’ve been in this coma for—”

“What time did you say you woke up this morning?” she asked.

“I only remember because I woke up more than once. Both times, the alarm clock said 9:29.”

With that previous robotic laugh being the first reality check for me—as to Julie anyway—what she did next almost made me stand up just so I could distance myself. Her eyes rolled back into her head. She made a rapid clicking noise with her tongue that stopped so abruptly I wasn’t even sure if the sound had really come from her. Her eyes centered themselves again and she looked at me.

“You were in a coma for 929 hours. That’s 38.7083333 days.”

“My god. Did you just—”

“Figure that out? Yeah. I could’ve done it faster if you had used qubits in my processing system instead of binary digits.”

“If I had used what kind of bits?”

“A qubit is a unit of information used in quantum computing. Even though quantum computers have been around for decades, you refused to use a qubit in my processor. You were afraid that I would compute too fast. If that happened, I might not be able to decipher memories in the proper order. Your theory was that if you used a quantum bit—”

“A qubit.”

“Right. If you had used a qubit, then I might get confused, and think that the first day of high school was also the day we got married and the morning I died. All wrapped up into one memory.”

“I can see how that might cause problems.”

“Of course that was just your theory. You ended up building me with normal bytes instead, so I have to separate each thought by itself, just like a human.”

“That probably makes it easier to have a conversation.”

“You really don’t remember any of this?”

“Nope.”

“Here. I want to give this to you.”

She reached behind her head and pressed her index finger firmly into a soft part of her neck. I could hear a whirring sound that ended with a click. She pulled a microchip from behind her neck and held it out for me. It wasn’t any larger than a pencil eraser, and it was the same color as her synthetic skin.

“What is that?”

“It’s your PortComm.”

“What’s it used for?”

“Portable Communications. Everyone has one.”

I took it from her and placed it in the palm of my hand.

“What does it do?”

“It’s basically a telephone. The backside of it is adhesive. You stick it underneath your earlobe. That way, it’s practically invisible and always attached.”

“A telephone?”

“Please tell me that you remember what a telephone is, or I don’t think I’ll have the patience to continue.”

“Yes. Of course I do. It all sounds great. But, J0, all my memories, false or not, are from 1981. I can only remember telephones with cords that are permanently attached to walls, not any of these scientifically advanced gizmos. That’s my life. That’s me.”

“I know. I was warned that you might suffer from delusions and amnesia when you woke up. We just have to be patient.”

“Okay. I’ll try to keep a positive attitude.”