The Tourist
A Culture Short Story
by Jeffrey Lee Phillips
He opened his eyes easily. This was a surprise, he thought looking at the ceiling. He'd felt weak as hell a few moments ago. He was pretty sure yesterday that he wouldn't have made it through another night, but here he seemed to be... feeling-well, now that you mention it-feeling pretty damn good.
He took a deep breath. No pain or wheezing there.
The ceiling looked different. They must've wheeled his gurney somewhere while he was out. Probably a broom closet or something. He would call for a nurse and ask what was going on, he thought. He fumbled beside him feeling around for the call button, but couldn't find it.
He did find that the bed itself was much wider than he thought, and with curiosity piqued, steeled himself for the inevitable pain of attempting to sit up.
Oh! that was quite pleasant, no pain at all, he thought, bounding upright. "Where the hell am I?" he said aloud.
As he began to focus on his surroundings, the thing that stood out the most was the word SIMULATION, hanging in the air just a few inches above the foot of the bed in vibrant red.
He kicked at it with his foot, under the combined layers of sheet and blanket. Nothing was physically there, but the words persisted. It didn't shimmer or budge, or dim.
He felt his face to make sure he wasn't wearing some sort of VR headgear he'd somehow not noticed until now, but no... just his normal face on the front of his normal head.
He scrunched up at the head of the bed and pulled his feet in closer, away from the perplexing word. Maybe its just a side effect of some new drugs, he thought. Whatever. It beat dying.
After a moment, the words flared slightly and then winked out of existence like they were never there in the first place.
With them gone, he focused more on the room around him. It was a fairly bland room. The walls were done in pastels green. The only other furniture in the room was a comfortable looking tweed chair and a wooden wardrobe, The decor seemed deliberately calming.
I'm probably not in Hell, he thought, I don't think they break it to you this gently.
The bed he found himself in was not a hospital bed, but seemed to be a regular mattress and box springs. There was no call button. Also missing were the wall jacks into which one would plug the call button. No oxygen valve either. No beeping glowing machine stood vigil beside it. In fact, he didn't see monitoring equipment of any kind, which seemed really strange.
The drapes were pulled closed on the wall of windows to his left, but a soft glow from behind them told him it was either dawn or dusk or overcast outside. Only one door, closed.
Just as he focused on it, he heard a someone knock four times, briskly.
Usually the nurses would knock before entering, but wouldn't wait for an invitation, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd woken without someone sitting in the room with him, just for the sake of being there. He waited a moment, but no one entered. Not a nurse then. Given the peculiarities of the room, he wasn't entirely sure he was still in a hospital.
The knock repeated.
"Come in," he said to the door.
He heard it unlatch and it opened inward.
A woman appeared and pushed the door fully open, then disappeared again. She reappeared moments later pushing a cart.
"Good morning," she said.
He could smell food and it was fucking glorious.
She pushed the cart further into the room and the door shut softly on its own with only a soft dull thud.
She lifted a tray from the cart and placed it on the end of the bed where a only a few moments before he thought he saw something... but it was probably just his imagination anyway.
The food was aromatic and delicious! The woman just stood back patiently while he set upon the contents of the tray like a hungry jackal and began stuffing items into his mouth and chewing and noisily sucking air into his lungs between giant gulps of food.
After wolfing down a couple things he picked up a piece of fruit and retreated back to the head of the bed and hunkered against the wall and began peeling it.
He looked around the room again, "Where am I?" he said.
The woman smiled slyly, "Where do you think you are?" she asked.
"Oh, I dunno, the nut-house maybe?"
She laughed, "What makes you think that?"
Talking around a mouthful of fruit, he said, "I'm not sure, I thought I saw something when I first woke up. It was weird."
"Oh, you mean this?" she said, and the word SIMULATION reappeared in its bold red font partially eclipsing the pitcher of juice sitting on the tray. She silently mouthed the word: simm-yoo-lay-shun.
She reached through the glowing floating word, picked up the pitcher and poured a glass of juice, walked around the corner of the bed and sat down near him.
She looked into his eyes and glanced toward the crimson apparition and then back into his eyes. "I see it, too. Its okay. You're not crazy." She handed him the glass of juice.
"I promise it will all make sense, but you have to try to remember," she said. "You've just been through something traumatic, we need to see if your memories are intact, okay?"
He chewed fruit at her.
"Tell me the last thing you remember."
He thought about it for a minute while he finished chewing and swallowing, then took a long drink from the glass and sighed.
"See, love, the problem is, I very well think I remember dying."
She nodded as though to silently say hmmm, interesting.
"That sounds about right then," she said. "What is the oldest memory you have?"
"'That sounds about right then?' So I'm DEAD?!" he exclaimed, "You're gonna just roll right past that? Am I dead?"
"Yes, no, maybe so..." she said, again with that sly look on her face, "Do you feel like you're dead?"
"Oh cut the crap, how would I know? I've never been dead before. Miss, will you just tell me what the hell is going on?"
"Yes, you died. No, you're not dead. Glad I could clear that up for you. Are you sure you don't remember anything else?"
"Did they freeze my brain?"
"What?" It was her turn to sound incredulous.
"Did they freeze my brain and now I'm being revived in the future like in that Tom Cruise movie with the crazy blonde and the car crash?"
"Vanilla Sky?"
"Yeah, that one."
"No, nobody froze your brain, its not the future. You died earlier this morning."
He furrowed his brow for a bit, but then brightened.
"Aha! I'm over thinking it. I died, but then I was resuscitated... by a different hospital..." he looked around, "...with bigger beds, and a really really good kitchen staff." This last bit he said eyeing the tray again.
She traded him another piece of fruit for the now empty glass.
She raised a hand flatly and teetered it back and forth. "Eeeeeeeenhhh, in a way? I guess?" She sounded very non-committal.
She nodded at the fruit he was now tearing into with his teeth.
"Tell me what you can remember about that," she said, nodding to the fruit.
"Thish?" he said, slurping. "Thish ish good."
"Yes, I thought you might say that" she said, "but what is it called?"
His eyes seemed to search randomly at nothing for a moment before he blurted out, "Mapuernl'k!"
"Yes!" she seemed genuinely excited for him.
"I haven't had these in a long long time! I love these, they're my favorite!"
"What else can you tell me about them?"
"Well, they're a real bitch to grow, but I don't know what that's got to do with anything."
"Oh yeah? Hard to grow? How so?"
"Well, they only seem to want to grow properly deep down in the near-core levels of shellworlds, and even then they're not bountiful. They won't grow on planets, they won't grow on orbitals, or microgravity. Sursamen has about the biggest crop, which only blooms once every fifteen standard years, and hence the has best trade going with them, and even that's a nightmare. Usually by the time you haggle with the farmer, arrange for a courier, and deal with all of the politics of which species holds jurisdiction over which fucking tower they travel up, the damn things have gone rotten. The only reliable way to enjoy one is..." his words slowed down, "...in... simulation."
She nodded sagely at all of this while he paused and ate more of the mapuernl'k.
Then his chewing began to slow down, slower and slower until finally his mouth just hung open while his mind tried to process everything.
"You are remembering yourself."
His voice was a whisper, "...yes."
His mind flooded with a multitude of memories. He had lived for thousands of years, accruing so many experiences that all of his memories could no longer fit into one standard human body. They had initially gotten around this by making him appear much more corpulent than the average Culture citizen, but being the only fat guy in an entire galactic civilization full of people who could look however sexy they wanted to be just by thinking about it got old really really quickly, so he cheated. He offloaded most of it to storage and had an adventure on an untapped world.
Though he didn't usually balk at adjusting to change-the rigors of body augmentation and modification were old hat to him-yet, in a way he had never gone this far. To be sure, he had lived for hundreds of years in completely non-humanoid bodies... no, this near-total eclipsing of his original self, that was new. It was entirely like being young again. A completely second childhood, new loves, friends, lots of laughter. A short sixty-year vacation from the weight of all his prior experiences. He was literally born again anew.
He got to see an entire uncontaminated civilization from the perspective of one of its own people, without the cascade of an aeon of memories constantly interrupting his thoughts with yet more stranger thoughts and memories of people and worlds that were out of context with his borrowed Earthman life. Yet still, there was leakage, it seemed.
"I can't believe I forgot all of this," he said. Memories, it had to be said, were the currency of life. Even in the Culture, where they prided themselves on having no concept of money, you always wanted more, of the highest quality possible, but once you had a large stockpile, it became more of a hindrance than a blessing.
He was to the point where he lived so long, his memories were like a little-used bank vault filled of old gemstones and fermenting cheese. It was worth a lot to him, but it wasn't easy to deal with in the day to day. It was a burden just to be himself.
"You had to, it was part of the stipulations you made for yourself," she smiled approvingly at him. "You wanted to experience life as one of the locals, so we implanted you with some parents and stepped back out to the edge of the solar system to watch and wait while you were born, grew up, and had a fairly successful Earth life. Bravo."
"And besides, you didn't forget completely. You told their entire world stories of us, many of which were even mostly accurate, though you got my name wrong."
"I did, didn't I," he chuckled.
"You believed at the time you were inventing everything, but it was just parts of your old self surfacing in your mind. You should be happy," she said, "You managed to make a large influence without making so much as a ripple of intergalactic political scandal. Your words will enlighten and inspire them for a long time to come, but yet you did it without popping their bubble. They still think they could be alone. They're still free to roam and grow without feeling the intimidation of knowing the a galaxy-spanning civilization with thousands of years jump start is out here for real.
"I certainly wrote books lots of books."
"Yes. Maybe its enough that they'll get it."
"And then I had cancer."
"Yes."
"Cancer sucks, I definitely don't recommend it. I died... Oh my god, Adele!" He looked up at the ceiling, his face seemingly at war with itself. His eyes were pleading, but his mouth was a firm line of willpower. His other facial features were still choosing sides.
"You know you can't tell her anything. Your life there is done and over with and they will deal with it in their own fashion. Your apparent death will give her more closure than telling her you're traipsing around the cosmos with the characters from your books."
He hung his head. Nodded once in acceptance, "Yeah, that might not go over so well, but then, she's pretty amazing, so what the hell do I know?"
"Special Circumstances has instructed me to inform you that you're not allowed to contact anyone from that planet from this point forward."
"Fine. What happened to my body?"
"I believe they burned it," she said. "We were backing you up fairly continuously as you circled the metaphysical drain. Once it was clear that body was going to be literal toast, we just kept what we had of your mind-state and left. By the time we were leaving they were talking about firing your burnt corpse particles at a bridge or something barbaric, but we were likely already out of the system by the time any of that commenced."
"I asked them to do that, actually," he said.
"Awww, how touching," she said sarcastically.
"You couldn't even stick around for the funeral services? I would have quite liked to have a recording of that, mind you!"
"No, you wouldn't. Its depressing and morbid. We do death much better."
"What's that then? firing corpses into the sun like torpedoes? Tell me how its a better version of burnt to a fucking crisp. The rocket is bigger? Fusion is so much cleaner?"
"You may have a point... though displacing is much less wasteful than a rocket, and the sun is a tad more impressive than a bridge."
"Fuck you, I love that bridge."
"Be that as it may, I must say I don't remember you being this argumentative before this little 60-year stint on Earth."
"Its the Scottish way."
"You don't say, Menzies."
"Don't call me that."
"Would you prefer Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry?"
"Oh please, do shut up now."
More softly she said, "Or how about Tursensa Ngaroe Hgan QiRia dam Yutton? Wanna go by that again?"
He smiled. "Tell you what, you can call me whatever you like right after you conjure up some more virtual mapuernl'k, throw some Star Trek on screen so I can relax, and let me think about how I want to customize the body I know you're growing for me somewhere close at hand."
Earth was fun and he would really miss a lot of people and things from it, but the universe is a huge and interesting place. He was nearing two thousand years of subjective experience, and he'd only seen but the tiniest percentage of the galaxy, let alone the whole of the universe.
The simulation was nice. He felt like he could handle all of his memories better when not relying on real physical meat chemicals to do his processing, but he wondered if his simulated brain would come to the same conclusions as his old head porridge. Perhaps it was just the simulated environment had little chance of unscheduled distraction.
He certainly didn't feel any different in here, aside from being a solid metric fuck-ton healthier.
"Yeah, about that body thing," the ship's avatoid said as she opened the drapes. "I think we've solved the fatboy problem."
Decision at Farpoint was beginning to play on the wall opposite the foot of the bed. He realized when hearing Picard speak that he hadn't been speaking English since he'd awoken, they had both been speaking Marain the entire time. They weren't all that dissimilar in cadence, even if the phonemes were markedly different. The concept-per-second ratio was faster with Marain, of course, designed, as it was, to allow plodding humans to speak their minds as quickly as possible to the patiently waiting, yet also mostly bored Mind waiting for them to finish each sentence.
"Oh really?" he asked, not surprised. The ship had little to do but sit still and monitor the planet for the last sixty years. It would have been recording and sharing all of the broadcasts it picked up with other interested minds. But even with all of the radio, television, satellite and cellular traffic of an entire planet to collate, analyze, store and disseminate, the average Culture Mind was relatively bored. So still, plenty of time to think and talk to other ships. Plenty of time to formulate a plan.
Having his existence confirmed with an intergalactic sublimation nigh-snafu really undid a lot of the work he put into spreading the myth that he was, himself, a fictional character. He had a bit more of a fan following lately among the Culture ships, since that whole Gzilt kerfluffle. When he had initially went underground on Earth, it had been because he had really needed a vacation.
Suddenly, not only did every ship, drone, hub and Mind suddenly know he was really older than the Culture itself, they knew where he was, and-thanks to his recorded construct which was seized, questioned, and later published memoirs of its own-the intimate details of his past loves, elective surgeries, and a detailed analysis of his memory-related predicament.
Machine intellects could be such gossipy little bitches, really. Even when they were a copy of you, yourself. Perhaps especially when.
When this happened he wasn't used to feeling so exposed and certainly was uncomfortable with it. His natural response was to disappear. If everyone else in the galaxy knew where he was, he decided he would escape by forgetting himself and all of them for a while. Hence Earth. Rebirth.
"Yeah, we believe you can just do it like we do."
"We?"
"Ships. Avatoids. Specifically, remote presence. You would keep only your basic memories and consciousness within a biological body, and the bulk of your long-term memories would be accessible so long as you're within transmission range of the mobile storage unit holding the rest."
"You don't say..." he seemed lost in thought for a moment. "Kind of like a debit card for my memory vault...?" He raised an eyebrow at her. "Sounds cheesy."
"Not exactly. You know for someone who once had four ears, you don't listen all that well." she said, "Specifically, a couple of the other Minds and myself believe we can teach you how to be a ship."
"A ship like you?"
"No, you can't start off as a vessel as large as myself, but perhaps some day, who knows?"
Outside the window pane he could see stars streaming past as they traveled thousands of times faster than light itself. On the wall beside it, Patrick Stewart was sitting near a window also showing stars streaming past. It looked suspiciously similar, he thought.
"Can I be a fast ship?"
"That depends on you, of course. You'll have to get the hang of field control and put a whole lot more effort into your math skills, but we'll build you whatever you can safely handle, and there is plenty of time. In the mean time, while you get the hang of it, I'll continue to lug you around wherever you want to go. "
He reminded himself that this was still just a simulation. Superluminal space travel probably didn't even look like that... He wondered what it would be like to experience it first hand, the way a ship does.
It could be fun, he decided.
"Sure, why not," he said.
~Fin~