Circuit Of Heaven

For my mom, who dreamed of being a singer, and my dad, who dreamed of being a writer.

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton,
Paradise Lost

NEWMAN
ROGERS
HAD
BEEN
ERRATIC
LATELY
,
DESPONDENT
, flying into a rage over nothing, working into the wee hours of the morning. His coworkers would often find him sleeping on the sofa in the waiting room when they came into work in the morning, or even slumped over his computer. He was brilliant, a genius perhaps, but he was only one member of a team working to develop artificial intelligence and was not thought to be indispensable. Whatever he was working on so compulsively—he didn’t share it with the rest of the team—soon prompted him to cease work altogether on the job he was hired to do. Management was concerned.

And then, on a mid-December afternoon in 2020, he was fired for calling his supervisor an idiot. He was thirty-nine, well thought of until recently, but under the terms of his contract he couldn’t work on artificial intelligence research for any other firm for a period of two years, even though every other firm would only be interested in him for such research.

None of this seemed to concern him, however. He holed up in his apartment and continued to work, hacking his former employer’s system late at night. A few months after his dismissal, he published an obscure paper demonstrating, with a string of elegant proofs, that artificial intelligence was impossible. He added, however, in a modest concluding paragraph, that it might be possible to digitize human personality and, building on techniques already in use in medicine and virtual reality simulations, transfer the personality to another organism, or even to another, more durable, medium altogether.

While competing theorists flung themselves at his proofs like a pack of skilled dogs, a small group of wealthy and aging businessmen contacted him and offered to finance his research. Suddenly he found himself in charge of a team of researchers with almost limitless resources. In 2030, the first practical application of his work, the transfer of the identity of a ninety-seven-year-old owner of a large insurance company into the quick-grown clone of a healthy young man, was performed with complete success. Even young men eventually die, however, and Newman was encouraged to continue developing a more durable medium for human intelligence.

To help finance this venture, his backers, over his objections, marketed Constructs—humans made from portions of several different personalities implanted into a cloned body—as servants and laborers. To overcome customers’ uneasiness with what some described as the new slavery, the clones, with increasingly clever, even entertaining gene splices, were made to look as if they weren’t human. Unfortunately (and as Newman had predicted) the partial personalities that made up each Construct reconstituted themselves over the years, remembering their former lives and identities.

In 2040, Rogers succeeded in designing the Alternative Life Medium Assembly,
ALMA
for short, a vast network of silicon crystals in which any number of human personalities might dwell in a world they would experience as indistinguishable from the real world. The operating system could be programmed to eliminate disease, violence, and death—and it would last forever. He had invented paradise.

The new world government, shakily formed in 2036, sold the former site of the Pentagon for the construction of
ALMA
, dubbed “the Bin” by the media, a nickname that stuck. In 2050 it went on-line, and some half a million souls who could afford it entered their new world. In 2060, after ten years of mounting pressure from residents of the real world,
ALMA
was opened up to everyone eighteen years or older who did not scan as criminally insane. By 2074, the Supreme Court (the majority of whom now resided in the Bin) lifted the ban against minors, so that anyone, young and old alike, might enter the Bin and live forever.

After a few years, the only people left in the real world were members of religious sects who believed the Bin to be in violation of God’s laws; the criminally insane; and a handful of persons who, for one reason or another, stubbornly distrusted paradise. By 2080, the remaining population of the real world, not counting Constructs, was about 2.5 million, though reliable figures were hard to come by. The population of the Bin was over 12 billion.

As for Newman Rogers, the patron saint of
ALMA
, no one knew where he was or what he was doing, though rumors were plentiful.

JUSTINE
WAS
DREAMING
SHE
WAS
SOMEONE
ELSE: She was in the real world, a long time ago, before she was born—there were people everywhere and cars moving up and down the streets like huge schools of brightly colored fish. All the shop windows were intact, lit up with fluorescent and neon, full of cheap jewelry and boom boxes and skimpy clothes stretched over chipped mannequins. She hurried past them, a light drizzle falling, the streets black and slick, glistening with reflected light. The ozone smell of the rain hovered over the stench of exhaust fumes and urine and rotting food.

She was seventeen, sneaking out at night, hurrying to meet a boy around the corner, at the end of the next block. His name was Steve, and she remembered his face—maybe twenty, thin, a sharp nose, a closely trimmed goatee, hungry eyes. She had his address on a slip of paper wadded up in her hand, and when she thought about him, her hand tightened around the lump of paper, and she walked even faster. She was crazy for him. She hardly knew him, and Alice, a girlfriend, said he was bad news, but she was crazy for him anyway.

She started up the narrow stairs to his apartment, when a door opened above her, and he stepped onto the landing, light blazing at his back. He must’ve had a dozen floods in there. Music blared in the cavernous stairwell.

“Hey Angelina,” he shouted, and she followed him into his room, cluttered with electronic equipment and wires snaking across the floor. The lights were on stands, all aimed at the bed in the middle of the room. He circled around her, taking her jacket, wrapping his arms around her, stripping off her shirt. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He pushed her onto the bed and looked down at her. She could hardly see him for the glare of the lights. “Put this on,” he said, pulling something over her head like a bathing cap. He pinned her arms and pushed himself into her, hammering away at her. He came in a matter of minutes and rolled off of her. She opened her hand and there was his address, wadded to a pulp in her hand. He yanked the cap off her head, and she woke up.

Her heart was racing. Her stomach was in a knot. Her fist was clenched around the sheet. Slowly, she opened it. There was no slip of paper there. It was just a dream. I’m still me, she thought, still Justine, twenty years old, in the Bin six weeks—and I’ve never seen a car in the real world except rusted out junkers, never walked down a city street without feeling the grit of glass under my shoes.

The girl in her dream was named Angelina, and it’d been 2002. She had no idea how she knew that, but there it was, like a memory. Justine was born in 2061.

In the present, she was in her hotel room with a man’s naked arm across her chest. He wore a fat gold ring with an onyx pentagon on his middle finger, a heavy gold chain around his wrist. His fingers were fat and stubby, his nails buffed and polished to a shine. Downy white hair covered his arm, the back of his hand, like moss. He was sound asleep, his face half-buried in the pillow. He’d said he was a senator, she remembered. He looked the part—silver hair, strong jaw, square shoulders, just enough crow’s feet to make him seem wise and fatherly. Old enough to be her father. She couldn’t remember how she’d ended up in bed with him. I must’ve been tying one on, she thought. Watching him sleep, there was something she didn’t like about him, though apparently there’d been something she’d liked well enough the night before.

She looked around the room, moving her head carefully to make sure she didn’t wake him. A narrow shaft of light, where the curtains weren’t quite drawn, cut across the room. It was a nice room, a tasteful room, with delicate furniture and a vaseful of jonquils on the dresser. Not the sort of room to wake up in with a stranger. His clothes and hers, tangled and inside out, were scattered around the rose-colored carpet. She didn’t remember that either.

She remembered fucking him. She remembered that too clearly, tortured herself with the memory for a while, thinking, Justine, you’re too damn lonely.

She carefully lifted his arm off her and slid out of bed, placing his arm on her pillow as if it were a sleeping kitten. She gathered up her clothes and went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. As she took a shower she tried to remember the man in her bed. His name was W something—William or Waylon or—Winston, that was it. She was almost sure. Winston.

But when it came to what kind of person this Winston was, all she could remember was lewd, cartoonish sex like something out of a porno. God, she thought, that wasn’t me. I must’ve been worse than drunk.

She took a long shower, fiddling with the massage, lathering herself up till she looked like a marshmallow. She wanted to put off for as long as possible talking to the stranger in her bed. But then, she asked herself, who else are you going to talk to? She didn’t know anyone in D.C., not a fucking soul. She rinsed herself off, watching the huge gobs of suds pile up around the drain. She stepped out of the shower, wiped the steamed-up mirror with the side of her arm, and grimaced at herself, thinking, I don’t even know the guy I just fucked.

But then, she thought as she dried off, if I wasn’t myself, maybe he wasn’t himself either. By the time she’d finished blow-drying her hair, she’d decided to at least give the guy a chance. Maybe have breakfast with someone for a change. She shut off the dryer and stuck it into its little cubby hole. The whine of the thing echoing off the tiles still rang in her ears. She picked up the wad of clothes and disentangled them. They were surprisingly fresh for the night she’d spent. She had started turning them rightside out when she realized there were voices coming from her room.

She put her ear to the door, but couldn’t make out what was being said. though the tone and cadence came through. There were two male voices, one deep and rich, the senator’s voice, but talking too fast, making excuses she would guess, and the other voice, cutting through the senator’s like a nun bringing a young sinner to his knees, with a few unhurried phrases as resonant as a bowed cello. She listened until they seemed to be done, but couldn’t make out a word, listened hard for someone opening and closing the door to the room, but there wasn’t a sound.

She dressed quickly and quietly and came back into the room. There was only Winston sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, his hair neatly combed. He rose to his feet and bowed slightly. He was wearing a turn-of-the-century Italian suit, charcoal, almost black, with faint pinstripes. It hung perfectly, showing no signs of having spent the night in a heap on the floor. “Good morning, Justine,” he said. His smile was almost paternal. He’s as embarrassed as I am, she thought.

“Good morning. Would you like some coffee or something?” She went to the room service pad set into the wall beside the bed.

“No thanks,” he said quickly. “I really must be going.” He smiled apologetically. “An important committee meeting.”

“Hope you don’t mind, but I need some.” She pressed the little picture of a black cup of coffee, steam lines rising out of it in neat squiggles. A panel slid open, and there was coffee. Like
Star Trek
, she thought. She looked around the room, but there was no one else there, no sign anyone had been there. The room door was right by the bathroom. If someone had left, she would’ve heard him. She blew on the coffee until it was drinking temperature, then drank half of it. “Was somebody here? Were you talking to somebody just now?”

“Talking?”

“Just now. I thought I heard you talking to somebody in here.”

He shook his head more emphatically. “No, I wasn’t talking to anyone.” He squared his shoulders and shrugged with his hands. The chain around his wrist made a clicking noise. “I’m afraid I sometimes discuss things out loud with myself. A silly habit. Actually, I was wondering if you might join me for a dinner party this evening at my sister’s house in Front Royal. It’s my nephew’s birthday. I believe you told me last night that you would be free this evening.”

She laughed. “I’ll have to take your word for what I said last night. I don’t remember much of it. What else did I say?”

The question seemed to make him nervous. He spoke as if reciting—“You said you were a singer, that you were only in town for a week and didn’t know anyone here, not even the musicians you’ll be performing with. I thought, under the circumstances, you might like to meet some people.” He added sympathetically, “It’s a bit disorienting at first.”