AUDIO

Geoffrey Landis, “Approaching Perimelasma”
In this story the science is clearly explained and an almost unimaginable experience is made real to us with all the strange beauty that accompanies it, while at the same time the story focuses on character, on the mystery of the human personality. As the narrator comes nearer to the black hole, he increasingly questions his own identity as a download of his original and in a sense becomes an independent human being.

In this future, human beings, biologicals and non-biologicals, travel to distant stars via wormholes, do not die from natural causes, and can be downloaded into miniscule almost indestructible bodies. The story is told as if to the download’s original, a physicist “cocooned at absolute zero,” in a state of suspended animation, waiting for his copy to upload himself after the adventure. But from the beginning of the story we see certain underlying resentment of the situation the “copy” finds himself in. When first coming to consciousness, he tries to figure out what he can about his original who must be “[a] pilot, of course, you must have, you must be, a pilot. I integrate your pilot persona, and he is me. [….] A scientist, somebody to understand your experience, yes. I synthesize a persona. You are him, too, and I understand.” But there is a third part to this “self,” “someone to simply experience it, to tell the tale (if any of me will survive to tell the tale) of how you dropped into a black hole, and how you survived. If you survive. Me.”

The download then is aware that he and his original are not the same, and shows this realization by taking a separate name: “ I will call myself Wolf, naming myself after a nearby star, for no reason whatsoever, except maybe to claim, if only to myself, that I am not you.” The major difference between them is that “ in a real sense, you're not here at all. None of me are you. You are far away. Safe.” At this point only tangentially aware of his identity, Wolf asks what he is doing in that situation: “What type of man would allow himself to fall into a black hole? That is my question. Maybe if I can answer that, I would understand ourself.”

Wolf is many things, then, a scientist, a pilot, the archetypal explorer, the hero venturing into the unknown: “I will fly to the heart of a darkness REF far darker than any mere unexplored continent.” To fight the “ monster of relativity” , the black hole, which the psychologist tells him is " literally, the place of no return [. . . .] a metaphor for how we, ourselves, are hurled blindly into a place from which no information ever reaches us [. . .] We live our lives falling into the future, and we will all inevitably meet the singularity." The black hole is a metaphor symbolizing death, the monster Wolf, like his ancient namesake Beowulf, wishes to slay, and it is this inevitable fate he wishes to avoid, calling his adventure “ Wolf versus the black hole!”

But unlike epic heroes of the past, as he is undertaking this greatest of all adventures, he is also plagued by “my self-questioning, the implications of my growing realization that I have no understanding of why I'm doing this.” He is aware of a scientist’s reason: “One of the reasons I'm taking the plunge -- not the only one, not the main one, but one -- is in the hope that scientific measurements of the warped space inside the black hole will elucidate the nature of space and time, and so I myself will make one of the innumerable small steps to bring us closer to a FTL drive.”

However, some of his memories have not been uploaded. And this bothers him: “So I can never possibly solve the riddle, what kind of a man is it that would deliberately allow himself to drop into a black hole. I cannot, because I don't have the memories of you. In a real sense, I am not you at all.” One memory, though, he still has: a childhood experience of falling. In remembering this, he alternates between the pronoun designations I and you, signaling some confusion about his identify:

“I was a child, maybe nine, and there was no tree in the neighborhood that you could not climb. I was a careful, meticulous, methodical climber. On the tallest of the trees, when you reached toward the top, you were above the forest canopy (did I live in a forest?) and, out of the dimness of the forest floor, emerged into brilliant sunshine. Nobody else could climb like you; nobody ever suspected how high I climbed.”

As he approaches the memory of the fall itself, the distinction recurs less: “It was my own stupidity, really. At the very limit of the altitude needed to emerge into sunlight, the branches were skinny, narrow as your little finger. They bent alarmingly with your weight, but I knew exactly how much they would take. The bending was a thrill, but I was cautious, and knew exactly what I was doing.”

Then finally the “you” is dropped entirely:

“It was further down, where the branches were thick and safe, that I got careless. Three points of support, that was the rule of safety, but I was reaching for one branch, not paying attention, when one in my other hand broke, and I was off balance. I slipped. For a prolonged instant I was suspended in space, branches all about me, but I reached out and grasped only leaves, and I fell and fell and fell, and all I could think as leaves and branches fell upward past me was, oh my, I made a miscalculation; I was really stupid.”

He has no more memory of the fall or what happened afterward. Why does he remember this fall? Wolf is perhaps the risk-taking part of the original’s personality –and perhaps always, in a sense, has been. The psychologist tells the original he is a type R personality: "’Novelty-seeking,’ His personality type is shown as he approaches “[p]erimelasma, the closest point of my elliptical orbit” around the black hole. He realizes:

“My god, this is why I exist, this is why I'm here. “All my doubts are gone in the rush of naked power. No biological could have survived this far; no biological could have even survived the million-gee circularization burn, and I am only at the very beginning. I grin like a maniac, throb with a most unscientific excitement that must be the electronic equivalent of an adrenaline high.”

But now he is not the same self who fell from the tree. He is no longer a mere “biological.” In his thoughts he links the nature of his journey with his questions about identity: “On a metaphorical level, a black hole stands for death, the blackness that is sucking us all in. But what meaning does death have in a world of matrix back-ups and modular personality? Is my plunge a death wish? Is it thumbing my nose at death? Because I intend to survive. Not you. Me.” With this, he declares his separateness and is in effect reborn as a new individual so much so that he twice ignores the mission plan and does not “uplink” his “brain state,, so that […] you, my original, will be able to download my state and experiences to this point. To hell with that, I think, a tiny bit of rebellion. I am not you. If you awaken with my memories, I will be no less dead.”

Having literally plunged into the mysterious future he and the psychologist have spoken of, he is “trapped in the infinitely stretched time of the black hole,” where “the stars have already burned out, and even the most miserly red dwarf has sputtered the last of its hydrogen fuel and grown cold. The universe has already ended” and he knows this: “I cannot avoid the singularity at the center of the black hole any more than I can avoid the future. Unless, that is, I have a trick.”

And he does have a trick. Technology and technologists save him: “Far away, and long ago, my friends at the wormhole station above dropped a wormhole into the event horizon.” He is jubilant because the experiment works and he has not been destroyed. But things do not go as planned. As he emerges it is to an unfamiliar universe: “Instead of stars, the sky is filled with lines, parallel lines of white light by the uncountable thousands. Dominating the sky, where the star Wolf-562 should have been, is a glowing red cylinder, perfectly straight, stretching to infinity in both directions.” He briefly considers giving up: “I could just turn my brain off, and I will have lost nothing, in a sense. They will bring you out of your suspended state, tell you that the edition of you that dropped into the black hole failed to upload […]The experiment failed, but you had never been in danger.” This comfort doesn’t work: “But, however much you think we are the same, I am not you. I am a unique individual. When they revive you, without your expected new memories, I will still be gone.[…]I want to survive. I want to return.”

Fortunately, he realizes that going through the black hole has reversed space and time and “time, to me, is now a direction I can travel in.[…] I need only to move back to an instant just after the wormhole passed through the event horizon, and, applying full thrust, shoot through.” He does this and the mission is a success. His realization of his separate identity, which he signaled by his refusal to uplink to his original, persists once the mission is over. Fortunately as he is told "There's no law that compels you to uplink back into your original. You're a free human being. Your original can't force you."

His society, then, considers him human. For civilization has passed beyond another singularity, a metaphoric one: “If artificial intelligence reaches equivalence to human intelligence, it will soon become capable of augmenting its own intelligence with increasing effectiveness, far surpassing human intellect.” This has been called the technological Singularity “following creation of strong AI or sufficiently advanced intelligence amplification technologies such as brain-computer interfaces.”

Wolf’s jubilation is tempered a bit by his discovery that his survival is due not just to his own considerable intelligence but also to luck. As he did when his original and he fell from the tree, he made a miscalculation which might have killed him. Wolf is for the first time in his short existence daunted: “I hadn't thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever.”

Like many a conquering hero, after his success, Wolf feels a let-down: “Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do.”

This is indeed every human being’s task. It is significant perhaps that Wolf , having differentiated himself from his original and grown into a separate human being now considers not only meeting him but also: “ maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I'll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one.”