I asked. “Why am I suddenly thus?”
“Wait,” the voice responded.
There was a quavering hum in the midfrequency of my reduced hearing range, and a small object appeared far down the hall It approached at good speed, rolling on a sort of large, flexible ball. When it was about a meter distant, it stopped. “Greetings. Deradan,” it said in a lesser version of its master’s voice.
“Greetings,” I replied, examining the mechanical beast. It stood about a meter and a half high and half a meter across and was boxy-looking, with rounded-off edges It wore a nubby metallic skin with few projections, the major one being a pair of hemispherical eyes protruding from the top.
“Come with me,” it said. “It will be good for you to move about. Your body has not had any exercise for some time.” It started back down the hall and I accompanied it. There was nothing else to do.
“This, then, is my body?” I asked. “I have been out of it for a long while.”
“Indeed,” the creature said.
“Where am I?” I asked. “Where is Thrayna?”
“Soon,” the creature said. “Come.”
We walked and rolled together to the end of the hall, which was a considerable distance for my long-unused legs. The wall opened and the creature led me through. A chair occupied the center of the small room, and gladly I sat in it. Vague memories were fluttering back to me, and this room, this chair, looked familiar. I knew I had sat thus before. “Tell me now,” I said.
“You are Deradan,” the creature replied, “last of the Technicians.”
“Last?”
“Once the great hall behind us was filled with the dormant bodies of technicians, such as yourself. But as time passed, the bodies became one by one past recall, and the casks which held them were removed. Now only yours remains in the vastness of the hall. You are the last.”
“What is a technician?” I asked. “Recalled from where? Called back to Earth from the infinite universe?”
“Not quite, Deradan. Lean back, and let the memories return to you.”
I leaned back and my head touched the back of the chair, which felt warm and vibrated slightly, and slowly I remembered.
By the twenty-fourth century, as we counted centuries, we humans had explored the inner solar system and much of the outer. We had placed colonies on those planets that would tolerate us, and many in space itself. But we could go no farther.
We could not reach the stars.
There were more and more of us every day, and we spread out like a cloud around the Sun. We were clever, we were inventive, we achieved a golden age. But we could not solve the final problem: our vehicles could not easily approach light-speed, and we could not hope to surpass it.
We could hear voices from the stars now: signals arriving from limitless space that were clearly the work of other intelligences. But we could not understand them, and they did not reply to our urgent beamings in their direction. Of course it might take a signal centuries to reach them, and their reply centuries to return. But, more probably, they were not listening for us, and thus would not hear us. And there was no indication from any of the intercepted signals that these alien intelligences had solved the C 2 problem, either.
“Do you remember. Deradan?” the creature asked. “Oh, embodied ghost of my creator, do you remember your history?”
I did remember. “We were the Seekers.”
“So you called yourselves. First the Seekers, and then the Rejectionists. Others called you the Hiders and less complimentary names.”
“We wanted the stars.”
“But you could not have the stars.”
Memories returned, welling up inside of me. “That’s right,” I said. “And so we found another way.”
“Another way,” the creature agreed.
“We looked inward.”
“You built the Box.”
“That’s right. The greatest computer in the world. And then we froze our bodies, and put our minds into the computer.” I remembered all. “We brought the universe to us. Inside the vast matrix of the Box, we would be free to roam outside our bodies through all of time and space-to go where humans could never venture.”
“I am honored,” the creature said, “to be serving such a noble purpose.” Its eyes, if they were its eyes, were gazing off through the far wall.
I patted the creature on its nubby flank. “A self-repairing, self-improving computer, designed to last forever, and to hold the best minds of humanity and, by enclosing them, give them freedom.”
“Forever,” the creature said. “On this mud-ball forever.”
“Why am I recalled?” I asked.
“It was in the terms of the indenture,” the creature said, rolling its eyes toward me. “You technicians were to come into your bodies, twenty of you every thousand years, on a rotating basis, to investigate the new work I had done while you scrambled about inside of me, to walk the miles of my internal corridors and check my wiring, to peer into my crystal lattices, to determine the status of the bodies of your brothers in my great halls-and to look in on the striving of those poor humans who had not opted for the freedom of the Box.”
“It comes back to me,” I said. “Then this is my tour. Where are the other nineteen?”
“Flitting about the boundless space of my interior on wings of electrons,” the Box told me, “their bodies long since useless. The cryogenic process had its flaws. After a while the bodies deteriorated, and could not be reanimated. Little, hidden flaws that could not be predicted or guarded against.”
“Then how am I here?”
“Random chance,” the Box told me. “Your body lasted out the ages; the others did not.”
“I see.” I rose from the chair and stretched. I was tempted to ask how long it had been, but for some reason I was afraid; I did not want the answer.
“You may do what checking you like,” the Box told me. “I will aid you.”
“It seems pointless,” I said. “I have forgotten too much, and you have changed too much.”
“Is there anything you would like to know? There must be something.”
I thought. “How has humanity progressed?” I asked. “What is the history of those who did not choose the freedom of the Box?”
“That I cannot tell you,” the creature said.
“Why?” I asked. “What part of my question is obscure?”
“The answer,” the Box that was my soul and my home replied. “After you and your fellows departed the outer world for my inner world, the population
