Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 by Penny Publications Read Free Book Online

I didn't have any help, and had never done anything like it before, there was a very good chance I'd wind up nothing more than a mindless piece of meat, my entire life hopelessly scrambled inside the computer.
    I prepared carefully. In the event that I did not survive, I programmed an automatic course into the guidance system. Having come this far, it seemed worth it to make sure my remains had at least a chance of arriving at my destination. I also networked the life support servers and crossed them with the recording monitor, so that if the recording process completed and I did not awake and assume full control over the observatory, the contents of the observatory would be gradually deep-frozen.
    My brain would be empty at that point anyway, and I didn't like the idea of leaving my body to slowly rot on the recording couch.
    Once I was satisfied that I'd tended to the necessary details, I sat down and considered my final words. In my entire life, through everything I'd experienced, I'd never really thought about what I'd want to leave behind for the future. It had always been someone else leaving something behind for me. I had always been the one to have to pick up the pieces and carry on. It frustrated me to sit there in front of the computer, finger poised over the button that would begin audio-video storage, and not have a damned thing to say.
    After ten minutes I finally tapped the button and spoke—in TransCom, so that the people who might recover the recording would understand.
    "My name is Miroslaw Jaworski. I might be the only survivor to have escaped the destruction of planet Earth. If you are viewing this message, it means that I am dead. If it's not too much trouble, I'd like somebody to put up a placard somewhere, for myself and my family."
    I slowly repeated the full names of my sister, mother, and father, as well as my grandparents, and several extended family who had been alive when the antimatter bombs wiped out the Earth. It seemed like a good idea to include them, since we were all victims and I wanted our lives to be remembered somewhere, by somebody.
    "I don't really care what happens after that. Tabitha and Howard Marshall are entombed on the other side of this facility, and I think they should stay there. My body, and the entire contents of this observatory, are yours to do with as you see fit.
    "Out."
    I punched the stop key, made sure the file replicated through my crude daisy chain of stand-alone workstations, then stood up and walked to the recording room, where I slowly shut the door, set up the IV system—I'd need fluid put into me during the process, or I'd dehydrate to death before recording was complete—then sat in the recorder's attached chair.
    The recorder "crown"—which is how I'd come to think of it—was poised just centimeters above my skull. I'd detached the activator toggle from the control station and put it on a cable that allowed me to hold the toggle in my hand.
    I thought about how Howard had once had to do this, with only Tab to monitor his progress.
    Swallowing hard, I flipped the toggle with my thumb.
    And the universe vanished into a swirl of sounds and color.
     
    Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. One moment I was bathed in an endless sea of shifting and chaotic images—sounds echoing across the cosmos from one side of my mind to the other—and the next moment I seemed to snap back to a state of utterly cold and solid reality.
    Only I was seeing the observatory through at least fifty different eyes, and hearing with fifty different ears, and I couldn't blink or turn off the input. So I was trying to scream, but that just made things worse because my scream bellowed from fifty different speakers, which overloaded fifty different microphones. Within my head a feedback squeal like a migraine peeled across my consciousness.
    It was Howard who saved me. Or, rather, his memories.
    On the chance that I'd be able to access what was left of Howard's