This Month's Theme: Backup

March 31st is World Backup Day, highlighting the importance of backing up your data. I could have written an opinion piece telling horror stories of lost data and rambling on about the importance of backing up, but statistically speaking you would have ignored my advice, probably eventually suffered a major loss of irreplaceable personal data, and maybe thought to yourself, “Hey, didn’t I ignore a piece about the importance of backing up my data on The Cud once?” So instead of wasting both our times, here are a few fun spec-fic stories about backing up.

“Wikiplanet”
Sci-fi
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Author’s note: This story was inspired in part by the Arthur C. Clarke short story “The Star,” which is an absolute must-read for any SF fan. You can read it on the Wayback Machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/20080718084442/http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/star_clarke.html

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Eris was cold. The Sun shone as a distant glow, looking like almost any other star in the sky. Martina stood on the surface in her spacesuit, watching the cutting laser from Dysnomia, the small orbiting moon, boring another hole in the surface. It was the last of sixty-two that they’d done around the dwarf planet.

“Two hundred feet,” Xang said over her comlink. “That’s it.”

The transport, on its eight massive wheels, sat a hundred feet behind her, a bright object in front of the dark mountains and black space beyond. She gave Xang a thumbs-up, and he returned it through the window of the control bay.

The brilliant beam, the product of an array of nuclear-powered lasers installed around Dysnomia, shut down. Martina hurried across the barren surface of Eris, towing the wheeled container like luggage, until she could peer into the shaft. It was three feet wide and devoid of any rock; it had vaporized all that rock into gas.

“Dropping it in,” she said.

She opened up the case and pulled out the data core. It only weighed a little over a hundred pounds on Earth, but it wasn’t even nine pounds in the weak gravity of the dwarf planet.  She dropped it into the shaft and watched as it slowly descended.

“Okay, cap it,” she called.

She got a safe distance away and turned her eyes back to the transport. Xang worked his controls and the underside bay door opened; the cap, guided by remote control, rolled across the rock. It settled over the hole and retracted its wheels. Martina could feel the vibrations of the drills as they bored into the rock to anchor it there; atop it, a translucent panel began to flash in a pattern of staccato blips.

“Beacon functioning,” Martina reported.

“And will for the next billion years, captain.”

She trudged across the desolate plain and climbed the ramp. Once it was sealed and she had cleared the airlock, she got out of her suit, probably for the last time. She met Xang in the lounge, and they made dinner from their supplies without a word. After eating, he pulled out the deck of cards and dealt out hands. They played in silence for a few minutes.

“It’s just hitting me now, captain,” he said.

She regarded him. He was a handsome man of Asian ancestry—something she’d noticed before, but which she’d always back-burnered in the face of their mission. She’d always wondered if he liked Hispanic women, or if he even found her attractive, but again the mission had been what had mattered for the last twenty years. But that didn’t matter anymore. “It’s Martina. No more ranks.”

He nodded. “So it’s just us. I mean, billions back on Earth, for now. But in a few days they’ll all be gone. It will just be us—the last two human beings. The last life forms from the planet Earth. That’s… that’s deep.”

Martina laid her cards down, and he followed, the game forgotten. “This mission has been the most important undertaking in human history,” she said. “We’ve left sixty-two data cores containing the entire sum of human existence on them beneath the surface of Eris, which will escape the supernova that should never have happened. We should have had a cool five billion years before it became a red giant, but here we are. Eris will be a rogue planet traveling through the galaxy, and hopefully an intelligent species will find one of our time capsules.”

“And we’ve launched three hundred data cores in mini-probes from Dysnomia, heading away from the solar system,” he said. “We’re just hoping for immortality. That someone finds our history, our literature, our music, our art… the DNA of every species on our planet… that we might matter beyond our existence.”

They stared at each other across the table for a long time. He was a reliable junior officer, a talented scientist… but none of that mattered anymore.

“We have six months of food, water, and oxygen,” she said. “We’ll watch our world die. And then it’s just us. We should make it a good six months.”

He stood up in unspoken agreement and took her hand, and they went back to the bunkroom together, like so many countless millions of people on Earth were doing at that moment.

“Back Up Your Important Personal Things”
Sci-fi
By David M. Fitzpatrick

“Have you done a recent backup?” Jim asked.

They were standing amidst the trees on a hiking trail. It was just happenstance that she’d discovered his sins while they were in the middle of nowhere, with no one around.

Dara was still pissed at him, and she shot him the evil eye. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I just want to make sure you’ve backed up. You always put off everything technological until it’s too late, Dara.”

In her folded-arm anger, her face softened a bit. “I know I put it off. It just doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather call in a pizza order than do it online. I’d rather read a printed book than an ebook. I’d rather write something down than type it in. You KNOW all of this. So stop deflecting. What matters now is that you CHEATED on me! How the hell could you do this to me, Jimmy? And with some random woman?”

“I had a weak moment,” he said, pleading with his puppy-dog eyes as much as his little-boy voice. “I’ve never done anything like that before. And I never will again. Just give me a chance.”

She thought about it, long and hard, with pursed lips, glaring at him. “I don’t think so. You know that this was the deal-breaker. I told you when we first got together that if you ever cheated on me, it would be over—even if we’d been married a hundred years. I KNEW something was up. I just KNEW it. And I’m not going to apologize for hiring a private investigator to follow you.”

She whipped out her phone—an extremely out-of-date model; typical for her—and looked at the screen. “Chance meeting at a restaurant over lunch. You played sick from work and took her to a hotel. And he sent me lots of pictures. How the hell am I supposed to let that go? How can I forget it? And how can I trust that you wouldn’t do it again? Or that you haven’t done it before?”

Dara hurled her phone into the nearest tree, and it exploded into plastic and glass. “That’s what I think about technology!” she screamed. Then she deftly yanked off her wedding and engagement rings. She threw them at him; they bounced off his chest and onto the leafy trail.

“And that’s what I think about you,” she said. “I HATE you!” And she spun on her heel as if to stalk away.

“Dara, wait—when was your last backup?”

She stopped, spun back, and stepped forward until she was in his face. “I don’t know why the hell you care, but fine—I’m a procrastinator. It was probably five or six months ago.”

“Good,” Jim said, and he grabbed her by the hair with both strong, gloved hands and smashed her head into the same tree that she’d thrown her phone into. She was unconscious immediately but he kept smashing her head into the tree until he was sure she was dead.

After her body crumpled into a twisted heap, he found the rings, which he threw into a river on the way out of the woods.

*   *   *

He called the police that evening when she didn’t return home, and they found the last location of her phone, and thus her body. There was a halfhearted investigation. The story was that she had jogged ahead of him and apparently had been accosted—robbery attempt turned murder or something.

“And she had a recent backup?” the detective asked at the end of the interview.

“Five or six months old, I think. I’m always on her about doing it, but she never does.”

The detective whistled. “That ought to be tough.”

*   *   *

He visited Data Masters the next afternoon. While he waited for them to prepare the host, he logged in to every online portal Dara had to make sure that she hadn’t made any mention of her suspicions about him cheating. There were no social-media posts, no emails, no electronic memos—nothing. She always had been a private person, and kept personal details to herself. That worked out great for him.

Eventually, they took him into the restoration room. “We’ll start the data restore in a minute,” they said. “Are you sure you want to watch?”

“Absolutely.”

He stood at the glass, looking into the room, and saw the naked clone of Dara’s body floating in the restoration capsule, its head surrounded by the spherical laser array. It had no consciousness, but that was about to change.

The restoration began, fifty thousand lasers spinning in the great orb about her head, penetrating skin and bone as if it weren’t there; where they intersected, neurons were programmed to create the memories stored in her most recent backup. When it was finally over, the new Dara, nearly six months out of date, opened her eyes.

*   *  *

“Mugged and beaten to death?” she echoed, her eyes wide. “Did they get the guy?”

“Not yet, but they’ll keep looking.” He was holding her hand.

“Wow! Well… almost six months since this backup means I have a lot to catch up on. Did I miss anything?”

He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Nothing at all.”

*   *   *

When he went to work the next day, Dara set out to catch up on the lost six months. She loved Jim and she trusted him with everything in her heart, so sometimes she did feel guilty about her little secret. She was just old-fashioned that way; she didn’t like dealing with her personal problems in a high-tech, online fashion. She preferred the way she’d done it since she was eight years old.

Buried deep in her boxes of books, she fished out her secret, handwritten diary. A quick leaf-through told her that she’d written in it steadily—including the day she’d died.

She settled back to read.

“Daddy’s Watching”
Sci-fi
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Andrea Wagner got home in time for her father to light into her.

“Where have you been, young lady?” he demanded.

She sighed. “Dad, I’m twenty-nine. I’m old enough to stay out late.”

“Well, you’ll always be my little girl.” He gave her a stern look from the screen on the wall display in the living room. There were such panels throughout the house. “I don’t have to physically be here to look out for you, you know.”

“And I appreciate that, Dad. But I’m not a child. You need to accept that.”

“I certainly do not. This is MY house, Andrea, and if you live here, you’ll do so under MY rules!”

She had to change the subject. It was easy to do with him. “I got a raise today.”

His face lit up and he smiled broadly. He looked much nice when he did that. “Congratulations! I know you’ve been working towards that. Your mother would be proud.”

“I’m sure she would.” Andrea pulled off her coat and headed into the kitchen, where she poked around for something to eat. The kitchen display lit up as her father transferred there.

“I remember when you were born,” he said. “Your mother was in labor for thirteen hours, but when you arrived, it was the best moment of our lives.”

She threw some ham and cheese on bread and squirted mustard on as he went on about how wonderful she had been. She didn’t want to talk to him today. She hated herself for despising him, but she just wanted peace and quiet for a change. He had to learn to let go. The past year with the screens everywhere—and HIM everywhere—had worn on her to the point of near-madness.

“When you graduated high school, we were so proud,” he rambled on. “Four-year perfect attendance! A four-point-oh GPA! Valedictorian! Full scholarship! You were all that we had hoped for and more.”

She grabbed a can of Dr Pepper and took her sandwich with her as she headed to the hallway. The hall display lit up with his proud-father face as she passed.

“You won the spelling bee in sixth grade,” he said, shaking his head with a gleeful smile. “You were SO proud that day. You showed everyone how smart you were. You beat the seventh- and eighth-graders. I don’t think any of them had even HEARD the word ‘soliloquy,’ but there you were, rattling it off like it was ‘cat.’” He laughed aloud at the memory.

Andrea had been headed to the living room and stopped to listen politely to him, but like a switch being thrown she couldn’t listen anymore. She turned right into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. There was no display in there, so she sat on the toilet lid and tried to enjoy her sandwich. Out in the hallway, she heard her father’s muffled voice.

“Why the hell are you eating a sandwich in the john?” he asked. “Besides, I can’t see you in there.”

“That’s the idea,” she hollered. “I don’t really want you in the bathroom with me, Dad.”

“I remember toilet-training you in there. You were about two, and we had a little pink plastic potty…”

He yammered on out there while she ate on the toilet, and she felt ridiculous. It was the only way she got any privacy. She couldn’t afford to buy a new place, so she had to stay in her father’s house, and put up with him on displays in every room. It was almost nonstop. Sometimes he even woke her up at night to reminisce over this or that; the bedroom display would come on and he’d holler at her to wake up.

“…when you were in Brownies and then Girl Scouts…”

She loved her father, but this was maddening. She ate the last bite of her sandwich and wished she made a half-dozen of them. Maybe she could fill the tub with hot water and bubble bath, turn on the radio really loud, and try to ignore him.

“…and then that job you had at the convenience store…”

Fact after fact, memory after memory; he just recited them all, happy and proud, without any sensible connection. And in that moment, sitting on her toilet with sandwich crumbs on her blouse, she just couldn’t take it any longer. She loved him, but… she was done.

She got up and threw open the bathroom door. Her father’s surprised face was on the display in front of her.

“There you are!” he said. “This reminds me of when we used to play Hide and Seek when you were little. I always knew where you were, but I played along…”

“No more, Dad,” she snapped. “This has to stop. You have to give me some personal time. You can’t be hovering over me like this on these damn screens. You have to let me live my life.”

He raised his brow. “But I love you, Andrea. That’s why I set up these screens. When your Mom died, you were so hurt that I worked hard to make sure that you at least had one of us with all the time. I did this for you, Andrea. Don’t you love me?”

“I do. But it’s not about that. Computer, commence system shutdown.”

He looked horrified, but the system shut down as ordered. The display went blank. Andrea took a deep breath and shuddered as she released it. She felt like a bad daughter—as absurd as it sounded. She retrieved her Dr Pepper from the bathroom and padded into the living room, aware of every blank screen along the way. She popped the soda and drank deeply as she stopped in front of the fireplace. She looked at the decorative metal urns there.

LINDA WAGNER, said the one on the left, with her mother’s death date of ten years before. JOHN WAGNER, said the other, with her father’s death date of last year.

She remembered him working feverishly after Mom had died. Day and night, he’d programmed the artificial intelligence and recorded every memory he could recall. The AI learned those memories and learned to talk about them in myriad ways. In a sense, the AI and its data was, in fact, her father. That’s why her guilt was so overwhelming.

No. She shook her head to dismiss the line of thinking. Her father was an urn full of ashes on her mantle. That was all. The system contained the next best thing to him—but it was still a fake.

It would always be there. She could launch the AI at any time and talk to him. For now, she just needed to have her life—to move on without him, like every girl who ever lost her parents had to learn how.

At once, she felt relaxed in her solitude—but all alone.
 

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.