bowel, or bladder wore out. You just turned over your specifications to the people at the spare-parts division of the CHON-food factory, and when they pulled your new organs out of their amniotic soup the surgeons popped them in place.
In fact, all the life sciences flowered. The Heechee food factories made it possible to identify, and then to reproduce or even creat'e, a thousand new biological agents-anti-antigens; antivirals; selective enzymes; cell replacements. Disease simply passed out of fashion. Even such long-endured traumas as tooth decay, childbirth, and the common cold became history. (Why should any woman suffer through parturition when some other breeding machine-say, a cow-could be persuaded to accept the fertilized ovum, nurture it to ripeness, and deliver it healthy and squalling?)
And then there was the second reason. If, in spite of everything, a person did finally die of simple overall decay, he didn't have to die completely.
At least, there was another Heechee invention-it had been first
found on the ship called "Heechee Heaven"-that robbed death of some of its sting. The Heechee's techniques for capturing a dead person's mind in machine storage produced the "dead men" on Heechee Heaven. Later, on Earth, it produced the enterprise called "HereAfter, Inc.," the worldwide chain of operators that would take your deceased mother or spouse or friend, put his or her memory into computer space, and permit you to converse with him or her whenever you liked-forever. Or as long as someone paid the storage charges for his or her datafile.
At first that certainly wasn't quite the same as being really alive. But it was a whole lot better than being irrecoverably dead.
Of course, as the technology matured (and it matured very fast), machine storage of human intelligence got easier and a great deal better.
When it got really good it began to raise some unexpected problems. Surprisingly, the problems were theological. The promises of Earthly religions were being fulfilled in a way the religious leaders had never planned, for indeed it seemed now to be true that "life" was only a sort of overture, and that "death" was in fact nothing more than the stepping stone to "eternal bliss in Heaven."
The dying man who then woke up to find himself no more than a collection of bits in the datafile of the immense computer networks might well wonder why he had clung to life in his organic body so long, for the machine afterlife had everything going for it. He had lost nothing through death. He still could "feel." The machine-stored ate as much as they liked-neither cost nor season were factors in planning a menu-and if they chose they excreted, too. (It did not matter that the "food" the "dead man" ate was only symbolically represented by bits of data, because so was he. He could not tell the difference.) All the biological functions were possible. He was deprived of none of the pleasures of the flesh. He could even make love with his dearest-provided only that she had stored herself in the same net-or with any number of dearests, real and imaginary, if that was how his tastes went. If he wanted the
society of the still-living friends he had left behind, there was nothing to stop him representing himself to them (as a machine-generated hologram) in order to have a conversation, or a friendly game of cards.
There was also travel; and, perhaps most popular of all, there was work.
After all, the basic human work is only a kind of date processing. Humans don't dig the foundations for skyscrapers. Machines do that; all the humans do is run the machines, and that could be done as readily from machine storage as in the flesh.
All those books that the deceased had been meaning to read-the plays, the operas, the ballets, the orchestral performances-now there was time to enjoy them. As much time as he chose. Whenever he chose.
That svas heaven indeed. The dead person's style of life was
exactly what he wanted it to be. He didn't have to worry about what he could "afford" or what was "bad for him." The only limit was his own desire. If he wished to be cruising in the Aegean or sipping cold rum drinks on a tropical beach, he only had to order it. Then the datastores would summon up any surround he liked, as detailed as any reality could be and just as rewarding. It was almost like living in a perfect video game. The operative word is
"perfect," for the simulations were just as good as the reality; in fact they were better: Tahiti without mosquitoes, French cuisine without gaining weight, the pleasure in the risks of mountainclimbing without the penalty of being killed in an accident. The deceased could ski, swim, feast, indulge in any pleasure . . . and he never had a hangover.
Some people are never happy. There were a few of the formerly dead who weren't satisfied. Sipping aperitifs at the Cafй de la Paix or rafting down the Colorado River, they would take note of the
taste of the Campari and the spray of the water and ask, "But is it real?"
