"The Devil in the Details"

(originally published as an afterward to the A View Before Dying chapbook)

D-mat—the electronic transmission of matter—has obsessed me for over ten years. My first short story ever—“The Ghost in the Machine”, finished in 1989—was about a man, Bill Harriman, who invented what was essentially a working d-mat prototype, only to be haunted by his own poltergeist. The deconstruction of his body every time he went through the machine necessarily caused his death, thereby creating a number of almost identically restless spirits. Obvious, really.

It wasn’t a good story—first attempts rarely are—and that failure put me off the idea for a couple of years. Over fifty stories later, I returned to the theme, penning the pivotal disintegration scene in “New Flames For an Old Love” in one sudden rush, then going back the next day to fill in the rest. It was, to me, a horror story about the hopeless-in-love inventor of d-mat, this time called Marcus “dB” deBarrow (based, incidentally, on an old school friend), who uses his own invention as a means of blackmail and mass-murder, albeit for the best of reasons.

“On the Road to Tarsus” followed less than a year later, and “A View Before Dying” the year after that. “View” took some considerable input from Bill Congreve to make it work, but got there eventually. Around the end of 1994, I had an idea for a really big d-mat story, probably a novella called "Resurrection", about a serial killer who uses d-mat to copy and kill people. This evolved into the novel The Resurrected Man and its possible sequel Widow of Opportunity—making it a very big novella indeed.

And that, more or less, is a potted history of my work on d-mat. (Oh, there is a similar device, “MAT”, used in an up-coming short story called “The Land Itself”, by which means encoded humans can travel across the galaxy at ftl speeds while their core personalities remain at home—but that’s another thread entirely.) Only one thing remains to be pointed out, which completists will have spotted already:

the stories as they stand, much to the annoyance of at least one reviewer (who cheerfully called me a “bastard” for it), aren’t consistent.

For a start, d-mat has a capital “D” in “Flames” and a small “d” elsewhere, except for “Ghost”, in which it doesn’t have a name at all (it’s just referred to as <sinister rumbling> The Process). I’ve already mentioned two different names for the inventor of d-mat; in fact, there are three: Nick Luhr is credited with the feat in The Resurrected Man. The company responsible for making d-mat commercially viable and marketing it to the public is called QDos in “Flames” and “Tarsus” but “KTI” (“Kudos Technologies Incorporated”) in The Resurrected Man. QDos’ headquarters is in Dallas in “Flames”, but in geosynchronous orbit on an orbital tower in The Resurrected Man—the same tower, GOLIATH, which featured (unnamed) in “Tarsus”. In “Flames”, d-mat data is distributed through something called the “Earth Network”—a task later absorbed by KTI—although the hub of this network is referred to as being in geosynchronous orbit.

Most obviously, the mass-murder that occurs in “Flames” is never referred to again; it was too dramatic an event to see past in order to predict what the world might be like later that century. The method by which d-mat is introduced to a sceptical market is fundamentally unchanged in The Resurrected Man, however, and the way d-mat shrinks the global village (specifically by allowing easy access to previously inaccessible areas) recurs in all the stories—so “Flames” still shares some connectivity with the rest.

Dates vary. “Tarsus” takes place in 2062, when d-mat is common-place but Resurrection hasn’t even been thought of. D-mat was invented in 2039 in The Resurrected Man but has, by 2069, only been available to the public for a decade; Resurrection, however, has been around for a while, for those who can afford it (unlike in “Tarsus”, where it is free for all). In "Tarsus", the lightspeed colonists (here called “Latecomers”, as they are in Widow of Opportunity) are due to arrive in Eta Boötis System around 2093; that date becomes 2098 in The Resurrected Man. In “View” no dates appear at all; I’d learned by that point not to give too much information. Likewise, no dates are mentioned in “Flames”, but if you add up all the months and years that elapse in the course the story, only around a decade passes between the first d-mat prototype and the public’s mass-acceptance. In The Resurrected Man, that gap is over 30 years.

Looking to the future, although Widow is yet to be written, its chronology is already in place. In “Tarsus”, there’s a well-established colony on the planet around Eta Boötis (still called Tarsus, thankfully) by 2093, just two years after the first colonists are due to arrive; in Widow, this will not be accomplished for another ten years, and as the Latecomers will be placed in storage upon arrival, for legal reasons, there would be, in that version of the d-mat mythos, no teary reunification of the main characters from “Tarsus”. The ftl trick employed to beat the Latecomer colonists to this planet is the “Fraus Effect” in “Tarsus”, but “Fraun” in Widow. The Saul probes and the failure of Saul–1 in particular feature prominently in Widow, but for different reasons; in that book, Tarasento, Gehrke and Hallows make it home AOK, as do the other outfitters (bar the last three). And the aliens from “View” remain in an alternate universe, where they belong.

There are probably other inconsistencies I’ve missed; it’s been a while since I read these stories with any great attention to detail. That’s probably how the discrepancies arose in the first place: a combination of never really intending the stories to form a contiguous universe (allowing myself to be careless, in other words), and the universe of The Resurrected Man evolving in my head as I went.

As to whether I’ll ever return to the theme after Widow, I’d have to say: maybe. With the news that humanity could soon be able to transmit whole viruses by means of a device very much like d-mat within the next ten years (according to Anton Zeilinger of the University of Innsbruck, as reported in New Scientist, 14th March 1998), anything is possible.

I just hope they get the details right.

Sean Williams

April 1^st, 1998

PS. Since writing this, the sequel to The Resurrected Man underwent a few changes. The title, for one, went out the window (Widow of Opportunity is now the title of an unrelated novel). Some of the plot points changed, too. So the mythos continues to evolve, and everything I write on the subject becomes increasingly inaccurate ... (March 9^th, 2001)