The short story “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill was published for the first time in 2012.
Rico is worried about his mother, who is elderly and has some mental problem. Whenever she says goodbye to someone, she’s convinced that she’ll never see them again. Some time earlier, Rico’s father had his min uploaded to a virtual environment, where he now lives, even if the procedure doesn’t seem free from flaws. Will Rico convince his mother to do the same thing?
In this story which was a finalist for the Nebula Award, Tom Crosshill takes us to a not too distant future in which the technology of the upload to transfer the mind of a person to a computer is in its developing stage. The protagonist Rico is taken between this possible perspective with his father who already underwent the upload and the past with his mother now very elderly whose mind is no longer in its best conditions and could die.
“Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” is a short story but manages to concentrate in a few pages a remarkable complexity. Rico’s mother is convinced that every time she says greet to someone she’ll never see them again but remembers well the historical events she lived. This gives us a very solid dimension of what the character has lived and is living. It’s a story all in all close to us, not of a distant future.
On the other side there is the prospect of the upload but it’s far from perfect. The result is that Rico’s father doesn’t care. Perhaps the problem will be solved when the technology will be perfectioned because there are continuous steps forward but what will be the consequences for humanity?
Speaking with Rico, his wife Lisa points out that human beings have fragmented into thousands of different species and with each new technology they become more and more. But it’s not just a problem of technology because Rico observes that whenever Lisa leave a room, she comes back a different person.
In the end, people are human fractals who fragment in a thousand ways with the hope to get close enough to interact. Modern technology has only accelerated the fragmentation but the basics don’t change. What changes is the way to say goodbye to people who pass away but also in the way to deal with changes, including those in ourselves.
In “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes”, Tom Crosshill addresses these issues from a humanistic point of view. Technologies such as uploading are used only to show the characters’ emotional reactions to certain choices. For this reason, it’s definitely a character-oriented story and the author manages to give them a good depth even though this is a short story.
The topic deserves at least one novel to be developed with a certain completeness and probably that wouldn’t be enough. “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” offers some ideas, leaving the reader with the possibility to reflect upon them. For this reason, in my opinion it deserves to be read and also reread to dwell on some details, also taking advantage of the fact that it’s available in an ebook on Amazon USA
