She stares at him. “Myles it is.” She seems calm, but the tracks of recent tears still show on her face. “I guess you’re supposed to decide whether I’m crazy.”
“Whether you’re fit to stand trial, yes. I should tell you right off that nothing you say to me is necessarily confidential. Do you understand?” She nods. Thomas sits down across from her. “What would you like me to call you?”
“Napoleon. Mohammed. Jesus Christ.” Her lips twitch, the faintest smile, gone in an instant. “Sorry. Just kidding. Jaz’s fine.”
“Are you doing okay in here? Are they treating you all right?”
She snorts. “They’re treating me pretty damn well, considering the kind of monster they think I am.” A pause, then, “I’m not, you know.”
“A monster?”
“Crazy. I’ve—I’ve just recently undergone a paradigm shift, you know? The whole world looks different, and my head’s there but sometimes my gut—I mean, it’s so hard to feel differently about things…”
“Tell me about this paradigm shift,” Thomas suggests. He makes it a point not to take notes. He doesn’t even have a notepad. Not that it matters. The microcassette recorder in his blazer has very sensitive ears.
“Things make sense now,” she says. “They never did before. I think, for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy.” She smiles again, for longer this time. Long enough for Thomas to marvel at how genuine it seems.
“You weren’t very happy when you first came here,” he says gently. “They say you were very upset.”
“Yeah.” She nods, seriously. “It’s tough enough to do that shit to yourself, you know, but to risk someone else, someone you really care about—” She wipes at one eye. “He was dying for over a year, did you know that? Each day he’d hurt a little more. You could almost see it spreading through him, like some sort of—leaf, going brown. Or maybe that was the chemo. Never could decide which was worse.” She shakes her head. “Heh. At least that’s over now.”
“Is that why you did it? To end his suffering?” Thomas doubts it. Mercy killers don’t generally disembowel their beneficiaries. Still, he asks.
She answers. “Of course I fucked up, I only ended up making things worse.” She clasps her hands in front of her. “I miss him already. Isn’t that crazy? It only happened a few hours ago, and I know it’s no big deal, but I still miss him. That head-heart thing again.”
“You say you fucked up,” Thomas says.
She takes a deep breath, nods. “Big time.”
“Tell me about that.”
“I don’t know shit about debugging. I thought I did, but when you’re dealing with organics—all I really did was go in and mess randomly with the code. You make a mess of everything, unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s what I’m working on now.”
“Debugging?”
“That’s what I call it. There’s no real word for it yet.”
Oh yes there is. Aloud: “Go on.”
Jasmine Fitzgerald sighs, her eyes closed. “I don’t expect you to believe this under the circumstances, but I really loved him. No: I love him.” Her breath comes out in a soft snort, a whispered laugh. “There I go again. That bloody past tense.”
“Tell me about debugging.”
“I don’t think you’re up for it, Myles. I don’t even think you’re all that interested.” Her eyes open, point directly at him. “But for the record, Stu was dying. I tried to save him. I failed. Next time I’ll do better, and better still the time after that, and eventually I’ll get it right.”
“And what happens then?” Thomas says.
“Through your eyes or mine?”
“Yours.”
“I repair the glitches in the string. Or if it’s easier, I replicate an undamaged version of the subroutine and insert it back into the main loop. Same difference.”
“Uh huh. And what would I see?”
She shrugs. “Stu rising from the dead.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Spread out across the table, the mind of Jasmine Fitzgerald winks back from pages of standardised questions. Somewhere in here, presumably, is a monster.
These are the tools used to dissect human psyches. The WAIS. The MMPI. The PDI. Hammers, all of them. Blunt chisels posing as microtomes. A copy of the DSM-IV sits off to one side, a fat paperback volume of symptoms and pathologies. A matrix of pigeonholes. Perhaps Fitzgerald fits into one of them. Intermittent Explosive, maybe? Battered Woman? Garden-variety Sociopath?
The test results are inconclusive. It’s as though she’s laughing up from the page at him. True or false: I sometimes hear voices that no one else hears. False, she’s checked. I have been feeling unusually depressed lately. False. Sometimes I get so angry I feel like hitting something. True, and a hand-written note in the margin: Hey, doesn’t everyone?
There are snares sprinkled throughout these tests, linked questions designed to catch liars in subtle traps of self-contradiction. Jasmine Fitzgerald has avoided them all. Is she unusually honest? Is she too smart for the tests? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that—
Wait a second.
Who was Louis Pasteur? asks the WAIS, trying to get a handle on educational background.
A virus, Fitzgerald said.
Back up the list. Here’s another one, on the previous page: Who was Winston Churchill? And again: a virus.
And fifteen questions before that: Who was Florence Nightingale?
A famous nurse, Fitzgerald responded to that one. And her responses to all previous questions on historical personalities are unremarkably correct. But everyone after Nightingale is a virus.
Killing a virus is no sin. You can do it with an utterly clear conscience. Maybe she’s redefining the nature of her act. Maybe that’s how she manages to live with herself these days.
Just as well. That raising-the-dead shtick didn’t cut any ice at all.
She’s slumped across the table when he enters, her head resting on folded arms. Thomas clears his throat. “Jasmine.”
No response. He reaches out, touches her lightly on the shoulder. Her head comes up, a fluid motion containing no hint of grogginess. She settles back into her chair and smiles. “Welcome back. So, am I crazy or what?”
Thomas smiles back and sits down across from her. “We try to avoid prejudicial terms.”
“Hey, I can take it. I’m not prone to tantrums.”
A picture flashes across the front of his mind: beloved husband, entrails spread-eagled like butterfly wings against a linoleum grid. Of course not. No tantrums for you. We need a whole new word to describe what it is you do.
“Debugging,” wasn’t it?
“I was going over your test results,” he begins.
“Did I pass?”
“It’s not that kind of test. But I was intrigued by some of your answers."
She purses her lips. “Good.”
“Tell me about viruses.”
That sunny smile again. “Sure. Mutable information strings that can’t replicate without hijacking external source code.”
“Go on.”
“Ever hear of Core Wars?”
“No.”
“Back in the early eighties some guys got together and wrote a bunch of self-replicating computer programs. The idea was to put them into the same block of memory and have them compete for space. They all had their own little tricks for self-defence and reproduction and, of course, eating the competition.”