And who is that? he wondered absently.
“It changed right there while I was talking to it, Russ. It was really spooky. It started out in this dead monotone, and as we talked it started mimicking my voice, and my mannerisms, and in a little while it sounded just like me, and here it is. It went from machine to human in about four hours.”
He smiled, not easily, because he knew what was coming next.
“It—actually, it was a bit like watching a time-lapse video of you over the past few years,” the model said. “Played backwards.”
He kept his voice exactly level. “You’re not coming home.”
“Sure I am, Russ. Only home isn’t here any more. I wish it were, you don’t know how badly I wish it were, but you just can’t let it go and I can’t live with that any more.”
“You still don’t understand. It’s just a program that happens to sound like Carol did. It’s nothing. I’ll—wipe it if it’s that important to you—”
“That’s not all I’m talking about, Russ.”
He thought of asking for details, and didn’t.
“Lynne—” he began.
Her mouth widened. It wasn’t a smile. “Don’t ask, Russ. I can’t come back until you do.”
“But I’m right here!”
She shook her head. “The last time I saw Russ Wescott, he cried. Just a little. And I think—I think he’s been hunting something for ten years, and he finally caught a glimpse of it and it was too big, so he went away and left some sort of autopilot in charge. And I don’t blame him, and you’re a very good likeness, really you are but there’s nothing in you that knows how to feel.”
Wescott thought of acetylcholinesterase and endogenous opioids. “You’re wrong, Carol. I know more about feelings than almost anyone in the world.”
On the screen, Lynne’s proxy sighed through a faint smile.
The simulation was wearing new earrings; they looked like antique printed circuits. Wescott wanted to comment on them, to compliment or criticise or do anything to force the conversation into less dangerous territory. But he was afraid that she had worn them for years and he just hadn’t noticed, so he said nothing.
“Why couldn’t you tell me yourself?” he said at last. “Don’t I deserve that much? Why couldn’t you at least leave me in person?”
“This is in person, Russ. It’s as in person as you ever let anyone get with you any more.”
“That’s bullshit! Did I ask you to go out and get yourself simmed? You think I see you as some sort of cartoon? My Christ, Lynne—”
“I don’t take it personally, Russ. We’re all cartoons as far as you’re concerned.”
“What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”
“I don’t blame you, really. Why learn 3D chess when you can reduce it down to tic-tac-toe? You understand it perfectly, and you always win. Except it isn’t that much fun to play, of course…”
“Lynne—”
“Your models only simplify reality, Russ. They don’t re-create it.”
Wescott remembered the printout in his hand. “Sure they do. Enough of it, anyway.”
“So.” The image looked down for a moment. Uncanny, the way it fakes and breaks eye contact like that—“You have your answer.”
“We have the answer. Me, and a few terabytes of software, and a bunch of colleagues, Lynne. People. Who work with me, face to face.”
She looked up again, and Wescott was amazed that the program had even mimicked the sudden sad brightness her eyes would have had in that moment. “So what’s the answer? What’s at the end of the tunnel?”
He shrugged. “Not much, after all. An anticlimax.”
“I hope it was more than that, Russ. It killed us.”
“Or it could’ve just been an artefact of the procedure. The old observer effect, maybe. Common sense could have told us as much, I could’ve saved myself the—”
“Russ.”
He didn’t look at the screen.
“There’s nothing down there at all,” he said, finally. “Nothing that thinks. I never liked it down there, it’s all just…raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it’s just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can’t be bothered with. I never even considered that it might still be somehow…alive…”
His voice trailed off. Lynne’s ghost waited silently, perhaps unequipped to respond. Perhaps programmed not to.
“You die from the outside in, did you know that?” he said, when the silence hurt more than the words. “And then, just for a moment, the center is all you are again. And down there, nobody wants to…you know, even the suicides, they were just fooling themselves. Intellectual games. We’re so fucking proud of thinking ourselves to death that we’ve forgotten all about the old reptilian part sleeping inside, the part that doesn’t calculate ethics or quality of life or burdens on the next of kin, it just wants to live, that’s all it’s programmed for, you know? And at the very end, when we aren’t around to keep it in line any more, it comes up and looks around and at that last moment it knows it’s been betrayed, and it…screams…”
He thought he heard someone speak his name, but he didn’t look up to find out.
“That’s what we always found,” he said. “Something waking up after a hundred million years, scared to death…”
His words hung there in front of him.
“You don’t know that.” Her voice was distant, barely familiar, with a sudden urgency to it. “You said yourself it could be an artefact. She might not have felt that way at all, Russ. You don’t have the data.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “Wetware always dies the same way—”
He looked up at the screen.
And the image was for Chrissakes crying, phosphorescent tears on artificial cheeks in some obscene parody of what Lynne would do if she had been there. Wescott felt sudden hatred for the software that wept for him, for the intimacy of its machine intuition, for the precision of its forgery. For the simple fact that it knew her.
“No big deal,” he said. “Like I said, an anticlimax. Anyhow, I suppose you have to go back and report to your—body—”
“I can stay if you want. I know how hard this must be for you, Russ—”
“No you don’t.” Wescott smiled. “Lynne might have. You’re just accessing a psych database somewhere. Good try, though.”
“I don’t have to go, Russ—”
“Hey, that’s not who I am any more. Remember?”
“—we can keep talking if you want.”
“Right. A dialogue between a caricature and an autopilot.”
“I don’t have to leave right away.”
“Your algorithm’s showing,” he said, still smiling. And then, tersely: “Stop.”
The cube darkened.
“Do y-ou want to cancel the program or just suspend it?” Carol asked.
He stood there for a while without answering, staring into that black featureless cube of perspex. He could see nothing inside but his own reflection.
“Cancel,” he said at last. “And delete.”
NIMBUS
She’s been out there for hours now, listening to the clouds. I can see the RadioShack receiver balanced on her knees, I can see the headphone wires snaking up and cutting her off from the world. Or connecting her, I suppose. Jess is hooked into the sky now, in a way I’ll never be. She can hear it talking. The clouds advance, threatening gray anvils and mountains boiling in ominous slow motion, and the ’phones fill her head with alien grumbles and moans.