Flesh Made Word
by Peter Watts
This was my second sale, to a small Canadian mag called “Prairie Fire” back in 1994. Think “Max Headroom” meets “Terms of Endearment”. A lot of people seem to like it, although I keep wondering if it isn’t a teeny bit wet. It does, after all, involve a dead cat; so I post it here in memory of the recently-departed Cygnus T.
Flesh Made Word
Wescott was glad when it finally stopped breathing.
It had taken hours, this time. He had waited while it wheezed out thick putrid smells, chest heaving and gurgling and filling the room with stubborn reminders that it was only dying, not yet dead, not yet. He had been patient. After ten years, he had learned to be patient; and now, finally, the thing on the table was giving up.
Something moved behind him. He turned, irritated; the dying hear better than the living, a single spoken word could ruin hours of observation. But it was only Lynne, slipping quietly into the room. Wescott relaxed. Lynne knew the rules.
For a moment he even wondered why she was there.
Wescott turned back to the body. Its chest had stopped moving.
Sixty seconds, he guessed. Plus or minus ten.
It was already dead by any practical definition. But there were still a few embers inside, a few sluggish nerves twitching in a brain choked with dead circuitry. Wescott’s machines showed him the landscape of that dying mind: a topography of luminous filaments, eroding as he watched.
The cardiac thread shuddered and lay still.
Thirty seconds. Give or take five. The qualifiers came automatically. There is no truth. There are no facts. There is only the envelope of the confidence interval.
He could feel Lynne waiting invisibly behind him.
Wescott glanced at the table for a moment, looked away again; the lid over one sunken eye had crept open a crack. He could almost imagine he had seen nothing looking out.
Something changed on the monitors. Here it comes . . .
He didn’t know why it scared him. They were only nerve impulses, after all; a fleeting ripple of electricity, barely detectable, passing from midbrain to cortex to oblivion. Just another bunch of doomed neurons, gasping.
And now there was only flesh, still warm. A dozen lines lay flat on the monitors. Wescott leaned over and checked the leads connecting meat to machine.
“Dead at nineteen forty-three,” he said into his recorder. The machines, intelligent in their own way, began to shut themselves down. Wescott studied the dead face, peeled back the unclenched eyelid with a pair of forceps. The static pupil beneath stared past him, fixed at infinity.
You took the news well, Wescott thought.
He remembered Lynne. She was standing to one side, her face averted.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is never a good time, but it’s—”
He waited.
“It’s Zombie,” she went on. “There was an accident, Russ, he wandered out on the road and—and I took him into the vet’s and she says he’s too badly hurt but she won’t put him to sleep without your consent, you never listed me as an owner—”
She stopped, like a flash flood ending.
He looked down at the floor. “Put him to sleep?”
“She said it’s almost certain anything they tried wouldn’t work, it would cost thousands and he’d probably die anyway—”
“You mean kill him. She won’t kill him without my consent.”
Wescott began stripping the leads from the cadaver, lining them up on their brackets. They hung there like leeches, their suckers slimy with conductant.
“—and all I could think was, after eighteen years he shouldn’t die alone, someone should be there with him, but I can’t, you know, I just—”
Somewhere at the base of his skull, a tiny voice cried out My Christ don’t I go through enough of this shit without having to watch it happen to my own cat? But it was very far away, and he could barely hear it.
He looked at the table. The corpse stared it’s cyclopean stare.
“Sure,” Wescott said after a moment. “I’ll take care of it.” He allowed himself a half-smile. “All in a day’s work.”
The workstation sat in one corner of the living room, an ebony cube of tinted perspex, and for the past ten years it had spoken to him in Carol’s voice. That had hurt at first, so much that he had nearly changed the program; but he had fought the urge, and beaten it, and endured the synthetic familiarity of her voice like a man doing penance for some great sin. Somewhere in the past decade the pain had faded below the level of conscious recognition. Now he heard it list the day’s mail, and felt nothing.
“Jason Mosby called again from Southam,” it said, catching Carol’s intonation perfectly. “He s-still wants to interview you. He left a conversational program in my stack. You can run it any time you want.”
“What else?”
“Zombie’s collar stopped transmitting at nine sixteen, and Zombie didn’t s-show up for his afternoon feed. Y-You might want to call around.”
“Zombie’s gone,” he said.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, I mean—” Christ, Carol. You never were much for euphemisms, were you? “Zombie got hit by a car. He’s dead.”
Even when we tried using them on you.
“Oh. Shit.” The computer paused a moment, some internal clock counting off a precise number of nanosecs. “I’m sorry, Russ.”
It was a lie, of course, but a fairly convincing one all the same.
Outside, Wescott smiled faintly. “It happens. Just a matter of time for all of us.”
There was a sound from behind. He turned away from the cube; Lynne stood in the doorway. He could see sympathy in her eyes, and something else.
“Russ,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He felt a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “So’s the computer.”
“How are you feeling?”
He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”
“I doubt it. You had him all those years.”
“Yeah. I — miss him.” There was a hard knot of vacuum in his throat. He examined the feeling, distantly amazed, and almost felt a kind of gratitude.
She padded across the room to him, took his hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the end, Russ. It was all I could do to take him in. I just couldn’t, you know—”
“It’s okay,” Wescott said.
“—and you had to be there anyway, you—”
“It’s okay,” he said again.
Lynne straightened and rubbed one hand across her cheek.
“Would you rather not talk about it?” Which meant, of course, I want to talk about it.
He wondered what he could say that wouldn’t be utterly predictable: and realised that he could afford to tell the truth.
“I was thinking,” he said, “he had it coming to him.”
Lynne blinked.
“I mean, he’d spread enough carnage on his own. Remember how every couple of days he’d bring in a wounded vole or a bird, and I never let him actually kill any of them—”
“You didn’t want to see anything suffer,” Lynne said.
“—so I’d kill them myself.” One blow with a hammer, brains scrambled instantly, nothing left that could suffer after that. “I always spoiled his fun. It’s such a drag having to play with dead things, he’d bitch at me for hours . . .”
She smiled sadly. “He was suffering, Russ. He wanted to die. I know you loved the little ingrate, we both did.”
Something flared where the vacuum had been. “It’s okay, Lynne. I watch people die all the time, remember? I’m in no great need of therapy over a fucking cat. And if I was, you could—”