She’s running, he thought, fascinated. My words did that to her.
I make waves in the air and a million nerves light up her brain like sheet lightning. How many ops/sec happening in there? How many switches opening, closing, rerouting, until some of that electricity runs down her arm and makes her hand turn the doorknob?
He watched her intricate machinery close the door behind itself.
She’s gone, he thought. I’ve won again.
Wescott watched Hamilton strap the chimp onto the table and attach the leads to its scalp. The chimp was used to the procedure; it had been subject to such indignities on previous occasions, and had always survived in good health and good spirits. There was no reason for it to expect anything different this time.
As Hamilton snugged the straps, the smaller primate stiffened and hissed.
Wescott studied a nearby monitor. “Damn, it’s nervous.”
Cortical tracings, normally languorous, scrambled across the screen in epileptic spasms. “We can’t start until it calms down. Unless it calms down. Shit. This could scotch the whole recording.”
Hamilton pulled one of the restraints a notch tighter. The chimp, its back pulled flat against the table, flexed once and went suddenli limp.
Wescott looked back at the screen. “Okay, it’s relaxing.
Showtime, Pete; you’re on in about thirty seconds.”
Hamilton held up the hypo. “Ready.”
“Okay, getting baseline—now. Fire when ready.”
Needle slid into flesh. Wescott reflected on the obvious unhumanity of the thing on the table; too small and hairy, all bow legs and elongate simian arms. A machine. That’s all it is.
Potassium ions jumping around in a very compact telephone switchboard.
But the eyes, when he slipped and looked at them, looked back.
“Midbrain signature in fifty seconds,” Wescott read off. “Give or take ten.”
“Okay,” Hamilton said. “It’s going through the tunnel.”
Just a machine, running out of fuel. A few nerves sputter and the system thinks it sees lights, feels motion—
“There. Thalamus,” Hamilton reported. “Right on time. Now it’s in the ret.” A pause. “Neocortex, now. Same damn thing every time.”
Wescott didn’t look. He knew the pattern. He had seen its handwriting in the brains of a half a dozen species, watched that same familiar cipher scurry through dying minds in hospital beds and operating theatres and the twisted wreckage of convenient automobiles. By now he didn’t even need the machines to see it.
He only had to look at the eyes.
Once, in a moment of reckless undiscipline, he’d wondered if he were witnessing the flight of the soul, come crawling to the surface of the mind like an earthworm flushed by heavy rains. Another time he’d thought he might have captured the EEG of the Grim Reaper.
He no longer allowed himself such unbridled licence. Now he only stared at the widening pupils within those eyes, and heard the final panicked bleating of the cardiac monitor.
Something behind the eyes went out.
What were you? he wondered.
“Dunno yet,” Hamilton said beside him. “But another week, two at the outside, and we’ve got it nailed.”
Wescott blinked.
Hamilton started unstrapping the carcass. After a moment he looked up. “Russ?”
“It knew.” Wescott stared at the monitor, all flat lines and static now.
“Yeah.” Hamilton shrugged. “I wish I knew what tips them off sometimes. Save a lot of time.” He dumped the chimp’s body into a plastic bag. Its dilated pupils stared out at Wescott in a grotesque parody of human astonishment.
“—Russ? You okay?”
He blinked; the dead eyes lost control. Wescott looked up and saw Hamilton watching him with a strange expression.
“Sure,” he said easily. “Never better.”
There was this cage. Something moved inside that he almost recognised, a small furred body that looked familiar. But up close he could see his mistake. It was only a wax dummy, or maybe an embalmed specimen the undergrads hadn’t got to yet. There were tubes running into it at odd places, carrying sluggish aliquots of yellow fluid. The specimen jaundiced, bloated as he watched. He reached through the bars of the cage . . . he could do that somehow, even though the gaps were only a few centimeters wide . . . and touched the thing inside. Its eyes opened and stared past him, blank and blind with pain; and their pupils were not vertical as he had expected, but round and utterly human . . .
He felt her awaken in the night beside him, and not move.
He didn’t have to look. He heard the change in her breathing, could almost feel her systems firing up, her eyes locking onto him in the near-darkness. He lay on his back, looking up at a ceiling full of shadow, and did not acknowledge her.
He turned his face to stare at the faint grey light leaking through the window. Straining, he could just hear distant city sounds.
He wondered, for a moment, if she hurt as much as he did; then realised that there was no contest. The strongest pain he could summon was mere aftertaste.
“I called the vet today,” he said. “She said they didn’t need my consent. They didn’t need me there at all. They would have shut Zombie down the moment you brought him in, only you told them not to.”
Still she did not move.
“So you lied. You fixed it so I’d have to be there, watching one more piece of my life getting—” he took a breath, “—chipped away—”
At last she spoke: “Russ—”
“But you don’t hate me. So why would you put me through that? You must have thought it would be good for me, somehow.”
“Russ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely true,” he remarked.
“No. I guess not.” Then, almost hopefully, “It did hurt, didn’t it?”
He blinked against a brief stinging in his eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think, nine years ago I moved in with the most caring, humane person I’d ever known. And two days ago I didn’t know if he’d give a damn about the death of a pet he’d had for eighteen years. I really didn’t know, Russ, and I’m sorry but I had to find out. Does that make sense?”
He tried to remember. “I think you were wrong from the start. I think you gave me too much credit nine years ago.”
He felt her head shake. “Russ, after Carol died I was afraid you were going to. I remember hoping I’d never be able to hurt that much over another human being. I fell in love with you because you could.”
“Oh, I loved her all right. Tens of thousands of dollars worth at least. Never did get around to figuring out her final worth.”
“That’s not why you did it! You remember how she was suffering!”
“Actually, no. She had all those—painkillers, cruising through her system. That’s what they told me. By the time they started cutting pieces out of her she was—numb . . .”
“Russ, I was there too. They said there was no hope, she was in constant pain, they said she’d want to die—”
“Oh yes. Later, that’s what they said. When it was time to decide. Because they knew . . .”
He stopped.
“They knew,” he said again, “what I wanted to hear.”
Beside him, Lynne grew very still.
He laughed once, softly. “I shouldn’t have been so easy to convince, though. I knew better. We’re not hardwired for Death with Dignity; life’s been kicking and clawing and doing anything it can to take a few more breaths, for over three billion years. You can’t just decide to turn yourself off.”