She slid an arm across his chest. “People turn themselves off all the time, Russ. Too often. You know that.”
He didn’t answer. A distant siren poisoned the emptiness.
“Not Carol,” he said after a while. “I sort of made that decision for her.”
Lynne put her head on his shoulder. “And you’ve spent ten years trying to find out if you guessed right. But they’re not her, Russ, all the people you’ve recorded, all the animals you’ve . . . put down, they’re not her—”
“No. They’re not.” He closed his eyes. “They don’t linger on month after month. They don’t . . . shrivel up . . . you know they’re going to die, and it’s always quick, you don’t have to come in day after day, watching them change into something that, that rattles every time it breathes, that doesn’t even know who you are and you wish it would just—”
Wescott opened his eyes.
“I keep forgetting what you do for a living,” he said.
“Russ—”
He looked over at her, calmly. “Why are you doing this to me?
You think I haven’t already been over it enough?”
“Russ, I’m only—”
“Because it won’t work, you know. It’s too late. It took long enough, but I know how the mind works now, and you know what?
It’s nothing special after all. It’s not spiritual, it’s not even quantum. It’s just a bunch of switches wired together. So it doesn’t matter if people can’t speak their minds. Pretty soon I’ll be able to read them.”
His voice was level and reasoned. He kept his eyes on the ceiling; the darkened light fixture there seemed to waver before his eyes. He blinked, and the room swam suddenly out of focus.
She reached up to touch the wetness on his face. “It scares you,” she whispered. “You’ve been chasing it for ten years and you’ve almost got it and it scares the shit out of you.”
He smiled and wouldn’t look at her. “No. That isn’t it at all.”
“What, then?”
He took a breath. “I just realised. I don’t care one way or the other any more.”
He came home, clutching the printout, and knew from the sudden emptiness of the apartment that he had been defeated here as well.
The workstation slept in its corner. Several fitful readouts twinkled on one of its faces, a sparse autonomic mosaic. He walked towards it; and halfway there one face of the cube flashed to life.
Lynne, from the shoulders up, looked out at him from the screen.
Wescott glanced around the room. He almost called out.
On the cube, Lynne’s lips moved. “Hello, Russ,” they said.
He managed a short laugh. “Never thought I’d see you in there.”
“I finally tried one of these things. You were right, they’ve come a long way in ten years.”
“You’re a real simulation? Not just a fancy conversational routine?”
“Uh huh. It’s pretty amazing. It ate all sorts of video footage, and all my medical and academic records, and then I had to talk with it until it got a feel for who I was.”
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 acetycholinesterase 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 3-d 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 recreate 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 . . .”