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 algorithms’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.”