Lentz addressed her plate. "Here we go, wife. Have a bite."
But he would not feed her. He picked up the spoon. Dried it off. Put it back in her hand. Pointed out the path from bowl to mouth. Supervised training. No good unless she worked out the specifics herself.
"She's getting worse," Lentz observed.
"It's an off day." Cheery Constance.
After lunch, Lentz suggested a stroll around the grounds.
"It's too cold for her," Constance said.
"Is it too cold for you, Audrey?" Lentz asked.
Audrey stood at attention and studied her shoes. "Oh, call it by some better name," she said, "for friendship sounds too cold."
Lentz chuckled and hugged her. She hugged him back, laughing. "The database is still intact," he pronounced. "As is the retrieval. It's just meaning that's gone. Huh, wife?"
"Just meaning," she echoed him, shy and uncertain again.
Lentz bought Constance off, and he, his wife, and I paced the corridors of the home. Clean, discreet, and genteel. As harrowing as a gothic nightmare. I looked away, to keep the scene from imprinting.
Lentz, on the other hand, rallied in the face of numbers. "Radical reductionism at its finest," he narrated, waving down one of the catacombs where the soulless shuffled. "Age, disease, death. Big problems, in need of isolation and solution. Well, we've handled it. If not eliminated from theory, at least from practice. Consider the project all but accomplished."
"Well, I'll be." Audrey shook her head in bewildered amusement. "Everybody has something to say!" She crooked a thumb at her husband, shrugged at his ludicrousness, and winked at me. "Isn't that right?" The gesture still indexed the woman she was, once.
"Increasing control over all the variables. Divide and conquer. Max out the activity or do away with it. Future tech. That's what science is all about, Marcel. Efficiency. Productivity. Total immunity. Regeneration of lost parts. Eternal, ripple-free life, frozen in our early twenties. Or die trying."
"And after?" I found it far easier to chatter back at Lentz than to look at her. To see any of the Audreys staring at me on all sides. "After we solve aging? Won't we still need to convince ourselves of our own sleight of hand?"
"I'm surprised at you, Marcel. That's never been a problem. I thought you made a living doing that."
Audrey, bored, had begun to hum "Amazing Grace" to herself. I battened down under Lentz's rant. I wasn't about to interrupt the man, ever again.
"We've evolved this incredible capacity for lying to ourselves. It's called intellect. Comes with the frontal lobes. In fact, we've gotten so good at the walking-on-water bit that it no longer requires any energetic pretense to keep the act afloat."
He slipped his arm around Audrey's waist. Force of habit. Long years, that would not go away. Either intimacy seemed right to her now, or she did not notice. Maybe she was too bewildered to object.
"And the child?" I asked, free-associating.
Lentz stared at the spot of air my question occupied.
"You know. The one who snapped the picture?" The picture. Could we build a mind that would know what you were talking about, when there was no referent? Lentz would get this one. Audrey could have gotten it, when she was still Audrey.
Lentz's mouth soured, the birth pains of an ironic smile. "Inference, Marcel. Pure speculation."
"But accurate," I bluffed.
He slowed, inhaled. Audrey, confused by the change in cadence, sat down on the hallway floor. Lentz thought to lift her. Then he changed his mind and sat down beside her.
"My daughter has eliminated me. As cleanly as only the daughter of an old reductionist can."
"Why?" I asked, and regretted that single word.
"Apparently" — he held his palms out—"this is all my fault."
Confusion scattered me as fall scatters warblers. I might have been an occupant of that place, stretched out in front of disorientation's hearth. "How…? This is organic, isn't it?" The coded this. Antecedent kept vague, as if we were spelling out words, keeping meaning out of reach of an eavesdropping preschooler. "It's disease, isn't it?"
"Even if that were the etiology, I'd still be held responsible. For one, I was supposed to care for her at home. Forever. But I can't. I—"
His voice broke, taking my equanimity along with it. I didn't want to know another thing about him. "Of course not," I agreed, too rapidly. Efficiency. Productivity. Two lives, to pay for one. I looked away.
'There's more. Jennifer was the one. The one who found Audrey. Just after the event. Cardiovascular accident. You have to love the euphemism. Slumped out on the bathroom tiles. Jennifer went to pieces. You get — what? Three minutes without oxygen before the whole imaginary landscape stops believing in itself? And she called me!”
"What was she supposed—"
"Anything," he snapped. "Nothing, probably. Who knows how long Audrey had been out already? But anything. Pound on the chest. Cough down the windpipe. My daughter was too terrified to touch her own mother. To call emergency dispatch."
"Philip. She was only a child." I don't know what made me assume that.
"She was a college grad. In English. Back at home because she couldn't find work. Not the humanistic encounter that close reading prepares you for. Jennifer panicked, and called me."
"Jenny?" Audrey jerked up. "Someone hurt Jenny?" From her slack mouth arose a wail. The sound flirted playfully for a few seconds before going bloodcurdling.
Lentz put his hands over his eyes. "Maybe it is," he whispered. "Maybe it is my fault."
"Lentz," I managed. Almost a warning.
"There had been an argument that morning. I'd left angry. Audrey was… I didn't want to deal with it. I wasn't answering my phone."
Another scream, a held bellows of hysteria, brought Constance running into the room. Visiting hour, she informed us, was over.
I had my answer. I knew now what we were doing. We would prove that mind was weighted vectors. Such a proof accomplished any number of agendas. Not least of alclass="underline" one could back up one's work in the event of disaster. Surprised at you, Marcel. Took you long enough.
We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two.
Each machine life lived inside the others — nested generations of "remember this." We did not start from scratch with each revision. We took what we had and cobbled onto it. We called that first filial generation B, but it would, perhaps, have better been named A2. E's weights and contours lived inside F's lived inside G's, the way Homer lives on in Swift and Joyce, or Job in Candide or the Invisible Man.
The last release, the version that ran our simulated human, involved but one small firmware change. This one incorporated an essential modification to the bit that had gone too long without an upgrade. The component that had been holding up the show. H was a revision of the trainer.
Imp G became Imp H, in seamless conversion, after I met Audrey Lentz.
Sometimes the phone would ring, or a bell come from the door. A thought would flash through my brain, conditioned for over a decade. Could you get that, sweet? I have my hands full.
It took me until thought's backwash, sometimes, to remember there was no sweet. No one to know how full my hands were, or care.
H was voracious.
"Tell another one," it liked to say to me. I don't know where it got that. Somewhere in one of the canned vignettes — the cliff-hangers about father planting roses or mother calling the doctor — someone had asked someone else to tell them another one. And H latched on to the tag, filed it away as the handiest of magic words. Please, sir. I want some more.