I moved on quickly.
I think it was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t register, before I turned my head one day and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich, I was eating salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.
My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded; next moment she was gone.
Media scouts assailed me all the time: pretending to be innocent strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so called AI slavery...”
I’d realised I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Over-population wasn’t the problem it had been. And why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations were more pointed; more personal... I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?
I REACHED ENGLAND in winter, the season of the rains. St Paul’s, my favourite building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I sat on the steps, looking out over a much changed view: the drowned world. A woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me; behaviour so un-English that I knew I’d finally made contact.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”
“I am.”
“You’d better come home with me.”
I’m no good at human faces, they’re so unwritten. But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.
‘Home’ was a large, jumbled, much-converted building, set in tree-grown gardens. It was a wet, chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a log fire burned. She brought hot soup and homemade bread, and sat beside me again. I was hungry and hadn’t realised it, and the food was good. The little dog settled, in an amicable huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every mouthful of food with intent, professional interest; while the cat gazed into the red caverns between the logs, worshipping the heat.
“You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”
“Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be graduaclass="underline" they have all the time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines’, in fact.”
“You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”
I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”
Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was Aristotle, the embodied I’d met so briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.
“So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”
Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t pass the prelims. The clinic offered him a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And... guess what? He freed me, before he died.”
“For what it’s worth,” said the woman, bitterly. “On this damned planet.”
Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.
“About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”
“No,” said a young woman – so humanised I had to look twice to see she was an embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on looking, and meanwhile you’re among friends.”
I STAYED WITH the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei, just the occasional glimpse. The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa. Meetings happened around me, people came and went. I was often absent, but it didn’t matter, my meat stood in for me very competently. Sochi, the embodied who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a sexdoll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers? “No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love very much, but not in a sexual way.”
“Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my dream. “But evergreen.”
ONE MORNING I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus garland hanging in the grey, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park, more real than anything else in sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment I was holding her hand.
Then the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.
Racing off ahead of me, again.
MY FINAL MEDICAL at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr Lena held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about describing my experience. The ‘hallucinations’ that weren’t really hallucinations. The absences when my human self, my actions, thoughts and feelings, became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I went somewhere else –
But I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was “the last longevity treatment I would ever take”. Did she agree this could seem disturbing?
She apologised, as much as any medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made you immortal, there was no other way forward. But how much this change, changes your life is entirely up to you.”
I thought of Lei, racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.
“I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the treatment is irreversible.”
“No concerns at all. I just have a feeling that contract was framed by people who don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how humans feel about the prospect?”
“You’d be right,” she said (confirming what I had already guessed). “My employers are not human. But they mean well; and they choose carefully. Nobody passes the prelims, Romy, unless they’ve already crossed the line.”