The receptionist smiled brightly. ‘I beg your pardon, Ms Simling, was there something else you wanted?’
I think she’d been wiped clean recently. Her reactions were a little wooden.
Dr Hammer arrived soon after. He was a young man, about my own age.
‘Ms Simling? Pleased to meet you. If you’d like to step in here. Do you want your husband to join us?’
He meant me. I looked older, after all, than the beautiful redhead. We followed him into a small interview room.
‘I was hoping to contact you before you left SenSpace.’ Dr Hammer was anxious and tense. ‘You see, I wanted to have a proper discussion with you this step you’re proposing to take. I mean… are you aware of the consequences? There’s no question at all of survival for anything other than the briefest of…’
‘I understand all that.’
‘Obviously I have reviewed your medical records. Being in body maintenance doesn’t confer immortality of course, but the fact is that your body is really very stable. We are quite confident that all unstable tissues and organs have been identified and attended to. Where surrogate organs have had to be provided they are coping very well. In particular the cyber-neurological interface is absolutely stable and is presenting no problems whatever, whether immunological or neural. You’re looking at a body that has another ten, twenty, maybe even thirty more years of life in it.’
‘Have you tried living in SenSpace?’
‘Well, no, but I’ve visited SenSpace many times of course.’
‘Well, I’m tired of it.’
‘But surely the whole point of SenSpace is that it offers choice? If you don’t like what you find, you can always change it for something else.’
‘Well, I’m exercising choice.’
‘I see.’
The doctor turned to me for a moment, as if wondering whether it was worth appealing to me instead. I must have looked unmoveable, because he turned back to Ruth:
‘Another thing, Ms Simling. I don’t quite know what you’re expecting, but your body now isn’t the same as the body you left behind. It’s functional of course, but…’
When the lid came off, Ruth’s vehicle gave a little cry. The thing within had no arms and no legs, no intestines or pelvis or lower abdomen. Its face was an eyeless mask. Wires fed into the hollow eye sockets where hemispherical screens had been implanted against the retinae. The mouth also gaped open to admit a mass of wires and tubes. The teeth had been removed for convenience and in place of hair were thousands of fine wires that pierced through into the skull.
The thing’s torso was enclosed in a transparent box of hard plastic, out of the top of which protruded the head, itself covered in a transparent plastic membrane. On the outside of this box was a radio transmitter and an electric pump. There was a yellow plastic nozzle sticking out from the lungs through which the thing noisily breathed, completely by-passing the throat. The front of the body cavity had no cover other than the hard plastic shell, no skin or bone or muscle, so you could look through and see the organs within: the dark liver, the pulsing heart, the lungs rhythmically swelling and contracting like an empty crisp packet inflated and deflated by a child.
The heart and lungs were the only things that moved.
‘As I say,’ said Dr Hammer with a certain grim satisfaction, ‘not a pretty sight I’m afraid.’
Ruth ignored this. She just stared into the box where the thing lay.
‘Is this really the heart that keeps me alive?’
‘That’s right,’ said Dr Hammer, ‘though if we were ever to detect any sign of deterioration in your heart or lungs, we could very quickly substitute a CIRC unit which would serve equally well.’
He paused, his face becoming slightly prim.
‘But as your heart and lungs are doing just fine,’ he said, ‘we’ve left them in place. We do try not to be unnecessarily interventionist.’
‘And is it really inside this head,’ said Ruth, ‘that all these thoughts of mine are going on?’
‘Absolutely. You see these various wires are either linked to the main sense organs or directly to the sensory and motor centres in your brain. And then they are all linked via this radio transmitter here with the SenSpace web, which of course in turn is now linked to the Vehicle which you’re now…’
The doctor broke off. Ruth was obviously not listening to him.
‘As I say,’ he tried again, ‘it does all look a bit gruesome at first sight I know. But it’s only a matter of…’
Ruth – Ruth’s Vehicle – suddenly turned a radiant smile upon him.
‘It’s beautiful!’ she said, ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!’
73
So we left the Facility with Ruth carrying her own true self in its plastic case. She had wrapped it in a blanket and carried it like a baby. We got back into the car and I drove us down the coast to that little cove of Aghios Constantinos.
We parked the car on the road and walked through the olive groves until we were overlooking the sea. Then Ruth sat down with her back against a tree-trunk and unwrapped the body. With so much of its lower half missing and with no limbs, it was really no bigger than a small child. She cradled it in her arms. Its breath whistled in and out of the nozzle sticking out of its chest. The electric pump faintly hummed. The heart throbbed steadily beneath her surrogate hand.
I sat against another tree and watched her. I wondered whether she had ever cradled me like she cradled that mutilated thing?
‘It can’t survive more than two hours,’ Dr Hammer’s parting words had been. (By ‘it’ he meant the body of course. He would have referred to the syntec vehicle as ‘she’).
He had been hoping no doubt that reason would still prevail in time and that Ruth would return her body and resume her carefree life in SenSpace.
‘Not more than two hours at the outside,’ he had repeated.
After an hour or so had passed, Ruth lay the strange bundle carefully on the ground and took from me the garden trowel we had bought earlier. She found a suitable spot between the olive trees and began to dig.
It was a cheap trowel and the earth was hard and stony. When the job was only halfway done, the handle broke off. Ruth swore. She threw away the useless handle and began to dig with her hands. Time was running out for her. I offered to help but she swore at me too, savagely, like a snarling dog. She tore at the dry stony earth with those clumsy syntec hands until the flesh came away in bloody strips from the plastic fingers.
Finally she was satisfied. She turned aside from the shallow hole and gently picked up the box of organs and flesh. Then she pulled awkwardly with her broken fingers at the plastic skin covering the face – if you can call such a thing a face. And when one cheek was open to the air, she bent and kissed the moist and pallid skin…
…and at the same moment as she gave the kiss, she felt it – the warm lips of some unseen being touching her gently on the cheek.
Ruth smiled and placed the bundle carefully into the hole she had dug for it, covering it up again with a mound of earth – just leaving the breathing nozzle sticking out, so she could fade away rather than suffocate.
And that was the last that the world saw of little Ruth Simling, who it had never noticed much, preferring as she did the company of machines, and the safety of solitude.
But she was to speak one more time.
When she had finished her work, Ruth’s redheaded vehicle lay down beside the mound with one arm protectively draped over her own grave, and waited. Two hours had gone by now and nutrient levels were very low in the blood that still pulsed around beneath the soil, but Ruth was still, just, awake.