"Stealing my drugs?" Caroline repeated stupidly.
"For many years. This is the reason you were in so much pain, and also why you nearly died when this institution gave you real morphine."
"Go away." It went away.
Was anything real? The one constant in her later life had been AnneMarie's steady presence. She hadn't wanted to disappoint AnneMarie by dying on her. Her family drifted in and out of her life like shades, but AnneMarie had always been there, changing her diapers when she soiled herself, feeding her when her muscles wouldn't work right, and carefully turning her when she was too weak to move.
Caroline felt as if her insides were dissolving, then all at once she let out a terrible wail of anger and despair. Then she began sobbing, great heaving sobs which echoed down the halls. The emotions seemed to erupt from her like the explosions of a volcano. Most of the staff had gone home forever by that time, but the few remaining discreetly kept their distance while Caroline cried. It wasn't hard for them to figure out what Caroline had learned.
Finally the sobbing subsided, and an eerie quiet settled on Caroline's room. After a few hours the nurse with the nose ring timidly knocked on her door, then entered. Caroline was gone. The nurse asked Prime Intellect where she had gone, and it would only say: Home.
She had gone to Arkansas.
Prime Intellect understood despair the way humans understand digital logic. That is, it couldn't experience the emotion, but it could work out causes and effects based on general rules of human behavior. So Prime Intellect wasn't surprised (an emotion Lawrence had built into it) at Caroline's reaction.
When Caroline asked to go home, Prime Intellect skipped a long list of questions about specifics and simply acted. It could always change things if it had guessed wrong. So it built her a tidy cabin in the Ozark mountains, miles from any roads or neighbors, atop a ridge with a beautiful view. It turned out to be less than forty miles from the place Caroline had been born. It furnished the cabin conservatively and stocked the freezer and pantry so that Caroline would not need to ask about food for at least a month.
A lot of people wanted to go to Arkansas, but Caroline had priority. She got the real Arkansas, not a New Arkansas on another planet.
The surroundings seemed to have the right effect, at least at first. Caroline calmed down and sighed when she saw the view. Since her eyesight had begun to fail in her seventies, she hadn't been able to appreciate such a panoramic view. She spent a long time standing on the cabin's porch, looking. Then she went inside and ate. There was a TV set. Caroline shook her head and laughed at that. Who would bother to produce TV shows now? Or maybe every half-baked artist wannabe could now produce a TV show, and jam up five hundred channels with redundant worthless dreck.
"Nobody has any idea what's going on," she finally said aloud.
The view beckoned. She was young, healthy, watched over by a powerful god who would let no harm come to her, and she had nothing else to do. She made no plans or preparations; she simply walked off into the thick forest. She never came back to the cabin again.
Walking cleared her head.
It was hard for Caroline to think through the ramifications of her renewed youth. She tried often, but it all came back to this sick sense of despair and rage and futility. Why wasn't she grateful? That was what she couldn't figure out. She didn't feel grateful. She felt cheated.
She had worked hard her entire life. She had borne six children and raised them up, fed them, cleaned and kept house for them, and watched all six of them go on to raise families of their own. She had once believed children were the most important thing in the world, because they were the future. But now the future didn't need children; she herself had been reborn as a child. What then had been the purpose of all those years of work? What were her children and grandchildren going to do?
She had taught them to educate themselves and watched three put themselves through college. She had thought that was important because it was Man's nature to strive upward, to create things, to better himself and to build for the future. But now the future was here. There was nothing she had ever envisioned, nothing at all, which she could not have instantly with a snap of her fingers. Even that little cabin, which would once have pleased her so much, seemed pointless.
Caroline was wearing a plain white cotton dress. On impulse, she slipped it over her head and looked at her body.
After decades of declining spinsterhood, she was once again a creature who could turn men's heads. She had been faithful to both of her husbands and had never indulged herself sexually, although she had been a beautiful young girl once before with plenty of opportunities. She had considered her family and her virtue more important. She had controlled that base desire, which she was beginning to feel again after years of absence, for the greater good of her loved ones and her society.
But now she could have anything she wanted, and there was no risk. She would catch no disease, she would not get pregnant unless she literally asked for it. Even the act of sex itself was now pointless, except that she could feel the urge returning, mindless and passionate. Like Prime Intellect, she was programmed to do certain things.
She knew that in this strange false second life there would be no faithfulness, no love, no children. Those things had been burned away. They belonged to a nonexistent world.
Perhaps if she gave her body indiscriminately to men, if she drank deep when that animal urge came on her, perhaps all this bullshit would seem more real. There was no longer any reason to be cautious about it.
She looked at the dress. It had seemed pretty and simple, but now it looked pathetic draped formlessly across a low branch. Nothing but a rag. Why did people wear clothes? For protection? The thin dress offered little, but with Prime Intellect watching, there was no need for even that. Modesty? All the noble goals had been discarded or achieved. There was nothing to distract anybody from. Let them look at her body. Let them want her. Let them take her! Law? What would they do, put her in jail for indecent exposure? This thought made her laugh, and some of the tension and rage seemed to melt away. She laughed hard and long and almost hysterically, until the laughter dissolved into a thin stream of giggles.
Caroline left the dress and kept walking. Being so exposed made her feel strangely bouyant. She could be like an animal in the forest, she mused. They didn't worry about the future either. They simply existed. Perhaps she would encounter a male animal and they would fuck, and her body would tell her that everything was all right. And as she thought this, she walked a little faster and began to hum a little tune.
Prime Intellect paid very close attention to Caroline while she lived in the Ozark forest. She ate whatever was handy, without worrying whether it was poison or not. She was not careful, and there were dangers. It theorized that this return to primitivity was a part of her psychological healing process, and did not want to interfere. But it also knew that if everybody followed her example, it would have a serious problem keeping up. Some suicides were already slipping through its net, and it worried that Caroline might become one of them. And it knew that if the garden inmates were loosed upon the world, they would find ways to slip murder past its attention too.
For that matter, not all of the people who needed to be in gardens had been found and put in gardens yet. Every day a few more murders were attempted, and while they were easier to thwart than suicides it was by no means certain that Prime Intellect would always catch them in time.