Jan stared at her. She was mad. “Er … this ‘Carl’ person just spoke to you and told you all that?” she asked hesitantly.
Ashley nodded. “We have a direct link.”
“I see,” said Jan as if that explained everything. “So there is food and water here.” Mention of water made her aware of a raging thirst, and she hoped the water wasn’t another of Ashley’s fantasies. But the girl appeared physically healthy, at least, so she must have been getting food and water from somewhere. Yet, oddly enough, she hadn’t mentioned eating or drinking herself. “Ah, don’t you and Carl need food or water?” she asked, trying to humour her.
“I told you, Carl is a computer program. Programs don’t eat or drink.” She gave a nervous giggle.
“And what about you?”
Ashley bit her lip and looked uncomfortable. She didn’t answer.
“Well?” persisted Jan.
“I suppose I’d better tell you,” said Ashley sadly. “You would have found out sooner or later.”
“Found out what?”
“This.” Ashley walked over to where Jan was sitting on the couch and held out her right hand to her. Puzzled, Jan went to take hold of it. …
… and her hand passed straight through Ashley’s as if it wasn’t there.
“See?” said Ashley and sighed.
Jan shrank back on the couch and stared at her with terrified eyes. “You’re a ghost!” she cried.
“Well, sort of.”
Jan stared about frantically. The luxurious room had suddenly become a frightening place. She was trapped inside it hundreds of feet below the earth with this dead thing. “I want to leave! Please let me go!” she pleaded.
“Oh shit, I was afraid you’d react this way,” said Ashley, backing away from the couch. “Look, I’m not the sort of ghost you seem to think I am.”
“You’re not dead?” Jan asked nervously.
“Oh, I’m dead all right,” Ashley admitted brightly. “Or rather, the original me is. I’m just a recording.”
“A what?”
“You know, a recording. A copy. There was once, centuries ago, a real, live girl called Ashley Vee and a copy was made of her mind and stored in a computer. And I’m that copy.”
“But I can see you,” protested Jan.
“What you can see is a holographic projection controlled by the computer. You do know what a hologram is, do you?”
Jan remembered the ‘entertainments’ of the Aristos. Milo had called them holographic projections, and they had been remarkably realistic too. She relaxed slightly. “So you’re not a ghost …?”
“Not a real one. Only an electronic one. So please don’t go. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of. Please say you’ll stay.”
Jan didn’t know what to do. The knowledge that Ashley wasn’t a supernatural apparition was comforting, but at the same time she still found her presence unnerving. The holographic people in the ‘entertainments’ had appeared real too but they hadn’t carried on conversations with you. “Who did … this … to you? And why?” Jan asked hesitantly.
“My parents,” Ashley answered. “I had this dangerous hobby, you see. Glider flying. Do you know what a glider is?”
Ruefully, she said, “Only too well.” And she told her of the escape from the Lord Pangloth in the Japanese glider.
“Oh, I don’t mean hang-gliding. My glider looked like a plane, with a cockpit and everything. It was called Pegasus, and it had a wing-span of over a hundred feet. I could go up thousands of feet in it. It was beautiful. But my parents were right. I crashed it. And died.”
“You mean you can remember being killed?” Jan asked, shocked.
“Oh no. The last update on the recording occurred two weeks before I was killed, so I have no memory of the last two weeks of ‘my’ life, including the crash itself. Anyway, fearing that I was going to kill myself, my parents wanted to preserve me in some way. Their original intention was to implant the recording of my personality and memories into a clone of myself, but though they were rich they weren’t powerful enough to arrange to have me cloned. At the time I was alive it was highly illegal, you see. So they settled for second best. A hologram. Me.”
Jan was silent for a time as she stared hard at Ashley. The illusion was perfect. It was hard to believe she wasn’t made of flesh and blood. Then she said, “What’s it, well, feel like? Being what you are, I mean.”
Ashley frowned. “Well, that’s kind of hard to put into words. But I can tell you it’s sure not the same as being alive … as being real.”
“But you think, and you have feelings, don’t you?” Jan asked.
“Oh yes, I can think. At least, I think I can think. It’s hard to be sure. The same with feelings. I think I have feelings but they’re not the same as what I had when I was alive. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” admitted Jan.
Ashley sighed. “It’s difficult to explain … it’s as if my feelings were imitation feelings. Unreal. Yes—” she gave a nod “—I definitely feel unreal. But then that shouldn’t be surprising … I am, after all, just an electronic shadow of my former self.” She smiled at Jan then added, “But I’m fading, I know it. The human bits of me. I’m afraid I’ll eventually end up just like Carl. And, God, he’s boring.”
Jan was trying to imagine what it must be like for Ashley but it was beyond her capability. “How long have you been, er, like this?”
“Just a sec, I’ll ask Carl.” And then without a pause she said, “Four hundred and thirty-nine years.”
“That long? How awful! How do you spend your time down here? You must get very bored.”
“I do, when I’m awake. Most of the time I’m asleep. Well, not really asleep—I don’t dream or anything—I’m actually shut down. But when I’m awake I can make time go very fast, which helps. To talk to you I’ve had to really slow down my thought processes. I haven’t had subjective time to go this slowly since my last visitor.”
“When was that?” asked Jan.
“Oh, about eighty years ago. His name was Vic. A very pretty boy. He took shelter in the ruins to escape some marauders who were pursuing him. He stayed here for ten years then he got sick and died. He didn’t like it down here, which was a shame. That’s him over there.” Ashley turned and pointed. At the same moment the lights brightened and Jan saw, lying on the far side of the room, what appeared to be a pile of bones.
Jan was shocked. “You just left him lying there?”
“What else could I do? I kind of lack substance, as you’ve already noticed,” Ashley said and laughed. “There used to be a couple of servo-mechanisms that kept the shelter clean but they broke down ages ago.”
A worrying thought had occurred to Jan. “You said Vic wanted to leave here. Why didn’t he?”
“Oh, Carl wouldn’t let him, of course. Carl acts as my protector, you see. He doesn’t want knowledge of the shelter’s existence to get out, so he never lets my visitors leave.”
Jan said, “You mean he’s not going to let me leave either?”
Ashley nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so. You aren’t going to be upset, are you?”