by Peter Watts
They’ve put someone in there with her.
“Hello, Ms. Fitzgerald. I’m Dr. Thomas. My first name’s Myles, if you prefer.”
She stares at him. “Myles it is.” She seems calm, but the tracks of recent tears still show on her face. “I guess you’re supposed to decide whether I’m crazy.”
“Whether you’re fit to stand trial, yes. I should tell you right off that nothing you say to me is necessarily confidential. Do you understand?” She nods. Thomas sits down across from her. “What would you like me to call you?”
“Napoleon. Mohammed. Jesus Christ.” Her lips twitch, the faintest smile, gone in an instant. “Sorry. Just kidding. Jaz’s fine.”
“Are you doing okay in here? Are they treating you all right?”
She snorts. “They’re treating me pretty damn well, considering the kind of monster they think I am.” A pause, then, “I’m not, you know.”
“A monster?”
“Crazy. I’ve—I’ve just recently undergone a paradigm shift, you know? The whole world looks different, and my head’s there but sometimes my gut—I mean, it’s so hard to feel differently about things …”
“Tell me about this paradigm shift,” Thomas suggests. He makes it a point not to take notes. He doesn’t even have a notepad. Not that it matters. The microcassette recorder in his blazer has very sensitive ears.
“Things make sense now,” she says. “They never did before. I think, for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy.” She smiles again, for longer this time. Long enough for Thomas to marvel at how genuine it seems.
“You weren’t very happy when you first came here,” he says gently. “They say you were very upset.”
“Yeah.” She nods, seriously. “It’s tough enough to do that shit to yourself, you know, but to risk someone else, someone you really care about—” She wipes at one eye. “He was dying for over a year, did you know that? Each day he’d hurt a little more. You could almost see it spreading through him, like some sort of—leaf, going brown. Or maybe that was the chemo. Never could decide which was worse.” She shakes her head. “Heh. At least that’s over now.”
“Is that why you did it? To end his suffering?” Thomas doubts it. Mercy killers don’t generally disembowel their beneficiaries. Still, he asks.
She answers. “Of course I fucked up, I only ended up making things worse.” She clasps her hands in front of her. “I miss him already. Isn’t that crazy? It only happened a few hours ago, and I know it’s no big deal, but I still miss him. That head-heart thing again.”
“You say you fucked up,” Thomas says.
She takes a deep breath, nods. “Big time.”
“Tell me about that.”
“I don’t know shit about debugging. I thought I did, but when you’re dealing with organics—all I really did was go in and mess randomly with the code. You make a mess of everything, unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s what I’m working on now.”
“Debugging?”
“That’s what I call it. There’s no real word for it yet.”
Oh yes there is. Aloud: “Go on.”
Jasmine Fitzgerald sighs, her eyes closed. “I don’t expect you to believe this under the circumstances, but I really loved him. No: I love him.” Her breath comes out in a soft snort, a whispered laugh. “There I go again. That bloody past tense.”
“Tell me about debugging.”
“I don’t think you’re up for it, Myles. I don’t even think you’re all that interested.” Her eyes open, point directly at him. “But for the record, Stu was dying. I tried to save him. I failed. Next time I’ll do better, and better still the time after that, and eventually I’ll get it right.”
“And what happens then?” Thomas says.
“Through your eyes or mine?”
“Yours.”
“I repair the glitches in the string. Or if it’s easier, I replicate an undamaged version of the subroutine and insert it back into the main loop. Same difference.”
“Uh huh. And what would I see?”
She shrugs. “Stu rising from the dead.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Spread out across the table, the mind of Jasmine Fitzgerald winks back from pages of standardised questions. Somewhere in here, presumably, is a monster.
These are the tools used to dissect human psyches. The WAIS. The MMPI. The PDI. Hammers, all of them. Blunt chisels posing as microtomes. A copy of the DSM-IV sits off to one side, a fat paperback volume of symptoms and pathologies. A matrix of pigeonholes. Perhaps Fitzgerald fits into one of them. Intermittent Explosive, maybe? Battered Woman? Garden-variety Sociopath?
The test results are inconclusive. It’s as though she’s laughing up from the page at him. True or false: I sometimes hear voices that no one else hears. False, she’s checked. I have been feeling unusually depressed lately. False. Sometimes I get so angry I feel like hitting something. True, and a hand-written note in the margin: Hey, doesn’t everyone?
There are snares sprinkled throughout these tests, linked questions designed to catch liars in subtle traps of self-contradiction. Jasmine Fitzgerald has avoided them all. Is she unusually honest? Is she too smart for the tests? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that—
Wait a second.
Who was Louis Pasteur? asks the WAIS, trying to get a handle on educational background.
A virus, Fitzgerald said.
Back up the list. Here’s another one, on the previous page: Who was Winston Churchill? And again: a virus.
And fifteen questions before that: Who was Florence Nightingale?
A famous nurse, Fitzgerald responded to that one. And her responses to all previous questions on historical personalities are unremarkably correct. But everyone after Nightingale is a virus.
Killing a virus is no sin. You can do it with an utterly clear conscience. Maybe she’s redefining the nature of her act. Maybe that’s how she manages to live with herself these days.
Just as well. That raising-the-dead shtick didn’t cut any ice at all.
She’s slumped across the table when he enters, her head resting on folded arms. Thomas clears his throat. “Jasmine.”
No response. He reaches out, touches her lightly on the shoulder. Her head comes up, a fluid motion containing no hint of grogginess. She settles back into her chair and smiles. “Welcome back. So, am I crazy or what?”
Thomas smiles back and sits down across from her. “We try to avoid prejudicial terms.”
“Hey, I can take it. I’m not prone to tantrums.”
A picture flashes across the front of his mind: beloved husband, entrails spread-eagled like butterfly wings against a linoleum grid. Of course not. No tantrums for you. We need a whole new word to describe what it is you do.
“Debugging,” wasn’t it?
“I was going over your test results,” he begins.
“Did I pass?”
“It’s not that kind of test. But I was intrigued by some of your answers.”
She purses her lips. “Good.”
“Tell me about viruses.”
That sunny smile again. “Sure. Mutable information strings that can’t replicate without hijacking external source code.”
“Go on.”
“Ever hear of Core Wars?”
“No.”
“Back in the early eighties some guys got together and wrote a bunch of self-replicating computer programs. The idea was to put them into the same block of memory and have them compete for space. They all had their own little tricks for self-defence and reproduction and, of course, eating the competition.”
“Oh, you mean computer viruses,” Thomas says.
“Actually, before all that.” Fitzgerald pauses a moment, cocks her head to one side. “You ever wonder what it might be like to be one of those little programs? Running around laying eggs and dropping logic bombs and interacting with other viruses?”
Thomas shrugs. “I never even knew about them un
til now. Why? Do you?”
“No,” she says. “Not any more.”
“Go on.”
Her expression changes. “You know, talking to you is a bit like talking to a program. All you ever say is go on and tell me more and—I mean, Jesus, Myles, they wrote therapy programs back in the sixties that had more range than you do! In BASIC even! Register an opinion, for Chrissake!”
“It’s just a technique, Jaz. I’m not here to get into a debate with you, as interesting as that might be. I’m trying to assess your fitness to stand trial. My opinions aren’t really at issue.”
She sighs, and sags. “I know. I’m sorry, I know you’re not here to keep me entertained, but I’m used to being able to—
“I mean, Stuart would always be so—
“Oh, God. I miss him so much,” she admits, her eyes shining and unhappy.
She’s a killer, he tells himself. Don’t let her suck you in. Just assess her, that’s all you have to do.
Don’t start liking her, for Christ’s sake.
“That’s—understandable,” Thomas says.
She snorts. “Bullshit. You don’t understand at all. You know what he did, the first time he went in for chemo? I was studying for my comps, and he stole my textbooks.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he knew I wasn’t studying at home. I was a complete wreck. And when I came to see him at the hospital he pulls these bloody books out from under his bed and starts quizzing me on Dirac and the Bekenstein bound. He was dying, and all he wanted to do was help me prepare for some stupid test. I’d do anything for him.”
Well, Thomas doesn’t say, you certainly did more than most.
“I can’t wait to see him again,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.
“When will that be, Jaz?”
“When do you think?” She looks at him, and the sorrow and despair he thought he saw in those eyes is suddenly nowhere to be seen.
“Most people, if they said that, would be talking about the afterlife.”
She favours him with a sad little smile. “This is the afterlife, Myles. This is Heaven, and Hell, and Nirvana. Whatever we choose to make it. Right here.”
“Yes,” Thomas says after a moment. “Of course.”
Her disappointment in him hangs there like an accusation.
“You don’t believe in God, do you?” she asks at last.
“Do you?” he ricochets.
“Didn’t used to. Turns out there’s clues, though. Proof, even.”
“Such as?”
“The mass of the top quark. The width of the Higgs boson. You can’t read them any other way when you know what you’re looking for. Know anything about quantum physics, Myles?”
He shakes his head. “Not really.”
“Nothing really exists, not down at the subatomic level. It’s all just probability waves. Until someone looks at it, that is. Then the wave collapses and you get what we call reality. But it can’t happen without an observer to get things started.”
Thomas squints, trying to squeeze some sort of insight into his brain. “So if we weren’t here looking at this table, it wouldn’t exist?”
Fitzgerald nods. “More or less.” That smile peeks around the corner of her mouth for a second.
He tries to lure it back. “So God’s the observer, is that what you’re saying? God watches all the atoms so the universe can exist?”
“Huh. I never thought about it that way before.” The smile morphs into a frown of concentration. “More metaphoric than mathematical, but it’s a cool idea.”
“Was God watching you yesterday?”
She looks up, distracted. “Huh?”
“Does He—does It communicate with you?”
Her face goes completely expressionless. “Does God tell me to do things, you mean. Did God tell me to carve Stu up like—like—” Her breath hisses out between her teeth. “No, Myles. I don’t hear voices. Charlie Manson doesn’t come to me in my dreams and whisper sweet nothings. I answered all those questions on your test already, so give me a fucking break, okay?”
He holds up his hands, placating. “That’s not what I meant, Jasmine.” Liar. “I’m sorry if that’s how it sounded, it’s just—you know, God, quantum mechanics—it’s a lot to swallow at once, you know? It’s—mind-blowing.”
She watches him through guarded eyes. “Yeah. I guess it can be. I forget, sometimes.” She relaxes a fraction. “But it’s all true. The math is inevitable. You can change the nature of reality, just by looking at it. You’re right. It’s mind-blowing.”
“But only at the subatomic level, right? You’re not really saying we could make this table disappear just by ignoring it, are you?”
Her eye flickers to a spot just to the right and behind him, about where the door should be.
“Well, no,” she says at last. “Not without a lot of practise.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Besides the obvious, of course. Besides the vertical incision running from sternum to approximately two centimetres below the navel, penetrating the abdominal musculature and extending through into the visceral coelom. Beyond the serrations along its edge which suggest the use of some sort of blade. Not, evidently, a very sharp one.
No. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The coroner’s art is nothing if not systematic. Very well, then: Caucasian male, mid-twenties. External morphometrics previously noted. Hair loss and bruising consistent with chemotherapeutic toxicity. Right index and ring fingernails missing, same notation. The deceased was one sick puppy at time of demise. Sickened by the disease, poisoned by the cure. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse …
Down and in. The wound swallows the coroner’s rubberised hands like some huge torn vagina, its labia clotted and crystallised. The usual viscera glisten inside, repackaged by medics at the site who had to reel in all loose ends for transport. Perhaps evidence was lost in the process. Perhaps the killer had arranged the entrails in some significant pattern, perhaps the arrangement of the GI tract spelled out some clue or unholy name. No matter. They took pictures of everything.
Mesentery stretches like thin latex, binding loops of intestine one to the other. A bit too tightly, in fact. There appear to be—fistulas of some sort, scattered along the lower ileum. Loops seem fused together at several spots. What could have caused that?
Nothing comes to mind.
Note it, record it, take a sample for detailed histological analysis. Move on. The scalpel passes through the tract as easily as through overcooked pasta. Stringy bile and pre-fecal lumps slump tiredly into a collecting dish. Something bulges behind them from the dorsal wall. Something shines white as bone where no bone should be. Slice, resect. There. A mass of some kind covering the right kidney, approximately fifteen centimetres by ten, extending down to the bladder. Quite heterogeneous, it’s got some sort of lumps in it. A tumour? Is this what Stuart MacLennan’s doctors were duelling with when they pumped him full of poison? It doesn’t look like any tumour the coroner’s seen.
For one thing—and this is really kind of strange—it’s looking back at him.
His desk is absolutely spartan. Not a shred of paper out of place. Not a shred of paper even in evidence, actually. The surface is as featureless as a Kubrick monolith, except for the Sun workstation positioned dead centre and a rack of CDs angled off to the left.
“I thought she looked familiar,” he says. “When I saw the papers. Didn’t know quite where to place her, though.”
Jasmine Fitzgerald’s graduate supervisor.
“I guess you’ve got a lot of students,” Thomas suggests.
“Yes.” He leans forward, begins tapping at the workstation keyboard. “I’ve yet to meet all of them, actually. One or two in Europe I correspond with exclusively over the net. I hope to meet them this summer in Berne—ah, yes. Here she is; doesn’t look anything like the media picture.”
“She doesn’t live in Europe, Dr. Russell.”
<
br /> “No, right here. Did her field work at CERN, though. Damn hard getting anything done here since the supercollider fell through. Ah.”
“What?”
“She’s on leave. I remember her now. She put her thesis on hold about a year and a half ago. Illness in the family, as I recall.” Russell stares at the monitor; something he sees there seems to sink in, all at once.
“She killed her husband? She killed him?”
Thomas nods.
“My God.” Russell shakes his head. “She didn’t seem the type. She always seemed so—well, so cheery.”
“She still does, sometimes.”
“My God,” he repeats. “And how can I help you?”
“She’s suffering from some very elaborate delusions. She couches them in a lot of technical terminology I don’t understand. I mean, for all I know she could actually be making sense—no, no. Scratch that. She can’t be, but I don’t have the background to really understand her, well, claims.”
“What sort of claims?”
“For one thing, she keeps talking about bringing her husband back from the dead.”
“I see.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Should I be? You said she was delusional.”
Thomas takes a deep breath. “Dr. Russell, I’ve been doing some reading the past couple of days. Popular cosmology, quantum mechanics for beginners, that sort of thing.”
Russell smiles indulgently. “I suppose it’s never too late to start.”
“I get the impression that a lot of the stuff that happens down at the subatomic level almost has quasi-religious overtones. Spontaneous appearance of matter, simultaneous existence in different states. Almost spiritual.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true. After a fashion.”
“Are cosmologists a religious lot, by and large?”
“Not really.” Russell drums fingers on his monolith. “The field’s so strange that we don’t really need religious experience on top of it. Some of the eastern religions make claims that sound vaguely quantum-mechanical, but the similarities are pretty superficial.”