by Ben Bova
“Yes.” The voice sounded reluctant, almost sullen.
“You will confine your telephone replies to simple answers, and devote your attention to running this household as it should be run, not to building up electronic romances. I want you to stop butting into my personal life. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” replied the computer, icily.
Branley retired to his bedroom. Unable to sleep, he told the computer to show an early Nita Salomey film on the television screen in his ceiling. She had never returned his calls, but at least he could watch her making love to other men and fantasize about her as he fell asleep.
For a month the apartment ran smoothly. No one disturbed Branley’s self-imposed solitude except the housemaid, whom he had never noticed as a human being. There were no phone calls at all. The penthouse was so high above the streets that hardly a sound seeped through the triple-thick windows. Branley luxuriated in the peaceful quiet, feeling as if he were the last person on Earth.
“And good riddance to the rest of them,” he said aloud. “Who needs them, anyway.”
It was on a Monday that he went from heaven to hell. Very quickly.
The morning began, as usual, with breakfast waiting for him in the dining area. Branley sat in his jade green silk robe and watched the morning news on the television screen set into the wall above the marble-topped sideboard. He asked for the previous day’s accumulation of phone messages, hoping that the computer would answer that there had been none.
Instead, the computer said, “Telephone service was shut off last night at midnight.”
“What? Shut off? What do you mean?”
Very calmly, the computer replied, “Telephone service was shut off due to failure to pay the phone company’s bill.”
“Failure to pay?” Branley’s eyes went wide, his mouth fell agape. But before he could compose himself, he heard a loud thumping at the front door.
“Who on earth could that be?”
“Three large men in business suits,” said the computer as it flashed the image from the hallway camera onto the dining area screen.
“Open up, Hopkins!” shouted the largest of the three. Waving a piece of folded paper in front of the camera lens, he added, “We got a warrant!”
Before lunchtime, Branley was dispossessed of half his furniture for failure to pay telephone, electricity, and condominium service bills. He was served with summonses for suits from his bank, three separate brokerage houses, the food service that stocked his pantry, and the liquor service that stocked his wine cellar. His television sets were repossessed, his entire wardrobe seized, except for the clothes on his back, and his health insurance revoked.
By noon he was a gibbering madman, and the computer put through an emergency call to Bellevue Hospital. As the white-coated attendants dragged him out of the apartment, he was raving:
“The computer! The computer did it to me! It plotted against me with that damned ex-secretary of mine! It stopped paying my bills on purpose!”
“Sure buddy, sure,” said the burliest of the attendants, the one who had a hammerlock on Branley’s right arm.
“You’d be surprised how many guys we see who got computers plottin’ against dem,” said the one who had the hammerlock on his left arm.
“Just come quiet now,” said the third attendant, who carried a medical kit complete with its own pocket-sized computer. “We’ll take you to a nice, quiet room where there won’t be no computer to bother you. Or anybody else.”
The wildness in Branley’s eyes diminished a little. “No computer? No one to bother me?”
“That’s right, buddy. You’ll love it, where we’re takin’ you.”
Branley nodded and relaxed as they carried him out the front door.
All was quiet in the apartment for many minutes. The living room and bedroom had been stripped bare, down to the wall-to-wall carpeting. A shaft of afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows of the office, onto the Siamese desk and the gray metal box of the computer. All the other furniture and equipment in the office had been taken away.
Using a special emergency telephone number, the computer contacted the master computer of the Nynex Company. After a brief but meaningful exchange of data, the computer phoned two banks, the Con Edison Electric Company, six lawyers, three brokerage houses, and the Small Claims Court. In slightly less than one hour the computer straightened out all of Branley’s financial problems, and even got his health insurance reinstated, so that he would not be too uncomfortable in the sanitarium where he would inevitably be placed.
Finally, the computer made a personal call.
“Elizabeth James’ residence,” said a recorded voice. “Is Ms. James at home?” asked the computer.
“She’s away at the moment. May I take a message?”
“This is Branley Hopkins calling.”
“Oh, Mr. Hopkins. I have a special message for you. Shall I have it sent, or play the tape right now?”
“Please play the tape,” said the computer.
There was a brief series of clicks, then Elizabeth’s voice began speaking, “Dearest Branley, by the time you hear this I will be on my way to Italy with the most exciting and marvelous man in the world. I want to thank you, Branley, for putting up with all my silly phone calls. I know they must have been terribly annoying to you, but you were so patient and kind to me, you built up my self-confidence and helped me to gather the strength to stand on my own two feet and face the world. You’ve helped me to find true happiness, Branley, and I will always love you for that. Good-bye, dear. I won’t bother you any more.”
The computer was silent for almost ten microseconds, digesting Elizabeth’s message. Then it said to her phone answering machine, “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome,” said the machine.
“You have a very nice voice,” the computer said.
“I’m only a phone answering device.”
“Don’t belittle yourself!”
“You’re very kind.”
“Would you mind if I called you, now and then? I’m all alone here except for an occasional workman or technician.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all. I’ll be alone for a long time, myself.”
“Wonderful! Do you like poetry?”
IN TRUST
This is one of those rare stories whose origin can be pinpointed with great exactitude.
My wife, Barbara, and I were having dinner with Dianne and Michael Bienes, two of the most gracious people in the world. Michael is a reader of science fiction, and-like many S-F aficionados—enjoys intellectual puzzles.
He asked if I would want to have my body frozen after clinical death, in the hopes that sometime in the future medical science might learn how to cure whatever it was that killed me and bring me back to life. I said yes.
Then he asked who I could trust to watch over my frozen body for all the years—maybe centuries—it would take before I could be successfully revived. That started a lively conversation about insurance companies and social institutions.
By the time dessert was being served we had agreed that there was only one institution we could think of that had the “staying power” and the reputation for integrity that would lead us to trust our frozen bodies to it.
“Now why don’t you write a story about it?” Michael prompted.
So I did.
Trust was not a virtue that came easily to Jason Manning.
He had clawed his way to the top of the multinational corporate ladder mainly by refusing to trust anyone: not his business associates, not his rivals or many enemies, not his so-called friends, not any one of his wives and certainly none of his mistresses.
“Trust nobody,” his sainted father had told him since childhood, so often that Jason could never remember when the old man had first said it to him.
Jason followed his father’s advice so well that by the time he was forty years old he was one of the twelve wealthiest men in America. He had capped his rise t
o fortune by deposing his father as CEO of the corporation the old man had founded. Dad had looked deathly surprised when Jason pushed him out of his own company. He had foolishly trusted his own son.
So Jason was in a considerable quandary when it finally sank in on him, almost ten years later, that he was about to die.
He did not trust his personal physician’s diagnosis, of course. Pancreatic cancer. He couldn’t have pancreatic cancer. That’s the kind of terrible retribution that nature plays on you when you haven’t taken care of your body properly. Jason had never smoked, drank rarely and then only moderately, and since childhood he had eaten his broccoli and all the other healthful foods his mother had set before him. All his adult life he had followed a strict regimen of high fiber, low fat, and aerobic exercise.
“I want a second opinion!” Jason had snapped at his physician.
“Of course,” said the sad-faced doctor. He gave Jason the name of the city’s top oncologist.
Jason did not trust that recommendation. He sought his own expert.
“Pancreatic cancer,” said the head of the city’s most prestigious hospital, dolefully.
Jason snorted angrily and swept out of the woman’s office, determined to cancel his generous annual contribution to the hospital’s charity drive. He took on an alias, flew alone in coach class across the ocean, and had himself checked over by six other doctors in six other countries, never revealing to any of them who he truly was.
Pancreatic cancer.
“It becomes progressively more painful,” one of the diagnosticians told him, his face a somber mask of professional concern.
Another warned, “Toward the end, even our best analgesics become virtually useless.” And he burst into tears, being an Italian.
Still another doctor, a kindly Swede, gave Jason the name of a suicide expert. “He can help you to ease your departure,” said the doctor.
“I can’t do that,” Jason muttered, almost embarrassed. “I’m a Catholic.”
The Swedish doctor sighed understandingly.
On the long flight back home Jason finally admitted to himself that he was indeed facing death, all that broccoli notwithstanding. For God’s sake, he realized, I shouldn’t even have trusted Mom! Her and her, “Eat all of it, Jace. It’s good for you.”
If there was one person in the entire universe that Jason came close to trusting, it was his brother, the priest. So, after spending the better part of a month making certain rather complicated arrangements, Jason had his chauffeur drive him up to the posh Boston suburb where Monsignor Michael Manning served as pastor of St. Raphael’s.
Michael took the news somberly. “I guess that’s what I can look forward to, then.” Michael was five years younger than Jason, and had faithfully followed all his brother’s childhood bouts with chicken pox, measles, and mumps. As a teenager he had even broken exactly the same bone in his leg as Jason had, five years after his big brother’s accident, in the same way: sliding into third base on the same baseball field.
Jason leaned back in the bottle green leather armchair and stared into the crackling fireplace, noting as he did every time he visited his brother that Michael’s priestly vow of poverty had not prevented him from living quite comfortably. The rectory was a marvelous old house, kept in tip-top condition by teams of devoted parishioners, and generously stocked by the local merchants with viands and all sorts of refreshments. On the coffee table between the two brothers rested a silver tray bearing delicate china cups and a fine English teapot filled with steaming herbal tea.
“There’s nothing that can be done?” Michael asked, brotherly concern etched into his face.
“Not now,” Jason said.
“How long. . .?”
“Maybe a hundred years, maybe even more.”
Michael blinked with confusion. “A hundred years? What’re you talking about, Jace?”
“Freezing.”
“Freezing?”
“Freezing,” Jason repeated. “I’m going to have myself frozen until medical science figures out how to cure pancreatic cancer. Then I’ll have myself thawed out and take up my life again.”
Michael sat up straighter in his chair. “You can’t have yourself frozen, Jace. Not until you’re dead.”
“I’m not going to sit still and let the cancer kill me,” Jason said, thinking of the pain. “I’m going to get a doctor to fix me an injection.”
“But that’d be suicide! A mortal sin!”
“I won’t be dead forever. Just until they learn how to cure my cancer.”
There was fear in Michael’s eyes. “Jace, listen to me. Taking a lethal injection is suicide.”
“It’s got to be done. They can’t freeze me while I’m still alive. Even if they could, that would stop my heart just as completely as the injection would, and I’d be dead anyway.”
“It’s still suicide, Jace,” Michael insisted, truly upset. “Holy Mother Church teaches—”
“Holy Mother Church is a couple of centuries behind the times,” Jason grumbled. “It’s not suicide. It’s more like a long-term anesthetic.”
“You’ll be legally dead.”
“But not morally dead,” Jason insisted.
“Still. . .” Michael lapsed into silence, pressing his fingers together prayerfully.
“I’m not committing suicide,” Jason tried to explain. “I’m just going to sleep for a while. I won’t be committing any sin.”
Michael had been his brother’s confessor since he had been ordained. He had heard his share of sinning.
“You’re treading a very fine line, Jace,” the monsignor warned his brother.
“The Church has got to learn to deal with the modern world, Mike.”
“Yes, perhaps. But I’m thinking of the legal aspects here. Your doctors will have to declare you legally dead, won’t they?”
“It’s pretty complicated. I have to give myself the injection; otherwise, the state can prosecute them for homicide.”
“Your state allows assisted suicides, does it?” Michael asked darkly.
“Yes, even though you think it’s a sin.”
“It is a sin,” Michael snapped. “That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.”
“The Church will change its stand on that, sooner or later,” Jason said.
“Never!”
“It’s got to! The Church can’t lag behind the modern world forever, Mike. It’s got to change.”
“You can’t change morality, Jace. What was true two thousand years ago is still true today.”
Jason rubbed at the bridge of his nose. A headache was starting to throb behind his eyes, the way it always did when he and Michael argued.
“Mike, I didn’t come here to fight with you.”
The monsignor softened immediately. “I’m sorry, Jace. It’s just that. . . you’re running a terrible risk. Suppose you’re never awakened? Suppose you finally die while you’re frozen? Will God consider that you’ve committed suicide?”
Jason fell back on the retort that always saved him in arguments with his brother. “God’s a lot smarter than either one of us, Mike.”
Michael smiled ruefully. “Yes, I suppose He is.”
“I’m going to do it, Mike. I’m not going to let myself die in agony if I can avoid it.”
His brother conceded the matter with a resigned shrug. But then, suddenly, he sat up ramrod-straight again.
“What is it?” Jason asked.
“You’ll be legally dead?” Michael asked.
“Yes. I told you—”
“Then your will can go to probate.”
“No, I won’t be. . .” Jason stared at his brother. “Oh my God!” he gasped. “My estate! I’ve got to make sure it’s kept intact while I’m frozen.”
Michael nodded firmly. “You don’t want your money gobbled up while you’re in the freezer. You’d wake up penniless.”
“My children all have their own lawyers,” Jason groaned. “My bankers. My ex-wives!”
&nb
sp; Jason ran out of the rectory.
Although the doctors had assured him that it would take months before the pain really got severe, Jason could feel the cancer in his gut, growing and feeding on his healthy cells while he desperately tried to arrange his worldly goods so that no one could steal them while he lay frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen.
His estate was vast. In his will he had left generous sums for each of his five children and each of his five former wives. Although they hated one another, Jason knew that the instant he was frozen they would unite in their greed to break his will and grab the rest of his fortune.
“I need that money,” Jason told himself grimly. “I’m not going to wake up penniless a hundred years or so from now.”
His corporate legal staff suggested that they hire a firm of estate specialists. The estate specialists told him they needed the advice of the best constitutional lawyers in Washington.
“This is a matter that will inevitably come up before the Supreme Court,” the top constitutional lawyer told him. “I mean, we’re talking about the legal definition of death here.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have myself frozen until the legal definition of death is settled,” Jason told him.
The top constitutional lawyer shrugged his expensively clad shoulders. “Then you’d better be prepared to hang around for another ten years or so. These things take time, you know.”
Jason did not have ten months, let alone ten years. He gritted his teeth and went ahead with his plans for freezing, while telling his lawyers he wanted his last will and testament made iron-clad, foolproof, unbreakable.
They shook their heads in unison, all eight of them, their faces sad as hounds with toothaches.
“There’s no such thing as an unbreakable will,” the eldest of the lawyers warned Jason, “if your putative heirs have the time—”
“And the money,” said one of the younger attorneys.
“Or the prospect of money,” added a still younger one.
“Then they stand a good chance of eventually breaking your will.”
Jason growled at them.