Candle

by Barnes, John

  “Uh, you’re not sounding like a meme, but you are sounding like a PR department somewhere wrote your dialogue.”

  She giggled, and it was a healthy natural sound. “Yeah, sorry. Resuna spends a certain amount of its effort in persuading the people who have it that they’re better off with it. I’m afraid we all do speak with some of the same phrases, and some of them aren’t very natural. But Resuna will get smarter. And I’m really not kidding; having it in your head doesn’t mean you’re not you, which does make it different from most other memes.”

  I thought about that one as it got darker. We talked about other trivial stuff, where our lives had taken us, what we had done. I said just enough about having lost Tammy and Carrie so that I figured she wouldn’t bring it up; she told me that she’d been a novice in an Unreconstructed Catholic convent. When One True had invaded and captured her area, the convent was given as a reward to a mercenary company, for seventy-two hours of the sort of thing that used to happen in those last years of the war. At the end of the three days, the survivors were all turned by One True. She had One True for a long time after that, “which was probably better than crying and screaming and lying in the fetal position, because I’m here and I’m functioning now. And One True did do some repairs to me, and now Resuna’s coming along with fixing up the rest of me, I guess you could say. At least it seems like it’s done enough repairs to be able to give me more freedom.”

  “More freedom?” I asked. I wasn’t used to thinking of that in connection with One True.

  The sun was gone. Our road was lighted in front of us by the glow of the city below. She moved closer, and I felt her hand very tentatively touching mine. A minute later we were holding hands, and that seemed pleasant, after years alone. If this was how One True was going to come after the unturned population, in these new days of Resuna, well, it was much nicer than being netted, sedated, and brainwashed.

  I thought she had just droplined me, after I asked my question, maybe because she was offended. But then she said, “Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by freedom. Without One True I’d have been free to do whatever I wanted, but all I wanted to do was sit and cry. With One True, I at least got some of my life restarted, and was useful, and meanwhile I could be huddled up inside, crying at first, and then thrashing things out, and finally getting better, while not being either a danger to myself or a burden on everyone else. And now with Resuna I’m free to do and be so many more things, but I feel safer knowing that if I’m about to do something stupid, or crazy, or dangerous, it will stop me—probably just by talking to me and persuading me that it’s not in my best interests. So I’m free to not be miserable, or useless, and I’m free to not spend all of my time coping with what happened to me and my friends, and most of all I’m free to make myself useful and effective and someone I can like. That’s Um more freedom than I had when I felt compelled to rock and sob.”

  “I can see how you would feel that way,” I said, and couldn’t help thinking that if Tammy and Carrie had survived, somehow, they too would have been living down gruesome memories for a long time, and might well have welcomed anything at all that gave them a way to function and to shut down some of the pain.

  “Well,” she said, “and it’s done other good things for me. Can I be honest with you?”

  “I think I’d prefer it,” I said, “if Resuna will let you.”

  “Silly, it’s the one that suggested being honest.” She drew a deep breath and pressed down on my hand, so that we walked even closer to each other. “The thing is, it’s hard to explain,” she said, “and I’m afraid it might upset you, but I’d rather have you know it than not. I was a virgin—hadn’t even been kissed—when I entered the convent. Then I got gang-raped for several hours, and some other stuff.” She said it with about as much emotion as most people mention having their wisdom teeth out. “After I got turned to One True, I never had sex, and I haven’t had sex since I turned from One True to Resuna, but Resuna says I’m ready if I want to, and, well, gee, I’m healthy and twenty-two and … uh, see, Resuna and One True have really good information about me, and good information about many people they haven’t turned yet, and … oh, well, look, One True picked you out for me. Since I was already here in Quito, it’s where my job is and all, and they knew you were applying, they sent me up here to meet you. And I think you’re really great-looking and you’ve been so nice and well—there. Now I told you. But I approached you all on my own. Really. I just got some hints about what to say from Resuna. So if we, you know, do it, you’ll be with me, not with Resuna, and we don’t have to rush or anything if you—”

  “Whoa,” I said. I was still holding her hand, and she was pressed close against me; we weren’t moving very fast. “Resuna, or One True, or somebody, picked me out of all the guys on Earth?”

  When she responded her voice was oddly flat—more mechanical than it would have been with most other memes. Because Resuna is relatively small, it doesn’t have much fine control on things like inflection. “Actually you were picked out of the eligible unattached men who would be passing through Quito this week. Mary Roder has a common problem that comes up during recovery; in the process of healing and learning to look forward to her future again, she has begun to romanticize more than would be optimal for a healthy emotional life. She needs to have an experience with someone who will not be rough, impatient, or rude, but whom she sees as strong enough to protect her—basically a sensation of complete safety—but she needs to not fall too completely in love. So a handsome, kind, courteous stranger is what is called for, and that is you, Currie Curran. If you don’t wish to do this, we’ll find someone else without much difficulty, but you were the first choice. And we of One True know enough of your life to know that you must be very lonely and unhappy; an evening with company and affection would hardly harm you.”

  “Can Mary hear you saying this?”

  “No. In just a few minutes she’ll become conscious without realizing that she walked this distance with you while unconscious. Meanwhile, do you want to do this? If not, she can lose interest.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It was strange to have my arm around her waist while another mind talked for her. She wasn’t really my type, I suppose, but it had been a long time, and I was lonely, and the thought of being all alone in some anonymous hotel was unattractive. “I’d like to,” I said. “And I’ll be as gentle and patient as you need me to be.”

  “As Mary needs you to be,” Resuna corrected me. “And you would not have been selected had we not known what we do of your past. Your feelings are very straightforward, reasonable ones; you love those who love you back, you hate those who hurt them, you give your loyalty to things you think are worthy. It’s that simplicity which Mary Roder needs.

  “Before I bring Mary Roder’s personality back, there are two things you need to know. First, you may either continue this relationship or not; we will see that the memory is a good one for Mary, as long as you help by creating pleasant experiences to work with. If you do wish to continue, you may stay with Mary after you are turned.

  “Second, and this is very important: the cue phrase that enables Resuna to take over and deal with emotional distress is ‘Let overwrite, let override.’ If Mary appears to become hysterical or catatonic, if she acts in ways that seem unusual or unhealthy, if she begins to cry uncontrollably or shows any other sign of real distress, speak that phrase, firmly, until she hears it. That will bring Resuna to the front of her mind to deal with the crisis.”

  “You can’t just come on your own?”

  “Resuna is systematically limited; if it had the power to overpower human minds, it would have the power to contemplate resistance to One True, and that cannot be permitted. Do you have any question?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “A public diskster will pick you both up in a few minutes. It will take you to Buenos Aires Dome, where there’s a hotel room waiting. No charge—it is One True’s way of thanking you for he
lping Mary.”

  I walked along with her body, around a slow bend in the road, for maybe ten minutes, turning the alternatives over in my head. I was really not seeing any likelihood of any problems I couldn’t handle, and the idea was more attractive every time I thought it through. At last I said, “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “Remember,” the Resuna voice said, “Mary Roder will not remember we had this conversation, and as far as she is concerned, the last seventeen minutes and twenty seconds never happened. Enjoy yourself, treat Mary well, and remember you have One True’s gratitude. Are you ready for me to release her back into her body?”

  “I guess so.”

  With a subtle shift in her body, Mary regained control and consciousness. “Since I was already here in Quito, it’s where my job is and all, and they knew you were applying, they sent me up here to meet you. And I think you’re really great-looking and you’ve been so nice and well—there. Now I told you. But I approached you all on my own. Really. I just got some hints about what to say from Resuna. So if we, you know, do it, you’ll be with me, not with Resuna, and we don’t have to rush or anything if you want to take your time and get to know each other first. What do you think?”

  “I think I ought to com for a nice high-speed diskster, and hire it on my credit to take us somewhere nice, have dinner on the diskster, spend a while looking at scenery and messing around, check into a hotel room, mess around some more, and just kind of see what happens,” I said. “Have you ever been to Buenos Aires?”

  <> “So what exactly happened?” Dave asked. “You woke up the next morning with a jack in your head, or she talked you into talking to a terminal for a while, or you fell in love and decided to stay?”

  “Mostly that last one,” I said. “Mary was very attentive and very affectionate. And I was just twenty-five, even if I was a widower, and I’d only ever been with Tammy before, and it had been years, and so at first I was probably just there for the sex and the not being lonely part. Then I got kind of hooked on being her hero, I guess you’d have to say, and after that I started to see that she really needed me—and by then it was November 15, a beautiful spring in Buenos Aires, the warmest on record—and way too late to make any plans to run away, and so one evening I came back from having a jack put in, and we made love, and she plugged me into the phone and held my hand, and when I woke up I was turned, and running Resuna. We held a party to celebrate. And now we’ve been married twenty-three years. And this is the first time since 2062 I’ve really had a free thought about whether or not I like her, or what kind of a wife she’s been.”

  Dave nodded slowly, as if digesting the whole situation. “What do you think?”

  “I think I miss her at the moment. I hope she’s not too worried. I’d like to see her again.”

  He smiled. “Well, good, then. Another glass?”

  “Pos fuckin‘ def.”

  “And can I trust you not to tie me up and turn me in if we get very drunk tonight?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good enough.” He raised his glass. “My story’s not as dramatic, so we’re going to need more wine.”

  <> Dave’s tale didn’t take long. He was a foundling in Denver Dome, a few years after I was dropped off at Spokane Dome—we both thought it was pretty funny (with help from the wine) that we theoretically could be brothers. He’d been in a couple of mercenary units before being hired as part of the bodyguard for a Freecyber cell in upstate New York, within fifty miles of where I was stalking Murphy’s Comsat Avengers.

  He’d liked working for the Freecybers—he said they were pleasant employers, met their bills, didn’t ask for the impossible, treated you like people—but it came to an abrupt end when Murphy’s unit overran them and butchered the people they were guarding. “No call for it, either,” he said. “They could have just turned them. It was pretty close to the end of the war. Could’ve just put One True into them, and I bet that’s what One True would have preferred. Murphy’s was the only mercenary company I ever heard of that regularly killed just for fun; it was like a whole outfit of serial killers.”

  I nodded and took a big slurp of the wine, which was absolutely delicious. “Yeah. You know where Murphy came from? He was nothing more than an old vag at the time the war broke out. There probably weren’t two thousand vags left on the planet in 2049, but unfortunately, he happened to be one of them.”

  Dave shrugged. “I knew a couple of former vags, myself. One of them and I went sniping a few times, because he was so crazy he’d go show himself on the skyline to draw fire—he lasted about a week, I think. All the old vags I knew were crazy. Most of them were people who just never got over losing something, and spent their lives in the woods, robbing and looting, trying to get it back, pathetic crazy bastards who were dangerous to anyone they ran into, but otherwise not anything much to worry about. Murphy was something else again entirely, a lot more than just crazy. He was about as evil and sick a bastard as the poor old world has ever seen and it’s a good thing his delusions made him too incompetent to get anywhere.”

  “Amen,” I said, and extended my glass in a toast; we clinked them together, and I said, “I saw him die. You could call it a mixed pleasure. I had always hoped to get the fucker myself, and the first time I was about to get a good shot at him, two of his own men did it. The three of them were out in front of his tent, talking about what to do now that peace was here, and he was going on in some crazy riff about putting the comsats back up—like anyone needs them with the supras there. Then he grabbed one of them by the shirt, and the other one shot him. I was so startled that I muffed my first shot at one of them, so they both got away.”

  Dave nodded firmly. “You at least got in a good try at them. Me, once Freecyber was gone, I didn’t have any side in the war, so I just went into the bush. Here’s a strange thought. I didn’t have nearly as much grudge against One True as you did, and if One True had made me the offer to become a cowboy hunter—even without being memed, just hunting cowboys in exchange for my keep—I might have taken it. And from what you tell me, if you hadn’t run into Mary on that road, you might have drifted into cowboying, or whatever it was called up the Northeast. We could’ve been on switched sides. Funny how life cuts.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The warm water and the wine were getting a dead solid grip on me, and I was fading fast. “I’m starting to think of bed,” I admitted.

  “Me too, Currie. Let’s drink up. There’s not much left of these bottles.”

  There wasn’t much left of his; there was about a quarter of mine, but I pounded it right down like a dumbass teenager anyway. He took my glass, reached to an overhead shelf, and handed me a bar of soap. “Oatmeal soap, for rich ladies to scrub their dingy skin with,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry about it making you pretty, it didn’t make them pretty.” He guffawed at his own joke and I did too; we were pritnear as drunk as I’ve ever been. When he got out to soap up, he nearly fell, and I got out very slowly; it’s not easy when you’re holding a bar of soap in one hand, and you really wish you had both hands to hang onto the floor with.

  We both soaped up all over, working up thick lather in our hair and beards. A couple of knotted, crusty scars were on the back of my head, which probably meant that whatever Dave had done to the back of my head with his club should have had stitches but hadn’t gotten them. Oh, well, I was alive, and not memed, and thinking as myself.

  When we had finished lathering, Dave carefully put our pieces of soap back on the shelf, and said, “Just be sure you don’t stay with your head under too long. I can’t think that would be real good for a guy with a recent brain trauma.”

  We climbed back in, the hot water feeling good after the cool of soaping up, and swished around in the water, getting the soap off and the last kinks out. I let myself slip down and put my head under. In water that’s warmer than body temperature, with a skinful of wine, putting your head under hits like a sledgehammer, and you can easily pass out, but I let myself
hang for a moment in that blissful almost-not-there state, so relaxed that my muscles seemed to just blend into the surrounding water. If Dave had wanted to kill me, that moment then would have been a good time; I’d probably have slipped over to the other side without caring.

  But clearly he didn’t. I suppose decades without a friend do things to a man; the thing that seemed strangest to me was that he was still fairly good at getting along with people, after all that loneliness.

  I let the warmth fill my whole body, then sat back up, splashing and wiping the water from my face. “I don’t suppose you’ve got—”

  “But of course,” he said. “I built my towel closet with racks that carry hot water. All towels are always dry, fluffy, and hot.”

  “Damn, you know how to live.” I got out and he tossed me a towel; I dried myself thoroughly. It felt good to be alive. “Dave, if you don’t want to be turned, I am not going to turn you. And since you can’t trust me if I’m turned, I guess I’m out in the woods for good, myself. You’ll have to teach me most of the mechanics of living out here, and I’ll have to depend on you for a while, but I’ll construct a place of my own, if you prefer, just as fast as I can. And I guess we both have to move, anyway, because there’s bound to be some of them looking for me in a couple-few weeks, once some of the spring melt has happened, plus of course they had enough uploads from my copy of Resuna, the last few days before you caught me, to have you pritnear dead solid located.”

  Dave sighed. “Well, we’re both in a sloppy sentimental mood. Been a long time since I’ve had a partner, and living out in the woods without anybody else is lim, lim hard. But you gotta think about things like the fact that you wouldn’t see Mary again, ever, probably, and I got to think about whether I’m letting my feelings blind me. So let’s sleep on it, get up late, talk it over … you know, the usual kind of thing you do when you know what you want to do, but you want to be sure you want to. You know?”