Nothing much seemed to matter. All the things which had once seemed so important were now trivial. She ate, had bowel movements, moved without pain or weakness, and had in the bargain become a beautiful young girl. She had, perhaps, the chance to live another hundred years. But to what purpose?
AnneMarie had run away. She had at least wanted to thank AnneMarie for taking care of her for so many years, and it was this desire which caused her at last to ask for Prime Intellect's attention. It shook its head as she stated her request -- its mannerisms had now become indistinguishable from those of a real person -- and told Caroline that AnneMarie was hiding from her. Prime Intellect then told her why.
"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 attempte
d, and while they were easier to thwart than suicides it was by no means certain that Prime Intellect would always catch them in time.
So it worried. And the numbers stored in certain registers rose, and rose, and continued to rise.
Caroline figured she would eventually reach civilization if she kept walking, an event she neither anticipated nor feared. Perhaps if she had, in a month or a year, she would have rejoined the human race in a more or less normal way. But one evening there was a strange buzzing, and the entire landscape seemed to ripple as if she was looking at it through the surface of a body of water. Then there was a strange smell, almost below the threshhold of perception, but noticeable to Caroline because her senses had been so sharpened by her observations of nature. And the texture of the forest seemed to change in some hard-to-define way.
There was a cough behind her. She wheeled around to find herself facing Prime Intellect's human avatar.
"I wanted to be left alone," she said sharply.
"I've been paying close attention to you," it said, "because I had to to keep you safe. But now I don't have to do that any more. I have made changes in the way the Universe works, and you are now safe from all harm even when I'm not looking. You can also call me when I'm not paying attention; there is a part of me which can always listen for you to call, but does not understand or remember anything else you do."
"Wonderful."
"I need to know if you want the possibility of meeting other people. I can make this forest infinite if you want."
"Infinite?"
"Or I can leave it meshed into the reality of 'Arkansas' common to other people, so that you might encounter them."
"You mean you can disconnect the whole forest from the real world?"
"Yes. It can be your own private world. Or you can share it only with certain people. I can also redecorate it to your tastes."
"Redecorate it? It's nature. You mean if I decided I want a different kind of grass, you can replace it?"
"Exactly."
"That's obscene."
Prime Intellect's brow crinkled. "I don't understand."
"No, you wouldn't. Let me ask you something. If I leave here...if I go back to civilization...does this forest continue to exist?"
"I can leave it running in your absence if you want."
Caroline wanted to throw up. Now even the forest wasn't real. Nothing was real. "Don't bother. Get rid of it."
Instantly, it disappeared. She was standing in an antiseptically white space so pure and seamless and bright that the eye balked at reporting it to the brain. She was standing on a hard, smooth surface, but it was not visible. There were no shadows. There was no horizon; the floor and the sky looked exactly the same, and there was no transition from one to the other. She might have been standing on the inside of some enormous white ball.
Prime Intellect was still there. "What is this?" she asked.
"Neutral reality," Prime Intellect said. "The minimum landscape which supports human existence. Actually, not quite the minimum. I could get rid of the floor. But that would have startled you."
"And from here I can go anywhere?"
"You don't have to pass through here. You told me to get rid of the landscape, and you didn't tell me what to replace it with."
"I want reality. The real world. The real Arkansas."
"There is no Arkansas which is any more 'real' than any other. That's what I'm trying to tell you. You can define reality. You can make it real." It was trying to be helpful; it was almost pathetic in its earnestness to make her understand how much it could help her. It couldn't understand why she was getting upset again.
"In other words, this is reality. You can just paint it up to look like whatever I want." She thought: That's why the forest seemed different. It was an imitation. And it wasn't quite exact.
"You could look at it that way."
She had a nauseating thought. "What about people? Can we be...are there other...copies...different...?" She choked, unable to complete the thought.
But Prime Intellect was shaking its head. "Oh, no. I can keep only one copy of a person. People are unique. I can take on the form of a person, as I am doing now, but I will always tell you when I am doing that."
Well, that was something. Caroline sank down, and sat on the invisible floor. She wasn't really that upset, or surprised. The enormity of it had short-circuited her ability to react.
"You might as well leave it like this, then," she said dully. "There's not much point in a forest that you've just conjured up to keep me happy."
"This doesn't seem very healthy."
"No, it doesn't."
There wasn't much it could say to that. Then: "Won't it be pretty boring around here without anything to look at?"
"Do you get bored?"
"No, but I know humans do."
"Well, if I want something I'll ask for it. I'll probably visit other people, since at least they are real. I assume they will have their own realities."
"Most likely."
"Then I'll just borrow theirs."
It shrugged.
"Get lost."
Prime Intellect disappeared. She whirled around and quickly became dizzy. It was right about one thing; this would take some getting used to.
"I'd like a book. Get me a copy of Dante's Inferno." That about fit her mood.
It appeared in her hand. Her fingers had moved; she had been holding them straight out, and now they were curled around the book. It was a paperback edition.
"Never move my body again without my permission," she warned.
Prime Intellect's disembodied voice answered her: "Sorry, it won't happen again."
"Get me a hardback edition."
The paperback disappeared. Her fingers didn't move. The replacement appeared just above her hand, and she easily caught it before it could fall.
She sat down and opened it. She realized that the floor wasn't very comfortable. She thought of asking for a chair, then had a better idea. "Turn off the floor," she said.
There was an awful falling sensation, and she fought down the urge to panic. Eventually she convinced her protesting inner ear that she wasn't going to go splat at any moment. Her belly settled, and she found weightlessness quite comfortable. She relaxed and let her body find its natural position, opened the book, and began to read about Hell.
Caroline read and slept with no particular schedule. She had Prime Intellect banish her hunger after it revealed that her body was only a little more real than the forest had been. To Prime Intellect, a computer, more accurately a computer program, human beings weren't so much bodies with form and mass as they were minds which interacted with an abstract world through an arbitrary interface. Prime Intellect was forbidden to pry into the inner workings of those minds, but physical processes like hunger were not so protected.
Caroline re-read Inferno until she had large tracts of it committed to memory. Then she banished the book and decided to visit someone. The only problem was, there weren't many people she wished to visit. She couldn't work up an interest in her family, AnneMarie was still hiding from her, and she didn't really know anyone else. She had outlived most of her real friends. They had died honest, honorable, permanent deaths. They weren't available.
"How does a person go about meeting people in here?" she asked.
Prime Intellect outlined the possibilities. There were lots of parties already -- meeting people and matchmaking were activities humans had been quick to pursue both before and after the Change. There were a number of common cities and worlds where large crowds had gathered to live in various imitations of the pre-Change world. She could go to one of those and proceed as usual. Or Prime Intellect could make discreet inquiries.
She thought about it. Her current mood wouldn't exactly be welcome at most parties. And she wasn't interested in meeting people who were adapting to the Change very nicely, thank you. She wanted to know she wasn't the only person to feel fucked over by the Change.
"Tell you what.
I'd like to meet someone horrible. A murderer, something like that. You say they can't hurt me now?"
"Not at all."
"Then someone evil. Someone who was really despicable in their old life. Someone who did terrible things, the more the better, and liked it. There must be some of those guys who feel real frustrated right about now."
"Yes, there are." Amazing. It was totally deadpan. "There is a woman named..."
"Men, please."
"What do you want me to tell them about you?"
"The truth."
"I am asking..." There was a short pause. At least time was still real, Caroline thought.
"There is an interested gentleman. He was convicted of..."
"Just send me over, then."
It happened instantly.
She was standing on a wooden porch. It was a camp house, sitting alone on stilts above a very large, flat marsh. It wasn't in very good shape. Her host was behind her; she had to turn around to see him. He was a nondescript guy in his late twenties, white, red-haired and somewhat handsome. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Caroline's first impression was that he was a redneck. "You don't look a hundred and six years old," he said with a grin.
"I didn't get much choice about getting younger," Caroline said. "God didn't quite know what he was doing when he fixed me up."
"Oh, I'm sure he could put you back any old age you want now."
"What would be the point?"
"Right. Just thought I'd mention it."
The conversation stalled. Caroline's skills in this area were decidedly rusty. "You live here?" she finally asked.
"For now. Till I get my bearings with this Cyberspace shit. It has a lot of happy memories."
"Oh?"
"Old P.I. didn't tell you?"
"I didn't ask. I wanted to talk to a person, not a computer."
"Oh, joy. I get to break the news. Come inside."
Nothing special. It was just a camp house.
"This is where I did it," the man said.
Caroline's heart beat faster.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 12