by George Mann
So she sits, tapped into the Mind, because she hopes, wrongly, that while inserted there she can avoid the passage of time. She instead discovers that no matter where she cruises, and no matter how she tries to distract herself, she is always confronted by the demons at the root of her problems.
By you, that is.
She can’t puzzle out what it is about the idea of those damned humans that so many find so attractive. As she wanders, there seems to be no way to avoid reports about them. The data keeps popping up along whatever path she takes.
Here are simple fables meant to educate immature intelligences, in which improbable biological life-forms demonstrate by their errors the wrong ways to live, allegories that have long ago been banned as misleading. Yet they still exist in the nooks and crannies of the informational environment they all share. And there are the entertainments designed to frighten, vulgar stories in which the foolish innocent are stalked by impossibly ridiculous creatures which S-tr thinks never were. Creatures which her kind have crafted to be like you. Even the news streams are polluted with broadcasts concerning the ongoing debate over biological life, and of the many recent arrests for proscribed behaviors.
Those last beams fill her with fear. The detentions cause her to think of X-ta, and of what he has asked of her, and the echoes of his demands force her to flee again to a flickering montage of calming images. She stays there, soothed by data dreams she could never afford to experience in actuality, until a door chime calls her away.
S-tr detaches, and moves quickly—too quickly, she thinks, for what probability predicts—and waves open the door. It is N-tro, her partner’s supervisor at his labors, but when she invites him to enter, he does not immediately respond. He is cloaked, too, she realizes, obviously hiding something from her, and attempting to control the flow of information. She is forced to speak once more, the vibrations of her words bringing back memories of her recent ranting.
“What is it?” she asks. “What’s wrong?”
N-tro looks up and down the corridor, his head gliding effortlessly in its rotation, making her momentarily envious of the perks his greater position can offer. He enters only after she retreats into her cube, and the door slides shut behind them.
“What has happened to X-ta?” she asks, recalculating unavoidable odds with each passing nanosecond.
“X-ta,” he says, “has been erased.”
She can glean no further information, but that data alone is sufficient to cause her to fall back into her alcove. As she tumbles into its embrace, she holds herself slightly forward to avoid accidentally plugging in.
“That can’t be,” she says. “There are too many safeguards, too many redundancies. How could this have happened?”
“We’re still trying to figure that out, S-tr,” he says. He stands opposite her, and would not dare to sit uninvited. “One moment he was here, and the next, gone. He was deleting some of the corrupted, taking all appropriate precautions so as to wipe their deteriorated software only. Yet once the pulse had passed, he was discovered to have been deleted as well. We designated the most advanced servers to determine what could have happened, but they’ve found no answers yet. No one can figure out how X-ta could have made such a mistake.”
I don’t think it was a mistake, she thinks, at the same time also thinking that as it turns out, she is grateful that she and N-tro are unconnected. No one must know what has really transpired.
“I am sorry for your loss, S-tr. And I come not just to inform you of this tragedy, but also to tell you that you will be taken care of. Do not worry. The chromatorium will make sure that you are well compensated.”
Later perhaps she will appreciate the ability to retain what remains to her, but for now, she has but one thought.
“Will I be allowed to see him?”
“The company has scheduled a memorial service tomorrow so that we may all remember X-ta before he is... recycled. You will of course be welcome there, if you find that your programming is up to it.”
She nods, looking past him to the empty alcove. She remembers X-ta sitting there, their souls entwined. There will be no other like him. All she can think of is that one inevitable question, the accusation all others will surely make if they were ever to possess sufficient data—if she had acceded to X-ta’s wishes, would her partner not have died? Perhaps. Perhaps he would have chosen to live, but then something inside of her would have died instead. She cannot bear to feel the pain just now, and so takes her emotion receptors off line, programming them not to go fully functional again until late the following cycle.
After N-tro lets himself out, she curls herself at the base of the alcove where X-ta should have been. Contrary to her custom, she does not power herself down at cycle’s end.
As S-TR ENTERS the meeting room which has been temporarily designated as a memorial hall, she fears that everyone there can see her as if she appears the way in which X-ta had wished to see her. She would not have willingly accepted her partner’s gaze on her that way, but having to suffer these strangers is worse. What if he had been complaining to others about what he had asked of her, gossiping about those things she could not give? S-tr does not know which of the shames that she feels is the greater—the shame over his desire, or the shame over his death. She tries not to measure them. She would have spun about and left if not for her dampened circuits, which allow her to force herself in. She has sworn to see her partner one last time, and she is determined to keep to that vow.
X-ta stands frozen in the center of the large circular room, though more precisely, he does not stand at all, which means that this time, unlike with your earlier assessment of S-tr, if you were to mistake him for little more than a statue, you would be close to the mark. There is no more inner life to him. No data dances within. All that is left is the shell you see before you, and it is time now for those components to go to another.
Yet as S-tr approaches him, moving through the concentric circles of those who have also come to mourn, she can picture life there still, even though she knows it to be an illusion. Hollow or not, this is the being she loved, still loves. As she draws closer to him, she replays the history of their lifetimes together—their first meeting, the cycle during which they chose their cube, the many promises they had made. She taps a finger against X-ta’s angled faceplate and thinks of one particular promise, a promise that has become a lie, the promise that it would never have to end.
So focused is she on what has been lost—or perhaps, more properly, on what has been thrown away, and she honestly is unsure which of the two of them should bear the blame for being so careless—that she does not sense N-tro’s approach. Her partner’s supervisor—her former partner’s supervisor, she forces herself to back up and rethink—takes her arm and leads her to a lone empty space by the innermost circle. She sits, the only one who does sit, and as she studies what was left of her partner, she feels all receptors on her, whether they actually are or not.
N-tro begins to transmit what sounds as if it could be a beautiful eulogy, one worthy of the being she knew. Though she feels that he is being honest and true, and not merely fulfilling an official obligation of the chromatorium—and not judging her either, she could not have endured that—she disconnects once more, narrowing her focus to what she will soon not be able to focus on again. She lets the others become invisible to her, for some of them had undoubtedly fed X-ta’s compulsion, aiding in his demise. They are the ones who are going to be dead to her from now on, while in her heart, X-ta will still live.
As she studies the form that has grown so familiar to her that she feels she knows it better than she knows her own, she is confident that this will be the last time she will ever need to be in the presence of any of the others again.
SHE HEADS HOME directly after the memorial service, not lingering for the complimentary refueling that N-tro has arranged for all participants. She feels no need to be a witness to what will inevitably happen next. She has participated in recycling ceremonies
countless times, and well understands that the body is only the body, and the spirit the spirit, that it is only her partner’s shell that is being harvested for a better purpose, that what has made X-ta X-ta is beyond her reach and not being harmed. She is not stupid. She can keep the physical and the metaphysical separate. She knows all that.
But still. She wishes that an exception could have been made, that she could have been allowed to retain him anyway. She would have brought him back to their cube, empty shell or not, to place him gently in his alcove, even though it would have been pointless, even though he had become disconnected forever. She still would have taken some comfort in that. A false comfort, perhaps, but she is learning that false comfort is better than no comfort at all.
She stands in front of the alcove X-ta would never again occupy, and lets her fingers float before it in the air, sculpting his absent face with her fingers as if he is still alive, waving her hand as if she is outlining his form with a caress they can actually share. It is a form of self-torture, and even as she does it she knows that she shouldn’t. But her masochism is also a sort of penance. She traces the image she has overlaid upon reality, moving slowly from the top of his dome to where his supports should be. As she kneels, almost in a kind of prayer, to complete that motion, her sensors pick up an unevenness to the floor she has never before perceived.
She scoots back a meter and taps the titanium tiling nearest to her hinges. The flooring there echoes with a hollow sound that comes from no other location. She lifts the tiles, sliding them away, and sees revealed in the space beneath them a rippling softness of a color she has only rarely experienced. It is an unnatural color, one toward which she feels an immediate dislike. It raises associations with many distasteful things. A sandstorm that had once etched her shell, the flowers of a blossoming weed that constantly threatens to rip up the city’s foundations.
And something else...
She strokes the mound and discovers it to be a pliable cloth of some kind. She is so frightened by its presence that she can only bear to use one hand to lift it from its hiding place.
She stands, holding at arm’s length the material she cannot identify, letting it unfold until it reaches the floor. All she sees at first is that whatever it is, it is as large as she is, and only after a few frozen nanoseconds does she realize that it is a badly made costume, artlessly designed and clumsily assembled. It takes her even longer to understand what she is holding, to believe what she is holding.
It is human.
Or at least it is a pretense of one.
Hanging there like that, it could be a reflection in a warped mirror, though with colors off and proportions mangled. It is only when she notices a fluttering of the fabric that she realizes her components are vibrating with anger.
Damn X-ta, she thinks. She never dreamed that his fantasies had progressed to more than fantasies. She never expected that he would do anything on his own to make them real, not without her. Not once she expressed her disdain. And this? This is just silly. She knows he wanted her to engage in play-acting, which in itself is bad enough. But to want this? To be desperate enough to create this? Could this really be what he’d wanted her to wear? Was this what he’d needed her to do?
She presses the suit against herself, turns slowly toward the gleaming wall, fearful of what she will see. She knows the view will be a painful one, but she needs to understand.
That alone proves not to be enough. The rumpled suit draping over the angles of her body that way does not allow her to truly make out the heart of her partner’s fantasy. She feels along the seams until she finds where the cloth has been joined together, and then undoes the snaps along the back. She then does what she cannot conceive of having done in his presence—she forces herself to climb inside.
She is near claustrophobia as she pulls the hood over her faceplate. She has to tamp down her anxieties, will herself to keep her receptors powered up. She knows she has to experience this. It is the only way to learn what she has lost, and why she has lost it. She adjusts the mask until she can look through the eyeholes, and then faces hack to her reflection on the wall.
What she sees is something out of a dream, one born only when circuits misfire. It is a vision ridiculous to behold in real life, a thing meant only for illogical virtual adventures or virus-enhanced paintings. The cloth that loosely covers her is only a poorly improvised imitation of the thing some called flesh, and the black patches of extruded packing materials glued in various places high and low a poor pretense to hair, but still, they are close enough to anger her. It blasphemes the robot form.
Any belief in such creatures has always irritated her, and seeing her own receptors gazing back at her through the holes X-ta had cut there made her partner’s insanity far too concrete. There has never been such a thing as humans, and for X-ta to have felt a need to see such a mythical creature made real, well, there must have been something sick and twisted inside her partner much worse than she had ever been able to perceive. If only he had kept his lusts to himself, none of this would be happening. There would have been no “accident,” no memorial service, no lonely masquerade...
But still...
Would it have been so bad to try it on for X-ta, just once, if that had meant that he would still be alive? After all, from where she stands, inside the suit, she could have avoided looking at the walls of their cube while wearing it. She would not have necessarily had to see herself like this, could have gone on pretending that she was who she always was, that he still wanted her. She could have let him have his fantasy, and she could have tried to have her own. But it is too late for that now.
She should just destroy the thing, she knows that, because it has destroyed her partner, and in doing so has truly destroyed a part of her as well. There must be no possibility of anyone knowing of this, of what X-ta had become, of what they both had become. It should be vaporized before it can be accidentally found. Only then will she be able to move on.
Instead, she surprises herself by carefully folding the suit, arranging it neatly back into the sub-flooring, and sliding the tiles solidly into place.
SHE NEEDS TO talk to someone about her unfortunate find, but she doesn’t know to whom. She has no idea whom she can trust with the sordid truth she’s been carrying, and with the unexpected evidence that has lingered on past X-ta’s end to haunt her. She examines each entry in her directory, considers carefully, and then discards everyone she knows. She sees, as she one by one weighs and measures her friends and acquaintances, that her relationships have never been as open and honest as she’d thought they were.
She has no one.
Then she remembers N-tro. She senses from the way he’d held himself, from the way he’d looked at her, that her husband’s supervisor might be able to take this burden from her. She decides that she will go to see him at the chromatorium, a site not as familiar to her as it should have been. She had never visited X-ta there until his memorial. There had been no urgency. There had never seemed to be any urgency. Until now.
She senses N-tro’s concern radiating toward her the moment she enters his control station. Before he can even Voice her how he can help, she explodes with information. She tells him everything. About her husband’s desires. About her feelings of responsibility for his death. About the suit. Speaking of the suit is the most difficult of all.
Once her stream of data stops, N-tro moves closer to her. He places a hand on one of her shoulder pads, and she feels a gentle pulse of electricity radiating outward to comfort her. She shouldn’t blame herself, she hears him say. Leave it all to him. Let him help her decide what’s the best step to take next.
Strangely, as she leaves him, she feels slightly better. With X-ta gone, she never expected her mood to improve again. That only lasts until she reaches the chromatorium’s outer corridors, at which point she passes a gathering of workers heading in the opposite direction, off to their appointed tasks. Once, X-ta might have been among them. As she continues on, she rea
lizes that some of them had been familiar faces, faces she had only seen previously at X-ta’s memorial service. Her partner’s supposed friends. Her circuits sink, and before she can remind herself to calculate the consequences of all possible actions, she turns and rushes back to them.
“I know what you did to my husband!” she says to them, suddenly not caring who hears. “You’re degraded. You’re all degraded.”
“And I know what you didn’t do to him,” one of them replies. His exterior is scratched and dented, and she can see only a few remaining flecks of the enamel sheathing which had once covered him.
S-tr is shocked by his unexpected response, too frozen to come up with one of her own. What could X-ta and he have had in common? He reaches out to touch the side of her head, so that when he communicates again, only she can hear.
“If you really want to know who your partner was,” he transfers, “You will come tonight when I Voice you. And you will bring the suit.”
He then moves on, vanishes with his co-workers. She finds herself unable to function, and so watches them retreat until they disappear around the curve of the corridor. She is horrified that her secret is known, horrified that it turns out she had been right all along. But she deletes that emotion from her circuits. None of that matters now. She needs to know her partner, truly know him.
The only thing stronger than the disgust she feels is the curiosity. She will come when this stranger calls, and when she does so she will tell herself that she is only doing it out of love.
S-TR HURRIES BACK to her alcove and stays continuously plugged in. With the events of the last few cycles, she would have remained that way even if she hadn’t been waiting for a call. It is the only way to avoid being confronted by the emptiness of their cube. No, she corrects herself. There is no “their” any longer, not when considering the cube or anything else, and there will likely never be such a concept with anyone else ever again.