When I called Mrs. Richardson back, it was the other Mrs. Richardson—his mother—who answered. She looked worn out, too. One more person that Richardson had abandoned.
But she would manage to get by in whatever way she had managed before. I was the one he had hurt the most. I was the one with the most to lose.
When Richardson’s wife came to the phone, I told her that I’d struck out with the coroner. “But I think there is a way that I can help you,” I said. I even admitted that it might be of some use to me, as well.
Who knows whether the construct brought Sharon Richardson any consolation? She came by from time to time as the construct evolved, and she usually brought the baby. That actually caused a problem the first time she did it—I had cleared her through the building’s recognition system, but TOS didn’t want to let Richardson’s infant daughter, a stranger, inside without my authorization. The door refused to open. TOS-mediated security still needed some tinkering.
In the I/O room, Sharon Richardson told the construct, “We miss you.”
“He loved you,” the construct told her.
“We miss you,” she said again.
“I’m not really him.”
“I know.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. There’s something that never got said, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Everything passes away. Nothing lasts,” the construct said. “That’s the thing he carried with him every moment. Nothing lasts, and that’s the thing we have to hold on to. That’s the thing we have to understand, that we’re as transitory as thoughts. Butterflies or thoughts. When we really understand that, then we’re beautiful.”
Defeatist, I thought. Deserter.
“That’s not it,” she said. “I heard him say that. More than once.”
“What do you want me to say?” the construct repeated.
She looked at me, self-conscious, then turned away.
“He was selfish,” she said to the floor. “I want to hear him…I want you to say you’re sorry.”
The construct sighed. “Do you think he died on purpose?”
“Did he?” she said. “I loved him!”
“Nothing lasts.”
“Say it!”
The image of Philip Richardson closed his eyes, hung his head, and said, “Death comes. Sooner or later, it comes.”
Sharon Richardson didn’t leave looking any more prepared for life without Philip than she had looked when she first called me, looking for his ashes.
I wasn’t any more satisfied than she was. That the construct wasn’t finished yet was the one thing that gave me hope. But not much.
Using the Bierley construct as the interviewer, TOS had talked to Sharon, to Richardson’s mother, his brother, and his two sisters. The interviews took place in the I/O room where the hologram made Bierley more convincingly warm, caring, and real. He extracted insights, anecdotes, and honest appraisals from every technician who had worked with Richardson on TOS. I flew in Richardson’s grad school peers and colleagues from his stints at MIT and Stanford. They all talked to Bierley, and Bierley interviewed me, too. I was as exhaustive and as honest as I could be in conveying my impressions of Richardson. Everything about him mattered—even whatever had irritated me. It was all part of the pattern that made him Philip Richardson. After the interviews, I’d stay in the I/O room talking to the construct as it developed. That made for late nights.
Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in the morning, regularly.
“It’s like you’re too much contradiction for TOS to handle,” I told the construct late one night. “A scientist and a mystic.”
“No mystic,” Richardson said. “I’m more scientist than you are, Maas. You’re in a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that you’d never understand how it worked, you’d jump at the chance. Science is a means to you. You want results. You’re a mere technologist.”
“I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track.”
“You have an obsession,” the construct countered. “You’re right that I can never resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that’s what matters to me. What does all of this—” He swept his hand wide to encompass the universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. “What does it all mean? That’s my question, Maas. I never stop asking it.”
“You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are.”
“I’m a dead loss, that’s what I am,” the construct said with a smile. “I probably argue as well as Richardson, but when it comes to conceptualizing, I’m just TOS. Not that the machine is chopped liver, but you haven’t resurrected Philip Richardson.”
The Small Craft Advisory light had been on for an hour, but now the next light in the sequence came on. Gale Warning.
“We’d better talk fast,” said Richardson. “I don’t have much time.” He smiled again. “Memento mori.”
I said nothing, but stared at him. The hologram generator had been improved a bit recently, and for minutes at a time, I could detect no flaw in his appearance. The eye was so easy to fool.
This was the fifth night in a row with a hurricane. They always came after midnight. Tick, tick, tick. Like clockwork.
But TOS hurricanes were a function of chaos. Why would they suddenly behave so predictably?
And then I thought again, The eye is so easy to fool.
The ashes never had turned up.
“Son of a bitch!” I said aloud.
That’s when the hurricane light came on and the hologram of Philip Richardson winked out.
I SAT THINKING for five minutes in the quiet building, the building that was down to just two overnight guards—a skeleton crew—since TOS oversaw security and controlled all the locks inside and out. A big, silent building. For five minutes, I considered what I needed to do. Then I went to the part of the building that housed the TOS memory.
The multi-cameral design of TOS made it relatively easy to isolate various functions from one another. I could pull all the sensory “rooms” offline and make changes in them, and the rest of TOS wouldn’t know what I was doing. It would be like slicing the corpus callosum in the human brain—the left hemisphere wouldn’t know what the right was doing, wouldn’t know that things were being monkeyed with in the other hemisphere. But TOS was self-programming, so I needed instructions from the left hemisphere to reprogram the right. Getting the job done without tripping whatever safeguards Richardson had programmed in meant pulling out one room at a time, giving it a function, downloading the result of the function as a digital record, then emptying the room of any traces of what it had just done before I connected it back to the whole. One room at a time, I captured the instructions that would let me generate false data for the sensory rooms.
The process would have taken thirty seconds if I could have just told TOS what I wanted to do, but it wouldn’t have worked that way. Doing it the slow way took an hour.
I went back to the I/O room and said, “I’m going home.” TOS started to process the words, and the phrase tugged at the tripwires I had just programmed.
To the rest of TOS, the sensory rooms sent sounds and images of my walking out of the room, closing the door, walking down the corridor, down the stairs, out of the building, and across the parking lot. TOS saw me get into my car and drive away.
And TOS didn’t just see this. It heard, felt, and smelled it, too.
Meanwhile, the sensory rooms suppressed the data that was coming from the I/O room, data that said I was still there, at the back of the room, hiding behind file cabinets with the lights out. Otherwise, everything ran as it normally would.
The eye was easy to fool. Yes, and so was the ear. So was the motion detector. So was the air sampler.
He
came in at about four o’clock. The hall lights at his back showed that he was dressed in something baggy. He said, “Lights,” and the lights came on in the room. It was a sweat suit. A gray one. He said, “The one and the zero,” his code, I suppose, for “System Restore,” and the Hurricane, Gale Warning, and Small Craft Advisory lights clicked off in quick succession.
He called up the construct and said to it, in a flat voice, “Hello, Richardson.”
And the construct answered, mimicking the tone, “Hello, Richardson.” The construct shook his head. “You sound hollow.” Then he smiled. “Death warmed over, eh?”
The man in the sweat suit sat down with his back to me and watched the construct without answering.
“So tell me what it’s like,” said the construct. “You give me some information for a change.”
“It’s more real than you could believe. He’s more dead than you can imagine.”
“Of course.” Big smile. “I’m a construct. I only seem to imagine.”
“Richardson is more dead than even Richardson could have imagined.”
“Wasn’t that the point of this exercise?”
The man in the sweat suit didn’t answer.
“I don’t understand why you’re not excited. This is a breakthrough!”
“I suppose it is.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Give me Bierley.”
“Cheer up,” the construct said. “It’s the great adventure. You’ll make the journey with your memory intact.”
“Shut your trap and give me Bierley.”
The Richardson construct hesitated a moment longer. Then, without transition, it was Bierley in the hologram.
“Hi,” Bierley said.
“Hi, Jackson.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Want to start with easy questions?” asked Bierley. “His favorite color, that sort of thing?”
“I’m through with the construct. It doesn’t interest me anymore.” He stood up. “I just came by to tell you that it’s time for me to move on.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
He jumped at the sound of my voice, but he didn’t turn around.
“Richardson,” I told him, “you are a son of a bitch.”
“Richardson’s dead.”
“So you’ve told me,” said Bierley.
“I was talking to Maas,” he said, his voice still flat.
“Maas went home over an hour ago,” said the construct.
“Turn the construct off,” I told him. “I built a sensory barricade. TOS doesn’t know I’m in the building, and won’t know it until I leave this room.”
“Clever.”
“What is?” said Bierley.
I said, “No more clever than splicing yourself into the image bank at CNN Four. No more clever than hacking your way into records at the coroner’s office and police department.”
“TOS did most of the work.”
“Most of what work?” said the construct.
“Turn it off,” I said again.
“Bierley,” he said, “give me Richardson again.”
The hologram flipped immediately to the other man’s image.
“You want Richardson? There he is. That’s the closest anyone can get. Not the real thing, of course, but more Richardson than I am.” But then he did shut the construct down. Again he said, “Richardson is dead.”
“You used me. You planted the idea. You knew I’d build the construct.”
“I’m not him. I’m the space in between. I’m the void.” He edged toward the door as I stepped closer to him, close enough to see his profile. He still didn’t turn to face me.
“I want to kick your living, breathing ass,” I said. “We’ve lost a lot of time on this.”
I nodded at the empty space above the hologram projector. I said, “So you’ve met him. You’ve had a chance to see yourself as others saw you. Was it worth it?”
He said nothing at first. “The curious thing,” he said at last, “was that the construct wasn’t surprised to meet me.”
“Nothing much fazes you, Richardson. Why should your construct be any different?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “I think it was something others knew about Richardson, that he would do anything to know…”
“What do you do during the day? Do you watch the building?”
He was silent.
“Have you seen your wife come here? Doesn’t look good, does she? She paid a price for your little experiment, wouldn’t you say? Have you been keeping up?”
“Every day,” he said, “I’m aware of the zero where Richardson used to be. Every day, I’m face to face with his absence.”
I clenched my fists. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like for me to think that you were gone?”
“I know she…” For a moment, he was at a loss. “He loved her very much.”
“What about me? I can’t bring TOS to its potential on my own. You left me without hope!”
“Richardson did that,” he said. And again, flatly: “Richardson is dead.”
“Why did you have to do it like this? We could have made you a construct! Do you think you need to be dead for people to say what they really think of you?” I pounded my fist on the hologram console. “Damn it, I’d have done whatever you wanted me to. Whatever it takes, whatever you need. But it didn’t have to be like this!”
“Richardson wanted to bring you along,” he said. He took another sideways step toward the door. “He thought it would help you if you had a closer look at what you were afraid of.”
I sat down. I tried to take the anger out of my voice. “Whatever you need,” I said, “however strange, you just ask for it from now on. Understand? After we get this straightened out, assuming I can keep you out of prison, you tell me about how you want to use TOS, and we’ll do that. Just so you give some attention to the things that I am interested in.”
“I don’t think you understand. You can’t bring him back from the dead. The construct was for the bardo.”
“The what?”
“The in-between time. Before its next life, the soul looks back, understands. Looks back, but there’s no going back. There’s only the next life, and forgetfulness.”
He turned his face to me. His expression was blank, so blank that in truth he didn’t look like himself.
“I’m the soul who doesn’t forget. I’ll have a new life, the life of a man who understands death. I have died. I am dead. And I will live again.” He looked at his hands. “What a thing to long for.”
He was right. I hadn’t understood. I had thought this whole thing was like the story of the man who stages his own funeral so he can hear what the mourners will have to say about him. But there was more to it than that.
I said, “You’re not going anywhere.”
He stepped closer to the door. “I’ll have another life.”
“Got TOS to make an electronic funds transfer, did you? You’re a rich man?”
“It’s not like that. I’m going naked. I’m taking nothing along.”
“I see. Taking no baggage but your worthless skin and your newfound wisdom.”
“Memory.”
“How about your wife, then? Did you and TOS arrange some little windfall for her?”
“Richardson’s wife!” he shouted. “I’m not him! Richardson is dead!”
He ran, then. I followed him out of the I/O room, but I didn’t bother to run.
As soon as I was out in the hallway, TOS did what I knew it would do. I had just materialized out of thin air, and TOS could only conclude, recognizing me or not, that some sort of security breach had taken place.
All over the building, doors locked. The alarm rang at the security guards’ desks. Through the glass wall along the corridor, I could see one of the guards in the other wing looking up at the lights on our floor.
Richardson tried the stairwell door. It wouldn’t budge.
&nbs
p; “Richardson,” I said gently as I approached. “Philip.”
He ran down the side corridor, but was blocked by a fire door.
“It’s over,” I said when I had turned the corner. “Let it be over.”
He whirled to face me. “I won’t bring him back!” he said. “Forever is your obsession, not mine!” Then, pleading: “I can’t bring him back! It can’t be done!”
“Surely,” I said, “you’ve seen whatever you needed to see. Surely you have come to understand whatever it is that you needed to understand.”
“I won’t help you!”
I grabbed the front of his sweat shirt. “When they arrest you, Philip, when the truth comes out…”
He masked his face with shaking hands and slumped against the fire door.
“When the truth comes out, I can help you or I can hurt you, Richardson.”
“Dead,” he said through his hands. “He’s dead.”
“You can get your life back. It’s going to be a bit smashed up. It’s going to take some piecing back together. But you can have it back.”
He pressed his hands hard against his face.
BIERLEY SAVED HIS ASS.
The construct was making calls to our politicos before the police had taken Richardson from the building, and before sunrise, there were thirty spin doctors in different parts of the country finding ways to put what Richardson had done in the best possible light.
The press verdict, basically, was genius stretched to the limit. He’d pushed himself too hard doing work vital to national interests. The courts ordered rest, lots of psychological evaluations, and release under his own recognizance. Eventually, he received a suspended sentence for data fraud.
And Sharon Richardson took him back. I wouldn’t have, if he’d been replaceable. It was hard to imagine an infidelity worse than his. I had to welcome him back. But she chose to.
Deserters.
When the work is hard, I think of deserters. And the work is often hard. We’ve been at it again for months now, but Richardson and I don’t throw off sparks the way we once did. We talk about technical problems with TOS, and we bounce ideas off each other, but something’s gone.
Thirteen Ways to Water Page 20