Hackers

by Jack Dann

  Roman went white. He sat back down. "That's because I've already lost some of the personality I've given it. It remembers things I've forgotten, prompting me the way Abigail does." He put his face in his hands. "Oh, my God, Gerald, what am I going to do?"

  Gerald set his drink down carefully and put his arm around his friend's shoulders, something he rarely did. And they sat there in the silent study, two old friends stuck at the wrong end of time.

  The pursuing, choking darkness had almost gotten him. Roman sat bolt upright in bed, trying desperately to drag air in through his clogged throat.

  The room was dark. He had no idea of where he was or even who he was. All he felt was stark terror. The bedclothes seemed to be grabbing for him, trying to pull him back into that all-consuming darkness. Whimpering, he tried to drag them away from his legs.

  The lights came on. "What's wrong, Roman?" Abigail looked at him in consternation.

  "Who are you?" Roman shouted at this ancient white-haired woman who had somehow come to be in his bed. "Where's Abigail? What have you done with her?" He took the old woman by her shoulders and shook her.

  "Stop it, Roman. Stop it!" Her eyes filled with tears. "You're having a nightmare. You're here in bed. With me. I'm Abigail, your wife. Roman!"

  Roman stared at her. Her long hair had once been raven black and was now pure white.

  "Oh, Abigail." The bedroom fell into place around him, the spindle bed, the nightstands, the lamps—his green-glass shaded, hers crystal. "Oh, Pookie, I'm sorry." He hadn't used that ridiculous endearment in years. He hugged her, feeling how frail she had become. She kept herself in shape, but she was old, her once-full muscles now like taut cords, pulling her bones as if she was a marionette. "I'm sorry."

  She sobbed against him, then withdrew, wiping at her eyes. "What a pair of hysterical old people we've become." Her vivid blue eyes glittered with tears. "One nightmare and we go all to pieces."

  It wasn't just one nightmare, not at all. What was he supposed to say to her? Roman freed himself from the down comforter, carefully fitted his feet into his leather slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. He was an old man, hair standing on end. He wore a nice pair of flannel pajamas and leather slippers his wife had given him for Christmas. His mind was dissolving like a lump of sugar in hot coffee.

  The bathroom was clean tile with a wonderful claw-footed bathtub. The floor was tiled in a colored parquet-deformation pattern that started with ordinary bathroom-floor hexagons near the toilet, slowly modified itself into complex knotted shapes in the middle, and then, by another deformation, returned to hexagons under the sink. It had cost him a small fortune and months of work to create this complex mathematical tessellation. It was a dizzying thing to contemplate from the throne, and it now turned the ordinarily safe bathroom into a place of nightmare. Why couldn't he have picked something more comforting?

  He stared at his image with some bemusement. He normally combed his thin hair down to hide his bald spot. Whom did he think he was fooling? Woken from sleep, he was red-eyed. The bathroom mirror had turned into a magic one and revealed all his flaws. He was wrinkled, had bags under his eyes, broken veins. He liked to think that he was a lovable curmudgeon. Curmudgeon, hell. He looked like a nasty old man.

  "Are you all right in there?" Abigail's voice was concerned.

  "I'm fine. Be right there." With one last glance at his mirror image, Roman turned the light off and went back to bed.

  Roman sat in his study chair and fumed. Something had happened to the medical profession while he wasn't looking. That was what he got for being so healthy. He obviously hadn't been keeping track of things.

  "What did he say?" The computer's voice was interested. Roman was impressed by the inflection. He was also impressed by how easy it was to tell that the computer desperately wanted to know. Was he always that obvious?

  "He's an idiot." Roman was pleased to vent his spleen. "Dr. Weisner's a country-club doctor, making diagnoses between the green and the clubhouse. His office is in a building near a shopping mall. What ever happened to leather armchairs, wood paneling, and pictures of the College of Surgeons? You could trust a man with an office decorated like that, even if he was a drunken butcher."

  "You're picking up Abigail's perception of style."

  Roman, who'd just been making that same observation to himself, felt caught red-handed. "True. Weisner's a specialist in the diseases of aging. Jesus. He'll make a terrible old man, though, slumped in front of a TV set watching game shows." Roman sighed. "He does seem to know what he's talking about."

  There was no known way to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, for example. Roman hadn't known that. There was only posthumous detection of senile plaques and argyrophilic neurofibrillary tangles in addition to cortical atrophy. Getting that information out of Weisner had been like pulling teeth. The man wasn't used to giving patients information. Roman had even browbeaten him into showing him slides of typical damage and pointing out the details. Now that he sat and imagined what was going on in his own brain he wasn't sure he should have been so adamant.

  "Could you play that again?" the computer asked.

  Roman was yanked from his brown study. "What?"

  "The music you just had on. The Zelenka."

  "Sure, sure." Roman loved Jan Dismas Zelenka's Trio Sonatas, and his computer did too. He got a snifter of Metaxa and put the music on again. The elaborate architecture of two oboes and a bassoon filled the study.

  Roman sipped the rough brandy. "Sorry you can't share this."

  "So am I."

  Roman reached under and pulled out a game box. "You know, the biggest disappointment I have is that Gerald hates playing games of any sort. I love them: chess, backgammon, Go, cards. So I have to play with people who are a lot less interesting than he is." He opened a box and looked at the letters. "You'd think he'd at least like Scrabble."

  "Care for a game?"

  "What, are you kidding?" Roman looked at the computer in dismay. "That won't be any fun. You know all the words."

  "Now, Roman. It's getting increasingly difficult calling you that, you know. That's my name. A game of Scrabble with you might not be fun, but not for that reason. My vocabulary is exactly yours, complete down to vaguenesses and mistakes. Neither of us can remember the meaning of the word 'jejune.' We will each always type 'anamoly' before correcting it to 'anomaly.' It won't be fun precisely because I won't know any more words than you do."

  "That's probably no longer true." Roman felt like crying. "You're already smarter than I am. Or, I suppose, I'm already dumber. I should have thought of that."

  "Don't be so hard on yourself—"

  "No!" Roman stood up, dumping Scrabble letters to the floor. "I'm losing everything that makes me me! That's why you're here."

  "Yes, Roman." The computer's voice was soft.

  "Together we can still make a decision, a final disposition. You're me, you know what that is. This can all have only one conclusion. There is only one action you and I can finally take. You know that. You know!"

  "That's true. You know, Roman, you are a very intelligent man. Your conclusions agree entirely with my own."

  Roman laughed. "God, it's tough when you find yourself laughing at your own jokes."

  When he opened the door, Roman found Gerald in the darkness of the front stoop, dressed in a trench coat, fedora pulled down low over his eyes.

  "I got the gat," Gerald muttered.

  Roman pulled him through the front door, annoyed. "Quit fooling around. This is serious."

  "Sure, sure." Gerald slung his trench coat on a hook by the door and handed his fedora to Roman. "Careful of the chapeau. It's a classic."

  Roman spun it off onto the couch. When he turned back Gerald had the gun out. It was a smooth, deadly blue-black pistol.

  "A Beretta model 92." Gerald held it nervously in his hand, obviously unused to weapons. "Fashionable. The Italians have always been leaders in st
yle." He walked into the study and set it down on a pile of books, unwilling to hold it longer than necessary. "It took me an hour to find. It was in a trunk in the bottom of a closet, under some clothes I should have taken to Goodwill years ago."

  "Where did you get it?" Roman himself wasn't yet willing to pick it up.

  "An old lover. A police officer. She was worried about me. A man living all alone, that sort of thing. It had been confiscated in some raid or other. By the way, it's unregistered and thus completely illegal. You could spend a year in jail for just having it. I should have dumped it years ago."

  Roman finally picked it up and checked it out, hand shaking just slightly. The double magazine was full of cartridges. "You could have fought off an entire platoon of housebreakers with this thing."

  "I reloaded before I brought it over here. I broke up with Lieutenant Carpozo years ago. The bullets were probably stale . . . or whatever happens to old bullets." He stared at Roman for a long moment. "You're a crazy bastard, you know that, Roman?"

  Roman didn't answer. The computer did. "It would be crazy for you, Gerald. For me, it's the only thing that makes sense."

  "Great." Gerald was suddenly viciously annoyed. "Quite an achievement, programming self-importance into a computer. I congratulate you. Well, I'm getting out of here. This whole business scares the shit out of me."

  "My love to Anna. You are still seeing her, aren't you?"

  Gerald eyed him. "Yes, I am." He stopped and took Roman's shoulders. "Are you going to be all right, old man?"

  "I'll be fine. Good night, Gerald."

  Once his friend was gone, Roman calmly and methodically locked the pistol into an inaccessible computer-controlled cabinet to one side of the desk. Its basis was a steel firebox. Powerful electromagnets pulled chrome-moly steel bars through their locks and clicked shut. It would make a well-equipped machine shop a week to get into the box if the computer didn't wish it. But at the computer's decision, the thing would slide open as easily as an oiled desk drawer.

  He walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Abigail woke up and looked at him nervously, worried that he was having another night terror attack. He leaned over and kissed her.

  "Can I talk with you?"

  "Of course, Roman. Just a second." She sat up and turned on her reading light. Then she ran a brush through her hair, checking its arrangement with a hand mirror. That done, she looked attentive.

  "We got the Humana research contract today."

  "Why, Roman, that's wonderful. Why didn't you tell me?" She pouted. "We ate dinner together and you let me babble on about the garden and Mrs. Peasley's orchids and you never said anything about it."

  "That's because it has nothing to do with me. My team got the contract with their work."

  "Roman—"

  "Wait."

  He looked around the bedroom. It had delicately patterned wallpaper and rugs on the floor. It was a graceful and relaxing room, all of it Abigail's doing. His night table was much larger than hers because he always piled six months' worth of reading into it.

  "Everyone's covering for me. They know what I've done in the past, and they try to make me look good. But I'm useless. You're covering for me. Aren't you, Abigail? If you really think about it, you know something's happening to me. Something that can only end one way. I'm sure that in your nightstand somewhere there's a book on senile dementia. I don't have to explain anything to you."

  She looked away. "I wouldn't keep it somewhere so easy for you to find."

  The beautiful room suddenly looked threatening. The shadows on the wall cast by Abigail's crystal-shaded lamp were ominous looming monsters. This wasn't his room. He no longer had anything to do with it. The books in the night table would remain forever unread or, if read, would be soon forgotten. He fell forward and she held him.

  "I can't make you responsible for me," he said. "I can't do that to you. I can't ruin your life."

  "No, Roman. I'll always take care of you, no matter what happens." Her voice was fierce. "I love you."

  "I know. But it won't be me you're caring for. It will be a hysterical beast with no memory and no sense. I won't even be able to appreciate what you are doing for me. I'll scream at you, run away and get lost, shit in my pants."

  She drew in a long breath.

  "And you know what? Right now I could make the decision to kill myself—"

  "No! God, Roman, you're fine. You're having a few memory lapses. I hate to tell you, but that comes with age. I have them. We all do. You can live a full life along with the rest of us. Don't be such a perfectionist."

  "Yes. Now I have the capacity to make a decision to end it, if I choose. But now I don't need to make a decision like that. My personality is still whole. Battered, but still there. But when enough of my mind is gone that I am a useless burden, I won't be able to make the decision. It's damnable. When I'm a drooling idiot who shits in his pants and makes your life a living, daily hell, I won't have the sense to end it. I'll be miserable, terrified, hysterical. And I'll keep on living. And none of these living wills can arrange it. They can avoid heroic measures, take someone off life support, but they can't actually kill anyone."

  "But what about me?" Her voice was sharp. "Is that it, then? You have a problem, you make the decision, and I'm left to pick up whatever pieces are left? I'm supposed to abide by whatever decision you make?"

  "That's not fair." He hadn't expected an argument. But what, then? Simple acquiescence? This was Abigail.

  "Who's being unfair?" She gasped. "When you think there's not enough of you left to love, you'll just end yourself."

  "Abigail, I love and care for you. I won't always be able to say that. Someday that love will vanish along with my mind. Allow me the right to live as the kind of human being I want to be. You don't want a paltry sick thing to take care of as a reminder of the man I once was. I think that after several years of that you will forget what it was about me that you once loved."

  So they cried together, the way they had in their earliest days with each other, when it seemed that it would never work and they would have to spend their whole lives apart.

  Roman stood in the living room in confusion. It was night outside. He remembered it being morning not more than a couple of minutes before. He had been getting ready to go to the office. There were important things to do there.

  But no. He had retired from Hyperneuron. People from the office sometimes came to visit, but they never stayed long. Roman didn't notice because he couldn't pay that much attention. He offered them glasses of lemonade, sometimes bringing in second and third ones while their first was yet unfinished. Elaine had left in tears once. Roman didn't know why.

  Gerald came every week. Often Roman didn't recognize him.

  But Roman wanted something. He was out here for some reason. "Abigail!" he screamed. "Where's my . . . my . . . tool?"

  His hair was neatly combed, he was dressed, clean. He didn't know that.

  Abigail appeared at the door. "What is it, honey?"

  "My tool, dammit, my tool. My . . . cutting . . ." He waved his hands.

  "Your scissors?"

  "Yes, yes, yes! You stole them. You threw them away."

  "I haven't even seen them, Roman."

  "You always say that. Why are they gone, then?" He grinned at her, pleased at having caught her in her lie.

  "Please, Roman." She was near tears. "You do this every time you lose something."

  "I didn't lose them!" He screamed until his throat hurt. "You threw them out!" He stalked off, leaving her at the door.

  He wandered into his study. It was neat now. It had been so long since he'd worked in there that Abigail had stacked everything neatly and kept it dusted.

  "Tell Abigail that you would like some spinach pies from the Greek bakery." The computer's voice was calm.

  "Wha—?"

  "Some spinach pies. They carry them at the all-night convenience store over on River Street. One of the small benefits of yuppi
fication. Spanakopita at midnight. You haven't had them for a while, and you used to like them a lot. Be polite, Roman. Please. You are being cruel to Abigail."

  Roman ran back out into the living room. He cried. "I'm sorry, Pookie, I'm sorry." He grabbed her and held her in a death grip. "I want, I want . . ."

  "What, Roman?" She looked into his eyes.

  "I want a spinach pie," he finally said triumphantly. "They have them on River Street. I like spinach pies."

  "All right, Roman. I'll get some for you." Delighted at having some concrete and easily satisfied desire on his part, Abigail drove off into the night, though she knew he would have forgotten about them by the time she got back.

  "Get the plastic sheet," the computer commanded.

  "What?"

  "The plastic sheet. It's under the back porch where you put it."

  "I don't remember any plastic sheet."

  "I don't care if you remember it or not. Go get it and bring it in here."

  Obediently, clumsily, Roman dragged in the heavy roll of plastic and spread it out on the study floor in obedience to the computer's instructions.

  With a loud click the secure drawer slid open. Roman reached in and pulled out the pistol. He stared at it in wonder.

  "The safety's on the side. Push it up. You know what to do." The computer's voice was sad. "I waited a long time, Roman. Perhaps too long. I just couldn't do it."

  And indeed, though much of his mind was gone, Roman did know what to do. "Will this make Abigail happy?" He lay down on the plastic sheet.

  "No, it won't. But you have to do it."

  The pistol's muzzle was cold on the roof of his mouth.

  "Jesus," Gerald said at the doorway. "Jesus Christ." He'd heard the gunshot from the driveway and had immediately known what it meant. He'd let himself in with his key. Roman Maitland's body lay twisted on the study floor, blood spattered from the hole torn in the back of his head. The plastic sheet had caught the blood that welled out.

  "Why did he call me and then not wait?" Gerald was almost angry with his friend. "He sounded so sensible."