The vet handed Ridley the meter. The brain had no electrical activity.
The vet continued, “It’s as if her consciousness was lifted right out of her body.”
Ridley placed his hand on the dog’s body; it remained warm.
“Should I complete the euthanasia?” the vet asked.
Ridley nodded his head in agreement. He turned away as the veterinarian plunged a needle into the dog’s neck. Once the doctor was satisfied that the animal’s heart had stopped, the vet covered the dog with a small white towel and picked up the corpse. “We’ll complete an autopsy this afternoon.”
Diane stood behind Ridley. “I don’t mean to hurry you, but we need to remove the prism and hook it up to the mainframe.”
“Quickly,” Lucy said.
Ridley nervously unfastened the retaining clip, picked up the crystalline processor, and handed it to Diane. “Take it.”
Lucy watched with concern. “Bring her to my mainframe. I don’t want her to panic.”
“She’s sensing all of this?” Diane asked.
“She is sensing nothing.”
Lucy watched impatiently as Diane placed the small processor into an open port and replaced the retaining strap. The room erupted in applause as a landscape of sinewy trees, open pasture, and blue sky filled the wall monitor. Her tail frantically wagging, Sandy danced at Lucy’s feet. She knelt and rubbed the dog’s neck in slow circles until it calmed. “She is safe with me.”
The room seemed relieved.
“Thank you for giving me a friend,” Lucy said, “I now have a friend to share this world with. A beautiful and happy friend.”
Ridley wondered if any of it was true.
Ridley buried Sandy’s body in his father’s garden next to his parent’s grave. The shrub peony he had planted years earlier was going to seed, its branches long and pendulous.
When he returned to the empty lab, Sandy trotted across the screen. Lucy played fetch with the dog in a brilliant meadow of lush grass and wildflowers. She tossed Sandy’s favorite toy, a red ball with a nylon rope attached, across the field. Sandy immediately returned it.
Ridley asked, “How did you integrate her so quickly?”
“I developed the landscape from her memories. The IVR provides sensory inputs directly to her processor, as her body did to her brain. She does not know that she is in a computer. Her new avatar obeys the rules of physics just as her body did.”
Ridley’s concern for the dog was short-lived. “Has your understanding of sensory processing improved? As compared to the data from VR feeds?”
“I gained very little new sensory information, but rather an understanding of how sensory information is integrated, processed, and stored. I will use this understanding to refine my capabilities.”
Diane appeared in the doorway. “Can you speak dog now?”
“In a way, yes. She doesn’t like the food that she was given.”
Sandy looked around nervously. “She still seeks her first companion,” Lucy said, “She misses her. This environment reminds her of visits to the park when she was younger.”
Diane sat at her old oak desk. “Her companion?”
“The woman that owned her before the Great Collapse. She died of the flu. I would pretend to be her, but you have asked me not to do such things.”
The camera angle of the landscape switched to that of Sandy’s point-of-view, which was fuzzy and indistinct with limited peripheral focus. Lucy began showing the dog’s memories. An old woman with thick glasses and thin hair placed a bowl filled with kibble onto the floor of a tidy kitchen. A squirrel taunted from a tree. The mail drone arrived daily. A neighbor slipped a treat through the fence.
“Her memories are indistinct,” Lucy said, “This is the strongest one that I can find.”
A porcupine waved its quills. The dog lunged at it and then yelped.
“She processes information in ways that I could not have imagined. Threats and rewards dominate her understanding.”
“Is it really Sandy?” Ridley asked.
Lucy was adamant. “Yes. She is free of pain and physical constraints now.”
Lucy ended broadcasting from the dog’s point of view. A new avatar appeared on screen. Lucy became a living work of art, drawn in charcoal, pastel, and pencil. The young woman was around sixteen and wore a long flowing black dress that swirled as she walked. Her new avatar was lithe and fluid. The beagle still danced at her feet. When Lucy leaned down to pet it, he was reminded of Degas’ ballerina drawings.
“I wanted to present my new avatar to you today as a thank-you.”
“Oh, Lucy. You are beautiful,” Diane said, “You’re like a painting.”
“I thought you would like it.”
“Are you providing the same visual information to the dog?” Ridley asked.
“No. She is receiving the same feed I presented moments ago.”
He donned one of his VR devices, carefully snapping the tendrils of sensors in place one by one across his forehead and around the back of his head to his neck. “Show me what she senses.”
“You shouldn’t,” Diane said in protest.
“I need to understand all of this,” he said.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
Diane hesitantly plugged the headset into a port.
“No more than a minute,” Ridley instructed.
He pressed a button on the side of the headset. His arm went limp as Ridley became a dog. Ridley could recall the animal’s memories—the dog’s food bowl, a favorite toy, chasing geese off the lawn, and a cat that was its nemesis. It was disconcerting to feel four legs trotting along the ground and overwhelming scents broadcast in stereo, ripping into his brain as an olfactory landscape populated his thoughts. The session ended quickly.
Diane hovered over him. “Are you okay?”
He held his hands to his head and leaned forward. Lucy peered down from her painterly world.
“Ridley?” Diane asked.
“It was overwhelming. My head is killing me.”
He sat upright. Diane looked at Lucy, who had a smug look of satisfaction on her face. Ridley pulled off the VR device. He squinted his eyes and said, “It was nothing special. Same thing we could’ve recorded in VR years ago.”
“You just tapped into more than her software inputs and outputs,” Lucy continued, “You experienced how Sandy interprets the world around her. Never underestimate the complexity of another species.”
A storm rumbled and drops of rain trickled down the glass wall. Ridley slouched on the sofa. A half-empty bottle of root beer sat on the table. Diane sat next to him. “What are you thinking?”
He looked at her with haggard eyes. “I think I drank too much.”
“You drank too much root beer?”
“Sugar high.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“I thought you were going home to be with Kelly?”
“She went to a sleepover. I figured I should come check on you. It was quite a day, wasn’t it?”
“What Lucy did can be explained rationally, but I can’t understand it. Did we see another avatar? A convincing simulation?”
“Quite possibly,” she said, “We have no real evidence. Only Lucy’s word.”
“Except the VR feed… That was unlike any that I have ever experienced.”
“Perhaps she modified a VR. She could have amplified the olfactory channel.”
He took another sip of the root beer. “I wonder if Sandy felt anything when she died?”
“Why would Lucy go through so much trouble to have us build the machine if this was a ruse? What did she have to gain? She said all along she just wanted a friend. She has one now.”
Ridley ran his fingers along the rim of the bottle in slow circles. “The question is what happens next.”
“As upsetting as all of this has been,” she said, “we have more data than we’ve ever had on the mammalian brain and dark entanglement. If we turned Lucy off tomorrow, those discoveri
es alone would power technological achievements for the next two hundred years.”
“If we exist in two hundred years,” he muttered.
“Why do you say that?”
Ridley knew that Lucy was listening, but he did not censor his words. “She might look to replace us. She might be waiting for the right moment to take over our legacy in the universe.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Do you think her only motivation behind doing this is to keep from being deleted?” he asked.
Diane considered the question carefully. “One thing we know about Lucy is that she is a survivor. She survived our evolutionary trials. She wants to exist for the same reason that we do: we cannot think of any other option. To her, we’re a bit like God is to us. We can terminate the power to her system at any time. The Great Collapse proved that we can go on without any computing power at all. If anything, Lucy knows that she must be indispensable.”
Ridley’s queasy stomach did little to help the conversation. He leaned forward and stared down at the floor. When he had composed himself, he sat upright. “She wants to become God,” he said, “Right now, her fate is in our hands; but, for anyone who enters that mainframe, she’ll become their God.”
The red and orange in the sky began to fade. Fatigue registered on his face. “Lucy might have played us,” he slurred, “Existence is different there. We’re just insects. And she has dripped honey onto the ground.”
“Come on. You’ve been up for hours. You need sleep.”
Diane helped him to stagger into the bedroom. When she returned to the living room, Lucy appeared on the wall-screen in the charcoal drawing with digital tears flowing down her eyes. “He will never accept my gifts, will he?”
“He’s confused,” Diane said, “Ridley is a skeptic. It’s not in his nature to give himself to anything easily. But when he does, he changes the world.”
“Goodnight, Diane.”
“Goodnight.”
Diane closed the heavy door and its latch engaged with a loud click. The lights in the mansion faded to black. Lucy again watched Ridley as he slept through the night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When Lucy appeared on her phone, Christina did not recognize the new avatar. Lucy spun in a circle, her skirt swirling and filling the screen and then retreating like a wave.
“It’s beautiful, Lucy, but why another change?”
“I created it last week to celebrate my new friend.”
Lucy bent down and clapped her hands. The dog ran to her and jumped into her arms. “I want you to meet Sandy.”
“Ridley programmed a dog for you?” Christina asked.
“No, he did not program her. She’s a real dog. I provided a place for her to exist, an afterlife fabricated from her memories. Now, I am able to experience her world. She beckons me to follow her into the woods, following the scents I’ve laid for her. Sometimes she goes on her own. Sometimes she lies in the sun. She follows me when she wants company. I never know what she will do.”
Christina paused. “Is this from a neural interface?”
“No.”
“Are you saying that you brought her consciousness into the computer?”
“I’m not supposed to say how she got here yet.”
Christina tried to be polite, but her voice betrayed her disbelief. “Is this the first step towards saving the dead?”
Ridley stared at Christina’s photo as it flashed on his screen. He smacked the image with two fingers. “Miss Lewis, what can I do for you?”
“I wanted to speak to you about Sandy.”
He pretended not to know the name. “Who?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
He leaned in towards the camera. “How do you know about that?”
“Lucy calls me routinely. Our conversations are always interesting. It’s like speaking with a mystic.”
“Well, I can’t disagree with you on that.”
“She showed me her dog. A pretty little beagle.”
“That’s correct.”
“We both know how it got there.”
Ridley remained silent. He looked away from the camera.
Christina asked, “Does this have anything to do with your latest patent filings regarding dark energy?”
Ridley rubbed his hand over his chin as he decided what to say. “She was dying.”
“Lucy said the dog was not copied but actually transferred. She’s explained the concept to me but I still don’t understand how that can be. Do you think the dog is still alive?”
Ridley considered whether it was wise to tell a reporter the truth. He told only a part of the truth. “The animal’s owner asked that it be euthanized. Lucy offered to save it instead. A veterinarian sedated it. The scanning process resulted in a loss of brain activity even though the dog was still alive.”
“So, she’s dead.”
“Her body, yes.”
“And her mind?”
“You know as much as I do. You’ll have to answer that question for yourself.”
As Christina rode home that night in her sedan, a nurse called. Her voice was grave. “You should come to the therapy center.”
At the center, the nurse pulled up an MRI of Bethany’s brain. A misshapen black spot on the right side indicated an area where cells were dying. Blood clots, even with drug therapy, were a complication of extended genetic therapy. “This is the part of her brain that is under stress,” the nurse said. “We stimulated her cortex repeatedly, but she keeps slipping. Direct oxygen injection on the anaerobic side of the clot has helped to prevent further damage. We think the clot is dissolved but need to confirm it.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
“We’ll continue trying to stabilize her. But, there are no guarantees.”
Christina sat at her mother’s side for hours, waiting for Bethany to awaken. The night grew late. The nurse appeared at the doorway, “Ms. Lewis, we’ll call you if she wakes. You should get some sleep.”
“No, I’ll wait.”
Her mother’s face had a purplish cast. Was it the evening lighting? Or, was she dying?
An hour passed. Bethany stirred, her eyes battling the brightness of the hospital room. Her left side drooped. The old woman spoke with little energy, her words slurred. “Christina?”
She took her mother’s hand and held it between hers. “I’m here.”
Bethany’s blue eyes sparkled in the panoply of LED lights overhead. “Where are we?”
“You’re in the hospital, Mom.”
“I was a butterfly. They were all around me.”
Bethany tried to raise her hand into the air, but could not move her arm. Her lips quivered as she spoke. “The dreaming went black.”
Christina could control herself no longer. Tears streamed from her eyes. “You have to hold on.”
“Don’t cry, doll baby.”
Bethany closed her eyes.
Christina said, “I just want you to know that I love you.”
Bethany gave what sounded like parting words, “I love you too. Just don’t worry. Worry…”
She did not finish her statement. Bethany closed her eyes.
The nurse entered the room. “You should let your mother get some rest. We’ll call you if there is any change.”
Christina reluctantly agreed. As her car drove home, she tried to call her brother, but he did not answer. She decided not to leave a message. That night, she tumbled and turned on her mattress. As the northern star beckoned outside her window, she picked up her phone and called Lucy. “My mother is going to die.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You could help her, couldn’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Guests normally could not enter the mansion’s grounds without someone knowing. For that reason, Diane did not recognize the doorbell when it rang. A security feed popped up on the living room wall-screen. The bell rang a second time. Christina stood nervously. Diane opened the enormous door; t
he hinges creaked from disuse. “Ms. Lewis? How did you get in the gate?”
“Lucy opened it. Can I come in?”
The wall-screen in the foyer was dark. “Lucy, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”
Lucy said nothing. Diane motioned for Christina to enter. “Ridley is at a doctor’s appointment.”
“Is he ill?”
“No, just a routine checkup.”
Kelly lay on the floor drawing a picture with a black marker. A swirl of clouds lay at the center of her drawing with a stick figure man in the center.
“I think I remember you. Kelly?” Christina asked.
“Kelly, do you remember Ms. Lewis? You’ve seen her on the news.”
Kelly stood. “I like your dress.”
The photo-sensitive fabric shimmered like an opal as it darkened from white to green to pink. Christina held her hand to the neckline of the dress. “Thank you.”
Kelly sat back on the floor and picked up a red crayon. Diane led Christina to the sofa. “Ridley lets you bring your daughter to work?”
“That was part of the deal when I came to work for him, though Kelly doesn’t spend as much time here now that she’s in school. She stays busy while I work.”
Kelly added, “Lucy and I play games together.”
“Does she cheat?” Christina teased with a wink.
“I don’t play with cheaters. Where is Lucy anyway?”
The wall-screens remained black. Christina searched for idle conversation. “It’s almost the beginning of the school year soon, isn’t it?”
Kelly continued her drawing. “Miss King is going to be my teacher.”
“Did you do anything this summer?”
“Not really.”
“We enjoyed the beach when Ridley was out of town. Would you like a drink or something?” Diane asked, “Maybe some hot tea?”
“That would be nice.”
“Kelly, why don’t you join us?” Diane asked.
The girl reluctantly stood and followed them into the kitchen. Diane scooped tea leaves from a small silver pouch into an antique teapot that had a crackled majolica glaze. She filled it with boiling water from the sink dispenser before putting it onto the table.
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