by Jeff Pollard
Seth awakens on a bed in an infinite white space. He turns and extends his feet off the side, into the void. He slowly lowers himself, unsure if there will be anything to stop him from falling. His feet find a smooth floor and he stands up. “Hello?”
He examines his hands, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips. He feels his own face, hair, and even pokes his own eye, causing a twinge of pain. He spins around, searching the nothingness, and finds a televator not far away. He walks towards it, but before he gets there, the door closes by itself.
“Okay,” he says unsure, backing away. The door opens and Renee exits. Within a moment, she is joined by a second Renee.
Seth backs away, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“I'm not dead am I?”
“We vivisected you.”
“Saved your life.”
“I figured that out,” he replies. Both Renees sit on either side of him, but he is obviously uneasy, scoots back.
“Relax, you're okay.”
“Now we're on the same plane of existence. No robots, no sensors, no bodies to get in the way.”
“Yeah,” Seth replies, very uneasy.
“What's wrong with you?”
“It's a lot to take in. I mean, I almost died, now I'm some brain in a damn jar,” Seth replies. One Renee kisses him on the cheek. The other joins with a kiss on the other cheek. “Stop,” he pushes them away.
“What?”
“You killed my father. You didn't try to save me when he put a gun to my head. You used me.”
“I did what I had to.”
“I'm sorry, I need some time alone.”
49
“Do we alert the authorities?”
“No absolutely not.”
“There might be more of them out there, accomplices that got away or are on the mainland, we have to go after them!”
The survivors assembled in the atrium debate their next course of action.
“Look, we cannot, simply cannot have a repeat of the Rothstein incident,” Peter announces.
“What was that?” Renee asks, standing beside Peter. The debate rages but Peter stops to explain it to Renee.
“Before we came out here on the ocean, our servers and vats were in a warehouse. Well, the feds decided that one of our residents was in possession of child pornography. The man was using an avatar of a child and was engaged in virtual sexual activities. He shared a video of it with the wrong person and he got busted. We let them come in, take him, take his vat and put him on trial, and then put him in prison. I mean, a prison, for a brain in a vat, it was completely absurd. They had to make their own neural net, but it was just him on it, and it had all these limitations, so he was in a virtual prison. They mismanaged his brain chemistry and he died of a kind of stroke after six months. That's one of the reasons we came out here.”
“If we tell the authorities,” Dr. Graeme argues, “they're going to come in here, investigate, try to determine if anyone was in the wrong, and some of us killed people, it was self-defense, but the government won't be satisfied with that. With the attitudes out there about us, we just can't subject ourselves to their treatment.”
“I agree,” Peter says.
“So are we in agreement, no telling the authorities?” Dr. Graeme asks.
“What do we do with the prisoners?” a man asks.
“Yeah, we can't just keep them here.”
“And we especially can't let them into Solipsis!” a woman shouts, looking at Renee.
“Are you talking about Seth?” Renee demands.
“We can't trust him.”
“What do you want to do, kill him?” Renee asks. “I mean, if we're not going to the feds, not letting them go, then what are we doing with them?”
“We can put them in hell,” Patrick adds. “See how they like it.”
“No,” Renee says. “Absolutely not! We let them go. We've learned our lesson, we won't be caught off guard again. They don't pose a threat to us anymore.”
“But after what they did? You just want to let them go?”
50
The desert floor of hell has been erased, turned into a lush green field. Nearly the entire population of Solipsis is there. The avatars of those who died during the ordeal are all laid out on concrete slabs in a kind of cemetery. The grounds are beautiful, dotted with colorful blooming trees. The avatars lay silently, serenely, ready to be placed below ground. With so many dead, it seemed too daunting a task to have a proper funeral for all of them. Rather they are laid out for three days to receive good-byes, then they will be lowered, hidden forever. Everyone walks through the rows, saying goodbye to those they lost.
Patrick and both Renees sit on a hill overlooking the graves.
“Come on, we need to do this,” one Renee says.
“Not yet.”
“Are you still in denial? He's gone, we need to say goodbye.”
“I'll stay right by your side,” Patrick adds. They each take a hand of the reticent Renee. Small footsteps carefully lead them down the hill and through a row of lifeless avatars. Some are just familiar faces, some friends; all of them struck down by evil.
They find Percival, dressed in a white suit. They stand on one side of the cold concrete slab. They silently stare.
“Should we say something?” Patrick asks.
“I want to say goodbye to Nellie too.”
“She's over there.”
They approach the avatar of Nellie. Both avatars represent the same person, and yet are very distinct.
“I still think we should say something,” Patrick adds.
“Why isn't Mom here?” Renee asks through tears.
“Something’s wrong with her. She's not all there,” the other Renee replies.
“She's just having a hard time.”
“Mind if I join you?” Seth asks from behind them. The Renees beckon him. He joins their side, overlooking Nellie. “She'll be missed.”
“What do you care?” Patrick interrupts.
“What?” Seth is caught off guard.
“Why are you even here? You were a part of this,” Patrick says, pushing Seth away.
“Stop,” Renee says, getting between them. “He helped us, without him, we don't get out of that hell.”
“That doesn't excuse anything,” Patrick says, “he went along with the plan, he knew they were going to do it, he could have given us warning, told somebody. As far as I'm concerned, he's one of them.”
“Patrick, stop.”
“I'll leave you three alone,” Seth mutters, walking away.
“Can we please just say something, this is absurd.”
“What's there to say? A prayer?”
“I don't know, something.”
“I might have something to say,” Patrick adds. “It's umm, Nellie read me this poem before I had my vivisection, I was nervously waiting for hours for my surgery and she sat with me. She was so calming, so motherly. She held my hand and read me this poem:
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.”
51
Both Renees float in a black loading program. They experience no physical sensations and hover in zero-gravity. One Renee opens up a file on a digital display system brightly lit in fro
nt of them. This is a program for watching older videos or movies in a blank space where you have no distractions of your physical body. The video begins with a noisy digital signal. Blocks of the image are corralled into squares that are an average of their color, artifacts of video compression.
“Wow this video sucks.”
“I don't know how people watched stuff on those digital cameras, it's so ugly.”
Nellie walks up to a podium. This is really Nellie, flesh and blood, no computers, no animatrons, no avatars, but her real body. Her red hair shines like strands of copper. Both Renees immediately see a resemblance to what they see in the mirror everyday. In a weird way, it's like meeting your real mother, years after she's died. They knew her well, but not as this person.
“She looks so young.”
“She's practically shiny.”
“What are you?” Nellie asks. A light rain echoes off a glass roof. “When I say that I miss my deceased grandmother, what do I mean? Do I miss her physical body? Do I miss her soul? When I say 'her' what am I referring to really? The physical brain? The consciousness that the brain produces? Or just the entity which interacts with me, causes me to feel good or bad? Do we like a person as a whole, do we like what they do to us on a chemical level? What is that person exactly?”
“Am I just my brain? The molecules of our bodies are constantly being replaced, recycled, so that from one year to another, we're composed of different matter. Okay, so it's not the physical material we're concerned with, it's the consciousness it produces. In that case I'm not even the brain, I'm the present electrical state of the brain. That's like saying that we're not a computer, just what the computer creates when it is on. When the power goes out...so do we.”
“You might think, so what, what difference does it make how we think about it? I know who I am. Except that you aren't you. In fact, there's no such thing as you. It's all an illusion.”
“Every time we sleep, we wake up as a different person. It's a different consciousness, and everything that came before I woke up this morning, was not me, was not this consciousness, it was a different consciousness produced by a different brain. Yesterday-me was only very slightly different, but was a physically different brain. When we wake up, all of the facts of our lives, who we are, what we've done, all of our memories, how we feel, everything is just information. Nothing more.”
The video cuts out, returning to the display showing the video file in a folder.
“It's all just information,” Renee says.
“Putting the word 'just' in there implies that it's somehow inferior. Inferior to what? What else would memories and emotions be? Of course they're just information, what else could they be?”
“Wanna watch it again?”
“Yeah,” the other Renee replies quietly.
52
“I want you to euthanize me.”
“What?” Renee wakes up, trying to place the voice. Renee is in her bed, in her room. the other Renee is in another room, an exact copy of this room.
“I want you to euthanize me,” Gwen repeats. Her voice is shallow, raspy, barely audible. Renee sits up, rubbing her eyes. Gwen sits down next to her. “I've seen things that nobody should see. At a certain point, death is preferable to continued existence.”
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
“Please, I just don't want to go on.”
“Things will get better, okay, you've still got centuries in front of you, things will get better, life goes on.”
“Not for me. My life has run its course.”
“Mom, I can't help you commit suicide.”
“Then I'll ask the other you,” Gwen gets up and walks out. Renee peels herself from the covers and follows. She finds Gwen already sitting next to the other Renee, who groggily wakes up.
“Please,” Gwen says.
“What are you talking about?”
“She wants us to help her die,” Renee says from the doorway. “Just tell her we can't let her do that.”
“It's not our choice to stop her,” the sleepy Renee replies, sitting up.
“What?!”
“If that's what she wants...Who are we to say she can't.”
“I say she can't”
“It's her call, not yours!”
“She's not doing it, end of story.”
“Please, it's what I want,” Gwen pleads. “I just want to go quietly. No more suffering, no haunting nightmares, just have it all be over. We aren't evolved to live forever and handle all the baggage that comes with that life-span. Were meant to die. It's a natural part of life. Please, help me do it.”
“See, we can't make that call for her,” Renee says, wrapping her arm around her mother. The other Renee stands in the doorway, arms crossed, ready to fight for this.
“I will not allow her to die, and that's the end of the story.”
“It's not your call.”
“How can we have such a different opinion on this, we're the same god damn person!”
“Apparently we're not the same person.”
Gwen stares into space, mesmerized by the absurd situation.
“What are you saying? Are you trying to claim you're the original again?” Renee demands from the doorway.
“No, not original, just different. I had that near-death experience in the Comatorium. I know what death is like. Mom's right, it's natural, it's a part of life. It's not something to be afraid of. You won't suffer your non-existence in the future anymore than you suffer your non-existence during the renaissance.”
“That damn drug trip again!? Come on, you were high on DMT, there's nothing magical, there's no soul or a heaven, no bright light.”
“It doesn't matter if it's real. It's the experience that matters.”
“So can I die or not?” Gwen asks pathetically. Renee holds her closer to comfort her.
“We're going to respect your wishes.”
“No,” Renee says from the doorway.
53
“It's him or me,” Seth demands. “You can't be dating both of us.”
“Why not, there's two of me.”
“What she said,” the other Renee agrees. The three of them stand in the observation dome of the house.
“You can't have two boyfriends, and besides he hates me.”
“What does it matter? I mean, when you can live forever, it's quite a tall order to say, yeah, let's be monogamous forever.”
“It's not right,” Seth replies.
“We don't have to think like that here,” Renee replies.
“I just don't understand, I want to love you, but I can't,” Seth says.
“Why not?”
“What kind of love is that?” Seth asks.
“So you can't love someone unless you also own them and nobody else can get their dirty hands on them. What kind of love is that?”
“Well I can't be involved in something I think is...” Seth trails off.
“A sin?”
“Yeah,” he gulps.
“You've got a lot to learn,” a Renee says coldly.
“I know my beliefs,” Seth replies.
“Why are you still a Christian. After all this. You still believe that crap.”
“It's not crap. Okay, just because my dad went off the deep end, that doesn't prove it's wrong. There are extremists in any group that take things too far, that doesn't mean the ideas are wrong.”
The Renees look at each other, both knowing what to say next.
“If you keep being a Christian, then I can't have anything to do with you.”
“Why are you so intolerant? Jesus commanded you to love your enemies, to turn the other cheek. What's wrong with that?”
“The fact that you think that's true because of who said it and not on merit.”
“When good is defined by your god, then you can justify anything you want, every religious person constructs their own god that happens to agree with them. You don't ever meet someone who's for gay rights but thinks that god hat
es gays. People make their own gods so that they can justify their beliefs as being divinely inspired.”
“So when you introduce the idea that truth comes from god, you're writing a blank check for every religious person to act on behalf of their personal god, which is nothing but their ego and pre-conceived notions run amok.”
“You really hate religion don't you,” Seth says defensively, being double teamed.
“Yes!”
“Why?” Seth asks, “everything you say about it, all these logical arguments and bringing up the crusades and philosophy, but the experience of being religious and spiritual has nothing to do with those things, it's a loving group of people coming together to be better people and make the world a better place through charity and love and it's not this evil thing. Most of the time it's just about respecting other people, love, etc. So why do you hate it so much?”
“Because I care about what's true,” Renee replies.
“I was just gonna say because it's a superstitious Bronze-Age cult of human sacrifice, but that's good too,” the other Renee adds.
“You can put a negative spin on anything, okay, there's nothing inherently wrong with loving Jesus.”
“Let's suppose that you are a poor farmer,” Renee begins. “One day a priest comes along and offers you a great harvest if you donate to his church. If you don't give him anything, he tells you that his god will punish you with a famine. So you pay up. The next day, another man comes along, this one represents a different temple, but tells you the same thing: give him money, or his god will punish you. You pay up. The next day, a third guy comes along. You realize you're being swindled.”
Seth is immediately restless.
“You're tired of being a poor farmer, and you have an idea. You go into town and claim that god has spoken to you, or better yet, you are a child of the one true god. People have been hearing that churches and temples need money and sacrifices, they've been had by swindlers. But you...you're not asking for any of that. All you ask is for their belief. The shamans and priests are always talking about how god will bless believers with good crops, health, etc. You can promise these too, but when a shaman promises that a sick boy will live, and he dies, then his god doesn't seem very powerful. If you promise results, you can't then be wrong. You come up with a new plan: you call the town to attention and announce that if they believe in your god, they will be rewarded upon death with eternal life in god's kingdom in the sky, reunited with fallen loved ones. Infinite rewards, forever. But, there's no way of proving you wrong.”