Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  “How many of you here have a daughter, granddaughter maybe, with a Xumu?”

  Half of the board nodded. “My grandson, too,” one offered.

  “The Expectant Mother Unit. The Xumu doll. Lowest-level sentience allowable for retail purchase by our ever-evolving international standards. Tens of millions are sold by GenAssist, hundreds of millions of knock-offs around the world. It cries, it becomes malnourished, you can leave it locked in a hot car on a hundred-thirty degree June day. Of course, no one here's a monster, but haven't we seen our own kids being a little too rough? Maybe… forget to feed it for a few days?”

  He completed his lap around the room. “All I'm saying is, don't we accept uncomfortable things day in and day out for less money than this will bring? All I'm saying is, you can't keep the head-start I'm bringing you forever. All I'm saying is...I have a fully-consenting, fully-modeled...” And he paused here, leaning on the table. I don't know whether it was dramatic effect or if he was really considering the value of his words. “Human being. Self-determined. With zero liability.”

  He gazed at the vice president of sales, who was shifting his weight around, fingering a stack of papers. Hungry. Maybe Jericho was thinking of the last mind he blew, the blood-spattered walls and the vultures.

  “Let me do this for you.”

  When Eric looks up again, Crane is staring him in the face.

  “It's going to be a long night,” he says. “Get some rest.”

  ***

  It's been nearly two days since he's rested, but Eric doesn't sleep.

  He lays in his bunk for a while, thinking about the old world, about the things he's read, about Realm.

  He'd never used it himself, but he was old enough at the time of the plague's origins to remember the world winding slowly to a stop.

  The streets became less and less crowded and people seemed to disappear.

  Then they exploded back out, frenzied, disoriented, diseased.

  Whatever Crane is doing, it's begun to scare him.

  Around midnight, he pulls on a jacket and takes the book outside. Sitting by himself in one of their trucks, using the cold to stay awake, he continues reading.

  It's funny how time can speed up, slow down. That day seemed to last forever, but the next three years were like a vacuum. Everything happening so fast in an empty space, collapsing at the speed of light.

  Realm was sold. And then formally named Realm. It was an acronym. Reality. Enhancement, maybe. Something. Life. Something.

  I moved back into my old apartment, a particularly strange experience. It was “high resolution,” as Jericho would say, compared to his simulation. The changing sunlight made it feel bigger, the sounds outside made it seem lonelier.

  Jericho gave me more money than I could ever spend, but I didn't know what to do with myself. The old bookstore closed. People finally stopped “scribbling in the margins.”

  For a little while I worked in a grocery, but most people started printing out anything they needed. Everything was changing, shifting economically. Money was still being traded but landfills were sucking up the last name tags and uniforms and packing materials.

  Occasionally, I'd meet Jericho in Realm. Each time it was exponentially more convincing, and always in a new, private environment he'd been building. Our conversations felt increasingly hollow, Jericho preoccupied with the restaurants and wine shops and hotels where we met. I asked if he really needed to develop these places to sell on the marketplace–wasn't he rich enough? But he'd just shake his head, say they weren't being made for the public.

  “This is my Taj Mahal.”

  “Befitting, Emperor Amara.” Emperor. That was the last thing he seemed to want, whether I was speaking truth or sarcasm.

  “Pfft.” He rolled his eyes, studied the refraction of buttery window light across rows of wine bottles. “So, read any good books lately?”

  Books–as though a publishing industry existed anymore. Everyone started using Realm. Why not? It was free to print out the little tablet. Swallow once. Thirty dollars a month to stay connected. Ten dollars for a new body or a new house, two for an outfit, twenty for a whole city to explore, five for a girlfriend or boyfriend or dog. Who was talking to you from a mind in a real flesh body? Who was just an illusion? It stopped mattering much sooner than anyone would admit. The new economy was here. You could buy or sell any of it, but Leviathan, and Jericho, got their cut.

  And here Jericho was, asking about books. The illusion master lost in his own fog.

  There's a knock on the driver's side window, and Eric jumps.

  It's Crane.

  He rolls the window down, and Crane looks weary.

  “Trade places,” is all he says.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I'm meeting one of our contacts at the Republic in Big Pine.”

  “That's four hours.” Eric slides out of the truck.

  Crane stands beside him for a moment, maybe wondering how much to tell him.

  “I'm going alone. I'm borrowing the Owens Valley Radio Observatory.”

  He enters the truck and looks back. “We'll talk in the morning.”

  ***

  Four sleepless hours later, Eric watches Eva encircle the table before him. Her exhausted, expressionless face as pallid as the severed heads laid out in a precise row.

  Her gaunt white arm reaches a gloved hand to the nearest skull.

  “Are you at all familiar with the old laws of artificial intelligence?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Such fully-replicated human models were rare. They were expensive and pointless in a world full of slaves. But things never change. People prove their power.” Her eyelids fall over her purple irises. “And that demands laws. Among them: the physical memory of a human-modeled brain cannot be altered without removing it. And removing a brain must destroy the host.”

  “These are all–”

  “Forgotten things. We've scoured these minds of their secrets. Until now, The Guard has outpaced us. Crane is supplying our contact with a new set of coordinates. We are about to intercept our greatest shipment.”

  “Eva, what are we bringing in?”

  “Jericho Amara.”

  ***

  Before approaching the barracks and armory, Eric stands between the two buildings, dawn breaking in the distance.

  He takes out the book again, almost to its end, and realizes pages have been ripped out where he left off. The last few pages are all that's left.

  The restaurant was bustling, except no one was dressed quite formally enough. A beefy, tanned man was already sitting next to Jericho when I arrived.

  “Reuben, this is Keene. Keene, Reuben.”

  Reuben looked familiar, but I was just as puzzled by the crowd. He never had others in these private Realms of his.

  He took in a brief panoramic glance of the dining room, breathing deeply, then cut short a faint glimmer of pride. “Coastal town, quaint, childhood memory stuff,” Jericho informed me, dismissive, wanting to move on.

  “But I thought this was private.”

  “It is,” he said impatiently. “Reuben, could you grab us a round? On me.”

  Then he hurriedly told me this wasn't supposed to happen. Not like this, not exactly. All those diseases, I knew what they were, didn't I? Didn't I realize, no matter how ahead of the game Jericho ever was, they were always one step further ahead? Waiting. Waiting for the future. Why else were these diseases always popping up in some of the richest cities in the world?

  But this wasn't supposed to happen. He had a plan, too, he always had a plan, but it was going to take eight months. He was coming back to California, and he needed my help. He was working with Blackthorne Aeronautics, and someone named Emma, and he hadn't finished his other project yet, but that was okay because it would all fall into place. Eight months.

  It would be okay. It's all part of the master plan.

  I wanted to ask so many questions. I didn't know where to begin, b
ecause I couldn't bring myself to those gravest of questions. Jericho couldn't have wanted all this, could he? All the death? How did his plan interlock with the invisible master plan?

  So I settled on asking who Reuben was.

  “Something old, something new,” Jericho told me. He stared up at the rafters. “You probably don't remember my old partner. Things went south, but now we'll evolve quite a friendship with all the work out of the way. Please don't break the–what is it? The fourth wall?”

  “Wait–Reuben? From University? You've modeled one of these things after him?”

  I watched the man order drinks from the bartender. Realizing he didn’t have a flesh and blood body anywhere at all. Merely an elaborate trick of light and source code.

  Jericho only smiled.

  “But...you know he's...it's...designed to play off of you. Can you really forget that?”

  “I don't know,” Jericho told me. “Initially, Reuben was just an experiment to see how complicated it can become, whether reflective intelligence can rival artificial, or even organic, intelligence. I didn't think I could be surprised by someone when I know they're just a reflection of myself. But being human, that's your area of expertise, isn't it?”

  I knew scarcely anything about this “reflective intelligence” in Realm. It was all quantum logic, endless possibilities, choosing the most sensible reactions. It was supposed to be smoother, more stable, than other forms of artificial intelligence. And more vain. Increasingly, my “area of expertise” was being defined by its absence.

  “At its most basic,” Jericho continued, “I'd like to know if using only his DNA and my best attempt to model his memories–or my best guess at them–can produce someone uncannily like him.”

  “You don't still harbor resentment that he never came to your defense at trial?”

  Jericho bristled. “What difference does it make anymore?”

  “Jericho,” I said slowly, “Reuben committed suicide after years of depression and guilt for contributing to your research. How can you objectively–”

  “That didn't happen,” he insisted. “Not in this timeline. In fact, in this timeline I'm keeping him far away from my research. I’ve dumbed him down. He’s closer to his family. He doesn't even know the first thing about science. We'll all be much happier this way.”

  “We?” I began to ask why he was running this experiment, but as Reuben returned, Jericho changed the conversation. “Anyway, there are more pressing matters.”

  “My area of expertise is extinct,” I told him, not without an accidental edge of bitterness. I didn't particularly care that Reuben had returned, that Jericho thought his artificial feelings could be hurt. Feelings that evolved as a response to Jericho's feelings, whether complimentary or otherwise.

  “Really? Extinct?” Jericho asked. “Then that should leave you as the most qualified person to finally answer this: What does it mean to be human? Have you found an answer yet?” Perhaps it was Jericho trying a logical checkmate.

  I couldn't pin down what I found so appalling. One could easily argue all human relationships could be distilled to this same dynamic. As Jericho himself often said, “We're just our relationships with other people.”

  Reuben laughed at our conversation. “This shit again,” he said. “One day I'm gonna show my friend here how to live.”

  By now I was too overwhelmed. “I regretfully conclude I might not be the person to ask.”

  Jericho ignored me. “I'm retiring soon,” he told Reuben while pulling two tablets from under the table. “There will be plenty of time for relaxing then.”

  “You can get high in here?” I asked, surprised.

  Jericho waited patiently, staring me in the face until Reuben looked away. “Fourth wall,” Jericho muttered under his breath, and I wondered why he and I were the actors in this artificial world, everyone else the audience. “You can get high, you can feel pain, you can do anything but die. I didn't design that. Everyone else did.” Reuben leans back in, and Jericho raises his voice again. “Supply and demand. What's being human without misery? Unending misery.”

  “I don't think that's your answer.”

  Reuben laughed again. “This guy,” he said. “Keene gets it.”

  I realized then how strange Jericho looked. Unshaven, his hair matted, rings of wrinkles spiraling up his sleeves, weary creases accentuating his young blue eyes. As though entropy had at some point been scripted into Realm.

  Reuben downed his beer, said he had to be going home. “Can't neglect the wife and kids too much.” He stood, shaking my hand, winked. “Just in moderation.”

  Jericho's opposite, a freewheeling family man. He was living vicariously.

  “It already seems rather complex,” I told Jericho, but he wasn't paying attention. Then I had a thought that chilled me, though I couldn't explain why.

  “You gave him his wife and twins?”

  “Beyond these walls is a whole world. There's a beach...with waters that never stop flowing.” His voice tremored. “Enough play. We have a lot of work to do.”

  He pulled out two more tablets and grew pensive. Pushed them across the tablecloth, back and forth, into each other, away from each other. His lips moved slowly.

  It was in that moment I made my decision. In the months that followed, I watched the number of infected rise. I watched their slow, agonizing deaths. I watched captains of industry and government overlords vanish. I watched the very fabric of time and space dissolve.

  But I made the decision then, that moment, watching a wounded man under the influence of opiates mouth the only thing that mattered to him.

  His lips formed her name over and over. A prayer. A mantra.

  Just as mouse 15 couldn't discern the nuances and inconsistencies between two versions of my living room, so too, for Jericho the whole world was low-resolution. A search for his little bit of happiness amidst a sea of duplicitous, irrelevant, and indifferent details.

  Why did we leave? I can't answer. I'm still searching.

  15

  Awakening

  The television is dead black, thick curtains pulled shut over the windows. Nothing measures time. Even the machines are arrhythmic, a private conversation.

  At some point, a different doctor returned and told Lydia her father did indeed have pneumonia, and had a whole new list of words and terms to make her feel like a powerless child again.

  He gave the pneumonia a “score of five,” and what's more there was severe sepsis, so they were going to administer a vasopressor, and also a corticosteroid.

  “Ok,” she kept saying, but there were no assurances, no “he'll be just fine.”

  “Are you going to do an x-ray?” she demanded. “Has the cancer spread?”

  The doctor seemed surprised. “We're going to get Claudio stabilized first. One thing at a time.” No supportive smiles.

  All sorts of people have rushed in and out since then, sometimes asking her to leave, sometimes telling her she can return, but she hasn't checked her phone for the time. Whether five dreadfully slow minutes pass between moments or five precious hours, it's terrifying and uncontrollable.

  No one asks if she needs anything, or how she's doing, or tells her those simple things like where vending machines are if she's hungry or how to operate the television, not this time.

  They know.

  Eventually Jericho returns with a paper bag.

  He looks awful, pale and shaking as he sets it next to her. “I think that's what I saw you with,” he says.

  She looks in the bag. Two of her silly banana-nut muffins.

  “Thank you,” she says, though she has no appetite.

  He pulls a second chair over and sits in silence, his arm around her. She wants to ask if he's alright, but something about his quiet is comforting.

  The room grows dark, and Lydia awakens to Jericho telling her she fell asleep.

  She stares at the hushed chaos of her father's life support, mad at herself for dozing off.

 
“It's ok,” he says. “You didn't miss anything.”

  She adjusts, her body stiff. She'd been up all night keeping an eye on her father, and every muscle has hardened to aching stone.

  It makes them ache more, but she leans her head on his shoulder anyway.

  “I love you, too,” she says. She wonders at this, but her heavy eyelids close themselves.

  Just as she begins to drift off again, one of the men she's seen before returns, tells her he's broken the rules for her a few times, but she'll have to retire to the waiting area for a while, and he's afraid only one person can stay overnight.

  Jericho follows her outside. They light cigarettes, watching cars pull up with headlights flaring like wildfires in the heavy rain.

  “I'm going to get cancer myself,” she says to her cigarette, then feels stupid and insensitive. What killed his fiancé? He'd never said.

  He holds her, and she relaxes, unaware of how tense she had been.

  “I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm always so–”

  He hushes her, and they continue standing in silence until she can feel his phone vibrate.

  “Go ahead.”

  He reluctantly checks, his face growing pained.

  “What is it?”

  “A friend,” he says. “Fern.”

  “You look worried.”

  He looks more than worried. He looks physically sick, but she knows he'll deflect any concern.

  He says nothing.

  “What's wrong?”

  “She's in some trouble. I've been helping her out.”

  That agonized face, those pangs of helplessness. It's the same face whenever he evades talking about his past.

  “I appreciate you being here, Jericho. You can go if you have to.”

  “You said don't go. I'm not going anywhere.” His voice is dry, and he coughs.

  “That's not what I meant,” she tells him. “I'll be fine.”

  His phone rings again.