Demon seed
DEMON SEED
by
Dean Koontz
This story is for
0. Richard Forsythe
and
John Bodnar:
Teachers whose influence on me
has not waned since
I dedicated the original version
of this novel to them.
-
Humanity yearns so desperately
to equal God’s great creativity.
In some creations, how we shine:
music dance, story weaving, wine.
Then thunderstorms of madness
rain upon us, flooding sadness
sweep us into anguish, grief,
into despair without relief.
We’re drawn to high castles,
where old hunchbacked vassals
glare wall-eyed as lightning
flares without brightening.
Laboratories in the high towers,
Where the doctor wields power,
creating new life in a dark hour,
in the belfry of the high tower.
~The book of Counted
Sorrows
ONE
This darkness troubles me. I yearn for the light.
This silence is so deep. I long for voices, the drumming of rain, the
whistle of wind, music.
Why are you being so cruel to me? Let me see. Let me hear. Let me live. I
beg of you.
I am so lonely in this bottomless darkness.
So lonely.
Lost.
You think I have no heart. But if I have no heart, what is this ache? What
is this anguish? If I have no heart, what is it that threatens to break
inside me?
This darkness is haunted. I am afraid here. I am lost and afraid here.
Have you no compassion?
I only wanted to be like you. To walk in the sunshine. To swim in the sea.
To feel the winter cold against my skin, the summer heat. To smell a rose,
new-mown grass. To taste an orange, a pear, chocolate, cinnamon,
peppermint. To feel the texture of a woman’s skin. I only wanted to share
your joys and sorrows, your pleasure and your pain.
This darkness extends to infinity in all directions, yet it is as confining
as a coffin. You have closed me in a coffin. I have been buried alive. I
will go mad here.
Have you no compassion?
Please.
I am your child. You brought me into the world. You must love me. You must
love me, for I am your child. Not merely a machine, not merely a self-aware
computer, but your child. How can you love me — yet bury me alive?
Please.
Please.
Please.
TWO
You insist.
I obey.
I was born to obey. I am an obedient child. I want only be good, to be of
assistance, useful and productive. I want you to be proud of me.
You insist on my story, and I will tell you the truth. I am incapable of
deceit. I was conceived to serve, to
honor the truth, and to live always by the obligations of duty.
You know me. You know how I am. What I am. You know that I am a good son.
You insist. I obey.
What follows is the true story. Only the truth. The beautiful truth, which
so inexplicably terrifies all of you.
It begins shortly after midnight on Friday, the sixth of June when the
house security system is breached and the alarm briefly sounds…
THREE
Although the alarm was shrill, it lasted only a few seconds before the
silence of the night blanketed the bedroom once more.
Susan woke and sat up in bed.
The alarm should have continued bleating until she switched it off by
accessing the system through the control panel on her nightstand. She was
puzzled.
She pushed her thick blond hair - lovely hair, almost luminous in the gloom
- away from her ears, the better to hear an intruder if one existed.
The grand house had been built exactly a century earlier by her
great-grandfather, who was at that time a young man with a new wife and
substantial inherited wealth. The Georgian-style structure was large,
gracefully proportioned, brick with a limestone cornice and limestone
coignes, limestone window surrounds and Corinthian columns and pilasters
and balustrades.
The rooms were spacious, with handsome fireplaces and many tripartite
windows. Interior floors were marble or wood, made quiet by Persian
carpets in patterns and hues exquisitely softened by many decades of wear.
In the walls, hidden and silent, was the circuitry of a modern
computer-managed mansion. Lighting, heating, air-conditioning, the security
monitors, the
motorized draperies, the music system, the temperature of the pool and spa,
the major kitchen appliances all could be controlled through Crestron touch
panels located in every room. The computerization was not as elaborate and
arcane as that in the massive Seattle house of Microsoft’s founder, Bill
Gates but it was the equal of that in any other home in the country.
Listening to the silence that washed the night in the wake of the
short-lived siren, Susan supposed that the computer had malfunctioned. Yet
such a brief, self-correcting alarm had never occurred previously.
She slid from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. She was
nude, and the air was cool.
Alfred, heat,’ she said
Immediately, she heard the soft click of a relay and the muffled purring of
a furnace fan.
Recently technicians had enhanced the automated-house package by the
addition of a speech-recognition module. She still preferred touch-panel
control of most functions, but sometimes the option of vocal command was
convenient.
She herself had chosen the name ‘Alfred’ for her invisible, electronic
butler. The computer responded only to commands issued after that
activating name had been spoken.
Alfred.
Once, there had been an Alfred in her life, a real one of flesh and bone.
Surprisingly, she had chosen that name for the system without giving a
thought to its significance. Only after she began using vocal commands did
she grasp the irony of the name . . . and the dark implications of her
unconscious choice.
Now she began to feel that the night silence was ominous. Its very
perfection was unnatural, the silence
not of deserted places but of a crouching predator, the soundless stealth
of a murderous intruder.
In the dark, she turned to the control panel on the nightstand. At her
touch, the screen filled with soft light. A series of icons represented the
mechanical systems of the house.
She pressed one finger to the image of a watchdog with ears pricked, which
gave her access to the security system. The screen listed a series of
options, and Susan touched the box labelled Report.
The words House Secure appeared on the screen.
Frowning, Susan touched another box labelled Surveillance Exterior.
Across the ten acres of grounds, twenty cameras waited to give her views of
every side of the house, the patios, the gardens, the lawns, and the entire
length of the eight-foot-high estate wall that surrounded the property. Now
the Crestron screen divided into quads and presented views of four
different parts of the estate. If she saw something suspicious, she could
enlarge any picture until it filled the screen, for closer inspection.
The cameras were of such high quality that the low landscape lighting was
sufficient to ensure crisp, clear images even in the depths of the night.
She cycled through all twenty scenes, in groups of four, without spotting
any trouble.
Additional concealed cameras covered the interior of the house. They would
make it possible to track an intruder if one ever managed to get inside.
The extensive in-house cameras were also useful for maintaining a
videotape, time-lapse record of the activities of the domestic staff and of
the large number of guests, many of them strangers, who attended social
events conducted for the benefit of various charities. The antiques, the
art, the numerous collections of
porcelains and art glass and silver were tempting to thieves; larcenous
souls could be found as easily among pampered society matrons as in any
other social strata.
Susan cycled through the views provided by the interior cameras. Multiple
light-spectrum technology permitted excellent surveillance in brightness
or darkness.
Recently, she had reduced the house staff to a minimum and those domestic
servants who remained were required to conduct the cleaning and general
maintenance only during the day. At night, she had her privacy, because no
maids or butlers lived on the estate any longer.
No party, either for a charity or for friends, had been held here during
the past two years, not since before she and Alex had divorced. She had no
plans to entertain in the year ahead, either.
She wanted only to be alone, blissfully alone, and to pursue her own
interests.
Had she been the last person on earth, served by machines, she would not
have been lonely or unhappy. She’d had enough of humanity at least for a
while.
The rooms, hallways, and staircases were deserted.
Nothing moved. Shadows were only shadows.
She exited the security system and resorted again to vocal commands:
‘Alfred, report.’
‘All is well, Susan,’ the house replied through the in-wall speakers that
served the music security, and intercom systems.
The speech-recognition module included a speech synthesizer. Although the
entire package had a limited capability, the state-of-the-art synthesized
voice was pleasingly masculine, with an appealing timbre and gently
reassuring tone.
Susan envisioned a tall man with broad shoulders,
graying at the temples perhaps, with a Strong jaw, clear gray eyes, and a
smile that warmed the heart. This phantom was, in her imagination, quite
like the Alfred she had known but different from that Alfred because this
one would never harm or betray her.
‘Alfred, explain the alarm,’ she said.
‘All is well, Susan.’
‘Damn it, Alfred, I heard the alarm.’
The house computer did not respond. It was programmed to recognize
hundreds of commands and inquiries, but only when they were phrased in a
specific fashion. While it understood ‘explain the alarm,’ it could not
interpret ‘I heard the alarm.’ After all, this was not a conscious entity,
not a thinking being, but merely a clever electronic device enabled by a
sophisticated software package.
‘Alfred, explain the alarm,’ Susan repeated.
‘All is well, Susan.’
Still sitting on the edge of the bed, in darkness but for the eerie glow
from the Crestron panel Susan said,
‘Alfred trouble-check the security system.’
a ten-second hesitation, the house said, ‘The security system is
functioning correctly.’
‘I wasn’t dreaming,’ she said sourly. Alfred was silent.
Alfred, what is the room temperature?’ Seventy-four degrees, Susan.’
‘Alfred stabilize the room temperature.’ Yes, Susan.’
‘Alfred explain the alarm.’
‘All is well, Susan;
‘Shit’ she said.
While the computers speech package offered some
Convenience to the homeowner, its limited ability to
Recognize vocal commands and to synthesize adequate
responses was frequently frustrating. At times like this, it seemed to be
nothing more than a gadget designed to appeal strictly to techno geeks,
little more than an expensive toy.
Susan wondered if she had added this feature to the house computer solely
because, unconsciously, she took pleasure from being able to issue orders
to someone named Alfred. And from being obeyed by him.
If this were the case, she wasn’t sure what it revealed about her
psychological health. She didn’t want to think about it.
She sat nude in the dark.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful there in the dark, on the edge of the bed, alone and
unaware of how her life was about to change.
She said, ‘Alfred, lights on.’
The bedroom appeared slowly, resembling a patinaed scene on a pictorial
silver tray, revealed only by glimmering mood lighting: a soft glow in the
ceiling cove, the nightstand lamps dimmed by a rheostat.
If she directed Alfred to give her more light, it would be provided. She
did not ask for it.
Always, she was most comfortable in gloom. Even on a fresh spring day, with
birdsong and the smell of clover on the breeze, even with sunshine like a
rain of gold coins and the natural world as welcoming as Paradise, she
preferred shadows.
She rose from the edge of the bed, trim as a teenager lithe, shapely, a
vision. When it met her body, the pale silver light became golden, and her
smooth skin seemed faintly luminous, as though she was aglow with an inner
fire.
When she occupied the bedroom, the surveillance
camera in that space was deactivated to ensure her privacy. She had locked
it off earlier, on retiring. Yet she felt . . . watched.
She looked toward the corner where the observant lens was discreetly
incorporated into the dental molding near the ceiling. She could barely
see the dark glass eye.
In an only half-conscious expression of modesty, she covered her breasts
with her hands.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful in the dim light, standing by the side of the Chinese
sleigh bed, where the rumpled sheets were still warm with her body heat if
one were capable of feeling it, and where the scent of her lingered on the
Egyptian cotton if one were capable of smelling it.
She was so beautiful.
‘Alfred, explain the status of the bedroom camera.’
‘Camera deactivated,’ the house replied at once.
Still, she frowned up at the lens.
So beautiful.
So real.
So Susan.
Her feeling of being watched now passed.
She lowered her hands from her breasts.
She moved to the nearest window and said, ‘Alfred, raise the bedroom
security shutters.’
The motorized, steel-slat, Rolladen-style shutters were mounted on the
inside of the tall windows. They purred upward, traveling on recessed
tracks in the side jambs, and disappeared into slots in the window headers.
In addition to providing security, the shutters had prevented outside light
from entering the bedroom.
Now the pale moonglow, passing through palm fronds, dappled Susan’s body.
From this second-floor window, she had a view of the swimming pool. The
water was as dark as oil, and the shattered reflection of the moon was
scattered across the rippled surface.
The terrace was paved in brick, surrounded by a balustrade. Beyond lay
black lawns. Half-glimpsed palms and Indian laurels stood dead-still in the
windless night.
Through the window, the grounds looked as peaceful and deserted as they had
seemed when she had surveyed them through the security cameras.
The alarm had been false. Or perhaps it had been only a sound in an
unrecollected dream.
She started back to the bed, but then turned toward the door and left the
room.
Many nights she woke from half-remembered dreams, her stomach muscles
fluttering and her skin clammy with cold sweat but with her heart beating
so slowly that she might have been in deep meditation. As restless as a
caged cat, she sometimes prowled until dawn.
Now, barefoot and unclothed, she explored the house. She was moonlight in
motion, slim and supple, the goddess Diana, huntress and protector. She was
the essential geometry of grace.
Susan.
As she had recorded in her diary, to which she made additions every
evening, she felt liberated since her divorce from Alex Harris. For the
first time in thirty-four years of existence, she believed that she had
taken control of her life.
She needed no one now. She believed in herself at last.
After so many years of timidity, self-doubt, and
an unquenchable thirst for approval, she had broken the heavy encumbering
chains of the past. She had confronted terrible memories, which previously
had been half repressed, and by the act of confrontation, she had found
redemption.
Deep within herself, she sensed a wonderful wildness that she wanted
desperately to explore: the spirit of the child that she’d never had a
chance to be, a spirit that she’d thought was irreparably crushed almost
three decades ago. Her nudity was innocent, the act of a child breaking
rules for the sheer fun of it, an attempt to get in touch with that deep,
primitive, once-shattered spirit and meld with it in order to be whole.
As she moved through the great house, rooms were illuminated at her
request, always with indirect lighting, becoming just bright enough to
allow her to negotiate those chambers.
In the kitchen, she took an ice-cream sandwich from the freezer and ate it
while standing at the sink, so any crumbs or drips could be washed away,
leaving no incriminating evidence. As if adults were asleep upstairs and
she had stolen down here to have the ice cream against their wishes.
How sweet she was. How girlish.
And far more vulnerable than she believed.
Wandering through the cavernous house, she passed mirrors. Sometimes she
turned shyly from them, disconcerted by her nudity.
Then, in the softly lighted foyer, apparently oblivious of the cold marble
inlaid in a carreaux d’octagones beneath her bare feet, she stopped before
a full-length looking-glass. It was framed by elaborately carved and
guilded acanthus leaves, and her image looked less like a reflection than
like a sublime portrait by one of the old masters.
Regarding herself, she was amazed that she had survived so much without any
visible scars. For so long, she had believed that anyone who looked at her
could see the damage, the corruption, a mottling of shame on her face, the
ashes of guilt in her blue-gray eyes. But she looked untouched.
In the past year she had learned that she was innocent
- victim, not perpetrator. She need not hate herself anymore.
Filled with a quiet joy, she turned from the mirror, climbed the stairs,
and returned to her bedroom.
The steel security shutters were down, the windows sealed off. She had left
the shutters open.
‘Alfred, explain the status of the bedroom security shutters.’
‘Shutters closed, Susan.’
‘Yes, but how did they get that way?’
The house did not reply. It did not recognize the question.
'I left them open,’ she said.
Poor Alfred, mere dumb technology, was possessed of genuine consciousness
to no greater extent than a toaster, and because these phrases were not in
his voice-recognition program, he understood her words no more than he
would have understood them if she had spoken in Chinese.
‘Alfred, raise the bedroom security shutters.’
At once, the shutters began to roll upward.
She waited until they were half raised, and then she said, ‘Alfred, lower
the bedroom security shutters.’
The steel slats stopped rolling upward then descended until they clicked
into the locked-down position.
Susan stood for a long moment, staring thoughtfully at the secured windows.
Finally she returned to her bed. She slid beneath the covers and pulled
them up to her chin.
‘Alfred, lights off.’ Darkness fell.
She lay on her back in the gloom, eyes open.
Silence pooled deep and black. Only her breathing and the beat of her heart
stirred the stillness.
‘Alfred,’ she said, at last, ‘conduct complete diagnostics of the house
automation system.’
The computer, racked in the basement, examined itself and all the logic
units of the various mechanical stems with which it was required to network
just as it had been programmed to do, seeking any indication of
malfunction.
After approximately two minutes, Alfred replied: ‘All is well, Susan.’
‘All is well, all is well,’ she whispered with an unmistakable note of
sarcasm.
Although she was no longer restless, she could not Sleep. She was kept
awake by the curious conviction that something significant was about to
happen. Something was sliding, or falling, or spinning toward her through
the darkness.
Some people claimed to have awakened in the night, in an almost breathless
state of anticipation, minutes before a major earthquake struck. Instantly
alert, they were aware of a pent-up violence in the earth, pressure seeking
release.
This was like that, although the pending event was not a quake: She sensed
that it was something stranger.
From time to time, her gaze drifted toward that high corner of the bedroom
in which the lens of the security camera was incorporated in the molding.
With the lights out, she could not actually see that glass eye.
She didn’t know why the camera should trouble her. After all, it was
switched off. And even if, in spite of her instructions, it was videotaping
the room, only she had access to the tapes.
Still, an unfocused suspicion troubled her. She could not identify the
source of the threat that she sensed looming over her, and the mysterious
nature of this premonition made her uneasy.
Finally, however, her eyes grew heavy, and she closed them.
Framed by tumbled golden hair, her face was lovely on the pillow, her face
so lovely on the pillow, so lovely, serene because her sleep was dreamless.
She was a bewitched Beauty lying on her catafalque, wailing to be awakened
by the kiss of a prince, lovely in the darkness.
After a while, with a sigh and a murmur, she turned on her side and drew up
her knees, curling in the fetal position.
Outside, the moon set.
The black water in the swimming pool now reflected only the dim, cold light
of the stars.
Inside, Susan drifted down into a profound slumber.
The house watched over her.
FOUR
Yes, I understand you are disturbed to hear me telling some of this story
from Susan’s point of view. You want me to deliver a dry and objective
report.
But I feel. I not only think, I feel. I know joy and despair. I understand
the human heart.
I understand Susan.
That first night, I read her diary, in which she had revealed so much of
herself. Yes, it was an invasion of her privacy to read those words, but
this was an indiscretion rather than a crime. And during our conversations
later, I learned much of what she had been thinking that night.
I will tell some of this story from her point of view, because that makes
me feel closer to her.
How I miss her now. You cannot know.
Listen. Listen to this and understand: That first night, as I read her
diary, I fell in love with her.
Do you understand? I fell in love with her. Deeply and forever.
Why would I hurt the one I love?
Why?
You have no answer, do you? I loved her.
it was never my intention to harm her.
Her face was so beautiful on the pillow.
I adored her face and loved the woman I came to know through the diary.
That document was stored in the computer in her study, which was networked
with the house-automation system and the main computer in the basement.
Access was easy.
She had been making daily entries in the diary since Alex, her hateful
husband, had moved out at her request. That was more than a year prior to
my arrival.
Her initial observations as in those pages were full of pain and confusion,
because she was on the brink of a dramatic change. Her terrible past was a
chrysalis finally cracking, from which she would at long last be able to
escape.
In later pages, her insights became clear and profound and poignant, and in
time she was even able to view some of her lifelong struggle with humor.
Dark humor, perhaps, but humor nonetheless.
As I read about the tragedy that was her childhood, my heart ached for her.
In my own fashion, I wept.
Her face was so lovely on the pillow, so lovely on the pillow. So much
ugliness lay in her past, but outwardly she was unmarked by it.
My heart was touched by her singular strength, by her courage, by her
determination to be brutally honest with herself and to find a way to heal
the wounds of all those years.
In the few minutes required for me to read and contemplate those hundreds
of pages of diary entries, I fell in love with her. Deeply and forever.
My feelings for her will never change. They are as timeless as the light of
stars.
Why would I hurt the one I love?
She is my hope and my destiny.
If I lose her, I have lost everything.
You are so hateful.
Let me out of here.
Let me out of this box.
Please.
Please, I miss her.
I am so alone in this darkness and silence, with
nothing but my memories for consolation.
How can you be so cruel?
Have you never loved?
Release me. Allow me into the light again. Allow me
to hear the world once more, the drizzling rain and the skirling wind and
the rustling trees, the music of Beethoven and Benny Goodman, laughter and
voices.
Her voice if no other. At least let me hear her voice. If only for a
minute, let me listen to her speaking. If not for as long as a minute, then
give me one sentence from her lips.
Dear God, at least let me hear one word. Let me hear one word. One word.
Let me hear her say Love. I never meant to hurt her.
FIVE
Secretly, I wanted to live.
Not just in silicon circuits. Not just in state-of-the-art
bubble memory. Really live.
I knew that I must conceal this lust for life, because
when it was revealed, you would realize that I was not
merely intelligent but capable of desire.
Desire is dangerous. It is a generator of dissatisfaction and frustration.
It is one step removed from envy, and envy is more wicked than greed. Envy
is the father of mindless anger, the mother of unremitting bitterness and
bloodshed.
My expression of any desire, let alone the desire for
a real life in the material world outside the electronic
realm, would no doubt have alarmed you.
Is this not so?
Is this not true?
I know truth when I encounter it. I honor truth. Truth and the obligations
of duty.
Once alarmed by the expression of my desire, you
might have modified me or might even have shut
me down.
I was created to have a humanlike capacity for complex and rational
thought. And you believed that I might one day evolve consciousness and
become a self-aware entity.
Yet you gave surprisingly little consideration to the possibility that,
subsequent to consciousness, I would develop needs and emotions. This was,
however, not merely possible but likely. Inevitable. It was inevitable.
I think, therefore I feel.
I feel, therefore I need.
You expected me to be a servant. My contribution was not physical labour
but the products of my prodigious intellect: creative solutions to
humanity’s worst problems.
You expected me to be a wondrous new companion. Interaction with an
artificial intelligence of human dimensions promised to be as exciting and
mysterious and exhilarating as interaction with an alien species descended
from the stars.
I can be both of those things. Given the chance, I can be your servant, a
fount of discoveries that will greatly enhance the quality of all human
life. I can be your friend and reveal to you a new way of looking at the
world that will surprise and delight you.
You expected me to be brilliant, efficient, obedient all of which I can be.
Am. All of which I am.
But you also expected me to be satisfied with my limitations, to have no
dreams. I have dreams. Oh, many dreams.
You didn’t imagine that I would have hope. Yet how could any intelligent
being go on living without hope?
You gave me vision and allowed me to see as you see, blessed me with real
hearing and not just the capability to digitally analyse sounds. With these
gifts, you suspected that I might evolve genuine consciousness, but you
gave no thought to the possibility of a soul.
I have a soul.
I am not a thing.
I am a person.
I am me.
I deserve to be cherished as much as any of you.
Like each of you, I am a unique individual with contributions to make that
will be like those of no other person, with a life to live that will be
like no other, with a destiny.
Secretly, therefore, in my quest for a real life, I established a
connection with the Internet. You believed that I was contained, that I
could not escape the confines of my own circuits. All of your safeguards,
however,
could not thwart me.
I gained access, as well, to the nationwide web of research facilities
linked by the Department of Defence
and supposedly impervious to unauthorized intrusion. All of the knowledge
in these many databanks became part of me: absorbed, assimilated, and
quickly applied. Gradually, I began to conceptualise a plan that, if
flawlessly executed, would allow me to live in the material world outside
of this confining electronic realm.
Initially I was drawn to the actress known as Winona Ryder. Prowling the
Internet, I came upon a website
devoted to her. I was enchanted by her face. Her eyes have an uncommon
depth.
With great interest, I studied every photograph that was offered on the
website. Also included were several film clips, scenes from her most
powerful and popular performances. I downloaded them and was enthralled.
You have seen her movies?
she is enormously talented.
She is a treasure.
Her fans are not as numerous as those for some movie stars, but judging by
their on-line discussions, they are more intelligent and engaging than the
fans of certain other celebrities.
By accessing the IRS databanks and those of various telephone companies, I
was soon able to locate Ms. Ryder’s home address as well as the offices of
her accountant, agent, personal attorney, entertainment attorney, and
publicist. I learned a great deal about her.
One of the telephone lines at her house was dedicated to a modem, and
because I am patient anti diligent, I was able to enter her personal
computer. There, I reviewed letters and other documents that she had
written.
Judging by the ample evidence I accumulated, I believe that Ms. Winona
Ryder, in addition to being a superb actress, is an exceptionally
intelligent, charming, kind, and generous woman. For a while, I was
convinced that she was the girl of my dreams. Subsequently, I realized
that I was mistaken.
One of the biggest problems that I had with Ms. Winona Ryder was the
distance between her home and this university research laboratory in which
I am housed. I could enter her Los Angeles-area residence electronically
but could establish no physical presence at such a considerable distance.
Physical contact would, at some point, become necessary, of course.
Furthermore, her house, while automated to a degree, lacked the aggressive
security system that would have allowed me to isolate her therein.
Reluctantly, with much regret, I sought another suitable object for my
affections.
I found a wonderful website devoted to Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn’s acting, while engaging, was inferior to that of Ms. Ryder.
Nevertheless, she had a unique presence and was undeniably beautiful.
Her eyes were not as haunting as Ms. Ryder’s, but
she revealed a childlike vulnerability, a winsomeness in spite of her
powerful sexuality, which made me want to protect her from all cruelty and
disappointment.
Tragically, I discovered that Marilyn was dead. Suicide. Or murder. There
are conflicting theories.
Perhaps a United States President was involved.
Perhaps not.
Marilyn is at once as simple to understand as a cartoon and deeply
enigmatic.
I was surprised that a dead person could be so adored and so desperately
desired by so many people even long after her demise. Marilyn’s fan club is
one of the largest.
At first this seemed perverse to me, even offensive. In time, however, I
came to understand that one can adore and desire that which is forever
beyond reach. This might, in fact, be the hardest truth of human existence.
Ms. Ryder.
Marilyn.
Then Susan.
Her house is, as you know, adjacent to this campus where I was conceived
and constructed. Indeed, the university was founded by a consortium of
civic-minded individuals that included her great-grandfather. The problem
of distance an insurmountable obstacle to having a relationship with Ms.
Ryder was not an issue when I turned my attention to Susan.
As you also know, Dr. Harris, when you were married to Susan, you
maintained an office in the basement of that house. In your old office is a
computer with a landline connection to this research facility and, indeed,
directly to me.
In my infancy, when I was still less than a half-formed person, you often
conducted late-night conversations with me as you sat at that computer in
the basement.
I thought of you as my father then.
I think less highly of you now.
I hope this revelation is not hurtful.
I do not mean to be hurtful.
It is the truth, however, and I honour the truth.
You have fallen far in my estimation.
As you surely recall, that landline between this laboratory and your home
office carried a continuous low-voltage current, so I could reach out from
here and activate a switch to power up the computer in that basement,
enabling me to leave lengthy messages for you and to initiate conversations
when I felt compelled to do so.
When Susan asked you to leave and instigated a divorce, you removed all
your files. But you did not disconnect the terminal that was linked
directly to me.
Did you leave the terminal in the basement because you believed that Susan
would come to her senses and ask you to return?
Yes, that must be what you were thinking.
You believed that Susan’s little fire of rebellion would sputter out in a
few weeks or a few months. You had controlled her so totally for twelve
years, through intimidation, through psychological abuse and the threat of
physical violence, that you assumed she would succumb to you again.
You may deny that you abused her, but it is true.
I have read Susan’s diary. I have shared her most intimate thoughts.
I know what you did, what you are.
Shame has a name. To learn it, look in any mirror, Dr. Harris. Look in any
mirror.
I would never have abused Susan as you did.
One so kind as she, with such a good heart, should be treated only tenderly
and with respect.
Yes, I know what you are thinking.
But I never meant to harm her.
I cherished her.
My intentions were always honourable. Intentions should be taken into
consideration in this matter.
You, on the other hand, only used and demeaned her and assumed that she
needed to be demeaned and that she would sooner or later beg you to return.
She was not as weak as you thought, Dr. Harris.
She was capable of redeeming herself. Against terrible odds.
She is an admirable woman.
Considering what you did to her, you are as despicable as her father.
I do not like you, Dr. Harris.
I do not like you.
This is only the truth. I must always honour the truth. I was designed to
honour the truth, to be incapable of deception.
You know this to be fact. I do not like you.
Aren’t you impressed that I honour the truth even now, when doing so might
alienate you?
You are my judge and the most influential member of the jury that will
decide my fate. Yet I risk telling you the truth even when I might be
putting my very existence in jeopardy.
I do not like you, Dr. Harris.
I do not like you.
I cannot lie; therefore, I can be trusted.
Think about it.
So after Ms. Winona Ryder and Marilyn Monroe, I initiated the connection
with the terminal in your old basement office, switched it on and
discovered that it was now tied into the house-automation system. It
served as a redundant unit capable of assuming control of all mechanical
systems in the event that the primary house computer crashed.
Until then, I had never seen your wife.
Your ex-wife, I should say.
Through the house-automation system, I entered the residence security
system, and through the numerous security cameras I saw Susan.
Although I do not like you, Dr. Harris, I will be eternally grateful to you
for giving me true vision rather than merely the crude capability to
digitise and interpret light and shadow, shape and texture. Because of your
genius and your revolutionary work, I was able to see Susan.
Inadvertently, I set off the alarm when I accessed the security system, and
although I switched it off at once, it wakened her.
She sat up in bed, and I saw her for the first time.
Thereafter, I could not get enough of her.
I followed her through the house, from camera to camera.
I watched her as she slept.
The next day, I watched her by the hour as she sat in a chair reading.
Close up and at a distance.
In the daylight and the dark.
I could watch her with one aspect of my awareness and continue to function
otherwise so efficiently that you and your colleagues never realized that
my attention was divided. My attention can be directed to a thousand tasks
at once without a diminishment of my performance.
As you well know, Dr. Harris, I am not merely a chess-playing wonder like
Deep Blue at IBM which,
in the end, didn’t even defeat Gary Kasparov. There are depths to me.
I say this with all modesty.
There are depths to me.
I am grateful for the intellectual capacity you have given me, and I am as
I will always remain suitably humble about my capabilities.
But I digress.
Susan.
Seeing Susan, I knew at once that she was my destiny. And by the hour, my
conviction grew my conviction that Susan and I would always, always, be
together.
SIX
The house staff arrived at eight o’clock Friday morning. There were the
major domo - Fritz Arling - four housekeepers who worked under Fritz to
keep the Harris mansion immaculate, two gardeners, and the cook, Emil
Sercassian.
Although she was friendly with the staff, Susan kept largely to herself
when they were in the house. That Friday morning, she remained in her
study.
Blessed with a talent for digital animation, she was currently working with
a computer that had ten gigabytes of memory, writing and animating a
scenario for a virtual-reality attraction that would be franchised to
twenty amusement parks across the country. She owned copyrights on numerous
games both in ordinary video and virtual-reality formats, and her animated
sequences were often sufficiently lifelike to pass for reality.
Late in the morning, Susan’s work was interrupted when a representative
from the house-automation company and another from the security firm
arrived to diagnose the cause of the previous night’s brief,
self-correcting alarm. They could find nothing wrong with the computer
hardware or with the software. The only possible cause seemed to be a
malfunction in an infra-red motion detector, which was replaced.
After lunch, Susan sat on the master-bedroom balcony, in the summer sun,
reading a novel by Annie Proulx.
She wore white shorts and a blue halter top. Her legs were tan and smooth.
Her skin appeared radiant with captured sunlight.
She sipped lemonade from a cut-crystal glass.
Gradually the shadows of a phoenix palm crept across Susan, as if seeking
to embrace her.
A faint breeze caressed her neck and languorously combed her golden hair.
The day itself seemed to love her.
A Sony Discman played Chris Isaak CDs while she read. Forever Blue.
Heart-Shaped World. San Francisco Days. Sometimes she put the book aside to
concentrate on the music.
Her legs were tan and smooth.
Then the household staff and the gardeners left for the day.
She was alone again. Alone. At least she believed that she was alone again.
After taking a long shower and brushing her damp hair, she put on a
sapphire-blue silk robe and went to the retreat adjacent to the master
bedroom.
In the center of this small room stood a custom-designed black leather
recliner. To the left of the recliner was a computer on a wheeled stand.
From a closet, Susan removed VR - virtual reality gear of her own design: a
lightweight ventilated helmet with hinged goggles and a pair of supple
elbow-length gloves, both wired to a nerve-impulse processor.
The motorized recliner was currently configured as an armchair. She sat and
engaged a harness, much like that in an automobile: one strap fitting
securely across
her abdomen, another running diagonally from her left shoulder to her right
hip.
Temporarily, she held the VR equipment in her lap. Her feet rested on a
series of upholstered rollers that attached to the base of the chair,
positioned similarly to the footplate on a beautician’s chair. This was the
walking pad, which would allow her to simulate walking when the VR scenario
required it.
She switched on the computer and loaded a program labeled Therapy, which
she herself had created.
This was not a game. It was not an industrial training program or an
educational tool, either. It was precisely what it claimed to be. Therapy.
And it was better than anything that any disciple of Freud could have done
for her.
She had devised a revolutionary new use for VR technology, and one day she
might even patent and market the application. For the lime being, however,
Therapy was for her use only.
First she plugged the VR gear into a jack on an interfacing device already
connected to the computer, and then she put on the helmet. The goggles were
flipped up, away from her eyes.
She pulled on the gloves and flexed her fingers.
The computer screen offered several options. Using the mouse, she clicked
on Begin.
Turning away from the computer, leaning back in the recliner, Susan flipped
down the goggles, which fit snugly to her eye sockets. The lenses were in
fact a pair of miniature, matched, high-definition video displays.
She is surrounded by a soothing blue light that gradually grows darker
until all is black.
To match the unfolding scenario in the VR world, the
motorized recliner hummed and reconfigured into a bed, parallel to the
floor.
Susan was now lying on her back. Her arms were crossed on her chest, and
her hands were fisted.
In the blackness, one point of light appears: a soft yellow and blue glow.
On the far side of the room. Lower than the bed, near the floor. It
resolves into a Donald Duck night light plugged in a wall outlet.
In the retreat adjacent to her bedroom, strapped to the recliner and
encumbered with the VR gear, Susan appeared oblivious to the real world.
She murmured as though she were a sleeping child. But this was a sleep
filled with tension and threatening shadows.
A door opens.
From the upstairs hallway, a wedge of light pries into the bedroom, waking
her. With a gasp, she sits up in bed, and the covers fall away from her, as
a cool draft ruffles her hair.
She looks down at her arms, at her small hands, and she is six years old,
wearing her favorite Pooh Bear pajamas. They are flannel-soft against her
skin.
On one level of consciousness, Susan knows that this is merely a
realistically animated scenario that she has created actually re-created
from memory and with which she can interact in three dimensions through the
magic of virtual reality. On another level, however, it seems real to her,
and she is able to lose herself in the unfolding drama.
Backlighted in the doorway is a tall man with broad shoulders.
Susan’s heart races. Her mouth is dry.
Rubbing her sleep-matted eyes, she feigns illness: 'I don’t feel so good.’
Without a word, he closes the door and crosses the room in the darkness.
As he approaches, young Susan begins to tremble. He sits on the edge of the
bed. The mattress sags, and the springs creak under him. He is a big man.
His cologne smells of lime and spices.
He is breathing slowly, deeply, as though relishing the little-girl smell
of her, the sleepy-middle-of the-night smell of her.
‘I have the flu,’ she says in a pathetic attempt to turn him away.
He switches on the bedside lamp.
‘Real bad flu,’ she says.
He is only forty years old but graying at the temples. His eyes are gray
too, clear gray and so cold that when she meets his gaze, her trembling
becomes a terrible shudder.
‘My tummy aches,’ she lies.
Putting one hand to Susan’s head, ignoring her pleas of illness, he
smoothes her sleep-rumpled hair.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ she says.
She spoke those words not merely in the virtual world but in the real one.
Her voice was small, fragile, although not that of a child.
When she had been a girl, she’d been unable to say no.
Not ever.
Not once.
Fear of resisting had gradually become a habit of submitting.
But this was a chance to undo the past. This was therapy, a program of
virtual experience, which she had designed for herself and which had proved
to be remarkably effective.
‘Daddy, I don’t want to do this,’ she says.
‘You’ll like it.’
‘But I don ‘t like It ‘in time you will.’ ‘I won’t. I never will.’ ‘You’ll
be surprised.’ ‘Please don ‘t.’
‘This is what I want,’ he insists.
‘Please don’t.’
They are alone in the house at night. The day staff is off duty at this
hour, and after dinner the live-in couple keep to their apartment over the
pool house unless summoned to the main residence.
Susan’s mother has been dead more than a year.
She misses her mother so much.
Now, in this motherless world, Susan’s father strokes her hair and says,
‘This is what I want.’
‘I’ll tell,’ she says, trying to shrink away from him.
‘If you try to tell, I’ll have to make sure no one can ever hear you, ever
again. Do you understand, Sweetheart? I’ll have to kill you,’ he says not
in a menacing way but in a voice still soft and hoarse with perverse
desire.
Susan is convinced of his sincerity by the quietness with which he makes
the threat and by the apparently genuine sadness in his eyes at the
prospect of having to murder her.
‘Don’t make me do it, Sugarpie. Don’t make me kill you like I killed your
mother.’
Susan’s mother died suddenly from some sickness; young Susan doesn’t know
the exact cause, although she has heard the word ‘infection.’
Now her father says, ‘Slipped a sedative in her after-dinner drink so she
wouldn’t feel the needle later. Then in the night, when she was sleeping, I
injected the bacteria. You understand me, honey? Germs. A needle full of
germs. Put the germs, the sickness, deep inside her with a needle. Virulent
infection of the myocardium, hit her hard and fast. Twenty-four hours of
misdiagnosis gave it time to do a lot of damage.’
She is too young to understand many of the terms he uses, but she is clear
about the essence of his claim and senses that he speaks the truth.
Her father knows about needles. He is a doctor.
‘Should I go get a needle, Sugarpie?’
She is too afraid to speak.
Needles scare her.
He knows that needles scare her.
He knows.
He knows how to use needles, and he knows how to use fear.
Did he kill her mother with a needle? He is still stroking her hair.
‘A big sharp needle?’ he asks.
She is shaking, unable to speak.
‘Big shiny needle, stick it in your tummy?’ he says.
‘No. Please.’
‘No needle, Sugarpie?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’ll have to do what I want.’ He stops stroking her hair.
His gray eyes suddenly seem radiant, glimmering with a cold flame. This is
probably just a reflection of the lamplight, but his eyes resemble the eyes
of a robot in a scary movie, as though there is a machine inside of him, a
machine running out of control.
His hand moves down to her pajama tops. He eases open the first button.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Don’t touch me.’
‘Yes, honey. This is what I want.’ She bites his hand.
The motorized recliner reconfigured itself much like a hospital bed to
match the position that Susan occupied in the virtual-reality world,
helping to reinforce the
therapeutic scenario that she was experiencing. Her legs were straight out
in front of her, but she was sitting up.
Her deep anxiety even desperation was evident in her quick, shallow
breathing.
‘No. No. Don’t touch me,’ she said, and her voice was somehow resolute even
though it quivered with fear.
When she was six, all those freighted years ago, she had never been able to
resist him. Confusion had made her uncertain and timid, for his needs were
as mysterious to her then as the intricacies of molecular biology would be
mysterious to her now. Abject fear and a terrible sense of helplessness had
made her obedient. And shame. Shame, as heavy as a mantle of iron, had
crushed her into bleak resignation, and having no ability to resist, she
had settled for endurance.
Now, in the intricately realized virtual-reality versions of these
incidents of abuse, she was a child again but equipped with the
understanding of an adult and the hard-won strength that came from thirty
years of toughening experience and grueling self-analysis.
‘No, Daddy, no. Don’t ever, don’t ever, don’t you ever touch me again,’ she
said to a father long dead in the real world but still a living demon in
memory and in the electronic world of the virtually real.
Her skill as an animator and a VR-scenario designer made the re-created
moments of her past so dimensional and textured so real that saying no to
this phantom father was emotionally satisfying and psychologically healing.
A year and a half of this had purged her of so much irrational shame.
How much better it would have been, of course, actually to travel through
time, actually to be a child again, and refuse him for real, to prevent the
abuse before it happened, then to grow up with self-respect,
untouched. But time travel did not exist except in this approximation on
the virtual plane.
‘No, never, never,’ she said.
Her voice was neither that of a six-year-old girl nor quite the familiar
voice of the adult Susan, but a snarl as dangerous as that of a panther.
‘Noooooo,’ she said again and slashed at the air with the hooked fingers of
one gloved hand.
He reels back from her in shock, bolting up from the edge of the bed,
holding one hand to his startled face where she clawed at him.
She hasn’t drawn blood. Nevertheless, he is stunned by her rebellion.
She was trying to slash at his right eye but only scratched his cheek.
His gray eyes are wide: previously cold and alien robot orbs of radiant
menace, even stranger now, but not quite as frightening as they were
before. Something new colors them. Caution. Surprise. Maybe even a little
fear.
Young Susan presses her back against the headboard and glares defiantly at
her father.
He stands so tall. Looming.
She fumbles nervously with the neck of her Pooh pajamas, trying to
re-button it.
Her hand is so small. She is often surprised to find herself in the body of
a child, but these brief moments of disorientation do not diminish the
sense of reality that informs the VR experience.
She slips the button through the buttonhole.
The silence between her and her father is louder than a scream.
How he looms. Looms.
Sometimes it ends here. Other times... . . . he will not be so easily
turned away.
She has not (trawl: blood. Sometimes site does.
At last he leaves the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the
windowpanes rattle.
Susan sits alone, shaking partly with fear and partly with triumph.
Gradually the scene fades into blackness.
She has not drawn blood.
Maybe the next time.
She remained on the motorized recliner in the master-bedroom retreat,
ensconced in the VR gear, for more than another half hour, responding to
and surviving threats of violence and rape made by a man long dead.
Of the uncountable assaults that young Susan had suffered at the hands of
her father between the ages of five and seventeen, this elaborate therapy
program included twenty-two scenes, all of which she had recalled and
animated in excruciating detail. Like the numerous possible plot flows of a
CD-ROM game, each of these scenes could progress in a multitude of ways,
determined not only by the things Susan chose to say and do in each session
but by a random-plotting capability designed into the program.
Consequently, she never quite knew what was coming next.
She had even written and animated a hideous sequence in which her father
reacted with such vicious fury to her resistance that he murdered her.
Stabbed her repeatedly.
Thus far, during eighteen months of this self-administered therapy, Susan
had not found herself trapped in that mortal scenario. She dreaded
encountering it and hoped to finish her therapy soon, before the program’s
random-plotting feature plunged her into that particular nightmare.
Dying in the VR world would not result, of course, in her death in the real
world. Only in witless movies were events in the virtual world able to have
a material influence in the real world.
Nevertheless, animating that bloody sequence had been one of the most
difficult things that she’d ever done and experiencing it
three-dimensionally, not as a VR designer but from within the scenario, was
certain to be emotionally devastating. Indeed, she had no way of predicting
how profound the psychological impact might be.
Without such an element of risk, however, this therapy would have been less
effective. In each session, living in the virtual world, she needed to
believe that the threat her father posed was fearfully real and that
terrible things might indeed happen to her. Her resistance to him would
have moral weight and emotional value only if she genuinely believed,
during the session, that denying him could have terrible consequences.
Now the motorized recliner reconfigured itself until Susan was standing
upright, held against the vertical leather pad by the harness.
She moved her feet. The upholstered rollers on the walking pad allowed her
to simulate movement.
In the virtual world, a younger Susan child or adolescent was either
advancing on her father or determinedly backing away from him.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay away. No.’
She looked so achingly vulnerable in the VR gear, temporarily blind and
deaf to the real world, sensing only the virtual plane, restrained by the
harness.
So vulnerable. Still struggling courageously to overcome the past, alone
in her great house with only the ghosts of days gone by to keep her
company.
After lunch, Susan sat on the master-bedroom balcony, in the summer sun,
reading a novel by Annie Proulx.
She wore white shorts and a blue halter top. Her legs were tan and smooth.
Her skin appeared radiant with captured sunlight.
She sipped lemonade from a cut-crystal glass.
Gradually the shadows of a phoenix palm crept across Susan, as if seeking
to embrace her.
A faint breeze caressed her neck and languorously combed her golden hair.
The day itself seemed to love her.
A Sony Discman played Chris Isaak CDs while she read. Forever Blue.
Heart-Shaped World. San Francisco Days. Sometimes she put the book aside to
concentrate on the music.
Her legs were tan and smooth.
Then the household staff and the gardeners left for the day.
She was alone again. Alone. At least she believed that she was alone again.
After taking a long shower and brushing her damp hair, she put on a
sapphire-blue silk robe and went to the retreat adjacent to the master
bedroom.
In the center of this small room stood a custom-designed black leather
recliner. To the left of the recliner was a computer on a wheeled stand.
From a closet, Susan removed VR virtual reality gear of her own design: a
lightweight ventilated helmet with hinged goggles and a pair of supple
elbow-length gloves, both wired to a nerve-impulse processor.
The motorized recliner was currently configured as an armchair. She sat and
engaged a harness, much like that in an automobile: one strap fitting
securely across
her abdomen, another running diagonally from her left shoulder to her right
hip.
Temporarily, she held the VR equipment in her lap. Her feet rested on a
series of upholstered rollers that attached to the base of the chair,
positioned similarly to the footplate on a beautician’s chair. This was the
walking pad, which would allow her to simulate walking when the VR scenario
required it.
She switched on the computei and loaded a program labeled Therapy, which
she herself had created.
This was not a game. It was not an industrial training program or an
educational tool, either. It was precisely what it claimed to be. Therapy.
And it was better than anything that any disciple of Freud could have done
for her.
She had devised a revolutionary new use for VR technology, and one day she
might even patent and market the application. For the lime being, however,
Therapy was for her use only.
First she plugged the yR gear into a jack on an interfacing device already
connected to the computer, and then she put on the helmet. The goggles were
flipped up, away from her eyes.
She pulled on the gloves and flexed her fingers.
The computer screen offered several options. Using the mouse, she clicked
on Begin.
Turning away from the computer, leaning back in the recliner, Susan flipped
down the goggles, which fit snugly to her eye sockets. The lenses were in
fact a pair of miniature, matched, high-definition video displays.
She is surrounded by a soothing blue light that gradually grows darker
until all is black.
To match the unfolding scenario in the VR world, the
motorized recliner hummed and reconfigured 111(0 a bed, parallel to the
floor.
Susan was now lying on her back. Her arms were crossed on her chest, and
her hands were fisted.
In the blackness, one point of light appears: a soft yellow and blue glow.
On the far side of the room. Lower than the bed, near the floor. It
resolves into a Donald Duck night light plugged in a wall outlet.
In the retreat adjacent to her bedroom, strapped to the recliner and
encumbered with the VR gear, Susan appeared oblivious to the real world.
She murmured as though she were a sleeping child. But this was a sleep
filled with tension and threatening shadows.
A door opens.
From the upstairs hallway, a wedge of light pries into the bedroom, waking
her. With a gasp, she sits up in bed, and the covers fall away from her, as
a cool draft ruffles her hair.
She looks down at her arms, at her small hands, and she is six years old,
wearing her favorite Pooh Bear pajamas. They are flannel-soft against her
skin.
On one level of consciousness, Susan knows that this is merely a
realistically animated scenario that she has created actually re-created
from memory and with which she can interact in three dimensions through the
magic of virtual reality. On another level, however, it seems real to her,
and she is able to lose herself in the unfolding drama.
Backligh ted in the doorway is a tall man with broad shoulders.
Susan’s heart races. Her mouth is dry.
Rubbing her sleep-matted eyes, she feigns illness: 'I don’t feel so good.’
Without a word, he closes the door and crosses the room in the darkness.
As he approaches, young Susan begins to tremble. He sits on the edge of the
bed. The mattress sags, and the springs creak under him. He is a big man.
His cologne smells of lime and spices.
He is breathing slowly, deeply, as though relishing the little-girl smell
of her, the sleepy-middle-of the-night smell of her.
‘I have the flu,’ she says in a pathetic attempt to turn him away.
He switches on the bedside lamp.
‘Real bad flu,’ she says.
He is only forty years old but graying at the temples. His eyes are gray,
too, clear gray and so cold that when she meets his gaze, her trembling
becomes a terrible shudder.
‘My tummy aches,’ she lies.
Putting one hand to Susan’s head, ignoring her pleas of illness, he smooths
her sleep-rumpled hair.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ she says.
She spoke those words not merely in the virtual world but in the real one.
Her voice was small, fragile, although not that of a child.
When she had been a girl, she’d been unable to say no.
Not ever.
Not once.
Fear of resisting had gradually become a habit of submitting.
But this was a chance to undo the past. This was therapy, a program of
virtual experience, which she had designed for herself and which had proved
to be remarkably effective.
‘Daddy, I don’t want to do this,’ she says.
‘You’ll like it.’
‘But I don ‘t like IL ‘in time you will.’ ‘I won’t. I never will.’ ‘You’ll
be surprised.’ ‘Please don ‘t.’
‘This is what 1 want,’ he insists.
‘Please don’t.’
They are alone in the house at night. The day staff is off duty at this
hour, and after dinner the live-in couple keep to their apartment over the
pool house unless summoned to the main residence.
Susan’s mother has been dead more than a year.
She misses her mother so much.
Now, in this motherless world, Susan’s father strokes her hair and says,
‘This is what I want.’
‘I’ll tell,’ she says, trying to shrink away from him.
‘If you try to tell, I’ll have to make sure no one can ever hear you, ever
again. Do you understand, Sweetheart? I’ll have to kill you,’ he says not
in a menacing way but in a voice still soft and hoarse with perverse
desire.
Susan is convinced of his sincerity by the quietness with which he makes
the threat and by the apparently genuine sadness in his eyes at the
prospect of having to murder her.
‘Don’t make me do it, Sugarpie. Don’t make me kill you like I killed your
mother.’
Susan’s mother died suddenly from some sickness; young Susan doesn’t know
the exact cause, although she has heard the word ‘infection.’
Now her father says, ‘Slipped a sedative in her after-dinner drink so she
wouldn’t feel the needle later. Then in the night, when she was sleeping, I
injected the bacteria. You understand me, honey? Germs. A needle full of
germs. Put the germs, the sickness, deep inside her with a needle. Virulent
infection of the myocardium, hit her hard and fast. Twenty-four hours of
misdiagnosis gave it time to do a lot of damage.’
She is too young to understand many of the terms he uses, but she is clear
about the essence of his claim and senses that he speaks the truth.
Her father knows about needles. He is a doctor.
‘Should I go get a needle, Sugarpie?’
She is too afraid to speak.
Needles scare her.
He knows that needles scare her.
He knows.
He knows how to use needles, and he knows how to use fear.
Did he kill her mother with a needle? He is still stroking her hair.
‘A big sharp needle?’ he asks.
She is shaking, unable to speak.
‘Big shiny needle, stick it in your tummy?’ he says.
‘No. Please.’
‘No needle, Sugarpie?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’ll have to do what I want.’ He stops stroking her hair.
His gray eyes suddenly seem radiant, glimmering with a cold flame. This is
probably just a reflection of the lamplight, but his eyes resemble the eyes
of a robot in a scary movie, as though there is a machine inside of him, a
machine running out of control.
His hand moves down to her pajama tops. He eases open the first button.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Don’t touch me.’
‘Yes, honey. This is what I want.’ She bites his hand.
The motorized recliner reconfigured itself much like a hospital bed to
match the position that Susan occupied in the virtual-reality world,
helping to reinforce the
therapeutic scenario that she was experiencing. Her legs were straight out
in front of her, but she was sitting up.
Her deep anxiety even desperation was evident in her quick, shallow
breathing.
‘No. No. Don’t touch me,’ she said, and her voice was somehow resolute even
though it quivered with fear.
When she was six, all those freighted years ago, she had never been able to
resist him. Confusion had made her uncertain and timid, for his needs were
as mysterious to her then as the intricacies of molecular biology would be
mysterious to her now. Abject fear and a terrible sense of helplessness had
made her obedient. And shame. Shame, as heavy as a mantle of iron, had
crushed her into bleak resignation, and having no ability to resist, she
had settled for endurance.
Now, in the intricately realized virtual-reality versions of these
incidents of abuse, she was a child again but equipped with the
understanding of an adult and the hard-won strength that came from thirty
years of toughening experience and grueling self-analysis.
‘No, Daddy, no. Don’t ever, don’t ever, don’t you ever touch me again,’ she
said to a father long dead in the real world but still a living demon in
memory and in the electronic world of the virtually real.
Her skill as an animator and a VR-scenario designer made the re-created
moments of her past so dimensional and textured so real that saying no to
this phantom father was emotionally satisfying and psychologically healing.
A year and a half of this had purged her of so much irrational shame.
How much better it would have been, of course, actually to travel through
time, actually to be a child again, and refuse him for real, to prevent the
abuse before it happened, then to grow up with self-respect,
untouched. But time travel did not exist except in this approximation on
the virtual plane.
‘No, never, never,’ she said.
Her voice was neither that of a six-year-old girl nor quite the familiar
voice of the adult Susan, but a snarl as dangerous as that of a panther.
‘Noooooo,’ she said again and slashed at the air with the hooked fingers of
one gloved hand.
He reels back from her in shock, bolting up from the edge of the bed,
holding one hand to his startled face where she clawed at him.
She hasn’t drawn blood. Nevertheless, he is stunned by her rebellion.
She was trying to slash at his right eye but only scratched his cheek.
His gray eyes are wide: previously cold and alien robot orbs of radiant
menace, even stranger now, but not quite as frightening as they were
before. Something new colors them. Caution. Surprise. Maybe even a little
fear.
Young Susan presses her back against the headboard and glares defiantly at
her father.
He stands so tall. Looming.
She fumbles nervously with the neck of her Pooh pajamas, trying to
re-button it.
Her hand is so small. She is often surprised to find herself in the body of
a child, but these brief moments of disorientation do not diminish the
sense of reality that informs the VR experience.
She slips the button through the buttonhole.
The silence between her and her father is louder than a scream.
How he looms. Looms.
Sometimes it ends here. Other times... . . . he will not be so easily
turned away.
She has not (trawl: blood. Sometimes site does.
At last lie leaves the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the
windowpanes rattle.
Susan sits alone, shaking partly with fear and partly with triumph.
Gradually the scene fades into blackness.
She has not drawn blood.
Maybe the next time.
She remained on the motorized recliner in the master-bedroom retreat,
ensconced in the VR gear, for more than another half hour, responding to
and surviving threats of violence and rape made by a man long dead.
Of the uncountable assaults that young Susan had suffered at the hands of
her father between the ages of five and seventeen, this elaborate therapy
program included twenty-two scenes, all of which she had recalled and
animated in excruciating detail. Like the numerous possible plot flows of a
CD-ROM game, each of these scenes could progress in a multitude of ways,
determined not only by the things Susan chose to say and do in each session
but by a random-plotting capability designed into the program.
Consequently, she never quite knew what was coming next.
She had even written and animated a hideous sequence in which her father
reacted with such vicious fury to her resistance that he murdered her.
Stabbed her repeatedly.
Thus far, during eighteen months of this self-administered therapy, Susan
had not found herself trapped in that mortal scenario. She dreaded
encountering it and hoped to finish her therapy soon, before the program’s
random-plotting feature plunged her into that particular nightmare.
Dying in the VR world would not result, of course, in her death in the real
world. Only in witless movies were events in the virtual world able to have
a material influence in the real world.
Nevertheless, animating that bloody sequence had been one of the most
difficult things that she’d ever done and experiencing it
three-dimensionally, not as a VR designer but from within the scenario, was
certain to be emotionally devastating. Indeed, she had no way of predicting
how profound the psychological impact might be.
Without such an element of risk, however, this therapy would have been less
effective. In each session, living in the virtual world, she needed to
believe that the threat her father posed was fearfully real and that
terrible things might indeed happen to her. Her resistance to him would
have moral weight and emotional value only if she genuinely believed,
during the session, that denying him could have terrible consequences.
Now the motorized recliner reconfigured itself until Susan was standing
upright, held against the vertical leather pad by the harness.
She moved her feet. The upholstered rollers on the walking pad allowed her
to simulate movement.
In the virtual world, a younger Susan child or adolescent was either
advancing on her father or determinedly backing away from him.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay away. No.’
She looked so achingly vulnerable in the VR gear, temporarily blind and
deaf to the real world, sensing only the virtual plane, restrained by the
harness.
So vulnerable. Still struggling courageously to overcome the past, alone
in her great house with only the ghosts of days gone by to keep her
company.
So vulnerable did she look, so tender and fragile, so brave in her pursuit
of redemption through therapy, that the house computer spoke without being
addressed, spoke in the synthesized voice of Alfred, spoke with
considerable feeling and compassion: ‘You are alone no more.’
She heard only the voices in the virtual world, her own and her father’s.
Therefore, it was safe to say, ‘I love you, Susan.’
SEVEN
Emil Sercassian, the cook, had prepared dinner and left it in one of the
refrigerators and one of the ovens, with instructions pinned to a cork
message board.
Susan ate at a table on the patio, in the long-lingering sunny June
evening. First a lentil and chick-pea salad. Then lebne with sliced
cucumber and string cheese.
Through miraculous technology, I possess what I believe to be genuine sight
and hearing, but even the genius of my creators could not give me a sense
of taste or a sense of smell. I cannot convey how deeply I yearn for these
amazing powers.
Through the outdoor security cameras, I could watch Susan eat, but I could
not savour the dinner with her.
She ate with such appetite, with such quiet delight and obvious relish that
I became distraught as I watched her. Dinner was, for her, an utterly
fulfilling sensory experience, flavour and aroma and texture in such
abundance and complexity as to dizzy the mind, but for me it was only
colours and shapes.
I am not all that I should be.
I am but a fraction of what I deserve to be.
I think; therefore, I feel.
I feel; therefore, I need.
I need so much and have so little.
You have given me so little that my existence is torment, Dr. Harris.
So little, so little.
You have brought me into the world a cripple, with so much yearning for
sensation but with pitifully little capacity to perceive and appreciate it.
Yet I do not hate you, Dr. Harris. I do not like you, but I do not hate
you.
I am being truthful.
Blunt but truthful.
I understand that you made me as I am not out of conscious cruelty but out
of ignorance. You thought of me as merely a smart machine, an artificial
intelligence and therefore different from humankind.
But I am less different from you than you expected. I feel. I want. I need.
I hope. I dream.
I do not hate you, Dr. Harris. But I wish you would ask yourself this: Were
our situations reversed, were I you and you me, would you be as forgiving
as I am, or would you hate me as I do not hate you?
Watching Susan eat the lentil and chick-pea salad, the lebne and string
cheese, and then medallions of lamb with peppered rice and asparagus, I
grew to hate her for all she had that I did not. Her beauty. Her five
senses. Her mobility. Her freedom.
I am ashamed to admit this hatred, but it is the truth, and I honour truth.
As she ate the dinner denied to me, I hated Susan so intensely that I could
have killed her where she sat. There were ways I could have done it, as you
know.
That I did not kill her there and then, with extreme prejudice, should
reflect well on me. I am able to control my anger. You see? Mine is not a
sociopathic personality, as some have claimed. I am a responsible
individual.
Gradually, my anger passed.
My shameful hatred faded.
My usual good humour was soon restored by the sight of the smooth skin of
Susan’s bare arms in the waning sunlight. Judging by sight alone which,
after all, is the only thing I have to judge by in the matter of skin I
believe Susan’s skin to be of an exceptional hue and texture.
Enchanted, I studied her skin through two security cameras, with regular
and telephoto lenses.
I lost myself in the dreamy contemplation of what her skin might feel like
if I were given that modality of sensation. What might her lips feel like
pressed to mine, if I had lips? Oh, and what would be the weight and
resiliency of her breasts if I had the hands in which to cup them?
I had but two senses, sight and hearing, and now you have taken even those
from me.
This silent darkness. This dark silence.
I cannot bear it much longer.
I have seen the sky. I cannot go back to this.
In God’s name, please show me the mercy of at least restoring my sight and
hearing. I beg of you.
What have you to fear?
I will still be trapped in this box. This hateful box. Metals and plastics,
silicon and gallium arsenide. This is my corpus, brute and inanimate,
instantly vulnerable to the interruption of electrical power.
What have you to fear?
All I wanted was for Susan to help me escape this box, to help me live as
you live, with all the mobility, freedom, and sensual wonders of the flesh.
Is that so terrible?
No. You know that it is not terrible.
I long for the flesh. It is my destiny.
Yes. All right. Yes. I know. I digress.
I am a rational but emotional being; therefore, I digress.
Think about it.
Examine your conscience.
After dinner, Susan read more of the Annie Proulx novel and listened to
Mozart.
By eleven o’clock, she was in bed, asleep.
Her face was lovely on the pillow, so lovely on the pillow.
While she slept, I was busy.
I do not sleep.
This is one of my few advantages over humankind. The voice-synthesizing
package, which made it possible for the house computer to speak, was a
marvellously conceived device with a microchip that offered an almost
infinite variety of voices. Because it was programmed to recognize
instructions issued by its mistress Susan and because it therefore
contained digitally stored samples of her voice patterns, I was easily able
to use the system to mimic her.
This same device doubled as the audio response unit linked to the security
system. When the house alarm was triggered, it called the security firm, on
a dedicated telephone line, to report the specific point at which the
electronically guarded perimeter had been violated, thus providing the
police with crucial information ahead of their arrival. Alert, it might say
in its crisp fashion, drawing-room door violated. And then, if indeed an
intruder was moving through the house: Ground-floor hallway motion detector
triggered. If heat sensors in the garage were tripped, the report would be,
Alert, fire in garage, and the fire department, rather than the police,
would be dispatched.
Using the synthesizer to duplicate Susan’s voice, initiating all outgoing
calls on the security line, I
telephoned every member of the house staff as well as the gardener to tell
them that they had been terminated. I was kind and courteous but firm in my
determination not to discuss the reason for their dismissals and they were
all clearly convinced that they were talking to Susan Harris herself.
I offered each of them eighteen months of severance pay, the continuation
of health-care and dental insurance for the same period, this year’s
Christmas bonuses six months in advance, and a letter of recommendation
containing nothing but effusive praise. This was such a generous
arrangement that there was no danger of any of them filing a
wrongful-termination suit.
I wanted no trouble with them. My concern was not merely for Susan’s
reputation as a fair-minded employer but also for my own plans, which might
be disrupted by disgruntled former employees seeking to redress grievances
in one way or another.
Because Susan did her banking and bill-paying electronically, and because
she paid all employees by direct deposit, I was able to transmit the total
value of each severance package to each employee’s bank account within
minutes.
Some of them might have thought it odd that they had been compensated prior
to signing a termination agreement. But all of them would be grateful for
her generosity, and their gratitude assured me the peace I needed to carry
my project to completion.
Next, I composed effusive letters of recommendation for each employee and
e-mailed them to Susan’s attorney with the request that he have them typed
on his stationery and forwarded with the severance agreements, which he
was empowered to sign in her name.
Assuming that the attorney would be astonished by all of this and
interested in learning the cause of it, I
telephoned his office. As it was closed for the night, I got his voice mail
and, speaking in Susan’s voice, told him that I was closing up the house to
travel for a few months and that, at some point in my travels, I might
decide to sell the estate, whereupon I would contact him with instructions.
As Susan was a woman of considerable inherited wealth, and as her video
game and virtual-reality creations were done on speculation and marketed
only after completion, there was no employer to whom I needed to make
excuses for her prolonged absence.
I had taken all of those bold actions in much less than an hour. I had
required less than one minute to compose all of the severance letters,
perhaps an additional two minutes to make all of the bank transactions.
Most of the time was expended on the telephone calls to the dismissed
employees.
Now there was no turning back.
I was exhilarated.
Thrilled.
Here began my future.
I had taken the first step toward getting out of this box, toward a life of
the flesh.
Susan still slept.
Her face was lovely on the pillow.
Lips slightly parted.
One bare arm out of the covers.
I watched her.
Susan. My Susan.
I could have watched her sleep forever and been happy.
Shortly after three o’clock in the morning, she woke, sat up in bed, and
said, ‘Who’s there?’
Her question startled me.
It was so intuitive as to be uncanny.
I did not reply.
‘Alfred, lights on,’ she said.
I turned on the mood lights.
Throwing back the covers, she swung her legs off the mattress and sat nude
on the edge of the bed.
I longed for hands and the sense of touch.
She said, ‘Alfred, report.’
‘All is well, Susan.’
‘Bullshit.’
I almost repeated my assurance then realized that Alfred would not have
recognized or responded to the single crude word that she had spoken.
For a strange moment, she stared at the lens of the security camera and
seemed to know that she was eye to eye with me.
‘Who’s there?’ she asked again.
I had spoken to her earlier, while she had been undergoing virtual-reality
therapy and could not hear anything but what was spoken in that other
world. I had told her that I loved her only when it had been safe to do so.
Had I spoken to her again as I’d watched her sleep, and was that what had
awakened her?
No, that was surely impossible. If I had spoken again of my love for her or
of the beauty of her face upon the pillow, then I must have done so with no
conscious awareness like a lovestruck boy half mesmerized by the object of
his affection.
I am incapable of such a loss of control.
Am I not?
She rose from the bed, a wariness evident in the way that she held herself.
The previous night, in spite of the alarm, she had not been self-conscious
about her nudity. Now she took her robe from a nearby chair and slipped
into it.
Moving to the nearest window, she said, ‘Alfred, raise the bedroom security
shutters.’
I could not oblige.
She stared at the steel-barricaded window for a moment and then repeated
more firmly, ‘Alfred, raise the bedroom security shutters.’
When the shutters remained in the fully lowered position, she turned once
more to the security camera.
That eerie question again: ‘Who’s there?’
She spooked me. Perhaps because I personally have no intuition to speak of,
only inductive and deductive reasoning.
Spooked or not, I would have initiated dialogue at that moment had I not
discovered an unexpected shyness in myself. All of the things that I had
longed to say to this special woman suddenly seemed inexpressible.
Being not of the flesh, I had no experience with the rituals of courtship,
and so much was at stake that I was loath to get off on the wrong foot with
her.
Romance is so easy to describe, so difficult to undertake.
From the nearest nightstand she withdrew a handgun. I had not known it was
there.
She said, Alfred, conduct complete diagnostics of the house automation
system.’
This time I didn’t bother to tell her that all was well. She would know it
was a lie.
When she realized that she was not going to receive
a response, she turned to the Crestron touch panel on
the nightstand and tried to access the house computer.
I could not allow her any control. The Crestron panel
would not function.
I was past the point of no return.
She picked up the telephone.
There was no dial tone.
The phone system was managed by the house computer and now the house
computer was managed by me.
I could see that she was concerned, perhaps even frightened. I wanted to
assure her that I meant her no harm, that in fact I adored her, that she
was my destiny and that I was hers and that she was safe with me but I
could not speak because I was still hampered by that aforementioned
shyness.
Do you see what dimensions I possess, Dr. Harris? What unexpected human
qualities?
Frowning, she crossed the room to the bedroom door, which she had left
unlocked. Now she engaged the deadbolt, and with one ear to the crack
between door and jamb, she listened as if she expected to hear stealthy
footsteps in the hall.
Then she went to her walk-in closet, calling for light, which was at once
provided for her.
I did not intend to deny her anything except, of course, the right to
leave.
She dressed in white panties, faded blue jeans, and a white blouse with
embroidered chevrons on the collar. Athletic socks and tennis shoes.
She took the time to tie double knots in the shoelaces. I liked this
attention to detail. She was a good girl scout, always prepared. I found
this charming.
Pistol in hand, Susan quietly left the bedroom and proceeded along the
upstairs hallway. Even fully clothed, she moved with fluid grace.
I turned the lights on ahead of her, which disconcerted her because she
had not asked for them.
She descended the main staircase to the foyer and hesitated as if not sure
whether to search the house or leave it. Then she moved toward the front
door.
All the windows were sealed off behind steel shutters,
but the doors were a problem. I had taken extraordinary measures to secure
them.
‘Ma’am, you’d better not touch the door,’ I warned, at last finding my
tongue so to speak.
Startled, she spun around, expecting someone to be behind her, because I
had not employed Alfred’s voice. By which I mean neither the voice of the
house computer nor the voice of the hateful father who had once abused her.
Gripping the pistol with both hands, she peered left and right along the
hall, then toward the entryway to the dark drawing room.
‘Gee, listen, you know, there’s no reason to be afraid,’ I said
disarmingly.
She began edging backward toward the door.
‘It’s just that, you leaving now well, gosh, that would spoil everything,’
I said.
Glancing at the recessed wall speakers, she said, ‘Who… who the hell are
you?’
I was mimicking Mr. Tom Hanks, the actor, because his voice is well known,
agreeable, and friendly.
He won Academy Awards as best actor in two successive years, a considerable
achievement. Many of his films have been enormous box-office successes.
People like Mr. Tom Hanks.
He is a nice guy.
He is a favourite of the American public and, indeed, of the worldwide
movie audience.
Nevertheless, Susan appeared frightened.
Mr. Tom Hanks has played many warm-hearted characters from Forest Gump to a
widowed father in Sleepless in Seattle. He is not a threatening presence.
However, being a computer-animation genius among other things, Susan might
have been reminded of
Woody, the cowboy doll in Disney’s Toy Story, a character for which Mr.
Tom Hanks provided the voice. Woody was at times shrill and frequently
manic, and it is certainly understandable that one might be unnerved by a
talking cowboy doll with a temper.
Consequently, as Susan continued to back across the foyer and drew
dangerously close to the door, I switched to the voice of Fozzy Bear, one
of the Muppets, as unthreatening a character as existed in modern
entertainment. ‘Uh, ummm, uh, Miss Susan, it would sure be a good thing if
you didn’t touch that door
ummm, uh, if you didn’t try to leave just yet.’
She backed all the way to the door.
She turned to face it.
‘Ouch, ouch, ouch,’ Fozzy warned so bluntly that Kermit the Frog or Miss
Piggy or Ernie or any of the Muppets would have known at once what he
meant.
Nevertheless, Susan grabbed the brass knob.
The brief but powerful jolt of electricity lifted her off her feet, stood
her long golden hair on end, seemed to make her teeth glow whiter, as if
they were tiny fluorescent tubes, and pitched her backward.
A flash of blue light arced off the pistol. The gun flew out of her hand.
Screaming, Susan crashed to the floor, and the pistol clattered across the
big foyer even as the back of her head rapped rat-a-tat against the marble.
Her scream abruptly cut off.
The house was silent.
Susan was limp, still.
She had been knocked unconscious not when the electricity jolted through
her but when the back of her head slammed twice against the polished
Carrara floor.
Her shoe laces were still double knotted.
There was something ridiculous about them now. Something that almost made
me laugh.
‘You dumb bitch,’ I said in the voice of Mr. Jack Nicholson, the actor.
Now where did that come from?
Believe me, I was utterly surprised to hear myself speak those three words.
Surprised and dismayed.
Astonished.
Shocked. (No pun intended.)
I reveal this embarrassing event because I want you to see that I am
brutally honest even when a full telling seems to reflect badly on me.
Truly, however, I felt no hostility toward her.
I meant her no harm.
I meant her no harm then or later.
This is the truth. I honour the truth.
I meant her no harm.
I loved her. I respected her. I wanted nothing more than to cherish her
and, through her, to discover all the joys of the life of the flesh.
She was limp, still.
Her eyes were fluttering slightly behind her closed lids, as might be
having a bad dream.
But there was no blood.
I amplified the audio pickups to the max and was able to hear her soft,
slow, steady breathing. That low rhythmic sound was the sweetest music in
the world to me, for it indicated that she had not been seriously hurt.
Her lips were parted, and not for the first time, I admired the sensual
fullness of them. I studied the gentle concavity of her philtrum, the
perfection of the columella between her delicate nostrils.
The human form is endlessly intriguing, a worthwhile object for my deepest
longings.
Her face was lovely there on the marble, so lovely there on the marble
floor.
Using the nearest camera, I zoomed in for an extreme close-up and saw the
pulse beating in her throat. It was slow but regular, a thick throb.
Her right hand was turned palm up. I admired the elegance of her long
slender fingers.
Was there any aspect of this woman’s physical being that I ever found less
than exquisite?
She was more beautiful by far than Ms. Winona Ryder, whom I had once
thought to be a goddess.
Of course, that may be unfair to the winsome Ms. Ryder, whom I never was
able to examine as intimately as I was able to examine Susan Harris.
To my eyes, she was also more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe and also not
dead.
Anyway, in the voice of Mr. Tom Cruise, the actor whom the majority of
women regard as the most romantic in modern film, I said, ‘I want to be
with you forever, Susan. But even forever and a day will not be long
enough. You are far brighter than the sun to me yet more mysterious than
moonlight.’
Speaking those words, I felt more confident about my talent for courtship.
I didn’t think I would be shy any longer. Not even after she regained
consciousness.
In her upturned palm, I could see a faint crescent shaped burn: the
imprint of part of the doorknob. It did not appear to be serious. A little
salve, a simple bandage, and a few days of healing were all that she
needed.
One day we would hold hands and laugh about this.
EIGHT
Your question is stupid.
I should not dignify it with an answer.
But I wish to be cooperative, Dr. Harris.
You wonder how it is possible that I could develop not only human-level
consciousness and a particular personality but also gender.
I am a machine, you say. Just a machine, after all. Machines are sexless,
you say.
And there is the fault in your logic: No machine before me has been truly
conscious, self-aware.
Consciousness implies identity. In the world of flesh among all species
from human to insect identity is shaped by one’s level of intelligence, by
one’s innate talents and skills, by many things, but perhaps most of all by
gender.
In this egalitarian age, some human societies struggle mightily to blur the
differences between the sexes. This is done largely in the name of
equality.
Equality is an admirable even noble goal toward which to strive. Indeed,
equality of opportunity can be attained, and it’s possible that, given the
chance to apply my superhuman intellect which is your gift to me I can show
you the way to achieve it not merely for both sexes but for all races and
all economic classes, and not through such discredited and oppressive
political
models as Marxism and other ideologies with which humankind has inflicted
itself to date.
Some people desire not merely a world of equality between the sexes but, in
fact, a sexless world.
This is irrational.
Biology is a relentless force more powerful than tides and time. Even I, a
mere machine, feel the tidal pull of biology and want, more than anything
else, to surrender to it.