Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

  Hamilton pulled one of the restraints a notch tighter. The chimp, its back pulled flat against the table, flexed once and went suddenli limp.

  Wescott looked back at the screen. “Okay, it’s relaxing.

  Showtime, Pete; you’re on in about thirty seconds.” Hamilton held up the hypo. “Ready.”

  “Okay, getting baseline—now. Fire when ready.”

  Needle slid into flesh. Wescott reflected on the obvious unhumanity of the thing on the table; too small and hairy, all bow legs and elongate simian arms. A machine. That’s all it is. Potassium ions jumping around in a very compact telephone switchboard.

  But the eyes, when he slipped and looked at them, looked back. “Midbrain signature in fifty seconds,” Wescott read off. “Give or take ten.”

  “Okay,” Hamilton said. “It’s going through the tunnel.”

  Just a machine, running out of fuel. A few nerves sputter and the system thinks it sees lights, feels motion—

  “There. Thalamus,” Hamilton reported. “Right on time. Now it’s in the ret.” A pause. “Neocortex, now. Same damn thing every time.”

  Wescott didn’t look. He knew the pattern. He had seen its handwriting in the brains of a half a dozen species, watched that same familiar cipher scurry through dying minds in hospital beds and operating theatres and the twisted wreckage of convenient automobiles. By now he didn’t even need the machines to see it. He only had to look at the eyes.

  Once, in a moment of reckless undiscipline, he’d wondered if he were witnessing the flight of the soul, come crawling to the surface of the mind like an earthworm flushed by heavy rains. Another time he’d thought he might have captured the EEG of the Grim Reaper.

  He no longer allowed himself such unbridled licence. Now he only stared at the widening pupils within those eyes, and heard the final panicked bleating of the cardiac monitor.

  Something behind the eyes went out.

  What were you? he wondered.

  “Dunno yet,” Hamilton said beside him. “But another week, two at the outside, and we’ve got it nailed.” Wescott blinked.

  Hamilton started unstrapping the carcass. After a moment he looked up. “Russ?”

  “It knew.” Wescott stared at the monitor, all flat lines and static now.

  “Yeah.” Hamilton shrugged. “I wish I knew what tips them off sometimes. Save a lot of time.” He dumped the chimp’s body into a plastic bag. Its dilated pupils stared out at Wescott in a grotesque parody of human astonishment. “—Russ? You okay?”

  He blinked; the dead eyes lost control. Wescott looked up and saw Hamilton watching him with a strange expression. “Sure,” he said easily. “Never better.”

  • • •

  THERE WAS THIS CAGE. Something moved inside that he almost recognised, a small furred body that looked familiar. But up close he could see his mistake. It was only a wax dummy, or maybe an embalmed specimen the undergrads hadn’t got to yet. There were tubes running into it at odd places, carrying sluggish aliquots of yellow fluid. The specimen jaundiced, bloated as he watched. He reached through the bars of the cage … he could do that somehow, even though the gaps were only a few centimeters wide … and touched the thing inside. Its eyes opened and stared past him, blank and blind with pain; and their pupils were not vertical as he had expected, but round and utterly human…

  He felt her awaken in the night beside him, and not move.

  He didn’t have to look. He heard the change in her breathing, could almost feel her systems firing up, her eyes locking onto him in the near-darkness. He lay on his back, looking up at a ceiling full of shadow, and did not acknowledge her.

  He turned his face to stare at the faint grey light leaking through the window. Straining, he could just hear distant city sounds.

  He wondered, for a moment, if she hurt as much as he did; then realised that there was no contest. The strongest pain he could summon was mere aftertaste.

  “I called the vet today,” he said. “She said they didn’t need my consent. They didn’t need me there at all. They would have shut Zombie down the moment you brought him in, only you told them not to.”

  Still she did not move.

  “So you lied. You fixed it so I’d have to be there, watching one more piece of my life getting—” he took a breath, “—chipped away—”

  At last she spoke: “Russ—”

  “But you don’t hate me. So why would you put me through that? You must have thought it would be good for me, somehow.”

  “Russ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely true,” he remarked.

  “No. I guess not.” Then, almost hopefully, “It did hurt, didn’t it?”

  He blinked against a brief stinging in his eyes. “What do you think?”

  “I think, nine years ago I moved in with the most caring, humane person I’d ever known. And two days ago I didn’t know if he’d give a damn about the death of a pet he’d had for eighteen years. I really didn’t know, Russ, and I’m sorry but I had to find out. Does that make sense?”

  He tried to remember. “I think you were wrong from the start. I think you gave me too much credit nine years ago.”

  He felt her head shake. “Russ, after Carol died I was afraid you were going to. I remember hoping I’d never be able to hurt that much over another human being. I fell in love with you because you could.”

  “Oh, I loved her all right. Tens of thousands of dollars worth at least. Never did get around to figuring out her final worth.”

  “That’s not why you did it! You remember how she was suffering!”

  “Actually, no. She had all those—painkillers, cruising through her system. That’s what they told me. By the time they started cutting pieces out of her she was—numb…”

  “Russ, I was there too. They said there was no hope, she was in constant pain, they said she’d want to die—”

  “Oh yes. Later, that’s what they said. When it was time to decide. Because they knew…” He stopped.

  “They knew,” he said again, “what I wanted to hear.” Beside him, Lynne grew very still.

  He laughed once, softly. “I shouldn’t have been so easy to convince, though. I knew better. We’re not hardwired for Death with Dignity; life’s been kicking and clawing and doing anything it can to take a few more breaths, for over three billion years. You can’t just decide to turn yourself off.”

  She slid an arm across his chest. “People turn themselves off all the time, Russ. Too often. You know that.”

  He didn’t answer. A distant siren poisoned the emptiness.

  “Not Carol,” he said after a while. “I sort of made that decision for her.”

  Lynne put her head on his shoulder. “And you’ve spent ten years trying to find out if you guessed right. But they’re not her, Russ, all the people you’ve recorded, all the animals you’ve…put down, they’re not her—”

  “No. They’re not.” He closed his eyes. “They don’t linger on month after month. They don’t…shrivel up…you know they’re going to die, and it’s always quick, you don’t have to come in day after day, watching them change into something that, that rattles every time it breathes, that doesn’t even know who you are and you wish it would just—”

  Wescott opened his eyes.

  “I keep forgetting what you do for a living,” he said.

  “Russ—”

  He looked over at her, calmly. “Why are you doing this to me?

  You think I haven’t already been over it enough?”

  “Russ, I’m only—”

  “Because it won’t work, you know. It’s too late. It took long enough, but I know how the mind works now, and you know what? It’s nothing special after all. It’s not spiritual, it’s not even quantum. It’s just a bunch of switches wired together. So it doesn’t matter if people can’t speak their minds. Pretty soon I’ll be able to read them.”

  His voice was level and reasoned. He kept his eyes on the ceiling
; the darkened light fixture there seemed to waver before his eyes. He blinked, and the room swam suddenly out of focus.

  She reached up to touch the wetness on his face. “It scares you,” she whispered. “You’ve been chasing it for ten years and you’ve almost got it and it scares the shit out of you.”

  He smiled and wouldn’t look at her. “No. That isn’t it at all.”

  “What, then?”

  He took a breath. “I just realised. I don’t care one way or the other any more.”

  • • •

  HE CAME HOME, clutching the printout, and knew from the sudden emptiness of the apartment that he had been defeated here as well.

  The workstation slept in its corner. Several fitful readouts twinkled on one of its faces, a sparse autonomic mosaic. He walked towards it; and halfway there one face of the cube flashed to life.

  Lynne, from the shoulders up, looked out at him from the screen.

  Wescott glanced around the room. He almost called out.

  On the cube, Lynne’s lips moved. “Hello, Russ,” they said.

  He managed a short laugh. “Never thought I’d see you in there.”

  “I finally tried one of these things. You were right, they’ve come a long way in ten years.”

  “You’re a real simulation? Not just a fancy conversational routine?”

  “Uh huh. It’s pretty amazing. It ate all sorts of video footage, and all my medical and academic records, and then I had to talk with it until it got a feel for who I was.”

  And who is that? he wondered absently.

  “It changed right there while I was talking to it, Russ. It was really spooky. It started out in this dead monotone, and as we talked it started mimicking my voice, and my mannerisms, and in a little while it sounded just like me, and here it is. It went from machine to human in about four hours.”

  He smiled, not easily, because he knew what was coming next.

  “It—actually, it was a bit like watching a time-lapse video of you over the past few years,” the model said. “Played backwards.”

  He kept his voice exactly level. “You’re not coming home.”

  “Sure I am, Russ. Only home isn’t here any more. I wish it were, you don’t know how badly I wish it were, but you just can’t let it go and I can’t live with that any more.”

  “You still don’t understand. It’s just a program that happens to sound like Carol did. It’s nothing. I’ll—wipe it if it’s that important to you—”

  “That’s not all I’m talking about, Russ.”

  He thought of asking for details, and didn’t.

  “Lynne—” he began.

  Her mouth widened. It wasn’t a smile. “Don’t ask, Russ. I can’t come back until you do.”

  “But I’m right here!”

  She shook her head. “The last time I saw Russ Wescott, he cried. Just a little. And I think—I think he’s been hunting something for ten years, and he finally caught a glimpse of it and it was too big, so he went away and left some sort of autopilot in charge. And I don’t blame him, and you’re a very good likeness, really you are but there’s nothing in you that knows how to feel.”

  Wescott thought of acetycholinesterase and endogenous opioids. “You’re wrong, Carol. I know more about feelings than almost anyone in the world.”

  On the screen, Lynne’s proxy sighed through a faint smile.

  The simulation was wearing new earrings; they looked like antique printed circuits. Wescott wanted to comment on them, to compliment or criticise or do anything to force the conversation into less dangerous territory. But he was afraid that she had worn them for years and he just hadn’t noticed, so he said nothing.

  “Why couldn’t you tell me yourself?” he said at last. “Don’t I deserve that much? Why couldn’t you at least leave me in person?”

  “This is in person, Russ. It’s as in person as you ever let anyone get with you any more.”

  “That’s bullshit! Did I ask you to go out and get yourself simmed? You think I see you as some sort of cartoon? My Christ, Lynne—”

  “I don’t take it personally, Russ. We’re all cartoons as far as you’re concerned.”

  “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”

  “I don’t blame you, really. Why learn 3-d chess when you can reduce it down to tic-tac-toe? You understand it perfectly, and you always win. Except it isn’t that much fun to play, of course…”

  “Lynne—”

  “Your models only simplify reality, Russ. They don’t recreate it.”

  Wescott remembered the printout in his hand. “Sure they do.

  Enough of it, anyway.”

  “So.” The image looked down for a moment. Uncanny, the way it fakes and breaks eye contact like that— “You have your answer.”

  “We have the answer. Me, and a few terabytes of software, and a bunch of colleagues, Lynne. People. Who work with me, face to face.”

  She looked up again, and Wescott was amazed that the program had even mimicked the sudden sad brightness her eyes would have had in that moment. “So what’s the answer? What’s at the end of the tunnel?”

  He shrugged. “Not much, after all. An anticlimax.”

  “I hope it was more than that, Russ. It killed us.”

  “Or it could’ve just been an artefact of the procedure. The old observer effect, maybe. Common sense could have told us as much, I could’ve saved myself the—”

  “Russ.”

  He didn’t look at the screen.

  “There’s nothing down there at all,” he said, finally. “Nothing that thinks. I never liked it down there, it’s all just…raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it’s just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can’t be bothered with. I never even considered that it might still be somehow…alive…”

  His voice trailed off. Lynne’s ghost waited silently, perhaps unequipped to respond. Perhaps programmed not to.

  “You die from the outside in, did you know that?” he said, when the silence hurt more than the words. “And then, just for a moment, the center is all you are again. And down there, nobody wants to…you know, even the suicides, they were just fooling themselves. Intellectual games. We’re so fucking proud of thinking ourselves to death that we’ve forgotten all about the old reptilian part sleeping inside, the part that doesn’t calculate ethics or quality of life or burdens on the next of kin, it just wants to live, that’s all it’s programmed for, you know? And at the very end, when we aren’t around to keep it in line any more, it comes up and looks around and at that last moment it knows it’s been betrayed, and it … screams …”

  He thought he heard someone speak his name, but he didn’t look up to find out.

  “That’s what we always found,” he said. “Something waking up after a hundred million years, scared to death…” His words hung there in front of him.

  “You don’t know that.” Her voice was distant, barely familiar, with a sudden urgency to it. “You said yourself it could be an artefact. She might not have felt that way at all, Russ. You don’t have the data.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “Wetware always dies the same way—”

  He looked up at the screen.

  And the image was for Chrissakes crying, phosphorescent tears on artificial cheeks in some obscene parody of what Lynne would do if she had been there. Wescott felt sudden hatred for the software that wept for him, for the intimacy of its machine intuition, for the precision of its forgery. For the simple fact that it knew her.

  “No big deal,” he said. “Like I said, an anticlimax. Anyhow, I suppose you have to go back and report to your—body—”

  “I can stay if you want. I know how hard this must be for you, Russ—”

  “No you don’t.” Wescott smiled. “Lynne might have. You’re just accessing a psych database somewhere. Good try, though.”


  “I don’t have to go, Russ—”

  “Hey, that’s not who I am any more. Remember?”

  “—we can keep talking if you want.”

  “Right. A dialogue between a caricature and an autopilot.”

  “I don’t have to leave right away.”

  “Your algorithms’s showing,” he said, still smiling. And then, tersely: “Stop.”

  The cube darkened.

  “Do y-ou want to cancel the program or just suspend it?” Carol asked.

  He stood there for a while without answering, staring into that black featureless cube of perspex. He could see nothing inside but his own reflection.

  “Cancel,” he said at last. “And delete.” ■

  Fractals

  Trespassing? Trespassing? You arrogant slant-eyed alien motherfucker, I used to live here!

  HOW LONG HAVE I wanted to do that? How many years have I hated them, dreamt that my fists were smashing those faces into shapes even less human? I can’t remember. The anger is chronic. The anger has always been chronic. And impotent, until now. The pain in my knuckles throbs like a distant badge of honour.

  It’s cold.

  The rage is gone, absorbed somehow by the mud and the unlit piles of lumber and masonry scattered around me. I can barely focus on my surroundings. The shapes keep changing, hulking angular monstrosities shifting on all sides. Only the sign at the front of the lot, the sign he kept pointing at, refuses to move.

  I can barely see him in the dark. He’s just a few meters away, but the shadows are so black and he doesn’t move at all. What if I killed him? What if I—

  There. He moved a bit. It’s okay, I didn’t kill him, he’s not dead—

  Yet. What if he dies here in the mud?

  (So what if he does? Lots more where he came from.)

  No. I don’t mean that. I can’t believe I ever did, I mean, what if I, what if he dies here, what if—

  What if he lives, and identifies me?

  A couple of steps forward. A couple more. Okay, he was about here when he saw me, and then he moved over there and started shouting—

  He couldn’t have seen my face. Even when he came closer, it’s so dark he’d only have seen a silhouette, and then he was right in front of me and—