James Smythe - The Machine

Do we have any photos of that weekend? he asked her, and she said no. She reported it to the company, and they sent her a doctored picture, computer generated.

To help establish the fiction, they said in the attached email. She showed the photograph to Vic and he smiled.

That’s the place, he had said. Yeah, wow.

Beth wondered if there was a bank of such material inside the Machine, to help establish these memories. Pictures of places that the creators had visited; or yanked from brochures, pages torn out to feed into the thing. And maybe whole stories, created by a team of writers. In some ways, she thought, this is the newest form of drama: the creation of something from nothing, a play that’s made to be performed by couples, where one of them is oblivious to the fact that the other is acting. She wonders how that stuff gets inside the patient’s head. If it’s just zeros and ones, binary burned in.

She tries not to think about it too much.

Beth pulls the Crown down from the dock. This won’t hurt, she says to Vic’s body, and she pulls the umbilicus towards him, making it uncoil from where it’s withdrawn inside the Machine. She manoeuvres herself to the other side of the Crown – nearer to the Machine’s control panel, because this is where she’ll need to be – and she leans down to put the Crown onto the head. The panels slide on; a perfect fit. She wonders what the chances are that she and Vic have the same size head. She wonders if she has a large head, or he has a small one. Must be her hair, makes her head seem bigger.

The pads sit exactly on the burned-in scars on his temples, like they’d never left. She’s got some lubricant at the side of the bed, because she’s read that it can make it easier, so she puts some onto her finger and lifts the pads one by one, smoothing the jelly down onto his skin.

Right, she says. I think we’re ready.

Beth presses the Machine’s screen and it lights up. She can see the options. REPLENISH had always been intended to help those with dementia. To prompt them back into life: a secondary effect of the Machine’s powers, and one that the company behind it saw as a lucrative revenue source. There was a huge untapped market there, and the tech was already available at every hospital around the country. Soon it would be in every home that needed it, that was the plan. Fool-proof tech, software, hardware, and those who had loved ones afflicted by too few memories, or too many, could take care of the situation themselves. That was the pitch they gave to shareholders. Beth watched the conference on the internet, back when she was helping Vic herself. She remembers the applause that the announcement got.

REPLENISH. The Machine’s fans kick in at double, maybe triple time, and the thing sounds like it’s growling. The whole screen vibrates beneath her fingers, and she’s barely able to keep her hand there. Each touch is like pins and needles. The file menu appears and she picks the first.

We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? The doctor’s voice fills the room. She wonders how the Machine knows to not take that information, to not turn Vic into the doctor. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She knows that it works, that’s enough.

Victor McAdams.

And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?

Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.

Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. He laughs. You know why you’re here?

Yes sir.

Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First name terms here, Victor.

Vic.

Vic.

She’s putting him back exactly as he once was. She reasons that this is going to be easier if there are no more lies: if he’s back to being Captain Vic McAdams, scarred in the war, leaving the army by choice. No manufactured photographs. She wants him to be exactly the man he was, and they can go through the process – the healing, the therapists, the PTSD counselling – together, as they should have done in the first place. Can’t pretend that something didn’t happen. Can’t just brush it under the carpet.

On the bed, Vic’s body moves ever so slightly, twitches left and right. His face spasms slightly, and his eyes – Beth didn’t see them close – dart around underneath his eyelids, as if he’s dreaming. There’s no sound from him, only the rustling of his arms on the sheet.

So, tell me why we’re here, Vic.

Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. There was an explosion, an IED, when we were on a mission. Went off when we were doing a sweep on a hospital which looked abandoned, and we were sloppy. I took the brunt, here and here. Beth can picture Vic pointing. He always pointed the same way: to his skull and then to his arm, as if the hole in his head and the tear through his bicep were the same thing, the same level of damage. I returned home, Vic continues, and was sent to recuperate, and then given leave. I was rewarded for saving my squad, they said.

You’re a hero.

So they say.

And now you’re here?

Because I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I, ah, replay the event. Dreams and such, and lucid dreaming, you called it.

Don’t worry about what I called it.

Fine. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with Beth and—

Beth?

My wife. We’ll be sitting together watching TV or whatever and I’ll zone out, and I’ll be somewhere else. And I could swear it. If she tries to wake me up… She tried to wake me up a few weeks ago and I hit her. And I knew it was her, but still, I hit her. Not because it was her, but I couldn’t stop it. I was somewhere else.

By the end of the hour, Beth’s worse than Vic. She had pictured him convulsing, worst-case scenario, and yet Vic’s body is relatively still. She’s the one who’s been affected. Hearing him talk about her like this, and knowing that this is what she’s putting back into him. That, when he wakes up, he might be back as he was. Her memories of what happened are different from his, though: because she remembers being there, and how he screamed at night, and sweated, and would cling to her when he woke up; and how he worked out all the time, until his skin was glossy and the lines of his scars throbbed; and how he stood in the bathroom for hours, no exaggeration, and used his finger to trace the lines of the scars, up and down, not even realizing that he was doing it, rubbing the already puckered and tender flesh sore; and how she would serve dinner, putting it onto the table at the same time every day, one square meal a day, and he would pick at it, pushing it away, growing ever thinner, while the lines on his face deepened. It never went so far as to be something you could call a disorder, but it was serious enough that she knew there was something really wrong. And she remembered how they could never watch the television shows that they used to, the series about the anti-terrorist group sidelined in favour of cooking shows and renovation shows and soaps, which he used to hate, but which posed no danger of sparking an episode, as he called them. And how, that first year he came home, fireworks night made him like a scared cat, the first bangs prompting him to turn up the volume of the television, and the second round making him put in headphones, and then the way that he shook slightly on the sofa. And how, at his worst, he drank a lot, becoming a cliché, but he hid it from Beth because, he said – when she finally caught him – he was ashamed, and that he thought he had a problem, and when Beth said that it was because of the war, he shrugged and thought about the next drink. And how he said to Beth that they should try again for a child, and she said no, because this was no environment to bring a child into. And how he saw things and remembered things that never happened, long before the Machine got involved, when they argued or reminisced (which was all they ever seemed to do), and Beth would at first contradict him and tell him that he was insane, but then soon, because it was easier, began to placidly agree, and let him have his way. And how he didn’t hit her just once, lashing out in confusion about who she was, but how he hit her a few times. He didn’t do it like an abuser, though: no trying to avoid visible bruises. He got angry and he struck whatever was closest. Four times, before he hit her, it had been the walls of their house. His fists left indents and cracked thick paint. She had been next, the first time because she was close, and she was asking him to get help because of how little he’d been sleeping. The marks underneath his eyes were like bruises on his cheekbones, or warpaint in some action movie. The second and third times were when they were in bed, and he woke up, and then he swung his fists. The fourth time was when Beth gave him the leaflet that the doctor had left them about the Machine, and begged him to consider it seriously. After that, she told him that there wouldn’t be a fifth time.