Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“—and all I could think was, after eighteen years he shouldn’t die alone, someone should be there with him, but I can’t, you know, I just—”

Somewhere at the base of his skull, a tiny voice cried out, My Christ don’t I go through enough of this shit without having to watch it happen to my own cat? But it was very far away, and he could barely hear it.

He looked at the table. The corpse stared its cyclopean stare.

“Sure,” Wescott said after a moment. “I’ll take care of it.” He allowed himself a half-smile. “All in a day’s work.”

The workstation sat in one corner of the living room, an ebony cube of tinted perspex, and for the past ten years it had spoken to him in Carol’s voice. That had hurt at first, so much that he had nearly changed the program; but he had fought the urge, and beaten it, and endured the synthetic familiarity of her voice like a man doing penance for some great sin. Somewhere in the past decade the pain had faded below the level of conscious recognition. Now he heard it list the day’s mail, and felt nothing.

“Jason Mosby called again from Southam,” it said, catching Carol’s intonation perfectly. “He s-still wants to interview you. He left a conversational program in my stack. You can run it any time you want.”

“What else?”

“Zombie’s collar stopped transmitting at nine-sixteen, and Zombie didn’t s-show up for his afternoon feed. Y-You might want to call around.”

“Zombie’s gone,” he said.

“That’s what I said.”

“No, I mean—” Christ, Carol. You never were much for euphemisms, were you? “Zombie got hit by a car. He’s dead.”

Even when we tried using them on you.

“Oh. Shit.” The computer paused a moment, some internal clock counting off a precise number of nanosecs. “I’m sorry, Russ.”

It was a lie, of course, but a fairly convincing one all the same.

Outside, Wescott smiled faintly. “It happens. Just a matter of time for all of us.”

There was a sound from behind. He turned away from the cube; Lynne stood in the doorway. He could see sympathy in her eyes, and something else.

“Russ,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He felt a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “So’s the computer.”

“How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“I doubt it. You had him all those years.”

“Yeah. I—miss him.” There was a hard knot of vacuum in his throat. He examined the feeling, distantly amazed, and almost felt a kind of gratitude.

She padded across the room to him, took his hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the end, Russ. It was all I could do to take him in. I just couldn’t, you know—”

“It’s okay,” Wescott said.

“—and you had to be there anyway, you—”

“It’s okay,” he said again.

Lynne straightened and rubbed one hand across her cheek. “Would you rather not talk about it?” Which meant, of course, I want to talk about it.

He wondered what he could say that wouldn’t be utterly predictable: and realised that he could afford to tell the truth.

“I was thinking,” he said, “he had it coming to him.”

Lynne blinked.

“I mean, he’d spread enough carnage on his own. Remember how every couple of days he’d bring in a wounded vole or a bird, and I never let him actually kill any of them—”

“You didn’t want to see anything suffer,” Lynne said.

“—so I’d kill them myself.” One blow with a hammer, brains scrambled instantly, nothing left that could suffer after that. “I always spoiled his fun. It’s such a drag having to play with dead things, he’d bitch at me for hours…”

She smiled sadly. “He was suffering, Russ. He wanted to die. I know you loved the little ingrate, we both did.”

Something flared where the vacuum had been. “It’s okay, Lynne. I watch people die all the time, remember? I’m in no great need of therapy over a fucking cat. And if I was, you could—”

—have at least been there this morning.

He caught himself. I’m angry, he realised. Isn’t that strange. I haven’t used this feeling for years.

It seemed odd that anything so old could have such sharp edges.

“Sorry,” he said evenly. “I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just—I heard enough platitudes at the vet, you know? I’m sick of people saying He wants to die when they mean It would cost too much . And I’m especially sick of people saying love when they mean economics. ”

Lynne put her arms around him. “There was nothing they could have done.”

He stood there, swaying slightly, almost oblivious to her embrace.

Carol, how much did I pay to keep you breathing? And when did I decide you weren’t worth the running tab?

“It’s always economics,” he said. And brought his arms up to hold her.

“You want to read minds.”

Not Carol’s voice, this time. This time it belonged to that guy from Southam…Mosby, that was it. Mosby’s program sat in memory, directing a chorus of electrons that came out sounding like he did, a cheap auditory clone. Wescott preferred it to the original.

“Read minds?” He considered. “Actually, right now I’m just trying to build a working model of one.”

“Like me?”

“No. You’re just a fancy menu. You ask questions; depending on how I answer them you branch to certain others. You’re linear. Minds are more…distributed.”

“Thoughts are not signals, but the intersections of signals.”

“You’ve read Penthorne.”

“I’m reading him now. I’ve got Biomedical Abstracts online.”

“Mmmm.”

“I’m also reading Gödel,” the program said. “If he’s right, you’ll never get an accurate model of the human brain, because no box is big enough to hold itself.”

“So simplify it. Throw away the details, but preserve the essence. You don’t want to make your model too big anyway; if it’s as complicated as the real thing, it’s just as hard to understand.”

“So you just cut away at the brain until you end up with something simple enough to deal with?”

Wescott winced. “If you’ve got to keep it to vidbits, I guess that’s as good as any.”

“And what’s left is still complex enough to teach you anything about human behaviour?”

“Look at you.”

“Just a fancy menu.”

“Exactly. But you know more than the real Jason Mosby. You’re a better conversationalist, too; I met him once. I bet you’d even score higher on a Turing test. Am I right?”

A barely perceptible pause. “I don’t know. Possibly.”

“As far as I can tell you’re better than the original, and with only a few percent of the processing power.”

“Getting back to—”

“And if the original screams and fights when somebody tries to turn him off,” Wescott went on, “it’s just because he’s been programmed to think he can suffer. He puts a bit more effort into keeping his subroutines running. Maybe not much of a difference after all, hmmm?”

The program fell silent. Wescott started counting: One one thousand, two one thousand, three—

“That actually brings up another subject I wanted to ask you about,” the menu said.

Almost four seconds to respond, and even then it had had to change the subject. It had limits. Good program, though.

“You haven’t published anything on your work at VanGen,” Mosby’s proxy remarked. “I’m unable to access your NSERC proposal, of course, but judging from the public abstract, you’ve been working on dead people.”

“Not dead. Dying.”

“Near-death experiences? Levitation, tunnel of light, that sort of thing?”