Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

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 gray 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. Hundreds 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 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.”