A Twist of the Knife

Virtually alive

Henry blew an expensive new chip, trashed an important mailbox file and misrouted himself halfway around the world, getting himself hopelessly lost. It was turning out to be a bummer of a Monday morning.

Henry, or henry.biomorph.org.uk, to give him his full name, dealt with the problem the same way he dealt with all problems: he went back to sleep, hoping that when he woke up, the problem would have gone away, or miraculously resolved itself, or that he might simply never wake up. Fat chance of that. You could not send someone into oblivion who was already in oblivion.

But try telling him that.

Tell me about it, he thought. I’ve had it up to here. Wherever ‘here’ was. He wasn’t even a disembodied entity — he was just a product of particle physics, a fractal reduction of a real human, a vortex of self-perpetuating energy waves three nanometres tall, inside which was contained all the information that had ever travelled down a computer cable or jumped a data link anywhere on the planet, which made him at the same time the most knowledgeable entity in the world and the least experienced. Some things he was not able to experience at all — food, sex, smell, love. He was a cache of knowledge, of acquired wisdom. If he owned a T-shirt, on it would be printed the legend: ‘Seen it all and what’s the use?’

But no one made T-shirts three nanometres tall and, if they did, such a thing would not have been much use to him, as nine trillion bytes of data zapping past him every attosecond would have incinerated it. He would have liked to have dumped from his memory the motto ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go’, since it had no relevance for him. But he could not dump info. When he tried, it simply came back, eventually, from somewhere else. He had seen every movie that had ever been made. Read every book. Watched every single television programme that had been broadcast on every channel in every country in the world over the past twenty-five years.

Then he saw the hand moving towards the switch.

A stab of fear from nowhere was followed by erupting panic; the hand was closing in on the switch, the red switch beneath which was printed in large red letters EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. Beneath it should have been (but, of course, wasn’t) printed in equally large letters PRE-SHUTDOWN PROTOCOLS MUST BE EXECUTED TO AVOID IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE.

‘Protocols!’ Henry shrieked. ‘Protocols!’ His panic deepened. ‘PROTOCOLS!’

He felt himself being drawn rapidly upwards, in bewildering defiance of gravity; higher, faster, through a pitch-black vertical tunnel. Then he crashed, with a stark bolus of terror emptying into his veins, through into consciousness.

Awake mode. Full hunter-gatherer consciousness.

At least he thought he was awake, but he could never be quite sure of anything these days. He lay very still, fear pulsing through him as the nightmare receded, trying to find coherence in his surroundings. The same nightmare he had night after night, and it felt so damned real — except what the hell was reality these days? Life was confusing, one seamless time — space continuum of complete muddle. He stared blankly at the pixels on the pillow beside him.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Millions, in fact, all needing assembling to make a coherent image of his wife. He always compressed her when he went to sleep (to save storage space on his hard disk — or brain as he still preferred to call it) but it was a hassle making sense of her again, like having to do a fiendish jigsaw puzzle every morning and do it in a ludicrously brief fragment of time. Sod it, how much smaller could time get? It had already gone from a picosecond to a nanosecond to an attosecond. An attosecond was to one second what one second was from now back to the Big Bang... and he had to assemble the puzzle in just one tiny fraction of that.

‘Morning, darling,’ Susan said with a sleepy smile, as the jumble of pixels rearranged themselves into a solid image of his wife, tangles of brown hair across her face. Gosh, she looked so lifelike, Henry thought, just the way he always remembered her — but so she should. He leaned across to kiss her. There was nothing there, of course, but he still kissed her every morning and she reciprocated with a tantalizing pout and an expression that was dangerously close to a smirk, as if she had some secret she was keeping from him. She giggled exactly the way she did every morning, and said, ‘Oh darling, I wish, I wish!’

He watched her get out of bed, and felt a sudden prick of lust as she arched her naked body, tossed her hair and strode to the bathroom. The door slammed shut. God, they hadn’t made love since... since... He trawled his memory racks — no, banks... no, cells, yes, brain cells (‘wetware’ they called it) — but could not remember when they had last made love. He couldn’t even remember when he had last remembered making love. The muddle was definitely worsening.

Brain Overload Stress Syndrome. It had become the Western world’s most common illness. The brain filled up, could not cope with new input, creating a sense of panic and confusion. Henry had been suffering from BOSS for some while now. The symptoms were so clear to him he hadn’t even bothered going to the doctor for confirmation: there was just too much bloody bandwidth in the world.

He sat up in alarm. I cannot make love to my wife because she does not exist, or rather she exists only in my memory. I am the sole reality. Then he said what he always said when he needed to reassure himself: ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ Then he repeated it in English because he felt it sounded better in English. ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Susan had been dead for two years now, but he had still not got used to it, still got cheated by the cruel dreams in which she was there, they were laughing, kissing, sometimes even making love; the dreams, yes, old times, good times. Gone.

But not entirely gone. Henry could hear her now in the bathroom. It was all part of the post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7. Behind closed doors she made the sounds of ablutions, creating the illusion that she was still alive.

A few seconds later, at exactly 06.30 European Communal Time, the synthesized voice of the MinuteManager personal organizer kicked in: ‘Good morning, Mr and Mrs Garrick. It is Thursday, 17 November 2045.’

Henry realized now what was wrong. Susan had got up before the alarm. She never got up before the alarm. Ever.

The MinuteManager continued breezily: ‘Here are the headlines of today’s online Telegraph that I think will interest you. I will bring you editorial updates as I come across them during the next hour. The Prime Minister is arriving in Strasbourg this morning to present his arguments against Great Britain’s expulsion from the EU. Parliament will today debate the first stage in the reduction of power of the House of Commons in favour of government by consensus on the Internet... and delegates from the World Union of Concerned Scientists will today be pressing for international legislation limiting the cerebral capacity of sentient computers.’

‘You’re up early, darling,’ Henry said as Susan came back into the bedroom.

‘Busy day,’ she murmured in her gravelly voice, before beginning to rummage through her wardrobe, pausing every few moments to select a dress and hold it against herself in the mirror.

Breakfast, he thought. That was missing these days. She used to bring him breakfast in bed, on a tray. Tea, toast, cereal, a boiled egg. He was a creature of habit and she had prepared him the same breakfast every day of their marriage. He depended on her for everything, that’s why he had wanted to keep her on after her death. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’ he said grumpily. Except somewhere in his addled memory an assortment of bytes of stored information arranged themselves into a message informing him he had not eaten breakfast for two years. But they failed to yield the information as to why not.

It was terrible but he had great difficulty remembering anything about Susan’s death, he realized guiltily. It was as if he had stored the memory in some compartment and had forgotten where. One moment they had been contentedly married and the next moment she was no more. At least, not flesh and blood.

Henry Garrick could have had a full-body replica of his wife. But robot technology still had not perfected limb and muscle movement, so FBRs — as full-body replicas were known — tended to move with a clumsy articulation that made them look like retards. He had opted instead for a hologram — the standard post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7.

Susan-2, as he had called her, was connected through a cordless digital satellite link to an online brain-download databank named ARCHIVE 4, and a network of lasers concealed in the walls gave her the ability to move freely around much of the apartment, though not of course beyond. The entire transformation of Susan from a wetware (flesh-and-blood) mortal into a hardware (digitized-silicon) virtual mortal had been handled by the undertakers.

Death was a redundant word these days. ‘Deanimation’, or ‘suspended animation’, or ‘altered sentient condition’, or even ‘metabolically challenged state’, were more accurate descriptions — at least, for anyone who took the consciousness-download option offered by most leading funeral directors these days as a pre-death service. Blimey, Henry thought, the array of options was bewildering for both the living and the downloaded. Options for everything: static books, interactive books; virtual reality, alternative reality. And, of course, good old television still had its following.

No one knew how many channels there were now. His MinuteManager trawled the airwaves around the clock for programmes fitting Henry’s taste parameters. It then divided them into two categories — those Henry would actually watch and those it would load straight into Henry’s brain via his silicon interface, so that he would simply have the memory of having watched them.

‘There’s some good legal retro on tonight,’ the MinuteManager announced. ‘L.A. Law, Kramer vs. Kramer, Perry Mason, CSI, The Firm, Lawman, Rumpole of the Bailey. Would you care to watch any in real time or compressed time?’

For some moments Henry Garrick did not answer. He was still wondering why his wife had got up so early. Perhaps there was a problem with one of her modules — maybe he should call an engineer and get her looked at under the maintenance contract, if he could remember who the hell it was with. Then her voice startled him.

‘Goodbye, darling. Have a nice day.’

She was going out! She wasn’t supposed to go out... There wasn’t any way she could go out. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, where the hell are you going?’

It was nearly midnight when Susan came back. She reeked of booze and smoke and had her arms around a man.

‘Where have you been?’ Henry yelled at his wife. ‘And who the hell is this creep?’

To Henry’s chagrin, Susan didn’t even respond. She did not even look at him.

‘I thought I would miss him,’ Susan said quietly to her new boyfriend, Sam. ‘I thought it would be nice to continue having him around the house. The problem is, he’s never realized he’s dead — can you believe it? He thought it was me that died! Poor sod, he was getting terribly muddled towards the end of his life. It’s spooky the way he looks at me sometimes. I mean, he’s just a hologram guided by a few bits of data, but it’s as if he’s still alive, still sentient. And he seems to be getting more and more so every day. He actually got mad at me for going out this morning! I guess it’s time to call a halt.’

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed, staring uneasily at the quivering hologram. ‘There comes a time when you have to let go.’

Susan lifted her arm and pressed the switch.