Penumbra

4

It was almost ten when Bennett reached Mojave Town.

Automobiles were not allowed within the city limits, so he parked in the small lot on the perimeter. Rather than take an electric bus, he walked the two kilometres to the town centre.

He shared the wide streets with citizens out jogging or strolling, cleaning-drones that seemed to have very little to clean, and children on scooters. The habitats on either side of the streets occupied spacious, abundant gardens, an eclectic collection of the latest domes, mock-timber A-frames and more conventional carbon-fibre houses. The high foliage of a thousand evergreens shaded the town, and power was provided by tall masts which pierced the canopy and opened petal-like energy panels to the burning desert sun.

The Oasis Medical Centre occupied extensive grounds in the centre of town, over two dozen polycarbon units linked by a warren of diaphanous passages set in rolling landscaped gardens. Bennett strolled across the avenue and into the hospital. He found reception and was directed down long corridors to the consultancy rooms of Dr Samuels.

The door opened automatically at his approach, forestalling his attempt to knock. He stepped inside.

“Mr Bennett, I’m glad you could make it. If you’d care to take a seat.”

Samuels, as informal in person as he had appeared on the vis-link that morning, moved from his desk and sat on the window-seat overlooking the rolling greenery. Bennett took the offered swivel seat and turned to face the doctor.

“Mr Bennett, I appreciate how you must be feeling—”

Bennett heard himself saying: “My father’s been ill for over a year now. I’ve had time to consider the inevitable.”

Samuels nodded. “I know it’s always a hard decision for loved ones to make. I don’t know how you stand, ethically, on the issue of euthanasia, but if you’d like me to run through the legal side of things…”

Bennett shook his head. “I followed the state rulings when the bill was passed,” he said. He paused. “I’ve nothing against euthanasia. If it’s really what my father wants…” He hoped he didn’t sound too perfunctory.

Samuels was nodding. “Your father is bed-ridden, unable to feed himself, and in occasional pain. We administer the most effective analgesics, but there is only so much we can do to relieve his discomfort. Your father is failing on many fronts; the side-effects of the drugs he is on are becoming as difficult to treat as the primary complaints. In my opinion he is sound of mind. He has stated daily for the past week that he wishes to die, and in my opinion his quality of life is so severely reduced that euthanasia would be a mercy.”

“Can I talk it over with him?”

“By all means. I’ll take you to his room immediately.” Samuels hesitated. “Are you aware that your father spends much of his time in VR?”

Bennett nodded. “I see him every couple of months.”

Samuels rose from the window-seat and gestured to the door. “Please, this way.”

As they passed down a series of corridors, Bennett experiencing a mounting sense of apprehension. Samuels cleared his throat. “The actual apparatus of euthanasia is ready to utilise almost immediately,” he said, “should you decide to sign the usual legal forms and waivers.”

Bennett nodded, finding it hard to accept that they were talking about the termination of a life. It was more like a business transaction. “How soon? I mean—”

“That is entirely up to your father. As long as it takes him to compose himself.”

“And I can be with him?”

“Of course. Here we are.” Samuels paused before a white door and turned to Bennett. “Lately your father has refused to exit the VR site. He finds it… comforting. He will only see visitors in the net.”

Bennett stared at the doctor. “And you say he’s of sound mind?”

“In my opinion, yes, Mr Bennett. His retreat to the VR site is his way of... of coping with his decision to die. As you will see for yourself.”

Bennett stepped into a sunlit room occupied by a narrow bed, banks of medical apparatus, a VR module and a chair.

His father lay on the bed. He had always been tall, somewhat martial, but near death, laid out as if in preparation for his exit, he seemed elongated, whittled down to a wasted minimum of flesh and bone, stripped of dignity. He wore a grey one-piece VR suit and wraparound glasses. So many leads issued from the suit that Bennett was unable to discern the VR links from the tubes pumping blood, plasma and drugs into the hundred-and-three-year-old body. His mouth was open and drooling. Occasionally his limbs twitched in reaction to some event in the make-believe VR world, giving lie to the notion that he had already died. Beside the bed a cardiogram bleeped with his feeble heartbeat.

Bennett sat down. “He’s so wasted…” he began.

“He’s been refusing food, so we’ve had to feed him intravenously.” Samuels passed him a pair of VR glasses.

“If you’d care to put these on, I’ll patch you into your father’s site.”

Bennett slipped the glasses over his eyes. The room went dark and the ear-pieces muffled all sound.

He waited, unsure whether to be grateful he was being spared a real-world confrontation with his father, or fearful of what was to follow.

He was jolted by a sudden flare of colour. His vision adjusted and he stared out across a vast expanse of rolling grassland, dotted here and there with sumptuous habitat domes. He was surprised by the clarity of the vision: the panorama of greensward and cloudless blue sky was as real as the latest holographic images. He felt as if he could reach out and actually touch the grass before him. His father had obviously gone to some expense to obtain the very best programming software.

“Joshua! Is that you, boy?”

His father’s voice—recognisably his father’s voice, but changed, deeper of timbre, confident—sounded in the ear-piece of the glasses, coming from behind him. His heart set up a steady pounding.

He turned and stared, shocked, at the image of his father. He was no longer the skeletal old man on the bed—not that Bennett had expected him to be. But, also, he had not expected to see this apparition from the past. The image of his father was as he had been thirty years ago, in his seventies. Tall and balding, thin-faced and stern, he stood with his hands behind his back, staring at his son with unspoken censure.

“Joshua, answer me for mercy’s sake!”

He found his voice at last. “Dad.”

His father peered at him. “It’s sometimes hard to tell who’s wearing those damned glasses. They’re supposed to scan a likeness of the user’s face direct to the site, but they’re none too accurate. The rest of the programming works like a dream, though.” He gestured around him at the rolling greensward. “What do you think, Joshua?”

“It’s great, really great.” Seeing his father here like this, an apparition from his boyhood, Bennett felt like a six-year-old again, dominated by the presence of the man he had always secretly feared.

“I’m pleased you decided to visit at last. Where the hell have you been, boy?”

“I’ve been working, Dad. I work, remember?” He stared at the face of his miraculously rejuvenated father, and the memories flooded back.

“I suppose that smarmy creep Samuels has filled you in?”

Bennett nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

His father gave him an intimidating glare. “And I take it you have no objections to granting your consent.”

Bennett swallowed. “No. No, of course not.”

His father sniffed. “Thought not,” he said, and then, more to himself: “You always were amenable to reason.” He gestured Bennett to follow him as he set off at a brisk pace across the grass.

Bennett recalled how to use the VR glasses and tipped his head forward. His vision seemed to float across the ground in the wake of his father.

“I have something to show you, Joshua,” he said over his shoulder. “Over here.”

They approached the nearest dome and paused before the semi-circular plinth of steps at its base. His father lodged a foot on the bottom step and regarded Bennett.

“Do you know where we are, boy?”

Bennett stared at the dome. “I don’t recognise it…” The dome was like hundreds of others he saw every day when on Earth.

“I don’t mean the dome, you numbskull. This!” He flung out a hand at the greensward. “This site. Do you know where we are?”

Bennett shook his head. “I give in,” he said. “Tell me.”

His father gave a broad grin. “This is Heaven, boy. Take a good look round at Heaven.”

His mouth was suddenly dry. He could only stare at his father. He wondered why he should be so shocked that, this close to the end, his father had finally lost his reason.

“What do you think, Joshua?” he laughed. “Now just you wait until you see who I’ve got…” And he turned and shouted into the dome. “Mother! Come out here—look who’s come visiting!”

As Bennett stared, the hatch opened and his mother—or rather a version of his mother in her fifties—stepped from the dome. She peered down at Bennett, her face scoured of pleasure by years of fundamentalist belief, and shook her head. “Josh? It doesn’t look like Josh to me.”

“How did you do that, Dad?” Bennett asked.

His father laughed. “A simple bit of programming, boy. A simulacra circuit built up from all the vid-film and holograms I took of mother over the years.” He paused, then called again: “Hey, Ella. Look who’s out here.”

“No…” Bennett said to himself. “Please, no.”

As the diminutive figure of his sister skipped from the dome and sketched a wave his way, Bennett felt a sudden pang of jealousy. Over the years he’d had Ella to himself in the memorial garden, had built a relationship that was as exclusive and private as it had been in reality all those years ago.

“Hi, Josh. I’ve been playing rockets in the lounge. Want to come and join me?”

He found his tongue. “Some other time, Ella, okay?”

She beamed. “Sure,” she said, smiling down at him.

“Had the simulated identity hologram from the memorial garden copied years ago,” his father explained. “Always intended to use it in my VR module, just never got round to it till now. Still, better late than never.” He laughed. “Cute, eh?”

Bennett stared up at the image of his sister, aware that this copy could have no memory of their conversations over the years. This version of Ella’s ghost was a cheap imitation, with no knowledge of him and his pain.

He shook his head, as if to clear it. They’re just programs, he told himself—all of them, just expensive holographic projections and complex memory banks.

“So you see, Josh, you see what I’m going to when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil!”

“Praise be to God,” his mother carolled.

“Amen to that!” Ella responded.

Bennett closed his eyes, blanking out the tawdry concoction of his father’s private Heaven.

“Now Josh and me need a few private minutes together, mother. Joshua…”

When Bennett opened his eyes, his father was beckoning him away from the dome. Compliant, eager to get the conversation over with so that he could re-enter the real world, Bennett followed.

His father halted and turned to him. “I’m glad you’ve agreed to let me die, Josh. I’m an old man and I’ve had enough. I just want out. You’ve seen what’s awaiting me…” He stared back at the dome, and a smile softened his features; then his gaze snapped back to Bennett. “When you get back, tell Samuels to go ahead with the process. And tell him—this is important, boy—tell him that I want to stay in here while he’s administering the drug. You got that? I don’t want to be dragged back to that antiseptic room and the wreck of my shrivelled body. Do you understand, Josh? Tell Samuels that I want to die with dignity.”

Bennett nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

“I knew you would, Joshua.” His father nodded. “Goodbye, son.”

Bennett regarded his father, wanting to say something final and fitting, but the words were impossible to find. He reached out a hand, intending to shake, before remembering that he wasn’t equipped for tactile sensation in VR. His father just stared at him, realising his son’s mistake. The impasse seemed fittingly symbolic of their life-long relationship. Bennett sketched an embarrassed, inadequate wave, and quickly ejected himself from Heaven by pulling the VR glasses from his face.

The sunlight in the small hospital room dazzled him, and when his eyes adjusted he found himself staring at the shrunken body of his father. In the drawn, collapsed face beneath the glasses he saw the merest lineaments of the man he’d spoken to in the VR world. From time to time the thin hands fluttered, and his lips twitched in a grotesque parody as his father smiled in Heaven.

“Mr Bennett?”

He looked up. Samuels was staring down at him.

“I know, it must have come as something of a shock.”

Bennett shook his head, clearing it of the visions. “I told him I agreed with his wishes,” he said. “Are there forms I need to fill in?”

For the next couple of hours, as medics prepared the apparatus to administer the lethal injection, Bennett was introduced to his father’s legal representative and chaplain, who murmured platitudinous condolences and assured him that it was for the best. He signed a raft of various release forms, waivers and other legal documents, including arrangements for the funeral, and was finally left alone in the room with his father.

He considered switching off the VR module, trying to talk to his father as he had been unable to do so in the ersatz Heaven. He decided that he had little to say to the old man; he would let him pass his last few minutes in the Heaven bought with the money he had managed to save from his creditors.

At noon, Dr Samuels and two medics, his father’s representative and the chaplain, entered the room and gathered around the bed.

Bennett recalled his father’s wish to die while still in the VR site. “Dr Samuels, my father wanted to remain linked to the module.”

Samuels frowned and glanced at the legal representative. “State law dictates that a patient’s death must be monitored free from the artificial stimulus of VR linkages or similar,” Samuels explained.

“But surely it won’t make any difference? It was his last wish.”

“Mr Bennett, I’ll ensure that your father is so sedated that he will have no way of knowing that he no longer occupies the site. If you’d care to tell me when…”

Bennett pulled the chair towards the bed and took his father’s hand. It was already cold, as if death was claiming him piecemeal. He nodded to Dr Samuels.

A medic slipped the glasses from his father’s face, and to his relief Bennett saw that his eyes were closed. Another medic deactivated the VR module. Dr Samuels nodded to Bennett and pressed a touch-pad on a monitor behind the bed.

As his father died, Bennett experienced a sudden and involuntary rush of images—a compendium of incidents from their shared time together—and wished that somehow it might all have been different.

He squeezed the cold hand in his, and at that second his father opened his eyes briefly and stared at him. Bennett could sense, from long and bitter experiences of his father’s moods, the old man’s silent articulation of betrayal.

Then his father’s eyes fluttered shut, and the cardiogram flatlined with a high, monotone note, and the chaplain at the foot of the bed began a hushed prayer.