The Last Theorem

48 THE SOUL IN THE MACHINE

If there was any patient for whom Dr. Ada Labrooy would pull out all the stops, it was certainly her beloved aunt Myra. It wasn’t entirely up to her, however. The alien machines that could do the job were fortunately nearby, getting ready to transform old Surash into the abstract of himself that would live on in the machines. But the parts had not yet been assembled together. Some were stacked in the hall outside Surash’s hospital room, some were on pallets in the yard, a couple were still on the trucks that had brought them from the Skyhook. It would take time to put them all together.

Time in which the remorseless agents of decay would be doing their best to make Myra’s body unusable.

They had to buy time. There was only one way to do it. When Ranjit bullied his way into the chamber where what was left of his wife was being worked on, he at last understood why they had tried so hard to keep him out. Myra wasn’t in a hospital bed. She was submerged in a tank of water with half-melted ice cubes floating on its surface. Rubber cuffs at her neck and groin gave work space to the preservation techs, each perfusing Myra’s body with some chill liquid while Myra’s actual scarlet blood ran into a—toilet? But yes, that was where it was going!

From behind him a voice said, “Ranjit.”

He turned, his expression still horrified. The tone of Dr. Ada Labrooy’s voice had been kind, but the look on her face was stern. “You shouldn’t be here. None of this is pretty.” She glanced at a dial and added, “I think we’re in time, but you should get out of here and let us work.”

He didn’t argue. He had seen all he could stand to see. Over a long and happy marriage he had seen his wife’s naked body many times, pink-tinged and healthy, but now it was a bluish-violetish shade that he could not bear to look at.

The waiting time was forever, or seemed like it, but at last it came to an end. Ranjit was sitting in an anteroom, staring into space, when Dr. Labrooy came in, looking flushed and even happy. “It’s going well, Ranjit,” she said, taking a seat beside him. “We were able to establish all the interfaces. Now we’re just waiting while the data transfer is going on.”

Ranjit translated that for himself. “That means Myra’s being stored in the machine? Shouldn’t someone be there while that’s happening?”

“Someone is, Ranjit.” She lifted her arm to display a wrist screen. “I’m monitoring the flow. You know we’re lucky that the Grand Galactics have a habit of storing a few samples of every race they exterminate, so the Machine-Stored were already tooling up for the job before they got here.”

Ranjit scowled at a word. “What do you mean, ‘storing’? Are you talking about something like, I don’t know, some kind of coffin or urn or something?”

Ada scowled back. “Haven’t you been keeping up with the news, Ranjit? It’s nothing like that. It’s like the Machine-Stored themselves. They’re what you might call stage two machines. Stage one is just making exact copies of people and tucking them away for samples. Stage two is giving them life within the machine—no, wait,” she said as there was a tiny bell-like sound. Her eyes were on the news screen as she lifted her arm and spoke into the contraption on her wrist. A moment later the screen went black. When it lighted up again, Ranjit’s heart stopped, for what it was displaying was his wife as he had seen her last, wearing her swimsuit as before but now lying motionless on a surgical cot….

No, not motionless. Her eyes opened. Her expression was puzzled but interested as she lifted her hand and rotated it to study the fingers.

“You’re seeing her in her simulation,” Ada informed him proudly. “Later on she’ll learn how to simulate any surround she likes, and how to interact with others in the simulation.” Then she whispered again into the thing on her wrist. The screen went black once more. “We aren’t being fair to her, though. Let’s let her have her privacy while she gets used to what’s happened to her. You and I can get a cup of tea, and I’ll try to answer all your questions, assuming you have some.”

Oh, Ranjit had questions, all right. The tea in his cup, undrunk, grew cold while he tried to make sense of what had happened. At last there was another tiny bell and Ada smiled. “I think you can talk to her now,” she said, and nodded toward the screen, which abruptly displayed Myra again. “Hello, Aunt Myra,” Ada said to the screen. “Has the briefing program told you all you need to know?”

“Almost.” Myra touched her hair, untended since she’d come out of the water that had killed her. “I need to know how to fix myself up a little, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. Hello, Ranjit. Thanks for saving my—well, my meta-life, I guess, or whatever you can call it.”

“You are very welcome,” was all Ranjit could find to say. And then, as Ada got up to let the two of them talk in private, he said to Ada, “Wait a minute. You don’t have to be dead to be stored like this, do you? I mean, if I wanted to, you could put me right in the scene with her? And then it would be just as though we were flesh-and-blood people together?”

Ada looked alarmed. “Well, yes,” she said. She would have gone on, but Myra, speaking from the screen, was ahead of her.

“Dear Ranjit,” she said, “forget it. Much as I’d like to have you here with me, you mustn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Tashy, or to Robert, or—Hell, let’s face it. It wouldn’t be fair to the world.”

Ranjit stared at the screen. “Huh,” he said. And then, after a moment’s pondering, “But I miss you already,” he complained.

“Of course. And I miss you. It’s not as though we could never see each other, though. The briefing program says we can talk like this as often as we like.”

“Huh,” Ranjit said again. “But we can’t touch, and I may live for years.”

“Many years, I hope, my darling. But it will give us something to look forward to.”