A Stand-In for Dying Read online

  The crowd was now cheering, swept by the passion of her words. Marcus joined in the cheers, wanting to embrace this angel’s cause as his own despite its logical shortcomings.

  It was true that the current generation of SPUDs had extraordinary knowledge and that they could appear in many respects unerringly human. They were endowed with exquisite sensory perceptions, able to describe even the qualities of a wine more accurately than the most experienced connoisseur. And they could respond to many situations with appropriate emotional expression. But they still lacked the capacity to enjoy the wine or, for that matter, anything else. They couldn’t experience the emotions that they mimicked so well. These capacities, which came to be known as the Pinocchio Factor, remained the Holy Grail of cybernetics. Even the angel that stood before him lacked the power to confer these properties upon the beings she strove so passionately to elevate.

  The crowd thronged around the speaker once she’d finished, peppering her with questions. Marcus waited patiently until most of the crowd had dispersed, then approached her.

  “Do you have a question for me?” she asked as he stared into her eyes. It took all his courage to respond.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Corinne.” She blushed and looked away. Her shy response reassured him that she was flesh and blood after all and not one of the robotic beings she was championing.

  “I’m Marcus,” he said. “Would you like to get some coffee?”

  4

  THE RED HOVERCAR glided to a stop in front of the entrance to Ray’s home. A solid, windowless façade of red marble, two stories high, faced the street, capped by a steep, bronze colored standing seam roof of titanium with an underlayment of Kevlar. Layers of Kevlar and titanium also formed an impregnable barrier behind the marble façade. Two solid marble steps led up to the door. Within most of this structure beyond the armor was a hollow space, completing the illusion of an above ground dwelling.

  As the car slipped away, Ray stood in front of the full-body scanner embedded in the opaque glass door that compiled data from his DNA, his facial characteristics, a retinal scan, and patterns in his skin’s surface blood vessels. Security systems using only one or two of these parameters had long since been defeated by sophisticated spoofing techniques. Increasing complexity maintained a scant lead on the hackers.

  Ray felt a nagging sensation in the muscles of the back of his neck, resisted the urge to move, and then tightened the muscle on the right until he heard a small pop accompanied by a twinge of pain. His head moved imperceptibly. He’d learned this maneuver over the years to cover the tics that had plagued him since his teens.

  The door slid open. The tension that had built across his shoulders and neck released. At least the biological modifications he’d just undergone had not changed the essential blueprint of his body. Ray stepped into the cylindrical chamber and the door slid closed behind him. As the capsule descended, a blast of air blew any loose debris from his body and clothing and sucked it away through linear openings in the floor. The elevator came to a stop twenty feet below the surface. A panel at the rear slid open. He stepped out into a brightly lit corridor onto a moving platform. More air blasted across his body at intervals, interspersed with instantaneous bursts of ultraviolet light. At the end of the corridor was another door equipped with a body scanner. Redundant measures kept this underground fortress secure from both microscopic and human scale threats.

  The last door slid open and Ray emerged into a space of surprising volume, given its underground location and the cramped pathway to its entrance. The spaciousness of the home was enhanced by the sparseness of furnishings and the slickness of every surface. A broad palette of colors compensated for the lack of texture. And the walls displayed an ever-changing array of art from Renaissance masterpieces through contemporary kinetic abstractions. If one tired of the images changing, the display could be frozen to linger on a chosen view.

  To Ray, this underground fortress was a cocoon of safety, protecting him from an outside world fraught with dangers that threatened at any moment to extinguish his fragile existence. To his wife Lena, it was a sterile prison that shut her off from everything that was meaningful to her before life with Ray began, including her work as a journalist.

  *****

  Lena had a knack for storytelling almost from the time she could speak. By the time she got to college, two of her short stories had won sufficient recognition to encourage her to pursue journalism as a profession. By the time she graduated, journalism had undergone radical changes that severely limited her opportunities for employment. There was no longer any need for news reporters in any medium. Most world events hit the Universal Data Base as they occurred and the significance of events was parsed by sophisticated algorithms from the video and audio record into coherent and accurate accounts. There was little room in this process for subjective point of view.

  The public was still hungry, however, for personal stories, particularly those involving the lives of celebrities. While there were no longer tabloid newspapers, a small area of the UDB was still devoted to these stories and it remained possible to make a living writing them. So it was in Lena’s role as celebrity journalist that she first met Ray. In order to provide sufficient color to her biographical pieces to engage readers beyond the known facts, her approach went far beyond interviews to embedding herself in the lives of her subjects, often for weeks or months. If she had to make a living chronicling the lives of the rich and famous, she would at least produce compelling narratives in skillful prose.

  She began her story on Ray in the summer of 2029, three years after HibernaTurf first hit the market and at the height of the positive slope of his celebrity. Beyond its commercial success, it appeared at the time that HibernaTurf was helping to solve the world’s water shortage as it grew in the extent of its worldwide coverage and curtailed almost entirely the residential and commercial use of irrigation in landscaping. Some communities were able, for a while, to relax restrictions on water use for consuming and bathing. People once again enjoyed bathing more than once or twice a week.

  Ray was eccentric, a loner, who ventured infrequently from his carefully engineered home and allowed few visitors into his sanctum. Over the weeks of her research, though, Lena insinuated her presence into his space and his isolation began to melt away. By the time she was done with the story and ready to leave, he insisted she stay a while longer. During the next weeks, their conversations became more intimate and affection grew between them.

  They married in December 2029 in the presence of Lena’s parents and several of her closest friends. None of the guests were Ray’s, which should have been a red flag for her about his capacity for relatedness.

  Over the first three years of their marriage, HibernaTurf started to go horribly wrong. After looking like a boon to the environment, unintended consequences emerged that turned it into a scourge. It spread uncontrolled, replacing fertile farm and grazing lands with a virtually inert material lacking in any nutritional value. Ray went from international hero to one of the most reviled people on the planet. He was Midas and HibernaTurf was his gold. And by the end of that time, he became increasingly paranoid and guarded.

  By the fall of 2033, HibernaTurf was bankrupt, but Ray had managed to amass a personal fortune that was well shielded by his corporate shell from litigation. His growing list of enemies were enraged that he’d profited so handsomely from the debacle he’d created. A substantial portion of his wealth was devoted to protecting him and Lena from his enemies.

  Ray’s wealth in the early years of their marriage gave Lena access to an enormous amount of information. They were both endowed with the most advanced MELD chips for interfacing with the UDB and acquired advanced knowledge modules covering the equivalent of a 20th Century college education dozens of times over. Lena became addicted to knowing and could not imagine ever lapsing back into ignorance. The ultimate cost of leaving Ray would mean giving up her MELD chip, disconnecting her fr
om all the knowledge that she’d accumulated in her personal space within the UDB. Since that knowledge had become integral to her identity, giving it up became unthinkable, enough to keep her imprisoned within a marriage that was increasingly deprived of emotional oxygen as Ray became more distant and wooden. Even without this powerful incentive to stay, Lena couldn’t bring herself to abandon him when the rest of the world had turned against him.

  *****

  “Lena,” Ray called as he moved toward the sleeping chamber at the rear of the dwelling. There was no response. He hurried into the chamber, but found it empty. His pace quickened as he moved to the bathroom, then the kitchen. Still no sign of Lena.

  “Where are you?” he screamed. Only silence. His rage expanded to fill the empty space around him. He pounded the kitchen counter with his fist hard enough to sting his hand. He sat down and took some slow deep breaths. When he’d calmed down enough to clear his mind, he reached out to her in thought. Still no reply and no signal telling him her location. Her chip’s broadcast function had gone dark. Either she was in a rare skip area of the UDB or she had deliberately become invisible.

  It was unlike Lena to leave home unannounced. She knew how anxious it made him for either of them to venture into the dirty, perilous outside world. There was seldom an opportunity to leave without his notice. But the infusion had taken the better part of a day. She’d apparently used his extended absence as a chance to sneak out. Where could she have gone that was important enough to put them both at risk?

  But then, there were the other reasons Ray hated for Lena to venture beyond the safety of their home. They were both potential targets for crackpots seeking revenge for the ravages of HibernaTurf. There had been a close call years before during one of his last public appearances when a sniper took a shot at him from a distant rooftop. It hit him square in the chest, but he’d already begun to wear bullet-proof clothing in public. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He was otherwise unharmed.

  Their still considerable wealth also put them both at risk for kidnapping. Ray began to wonder whether Lena went dark for more sinister reasons. Could she have been abducted and hidden in a dark location, or could someone else have turned off the signal from her chip? Rage had primed his muscles for brutal force. Now fear drained them of all power, leaving him limp and vulnerable.

  It was too soon to report her missing. There was no evidence that she’d met with foul play other than the lack of a signal indicating her location. Even if he turned to the authorities, he held little trust trust that they’d respond to his plea for help. When HibernaTurf went bad, his most loyal admirers and dedicated employees all abandoned him within months. There were few left who didn’t despise him. Only Lena kept his underground sanctuary from turning into perpetual solitary confinement.

  An alarm alerted him that someone was approaching the outer entry door. A holographic image of a human figure materialized in his peripheral vision to his left. The ground began to rumble beneath his feet and the image dissolved before he could direct his gaze toward it. The rumbling grew to a crescendo until it shook his whole body as he struggled to maintain his balance. The lights went out. Then all was still.

  Ray stood in the darkness, enveloped by silence from without and within. His MELD chip’s connection with the Universal Data Base required power within his underground world. The backup power source had failed. He was utterly alone.

  5

  LOVE CAN BE an overwhelming force to a man floating aimlessly in a solitary world. As they spent more and more time together, Marcus was swept along by Corinne’s passions. She became the compass that would guide him through the next stage of his life. Her causes became his causes, her friends his friends. For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. Purpose and meaning were seeping into his being.

  Corinne also opened for Marcus a new world of sensory and aesthetic experiences. Before she came into his life, his exposure to music and art was limited mostly to works created by artificial intelligence. Digitally composed symphonies were harmonically refined and pleasing to the ear, while sophisticated kinetic sculptures that could be continually revised had offered a seemingly endless array of images to capture his attention.

  Corinne’s world instead contained static images and dissonant sounds composed by living artists. She and her friends shunned the technical perfection of the automated world to embrace the diversity that only individual creativity could generate. They delighted in all things crafted by hand, collecting and hoarding even articles of clothing that were no longer legal to wear because they couldn’t be sanitized with blasts of air or thimblefuls of water. And then there were her books, shelves and shelves of ancient tomes, tattered and dusty, remnants of an age when information had not all been catalogued in digital form.

  While Marcus’s data modules provided him with an analytical knowledge of music, until he met Corinne he’d never listened to the doleful cadence of a Mahler symphony, the inspired improvisations of Coltrane’s saxophone, or the rock and roll music of the Rolling Stones. Visiting her home was a feast for his senses. He looked forward to his visits with the eager anticipation of a child discovering the world for the first time. And he was never disappointed by her ability to surprise him.

  On his fourth visit, she greeted him at the door barefoot in a flowing black silk robe in place of the form fitting synthetic material that usually covered her body. While the materials shared a similar luster, there was something about the texture of the natural material and the subtlety of Corinne’s body within its loose folds that placed all of his senses on alert. She took him by the hand and he followed obediently as she led him to the softest chair in the apartment, a leather upholstered antique that she’d managed to save years before from an old building scheduled for destruction.

  As his body melted into the chair and the stirring strains of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto enveloped him, Corinne silently removed the silk sash of her robe, slipped behind him, and passed it over his eyes. He allowed her to fasten the makeshift blindfold.

  “Patience,” was her only utterance. He listened while her footsteps faded away.

  The next sensation to overtake him was a pungent aroma, both unfamiliar and exquisite. Marcus inhaled deeply as it filled the room and his mouth began to water. The soft padding of Corinne’s bare feet slowly approached and stopped just in front of him.

  “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue,” she entreated. Marcus obeyed. Corinne placed something soft and curved and wet on his outstretched tongue and invited him to take it into his mouth. The taste of the object enhanced the aroma he’d been savoring and grew in complexity as he rolled it over his tongue and between his teeth. When he bit down, it was slightly chewy. He swallowed and grinned.

  “Real food,” he thought while misty images from a distant past beckoned his attention. “I’d almost forgotten how it tasted.” She’d spent the whole afternoon preparing the pasta shells from the small stash of bootleg wheat flour she kept in the hidden pantry behind her kitchen and the couple of eggs she’d scrounged from friends. She’d been saving the fresh garlic cloves and herbs for a special occasion. A vintage electric cooktop slid out from its hiding place beneath the module that converted pods of synthetic protein into the semblance of meals that they usually ate.

  Corinne followed this morsel with a sip of liquid that aroused another medley of sensations in his mouth and nose. The wine washed down the bit of pasta along with the fresh garlic and rosemary that laced the oil that coated it. She fed him another dozen bites in this manner before leading him, still blindfolded, into the next room. A silky fold brushed the fingertips of his free hand. As they moved away from the kitchen, the aroma of cooking food yielded to the sweet smell of jasmine.

  They stopped. Now the warmth of her breath washed over his face. A finger traced his lips, then the moist tip of her tongue. Two fingers pushed gently against his chest and he fell back onto the bed. She kissed his neck and slid one han
d between his legs while she released the knot on the blindfold with the other. The cloth fell away, candlelight reflected in the ebony surface of Corinne’s eyes, and he was helpless in her grasp.

  “Even if I die tomorrow,” Marcus thought, “tonight would be worth it all.”

  By day in Corinne’s company, he met the students who came to her home for their lessons. Her students weren’t children as they might have been in the days when knowledge was still imparted directly from person to person. She was an educator for newly created SPUDs. While they were endowed upon creation with a prodigious data set of linear knowledge, they were entirely lacking in any capacity to read human emotions or to respond like people to circumstances that would provoke emotional responses. This is the language that she taught by spending hours of training with each of her charges, observing images together of evocative, often heart wrenching experiences and having them watch the actors’ and her emotional responses.

  The newer students all greeted him with a singsong “pleased to meet you,” accompanied by smiles that seemed to be pasted on their faces. Over time, the smiles became nuanced and other emotions began to filter into their expressional repertoire. Corinne was a gifted instructor. When she threw a graduation party for a group of her charges, Marcus couldn’t distinguish some of her advanced pupils from her human friends.