A Stand-In for Dying Read online

  Marcus sometimes wondered whether he was really very different from Corinne’s students. He’d come to her programmed with a formidable store of knowledge, but with little understanding of his place in the world. In her presence, he was recovering his humanity. And in the process, long forgotten memories and long dormant passions were rekindled along with his considerable capacity for connecting empathically with others.

  *****

  Early in her career, Corinne’s students were referred to her by owners who believed that appearing more human added value to their property. After a while, though, referrals started to come from her graduates, who seemed eager to share with others of their kind what they’d learned. Some of her graduates would continue to visit long after their lessons had ended, leaving Corinne the impression that she’d taught them something that transcended the mere mirroring of emotional expression. A measure of randomness was built into their programming that allowed for something resembling free will. Corinne became convinced that she was seeing motivated behavior, an indirect indicator of underlying feelings, which was what had initially spawned her interest in the SPUDs’ rights movement.

  Corinne was born in 2021 in a small town in western Massachusetts. Her brother Benjamin was born three years later. By the time Benjamin turned two, he’d developed idiosyncrasies of behavior auguring a struggle that would define her family throughout the remainder of her childhood. At that point, Corinne’s life veered sharply off course while her parents devoted most of their attention and modest resources to Benjamin’s needs.

  Corinne knew before any of the adults in her life that her brother was different. When he’d begun to walk, she watched him spinning the wheels of a wooden car for hours on end and twirling himself round and round until he fell down. While she’d been able to cuddle him as an infant, touching him as a toddler became a riskier business. She bore bruises on her face and arms from when he startled and flailed in response to her touch.

  One day when Benjamin was two, she saw him thrashing on the ground in a tantrum, dangerously close to striking his head on the corner of a table. Corinne dove in to protect him and wrapped her arms tightly around his body. The thrashing and screaming stopped. His breathing slowed and his body relaxed. As she released her hold, his breaths once again came in short gasps and his body began to jerk. When she tightened her arms, he again relaxed.

  One of Benjamin’s favorite toys was a stuffed monkey with long, floppy arms and legs. Once Corinne discovered the calming effect of her embrace, she tried tying the monkey’s arms and legs tightly around his body and found that with sufficient pressure it had a similar effect. When she shared her discovery with her mother, her mother fitted the toy with fasteners to make it easier to swaddle Benjamin with it. From that time on, Benjamin and his monkey lived in a perpetual clinch.

  Inanimate objects were the primary focus of Benjamin’s world. He paid little attention to people, seldom looking in their faces and never making eye contact. Of all the people in his life, Corinne was the one who was most able to reach him. While he was tightly wrapped with his monkey, she would take him by both hands, wait for his randomly moving head to come around, and bump noses. The first time she did this, there was no response, but she persisted, and by the fortieth or fiftieth time he laughed. This game between them was repeated thousands of times to his apparent delight, one of the few social responses he’d ever shown.

  Once she was in school, Corinne was left mostly to her own devices to entertain herself while her parents struggled to keep Benjamin safe and did everything they could to address his disabilities. She wandered around the nooks and crannies of the town and was particularly fascinated by some of the older buildings that had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. One such building was largely hidden behind a dense overgrowth of foliage and had some of its windows boarded up.

  One day when she seven, she noticed after a storm that the boards over one of the windows had come loose. She carefully pulled a couple of them off, creating an opening large enough for her to crawl through. Her heart raced as she pulled herself through the window and tumbled to the floor. Cobwebs hung from the ceilings and the air smelled musty. A shiver went through her. It felt like a haunted house.

  But as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she became aware of row after row of tall shelves, mostly filled with books. She’d had a couple of picture books as a toddler, but most of her experience with the written word had until then been on screens. Never had she seen such an array of volumes. She walked along the aisles, running her fingers over the spines of the books on the lower shelves, feeling the coarse textures of cloth and the sculpted smoothness of leather. The fear that had overtaken her when she first entered the building melted away in the face of her curiosity about these marvelous objects.

  At last, she pulled one of the books from its resting place and it fell open. It was a particularly old volume. The pages had gilded edges and were liberally illustrated with detailed sepia toned engravings. She sat for hours turning the pages, enthralled by the pictures from a long past era and inhaling the scent of the aging paper. As night began to fall, she carefully placed the book back in its place and climbed back through the window. When she’d lowered herself to the ground, she moved the loose boards back in place.

  The old library became Corinne’s secret hideaway. She washed the grime off several of the windows in order to admit enough light by which to read and brought a cushion and blanket with which she could curl up on one of the benches with her books. She managed to open a couple of windows just enough to create a cross breeze in the summer, allowing the cavernous room to cool naturally.

  She grew up with these books as her best friends, educating herself with an eclectic mix of literature, art, history, and philosophy. She was inspired by Thoreau’s “Walden” and deeply moved as a teenager by “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Her ancient books contained knowledge that the architects of the digital database that was fed to her peers did not see fit to include.

  When she was seventeen, the town began a redevelopment project for the area encompassing the library. Corinne learned that the building was slated for demolition. In the months that remained before the wrecking lasers moved in to pulverize the structure, Corinne began rescuing as many of the volumes as she could, removing a few with each visit. She agonized each time over which ones to take. There were so many that she loved from reading and rereading and so many more rare and fragile tomes that had survived for centuries and would be doomed to annihilation. They had all begun to feel like her children, but she could only save a few.

  As time grew short, it occurred to Corinne that the developers might salvage the remaining books before demolishing the building. She had mixed feelings about this prospect. It would mean that more would be saved, but it would also make her a thief. She had not considered that the library and its contents might belong to someone or that she didn’t have a right to raid it. She’d considered her little burglaries as missions of mercy. In the end, the remaining books were buried in the rubble of the age-old building. She was both heartbroken at their loss and relieved that her acts of larceny had been justified.

  Her sweeping exposure to the world of literature left her uniquely adept at modeling emotional responses for her pupils. And her interactions with Benjamin provided additional insight into how to engage entities for whom emotional processing was not innate.

  *****

  It was Corinne’s devotion to saving the environment that provided the turning point guiding Marcus toward his destiny. The rallying cry “Stop HibernaTurf Now” resonated with a wound buried deep in his heart. As soon as he heard it, he knew what he had to do with the remarkable opportunity that Terra had given him. HibernaTurf was now threatening to derail decades of progress in controlling global warming and conserving crucial resources needed to sustain all life on the planet.

  As HibernaTurf spread, replacing huge swaths of natural vegetation, droughts increased in frequency and carbon dioxide levels
again climbed precipitously, renewing the cycle of global warming. Food supplies were compromised and famine spread anew amongst populations that had only begun to beat starvation by the mid-twenties. Water supplies reached the most critical levels of the century. Most people agreed that HibernaTurf needed to be eradicated, but nobody had any idea how to do it.

  Marcus Takana made it his mission to rid the world of HibernaTurf. He used some of his remaining funds budgeted for educational modules to acquire expertise in environmental science and bioengineering, later adding modules in plant physiology and genetic engineering.

  While others had searched for ways to destroy HibernaTurf with herbicides and defoliants or looked for aggressive species that could compete with it, Marcus began looking for a way to align with its strength and change it back into something benign. As a child, he’d learned how sailboats could move almost directly into the wind by filling their sails from an angle, an early lesson in harnessing the power of an adversary in order to defeat it.

  Marcus longed to merge his world with Corinne’s forever, but he’d shared little with her of who he was. While he was busy assimilating her world, he’d managed to maintain the secrecy about his that was required by his situation. Corinne had no idea how wealthy he was, much less how he’d come by that wealth. She didn’t know he had a MELD chip or that he’d undergone the Ambrosia Conversion. Most of all, she had no inkling of the fateful contract that could someday replace him without any warning with a total stranger.

  6

  THE SILENCE WAS BROKEN by the echoing sound of footsteps hurrying down the corridor from the elevator to the inner door. The loss of power had triggered a sequence that automatically released the locks on all the doors in order to provide a flow of outside air as well as an escape route from the underground chamber if a natural disaster compromised the air supply and threatened to entomb its occupants. The backup generator had failed to kick in promptly enough to abort the sequence. It was still not running. Ray stood helpless in the dark, holding his breath as the footsteps neared.

  “Ray?” Lena’s voice came from an arm’s length away.

  “I’m right here,” answered Ray.

  “Oh! Thank God!” said Lena, moving toward the sound of his voice until she could embrace him. He didn’t return the hug.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he exploded. Lena let go and took a few steps back.

  “Screw you, Ray,” she shot back. “We’ve just been through an earthquake. I would have thought you’d be relieved that I was safe.”

  “Sorry, Lena. Of course I’m glad you’re home.” It was still pitch black. He took a step toward her voice and reached out, but grasped only empty air. Lena’s cold shoulder left him feeling even more alone than when she wasn’t there at all.

  The ground began to rumble again, this time less intensely than before. After half a minute it stopped.

  “We should get out,” said Lena. “We could wind up trapped in here if there’s another aftershock.”

  “Guess so,” conceded Ray. He reached out, this time finding her hand, and they began moving together toward the corridor. Dying underground in a space dark to the data cloud would be one of the rare circumstances in which his newly activated contract would be worthless. At least the hazards of the aboveground world would provide him access to his backup life.

  When they reached the elevator capsule, the door was open, but there was still no power. Once inside, he felt along the wall to the right of the door until his fingers found the latch of a panel. He tugged and the latch fell away. Inside, he found a foot-wide rubber belt that fastened around pulleys above and below the capsule. With both hands he tugged at the belt by its edges and the capsule began slowly to rise.

  “Let me help,” Lena said as she moved beside him and began tugging at the left side of the belt with both hands. Ray moved both hands to the right edge and together they pulled themselves up. Even with the mechanical advantage of the pulley, it took them nearly twenty minutes to rise the twenty feet to the surface. Light began to filter into their space as they approached the top. They were both too exhausted to be angry by the time they stepped into the sunlight.

  “I’m ready for that hug now,” Ray said. Lena furrowed her brow, smiling like a mother bestowing forgiveness on an errant child and moved into his embrace.

  When they looked around them, there were no signs of any damage from the quake. Traffic had resumed its normal flow and people were walking about as though nothing had happened. They headed to the Blue Bottle on the corner, a throwback to the San Francisco of their youth, and went inside.

  “What’ll you have?” asked the barista. They both ordered espressos. Ray looked into the scanner while the barista prepared their drinks and fifty-six dollars was debited from his account. Coffee was one of the small pleasures that Ray still cherished and could fortunately afford. The irony was that HibernaTurf was mostly responsible for its scarcity.

  “We’ve got to get out of there, Ray,” Lena said once they’d sat down. “You know how much I hate it.” Lena had been lobbying to move ever since they married. It had been a major bone of contention between them, more than once threatening to break them up. Ray despised change, especially when it infringed upon his intricately crafted defenses.

  Earthquakes had always been a flaw in his security plan, the one hazard that was arguably more dangerous underground, but Ray had always feared attack and disease more than natural disasters and had waved off Lena’s warnings that they risked dying in a strong enough temblor. His new circumstances now weighed heavily on the other side of the equation. Regardless of how he might die, it would now have to happen aboveground, where communication with the data cloud didn’t depend on a powered network.

  “OK. You’re right,” he said, “Let’s move as soon as possible.”

  Lena’s eyes lit up, then filled with tears. “You mean it, Ray? Please tell me you’re not just screwing with me.”

  “Yeah, Lena, I mean it. I’ve been an idiot for not listening to you. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to see the light.” He could never tell her his real reason for changing his mind.

  Within the week, they had located a building on the corner of Powell and Sacramento that met as many of Ray’s criteria for safety and defensibility as possible. They chose the penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor. Twin pillars of titanium and concrete flanked the huge central room and went all the way to bedrock. The building had been completely rebuilt following the great earthquake of 2022. The only buildings that survived had been constructed with pillars like these that were now required in every new structure.

  The outer perimeter of the apartment was constructed almost entirely of glass that met the most stringent standards of durability. It had enough flexibility to withstand an earthquake, but was tough enough to be impervious to any impact short of an explosion. Just as in his underground lair, all the materials of the structure and its furnishings were completely fireproof. That had been an absolute requirement for anyplace Ray lived ever since the childhood catastrophe that turned him from a rambunctious daredevil into a fretful recluse. Most important it was completely permeable to communication with the data cloud and the UDB.

  All that was left was to build in security from intruders and a system to sanitize anything that entered the space. Lena reluctantly conceded that the furnishings from their former residence could come with them. She would have preferred to leave behind the hard slick surfaces and create a more tactilely soothing environment, but she was grateful enough to leave the windowless dungeon that she was willing to make the compromise.

  The move to the penthouse was the most significant change in Ray’s world since the nanoparticle infusion conferred upon him the promise of immortality. It was astounding how little else had changed. He still took every possible precaution against infection and remained convinced that everyone meant him harm. Avoidance of risk was deeply ingrained in his way of life and was not about to dissipate just because the stak
es had changed. Peace eluded him. His life remained dismal and filled with dread.

  For Lena, the earthquake had been a godsend. She could finally awaken to a sunrise across a magnificent vista and gaze at the moon and stars at night. Ray still closely monitored her comings and goings, but he never again asked where she’d been the day of the quake.

  7

  MARCUS WALKED through the greenhouse past tray after identical tray of HibernaTurf, looking for evidence that any of the samples was responding to his treatments. He shook his head. It was a sea of uniformity. In his months of study so far, none of his interventions had made any difference in growth rate. Even when he fed the results of the trials back into his scientific database, the algorithms failed to improve enough to yield a solution.

  As his frustration grew, he worked more and more hours until he was spending all but a few hours of each day in the laboratory and the greenhouse, sleeping in catnaps and eating while he worked. Corinne watched from the sidelines with increasing alarm. While his body showed no visible signs of fatigue even on just a few hours of sleep a day, the stress was telling in his mood and behavior. In their brief moments together during those months, he was preoccupied and emotionally distant. Even lovemaking seemed incapable of distracting him from his work.