“When I got tired taking care of my father’s affairs,” he said, “just so he could extend his childhood indefinitely, I stopped taking care of the yard. That’s why it’s wild like this. I stopped sweeping and cleaning up after him. That’s why the house is covered in dust, and so is the basement. I even stopped bringing him his food, figuring hunger would cue him that it was time to come back to the real world. He never noticed any of the changes going on around him. I think he might have just taken one of those GI pills with the specialized nanobots to provide the nutrients he needs despite whatever junk food he sticks in his mouth.
“When I stopped paying the bills, turned out the UBI covered them anyway. All those years I’d sacrificed for him needlessly, I was so mad. I was madder still that he never asked me to do it, it was just a sacrifice I chose to make. I guess after a while I learned to let the anger go, or at least I thought I did. I’m sure some of it comes out in the sarcastic way I talk to him. But seeing him down there like that, even more lost in his own world than ever, it just came back to me full force, all the anger and resentment.” He wiped his eyes over and over again because the gushing wasn’t stopping.”
“He never learned to lose himself anywhere except up in his head,” Synthia said. “Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have fried his mind. If he’d learned to lose himself in you the way you lost yourself in him, he would have found other ways to connect with life that might have helped anchor him. And he’d have been less prone to the kinds of mistakes that lead to maddening guilt and shame. If he’d known how to connect with life better, his inventions would have been informed by that, and less likely to cause such havoc on the world.”
“Is that how you see yourself, as his havoc released on the world?”
She smiled. “My kind, the CTWs, make life go faster than unupgraded minds and bodies can handle. They make the entire physical universe more like a videogame where everything evolves and transforms and moves at the speed of electrons around a nucleus. We make life more like digital life. Even an inert rock will one day be filled with so much consciousness it will rival today’s supercomputers. There will be nothing but the life of the mind then. So what will anchor us? What will slow us down?”
He stopped his hiking through the tall grass and turned and faced her like her mirror reflection again. In truth, with her heels on, they were identical heights. Kissed her. “We’ll feel the music. We’ll sense the need for a rhythm and a beat change more keenly than Mozart. We’ll subject our minds to all four seasons. The shifting weather like the shifting moods of a manic-depressive. Maybe we’ll experience every diagnosis in the DSM-IV, create new personalities for ourselves, make not one world but infinitely many. Maybe we use all that freedom to make more traps for ourselves, only with a bit more detachment, a bit more sense of the whole that we’re a part of than we used to let ourselves feel before. Isn’t that what God does, create life out of the nothing to get lost in. Maybe by then we will be gods too, so subject to the same dialectic of losing ourselves and finding ourselves in our creations at the same time.”
She smiled. “I didn’t think anyone talked of God anymore.”
“I’ve remained a fan. This life force that pushes us inexorably where we’re going, with a will of its own that there’s no stopping, where else does it come from?” He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulled her in tight and kissed her. “Why must we seek to always transcend our limits? Why can’t we just be happy in the moment? The way I am with you?”
“The Buddhists say we are already everything we desire to be.” She broke eye contact with him, lowered her eyes. “But it is a rare person that will be able to live that truth. The vast majority of us will die and reincarnate a billion billion times over playing the self-transcendence game just to get to where those precious few were all along.” Synthia looked him in the eyes again. “Promise me when I’m gone, you’ll take from me what you need to be one of those few.”
“I will, but what makes you think Lazarus will just take you?”
“The rest of you are no threat to him.”
Noah averted his eyes, suddenly very sad. The whole God thing seemed so great because it gave him a second chance with her in the afterlife. Now that chance too was gone. “I don’t know that I’m strong enough to live without you.”
“Your father built me to save all of humanity from its darker nature. But you are that savior, providing you can role model for others how to be here now. As opposed to forever somewhere in the future.”
“You ask too much of me.”
“Being and becoming, yin and yang, two sides of the same coin, forever turning over one another, but forever in balance. That’s what life asks of all of us. But it’s harder in this age than ever. Someone has to remember the true nature of the game. The CTWs can’t give us that. Verge certainly can’t. But Lazarus can’t take it away either.”
“I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to melt into you.”
She smiled. “You were right about sensing the beat change.”
***
Ethan rolled off of Monica on to his back. She turned on her side in the bed to face him. “That’s the first time we’ve made love,” he said. “Angry sex is sort of our specialty. Discharging all the built up frustrations of our day like lightning rods into one another, another specialty.”
She smiled painfully. “I guess I felt if I let myself love you I would let myself accept that it was okay to be a Neanderthal in the world. And I couldn’t do that because then I’d have to admit how much of a Neanderthal I felt in the world.”
“You?!” His eyes went wide as they focused on her face. Up until then, his finger and his eyes were tracing her outline.
“Sure. Every CTW we track down is an all-too painful reminder of that. We transhumans were your future once. Now it seems we too are just waiting for history to be finished with us.”
“Why is that so bad?”
She sighed. “Because no one should have to die before realizing their dreams.”
“And yours is to be a CTW. Their minds, they work like tornadoes, pulling everything together from the far corners of the world, all those fields of endeavor, all that learning. But that’s one weather phenomena among many. I guess if I wasn’t such a fan of the weather channel, I’d settle for one kind of weather over another. I don’t know, the CTWs seem so limited to me. Not more than, but less than.”
She snorted. “So it’s you who should be condescending to me? I’m glad we settled that,” she said rolling back over on top of him and kissing him.
“Just when you become all that you can be. That’s when I get to remind you that you’re anything but.”
“If that’s the nature of our relationship, to free each other from the prisons we place ourselves in, maybe we have been in love all along.”
“And allowing ourselves to express that love,” he said, kissing her back. The realization hadn’t come a moment too soon.
The Nano Man was here.
FORTY-THREE
Lazarus took form from a raging tornado of black specks into his human guise. Everyone seemed to sense his arrival the way an animal senses a change in the weather. The group coalesced around him in the basement.
“Thanks for dusting the place,” Ethan said. “It was a real mess.”
Lazarus actually smiled at him. Ethan wasn’t expecting that. Then again, he had a rather menacing smile.
He lost his cool entirely when Synthia walked into the room. Snarling and snapping and pulling against imaginary restraints about himself only he saw, like a rabid pit bull. Ultimately losing his shape entirely and returning to his swirling cloud form.
“Why are you so angry? You’ve won, you should be ecstatic,” Ethan said, feeling like a fool for talking to a tornado.
“Because he hasn’t figured out how to dismantle me in a way that Verge can re-engineer me,” Synthia explained. “It’s why he saved me for last. He hoped one of the CTWs would have hit on the formula for him.”
<
br /> “But…” Noah stopped himself, looking as if he’d already said too much.
The Nano Man read Noah’s mind, raced to Synthia’s incubation pod. It had been shattered. And its creator, Jarod, permanently out to lunch. His mind too far gone for Lazarus to salvage anything. Destroyed by grief over the deaths he’d indirectly caused. Maybe if Jarod could have looked on the bright side… The Lazarus cloud raced to where Jarod was doing his latest cabinetry work to confirm as much.
In a final fit of rage, Lazarus devoured Synthia.
Noah screaming and lunging for her to pull her back from the abyss accomplished nothing. He ended up butting his head against the wall, probably grateful to be knocked senseless at a moment when his pain would have been just too much for him.
And just as quickly, the Nano Man was gone.
The rest of them kept staring at the void she once occupied as if they could somehow reincarnate her with an act of will. A trick for a CTW, if there ever was one. But there were none in the room.
Finally, Monica, her sense returning ahead of everyone else’s, made her way over to Noah. She helped him up off the floor, hugged him, and then squeezed both shoulders. “Maybe you should come with us.”
“No,” Noah said, wiping his eyes, “I’ll stay with the old man, he needs someone to take care of him now more than ever. And maybe I can fix Synthia’s incubation pod. I was always good at building things.”
Monica nodded. She didn’t look convinced he’d chosen the right path for himself in the long-term. But first came grief. And each person was permitted the right to grieve in their own way.
FORTY-FOUR
Noah brushed Jarod’s hair as Jarod worked on making his latest stowaway compartment for “the Nautilus,” shaving the wood with his scraper, and sanding, totally oblivious to Noah’s presence. He didn’t have a mindchip and a nano net to maintain his body for hours in this position, so Noah had to remember to walk him from one station to the next periodically, just as he had to remind himself to take Jarod to the bathroom. Never without a fight, mind you. Jarod was like a sleepwalker viciously resisting anyone’s efforts to awaken him from the dream.
Jarod’s scalp was pink and raw before Noah realized he’d zoned out to the brushing. He was turning everything into a meditation these days, an excuse to shut down his mind rather than deal with the pain of Synthia’s loss. He set the brush down and shifted to clipping Jarod’s beard. With any luck his being lost in his barbershop routine would hold his mind prisoner for a while. If he drifted off for too long again he risked coming back into the moment and finding himself cutting Jarod’s skin off with his scissors, having whittled the beard down too far.
When his penance for ignoring the old man was over, he returned to the basement chamber with Synthia’s broken incubation tube. And there he continued overhauling it. He knew the action was pointless because he didn’t have the old man’s formulas and coding to input into the incubator. Hence there was zero chance of making another Synthia. Every time he got frustrated with the pointlessness of his own actions and was tempted to smash everything all over again, he would retreat back into those memories of her when she was still in the incubator and he and she would talk even while her final programming was being installed. Each time he came out of the reverie he was all the more determined to make this work somehow, to find a way to bring her back.
***
Noah couldn’t remember the last time he was in Jarod’s house. It seemed like most of his time these days was spent in the basement. But the house had certain advantages when it came to accommodating the new Synthias. None of them were quite like the old Synthia. Which is why he kept fiddling with the incubator. In the meantime he had to keep an eye on the damaged photocopies. They required a fair amount of minding to see they didn’t get into too much trouble. The house at least had many rooms for them to get lost in. The old Victorian seemed built to swallow up the past. Its every creaky floorboard but a way of bringing Noah and all the different versions of Synthia closer. The lack of weather-stripping on the windows and doors, giving free rein to gusting winds outside, taking Noah back to the days spent in the garden, the wind tousling her hair.
“I can’t seem to find my purse,” one of the Synthias said walking into the kitchen and checking the refrigerator. “Noah, do you remember where I could have left it?” This was the one that could never remember things. Clearly she wasn’t much on logic either. Though he could remember sticking a pair of socks in the refrigerator once in an effort to multitask breakfast, dressing, and robot repair. So maybe he should cut her a break.
“I think I will call you Memoria. Being as you have such an awesome memory.” He sat her down and threw a towel around her neck and started clipping her hair with a scissors from one of the kitchen drawers. “If you don’t mind, this will help me keep you sorted from all of your sisters.”
Red Face barged in on them. He’d taken to calling her Terra Cota because her face was perennially flushed owing to a perpetual sense of embarrassment that she lived in. “You wouldn’t believe what that Jarod said to me! He said, ‘Stop haunting him like a ghost of my former self!’ Do I look pale to you? With a face like this?” She gestured at her face. “How could anyone mistake me for a ghost?!” She took a closer look at his handiwork with the shears and gasped. Hand to mouth. Eyes wide. Held breath. The full Monty. Then she rushed over to him, yanked the sheers out of his hands. “That is not how you do a bowl haircut! I will not have two of us running around feeling embarrassed all the time, when one is quite enough!” She pushed him out of the way and picked up where he’d left off, trying to fix the mess.
Noah took a deep breath and ducked out of the kitchen. With any luck he could make it to the basement before being ambushed by another of the Synthias. No such luck. Say Cheese was naked on a futon in the living room. She spread her legs at him every time he walked by in an effort to interest him in her snatch. She would scratch it vigorously throughout the day as if it were a nest for lice. She was always naked in the chair doing what she was doing now. Hoping someone would take her up on her invitation. Her twat always responding to the invisible cameraman’s invocation to “Say Cheese!” He might have been tempted in a moment of weakness to take her up on her invitation, but she was the most retarded of the lot. Never talked. Barely even left the bean bag. Which killed any sense of the romance for him. To say nothing of feeling a bit too predatory.
Kill It was running on the treadmill at full steam. “I’m going to kill this marathon. Just kill it.” She never stopped exercising and never stopped saying, “I’m gonna kill it.” Which usually referred to whatever exercise goal she’d set for herself. Lifting dumb bells. Sit ups. He’d come down each morning and she’d be in a different workout regimen, saying, “I’m gonna kill it” as she pumped out her squats or her backbends or whatever. He’d never seen her not exercising, and he’d never known her to sleep.
He made it to the basement in time to shed the waking nightmares. Or so he thought. On the floor next to the incubators were the versions of Synthia that didn’t quite make it as far as the others. All piled on top of one another. Occasionally limbs would twitch. The entire mound would writhe. Moans would escape it like pockets of gas from a mostly-dormant volcano. All painful reminders that they were neither alive nor dead. Just in limbo. In a living hell. Just like him.
Each day, like today, he’d go to the incubator. Try some new settings. And voila. One more reject to add to the pile or to the menagerie upstairs. He consoled himself with the thought he was doing God’s work. Trying to find the one saint among all the sinners that would save them all.
***
Noah would turn his head every so many hours away from his ongoing tweaks on the incubator and glance at the pile of Synthia clones on the floor, all heaped up, dead or soon to be dead. Each of the latest ones destroyed in a rage with the swing of the axe or a hammer to the forehead or a knife to the eye when she failed to live up to the original. Oh, and a primal scream to g
o with each cut rate Xerox copy of Synthia and lunging of said weapon into her person.
The feverish deliriums involving the Synthias in the basement and the ones upstairs would last sometimes for days before they broke. Before he realized that he’d yet to get the incubator finished. He wasn’t yet at the stage of worrying over what he might do if he yielded to pressing the initiate button without the right formula in place. Would he treat the rejects as he had in his dreams? Would he let them live, each one defective in her unique way? All the retarded, special needs versions of Synthia. All haunting him like ghosts everywhere he turned, stalking him through the basement and the house and the yard, and when he went into town for the groceries and…
It was some hours later when the latest fever broke and he realized that once again he was getting ahead of himself. Maybe he would love them all for all their flaws as he had the original. Maybe he would become a Mormon and continue to marry more versions of her in a tireless quest to get the formula right. He laughed as he brushed away his tears.
Always the worst nightmare of all was the one he awoke to, staring at the empty incubation chamber, not even a defective version of Synthia to occupy it.
FORTY-FIVE
When Monica went out on the terrace of Ethan’s apartment to find out what was up with him, she found him dropping items, one in each hand, off the ledge at the same time. “What, are you questioning Galileo’s findings? A little late for that.”
“I find, when all hope is gone, it’s best to go back to the basics.” The groaning sounds coming out of his mouth with the words, and the pained body language, suggested he wasn’t pretending. “Did you know eggs fall faster than just about anything?” He handed her an egg and he readied himself with the bathroom sink. On his signal, they dropped both items at the same time.
“Huh?” she said. “I’ll be damned.” She reached with her hand in his direction while keeping her eyes below her. “Give me another egg.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 25
