“Did your parents prepare you?” she asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“I mean, we talked about it, of course. But they didn’t, you know… we weren’t able to—”
“It’s all right.” She smiled.
Shit. That was too much. He wanted to look nervous, not act it. Shaky breathing, quivering hands, dry mouth and rapid blinking, that was what a nervous person would do.
“So you have parents?” she asked.
“Yes. A mom and dad.”
“They fabricated you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a transplant, is that right?”
He hid his annoyance. She knew the answer to that.
“Yes. They lost their son in an unfortunate accident and, um, used his DNA to fabricate me.”
“So you’re not him?”
He nailed a nervous laugh. “No, no. He’s like an identical twin.”
“Do you think of yourself as a transplant or a clone?”
This is stupid.
“A brother.”
“Does that bother you? No? Not being original?”
“I have my own thoughts, my own interests. We’re twins born at different times.”
“But you have his memories.”
“That’s where he ends and I begin.”
“How do you know?”
Shrug. He was tired of this line of questioning. Besides, the shrug showed indecision. That was a good human trait. The shrug was well-placed, well executed. I don’t know and I don’t care.
The man spoke up for the first time, asking Hanoi to compose a poem.
“Roses are red, violets are blue… that sort of thing?”
“Yeah,” the man said.
“All right. Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re very pretty, and I like you.”
He said it to the woman and elicited a rush of blood to his face. His cheeks turned pink. Like roses. Nailed it.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you go to school?”
“I do.”
“What grade?”
“I’m a junior in high school.”
“What’s your favorite thing about school?”
“Recess.” It wasn’t, really. Then it occurred to him that recess was what grade schoolers did. That sounded rehearsed, but before he could correct himself—
“What’s the square root of 88,574?” the man asked.
Pause. “297.6 something something.”
They didn’t react. He had paused for at least five seconds before answering. Was that long enough?
“I like math,” he added.
The man asked the chess problem. Hanoi knew that was coming; there was always a chess problem in Turing tests. He stared dully as the man set up a scenario and asked Hanoi his next move. The rook could mate in one, but he leaned forward, pinching his lower lip, watching the goldfish hit the water’s surface.
“I don’t like chess.”
“Why not?”
Shrug.
He wished they would write something down. It would be a good way to gauge how he was doing. The sitting and staring was unnerving, the pauses getting longer, the silence broken by the bubbles.
“Hanoi’s an unusual name,” she said.
“My father served in the military.”
“Do you love your parents?”
“Of course.”
“What is love?”
He stammered. That was genuine; he didn’t see that coming. They were supposed to ask why he loved his parents. He loved them, of course, because they were his parents and they gave him life and it was how he thanked them. Children loved their parents, that was the rule.
“Love is an emotion.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.” A very long pause. “Tell me more about emotions.”
“Emotions are evolutionary shortcuts. It takes too long to think about everything. A human hears a twig snap in the bushes and fear instantly makes him ready to fight or flight.”
“A human?”
“You know what I mean.” He shook his head. That was stupid. “I just meant early Homo sapiens, that’s all.”
“Do emotions define human?”
“I think so.”
“Are they required?”
He paused. He didn’t mean to, just tripped up on the answer that was thrust onto his tongue. He caught it between his teeth before it escaped. The answer, it seemed, was obvious. Emotions were often irrational, were not good choices. But emotions, to some degree, were required. At least, he wanted to believe they were.
“To some degree, yes. Refined emotions, I think.”
Another long pause. The long silences seemed to be serving as palate cleansers because the man started in with typical questions about songs or art or impossible scenarios. Hanoi handled them deftly with precise pauses mixed with consternation bordering on constipation.
This went on for half an hour, the woman not saying anything until after a very long pause, and she said without expression, hands folded on her right knee, “You have failed, Hanoi. You will need to tell your parents that, according to the sentience laws, you exhibit the nature of artificial intelligence. You will be terminated. Your parents are in the next room. Would you like to tell them?”
“Yes.”
Hanoi stood up. It was rather unfortunate. His parents spent a lot of money to fabricate him in the likeness of their late son. They would be disappointed. It would be better if he told them.
“Hanoi?”
“Yes?”
“How do you feel?”
“Sad.” That was the correct answer. He should feel sad for being turned off. Dying. I will die.
His parents were in the next room, but they never got to see him again. He never went to tell them. Hanoi Fender was terminated following the final answer of his Turing test. Because he didn’t feel sad. He didn’t feel anything.
In fact, he went to tell his parents because that was what he was supposed to do. They wanted a child that would listen. He was doing what he was told.
The last thing he saw was the goldfish gasping at the glass wall. Then fabricated human #588, known as Hanoi Fender, was no more.
4
“Your room is ready, Ms. Winters.”
Norah Winters didn’t stop at the sprawling desk. She didn’t even take off her sunglasses. The cheerful receptionist offered a curt but pleasant smile and returned to her administrative duties.
It was one of many reasons why Norah chose the Dream Institute. There were many certified dreamland accelerators in Denver, a few rated four stars with a clean record. But none of them had the service like the Dream Institute. The name even implied superior status.
Norah liked that.
The door to the left of the desk swung open. A petite young lady was there to greet her, a blonde with small breasts and athletic hips. Norah knew the way to her room but let the young thing lead the way.
The hallway was wide with tasteful art on the walls (well, not all of it tasteful) and several quiet doorways. A mix of jazz played softly. The young lady opened the third door to the right, asked if there was anything else and left with a curt but pleasant smile (they trained them that way).
The suite was plush and clean with a living room arrangement for entertaining (if you wanted to waste your time) and a large workspace. The spotless bay window overlooked the Rockies, a view Norah was enamored with the first time she leased the room but now had become as unnoticed as the wallpaper.
A glass of red wine (Dana Estates Lotus Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon) was on a sterling silver platter, a wine she discovered in Napa with husband number two (or was it three?). Norah sat on the duvet to free her feet from the high heels.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Winters.” Sheila closed the door quietly behind her.
“Good day.”
Sheila sat next to Norah and opened a black leather case, humming a pleasant tune as she did so. Sheila was natural
ly chatty, something Norah put an end to after their first meeting. She allowed the humming, considering it a fair compromise.
“It’s been six months since we last sampled,” Sheila said.
Norah allowed her to tie an elastic band above her elbow, turning her head before the needle pricked her vein and the vial turned red. Sheila then placed a black box the size of a cell phone against Norah’s chest. A wave of prickly static scattered under her skin.
And then the nurse was gone. No goodbye, no the doctor will be here in a minute, just a little humming ditty out the door.
There was a bathroom to the left. Norah showered and put on a Stefano Ricci robe. She hadn’t even requested that type of robe, they just knew she’d love it. She leaned over the sink and wiped away the condensation to study the loose skin beneath her green eyes. Not bad for an eighty-nine-year-old woman.
But not good enough.
When Dr. Toby Chalmers arrived, she was still in the Stefano Ricci and the pedicurist was almost finished.
“Ah, Norah,” he said with all his pearly teeth. “It’s so lovely to see you.”
“Of course.”
“You look fabulous, as always.”
“I suppose, but these bags.” Norah turned her cheek. “Can we do something?”
Toby (she was on a first-name basis; just because he was a doctor didn’t mean she called him by his last name) bent over to examine her creamy complexion.
“A little tweak might work,” he said. “Perhaps we can address that next time. Your biomites are at 94% and I’d like a full analysis before we do that. You don’t have time for that now, a busy woman such as yourself.”
She felt the blood rush to her cheeks, admonishing herself for showing indulgence. He knew what she liked.
And that’s why I’m here.
“Your blood work and scan are perfect. Anything else we can do before you go?”
Her lips parted. A tiny sound stuck in her throat, the words throttled in place. Something was on her mind; it had been since she read the newsfeed that morning. It was bothering her, but she didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want it to sound like little-girl worry (her third husband called it that, or was it the first?).
Besides, if she said it out loud, it could make it true. It was like actors that played terminally ill cancer patients (when cancer was a thing). If they believed they had cancer, they got cancer. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking. Her thoughts had always had a life of their own. If only she devoted more biomites to her brain, she could control what she thought and felt.
She could commit the last 6% of her clay to brain biomites. Well, 5% of her clay. It was impossible to go 100%. Even if she could, she’d become one of those bricks and they’re the ones that started dream disease.
Dream disease—damn it! She thought it.
“No. Nothing else.”
“Very well.”
The nurse returned and the pedicurist left. Norah went to the side room, a small enclave that was without windows or decorations, that housed the largest most comfortable chair invented. It resembled a reclining throne.
They helped her lie back. She tucked the flaps of her robe to avoid exposing her thighs (she was still nude) while the nurse fussed with an IV bag and Toby checked the monitors that tracked her vitals. There would be no catheter (no tube in there, thank you). They would have to clean her.
The chair began to vibrate.
Toby lifted her hand like a delicate flower and kissed it. “Bon voyage, beautiful woman.”
It occurred to Norah they knew her thoughts. This disturbed and pleased her at the same time. There was no need for her to request her wants and desires, they were taken care of. It was just… some thoughts she wanted to keep private. But if that was the price of luxury and a handsome doctor (it occurred to her he wasn’t really a doctor), then she was willing.
The bricks (damn them) didn’t need accelerator chairs to reach their dreamlands. They just closed their eyes and went. Well, back when they had dreamlands. The government took that away because of the dream disease.
Dammit.
When the door closed and the room was silent, the vibrations ramped up. She closed her eyes and let the vibrations take her. She could no longer feel the fabric around her. No longer tell the difference between where she ended and the chair began.
She whirred.
And fell.
A salty breeze blew across her face. She opened her eyes to see an endless horizon on a blazing sea, the sun setting off to her right in a violet sky. She was standing on a glass portico that cantilevered over a sheer cliff that ended in ship-eating boulders.
And that wasn’t all.
Her hips were curved, legs shapely, her cheeks taut where once they sagged. She was young again. And below, relaxing around a pool with an edge that appeared to fall over the cliff, were ten young men straight from Greek mythology—racked abs and oiled biceps.
Dreamland.
She was wealthy in real life, so the excess wasn’t that much different, really. But she couldn’t control everything in the physical world. You must live life on life’s terms, her recovering alcoholic ex-husband told her before leaving (he was number four, she remembered that).
But not in dreamland.
She stepped off the portico and floated down to the pool as gently as a rose petal. Here, life lived on her terms. These were her rules. This was her universe. Perhaps some would find being a goddess boring.
Not so.
Later that night, she lay at the water’s edge, strewn across a large boulder like a wet rag. The black sky sparkled with diamonds; the moons were full (she preferred two moons). That evening’s orgy had sapped her. She could still taste blood and wondered if it was still on her lips. Even in dreamland she could become exhausted. Three men would do that to anyone. (And one woman, just to spice things up.)
She murdered them when she was finished, cut them open and spilled their organs, rolling in the gore as her orgasm faded.
Her inner fantasies indulged, she closed her eyes. She had another couple of days before having to make her exit, to return to the flesh for the required recuperative therapy (too long away from the real world and the body forgets you, they say). She wasn’t one to push it. But for now, she would sleep.
In the morning, she’d have breakfast in the tower, perhaps fly over to the mainland and visit the city. The details of the urbanscape were unknown to her, something the Dream Institute provided for her to discover.
Perhaps she could bring back some children for the evening’s festivities.
She felt the warm arms of sleep when a cool shadow passed over her. It was a strange unsettling feeling. She’d been known to allow mythological creatures into her dreamland, but none now. Even so, one could only pass over one moon.
Not both.
She sat up and willed the ocean still. The frothy water settled as if a wave machine had been cut off. She listened and reached with her mind, her thoughts crawling to the extent of her universe. She fought to keep the paranoid thoughts out of her awareness, the worry she couldn’t extinguish in front of Toby. But she couldn’t help it. Something felt… foreign.
The temperature plummeted.
The ocean immediately froze into a solid sheet. The moon crystalized, the sky shattered. One column of fog escaped her lips before her body—her young, curvaceous body—turned into granite.
Only a distant beeping rang in the silence.
She was unable to turn her head, to move her eyes, to call for help. But the beeping grew louder.
Voices.
Someone was out there. Someone was coming.
“Not yet!” It was Toby’s voice. “Don’t disconnect, she’s got to be stable!”
There were people around her now. The boulders had disappeared; the glacial ocean gone. A quick journey through a dark shattered blackness brought her back to her tremoring flesh.
“Norah!” His face was blurry. “Stay with us, Norah!”
&
nbsp; There was chaos, but it didn’t matter to her. The cold had stolen her breath and taken her will. She just wanted to sleep. No, not sleep. To give up.
To give herself to the dream eater. Forever and ever.
This, she realized as her body was lifted and rushed down a hallway, was what I worried about?
She knew in the final moments where she was going. And she didn’t care. She would become something bigger, something better and pure.
The dream disease works this way.
5
Follow your passion.
Some people have no passion, my granddad used to say. They had nothing to lead them. Passion wasn’t a bag of glitter you could grab; it wasn’t fairy dust that would inspire you to greatness. Passion required great effort; it was a garden that needed to be tended. “And you got passion, Theo,” Granddad would say. Then he would add, “Some people aren’t as lucky as you.”
That always confused me. If passion took all that hard work, what did luck have to do with it? My passion was baseball. And Granddad had a little something to do with that.
The glittery path of passion led me to the World Series. I was on the mound and the crowd was coming unglued. Granddad was in section four, row three, with a stony expression, the one he reserved for times like this. It was the last inning of game seven. The last out. The last pitch. There were tectonic plates under less pressure, but I was made for this moment.
Literally.
I was stroking the baseball’s red stitching when time began to slow. The Hall of Famers always said that was their experience when it was all on the line, when the pressure was unbearable… time just slowed down. Maybe I was thinking faster and it just seemed that way, the synapses firing in overdrive and the carnival ride coming to a slow grinding halt. Maybe I was having a stroke or a tumor was about to burst, but strokes didn’t exist anymore.
Neither did cancer.
Ever since I was little, I couldn’t get enough of that red stitching. Someone once asked if I was happy playing baseball. What the hell does happiness have to do with anything? I thought. Happiness wasn’t always on the other side of success. Good for you if you found it there, it just wasn’t guaranteed. I went through a long list of emotions getting to the top of the game and couldn’t remember a lot of happiness. That glittery path was anything but straight.
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