Thorn dared to say, “I guess we’re just on our own out here. I certainly feel so alone.”
“How’s Granny Ba-nanny… I mean, Lady Hatchet?” Nuremburg asked.
Christopher Goi asked, “Do you think she’ll ever get out of bed? She went to bed in one of the yachts and she’s been off staring at the stars in such a bizarre daze.”
Nuremburg added, “And it makes her look really old.”
Thorn said, “She’s probably homesick for Earth now that she thinks it’s gone, if it’s really gone. If so, that’s normal to feel like that. And she is really old.”
“Well,” Nuremburg said, “if she doesn’t shake her glum we’ll have to go electrocute her.”
Christopher Goi nodded, seriously, thoughtfully. “That always puts kick back into a sad person.”
Nuremburg asked, “Do you think she’s dying?”
Christopher Goi was surprised. “Why do you ask that? Is there a reason to think it isn’t just malaise?”
Thorn said, “Probably not, I just worry that we’ll all get older and need splints and plastic legs and catheters into everything and then we’ll die of not being able to crawl to the food.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Nurse Bobbit remarked from where he sat in the far corner, face renewed and flawless, tightly woven back onto his plastic skull. “And that will leave me all alone with that old other robot you have, Frankenstein.”
“Phranc C-line!” Christopher Goi corrected.
Thorn repeated, “I still worry about what’ll happen to us when we humans are too old to even crawl.”
The robot said, “Why can’t we just be happy with memory and not think so much of the horrible memories we haven’t even had yet?”
Thorn asked the robot, “We? I thought you couldn’t worry. You had the mind of something better.”
The robot said, “My many experiences along the way made something sick occur. My mind has grown something odd since the wires are organic and sloppy. A human infection. I’m not happy about it at all. You humans are all a vile bunch of creatures living on and on and growing more outlandish and grotesque mental bridges with every passing year.”
“You’re growing a human mind?” Thorn asked the robot.
“I pray to any god of any religion on my knobby nuts-and-bolts knees that nothing so vile occurs. But my mind has grown old enough to create too many mental synapses that I’d like to rip out, right now!”
“What does it make?”
“Sadness. Anxiety. Fear. Worry. Doubt. Hypochondria.”
Thorn said, “You make it sound as though we all age into some mental nightmare.”
Nurse Bobbit nodded. “More convoluted and tangled bridges spinning off into irrelevancy. But then the mind is a terrible thing. It’s not what you think.”
“Humans made you,” Christopher Goi reminded him. “And then I remade you to last. I revived you and your face. You could last hundreds more years, now, before another tune up.”
Nurse Bobbit said, “I’ll live to regret it. And I now worry about it. I feel worried sick.”
Christopher Goi shuddered and looked into Thorn’s narrowing eyes, bemused. Thorn just smiled back blankly, thinking about how the mind is a terrible thing.
In the villa, Thorn went to a room full of mirrors. He put on a hologram of Eleven Jane in yellow pajamas and sadly danced with her, getting as close as he could without touching.
She sang, “We are all one in light and water. We are all one in spirit and matter. Let us swim in the ocean of space to show how we are all one. We are all one in light and water. We are all one in spirit and matter. Let us swim in the ocean of space to show how we are all one.”
The end
Multitude Page 31
