by Jeff Pollard
“What?”
“Look into Descartes.”
Renee and Patrick, also fourteen, sit close together at a wooden table in a great library. Above them is an intricate glass spire that seems to go on forever. The crystalline spire refracts and reflects so much light that it casts a wonderful but muted light evenly across the entire library. There are no shadows. Touch-Holograms float in front of Renee and Patrick, presenting information in a fully interactive sphere. Besides these two, the library is entirely devoid of life.
“My mom said we should check out the one on Day-Car.”
“How do you spell that?” Patrick flips across several tabs looking for Descartes, but while he's doing this, Renee puts her hands on his thigh. She faces forward, but her eyes spy on his reaction. Renee leans closer to him. She wants to kiss him. Or more accurately, she wants him to kiss her. She leans close, but he nervously flips through more tabs. “Is this it? Des-cart-es. Does that say Day-Car?”
“Hey, her name is Rene.”
“That's an ugly woman,” Patrick mutters.
“Okay, so it's a French dude,” Renee says. Renee scoots a little closer.
“Rene Descartes is most famous for the expression 'I think, therefore I am,” Patrick says. “Related: Solipsism, the belief that only one's own mind exists and everything else is an illusion.”
“Whoa,” Renee replies.
“Whoa indeed.”
“That would be awesome,” Renee says.
“Awesome?”
“If my mind was the only thing that exists. That makes me god,” Renee says, relaxing back into her chair.
“I don't want to be god,” Patrick quips.
“Why not?”
“Then it wouldn't matter what I did, it's all fake,” Patrick reclines in his chair also. Renee leans her shoulder on his.
“All that matters is what is real to us,” Renee says, leaning in close.
“Well, I think-” Renee doesn't want to hear what he thinks, she kisses him eagerly.
“So...how about that Descartes guy,” Patrick gulps. He sits up, trying to focus back on the information cloud.
Did I ruin it? Was I supposed to let him make the first move? She looks back to the hologram with a sigh.
“I think, therefore I am,” Renee reads, “Cogito, Ergo Sum. Latin just sounds-” she stops mid-sentence.
“What?”
From Renee's point of view, a visual display has appeared around Patrick.
Patrick Campbell, location: SR-45, Age: 28, Male.
She's never seen anything like this before.
“What?” Patrick asks again.
Renee focuses in on one piece of information. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
Stunned, Renee runs for televator.
Back home, Renee runs from the televator and up the stairs to the top-floor glass observation dome. She finds Medved lying in a very large recliner, smoking a pipe fit for a bear. He's giggling and watching a kind of light show on the glass dome. Medved also has an aura of information displayed around him.
Medved (Peter), location: AT-14, Age:68, Male.
“Hey honey bear,” Medved says, “Something wrong?”
Renee runs to her room and stands in front of her large mirror, but is afraid of what she might see. She takes a deep breath and faces the truth:
Renee, location: SC-P1, Age: 14, Female.
“SC-P1? What the hell is that?”
Her name lights up in a different color. Renee thinks hard and makes the selection change to SC-P1.
SC-P1.
Xenon Shock? Yes / No / Unsure
Temperature: N/A.
Oxygen Content: N/A.
Last Maintenance: N/A.
Request Maintenance?
Advanced
Exit
What the hell is going on?
Renee sits on the couch, reading a novel on a touch-hologram. She's not really reading, she stares through the hologram to the televator. The televator door closes by itself, then reopens. Gwen appears:
Gwen, Location AF-29, Age: 71, Female.
Seventy-one!? Gwen sees the shock in Renee's eyes. Gwen simply puts a finger over her lips, then walks past Renee. Percival emerges from the televator.
Percival (Nellie), Location AA-18, Age: 73, Male(Female).
Gwen walks up the stairs as Percival arrives. He looks to Renee a bit suspiciously. Renee buries her face in her book and tries to hide the realization that her father is a seventy year old woman.
8
Percival grabs his coffee and heads for the televator. Renee stalks after him. She slides up against the televator pressing her ear to the cold metal. She hears his muffled voice say: “Animatron one.”
The televator door re-opens with no Percival inside. Renee jumps inside and quickly closes the door behind her. She holds her breath for a moment before meekly saying, “Animatron one?”
“I'm sorry, you have no animatrons selected,” the televator voice responds. Renee is defeated. “Would you like to use a default animatron?”
“...yes?”
A robot, genderless, bald, wakes up hanging by its neck in a docking station. “Where am I?” it speaks in Renee's voice. It extends its legs and undocks. Looking around, the robot discovers a giant warehouse filled with other animatrons resting in identical docking stations.
Her clumsy feet take tentative steps onto the concrete floor. She walks down the row of docking stations, looking at the lifeless animatrons. Some are generic, like her. Others seem to be exact copies of people.
Renee comes to the end of an aisle and realizes that there are dozens more aisles. There must be thousands of robots. A few people stand about forty meters down this main aisle. Displays appear over their heads, showing their names. She scans the displays but doesn't recognize any of the names.
A man walks toward her. Renee freezes. As he approaches, she realizes that he is a robot too. Renee panics and ducks behind a bank of docking stations. The man follows, finding her crouched behind a robot hanging from a docking station. “Hey, you're not supposed to be here!”
Renee's bare silicone feet slide on the cold floor as she starts to run.
“Hey, stop!”
Renee escapes into a stairwell and runs up the stairs. Her animatronic body is heavy, and she's not used to having so much momentum as she turns a corner. Her shoulder crashes into the wall, putting a large dent in the metal.
A few flights up she sees a door marked “Vivisection Floor.” Renee quietly opens the door and finds herself in a clean, white, hospital-like floor. She carefully sneaks past empty operating rooms. She hears activity not far away. Following the sound, she peeks through a large glass window where three surgeons are operating on a body. The surgeons appear human, but on close inspection their skin doesn't look quite right, their glass eyes containing digital cameras are a little too reflective. These robots are stripping the skin from a dead body. “They must be performing an autopsy,” Renee thinks, as they remove muscle and flesh, excising nerve endings. Renee looks at the displays hovering over each doctor. The display over the red-headed surgeon reads Nellie (Percival).
The body shutters. Renee jumps, stunned, she puts her hands up in front of her in an automatic defense mechanism, but accidentally shoves her hands through the glass window, not knowing her own strength. The glass shatters, alerting the surgical team.
Renee's generic robot sits in a swivel chair in a dark room. “What were you doing to that woman?” Renee asks quietly.
“What are you doing here?” Nellie asks. This animatron looks almost exactly like Nellie's human body did.
“What were you doing?” Renee persists.
“Saving his life,” Nellie responds.
“It looked like you were torturing him.”
“I was performing a vivisection. It's a procedure to extract a living nervous system from a dying body.”
“I don't understand,” Renee says.
“We are g
oing to take her brain and plug it into a simulation. A computer world that's shared by thousands of other people like her. When we're done, she'll look like that,” Nellie points to a glass vat in the corner. It's a brain, spine, and nerves suspended in cerebro-spinal fluid and hooked to wires.
“But...who would want to live in a jar?”
Nellie takes a moment to carefully think about her next words. “From their point of view, they don't live in a jar. We experience the world through impulses interpreted by our brains. By controlling those impulses, people can experience anything. These people live in a world we call . . . Solipsis.”
Renee's jaw drops. She approaches the vat, wanting a closer look.
“Stop!” Nellie says. “Don't get too close, you don't have much coordination.”
Renee turns to Nellie, looking up at her from her glass eyes in her blank generic face. “Dad...Am I in a jar?”
Nellie kneels in front of her daughter. “You were vivisected just after birth. You wouldn't have lasted a month. Three open-heart surgeries couldn't fix you. There was no saving you, you were going to die, but you didn't have to.”
“I should be dead right now,” Renee says quietly, looking down to the floor.
“No. Look at me,” Nellie crouches lower, into Renee's eye-line. “You are exactly where you should be.” Renee nods. Her eyes are blank, looking but not seeing.
“So you're a woman in real life?” Renee asks after a long pause. Nellie nods. “So my dad is a woman. Alright.”
“We can be anything in here. For a while I switched back and forth, but once you came along I decided I should pick one and stick with it.”
“How do two people who don't have bodies reproduce?”
“We used a surrogate,” Nellie says.
“But if you're both women...”
“We had our DNA combined, so we're both your mother, technically. I really wanted a boy, but you came out a girl.”
“What?”
“It's a joke,” Nellie says.
“I don't get it.”
“We couldn't have had a boy...all X chromosomes and such.”
“Right, I guess I knew that,” Renee replies. “Nice dad-joke.” Renee looks back to the brain in a vat. “So I should be dead right now.”
“Your body is dead. We can keep living, maybe forever, being without loved ones. We've made heaven a reality. A place where death has no dominion.”
“I want to see myself,” Renee says. Nellie takes Renee by the hand and leads her toward a bank of elevators. They enter a clean room surrounded by windows on three sides and banks of electronic controls and panels. Two technicians sit at consoles, forty-something men, not robots, actual flesh-and-blood. Beyond the windows there's a dark abyss, glowing a dim bluish-purple. There are thousands of vats containing brains/nervous systems suspended in cerebro-spinal fluid.
“Welcome to the Comatorium," Nellie says. A display reads: 39.44% Xenon / 60.21% Oxygen
“Xenon?” Renee wonders, somewhere in the abyss, her brain makes the connection. “What's a Xenon Shock?”
“If a vat leaks or breaks, the brain might be exposed to air, causing the brain to deteriorate rapidly. The Oxygen feeds your brain, but pure oxygen is both highly explosive and causes its own ill-effects on the brain. Xenon has neuro-protective properties. It slows the brain damage,” Nellie says, “the shock is the strange feeling you get when your brain is exposed to the air. Since the brain itself has no pain sensors, we've had to incorporate artificial touch sensors that we simulate. So it's a feeling that's not really based on the reality of the body.”
“I wanna see my brain,” Renee says quietly.
“You can't go in there,” a technician announces.
“Why not?”
“You're not even allowed in that animatron.”
“You have to be sixteen before you can pilot one of these,” Nellie says.
“Get her out of here before she breaks something.”
“Relax, we're going,” Nellie says.
Nellie leads Renee to her docking station. “Are we going back to Solipsis already?” Renee asks.
“Yes. I'm in enough trouble already,” Nellie says. Renee stops cold.
“But I've never done anything real in my life. I've never even seen the real world. I want to look up at the sky and feel the sun on me.”
“You wouldn't be seeing it with your own eyes. It'd be these,” Nellie taps on Renee's glass eye. “And when you are here, you aren't directly feeling or seeing anything, it's all filtered through electronics, cameras. You can't directly experience the real world. So in a way, Solipsis is more real to you than Earth.”
“I wanna see the real sky.”
Nellie leads Renee up a spiral staircase in a glass atrium. They come out on top of this glass pyramid rising out of the sea. A tower extends ten meters above them, housing warning lights and antennae. Renee looks down the glass pyramid walls surrounding her. Waves wash up on the pyramid, but beneath the waves, she can see the platform extend deeper into the sea. The entire platform is a pyramid, and only this glass peak rises from the sea. Clouds obscure the sun, but threaten to give way. Nellie puts her arm around Renee as they peer up at the sun flirting with the edges of clouds.
“Why an ocean platform?” Renee asks.
“We had to get out from under any legal jurisdiction,” Nellie replies.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you're on land, you're governed by county, city, state, and federal governments. That's a lot of red-tape to deal with, especially for us. All it took was one special interest group getting their money in the hands of a few state senators and we could have been shut down, servers seized, plugs pulled.”
“Why?” Renee asks.
“A lot of people don't like what we're doing. And they're the kind of people that love to tell everyone else what to do,” Nellie says.
The sun finally pokes through, shining down on Renee for the first time. She feels the warmth of its radiation on her fake skin and stares into the bright disc. She expects the experience to be profoundly moving. But it feels distant, almost fake. Underwhelmed, she closes her eyes and lowers her head.
“I've seen enough.”
Percival and Renee walk amongst falling leaves down the center of a beautiful, vibrant neighborhood street in Solipsis. There are no cars in this place. They walk together, watching the fake sun set. It's larger than the real sun; a churning ball of yellow and orange with fingers spiraling out into the blue sky.
“Why did you keep this all a secret?” Renee asks.
“We tried to tell you,” Percival says quietly.
“You tried? When!?”
“It's as if you didn't want to know, you blocked out the information.” Percival tells Renee, making her quietly angry. They don't speak for a while.
“So I can look like anything right? Why the hell do I look like this?”
“You look great,” Percival says.
“I'm an awkward teenager, nothing is in the right proportion, I'm like half adult, half child.”
“It's called puberty,” Percival responds, “we wanted your development to be as normal as possible. So your hormones and growth have all been simulated.”
“Wait a minute. Puberty? I don't even have a reproductive system! Why am I going through this shit? Can't I just get an adult body?”
“It always takes some time to get used to being in a different avatar. We're different sizes and shapes, the brain has to relearn a lot of things. We've found ways of helping you adapt, and we've come a long way, but we're afraid of changing avatars for kids, the drastic changes might cause problems with a developing mind.”
Renee won't be satisfied by any answers, a rage is building inside her. “Why is Patrick twenty-eight?”
“His mind is frozen in development. He will always have the brain of a 14-year old,” Percival says.
“He won't grow up?” Renee asks. Percival tries to comfort Renee, but she pushes him away.
>
“Some minds take to the adaptation system, but others don't. They find themselves in arrested development. It's as if they don't age.”
“We were going to grow old together,” Renee says. “He'll always just be a boy?”
Percival nods. Renee feels tears start to well up and runs away so her father won't see her cry.
Renee and Patrick hold each other close, sitting in a tree house. They look up at an especially vibrant skyscape: stars, galaxies, shooting stars, all much brighter than the night sky on Earth.
“My whole life is fake,” Renee says, “that asshole!”
“Don't be so hard on him,” Patrick says.
“But he lied to me,” she replies.
“He saved both our lives,” Patrick says, “he did my vivisection.”
“Wait, how did you know he saved my life?” Renee asks.
“Because, it was a really tense time,” Patrick says, “hard to forget that.”
“You remember my birth?” Renee asks.
“Oh yeah, real well,” he replies excitedly, “It was like right after I moved here.”
“So you've been fourteen all my life,” Renee mutters.
“I guess so,” Patrick says sheepishly.
Renee looks into his eyes, “I thought we would grow old together.”
“We don't have to think like that.”
Renee sneaks back into her house in the dead of night, climbing a tree to the roof and entering through the glass dome. She gets to her room, quietly turning on a lamp. She looks through old photos, mementos, dream journals. Lies, all of them. Renee flips through graphic depictions of nightmares: visions of hell, torture, death. She tears out page after page, crumpling the papers and throwing them to the ground. Percival watches from the doorway.
9
Gwen sits comfortably on the couch, reading a book and listening to headphones. She turns a page and is distracted by an odd sound. She turns off the music and listens. After a long silence, there is a sickening thump. Gwen proceeds carefully down the stairs and the noise gets louder. She finds a trail of blood leading to the kitchen. Gwen tentatively steps around the corner, and reluctantly allows her eyes to follow the blood trail.
