The road wound along the gorge, next to the small stream that had carved it out. Goats grazed on the grassy bank under small bright trees. Far above us crows wheeled around nests in the crumbling walls of limestone that towered on either side, up and up and up, through all those millions of years of geological time.
Life was bursting out everywhere. There were swallows hunting over the stream, wild irises in the grass, spiders laying traps between the grass stems. Even the rock that dwarfed everything was itself made entirely of the remains of living things settling over millions of years in the warm depths of some tropical Jurassic sea.
This was not a SenSpace dream or a cleverly constructed display in the Beacon. These were the bones of a real planet, spinning in space. This hot sun above was a real star. This was the world. This was life, that strange cross-current in the steady downward flow of entropy: implausible, pointless, but undeniably
there
.
And I was part of it. The irises, the spiders, even those Jurassic coral polyps were all of them my own distant kin…
But Lucy sat rigid in her seat, looking straight ahead. These cliffs and trees meant nothing to her. She had nothing to compare this scene with, no vocabulary with which to interpret it.
And in a brief, cold moment of insight, which I immediately put out of my mind, I saw that, even if she one day learnt to see it for what it was, even then she would not be part of it. She would not be kin to it at all.
‘Oh Sol, roses, how lovely! You really shouldn’t have! You put yourself to so much trouble!’
‘Don’t mention it my dear! I’ve got to have
some
excuse to come and see you! How are you? You seemed a little down last time I saw you!’
There are parts of this story that I didn’t discover until a lot later on, and one of them was this:
In the months before I escaped from Illyria, Ruth had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with a handsome Jewish-American man called Solomon Gladheim, who every day visited her with a fresh bunch of flowers.
Mr Gladheim was about fifty-five years old. He had a fine physique and a magnificent head of grey hair. He had the demeanour of one who has been through struggles and looked tragedy in the face but emerged strengthened, setting the past behind him and looking forward to whatever the road ahead might bring. Perhaps he had lost some loved one? Or maybe he had built up a prosperous business out of nothing by sheer hard work, only to have it all taken from him by a crooked business partner in whom he had mistakenly placed his trust? He wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t impose his troubles on others. Whatever had happened to him in the past, Sol Gladheim was never bitter, never self-absorbed. He hardly ever talked about himself at all. And his kind friendly smile was never far away.
He had just one limitation, however, not necessarily a flaw, of course, but nonetheless undeniably a limitation. He was not real. In fact, insofar as he was genuinely human at all, Sol Gladheim was the projection of a small
group
of people, some male, some female, assisted by an Artificial Intelligence. He was constructed of information. He had no physical existence at all.
Real human beings, let’s admit it, seem to rather elude us Simlings.
‘Hey, Little Rose, you’ve been changing things around again! Where do you find the energy? I was just getting used to that room in pink and white and now you’ve done it in yellow! Nice, though. Very nice indeed!’
Mr Gladheim was one of a number of entities whose job was to patrol the SenSpace Worlds, seeking out the regular users of SenSpace and offering them support, friendship and counselling.
These so-called Help Entities had been created to conform to a number of popular ideas about the characteristics of helpful people which had been established by market research. They were animated by the staff of the SenSpace Corporation’s Welfare Service, an agency which the company had set up to head off public criticism that SenSpace exploited the vulnerable and lonely.
Most of the time Help Entities ran automatically, like Little Rose’s electronic neighbours in the City without End. But they were monitored by duty workers at the Welfare Service, who could assume direct control if needed at any time. From the point of view of the customer, such switches of control were invisible and seamless. Mr Gladheim looked the same, smiled the same way and spoke in the same sort of New York American English whether he was animated by a female welfare worker aged 23, a male worker aged 41, or by a Self-Evolving Artificial Intelligence.
But, real or not, it was Mr Gladheim who saved Ruth’s life four days after my departure. His imaginary knuckles saved her, knocking on the imaginary door of the imaginary house of imaginary Little Rose.
Ruth had fallen in love with him. She talked to him for hours. She told him secrets. She giggled and flirted. Each day she dressed up for him in new imaginary dresses, each morning she racked her brains for things to tell him about.
The Welfare Service, seeing the need, arranged for him to visit daily. It was no bother. He could be in many different places at the same time. They set him to visit daily with bunches of flowers, and to pay attention to her in a style which lay somewhere between indulgent father and respectful suitor, with a dash of professional counsellor thrown in.
He visited the day after my departure, and Little Rose told him she was worried about me. She said I was very selfish and never thought to tell her what I was doing or whether she might need me. Mr Gladheim clucked his tongue.
The day after that, my third day in Epiros, he visited again. Little Rose said she was very tired and Mr Gladheim asked if she was well and if she needed any help. She said no, but a hug would be nice. So he gave her a hug, a fatherly imaginary hug.
The next day she didn’t answer when he knocked. This was unusual. It was rare for Ruth not to spend most of her time in SenSpace, and unheard of for her not to be there at the times that Mr Gladheim had said that he would call.
The next day she still didn’t answer.
Or the next.
Mr Gladheim was being operated by the self-evolving artificial intelligence at the time and it recognized that for Ruth not to be there three days in a row was extremely atypical. It checked with SenSpace Centre, which monitored the entry and exit of customers into the SenSpace world. Centre looked into the matter very thoroughly and after nearly three microseconds it came back to the Welfare AI with the surprising information that Ruth
was
in SenSpace and indeed was currently projecting into the ‘City Without End
TM
’ Conceptual Field, though there was no sign of activity.
The AI notified the duty Welfare Officer, a human being, a woman in fact, who pulled the full ‘Connection Profile’ from Centre onto her screen – and was alarmed by what she saw.
‘This is going to look bad for the Corporation,’ fretted the Welfare Officer. ‘Someone is going to be for it.’
She e-mailed her senior with the whole profile. The senior shook his head.
‘This’ll be egg on our face, that’s for sure.’
He forwarded the profile to his own manager, marked urgent.
‘The service is going to come badly out of this,’ he commented in a covering note.
The Profile showed that Ruth had been connected continuously for five days. For the last three days, though she had still been connected, there had been no detectable output from her SenSpace address.
The manager told the senior to tell the Welfare Officer to contact the emergency services. Not the imaginary emergency services, the real ones, the ones in Illyria City.
Ambulance sirens went whooping through the streets, like I so often heard them do down there in the abyss as I stood on our fiftieth floor balcony, looking out at the towers and the sea. But this time they were not going to attend to some stranger. They weren’t going to deal with one of those dramas that happen to other people. They were going to our block in Faraday, our apartment. They were going to the place that no one visited, the place where nothing ever happened.
A strange group emerged from the elevator at the fiftieth floor: the paramedic and his robot assistant, two police officers and
their
robot assistant and the plastec janitor Lynda with her smooth pink face…
No one answered the front door of the apartment, and it was locked. Lynda the janitor emitted a signal in ultrasound giving the override code and instructing the door to unbolt. It duly did so, but still could not be opened because of the two manual bolts that Ruth had had fixed on the inside.
‘There’s a Mr Simling lives here too, apparently,’ said one of the police officers. They had checked with Central Records.
‘He has not been here since Monday,’ reported the robot janitor.
‘We know that,’ said the police officer. ‘We know that he…’
The police robot interrupted politely. It had just received more information from Central Records which said that I had crossed into Epiros on Monday afternoon. Also: that I was suspected in being involved in a theft involving a syntec. Also: that I was the subject of a classified security file entry.
Some data input clerk somewhere had slipped up. These pieces of information had up to now been filed in different locations and the obvious connections had not been made…
The police officers looked at each other grimly:
‘This is going to look bad. Someone’s going to be in trouble…’
But at least the someone wasn’t going to be either of them.
The police robot and the paramedic robot smashed in the door.
The whole crowd – three humans and three robots – entered our neat little apartment.
‘Mrs Simling? Mrs Simling?’
No answer. Charlie came whirring out of the kitchen where he’d been waiting for five days for instructions.
‘Hello, can I be of any assistance?’ was the message that was sent to his voice box by his small electronic brain. But we’d still not got that voice box repaired, and all that came out was the faintest of buzzing sounds.
They checked all the rooms and found that the door of the SenSpace room was locked on the inside. So the robots broke it down. The vibrations knocked an ornament from a shelf, a little china cup painted with a tiny red rose, Ruth’s one souvenir of her Victorian porcelain collection back in Chicago.
In the middle of the room Ruth was dangling in her SenSpace suit, like an empty coat dangling from a hook…
When they cut her down they found that all four of her limbs were ulcerated and gangrenous. So were her eyes. Her whole body was covered with septic sores. Her water bottle had run out two days previously. She was critically dehydrated. She’d been marinating all this time in urine and faeces and pus. I hadn’t been around to get her out of the suit at nights, that was the problem. She’d grown to rely on me to do that, and I hadn’t been there.
Charlie came trundling clumsily up to the paramedic, jogging him. The older policeman pushed him gently out of the door of the room and closed it behind him.
‘An X3!’ he murmured to his colleague. ‘Takes me back a bit! I haven’t seen one of those in years.’
Forty-eight hours later Ruth woke up in a bed in the Ullman Memorial Hospital. She didn’t know how much time had passed, or what had happened, or where she was. Strange pins-and-needles sensations were coming from her fingers and arms and toes, and her vision was blurred and flat and grainy.
In fact she was seeing through a temporary electronic eye spliced to her right optic nerve. The world resembled an early attempt at Virtual Reality, before the days of high resolution images.
‘How are you Mrs Simling?’ enquired a syntec nurse, while simultaneously sending an ultrasound signal to Hospital Control to say that patient RS/5/76 was awake.
Some time later a young male doctor arrived. He looked down at the mutilated object on the bed. His palms began to sweat disagreeably as he steeled himself to say what he had to say.
‘You’ve had a very nasty thing happen to you, Mrs Simling,’ he began.
Ruth didn’t react much.
‘I’m afraid,’ he tried again, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had to perform some rather drastic surgery.’
He looked uncomfortably across at the syntec, which offered a beautiful smile. The doctor smiled back. The syntec was much more agreeable to look at than Ruth, and, like all syntecs, was wonderful to flirt with.
He looked down again at the body of my mother, resenting her now for being so ugly and so unlucky and so entitled to be distressed.
‘I’m afraid Mrs Simling that your limbs were very badly damaged and we’ve had to amputate them.’
There now, he’d told her. He’d have to be sympathetic for ten minutes or so and then he could quite justifiably go on to other things and forget about the whole unpleasant business. He was only covering for a colleague anyway. He didn’t really belong in this ward.
Ruth nodded. She seemed to be taking it very well, thought the young doctor hopefully. Well, why not go for broke? He shrugged, quite visibly in fact, though he didn’t intend the shrug to be seen.
‘Also, there was a problem with your eyes and…’
The doctor tailed off.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you needn’t worry about hospital charges and so on. The SenSpace company have already said they’ll cover everything that isn’t covered by your medical insurance, including long-term care. The only thing is: you might want to get a lawyer to look at that offer sometime, Mrs Simling, because confidentially you’ve got the SenSpace people over a barrel…’
He trailed off, realizing that he was hardly addressing the central issue.
‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get out and about much anymore Mrs Simling,’ he said.
He hesitated. He had no instinct about these things, that was the problem.
‘What we can do nowadays,’ he said, ‘is to wire your nerves up directly to SenSpace. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Direct Link procedure? We can link you up so you can move around freely in there, even if you can’t do so out here. You can still get the sensation of limbs and eyes and so on…’
Ruth’s lips moved, as if she was struggling to speak.
The doctor knew he was getting it wrong. This woman had just woken up to find her body hacked back to a stump, and here he was gabbling about compensation claims and SenSpace.
‘I know it’s not the same,’ he said, almost humbly.
He looked over at the pretty syntec nurse, who was attending to a nutrient drip at the end of the bed. Seeing him looking at her, the nurse at once eagerly caught his eye and gave him another meltingly lovely smile. He smiled back, broadly. Then he turned his attention back, with an effort and again with some resentment, to his very unsexy patient.
‘But of course it is
ever
so real in SenSpace now as you know, and you meet people and build a house and visit friends and…’
‘So I will live in SenSpace permanently?’ said Ruth, finally managing to speak.
They were the first words she had spoken out loud for many days.
‘Yes. But of course…’
Ruth laughed merrily, cutting right across him.
‘Always? Even sleep there? Even get up there in the morning? No-one will ever tell me I’ve been in there long enough?’
‘Yes, but as I say you can…’
‘Oh that’s wonderful!’ said Ruth, still laughing. ‘It’s like a dream come true!’
The doctor stared at the thin ruined face, with the wires disappearing under the bandage over its eyes. It seemed quite horrible to him to see it laugh.
‘…As I say, if you want to look around outside, you can always hire a Vehicle.’
Ruth wasn’t listening. She looked up at the grainy face of the doctor. He was sneaking another look at the pretty syntec. And the syntec was giving him yet another dazzling smile.
‘Just
exactly
what I wanted,’ said Ruth.
‘Oh, well, good…’ the doctor said vaguely.
He was thinking at that moment about the syntec nurse. It struck him suddenly that this third smile was
exactly
the same as the other two, right down to the slight leftward tilt of the head. It wasn’t like a new smile at all, more like replaying the same smile again. And this took away its charm.
The fact was that, like thousands of SE machines across Illyria, the nurse had been wiped clean. A whole vocabulary of flirtation, which she had learnt from the doctor and others like him, had all been wiped away, along with a whole repertoire of patient care. All over the territory this had been happening: syntecs and robots being loaded into vans and taken back to the factories where they were made, artificial intelligences being shut down and reprogrammed again from scratch.
The doctor pulled his attention reluctantly back to his patient.
‘Well, good. I’m glad you are so positive about it. If there are any problems, don’t hesitate to ask…’
‘Just do it quickly please,’ Ruth said.
The reality of her position was beginning to hit her. She needed SenSpace. She was appalled by the prospect of having to lie here in this hospital room while her fears came pressing in around her bed.
There was no one else to fill this space, no-one but fears to come and visit her.
‘I’ve got a son. George…’ she said to the syntec, the doctor having slipped away.
The syntec made some enquiries with Hospital Control.
‘I’m afraid we haven’t been able to locate him. It seems he is travelling abroad.’