The Methuselarity Transformation (11 page)

“Is she…?” Hector began, addressing the older man.

“Flesh and blood,” responded the man with a knowing smile, “and as far as I know unattached.”

“Loved your presentation. That was quite a show.”

“Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. We’ve got to do whatever it takes to keep them in their place. I’m Ellison.”

“I’m Hector. Let me give you hand,” Hector said, stepping forward.

“Thanks, but not necessary. Samson here can help.” With that, he reached behind the back of the stationary figure and flipped a switch. The blond man came back to life and began carrying things to Ellison’s car. He seemed completely unaware of the time that had elapsed since he was turned off.

Hector accompanied Ellison to his hotel and they wound up talking deep into the night. Ellison was passionate about his cause. He’d become disillusioned years earlier when his six-year-old daughter drowned at the beach while under the care of a SPUD that was charged with her safety. When the undertow swept her off the beach, it had jumped in after her, but stopped moving after it hit the water. Both Ellison’s lifeless child and the SPUD washed up together on the beach hours later. That model was later recalled because of a defect in the integrity of its skin that made it vulnerable to moisture. Ellison never differentiated his anger at the manufacturer from his personalized rage at its product. He had trusted it, after all, with his daughter’s life and it had let him down.

“I was betrayed, too,” said Hector when Ellison had finished his story. “I had my heart broken when I was just a kid.”

“What happened?” asked Ellison, leaning in with his chin on his hands.

“I had a nanny for as long as I could remember. Her name was Arianna. She was with me almost all the time and I always felt safe around her. She had a wonderful smile that seemed only for me, and even as a small child I was aware that she was more beautiful than most other women, prettier even than I thought my mother was.”

“She sounds very special,” said Ellison. “Did something terrible happen to her?” Ellison guessed that she’d somehow become the victim of a SPUD.

“Not exactly,” answered Hector. “When I hit adolescence, I started to have a different kind of feeling for her. She wasn’t just beautiful, but ageless, too. As I caught up to her, my attraction to her became overwhelming. She was so close, yet always just out of reach. I’d fantasize about being with her every night as I fell asleep. I had to have her.”

“What about her? Was she falling for you, too?”

“For a while I thought she was. As time went by, she seemed emotionally softer. Her manner was more tender and intimate. I could only hope that it meant she cared for me in the same way I cared for her. But I knew, of course, there were barriers, taboos. She was my nanny, after all. She wasn’t supposed to love me that way.”

“It sounds like it must have been torture for you.”

“It was. Then on my seventeenth birthday, we were at a party. I’d been drinking a little too much and suddenly couldn’t stand it any longer. In a moment of impulse, I took her in my arms and kissed her.”

“Then what happened?” asked Ellison.

“Absolutely nothing. Her lips were stiff and unyielding. There was no trace of any affection or connection. She pushed me away and then I saw this look of utter bewilderment in her face. I suddenly realized that she had no framework for
responding to my advance. And I felt my stomach turn, realizing what I’d just tried to kiss.”

“She was a SPUD,” said Ellison, finally getting it. “You’d been in love with an illusion.”

“It was humiliating. How could I have missed all the signs? We’d become contemporaries, yet I’d failed to notice that she’d never aged. And all her emotions were simulations. How could I have failed to see that?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Ellison put an arm around his shoulders. “When she came into your life, you were just a child. And as you grew up and became more perceptive, she must have been gradually upgraded and educated in the nuances of human emotion so that the illusion kept pace with your ability to detect it.”

“My parents never told me she wasn’t human. I found out later that they were as surprised that I didn’t know as I was surprised at my discovery. She’d been such a crude approximation of a human at the beginning that they’d assumed I’d always known.”

“So what happened next?”

“I was crushed and heartsick. I couldn’t look at her without a sinking feeling of betrayal and humiliation. So I told my parents to get rid of her.”

“And they did?”

“I never saw her again. I had no idea what happened to her and didn’t care. Maybe they sold her or maybe they sent her back to the factory for parts. It no longer mattered now that I knew she wasn’t human. All I could feel about her from then on was contempt.”

“Consider yourself among friends. Most of the people in the Tribe have been hurt in some way by a SPUD. Mostly the damage happens when people expect them to be more
human than they’re capable of being. It was probably a mistake in the first place to create them in our image. No good was ever going to come of that.” Ellison was a skilled closer, but Hector was already sold.

Hector joined the movement and became Ellison’s protegé, traveling around the country with his blond, blue-eyed SPUD, leading rallies. He gradually took Ellison’s place in the presentations, relishing the power of activating and deactivating his synthetic foil, fair compensation for the power he imagined Arianna once had over him.

Ellison watched his young accomplice approvingly from the sidelines while Hector savored the limelight. Hector’s youthful zeal together with the chemistry between him and Samson was drawing bigger and bigger crowds. But getting the word out was only part of Ellison’s plan.

“He’ll do very nicely,” thought Ellison during a particularly rousing rally just months after they’d first met. “Soon he’ll be ready. Then nothing can stop us.”

14

RAY’S DRIVER PULLED
up to the front of a weathered brick faced building almost entirely covered in a dense thatch of ivy. The passenger door slid silently open.

“This is it,” said the driver.

Ray stared at the building, rooted to his seat. Beads of perspiration formed at his temples and dripped slowly past his throbbing ears.

“I said we’re here,” prompted the driver. “aren’t you going to get out?”

Ray drew in a deep breath, clenched and unclenched his hands, and put his right foot out the door.

“Are you sure this is the right place?’ he asked, staring at the dilapidated structure. “It’s supposed to be a doctor’s office.”

“Of course I’m sure. Now are you going to get out or do you want me to take you back where you came from?”

He drew another long breath, swung his left leg onto the pavement and pulled himself to his feet. He wobbled a moment, steadied himself, and waved the driver off. He
moved tentatively across the sidewalk to the entrance, which was secured with a rusty iron gate. The doctor’s name was the third from the top: “Abigail Jensen.” There was no modifier indicating her professional status or degree. Beside the nameplate was a black button framed in corroded brass. He pushed it and waited.

The lock on the gate buzzed and he pulled it open. He hadn’t seen an entry like this since his youth. He turned the handle on the door and it gave way. As he stepped across the threshold, it felt as though he were stepping through a time warp into the distant past. Inside was an ancient looking elevator and a stairwell. Ray chose the stairs and made his way warily to the third floor as the stairs creaked under foot. Upon emerging into the corridor, he spotted a door cracked open. A diminutive figure stepped into the opening and beckoned him in with a sweep of her hand.

“Dr. Jensen?”

“You must be Ray,” she replied, extending her hand. He didn’t take it. She nodded, let her arm drop to her side, and stepped aside to let him pass.

Ray’s eyes darted about. The tension grew along the muscles in the right side of his neck until he gave in with a stifled jerk. Everything about this place felt alien. On the floor before him was a threadbare oriental rug. Paintings and photographs hung from the walls. And there was fabric everywhere. When he let himself breathe, the aroma of the room filled his nostrils with an unsettling familiarity. He tried to place the smell, but any attached images lingered just beyond his awareness. His ears began to ring as he imagined the room teeming with microbes. There was too much texture. How could he ever control the contamination?

The doctor gestured toward a couch, inviting him to sit. He stood in the middle of the room, arms drawn tightly to his
sides and shook his head from side to side, looking like a small child refusing to obey a parent. The room suddenly seemed huge, the ceiling vast and distant.

Dr. Jensen settled into a large upholstered chair in his line of sight and rested her hands softly in her lap. She looked even tinier, framed by the chair, than she’d looked when he’d first seen her...like an antique doll left over from another century. Her face was soft, the experience of years mapped with branching rivulets and trails. Tightly coiled silver ringlets seemed to form a protective helmet atop her head. Only her eyes had escaped the ravages of time and now drew Ray’s attention. Deep creases defined the upper edges of her eyelids, accentuating dark brown irises reaching into a well of serenity.

“You may stand if you like,” she said, “whatever makes you comfortable.”

“This was a mistake,” Ray replied. “I should go.” He began to turn, but his leaden legs bound his feet solidly to the floor. He was going nowhere.

“Let’s see,” the doctor said. “Tell me what you’ve come to get help with and we can decide if your trip was worthwhile.”

“Lena...my wife...wanted me to see you. She’s tired of all my precautions. She thinks you can help.”

“Precautions?”

“Safeguards for our lives. Keeping out intruders. Protecting against infection.”

“Reasonable threats,” Dr. Jensen said, palms outstretched.

“Yes...yes. Reasonable threats. So you understand, then.” Ray’s posture relaxed just a bit.

“But Lena thinks your precautions are somehow excessive?”

“Yes, she does. She doesn’t understand how perilous the world can be.”

“Not like you do, of course. So tell me, Ray, what do these precautions cost you?”

“Cost me?”

“What do you give up in exchange for your absolute safety?”

Ray’s legs were getting tired and his head was beginning to swim. He longed for a safe place to rest. The doctor’s eyes scanned his body and fixed on his trembling legs.

“Comfort? Do you sacrifice comfort like you’re doing now? Pleasure? Freedom? What are all the things you’ve given up?”

Ray’s shoulders slumped and his head hung. He sighed all the way to the bottoms of his feet.

“Yes, comfort, pleasure, freedom...everything I guess. I’ve given up everything. And I’m about to lose Lena, too.”

“So we need to learn how the world came to feel so dangerous to you that you’ve had to give up living just to keep from dying. Does that make sense?” Her eyes were again engaged with his. Her face was relaxed and peaceful. Ray felt the muscles of his own face relax as his facial expression began mirroring hers. And from somewhere deep within him came a glimmer of hope. He nodded in agreement.

“Then you will need to trust me.” She stood and faced him, holding both hands out in front of her. This time he took them in his.

“Good,” she said, “now breathe with me.” She took in a long, deep breath, held it a few seconds, and let it flow out. Ray followed her lead. On the fifth breath, she engaged her vocal cords in a deep, vibrating sound that seemed to emanate from her belly. Ray joined in the vocalization that resonated throughout the room. When they were done, his fatigue had lifted and his body felt looser.

“Now how do you feel?”

“Better...relaxed.”

“Do you think perhaps now you can permit yourself to sit?”

Ray glanced around the room. The noise in his head had subsided. While he still believed that microbes lurked everywhere, the paralyzing terror was gone. He walked over to the couch and sat down.

“Good. Now we can begin.”

By the time Ray left the elderly doctor’s office, he was in her spell. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met, yet she’d been able to set him completely at ease in a setting that was anathema to every vision of his safety. When he emerged back onto the street in the middle of the twenty first century, he wondered whether this ancient apartment and its equally ancient inhabitant had been some sort of elaborate hallucination. As he stepped into the waiting hovercar, the trappings of his present day life triggered all of his accustomed defenses and by the time he returned home to Lena, his body was stiff from the armor that once more held him in its grip.

Lena had agonized for weeks over whether to publish her piece on Marcus and Corinne Takana. Theirs was a wonderful story of brilliance, generosity, and love. They seemed so trusting of one another. How wonderful it must be, she’d thought, to be young, innocent, and entirely without secrets. How enviable to be in love with the one you’re with. The story flowed so easily from her fingers that it seemed to write itself.