Fragments (4 of 4)
What Remains After Goodbye
Four
Clara removed the VR headset.
Tracie took it from her, sprayed it with a sanitizing solution, and placed it on its mount on the harness.
"Get me out of this rig," Clara said.
She was still in tears.
"Was it a hard session?" Tracie asked.
"They are all hard sessions," Clara said. "But yes, today was especially hard.
Tracie chatted away as she unstrapped Clara from the harness, speaking about the events in a detached, clinical nature that Clara had always felt off-putting, but she stood patiently as the young woman unstrapped velcro and unclipped wires.
"Still the same with him not seeing you come in?" she asked.
"Well, I just appear somewhere in the cafe every time I put the rig on, so he doesn't actually see me come into the cafe. He's always surprised to see that I've appeared, just as he's always surprised to have whatever drink he imagines appear in his hand."
"It's funny the things they construct," Tracie said. "That cafe seems sublime, doesn't it? Half library, half cafe; but somehow part lounge, part lodge, and part study."
"The kinds of things he liked," Clara said. "Can you tell Thad that this is my last session?"
"Really?" Tracie asked. "Oh, that makes me sad. But it's probably a good choice. There isn't much left. People always try just one more time, and it's usually a bad idea."
"It's hard to let go," Clara said, trying to maintain her composure as she dried her tears with a tissue. She stepped out of the harness, placing her feet on solid ground, hitched up her sweatpants, and brushed out her greying hair with her fingers.
Tracie typed up some notes on a terminal, sanitized the harness, and said, "Thad will see you now."
"Tracie tells me that you want to withdraw from the program," Thad said.
"It's run its course. He gets worse and worse each visit. It's over. I want to turn it off."
"You'll need to sign the consent forms."
"I'm aware."
"Are you certain?"
"He's been dead for four months. It's time to let him go," Clara said.
Thad pulled a tablet from his desk and began tapping on it. "You'll have to go through these. There are seven forms you need to authorize." He passed the tablet to Clara.
"Thanks," she said.
"Did he ever recognize you?"
"No," Clara lied. It was a struggle to keep her face passive and she didn't completely succeed, but that was okay. It was a sad moment, so wearing a complete mask wouldn’t have been realistic anyway.
"Okay, the first one," Thad said. "You're agreeing to terminate the consciousness of Alex Endlemen. This act is final."
"I understand," Clara said, pressing her thumb to the pad, authorizing the decision.
"I'm disappointed for you," he said. "We had such a good chance. It was a fresh harvest. This one is a standard indemnification. The next a refresher of the NDA.”
"See, that's part of the reason I'm going to vote No when it comes to the floor."
"What do you mean?"
"You called it a harvest! Come on, Thad. You copied my husband's consciousness moments after he was declared dead. He was a real person. A brave, brilliant, capable man who had a bad accident. He was stolen from his family by happenstance, and you treat it coldly. A harvest? Really?"
"I don't mean to offend. I just meant that I had high hopes for this case. It's too bad we couldn't keep them permanently. But the degradation is not reversible. We don't really even know how it works, to be honest. But it does function a lot like Alzheimer's. It's rather fascinating and it makes one question whether that condition is entirely physical or not. Your participation in this trial will be a big help to us. But it's unfortunate that he never recognized you."
"Yes, well, it didn't work as you were hoping," Clara said. "So, it was good to learn that. It's doubtful that there'll be any continued funding for it. As I said at the beginning, I do have ethical problems with it. Although I don't feel as strongly about it as I once did, I'll still be on the wrong side of the ballot as far as you are concerned."
"Well, we appreciate you participating anyway. Things may change in the future, and we'll keep plugging away, even with reduced funding."
"I really wish you wouldn't," Clara said.
"I understand your viewpoint. But, it was worth doing, right?" Thad said. "I mean to spend time with him?"
"No. It wasn't. It wasn't really him," Clara said. "It didn't have that personal element, and so I'm not persuaded."
"I’m sorry it didn’t work out," Thad said. "But I do think there is a future in it, even if the Senate votes against the appropriations bill. We'd like to improve it. I think we can do better. Maybe we can extend the timeframe. Maybe it can become more like organ donation. Those help people. Mapping a consciousness into an AI platform helps people, too. It helps give closure, especially for people who didn't have that chance. I mean, you came in two dozen times to be with him."
"But I wasn't with him," she said. "It was just an AI pretending to be him. There was no soul there. There was no moment of truth. There was just me made up to look like some chick who was way hotter than I ever was. I mean, hell, how is that supposed to help him recognize me? I didn't really even look like me."
"What are you talking about?" Thad asked.
"You created an avatar for me with a perfect ass, great tits, flawless skin, amazing eyelashes, unbelievably beautiful. That's not me. It's never been me. I'm not a perfect twenty-year-old. I'm forty-six and saggy. I have dark circles under my eyes all the time now. I have stretch marks, my hips are too wide, and my butt is too flat. That's me. That's who my husband knew and loved, despite my flaws. How was the AI supposed to recognize me as a perfect model?"
Thad cleared his throat. "Did you actually read everything in the entry documents? All the stuff that you were supposed to read at the beginning?"
"Why?"
"Did you?" Thad insisted. "Or did you just hand it off to one of your assistants to read for you?"
"Where are you going with this?" Clara asked.
"The cafe. That was his own construction. You know that, right?"
"I gather it comes from his mind."
"Yes, as I said, this was in the reading materials we gave you."
"Right."
"Clara. We didn't construct an avatar for you. It came from him."
"Like with the cafe? How would he even do that?”
“Yes, just as he did with the cafe. It's not a conscious choice. It's proof that we're mapping the subconscious, too."
"How so?"
"Your avatar had perfect breasts, because your husband thought yours were perfect. You had flawless skin, because he saw you as flawless. You had perfect lips, because he loved yours. Everything he made up about you was his subconscious reconstructing you.”
He made that body from his own mind?” she asked.
”Somewhere between the subconscious and conscious mind, he made you a perfect being. Because you were perfect to him. Don't you see that this proves what we have said all along? Doesn't it prove also, that your husband saw your inner beauty, coupled it with your outer reality, and constructed what he really thought of you? Don't you see the beauty in that very idea? That he thought you were perfect?"
"Or maybe," Clara said, "He was just a typical man, that wants a twenty-something hottie on his arm. In any case, I've made my decision. Shut it down. The process didn't work."
"As you wish," Thad said.
Clara nodded and left the building as quickly as her 46-year-old legs could take her. She carried with her two books, one a handwritten journal with poems and songs her husband had written. The other book was her husband’s worn copy of The Count of Monte Christo, a novel he had read every year, claiming to find something new in it each time. Now, he couldn’t remember a single line.
He couldn’t remember the betrayal and imprisonment of Edmund Dantes. But Clara remembered. It had come to her last night. She knew that she could no longer keep Alex locked up in the Château d’If.
Clara barely made it out the door before the sobbing began.
“Did you delete the construct?” Thad asked.
“Yep,” Tracie said. “Alexander Edleman is no more.”
“What did you sense from her today?”
“She was very emotional,” Tracie said. “Maybe it was because she was saying goodbye.”
“Or,” Thad said, “What if she really did have a connection for a moment?”
“Maybe,” Tracie said.
They exited the lab together. The door clicked shut as their voices faded away.
Meanwhile, deep in the belly of a high-performance computing cluster, the mind of a man wandered alone in the near darkness. All he could see was the silhouette of a face for a fleeting moment before he was, once again, shrouded in darkness.
“Clara! Where are you?” he shouted.
But there was no volume to his voice. It was barely a whisper, lost in the hum of cooling fans.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.