Axiomatic (23 page)

He had one final question. ‘Has your wife ever been scanned?’

I laughed. ‘Hardly. She loathes computers. Even if the cost came down a thousandfold, she’d be the last person in the world to have it done.’

‘I see. Well, we appreciate your cooperation. If there are any further incidents, don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

As he hung up, I belatedly wished I’d asked him: ‘What if she
had
been scanned? Why would that be a factor?
Have hackers started breaking into people’s scan files?’

That was a disturbing notion . . . but even if it were true, it had no bearing on the hoax call. No such convenient, computerised description of Loraine existed, so however the hoaxers had reconstructed her appearance, they’d obtained their data by other means entirely.

* * * *

I drove home on manual override, breaking the speed limit — marginally — on five separate occasions, watching the fines add up on the dashboard display, until the car intoned, ‘One more violation and your licence is suspended.’

I went straight from the garage to the studio. Loraine was there, of course. I stood in the doorway, watching her silently, as she fussed over a sketch. I couldn’t make out the subject, but she was working in charcoal again. I often teased her about her anachronistic methods: ‘Why do you glorify the faults of traditional materials? Artists in the past had no choice but to make a virtue out of necessity — but why keep up the pretence? If charcoal on paper, or oil paint on canvas, really is so wonderful, then
describe
whatever it is you find so sublime about them to some virtual art software — and then generate your own virtual materials which are twice as good.’ All she’d ever say in reply was: ‘This is what I do, this is what I like, this is what I’m used to. There’s no harm in that, is there?’

I didn’t want to disturb her, but I didn’t want to walk away. If she noticed my presence, she gave no sign of it. I stood there and thought:
I really do love you. And I really do admire you: the way you kept
your head in the middle of
—

I caught myself. The middle of
what?
Being thrust in front of a camera by her abductors? None of that had actually happened.

No . . . but I knew Loraine — and I knew that she
wouldn’t have
fallen to pieces, she would have stayed in control. I could still admire her courage and her level-headedness — however bizarre the means by which I’d been reminded of those qualities.

I started to turn away, and she said, ‘Stay if you like. I don’t mind you watching.’

I took a few steps into the cluttered studio. After the stark, cavernous spaces of the gallery, it looked very homely. ‘What are you working on?’

She stood aside from the easel. The sketch was almost completed. It showed a woman, clenched fist raised to her lips, staring straight at the onlooker. Her expression was one of uneasy fascination, as if she was gazing at something hypnotic, compelling — and deeply troubling.

I frowned. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? A self-portrait?’ It had taken me a while to spot the resemblance, and even then, I wasn’t sure.

But Loraine said, ‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Am I allowed to ask what you’re looking at?’

She shrugged. ‘Hard to say. The work in progress? Maybe it’s a portrait of the artist caught in the act of self-portraiture.’

‘You should try working with a camera and a flatscreen. You could program the stylisation software to build up a composite image of yourself — while you watched the result, and reacted to it.’

She shook her head, amused. ‘Why go to so much trouble? Why not just frame a mirror?’

‘A mirror? People want to see the artist revealed; they don’t want to see
themselves.
’

I wandered over and kissed her, but she barely responded. I said, tenderly, ‘I’m glad you’re safe.’

She laughed. ‘So am I. And don’t worry — I wouldn’t let anyone kidnap me, now. I know you’d have a stroke before you had a chance to pay the ransom.’

I put a finger to her lips. ‘It’s not funny. I was terrified — don’t you believe me? I didn’t know what they might do. I thought they were going to torture you.’

‘How? By voodoo?’ She backed out of my embrace, then walked over to the workbench. The wall above was covered with her sketches — ‘failures’ which she kept on show for ‘salutary reasons’.

She picked up a paperknife from the bench and made two diagonal slashes in one of the drawings — an old self-portrait, one I’d liked very much.

Then she turned to me and said, in mock amazement, ‘That didn’t hurt a bit.’

* * * *

I managed to keep myself from broaching the subject again until late in the evening. We were sitting in the living room, huddled together in front of the fireplace — ready for bed, but reluctant to move from this cosy spot (even though a few words to the house could have reproduced the very same hearthside warmth, anywhere at all).

‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that someone must have followed you around with a camera — long enough to capture your face, your voice, your mannerisms . . .’

Loraine scowled. ‘My
what?
This thing didn’t even speak a whole sentence. And they need not have
followed me
anywhere — they probably just intercepted a phone call I made, and based it all on that. They pushed their own call straight through your office defences, didn’t they? They’re probably just a bunch of bored hackers — and for all we know, they could live on the other side of the planet.’

‘Maybe. But not one phone call — dozens. They must have gathered a lot of data, however they did it. I’ve talked to artists who do simulation portraits — ten or twenty seconds of action, based on hours of sittings — and they say it’s still not easy to fool anyone who really knows the subject. OK, I should have been sceptical . . . but why wasn’t I? Because it was so
convincing.
Because it was
exactly
how I would have imagined you—’

She shifted in my arms, irritably. ‘It was nothing like me. It was melodramatic, computerised overacting

— and they knew it, which is why they kept it so short.’

I shook my head. ‘Nobody can judge an impersonation of themself. You’ll have to take my word for it. I know, it only lasted a few seconds — but I swear,
they got it right.’

As the conversation dragged on into the early hours of the morning, Loraine stood her ground — and I had to concede that there was nothing much we could actually
do
to make our lives any safer, whether or not the caller harboured plans to inflict real physical harm. The house already had state-of-the-art security hardware, and Loraine and I both carried surgically implanted radio alarm beacons. Even I balked at the idea of hiring armed bodyguards.

I had to concede, too, that no serious aspiring kidnappers would have alerted us to their intentions with a hoax call.

Finally, wearily (as if it had to be settled, there and then, if we weren’t to keep arguing until dawn), I caved in. Maybe I’d overreacted. Maybe I just resented having been fooled. Maybe the whole thing had been nothing but a prank, after all.

However sick. However technically accomplished. However apparently pointless.

* * * *

When we slumped into bed, Loraine fell asleep almost at once, but I lay awake for hours. The call itself finally stopped monopolising my thoughts — but as soon as I’d put it out of my mind, another set of concerns came floating up to take its place.

As I’d told the detective, Loraine had never been scanned. I had, though. High-resolution imaging techniques had been used to generate a detailed map of my body, down to the cellular level — a map which included, among other things, a description of every neuron in my brain, every synaptic connection. I had purchased a kind of immortality: whatever happened to me, the most recent snapshot of my body could always be resurrected as a Copy: an elaborate computer model, embedded in a virtual reality. A model which, at the very least, would act and think like me: it would share all my memories, my beliefs, my goals, my desires. Currently, such models ran slower than real time, their virtual environments were restrictive, and the telepresence robots meant to enable interaction with the physical world were a clumsy joke . . . but all of the technology was rapidly improving.

My mother had already been resurrected in the supercomputer known as Coney Island. My father had died before the process had become available. Loraine’s parents were both still alive — and unscanned.

I’d been scanned twice, the last time three years before. I was long overdue for an update — but that would have meant facing up to the realities of my posthumous future, all over again. Loraine had never condemned me for my choice, and the prospect of my virtual resurrection didn’t seem to bother her at all

— but she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t be joining me.

The argument was so familiar that I could run through it all in my head, without even waking her.

LORAINE: I don’t want to be imitated by a computer after I’m dead. What use would that be to
me?

DAVID: Don’t knock imitation —
life
consists of imitation. Every organ in your body is constantly being rebuilt in its own image. Every cell that divides is dying and replacing itself with imposters. Your body doesn’t contain a single atom you were born with — so what gives you your identity? It’s a pattern of information, not a physical thing. And if a computer started imitating your body — instead of your body imitating itself — the only real difference would be that the computer would make fewer mistakes.

LORAINE: If that’s what you believe . . . fine. But it’s not the way I see things. And I’m as frightened of death as anyone — but being
scanned
wouldn’t make me feel any better. It wouldn’t make me feel immortal; it wouldn’t comfort me at all. So why should I do it? Give me one good reason.

And I never could bring myself to say (not even then, in the safety of my imaginings):
Do it because I
don’t want to lose you. Do it for me.

* * * *

I spent the next morning dealing with the curator for a large insurance company, who was looking for a change of decor for a few hundred lobbies, elevators, and boardrooms, real and virtual. I had no trouble selling her some suitably dignified electronic wallpaper, by some suitably revered young talents.

Some starving artists put low-resolution roughs of their work into network galleries, hoping to strike a compromise between a version so crude as to be off-putting, and one so appealing as to make buying the real thing superfluous. Nobody will pay for art unseen — and in the network galleries, to
see
was to
own.

Physical galleries — tightly run — remained the best solution. All my visitors were screened for microcameras and visual cortex taps; nobody left the building with anything more than an impression, without paying for it. If it had been lawful, I would have demanded blood samples, and refused entry to anyone with a genetic predisposition to eidetic memory.

In the afternoon, as always, I viewed the work of aspiring exhibitors. I finished watching the Kreyszig piece which had been interrupted the day before, and then started sifting through a great heap of lesser submissions. The process of deciding what would or wouldn’t be acceptable to my corporate clientele required no intellectual or emotional exertion; after two decades in the business, it had become a purely mechanical act — as uninvolving, most of the time, as standing at a conveyor belt sorting nuts from bolts. My aesthetic judgement hadn’t been blunted — if anything, it had become more finely honed — but only the most exceptional work evoked anything more from me than a — highly astute, unfailingly accurate —

assessment of marketability.

When the image of the ‘kidnapper’ broke through on to the screen again, I wasn’t surprised; the instant it happened, I realised that I’d been waiting for it all afternoon. And although I grew tense in anticipation of the unpleasantness to follow, at the same time, the opportunity of discovering more about the caller’s true motives was, undeniably, welcome. I couldn’t be fooled again, so what did I have to fear? Knowing that Loraine was safe, I could watch with a sense of detachment, and try to extract some clue as to what was really going on.

The mask said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’

The synthetic image of Loraine reappeared. I laughed uneasily.
What did these people expect me to
believe?
I surveyed the picture coolly. What I could see of the dingy ‘room’ behind ‘her’ badly needed repainting — another laborious touch of ‘realism’ to contrast with the background for the other mask. This time, ‘she’ didn’t seem to have been struggling — and there were no signs that ‘she’ had been physically ill-treated (it even looked like ‘she’ had had a chance to wash) — but there was an uncertainty in ‘her’ expression, a hint of subdued panic on ‘her’ face, which hadn’t been there before.

Then she looked straight into the camera and said, ‘David? They won’t let me see you — but I know you’re there. And I know you must be doing all you can to get me out of this — but please hurry. Please, pay them the money as soon as you can.’

My veneer of objectivity shattered. I
knew
it was just an elaborate piece of computer animation — but listening to it ‘pleading’ with me this way was almost as distressing as the call I’d thought was real. It looked like Loraine, it sounded like Loraine; every word and gesture rang true. I couldn’t throw a switch inside my head and turn off all my responses to the sight of someone I loved, begging for her life.

I covered my face and shouted, ‘You
sick fuck —
is this how you get off? Do you think I’m going to
pay you
to stop this? I’ll just get the phone fixed so you can’t break through — then you can go back to running interactive snuff movies, and fucking your own corpse.’

There was no reply, and when I looked at the screen again, the call was over.

I waited until I’d stopped shaking — mostly with anger — then I called Detective Nicolson, for what that was worth. I gave him a copy of the call for his files; he thanked me. I told myself, optimistically: with computer analysis
of modus operandi,
every piece of evidence helps; if the same caller goes on to do the same thing to other people, the information collected might eventually coalesce into some kind of incriminating profile. The psychopathic piece of shit might even get caught one day.