Beyond the Rift (20 page)

Someone has spray-painted two words in stencilled black over the mouth of the machine:
The Shadow.
Delaying, I glance a question at the guard.

“It knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” he says. “Bwahaha. Let’s move it along.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

The walls of the booth glimmer with a tight weave of copper wire. The helmet descends from above with a soft hydraulic hiss; it sits too lightly on my head for such a massive device. The visor slides over my eyes like a blindfold. I am in a pocket universe, alone with my thoughts and an all-seeing God. Electricity hums deep in my head.

I’m innocent of any wrongdoing. I’ve never broken the law. Maybe God will see that if I think it hard enough. Why does it have to see anything, why does it have to
read
the palimpsest if it’s just going to scribble over it again? But brains don’t work like that. Each individual
is
individual, wired up in a unique and glorious tangle that must be read before it can be edited. And motivations, intents—these are endless, multiheaded things, twining and proliferating from frontal cortex to cingulate gyrus, from hypothalamus to claustrum. There’s no LED that lights up when your plans are nefarious, no Aniston Neuron for mad bombers. For the safety of everyone, they must read it all. For the safety of everyone.

I have been under this helmet for what seems like forever. Nobody else took this long.

The line is not moving forward.

“Well,” Security says softly. “Will you look at that.”

“I’m not,” I tell him. “I’ve never—”

“And you’re not about to. Not for the next nine hours, anyway.”

“I never
acted
on it.” I sound petulant, childish. “Not once.”

“I can see that,” he says, but I know we’re talking about different things.

The humming changes subtly in pitch. I can feel magnets and mosquitoes snapping in my head. I am changed by something not yet cheap enough for the home market: an ache evaporates, a dull longing so chronic I feel it now only in absentia.

“There. Now we could put you in charge of two Day Cares and a chorus of altar boys, and you wouldn’t even be tempted.”

The visor rises; the helmet floats away. Authority stares back at me from a gaggle of contemptuous faces.

“This is wrong,” I say quietly.

“Is it now.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“We haven’t either. We haven’t locked down your pervert brain, we haven’t changed who you are. We’ve protected your precious constitutional rights and your God-given identity. You’re as free to diddle kiddies in the park as you ever were. You just won’t
want
to for a while.”

“But I haven’t
done
anything.” I can’t stop saying it.

“Nobody does, until they do.” He jerks his head towards Departure. “Get out of here. You’re cleared.”

I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong. But my name is on a list now, just the same. Word of my depravity races ahead of me, checkpoint after checkpoint, like a fission of dominoes. They’ll be watching, though they have to let me pass.

That could change before long. Even now, Community Standards barely recognise the difference between what we do and what we are; nudge them just a hair further and every border on the planet might close at my approach. But this is only the dawning of the new enlightenment, and the latest rules are not yet in place. For now, I am free to stand at your unconsecrated graveside, and mourn on my own recognizance.

You always were big on the power of forgiveness, Father. Seventy times seven, the most egregious sins washed away in the sight of the Lord. All it took, you insisted, was true penitence. All you had to do was accept His love.

Of course, it sounded a lot less self-serving back then.

But even the unbelievers get a clean slate now. My redeemer is a machine, and my salvation has an expiry date—but then again, I guess yours did too.

I wonder about the machine that programmed
you
, Father, that great glacial contraption of dogma and moving parts, clacking and iterating its way through two thousand years of bloody history. I can’t help but wonder at the way it rewired
your
synapses. Did it turn you into a predator, weigh you down with lunatic strictures that no sexual being could withstand, deny your very nature until you snapped? Or were you already malfunctioning when you embraced the Church, hoping for some measure of strength you couldn’t find in yourself?

I knew you for years, Father. Even now, I tell myself I know you—and while you may have been many things, you were never a coward. I refuse to believe that you opted for death because it was the easy way out. I choose to believe that in those last days, you found the strength to rewrite your own programming, to turn your back on obsolete algorithms two millennia out of date, and decide for yourself the difference between a mortal sin and an act of atonement.

You loathed yourself, you loathed the things you had done. And so, finally, you made absolutely certain you could never do them again. You
acted
.

You acted as I never could, though I’d pay so much smaller a price.

There is more than this temporary absolution, you see. We have machines now that can burn the evil right out of a man, deep-focus microwave emitters that vaporise the very pathways of depravity. No one can force them on you; not yet, anyway. Members’ bills wind through Parliament, legislative proposals that would see us preemptively reprogrammed for good instead of evil, but for now the procedure is strictly voluntary. It
changes
you, you see. It violates some inalienable essence of selfhood. Some call it a kind of suicide in its own right.

I kept telling the man at Security: I never
acted
on it. But he could see that for himself.

I never had it fixed. I must
like
what I am.

I wonder if that makes a difference.

I wonder which of us is more guilty.

FLESH MADE WORD

W
escott was glad when it finally stopped breathing. It had taken hours, this time. He had waited while it wheezed out thick putrid smells, chest heaving and gurgling and filling the room with stubborn reminders that it was only dying, not yet dead, not yet. He had been patient. After ten years, he had learned to be patient; and now, finally, the thing on the table was giving up.

Something moved behind him. He turned, irritated; the dying hear better than the living, a single spoken word could ruin hours of observation. But it was only Lynne, slipping quietly into the room. Wescott relaxed. Lynne knew the rules.

For a moment he even wondered why she was there. Wescott turned back to the body. Its chest had stopped moving.
Sixty seconds
, he guessed.
Plus or minus ten.

It was already dead by any practical definition. But there were still a few embers inside, a few sluggish nerves twitching in a brain choked with dead circuitry. Wescott’s machines showed him the landscape of that dying mind: a topography of luminous filaments, eroding as he watched.

The cardiac thread shuddered and lay still.

Thirty seconds. Give or take five.
The qualifiers came automatically. There is no truth. There are no facts. There is only the envelope of the confidence interval.

He could feel Lynne waiting invisibly behind him.

Wescott glanced at the table for a moment, looked away again; the lid over one sunken eye had crept open a crack. He could almost imagine he had seen nothing looking out.

Something changed on the monitors.
Here it comes...

He didn’t know why it scared him. They were only nerve impulses, after all; a fleeting ripple of electricity, barely detectable, passing from midbrain to cortex to oblivion. Just another bunch of doomed neurons, gasping.

And now there was only flesh, still warm. A dozen lines lay flat on the monitors. Wescott leaned over and checked the leads connecting meat to machine.

“Dead at nineteen forty-three,” he said into his recorder. The machines, intelligent in their own way, began to shut themselves down. Wescott studied the dead face, peeled back the unclenched eyelid with a pair of forceps. The static pupil beneath stared past him, fixed at infinity.

You took the news well
, Wescott thought.

He remembered Lynne. She was standing to one side, her face averted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is never a good time, but it’s—”

He waited.

“It’s Zombie,” she went on. “There was an accident, Russ, he wandered out on the road and—and I took him into the vet’s and she says he’s too badly hurt but she won’t put him to sleep without your consent, you never listed me as an owner—”

She stopped, like a flash flood ending.

He looked down at the floor. “Put him to sleep?”

“She said it’s almost certain anything they tried wouldn’t work, it would cost thousands and he’d probably die anyway—”

“You mean kill him. She won’t kill him without my consent.” Wescott began stripping the leads from the cadaver, lining them up on their brackets. They hung there like leeches, their suckers slimy with conductant.

“—and all I could think was, after eighteen years he shouldn’t die alone, someone should be there with him, but I can’t, you know, I just—”

Somewhere at the base of his skull, a tiny voice cried out,
My Christ don’t I go through enough of this shit without having to watch it happen to my own cat?
But it was very far away, and he could barely hear it.

He looked at the table. The corpse stared its cyclopean stare.

“Sure,” Wescott said after a moment. “I’ll take care of it.” He allowed himself a half-smile. “All in a day’s work.”

The workstation sat in one corner of the living room, an ebony cube of tinted perspex, and for the past ten years it had spoken to him in Carol’s voice. That had hurt at first, so much that he had nearly changed the program; but he had fought the urge, and beaten it, and endured the synthetic familiarity of her voice like a man doing penance for some great sin. Somewhere in the past decade the pain had faded below the level of conscious recognition. Now he heard it list the day’s mail, and felt nothing.

“Jason Mosby called again from Southam,” it said, catching Carol’s intonation perfectly. “He s-still wants to interview you. He left a conversational program in my stack. You can run it any time you want.”

“What else?”

“Zombie’s collar stopped transmitting at nine-sixteen, and Zombie didn’t s-show up for his afternoon feed. Y-You might want to call around.”

“Zombie’s gone,” he said.

“That’s what I said.”

“No, I mean—”
Christ, Carol. You never were much for euphemisms, were you?
“Zombie got hit by a car. He’s dead.”

Even when we tried using them on you.

“Oh. Shit.” The computer paused a moment, some internal clock counting off a precise number of nanosecs. “I’m sorry, Russ.”

It was a lie, of course, but a fairly convincing one all the same.

Outside, Wescott smiled faintly. “It happens. Just a matter of time for all of us.”

There was a sound from behind. He turned away from the cube; Lynne stood in the doorway. He could see sympathy in her eyes, and something else.

“Russ,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He felt a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “So’s the computer.”

“How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“I doubt it. You had him all those years.”

“Yeah. I—miss him.” There was a hard knot of vacuum in his throat. He examined the feeling, distantly amazed, and almost felt a kind of gratitude.

She padded across the room to him, took his hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the end, Russ. It was all I could do to take him in. I just couldn’t, you know—”

“It’s okay,” Wescott said.

“—and you had to be there anyway, you—”

“It’s okay,” he said again.

Lynne straightened and rubbed one hand across her cheek. “Would you rather not talk about it?” Which meant, of course,
I want to talk about it.

He wondered what he could say that wouldn’t be utterly predictable: and realised that he could afford to tell the truth.

“I was thinking,” he said, “he had it coming to him.”

Lynne blinked.

“I mean, he’d spread enough carnage on his own. Remember how every couple of days he’d bring in a wounded vole or a bird, and I never let him actually kill any of them—”

“You didn’t want to see anything suffer,” Lynne said.