34
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“I think the clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with dissociative identity disorder,” said Marie.
I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d managed to piece together what was happening, and it was terrifying.
“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”
Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Jimmy was good at hiding his tracks. We had only the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting, but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.
Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.
“Do you think he was really responsible for the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia?” I asked Marie. It was obvious now that he was behind what had happened to Cindy Strong and Olympia Onassis, but in those cases he had a strategic goal. In most of the other disappearances, we didn’t understand what there was to gain. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that? With people so close to him?”
“Perhaps he’s unaware of the other parts of himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”
Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection by others, but with the risk of falling out of touch with reality yourself—this was something we’d compounded with pssi.
The bigger the neocortex and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie to itself and others, and Jimmy was as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore.
Whatever he’d become, he was now the master of deception.
“We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him. Just rumors that seem to originate with him,” said Marie. “I think he constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior.”
“Dissociative personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”
Marie stared at me and shook her head.
“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”
I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.
In my decades of research developing synthetic intelligence, I’d developed statistical models of past human civilizations that had revealed a strong correlation between the self-deceptive characteristics of a people and the worst atrocities that group would commit. Pssi had heightened human capacity in many ways, but it had increased the ability to fool ourselves the most—and we were about to unleash it on humanity under the guise of its savior.
The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.
All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception.
I should have known better.
Which is worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster?
My monster.
Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child, as my life began to slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me, even as I understood the beast I may have created.
I wanted to believe there was something to save.
“Can we remove him from the board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.
Marie said what I was already thinking. “He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters. And he’s become a celebrity in the world media. I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open.”
I continued the thought for her, “And if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of a disgraced old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”
“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “Encouraging the formation of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”
“Perhaps.”
“What about the data from the neutrino telescope?”
I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget them myself. Could it be real?
“Ship that data off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it, I want it away from here.”
If it was true, and not some artifact of the viral infection, my skin crawled thinking of the ways Granger and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, or whatever it was that this signal from a parallel universe was coming from.
“Send a report back into the science community, say that it was a failure, and leave the connection key with the package delivered to Bob and Nancy. But only to them.”
“I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”
Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist.
Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t quite accurate to say that Marie didn’t exist. I’d never really thought of her as my child before that moment, always as more of a sister. But I had created her. Perhaps she was both.
“You’ll communicate everything to them, right? Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”
“Yes, Patricia.…”
“It’s just.…”
“I know.”
Silence descended. My body’s systems were on the brink of failure, something I’d been able to see coming for some time.
“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”
“But proxxies terminate with their owners. That goes against the whole program.”
“It’s been managed before,” I replied, smiling. “Anyway, it’s done. I’ve already made a special provision in my will. There are some advantages to being the senior researcher at Cognix.”
“Are you sure? This will create precedent.”
“Exactly.” I smiled. “I think this situation calls for special consideration, and I want you to continue on with the work we’ve started on the Synthetic Being Charter of Rights. Besides.…”
“Besides what?”
I looked at Marie carefully. “Aren’t you the least bit worried about ceasing to exist? Doesn’t this arrangement strike you as unfair?”
She smiled and gently shook her head. “I could ask you the same thing.”
I let out a quiet laugh. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin.
So fragile.
“Everything is in order,” I said quietly. “I think I’d like this time to myself. Goodbye, Marie, and say goodbye to Nancy for me.”
I turned off my pssi for the last time, and my office faded into the muted colors of my real-world living space, a modest apartment near the beaches. It was small, but one of only a handful on the surface of Atopia.
In the end, Jimmy gave me what I’d thought I wanted—for the world to embrace pssi—but he had exacted his price for it. It was clear he’d sabotaged my medical systems. But perhaps leaving this world was a wish I hadn’t been able to admit to myself, and he’d simply been the instrument of my desire.
It was time for me to go.
Of all the things that pssi could give us, perhaps the least touted was dignity in death. It was just me, by myself, for perhaps the first time in nearly half a century.
So this is what reality feels like.
I’d forgotten.
Wearily, I lifted my ancient body off the chair that Marie had left it sitting on. I wanted one last look at my tiny garden out back, that little plot of life.
Slowly, limping, I made my way to its neglected grounds. I looked around. Some pots were blown over and everything had a dull gray tint to it in the dim pre-dawn light. I shuffled over to a sun lounger in the back near an old raspberry bush that was nearly as decrepit as I was.
So I won’t last to see pssi spread into the world.
It was probably for the best.
I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the pace of change anymore, and not sure I wanted to be around, and responsible for, what might be coming.
My own end. I’d always managed to suspend disbelief about it.
Now there was something we all had a talent for.
“Marie,” I called out, “I have one last story to tell you.”
I couldn’t see or feel her anymore, but I knew she was with me. In fact, I knew she would be surrounding and cradling me like a baby right now, and that was a comforting thought. As I began to understand my end was coming, I’d started telling Marie stories of my earlier life, from before the machines had begun to capture our memories and preserve the digital trails of our lives as we blindly forged ahead.
Telling Marie my stories made me feel like a part of me would live on, as well as a part of some of the people in them. I had saved my most important, my most cherished and hidden story, for last.
Tears streamed down my face as I told Marie my most private of memories, unspoken to anyone now living, unspoken even to myself in over a century, of young love gone wrong. It was the story of why I’d never married, of a young airman who’d died in my arms so long ago.
Instead of life and family, I’d focused my mind on finding ways to escape reality, to escape what had happened to me. At least that’s what I’d started out doing, as unspoken as it was. In the end, my escape had taken on a life of its own, and my love had, in the end, blinded me.
But now, at my own end of time, I remembered, and I remembered why.
My love, will I find you now?
Wiping away my tears, I was pleased to see that dawn was beginning to break on the horizon. It’s going to be a nice day. Glancing sideways, I inspected my long-forgotten raspberry bush.
Within its spiny gray branches I was surprised to find, still surviving, one lush red raspberry, standing out in surreal relief from the grayness surrounding it. I leaned over and picked it, rolling it around gently in my fingertips.
I was afraid of letting go, but I was also so tired, and the last of my resistance slipped away. I popped the raspberry into my mouth.
I thought of the billions of humans out there, some asleep, some awake, but most somewhere in between. I thought of the tens of billions of synthetic souls now roaming the multiverse, and the infinite inner-space we had created together, we and the machines.
I wished them all well.
In the early morning glow, a monarch butterfly fluttered and danced its way through the garden where Dr. Killiam lay, finally at peace. The butterfly seemed to consider her for a moment, dancing this way and that above her motionless body, and then fluttered away, gaining altitude.
As it darted back and forth, ever higher, it was joined by a brown butterfly marked with circles on its wings. Joyously, the two touched and danced off into the distance, rising above and away to leave Atopia below.
The first rays of sunlight pierced the horizon, illuminating thin red and gold clouds, high in the aquamarine sky.
A new day was dawning.