Conscious Designs, page 7
“I can. And so can you. We could lose our jobs, you know. Lose the chance to be together in Arcadia. I wish you would get rid of that old thing. Let’s take the self-driver out instead.”
“Eugene, have you noticed that nothing changes? You live out a version of the same monotonous suffering. That is dangerous. That’s something that should frighten you. Why do you think you’re so afraid of a car?” Her words seemed to confuse him.
“There’s a reason we don’t drive those things anymore,” he said. And in truth, it had been one of the leading causes of death before they had been replaced by autonomous vehicles, ending the era when human brains could be trusted to control the movement of bodies through space at high velocities. She thought about trying to drive away with Eugene to some other place, some other world. Then the absurdity of this idea made her feel stupid, insignificant.
Corina went to the garage. It contained nothing but the Shelby. The keys were in it and she fired up the engine, which seemed to shake this entire world. She parked it at the front door and it was clear that there would be no need to convince Eugene of anything. The Corina of his mind had completely usurped his will, as Ashcroft had suggested.
The robotic exoskeleton walked him down the stairs, its gait communicating nothing about his mind. He opened the driver’s side door, turned his back against the seat, and the exoskeleton sat him down in the ancient leather of the passenger’s seat of the antique machine. It had no seatbelts.
They took the old road up into the mountains. Beneath them, the smog rested heavy on the imagined city that appeared so real now. It was the same city she lived in, the haze pressing down heavy on her world too.
“Do you ever wonder why we keep living here? Why we don’t just leave?”
“This is where XenoLife is. That is our life,” he said.
“Our livelihood. Not our life.”
He gestured vaguely in the direction of Conscious Designs. “My Second Self is there forever. And this is where you will be, too, as soon as we can afford it. Maybe we could start by selling this relic to a museum. I bet they would pay.”
When they had crested into the highlands, tall pines began to line the road. When she glanced at Eugene, it seemed that he was coming into himself. Like he was waking up. “Eugene, do you remember the accident?” she asked.
“I’ve been here,” he said. “With you. Years ago. This is the accident. We were arguing. What was it about? I can’t remember.”
“Children.”
“Yes, that was it.”
“You were angry. You were crying, not paying attention. You had somehow gotten in the other lane. There was another car, a self-driver. It couldn’t communicate with our vehicle. You swerved to avoid it. I remember, you overcorrected. Smashed into one of these pines.” He gestured at the trees that seemed to be growing taller. “I don’t remember the pain. But I remember the way the car had wrapped around the pine. It was almost peaceful. It was as though the tree had grown through the machine, like we had been there for a hundred years. It must have been this car, wasn’t it? But that’s not possible. I’m sure it was a dream I had. I have a lot of dreams. Sometimes I forget where the dreams end and this world begins.”
He had the right to know who he was, or what he had become.
“You have two selves, Eugene, and they both inhabit space in Conscious Designs. You live simultaneously in the fourth and eighth sub-basement, in Solus and Arcadia. I had you migrated when you died.”
“The accident?” His voice had no wonder, no surprise.
“No. After that.”
“The pills?”
“Yes. The pills.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Well, nobody is coming to lock up your quantum mind for suicide.”
Eugene was quiet for a moment. “No. It’s illegal to have two digital selves. And you’re not real. Just an angel of death program of Conscious Designs. Programmed to remove me, make way for the update . . . And you haven’t been real for the last ten years.”
“I am the real Corina now.” The statement of course was true and untrue. It had occurred to him that maybe there was no distinction between truth and fiction, not anymore at least. “Your new life, your new Second Self, will be better, free of pain. No more suffering. That’s all I’ve wanted for you. I’m sorry.”
Eugene’s eyes were closed. Then he opened them and looked over at Corina. Without speaking his eyes communicated gratitude and maybe love. For Corina, this seemed like the most real moment that she had ever experienced. And maybe the same was true for Eugene. She hoped.
Corina felt the car wrest control from her. She tried to overcome the wheel, but the vehicle had come to serve the will of Eugene’s mind. She felt the impact of the tree come through the engine in her haptic suit, and was surprised at how painful the apparatus had allowed the experience to be on her physical body in the intervention room. When she looked over at Eugene, he seemed to be experiencing true consciousness, a moment of beatitude. The image fogged as her hot tears corrupted the visual experience of the stereoscopic headset. Then the feed went black, which she knew meant that the engineers had turned off Eugene’s processors and he no longer existed, not in Solus at least. And neither did that version of Corina who Eugene had continued to love for a decade, despite what she had done to him.
And then Corina was alone in Intervention Room 6, pulling off the cumbersome equipment, embodied again.
PART FIVE / ARCADIA
He awakens from darkness and the dream of being buried alive in a white, metallic-smelling casket into a large bed in a room with bare walls. The memory of pain has faded into a gentle burn that lingers in the ends of his toes. He looks down at his legs and sees an atrophied body. How long in this bed? He tries to flex his right quadriceps, but doesn’t even remember how to create the message. He somehow knows that these are not physical legs, just an idea of legs. Maybe there is liberation in this. And somehow he knows that there should be a woman here, but he is alone.
He looks for something he knows should be beside him, but he can’t remember what it looks like or what it does. It was something always sitting in a chair at the bedside. Or was it someone? But there is nothing in the room beyond him and the oversized bed. Through the open door, he sees there is no furniture in the house. Perhaps it is going to be sold, or bought, or maybe it was just built.
He looks down at his legs again and begins to imagine the muscles firing. After a few minutes, he is able to get the legs to straighten and bend upon his command. After some practice, he is able to lie on his side and simulate the act of walking. His body feels whole, for now.
He tries to stand up but falls down. The pain from the impact of the hard floor against his frail body seizes the entire moment. He laughs but doesn’t know why, only knows that this temporary pain has a purpose, a meaning. He pulls at the curtain until the rod dislodges from the window and his laughter grows more hysterical. He pulls himself up on the windowsill and uses the rod to support himself.
He notices that he is naked and feels shameful, even though he is alone. He wraps himself in the curtain just as his father taught him to do with a towel after getting out of the shower, telling him “this is how boys do it.” The canvas feels rough like that towel of his memory. The image of the father is usurped by a naked mother wrapping a large towel around her body, concealing her breasts, teaching a little girl “how us girls have to cover ourselves up.” Another memory of a towel slipping off in a locker and a chorus of boys shouting “needle dick” in unison. Another memory of wrapping a baby in a soft towel and thinking my “little burrito. I could just eat you alive.”
He fends off these strange memories that seem both familiar and alien at the same time and comes back to himself. Outside the sun is beginning to set; the clouds blush from gold into a deep crimson. He remembers writing a poem about this sunset in particular. The colors are . . . vivacious. Vivacious. He has heard that word, but can’t grasp a meaning. It feels like a smell that is attached to a memory that is just barely lost beneath the surface of the mind.
He stumbles into the kitchen and finds there is only hunger within him now. A bowl of mangoes is on the counter, the only thing in the room. He believes he has never eaten the fruit but knows, perfectly, their smell and their taste. A thousand memories of mangoes fill this moment as he peels off the skin and sinks his teeth in deep. The juice drips down his chin and sticks onto his chest. There is something pure about the sensation, almost erotic. He remembers when a woman had come to him from nowhere. She had held him, and loved him, made love to him. He keeps this memory as long as he can while he limps around the house to see if there is some sign of the woman. But he finds nothing.
A thousand mothers rush into his mind. Most had loved him; some had beaten him. He helps one of these women, a paralytic, in and out of her bed, placing her frail body into a wheelchair where she spends her days watching melodramas and writing letters to old friends. He sees another mother weeping in an empty hospital room, and another cutting a mango on a beach speaking a language he does not know but understands. She is telling him the fruit is the taste of the soul. And then there are no more memories as he begins to peel another mango.
When he has eaten the last fruit, a scene comes to his mind. A series of tall pines race past. He is driving an old car. He is upset, but doesn’t understand why. There is a man in the passenger’s seat who wears metal on his legs. He knows this man’s mind. He looks across the empty house at a large mirror and sees that he is the man from the memory that is not his own. He loves this man. Even after he has died.
He steps out of the house and looks into the sunset. When he breathes in the hot air, the clouds on the horizon expand, and as he expels the air from his chest, they contract. He waits to see if the colors will change, but the sunset seems to be fixed in time, as he now understands himself to be. There had never been anything but this sunset. He looks again at his body, but it is not there. Then this moment slips away and all that remains are a million moments, spots in time, fragments of lives once whole, each with discrete meaning in themselves, but together meaning nothing.
This book is dedicated
to everyone whose love
rehabilitated me after
my spinal cord injury.
NATHANIAL WHITE
grew up in Maine and has lived in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador. His speculative fiction explores the human psyche, physical disability, culture, technology and consumerism. He currently teaches high school English in the Rocky Mountains of Western Colorado.
Nathanial White, Conscious Designs
