Complete Stories (48 page)

The next morning, he was back at the Bertroy Building. Lo Park’s office was in the basement; it was one of a number of small cubicles partitioned off along one wall of a room-sized computer installation. To all appearances, Lo worked as a programmer here. There was nothing about “Soft Death” on her flimsy office door. Leckesh wondered if he should bother going in, but the thought of outflanking Abby’s occultist manipulations goaded him on.

The Korean woman at the desk was young and slender, with hair so dark as to appear almost blue against her yellow skin. She looked up with a quick smile.

“Mr. Leckesh? Yung told me about you.”

“He told you I’m rich, dying and desperate, I suppose. What kind of immortality are you selling, Lo? And what’s the price?”

“The price is high. The immortality is software.”

“What do you mean?”

“Consider, Mr. Leckesh. The human body changes almost all its atoms every seven years or so. But you feel you are the same person as you were seven or fourteen or fifty-six years ago. What is constant in your body is the arrangement of cells, especially the cells of the brain. The real essence of Douglas Leckesh is not the seventy-five kilograms of diseased flesh that sits here. The essence of Douglas Leckesh is to be found in the pattern that your brain codes up. Do you follow?”

Leckesh nodded approvingly. “I was afraid you’d be another spiritualist. You’re saying that my so-called soul is really just a pattern of digital information?”

“Exactly. Abstractly speaking, the information pattern exists even in the absence of a body. Yet for the pattern to be in any sense
alive
, it needs some kind of substrate.” She smiled and gestured beyond her office door. “The Soft Death substrate is that computer out there. If you wish, I can extract the entire software information pattern from your body and code it into the machine.”

“How do I know you can really do it? And what would it feel like to live inside a computer’s memory?”

“Before we continue, Mr. Leckesh, I need a commitment from you. For various reasons, the full work of Soft Death is not legally sanctioned. I cannot put my earlier clients at risk without some proof of your sincerity.”

“You’re saying you want a check?”

“I want a document granting us title to approximately half of your properties and investments.” She slid a legal paper across the desk. “I’ve taken the liberty of drawing it up.”

Leckesh scanned down the contract with a practiced eye. Soft Death Incorporated had worked fast: half his assets were listed here, nearly a billion dollars worth. In return for the billion, Soft Death was promising Leckesh “hospice care and advanced embalming services.”

“We can’t make the contract more specific, Mr. Leckesh, again because of the legal sanctions on certain aspects of our operation.”

Leckesh shrugged. Perhaps this was a con. But what was the difference anymore? If Soft Death didn’t get this billion, Abby would give it to the Mr. Gardens of the world. He could feel the cancer deep in his guts; he could feel the growing of the pain. “I’ll sign.”

Lo pushed a buzzer, and a man came in to witness and notarize the document. Another blue-haired Korean. They reminded Leckesh of smurfs.

“Your brother, too?” asked Leckesh, smiling a little. Signing away this money felt good. What was that old bible story about the rich man trying to squeeze through a needle’s eye?

“No,” said Lo. “A cousin.” She locked the contract in her desk. “And now you’ll want to see proof that our process works. Do you remember William Kaley?”

“Bill Kaley? Yes, I knew him rather well. We did business together. He died last fall, I believe. He was one of the most materialistic men I ever knew. Are you telling me …”

“Here,” said Lo, punching a code into her telephone, and handing Leckesh the receiver. “You can talk to him.”

At first Leckesh heard only pips and bleats, but then there was a ringing, and a voice.

“Hello? Kaley here.”

“Bill? This is Doug Leckesh. Do you know what day it is?”

“It’s March 31, Doug. Are you dead, too?”

“Damn near. Are you really inside that computer?”

“Sure am. It’s not bad. There’s a lot of information coming in. I’m managing most of the investments I signed over to Soft Death, which keeps me busy. There’s a pretty good gang of people in here.”

“Any landscape?”

“It’s not like that, Dougie. But you’d be surprised how much fun pushing around the bits can be. How soon are you coming in? I’m a little lonely for a new voice, to tell you the truth.” He sounded almost wistful. “But, hell, it beats being dead. When are you coming in?”

“We haven’t worked that out yet.” Was this real? Leckesh paused, trying to remember something that would convince him he was really talking to the software of William Kaley. The Schattner deal! “Do you remember the Schattner takeover, Bill?”

“Do I! Don’t tell me the SEC finally found out.”

“No, no, I’m just checking. Remember the night after Schattner shot himself, and you and I’d made twelve million bucks? Do you remember what we had for dinner?”

“We went to MacDonald’s. The check was twelve dollars. We laughed our asses off.
I could eat a million of these.
Oh, it’s me in here, Doug, don’t worry.”

Leckesh smiled. “I’m not worried now, Bill. See you soon.” He hung up and looked at Lo. “When do we start?”

“Let me outline the procedure. To extract your software, we need to get five kinds of maps of your brain: symbolic, metabolic, electrical, physical, and chemical. Taken together, these data-sets are sufficient to produce an isomorphic model of your mental processes. You should begin working on the symbolic map today.”

“What do you mean? I thought
you
would do the work.”

“Only you know your own symbol-system, Mr. Leckesh.” Lo took a device the size of a cigarette-pack out of her desk. It had two little grilles, for microphone and speaker. “We call this a lifebox. Basically, I want you to tell it your life story. Tell everything. It takes most people a couple of weeks.”

“But…I’m no writer.”

“Don’t worry; the lifebox has prompts built into its program. It asks questions.” She flicked a switch and the lifebox hummed. “Go on, Mr. Leckesh, say something to it.”

“I…I’m not used to talking to machines.”

“What are some of the first machines you remember, Doug?” asked the lifebox. Its voice was calm, pleasant, interested. Lo nodded encouragingly, and Leckesh answered the question.

“The TV, and my mother’s vacuum cleaner. I used to love to watch the cartoons Saturday morning—Bugs Bunny was the best—and Mom would always pick that time to vacuum. It made red and green static on the TV screen.” Leckesh stopped and looked at the box. “Can you understand me?”

“Perfectly, Doug. I want to build up a sort of network among the concepts that matter to you, so I’m going to keep asking questions about some of the things you mention. I’ll get back to the vacuum cleaner in a minute, but first tell me this: what did you like best about Bugs Bunny?”

For the next couple of weeks, Leckesh took his lifebox everywhere. He talked to it at home and in the club—and when Abby and his friends reproved him for ignoring them, he began talking to it in a booth at Yung’s bar. The lifebox was the best listener Leckesh had ever had. It remembered everything he told it, and it winnowed the key concepts out of all his stories. Leckesh would respond to its prompts, or simply go off on tangents of his own. Except for the dizziness and the constant pain, he hadn’t had so much fun in years.

Finally, in mid-April, the lifebox said, “Now
that’s
a story I’ve heard before, Doug. And so was the last one. And, unless I’m mistaken, you’re about to tell me about the first time you slept with Abby.”

“You’re right,” said Leckesh, feeling a little twinge of guilt. Telling his life had made him remember how big a part of him Abby really was. And now, for two weeks, he’d been too busy with the lifebox to even look at her.

“Abby, Summer, Maine, Fourth of July, Firecrackers, Cans, Pineapple, Aunt Rose, Roses, Abby, Skin, Honey, Hexagons…I think we’ve got enough to go on, now, Doug. Why don’t you bring me on over to Lo’s. I’ve signaled her to expect us.”

Leckesh nodded to Yung and walked over the Bertroy Building. It was a beautiful spring day at last, with the endless blue sky leaping up from the spaces between the big city building. Six shades of blue, if you looked carefully. He hadn’t been able to tell the lifebox much about colors.

Lo was all smiles. “You’ve done a good job with the lifebox, Mr. Leckesh. That’s one of the most important steps. Now, what the lifebox program has done is to arrange some ten thousand of your key concepts into a kind of tree-diagram. The next step is to correlate this concept-network with your brain’s metabolic activity. Please come this way.”

Leckesh followed Lo across the computer room to the elevators. They rode up to a neurologist’s office on the top floor. There was a nice view out the top halves of the windows; the bottom halves were frosted glass. The neurologist and his nurses were, of course, Korean. Working quickly, they injected Leckesh with something, and laid him out on a table, with his head inside a large, domed sensor device.

“This is a PET-scanner, Mr. Leckesh,” explained the doctor. We want to learn just which parts of your brain react to the key concepts of your life story.” The injection made Leckesh feel both stunned and lively. He couldn’t move, but his mind was going a mile a minute. The PET-scan sensor seemed like a cavern, a door into the underworld. The doctor set the lifebox down on Leckesh’s chest, and it began its rapid-fire rundown.

“Machine. TV. Vacuum cleaner. Bugs Bunny. Rudeness. Teeth. Dogs …” After each word or phrase the PET-scanner would click. The process went on for the whole afternoon. ”…Pineapple. Cans. Firecrackers. Fourth of July. Maine. Summer. Abby.” Finally it was over. The doctor injected an antidote; Leckesh’s body speeded back up, and his mind slowed back down. Lo took him downstairs to her cubicle. The long afternoon’s ordeal had left him so weak that his walk was a stooped shuffle.

“Well, that’s it, Mr. Leckesh—until the end. We’ll get the electrical, physical and chemical maps at the end.”

“The end? After I die?”

Lo looked a little uncomfortable. “This is where the hospice comes in. We can’t take the risk of having your brain degenerate before we can analyze it. For the electrical probes to give reliable reading, the brain still has to be somewhat functional. Unless the tissues are absolutely fresh, the physical microtoming process works very poorly. And memory RNA is an extremely labile substance. The coordination of your brain-removal with our team’s readiness is a delicate thing.”

“Now hold on a minute. What are you saying?” Lo’s yellow face and blue hair made Leckesh think of a nightmare by van Gogh.

“I told you that some aspects of our operation are legally questionable, Mr. Leckesh.” Each syllable came out just so.

“You’re telling me that I’m supposed to make an appointment for your doctors to shock me to death, and cut up my brain, and grind up the pieces for a chemical analysis?”

“We need a day’s notice, is all. When you get to the point where you think the end is near, Mr. Leckesh, you simply get in touch with Soft Death, and our ambulance will take you to our hospice.”

“What if I wait too long?”

Lo shrugged. “It’s a matter of statistics, like everything else. Here.” She took what looked like a wristwatch out of her desk. “Wear this. To signal us to come get you, simply push this button here. The watch also has sensors which signal us automatically in case you collapse. Let me stress that the chances of our achieving a fully isomorphic copy of your software are much greater if you come in early. Quite frankly, I’d advise coming in today. I think the crisis is closer than you realize.”

“You’re just in a hurry to claim your half of my assets,” challenged Leckesh, suddenly wild with fear. His guts were on fire and his head was spinning.

“We already
have
half of your assets,” corrected Lo. “The document you signed was a contract, not a will. And, by the way, for another quarter of your assets we would be able to provide software
transmission
as well as the planned preservation …”

“I’m getting out of here,” shouted Leckesh, in a strained, cracking voice. “Soft Death is a bunch of vampires and ghouls!” In the cab home, he began coughing blood. He wondered if the Soft Death neurologist had poisoned him. This had all been a horrible mistake. He’d never been able to take Bill Kaley for more than an hour at a time; and now he was supposed to spend eternity in a machine with Kaley and a bunch of other rich fools?

He found Abby alone in the apartment, talking on the phone with Mr. Garden. Leckesh was so desperate to see his wife that he didn’t bother to be annoyed.

“Oh, Abby, I’ve been selfish. I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring you these last few weeks.”

“Where’s your little recorder, Doug? Did you finish dictating your life story?” Her pale, anxious face was luminous in the apartment’s gathering dusk.

“It’s all done. Kiss me, Abby.”

They hugged and kissed for a long time. Leckesh wondered how he could have thought that his words were more important than Abby’s real self, her real body with its real curves and its sweet real fragrance. And…even realer than that…her
aura
, the married couple telepathy they had together, the precious, unspoken understanding of two people in love.

“Doug?”

“What, darling?”

“What have you been up to, really? What were you always talking into that little box for? I know it wasn’t a recorder like you said. I heard it talking back to you. And there’s something else. I went to the bank today, and half of our money is gone. The teller said some group called Soft Death had a paper giving them the right to take half of our money out. What is Soft Death, Doug?” Abby’s voice quavered and broke. “Is it another woman you’ve been talking to? I wouldn’t blame you, with so little time left, but why won’t you let
me
help you, too?”

Leckesh’s heart swelled as if to burst. After all the bad things he’d thought about Abby in the past—she really did care. She cared more than anyone. Yet, still, he couldn’t tell her. It was Soft Death or nothing, wasn’t it? There was no immortality outside of their machine.