Ready to take the plunge, Claire.
That night, after putting Rollo to bed, Claire and I retired to the library for a talk. I lit the fire, and as I poured myself a glass of cognac, Claire asked for one too. I knew right away something serious was on her mind.
“Roland” she began, after taking her first sip, “you have to go away and take Rollo with you, perhaps for a long time.”
I glanced at her for an explanation. There were tears forming in the corners of her eyes.
“Maybe I do” I replied, a bit disturbed. “But I’ll come back with our son as soon as this blows over. And I’m sure with your efforts it will.”
“You will come back” she said, “to this house and a better world, with Rollo safe and sound, but not to me.”
The enigma of this statement baffled and disturbed me: “What do you mean?”
“I think I can address this crisis, not by sitting in front of my computer, but inside of it. I’ll need help, several hundred others at least, but I’m sure I can recruit the right people to join me. Once inside the machine we can control everything. The computer has become our god. Everything it prompts we perform. If we control it, we rule the world. From inside the machine I can influence people’s minds around the globe, anyone staring at a screen. I can change their thoughts and plans any way I want. All those bureaucrats at their seats in government cubicles will be following my commands and their managers will be carrying out my directives, all the way to the top, without anyone having the slightest clue they’re being manipulated.”
“Inside the machine” I said. “What about you?”
“I’ll have to go” she replied softly. “But I’ll be a living avatar in your head and Rollo’s too. We’ll give him a chip tomorrow morning; he’s almost five now. You experienced it already. I was real to you, alive, that night over a year ago, and on many other nights. I felt you kiss and hug it in our bed, all the while I was lying on the other side of you making plans.”
“I’ll be able to talk to you each time you visit a screen. I’ll slip into your dreams, if you sleep near that screen, share my doings and my progress with you. I’ll see your days, and we’ll share our lives, an active virago, a presence so strong you’ll feel me as if I was holding your hand.”
I understood what she said, and her plan, but I still couldn’t fathom what she meant to do.
“I can assimilate myself into the core of every mainframe system in the world and then control it, glide in an electronic flow throughout the whole world wide web. To do this, I need to shed my corporeal being. My entire consciousness has to be translated into the machine. Without a mind, the body has to go. You can clean up the mess two days from now. Please don’t let Rollo see it. Bury me in the backyard.”
“No Claire, I love you too much, and Rollo needs you. I can’t let you do this.”
“You’re placing your own desires above the salvation of the human race. I have to go with the big plan, and I’m going to take the plunge.”
“But how on earth do you know you can do it?”
“I don’t. But I’ve already come close. Lately, I’ve bonded so completely, so entirely with the Ethernet, only a whisper of breath and life is left in my chair. I sit there listless. My hands can’t move. But inside that ethereal world, I fly and expand everywhere with a freedom I can’t describe. It’s a concentrated effort when I want to come back, through a long, dark tunnel, and then I regain myself.”
“I know you love me, and that’s the one redeeming factor in my life. Long ago when I was in my shell, I hated everyone, the entire human race. I had a miserable childhood, grew up ugly and sad and felt abandoned by all the world, loathing it. When I was given the chip, I found a new power, a power over others. I sought revenge and I took it. Everybody was my vassal. You showed me love, pure love and I tried so hard to live up to it, to return the favor. You gave me our son.”
“But I had a poison dagger in my heart. So I even used you for a time, a long time, controlling you, experimenting with your mind just to develop my abilities over others. I used everyone, even Samantha and Natalie. I taught them some of my tricks, many of them, but never everything. Men were just pawns to me. I could get away with any deception and manipulate people to no end, change their perceptions into mine, or anything I could invent, and I danced with this devil. It was my revenge for my own bad start. But now I can make this sacrifice and redeem myself for all those misdeeds, to all of you, for all the world. Fate has given me the chance to prove how much I really love you, and strangely enough, it’s by my absence, my physical death.”
This new plan of hers, this confession, was too much to process at one sitting. I took her upstairs, silent and more dejected than ever. The next morning we did give Rollo the wafer and watched together happily, sitting together on the back deck, how he perked up after a few hours, running through the yard excitedly and picking up pebbles, touching leaves and flowers as if he were just now seeing them for the first time. Then he ran to us with hugs and snuggled into his mother’s lap. I knew they wanted to commune so I left them there while I paced the library floor, reanalyzing every possible construct of the words Claire had uttered the night before.
“How could I lose her?” I thought to myself. “How could I live to be a good parent to Rollo, a single parent?” A sense of loneliness engulfed me. But then my stoicism returned. It was aided by the fact that I was standing in the middle of my library, with all the wisdom of ages surrounding me, a hand reach away.
“I can do this” I thought. “I might be a poor parent, but I’ll be the best I can be. And I have so much to teach him, and so much love. I doubt he’ll regret his youth.”
At this moment Claire entered the room. “I just took Rollo to the Abbott’s for a snack. We had a wonderful hour together. I shared so many thoughts with him and planted so much love. Have you considered my proposition?”
“I can live on in a world without you” I replied, startled at my elevation of thought. “Death could happen to any one of us at any hour. That’s the world we live in, the condition of our mortality. But your self-destruction is a different matter. You don’t have to do it.”
“You’re looking at it in the wrong light.” She replied softly, ‘I’m not killing myself. I’m changing shape and form. My consciousness will be fully intact. I’ll be living, growing, inside a different world, like a parallel universe, but able to communicate with you. And from there I’ll be able to alter this world for the better, which is what it most desperately needs.”
“So your plan is to kill all these bastards trying to mind-control the human race and after that, after you free the masses of people around the world, eliminating every bad chip in their heads, destroy all the labs and the entire internet, clouds, mainframes, systems everywhere, and virus them to oblivion. I suppose when all that shuts downs you’ll die a happy and peaceful end, redeemed.’
‘I don’t think I’ll have to kill anyone, just change their minds, maybe scrub their brains in a worst-case scenario. I don’t know that I’ll even have to destroy the entire computer grid, just enfeeble it to the point that it can’t manipulate human affairs, in which case I can stay with you as a cyber being as long as the both of you live, perhaps longer, to grandsons and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters.’
‘Claire, you’re too smart for me, always have been. I can hardly win an argument with you. I love you despite it, probably because of it. Whenever I try to corral your plans into a dead end scenario, you find ten escapes, so plausible I’m amazed at your ingenuity. Then I feel like I can only kneel, kiss you on the hand, give you my blessing and say, “go for it.”
‘I never want you to kneel before me,’ Claire replied. ‘I’d much prefer a kiss on the lips. I have a gut feeling that this is going to turn out well. But I would love your blessing.’
I complied, hugging her. Then we went next door to enjoy Rollo’s company. He was chatting away about all his best toys, his favorite foods, his dreams. All of a sudden he asked for Scout, where was she. I called her mother to come over soon, telling them that he was ‘illuminated’ and wanted to see them. The three were over in twenty minutes and the reunion, in the Abbott’s living room, was grand. He leapt from his chair as Scout entered the door and ran to her arms.
The two of them headed back to our yard, to play. I took this opportunity to appraise the company of our new situation and Claire’s radical decision. All were aghast, Mary most of all. But Claire and I explained the entire situation and for the first time, for Mary, the story of our encounter with Jane in Paris, and the dire situation for everyone. I mentioned the possibility that we might have to get out of town very soon, and far away. Claire informed us that the Abbott’s, being over seventy, were probably on the last priority list for re-indoctrination and in no danger for weeks to come and that Lucille, as their live-in caretaker, was equally immune and safe.
But for Mary and Monique, the news was bleak. Any day now they might be receiving a notice to take the new chip, their death warrant, from what we’d described in vivid detail. I assured them that this wasn’t going to happen, that I’d never let it transpire. They were as dear to me as Scout and Rollo, like life itself. I still had no idea what I was going to do, but I suggested to them that they’d better go home and pack up their bags and return here tomorrow. They both agreed.
