The Screen
This kept her a busy being. She delegated authority well, to the thousands of able helpers in her system, and the tens of thousands standing ready to serve in our physical world. Still, she always found the time, in one small partition of her ethernet existence, to spend with us. The same familiar face came to the screen, smiling and chit-chatting about the most trivial occurrences of our daily lives, what Rollo had for breakfast, what he was reading, how Scout was doing at school, how her looks were changing, growing into adolescence, how Monique fared.
Monique wasn’t faring well. Months passed, and she made no visible improvement. Everyday Mary and I operated as a team, our main purpose in life to bring her out of the trance she was in. Mary took care of her personal needs, as I Rollo’s. At breakfast, we fixed and brought them their plates. They would eat and laugh together, side by side, giggling and nudging each other, but when I took them both to the library hand in hand to read with me, telepathically, Rollo progressed by leaps and bounds while Monique withdrew into a shell. I would continue, guilt smitten, for an hour or so, for Rollo’s education, but end each session with a pat on Monique’s back, saying to her that with all my heart, that I hoped tomorrow would be a better day.
So it went on, month after month. Rollo was now five and a half, and with his enhanced brain and chipset at play, he showed all the talents of a young prodigy, proficient in English and French literature, a tyro in the Latin, Greek, Italian and German, in history and math and science.
Monique, on the other hand, was taking on the role of his little sister. The way he would take her by the hand, though she was two feet taller and twenty years older, to a bookshelf and hand her the appropriate picture book to look at, while he read large history books, was pathetic to watch. She would lovingly do it, guided by him, her star, and gaze at the pictures, often glancing up and watching him read, waiting for the moment when he would return from his ancient kingdoms and lead her by the hand to the next toy.
This was a picture that could not go on. I dreaded the thought of the future of this scenario. I knew that in a few years his advancing enthusiasms would leave her behind. As with any siblings who are more than a few years apart, their love for each other displays itself in an occasional burst of affection, but their interests are worlds away. They hug each other for a moment but then go back to their own set of toys, each set incomprehensible to the other. They try to love each other but they can’t. Their imaginations are too different to share.
This sad dilemma went on in our small household while Claire and her numerous aids were busily transfiguring the shape of human society around the globe. As more and more intelligent people were enlightened with her broadening chip distribution, more recruits were found to take the plunge, to divest themselves of all corporeal trappings and enter the ethernet forever, as administrators of a new world, beneficent, altruistic overlords watching over the entire human race, like the classical Greek gods of yore.
I was surprised one afternoon when I went to our screen in the panic room, our private retreat, and she came on with a wearied look. She told me that she’d had enough of this business, that she was dying, fragmenting, that she was losing touch with everything and had no direction ahead.
Then she confronted me with a proposition.
“Rolland, I think I can get out of this shell and cure Monique at the same time.”
I told her I’d be right back and ran downstairs to find Mary and Monique sitting in the back garden. I told them to come upstairs right away, that Claire had a plan that all three of us should hear. Mary led Monique up the stairs as she would a little girl. Then we pulled up two more chairs, dimmed the lights to see the screen better, and Claire began:
“I feel like I’m dissipating into this large network; besides, my mission is over. Others can take the helm for me. They know all that I could teach and are my equals now. I’m slowly losing something, my identity, spread out in all directions, so I’ve decided it’s time to come back into a body, translate myself once again into a human mind. I thought of Monique. I think I can help her once inside.”
The unexpected novelty of this idea shocked the both of us, almost to a blush, while Monique had no clue what she meant, and stared back at Claire’s image with a blank, white face. There was a long silence.
Mary spoke first. “Claire, if you could put your consciousness into Monique’s mind would it erase hers?’
“No, not at all” she replied. “We’d be co-tenants, roommates and as far as control is concerned, I would give her half of our time, nap so to speak, while her identity is fully in control.”
“Claire” I said, “this is so strange an idea we’ll have to sleep on it. Let’s get back tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll have many more questions.”
We signed off, and Mary and I went to the den. We sent Monique up to Rollo’s room where he was playing with a Meccano set I’d recently bought him, constructing a crane.
“Mary” I began, “this idea of two people inside one head baffles me. I know it would help Claire to have a body again, but do you think it would help Monique?”
“I haven’t the faintest clue” she said, “but I do know it would be extremely uncomfortable for me to hear Claire’s voice coming from Monique’s mouth. How could I hug her and not know who I’m hugging?”
“Well” I replied sarcastically, “it would be one or the other. You’d have a fifty-fifty chance of hugging Monique. I’m sure you’d be able to tell. But, more seriously, are you still romantically engaged with her?”
“No, not at all. She acts like a five-year-old child at best, always looking up to me with big, watery eyes for answers to questions I can’t imagine. I can only hug and kiss her as a child. But I do know she has some inkling that something is very wrong inside her, and that she suffers deeply. Sometimes at night she cries, and it sends shivers down my spine, the memories of Scout lying beside me ten years ago, with the same quiet sobs so as not to wake me. But I am awake and crying even more quietly. Maybe we should let Claire in. I don’t think I can survive this same nightmare twice in one lifetime, year after year. I’m not that strong.”
“Then again” she continued, “let’s reverse the roles. How could I watch you kissing Claire in her body without jealousy? Or her being a mother to Rollo? Would she be your wife?”
“I can forgo that part of our relationship, I guess” was all I could say.
I thought out loud, “Scout is with us. Scouts’ the unifier. She looks to Rollo as a brother and me as a father. Wouldn’t this make the five of us one tight-knit family?”
“The six of us” Mary replied, “in five bodies. One very strange family.”
We left it at that to ponder the matter separately. And I did mull over the idea the rest of the afternoon, pacing the floor in my upper library. The complexities of the question staggered me. At the dinner table, we told Scout the proposition. The strangest look of distaste came across her face, as strange as the proposition itself. She made no reply, but we told her we wanted her to be with us the next day when we talked to Claire again.
Mid-morning we flicked on the screen. Claire’s image appeared, haggard as the day before. She began:
“First of all, Scout, I’m so glad that you’re here. You deserve a say in this as much as anybody. Have all of you considered my offer?”
Mary began: “Claire, we need some promises from you. If you stole Monique from me, I would hate you for it, forever. You’ve stolen other people’s minds before. If you do enter her mind you must promise me to nurture her back to health and share with her, in the largest sense of the word, equal time, Monique one day and Claire the next, or if possible, both at the same time. I know you’d be dominant, the one in control, but you’d also have to be completely passive at times and let her personality, her being, shine, while you slept. And you must use every trick in your book to restore her completely to her former self.”
“I wholeheartedly agree to this. It will be the text and condition of my tenancy. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to repair many lost parts of her personality, once inside. Whatever fragments I find, and I’m sure there will be many, I’ll try to reassemble them, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and give her back an image of her former self, a mirror for her to look into, so she can work from there.”
“But even if I can’t help fix her and she does remain a child, I swear to give her complete free reign over half of our hours. You’ll see it in every aspect of her character beaming forth. And Mary, you be the judge and demand that time for her supremacy. I’ll also bow to you, Roland, as another judge, and to you too Scout. I know both of you are fair and considerate beyond what most people can even imagine.”
We looked at each other, the three of us, with still pensive faces but inclining to agree to the terms, when Claire broke in once again:
“And remember, this is no irrevocable decision. If it doesn’t work out, if you’re not happy with the result, I’ll give up my truancy and return to my box, this intangible world, until another body is found for me, someone with no strings attached, a complete stranger to your world. Perhaps that’s the best route to take. I just thought that I might help Monique and being inside a familiar face you would all love the both of us more, and love is what I crave and miss the most right now.”
“Love isn’t ‘intangible.’ It never was. It has to have touch and feeling, which only a physical being can enjoy. Without that, it’s just a cold idea, which I’ve found out, as cold as the dark and empty reaches of space. It’s not even a sigh in here. It’s pure silence. It’s not life. I thought I’d be eternal in this space, but I’m dying, famished for love.”
With this impassioned speech, we melted down and agreed to the trial, all three of us, asking when she wanted to begin. She told us now would be the time, and that to prepare Monique we would have to feed her nineteen more wafers right away, ten for the each of them, like the size of an apartment, she said, and enough to accommodate Claire’s furniture.
We did this, the three of us, in the same baffled daze that our minds were in since hearing the proposition. We looked much like Monique as we led her to my study, four pale fools, but we presented her the chips and told her to eat them one by one, like potato chips, which she did.
An hour later, as per Claire’s instructions, we led her to the chair and turned on the screen. Claire’s face appeared, already more flush with life, and Monique was instantly transfixed, staring at the screen with the widest of eyes, taking in trillions of thoughts, not just thoughts but a whole new consciousness. As the hours passed the image on the screen faded to a white ghost, and then to an outline of a face, and then to nothing. Monique closed her eyes and seemed to doze for about an hour, as the three of us stood behind her, Mary with her hand on her shoulder the whole time.
Then, in an instant, Monique opened her eyes and stood up. She turned around and first hugged Mary, then me and then Scout, like an adult.
“I love all of you. This is Claire. Monique is right beside me and she wishes to say something.”
“I have Claire now. She’s going to help me.”
She said all of this in her sweet voice, with her French accent, facing Mary. But even as she was speaking to her, one hand slipped behind her back and squeezed mine. And then it was patting Scout on the head. All of us could see she was very tired, so Scout and I left her in Mary’s hands for the night. We smiled at each other hoping all was going to turn out well, after almost a year of disappointing efforts. I sent Scout to put Rollo to bed and went to my own empty bedroom and laid down to sleep. But halfway into dreamland, a vision of Claire came to me, more than that, an eidolon, as if she were right beside me to every sense, and I fell asleep in her imaginary flower scented arms.
