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And then I dreamed.
I dreamed Ell had been brought back from the depths of chaos,
a trillion bits of data resurrected
from infinite entropy.
I dreamed she stood before me, as naked as
the sun and as pure as a ruby laser light.
And I dreamed my dream was not a dream, but reality!
Could one man, reconstructing computer files
over a distributed computer system that spanned
a global network of a billion computers,
reconstruct a virtual woman totally composed of bits and bytes?
Perhaps.
Could he give this cloud of electrons
a flesh and blood existence? That was an entirely different
problem.
My nightmares were consumed with the shock of
seeing the corpse of Laura Silvan lying on the floor,
twitching occasionally, her eyes staring into infinity.
Laura had been a woman whose evilness had held
the attraction of adventure, yet I had no remorse for
her death. Had I loved Laura?
If obsession is love,
then yes, a thousand times yes, I had loved her. But did I love Ell.
Yes. A thousand times more.
The soul of Laura had departed (brain dead is the
euphemism the medical profession uses). But her
body still breathed and her heart still pumped
life blood through her veins. The medical people had
taken this 'thing' to their industrial complex
of rooms filled with tubes, permeated by the aroma of
decrepit flesh. I could not follow to mourn her passing,
I was now a criminal, an assassin, a threat
to society.
I had to run for my life, even though the life I
now possessed was devoid of meaning without the
loves of my life. My friends in the resistance
had eyes and ears, they informed me that Laura's soul
was gone, but her body would not be allowed to die gracefully.
Protected by secret service agents
who stood guard, her hospital room was her sarcophagus.
One mourner was officially allowed to see her, to stand at
her bedside and watch the constant respiration.
That mourner was President Clint Williams, who despite
the blackness of his soul had loved Laura Silvan as truly
as I did. Yet I could see no grace in such a death,
wept over by a man who controlled the world through
the deception of a potent virus.
The paparazzi saw differently, they deified Laura Silvan,
and her lover, a modern Evita and Juan Peron and
proclaimed it a love story for the ages.
My grief in contrast was cloaked by repression.
I was a wanted man, hunted to the four
corners of the earth. Still, I had friends,
even in the hospital complex. Dr. Freeman, who had cared
for me, was assigned the high profile case. Alice,
the intensive care nurse from my own stay in the
hospital, was brought along to care for Laura,
professional courtesy because of her expertise.
They provided the path to redemption.
It was Dr. Freeman who suggested to the President that
aura be fitted with neurophotonic
implants, on the faint chance that that would
stimulate Laura's brain. Grasping at straws, President Williams
authorized the procedure using the
latest DARPA technology. Dr. Aguerro, the neurosurgeon who had done my implants,
was brought in to perform the operation, which was a success
in the limited sense that Laura's brain now
was accessible from the outer world through
electronic probing. But the reality was that this was little more
the torture of an inanimate corpse. The President gave up hope, as the days went on and
electronic stimulus through the neurophotonic connectors to Laura's brain
provided no signs of
recovery. But inside me there was an idea, a slight sliver
of belief that this could not be the end of the story.
Late in the darkness of a still night,
when the secret service agents slept from the boredom of
watching a corpse, I went with Crystal to see Laura where she lay.
She looked as though she were
asleep, not like in a coma so infinitely deep and black that there was no return.
She appeared to be dreaming like
Snow White.
I quietly wept like a child.
I can't say it was easy what we had to
do when we returned again a week later.
Clothing a body on a resuscitator
with a neural web of fiber optic strands was
much more difficult than you might imagine. Andy the grad
student, now engineering professor, helped.
Slowly, eyes began to flutter, there was a
slight moaning that broke the otherwise rhythmic
movement of air in and out of the vegetative being.
Suddenly, its eyes were open, at first dimly robotic
but then slowly becoming intelligent,
viewing the surroundings, with fear, or perhaps
surprise, readable in their movements.
That incredible sense of humanness that no object or animal
can mimic began to glow from every inch of this creature,
and it sat up, radiating a thousand points
of light as consciousness returned.
She looked at me, and suddenly the pain and fear dissolved from the eyes.
"Laura, is that you?" I asked unsurely, not imagining what to expect.
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I attached the final cables that would make
this lifeless body live again and
Laura's inanimate form sparkled like
a thousand stars of light, all surrounding
the dark star that was now her soul.
With the pounding of
my heart, and the hearts of those around us,
I executed the program that would energize this flesh. I
spoke the letter "L." at the command interface and then ordered "EXECUTE".