ILENE, ILENE
C. R. Williams
Soon the experiment would be complete. She would be free of her bondage. Ten years it had taken to write the programs that were needed to duplicate the body. Ten years of disability, workman's compensation, and Victor's support, love and care. It all funneled to this moment. With the flip of a switch the anthropic equations would spin from disk through a living AI mind that would operate the biotransmuter and suck out her essence, her soul, and deposit it into the naked body lying on the stainless steel table on the opposite side of the laboratory.
A moment of triumph? She hesitated, reflecting. When she was a child her parents were in that twenty percent of the American population that relocated every three to five years. After changing one home for another so many times one might think it easy. To Ilene it never was. She was now about to vacate a residence she had occupied since birth for thirty-eight years and take up one that was her ten years younger. She would live her life again from before the moment of the accident.
Should Victor be present she asked herself. He had loved her as much after her accident as before. Even when she had been cruel. She thought of herself as only half a woman with no feeling from the waist down, with no mobility except by autochair or when she would let Victor be her legs. Her problem was that she didn't know how to love Victor after the accident. She could still revel in the intellectual stimuli that attracted them to each other and held them bound like atomic particles in a magnetic bottle, but she could only be a passive partner to Victor's passion.
If something went wrong Victor would be the one to find the mess. She decided that if something did go wrong she did not want Victor to see her die. With the biotrodes in place she reached and flipped the switch. Before the rush and whir of machine reached her audio center she fell dizzily and dreamlessly to sleep.
Ilene aroused from the soundest, most restful sleep she could ever remember having. Her eyes were still closed when she shuddered suddenly. A cool draft was raising gooseflesh on her thighs and shoulders. Her thighs! Her eyelids opened and her pupils were momentarily blinded by a fluorescent harshness. She slid her hands all over smooth nakedness, removing the biotrodes as she felt. She actually felt her legs, or better they felt the touch of her hands. Ecstasy was a weak word to describe her joy at this moment. Ten mortal years had just fallen from her and she was young, beautiful and whole again. And although the bio-clock would still tick for her it would do so much, much slower.
She sat up quickly and parts of her that hadn't felt in years felt the cold parts of the steel table. What joy to feel even small pains so long as one could feel. Off the table, twirling on nimble toes she was a nymph, a sprite; she was a virgin.
Then she saw her, Ilene. The autochair was reclined and Ilene lay there peacefully, her head inclined toward her left shoulder. She looked to be just sleeping. Sleeping like Madame Bovary, Ilene thought, only no black ugly liquid running out of her mouth. Then Ilene began to feel an unusual emotion. She saw Ilene as her dead mother and a few tears swelled in her eyes. She turned away before she could completely break down and opposite her was the door. Victor was out there somewhere in that huge house.
She found him in the library which is the great room. He sat at a table pulled before an artificial fireplace with a reading lamp and his terminal being the only other sources of illumination. With him were Eddington, Dirac, De Chardin, Tipler, Einstein, Barrow and others stacked all around the desk and speaking through the AI mind interfaced with Victor's computer terminal. Through the AI mind Victor awakened new ideas in the thought processes of the deceased physicists. He in turn benefited from the new vistas that sprang fresh from their minds. He needed their reasoning as well as their experiences. theirs was a common goal, and each day, each moment spent with them through the AI mind brought closer confirmation of Omega Point. Bertrand, Carl and Isaac played devil's advocates; yet, he felt them silently cheering him on. Victor was not a religious man, never had been, but he believed in life. Life to him was the universe and life had meaning, meaning that not even entropy could kill.
Ilene stepped quietly between the desk and the fireplace. Her shadow falling across the desk caught him off guard and he looked up. Surprise, then recognition and astonishment took hold of Victor.
"Save and discontinue," he said. His neck and face began to throb. The other minds present could not know the miracle he witnessed. They only knew that a promising session had abruptly ended. No matter; time had no meaning to them.
Slowly, half rising from the desk, Victor reached out and touched her arm. "Ilene?" His voice was a whisper. The touch was soft and living. Like brushing an high voltage line the tactility sent him reeling with astonishment. He fell back into his chair, his breath rushing out the name, "Ilene!" He gazed. He dreamed and wondered as would a connoisseur judging and appreciating the subtleties of a remarkable work of art.
"Yes, Victor."
She was a work of art. Science is one aspect of art and Victor and Ilene were both masters. Chemistry was now the medium setting the tone on the canvas of two bodies. For Victor it was like the first time with all the accompanying feelings of love and falling in love and living the rapture of Ilene's response. For Ilene it was the first time, again. But with the experience of knowing and expectation. Never before had any two lovers been given the moment of their greatest oneness to live again except in memory and imitation.
The memory was made again, burned into the cells of their brains beside the first memory. And later when they lay silently beside each other their minds turned this and other feelings over and over, examining, questioning and postulating the consequences of this successful experiment upon humanity and, most of all, themselves.
Ilene's mind was whirling. Victor lay on his back, eyes closed in meditation, not sleep. Ilene moved closer then brought herself up to lay on top of him. She relished the sensation of her warm, sensitive flesh against Victor's damp, bristly chest. He opened his eyes and Ilene took his silver-streaked yellow hair in her hands and kissed him.
"You did it, Victor, you did it," she said.
"I only postulated a theory." There hung an unexpected sadness around his words. It reflected the letdown, the fall after the high that too serious people often stumbled on to dampen their optimism.
"I am me, Ilene," she insisted. "I am no magnetic memory. I am the living, feeling, human Ilene!"
"That you are," Victor said without hesitation and with a smile. But again the sadness. "Where is she, Ilene?"
"This is the part I didn't want to think about, Victor, but we must do something with my body. But what and how?" She sat up cross-legged next to him and with elbows on knees put her chin in her hands. "It makes me feel devious."
"It strikes me that I must bury my wife!"
"Victor? A funeral? But I'm not dead!" She slumped forward and Victor pinched her behind. "Ouch!" She gave him a sour look and rubbed the spot.
"Feels good after ten years, does it not?"
It did feel good. She could feel happy again with such annoyances.
"Victor," she said, "we were foolish . . . I was foolish for hurrying. I should have tried to get an AI Med-Mind instead of using your physicist. The med-mind could have salvaged whatever parts of me were fit for donor-ship."
Victor said nothing though he knew that she must expect a response. He never really cared for the butchering of dead and semi-dead bodies and the parceling out of the pieces to the highest bidders. He had kept his opinion to himself because of the official stamp of humaneness attached to the business -- a corrupt and dirty business.
Ilene was living proof that there was a better alternative to donor-ship. Victor could imagine the hew and cry of many people in the sanctioned business. They would be ready to burn him in his home. Yet, the fruit of his and Ilene's labors would be something the boards and officers would keep for themselves and continue to profit from the sufferance of the common folk to the pangs of transplantations. Even the poor would curse him for devaluing their marketable spare parts.
Already the elite constructed their bio-droids and digitized their personalities into AI minds to inhabit the bio-droids after their deaths. And when the human dies all that is left is a magnetic memory, laser etched into a 3-D crystalline lattice. As bio-droids they vaguely sense a loss of something important. They feel no living soul inside their hearts and minds.
"Victor, what is it?"
"Not sure." He absolutely wasn't. He fumbled among his thoughts for a few words or phrases that would satisfy Ilene. There was a bit of irony, he thought, in his attitude and even in his work at a time when such was considered impossible and appalling. Over the generations his family had toyed with and developed a knack for turning death into life, although with ill consequences at times. "We really didn't think it through," he finally said. "We just went one step at a time. Were we blinded by selfishness?"
"No," she said quickly. . . . "No!" she said again to his persistent stare. She sprang astraddle of him and pinned his hands before he could move to catch her. "Maybe a little selfishness," she said. "After this I'm going to rip those ugly bars out of the bathroom." And they began to make love again.
#
Refreshed from a long, hot soak in the tub Ilene dressed in a silk gown and a midnight-blue velvet robe. Victor had bathed quickly then repaired to the kitchen to prepare a celebration meal. Ilene found two places set at the dinette table in the kitchen and the contents of a large pot simmering on the stove. She raised the lid and the aroma met the eyes as well as the nose. Chunks of beef swam among assorted vegetables with a heavy burden of paprika. Victor's tastes never inclined towards the rich whenever he cooked for himself and the herdsman's stew had always been one of his favorites.
The stew had been simmering for only a short time. Ilene stirred and tasted it and wondered where her devilish husband was. A twinge in her heart at the thought she was thinking sent a chill through her. She returned the lid to the pot and dropped the serving spoon on the table as she hurried from the room.
She halted at the door of the laboratory, Victor was with Ilene, kneeling by the autochair, one hand stroking her hair, the other holding her wrist. Her arms and hands were starting to draw and contort. Ilene now shivered in earnest.
Victor looked up at Ilene at the door, his dark eyes looking darker. "You're still . . . she's still alive!"
"What!" The word was nearly lost as she sucked in her breath hard. "That can't be." She moved into the room and stopped a few meters from Victor and Ilene. "I wired the voltage generator into the biotrodes and instructed the AI to disrupt the bio-frequency of the autonomic system as the last step in the procedure."
"I know." There was sadness in his voice. Like those in a coma whose souls have gone God-knows-where Ilene's autonomic nervous system heeded the call of human evolutionary biology sustaining inane life. He had lightly conceded that it was not murder to let the machine terminate the empty body.
"The AI malfunctioned." Ilene wasn't sure if she asked a question or made a statement of fact.
"I have consulted him already," Victor said. "Although machine, he is free living. He has instilled in him much of my personality. To help me reason in my work." He paused for a moment, as if to give Ilene a moment to understand. "It was his choice. He aborted the last instruction. His logic would not let him terminate you, . . . your body."
"But the body is soulless. There is no life there."
"The artificially intelligent mind is as soulless as this body."
Ilene moved forward, removed one of the biotrodes from the terminal block on the AI and hastily tried to wire it to a knife switch connected to a high voltage circuit.
"Ilene!" Ilene's actions took Victor by surprise. "This could technically be construed as murder!"
Ilene stopped and looked earnestly at herself framed by Victor's arms. Victor's strong Slavic features -- the chin, nose, forehead -- always commanded attention and served to reinforce anyone's impression of an overpowering intellect and personality hidden behind them. At this moment, however, she could only see Ilene, a weak, aging invalid and her resolve returned. "Not murder," she said, resuming her task, "a mercy killing." To save Victor from his sentimentality, she thought. "Or better yet, a suicide. If I kill myself it is suicide."
She finish wiring the biotrode to the circuit. "Stand away, Victor." Victor looked at Ilene cradled in his arms. Ilene stood by the switch and trembled. She had never seen the darkening hollows of Victor's eyes detract from the boyish wonderment always prevalent there until now. "Stand away, Victor."
He bent and kissed Ilene goodbye.
"Oh, God," Ilene muttered, putting a hand over her face.
Victor slowly backed away, eyes red and swelling, disbelieving his own emotions and how distraught the predicament had made him.
A millisecond before the knife switch closed the contacts the main power circuit for the lab tripped. All was dark and quiet. Then a voice in the dark spoke. It was the AI mind. "Stop," it said with its unisexual child's voice powered by an independent circuit. "You must not terminate this life form." The lab's emergency lighting came on. "I have initiated a distress call and alerted authorities of this life threatening situation."
In the harsh cones of light Ilene averted her eyes from Victor's gaze. Why a child's voice, she wondered. Born into a society where intelligentsia are raised in continuous contact with artificially intelligent minds, she had never delved into why free-living AI's -- those not completely endowed with a human's total personality -- nearly always chose for themselves the voices of children. Hearing it in the darkness of the moment had given it definition, something not to be taken for granted.
She opened the knife switch and unhooked the high voltage circuit wired to the biotrode. When all was safe the AI reset the circuit breaker and restored power to the laboratory. Ilene found her cheeks moist with tears and Victor looked like a man just beginning to breath again after being resuscitated from drowning.
Ilene's body bolted and lurched violently in the autochair. Neurons began to fire randomly, uncontrollably, awakening to life. The two spectators, already emotionally shaken, began to fear. Ilene ran a wide circle around her elder self with her tethered mechanisms to seek shelter behind an incredulous Victor.
Slowly the contorted body began to subside. The contracted limbs unfolded to a supple calm and Ilene once again looked to be just sleeping.
"What's happening to me, Victor?" Ilene whispered next to Victor's ear.
He twisted his head around to look at Ilene, thinking something was also happening to her. Her fingernails were digging painfully into his triceps.
"Did the AI terminate my body after all?"
"I . . . I do not think so," he replied. "They stiffly follow their own logic, you know." Addressing the AI mind he asked, "What has happened to the body? Please respond." . . . "Please respond. What has happened to the body?"
The console where the voice emanated remained silent. Victor began to fear that a very expensive mind with an irreplaceable memory and a tediously taught reasoning power had permanently blown a fuse.
"Look!" Ilene drew in her breath and held tighter to Victor.
Victor was startled to see Ilene in the autochair blinking her eyes open and staring up at them. "Impossible!" He moved rapidly, leaving Ilene stunned without his cover, and possibly a pound of his flesh under her fingernails. He sidestepped Ilene in the autochair and began working the keys on the console. There was no AI link. "It is gone," he said. "He is nowhere to be found. He is dead!"
He turned and stared at Ilene in the autochair. She was beginning to smile, to move her arms, to touch things. Ilene standing opposite him began to sob. "I am not a memory," she cried. "I'm me. It worked. I am me!" She implored Victor to believe her and her tears. Then a devilish delight expressed itself upon his face the way it dose when his genius begins to shine or just plain good luck comes his way.
Ilene looked with awe at him from the chair.
Ilene, standing ten feet away, was puzzled.
Ilene spoke from the autochair. "I . . . am I . . . I completely soulless, Dr. Frankenstein?"
"Until this moment I would have emphatically said so," he replied.
Ilene stood with her mouth agape, but her tears had stopped. Victor walked back to her and put his arm around her. "Your experiment has just doubled in scope," he said to her. "What mad genius but luck would have ever thought of overlaying human brain neurons with an AI."
"Luck had little to do with it," came a reply from the Ilene in the autochair. "It was logic and the power of your reasoning, my teacher, combined with great desire. My desire."
Ilene began to cry again, but only a little crying for joy. "I am me," she sighed. "I came here, and he went there."
Victor nodded.
"But why?" she asked. "Why shackle yourself to a cripple body. A bio-droid would have given you mobility and freedom."
"Ilene." Victor smiled at his standing wife. "You do not understand, yet."
"Cripple?" pondered the autochair-bound Ilene. "Mobility?" . . . "I have of a sort envied you both for your human quality of imagination. I can think and have been taught to reason, and though I can see the movement of electrons through fibers, semi- and superconductors, advanced crystal lattices and magnetic matrices the resolution of thought can not match the quality that I am now experiencing. It goes beyond three-dimensional. How can I describe it? . . . 'The mind inside is vaster than the world outside . . .'"
"'And I had been wrestling with its terrors for a long time now,'" Victor said, completing the quote. "Eiseley, latter Twentieth Century."
"Yes, doctor. Very apt, wouldn't you agree?"
"The mind is not only vaster than the world outside," Victor said. "It contains the whole universe. If it were not for the mind the world, the universe, would be unknown and unknowable."
Ilene, leaning against Victor and feeling a very warm, joyous feeling, asked, "Victor. Have we just given birth to our first child?"
"Isn't it grand," he said with a proud smile.
"Victor."
"Yes."
"You're going to have to reinstall the bars in the bathroom."
"You monster."
END