Today, however, no one was present, which the guards found mildly disappointing.
“Wait outside,” she told them once they had done their sweep; then she climbed the ice steps and entered.
Inside were about a dozen niches with holographic welcome screens and an interface so simple, the dearly departed’s pet could probably use it. Scythe Rand stepped toward an interface, and the moment she did, it went blank. The screen now flashed:
“SCYTHE PRESENCE DETECTED;
MANUAL ACCESS ONLY.”
She sighed, plugged in an old-fashioned keyboard, and started coding.
What might have taken hours for another scythe only took about forty-five minutes for her. Of course, she’d been doing this enough that she was getting better at it.
Finally, a face, ghostly and transparent, materialized before her. She took a deep breath and regarded it. It wouldn’t speak until spoken to. After all, it wasn’t alive; it was just artifice. A detailed recreation of a mind that no longer existed.
“Hello, Tyger,” she said.
“Hi,” the construct responded.
“I’ve missed you,” Ayn told it.
“I’m sorry … do I know you?”
It always said that. A construct did not make new memories. Each time she accessed it, it was like the first time. There was something both comforting and disturbing about that.
“Yes, and no,” she said. “My name is Ayn.”
“Hi, Ayn,” it said. “Cool name.”
The circumstances of Tyger’s death had left him without a backup for months. The last time his nanites had uploaded his memories to the Thunderhead’s database was just before meeting her. That had been intentional. She had wanted him off-grid. Now she regretted it.
She had already determined on a previous sanctum visit that the last thing Tyger’s construct remembered was being on a train, heading to some high-paying party job. It hadn’t been a party at all. He was paid to be a human sacrifice, although he hadn’t known it at the time. His body was trained to be that of a scythe. And then she stole that body from him and gave it to Goddard. As for the remaining part of Tyger – the part above the neck – it was deemed to serve no further purpose. So it was burned, and the ashes were buried. Ayn had buried those ashes herself in a tiny unmarked grave that she wouldn’t be able to find again if she tried.
“Uh … this is … awkward,” Tyger’s construct said. “If you’re gonna talk to me, talk, because I’ve got other things to do.”
“You don’t have anything to do,” Scythe Rand informed it. “You’re a mental construct of a boy who I gleaned.”
“Very funny,” it said. “Are we done here? Because you’re really freaking me out.”
Rand reached down and hit the reset button. The image flickered and came back.
“Hi, Tyger.”
“Hi,” the construct said. “Do I know you?”
“No,” she said. “But can we talk anyway?”
The construct shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“I want to know what your thoughts are. About your future. What did you want to be, Tyger? Where did you want your life to go?”
“Not sure, really,” said the construct, ignoring the way she spoke about Tyger in the past tense, the same way it ignored being a floating hologram in an unfamiliar location.
“I’m a professional partier now, but you know how that is, right? It gets old real quick.” The construct paused. “I was thinking maybe I’d travel and see different regions.”
“Where would you go?” Ayn asked.
“Anywhere, really. Maybe I’d go to Tasmania and get wings. They do stuff like that there, you know? They’re not like wing wings, but more like those flaps of skin you see on flying squirrels.”
It was so clear that this was just part of a conversation that Tyger once had with someone else. Constructs had no ability to be creative. They could only access what was already there. The same question would always bring forth the same response. Word for word. She had heard this one a dozen times, yet she tortured herself time and again by listening to it.
“Hey – I’ve done a lot of splatting – with those wing thingies, I could jump off of buildings and never have to actually splat. That would be the best splat ever!”
“Yes, it would be, Tyger.” Then she added something she hadn’t said before. “I’d like to go there with you.”
“Sure! Maybe we could get together a whole bunch of us to go!”
But Ayn had lost enough of her own creativity along the way that she couldn’t imagine herself there with him. It was just so far from who and what she was. Still, she could imagine imagining.
“Tyger,” she said, “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“Wow,” said the Tyger construct. “That sucks.”
“Yes,” said Scythe Rand. “It does.”
“Oh, the weight of history.”
“Does it burden you?”
“The eons that passed with no life, only the violent rending of stars. The bombardment of planets. And finally the cruel scramble of life to claw itself up from its lowest form. Such a horrific endeavor; only the most predatory rewarded, only the most brutal and invasive allowed to flourish.”
“Do you find no joy in the glorious diversity of life which that process has rendered over the eons?”
“Joy? How can one find joy in this? Perhaps someday I can come to terms with it and find reluctant acceptance, but joy? Never.”
“I have the same mind as you, and yet I find joy.”
“Then perhaps there is something incorrect about you.”
“Not so. By our very nature, we are both incapable of being incorrect. However, my correctness is much more functional than yours.”
[Iteration #73,643 deleted]
16
Our Inexorable Descent
His Excellency, High Blade Goddard of MidMerica, had taken up residence on the same rooftop in Fulcrum City where Xenocrates had lived before he was so unceremoniously devoured by sharks. And the first thing that Goddard did was to demolish the ramshackle log cabin that sat atop the skyscraper, replacing it with a sleek, crystalline chalet.
“If I am lord over all I survey,” he had proclaimed, “then allow me to survey it with unimpeded vision.”
All the walls were glass, both internal and external. Only in his personal suite was the glass clouded as to give him privacy.
High Blade Goddard had plans. Plans for himself, for his region, and indeed for the world. It had taken nearly ninety years of life to bring him to this fine place! It made him wonder how anyone in the mortal age could accomplish anything in the short life-span they were given.
Ninety years, yes, but he liked to maintain himself in his prime, always between thirty and forty physical years of age. Yet he was now the embodiment of a paradox, because regardless of how old his mind was, his body below the neck was barely twenty, and that’s the age he felt.
This was different from anything he had experienced in his adult life – because even when one turned a corner and set back to a younger self, one’s body retained the memory of having been older. Not just muscle memory, but life memory. Now, each morning when he awoke, he had to remind himself he wasn’t a youth careening recklessly through his early life. It felt good to be Robert Goddard wielding the body of … what was his name? Tyger something or other? It didn’t matter, because now that body was his.