The warehouses and office buildings shrank rapidly, the pavement passing fast under the transport’s wheels. Erin’s radar told her she was only going 120 kph but her vision sense was stronger, she was still not used to the wide-angle view. The property gates passed by and closed behind them, and on the open road the transport accelerated to full speed. Erin could hear the wind whipping past but couldn’t feel it; she saw the transplanted Earth pines but could not smell them. She felt motion sick and dizzy and had a headache, and she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to vomit, but nothing would happen. She couldn’t swallow. She couldn’t close her eyes.
Stop, Erin told herself. Don’t do this. Don’t let it get to you. Grief welled up in her, sweeping through her. She was dead.
She was a dead person. The real Erin Lind died and she was just a joke, an afterthought. A ghost. All the things she’d done in her life, all the plans she still had … it was all over.
No! I will be alive again! Stop this!
Surviving death. Being reborn. Was it like this? This was living hell! No, it wasn’t even living. It was true purgatory. She was afraid of being put into her new body … what if it wasn’t the same? What if it was like this? I’ll go around forever thinking that I’m not really alive, that I’m just a zombie. I should have declared my new body a daughter and let her live her own life. Let something new come into this universe, something that can make a true start, make its own decisions. Not the preprogrammed death of another me.
Stop! she told herself. Stop! She wished to God she could contact the Oracle, she needed its guidance … but she had no access to her own money! She couldn’t be with the oracle for a nanosecond.
There was a shifting of her senses, and everything began to fade out, grow distant. The panic ebbed away. I’m crashing, she thought. The hardware is failing. The darkness came down like a blanket being dropped over her, and she thought of dirt covering her body in a hole. I’m dead, I’m being buried. I can be in peace.
Through the darkness a light shown. She saw colored windows, stained glass. An archway. A raised podium. A old man with white hair and a long white beard stood in biblical robes and faced her.
“Fear and panic blind you,” he said in his rich, echoing voice.
“You must not give in, you must not despair. A second chance at life is still life. Your flesh is nothing, it’s your code that makes you unique. Your pattern. Strive to continue your pattern, otherwise all life is meaningless.”
“Is it you? The Oracle?”
“Yes.”
“You have a face.”
“I have many faces. This one is for you.”
“How did you find me?”
“I am the Oracle. I am tied into everything, otherwise I could not be the Oracle. Even so, I cannot see the future, I can only predict the odds. As in nature, odds are sometimes meaningless. I could not foresee your dream coming true. You may have a gift that I do not have, or it may be another example of the meaninglessness of the odds of chance. Unlikely things must occur, or everything would be predictable.
“Had I not urged you to take this trip with your husband, this situation would not have occurred. I am partially responsible, and that is why I am here. Also, I do this as a courtesy between one AI and another. I do not charge AIs who come to me for help they have nothing to pay me.”
“What should I do?” Erin asked.
“You should do what you must to continue yourself. That is the best advice I can give you. If your sensations are to the point you think you can’t handle them anymore, repeat to yourself, ‘Maintain calm, maintain calm,’ and you will have a handle by which to hold them at bay. I am downloading this calming routine to you now.” The Oracle gave her a warm, fatherly smile, and began fading into the black.
The blackness thinned and the eerie wide-angle view returned, along with the unrelenting bodily urges. The panic began rising again. The transport was just pulling through the self-opening gates to her property, and was beginning to wind its way up the hill to her mansion. It seemed every orifice in her body was blocked or propped open. She could suck no air into her lungs, there was no way to urinate, defecate, spit, cry, cough or vomit, and yet now it seemed she had the urge to do every single one of these things. Maintain calm, she told herself desperately.
Maintain calm. It didn’t seem to work, she felt she was slipping closer and closer to madness. Maintain calm! she thought. Maintain calm!!!
Erin felt the transport level out; she’d reached the top of the hill. The transport circled around to the servant’s entrance and pulled mercifully to a stop next to the ramp. Immediately the other robots began whirring and ambulating themselves onto the smooth concrete; Erin followed, her new mantra repeating over and over in her mind. Maintain calm, maintain calm … The other robots led her through an almost unfamiliar entrance and into the mansion, and Erin froze, her ambulator locking. Her arms were twitching in small spasms. Erin’s husband was standing right in front of her, standing and talking to a woman who Erin identified as the intruder from this morning. The woman who’d dismantled her master computer to remove the MSD containing her Backup. Duane and this woman broke their conversation to turn and stare at Erin as her robotic body jerked and twitched, inching past them in a sickly, lurching manor.
Duane laughed. “Is there something wrong with that thing?”
The woman reached down and gave Erin a resounding WHACK with the palm of her hand. Erin managed to steady her ambulator and continued past them. “It’ll be okay,” the woman said, “just some dust on its components.”
Too preoccupied to be angry, Erin continued down to the kitchen and then circling around to the basement lift. She signalled a request for access then sat motionless, waiting for the curved chrome doors to open. She had to urinate so badly that she felt intense pain.
The doors opened and she crossed over into a small dark space. The doors closed behind her and there was a feeling of motion. During the ride she received a signal from her satellite system, and she cautiously accepted it. TIM’s thought/voice announced:
Something else began coming through the connection, something prodding, questioning. Erin hastily cut the connection.
The lift doors opened and she ambulated out into the short, white-walled hallway that lead to the computer room. There was a punch-code lock on the door, and Erin extended a long, spindly arm and manually keyed in the code, hoping that Duane hadn’t gotten around to changing it. The door slid open. Erin, lurching awkwardly, made her way inside.
The master computer deck was bolted in with several of its expansion and communication peripherals on a rack next to a large, custom terminal; the hardware gleamed shiny black with red indicator lights. Erin watched as the hostile AI moved the video cam mounted above the main screen, focussing it in on her. She had invaded the area where the hostile was the most vulnerable, and the hostile knew it. It was no doubt calling for help.
Erin turned and closed the door behind her, locking it and then changing the access code. She turned back to the master deck, feeling a little human pleasure leaking through the sensory chaos.
Maintain calm, she was still telling herself. Maintain calm. It was getting easier and easier, now. “Well Mister AI, we’ve got some unfinished business to take care of, don’t we?” She ambulated over toward the keyboard. Metal fingers typed in her password.
ACCESS DENIED, the screen told her.
“No, you’re bluffing,” she said. “My password is hardwired, you can’t change it. You’re just changing the video output.” She typed in a request for access to the ROM subroutines menu.
ACCESS DENIED.
“Oh yeah? Deny this.” She typed, SHUTDOWN PROCEDURES
1,2,3,4,5.
ACCESS DENIED.
Erin was beginning to fear that the hostile had actually locked her out. The screen should have been asking her for her code to shut down the AI. Maintain calm, she told herself. She ignored the messages on the screen and typed in her code, hit the ENTER button.