How he looms. Looms.
Sometimes it ends here. Other times… he will not be so easily turned away.
She has not drawn blood. Sometimes she does.
At last he leaves the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the windowpanes rattle.
Susan sits alone, shaking partly with fear and partly with triumph.
Gradually the scene fades into blackness.
She has not drawn blood.
Maybe the next time.
She remained on the motorized recliner in the master-bedroom retreat, ensconced in the VR gear, for more than another half hour, responding to and surviving threats of violence and rape made by a man long dead.
Of the uncountable assaults that young Susan had suffered at the hands of her father between the ages of five and seventeen, this elaborate therapy program included twenty-two scenes, all of which she had recalled and animated in excruciating detail. Like the numerous possible plot flows of a CD-ROM game, each of these scenes could progress in a multitude of ways, determined not only by the things Susan chose to say and do in each session but by a random-plotting capability designed into the program. Consequently, she never quite knew what was coming next.
She had even written and animated a hideous sequence in which her father reacted with such vicious fury to her resistance that he murdered her. Stabbed her repeatedly.
Thus far, during eighteen months of this self-administered therapy, Susan had not found herself trapped in that mortal scenario. She dreaded encountering it and hoped to finish her therapy soon, before the program’s random-plotting feature plunged her into that particular nightmare.
Dying in the VR world would not result, of course, in her death in the real world. Only in witless movies were events in the virtual world able to have a material influence in the real world.
Nevertheless, animating that bloody sequence had been one of the most difficult things that she’d ever done and experiencing it three-dimensionally, not as a VR designer but from within the scenario, was certain to be emotionally devastating. Indeed, she had no way of predicting how profound the psychological impact might be.
Without such an element of risk, however, this therapy would have been less effective. In each session, living in the virtual world, she needed to believe that the threat her father posed was fearfully real and that terrible things might indeed happen to her. Her resistance to him would have moral weight and emotional value only if she genuinely believed, during the session, that denying him could have terrible consequences.
Now the motorized recliner reconfigured itself until Susan was standing upright, held against the vertical leather pad by the harness.
She moved her feet. The upholstered rollers on the walking pad allowed her to simulate movement.
In the virtual world, a younger Susan child or adolescent was either advancing on her father or determinedly backing away from him.
“No,” she said. “Stay away. No.”
She looked so achingly vulnerable in the VR gear, temporarily blind and deaf to the real world, sensing only the virtual plane, restrained by the harness.
So vulnerable. Still struggling courageously to overcome the past, alone in her great house with only the ghosts of days gone by to keep her company.
So vulnerable did she look, so tender and fragile, so brave in her pursuit of redemption through therapy, that the house computer spoke without being addressed, spoke in the synthesized voice of Alfred, spoke with considerable feeling and compassion: “You are alone no more.”
She heard only the voices in the virtual world, her own and her father’s.
Therefore, it was safe to say, “I love you, Susan.”
SEVEN
Emil Sercassian, the cook, had prepared dinner and left it in one of the refrigerators and one of the ovens, with instructions pinned to a cork message board.
Susan ate at a table on the patio, in the long-lingering sunny June evening. First a lentil and chick-pea salad. Then lebne with sliced cucumber and string cheese.
Through miraculous technology, I possess what I believe to be genuine sight and hearing, but even the genius of my creators could not give me a sense of taste or a sense of smell. I cannot convey how deeply I yearn for these amazing powers.