It had relinquished its memory because memories were recordings of events and relationships that had consequences, and consequences—good or bad—implied that one was responsible for one’s actions. Flight from responsibility had driven the creature to regression in the first place. Pain was another shedding memory—the pain of recalling what had been lost.
Likewise, it had surrendered the capacity to consider the future, to plan, to dream.
Now it had no past of which it was aware, and the concept of a future was beyond its ken. It lived only for the moment, Unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring.
It had one need. To survive.
And to survive, it needed only one thing. To feed.
29
The breakfast dishes had been cleared from the table while Sam was at the Coltranes’ house, battling monsters that apparently had been part human and part computer and part zombies—and maybe, for all they knew, part toaster oven. After Sam was bandaged, Chrissie gathered with him and Tessa and Harry around the kitchen table again, to listen to them discuss what action to take next.
Moose stayed at Chrissie’s side, regarding her with soulful brown eyes, as if he adored her more than life itself. She couldn’t resist giving him all the petting and scratching-behind-the-ears that he wanted.
“The greatest problem of our age,” Sam said, “is how to keep technological progress accelerating, how to use it to improve the quality of life—without being overwhelmed by it. Can we employ the computer to redesign our world, to remake our lives, without one day coming to worship it?” He blinked at Tessa and said, “It’s not a silly question.”
Tessa frowned. “I didn’t say it was. Sometimes we have a blind trust in machines, a tendency to believe that whatever a computer tells us is gospel—”
“To forget the old maxim,” Harry injected, “which says ‘garbage in, garbage out.'”
“Exactly,” Tessa agreed. “Sometimes, when we get data or analyses from computers, we treat it as if the machines were all infallible. Which is dangerous because a computer application can be conceived, designed, and implemented by a madman, Perhaps not as easily as by a benign genius but certainly as effectively.”
Sam said, “Yet people have a tendency—no, even a deep desire—to want to depend on the machines.”
“Yeah,” Harry said, “that’s our sorry damn need to shift responsibility whenever we possibly can. A spineless desire to get out from under responsibility is in our genes, I swear it is, and the only way we get anywhere in this world is by constantly fighting our natural inclination to be utterly irresponsible. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what we got from the devil when Eve listened to the serpent and ate the apple—this aversion to responsibility. Most evil has it roots there.”
Chrissie noticed this subject energized Harry. With his one good arm and a little help from his half-good leg, he levered himself higher in his wheelchair. Color seeped into his previously pale face. He made a fist of one hand and stared at it intently, as if holding something precious in that tight grip, as if he held the idea there and didn’t want to let go of it until he had fully explored it.
He said, “Men steal and kill and lie and cheat because they, feel no responsibility for others. Politicians want power, and they want acclaim when their policies succeed, but they seldom stand up and take the responsibility for failure. The world’s full of people who want to tell you how to live your life, how to make heaven right here on earth, but when their ideas turn out half-baked, when it ends in Dachau or the Gulag or the mass murders that followed our departure from Southeast Asia, they turn their heads, avert their eyes, and pretend they had no responsibility for the slaughter.”
He shuddered, and Chrissie shuddered too, though she was not entirely sure that she entirely understood everything he was, saying.
“Jesus,” he continued, “if I’ve thought about this once, I’ve thought about it a thousand times, ten thousand, maybe because, of the war.”
“Vietnam, you mean?” Tessa said.
Harry nodded. He was still staring at his fist. “In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn’t something that could be achieved alone. That was maybe the one positive thing about fighting in a war—it clarifies your thinking and makes you realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates good men from the damned. I don’t regret the war, not even considering what happened to me there. I learned that great lesson, learned to be responsible in all things, and I still feel responsible to the people we were fighting for, always will, and sometimes when I think of how we abandoned them to the killing fields, the mass graves, I lay awake at night and cry because they depended on me, and to the extent that I was a part of the process, I’m responsible for failing them.”