Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (24 page)

A
teenage boy, 16, sickly, rushes at her. Renee panics, turning to run
away.

“
Wait!
It's me, Seth!” the sickly boy protests, “Come on!”
He takes her hand and they run up the stairwell. They disappear into
a small room in this massive platform. Seth shuts the door and turns
off every little light in the room. This was the personal quarters
for one of the few non-vivisected people that maintained the station.

“
I
can't believe I got out,” Renee says quietly. She sits down on
the grated floor, leaning against a wall. Seth sits across from her.

“
So
what's the plan?”

“
If
we take back the control room, we can turn the neural net back on.
That means that anybody trapped in Solipsis can get to their
animatron,” Renee says.

“
Yeah,
but only if they get to a televator,” Seth replies.

“
Right.”

“
And
they have all of those,” Seth says. “Can't we just go in
as a dragon and get them down?” Seth asks.

“
They're
not at all dextrous. You'd be a giant uncoordinated mess,”
Renee replies, “it takes time to learn how to control those
things, and we don't have time, we only have one shot at this before
they figure out what we're doing.”

“
We
could go in as angels and fly to the televators,” Seth says.

“
But
nothing can cut through the cables. They used indestructible
architecture to make them.”

“
So
we can't free the televators and we can't very well get the people up
to the balloon. What if we destroy the balloon?”

“
The
whole thing is indestructible.”

“
Okay,
so the plan is to turn the neural net back on in the control room,
then somehow get the people to the televators. Then what?”

“
Then
everyone storms through the televators, all the robots come to life
and we take the station back,” Renee says.

“
I
don't know, that doesn't sound good.”

“
And
we need a bomb,” Renee adds.

“
Why?”

“
If
we fail, we don't want those people to be tortured for an eternity.
We're setting them free one way or another.”

“
I
can't kill,” Seth replies.

“
Then
I'll do it, it's what they would want,” Renee says, staring at
the floor. She thinks about the sudden violent death of almost
everyone she's ever known. Seth moves to her side.

“
It's
gonna work out, we can stop this,” Seth says, “before it
comes to that.”

“
I
don't know,” Renee replies. Seth's hand reaches for hers to
comfort her. He squeezes. She squeezes back. “You know...I've
never touched a real person before,” Renee says.

“
Can
you really feel anything with those hands?” Seth asks.

“
Some,
there aren't as many sensors as a real body, but it's still a decent
approximation.”

“
What
about this?” Seth asks, running the fingertips of his other
hand down her arm. Renee lets a little smile out.

“
Kind
of tickles.”

Renee
sits up straight, lightly touching the fingertips of her robotic hand
to the skin of his pale cheek.

“
Can
you feel that?” Seth asks.

“
Prickly,”
Renee says. She runs her hand across his bald head. She looks closely
at his skin, real, human, fleshy, hairy, sweaty skin.

Seth
interrupts by kissing her on her mechanical lips. Renee kisses back.

“
How
did that feel?” Seth asks.

“
You
are stuck in the real world,” Renee says quietly, “We can
never be on the same plane of existence. There will always be
something between us.”

The
cult member Renee tackled lays in a hospital bed, on the verge of
death. A respirator keeps him alive. Two men attend to him.

“
What
are you doing?” Lazarus protests as he enters the room.

“
I'm
trying to save this man.”

Lazarus
reaches for the respirator and grabs the power cord.

“
Stop!”

“
If
it is god's will for him to die, then he must. This is exactly what
we all signed up for,” Lazarus says definitively. The medic
wants to oppose him, but can't bring himself to. Lazarus pulls the
plug. The crushed man flat-lines within a minute. The guards and the
medic watch him slowly die. “I'd expect any one of you to do
the same for me,” Lazarus says quietly, “Don't mourn, as
his soul is arriving in Heaven right this moment. It's to be
celebrated.”

Lazarus
leaves, running into Paul, his second-in-command.

“
How
in God's name did she get out of Solipsis?” Lazarus demands.
“We completely severed the Neural net, right?”

“
Right!
Totally cut, no activity on the line,” Paul says.

“
So
how is she out here piloting an animatron?” Lazarus demands.

“
Maybe
it's her soul,” Paul says.

“
Her
soul!? Souls don't interact with robots you idiot.”

“
How
do you know?” Paul asks.

“
If
there's no activity on the neural net, that must mean she's not on
the neural net. Maybe she's not in the Comatorium and is getting
access from somewhere else.”

“
The
internet is completely cut, so wherever she is, she has to be in the
building,” Paul says.

“
I
want every square inch of this place searched,” Lazarus says.

“
That's
not going to be easy,” Paul says.

“
Just
do it,” Lazarus demands. Paul takes off in another direction.
Lazarus walks through a door and enters a Vivisection room. Dark
rusting blood remains from a recent procedure. Lazarus runs his
finger through the blood and examines it.

“
I
still don't understand why I could get out of the Comatorium and
nobody else could,” Renee says. Seth sits up on the edge of the
bed, buttoning his shirt.

“
Because
you're not in the Comatorium...”

“
What?”

Latex
eye-lids flutter while shut tight against glass eyes. Renee's
animatron hangs from the docking port on its neck in a dark room
somewhere in the Solipsis Ocean Platform. There are no other
animatrons or docking stations. Just her and a bank of computers. A
flat display shows what this animatron is seeing: dreams, memories,
moments, flashing from one to another. The screen reads:
Downloading:
79%

“
They
know you're in the real world now. They can disconnect you from this
body. We need to put you in one that's off the grid.”

Renee
and Seth slink down a corridor on the simulation floor. Renee follows
the boy into a room and he shuts the door quietly behind them. An
animatron hangs from a crudely spliced docking station. The animatron
is a flesh-bot, a technological creation every lonely teenage boy can
love.

“
You
need to put me in
that
body?” Renee asks.

“
They
won't be able to track you,” Seth replies. Renee looks at him
suspiciously. Then she notices something on a bank of displays next
to the docking station:
SCP1.
Somewhere in her mind, those four characters ring a bell.

“
What
is this?” Renee tries to push him aside. He won't budge.
“Move!”

“
You
don't want to see this,” he says.

“
I
do!” she shoves him aside. Her jaw drops in shock. A series of
screens display everything about a person: vital signs, respiration,
brain waves, a visual representation of the audio they are hearing,
and a double screen showing what each eye sees. But this isn't just
some
person.
This is Renee. Looking into the visual display, it turns into an
infinite regression. She closes her right eye and watches as the
right screen goes dark. “What is this?” She asks. Her
words register on the audio display.

“
Don't
freak out, okay,” Seth says. Renee finds a readout on the
display:

Simulated
Consciousness Project 1

“
You're
an AI,” Seth says. “You're not a brain in a jar.”

Renee feels woozy. Her knees
weak. She wobbles backwards until she finds the far wall. She slides
down to the floor, her feet slide on the floor, still trying to push
her away. “I don't understand,” Renee whispers.

“
You
don't need to understand. Right now I
have to plug your brain into this body directly,” Seth says,
pointing to the flesh-bot he has rigged up.

“
I
don't understand,” she begins repeating.

“
They
know you're not in the Comatorium now, they'll find you, just like I
did. They'll turn you off, okay, that's it, you'll be off, dead,
whatever.”

“
But...I'm
a person, I was born, I was vivisected, I've heard the story,”
Renee stares straight ahead, mesmerized by the regress. “I'm a
person. How is this possible?”

“
I
don't know, okay? But I do know that if you don't come over here and
get in this docking station and let me transfer your brain computer
into this body, they'll find this thing and they'll turn it off.”
She simply nods, and Seth comes to her side, helping her stand. He
guides her into the docking station. She bends her knees, lowering
her neck onto the port. Seth hits a series of buttons on the side of
this docking station. He downloads her consciousness from her regular
animatron into the ether. She's shown standing in a white loading
space on a screen, the animatron is powered off.

Seth
then goes to the SCP1 computer. He opens a metal panel, revealing a
series of blade super-computers. Renee's simulated consciousness is
hosted on one such blade. Seth extracts the blade carefully. It
switches to internal power as the connections are broken. Seth turns
to the flesh-bot, and presses the blade toward an open panel on the
side of its aluminum ribcage. He sweats and struggles to keep steady.
The blade computer shakes and rattles against the rails of the blade
port. He presses it in gently until it stops. He takes a deep breath
and pushes harder. The blade clicks, locking into place. Seth takes
his hands out and the covers slaps closed. He pushes the flap of
rubber skin until it sits flush with the rest of the skin around the
ribcage. He crouches behind the bot, under the docking port it hangs
by.

Seth
pulls open a skin panel on the back of the flesh-bot. A small screen
shows Renee in the white loading space, just as he left her. He
presses a button and her consciousness is sent streaming into this
animatron.

Renee's
eyes open. She slowly extends her feet until she stands up, freeing
herself from the neck port. It all feels very strange, as if waking
up in someone else's body. Seth hears shouting down the hallway, the
search for Renee is growing near. He flips the lights off, casting
the room in shadow.

“
We
need to go,” Seth says. Renee takes a step, but nearly trips,
not at all used to the different controls of this animatron. She
steadies herself and then spots her old animatron hanging blissfully
from the docking station. She stares into her own face.