Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (5 page)

A
man walks toward her. Renee freezes. As he approaches, she realizes
that he is a robot too. Renee panics and ducks behind a bank of
docking stations. The man follows, finding her crouched behind a
robot hanging from a docking station. “Hey, you're not supposed
to be here!”

Renee's
bare silicone feet slide on the cold floor as she starts to run.

“
Hey,
stop!”

Renee
escapes into a stairwell and runs up the stairs. Her animatronic body
is heavy, and she's not used to having so much momentum as she turns
a corner. Her shoulder crashes into the wall, putting a large dent in
the metal.

A
few flights up she sees a door marked “Vivisection Floor.”
Renee quietly opens the door and finds herself in a clean, white,
hospital-like floor. She carefully sneaks past empty operating rooms
.
She hears activity not far away. Following the sound, she peeks
through
a large glass window where three surgeons are operating on a body.
The surgeons appear human, but on close inspection their skin doesn't
look quite right, their glass eyes containing digital cameras are a
little too reflective. These robots are stripping the skin from a
dead body. “They must be performing an autopsy,” Renee
thinks, as they remove muscle and flesh, excising nerve endings.
Renee looks at the displays hovering over each doctor. The display
over the red-headed surgeon reads Nellie (Percival).

The
body shutters. Renee jumps, stunned, she puts her hands up in front
of her in an automatic defense mechanism, but accidentally shoves her
hands through the glass window, not knowing her own strength. The
glass shatters, alerting the surgical team.

Renee's
generic robot sits in a swivel chair in a dark room. “What were
you doing to that woman?” Renee asks quietly.

“
What
are you doing here?” Nellie asks. This animatron looks almost
exactly like Nellie's human body did.

“
What
were you doing?” Renee persists.

“
Saving
his life,” Nellie responds.

“
It
looked like you were torturing him.”

“
I
was performing a vivisection. It's a procedure to extract a living
nervous system from a dying body.”

“
I
don't understand,” Renee says.

“
We
are going to take her brain and plug it into a simulation. A computer
world that's shared by thousands of other people like her. When we're
done, she'll look like that,” Nellie points to a glass vat in
the corner. It's a brain, spine, and nerves suspended in
cerebro-spinal fluid and hooked to wires.

“
But...who
would want to live in a jar?”

Nellie
takes a moment to carefully think about her next words. “From
their point of view, they don't live in a jar. We experience the
world through impulses interpreted by our brains. By controlling
those impulses, people can experience anything. These people live in
a world we call . . . Solipsis.”

Renee's
jaw drops. She approaches the vat, wanting a closer look.

“
Stop!”
Nellie says. “Don't get too close, you don't have much
coordination.”

Renee
turns to Nellie, looking up at her from her glass eyes in her blank
generic face. “Dad...Am I in a jar?”

Nellie
kneels in front of her daughter. “You were vivisected just
after birth. You wouldn't have lasted a month. Three open-heart
surgeries couldn't fix you. There was no saving you, you were going
to die, but you didn't have to.”

“
I
should be dead right now,” Renee says quietly, looking down to
the floor.

“
No.
Look at me,” Nellie crouches lower, into Renee's eye-line. “You
are exactly where you should be.” Renee nods. Her eyes are
blank, looking but not seeing.

“
So
you're a woman in real life?” Renee asks after a long pause.
Nellie nods. “So my dad is a woman. Alright.”

“
We
can be anything in here. For a while I switched back and forth, but
once you came along I decided I should pick one and stick with it.”

“
How
do two people who don't have bodies reproduce?”

“
We
used a surrogate,” Nellie says.

“
But
if you're both women...”

“
We
had our DNA combined, so we're both your mother, technically. I
really wanted a boy, but you came out a girl.”

“
What?”

“
It's
a joke,” Nellie says.

“
I
don't get it.”

“
We
couldn't have had a boy...all X chromosomes and such.”

“
Right,
I guess I knew that,” Renee replies. “Nice dad-joke.”
Renee looks back to the brain in a vat. “So I should be dead
right now.”

“
Your
body is dead. We can keep living, maybe forever, being without loved
ones. We've made heaven a reality. A place where death has no
dominion.”

“
I
want to see myself,” Renee says. Nellie takes Renee by the hand
and leads her toward a bank of elevators. They enter a clean room
surrounded by windows on three sides and banks of electronic controls
and panels. Two technicians sit at consoles, forty-something men, not
robots, actual flesh-and-blood. Beyond the windows there's a dark
abyss, glowing a dim bluish-purple. There are thousands of vats
containing brains/nervous systems suspended in cerebro-spinal fluid.

“
Welcome
to the Comatorium," Nellie says. A display reads:
39.44%
Xenon / 60.21% Oxygen

“
Xenon?”
Renee wonders, somewhere in the abyss, her brain makes the
connection. “What's a Xenon Shock?”

“
If
a vat leaks or breaks, the brain might be exposed to air, causing the
brain to deteriorate rapidly. The Oxygen feeds your brain, but pure
oxygen is both highly explosive and causes its own ill-effects on the
brain. Xenon has neuro-protective properties. It slows the brain
damage,” Nellie says, “the shock is the strange feeling
you get when your brain is exposed to the air. Since the brain itself
has no pain sensors, we've had to incorporate artificial touch
sensors that we simulate. So it's a feeling that's not really based
on the reality of the body.”

“
I
wanna see my brain,” Renee says quietly.

“
You
can't go in there,” a technician announces.

“
Why
not?”

“
You're
not even allowed in that animatron.”

“
You
have to be sixteen before you can pilot one of these,” Nellie
says.

“
Get
her out of here before she breaks something.”

“
Relax,
we're going,” Nellie says.

Nellie
leads Renee to her docking station. “Are we going back to
Solipsis already?” Renee asks.

“
Yes.
I'm in enough trouble already,” Nellie says. Renee stops cold.

“
But
I've never done anything real in my life. I've never even seen the
real world. I want to look up at the sky and feel the sun on me.”

“
You
wouldn't be seeing it with your own eyes. It'd be these,”
Nellie taps on Renee's glass eye. “And when you are here, you
aren't directly feeling or seeing anything, it's all filtered through
electronics, cameras. You can't directly experience the real world.
So in a way, Solipsis is more real to you than Earth.”

“
I
wanna see the real sky.”

Nellie
leads Renee up a spiral staircase in a glass atrium. They come out on
top of this glass pyramid rising out of the sea. A tower extends ten
meters above them, housing warning lights and antennae. Renee looks
down the glass pyramid walls surrounding her. Waves wash up on the
pyramid, but beneath the waves, she can see the platform extend
deeper into the sea. The entire platform is a pyramid, and only this
glass peak rises from the sea. Clouds obscure the sun, but threaten
to give way. Nellie puts her arm around Renee as they peer up at the
sun flirting with the edges of clouds.

“
Why
an ocean platform?” Renee asks.

“
We
had to get out from under any legal jurisdiction,” Nellie
replies.

“
What
do you mean?”

“
Well,
if you're on land, you're governed by county, city, state, and
federal governments. That's a lot of red-tape to deal with,
especially for us. All it took was one special interest group getting
their money in the hands of a few state senators and we could have
been shut down, servers seized, plugs pulled.”

“
Why?”
Renee asks.

“
A
lot of people don't like what we're doing. And they're the kind of
people that love to tell everyone else what to do,” Nellie
says.

The
sun finally pokes through, shining down on Renee for the first time.
She feels the warmth of its radiation on her fake skin and stares
into the bright disc. She expects the experience to be profoundly
moving. But it feels distant, almost fake. Underwhelmed, she closes
her eyes and lowers her head.

“
I've
seen enough.”

Percival
and Renee walk amongst falling leaves down the center of a beautiful,
vibrant neighborhood street in Solipsis. There are no cars in this
place. They walk together, watching the fake sun set. It's larger
than the real sun; a churning ball of yellow and orange with fingers
spiraling out into the blue sky.

“
Why
did you keep this all a secret?” Renee asks.

“
We
tried to tell you,” Percival says quietly.

“
You
tried? When!?”

“
It's
as if you didn't want to know, you blocked out the information.”
Percival tells Renee, making her quietly angry. They don't speak for
a while.

“
So
I can look like anything right? Why the hell do I look like this?”

“
You
look great,” Percival says.

“
I'm
an awkward teenager, nothing is in the right proportion, I'm like
half adult, half child.”

“
It's
called puberty,” Percival responds, “we wanted your
development to be as normal as possible. So your hormones and growth
have all been simulated.”

“
Wait
a minute. Puberty? I don't even have a reproductive system! Why am I
going through this shit? Can't I just get an adult body?”

“
It
always takes some time to get used to being in a different avatar.
We're different sizes and shapes, the brain has to relearn a lot of
things. We've found ways of helping you adapt, and we've come a long
way, but we're afraid of changing avatars for kids, the drastic
changes might cause problems with a developing mind.”

Renee
won't be satisfied by any answers, a rage is building inside her.
“Why is Patrick twenty-eight?”

“
His
mind is frozen in development. He will always have the brain of a
14-year old,” Percival says.

“
He
won't grow up?” Renee asks. Percival tries to comfort Renee,
but she pushes him away.

“
Some
minds take to the adaptation system, but others don't. They find
themselves in arrested development. It's as if they don't age.”

“
We
were going to grow old together,” Renee says. “He'll
always just be a boy?”

Percival
nods. Renee feels tears start to well up and runs away so her father
won't see her cry.

Renee
and Patrick hold each other close, sitting in a tree house. They look
up at an especially vibrant skyscape: stars, galaxies, shooting
stars, all much brighter than the night sky on Earth.