Terry McGarry - The Only Gift a Portion of Thyself.pdf - Terry McGarry - widez2

The Only Gift a Portion of Thyself

by Terry McGarry

Some people came in here to hack off limbs, to excise eyeballs, to inflict pain and revel in gore. Some

people came in for unprotected sex. Some people dropped in for a smoke. I liked them the best, the way

they inflated with pleasure as they took that first drag. I watched them closely. I wondered if that's how I

would look, taking my first lungful of air.

None of them knew I was here. The ones I tagged as aberrant received an obligatory-therapy notice and

were, as far as I could tell from what I monitored, none the wiser. The exhibitionists who came in looking

for an audience created one for themselves -- and there were times, after you'd seen enough pathetic

Hamlets and horrendous standup comics, when you wished you had a choice.

Choices are a concept very new to me.

* * *

She had never come in before. I'd heard theories, expressed by subjects in other projection scenarios,

that there could be people like her, who didn't need it. They had enough Outside to fulfill them; they

couldn't wish for anything more. Some of them thought it was psychologically or morally dangerous, to

have a place where you could do anything you wanted to with no repercussions. Perhaps they would be

comforted if they knew of my presence. She was certainly surprised to find me; but she was far less

surprised at that than I was to find that she could see me. It was not supposed to work that way.

She came in on an assignment from college, and she clearly resented it. A lot of schools required

interspace as a creative exercise, to be saved to disk and handed in. Hers, she had informed the system,

was to interact in some historical time period. A pale-skinned brunette, she was sitting on a crate in a

Conestoga wagon, groaning, her stomach upset from the jolting.

"This is stupid," she said, to no one, knowing that her teacher would hear it when it was played back in

vicarity mode. "I could have told you myself that this would be uncomfortable; what was wrong with my

paper on the trials of women on the Oregon Trail? I hereby lodge my complaint at this double-checking

of my imagination. I imagined this perfectly well in my own mind, and my report communicated that

clearly. To require me to live the experience so that Professor Daniels can see me experience it is

redundant and invasive."

She looked toward the front of the wagon, and her eyes widened, though there was nothing there but the

piled and wrapped belongings of the projected interspace family moving from Independence, Missouri,

to the American northwest.

"Who are you?" she said, and I realized that she was looking not just in the direction of my virtual

perspective, but at me. "You're not part of the simulation."

It was not in my programming to be interactive. I didn't think I could generate speech.

"You look like a ghost, all see-through, diaphanous. I didn't know interspace was haunted, unless you

programmed a scary experience."

A ghost. A good characterization. The ghost of your conscience; the conscience of the directorate, who

used the interspace system to diagnose the sick and dangerous before a crime could be committed. The

ghost of a personality who had never existed. That was me, all right.

"Can't you talk to me?" she said. "Has no one ever seen you before? You look so amazed." She

scrunched around awkwardly on the crate, toward me. "Have you come in from some other program, by

accident?"

If I appeared to have a body, it followed that I would have a head to shake, and tried the gesture. It

worked. Being an observer for so long, I must have conceived of myself as having a human-looking body

all this time and never been aware of it.

"What is your name?" she asked.

The most basic of questions. Most creatures with an ego, with self-awareness and the language to

express it, have a name, some way of indicating themselves. "No," I said, and blinked to hear my own

voice, a thin tenor. I could blink. I had eyes. I had a tenor voice; I was male. I tried to look down at

myself, to see this body I hadn't known existed, but I saw only the crates and tarps, felt the familiar shift

of perspective I was able to make at will.

"Wow!" she said. "You must like to imagine flying, if you can float around like that."

"I . . . didn't know I was," I said. I was not supposed to talk to them. This was terribly wrong.

"You look so confused, and sad." She got up, clinging to the frame of the wagon's top, and took a few

halting steps toward me. Her face, heart-shaped, petite, surrounded by an effervescence of black curls,

filled my field of view. Her hand came out, moved forward.

She flinched. "Okay, all right, don't be afraid. I won't touch you if it bothers you."

"I'm sorry," I said. I must have appeared to shrink back. "I am . . . confused, as you say. Please tell me .

. . what do you see?"

"A handsome young sandy-haired man. Blue eyes. You're cute. Maybe I imagined you myself; you'd be

just my type, outside."

"Is that all?" I said.

"You have a kind, sad expression, and beautiful hands, very thin and delicate, an artist's hands. Did I

dream you up?"

"No. I live here." I shouldn't tell her this . . . I would be wiped, tagged as aberrant the same way I tagged

the subjects . . .

But nothing changed. Perhaps the system was not registering this interaction. Was this queer surge I felt

hope?

"You're not supposed to know I'm here." I was talking very fast. Her face was relaxed, mildly surprised

but interested, encouraging. "No one has ever seen me before. I'm not part of the projection. I supervise

to insure nothing goes wrong."

She either made a deductive leap, or saw some sign of deceit on my face, for she said, "If you were just

a diagnostic program, you wouldn't be sentient. They don't use AIs for maintenance. What do you really

do? Do you watch us in here, report on us when we're bad?"

I tried a nod this time. Still the system did not respond. There was no one here except for me, and her,

and the projections around us, which were going along on their preprogrammed route.

"But what use is that?" she asked. "Interspace lets people let off steam without hurting anything in the real

world. The whole point is that you can do anything you want."

I found that I could sigh -- that I wanted to sigh, not merely simulate a subject sighing in response to the

correct stimulus. "That isn't always enough. I have a list of things to look for, to tell when someone is

liable to repeat their behavior outside. Frustration at unfulfillment; dissociation, insanity; sadism -- "

She cut off what would have been a long list. "And when you find one of those people?"

I didn't answer.

"All my life I believed that the reason interspace wiped out crime was because it gave an outlet. After

world peace was achieved, after economic parity was established, there was no reason to rob or rape or

kill except perverse desire . . . and you could do those things here without being punished, so there was

no reason to do them outside." She placed fingertips against her temple. "But that isn't the whole story, is

it . . .."

The wagon jolted to a halt; I couldn't feel it, myself, but I observed the effect on her.

"Maisie?" yelled someone from up front -- her brother in the simulation, who had been driving the ox

team. "Time to set up for supper, Maise."

She looked at me. "I could stop the program now. Where would you go if I did?"

I paused, not knowing the answer. "Just a place. A waiting place, until another program is activated."

"Are there others of you?"

"The system is constantly in use worldwide."

"How will I find you again?"

"Perhaps you won't." An abyss of regret opened at the idea. "Perhaps you'll see one of my analogues."

"I'll call you Glowrie," she said, "for the Glowrie Ghost in that old twovie _The Ghost Goes West_." She

waited for me to react to her humor, and I effected a smile. "If I see another one of you, I'll ask if it's

Glowrie, and only you will know to say yes."

"You said you didn't like interspace. You would have to keep using it."

"I'll just set blank parameters, like a waiting room, somewhere we won't be disturbed, where we can

talk."

I felt sadness; did my face show it? "I'll be gone by then. When your professor screens this disk -- "

"Maisie? Come on along now, girl, the team's unhitched, I'm starved." The brother projection banged on

the outside of the wagon.

"I'll be right there, Abe," she called, scrunching up her face at her response to the illusion, and then said,

"I'll purge it, ask to do it over. Then no one will ever know. I can't just leave you alone in here."

I thought about that. She had done me a disservice, in seeing me, in registering me. It had never occurred

to me that I was alone in here. But I was, and nothing could change that -- or my awareness of it, now. I

might be better off wiped. But I didn't want to be wiped. I wanted very badly to stay alive. And to see

her again.

At last I nodded. "All right," I said. Then, before she could stop the program, I said, "Is your name

Maisie?"

She smiled. "No, that's just the persona. My name is Emma. Goodbye, Glowrie. I'll see you soon." She

winked, gave a small wave, and then said, "System, abort" -- and I was in blackness, a gray-black

emptiness I had never registered as gray-black, never having considered sensory stimuli before at all.

Almost immediately I was transferred to a man's fantasy. He came into a room to find a woman tied to an

old-fashioned four- poster bed. He pulled off her clothes and entered her. There was nothing to tag; he

didn't cut her, or hit her.

I had observed, impartially, countless scenes of rape, murder, torture. I tagged them and went on,

unaffected. But this time I was affected. She was only a projection, true. Binary code translated into a

virtual reality. But so was I. And she looked like Emma . . ..

She was begging him to stop, not unusual in a male-fantasy sequence. I leaned over the bed and looked

right into her face. "Can you see me? Can you hear me?" I said. She didn't react. She couldn't feel

anything, not really . . . not like me . . ..

He didn't react, either. I wondered what was different about Emma, why she had been able to sense me.

Some human esper capacity, perhaps? Some extra sensitivity?

It seemed to take forever for the simulation to end. I had never had a concept of subjective time before,

when the system chronometer was all I perceived; now the endlessness was painful, the repetition of this

act. And I could not stop seeing Emma's face on the woman. At last the subject terminated the program,

and I was back in the blessed black nothingness of the waiting area. I wanted to rest, to think, but again I

was transferred to a new scenario.

This one was pleasant, the subject experiencing what it would be like to be an Olympic athlete. I started

to keep track, as the scenarios flashed by; I kept tabs on how many were harmless, and how many were

horrifying. I expected them to be weighted toward the latter, but to my surprise the numbers were equal.

I also expected a diagnostic to be triggered by this keeping track; I was using storage space to

remember, something I'd never done much of before, and I lived in fear of being purged. But apparently

it was accepted that the monitor programs would use up thinking space.

I wanted to know why I was suddenly capable of feeling revulsion for sadistic and criminal fantasies.

Why I was capable of feeling rage at having to witness them. I wanted to know if I was intrinsically male,

or if Emma had projected maleness onto me, because she was female. Most of all, I wanted to know

whether I had always had the potential for emotional awareness, or if she had somehow created me,

impressed some of herself into me.

I missed her. I feared that she would never reappear. I wondered how long I would live. As long as the

system was maintained, I supposed. I just wanted to see Emma one more time before the end.

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that when I found myself in a plain room, looking at Emma sitting in

a chair, I could barely believe it. Her look of pleasure, the way her face lit up when she saw me, was

beautiful.

"Hi, Glowrie," she said.

"Hi, Emma," I replied. "How did you know it was me?"

She shrugged. "I haven't seen any other beings like you. I've come and sat in this room about thirty times,

and never seen a thing. I've been afraid to call out to you; I'm afraid to alert the system. So when you

don't show up in five minutes, I just leave, and try again. It's taken me all afternoon."

Why was I the only monitor she could see? There had been one present each time she entered this room.

"I think," I said slowly, "that you made me somehow. Out of your own imagination. Maybe because you

were angry at being in the simulation. I existed before; I remember existing. But I think you gave me a

body, and a . . . I don't know, something else I didn't have before. Compassion. Something."

She smiled. "Well, you're Glowrie now; it's too late to call you Galatea, and anyway she was female."

We talked for a while, about my experiences, about what was different since we'd met. I told her I knew

she had a life Outside, and that I wouldn't expect her to spend much time with me, but that it would be

nice to look forward to a visit now and then. I told her I'd missed her.

"I missed you, too," she said. "Maybe I did create you in the image I most like, because I feel very drawn

to you, more than to anyone outside, anyone flesh-and-blood. I don't suppose it's healthy, but I don't

really care."

It wasn't healthy; even I knew that. "You should go back. You're real. Go live your life."

She reached out again, as if to soothe me. "You look so pained by the idea. It's sweet of you to worry

for me."

This time I didn't shrink away; I leaned toward her hand. But I never felt it. I looked down, and saw her

hand outstretched immediately below me. When I looked up, her expression flickered through surprise

and discomfort to disappointment.

"I'm almost at the end of the time I set aside," she said quietly, after a moment. "But I'd like to keep

talking to you, at least. I'll be back, Glowrie . . .." Before I could cry out to her to stay, not to cut me off,

she had aborted.

I agonized through scenario after scenario, sure that my lack of a corporeal self had put her off me

forever. But she did come back, at last.

"I've been doing research," she said, without preamble. "It seems that other people have seen ghosts in

here, the first time they come into interspace. All of those people had strong psi powers, were adults the

first time they tried interspace, and never felt a need to utilize the system for personal reasons; they were

always required to by jobs or tests or school, like me. No one has ever reported connecting with a

monitor, but I'm convinced that they could have, or did and didn't tell anyone. And all of them were

content in family relationships. I was lonely when I came here; I was a nerd in a dysfunctional romance.

My family uses their money to herd me like a sheepdog, and to pretend they care for me by buying me

anything I want. I guess we needed each other," she concluded. "And some kind of bond was forged."

"The system works by tapping into your memories," I supplied. "That's how it knows how people look

and sound and feel to you."

"Yes," she said, regarding me fondly. "And somehow you were born out of that function."

She would visit me every couple of days, setting up scenarios where we could walk through wooded

glens side by side, or drift on buoyant lakes, or sail through clouds on feather-down gliders. It was all for

her; for me there was only the half- sense of a body I could never fully enjoy. But I loved her company. I

loved her stories of the Outside, though they made me ache for what I could never share with her; in

return I told her everything I knew about the system, about myself, embarrassed at how little there

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