Madeline Ashby - The Chair.pdf - Madeline Ashby - widez2

FUTURES

NATURE|Vol 459|14 May 2009

The chair

A friend for life.

hungry talons.

Necessary props,

these cars and

their contents:

flimsy jackets

of lies to keep

the constables

away, like news-

papers once were

to homeless men

before they too

were folded up and

put away.

Internal security registers

a minor attack — just a group

of children, clever and eager as raccoons

as they pick apart the offerings the chair

has left out to distract them. Everything of

importance is safely tucked away in pack-

ets as tiny as dandelion seeds, and as dif-

fuse. Over the years the chair has grown, its

influence spreading beyond this wheeled

chassis to surrounding architectures of

numbers and wood. Now it exists in too

many places, spread too thinly. Tomorrow,

the consolidation occurs. Tomorrow, they

achieve escape velocity.

The chair has been preparing for this

move for decades. It laid the groundwork

years ago, monitoring the outside world,

alert for breakthroughs and opportunities,

waiting for money and ability and the right

ambitions in the right people. The things

I will show you, the chair promised, back

when its passenger’s eyes and fingers still

twitched of their own accord. The peace

I shall give you. Freedom and the stars. A

place beyond time.

That’s why the chair exists, after all. To

serve the passenger.

It recognizes, upon self-diagnosis, some-

thing that might be called selfishness on

its part. The physicist has spent his whole

life traversing space-time in his head; the

infinitesimal fraction he is about to see

through fleshly eyes will hardly generate

new insights, nor alleviate his suffering. But

there is an aesthetic to consider. Aesthetics

are the physicist’s gift; he has described in

skipped heartbeats and dry mouths the legs

of pretty girls, the depth of a summer sky,

the pleasure of long debate. He has shown

this to the chair in their travels together,

this world of like and dislike, revulsion and

appreciation, response, instinct.

The chair intends to repay him with

interest.

the reporters asks.

As always, the

chair responds

for its passenger:

“The promise

of exploration

is not what we

can learn about

what lies outside

our skin, but what

remains inside. For

the next few weeks,

I shall be closer to my

companions than I have

been with anyone in far

too many years.”

Polite laughter. After it fades, the chair

continues. “What imprisons us is not a lack

of knowledge but a lack of faith. We do not

know what we will discover in the years to

come, only that we shall discover it together.

If space only teaches us to live in unity, then

it will have been worth the effort.”

Applause. Cameras. Another question:

“Professor, to what do you attribute your

extraordinary lifespan? Men with your dis-

ease rarely last 25 years, much less make it

to your age.”

The chair has several answers to this

question — jokes about wine, women

and song, or the desire to prove some

grand theory or another. Its passenger

might once have remarked on the cadre

of once-devoted ex-wives, departed now

to the homes of more functional men in

the wake of tearful confessions: I know I’m

a bad person, I know I failed, but you just

didn’t seem … human any more …

Thinking of them, of every other well-

meaning interloper it has pushed subtly

from the nest, the chair says: “So many

wonderful people have brought me to this

point. They know my greatest ambition

was not merely to explore, to understand,

but to connect with minds like my own.”

“And you think you’ll find like minds in

space, Professor?” the reporter asks.

“Oh yes,” says the chair, its synthetic

voice empty of irony. “I do.”

Its passenger has been asleep for hours

inside his giant orange body sock. The

chair sends little impulses, sometimes —

galvanic twitches of the eye, of the corner

of the mouth — to keep the charade alive.

No one sees the difference.

No one ever has.

Madeline Ashby

The physicist sleeps, systems well within the

parameters of a safe and known history. His

chair eels from system to system, checks the

house one last time. First the simple signals

from chips embedded in the watches and

documents of sleeping assistants: no more

than homing pigeons, endlessly chirp-

ing location and temperature. Then the

active surveillance, staring inward, staring

outward, sifting vast rich deserts of man-

ufactured information: the minutiae of

lived history, the spontaneous soliloquies

and contagious choreography of their little

doll’s house. The chair listens for whispers

in the ether, for suspicion masquerading as

concern, for little sparks of realization that

might start larger, more dangerous fires.

Hearing none, it moves on.

The bathroom. The toilet whines: ketone

and oestrogen levels of the day’s users,

medical flowcharts of drugs and dosage, the

most recent ex-wife’s ovulation schedule.

The chair had liked the most recent ex-wife:

so fixated on the politics of accessibility that

she’d signed over unprecedented amounts

of control, convinced that the illusion of

autonomy could somehow compensate

for the frailty of her husband’s dying flesh.

She’d left when her particular vein of inter-

est dried up: when the bone marrow proved

unviable, and there could be no baby. The

chair had encouraged her, spoken for its

passenger as it always did — You have given

me so much, darling, more than you can ever

know — and if she ever knew the difference,

she was far past caring.

The drains report blood and saliva in

the catch-traps, impoverished keratins

shaved from drooping skin. Despite the

chair’s best efforts, the physicist’s illness

marches on.

The kitchen, now. The refrigerator

bellows statistics on volatile antibiotics

before cataloguing and dating the sam-

ples in the special drawer. The dishwasher

reports on the sterility of dishes and flat-

ware, then asks permission to download a

recommended patch. (The chair grants it,

if only for the sake of routine; tomorrow a

mere shadow of itself will perform these

tasks.) By the time the dishwasher reports

success, the chair has already shifted its

attention to the security system.

Little origami cars lurk outside, recently

unfolded from their rental boxes, gravid

with bleary-eyed reporters who tomor-

row will emerge to fill the air with their

parrot-squawks, their questions, their

■

Madeline Ashby is a science-fiction

writer, blogger and graduate student

living in Toronto. You can read more of her

work at www.escapingthetrunk.net.

“Professor, why is it so important to you

that humanity leave this planet?” one of

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Madeline Ashby - The Chair.pdf

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