A Twist of the Knife by Peter James Read Free Book Online

the world.
    He sat up in alarm.
I cannot make love to my wife because she does not exist, or rather she exists only in my memory. I am the sole reality
. Then he said what he always said when he needed to reassure himself: ‘
Cogito
,
ergo sum
.’ Then he repeated it in English because he felt it sounded better in English. ‘
I think, therefore I am.’
    Susan had been dead for two years now, but he had still not got used to it, still got cheated by the cruel dreams in which she was there, they were laughing, kissing, sometimes even making love; the dreams, yes, old times, good times. Gone.
    But not entirely gone. Henry could hear her now in the bathroom. It was all part of the post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7. Behind closed doors she made the sounds of ablutions, creating the illusion that she was still alive.
    A few seconds later, at exactly 06.30 European Communal Time, the synthesized voice of the MinuteManager personal organizer kicked in: ‘Good morning, Mr and Mrs Garrick. It is Thursday, 17 November 2045.’
    Henry realized now what was wrong. Susan had got up before the alarm. She
never
got up before the alarm. Ever.
    The MinuteManager continued breezily: ‘Here are the headlines of today’s online
Telegraph
that I think will interest you. I will bring you editorial updates as I come across them during the next hour. The Prime Minister is arriving in Strasbourg this morning to present his arguments against Great Britain’s expulsion from the EU. Parliament will today debate the first stage in the reduction of power of the House of Commons in favour of government by consensus on the Internet . . . and delegates from the World Union of Concerned Scientists will today be pressing for international legislation limiting the cerebral capacity of sentient computers.’
    ‘You’re up early, darling,’ Henry said as Susan came back into the bedroom.
    ‘Busy day,’ she murmured in her gravelly voice, before beginning to rummage through her wardrobe, pausing every few moments to select a dress and hold it against herself in the mirror.
    Breakfast, he thought. That was missing these days. She used to bring him breakfast in bed, on a tray. Tea, toast, cereal, a boiled egg. He was a creature of habit and she had prepared him the same breakfast every day of their marriage. He depended on her for everything, that’s why he had wanted to keep her on after her death. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’ he said grumpily. Except somewhere in his addled memory an assortment of bytes of stored information arranged themselves into a message informing him he had not eaten breakfast for two years. But they failed to yield the information as to why not.
    It was terrible but he had great difficulty remembering anything about Susan’s death, he realized guiltily. It was as if he had stored the memory in some compartment and had forgotten where. One moment they had been contentedly married and the next moment she was no more. At least, not flesh and blood.
    Henry Garrick could have had a full-body replica of his wife. But robot technology still had not perfected limb and muscle movement, so FBRs – as full-body replicas were known – tended to move with a clumsy articulation that made them look like retards. He had opted instead for a hologram – the standard post-deanimation program hologram model PermaLife-7.
    Susan-2, as he had called her, was connected through a cordless digital satellite link to an online brain-download databank named ARCHIVE 4, and a network of lasers concealed in the walls gave her the ability to move freely around much of the apartment, though not of course beyond. The entire transformation of Susan from a wetware (flesh-and-blood) mortal into a hardware (digitized-silicon) virtual mortal had been handled by the undertakers.
    Death was a redundant word these days. ‘Deanimation’, or ‘suspended animation’, or ‘altered sentient condition’, or even ‘metabolically challenged