Blue Shifting by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

cast her a stricken look. "And anyway, how might I spend eternity, unable to create?"
    "Immortals have no reason to create," Abbie said. "They have time to answer every question; they're no longer slaves to psychological conflict. Imagine being free of the devil that drives you..."
    "I can imagine other ways," he said, more to himself than to Abbie. Then it was his turn to change the subject. "Come. It's time for you to meet my daughter."
    Abbie followed him through the studio to the third dome, sick with apprehension.

    The dead woman lay naked and very still, cocooned in a crystal catafalque above the computer system. Subdermal electrode implants showed as raised discs beneath her pale skin. She was very much like the hologram of her mother, and just as beautiful. Her chest rose and fell with measured breaths. Wellard stood beside her, stroking hair from her brow, and Abbie almost cried aloud at the poignancy of the father and daughter tableau and all it represented.
    Wellard emerged from his reverie. "Technically, Zoe is dead. This system has kept her body alive for fifteen years. Her mind is empty, blank." He smiled. "Thanks to the system, she is capable of limited motion."
    He hit a command key; the electrodes fired and Zoe spasmed. The contrast between the sleeping woman as she was and this helplessly jerking corpse was painful to behold. Abbie winced, turned away.
    Through her fingers she watched the woman sit up, drag her legs from the catafalque and stand clumsily. She took half a dozen faltering steps, her father in close attendance. What was so tragic about this woeful parody of a marionette was that the technology at Wellard's command was over a decade old. A modern system could fit unobtrusively at the base of her skull and give her he swinging gait of a mannequin. There was such a thing as respect for the dead.
    And there were Pilots...
    Wellard returned his daughter to her resting place and glanced at Abbie. "Well?"
    "If you could leave us alone for a time..."
    When Wellard had finally departed, after lovingly arranging his daughter's hair, Abbie approached the dead woman and stared down at her. A regime of regular, computer-assisted exercises had maintained her muscle tone, but her moribund eyes suggested a similar deterioration of mind. Abbie kissed the woman on the lips, fighting to control her emotions, and slipped into a sitting position on the floor. She reached behind her head and activated her occipital system.
    The sensation was as if she had suddenly switched off her senses. She existed in a lightless limbo, unaware of her own physicality. What happened next had a perfectly rational scientific explanation, but the process always came to Abbie in the image of a dispossessed awareness (her own) floating into a vacated seat of consciousness (her subject's). She insinuated herself into the derelict neural pathways of Zoe's brain, exploring the intricate matrix of the dead woman's nervous system. She was aware of an extreme weariness, the leaden weight of a body fifteen years dead. There would be much that she would be unable to do with Zoe, and more that she would only be able to make function at a much reduced capacity. In normal circumstances her subjects were newly dead and easily manageable. Zoe would be a test of her abilities.
    She opened Zoe's eyes, made out the sunlight beyond the dome as if through a fathom of ocean. With care she flexed the right leg, then the left. She sat up, and her misted vision swung from the upper curve of the dome to the far wall. She was swamped with nausea, dizziness. She gripped the edge of the catafalque and pushed herself to her feet. Swaying, she took a tentative first step, then a second. She glanced down and noticed herself sprawled across the tiles, her eyes vellicating behind closed lids, a soft moan escaping her lips. Then she looked down at Zoe's body, the small breasts, the curving thighs, and although she wanted more than anything to cry, the dead woman's