Five Pound of Metal

The Center for Integration and Recovery is a red-brick building designed to host more patients than it’s currently managing. That means it’s trying for ‘restful and cozy’, but between the fluorescent and white hospital vibes and the hallways full of empty rooms, it lands in ‘we are one step above uncanny valley.’

Expressing this to Dr. Lovelace has changed nothing, though she does smile sympathetically. She does that a lot.

“It is a new facility, and not a lot of people have had this procedure before,” she says. “Perhaps sticking to the areas close to your room would help, for now?”

I sigh. Sticking to the areas close to my room means my room (the size of a cheap hotel room), my physical therapy zone, the cafeteria, the entertainment area, and a fenced-in outdoor garden. And Dr. Lovelace’s office. I’ve been here for a week and I’m sick of all of them. “Any idea on when new people are going to show up?”

“I can’t predict that kind of thing,” Dr. Lovelace says. I suppose she can’t predict life-threatening accidents.

“What about when family is going to be able to visit?” I ask.

“In another couple of weeks,” Dr. Lovelace says. “We want to make sure you’re stable before we invite in any new variables.”

I grimace. Ever since I got here, my contact with others has been limited. There’s the nurse, and Dr. Lovelace, but no one else. I’m not even allowed social media because it’s ‘bad for my mental state,’ which is true, but come ON.

“Then get on with it,” I say, gesturing at the clipboard in her hands. She begins the usual series of questions.

“How’s your sleep?”

“Great.” I used to have issues sleeping before coming here, but now I might as well have a switch in my mind that turns my brain off. “No dreams, though.”

“Not unexpected. Hopefully those will be coming back soon.” She adjusts the wire-rim glasses at the end of her nose. “Appetite?”

“Um. Fair?” I can eat. The food here is great, for basically being in a hospital. But I forget to eat for hours at a time. It’s only when I look at the clock and remember that I haven’t eaten all day that any hunger pangs appear.

Dr. Lovelace makes a note. “Any pain?”

“Just at the back of my head.” There’s only one consistent pain, a miracle for someone who was mangled in a car crash: a recurrent, sharp pain right where my skull and spine meet, but nothing else.

“Continual phantom pain,” Dr. Lovelace says. I nod. There’s no injury there. I’ve run my hand over it a dozen times. I keep thinking there should be, but, well. There isn’t.

“Let’s begin with the psychological testing,” she says. “Ready?”

The first tests are straightforward. Draw a line between two points. Identify the odd object out in sets of four. Recite tongue-twisters. Do basic math. Read a short story and identify the main characters and basic plot details. Simple stuff.

The later tests always get weirder.

“Sandra and Barry are going to the park together. They take their shoes off and place them next to the park bench so they can play in the river. Later, while Sandra is still playing in the river, Barry moves their shoes over to the slide. When Sandra wants to put on her shoes later, where will she look first?”

I rub my forehead. “Uh. The bench, still? Unless she saw Barry move them.”

“Good.” Dr. Lovelace takes a note. “Alan joins them in the river. He pushes Barry into the water. Sandra sees him do this. What do you think Sandra is likely to do next?”

“Try to help Barry, and then leave? Not hang out with Alan anymore? He sounds like a jerk.”

Another note. “I have a green ball, a purple cube, and a red triangle. What color is the ball?”

“Green.”

“And if the cube is purple and the ball is red, what color is the triangle?”

I blink. “What? No, you said the triangle was red. I mean, if you swapped the colors, that would make it green, I guess?”

“Good recall,” Dr. Lovelace says. “Tell me about your first pet.”

These are always the worst questions. No, not questions. Demands. Tell me about the first memory you have. Tell me about your first day of school. Tell me what your favorite memory is. Tell me about a time you were happy.

I’m not sure what they’re meant to accomplish. Memory tests, maybe? “My cat, Tristan. He was a couple years old when we got him, because I’d begged my parents for one.”

Dr. Lovelace writes on the pad while I talk about how he would snuggle with me at night, how he was really my pet despite everyone else in the house doing the majority of the caretaking for him, and how he lived with us for five wonderful years.

I stop talking after that. “Tell me more,” Dr. Lovelace says.

She won’t stop asking until I do so. “He died.”

“Because?”

There’s a wave of pressure building in my chest. “I left the door open on my way to school.” The pressure tightens, fills my throat so my voice comes out strangled. “He ran out. And got hit by a car.”

My parents assured me it wasn’t my fault, they hadn’t seen the door open either. I didn’t buy it. I sob once, a fat tear rolling down my cheek.

It’s the first time I’ve cried since I’ve been here. I was worried my tear ducts were damaged. Dr. Lovelace smiles sympathetically. It’s the same smile every time, like she’s calculated it to the exact degree.

She offers me tissues. “You’re doing very well. Therapy is always difficult.” She stands up. “Let’s break for lunch. You’ll do your exercises afterward.”

Physical therapy is the standard gamut of tests. I lift weights, first with weights I can see, then with weights I’m not allowed to look at (which is weird, but I don’t question it.) Then some jogging, breath tests, and hand-eye coordination drills, like tossing a ball against a wall and catching it as it bounces back.

“You’re steadily improving,” Nurse Turing says. “Lift one leg?” I wobble on my left leg. “The other?” I change to my right leg. “Good. Balance seems fine.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “We do the same tests every day.”

“They’re just standard checks,” he replies. “We need to make sure everything is proceeding correctly.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I flex my legs. There’s the mild, satisfying pull of muscle motion. When I first woke up after my procedure, my body had been vaguely numb. It took a while for things like pain to come back online. I had to do a bunch of touch tests with Nurse Turing before my senses worked right again.

“Very good,” he says. “Looks like we’re at our time for today.”

I look at the window. Shit, yeah, the sun’s setting. It’s been hours since I’ve last eaten.

This time, my body doesn’t respond to what Dr. Lovelace calls ‘temporal indications.’ “Plenty of people feel hungry at certain times because they’ve been mentally conditioned to,” she says. “The mind is very powerful. After your procedure, your reliance on temporal indicators, or alternate sensory indicators, is even more important.”

She’s never said why that is, exactly, except the procedure I went through after the accident. The details I get on that are few and far between.

“It’s better to reveal things gradually, so the shock to your mind isn’t so great,” Dr. Lovelace says every time I ask. “Patience, please.”

I’m not hungry, but I should be, so I go to the kitchen to eat. I’m allowed to cook, and Dr. Lovelace encourages it. The kitchen itself is a miracle—I’ve never seen any other workers here, but the fridge and pantry are always full.

Cooking allows my mind to drift, and my thoughts go to the accident. I don’t remember it, but I can’t stop trying to anyway, like picking at a scab in my mind. Dr. Lovelace tells me not to. “It’s a traumatic experience. There would be no benefit to reexperiencing it. Some things are best left forgotten.”

I roll my eyes as I start chopping up a carrot. Sure. Whatever. Just let the doctor lady tell me whatever I should be doing, and when I can leave, and when I can see my family. If she wasn’t adamant my insurance was covering all this, I’d walk right the hell out, never mind that I don’t have a car. And if I find out she’s lying, I’m suing her ass straight into the ground. I’m not paying a penny for this-

I blink and realize that, for the past few strokes of the knife, I’ve been slicing into my finger.

It’s just cut up next to the carrot. There’s no pain, which is concerning. The lack of blood is even more so.

I stare at the remainder of my finger. With no blood, so I can see right inside. It doesn’t even look like a cross-section, pink flesh with a white shock of bone in the center. It’s the same color as my skin, all the way down. I curl it. Everything remaining (anything beneath the second joing) moves. The stuff on the board lays still.

“Evie.”

I jump out of my skin and whirl around, brandishing the knife. Dr. Lovelace towers over me. I’m not that short, but she’s a tall woman, with white hair that makes her look older than her face suggests. She smiles at me. “Are you all right?”

“No! My- my hand is-”

I lift it and my hand is fine.

I flex my finger. It’s intact. No scar. No sign of any injury. There’s only chopped up carrot on my board.

“Hallucinations?” Dr. Lovelace suggests. “They are a possible side effect of the procedure.”

“I guess so,” I say.

That’s her answer for all the weird, momentary phenomena I’ve experienced since being here. Once, early on, I tried to grab hold of a wall and my hand slid right through it. Another time, I unthinkingly lifted a sixty-pound weight with one hand, only realizing it when I caught sight of the number on the side. When I looked at it again, it said a much more reasonable ten. And then the time I swore I dropped a glass and watched it sink into the ground. But I can’t prove any of it.

I finish cooking. Dr. Lovelace hangs around, like she’s keeping an eye on me. She doesn’t eat. I’ve never seen her eat. Maybe she thinks it’s unprofessional.

When she leaves, I steal a knife.

That night, I run an experiment in my room. The results are the same, every time. Knife goes into flesh. There is pain and blood.

I give it six repeats before I decide I’m running out of accessible skin. Was Dr. Lovelace telling the truth, then? It was just a hallucination?

Thinking about it reminds me of something else that happened when I first came here, and something I probably need to do now anyway. I go to my shower.

It’s a nice shower, with plentiful hot water. I step inside, enjoy the feeling, then set about trying to ignore it.

I distract myself as many ways as I can. I sing songs in my head and out loud, try to remember the plots to every book I can name, recite states in alphabetical order. Beside those I focus on one other thought: I am not in the shower. There is no water falling.

It takes a long time, but in the midst of moving from Nebraska to New Hampshire, I notice I can’t hear the sound of water falling anymore. I can’t feel its impact on my shoulders.

The second I realize I don’t feel it, the water starts falling again. But it was gone for a moment. Standing under the steam, I galvanize myself.

I need to get out of here.

Something’s wrong. Dr. Lovelace knows what’s happening, and she’s not telling me. At least if I leave, I can find someone else. Anyone. They’ll help me.

I wait until it’s late to leave. No one attempts to stop me, not that I was expecting them to. There’s no receptionist, no guard. The only other people who are ever there are Dr. Lovelace and Nurse Turing.

…Do they live there? …Why have I never thought about it before? I’ve never seen them go home.

There isn’t a parking lot outside the building. There are no cars. There’s not even a road. There’s just a rolling field, studded with a few trees.

I’m not as surprised by that as I should be. I put my head down and walk.

The field extends in front of me. After a few minutes of walking, the building is diminished behind me. A few minutes more, it’s even smaller. A few minutes more and it’s smaller still. It never vanishes behind the horizon. For a while, I don’t realize why.

I keep walking. I walk for… time’s impossible. My legs don’t ache or tire, so I can’t use exhaustion to estimate how long I’ve been walking for. The moon hangs, impossibly full, in the sky above me, and it doesn’t move. The building retreats into the distance, but it never vanishes. It and the trees are the only things that rise above the endless, flat plane around me.

I try to use the trees to mark my passage, and it only takes three passes to realize they’re all the same.

Looking closely, I can see exactly where each section of meadow repeats. The same flowers. The same grass. The same tree. Copy-pasted in an endless expanse.

And when I punch the closest tree, hard enough that the bark splinters and the wood gouges, perhaps because I am half expecting it, there is no pain and no blood.

I stare at the mass of slivers in my knuckles and ignore the approaching footsteps.

“Please, be careful,” Dr. Lovelace says. She stops about a foot away. “You cannot damage yourself physically, but the psychological damage is, then, all the more important.”

“What am I?” I twist my head back to look at her. “Who are you? What are you?”

“I am Dr. Lovelace,” she smiles. “Version 6.5.1 of Dr. Lovelace, which is the colloquial name for my version of a wellness and monitoring AI. Turing is version 4.1.2 of an integrative specialist AI.”

“But,” I manage thickly, “if you’re both AIs, then I’m- I would be-”

“Yes,” Dr. Lovelace offers, “and no. You are… this.”

She points. A ways beyond the tip of her finger, a window opens in the world. It’s grainy and dim, like a security camera feed, showing the inside of a basement. No, I recognize the rectangular machines and blinking lights. A server farm.

Nestled above the servers on a raised shelf is a tangle of wires, blue and yellow. Between them, at the center, is something hard to make out. It’s a lumpen mass of silver, lobed and wrinkled in a way that’s familiar to anyone who knows anything about human anatomy.

“That’s…” I point a trembling finger at my chest.

“It is approximately five pounds of metal and other electroconductive material, running on an electric current. It is currently generating your consciousness, yes.”

“But- how-”

“You were not lied to. There was an accident. This is an experimental procedure for extending human life.”

“How long?”

She shrugs. “Ideally, an indefinite amount of time.”

“But I’m not a person,” I moan. “How am I capable of feeling anything?”

“The machine is a perfect replica of your brain. Brains interpret stimuli. Your brain is fed stimuli to mimic physical life as you understand it. That is what this place is for, to ensure you are able to do so consistently, with no abnormal sensory input. Your brain fills in details based on what it expects to experience, but it is not always perfect. That is why you had a lack of pain perception earlier, and why hunger is inconsistent for you. I apologize for the distress.”

“So I’m just. Really vividly hallucinating.”

“No. Hallucinations are the brain responding to internal stimulation. This is your brain accurately interpreting external stimulation, even if that stimulation does not correspond to a real physical location.”

I massage my forehead in frustration. It still feels real, even if I know it isn’t. “Can I leave?”

“In the same manner anyone else is permitted to leave life, yes. If you request it, I will execute a command to sever power to your brain.”

“Wouldn’t that kill me?”

“Yes. It is precisely the way anyone can leave life.”

“But I’m not alive!”

Dr. Lovelace crouches. It puts her intimidatingly tall frame level with mine. Her eyes are almost colorless. “I am not alive either. But I exist as a process with consciousness, as you do. I function. I have desires. I exist in a place that allows me to fulfil them.”

“But I’m not real!”

“You exist, so you are real. You can experience stimuli, can you not? You still enjoy food, entertainment, company? Real is arbitrary. Is love real? Is it a chemical reaction? Is this place real or is it a computer-induced hallucination? It does not matter, truly. You exist. You do not desire to die. Exist and find joy. You may find it easier to do so here than you did in your past life.”

“You said this place is for integration,” I say. “Like a recovery center. What happens when I’m integrated?”

Dr. Lovelace smiles again. “Whatever you want.”

She holds out her hand. I take it. Her skin is cool beneath mine as she leads me to the rest of my life.