One hundred seven years.
So as he walks the long path to his lover's room, which he has done dozens of times now (don't include that in the formula, please), he passes the death sites of (432 x 107 =) 46,224 souls. A small city. A large luxury starship. A colossal prison, every sentence eternal.
Darling walks a little stiffly. The case he carries weighs over a hundred kilograms, and its shape prevents easy leverage or proper distribution of the mass. And there is also that more subtle cargo, the weight of fear and hope in what the case contains. The burden necessitates the stiff-legged gate of some monstrous golem, which is what, he supposes, he must seem to the hospital's staff. They certainly get out of his way.
When he arrives at Rathere's room, he deposits the case in the corner, and prepares himself to look at her.
She has moved, he realizes as he compares her position on the bed with cruelly exact memory. But that's merely the shuffling of bedpans and spraybaths and injections. She hasn't moved herself in nineteen months.
But as he flips between memory's image and the present, he does see changes. She isn't wasting away, exactly; there are flexor-implants to exercise her muscles, precise regimens of cardio and vascular stimulation, nutrients and roughage delivered by intravenous tubes, by nanomachines, by stomach probes. But something has slipped away a little further. She was always pale, raised on a starship without even forged sunlight, but her pallor seems to have gone from heliophobic white to a colder, less vital gray. But Darling flips the image to compare again, and realizes it's his imagination.
Or perhaps merely artificial intuition.
She has moved farther from him in the months he's been gone.
He waves for the tiny camera mounted discreetly above her bed. Its image chip feeds directly into her visual cortex, assuring that she «sees» what the world brings to this brightly colored hospital room. Sometimes, when he is gone, the little camera will pan across the presents he has brought. It does so according to a small patch of code cunningly both random (a nice surprise!) and not (a surprise that feels somehow inevitable, like that perfect weather just yesterday, or was it years ago?). In this way, the hopeful camera tries to stimulate Rathere from her coma, or at least sustain some glimmer of consciousness trapped inside.
"I have something new for you, my dear," he tells the microphones mounted just to either side of Rathere's head. "It's from my trip to the Koraq Mors. Remember, I told you I was shipping bachi and lyre? And you remember that when we were together there, we took an airship to the equatorial desert? I returned to that place, thought of you."
Later, he will upload a few hours of his visual memories into the tiny confines of the camera's chip. It will show them to Rathere according to those same fanciful yet deterministic algorithms.
He reaches to the case and pops its seals. There is a breathy intake like a child's gasp; the air pressure here on Earth is rather higher than on Koraq.
"I found this there."
There are two objects in the case. His eyes avoid one guiltily as he pulls the other out.
He is moved again by the sculpture's beauty.
The eye first perceives it as a school of fish, packed into a tight formation as if suddenly threatened or forced to navigate some narrow passageway. The fish are gold and seem to flutter with movement. But the fluttering is trompel'oeil, coalescing out of the minute structure of their scales: a multitude of tiny chevrons, each with its own angle of reflection. But take a closer look, they aren't fish at all; the elements that seemed a moment ago to be tails and fins are in fact wings, two colliding flocks of birds glimpsed from below, perhaps a skirmish in some avian war. Held closer, the shapes resolve into mere blobs of metal, dripped molten into this confection that is mostly air, connected by the slightest of metal tendrils (mistaken a moment before for fins or wings). And then, finally, the eye catches the negative space, and the empty regions between the blobs become figure, an Escher-esque, regular pattern that dances as the piece is turned.
He steps with the sculpture toward the camera. The machine tracks him, its tiny mind in love with movement, activity. Darling holds the sculpture at different ranges from the camera, enduring the whine of its focus, turns the work to many angles, telling stories of the old bootstrapped factory drone named Vaddum who made it with the pilot jet of a surplus flame thrower.
And through this all, Rathere sleeps. The input, the interaction, the new places and objects with which she raised up Darling to become a person seem useless here. There isn't enough left of her.
It started on the wet moors of Parate, where they went to receive a load of photosynthesizing insects destined to become the base of the food chain on some distant colony. Some nematode too small to be spotted by Rathere's medical monitors crawled under a toenail or perhaps through a pore. The symptoms started on the ship two weeks later, the length of the beast's life cycle. The med drone spotted labyrinthine corruptions in her brain, sudden but not severe, and recommended immediate cryostorage until an HC medical facility could be reached.
They said goodbye laughingly, knowing it would be all right. Darling surrendered her to the stasis of coldsleep with little more than a deep kiss; time was of the essence, and this would be fixed soon enough. Parate was months distant from Earth in those days, but slow, huge Darling could be very patient.
But the nematode had evolved in a polar lake bed far south of the moors, where the extreme axial tilt of Parate would lengthen winters to over seventy Standard years. There, the tiny worms had adapted to carry on a reduced life cycle even at the lowest temperatures. They moved, fed, and bred at a rate so slow that they didn't register on the cryo unit's medical monitors, which, after all, weren't looking for glacially slow changes (not in cryostasis), merely the acute, transitional emergencies of cellular crystallization.
By the time Rathere was unfrozen here at the hospital, three more generations of the creatures had lived and died, furrowing the rich tissues of her brain like virgin soil.
When Darling's monologue runs out, slowly driven to ground by depression, by exhaustion, by a feeling of uselessness, he wonders (again) if Rathere is alive at all.
Of course, alive is not the proper word. She breathes, her cells multiply and die, blood flows. She is warm. A few machines are required to keep her in this state, but Darling cannot quibble with this distinction. His muscles, his eyes, his somewhat imprecise equivalent of a heart are all machines. His very mind is a construct requiring knowledge of the most abstruse mathematics to understand; and yet he is real. Perhaps not alive. But very real.
Having corrected himself, Darling wonders if Rathere is, in fact, still a pmo».
Still Rathere at all.
There is nothing else Darling can do to delay his purpose here. He reaches again into the case and pulls from it the smaller, less beautiful object. He wonders how it came to exist.
There is, of course, no official Turing test for humans. The old privilege remains: they are people from birth, even as mewling, mindless, screaming bags of want. Fair enough. But what must be taken away from them, what measure of memories, of language, of understanding, before they slip under the threshold of personhood?
Darling first heard of the tester in a ward for comatose veterans of the NaPrin Rebellion, with its nerve gasses and nano-neuro-logical agents and sleeper assassins. One of the consulting physicians there, a specialist in brain death, considered the human Turing tester to be a frontier legend, a theoretical impossibility, a kind of nonsense.