She hadn’t seen Martin for more than fifty years. She hadn’t loved him for more than seventy. Yet here was Martin Warshaw. In what was left of his flesh.
The dog prodded Warshaw’s hand with his cold nose. Warshaw stirred. “Open the windows,” he whispered.
The dog tapped a button near the floor. Curtains rolled aside and floor-length windows shunted open onto damp Pacific air.
“I’m here, Martin,” Mia said.
He blinked in grainy astonishment. “You’ve come early.”
“Yes. I met your dog.”
“I see.” The back of the deathbed rose, propping him in a sitting position. “Plato, please bring Mia a chair.”
The dog gripped the bent wooden leg of the nearest chair and lugged it over clumsily across the carpet, puffing and whining with the effort. “Thank you,” Mia said, and sat.
“Plato,” said the dying man, “please be quiet now. Don’t listen to us, don’t talk. You may shut down.”
“May I shut down? All right, Martin.” The dog sank to the carpeted floor in deep confusion. His long furry head fell to the carpet, and he twitched a bit, as if dreaming.
The apartment was spotless and dustless and in suspiciously perfect order. By the look of it, Mia could tell that Martin hadn’t left his bed for weeks. Cleaning machines had been at the place, and civil-support personnel on their unending round of social checkups. The deathbed was discreet, but to judge by its subtle humming and occasional muted gurgle, it was well equipped.
“Do you enjoy dogs, Mia?”
“He’s a very handsome specimen,” Mia said obliquely.
The dog rose to his feet, shook himself all over, and began nosing aimlessly about the room.
“I’ve had Plato for forty years,” Martin said. “He’s one of the oldest dogs in California. One of the most heavily altered dogs in private ownership—he’s even been written up in the breeders’ magazines.” Martin smiled wanly. “Plato’s rather more famous than I am, these days.”
“I can see that you’ve done a great deal with him.”
“Oh, yes. He’s been through every procedure I’ve been through. Arterial scrubbing, kidney work, liver and lung work … I never tried any extension technique without running it through good old Plato first.” Martin folded his bony, waxlike hands above the covers. “Of course, it’s easier and cheaper to do veterinary work than posthuman extension—but I needed that sense of companionship, I suppose. One doesn’t like to go alone, into … medical experiences of such profundity.”
She knew what he meant. It was a common sentiment. Animal bodies had always preceded human bodies into the medical frontier. “He doesn’t look forty years old. Forty, that’s a very ripe age for a dog.”
Martin reached for a bedside slate. He brushed at the reactive surface with his fingertips, then brushed his fingers back through his hair—a gesture she recognized with a shock of déjà vu, after seven long decades. “They’re wonderfully resilient animals, dogs. Remarkable how well they get on with life, even after becoming postcanine. The language skills make a difference, especially.”
Mia watched the dog nosing about the bedroom. Freed from the heavy cognitive burden of language, the dog seemed much brisker, freer, less labored, somehow more authentically mammalian.
“At first, all his speech was very clearly machine generated,” Martin said, tugging at a pillow. Color had begun to enter his face. He’d done it with his scratching at the touchscreen, and with his bed, and with the medical support gear he was using, wired into his flesh beneath the pajamas. “Just a verbal prosthetic for a canine brain. Very halting, very … gimmicky. It took ten years for the wiring to sink in, to fully integrate. But now speech is simply a part of him. Sometimes I catch him talking to himself.”
“What does he talk about?”
“Oh, nothing very sophisticated. Nothing too abstract. Modest things. Food. Warmth. Smells. He is, after all, just my old good dog—somewhere under there.” Martin gazed at his dog with undisguised affection. “Isn’t that right, boy?” The dog looked up, thumped his tail mutely.
Mia had lived through a long and difficult century. She had witnessed massive global plagues, and consequent convulsive advancements in medicine. She’d been a deeply interested witness as vast new crypts and buttresses and towers were added to the ancient House of Pain. She had professionally studied the demographics of the deaths of millions of lab animals and billions of human beings, and she had examined the variant outcomes of hundreds of life-extension techniques. She’d helped to rank their many hideous failures, and their few but very real successes. She had meticulously judged advances in medical science as a ratio of capital investment. She had made policy recommendations to various specific organs of the global medical-industrial complex. She had never gotten over her primal dread of pain and death, but she no longer allowed mere dread to affect her behavior much.
Martin was dying. He had, in point of fact, amyloid neural degeneration, partial spinal paralysis, liver damage, and kidney nephritis, all of which had led through the usual complex paths of metabolic decline to a state his records neatly summarized as “insupportable.” Mia, of course, had read his prognosis carefully, but medical analysis was a product of its terminology. Death, by stark contrast, was not a word. Death was a reality that sought people out and put its primal stamp on every fiber of their beings.
She could tell at a glance that Martin was dying. He was dying, and he was offering her platitudes about his dog rather than harsh truths about his death, because his strongest and most genuine regret in life was leaving his dog. Demands, obligations, forced you to survive. Survival was an act of obligation to lovers, to dependents, to anyone who expected survival from you. A dog, for instance. What year was this, 2095? Martin was ninety-six and his best friend was his dog.
Martin Warshaw had once loved her. That was why he had arranged this meeting, why he was launching sudden emotional demands at her after fifty years of silence. It was a complex act of duty and rage and sorrow and politesse, but Mia understood the reality of the situation, just as she understood most other things these days: rather too well.
“Do you ever do mnemonics, Mia?”
“Yes. I’ve done memory drugs. Some of the milder ones. When I need them.”
“They help. They’ve helped me. But they’re a vice, of course, if you push them.” He smiled. “I’m pushing them hard now. There’s a lot of pleasure in vice when there’s nothing left to lose. Would you like a mnemonic?” He offered her a fresh pad of stickers. Factory-sealed, holographic backing.
Mia peeled one free, examined the name and the dosage, and smoothed the sticker to her neck. To please him.
“You’d think that after all these years they’d have found a mnemonic that would open your soul like a filing cabinet.” He reached into a bedside table and pulled out a framed photograph. “Everything just in its place, everything organized, everything indexed and full of meaning. But that’s too much to ask of a human brain. Memories compact themselves, they blur. They turn to mulch, lose all color. The details go. Like a compost heap.” He showed her the photo: a young woman in a high-collared coat, lipstick, eyeliner, wind-tousled brunette hair, squinting in sunlight, half smiling. Something guarded in her smile.
The young woman was herself, of course.
Martin gazed at the photo, wrapped in mnemonic like a psychic blanket, and then he looked up at her. “Do you remember much about the two of us? It’s been a long time.”
“I can remember,” she told him. That was almost true. “I wouldn’t have come, otherwise.”