'Scandal!' she said, fairly hissing the word. 'I will have no such word mentioned. No such word, do you hear? My father followed the company's orders to the letter. Later, they claimed he had failed them. That could not be further from the truth. If anything, my father was too successful with his workings. Too damned successful!'
The curse shocked me, coming from such an elderly personage. Hoping to conduct the conversation back to gentler ground, I enquired about the proposal mentioned in the letter.
'That is simply stated,' the old woman replied. 'I have prepared my father's various papers for your inspection.' She referred here to several bound notebooks set on a small table beside my chair. 'It would give me great comfort, sir, if you were to look over them.'
'Miss Bringhome… I feel hardly qualified for such-'
'I wish only that you would read my father's notebooks. That is all I ask. And that you write a short report, giving your honest opinion as to the work's commercial viability. I have a great desire, you see, that my father's reputation should be salvaged, and by an academic such as yourself.'
'If I may venture… is it not a little late, for…"
I could hardly finish the sentence.
'Sir! You speak of lateness, to one as old as I? I have waited many years for someone to take an interest in my father's work. I shall not be ungenerous, let me assure you.'
If only to calm the lady down, I quickly agreed to the sum mentioned. In truth, I was already eager to take the papers away with me, the better to study them. Even this was against her wishes, however: 'I cannot allow the papers out of my sight,' she said. 'I will ask you therefore to accept the hospitality of my home while you make your report.'
So began my sojourn in the old woman's house. I moved in the very next day, bringing with me a few simple provisions, clothes and suchlike, along with some of my textbooks. I was given a spacious bedroom of my own; the very same one, I was informed, that her father had slept in. Pausing only to ruminate upon the twisted pathway that had brought me to this most curious task, I opened the first notebook of Professor Bringhome and started to read:
'Some people', he began, 'burn themselves into the film-strip, the photographic plate, the painted portrait, the pixels, the vinyl disc, the video screen. Admitting of their magical presence, we call these people photogenic, audiogenic. Or more simply, and even if they are ugly, we call them beautiful. We say they have "charisma", from the Greek kharis; a religious term, signifying a divinely bestowed power or talent. To say that these favoured few belong not only to their time, but to all times, is a long-held poetic truth. However, I now believe that such transcendence is a physical fact of the universe itself. The great and the good do not die; rather, their base matter transforms into pure, undiluted image, contained alive within the traces of all they have touched. There they await us, scattered in clouds of information, pending only the invention of a suitable gathering device.'
It was a standard text, in all honesty, and typical of the time; only the final statement - that charisma was a physical property of the universe - seemed out of the ordinary. Certainly, in all my readings I had not come across this idea before. I automatically presumed the professor was speaking allegorically. But as my days and nights at the house progressed, I came to see that he had a material, if somewhat delusional, ambition behind the philosophical ramblings. He evidently believed such a machine could be built; a machine that would gather charisma from the ether. He referred to this as the Charisma Engine.
The complex equations and tortuous mathematical diagrams (only some of which I could understand) gradually homed in on one recurring image: that of two spirals, winding around each other like acrobatic snakes. At first I thought these the representation of the DNA structure, led to this belief by the numerous references to the so-called genetic properties of an image; a process the professor termed the 'photogenetic continuum'. Only slowly did it dawn on me that these were actually diagrams of the machine itself; blueprints, if you will, of the Charisma Engine.
I will freely admit I found all these ideas more than a little hard to take. The professor was claiming that the current image-retrieval technology could be augmented and vastly improved by his own invention, to produce not a copied image of the chosen person, but an exact replica; 'A reverberation in the charismatic field,' in Bringhome's own words, 'entirely indistinguishable from its material source'. As if this were not madness enough, he further went on to claim that 'the successful Charisma Engine will be a nurturing environment; by this I mean that the products of the retrieval will be sentient. They will have a life of their own.'
Shortly after this passage came the first mention of Lucinda Tonguebright. Hers was but one name in a long list of possibilities. It had however been underlined in a different pen, as though at a later date. And from that point on the notebooks were filled with speculations about her life and works. Of course, I was reminded of my own growing obsession.
During all this time of study I saw very little of the professor's daughter. The lady of the house kept to her own quarters most of the time. As for the young, silent manservant; I saw him only when I requested meals. I could ask for nothing more. And so, the first week passed.
I had now reached the section of the papers dealing with the Xikon sponsorship. The company had shown great interest in the professor's stated ideas of a 'fully enhanced replication', although nowhere in the correspondence did he mention the idea of sentience, as though realizing that such notions were strictly for private thought. Project Propagation, as it became known, was a prestigious undertaking for the university, and it was clear from his writings that Bringhome felt an immense pressure to deliver results. This may have caused him to throw all accepted scientific caution to the wind. How else to explain his decision to present a first tentative retrieval using only an untried prototype of the Charisma Engine? Lucinda Tonguebright was his chosen subject. To this demonstration were invited the board of the university, along with the directors of Xikon.
In the circumstances, it is perhaps fortunate that the resurrected image flickered into life for little more than two minutes. Two minutes in which (according to the professor's highly charged account) the half-formed Miss Tonguebright spat and howled, and verbally abused her creator; two minutes of precious life, in which she vomited blood and attempted physically to attack one of the Xikon directors. Somewhat reluctantly, the professor turned off the Charisma Engine; the image dispersed into thin, screaming air.
Even taking into account the professor's fevered view of the occasion, it seems hard to credit such things. An image that could produce saliva, could scream, could physically - physically! - attack a human being? No, I could not allow myself to believe such monstrosities. More likely the professor had exaggerated; more likely Miss Tonguebright's image had been badly reproduced. Some fault in the mechanism had caused the image to appear more alive than it could possibly have been.
But still, something out of the ordinary had taken place that day, in the university's media laboratory. Within a week Xikon had withdrawn their sponsorship, and Bringhome was given a month's notice from his position. However, so angry was he at this treatment - and the notebooks fairly explode with bile at this point - that the professor left at the first opportunity, taking all his workings with him.