He had just one limitation, however, not necessarily a flaw, of course, but nonetheless undeniably a limitation. He was not real. In fact, insofar as he was genuinely human at all, Sol Gladheim was the projection of a small group of people, some male, some female, assisted by an Artificial Intelligence. He was constructed of information. He had no physical existence at all.
Real human beings, let’s admit it, seem to rather elude us Simlings.
‘Hey, Little Rose, you’ve been changing things around again! Where do you find the energy? I was just getting used to that room in pink and white and now you’ve done it in yellow! Nice, though. Very nice indeed!’
Mr Gladheim was one of a number of entities whose job was to patrol the SenSpace Worlds, seeking out the regular users of SenSpace and offering them support, friendship and counselling.
These so-called Help Entities had been created to conform to a number of popular ideas about the characteristics of helpful people which had been established by market research. They were animated by the staff of the SenSpace Corporation’s Welfare Service, an agency which the company had set up to head off public criticism that SenSpace exploited the vulnerable and lonely.
Most of the time Help Entities ran automatically, like Little Rose’s electronic neighbours in the City without End. But they were monitored by duty workers at the Welfare Service, who could assume direct control if needed at any time. From the point of view of the customer, such switches of control were invisible and seamless. Mr Gladheim looked the same, smiled the same way and spoke in the same sort of New York American English whether he was animated by a female welfare worker aged 23, a male worker aged 41, or by a Self-Evolving Artificial Intelligence.
But, real or not, it was Mr Gladheim who saved Ruth’s life four days after my departure. His imaginary knuckles saved her, knocking on the imaginary door of the imaginary house of imaginary Little Rose.
Ruth had fallen in love with him. She talked to him for hours. She told him secrets. She giggled and flirted. Each day she dressed up for him in new imaginary dresses, each morning she racked her brains for things to tell him about.
The Welfare Service, seeing the need, arranged for him to visit daily. It was no bother. He could be in many different places at the same time. They set him to visit daily with bunches of flowers, and to pay attention to her in a style which lay somewhere between indulgent father and respectful suitor, with a dash of professional counsellor thrown in.
He visited the day after my departure, and Little Rose told him she was worried about me. She said I was very selfish and never thought to tell her what I was doing or whether she might need me. Mr Gladheim clucked his tongue.
The day after that, my third day in Epiros, he visited again. Little Rose said she was very tired and Mr Gladheim asked if she was well and if she needed any help. She said no, but a hug would be nice. So he gave her a hug, a fatherly imaginary hug.
The next day she didn’t answer when he knocked. This was unusual. It was rare for Ruth not to spend most of her time in SenSpace, and unheard of for her not to be there at the times that Mr Gladheim had said that he would call.
The next day she still didn’t answer.
Or the next.
Mr Gladheim was being operated by the self-evolving artificial intelligence at the time and it recognized that for Ruth not to be there three days in a row was extremely atypical. It checked with SenSpace Centre, which monitored the entry and exit of customers into the SenSpace world. Centre looked into the matter very thoroughly and after nearly three microseconds it came back to the Welfare AI with the surprising information that Ruth was in SenSpace and indeed was currently projecting into the ‘City Without EndTM’ Conceptual Field, though there was no sign of activity.
The AI notified the duty Welfare Officer, a human being, a woman in fact, who pulled the full ‘Connection Profile’ from Centre onto her screen – and was alarmed by what she saw.
‘This is going to look bad for the Corporation,’ fretted the Welfare Officer. ‘Someone is going to be for it.’
She e-mailed her senior with the whole profile. The senior shook his head.
‘This’ll be egg on our face, that’s for sure.’
He forwarded the profile to his own manager, marked urgent.
‘The service is going to come badly out of this,’ he commented in a covering note.
The Profile showed that Ruth had been connected continuously for five days. For the last three days, though she had still been connected, there had been no detectable output from her SenSpace address.
The manager told the senior to tell the Welfare Officer to contact the emergency services. Not the imaginary emergency services, the real ones, the ones in Illyria City.
37
Ambulance sirens went whooping through the streets, like I so often heard them do down there in the abyss as I stood on our fiftieth floor balcony, looking out at the towers and the sea. But this time they were not going to attend to some stranger. They weren’t going to deal with one of those dramas that happen to other people. They were going to our block in Faraday, our apartment. They were going to the place that no one visited, the place where nothing ever happened.
A strange group emerged from the elevator at the fiftieth floor: the paramedic and his robot assistant, two police officers and their robot assistant and the plastec janitor Lynda with her smooth pink face…
No one answered the front door of the apartment, and it was locked. Lynda the janitor emitted a signal in ultrasound giving the override code and instructing the door to unbolt. It duly did so, but still could not be opened because of the two manual bolts that Ruth had had fixed on the inside.
‘There’s a Mr Simling lives here too, apparently,’ said one of the police officers. They had checked with Central Records.
‘He has not been here since Monday,’ reported the robot janitor.
‘We know that,’ said the police officer. ‘We know that he…’
The police robot interrupted politely. It had just received more information from Central Records which said that I had crossed into Epiros on Monday afternoon. Also: that I was suspected in being involved in a theft involving a syntec. Also: that I was the subject of a classified security file entry.
Some data input clerk somewhere had slipped up. These pieces of information had up to now been filed in different locations and the obvious connections had not been made…
The police officers looked at each other grimly:
‘This is going to look bad. Someone’s going to be in trouble…’
But at least the someone wasn’t going to be either of them.
The police robot and the paramedic robot smashed in the door.
The whole crowd – three humans and three robots – entered our neat little apartment.
‘Mrs Simling? Mrs Simling?’
No answer. Charlie came whirring out of the kitchen where he’d been waiting for five days for instructions.
‘Hello, can I be of any assistance?’ was the message that was sent to his voice box by his small electronic brain. But we’d still not got that voice box repaired, and all that came out was the faintest of buzzing sounds.
They checked all the rooms and found that the door of the SenSpace room was locked on the inside. So the robots broke it down. The vibrations knocked an ornament from a shelf, a little china cup painted with a tiny red rose, Ruth’s one souvenir of her Victorian porcelain collection back in Chicago.