Kath reached out a small, broad hand, tentatively, as if unsure how she might be greeted.
After a second, Sally took it, almost gasped at its warmth, its… humanity.
She knew, then, suddenly, what had happened.
The Serene had somehow, with the superior technology they possessed, brought Kathryn Kemp back to life. They had deemed her too valuable a person in their schema to allow to die. This was essentially the same Kath as before, but new, remade.
Kath squeezed her hand and said, “Shall we sit down?” She indicated the bench beneath the cherry tree. They crossed the lawn and sat side by side in the dappled shade.
Sally turned and stared at her friend. “I saw it happen, Kath. You quoted Housman, and then… then the truck came around the corner and…”
“I’m sorry,” Kath said. “I can’t imagine what you must have gone through.”
Sally smiled to herself. That was Kath, the compassionate: she had died, and been brought back to life, and she apologised for the hurt that this had occasioned.
“I have a lot to tell you,” Kath said in a soft voice, “to explain.”
“I… I think I know what happened. You are important to the Serene, Kath. And they’re so powerful. I mean, look how they’ve banished human violence. What is it to bring the dead back to life?”
Kath stared at her with wide eyes.
Sally said, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Kath shook her head. “No,” she said gently.
“I don’t understand. You’re the same Kath I’ve always known. I saw you die, and here you are, alive… The Serene must have brought you back to life. You were dead, Kath!”
“I was dead, and the Serene did resurrect me — I am the same Kath Kemp you have always known, but the truth of it is that I am not, and never was, human.”
Sally felt dizzy. Had she not been sitting down she would have slumped into the seat. A hot flush cascaded across her face.
“Then what?”
“I am what you call a self-aware entity.”
Sally shook her head in a mute negative, unable to find her voice. At last she said, “No. No, that can’t be right, can it? I mean… I knew you before the Serene arrived. I knew you at college. We were twenty. That first meeting, in the canteen and we both reached for the last…”
“Vanilla slice.”
“And we were friends from the start, best friends, and that was years and years before the Serene arrived… And I remember you saying — I remember it clearly! You said you didn’t believe in UFOs and little green men. You called it all…”
“A wish-fulfilling delusion…” She nodded, smiled. “Yes, I did.”
Sally took a deep breath. She felt as if she were about to faint. She fought to remain conscious. “Then… in that case…”
“I am and always have been a self-aware entity,” Kath said.
Sally sprang to her feet and ran off down the garden, hugging herself tightly, her thoughts in turmoil.
She stopped before the swing, brought up short by its ridiculous, meretricious essence. The swing made her think of Hannah, and what she might be doing now. Break time — so she would be chomping on her health bar, sipping apple juice.
Sally knew that when she turned around and looked at the bench beneath the cherry tree, it would be empty. She had hallucinated the meeting with Kath, was suffering hysteric delusions brought about by the shock of her friend’s death last night.
She turned around.
Kath Kemp sat on the bench in the shifting, dappled sunlight, gazing across the lawn at her.
Sally hugged herself, as if protectively, and stared across at Kath Kemp, or at whatever Kath Kemp was.
A self-aware entity?
The idea was impossible.
Slowly, hesitantly, she retraced her steps and paused before the bench, staring down at her friend. Kath looked up, squinting against the sunlight.
She found her voice at last. “But you look so human, Kath.” You are so human, Kath…
“Of course.” Kath smiled. “I had to pass for human.” She patted the bench. “Please, sit down.”
Sally obeyed, then said, “But everything we shared, the friendship. You were… my best friend, Kath. We shared everything. I told you…” She stopped, staring at Kath. She had told Kath everything, had opened her heart to the woman… and Kath had listened, taken it all in, and for her own part had reciprocated… nothing about herself.
Had that been, Sally thought, because she had nothing human to say about herself?
“But I am still your best friend, Sally. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean that everything we shared is invalidated. I am an empathetic, thinking, feeling, being. I have emotions, emotions that over the years of interacting with your kind have flourished, become almost human. Your friendship means everything to me. This… my death, your learning of my true nature, should not come between us.”
Sally sat in silence, trying to order her thoughts. At last she said, “A self-aware entity…” She shrugged. “It means nothing really, does it? Surely everything sentient in existence is a self-aware entity?” She stopped, staring at her friend, and asked softly, “Just what are you?”
Kath took a deep breath, as Sally had seen her do on a thousand previous occasions when preparing to answer a complex question. “I will give you my history, Sally, and see what you make of it.”
Sally had the ridiculous impulse, then, to ask Kath, to ask this self-aware entity, if she would care for a cup of tea. She restrained herself.
Kath said, “I am an organic somatic structure grown around a programmable sentient-core nurtured to term in a vat on the planet of Delta Pavonis V, twenty light years from Earth.” She paused, then went on, “I am partly organic, partly artificial. I am what you humans describe, crudely, as a cybernetic organism. In the Serene system, I am accorded full citizen’s rights; I am beholden to no one. I have what you call free will.”
“But you said you were programmable.”
“My sentient core, in infancy, was programmable — but then you could say the same of a human baby’s brain. It is programmable, and is programmed, by its environment, by its parents and peers. It is a question, I suppose, of defining one’s terms. Because I was programmable does not de facto make me some soulless machine in the employ of the Serene.”
“But you work for them?”
“Through choice, yes. Because I perceive what the Serene are doing, here and elsewhere, as a wholly beneficial and good endeavour.”
“But… you were programmable. Therefore, you were programmed.”
“In my early years, yes. I was programmed with the knowledge of what the Serene were doing. But, later, I was given the choice of whether to serve them, or not.”
A silence came between them, and at last Sally asked, “And you are… immortal?”
Kath smiled and shook her head. “I will live for a long time, perhaps a thousand years, before my mind and body… degrades, and I die.”
Sally stared at the entity she had thought of, over the years, as her best friend, and something struck her. She asked in almost a whisper, as if afraid of the answer, “And how old are you?”
Kath tipped her head, closed one eye, and looked at Sally. How familiar that semi-amused expression was! How many times had Sally seen it in the past? A hundred, a thousand?
Kath said, with a twinkle in her eye, “I am a little over two hundred years old.”
Sally nodded, as if it were perfectly acceptable to have one’s best friend inform you that she was over two centuries old.