From: Simon Speed <simon@speed.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Brain Damage
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 95 22:13:58 GMT

Brain Damage
============

It was nine o'clock on a Tuesday evening that the dead astronaut walked
into the bar.

He moved calmly over to a booth, not requiring a drink, and perhaps
trying to avoid the attention that loitering near the bar might attract.
He waited, partly shaded by the wall of the booth, but not hiding in it;
as though waiting for a contact, who would need to see him with
reasonable clarity for recognition to occur.  He was, like many there,
in his working clothes; a light fabric mesh pressure suit with builtin
powered exostruts, might have seemed strange;  but had he worn his
helmet, you couldn't have seen that he was quite, quite dead.

A knowledge of what had happened, or at least of the general class of
thing that had happened, spread throughout the room.  At first nobody
spoke of what was happening, but the knowledge communicated itself to
those who had not seen, who could not have seen, as surely as to any
that had.  The faint smell of putrefaction spread only slightly more
slowly, giving the knowledge an emotional depth.  Ratz had been
polishing a beer glass behind the bar.  He continued to do so, though
the glass hadn't needed polishing in the first place.

Conversation did not cease, nor did it rise into a speculative chatter,
it merely quietened and subtly altered its character.  People spoke down
into their tables, hiding the movements of their lips with their hands,
trying to prevent the exact source of their speech from being apparent
to those that heard it.  Some in booths facing the wrong way, and
formally unaware that anything was amiss, continued on their existing
topics, but in a manner that gave the lie to their ignorance.  Others of
course, started to talk of the newcomer.

"Fuck", mumbled Sarah, sitting in a booth almost directly facing that
occupied by the astronaut, "who the hell is he?".

Her companion, Ruth, a communications engineer like herself, stayed
silent a while and then said "That's James Baldwin the Astronaut.  He's
famous.  He was one of the last to ride NASA's shuttle at the turn of
the century.  The teacher express they called it.  He absented himself
from some government high security project about a month ago."

"I saw that on the Tri-V! everybody saw that! but that guy hasn't been
seen. I heard someone say they'd shot him escaping and got rid of the
body."

Ruth replied "It looks like they didn't miss with the shooting, but body
disposal seems to have gone a little awry, don't you think?"

"But what's the matter with his face?"

"That's autolysis: the lysosyme in your cells starts to digest them when
you've been dead a while. Didn't you do biology at school?"

"This isn't happening. Give me an infodump on what's going on here."

"Well Sarah", said Ruth, "It's really quite simple." She smiled slightly
askew.  "What you see is a dead man sitting in a bar.  That's not a
terribly surprising thing in itself, in fact it happens all the time.
In this case however the dead man can not only move around, he could I'm
sure, if pushed, conduct a fairly decent conversation.  At least as good
as the one I'm having here with you.  And there lies the paradox, for
the dead cannot do these things.  The zombies on the Tri-V horror
stories who can take holes blasted in their vital organs, or bones or
musculature, can do so precisely because these living structures have
ceased to have their function.  Yet without these functions how can the
zombies achieve their feats of bad acting.  It is a contradiction: the
contradiction between the quick and the dead.  It's only resolvable by
special effects and if you look closely you can always see the wires
move.  Do you see his suit?"

Sarah nodded slightly remaining silent.

"I know it doesn't look much, but its really quite sophisticated.  As a
potentially wounded astronaut starts to lose functions from his body,
physical, biochemical or mental, the suit does its best to replace them.
Integrating them as closely as possible with the surviving functionality
of its occupant, to create a seemless whole.  Earlier versions have
saved the life of many a person in hazardous conditions.  I'm sure I've
told you how my Dad helped to build and test some of them.  The suit
that you see here is apparently an exceptionally advanced one, a
prototype from the laboratory at which its occupant was working.

"So you mean, it's keeping him alive?".  Sarah's voice was
barely a whisper next to Ruth's.

"Oh no! its gone well beyond that point, homeostasis has long since
gone, the onset of autolysis shows that even the most basic biochemical
stability has broken down in the body and even it's structural integrity
is under threat as a consequence.  The guy is as dead as a doornail.
And yet he moves and talks and emulates thought.  I wonder what it's
like to be dead." Ruth smiled again.  "You know, that used to be the
stupidest of the universal questions.  What will it be like when I am
dead? You might as well ask what it was like before you were born.  It's
not being at all, so it's not like anything.  Except for him."

The astronaut's head was being positioned and his mouth kept closed by
movements of the living fabric; and though his dead sunken eyes were
long past staring, Sarah could not help but feel, from the set of his
body, that he was looking at them.

"Of course the mere fact that everything that he does is really
mechanical, somewhat undermines his claim to humanity.  The impression
given is the same as that given by a thinking feeling being, but an
examinination of the suit would reveal an understandable, or at least
potentially understandable causality.  There's really no astronaut left
inside, guiding the thing like a captain in his ship."

The conversation of the two women, or rather Ruth's monologue, was
brought to an abrupt end by a movement of figure in the booth opposite.
The dead astronaut straightened, got out from under the table in his
booth, and made his way towards them.  Had he moved like a zombie from
the Tri-V, it would have been horrible yet bearable.  But his walk and
every aspect of his body language were those of a man.

"Hello".

He was standing directly in front of their booth.  The voice came from a
speaker somewhere around his collar.  The suits attempt to manipulate
his mouth in time with his speech was its biggest failing so far.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Please do!".  Ruth's confidence mirrored that of the machine before
her.

Sarah could hardly believe her ears.  The creature slid awkwardly, with
the awkwardness of a man, into the place next to her, leaving her
trapped in the booth between himself, Ruth and the table.  Ruth
continued:-

"Can I get you a drink?"

Sarah tensed seeing a ploy for them to escape.

"Please don't Ruth".  The dead man-machine's voice had a hint of pain in
it.

Ruth sat still, leaving her friend half standing, half sitting under the
bar-room table.  As Sarah sat back Ruth said "I don't think you've met
my Dad before, have you Sarah".

Sarah froze.  Then she relaxed and half smiled at the realisation of a
gruesome practical joke.  She reached out her hand.  But the
consequences of her touch convinced her that the was gruesomeness was
without humour.

"For Gods sake stop making fun Ruth," He said "I I I cant help this,
but you're friend's almost a wreck.  Why did you have to bring her?"

Ruth grinned.

"Well talking of wrecks, I think there's someone, or should I say
something, that's living in a glass house and throwing stones.  I
brought Sarah to see how a very sophisticated emulation running in a
suit would interfere with my grieving process for my poor dear dead Dad.
Of course I didn't tell her that when we came out, or else she wouldn't
have come, would she? Bye the way, I think you're doing very well at
coping with a situation that the original person could not possibly
encounter.  There are such contradictions in attempting to act normally,
where normality is itself impossible.  Sarah and I were discussing the
zombies on the Tri-V."

Sarah was looking at her friend.  She could see her talking, but as a
kind of abstraction, her face a two dimensional surface, a sense datum,
an artist's projection.

"We were talking about the impossibility of them functioning, but I
suppose that we can now have an insight into their behaviour.  After all
it can hardly be said that wandering around moaning and eating people is
bizarre, if that is, you're a zombie. Going into a bar, sitting down and
acting normally on the other hand ..."

The astronaut turned away slightly, as though he could stop seeing them
by moving his dead face.

"When we finish this, when we stop them, when we stop what they're
trying to do at the institute, I'm going to switch this suit off."

"Another paradox", replied Ruth "a survival suit condemned by its
programming to undo the very thing that it is trying to do.  I wonder
when it comes to the crunch whether the suit will abandon its emulation
sufficiently to survive or continue it to destruction.  Either way it
loses and yet the logic of its own actions forces it to choose.  There
may, in the end, be an old fashioned program loop or some other sort of
crash.  At least it will be comforting to be able to tell that it's just
an emulation.  You know that its all just cybernetics and biochemistry,
but the result is so disconcertingly convincing."

"Oh."  Could a thing despair at it's failure to be human?

"Ruth, perhaps it would help if you just called me `machine', and I'll
try not to act so human.  Perhaps we should go."

Sarah heard her friend say something about "another paradox", amidst a
whole load of other chatter, as she and the dead astronaut, in his now
stiffly moving suit, went out the door.

She was left sitting in a bar of planes, of surfaces and of light. Laws
of motion controlled the interaction of these things.  Perfectly.

--
Copyright 1995 Simon Speed
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