Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [3]
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.