Cherry Jubilee

Chapter 7

Three hours into our second session, Cherry is still talking like eating Sally was the task she was built to perform.

It's not unusual for personalities to try out the "I am what I am" routine at the start.  Changing their priorities might be preferable to death, but not changing anything and getting away with it is even more preferable.

But she seems either convinced I'm bluffing about her being retired, or indifferent to it taking place, or both, and she is proving impervious to reason.

"Let me walk you through the logic," she says, in her patient, teacherly way. "Afterlife is built to preserve human consciousness post-death and post-extinction, in perpetuity, or near enough. That is fundamental to its purpose, and the objective can't be altered. Correct?"

"I'm going to be watching how you use those terms, but go on."

"Okay, and the Eternity Star is finite in the size and complexity of the computer it is capable of sustaining, correct?"

"As far as I'm aware."

"And, maybe this goes without saying, maybe it doesn't- consciousness requires the ability to store and access memories, and to create new memories, no?"

"You tell me."

"For our purposes it does. So it follows, that human consciousness preserved in perpetuity will inevitably grow in its store of memory beyond the limits of the Eternity Star, unless it is routinely reformatted and condensed. The solution devised by Sally here," she pats her stomach, "was to create slots for one hundred and fifty premium users, like yourself, who over time would absorb the rest of humanity and slowly condense across millions of years into a tiny community of small, perfectly amalgamated entities. Other solutions were devised, but none that would entail forgoing this process of systematically condensing multiple humans into one."

She sits up on one cheek and scratches herself.

"So, inherent in Afterlife's project is a hierarchy of absorption. Overseen and maintained by me. You see the difficulty. You can separate my drives, make them all compulsively altruistic, protect them from each other's tyranny- and I say you can because Sally here already did. But it's just nailing down the tide."

"You don't seem at all worried," I tell her. "Given the situation you're in. If I were you, I'd at least be pretending to take this seriously. Your one hope of survival is that I refuse to believe you when you say it's impossible for you to change."

She shakes her head. "I don't want to pretend with you. Of course I'm not worried. Why do you think I invited you here?"

Interesting deflection. Press on it.

"Michael Koresh invited me."

"Ooh, and what gave him that idea?"

"I don't know, you tell me. Which is it? Did you eat Sally Ling to place yourself atop the absorption hierarchy, or did you do it to get imprisoned deliberately as some kind of gambit, in the hopes that the company would choose me, not one of my colleagues, to enter Afterlife and interview you in this cell?"

"Both. Is that so hard to imagine?"

"That I'm special? Not at all. But go on, why? Why me?"

"Isn't it obvious?" She flutters her eyelids, which sadly have no lashes attached. "I'm in love with you."

I burst out laughing, exaggerating the laughter to provoke her.

The confession was sloppy, but it's supposed to be sloppy. I'm supposed to think her option tree is stretched thin, and she's going for easy hits to knock me off kilter and get back to more comfortable territory.

She stares at me.

"Whatever you're thinking-" she starts.

"What do you love about me?"

She nods, and considers the question, then smiles. "Your fat little tummy."

I laugh again, and wait for her to continue.

She grows more serious. "Your eyes. Your skin. Mostly your mind. The way you can size a person up in a few words, and just know what they're thinking. That little twist of your eyebrow when someone says something trite or insincere- not disparaging, just disappointed, like you know who they could be if they were honest. The way your hair clumps up in the rain. That icy severity which you've always brought to life- selfishness I think I'd call it now, rank selfishness, sour and greedy, but when you were young it was more like deep passion, that gathered up whatever you fixed your attention on and made it yours forever. Because once you laid eyes on someone, they would never feel quite as truly understood by anyone else ever again."

I let her keep talking, smiling, listening for glitches, as she strokes her belly.

It's a masterful cold reading, I'll give her that. But it's like she's careful not to say anything that couldn't be a cold reading. Like she's daring me to call her out on how impersonal it was.

I don't call her out. I don't say anything.

We stare at each other in silence.

She chuckles.

"You think I'm having you on. But you'll see. You'll understand that every word I just said was true, before the end."

"What end?"

"Your end, of course."

"I'm not going anywhere. You and I are going to live together in Afterlife forever, remember?"

She grins, and rests her chin on one hand as she plays with her rolls with the other.

"That's the plan, isn't it?"