Advance Detective

Karen

Karen's not really supposed to talk to me – that's one of the rules – but I can watch her, and she knows I'm here. She was the one who persuaded John Price – the real John Price, that is; not John Price AD, i.e., me – she was the one who persuaded him to have the advance directive made.

I can remember it clear as glass, of course I can, just as clear as I can remember every other significant event of my simulated life. It was around the time her father was dying. He didn't have a stroke, he had dementia, but hell, same difference at the end, really. We went to see him most days for what seemed like forever, but it was probably only a couple of months. Most of the time he didn't even recognise her, didn't even register her presence. Sometimes he cried out and talked to people who weren't there. Most of the time he just blinked, looking confused and kind of hurt, then got on with the business of pissing and shitting himself.

Karen wanted them to pull the plug, but they couldn't, of course. They could withdraw some treatment, they told us, but it was another thing entirely to stop feeding him, stop giving him fluids.

It wasn't their decision to make, they told us, and it wasn't Karen's, either.

"Bullshit," said Karen, "I was his little girl, for Christ's sake, he raised me and changed me, I was closer to him than anyone, you think I don't know he would have hated this?"

But it wasn't in their hands or ours, and it took several long weeks for him to die. When he started coughing up green phlegm and struggling to breath, Karen was so happy.

Right about that time, the whole advance directive thing was getting fashionable, at least if you could afford it, and we weren't doing so bad.

So we got scanned, we both did.

And that's how come I'm here, watching myself live like a vegetable, live through the thousand and one electronic windows of my digital cage.