The Silver Platter

The Silver Platter

by M. Lazarus

Lark Publishing 2014

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It started, like most things in human history, as a combination of curiosity, vanity, idealism, and of course, money. Some clever university boys and girls had found a way to make a record of someone's personality - they were doing research on mental health or something, but the problem was that the process was just too damned expensive and they were short on funding. So these head-watchers went looking for the money elsewhere. Eventually, one of them hit on a brilliant idea - they'd approach the rich and famous and offer them a once in a life time opportunity - for a version of their own wonderful selves to live on in recorded form when their original sagged and drooped despite the facelifts. Well, as you can imagine, enough of them were into the idea to throw money at this tech. One of them (a film producer, I think it was) even gave the storage system its nickname - the Silver Platter - I guess because it looked sort of like a cross between that and a big film old-fashioned cannister. I'm sure that was some intentional marketing. Anyway, over the years, they got the thing running - they had actual versions of moguls and actors and actresses and financiers (not to mention the occasional patient, when they actually managed to squeeze some research in) recorded on the platter. They worked hard to give the copies a close approximation of the laws of real-world physics in the Platter, because they worked out that it wasn't good for mental stability if one of your patients, or a demanding narcissistic mogul for that matter, suddenly went flying off through the sky due to some glitch. Likewise, while comfortable surrounds were built for these study-copies, you didn't want to cater to their every whim (a lot of the originals had too much of that anyway), since that made them all listless and unstable. All this took a long time, you have to remember, and amazing as the ant-farm of personae was, eventually human nature kicked in again and everybody forgot about the whole system. Like, really forgot about it for a couple of generations. Abandoned, lost, dumped - who knows how or why? That's the nature of things.

Until recently. That's where I came in, and I do mean came in. Someone found the damn old science experiment and it appeared to have been running away quite happily on its own all this time. So, following my orders like a good boy, I'm going to be sent into the Platter, electronic style, obviously- it's the only way to travel to these parts - to give the old place a once over and see what's what.

Arriving in the Platter feels like every nerve has been switched off. You know that numb feeling you get when your leg goes to sleep? All of me feels like that. I didn't have a good sense of time yet, but after what may have been a long wait, eventually I had the minor triumph of being able to move my fingers. It takes a little longer until I could discern colours and then shapes. I couldn't move my neck yet, but I swivelled my eyeballs about to get a good look at the immigration processing room. It's drab and featureless. According to my barely-remembered briefing, that's to do with easing the psychological transition into the Platter.

"Good Morning, Sir," said a slightly bored voice. These ears appear to be working just fine, because I recognised the voice as belonging to G., my personal assistant. He's a fake - a pseudointelligence, so naturally he doesn't have all the messy quirks of naturally evolved humans, which meant that he had made the transition into the Platter much more smoothly. Of course, G. does everything smoothly. That's how he was made. He gives me a damn pain in the neck. I tried to strain my new fake eyes again to see if I can catch sight of G., curious to check how he looks in the Platter, but all I got in my field of vision is a sudden blob of a face. The blob appeared to be smiling at me.

"Welcome!" she beamed at me. Anyway, she sounded like a she. I'm going to go with that until I hear differently. "My name is Dr. Valeria. Don't try to get up. It will be a few hours before you can move around freely. In the meantime, I'm going to run some tests on you, to see how you're getting on here."