Demon Seed (5 page)

From a closet, Susan removed VR—virtual—reality—gear of her own design: a lightweight ventilated helmet with hinged goggles and a pair of supple elbow-length gloves, both wired to a nerve-impulse processor.

The motorized recliner was currently configured as an armchair. She sat and engaged a harness, much like that in an automobile: one strap fitting securely across her abdomen, another running diagonally from her left shoulder to her right hip.

Temporarily, she held the VR equipment in her lap.

Her feet rested on a series of upholstered rollers that attached to the base of the chair, positioned similarly to the footplate on a beautician’s chair. This was the walking pad, which would allow her to simulate walking when the VR scenario required it.

She switched on the computer and loaded a program labeled
Therapy,
which she herself had created.

This was not a game. It was not an industrial training program or an educational tool, either. It was precisely what it claimed to be. Therapy. And it was better than anything that any disciple of Freud could have done for her.

She had devised a revolutionary new use for VR technology, and one day she might even patent and market the application. For the time being, however,
Therapy
was for her use only.

First she plugged the VR gear into a jack on an interfacing device already connected to the computer, and then she put on the helmet. The goggles were flipped up, away from her eyes.

She pulled on the gloves and flexed her fingers.

The computer screen offered several options. Using the mouse, she clicked on Begin.

Turning away from the computer, leaning back in the recliner, Susan flipped down the goggles, which fit snugly to her eye sockets. The lenses were in fact a pair of miniature, matched, high-definition video displays.

 

 

To match the unfolding scenario in the VR world, the motorized recliner hummed and reconfigured into a bed, parallel to the floor.

Susan was now lying on her back. Her arms were crossed on her chest, and her hands were fisted.

 

 

 

 

In the retreat adjacent to her bedroom, strapped to the recliner and encumbered with the VR gear, Susan appeared oblivious to the real world. She murmured as though she were a sleeping child. But this was a sleep filled with tension and threatening shadows.

 

She looks down at her arms, at her small hands, and she is six
years
old, wearing her favorite Pooh Bear pajamas. They are flannel-soft against her skin.

On one level of consciousness, Susan knows that this is merely a realistically animated scenario that she has created—actually re-created from memory
—
and with which she can interact in three dimensions through the magic of virtual reality. On another level, however, it seems real to her, and she is able to lose herself in the unfolding drama.

He is only forty years old but graying at the temples. His eyes are gray, too, clear gray and so cold that when she meets his gaze, her trembling
becomes a terrible shudder.

 

She spoke those words not merely in the virtual world but in the real one. Her voice was small, fragile, although not that of a child.

When she had been a girl, she’d been unable to say no.

Not ever.

Not once.

Fear of resisting had gradually become a habit of submitting.

But this was a chance to undo the past. This was therapy, a program of virtual experience, which she had designed for herself and which had proved to be remarkably effective.

 

“If you try to tell, I’ll have to make sure no one can ever hear you, ever again. Do you understand, sweetheart? I’ll have to kill you,” he says, not in
a
menacing way but in a voice still soft and hoarse with perverse desire.

Susan is convinced of his sincerity by the quietness with which he makes the threat and by
the
apparently genuine sadness in his eyes at the prospect of having to murder her.

“Don’t make me do it, sugarpie. Don’t make
me
kill you like I killed your mother.”

“
No
.”

His gray eyes suddenly seem radiant, glimmering with a cold flame. This is probably just a reflection of the lamplight, but his eyes resemble the eyes of a robot in a scary movie, as though there
is
a machine inside of him, a machine running out
of
control.

His hand moves down to her pajama tops.
He
eases open the first button.

“
No
,”
she says. “No. Don’t touch me.”

The motorized recliner reconfigured itself much like a hospital bed to match the position that Susan occupied in the virtual-reality world, helping to reinforce the therapeutic scenario that she was experiencing. Her legs were straight out in front of her, but she was sitting up.

Her deep anxiety—even desperation—was evident in her quick, shallow breathing.

“No. No. Don’t touch me,” she said, and her voice was somehow resolute even though it quivered with fear.

When she was six, all those freighted years ago, she had never been able to resist him. Confusion had made her uncertain and timid, for his needs were as mysterious to her then as the intricacies of molecular biology would be mysterious to her now. Abject fear and a terrible sense of helplessness had made her obedient. And shame. Shame, as heavy as a mantle of iron, had crushed her into bleak resignation, and having no ability to resist, she had settled for endurance.

Now, in the intricately realized virtual-reality versions of these incidents of abuse, she was a child again but equipped with the understanding of an adult and the hard-won strength that came from thirty years of toughening experience and grueling self-analysis.

“No, Daddy, no. Don’t ever, don’t ever, don’t you ever touch me again,” she said to a father long dead in the real world but still a living demon in memory and in the electronic world of the virtually real.

Her skill as an animator and a VR-scenario designer made the re-created moments of her past so dimensional and textured—so real—that saying no to this phantom father was emotionally satisfying and psychologically healing. A year and a half of this had purged her of so much irrational shame.

How much better it would have been, of course, actually to travel through time, actually to be a child again, and refuse him for real, to prevent the abuse before it happened, then to grow up with self-respect, untouched. But time travel did not exist—except in this approximation on the virtual plane.

“No, never, never,” she said.

Her voice was neither that of a six-year-old girl nor quite the familiar voice of the adult Susan, but a snarl as dangerous as that of a panther.

“Noooooo,” she said again—and slashed at the air with the hooked fingers of one gloved hand.

Her hand is so small. She is often surprised
to
find herself in the body of a child, but these brief moments of disorientation do not diminish the sense of reality that informs the VR experience.

 

She remained on the motorized recliner in the master-bedroom retreat, ensconced in the VR gear, for more than another half hour, responding to and surviving threats of violence and rape made by a man long dead.

Of the uncountable assaults that young Susan had suffered at the hands of her father between the ages of five and seventeen, this elaborate therapy program included twenty-two scenes, all of which she had recalled and animated in excruciating detail. Like the numerous possible plot flows of a CD-ROM game, each of these scenes could progress in a multitude of ways, determined not only by the things Susan chose to say and do in each session but by a random-plotting capability designed into the program. Consequently, she never quite knew what was coming next.

She had even written and animated a hideous sequence in which her father reacted with such vicious fury to her resistance that he murdered her. Stabbed her repeatedly.

Thus far, during eighteen months of this self-administered therapy, Susan had not found herself trapped in that mortal scenario. She dreaded encountering it—and hoped to finish her therapy soon, before the program’s random-plotting feature plunged her into that particular nightmare.