《Robert Charles Wilson - The Cartesian Theater》.pdf

THE CARTESIAN THEATER, by Robert Charles Wilson Grandfather was dead but still fresh enough to give useful advice. So I rode transit out to his sanctuary in the suburbs, hoping he could help me solve a problem, or at least set me on the way to solving it myself. I didnt get out this way much. It was a desolate part of town, flat in every direction where the old residences had been razed and stripped for recycling, but there was a lot of new construction going on, mostly aibot hives. It was deceptive. You catch sight of the towers from a distance and think: I wonder who lives there? Then you get close enough to register the colorless concrete, the blunt iteration of simple forms, and you think: Oh, nobodys home. Sure looked busy out there, though. All that hurry and industry, all that rising dust—a long way from the indolent calm of Doletown. * * * * At the sanctuary an aibot custodian seven feet tall and wearing a somber black waistcoat and matching hat led me to a door marked PACZOVSKI—Grandfathers room, where a few of his worldly possessions were arrayed to help keep his sensorium lively and alert. He needed all the help he could get. All that remained of him was his neuroprosthetic arrays. His mortal clay had been harvested for its biomedical utilities and buried over a year ago. His epibiotic ghost survived but was slurring into Shannon entropy, a shadow of a shade of itself. Still, he recognized me when I knocked and entered. “Toby!” his photograph called out. The photo in its steel frame occupied most of the far wall. It smiled reflexively. That was one of the few expressions Grandfather retained. He could also do a frown of disapproval, a frown of anxiety, a frown of unhappiness, and raised eyebrows meant to register surprise or curiosity, although those last had begun to fade in recent months. And in a few months more there would be nothing left of him but the pic