Bad Karma was a VE drama, I explained. Underground stuff, shot circa twenty-one ninety-five. I used to make sex tapes and fight tapes in my youth, some of them far enough out on the edge to be bannable, but nothing like Bad Karma . The visuals were fairly crude I could have improvised those easily enough without doing serious damage to any of the people that were supposedly carved up by the viewpoint character but the sound track was something else. It was a whispered voice-over representing the stream-of-consciousness of the murderer whose eyes the user was supposedly seeing through.
The improvised thought-track provided a theory of sorts as to why Christine Caine had committed the murders. It was partly based on one of several conflicting statements shed given to the police and various psychiatric examiners after her arrest, but mainly improvised. In those days, even visuals were considered a potentially dangerous medium of consumer/perpetrator identification, but that thought-track kicked off a real moral panic.
Rumor had it that sensitive users especially kids might be taken over by the thought-track, driven mad, and led to commit copycat crimes. The rumors were probably started by the guys who made the tape, for marketing purposes, but they proved a little too effective. There were copycat crimes, for which the VE might have been partly responsible but you probably know better than I do how crazy those times were. Christine Caine cant know anything about the VE tape, of course, and she might be a very different person from the one represented in the thought-track but she did do the murders. If youve put her back together exactly as she was when she went into SusAn, youve reconstructed a crazy serial killer.
Davida Berenike Columella didnt seem to be as frightened by this news as she had been of my casual gesture, but I was physically present and Christine Caine wasnt.
She wont be able
to harm anyone, the wonderful child told me.
If that remark was supposed to be reassuring, it missed by a mile. I guessed immediately that if Christine Caine wasnt going to be able to hurt anyone when they woke her up and it seemed that nothing Id said had troubled that assumption then neither could I. Which meant that they hadnt, after all, put me together exactly as Id been before. Theyd taken precautions.
Youre installing some kind of IT in her head, I guessed, still talking about Christine Caine because I didnt want to talk about myself. Something that will stop her if she runs amok.
We can do that, the wonderful child confirmed, ambiguously.
That was when I saw clearly, I thought that Christine Caine would be resuming her life as an animal in a zoo: a specimen to be observed, and wondered at. And I understood, too, that I had just contributed to that fate by robbing her of her last hope of not being recognized for what she was, and her last hope of being able to make a new start.
I didnt know exactly how old Christine Caine had been when theyd put her away, but I knew that she wasnt much more than twenty. In terms of elapsed time, I was no more than twice her age; Davida Berenike Columella was ten times as old, although she looked no more than nine.
From the viewpoint of those who had brought us back into the world, I realized, Christine Caine and I were alike , no matter how slight my unknown crimes might have been compared to hers. Whatever they had done to her, and whatever they intended to do to her in future, they must have done and would also do to me. I too was a creature in a zoo: a representative of an extinct species, resurrected by ingenuity into a world of which I knew nothing.
I knew, because I had had dealings with the Ahasuerus Foundation a thousand years before, that the people of Excelsior were bringing Adam Zimmerman back because they intended to make him emortal. Even to Rachel Trehaine, in the 2190s, Adam Zimmerman had been a great hero, one of the founders of the modern world order. The Hardinist Cabal, or whatever rump of it still remained, could hardly help thinking of him in much the same light, given that he had played such a vital role in the economic coup that had launched their inexorable climb to world domination. This world presumably had a place ready made for Adam Zimmerman if not a throne, a pedestal. But what did it have for Christine Caine, or for me?
I concluded then that whatever debt of gratitude I owed Davida Berenike Columella and her people for bringing me back to life, they were not my friends. It was not a happy thought, but it was not a crushing discovery either.
I had always prided myself on being tough, on being able to adapt myself to adverse circumstance. I knew that I could be tough now. I knew that I could be tougher than I had ever been before, because I unlike Damon Hart, it seemed had managed to keep my place on that imaginary escalator while everyone else I ever knew had lost their footing.
If all this was real, then I really had ridden the tide of opportunity into a world where emortality was for everyone, or almost everyone including, I hoped, the animals in the zoo. I knew that I might have to be careful, and clever, and cunning, but I had been all those things before and the people of Excelsior seemed to have put me back together very nearly as I had been before.