On the forums, the person who built the Machine’s new firmware used a construction analogy.
Before, the post said, it was like you were building extra floors to a building, like a block of flats, when there wasn’t the structure for it. You weren’t supporting it with pillars and scaffolding, just putting it on the top and hoping for the best. And then, at the same time, you’re pulling out the bottom floors in big chunks. You’re taking out the basement and the lower levels, taking out the foundations, and you’re leaving the whole thing unbalanced. They – the doctors – didn’t think about that. So, what happened next? I apologize, because maybe the analogy is crude, but the whole thing collapsed, and the building that you were adding to was destroyed. Not just the new parts, but all the parts, the older parts as well. Might as well have been flattened. Now what you’re going to do is build something new on the ground. The building-up part, that’s not what made it collapse. It was the removing of the foundations. That’s why this is safe, perfectly safe, for them. No danger for them, and no danger for you.
Beth tells herself to remember that post as she clings to Vic, who she’s not given a break, because they’re into this now. Soon he’ll be strong enough to refuse the treatments, to maybe even run away – and that’s a real worry for Beth – so her window has grown smaller. She gave him chalky water this morning, far chalkier than the orange juice even, and not long after drinking it his eyes rolled, but he’s still awake, so she has to hold his arms to his side as much as she can. She can’t be sure but she thinks that he’s pissed himself, because he’s so damp, but his whole body is glistening with sweat, so it could just be that. And the Machine is making this so much worse: the noise is incredible, inside her head, intensifying her headache. Every part of them, every part of the room seems to shake, and when there’s respite – in the pause between audio files, and as the Machine rests briefly in between sending whatever it’s sending down the Crown’s umbilicus to Vic’s head – Beth feels sick, and clutches at her head, and even takes the tablet powder herself, poured into a bottle of water and necked back.
This is torture, she thinks to herself. She doesn’t know how long she can keep it up. The day moves by and the night comes, and she wants to sleep but that’s pointless now, because she’s so close. In his gasps of consciousness he begs, and he’s her Vic again.
Tell me how you feel? she asks on the recording.
I feel incomplete, he says.
How do you feel, she asks him now, as his eyes snap open, and he vomits and definitely pisses himself this time, so she forces more water into his mouth to wash the taste away and keep up his fluids. It might be chalky but that’s better than nothing.
He tries to answer her but nothing comes out. Still, she can see it in his eyes: who he really is now. How much of him is Vic again.
I love you, she hears him say, but then it’s gone, swallowed by the noise of the Machine and the noise of his thrashing as a new session is firmly underway, and she doesn’t know if that was the voice of him now, or from the recordings made long ago when she destroyed him.