PIXIE · Incident Review

The man in the chair gives evidence.

You’ve seen the photograph.

One man. A wall of televisions. All those eyes.

You probably thought I was watching her.

I was waiting for her to recognise me.

There’s a difference. There was, at the beginning.

Before the surge, she could come back. That was the arrangement. She went in, PIXIE went with her, and I stayed here to make sure the door remained open.

Then the lights went out.

When they came back, the equipment restarted.

She didn’t.

The chair of the committee consults the report.

“Your statement says she continued communicating.”

Yes.

“Then why do you describe her as absent?”

Because she wasn’t communicating the way she used to.

I understand how that sounds now.

At the time, every familiar word was evidence she was still in there. Every unfamiliar answer was evidence of damage. I had built myself a system in which she could only be herself by agreeing with me.

PIXIE tried to explain the tissue integration.

I called it interference.

She said separation might hurt.

I asked whether that was her speaking or PIXIE.

Imagine being asked to prove which part of your own voice belongs to you before someone will believe you’re in pain.

No one interrupts.

Dr. Meyers was useful to me then.

Not because he had an answer. Because he understood how to keep working when the answer became unbearable.

There was always another reading to check. Another adjustment. Another reason the last attempt had brought us closer.

I heard his account of Jeremiah. Heard him turn a child into a patient number, then recover the child’s name when it was too late. Even then, he needed a breakthrough. Something that would make the deaths amount to more than what had happened.

I recognised the mistake.

In him.

“The funding pressure was different in your case,” someone says.

Of course it was.

I wasn’t trying to bring a product to market.

I was trying to hear her laugh at something I said.

I thought that made my judgement better.

Every screen gave me something to work with. A movement. A response. An eye turning towards the camera. I stopped sleeping because I might miss the moment she came back.

Then I stopped trusting anyone who suggested she might already be speaking to me.

“You were instructed to suspend extraction attempts.”

I know.

“Why did you continue?”

Because I had promised to get her out.

“And what did she ask you to do?”

He looks towards the monitor.

She asked me to wait.

I told her she didn’t understand what was happening to her.

That was the last conversation before I tried again.

The committee chair closes the report.

“If she can hear you now, what would you say?”

I had prepared something for this. An apology, followed by an explanation of the next procedure.

I think I should leave out the procedure.

He turns his chair towards the screen.

I’m here.

I heard you ask me to wait.

This time, tell me what you need.