Creating Light

The doors juddered slightly as they closed. The pressurised rubber seals on their edges worn from years of regular use. The lift was large by all accounts but Edward knew from experience that the metal box would feel smaller and smaller during the ten minute journey to his work space. He was calm today, calmer than he either had right to be or had ever been in the last year. Tired though; he rubbed a hand across his eyes and down his care-worn face. Stubble had blossomed into a full grown beard that he could never find the time or energy to remove. He hated it, but like so many of his emotions hate had diminished itself, become a quiet buzzing in the back of his mind.

His eyes had begun to ache, a familiar almost ignorable sensation brought on by the not-quite bright enough fluorescent tubing that had been equipped in the early days of the lift's installation. This, coupled with the queasiness from the dropping sensation of travelling at high speed in a direction usually reserved for falling, had Edward almost hoping for the safeties to fail. His mind wandering in dark dismal places as it was wont to do, Edward leant sideways against the wall of the lift and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. It was dirty, stained with sweat despite the shirt he always wore under it. He couldn't actually remember the last time he had washed it but to be fair he couldn't remember the last time he'd bathed himself. He ducked his head and sniffed at the collar of his shirt, musty but not overly so.

The fluorescents juddered, pulsing rapidly for a few seconds before settling back to their steady sickly hum; halfway down or as near enough as to not matter. The lights juddered every time the lift's power source shifted from the mainly hydroelectric driven station on the surface and the fusion dominated subterranean levels. All told, the research base beneath the surface housed three fusion reactors, the largest and most powerful by far dedicated solely to the creation of energy for Edward's light mesh emitters. Saying “largest” meant little however, all three fusion reactors outputted insane levels of energy and if it weren't for the fact that his experiments utilised more high-power laser arrays and focusing matrices than the rest of the world’s research labs combined, they would power the entire complex; above and below.

All of this mental wandering was a ruse, a way of keeping his mind away from agonising over the facts that he could do nothing about until later. He had researched all available data on the subject and had run calculations himself until he had started seeing the possible outcomes in his sleep. One hundred and sixty pounds. Fourteen and a half feet. It would work.

Edward picked up on the deep-in-the-bones pulsing of sound coming from “his” fusion reactor. He wasn't actually sure that the one he drew power from was the closest to him, had never asked, but it made sense and the sound at least meant he was nearly down. He waited for the moment that the lift slowed and it came suddenly, jarring thanks to stiffening brake clamps. The lift dinged, he had reached his destination. The doors stuck for the briefest moment before opening with little puffs of protest and Edward squinted against the glare of multiple computer banks.

He stepped out of the lift. The space before him was small, made more so by the computer screens, whirring servers, humming computer towers and the single coffee machine that he had managed to sneak down without anybody noticing. The room, as always was hot, stuffy and musty. Everything was on, except the coffee machine which he fixed with a flick of it's switch. The lift was smart to an extent and had sent a message to the lab to power on when he had pressed the destination. The little huff of noise the doors made in closing indicated the lift was now gone, shooting back towards the surface. Claustrophobia threatened for a moment and was denied, thousands of metres of rock above a person's head was no reason to be afraid, not today.

The room had a single door other than the entrance to the lift and Edward played with the idea of staying in the computer room for a few minutes, actually drinking the pot of coffee that was now boiling, but he felt compelled to enter the hall behind the door. Moved by something akin to excitement in the same way light is kin to dark. The door lead eventually to what he had named the light room. The place he had spent hundreds of hours in silent work, placing arrays and calculating angles with subatomic precision. The place he had spent barely more than a day, twenty four and a half hours in all, in a state of heightened ambivalence. Simultaneously soaring in heaven and burning in hell.

His notes were attached to a clipboard on the wall beside the coffee pot, he stared at them for a second before slowly pulling them towards himself. The many computer screens flashed different messages, routine maintenance check-lists all green-lit, power from the fusion reactor running at one hundred percent, all matrices aligned perfectly. This was it. Coffee didn't matter, he switched it off. It had been pure reflex to switch it on. He turned to face the door, stepping to it he had a tiny moment of maddening fear of not being able to remember the code he was now typing into the keypad beside it.

The door opened soundlessly, not just quiet but actually silent. The hall beyond was well lit, cased on both sides by glass; a viewing platform for the rooms to either side. On the right was the room that started everything. Edward paused for a moment to look through the glass at the comparatively modest set up. Comparative to the light room at least. This room held the Biometric light scanner. It looked for all intents and purposes like a solitary sterile white table in a room with a single computer bank. Similar to the old X-ray rooms in hospitals that it had come to replace. In reality the room's walls were coated in light emitting and absorbing “hairs” of microscopic fibre cables that created a “light mesh” which could scan a human body in seconds and recreate the body on a computer. The machine could discern exactly what was wrong with a person and offer exact medical advice. Every person ever to come even close to helping to create it had become rich, famous and respected almost over night. Edward had had nothing to do with it's creation however and had come to hate the thing for his own reasons. He moved on, looking down at the other room through the glass.

The light room was well lit, by mundane lighting created by wide diffused spotlights. The space was a spheroid seventeen feet in height, flat only at the top and bottom. It too had a table set at it's centre within the deep depression, but no other items of furniture, no computers and no other comforts of any kind. As he entered a second separate set of numbers into the keypad outside his hand trembled. This place had tested him more than he had tested it.

The door opened, again silently and he entered. He felt the door close behind him and rather than give himself time to think he hurriedly made his way to the table. The metal was cold to the touch, he ran a hand down the side and a small keyboard unhooked itself from the base. He took a handful of steps back towards the slope of the walls and stood facing the table.

The sight of the cold metal table before him made him sweat. This room, the hours and hours of monotonous work it represented and the careful, painstaking planning that had preceded. This was his life's work. Absolutely no way of denying it, he could live to be a thousand years old and this would still be the pinnacle of his genius. He had begun work on it ten years before, when the Biometric light scanner had been shown off for the first time and Edward alone had apparently seen how far the technology could be pushed. A machine that could scan a living human being at the molecular level. Had any human being the understanding of how the brain actually works, of what precise stimuli cause what exact thought; you could read the scanned individual's mind. This was beyond science however, at the moment. But if you scanned a human being, then recreated it via simulation within a computer you wouldn't need to know why it worked, just how. This had been Edward's first breakthrough. Artificial intelligence hadn't been what he'd envisioned though and so with some more borrowed advancements he had created the light room.

If the Biometric light scanner was exactly that; a scanner, then the light room was a printer. Precise bursts of energy fired at billionths of a second intervals excited photons in the air. The individual that had been scanned was brought into existence as a being comprised entirely of light and powered by thousands of super-powerful computers all replicating outward stimuli. The person could feel and be felt. The lights around the room dimmed as Edward began the program with a few precise taps on the keyboard. He held his notes behind the keyboard and read the first line without meaning to.

'So that's it, we're done?'

He swallowed as he thought of the test subject. Twenty four and a half hours of talking, testing and joyful pain spaced over too many months to count and he still couldn't keep calm when the program began. He hit enter and heard the lasers warm up. All too suddenly the room was filled with dazzling multicoloured light which began to coalesce as the figure of a woman on the table. As the glare lessened he could make out her shape; she was beautifully proportioned with wide set hips and large breasts. She fit perfectly on the table, a little over five foot six with shoulder length hair that had been mahogany at the time but was now a multi-coloured rainbow of hues.

She lay completely motionless, the computers not yet running the predictive algorithms that were the largest drain on his power supply. Edward kept himself still as he waited, he knew every part of this woman intimately. Every curve, every inch. The computers began processing information as the lasers finally settled to a maintaining pattern. Start the clock.

'So that's it, we're done?' She spoke perfectly, intoning exactly as her real-life counterpart had, exactly as she had in the other forty nine iterations. When the program was begun, the test subject would always ask that same question, laying still against the table despite being told it wasn't necessary. Desperate to not have Edward fail because of something she had done.

'Keep your eyes closed.' Edward spoke, his voice firm. It had to be firm, test thirty six had proven that.

The test subject did exactly as she was told, he could see the lasers recreating a face with it's eyes closed tightly.

'I want you to listen to me Jess, do exactly as I say ok?'

The test subject nodded.

'Jess you aren't being scanned right now. You have been scanned and are now being replicated in the way I explained to you before.' The slow steady breathing that the computers had been simulating stopped. He counted to three in his head and the breathing began again, he glanced at the notes and waited another three,

'I know you have a lot of questions but I need you to keep listening and keep your eyes closed please, can you do that?'

There was a pause of a bare second and then the lasers set her nodding.

'Thank you. First I need to tell you that you are real. You are thinking in exactly the way you would have normally thought, I have tested it. You are alive, if you were to stop breathing you would die. You can touch, taste, hear, smell and see, I have tested all of these.' Edward paused, seemingly to let her process but actually because test thirty eight showed that it was required.

'At this point I feel it is safe for you to open your eyes. Do so slowly, you will see as normal.'

Her eyes blinked open, she kept herself lying down with her head against the table.

'Do it.' Edward commanded, answering her next question before she could ask it, 'Just the one arm though, preferably the right.'

Haltingly the test subject lifted her right arm and splayed her fingers in the air in front of her eyes. Edward managed to keep control of himself as her fingers wriggled. She grinned. She had grinned every time, her child-like glee coming out in a wave where a normal person would have been terrified.

'No,' He said, trying not to choke on his pain, 'I can't read your mind. You're just not the first iteration of yourself.'

'Will I get to ask any of my questions?' She asked, then laughed at him answering with his silence. Her tinkling girlish laughter spilled out and filled the whole room. Inside Edward clenched against the heart-ache.

'The program that recreates you is running on a multitude of systems, it controls the laser array that gives you your physical form and it takes more power than is able to be reliably output to this room.' He stopped. 'I know what you're going to say and do because it is always what you say and do when asked these questions. So far as my tests have seen that is.'

'That isn't very fair.' She dropped her hand, her face moving into a frown.

'I agree.' He stated, his heart began to thud deeply in his chest. In every iteration of the test besides this one and the one previous to this he had followed a pattern to discern clear scientific theories. Today, as like that previous time he was preparing to question the test subject for purely selfish reasons. Nobody would learn anything except himself.

'How many me's have you made?' He almost forgot the correct response to this and took a quick glance at his notes to answer,

'You are number forty nine.' A lie. A tiny almost pointless lie that tests thirty nine through forty two all proved was completely necessary. As stupid as the lie was it hurt to tell. She was number fifty and the fact that her number was round felt right some how, telling her otherwise seemed a massive injustice. Edward felt the annoyance at this strange simulated fate but quickly brushed it off before he lost focus.

'That's incredible!' Her face turned to him, as it had since test forty two. Her eyes met his. She was as stunningly beautiful as the very day she was scanned. But of course she was. He looked almost the same, a little thinner, a little greyer, less well kept. She either didn't notice or didn't care.

'So are we rich and famous now?' Her face was set in a coquettish slant and her simulated eyes dazzled not only because they were made of light.

Edward said nothing. Had he planned to say anything he would have been unable to say it, but his tests showed that his silence didn't matter for this part because the room said it all. It was empty but for himself and the test subject.

'Where is everybody?' Jess asked, 'Where am I?'

This was the moment Edward had come to hate and fear more than any other. He didn't need to check his notes for this.

'Jess.' She watched him silently, the colours on her simulated surface rippling and pulsing. 'The day we scanned you the computer found a tumour.'

She pushed herself up onto an elbow, her mouth forming an O that she would never speak.

'We were too late.' Edward swallowed hard, but the lump wouldn't leave his throat, 'It had already spread to your blood. You're dead Jess.'

Her mouth closed and she sat up slowly.

'How long?' She whispered,

'A year.' Test forty three made it clear that he had to be vague here. Not quite a lie but not quite the truth either. He found himself fiddling with the plastic on the back of his clipboard and stopped.

'Edward...' She leant forwards, the curve of her breasts cupped tightly between her arms,'Eddie I'm so sorry.'

She was sorry. Since iteration forty four she had said this and every time it made him smile. She was a marvel.

'You say that every time.' He said, voice cracking.

'Still not fair.' She frowned again, putting her hands back on the table and splaying her fingers.

'I have a solution.' He replied, he had saved ten minutes every iteration since test forty five with this line. He felt like he were stealing her free will, directing her down this path but he had forced himself through twenty four hours of emotional hell for this selfishness. He deserved peace.

'I tell you a secret, something I have never told you before.' She cocked her head to the side,

'Have the other me's heard it?' She pushed her legs over the edge of the table and let them dangle.

'No, it's different every time.' This was completely true.

'Ok, but I want to hear two.' She demanded, for the fourth time.

'Sure. But first I need to answer the question you don't want to ask.' Tests forty six and forty seven had been used to learn what he had to say next, another seemingly pointless lie, another moment of simulated cosmic fate that tormented him.

'Twenty three minutes.' In truth twenty two and a half. 'You have twenty three minutes until the fusion reactor stops being able to sufficiently power the light room and the fail safes turn you off. Twenty three minutes until you die.'

She hadn't asked, but he had told her that the room took more power to run than he could get and test forty eight had told him that her brave face, bright and beautiful as it was, was exactly that. A face that she was making for him.

'Secret number one.' He didn't give her time to respond, simply repeating the last few lines on his note sheet. 'I don't want to live any more.' His hands dropped from in front of him, the keyboard in one hand the clipboard in the other. He looked down at her,

'I have been alive without you for a year. Alive without my wife, my friend, my confidant, my cheering squad and my lover.'

She stood slowly, hands at her side, mirroring him.

'I spend every waking moment working on the light room, thinking of the light room, thinking of you. I have run every test that could possibly disprove that this machine is creating life. Every test that any other scientist could possibly think of to disprove my creation will be able to recreate a living breathing thinking human being. I have attempted to prove to my own rational mind that you aren't who you think you are. That your humanity isn't real and that when I look at you my love is for a three dimensional picture, a sad copy of you because you're dead and gone and I can never have you back. But I can't.'

Jess stepped towards him, her hands reaching to touch his as the things in them fell away. The clipboard bounced and his notes scattered, hitting her legs. She ignored the detritus at her feet and pulled him to her. Edward felt her skin on his, felt her light touch and welcomed the kiss that he had experienced in the last iteration. From this point on his notes wouldn't help him anyway, he had reached untested ground.

He kissed her back, desperately. The previous iteration he had pushed her back, they had talked, he had questioned, she had died. This time he was getting what he wanted, what he needed, his peace. With steady hands he pushed her back towards the table, the simulated clothes feeling like silk beneath his fingers. Her breath was hot, her eyes closed in the grip of passion. She worked the buttons on his coat and her hands swept under it, stroking up his chest over the shirt. He pulled the jacket she had worn off. It pooled realistically on the floor at their feet but he didn't notice, already blindly tearing at her top. She had removed his coat and shirt, he hers. Their fingers moved over each other as they kissed and he lay her back on the table. Edward removed her underwear, dropping it and following it with his own.

A year of work and grief induced celibacy found them minutes later, in close embrace. Jess kissing lightly at Edward's neck and cheek.

'How long do we have left?' Her voice was warm in his ear,

'I don't know.' He guessed it was less than a minute. If she had been keeping track she would think a minute and a half. The elation of lying with the woman he loved had left him. He felt empty.

'How about that second secret then?' He could hear her smiling, his creation was an enormous scientific success. He didn't smile, already waiting for the drop in power he knew was coming that would switch her off. That would kill her.

'Secret number two.' One hundred and sixty pounds, fourteen and a half feet, 'I'm going to kill myself today.'

He felt her stiffen beside him, he turned away from her and sat up.

'No...' She touched his arm with her hand, 'No!' He felt her move to put her arms around him and then felt the low thrum of the fusion reactor dissipate for a moment.

He sat in darkness.

The emergency back-up tripped and dim red low-power lights let him see the room. Collecting his underwear from the pile of clothes on the floor he looked down at the table. Empty now. Her clothes had disappeared as she had died, fed by the same power that had sustained her.

He left the room in just his underwear, returning with a bundle of cables in his hand exactly fourteen and a half feet long. With one hand and both feet he scaled the service ladder that curved to the top centre of the room. Deftly holding his one hundred and sixty pound frame with one hand he used the other to loop the bunched cable around the last rung of the ladder, securing it with a tug. He then dropped the noose he had tied in the other end around his neck, pulling it tight.

He felt a sob try to crawl out of his throat and swallowed it.

He felt his fingers loose their grasp on the rung.

He felt the cable tug at his skin.

He felt nothing.

The End