Switzerland by Daniel Freeman

A psychologist from the Postmortem Replication Institute is called in to evaluate the mental fitness of an ageing simulation designer.

Image generated with OpenAI

I'm suffocating in my suit and tie as my assignment is being given to me. A replication. Full-body. Full-brain.

A visionary. An artist. Someone important.

My boss relays the finer details in the briefing room, a stainless-steel coffin. Slowly, very slowly, he combs over each line of content on a "Francis Pico." He's the last living memory-maker of the old world, simulated multiple countries and landmarks and the like. It's all a little too lofty for myself. Invaluable education, though, I'm sure.

Transplants have taken him a long way from his time, but the general consensus is that he's ready to die. Although he himself has contested this notion, he's agreed with my supervisors that the replication process is overdue. Much more than that is not known, but if I don't do the preliminary checkups now, today, he likely won't be around long enough for another psychologist to take a crack at it.

The room I'm in has the strange ability to suppress any straggling thoughts. The boss speaks. The words are heard. I catalog them. The only other thought I can manage is that maybe I should refuse the company's offer for a guaranteed postmortem replication. Maybe I could delete their scans on me to make sure. Maybe.

Would they have me do this even after death?

"Get out."

Thank God!

---

The assuredly-rich Pico does not live in an estate, like I'd hoped - that would've been one thing to find pleasure in, at least. Instead, I find his lodgings holed up in one of the rat-nest complexes of the inner city. I ask several tenants for directions - Why do they insist on crouching in the halls? - before rapping my knuckles at a door on the fourth floor.

Footsteps approach from a distance to meet the door. Then there's a woman's sagging face.

"I'm from the Postmortem Replication Institute, ma'am. I'm here for Mr. Pico."

I'm let in with a sigh.

The room spreads across half the entire complex floor. It's five doors wide, and each one of those doors lead to this same vacant room. This older woman appears to be Pico's nurse.

"Why not remove the extra doors?"

She takes a moment. "Just get on with it," she says. She has a horribly expressionless face, and it pains me to have to continue this dialogue. "He made The Louvre, you know. He doesn't have time to talk to you."

"I promise to make it quick."

I'm led to the wall that separates what I can only assume to be the other five doors worth of space. It's plain enough, but the door is more in line with that of the steel briefing room. An indicator blinks, telling me the sim-room is active.

"Shouldn't we wait for him?"

"He doesn't leave. Ever."

She leaves me on my own.

---

Cracking open the door, I'm met with a wall of wind. It should blow the door clean through to my chest, but it stops at the invisible barrier of the sim-room. I only barely clear the entrance enough to close the door, passing the invisible veil, when a billowing snow presses me backward.

It's a blizzard localized in a single room. The walls give way to an authentic view of a night sky shrouded by trees that've been stripped clean by the dead of winter. Isolated in their guard, a wooded cabin.

It's pure masochism to choose something so harsh as the environment for a sim-room, much less endure the process of actually creating said environment. I can't deny that the man doesn't have a knack for it; it seems real enough. Too real, with this cold!

I push through a thick blanket of snow towards the cabin entrance - it must be over a foot deep. The air turns me to stone and the wind cuts through me. I feel like a jack-knifed ice sculpture by the time I'm at the door. Thinking I must have struggled through a quarter-mile of snow, I look back at the entrance to find it fifteen feet away. It seems so close, but the reality of the room stretches it out so far. It has a terrible effect on me that reminds me of why I don't ever use these devices.

I slam on the door, as I'd like very much to get out of the cold.

"Hello? I'm from P.R.I. Are you there, Mr. Pico?" It's polite to ask, anyway.

Appearing in the crack of the door is a derelict face wrought with the burden of experience. It melts into a smile. He speaks, in a gentle, aged voice:

"A visitor," as if it's a nostalgic concept. "Welcome to Switzerland!"

I would bother with a bit more formality if it weren't for the freezing cold, but at the moment I'm fumbling towards a roaring fire at the far wall. I'm still in my company suit, I realize. It's soaked.

"You must've come a long way in this blizzard!" He hobbles about, seemingly eager to make himself hospitable.

The cabin isn't unusual; I've been in similar simulations. All organic, mostly wood. Bits of drying meat and tools and such all hang about the walls and lay on hand-made tables. Every wall and floorboard has a unique grain and texture and... even seeing the clutter of details makes me dizzy. I struggle to imagine how he actually conceptualized the whole thing.

I'm handed tea and a thick sheet to cover myself.

"Sit, sit!" He noisily drags a chair across the floor, placing me on it as he sits across me on his own. "Don't rush yourself!"

"This is all very impressive," I shudder.

"Made it myself, all from the ground up," he beams.

I pause. "I don't think I'm quite comfortable with the... trees."

"Ah," he exhales, tilting his head back, eyes closed with understanding. "They are quite tall." He scratches at his cheek. "You're young."

"That young, yes." I don't feel young in the slightest. "I had a small patch of grass growing up," I continue in an attempt to build my credibility.

"A small patch of grass..." he mulls. He smiles at me with amused interest, tired eyes. We both sit thinking about grass for a short moment. I could imagine a world with more grass - why should it be so different.

That seems like enough small talk. I place my untouched tea on a nearby table, the solidity of which, again, feels inarguably real.

"Is it okay if I ask some questions?"

"Questions about trees, probably," he pursues. I don't get the sense that it's meant to be deprecating.

I push past it and grab for my notepad and pen, laying out his files for reference on the table. I'm poised to write on blank paper.

"You haven't left your room in a while?"

"It's comfortable here, so no." Polite, secure. I scribble it down.

"Do you feel adequately-minded to extend your life further?"

"I certainly don't feel like dying anytime soon." Content.

"What can you tell me about your reasons to replicate your mind, to exist past death?"

He looks confused, like he's waiting for me to elaborate.

"What do you plan to do after replication?"

He pauses here. "I don't know," he admits, shrugging. He laughs it off awkwardly.

"You don't know?"

"No, I really don't." He laughs like he hadn't realized so himself. "I don't recall really" - he shoots out a short giggle - "giving any opinion on something of that matter." He laughs more hardily now. I think he's amused at how difficult he's making my job, me in my soaked suit with my industry-standard notepad. I disguise my curtness poorly.

"I'll put down that you intend to continue your work."

"Oh, I live to work, of course. I'll work till my - till after my death!" Here, he begins wheezing with laughter. "What fun!" he continues. I write it down because he said it. The context doesn't need to matter; it works. Scribble, scribble.

"So besides work, outside the sims," - I can feel I'm on the brink of marking him as a permanently-unqualified candidate when he giggles at the word work - "what do you plan to do?"

His laugh recedes. "Outside the sims."

"Yes, beyond your sim-room. What about your family. Any friends? Hobbies?"

His good humor quits entirely.

"You mean outside the cabin?"

"No, not outside like - outside the outside. The real world."

He grapples tremendously with "real world." Then:

He collapses.

---

"He does that."

The nurse pulls me from my spot on the door frame where I'm bracing for a terrible panic. I do a lot of shaking of my head before I relinquish my hold on the handle. The door closes again on the blizzard. Active room, the blinking light says.

It takes a minute before I'm allowed to continue our dialogue.

"When you contacted us, you didn't mention the severity of... him."

The nurse is chain-smoking on one of the room's five balconies. We have a decent view of a stone-cold city. It at least lets me remove myself from the echoing room - and that sim-room. Only now do I realize there's barely a lick of furniture besides the nurse's chair.

I'm happy to look out over our concrete city. No trees. Damn that strange cabin!

"I didn't contact you," she says, interrupting my thoughts. She doesn't look near me.

"Pardon?"

"I didn't contact you. He did."

"Before?"

She inhales. "Before it got worse, yes." She exhales with a rattling cough. "At least it's real to him." She manages a laugh.

"Certainly feels real," I shiver.

"The memory is."

"An old memory?"

She breathes smoke. "Probably one of his very first. They regress when their memories start to go, you know."

The screening has become complicated, then. Maybe we can retain part of his memory with the brain scan, but to replicate a patient showing signs of dementia is...

"You've tried out The Louvre before?" she asks, betraying genuine interest. "That's a good seller."

"I can't remember." I really can't. I may have purchased an experience of the Eiffel Tower, if I remember correctly. "It must've been bigger than just that room, right?"

"You think?"

---

As I walk back into the sim-room, I realize the wind hasn't blown me back yet. The snow is falling, but strictly downward. It looks like a white rain. The blizzard has lost its volume. I can finally make out a two-dimensional, snow-peaked mountain on the far wall.

I make my way, with considerably less difficulty, through the room to the cabin entrance. It looks like a child's playpen in a wallpapered room but the sheetrock is peeling. It's only a stone's throw from the room's entrance.

Knock, knock. The same old face appears.

"A visitor," he says, as if it's a nostalgic concept. "Welcome to Switzerland! You must've come a long way in this blizzard!"

Blanket. Tea. Chair.

"This is all," I say reflexively, "very impressive."

"Made it myself, all from the ground up," he beams.

I choke something back. "You've lived here long, sir?"

"Oh, since I could remember," he says, tapping the rim of his cup, rocking in his chair, looking at the ceiling for an answer, maybe. Maybe.

I let the lull draw out so I can take a look around. The fine-crafted grain of the wood has become generic across every board. The texture of the walls has become flatter. Everything gives the undeniable feeling of an imitation. Plastic. Artificial.

The memory is fading. My cup is empty.

"It's a... lovely place." I struggle to pull the words from my throat.

He nods repeatedly with appreciation, scrunching his face as if to cry. He isn't fit for replication - doesn't need replication, I can't help but think.

The screening is over.

"Have you seen... the Eiffel Tower?" I ask after a pause.

He looks at me excitedly.

---

It's Paris. Behind it, the cabin.

The world around me - the sim-room around me, I should say - is changing in real time. When Pico sweeps his head, the cone of his vision outlines the Eiffel Tower, clear as day. It is day. Or is it night? I'm standing behind Pico, still in a dark Switzerland winter, and find that I can't decide.

He walks forward, leaving snow in his wake as he approaches the tower. He turns to speak to me, and suddenly it's day for me, too.

"¡Viva la revolución!" He shouts it loud, really feels its history. "Look, look!"

He turns again to gaze at the tower. I turn cold. When I look behind me, all I see is the dead cabin. That cabin, the whole room, looks so small. The blizzard has ceased completely now. The snow fades into the screened floor. The wallpaper of trees loses its range. The sky falls in. And to think it was all so profound.

When he speaks to me again, it all blows up into an orange light, not anything like the sims of Paris I'd seen previously. I would have remembered if it was like this, I'd think.

The eyes of Pico light up cluttered markets, tourists, natives, a full sun and sky and trees and I can even feel some of the warmth here in Switzerland. The sim room reacts instantly and selectively to his vision. No hesitation, no conceptualization, not a thought needed to see it all in full bloom.

It's beautiful.

He must feel what I feel, too, because the warmth shakes his body until he's dancing in the daylight, spinning in the sun. My world flashes like a spectacular kaleidoscope, then Switzerland is gone.

I'm still a little soaked, but my wet face and suit and eyes are toasted by a new day's light.

What day is it now? I ask myself.

Pico waves me to follow him. I find myself running.

---

I leave shortly after.

The nurse has fallen asleep on the balcony. It's dark here. I wake her to report on Pico.

She doesn't seem disappointed when I alert her that Pico has failed his preliminary screening, that he won't be replicated to live after death.

"He'll be fine in there," she insists. "He won't want to leave either way." She goes back to sleep.

When I manage to snake my way out of the complex and into the streets, I reflexively look to the skyline for trees, for that same brilliant sun, for anything. But they aren't there. Not anymore.

I idly wonder if I should try out The Louvre.

As I make my way back to the office, empty report in hand, a thin snow begins crossing down to the world.