UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

“Of course I won’t—but—”

“Conversation over.” Then the meal goes back to severe silverware. Deep down he knows she’s right, which just makes him furious. All they need to make Roberta’s scheme work is an attractive, personable girl holding his hand, convincing the public that there’s so much about Cam to love. But he finds no bit of actor in him. Perhaps he can feign it, but he dreads the moments alone when he has to face the emptiness of a false relationship.

Emptiness.

That’s what people believe is inside him. A great void. And if he can’t find a soul mate among the girls paraded before him, does that mean they’re right, and he has no soul?

“Incomplete,” he says. “If I’m whole, why do I feel like I’m not?” And as usual, Roberta has a calming platitude intended to ease his mind, but as time goes on her rote wisdom leaves him flat and disappointed.

“Wholeness comes from creating experiences that are solely yours, Cam,” she tells him. “Live your life and soon you’ll find the lives of those who came before won’t matter. Those who gave rise to you mean nothing compared to what you are.”

But how can he live his life when he’s not convinced he has one? The attacks in the press conference still plague him. If a human being has a soul, then where is his? And if the human soul is indivisible, then how can his be the sum of the parts of all the kids who gave rise to him? He’s not one of them, he’s not all of them, so who is he?

His questions make Roberta impatient. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, “but I don’t deal in the unanswerable.”

“So you don’t believe in souls?” Cam asks her.

“I didn’t say that, but I don’t try to answer things that don’t have tangible data. If people have souls, then you must have one, proved by the mere fact that you’re alive.”

“But what if there is no ‘I’ inside me? What if I’m just flesh going through the motions, with nothing inside?”

Roberta considers this, or at least pretends to. “Well, if that were the case, I doubt you’d be asking these questions.” She thinks for a moment. “If you must have a construct, then think of it this way: Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.”

“Until we are not,” Cam adds.

Roberta nods. “Yes, until we are not.” And she leaves him with none of his questions answered.

- - -

Physical therapy has evolved into full-on training sessions with machines, free weights, and cardio. Kenny is the closest thing Cam has to a friend, unless you count Roberta and the guards who call him “sir.” They talk openly about things that Roberta would probably want to monitor.

“So the great girlfriend search was a bust, huh?” Kenny asks while Cam pushes himself on the treadmill.

“We have not yet found a consort for the creature,” Cam says, mimicking Roberta’s accent.

Kenny chuckles. “You got a right to be choosy,” he tells Cam. “You shouldn’t accept anything less than what you want.”

Cam reaches the end of his workout, and the machine begins its slowdown. “Even if I can’t have what I want?”

“All the more reason to demand it,” Kenny advises. “Because then maybe they’ll get closer to the mark.”

Sound logic, perhaps, although Cam suspects it will do nothing but set him up for disappointment.

That night he goes alone to the tabletop computer screen in the living room and starts digging through photo files. Most of it is random stuff—the images Roberta still tests him on, although not as frequently as before. None of it is what he’s looking for. He finds a file that features the head shots of all the girls who interviewed. Two hundred smiling, pretty faces, with attached résumés. After a while, they all begin to look alike.

“You won’t find her in there.”

He turns to see Roberta standing on the spiral staircase, watching him. She descends the rest of the way.

“Deleted?” he asks.

“Should be,” Roberta says, “but no.”

She touches the screen, logs in, and opens up files that had been locked to Cam. In just a few seconds she drags out not just one, but three photos and sighs. “Is this who you were looking for?”

Cam looks at the pictures. “Yes.” The other two photos, like the one he had already seen, seem to have been taken without her knowledge. He wonders why Roberta is now willing to show him these pictures of the girl in the wheelchair, when she was so much against it before.

“Bus,” says Cam. “She was on a bus.”