Did he kill her mother with a needle? He is still stroking her hair.
'A big sharp needle?' he asks.
She is shaking, unable to speak.
'Big shiny needle, stick it in your tummy?' he says.
'No. Please.'
'No needle, Sugarpie?'
'No.'
'Then you'll have to do what I want.' He stops stroking her hair.
His gray eyes suddenly seem radiant, glimmering with a cold flame. This is probably just a reflection of the lamplight, but his eyes resemble the eyes of a robot in a scary movie, as though there is a machine inside of him, a machine running out of control.
His hand moves down to her pajama tops. He eases open the first button.
'No,' she says. 'No. Don't touch me.'
'Yes, honey. This is what I want.' She bites his hand.
The motorized recliner reconfigured itself much like a hospital bed to match the position that Susan occupied in the virtual-reality world, helping to reinforce the therapeutic scenario that she was experiencing. Her legs were straight out in front of her, but she was sitting up.
Her deep anxiety even desperation was evident in her quick, shallow breathing.
'No. No. Don't touch me,' she said, and her voice was somehow resolute even though it quivered with fear.
When she was six, all those freighted years ago, she had never been able to resist him. Confusion had made her uncertain and timid, for his needs were as mysterious to her then as the intricacies of molecular biology would be mysterious to her now. Abject fear and a terrible sense of helplessness had made her obedient. And shame. Shame, as heavy as a mantle of iron, had crushed her into bleak resignation, and having no ability to resist, she had settled for endurance.
Now, in the intricately realized virtual-reality versions of these incidents of abuse, she was a child again but equipped with the understanding of an adult and the hard-won strength that came from thirty years of toughening experience and grueling self-analysis.
'No, Daddy, no. Don't ever, don't ever, don't you ever touch me again,' she said to a father long dead in the real world but still a living demon in memory and in the electronic world of the virtually real.
Her skill as an animator and a VR-scenario designer made the re-created moments of her past so dimensional and textured so real that saying no to this phantom father was emotionally satisfying and psychologically healing. A year and a half of this had purged her of so much irrational shame.
How much better it would have been, of course, actually to travel through time, actually to be a child again, and refuse him for real, to prevent the abuse before it happened, then to grow up with self-respect, untouched. But time travel did not exist except in this approximation on the virtual plane.
'No, never, never,' she said.
Her voice was neither that of a six-year-old girl nor quite the familiar voice of the adult Susan, but a snarl as dangerous as that of a panther.
'Noooooo,' she said again and slashed at the air with the hooked fingers of one gloved hand.
He reels back from her in shock, bolting up from the edge of the bed, holding one hand to his startled face where she clawed at him.
She hasn't drawn blood. Nevertheless, he is stunned by her rebellion.
She was trying to slash at his right eye but only scratched his cheek.
His gray eyes are wide: previously cold and alien robot orbs of radiant menace, even stranger now, but not quite as frightening as they were before. Something new colors them. Caution. Surprise. Maybe even a little fear.
Young Susan presses her back against the headboard and glares defiantly at her father.
He stands so tall. Looming.
She fumbles nervously with the neck of her Pooh pajamas, trying to re-button it.
Her hand is so small. She is often surprised to find herself in the body of a child, but these brief moments of disorientation do not diminish the sense of reality that informs the VR experience.
She slips the button through the buttonhole.
The silence between her and her father is louder than a scream.
How he looms. Looms.
Sometimes it ends here. Other times….. he will not be so easily turned away.
She has not drawn blood. Sometimes site does.
At last he leaves the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that the windowpanes rattle.
Susan sits alone, shaking partly with fear and partly with triumph.
Gradually the scene fades into blackness.
She has not drawn blood.
Maybe the next time.
She remained on the motorized recliner in the master-bedroom retreat, ensconced in the VR gear, for more than another half hour, responding to and surviving threats of violence and rape made by a man long dead.
Of the uncountable assaults that young Susan had suffered at the hands of her father between the ages of five and seventeen, this elaborate therapy program included twenty-two scenes, all of which she had recalled and animated in excruciating detail. Like the numerous possible plot flows of a CD-ROM game, each of these scenes could progress in a multitude of ways, determined not only by the things Susan chose to say and do in each session but by a random-plotting capability designed into the program. Consequently, she never quite knew what was coming next.
She had even written and animated a hideous sequence in which her father reacted with such vicious fury to her resistance that he murdered her. Stabbed her repeatedly.
Thus far, during eighteen months of this self-administered therapy, Susan had not found herself trapped in that mortal scenario. She dreaded encountering it and hoped to finish her therapy soon, before the program's random-plotting feature plunged her into that particular nightmare.
Dying in the VR world would not result, of course, in her death in the real world. Only in witless movies were events in the virtual world able to have a material influence in the real world.
Nevertheless, animating that bloody sequence had been one of the most difficult things that she'd ever done and experiencing it three-dimensionally, not as a VR designer but from within the scenario, was certain to be emotionally devastating. Indeed, she had no way of predicting how profound the psychological impact might be.
Without such an element of risk, however, this therapy would have been less effective. In each session, living in the virtual world, she needed to believe that the threat her father posed was fearfully real and that terrible things might indeed happen to her. Her resistance to him would have moral weight and emotional value only if she genuinely believed, during the session, that denying him could have terrible consequences.
Now the motorized recliner reconfigured itself until Susan was standing upright, held against the vertical leather pad by the harness.
She moved her feet. The upholstered rollers on the walking pad allowed her to simulate movement.
In the virtual world, a younger Susan child or adolescent was either advancing on her father or determinedly backing away from him.
'No,' she said. 'Stay away. No.'
She looked so achingly vulnerable in the VR gear, temporarily blind and deaf to the real world, sensing only the virtual plane, restrained by the harness.
So vulnerable. Still struggling courageously to overcome the past, alone in her great house with only the ghosts of days gone by to keep her company.
So vulnerable did she look, so tender and fragile, so brave in her pursuit of redemption through therapy, that the house computer spoke without being addressed, spoke in the synthesized voice of Alfred, spoke with considerable feeling and compassion: 'You are alone no more.'
She heard only the voices in the virtual world, her own and her father's.
