HORROR
The Head
Sonya wandered through the galleries of the Science Center for the last time. She knew the location of every exit, every door, every security camera. This was the evening she planned to make her move. The museum didn't even know what it had. She had visited the affiliated aquarium and history collections, but found nothing there of importance. She didn't want the "hoard" of 12 Spanish gold coins recently placed in the museum vault or the semiprecious stones from the meager mineral collection. Even in this second-rate children's amusement palace it would require a professional with inside help to break into the safe. No, her mind was set on a small fossil currently in the preparation lab, a small slab of limestone with the imprint of the earliest bird, older even than
Archaeopteryx
. On the collector's black market, it would be worth a quarter of a million dollars, and she already had a buyer lined up. It would be a quick snatch and then she and the fossil would disappear. In the 16 days she had spent casing the museum, she had been careful not to leave a trail, using cash or credit cards under other names and avoiding frequenting the same restaurants or developing relationships. The only consistent record of her presence would be the museum security cameras if the guards were clever enough to see through the various disguises and wigs that she had worn on each visit during normal hours. By then she would be long gone.
Killing time until the museum closed, she lingered near her favorite exhibit, the hologram. The museum had cleverly demonstrated a multiplicity of media to represent a famous event, Valentina Tereshkova's return as the first woman in space. Visitors could read the news footage of her landing and emerging from the capsule; newspapers and photographs of the event; a video that was actually of a dramatic reenactment; and a diorama with wax figures reproducing the moment when she appeared in the hatchway of the capsule. Most interesting of all was a platform in the center of the exhibit in which two scenes played over and over with a life-sized hologram taken during the reenactment. One depicted her in the capsule in space, the other emerging from it on earth. Except for the retaining rope one could almost touch the figures. There was neither sound nor color, of course, but the people were real; they moved.
Sonya was fascinated by holograms. They seemed to capture objects and people in a way that was simultaneously real and not real. At the corner of the exhibit was an explanation of how they were created by using multiple projectors into a mist to create a three-dimensional image. Seemingly incidental to the display was the spookiest part of all - a hologram of a disembodied living head. At shoulder height, atop a two-foot wide chrome column was a cone of tinted glass. Within the swirling mist inside was the head. Through the distortions of the tinting and the mist, you had the impression that it could be real, if only you could see it a little more clearly.
The image was made from a living person, she was sure, because it blinked, moved its eyes, and occasionally moved its lips. It was easy to convince yourself it was looking at you. The woman had lustrous black hair that covered the back of her neck. She was young and pretty, though eyes looked a bit sad and tired. They made her seem that much more real. She wanted to stare at it for hours, but it was usually surrounded by kids who laughed at it through their nervousness and then tried to scare one another by making up stories about how she came to be there. Half-way up the plinth was a simple button with no label. The kids - mostly the boys - loved to play with it. Girls were more likely to run away.
On one of her first visits to the museum Sonya found herself alone in the gallery. She approached the obelisk and looked closely in the glass. She could have sworn the face was asleep. There was no tone in the muscles. The eyes were closed and the lips, as usual, were slightly parted. The nostrils very subtly expanded and contracted with her breathing. Almost involuntarily, Sonya's hand found its way down to the button. When she pressed, it the eyes suddenly opened. She pressed it again and the pupils appeared to dilate. She backed away in surprise and strange embarrassment. For the next week she resisted placing her face so intimately against the glass and had not dared to press the button; but the image preyed on her mind.
What was inside that cone? Could it be just a recorded hologram like that of Valentina Tereshkova? If so, its reaction to the button must have been a coincidence. But the kids seemed to be equally fascinated. Sonya formed a hypothesis: pressing the button must have reset the recording and produced the illusion of sudden movement. When she steeled herself to study the hologram again, it was only over the heads of boys straining to be tall enough to see as they repeatedly pressed the button. Sonya watched the eyes open and close and a range of expressions appear on the face until finally it froze in a position she recognized. The eyes looked into the distance; the mouth relaxed into a smile; the lids finally half shut. It was a look of ecstasy.
When the gallery was quiet again the head was an irresistible lure. It was asleep - that must be the end of the recording; but Sonya wasn't fully satisfied with that explanation. She pressed the button. The eyes opened. This time they appeared tired and irritable. Was that Sonya's imagination? Had the expression really changed, or was she imagining it? She could think of only two ways the head could be responding to the button.
Hypothesis 1: This was not a recorded hologram, but a live feed from a real person. Someone who sat in a chair all day under the cameras. But who would do that kind of a job? How tedious. The other possibility was more fantastic. It was not a person but a robot, an incredibly life-like simulacrum. The tinted glass and mist obscured the flaws, and the imagination filled in the rest. That must be the answer; but, if so, the robot itself would be more interesting than the hologram. Why wasn't a gallery devoted to that technology?
