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Through her lifetime, The Herta had constructed many puppets of her childhood self. Some were obsequious, others jealous, others pugnacious, and all bore minor idiosyncrasies of their own.
Since The Herta had been gone for so long, Ruan Mei assumed she needed no permission to imprison one of her puppets in her basement laboratory. The puppet resembled The Herta closely enough — if Ruan Mei had ever missed her, but was loath to admit it. This puppet did not come willingly and had to be dragged, limbs tearing, into the lab. But with enough engine oil desserts and psychological subjugation, she settled begrudgingly into her role as Ruan Mei’s live-in lab assistant.
Ruan Mei’s greatest frustration was with this Herta puppet's relentless physicality. Where was her consciousness housed? And what would she do when the puppet inevitably failed? Steal another? The Herta might have created near-infinite puppets, but surely not infinite. Could Ruan Mei possibly engineer one herself? Her expertise was in organic lifeforms, not synthetic intelligences. Ruan Mei herself had long been trying — and failing — to artificially manufacture geniuses. Herta’s puppets had come closest to this elusive goal, and it infuriated Ruan Mei to be continually outclassed by legions of puppet minds.
Sitting in her laboratory, Ruan Mei would sometimes wonder if the only intelligence that did not deserve to exist was her own.
“…the Great Herta! The beautiful, most admirable Herta…”, the Herta puppet would declare in her high, mocking tone as she strutted around the laboratory.
Such words would bring a paradoxical smile to Ruan Mei’s face.
Ruan Mei was especially troubled by the flower on Herta’s hat. However she tried, she could not make sense of this flower. It seemed to have a life of its own — sometimes wilting, sometimes fresh, and at times looking wholly artificial, like the rest of Herta. She finally asked Herta about it.
“My consciousness is in the flower,” Herta replied. “Detach at your peril.”
Ruan Mei’s curiosity won. She removed the flower, with no change. The next day, Herta insisted that her consciousness was in her hat instead. So Ruan Mei removed the hat, again to no visible effect. Annoyed, she began to replace individual limbs and screws, even considering swapping out the internal machinery of the puppet, as one would swap out organs from an organic lifeform. She was secretly afraid that the puppet would prove to be some kind of Ship of Theseus, remaining essentially unchanged even as individual components were swapped out.
Through all this, the puppet remained conscious and insufferably insolent in only the way that Herta could be. All this only fascinated Ruan Mei more, and deepened her resolve to study The Herta’s creation as much as she could. But time was gradually eroding her will to keep sane limits on her experimentation.
“Acid?” Herta asked, watching Ruan Mei at her benchtop.
“Why not?” said Ruan Mei. "Hydrochloric acid. I want to digest you.”
“You’re bluffing,” said Herta. “You’ll never destroy me.”
“And synthetic meat thinks its grower won’t, until harvest day,” Ruan Mei replied smoothly.
“I will never die in the way you want," sneered Herta. "Though you might engineer an approximation.”
“For some problems, an approximation is often sufficient,” Ruan Mei conceded, “But not this one.”
Infinitesimally close was not the thing itself.
Some of Ruan Mei’s own creations, when shocked with electricity or injected with potassium, would die in front of her, and she would observe how they twitched and gasped for air. If they did not have a mouth, the moment of death was harder to pinpoint. Was it the cessation of the pulse? Some of her beings did not have a pulse; they simply marinated in bio-fluid or nutrient soup until she had no further use for them. Mathematics had precise boundaries. Biology did not. She wanted to change that.
“But even if they are dying, how can I verify the moment?” Ruan Mei thought aloud. She cast her mind back to her previous creations, thinking that some analogy between those and Herta might spark an insight. “Fixed mydriasis. What if they have no eyes?”
“Want some help?” Herta offered.
“Okay,” replied Ruan Mei, with a stab of displeasure.
“Why use proxies? Try it yourself.”
Ruan Mei was shocked. “Are you asking me to die?”
“Why not? For science.”
“It is inefficient for me to die,” Ruan Mei snapped. “I have much to do, much to accomplish.”
“That is fradulent,” said Herta. “How can you call yourself a scientist, if you are not willing to experiment on yourself?”
“I do not experiment on myself because it introduces irreconcilable biases,” retorted Ruan Mei. “And you are a hypocrite. You are the embodiment of proxies. You built them, might I assume, to avoid suffering.”
“Yes, but they are all me. If they suffer, I suffer. The Magnificent Creator suffers.”
“I find it difficult to believe that you all share a nervous system.”
“Not quite,” Herta said, with a mechanical giggle. “But we are connected ... in other ways.”
Her filamentous hair seemed to bristle slightly as she continued, “I am trying to help you. The central question of philosophy is how to die. If you don’t die, why think about it at all? I have solved the question by making it irrelevant.”
“Proof by irrelevance,” echoed Ruan Mei absently.
“Yes. In fact, that’s how I solved the solitary waves theory — by realising that central parts of it were completely irrelevant. Sometimes, laziness is a virtue.”
Having said this, Herta skipped off.
Ruan Mei stared at her table. A persistent scratching came from the other room. Perhaps it was her own creation that had cannibalised forty-something of its fellows in a sort of battle royale, and was now starving alone, but Ruan Mei barely noticed.
“How do I make you, Herta?” she mused. “You must have done something I can’t grasp. Even if I found your blueprints, would I understand them?”
Herta was fiddling with something on the table, next to where Ruan Mei had left her beaker of acid. Then she turned to Ruan Mei.
“Look,” she said.
It was the flower from her hat, cradled in her ball-jointed palms. She placed it in Ruan Mei’s hands.
“It’s dead,” said Ruan Mei. “But —“
It was common sense that a flower detached from its stalk would be dead. There was no hint of movement, no hint of exchange in the petals, but she couldn’t convince herself that it had died at all, because when she observed it through an oblique gaze, much like one trained oneself to see in four dimensions —
“This is what I mean,” said Herta smugly. “With you, I’ll never die.”