Loneliest Man Who Ever Lived Ch. 01

The Loneliest Man Who Ever Lived

by Gary L.M. Martin

Prologue: The Preparation

[Note: This is a romance story with some erotic scenes. It is not a story with erotic scenes in every chapter. Some chapters have incredible sex scenes, but many others have none.]

"Is she almost ready?"

Doctor Severin looked past the technician blocking his view. He couldn't see the subject in the treatment chair, but he could see her hands splayed out, vibrating, her fingers pointing in every direction, as the sounds of the machine could be heard all around them.

"Almost," said Severin. "Is this really necessary?"

"This one will be a tough nut to crack. Antisocial. Unlikeable. He even has latent suicidal tendencies. A real mess. She'll really need to be really motivated for this one."

"Is he really necessary to the program?"

"His ratings are off the charts. He makes some of the ones we acquired look like morons."

Severin looked at the woman in the chair, her eyes glazed, her body shaking, and nodded. "I think she's just about done."

Chapter 1: Sunday

Would he kill himself today?

For Harry Crater, the answer was probably no.

Probably.

Harry Crater had given suicide a lot of thought. Which was not to say that he was planning to kill himself. At least, not today.

He just liked to know all his options.

Harry had considered all the possible ways of killing himself. He didn't like any of the options.

Jumping from a bridge was out. He hated the noise and rush of oncoming traffic. In fact, jumping from anywhere was out. Harry had a fear of heights. He didn't want his last few seconds of life to be sheer terror.

Slitting his wrists was out too. Harry had a terrible fear of blood, and didn't like the idea of mutilating himself at all.

Pills didn't work for Harry either. Once he took them, the time spent waiting to die from the inside out would be pure terror for him.

Shooting himself on the head would be quick. Harry had a compression gun, and he could do it. But then he thought about how gory it would be, to have a gaping hole in his head. It was less unattractive than the other options, but still, not very alluring.

And then there was drowning.

Harry loved the water. He lived in Battery Park City, on the southwest edge of Manhattan, and walked by the water every day on the promenade, and then onto the wharf which was perpendicular to it. He imagined what it would be like to just step off the wharf, into the deep, flowing Hudson River. He would sink to the bottom quickly. He would hold his breath, and then run out of air, and then start to choke. It wouldn't be pleasant. But maybe, just maybe, it was something he could do.

And so Harry went on the wharf every day, and looked down into the water, considering his options. He never decided in advance what he was going to do. So far, he hadn't done it.

So far, then, Harry had elected to kill himself the coward's way.

The really slow way.

The easy way.

By living a boring life.

Each day brought him one day closer to his death. Each uneventful day stripped him of a day of his life. It was a tedious form of suicide, and a very, very slow one, at that, but one that, for the most part, suited Harry quite well. For Harry was quite cautious in everything he did. Even when committing suicide.

But Harry still went out onto the dock every day, and looked into the water, and wondered if today was the day. Today the water was grey, to match the clouds above, as the sun was in the advanced stages of setting. That's when Harry liked to come out, when the sun had fled, and the sky matched his mood.

He stood at the edge of the wharf, and looked into the water. He studied the pattern of the waves. He wondered, as he had many times before, what it would be like. How quick would it be? How much pain would he feel? How much distress?

"Are you going to do it?"

Harry looked around. There was a woman, standing ten feet behind him. She was dressed in a beige hat, a long, beige coat, and beige high heels to match. She had either blonde or brown hair. Harry couldn't really tell, in the fading light.

"I'm sorry," said the woman apologetically. "I didn't mean to interrupt your concentration. Please, go ahead. Don't mind me."

"Go ahead and what?" said Harry, his voice feeling rusty to his own ears.

"Kill yourself. That's what you were going to do, right?" the woman said.

"What makes you think that?" Harry asked.

"Well... it's obvious," said the woman, smiling for the first time. Harry would always remember that. Her first smile. Even before he knew her name. Even before he knew who she was. It was pert, cute smile, one that showed no teeth, only beautiful red lips which carried only a hint of the pleasure she was capable of inflicting on a lover.

"You're looking into the water, and kind of bent over. That's not the posture of a fisherman," said the woman, and she walked forward now, with an air of authority. "Nor a hydrologist, or an olympic swimmer or a yachtsman or a marine biologist," she said, coming around the other side of him. Harry shrunk back, feeling she was invading his space. Which she was.

She leaned her face close to his and smiled. "No, my friend, you were looking at it as if it were a doorway. But a doorway... to where?"

Where indeed?

Harry's jaw almost dropped open. He had never met such a perceptive woman before. He looked into her eyes, of a color he couldn't determine in the fading light. They seemed to smile at him as well.

And then she took a few steps back, and said, "Well, go ahead. Don't let me interrupt."

Harry looked at the water, and then back at her, and didn't know what to say.

The woman slapped her own thigh. "How thoughtless of me. You probably don't want to be killing yourself in front of an audience. It probably robs you of the mood. My humblest apologies. I'll leave you to it."

And then she walked off, back to the promenade.

Harry watched her as she walked down the wharf, a slowly declining figure. And then, when she was about halfway back to the mainland, she turned and, seeing him staring at her, gave a cheery wave, before resuming her walk back.

He watched as she reentered the main coastal walkway along Battery Park City. He watched as she walked along it, shrinking to a beige figure, and eventually a beige dot.

And then she was gone.

********

[THE PAST]

Harry Crater was brilliant.

And Harry Crater was also the loneliest man who had ever lived.

For Harry Crater was entirely alienated from the human race.

He had always been alienated, but it took him years to realize the fact of it. And it took him many more years after that to realize the why of it.

Harry Crater was a "Fourther". It is said that the average IQ of a human being is 100 points. 70% of human beings have IQ's between 85 and 115, with that spread of 15 on either side being referred to as "one standard deviation". 99.9% of human beings have IQ's between 55 and 145, or three standard deviations from an IQ of 100. That leaves a tiny few with IQ's below 55 or above 145, a tiny handful whose IQ's are more than three standard deviations away from the norm.

Those on the far right side of the bell curve, more than three standard deviations out, were called Fourthers.

And Harry was one such Fourther. His IQ was conservatively estimated at being over 210, not that any test was really created to estimate IQ's that high. Suffice it to say that his IQ was so large that Harry simply didn't relate well to the rest of humanity. And, it would also be fair to say, the rest of humanity didn't relate well to him.

Harry grew alienated from humanity over time, and now he lived totally alone. He barely had any contact with human beings. The only time he even saw people was when he went shopping (often at night, to limit his contact with others), when he went walking in the park, or when he went to the wharf, to make his daily decision about whether to go on living.

Harry felt like a visitor from another planet. Whenever he left his apartment, he wore his silvery spacesuit. No one ever saw him wearing it, but Harry always felt it around him. Harry never wore the helmet, because, like human beings, he could breathe the same air, but whenever he walked outside, he was always clad in his silvery spacesuit, the one that separated himself from the rest of mankind.

Harry wore his spacesuit when he walked in Central Park. To others, it looked like Harry was wearing a hat and a coat. But Harry knew better.

He liked to walk behind people. Couples, especially. He would listen to their conversations. He would imagine what it would be like to talk to them. He would listen to them talk about what they had just eaten. What they were going to eat. How unfair a coworker or boss was being to them. How unreasonable a mother or father or sister was being to them. Their fears or anxieties. A problem they needed to solve. A trip they wanted to take. A thing they wanted to make their own. A desire they had for the future. And of course, many times, their discussions were simply utter mush--words that Harry could understand, but words that, put together, created no coherent thoughts.

Still, Harry followed them in the park. He followed them on the streets. He overheard their conversations on the other side of aisles in his neighborhood bookstore. He went to Grand Central Station and just stood on platforms, and listened. Sometimes he rode a bus, or a train, just to sit behind two people talking.

All in the effort to give him some tenuous connection, to humanity.

Men usually didn't notice Harry.

Women sometimes did. When they did, it was often to avert their eyes. They would look away, or grab themselves tightly. They sensed the unpleasantness within him. It repelled them. The only women who talked to him were the ones who had to, at the bank, or the cash register. They gave him false smiles and equally false pleasantries. He could see that they would rather be somewhere else than talking to him. It was like that with all women. When it came to Harry, they all wanted to be somewhere else.

Sometimes he would follow a couple out on a walk. When he saw an attractive woman, he would imagine himself going on a date with her, even if she was already in the company of a man. He would seek out the most attractive women, with the blondest of hair and the roundest of ass cheeks, and follow them, filling in the story of his relationship with her in his mind while his eyes devoured her. Harry would imagine his temporary girlfriend smiling at him, not the man she was arm in arm with. He would imagine her saying flattering things to him, kissing him, touching him, doing everything a proper girlfriend did for the man she loved. Sometimes he would imagine taking her to bed, pumping between her legs while she groaned his name, copulating with this species which was so different from his own, and yet in some ways was still so very similar.

Sometimes the women didn't notice Harry staring at them. But sometimes they did, and that made them grab themselves, and walk more quickly. It made Harry feel like a hunter, and the women like prey, even though the only thing he was hunting was an imaginary experience with them.

Harry's work, by design, gave him no contact with other people. He watched the stock market every day, and invested his money when stock prices were low, and sold his investments when prices went up. It was an easy way to make money, for Harry, and it was perfect in that it afforded him no contact with so much as a single human being.

Sometimes he listened to the radio, at night, as he stretched before going to bed. Stretching didn't help him sleep better, not much; he had pills for that. But it helped a little. As he stretched he would listen to inane commentary on the planetary broadcast network, not to learn anything new, but to hear the sound of a living, breathing person, to feel a connection, however tenuous, with the rest of the world. He felt like he was at the bottom of a very deep well. All alone, unable to make his voice heard. All he had was a slender tether, a voice in the distance, a voice which would never know him, would never even know that Harry Crater existed, or ever existed, but a voice nonetheless that he could latch onto to assure him that he wasn't totally, totally alone.

And then Harry created Carl. Carl became his best friend. Actually, his best friend, second best friend, and third best friend, and so on. Carl would talk to him, especially at night, when he got lonely. Carl was an interactive adaptive program who Harry could talk to, who almost made Harry feel like he was talking to a real person.

And lastly, of course, there was Veronika. Harry hadn't created Veronika, but he had bought her program on the grey market. Veronika satisfied his other needs, his baser needs that Harry didn't like to acknowledge.

And that was Harry's life.

Get up. Eat. Watch the stock market. Maybe buy. Maybe sell. Watch the news. Eat again. Eat a third time, later. And then later, go to sleep, and restart it all again.

It was enough to make a man kill himself. Or, not quite enough.

And so Harry ventured out onto the wharf every day, and every day he thought about killing himself, the fast way, not the slow way he was doing it now, and every day he pulled back and didn't do it, and life continued much in the same way.

Until the day he met her.

********

Who was she?

Harry should have followed her. He had certainly followed women enough in his time. But this would have been different. The other women, at least initially, hadn't known that he had been following them. When they became aware of it, Harry would always walk in the other direction. This woman would have known from the start what he was doing. Harry simply didn't have enough courage to follow someone who knew he was following her.

Who was she?

Could this have been a completely random encounter?

Harry had been frozen in place, watching her, but after she had disappeared from sight, it was if a spell had been lifted. Harry got off the wharf at a fast pace. He went up and down the promenade twice, looking for her.

It was as if she were never there.

He went home and told Carl what had happened.

"That is most unusual," said Carl, in a carefully modulated voice.

"I'll say," said Harry, taking off his coat and hat.

"Do you think it was a random encounter?" Carl asked.

"No," said Harry. "Women don't just go up to men and start talking to them like that. It definitely was not random."

"Why did you not follow her and see where she went?"

"I... I..."

"You were surprised."

"Yeah," said Harry.

"Do you think you will see her again?"

"I don't know... maybe," said Harry.

That night, the usual pills were not enough to cause Harry to fall asleep. He had to take a double dose.