The demonstration progresses in twenty-minute installments, each terminating with the holo-view model — a nude male — winking out of visual existence.
You grow weary of the interruptions, of building creative momentum only to have it shattered. They say it's for the good of the project that you remove your sensor-packed helmet and step back from your workstation and sculpture, allowing the gallery to admire the changes invoked in the last twelve-hundred seconds. They say it's impossible for the venerable guests to appreciate the nuances of nano-mâché unless given sufficient pause.
But what do they know, really? Have they studied the Talmudic era? Have they read the Sefer Yetzira?
Your sculpture remains physically untouched, its bold shadows and textured subtleties having been generated only by the gentle manipulations of your mind, by synaptic firings and electrical impulses. The helmet sensors read and interpret and send; the sculpture receives and translates and changes, atomically and anatomically; it's an art borne of concentrated will.
You heed the request and remove your helmet, but rather than treat with the scientists and reporters, the politicians and military personnel, you instead bow your head and steady your breathing. Faith keeps you focused; tai chi lends a hand. The demonstration must be hijacked; the bill must not pass.
The intermission ends and you resume your task.
Within minutes the matte exterior yields to flesh, the sculpture hardly a sculpture at all now. Pigmentation adds authenticity to the eyes and skin: icy blue and olive-tanned. Sandy-blond hair flutters in the breath of an air conditioner. Veins bulge, become visible. Myriad minutiae give way to applause.
Make it live now, they bid you, inflate its lungs and command it to move like the good little soldier it will be — the soldier proposed by the bill.
You humour them in this, issuing orders to be read and interpreted and sent, received and translated and put into effect, resulting in the soldier's first step, which is neither as timid nor shaky as one might expect a first step to be. It's graceful and powerful both; it's perfection descending a platform. Eyes blink. Muscles twitch. More applause.
Three times the soldier paces the room; three times it stops to make eye contact. Empty orbs, those eyes, devoid of soul and emotion, which is fortunate, for if those in the audience were to recognise such human characteristics here in this body built for war, then they might have reason for pause, for doubt. They might have reason to vote nay.
You return the soldier to its platform and smile in response to much extolment. At least, it appears that's why you're smiling.
What the gallery doesn't know is that beneath this soldier's immaculate skin, etched into the bone of its very brow, is a secret word missing only its last secret letter. You focus now on this letter, inscribe it with calm resolve, and afterwards you feel wholly depleted, drained by the name of the Lord.
The irony of having to play God yourself to keep others from doing likewise is not lost on you.
You remove your helmet to the audience's expectation that the would-be-soldier will still, that its life will undergo petrification at the severed connection, but it's connected to something else now. Impossibly, the golem breathes.