by David Beem
Shmuel frowns, then stuffs his face with another fistful of Cheetos.
“So, you think by turning Tron-Tron into—mm-these are good, want some?”
Wang shakes his head.
“Okay. So, you think by turning Tron-Tron into some kind of hair-bringer of supervillainy, the InstaTron people will be, like, what? Grateful?”
“It’s harbinger, dumbass. And hell yes, they’ll be grateful. We’re the unsung heroes, man. Field testing against the coming AI apocalypse! Drum up your worst, buddy—this is our big chance. InstaTron’ll be offering us a job by morning.”
“A job?” Shmuel’s eyebrows come up. “A job. Huh. Been meaning to get me one of those.”
“Slaughterhouses give me existential dread,” says Wang.
“They do?” asks Shmuel.
“No, dude, not me.” Wang points at the screen. “This thing. Tron-Tron. Jesus. It seriously thinks it’s a cow.”
Shmuel peers at InstaTron Tron’s tweet and frowns. “‘Bovine Beauties, Cow-a-Bunghole, and I Think I’m in Love with Moo are overrated’? Are those porn titles?”
“How the fuck should I know? Like, it couldn’t be enough to just think it’s a cow. It’s gotta be a cow pervert.” Wang releases a heavy sigh, leans back into the sofa, folds his arms. “Turning Tron-Tron into a harbinger of supervillainy might be harder than I thought.”
“Well, I’m not up for hard,” Shmuel replies, picking up the remote and channel surfing. “We got time to kill before Murder Mystery Night. Hey, dude. Kung Fury! Wanna watch?”
Wang sits up and grins. “Hell yes, I wanna watch the Kung Fury.”
Chapter Seven
“The ring is the same technology, essentially, as the medicine you’d be taking,” says Mikey. “You’d train here on how to use the suit, its capabilities and limits. Without the artificial intelligence helping you, it’s hard to say how much of the Collective Unconscious you’ll be able to access. If you tried to use too much, you’d overload. I’m not going to lie; there’ll be some trial and error.”
I shake my head, thinking I might not have heard him right. “Artificial intelligence?” I ask. “Medicine? Collective what?”
Mikey releases a sigh. His shoulders slump, and, for the first time since our reunion, he seems suddenly older. Something in the lighting, maybe, but there are crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes, and worry lines on his forehead I hadn’t noticed before. He looks like an entirely different guy.
“Right,” he says. “Cards on the table. Your power would be accessing something called the Collective Unconscious. A database of the lives of, as far as we know, everyone who’s ever lived. By accessing it, you’ll be able to know anything ever known, master any skill ever mastered, and, theoretically, relive the life of anyone. What’s more, we think you’ll also be able to psychically hack into the minds of anyone alive as well.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s nano-neuro medicine,” he says, his head tilting to the side. “It creates an auto-assembling biotechnology in your brain, linking neural pathways in the limbic system, hindbrain, neocortex—it’s complicated—but the upshot is that we’re at the cusp of a major breakthrough in human development. Are you familiar with the Collective Unconscious?”
I shake my head, momentarily distracted by the mention of nano-neuro medicine—my dad’s specialty, before he walked out the door and never came back. A familiar ache settles into my chest as I ponder what he might’ve thought about all this.
But Mikey’s talking again.
“The Collective Unconscious is a term coined by Carl Jung,” he’s saying. “It refers to a kind of shared ancestral memory, largely concerned with instinctive archetypes. For instance, Jung believed that the Tree of Life is known to all cultures without ever having been learned. It’s simply preprogrammed into the brain. And there are hundreds, possibly thousands of similar archetypes. Are you with me?”
And since I’m not with him at all, naturally, I nod.
“Kind of like a psychic Instagram account?”
He smiles. “Okay, sure. That’s good. Only there’s just the one Instagram account, okay? And we’re all on it. So, if you access it using your conscious mind, you’d achieve a species-wide omniscience.”
His eyes search mine.
“This is for real?” I ask.
“It’s for real. At least, it was. We’ve run into a snag.” Mikey comes out from around the bar to sit on the stool next to me. He drags an unused coaster closer and spins it idly on the gleaming marble surface. “Okay, so the technology is in three parts. There’s the ring. There’s the injection—that’s the nano-neuro medicine allowing you to access the Collective Unconscious—and then there’s the third part, the nano-artificial intelligence necessary to process the sheer volume of information coursing through your brain.”
“Nano-artificial intelligence. Yeah. I’ve been reading about your artificial intelligence.”
Mikey’s gaze meets mine, but if he’s got any guilt over not sharing credit for all the work I did for him on this back at Notre Dame, he’s got it buried pretty damn deep. When he makes no reply, I decide to get the whole story before giving him any shit.
“So your big idea is to put this AI into a human brain?”
“It’s the component necessary for true species-wide omniscience,” he replies. “And, unfortunately, sustainability. Without it, you—or whoever ends up taking this to trial—will die. Ninety-six hours, tops. It’s simply too much information for the brain to process otherwise. Think about it. Actionable data extrapolated from the lives of everyone who ever lived and everyone alive today. That’s roughly 108 billion lives, give or take. Accessing all that at once—for even a second—could overload the brain. And accessing it over time is just as dangerous. The easiest way to explain it, without getting bogged down in the neuroscience, is rapid neuronal cell death followed by cataclysmic implosion of all critical bodily functions.”
“Which brings us back to the death part.”
“Which brings us back to the death part,” he repeats, nodding. “The AI and the suit cooperate to take the brunt of the information gathering and organizing, freeing up your neurons for whatever information or tasks are immediately required. What I’m saying is, you really need all three parts of the technology for this to work properly. But there’s a silver lining. If you agree to help us, there’s a chance you’d be able to find whoever stole the AI and get it back. If you did that, your cells should stabilize. You should even have a full, healthy life.”
“I heard one chance and two shoulds in that.”
“I mean, this is all theoretical, Edge.”
“Uh-huh. This AI have a name?”
“In fact it does,” he says, straightening. “The AI is the component InstaTron is contributing to this enterprise. We call it… InstaTron Tron.”
“Wait, wait,” I say. “InstaTron… Tron?”
Mikey nods.
“So that’s two Trons?”
Another nod.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Mikey. That name sucks.”
“Eh. You get used to it. So, as I said, InstaTron Tron was designed to help achieve omniscience in the Collective Unconscious without overloading the human brain. But it was stolen from our labs a week ago. Then, without warning, it came online last night. It…opened a Twitter account.”
“Oh crap.” I roll my eyes. “Twitter is a cruel mistress.”
“People have been tweeting at InstaTron Tron ever since, corrupting our baby. It’s out there right now, totally confused.”
“Confused? Confused how?”
Mikey compresses his lips. He takes a measured breath before answering.
“It’s embarrassing. But, reading its Tweets…it’s like InstaTron Tron can’t decide whether it’s a…some kind of a neo-Nazi anarchist…or, a…a cow.”
My forehead tightens. I’m sure I must’ve misheard that.
“I’m sorry. It sounded like you just said your high-tech sup
er-advanced nano-artificial intelligence thinks it’s a neo-Nazi anarchist cow.”
Mikey nods.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Not exactly your run-of-the-mill Michael Crichton novel, now, is it?”
“Edger, we’ve got no way to shut it down. InstaTron Tron represents a quantum leap in programming and nano-technology.”
“The evil cow.”
“It can remotely access any server in the world, hack into government satellites at will—”
“And it thinks it’s an evil cow.”
“Edger—it could launch nuclear missiles.”
“At who? The Hamburglar?”
Mikey drags his hand through his hair and releases an exasperated sigh, but I press on.
“And you’re telling me my life would depend on technology that thinks it’s an evil cow? You’re telling me the best outcome of all this is me sticking an evil cow chip in my brain?”
“Edge, InstaTron Tron was never meant to be an autonomous, roaming entity. It was meant to be a part of this.” He jiggles the ring box at me. “If we don’t get a handle on this, there’s no telling what our baby might do. Seriously.”
“What is it you’re asking me to do, exactly?”
“Okay, listen. What I’m asking is for you to access the Collective Unconscious and find InstaTron Tron before it gets out of control—”
“Before it gets out of control? Whaddaya call this?”
Mikey dismisses “this” with a wave of his hand.
“The supersuit’s processors can assist you in searching the minds of everyone in San Diego to either find InstaTron Tron’s human host, or find clues as to—”
“Wait, wait,” I say. “Did you say human host?”
“Didn’t I explain?” Mikey sighs. “Sorry. There’s so much. For InstaTron Tron to be activated, it needs a biological host. Well, technically, the L-amino acids need the naturally occurring saline from our cells to auto-assemble into a semisolid nano-fiber mesh, and—you know what? I’m getting a text. Hang on.”
Mikey digs his phone from his pocket, unlocks it, and his eyes go wide.
“Shit.”
“What is it?”
“InstaTron Tron. It just shut down all power to the Eastern Seaboard. Edger, I need you.”
I stare back at him. “Holy shit. Holy shit, Mikey. You’re seriously asking me to risk my life to fix this shit?”
“Edger, I know. It sucks. I fucked up, okay?”
“That’s an understatement.”
Neither of us says anything. The urgency of the situation notwithstanding, his eyes seem to fill in the blanks in my head. This is more than him trusting me to be, I don’t know, incorruptible. It’s about expendability. If I died in ninety-six hours, who’d miss me? Gran and Fabio. Not Shep, that’s for sure. Would Kate? Probably not. But maybe none of that matters. Maybe Mikey is right. I have been throwing my life away. That’s the key point here. He’s not asking me because he thinks I’m such a great guy. He’s asking me because he’s looking at the big picture. And in the big picture, losing my life isn’t much of a loss at all.
Chapter Eight
Mikey gives me the night to think it over. I’m not to clock in at work tomorrow, but come straight here instead. It’s all been arranged, he says. My head is buzzing like an X-wing squadron by the time Mary walks me out. We reach Henrietta’s desk in the reception area. The lights are out and the room is abandoned.
“Hey,” says Mary, touching my arm. “You wanna sit for a second?”
I make no reply, and she knowingly steers me into a couch, then takes a seat next to me. Her fragrance is fresh and clean. Somehow through the maze of my spinning head, it hits me how so many gorgeous women smell like chemicals. Not this one.
“Are you all right?” she asks, her catlike eyes peering into me. “Can I get you some water?”
“No, thank you.”
She lays her hand on my arm. “You can talk to me. I know what it is he asked you to do.”
“You do?”
Her lips compress as she nods. “Mm-hmm.”
“Would you do it?”
She smiles on one side only. And with a rueful toss of her hair, she laughs. “Become the world’s first superhero? Sure. I could do it. But not like this.”
My forehead tightens. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’d want the thing to work like it’s supposed to. I’d want the total package. Not this race against time to find InstaTron Tron before my brain blows up. Only men make bad decisions like that.”
“You know, funnily enough, this man is partial to intact brains also.”
Mary smiles, this time on both sides, exponentially increasing the beauty rays. We sit in silence for a second, in the dark, her hand still on my arm. My neck and cheeks are hot. I’m probably glowing. I sit up straighter, and her hand slides off my arm. She sits up straighter too and smooths the hair on the back of her head. I don’t know why, her hair is perfect. She catches me staring. I clear my throat.
“Let me walk you out,” she says.
And then we’re on our feet and she’s hurrying to grab the door. I make it awkward by telling her she should go first, and then she’s saying no, I should go first, and so naturally we both try to go through together and bump elbows.
“Oh—excuse me.”
“Sorry.”
She steps back, still holding the door, and I go on through with the ol’ sheepish squiggle mouth. God. I rock so hard with the ladies.
The bright hallway is harsh on my eyes after the dark reception area. We walk in silence. The conference room I saw earlier is back on track. Everyone inside is hard at work, late on a Friday night. That’s not so bad. They still don’t have the word “dork” on their shirts. And none of them are being asked to risk their lives to recover a zillion-dollar evil AI cow.
At the elevators, Mary presses the button.
“Edger,” she says, facing me and folding her hands behind her back. “You can walk away from this, you know.”
“But what about those people without power?”
“Oh, come on. Stop thinking with your testosterone. There are first responders whose job it is to deal with these things, Edger.”
“Yeah,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “But I feel like I’m part of this now. And it’s just the one human race, right?”
Her eyes narrow.
“Okay, okay,” I say, blushing. “But I mean—how many people do you know on the East Coast?”
“Edger. Knock it off. There are other ways—reasonable ways—you can help. But this isn’t your problem. It’s Mr. Dame’s. You have a life, a family, and friends.”
Her eyes search mine like she thinks I’m hiding spies in them or something. I stand there and take the scrutiny, feeling strangely flattered. She’s so beautiful. Her eyes seem to hold mysteries and a lifetime of unanswerable and endlessly fascinating questions. I decide then and there I want to know them all—until something in how she said that stuff about me having a life triggers a distant alarm somewhere in my brain.
“You know,” I say, unsure of what’s coming out of my mouth next. “I’ve seen you a lot at the mall.”
An unreadable expression passes over Mary’s movie-star face. The elevator doors open. She sticks her hand between the door sensors, and the muscles in her cheeks soften.
“Just think about what I said, okay?”
“You work for Mikey,” I reply, smiling to smooth over any potential conflict my words might bring. “Shouldn’t you be telling me to do this thing? Aren’t you supposed to close the deal?”
Her eyebrows rise. “Encourage you to get yourself killed? Hardly.”
“You make it sound like it’s a forgone conclusion.”
“As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to me finding InstaTron Tron and, you know, saving the day, and…not dying.”
The doors bang on Mary’s hand, then spring open again. I hurry inside the elevator.
“I didn’t mean to imply
that,” she replies, leaning in and pushing the button, and then stepping back and away from the door. “Just think about whether Mr. Dame’s problem is really your problem, okay?” The doors begin to close. “Think about your grandmother, Shep, and Fabio,” she says, her words coming out in a rush.
The doors slam shut, leaving me staring at a metallic reflection of myself but not really seeing. I’m spinning on what she just said. I never told her about Gran, Shep, or Fabio. And as the elevator plummets downward, a likewise sinking suspicion takes shape in my stomach.
Mary hasn’t been loitering around the mall—she’s been spying on me.
Chapter Nine
The night air is cool and breezy at the bottom of Emerald Plaza. Traffic is light. I call Fabio straight away and start back for the parking garage to get my car.
The phone rings once.
“Promotion?” he asks, not bothering to say hello.
I hesitate before answering. “Well, we really didn’t talk about pay.”
“But he offered you a job! Holy shit, Edge! Holy shit—congratulations!”
I cut across Broadway and Front, then get stuck in the middle of the street while a bus rounds the corner.
“Slow down, champ,” I say.
“Did he or did he not offer you a job?”
“Oh, he offered me a job all right.” The bus finishes its turn, and I hustle to the other side of the street. “One that could kill me.”
“We’re all dyin’, Edge. I mean, there’s the shot-to-the-head variety, and then there’s I’ve-fallen-and-can’t-get-up variety. Personally, I’d go with the shot-to-the-head one.”
“Well then, this job is for you.”
“Really?” snaps Fabio. “Is there danger? Because I am totally down with the danger!”
I round the corner at First Avenue and pause, trying to remember what level I parked on, then decide to head around the outside of Nordstrom’s. A man and woman holding hands and reeking of hibachi grill brush past me.
