by Sean Platt
“Look how much Isaac has messed things up,” Jameson said, smiling, looking at the now-flickering Beam screen. His delivery was smooth, but Isaac could tell this hadn’t been part of the trick. Something was wrong. Jameson’s eyes met Isaac’s, almost pleading. He wouldn’t move his mouth and give himself away, but Isaac could read his glance: Get ahold of yourself, Isaac!
Swirling emotions wanted to burst forth in a torrent, but Isaac held himself in check. What the hell did they expect? Keep the idiot in the dark then hook up some ninja mojo to read his mind — ninja mojo on which the entire trick’s integrity seemed to depend? It was a terrible, stupid plan. Why hadn’t they told him how this was supposed to work? Why hadn’t they let him practice?
Jameson’s calm smile went to a burly man by the side of the stage, opposite Braemon’s bulk like a matching bookend.
“Matthew?” Jameson said, “before I show Micah here how to make his brother disappear and get out of Enterprise’s hair forever, we should make sure the feed is working so the watchers can see clearly. Can you check the feed?”
Matthew’s attention was already down, tapping on a handheld, rapping on an access panel affixed to the wall, and Isaac realized: This is a crisis in the making. Jameson and his crew were scrambling, trying to find their feet. Maybe it wasn’t only Isaac’s fault after all. If it fell apart, maybe he wouldn’t be the only one to look stupid.
But Isaac kept looking at the blade in Micah’s hand — the sword that magical tradition said was supposed to be slid through the cabinet to raise the tension.
“There’s some sort of an issue with the feed,” the big crew man said. “Sorry, Jameson.”
“Just go ahead!” someone shouted, his voice slurred by drink.
“Sorry for the difficulties, everyone,” Jameson said.
“It looks like local interference,” Matthew said. “Something in the canvas.”
Another big man had come up beside Matthew, also looking at a handheld.
“It’s not just in the canvas. There’s been fragmentation in this sector all day.”
“This is different,” Matthew said.
“Quark crews are already on it. Here: I just got an update. ‘Expect slowdowns. Redundant protocols will protect all user data and connectivity. We apologize for the inconvenience.’”
“I’m telling you, it’s something local.”
“Forget the feed!” a woman yelled. “Just do the trick!”
Jameson smiled up at her, but to Isaac, the smile looked threadbare. If something was going wrong with Braemon’s canvas — now, of all times — Isaac doubted the trick could just be done. Somehow, Isaac’s mind was broadcasting to control the hoverbots. Somehow, his mind would be the archive that would play the holo-recording to make himself reappear…and that required a canvas, and a connection.
The crowd gasped. Isaac’s eyes went to the screen. He watched himself vanish again, and this time stay gone. Then Micah’s eyes refocused, and Isaac decided he must have reappeared. Isaac’s gaze, meanwhile, had strayed to the room’s rear. His mother didn’t seem surprised in the least. And beside her, the dark-haired woman, Kai, seemed to be ducking behind Rachel, looking furtively for something…or someone.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jameson said, “it looks like our vanishing cabinet is having troubles. Maybe it’d be best to — ”
Isaac watched someone appear onstage beside him. It was a hologram of Carter Vale.
The crowd’s eyes moved between the real Vale, in the front row, and the newly appeared hologram. As if to demonstrate which was which, a glitch shimmered through the hologram before it snapped into perfect focus. As before, the hologram showed the Vale from earlier, from Isaac’s memory. It was Vale as he’d looked speaking to Isaac in the corner, just before Isaac had come onstage.
“Honestly,” said the holographic Vale, “I don’t love the idea of raising money for Respero. I mean, just think of what we’d be celebrating.”
Vale, in the front row, glared at Isaac as if he was doing this on purpose. Isaac tried to make desperate shrugging gestures to show he wasn’t at fault, but both of them knew that Isaac was if anyone was. The crowd was seeing a projection of Isaac’s POV stream from their earlier chat, recorded as faithfully as if Isaac had worn a rig to sell the footage later. It was as good a holo as the streams Natasha sold of her concerts, but this was just an ordinary memory. Still, Vale’s eyebrows were knitting with anger, as if Isaac had recorded their private words to play later using an illicit implant.
Holo Vale seemed to lean in. Isaac remembered the moment in real life; Isaac had been contemplating blurting his mission of murder. Thank West he hadn’t. His guts were on display enough as it was.
“I feel like a hypocrite supporting Respero Dinners, Isaac,” the Vale hologram said while the two burly crewmen tapped their handhelds and Jameson Gray shouted orders. “We all know what those little ceremonies are hiding.”
Isaac wanted to run, but the people onstage were holding him in place. If he vanished now, they’d know the trick. But now, they seemed to have a motive other than magic: to hold one of the men who, along with Carter Vale, was fast becoming the reluctant man of the hour.
Isaac wanted to swat at the invisible Fi streaming from his head like an insect. He wanted to erect a firewall that would be impervious to Jameson Gray’s practical magic, if he’d had any idea how. But most of all he wanted to get away before Vale’s recording said the next thing: We all know that Respero is murder.
It wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t something that anyone — especially the president — should say out loud. Of course everyone knew Respero was murder. Rich people threw fancy Dinners when the time came and pretended it was graduation, but nobody truly walked willingly into Respero…and nobody, accordingly, liked to be reminded. It was society’s dirty little secret, and as many riots had been brewing recently between rich and poor, the coming footage would only multiply the inevitable. A new face for the death penalty didn’t change what it was. No one opted for Respero.
Across the room, Violet James’s mother had her hand over her open mouth.
Isaac cringed, but the next thing the recording said wasn’t he’d expected it to — what he remembered the real Vale saying in life. Instead, the specter shifted on its feet and said, “Given what we do with Respero’d minds, we should at least give people the dignity of pretending we didn’t want them to die.”
In front of Isaac, Vale’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. His jaw hung open. The reporters, who’d been respectfully keeping their distance, moved forward in the chaos and surrounded Vale, shoving wands in front of his face, yammering questions.
Vale pushed past them and put his hands flat on the stage, his expression furious. Isaac stepped back, his clothing held tight by those who’d so recently been volunteers. He tripped and half fell. Beside him, Micah still held the sword. Jameson Gray and Natasha had gathered around the techs, shouting and berating, yelling profanity while the techs pressed useless buttons.
“I may be required to keep my mouth shut about Respero and Mindbender,” holo-Vale said, “but I refuse to pretend it’s all just flowers and daisies.”
The real Vale found himself trapped by two aggressive reporters, their Beam eyes whirring with focus, wands held high. Isaac could hear them begin to shout questions. But then Vale elbowed one away and looked right at Isaac to shout, “I didn’t say any of that!”
“Your family works with Xenia, Isaac,” holo-Vale went on. “Do you have any idea what the stick rate is these days? How many Respero’d minds even have anything worth filtering rather than just blowing apart?”
“I didn’t say any of this! It’s a lie! Someone made this up! A fabrication!”
At the back of the room, Rachel Ryan was laughing.
“You’d know, Isaac. You have access to those records, right?” The recording glitched and recycled to just before Vale’s last word. Again, the room watched him say, “Right?” And again, and again,
and again, Vale blipping from one position to a subtly earlier one, caught in a loop.
“You have access to those records? Right? Right?”
“Tony!” The real Vale shouted, stabbing a finger at one of his dark-suited guards. Vale’s finger moved to Isaac once the guard looked over. “Arrest him!”
The room surged. The crowd, disoriented, was beginning to churn. Agents moved toward the stage, but half a dozen new techs had joined Matthew and the others. Jameson was shouting at them all. Micah had dropped the sword, stepping back, finally surprised. There was a loud bang somewhere toward the back as if something had broken or a door had been slammed, but the shouting and murmuring quickly buried the sound.
All eyes were forward. Moving from one Vale to the other then finally to Isaac. Watching one president spill counterfeit secrets while the other lost his cool.
Isaac broke free of his captors and stumbled back. He caught Natasha’s eyes and saw hatred fill them. Her green irises spoke one word: Coward. But Isaac didn’t have a chance to prove her right or wrong because the second he broke away and turned to run — to sever this horrific mental hijacking, if nothing else — three things happened in quick succession:
There was another loud bang from the room’s rear, wood splintering, Plasteel rending.
The techs yelled something about a shutdown and a dangerous surge of data coming across The Beam, forced across Quark’s node from Xenia Labs.
And the holographic Carter blipped out of existence, replaced by the crouched form of a girl in a flowing blue gown, like a nightdress.
The noise from the rear continued, but nobody seemed to hear it. The entire room’s attention was on the girl — and Violet James’s mother, who came running forward.
“That’s…” a woman in the front row began, looking at the girl in the nightdress.
The girl stood up. She watched the older woman rush to the stage then flinched as the woman fell through her. It was as if the girl were trapped in digital form, projected as a hologram…but still very much alive.
“That’s…” the woman repeated, still watching the girl, seemingly unable to finish.
“Violet!” Violet James’s mother shouted, her voice full of desperate tears.
“SerenityBlue,” the woman in the front row finished in a whisper.
Isaac looked at his wife. Natasha looked back, her hatred eclipsed by shock — at the Directorate president’s behavior, at the reappearance of the NAU’s most famous Respero case, at all it implied about Vale’s mind-bending promises.
“Did you always know that Respero was — ” Natasha started to ask.
Another crash came from the rear, and the room filled with a spill of highly armed, highly enhanced bodies.
First came the warriors.
Then came the blood.
EPISODE 18
February 19, 2053 — IggNite Productions
“Forget it,” said Iggy.
“But — ”
“No, Noah. Alexa can’t know. She believes; that’s her strength. That’s good enough. When it’s time for your story to pop its top, you’ll need faith, not knowledge. Knowledge is hard-edged. It gets in its own way. When people know something, it fixes them into one way of acting. Obstacles come, and they’ll doubt what they know. Faith isn’t like that. The steadfast can’t be dissuaded from their faith. And if you doubt me, let’s go down to St. Matthew’s and take a contingent over to the Seventh Street mosque. I’ll start explaining how to tell who’s right. Think we can walk away with everyone agreeing?”
Noah shifted on Iggy’s couch. They were clearly in Iggy’s wheelhouse tonight, spinning the yarn that would become Noah’s legend, and Noah was trying to keep up. But the lack of support — from anyone on Panel, and especially the woman who had technology Noah needed — felt like an oversight rather than poorly constructed storycraft.
“Look, Noah. Alexa has been looking for God in the machine for as long as any of us have known her. It’s her quirk. Rachel mocks her and the rest of us indulge her, but right now she’s your best friend.”
“Exactly. And with the dispositional data O has been gathering since — ”
“Forget O’s algorithms. They’re for Alexa, not for you.” Iggy didn’t seem to like Noah finishing sentences. The man was tall, lanky, and overly energetic. In his own element, Noah was used to being the tireless one, but he and Iggy had been constructing a curious brew of vital and boring — and here, it was Iggy who never shut up. Noah didn’t have the head for it, and Iggy didn’t take dissenting opinions for an answer.
“She’s been looking for God in the machine,” Iggy went on, “so it’s your job to give it to her. Not for a long time, but eventually. The rest of us will be around Alexa after you’re gone. We’ll keep cajoling and nudging her deeper into her faith with the excellent tool of mockery. When it’s time, Alexa will need a way to connect the dots and follow the breadcrumbs. If you’ve used O tools to do what we need you to do, she’ll see those tools’ hallmarks…and then the jig will be up.”
Iggy stopped pacing and looked at Noah. Then, with an air of chastising, he said, “Do you have any idea how tricky it is, in a story, to lead a character to realize something without actually telling it to him?”
“No,” said Noah, “considering the storyteller is in control.”
Iggy laughed as if Noah had told an obvious joke. Then, seeming to consider the matter closed, he said, “I’m not a tech guy. This is your ball, your court, your everything. Define the problem for me. And don’t lean on O’s mined user data as your solution.”
Noah sat up. “Mindbender is tricky in a very specific way. We’ve been able to interpret and reproduce most of the electrochemical impulses from a brain. That part isn’t terribly difficult, and a lot of the same technology is already live on Crossbrace. So it’s just copying data. The problem is what I think of as a dislocation paradigm.”
“Mmm-hmm. That’s the philosophy stuff.”
Noah considered splitting hairs again, but Iggy hadn’t understood the difference the first time and probably wouldn’t now.
“Sort of. It’s a question of which mind is really the mind. If I’ve duplicated my mind online, there’s…” Noah paused. This part made him uncomfortable. He’d never been religious, but working on Mindbender made him wonder if he maybe always had been. “There’s something that seems determined to only recognize one or the other mind as primary, but not both.”
“In other words, as long as you’re using your mind and soul and spirit within your earthbound body, the Mindbender mind you’ve copied onto Crossbrace — ”
“Onto The Beam.”
Iggy rolled his eyes as if the difference wasn’t crucial, which of course it was. “As long as the mind in your head is still in use, someone out there keeps treating the other as an archive. Just files, and nothing more.”
“Right.”
“You know, I have a doctor I should introduce you to.”
Noah sat up.
“Real old-world kind of guy. Works in a castle.”
Noah sat back then rolled his eyes again.
“Name’s Frankenstein. He’ll give your Crossbrace brain the spark of life.” Then, when Noah didn’t react favorably, Iggy slouched and added, “And you think Alexa can help? Alexa Mathis. The erotic writer turned porn mogul.”
“She was gathering biometric and behavior data since before she hooked up with the rest of the Six and formed O. Since then, that’s what the company does: gathers user data. Did you ever hear the adage about how McDonald’s is actually a real estate company?”
“No.”
“O’s like that. They’re a data company, and sex just happens to be the most lucrative thing to sell — once the data shows you what people want. Innovation at O has always outstripped Quark’s in highly focused areas because it’s directly driven by things O can manufacture and sell. O’s profile aggregates and predictive models are the best out there. Because here’s the thing: Some parts of our Mindben
der uploads do light up, as if parts of the upload are willing to consider themselves independent. So what we need is a way to figure out what makes those parts special, and that’s what I’m hoping O’s information can show us.”
“Independent parts of an upload? Isn’t the idea to have one cohesive mind, not a bunch of little bits of intelligence, like random AI?”
Noah shook his head. He’d thought so for a long time, too, but as usual, breakthroughs tended to come when assumptions were tossed out the window. Inside a human head, the brain’s wetware had to be kept in one central place. But in computing, power had always come from distributed parallel processing. As early as the Internet days, even human tasks hadn’t been immune to the same idea. Recaptcha and mechanical turk had proved that huge groups of individual people, used efficiently, could parallel-process large tasks in no time if enough people shared the load.
Processing in pieces wasn’t the problem. The trick was in perfecting the system. You needed an efficient way to break a whole into pieces then a reliable way to bring those pieces together in the end.
“It’s so much harder to maintain the integrity of an archive — and by ‘archive,’ I mean a discreet mind that used to live in a discreet skull without other minds touching it — than it is to allow that archive to fragment and live in bits that communicate with each other.”
Iggy frowned. “You want to upload your mind…then let it break apart?”
“It’s the way the network wants to work. ‘All for one, and one for all,’ in a way. Trying to create discreet clusters not only violates entropy, which moves much faster in the new world — ”
“You mean online.”
“Right. It not only violates entropy; it’s also just totally inefficient. Fragmentation isn’t the problem so long as you have a way of keeping track of all the pieces.” There was more, but Iggy wasn’t technologically inclined. And there was something else, too: Just as intelligence moved faster if it was allowed to work in parallel chunks, Noah was loath to put 100 percent of his trust in Iggy’s hands. There were parts of this plan that only Noah should know existed, for insurance.
