by Sean Platt
For example: Iggy shouldn’t know that one piece of the fragmented puzzle (the master cypher, which unlocked the code) actually needed go into another person’s mind entirely rather than being stored with Noah’s. Or that another piece (the coalescence engine, which showed the pieces how to defragment and reform) would need to be stored inside yet another.
But for Iggy’s purposes, this was good enough. A smart man always kept a back door open, and aces up his sleeves.
Noah stood from the couch, crossed to Iggy’s bar, and opened a crystal decanter of scotch. He smelled it. Noah barely drank, but liquor’s scent was intoxicating.
“I need O’s user data,” Noah said, restoppering the bottle, “because with a large enough data pool, I can model mind uploads, predict outcomes, and run experiments. If I know Alexa, O has probably done some of the analysis already. You’ve hear the way she talks about sifting her sex workers’ key talents so O can build their avatars. It really is religious with her. But an avatar…why, that’d be most profitable for O if it truly resembled a human mind. When you think about it, Iggy, O growing an avatar from user data is a hell of a lot like what we’re trying to do with Mindbender.”
Iggy snickered. “No wonder Alexa believes. But the things that make her able to figure some of this out for herself make her more important as a believer and a future ally, not someone who’s in on the story’s truth from the start.” Iggy shook his head. “I’m telling you, Noah: O’s data is off limits, and we cannot tell Alexa what we’re up to. Trust me on this. You’ll need to find another place to get your mind data.”
“Where the hell am I going to find that large a pool of intelligence data?”
Iggy tapped his chin. Noah watched him then turned his search inward. The issue mattered, and Iggy was strategic enough to understand. At first (and maybe for a long time), making Mindbender click would only matter to Noah West. But once the model was proven, anyone with means would be able to upload, live digitally, even build new bodies for themselves and create utopias in the sky to live like gods. Until then, official word even among Panel would need to be that Mindbender had met a dead end. Iggy, out of them all, was patient enough to keep the secret and wait.
“What about Respero?” Iggy said.
“Respero?”
“You’re the computer guy. Would that work?”
“Would what work? I don’t even understand the question.” Noah blinked hard. Maybe he understood it after all. And worse: He wasn’t nearly as repulsed as he should be because Iggy’s off-the-cuff suggestion was right. It fit the bill far better than O’s data pool ever could.
“Never mind,” said Iggy. “It was just a thought.”
Noah held up a finger. “No, that could work. A Respero chamber is essentially just an evaporator. Who do we know in Respero? High up.”
“Everyone.” Iggy laughed. “You do know the strings that Panel can pull, right, Noah?”
“Okay. Then we start immediately.”
“Start what?”
“Start on a new Respero unit design.” Noah began pacing, now making Iggy look stationary. He’d need to entangle the changes with patents and decoy technology so that anyone who cared to investigate would believe the new units were merely enhanced reclamation chambers. “Two-stage cycle. The second is evaporation, same as now. But the first is a high-bandwidth Fi upload.” He tapped his chin. “This won’t be easy. Can I talk to Eli?”
“Only if you want him figuring out the rest.”
Noah paced. And thought. “Okay. I’ll push pause on Beam development to make time. The units won’t be able to upload that quickly, though, to get it in before the evaporation cycle begins. So we’ll need the subjects mapped beforehand.”
“You mean just follow Respero cases around with scanners before their time comes, painstakingly making a brain map so the upload can go quickly?” Iggy made a sarcastic smile. “I think they’d figure out something was up.”
“More than that,” said Noah. “The cortex needs to be primed to create the map. So we’ll also need subjects reflecting during the scan.”
“Reflecting?”
“Thinking about their pasts. Reliving memories.”
“So in the hours before their deaths,” Iggy said, frowning faux-thoughtfully, “you want state-mandated euthanasia victims to look through photo albums and remember the good times. While being scanned. Sure. That’s easy.”
Noah’s mind was churning, pieces falling into place. If this could be done, Respero could be revitalized from the ground up. New units in every Department of Respero would, with proper maps made ahead of time and multiple overlapping scanners working in parallel, be able to conduct Mindbender uploads in the seconds before the subject was evaporated. Uploads made in such a rush would be messy, and that was a problem because Noah’s own experiments proved that even meticulously collected uploads tended to crumble. But hundreds of people were Respero’d every day in the NAU, so the pool of uploaded minds would rapidly grow. Within a year, even accounting for losses due to rushed uploads, Respero would create a database larger than anything O could possibly have.
Once the database was formed, Noah could experiment all he wanted. Respero subjects were officially dead and gone, and nobody went looking for them. With hundreds of thousands of new minds to sift every year, Noah suddenly felt confident that it was all just a game of numbers. He could suss out what made some archives stick and others fall apart. His estimates right now predicted that at current failure rates, only 0.002 percent of minds would be able to maintain the level of data integrity required for Mindbender viability. But given the numbers involved, Respero would still give him plenty of success stories to choose from — many solid minds he could study to learn how to make it work.
Noah looked at Iggy, who was still waiting for an impossible answer. In order for a quick upload in the Respero chamber to have any chance of holding together, the machine would need a neural map. And in order to get a complete neural map, scanners would need hours of deep-memory activity to lead the mapping software in the right direction.
“We ritualize it,” Noah blurted.
“Ritualize it? What do you mean?”
“You’re the storyteller. So we tell them a story. It’s supposed to be mercy killing anyway, right? So we make it look like the state wants to make the whole thing more merciful. Right now, people are wheeled into rooms in hospitals, and they never come out — neat and tidy, but kind of a bummer and pretty sterile. But what if we turn Respero into something totally different? Stop thinking of it as medical, and make it social as well. Hell, make Respero graduations an honor; I’ve seen O do stranger manipulations to what you’d think were immutable morals and beliefs. We create events around the whole thing. Maybe before you get evaporated, there’s a ceremony. Or better — a fancy dinner. A time for…oh, yes, this could work…a time for family and friends to say goodbye.”
Iggy nodded. “Okay. And…what? Someone’s there with covert scanners, to make the maps?”
“State Respero agents. But they have to dress nice. Seem to be part of the party.”
“Sounds expensive.” But now Iggy was rediscovering his stride. A moment later, he said, “But the state doesn’t pay anyway. Like you said, we make it a point of honor to have a great Respero Dinner. It’s already ritualized a little; people accept it; there are cards you can buy, for shit’s sake. So…yeah.”
“What about poor people?” Noah asked.
“Quick and dirty. They get a short version — just long enough to get the map. Like a final meal more than a fancy dinner, but…but everyone who knew them still gets together. Shares photos, shit like that. Get them reflecting on those old days enough to push the right buttons.”
“What about people with no families? Gutter Enterprise, people like that who get sent to Respero?”
Iggy waved a dismissive hand. “Can’t win them all. But this would allow the units to upload most of them. Okay. I can work with this.” He nodded and paused. “Sho
uld I ask the ethical question?”
“Which ethical question?”
Iggy laughed. “Okay. I guess I won’t ask it. Because this is all for the good of mankind, right?”
Noah hadn’t been joking. Iggy’s question had been serious, but already Noah could see the tall man rationalizing. And it really was for the good of mankind. For mankind’s best and brightest, anyway. Because that was the thing about evolution: in order for it to work, only the strong could survive.
But still, in the wake of his laugh, Noah could see doubt forming on Iggy’s face. The issue as a whole was solved; Iggy was practical that way. But the man was also a thinker, and the disturbing facets of the idea had wormed beneath his skin. Noah could see it forming like a benign but troublesome cancer.
“What?” Noah asked, watching him.
“I was just wondering what it’d be like,” Iggy said. “Expecting to die then waking up again if they’re one of the few minds that stick. What would they think, returning to consciousness and swimming amid the billions of failed, fragmentary, probably demented Resperos? The ones that survive — would they wake up on the network, do you think?”
They’d have to. That was the point. The statistical few who made the upload intact would be Mindbender’s first successes, albeit scattered and less-than-ideal ones. They’d have undergone the brute force, sheer-numbers filter that no person would ever voluntarily undertake on their own — but they’d be successes nonetheless.
“For the good of mankind,” Noah said, dodging the question.
Violet awoke to the sounds of screaming.
For the first few seconds, she felt totally disoriented. The last thing she seemed to remember was being wheeled into the alloy chamber. Her mother had held her hand and hadn’t wanted to go. Dad had wanted to pry Mom away. Violet had been watching the ceiling, unable to move, only noticing her parents when they entered her view. It had been that way for most of Violent’s recent (at least she thought it was recent) memory. She’d been able to hear and see, but the doctors kept saying she’d never improve, that she was locked inside her mind and worse than terminal. Still, without the ability to respond, seeing and hearing had felt like a hollow talent. So when everyone had begun saying that poor little Violet James was destined for Respero, Violet had figured it was no big deal. She’d been dead and a burden to her family for a long time anyway. Except that Mom, in those last seconds of memory, must have forgotten her acceptance. Until Dad peeled her away, she’d refused to let her little girl go into the darkness alone.
For Violet, in the last bits of memory she could recall, there had been only ceiling. She’d felt a sense of lifting, and the air had seemed to fill with fireflies.
And then she’d been here, wherever this new place was, suddenly able to move. Not exactly able to feel her body…but able to come to her knees, look around, and see the way the rear of the large room of well-dressed people was tearing itself apart. She didn’t know where she was. But within seconds, she did know one thing: that she definitely didn’t want to be here.
Everyone was shouting. People were rising from behind, as if from the floor itself, dressed in what looked like mecha armor. Shots were being fired; Violet could see the deadly things striking the ceiling overhead and raining plaster dust like snow. She saw at least one person blown back when one of the warriors took aim. That person did not get up. Violet hoped they were okay. She hoped she was okay.
She remembered a man. A man in an apartment. A man who’d been struck.
But there was no proper place for that memory, especially here and now. Her mind felt divided. On one hand, Violet felt sure she’d never met that odd young man — never had the memory that somehow felt far more recent than the Respero chamber. But there was another part of Violet — a serene part, and that was definitely the word: serene — that felt sure that she had been in that apartment with that man. That she’d tried to help him. That she’d tried to give him clarity. Because that man knew something that others didn’t, and those others needed to find out what he knew before it was too late.
Violet shook the thought away when Mom appeared at the crowd’s front, practically elbowing a man in the face to sprint forward. Behind her, a woman seemed to fly through the air as if tossed by an impossibly strong hand. To the flying woman’s right there was a loud banging before a red splatter appeared on the wall.
Mom ran to Violet. Violet stood. Then Mom ran through her, stumbling to fall on the floor.
“Violet!”
She reached back to help her up. But again, the other hand went right through Violet’s as if she wasn’t here.
There was shouting to her right. Violet saw four people: three men in formalwear and a woman in a sheer gown. The woman was goggling at her while two of the men scrambled to drag the others away. Somehow, the woman seemed familiar. Just a touch, as if they’d once passed each other in public.
Then one of the men turned, assisting the last member of their party in trying to pull the tall red-headed woman away. Her face seemed to clear at the new man’s touch. The woman’s focus moved from Violet to the man. And she punched — not slapped — him hard in the face.
“Dammit, Natasha, move!”
“You son of a bitch! You evil, selfish, stupid son of a bitch!”
Another of the men grabbed the redhead, and they both pulled, dragging her away. They were just in time. Something hit the wood floor where Violet was sprawled, flashing blue like lightning. It ripped boards asunder in a long gash, its noise like thunder.
As the woman was dragged away — actually dragged, with both men hooking hands under her armpits — Violet became aware of Mom, kneeling, trying to touch her. Each time, her mother’s hand went through her leg, her arm, her torso, her shoulder, her face.
“You’re a hologram! What…where are you, Vi? Is it really you? Are you…are you really here?”
Amid the chaos, her words were strikingly out of place. Violet wanted to urge her mother to get out but was curious for the answers herself.
A few of Violet’s memories were beginning to surface — or to return, perhaps. They were distant, like her memory of the man in the apartment.
A school.
She had children, despite being little more than a child herself.
A sense of floating.
A feeling of a spoon made of chocolate, melting as it stirred in hot soup.
“Where…where are you, Violet?”
“I’m right here.”
A sense of being everywhere. Everywhere at once.
“But you’re being projected! Where’s the…the…” Then, more slowly: “The file?”
“Mom, what do you — ”
Violet stopped when a new shot struck the stage. This shot hit her mother too, and she crumpled into a corner. The daughter was the one who was supposed to die. But that’s not what had happened.
The others had fled. The room turned to chaos, people versus something like cyborgs. The half-metal woman who’d shot her mother with fire was coming forward, gunning for Violet.
The room screamed.
And now, with her mother dead, Violet screamed with them.
Nicolai and Kate were about to bar the door with a chair — as if that would help — when Kai elbowed her way in.
“Thank West it’s you,” Nicolai said.
“Who were you expecting?”
“Anyone. Maybe Braemon. Kate promised to meet him here after the magic show.” Nicolai looked into the hallway before shoving the door closed and propping the chair in place as planned.
“I don’t think a chair under the knob will keep anyone out who wants to come in,” Kai said.
“What’s going on out there?”
Kai sounded out of breath. “Some sort of an assault squad. Highly equipped. They seemed to come up from the…from the fucking floor. Not police. But not like a normal riot, either. It’s…it’s precise, Nicolai. It looks like chaos, but I can tell it’s not. They’re looking for something.”
> Nicolai turned toward Kate, who was still banging away on Braemon’s canvas. “Anything?”
“I uploaded the Doc shell, but nothing’s opening up. It just glitched hard.”
“We saw that happen in the front room,” Kai said.
Nicolai stepped forward. “Let me try York.”
Kate’s eyes hardened, and for a second Nicolai saw Doc Stahl’s formidable intensity. “I told you, this is the plan. You’re our last resort. Rachel fucking Ryan wants your shell used, that’s reason enough not to use it. This is our plan, Hopalong, not yours.”
Nicolai turned to Kai as Kate returned to her work, trying to force Doc Stahl to open doors that Nicolai knew perfectly well had always been a wild goose chase.
“Speaking of Rachel…”
“Dead,” Kai said.
“Just like that?”
“It’s not hard to kill someone, Nicolai,” Kai spat, her manner all business. “I did my job. Now you do yours. Tick-tock.”
“Stay away, and let me work,” Kate growled, her manner fully Doc’s. Even hair, legs, and large breasts couldn’t convince Nicolai that Kate wasn’t his old dealer in sheep’s clothing.
Nicolai listened as something exploded in the front room. He felt instinct prickle inside, suddenly sure that it was only a matter of time before someone stormed down the hallway. There was no reason to come back here if the action was in the front room, but for some reason Nicolai still felt certain that someone would be here in seconds. The sense was animalistic, like a prey smelling a predator on the wind.
“You’ve got ten more seconds, and then it’s my turn,” Nicolai said.
“Motherfucker, you are not going to install that shell!”
“Let him try,” Kai said.
“You stay out of this, freckles.”
Kai’s composure seemed to break. “Let him try! This is the last fucking resort! While you two were back here measuring your dicks like you always seem to — ” she stared directly at Kate, her eyes saying, You heard right, “ — I was out there while cyborg commandos were coming up from the…from the motherfucking sewers, I don’t know…and doing my job. And if you’ll just fucking step aside and let Nicolai try what we already know will work, maybe we can get out of here without this all having been useless!”
