Started with Errors (Relative Industries Series Book 2)

by Joanna Beaumont

  Started with Errors

  Joanna Beaumont

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Also by Joanna Beaumont

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Inside the ImReal control room in Zone 12, Beth watched the countdown timer.

  In ten minutes Jason’s immersion would activate, and the scene writing phase would fix the fake memories inside his brain.

  After that, the interesting part would start—the memory rejection algorithm would kick in.

  The algorithm reduced bleed through between real and fake memory sets by re-writing fake scenes. In Beth and Howard’s earlier test run scene re-writes had triggered at random timing intervals, which became far too distracting for the test subject. However, in the new modification, the one Jason was about to test, re-writes preempted memory retrieval, like detecting that an auto car was about to take a left turn and then diverting it from its intended course.

  The last time they’d tested together, Beth kneed Jason in the balls so she could stop Howard’s immersion, and he was still a little sore about it. Had Dr Bartholomew not signed off on the ImReal tech and taken the heat off both Jason and Beth, Meda might not have been so compromising.

  Dr Bartholomew wasn’t completely happy about signing off the use of ImReal for the government sponsored ‘Be Happy’ project; hence, the pages of ass-covering exclusions in his report, freeing him from any responsibility.

  Cait, Jason and Beth had worked on the test details for the whole of last year. After this run, ‘Be Happy’ would be ready to roll out across the New Cities.

  All their hard work was about to pay off, and Beth wasn’t missing a moment.

  She enlarged the image of Jason asleep in bed. His white quilt had wrapped tight around, like a mummified pharaoh. His expression was dead calm. She slid the diagnostics window next to him. Blood pressure, heart rate, brain activity; all reported normally.

  Jason would wake in his own time with the fake memories activated, and Beth and Cait would monitor him on the screens.

  Cait was late. She should’ve been in the control room now. Jason was unlikely to wake when the immersion activated, but he could, and he shouldn’t spot either of them until they’d assessed him.

  Beth sat in her chair and took a slice of pizza from the box the restaurant drones had dropped off earlier. She put her feet up on the desk and watched Jason while she ate.

  At 8:00 p.m., almost an hour ago, with Beth and Cait by his side, Dr Bartholomew had sedated Jason and injected the implant under the skin on his hand.

  Cait had kissed Jason, whispered sweet dreams, and then she’d left Beth to push the portable test station with the needles, implants, activation/deactivation panel and the server back along the Zone 12 walkway and into the control room by herself. She’d shrugged off the looks and sniggers she’d received while rolling along with her trolley like a tea lady and reminded herself that the fear of humiliation crushed creativity. At least Howard had not seen her. He wouldn’t approve. But she had kept her promise to him. She wasn’t testing on herself. She hadn’t tested on herself since they’d made their deal to freeze their embryos.

  Wondering if Cait had returned to Jason’s room after they’d left, Beth rewound the footage of him from the last hour. She had no idea how they could work together and be involved, but it seemed to work for them. Beth couldn’t work with Howard. They’d drive each other crazy.

  After the immersion activated, the code on Jason’s implant would first run the 3D mapping process, and scene writing would use the map to guide the nano-particles in the implant to the auditory and visual cortex, the functional sites inside the brain responsible for processing speech and sight.

  Many decades before, scene reading used the hazy images collected with fMRI then had later interpreted the tiny changes made to nano-particles when subjected to the active potential across a neuron. But the ImReal immersion wrote scenes inside the brain, and the test subject interacted with them like they would do a dream. After waking, the fake memories were indistinguishable from real memories.

  Like a movie, scene writing used just two senses, sight and hearing. However, convincing and compelling memory creation required smell and taste, and emotions like love, jealousy and rage. So the scenes had to trigger primal emotions and suggest the smell of coffee or the taste of a steak. And while dreaming, the brain spawned a wide neural-web inside the brain and connected the smell, taste and emotion sites together. The brain created its own neural network.

  Cait pushed open the door into the control room, wearing sweatpants and a baggy, white cotton shirt—probably Jason’s shirt. Her straight blonde hair hung loose and was perfect as always.

  “Sorry I disappeared. I was making the most of the time I had left before I’m stuck inside here again.”

  Beth detected a sadness in Cait’s voice.

  She rolled her chair next to Beth’s and sat down. Watching Jason on the screen wouldn’t stop Cait worrying about him. She remembered seeing Howard on the screens after he’d lost so much weight during his immersion. Never to be repeated. Cait had to be dreading this.

  “Two minutes left,” Cait said. “Pass me a slice.”

  Beth gawped at her. Was she serious? She couldn’t remember Cait eating pizza before. She normally turned her nose up at fat and cheese, which always made Beth feel like a lardy cow. She passed her a slice and watched her devour it. Then not even feeling guilty about it, Beth took another for herself.

  Eyes on Jason and leaning forward in their chairs, they counted down the seconds to activation like it was New Year’s Eve.

  Five…Four…Three…Two…One.

  But then, at zero, flashing on the diagnostics panel in large, bold red letters:

  Started with errors…Brain Mapping initialisation failure.

  Beth spat out a mouth full of chewed up pizza. “Shit! The code is still running. Why is the code still running? If mapping fails, the code should never move on to scene writing!”

  Beth spun around in her chair and scanned the lines of code, scrolling way too fast down her screen. Instead of writing scenes in the visual and auditory cortex, the code had overwritten random locations inside Jason’s brain. Each time the memory rejection algorithm wrote a scene it pushed red text to the screen, and it was dumping text constantly.

  “He’s waking up!” Cait said.

  Then in the next moment Cait was choking. Beth bolted up from her chair, whacked her on the back and pizza shot out of her mouth.

  Beth grabbed the back of Cait’s chair, and they stared at Jason.

  Under his quilt, his body spasmed. His eyes flipped open and stayed wide as if held by matchsticks.

  The diagnostics feed showed his heart rate was two hundred beats per minute, and his blood pressure was far too high.

  He fought
with his quilt. Then he sat up, jittery and on edge like a junkie after his next fix. His hands shook while he ran his fingers through his hair. A light sweat glistened on his face. But Jason’s eyes disturbed Beth the most. They either hunted around the room or stared into space vacantly. And he was speaking to himself.

  It was happening so quickly. All Beth could do was watch.

  Next he threw his quilt off and bolted out of bed. Stark-bollock-naked, he strode to the chest of drawers in the corner of his bedroom. Beth caught an eye-full but couldn’t look away.

  Jason yanked jeans from a drawer and hopped around while he put them on without underwear. Then he pulled a white T-shirt over his head. He stopped still, combing his fingers through his hair over and over and scanning the room like he wasn’t sure what to do next.

  Cait’s wide eyes looked up at Beth’s. “Why hasn’t the implant restored his brain back yet?”

  Beth’s mouth had run dry. This was a monumental fuck up for sure, and if any spawning had started, restoring might not work, but she couldn’t tell Cait her boyfriend’s brain might be bricked.

  Beth glanced away from her desperate gaze and calmly said, “That wasn’t procedure. If mapping fails, the code should never run scene writing. I don’t understand why it has.”

  “Well, it has and now we have to clean up the corrupted neurons. The implant must apply the restore file!”

  “We need to run a check before we can use it. If mapping failed when it collected the restore, we can use it, but if it didn’t, we’ll cause more corruption.”

  “Did mapping fail?” Cait asked.

  Beth pushed her chair in front of her screen and sat down. She held her head in her hands. She needed to search through the log files. But which log file first? She opened the directory on the system. There were hundreds of files, mountain loads of diagnostic information. She wiped her sweaty hands down her trousers and read each file name. She couldn’t think straight.

  “Did mapping fail, Beth?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Beth turned around and looked at Jason again on the large screen. He’d left his room and was running down the stairwell now. Was it better to stop the rewrites first? If the rewrites spawned a neural network, restoring would be useless. And if the restore file was corrupted, they couldn’t use it anyway.

  “Have we bricked his brain or not?” Cait demanded.

  “Back off, Cait! You’re not helping.” She swivelled back to her screen but could only stare at it blankly. Cait stood inches away, looking over Beth’s shoulder. Cait was literally breathing down her neck.

  Beth’s heart was beating hard. Her skin had gone cold and clammy. She wished she’d not eaten that sixth slice of pizza.

  “I’m sorry for shouting. He will be okay, won’t he?” Cait asked.

  Through pursed lips, Beth blew out a deep breath and turned back to Cait. Cait was trembling. Her eyes had filled with tears.

  “Give me a second, Cait.”

  Cait nodded and stepped away. Beth’s eyes couldn’t help but drift to Jason again on the screen behind Cait.

  Jason was on the ground floor, stalking down the walkway.

  Beth turned back to her screen and searched through the log files. She found the time stamp when the restore file was collected then opened another log file and located the same timestamp. If the restore file calibrated the parts of the brain overwritten by the scenes, they could use it.

  “Yes, mapping failed in the same way when it collected the restore file,” Beth said.

  “Really?” Cait sounded like a desperate child. She wiped her tears away.

  “Yes, really. We have the correct restore file.” Beth gave Cait a quick smile.

  “He’s going to be okay?”

  She pretended she hadn’t heard. If the corruption had spread, the restore would only be a partial clean up. Jason could be a completely different person when he came out of this.

  “So, what do we do?” Cait asked.

  “Tell the implant to apply the restore file.”

  “That’s what I said before!”

  “Well, yes. But if mapping had not failed when it collected the restore, then restoring would cause more corruption. Mapping runs twice, once for the restore and once for the scene writes.” Beth thought she should change that in case this ever happened again. No need to run mapping twice and risk it failing in different ways.

  “And then what would happen?”

  “Without the correct restore file?”

  Cait nodded. Beth dropped her head into her hands and slid her fingers down her face, distorting her features.

  “After we halted the scene rewrites the corrupted parts of his brain might have gone back to their original form by themselves. They could be malleable like the auditory and visual cortex. If not, we have older backup maps of various sites, and if they matched the corrupted positions we knew about…maybe we could get some of the old Jason back. Scene writing should never run if mapping fails, so we haven’t implemented a fail safe.”

  Cait sat heavy in her chair. “Shit! We could have bricked his brain.”

  “I need to tell the implant to apply the restore file. I’ll send the command.”

  Glancing nervously at Cait and desperately hoping spawning had not started, Beth looked up the command she needed to enter. She checked it again before typing on the control panel. This was not the time for more mistakes.

  Although they’d implemented over-the-air-activation and deactivation, they’d never sent an over-the-air message on a live test case striding along the walkway before. Beth pressed enter on the control panel then turned to the large screen to watch Jason. Beth had no idea how Jason would react when his implant applied it. Would he halt and spasm? Run and spasm? Drop to the floor?

  Beth focussed on him, expecting something to happen, anything to happen.

  “Where’s he going?” Cait asked.

  Beth turned back to her screen. The response to the deactivation message she’d sent to Jason’s implant had not returned.

  A successful response would have come back nearly instantly. It was taking too long.

  It was retrying to send the command, and Beth knew it was about to time-out on the re-sends.

  An error message appeared:

  Failed to send: Wireless Network failure.

  Beth sent the command again. They waited.

  It was retrying again. The same error message came back:

  Failed to send: Wireless Network failure.

  Fuck—the network was down. Beth turned to Cait. She felt the blood draining from her face.

  “Over-the-air isn’t working. We need to get him to a deactivation panel,” Beth said.

  They spun back to Jason just as he pushed open the door into the North Bar.

  “Typical. Even with a corrupted brain the first place he goes is the bar,” Cait said.

  He sat on a barstool next to a woman talking to her friend.

  Other people noticed his subtle rocking motion and peculiar eye movements, and five seconds later Jason had cleared a three-metre circle around himself as if he was carrying a contagious disease, but the woman sitting next to him was unaware and still talking to her friend.

  Beth checked the status of the comms network. It was red: off-line.

  “Comms is down. They’re upgrading the network, should be back online in four minutes,” Beth said.

  “Did you not think to check for scheduled maintenance?” Cait retorted.

  Cait was pissing her off now. No, she hadn’t checked for planned network outages. Cait could have checked too. The lessons learnt file would be bulging after this test run. It was unfair to blame anyone, but she’d let it go. Cait loved Jason. Beth would mark her down in her performance review though: does not cope well under stress, particularly when boyfriend’s brain could be bricked.

  The twenty cameras inside the North Bar gave them a good view from most angles. Jason leaned towards the woman next to him.

  Cait slammed her fist on
the desk. “What the hell is he doing?”

  Beth isolated their voices from the other noise in the room then increased the volume. Hopefully, he wouldn’t persuade her to go into the toilets. Cait would go ballistic.

  Jason nudged the woman playfully, and she turned around to him. Jason leaned closer, too close for someone unfamiliar, but she didn’t seem to mind. Cait’s eyes had locked on the screen.

  “Can you see them?” Jason whispered.

  The woman leaned closer to him. “Who?”

  Jason snapped his head back and looked at the ceiling. “The shadows.”

  She looked at the ceiling.

  “CIA, MI5, GCHQ, they’re all here, all listening.”

  The woman looked at him, then slowly she took in the three-metre area cleared around them.

  “You can see them, can’t you?” Jason asked her.

  She watched him, her eyes wide with alarm while he continued his shadow hunt.

  Too polite to stand up and move to another seat, she turned away from him, but moments later she left with her friend. The bartender, drying a glass with a tea towel, watched from the far end of the bar.

  The message light on Beth’s comms panel buzzed a few times before lighting up. She guessed the bartender informed the guards. The guards knew the test was happening and procedures were in place if Jason behaved oddly, and he was definitely behaving oddly.

  She checked the comms status again. It was red: off-line.

  She sent a thought-text to the panel and played-out the message.

  “Beth, this is Clayton, head of security, here. We’ve had complaints about Jason. He’s in the North Bar.”

  Beth had hoped she could handle this herself.

  She had no idea what Jason would do if he saw her or Cait before deactivation. Cait couldn’t take her eyes off Jason. Beth knew she shouldn’t be watching him.