How to Beat Tomorrow

by J Foster Ward

  “What’s his program?” female N26 103.1 eyed him distastefully.

  “Gossblumed meat-popsicle, some Hindustani knock-off,” male N26 104.1 dismissed him.

  “Ignore him, I’m giving orders here. Let’s go,” Sub-officer Whiteman barked.

  They were all turning away.

  Jacob felt a cold knife of confrontation. “You should know. There’s something out there. It’s not a question of if someone got in. It’s more a question of ‘how do we avoid getting our skulls eaten by it’.”

  Now he had Whiteman’s attention. “How do you know? Who are you?”

  “Jacob Mortimer. I know because I’ve been here already. Outside this room is another room and outside that is a hallway and that… well that’s where something tore me apart.”

  The room digested that a moment.

  “Some… thing?”

  “Why him? Why you? Why send you alone?” N26 107.1 asked. Jacob was starting to get a feeling like she was used to bossing people around.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jacob said.

  “Mediocre!” Whiteman exclaimed. “You,” he pointed at Jacob. “Show me. Rest of you: weapons,” the sub-officer ordered the room.

  Jacob approached the door until the glowing bird hologram appeared and we waved his hand through it. He led Whiteman into the observation room and the other door.

  “I don’t know who you are, but you contradict my orders again and we’ve got a problem!” Whiteman snarled in a low tone. “Stop trying to subvert the mission!”

  “I’m not… what? What mission? I’m trying to help.”

  “Help by not helping! That’s an order.”

  Jacob fumed, but before he could shout back the other naked humans had joined them.

  ***

  The wall locker, obviously some sort of emergency supply kit the others called a ‘Krisis Kit’ or simply the ‘K-kit’; Jacob realized the fast-forward button was actually a stylized letter K. It yielded a couple disposable scalpels, the drug injector and a bottle of hydrochloric acid. The orange-coded locker in the observation room produced a mutli-headed fireman’s prybar, two breather masks and a hefty orange fire extinguisher. But it was the tall locker that made Jacob stop and stare while the others broke it open.

  “Well there’s yer motoslave,” girl Number N26 103.1 said. She said her name was Bitchmurder; Jacob had had to ask her to repeat her name twice after she’d introduced herself.

  “Oh, he’s a beauty,” the guy with the cut lip and drug injector elbowed forward to get a better look in the crowded observation vestibule. He’d introduced himself as Americano Dean Jr. and that was one of the least improbable names from the squad of duplicates. “This is vintage! A Yoyodyne model 120A/2!”

  “It’s an antique piece of shit,” N26 107.1 complained. The girl with the black eye had introduced herself as ‘Milan’.

  The figure inside the locker was vaguely humanoid. Like a metal skeleton with a series of metallic bronze and steel sealed components roughly replacing hip bones, rib cage and skull. The hands and face were sheathed in disturbingly lifelike foam rubber or silicon of some kind. It wasn’t just dipping into the uncanny valley; it was plummeting into the uncanny chasm. Americano flipped an access panel and after a moment adjusting something internal the machine’s eyes lit up and it propelled itself to standing, stepping out of the closet and taking in the crowd.

  “Apologies shareholders,” it said in a nervous male voice. “I was unable to greet you properly after your awakening. My automatic enable drive must have sustained damage to due to prolonged operational usage beyond warranty. I recommend this unit be deactivated pending full-service overhaul.”

  “Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh- NO! Fuck that,” Milan shook her head. “They promised me a motoslave, you’re coming with me. These things have like a lifetime warranty anyway.”

  “That’s-“Jacob tried to find the words. “That’s… What is that?”

  “Yeah, not the top of the line,” Bitchmurder agreed.

  “B-but what is it?” Jacob insisted.

  Sabotage Jones eyed him like he was crazy. “You are gone looper. As if you never seen one before. It’s a flunk, a tommy, a toaster.”

  Jacob shrugged incomprehension.

  “You know: a droid. What’s the matter, you got pattern degradation, ganz?”

  “My unit designation Lexic-88,” the robot stated, extended a hand to Jake to shake. Jake eyed it like a chainsaw. “It would be my honor to escort you to the biogenic and imprinting facilities. If you will just follow me.”

  The robot walked jerkily. But out the door, within a dozen steps, it had regained a more human gait, as if walking off a long stiffness. It took the right branch of the corridor but Jacob paused to point left and spoke to the sub-officer. He had spotted a discoloured patch on the floor about midpoint to the next door.

  “Whatever… whatever happened to me. It was down there.”

  “Okay. We check it out. Leg it,” Whiteman said, and the squad of clones followed him towards the brown stain.

  Weapons poised the naked squad approached the splatter of drying blood, gone brown and crusty. Only towards the center was it still slightly tacky. The white lab coat was glued to the floor with blood.

  “How long do you think?” Whiteman asked.

  Jacob shrugged. “Felt like five minutes ago. I don’t get it. I was alive, and then I woke up here, and I walk down a hallway and something kills me, and now I’m alive. Again.” Despite the happy drugs he seemed to be on, he felt a surge of anxiety clawing its way to the surface. “How is this happening?”

  “You signed up for Tomorrow, just like the rest of us,” Whiteman dismissed him.

  “What’s Tomorrow?”

  “Whaddaya mean what’s Tomorrow? This. This is,” the sub officer said, annoyed.

  “No, no. Wait. I think I get it,” Jones was grinning at Jake with dawning comprehension. “What year do you think this is?” she asked Jacob.

  Jake blinked. What kind of a question was that? “I don’t know. Uh, I remember 2027 and I was hospitalized with the final stages of Viral Huntington’s. So I guess, I guess I’d say I… what… was frozen in 2027?”

  “You mean died.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Died. Kakked it. You weren’t frozen, you gossblume died, ganz.”

  Jones brayed laughter. “Aw comon, don’t you guys see it?” he asked, smiling. “Resurrection Inc is contracted to provide services to the Tomorrow project and provide re-jacketing for us corpsicles when we activate. But they started experimenting with personality downloads way waaay back even before the discovery of UE-242.”

  “Get to the point already,” Milan sighed, bored, gently prodding the swollen black eye beneath the N26 107.1 tattooed on her face.

  “He must be a load tolerance experiment for the cortical stack,” Jones said triumphantly.

  “By the Martian Buddha, you’re right,” Whiteman said. “He’s a – a test pattern!”

  ***

  Chapter 3

  : Saboteur

  “So what year is it anyway?” Jake demanded as the others either stared or laughed at him. Milan didn’t do either; she just looked bored.

  Jones shrugged “Laagered if I know. But sure as squid isn’t 2027. We-“ and here Jones emphasized the word to show how much she didn’t include Jake, “- were all processed and inducted into the Resurrection pool in 2292. And I’m guessing it’s been a solid century since.”

  “They said a hundred years at least before we’d be thawed,” Bitchmurder nodded agreement.

  Jacob swallowed that like a lump. Almost 400 years after he died? Impossible! He looked around; they didn’t have anything like this, especially not robots, where he was from.

  But…

  But if it was… everyone he’d ever known was dead and turned to dust.

  He felt a massive sense of relief. The father he could never impress would never judge him again. The co-worker who’d never retu
rned his advances after the drunken flirting at the office party and had instead filed a harassment suit: gone. Case-worker who’d forced him through demeaning interviews to collect his disability pension; that fucker was dead. Ex-wife who’d left him: super-gone. Boss he’d wished would drop dead: had done just that.

  Lexic-88 the robot had returned and politely, but passive-aggressively, had insisted they follow it. The droid was leading them the way back down the right-hand corridor. Jake had no idea where he was, or if anything these strange clones said was true, but decided to follow them and see what happened.

  What other choice did he have?

  Whiteman and the rest of the squad huddled at the elbow where the hallways met. Warily watching the clanky robot’s progress. When the stiff-legged bot reached the far door it paused, the door slid aside, and it entered.

  “Looks clear,” Whiteman said and made several hand motions.

  The others responded, leapfrogging up the corridor in twos. Jake grinned at them; they looked like naked college kids going streaking, and pretending their fingers were guns in a game of cowboys and Indians. Whiteman and Jacob were the last ones left and as Jacob just stood there the sub-officer grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along until Jake shook his arm free.

  At the door Whiteman held up the red plastic bracelet on his arm to the panel in the doorframe – some sort of scanner, and the portal slid aside. The lack of scifi ‘ssshusht’ sound made Jacob inordinately sad. The squad silently slipped inside.

  One glance and Jake began to believe he might really be living in the future. Like the other chamber it was made with plastic white walls and the slowly oscillating yellow and white illumination panels. Unlike it, four massive glass tubes nested amongst a heavy base of machinery and tubing, evenly spaced across the room. Again, there were two swivel chairs, set in front of a featureless slab of black glass or plastic. Lexic-88 stood at ease by the chairs.

  “Plu, uuurrreeeease proceed with biogentic manipulation,” the robot spoke with an extended squeal of slurred sound in the middle.

  Whiteman looked at him dubiously. “Do it. Initiate.”

  “I’m afraid this unit is not programmed for medical procedures,” Lexic-88 apologized.

  Whiteman frowned and settled into one of the chairs and smeared his hand across the black surface, clearing an arc of dust. Immediately dozens of glowing holographic displays in yellow blue and red sprang up, hovering just above the physical surface.

  “Cool,” Jake breathed, leaning to get a better look.

  Whiteman bit his lip, studying the display for a long minute. He began making adjustments. Sticking his fingers in intangible hologram readouts to slide levers, turn dials, flicker patterns of oscillation and bar graphs on and off. Finally he made one final jab and the doors of the four biogentic chambers popped open on a puff of dusty air and the machines came alive with the hum of pumps and machinery.

  Jake didn’t want to ask what it was all for. After a moment of arguing, four of the squad climbed inside them. The same vaguely familiar male voice came from nowhere.

  “Most excellent. Settle in, agents Bitchmurder, Milan DuPont, Owem Gee, Americano Dean Jr.”

  The doors closed. The tubes filled with frothing green slime. Once they’d finished thrashing and beating on the glass tubes to escape and the liquid entirely filled the chambers the four clones found they could breathe quite well in the substance and merely floated. Jake had read about that sort of thing once; perfluorocarbon mixture: breathable liquid.

  That left Jake with the sub-officer and Sabotage Jones.

  “That looked complicated, what you did there,” Jacob said to Whiteman. “Do you need to show one of us how to do it?”

  The man with the N26 102.1 drawn on his cheek abruptly turned to Jake, leaning into his personal space, face set in a grim line.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  A long moment of silence stretched, and Jake realised it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “I know who I am. I’m Jacob Mortimer. I don’t have any idea how I got here, or where this is, or even when this is.”

  The man snorted. “I can tell you who you are not. You are not one of my agents. You are not an authorized representative of the Tomorrow program. And do you know what I think you are?”

  Jake didn’t like the way this thug was trying to intimidate him. He squared his shoulders and glared. “No, but I bet you’re going to tell me.”

  “You’re a dirtworm. You’re a saboteur. You’re a virus hacked into the system by terrorists, sent here to undermine this facility for one of Nevermore’s rivals. Maybe even destroy the whole operation.”

  “That’s not what the computer thinks.”

  “The computer is acting very strange. Something is messed up and I think you’re behind it. And until I know what, dirtworm, I’ve got an eye on you.”

  “Hey ganz, that’s all very intimidating,” the other clone said, having witnessed the whole thing. “But dirtworm or not he’s got a point. How does the machine work?”

  The sub-officer grunted. Sighed. “This button right here,” he pointed.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s the ‘ON’ switch. Took me a while to find it.”

  Jacob sighed. This idiot acted like he knew everything, and he knew nothing! He shared a look with the Sabotage Jones – female number N26 103.1 – and she made a curious two-finger gesture at her temples and rolled her eyes..

  Jake decided to take a chance that she was friendlier than the guy who’d just accused him of being a virus and stepped closer to speak in a quiet voice.

  “What is this for again?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Jones narrowed her eyes.

  “Nope.”

  “TCP couldn’t predict existing conditions on Trigger Day.”

  “Sorry, what’s TCP?” Jake interrupted.

  “Tomorrow Central Programming. It could accurately predict that the environment after an extinction level event would be nothing like the one we left. Biogenetic updates give our clone bodies greater adaptability and survivability. If, for example, the surface conditions were baked by solar radiation we’d receive radiant resistant skin; if the conditions, say, were that of a second ice-age we’d be updated with bodies resistant to cold.”

  “Well let’s hope you get a higher pain tolerance thrown in. You guys go down harder than a date on prom night.”

  “I hear the words you say,” the clone stared at him. “But it’s total gibberish, ganz. But now that you mention it, why does everything hurt so much?” Jones asked. “Hey sub-commander, what’s going on with the pain?”

  Whiteman glared but something behind his eyes made Jake think the sub-officer had been wondering the same thing.

  He spoke to the ceiling; “Operations? My team encountered an extreme pain reaction earlier. Can you tell us if it’s the effects of cold storage?”

  “No.” the male computer voice answered.

  “No, you can’t say?”

  “No, it is not the after-effects of extended shelf storage. It is the effect of the removal of your Trauma Interface and Gratification Regulator.”

  “The what?” Jake asked, but the other two clones weren’t listening.

  “The gossblume thing say?” Jones demanded. “Removed our Tinglers?”

  “Operations, please explain. Are you saying…” here Whiteman seemed to swallow hard, as if unable to imagine the entire concept. “Are you saying we have no Tinglers?”

  “Correct.”

  Before Jake could find out what that meant, the four goo-filled chambers began the draining process amid a battery of flashing indicator lights and in moments the gagging squad members emerged, coughing breathable liquid out of their lungs.

  “Next up, let’s go,” Whiteman barked.

  “Uh, no thanks,” Jake didn’t move.

  “Listen dirtworm, I am not leaving you out here, while I am in there,” Whitman snarled and pushed Jake into one of the capsules until it closed shut aro
und him.

  Along with Jones, Whiteman got into a tube and the doors sealed shut with a hiss.

  It was worse knowing what was coming. He tried swallowing the liquid into his lungs a bit at a time and convulsed and choked, throwing it up instead and only when the tank was entirely full could he force himself to expel the air from his lungs and suck in a lungful of green goo. It required more effort to force in and out of his chest but otherwise he couldn’t tell the difference from breathing air.

  Small nozzles in the ceiling of the tube opened and he imagined mutagens flooding the liquid. Out of instinct he held his breath but eventually had to breath and his body began to tingle. So did his skin. Probably he was absorbing it through his pores.

  A hologram list of writing was projected on the inside of his tank and slowly scrolled downward. Presumably what he was being upgraded with.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  He could only guess what half of it meant. His body began to tremble as the changes took hold. It was not painless. When the liquid drained and the hatch unlocked he practically threw himself outside, tripped and lay shivering on the floor.

  The illumination panels were burning a deep, vibrant orange when he looked up. Through the green tint of the goo he’d missed it somehow.