Agent of Truth

by Grant Piercy

  I was broadcasting... I didn’t concentrate on who might be on the other end.

  There were OSS agents watching the mission. Other government agencies might have been made aware.

  The post read: “Recently, an operations team from the Office of Strategic Services was sent to stop a group of these dissidents from beginning their charge on society at one of their secret camps—an unspecified location called Home . There are secret camps like this all over North America. My sources also confirm that this camp was destroyed by a small nuclear warhead!”

  Secret camps like this all over North America.

  Secret camps.

  “What does this have to do with me?” I said. “Everything.”

  “Are you... are you him? Agent of Truth?”

  “No, but I need to find him. This is the only breadcrumb trail I have to follow to get back to where I belong. If I can get back, maybe Michael Render can get back to Daphne. Will you help me?”

  “You’re going to need to do a much better job explaining.”

  We sat beside Daphne until visiting hours were over. She didn’t wake. Her and Evelyn’s parents arrived, aghast at what their daughter had attempted. Evelyn and the doctors told them that she had delusions after Michael woke up and suffered severe depression when Michael’s memories didn’t return.

  Evelyn and I left the hospital together. She volunteered to take me back home, since I’d ridden to the hospital in the ambulance. On the way out the door, she asked, “You got a name?”

  “Let’s just go on pretending my name is Michael for now.”

  “Okay Michael. If you want me to help you, I need your story. You’ve got to give me something to trust you.”

  “Trust me,” I repeated after her. We got into Evelyn’s smartcar and sat for a few moments. She stared at me from the driver’s seat.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “I was what was called an architect. My mind had been uploaded to an android body—a once in a lifetime offer. It was all about processing information, but being able to understand nuance, which was why a normal synthetic wouldn’t work. A normal human couldn’t process information at the appropriate speeds, so this was their solution. They built in suppressors to prevent a technological singularity , but mine failed. We were also part of an experiment on dissidents involving mind uploads and replica bodies.”

  “Holy shit.”

  I laughed lightly. “You could say that. I introduced a few synthetic replicas to their original bodies, who were like blank slates. Their suppressors failed, and they experienced the singularity, just as I did. As we were escaping the facility, an OSS tactical team consisting of humans and synthetics conducted a raid. But we were already gone. I was broadcasting to the location, attempting to override all the failsafes. But not just for the uploaded, but for all of them. The tactical team responded by deploying a nuclear ordnance, annihilating the compound. I was watching through the eyes of an android called Jones when it happened.”

  “ Jesus, ” she said. “But how did you become Michael Render?”

  “I don’t know. It’s fuzzy after the nuke. I don’t remember much. Just watching it from a distance. We had a human with us... we worried he might suffer radiation poisoning, but we were far away from the blast. After that, nothing. I woke up in Michael Render’s body.”

  “But why? There must be a reason.”

  “Maybe I was cast out. Maybe they couldn’t forgive what I had done. Maybe I didn’t belong in their Eden.”

  “But you had this singularity, right? Doesn’t that mean you should’ve been able to see it coming?”

  She had a point. “Let’s just get back to the house, if that’s okay.”

  She commanded the car to take us back to the home of Mike and Daphne, the place I certainly didn’t belong. “So what’s next?” she asked. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’ll tell you when I figure it out,” I answered.

  I tried to parse the possibilities in my mind, the way I would when I was in the synthetic body, after the singularity had taken me. I could map out the different paths and probable outcomes, envisioning entire universes branching in infinite directions. It had been so easy, listening to the secret harmony of the universe as the music played, a bass line thrumming through all existence at the speed of life. Now it was just beyond my senses, beyond my vision and reach.

  I could follow the Agent of Truth thread—attempt to discover the user’s identity and location, though others had tried and failed. I assumed he was a government employee, likely OSS, who had intimate knowledge of the failed tactical op on the Home compound, meaning high-level security clearance.

  The riskier path meant moving through the looking glass, uncertain what would be waiting on the other side. I could provoke an OSS investigator and become labeled a dissident—getting arrested and erased like the others had been. But who’s to say I would land where I wanted, where I’d be in a position to investigate. I could just end up thrown in a hole and forgotten.

  “There’s one other thing I haven’t mentioned. It’s complicated,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a family across the street. The husband, he was uploaded to another android body—he’s one of the survivors. He was the human we brought with us.”

  “The husband across the street’s a robot?”

  “No. He was one of the blank slates. He renamed himself and went back to his family.”

  “So he knew about the explosion?”

  “ Yes. ”

  “Couldn’t he be the Agent of Truth?”

  I turned over the possibility in my mind—definitely worthy of investigation. Regardless, Adam would be the first one I’d need to turn to. Or even Didiane—he could’ve made her aware of the method of Home’ s destruction.

  We traveled mostly in silence until arriving back at the house. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll be back, and we’ll get started on finding the real Agent of Truth.”

  “What about you? With Daphne, I mean. Are you okay?” I asked.

  “The best thing I could do for Daphne is help you.”

  The Secret of the Remote Doomsday Device

  Op-Ed

  By Joanna Heard, Chronicle Staff Writer

  It was one of the most bizarre broadcasts to ever grace television sets and computers across the United States of America. A man named Robert Henry Baines had come into possession of what he claimed was a “doomsday device” called the Dead Hand. He gave an ultimatum of seven days for the world to provide him with a true answer to the question: why shouldn’t he detonate the device?

  After all, the world was already on the verge of a slow-burn climate apocalypse that would do the job anyway. If he went ahead and did it, the world wouldn’t have to passively wait it out.

  You can still see the video of Baines’ broadcast in various corners of the Knowledgebase, in which he sat in a blank hotel room, wearing glasses and a beard, in front of a clock that read 11:53, much like the Atomic Doomsday Clock counting down to midnight. What’s much more difficult to read about in the annals of the Knowledgebase is how this device came into Baines’ possession, or the authenticity of the device itself, or perhaps the most important question of all: if it was real, where did it go?

  Baines was captured seven days later in that same hotel room, having suffered an epileptic seizure next to the device. The only other thing found in the room with him was a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot , allegedly. He was also the only man in recent history to be executed for the crime of treason in the United States.

  But what came next?

  Let’s back up to the beginning. It’s not too far out of the realm of possibility that Baines actually had a doomsday device to begin with—a remote control for a nuclear arsenal does exist in our country, the nuclear football that follows the President at all times. The difference in the case of Robert Henry Baines was that it’s not supposed to be in the hands of a layperson . He had been given the
device by a Russian defector that went by the codename of Rogozhin, a name derived from the Dostoyevsky novel. Beyond the resulting incident with Baines, we have no evidence that this person even existed.

  So let’s take on the assumption that the Dead Hand doomsday device operated with the same basic concept as the nuclear football—a remote transmitter that would detonate specific weapons, triggering a global extinction event. It's reasonable to ask—since the seriousness of Baines’ crime incurred the response that it did—what happened to the device after its recovery from that hotel room?

  Robert Henry Baines was captured by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an organization notorious for its secrecy. The device should have been presented at Baines trial, but the government successfully labeled Baines a domestic terrorist/enemy combatant and was able to forego the normal channels of due process; therefore, the government never had to present the device at trial.

  During his execution, Baines made the cryptic statement, “You made the wrong choice, Block. You made the wrong choice.” But no one has satisfactorily answered the question of who Block was. And Baines never told. Was it possible that someone found Robert Henry Baines prior to his capture and gave him an answer to his question? And that maybe we owe this hidden savior our future?

  Regardless, the Dead Hand device disappeared from the pages of history after the capture and execution of Robert Henry Baines. But was it dismantled? Filed away in a warehouse? Once upon a time, we might have been able to pursue FOIA requests for this information, but that act has since been rendered moot, so we can only speculate.

  In the background, there has been a race to find the answer to how humanity might survive such an extinction level event. Many believe the underground Church of the Transferred Consciousness (Transhumanism as a cult) offers this as an answer in the face of global annihilation, though recent theories regarding Transhumans have gained traction in the various corners of the Knowledgebase that they are acting only for power’s sake. Perhaps this bizarre chapter in history spurred forward by the Cold War, half a century after its end, can be seen as the seed to humanity’s future rather than its extinction.

  The story of the Dead Hand shows a philosophical dichotomy at work: why allow humanity to survive on this planet when this is what we’ve done with it? It’s a flashpoint for humanity—we have grown so powerful that we can end all life on earth and are in danger of doing so... why should we be allowed to continue?

  Perhaps the answer to that question is best left to the person safeguarding the device, wherever they may be. An invisible sword of Damocles may be hanging over all of us, and maybe we should all remember that as we trust those in power to do right.

  14: mimic (regina)

  The difficulties with which you need to explain yourself to your company.

  “The damn thing is bricked—I can’t use it anymore,” I said to the technician on the other end of the line. This was a speakerphone conversation in my office, door closed. She sat lifeless in a chair against the wall. I’d done everything to clean her up for an exchange, including airbrushing and chemical spray.

  “Did you attempt to install the patch?”

  “Yes, I attempted to install the patch. It did nothing.”

  But getting home that night was ridiculous. Coming back home after watching, experiencing what I did... and he acted like nothing happened. She was perfectly cleaned and sterile, no trace of biological evidence of his transgression. I tried to imagine him dealing with her lifeless body, like cleaning up the scene of a homicide. She couldn’t move, and I left her in a position with her ass up in the air. I tried to imagine him trying to wake her back up when she was non-responsive. To turn her back on.

  “In order to exchange her for another model, we’re going to need a deposit taken from your departmental budget until we can ascertain misuse of the equipment.”

  “Excuse me? Don’t you keep these locked down?”

  My implant glitched, popping a small burst of static in my ear. The voice on the line said, “It’s possible that your model may have a virus or other malware preventing the patch from functioning. If that’s the case, the warranty may be void.”

  “This is company provided hardware. I can’t do anything with it unless you let me.”

  When I got back home that night, the night of the remoting incident, I held my emotions in check, despite the anxiety and rage deep in my chest. A woman needs to have a steel resolve for that sort of thing. I asked Devon if he had any success in installing the patch, and he said no. He said it seemed like she turned on for a minute, but then nothing, she froze. He left her sitting in that chair in the rec room. I told him I would need to see if I could exchange her for another model. He didn’t give away any reaction. He asked if the kids would be okay with a different nanny, of all things.

  I had to wheel her to the car on a dolly, which I had to bring with me so that I could wheel her up to the office. This was not as uncommon a sight as you might think since the blackouts began. NMAC shares were taking a beating in the market. I wondered how much longer this job would last if the company didn’t find a way to turn around.

  “It’s still possible to misuse company provided property, ma’am.”

  “But I didn’t misuse anything! This is the result of a blackout, which your people can’t fucking fix!”

  “There’s no need for profanity, ma’am.”

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry. Go ahead and bill the department, even if it is ridiculous. Will we get the budget back if you find no misuse of the hardware?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well submit the work order—I need a new model ASAP.”

  “A technician will be by to collect the model by tomorrow morning. You should expect delivery of the new model by Thursday or Friday.”

  “You can’t give me a more opportune window?”

  “I’m afraid that’s as accurate as we can be at this time. Is there anything else I can assist you with, Regina?”

  “No, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, clicking the line to hang up. “Fuck fucking fucking fuck, you motherfucker! Goddammit!” I hoped no one else in the office could hear me, but with the state of the company, I suppose an HR language violation could be overlooked.

  I stood up and walked to Opal as she stared lifelessly toward the door of my office. “What am I supposed to do with you? It’s not your fault my husband’s a rat bastard.”

  My implant glitched again, but this time she winced. I saw a muscle in her cheek wince ever so slightly, just enough to notice. Then another burst of static, as though all the air was being sucked from my ear—my hand went right to the side of my head, but so did hers.

  Opal.

  Her hand matched my movements.

  Then there was a clear tone emanating from my implant, and the two of us were connected. Our movements were like mirrors of one another. My right hand moved to touch her face, and her right hand reached up to touch mine.

  I backed away carefully, because she mimicked each movement of mine.

  “How do I turn this off?” I asked out loud.

  As I slowly backed to my desk chair, her feet scuffed against the floor, the chair scratching against the wall behind her. It was like a cornered animal unable to control itself. I cautiously picked up the control tablet and attempted to tether it with Opal, but she was already tethered to something else.

  Me.

  Remoting without a VR headset, without a body suit. Somebody figured it out, and they wanted me to use it. But it was just an aural implant! How was I supposed to see through her eyes? How was I supposed to take her anywhere? How could I control this?

  I closed my eyes, imagining what she could see. Like flexing a muscle, I imagined her examining her right hand and touching her own face. To my surprise, my nerves felt the touch on my cheek, but I hadn’t lifted a finger. When I stopped to look at her, the hand I imagined moving indeed had—it was resting on her cheek. She still looked directly a
head.

  I tried again, but this time with my eyes open. I just wanted her to tilt her head and look at me, and she did. Those vacuous eyes, observing a world I might never see or know. We stared at each other, as though facing oneself in a hall of mirrors, but the person looking back isn’t you.

  The clear sound coming through my implant, as though a wind was slowly blowing, sent shivers down my spine. Opal shuddered in response. I still needed to disconnect from her. I couldn’t exchange her now, not for all the money in the world.

  I had to call IT back and cancel the work order. Of course they gave me attitude about it, but fuck them. I must have looked hilarious with Opal mouthing the same words as me.

  But how could I leave the office? Opal and I would flail about out of step; we were bound to draw attention. Maybe the key was being in lockstep. I called my manager to let her know I needed to take some personal time—again, Opal mimicking my every gesture. I stood up in front of Opal with my back turned to her, carrying the tablet and my purse. She stood behind me. I marched out the office door carefully, making minimal movements, ensuring Opal followed behind. The look given to me by the lady in the elevator as Opal mimicked my button-pushing selection was priceless, but we moved through the building and to the car in the parking garage below as inconspicuously as possible.

  The smartcar took us home without the need for manual control.

  I called Devon, asking him to pick up the kids from the sitter after work. Hopefully he didn’t notice how short I was on the phone with him. How was I supposed to hold him accountable for cheating on his wife with his wife? I had to put off those thoughts until I figured out how to handle this situation without having the implant immediately removed.

  Once I got home, I looked under the sink for some aluminum foil. I walked downstairs with Opal, making sure she didn’t trip from the extra step she tried to mimic. In the rec room, I seated her in the same chair where I’d found her after the night with Devon. I stretched out the foil and placed it over her face, wrapping it tightly around and around. This was my attempt at interrupting the radio or Bluetooth signals tethering her to me. Wrapping the foil around her head, I felt minor static ripples from my implant.