The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  “Indeed we do.” He smiled.

  I could see through him now. I didn’t know what was in the case; I didn’t want to know. All I wanted was the money he had promised us. If Ellison thought his crew of ragtag thugs stood any chance against us, he was greatly mistaken. Even if every goon in this bar moved at once, Maze would have half of them down before I even slid out of the booth.

  Ellison's eyes twinkled with greed as he spoke. “I’ll need you to open the case so I can confirm its contents.”

  I turned the case toward him and opened it without looking inside. A low whistle escaped between his lips, so he must have been satisfied with the contents of the case. I closed the lid and moved it back to my side of the table. Ellison reached into his coat, and I felt my right hand drift down to my thigh. If he was going to make a move, he’d have to be faster than that. Instead, he threw two credit sticks out on the table.

  “Your payment and a bonus. The man who hired me for the job was extremely pleased with the successful outcome.”

  I looked at the credit sticks. It was a weird way to pay for a job, especially when he had our information to transfer the funds. The only reason I would have done it this way was if I planned on killing them and keeping the credits. I scooped up the credit sticks while shoving the case over to Ellison. The credits were safely stored inside of my coat, so I started to stand.

  “Oh, and Drake?” Ellison started to speak.

  Gabe’s voice shouted into my ear. “They’re coming in.”

  “He also asked for no loose ends,” Ellison said, and waved a hand toward the bar, hoping to distract me.

  Ellison reached for something under the table, but he was too slow. The first bullet ripped through his chest, and the second took off the left half of his face. There was something oddly satisfying about shooting a man with a real bullet. Sure, blasters got the job done, but the guns lacked that recoil and the noise that I loved.

  Turning away from the mess in the booth, I saw Maze lay down a barrage of cover fire as Gabe came in through the front door. Gabe dropped three men with his blaster before they even realized anyone had come through the door. Maze picked off the other three as they turned to fire on Gabe. A few of the patrons in the bar tossed their blasters on the tables or the ground in front of them. There was no reason to die now; the man who paid them to kill us was dead.

  “Everybody out!” They didn’t need to be told twice. Everyone left in the bar ran for the door. They couldn’t wait to be out of the line of fire. It was too bad we didn’t have time to search for Ellison’s stash. I had no doubt that it would have added nicely to the credits that we already made today. The people who fled the bar might be gone now, but they would be returning in numbers. They might not have liked Ellison, but a good number of them relied on him for work. With the possibility of pay off the table, they would need someone to blame, and that would be us. I’d prefer not to be around when they came back.

  I gave Ellison a good kick to make sure he was dead. With half his face gone, you would have thought it was a foregone conclusion, but it always paid to be careful. His pockets yielded a few more credit sticks. The amounts weren’t listed, but the prospect of extra credits made this trip worth it. Now it was time to decide what to do with the case.

  “Captain, we have to go,” Maze said, tugging on the sleeve of my coat.

  Gabe kicked open the front door and scanned the street. “All clear, Cap.”

  Picking up the case, I pushed Maze in front of me and headed toward the door. If someone wanted this bad enough to go through all this trouble, then it might be worth taking it with us to secure another payday. The last thing I wanted was for someone else to get my credits just because they had the guts to grab the case when I didn’t. Gabe strode out of the door, and Maze was right on his heels. I gave the bar one last onceover and then followed them outside.

  Until we were out of the slums, it was a good idea to move as fast as possible. We stuck to the main streets and moved at a quick jog. Once the trash piles started to recede and the buildings became taller, I flagged down an autocar and we all piled in.

  “Please state your destination.”

  “Alivera Space Station.”

  “The fee will be fifty credits. If you accept, please place your finger on the scanner.”

  My finger hovered over the scanning device, and the car started to move. We did it. We were out of harm’s way for the moment, and we got paid. The Talon would get us off this planet and away from the mess we left behind us. Once we were back in the black, we could figure out our next move. Now there was only one thing left to do.

  I laid the case flat in my lap and opened it up. I felt Maze stiffen next to me as my hands tightened on the edge of the case. It was worse than I thought. The only thing I managed to say as I closed the case again was, “Shit.”

  Chapter 6

  Staff Sergeant Pedia

  “Sergeant, the MPs have an unmarked package they would like you to come take a look at.”

  Great, just what I needed, another time sink on my already packed schedule. Today of all days, I didn’t have time to waste on some jumpy MPs. Everyone was on edge since the fusion bomb had been stolen. It was small enough to wind up just about anywhere, and if it went off, it could destroy a whole city. The only good news so far was that it hadn’t gone off, and we had been able to keep news of its theft away from the media.

  Checking on unmarked packages wasn’t exactly one of my jobs, but since the bomb went missing, they wanted me around in case someone mailed it to the base. Just because I had been stationed at the research facility for a year didn’t mean I knew how to stop a fusion bomb from going off.

  I let out a sigh. “Lead the way, Private.”

  The private held the door open as I picked up my glass of coffee. The last thing I was going to let those boys in security do was ruin my cup of morning delight. The private closed the door behind me and then scurried ahead to continue opening doors as we walked along. It was one of the perks of the job, not having to open your own doors. I’d hated it at first, but now it just felt normal.

  We rounded the final corner and moved into the docking area. The two MPs were standing beside an open box, and there was a metal case on the table next to it. As I walked forward, they moved to the side. My first thought was they were playing a joke on me. The case was obviously NEA property. If they wasted my time making me march all the way down here, there was going to be hell to pay.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I growled.

  “Sir, we opened the unidentified box, and this was what was inside.”

  I looked over the standard brown shipping box. It had the base’s address on it but no return information. How the damn thing had actually been delivered to the base in the first place was a damn mystery. Unmarked boxes weren’t supposed to be delivered to the base for security reasons. The box should have been dropped off at a secondary site on the edge of the city to be inspected. Just my luck that it was here now. A smarter man would have sent this back to that facility for inspection, but since the box was open and I was already here, I might as well take a look.

  “Have you opened the case yet?”

  “Sir, we thought we should wait for you.”

  So they didn’t want to take the heat for blowing up the entire base if it was the bomb. Well, I had news for them. If I opened the case and the bomb went off, they’d be just as dead. Moving to stand in front of the metal case, I slid my thumbs down the front and flipped open the latches. This was it. I felt the men tense beside me, and I let out a sigh as I slid the case open.

  It wasn’t a bomb. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. It was the missing bomb. Thankfully it hadn’t been activated yet. Who in the hell would steal something like this and send it back? Had someone actually been dumb enough to take a job breaking into a secure NEA location without asking what they were acquiring? It didn’t matter now. We had the bomb, and the Alliance was safe again.

  “Private, get
me General Sherman on the line. Tell him we have secured the fusion bomb, and to cancel the red status alert. Then bring me the phone.”

  We had the bomb. I had the bomb in my hands. I closed the case and started to head back to my office. What had started off as a shit day had just turned into a blessing. This was the kind of thing that got you promoted. I didn’t care who had taken the damn thing, only that it had been returned and to me. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife the good news.

  More About Bradford Bates

  Bradford is a stay at home dad for three wonderful dogs. So sometimes life gets chaotic, but he finds a way through it, via belly rubs and treats. When his canine overlords release him from his duties, he’s able to sit down and get some work done.

  When he’s not writing or being forced into retrieving yet another box of treats from the pantry, you can find him playing video games, or watching scary movies. Yep, he still gets scared, and that is why he loves them. More often than not you'll find a post on his blog about what he’s watching and how he felt about it. Being an author has been a wild ride, but every day he wakes up knowing he has the chance to do something that he loves. None of it would be possible without the love and support his wife gives him every day. She is his heart, his soul, his potato. https://www.amazon.com/Bradford-Bates/e/B012JWFCWM/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

  Genre: Artificial Intelligence

  DROP by Andrew Broderick

  DROP stands for Digital Representations of People. It belongs in the AI subgenre, and explores the extent to which an AI engine could deliver a visually and relationally convincing representation of a real person. Our protagonist has the means to create such a thing, and must use it to “download” and digitally copy his dying mother before time runs out. It is emotional, so have Kleenex at the ready!

  I write people with real needs and struggles. The plot is merely the wrapping, and could indeed be of any genre and still be a good story. However, I'm a science fiction writer and technologist, so that's the genre of choice. Please enjoy DROP, and check out my other works too - http://www.andrewcbroderick.com/amazonbooks

  The hairless old lady in front of me closed her eyes as instructed, and shifted so she was comfortable in the rocking chair. The crown-like apparatus on her head didn’t budge, indicating a snug fit. I turned to my laptop, sitting next to my seat, and clicked the Start button on a program that took up the entire screen. Text appeared in a window, one line at a time. The first lines read:

  Q: What is your name?

  A: Betty Ross McLean

  Q: When were you born?

  A: December 6th, 1960

  Q: Do you have any sons?

  A: One, Peter Andrew McLean

  Q: Do you love him?

  A: Yes.

  My eyes turned from the screen back to my mother. The blue walls of her bedroom became blurred as I blinked away a tear. It was hard to believe that I had found her after all this time.

  The questions and answers now related to her late husband, as the computer asked each question via the mind probe headset, recorded the answer, and assimilated the information into its database, slowly building the mesh of knowledge that was in her head.

  At the top of the screen was displayed: Nodes: 149/1648. This meant it had recorded 149 facts, but these had raised 1,648 further questions. After starting with a standard set of questions covering the basics of a person’s life, it would start zeroing in on the knowledge it had gained, expanding and deepening it. Nobody knew exactly how many nodes it would take to record the entire contents of a person’s brain, or even if it could truly be done. But, I was determined to find out. I was aiming to download the entire contents of her brain.

  * * *

  Three months earlier

  I was afraid of finding out who my birth parents were. For most of my life I’d known there was an inner wall that I couldn’t climb over, and they were on the other side. I was thirty-five when I finally started seeing a therapist, Judith, who led me to that wall. It was made of fear and dark places. I was in the process of scaling the wall when Judith died. I then shrank back into its shadow. But my fortieth birthday set the alarm bells off that I wasn’t getting any younger. It was time to face it.

  Since it was a closed adoption, my only option was to hire a private investigator to track them down. Less than two weeks later, he called me back and said, “Your father, Albert McLean, passed away from a stroke two years ago. However, your mother Betty is still alive—for now. She has stage four pancreatic cancer.”

  * * *

  Present day

  “How’s she doing?” I asked Maeve, one of Mom’s careers, on the way into the nursing home.

  “Pretty good for a post-chemo day,” Maeve smiled.

  “Thanks.”

  “Dinner’s in a half hour, but you can hang out up there while she eats.”

  “Got it.”

  I headed upstairs to Mom’s room.

  “Hi, honey,” Mom beamed.

  “Hi.” I knelt down and hugged her.

  After small talk about my work day, I said, “I don’t want to record your mind tonight. I want to take some video.”

  “Okay, dear.”

  “Just talk for now, but then get up and move around.” I positioned my phone on a tripod, with its stereoscopic 3D cameras on.

  “But what do you want me to talk about?”

  “Read a book? Recite a poem? Anything really.”

  “Psalm 103?”

  “Sure.”

  “Praise the Lord, my soul;

  “All my inmost being, praise his holy name.

  “Praise the Lord, my soul,

  “And forget not all his benefits…”

  We went on like this for a couple of hours. She had memorized a lot of the Bible. For a few minutes at a time (she was feeling weak that day), she walked around as she talked, and I captured her in 8K video. This would later be fed into a special program at work. It would take every facial expression, mannerism, verbal nuance, and wrinkle of cloth to build a physical and acoustic model of my mother. Fully processing this data would take a day or two, but the end result would be a photorealistic avatar that could be holographically projected, bringing her to life.

  I worked for a company called DROP, which stood for Digital Representations Of People. Our innovation was the mental mapping of the subject, through automatic neural interrogation, to effectively download their mind. That model was loaded into an extremely powerful AI engine, running on super-fast processors, which drove the 3D avatar and, crucially, allowed one to converse with it. Once I had completed this process with Mom, I would have a digital clone of her.

  * * *

  “Come on Mom, please,” I begged.

  “No, dear, I’m not feeling good enough today.”

  “Please?”

  “What is this damn contraption of yours, anyway?” Mom snapped, nodding at the mind probe cap.

  “I need as much of your knowledge and memories as possible, before…”

  “Before I die,” she growled. Her eyes were glassy with tears. She propped herself up in bed, grunting with the effort, and took a sip of water. She turned to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t look you up, Peter. I really thought it was for the best…”

  I nodded. “It’s okay,” I said, my voice catching. “I understand.”

  Mom shook her head. “We should have kept you. I wish we hadn’t given you up. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life,” she croaked.

  “You did what you thought was best at the time. I’d have gone through you and my dad’s breakup if you’d kept me.”

  “Peter, a mother loves her child like nothing else in the world. But I didn’t know that when I was sixteen. I had no idea who I was or what I was doing with my life. All I knew was that I was a teen mother in a world of hurt. I wondered who you were and what you were like every day after the adoption, but I thought I’d turn your life upside down if I came barging into it.” Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

 
I walked over and sat down on the side of her bed and embraced her. “At least we met,” I said. “If I’d waited a few more months it would have been too late.”

  * * *

  I looked up from the screen in front of me, around the other guys’ desks, and over at Tom’s glass-fronted office. Everything had a sheen of utter desperation. Every day that went by was one less that I had with Mom. I wished I didn’t have to go to work and could spend every waking minute with her, but it wasn’t to be, just like the whole concept of having an unbroken childhood in the first place. I had to make up for lost time.

  I opened up a file of code, and stared at a variable at the top called QPS. I examined each letter, weighing the great meaning of this setting. QPS, or questions per second, was set to 1, and always had been. We had assumed, during the development of the mind probe that a subject’s brain could only receive and respond to one question per second. We’d talked about going faster but never dared to try it. I clicked to the end of the line, deleted the 1 and its trailing semicolon, and typed 2 in its place. Semicolon, save, compile, reload.

  I selected Betty Ross McLean from the drop down menu, and the numbers read: Nodes: 162,980/124,633,659. I’d extracted a lot of information, enough to have a somewhat intelligent conversation with Mom’s avatar, but I wanted more. I had to have all of her mind. I needed the other 124 million nodes, and any more that the mind mapping program might identify along the way. I deleted the 2 and changed it to 3. I sighed. What if bombarding her mind at that rate caused her brain to melt down? But if it worked at one question per second, would three be that bad?

  * * *

  “Same as usual, just relax and let your brain do the work,” I said, feeling like a doctor instructing a patient. Mom just sat sweetly in the rocking chair and closed her eyes. I pushed aside my guilt and uncertainty over probing at three questions per second as I clicked Start. The screen filled with information much faster now. I switched my eyes from the steadily rising node counter to Mom and back again. So far, so good.