Neural Web

by Dima Zales

  Chapter Six

  I gape at the avatar as questions pepper Mitya from the rest of the room.

  “Dude, I see your charred remains,” I manage to say when I regain my voice.

  Mitya’s avatar is now completely solid, and there’s a hyperrealism to it, like when you switch from regular TV to ultrahigh definition. Also different are his clothes. He’s wearing something reminiscent of a toga and a helmet with a swan on top, and he’s carrying a double-headed axe and a shield with a bull’s face etched on the front.

  “Okay,” he says, interrupting the nonstop questions. “Here’s the deal. As you guys know, I’ve been worried about my biological brain.”

  “Right,” I say for everyone. I already know what he’s about to say, but we all need to hear him say it before we can officially start to process the information.

  “I last backed up the biological connectome when I went to bed yesterday,” the strangely dressed avatar continues. “When my unfortunate disembodiment occurred a few minutes ago, a special set of instructions was activated as soon as my Brainocytes declared official brain death—a set of instructions you people would have thought paranoid.”

  “You figured out a way to run your mind without the biological brain?” Ada gasps. “I thought you were still far away from making that work.”

  “I settled on a prototype solution about six months ago. Just didn’t have a good way to test it.” He lets go of his axe and shield, and they hover in the air. “Is this so hard to believe? Only a small fraction of your mind is biological now, anyway.”

  Muhomor looks him up and down a couple of times. “It’s not just the brain that makes us what we are. There’s also the rest of the body.”

  “Speaking of that,” Alan asks, clearly intrigued, “how does it feel to be without a body?”

  Mitya grimaces. “I can’t tell you for sure, because I was only without a body for a few subjective milliseconds. Now, though, I’m running an ultrarealistic simulation of the real body”—he spreads his VR arms—“plus I’m inside a couple of our top-of-the-line surrogate bodies as we speak—though I have to say, we’ll need to further this line of research immensely, else I can forget about going on a real-world date.”

  He doesn’t seem too put out, but that’s not surprising. Even when he had a body, Mitya mostly used VR for intimate encounters because of an obsessive fear of sexually transmitted diseases.

  Muhomor stares pointedly at the axe. “Okay, I’ll be the asshole to ask: what’s with the getup? This is not how you used to dress when you were a real boy.”

  “Since I’m pretty much pure mind now, I figured I’d make myself look like the Slavic god of wisdom.” Mitya pointedly grabs the axe and shield from the air and waits expectantly. When no one says anything, he says with clear disappointment, “Radagast.”

  I can’t help but look up the god in question.

  “According to what I just read, Radagast was a god of hospitality,” Muhomor says, beating me to it. “Hence the ‘Rad’ part, which is Russian for ‘happy,’ and ‘gast’ for ‘guest.’”

  “It’s also very likely that such a god didn’t exist,” Alan adds, “at least according to what I see on the Russian Wikipedia page. Radagast might’ve been the name of a town that an ancient chronicler accidentally turned into the name of a deity.”

  “And most importantly,” Ada says, finally smiling, “Radagast was the name of that wizard in The Hobbit movies, the one who lived with a bunch of animals in the woods. Then again, I guess I do see some resemblance.” She puts up a screen with the likeness of the crazy old man in question.

  Mitya’s avatar momentarily shimmers, and a moment later, he’s standing there in a very typical jeans-and-hoodie outfit. “I didn’t expect this much teasing on the day I die.”

  “Jokes aside,” I say, staring at my lifelike, sort-of-dead friend, “you’re going to be legally dead. What does that mean for your fortune? For your status in human society?”

  “Funny you should bring that up.” He stands up straighter. “I’m discussing this very thing with Mr. Kadvosky right now. Hold on, let me pull him into this room.”

  A man with noble, eagle-like features appears—an avatar we all recognize as the favorite of Nathaniel Kadvosky, recently appointed Head Attorney at Human++. The avatar exudes gravitas to such a degree that no one dares mention that in the physical world, he looks more like a plucked sparrow.

  “This is a historic case,” Kadvosky says without so much as a hello. “Supreme Court judges would have a hard-on if they heard of this—at least those of them able to get hard-ons.”

  “It won’t be that difficult to build a case.” Mitya sounds as if he’s continuing whatever conversation they began earlier. “I don’t have a will—”

  “Nor do you have children or close relatives,” the lawyer says. “No one benefits if you’re declared dead—aside from, perhaps, your business partners.” He looks pointedly at the rest of the people in the room.

  Mitya visibly saddens at the mention of his lack of family. His parents were murdered a while back, and he didn’t take the loss well. It might even have been the trigger for the obsession that led him to research how to remain alive after death.

  To pull him from his momentary funk, I say as confidently as I can, “Mitya’s not dead, as far as I’m concerned. I would not challenge his share of the company.”

  “I feel the same,” Ada says.

  Muhomor nods. “He’s as lame now as he’s always been. I wouldn’t declare him dead, that’s for sure.”

  “So no heirs,” Kadvosky sums up. “That’s good, but that fact alone doesn’t hand us the case. What will help is your idea of presenting this as a disability. There’s a man in Florida who lost half his brain in an automotive accident, but he’s fully functioning, thanks to Brainocytes, and no one disputes his personhood or that he is alive. We have quadriplegic people who move around on Human++ legs and eat with Human++ arms; no one challenges their status as living, either.”

  “Yeah, we can coin a new term: quinqueplegic, or septemplegic,” Mitya says.

  “I notice you skipped the term for six.” Muhomor chuckles. He expectantly surveys our humorless faces, then defensively adds, “Because in that case, the term would sexplegic.”

  “If anyone here were sexplegic, it would be you,” Ada tells Muhomor. I bet it’s taking all her willpower not to smack him on the back of the head, something she feels she can let herself do in VR because it’s not real violence.

  “The actual term is irrelevant,” Kadvosky says, and I’m impressed at the admirable job he’s doing at pretending Muhomor isn’t even there. “We can use whatever term the PR department decides would have the best resonance with the public.”

  “But what about the question of identity?” Alan asks. “I don’t think we want to abandon the question of inheritance so quickly.”

  Ada and I exchange proud glances. Kadvosky seems to be lagging behind Alan’s train of thought.

  “What do you mean?” the lawyer asks.

  “Knowing Mitya, he’s probably already figuring out a way to copy himself,” Alan says. When Mitya smiles mischievously, my son adds, “That’s what’s happening with the servers in Ohio, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Mitya says. “The Ohio servers took the brunt of running what used to be my biological brain. All our servers are running at peak capacity now, which is why I wouldn’t worry about my copying myself for a while.”

  Alan looks back at Kadvosky. “You need to plan for when he does clone himself. Who will own his money at that point?”

  “Your other selves will certainly only get one vote during our Brainocyte Club meetings.” Muhomor crosses his arms across his chest.

  “I can remain a singleton for a while,” Mitya says with a hint of disappointment. “Or I can design a new mind modality where me and my clones will become a sort of hive mind. But long term, yeah, this is something we’ll need to work out—just not now. I’m sure a new copy of me should
get some resources from me, a little bit like a child does from a par—”

  “Why don’t we focus on the immediate issue of your corporealness?” Kadvosky moves to adjust his glasses, then remembers he doesn’t wear any in VR. “I don’t think the Supreme Court would find the fate of your copies as interesting as the status of your current self, though I personally find the implications fascinating and would gladly discuss them further.”

  “What is the worst-case scenario?” Mitya asks Kadvosky with a seriousness unusual for him. “Can the law decide I’m software that can simply be deleted?”

  “No need to get so dramatic,” Kadvosky says. “In the worst case, your legal status would be akin to that of Einstein. Before we let the AI drive cars and drones, we made sure it has the same legal rights as corporations. In other words, you will still be able to own things, be sued, and sue other people. You’ll also be able to give money to political campaigns and so on.”

  “But corporations can’t marry,” Mitya says.

  I can’t resist. “If you find the right girl, you can have a merger.”

  Kadvosky gives me a scathing glance. “I have a lot of work ahead of me. I’m going to have to leave you to continue this conversation on your own. Just keep telling yourself that brain amputation is not death.”

  Without waiting for a reply—or perhaps dreading one—Kadvosky poofs out of the VR room in a manner most VR users would find rude. Leaving the room through the virtual door is quickly becoming the custom.

  Alan responds to Mitya’s subdued expression with a worried look. “Am I the only one who’s looking on the bright side of this? You won’t need food or to use the bathroom. You can run drug trial simulations on your simulated brain with no harmful side effects. You can boost your mind to a degree we can’t even dream of. You can—”

  “Young man,” Ada says to Alan in her stern maternal voice, her hands on her hips, “don’t even think about ditching your biological body, not over my d—”

  Joe’s avatar slams the conference table with such force that the virtual glass shatters and the table breaks into pieces.

  “Enough of this bullshit,” he says through gritted teeth. “It’s time you apply your sorry excuse for enhanced brains to the actual attempt on your lives.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ada and I exchange guilty looks. Joe is right. Someone put together a coordinated attack on us, one that spanned the whole globe.

  “I already did some investigating,” Mitya says defensively. “My thought process is at least double what it was when I was slowed down by a biological br—”

  “Dude, stay on topic,” I say, noting how Alan’s eyes shine with avarice at this tidbit about Mitya’s new state of being.

  “Right.” Mitya manifests screens with the faces of the four bombers and reads the bio as he points out the bomber from Bahrain. “This is Hamad Marhoon. He’s a programmer for the Al Baraka Banking Group. He was the first of the bombers I thoroughly—”

  “Racial stereotyping,” Ada grumbles. “Great.”

  “If I were stereotyping, it wouldn’t be that big of a leap.” Mitya looks at me for support, since I was in Manhattan that day on 9/11. When I don’t support him in time, he adds, “This doesn’t seem to be Jihad-related—or whatever the politically correct term is for that type of terrorism.”

  “I agree,” Muhomor chimes in. “Bahrain is a progressive coun—”

  “Right.” I nod. “Plus the other people involved in this make it seem unlikely.” I already knew some of this from the facial recognition app that’s always running in my head, but I haven’t had the chance to analyze it yet.

  Mitya points at the next man. “This is Vurnon Corsen. He’s a Curaçao native who does security and IT for Campo Alegre, a legal brothel. He’s a Catholic and a father of four. Nothing in his profile hints at why he’d want to hurt us at all, and I have a hard time picturing someone recruiting him to be a suicide bomber for any cause, let alone some radical Islam group. Even less suspicious is Garcelle Derulo, a Haiti national who worked for Royal Caribbean Cruises as a nurse. The man was a saint—he worked almost a week straight, pro bono, helping the recent earthquake victims. They wrote about him in the papers.”

  “I just checked the NSA files,” Muhomor says. “None of these people were on any terrorist watch lists. Checking the Russian sources next.”

  “Speaking of Russia, this is Ermolai Ruzatov, and I think he’s our best lead.” Mitya motions at the pale face of the third bomber.

  I realize I’ve been avoiding this bio because the man’s face invokes conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he almost killed Ada, so he got what he deserved. I’d kill him again to keep her safe. On the other hand, I ripped this man’s heart out of his chest—not something I would’ve imagined myself capable of, even if the situation demanded it.

  “Ruzatov is a quality assurance engineer for Gazprom,” Mitya reads. “He’s never been religious and has no living family and only a few friends outside work.”

  “He doesn’t belong to any terrorist groups, either.” Muhomor puts up a bio in Russian, something he must’ve gotten from the “Russian sources” we’d rather not know about.

  Ruzatov seems boring, as far as Russian government interests go. He’s never criticized the current regime or done anything worthy of notice.

  “Why did this Ruzatov come to our conference?” I ask. “He’s from Vladivostok. He would have no trouble getting Brainocytes there.”

  Muhomor looks smug. “They all had Brainocytes, every one of the bombers. But that and their fascination with technology in general is the only thing I can see that links them all—and they share that fascination with billions of other people.”

  Ada rubs her temples. “I won’t ask how you know they had Brainocytes.”

  We pride ourselves on the privacy we provide to our users, so the fact that Muhomor can get that information so quickly isn’t something we’d ever want the public to know.

  “Don’t be so paranoid,” he says. “I simply extrapolated their Brainocytes status based on how they used easier-to-hack technology.”

  “So,” I say before Ada can have a fit of righteousness, “did they ever email each other? Or call each other? Or meet in person?”

  “No. At least, not prior to getting Brainocytes. Afterward, it’s harder to say. Everything sent out is Tema-encrypted.”

  “What about the bombs?” I look at Joe. “There are ways to track those.”

  “Working on it,” my cousin says. “But the local police departments aren’t being very helpful. Did any of those four people show any interest in the Luddite movement?”

  Muhomor looks thoughtful for a moment—probably querying his prodigious resources. “Ruzatov had a coworker named Eugene Blinov who’s part of the Green Party. That’s the closest connection I could find. But the Russian Greens aren’t that interested in Human++.”

  “Why, Joe?” I ask, recalling the protestors outside the museum on Alan’s birthday. “Do you think the RHO or someone like that is behind this?”

  “I don’t know.” Joe kicks a large piece of the virtual table glass, and it shatters against the wall. “I’ll find out soon, though.”

  “It’s feasible,” Mitya says. “The Unabomber was anti-technology, and his manifesto sounds like the same crap you might hear from the RHO.”

  “I’ll deal with the RHO,” Joe says with barely disguised menace.

  “Don’t hurt anyone,” Ada warns.

  “Not without evidence,” I clarify.

  Ada gives me a narrow-eyed glare.

  “I could use some help investigating in Russia,” Joe says without dignifying our comments with a reply.

  “I’m not going to Russia,” Muhomor and I say at the same time.

  Muhomor is a wanted man there, and I still have nightmares from what happened the last time I was in the country.

  “Uncle Joe doesn’t want you to go,” Alan chimes in. “He’d have a hard time protecting you there. He proba
bly wants you to use one of our robots—so can I help?”

  Joe gives Muhomor and me a look that seems to say, “How is it that a four-year-old is so much smarter than the two of you?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Mitya says. “I can help also. The only trick is getting some avatar bodies. Because of the laws against them, we have very few operating in Russia and none in Vladivostok right now. I should be there in a couple of hours, though.”

  “You start on that,” I say. “The rest of us will think through other possibilities and explore other angles.”

  Everyone gets busy, and as things quiet down in the VR room, I get a private telepathic message from Ada: “Please join me in the Bedroom.”

  The Bedroom is a euphemism for the virtual reality sex room Ada and I use for intimate encounters when we’re not in proximity to each other (our Manhattan penthouse also has a non-virtual room designated for sex only, separate from our bedroom).

  As soon as I think about it, I find myself there. Out of habit, I enhance my muscles in the way I hope Ada likes and put on an outfit she designed for me to wear here (one I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in the real world).

  As soon as I see the expression on my wife’s face, I realize this isn’t going to be the usual sort of session we have in this room. Her eyes look puffy, and there are deep worry lines on her forehead—incongruous details among the sex toys, swings, mirrored walls, racks of lingerie, gallons of scented oils, and ultrarealistic VR characters with slack expressions and varying degrees of seductive nudity.

  Seeing Ada like this instantly makes me wish we could be in front of each other in person. But I still have a few hours of flight time before I reach New York City, and her flight is longer still.

  “I thought I would lose you.” Her hands are visibly shaking as I take her small, cold palms in mine.

  “It’s okay, babe.” I try to sound as reassuring as I can. “You’re stuck with me forever.”