Neural Web

by Dima Zales

  I run, barely breathing, my heart rate squarely in the anaerobic zone. When the place tries to be a maze and puts a mirror in my way, I shatter the offending surface with a well-placed kick. My goal seems to be to not see myself in any of the reflections, so I do it again and again as more mirrors pop up.

  When I kick the tenth mirror, pain explodes in my leg, but the cursed glass doesn’t even crack. The pain breaks my concentration, and I catch the reflection staring back at me—and regret it instantly. The baleful glare on Joe’s face makes his everyday coldness seem warm and fluffy.

  My whole body freezes in panic as Joe’s face stares back at me with varying shades of wrath from the infinitude of mirrors. A scream escapes my mouth, vibrating the air so violently the mirrors around me ripple and explode in a chain reaction.

  I’m on the verge of some great epiphany when the image in the mirror that refused to break morphs.

  First, Joe’s military cut grows into tufts of white hair that spread like a halo around his head. Next, his features soften into a wrinkly smile. Soon, Einstein’s famous face is staring at me, eyes twinkling with wisdom and mirth.

  “This is a dream,” I tell Einstein, my fight-or-flight response already calming down.

  “We discussed this one in therapy,” says the AI’s German-accented voice. As usual, in the context of psychology, it comes off sounding suspiciously like Freud. “You’re not becoming a monster.”

  “Make a note to discuss this again when I’m awake. For now, I want to try lucid dreaming again.”

  Einstein nods and disappears. After a moment of concentration, I soar upward toward the drone still flying in the empty, mirrored sky.

  Chapter Ten

  I wake with a start to the sight of Gogi’s face too close to mine. Given that I can hear a car’s engine and see my friend, the Do Not Disturb cycle must be complete.

  My cheek burns. He must’ve tried to smack me awake, one of the few ways to bypass the Do Not Disturb app—but not needed in this case, since mine was no longer on.

  “You have been unconscious for five hours,” Einstein says. “You had one minute of REM sleep, and I estimate that your sleep debt is still a full night’s sleep of eight hours, which I suggest you get as soon as you can.” Mitya has been incorporating emotional cues and contextual information in this latest version of Einstein, and the AI’s voice sounds annoyingly caring and consolatory. “Current time is 7:36 p.m.”

  I’m jealous of Ada, who’s still napping thanks to her longer flight. Rubbing my eyes, I wonder if I can order Gogi to let me sleep but decide against it, since my chances of getting quality sleep during the short ride are slim to none. Besides, given the time of day, it might be best if I suffer for a few hours and then sleep when it’s dark out. For now, I might as well catch up with my friend.

  “If I had a ruble for every time I dragged you from the plane to the car, I’d be able to retire,” Gogi says, a smile visible through his Stalinesque mustache.

  “You can retire now,” I answer groggily, unhappy that the Do Not Disturb app made me miss my landing. “You own a piece of Human++.”

  His face turns serious. “What’s with trying to get yourselves killed when it’s my turn to babysit?”

  “Next time I’ll try to get bombed when you’re around.” All remnants of sleep flee from my mind. Realizing I might be channeling negativity at the wrong person, I add in a conciliatory tone, “You can help find and deal with the people responsible. How are you at controlling the robots?”

  “The kid has been training me,” Gogi says. One of the robots inside Zapo X (at least I assume that’s what we’re driving) gives me a salute.

  I give Gogi a rundown of the recent events as I proceed to multitask, a part of me rejoining the VR room to check on the investigation.

  “I secured four robots,” Mitya says. “Your cousin is already walking one to speak with the bomber’s Green Party coworker.” He points at a screen where people are staring in awe at the shell of Joe’s robotic body stalking through the Russian streets.

  “Excellent job,” I tell him. “Gogi just volunteered to take one, and so have I.”

  “It might be best if you take one to speak with the bomber’s mother.” He warily eyes Joe’s VR avatar. “This task might require some finesse.”

  What goes unsaid is that Joe and Gogi are not above torturing the poor woman, who doesn’t yet know she lost her son, for information. Even before mingling my mind with Ada’s, I firmly believed the sins of the parents don’t transfer to their children and vice versa. With my post-Join outlook, I want to help this woman instead of interrogating her. The only issue I see is that I’m the one who killed her son. Facing her might be hard, though I probably deserve whatever discomfort I feel.

  “I’m going to try to locate his father,” Mitya says and puts up another screen showing a robot that also begins moving. “The dad is a drunk, and the mom divorced him a long time ago. But who knows? Maybe this Ruzatov guy stayed on speaking terms with his old man.”

  I take possession of my designated robot, an older model that reminds me of a microwave oven mixed with a Cylon from the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica. I plug the mother’s address into the GPS app and start clanking down the street. The GPS interface is the same as the Brainocyte one we put into wide use a couple of years ago.

  As I walk the Russian streets, I’m overcome with déjà vu. Though my native Krasnodar is nearly six thousand miles from Vladivostok—a distance possible only in Russia—I might as well be walking the streets I remember as a kid. This is what happens when you recycle architectural designs the way the Soviets did: cookie cutters seem original by comparison. In America, some of the government-built housing, such as the projects in New York City, evoke this kind of feeling, only this part of Vladivostok is much grayer and danker.

  To avoid becoming depressed, I look with my real-world eyes through the limo window at the streets of midtown Manhattan. Compared to Vladivostok, this is another world. In a strange way, when I swap points of view, I get the sense of traveling into the future, then back into the past—and I mean years, not just the switch between day and night brought about by the fourteen-hour time difference. Of course, this isn’t a fair comparison. Moscow is a lot like New York when it comes to the adoption of new technology and would make a fairer match; comparing a backward Vladivostok street to Manhattan’s Midtown is like comparing New York City to Nowhereville.

  New Yorkers have adopted every single one of Human++ innovations and still crave more. Though it’s long after most offices have closed, robotic commuters still litter the streets, a vast improvement for folks who live in the boonies yet whose jobs require their physical presence. No one so much as blinks at their metallic figures, and it’s clear that the future is going to look a lot like the movie Surrogates (but hopefully without the societal issues). For every robotic wearer, thousands of people are using VR to work remotely. All the big firms not only allow but encourage this form of telepresence, which allows them to hire the best people regardless of where they are in the world. Also, it helps that VR space is much cheaper than real-world office space, especially for companies based in Manhattan.

  VR’s presence is affecting more than the way people work, of course. Tourists on the street are using both augmented and virtual reality, their expressions blank as they tune in to the tours engineered to trigger near popular sights. The natives are just as affected by the new tech. Instead of keeping their noses in their smartphones and other devices, everyone is “in their heads.” People who can afford premium Brainocyte services are able to multitask while walking, and they watch the new, fully interactive movies that have more in common with video games than with the movies of old. Those using free entertainment end up sitting in cars and public transportation while doing the same.

  The cars, including ours, are all electric, silent, and self-driving, and most of them are commandeered by Einstein. For the first time in over a century, there are no traffic jams to
speak of in Manhattan. The air is as clean as in rural areas, and even the noise pollution is down, thanks in part to Brainocyte-enabled telepathic communication that’s quickly redefining the way people interact.

  The relative quiet of the street is short-lived, however, because when we get to 42nd Street, we see a crowd of protestors. Their shouting is hard to discern, but signs like Brainocytes Steal Your Soul and Humanity Is Lost leave little room for doubt that this is yet another demonstration by the RHO or a similar group.

  “Is this a coincidence?” I ask in the VR room. “Or should we reroute the car?”

  “You should reroute in any case,” Mitya replies instantly. “I just calculated the travel time to your apartment, and your current route is the slowest.”

  “Are you going to become our Einstein replacement?” I ask.

  “I can integrate with Einstein much better now,” Mitya says. “It’s now clear to me that the biological brain is a bottleneck of a sort. I can think much, much faster already, and I’ve only just begun to tweak my capabilities.”

  “We’re walking through this crowd,” Joe says without even a hint of interest in this fascinating update on Mitya’s condition. “No one here is wearing bombs.”

  He must be using a sniffer device, a gizmo designed by one of the enhanced engineers at Human++ R&D. Sniffers are orders of magnitude more reliable than a dog and, to quote Ada, “don’t require canine slave labor.”

  I authorize Einstein to take the path Mitya recommends and ask, “If Joe is in that crowd and Gogi is in the car, who’s watching Alan?”

  “I’m with Dominic, Father,” Alan replies grumpily. “Also Jacob and a slew of others.”

  “Alan, you’re smart enough to realize security is necessary,” I say, figuring it beats “watch your tone, young man,” which was my initial instinct. “Plus, you like Dominic.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” His petulant expression looks odd on his adult avatar’s face. “Just get home already.”

  Though I don’t say it out loud lest I upset Gogi and Joe, Dominic may be the most qualified person to stay with Alan, and not just because of their friendship. A schoolteacher back in his early twenties, Dominic enlisted in the army after 9/11 and eventually became part of the Special Forces. That’s how his path crossed with Joe’s, but their personalities couldn’t be any more different. Dominic is as straight an arrow as I’ve ever come across. An IED explosion left him in a coma, which he came out of two years ago, but the traumatic brain injury he received left his body in a completely locked-in state, unable to move any muscles. Unlike some people in that condition, he didn’t even have the ability to blink yes or no in response to questions.

  Brainocytes gave Dominic back a form of sight, a way to communicate, and an exoskeleton that allows him to move around—that is, until Dahan, our Director of Nanotech, works out an even better solution, enabling nanomachines to repair the damage he received. A state-of-the-art bionic arm replaced the one Dominic lost in that explosion, and he claims he’s unable to tell the difference between his left and right arms anymore.

  In large part because of what he regained thanks to our help, Dominic is probably the most grateful and loyal person who works for us. I’ve grown to trust him almost as much as I trust my closest friends and family.

  Almost ready to stop worrying about my kid, I remind myself that Alan mentioned that Jacob is guarding him as well. Jacob is extremely competent. His quick reactions saved Muhomor’s life in that hospital four and a half years ago, and he’s moved up rapidly through our security ranks ever since.

  “I’ve built Dominic a VR world,” Alan brags to me privately. “It’s doing wonders for his PTSD, and I think he’ll be able to walk up to cars soon without feeling any panic.”

  “Let me know when your VR therapy worlds are ready to be turned into a product,” I tell him. “They’re helpful for me. I’m actually now walking in Russia and don’t feel any dread.”

  The truth is that I do feel some negative emotions as I walk the morning streets of Vladivostok, but this isn’t due to irrational leftovers from my misadventures in Russia. I worry because a crowd is walking menacingly toward me. American protestors can look plenty angry, but these Russians seem even scarier in their emotionless movement.

  I make the robot cross the street, and the lynch mob crosses the street at the same time, leaving no doubt they’re up to something sinister.

  I turn my robotic head and see another, smaller group of people flanking me from behind.

  “Joe.” I cram my telepathic message with apprehension. “Look at what my robot is seeing.”

  “It’s not just you.” Joe’s telepathic reply is calm but foreboding.

  He’s right. In the VR room, everyone’s screens show their robots under pursuit by people who look a lot like the mob approaching me.

  “We’re in different parts of a large country,” I say, confused.

  “Yes, I know.” Mitya sounds just as puzzled.

  “None of these people seem to even know each other.” Alan points at a large screen where he’s posted hundreds of face recognition profiles.

  “If they destroy the robots, it will take days to procure more,” Mitya says. His crowd of people looks even more sinister than mine; they remind me of the pitchfork-wielding villagers approaching Frankenstein.

  “This attack has to be government sponsored.” Muhomor scares away a couple of scrawny cats as he cuts through a side alley to get away from his pursuers. “The Russians still hate us for developing Tema. Maybe this is payback?”

  Part of me agrees with Muhomor’s assessment. It’s not just Russia; every government wishes the Tema cryptography didn’t exist. Still unbreakable, Tema makes the ability to surveil your own or another country’s citizens a thing of the past—one the governments of the world dearly miss. Some countries tried to outlaw Tema, but once we made the algorithms, theory, and even the software open source, outlawing this system became like trying to outlaw the Pythagorean theorem.

  “I find it hard to picture these people working for the government,” Alan chimes in as I cast another wary look at my robot’s pursuers. “The majority are alcoholics and can barely keep a shitty job.”

  “Hey, watch your language,” I tell him privately, doing my best to embed fatherly disapproval into the Zik message. “But you’re right, they don’t look impressive.”

  “At least we found something they have in common,” Mitya says. “Because the kid nailed it. A lot of these people recently recovered in hospitals from alcohol poisoning. I guess Russia got rid of vytrezvitel.”’

  “Vytrezvitel is a detoxification center where cops take drunks to sober up,” I tell Alan. “The fact that the Soviet Union had a need for such facilities tells you a little bit about the culture at the time.”

  “Was Ruzatov an alcoholic?” he asks. “Though even if he was, I fail to see how it sheds light on any of this.”

  “He drank every now and then, but normal amounts.” Mitya’s robot dodges a red brick flying at his head and increases his pace. “For a Russian, anyway.”

  “He did get committed to a hospital.” Muhomor finds people waiting for his robot at the end of the alley, so he turns back. “A week ago.”

  “His blood alcohol level was .10,” Alan adds.

  “Like I said.” Mitya’s robot dodges a broken bottle this time. “That number is normal for a Russian.”

  “He had some head trauma,” Muhomor says. “Maybe he was in a drunken brawl?”

  “Speaking of a drunken brawl,” Alan says. “You should all focus on the trouble in the real world. We can pause the meeting for now.”

  He’s right. Though all of us can carry on a conversation in VR and deal with these attackers, it’s best to focus, especially considering what Mitya said about the difficulty of getting new robots.

  I stare at the cracked asphalt street. The first set of pursuers is but a foot away. Using the robot’s sense of smell, I verify the stench of stale vodka on the breath of
the nearest man.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I need this robot, so I won’t let you break it,” I rattle through the robot’s mouth in Russian.

  “Monster,” yelps the nearest drunk in a strange falsetto. “You’ll regret your sins.”

  As though emboldened by this cry to action, the two groups surround me and close the distance. My real-world heart forgets the difference between physical and robotic bodies, because it slams against my chest like a hydraulic motor after a power surge.

  Chapter Eleven

  When the first man strikes my metallic face, I realize that things might not be as dire as we fear. The guy’s fist is bloody, yet my robot’s diagnostics show no ill effects. To my shock, the guy hits me again, his bone crunching against the chest chassis. I see no pain in his face, just determination to hit me repeatedly.

  “He must be drunk right now,” I yell in VR when the same man headbutts the metal, his nose spraying blood onto the camera that serves as my eyes.

  “Watch out for that one with the crowbar,” Alan shouts. I instinctively duck, and the metal of the blunt weapon skitters along the top of my metallic skull.

  “Einstein, turn on Battle Mode,” I mentally command. “Adjust it to this robotic body.”

  “Done,” Einstein replies. “Do you want to turn on the Emotion Dampener as well?”

  “Let’s save Emotion Dampener for a much worse situation.”

  Battle Mode—or BM, as we sometimes abbreviate it to—is something I’ve been working on ever since I mastered the martial arts that now make up my personal, still-to-be-named fighting style. It’s a merger of my acquired skills and technology—a way to leverage Brainocyte-enabled, superluminal decision-making in a combat situation. Emotion Dampener—which we never abbreviate to ED—is an add-on to BM. It’s an optional subroutine that approximates what happens (or doesn’t happen) in Joe’s mind when he fights. It makes the regions of the brain responsible for empathy take a back seat, so users are free to maim and kill without compunction. It’s a scary enough app that I never told Ada about its existence—though in a way, the fact that I need an app like this proves I’m a good person, doesn’t it?