(ID)entity (Phoenix Horizon Book 2)

by PJ Manney

  But Ruth preferred to have a traditional monitor console all to herself, and to be left alone by the ship’s skeleton crew. A Zumwalt-class destroyer once needed a minimum of 130 crewmen to run her, but Major Tom and Ruth’s improved automation and nonmilitary goals reduced that number to fifteen men and women who provided the hands, feet, and autonomy that Major Tom lacked. They had been recommended by the admiral, and so far, they had proven loyal. Yet Ruth barely knew their names and had never made friends with any of them.

  Her head twitched to the side, and she sighed. “I miss the Pequod.”

  “I miss my body. And my old brain. And all the amazing things it did.” Though his memory was perfect and he felt psychological pain, his upload eliminated the more remarkable feats that his previously hacked and jacked human brain could perform. No more clairvoyance. No more manipulation of linear time. No more synesthesia. Thomas Paine’s synapses had been copied and recorded, but the nanobots and nanowiring did not replicate themselves in Major Tom. Even after trying and failing to reproduce them after he uploaded, he surmised that a digital copy could not replicate real-life atoms of matter coming into contact with one another and reacting in surprising ways. In the end it didn’t matter: his special abilities were gone. It made him wonder if there was an ineffable “magic”—a word scientists abhorred—to having a biological body.

  Ruth’s muscles twitched in unison in a single convulsion. “I miss a boat. You miss a body. I am not competing. For who has the most loss.”

  “You know why we had to change ships,” said Tom.

  “Safety. Always safety. Feh . . . ”

  Her sadness had slowly permeated the Zumwalt, like water passing through a cell membrane, diluting the morale of everyone around her. Here was one of the world’s greatest scientists, always battling at the cutting edge of the possible, too depressed even to argue back. Major Tom didn’t know how to fix it. Ruth rejected psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and the usual prescriptions of meditation, exercise, and sunlight.

  Humans needed a lot of tending.

  “How are our electric reserves?” he asked. “I noticed you stopped working with your hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline. Is there an energy problem?” They had changed the ship’s Rolls Royce MT-30 gas engine and generator sets for a tiered-hybrid system capable of utilizing any type of fuel available, as well as ample high-density, flexible solar arrays that unfurled like mats and sails when weather was good and stealth wasn’t necessary. Desalinization and food production with grow lights deep below deck allowed Ruth and crew to avoid ports. But it was conceivable they might need more power someday.

  “Oder es helft nit oder men darf es nit.”

  Either it didn’t help or it wasn’t needed. Tom wasn’t sure if she meant the nanoscale microscope or her emotional health.

  “And that guy. P-P-Ponnusamy,” she continued. “He’s bugging us. Again. Why don’t you message back?”

  “I might have been a scientist, but I don’t enjoy being the object of scientific scrutiny. He wants to pick my digital brain apart to make more of me. We can’t allow that.”

  Truth be told, as the world reshaped itself, fewer and fewer scientists had the funds to continue the type of research that might replicate Tom’s existence. They were busy trying to survive themselves. Caltech’s Dr. Arun Ponnusamy was one of the few still chasing him.

  “I’m not your mother,” said Ruth. “Don’t complain to me.”

  “You did kinda raise me,” said Tom. “Sorry I’m not a better companion.” Ruth had raised him, to the extent that a computer-simulated brain could be raised. She tried to make him do what was right, even if he didn’t agree or didn’t want to. Or found he couldn’t. “Ruth, I really am sorry.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m sorry I’m so limited,” he continued. “And selfish. But I can’t fix everything. I don’t understand as much as you would want me to. I can’t model a perfect equilibrium and have the model work. The world’s too complex. My digital brain is still like a human’s.”

  She sniffed. “You are too smart. For that argument.”

  “I can see and hear more of what’s happening in the world and process it faster. But there’s no omniscience. I’m not God . . . ”

  “Danken Gott . . .”

  “You said it. I’m no more than I was. I’m less. That superhuman shit’s just fodder for bad science-fiction movies. I’m afraid to do anything. I might screw it up all over again.”

  Ruth’s shoulders twitched uncontrollably. She looked like she might cry.

  She reached for her old-fashioned keyboard. Her cameras cut out. She’d hit the privacy screen. Their conversation was finished.

  He left the question unasked: Was it ethical to do nothing? His emotional programming said no. Major Tom checked the worldwide media. No one had picked up on the Sovereign raid. It would have been plainly visible from space by the major countries of the world, but it had been ignored. He checked the currency markets. The Shell was still being traded, but its price was more volatile. Cryptocurrencies were generally cyclical, and he saw the possibility of underlying instability. Vendors of biofuel and fish seemed to expect their deliveries.

  No obvious patterns emerged.

  Major Tom had one distinct advantage as a digital entity. He could verify and back up his digital “senses.” He couldn’t “remember” wrong. He had absolutely witnessed the Sovereign under attack.

  Unless it was an illusion created to lure him into something. It was possible, but he did not think it probable. He studied Dr. Who’s message and the footage again, to make sure. All the data looked real. He compared it to footage he lifted off foreign satellites. He could find only one—a South Pacific media satellite—that had captured the entire raid, and it backed up his own data.

  He found a headline: “Russian Army Along China’s Northern Frontier.” The Russian government-controlled media said, “The former Western Empire of homosexual pederasts has fallen to our Russian might! No longer will they humiliate us, steal our money and resources, and torture our brave Russian soul! Having brought our former Western regions back into the fold, we turn our eyes in dismay to the East, to the angry dragon snapping at our Great Bear’s ankles. If they cannot be brought to heel, they must be eliminated.”

  Even with his augmented intellect, there was no rationalizing idiotic propaganda aimed at future cannon fodder.

  Another headline: “China Activates Military Facilities in Philippines.” The Eastern Empire had created islands across the Pacific for years. When they bumped into another nation’s territory, an inevitable soft power struggle ensued. A few missiles lobbed back and forth that never hit their targets, then acquiescence when the aggrieved nation realized there was no one to help them fight back. In the wake of a fascist dictatorship, the Philippines had been taken over as a Chinese protectorate in a bloodless invasion. China had snared Japan and Indonesia into its political sphere of influence. Their ships had been seen near the Hawaiian Islands, with more landfill and construction gear. The Chinese navy had also launched deep-sea military facilities years ago, using the depths of the Pacific trenches to hide a multitude of operations. All this looked potentially relevant, given the Sovereign’s location just six hundred miles north of Hawaii.

  Major Tom’s revelations began a cascade of small and not-so-small revolutions around the world. The American Empire contracted, and the states fragmented into ideological regions. Without clear leaders or a mission, the US military had come home from overseas and hunkered down at American bases. The European continent’s cooperative agreements had broken up years ago, victims of the corrosive effects of bureaucracy and warring elites who shared only the language of money and manipulated those beneath them into blaming immigrants for Europe’s problems. Russia and China leveraged their investments and resources in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to take over the globe in their imperial ambition. After thousands of years of empires rising and falling, it looked like the world w
ould never learn.

  When Major Tom looked at the state of North America, he was confused. He had destroyed the Phoenix Club to stop the political elite from drugging the nation’s—and the world’s—citizens into conformity and apathy, mindlessly allowing their leaders to do whatever they wanted without resistance. By doing so, he had single-handedly eliminated the overabundance of warring and conspiring politicians and corporate heads who regularly destroy political systems, as had happened in Europe. With fewer players struggling for the top of the Teflon pole of power, the country should have relaxed. That’s what cliodynamics predicted, usually. Fewer infighting leaders meant more desirable seats at the eternal game of elite musical chairs, less political polarization, less educational and economic insecurity, and less stress on the entire system. With the Phoenix Club no longer there to tighten the screws of society, the system of American politics should have reset.

  Instead, the country was in shambles. He didn’t grasp something crucial at the heart of the continent. What was he missing?

  The West was fragmented and confused. Without the United States as the world’s emperor and policemen, and with Europe in pieces, Russia and China felt emboldened to move into full-blown imperial expansion. Countries that had criticized Pax Americana simply traded one emperor for another. No longer teamed up against the United States, China and Russia feared only each other, and in a scramble for dominance, both looked to pick off what the former United States and Europe had left behind.

  Maybe China attacked the seastead, looking for more Pacific real estate, he thought, edging its way toward Hawaii and, eventually, the entire Pacific Rim. But he lacked enough data to make a final analysis.

  Regardless, war was coming.

  The world was still filled with nuclear weapons. And bioweapons. And technological bear traps. With powerful robotic, surveillance, and energy weapons widespread, he wondered if humanity could survive. Otherwise, he would get painfully lonely, for as long as he had power and working servers. And then, he’d be gone, too.

  His daily musical gig in the virtual world was coming up in seconds. Thinking it might be among his last chances to play his music and enjoy the crowds, he kept the appointment. The show must go on, at least for today, he thought. The end of the world could wait. It always did.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Church of Major Tom was created by its users and existed on its own open virtual reality platform, allowing his disciples to access his public thoughts and archives and, from them, build a world. No matter how he had tried to dissuade them, he couldn’t stop their adoration. This was in contrast to the coalition of fundamental Abrahamic religionists who thought Major Tom was the devil; or the Americans for a Theocratic World, who thought he was the antichrist; or reactionaries of all political persuasions, who thought he destroyed the world through accelerated change. So he let TCoMT take on a life of its own.

  He was surprised how much he liked the virtual reality they created. He would appear in disguise each day at 5:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time as a wandering troubadour with a guitar, checking out the scene, eager to perform music the faithful enjoyed. No one knew he was Major Tom. He looked like any other fanboy. The songs were often his favorites, but he took requests, too. His disguise was of a male of Asian descent who looked like Chang Eng. He was no digital artist, and it was simplest to replicate those he knew best. It didn’t matter whom he looked like, as long as no one knew he was their supposed messiah.

  He materialized at his usual spot, a cobblestone sidewalk corner under a nineteenth-century streetlamp whose puddle of light illuminated him. Behind him loomed a medieval cathedral copied from the design of Chartes in France. The rose window glowed from inside and vibrated gently to the congregants’ singing of the primary doxology, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.”

  He wasn’t sure why they had chosen that song, as much as he liked it. It wasn’t one he had thought about in his previous life. But it had stuck with the acolytes, one of many hymns adopted by the devout. They created a virtual world in what they assumed was his image, hoping to entice the savior for a messianic return to their ranks.

  “You think I’m the narcissist?” Carter once teased Tom. “What do you think this makes you?”

  Tom didn’t like to admit how much he depended on the devotees’ interactions. He received messages, and not only from his fans. Some were images and people he couldn’t identify, as if TCoMT had created a hive mind greater than the sum of their individual thoughts. TCoMT was the only place he experienced these visions. He wondered if they were genuine or if someone had figured out who he was and was placing them inside his programming. Either possibility was unsettling.

  A month earlier, he had sat strumming his virtual 2001 Manzer Paradiso archtop acoustic guitar on the curb of a cobblestone street. Acolytes appreciated attention to details like the replication of the master’s own instrument. That day, he hadn’t wanted to play from the official hymnal. Instead, he played Coldplay’s “42,” singing of Carter, Josiah, Bruce, Anthony, and Chang within their Memory Palace. Remembering everything they did, unable to change the past. They weren’t ghosts. But through their memories, they were the undead. A house of ghouls, caught in the machine. As he sang, he had a vision. Dr. Who was conscious and restrained, in tight, gray, utilitarian, windowless quarters, maybe a military ship or submarine. He didn’t know if it had happened in the past, present, or future, or instead was a dream. Did he receive a message? Or did the virtual world create something on its own?

  He had sent Dr. Who a message on the Sovereign: Just checking in. Are you okay?

  She had been in the midst of teaching a Foxy Funkadelia pole-dancing lesson. “Child, you’re gettin’ paranoid in your eternal age. If you’re here for the splits, stick around. Otherwise, shove off, hon.”

  The vision had appeared a month before her kidnapping.

  He had also foreseen the riots in Washington, DC, the burning of the Capitol and the Phoenix Club, an enraged citizenry scouring the city, looking to attack members of the club. And the final demolition of the Phoenix Club camp outside of Yosemite National Park, where bulldozers knocked down every building and left only the trees behind. These were the rare times he had anything like his former clairvoyance. So something must have transferred in his upload. He just wasn’t sure what it meant.

  Now, a month later, he sat under the streetlamp and played “42” again, hoping to understand both a prescient vision and the true conundrum regarding Dr. Who. As the music spread, it activated a form of techno-synesthesia. He could hear the sound of silence between the notes. Feel the nothingness he inhabited as he plucked virtual strings. The lyrics of “42” captured the famous artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter’s work into the torturous nature of memory in I Am a Strange Loop. It hinted at the quirkiness of Douglas Adams’s numerical meaning of life. And it teased Major Tom’s own frustrations at his new identity. Who was he?

  The crowd, expecting its bard, had gathered to listen. Coins rattled into his panhandling cup. A woman in all black stood before him. She was tall, delicate, and attenuated to an unrealistic degree. She wore a corseted and studded bodice under a black-leather duster coat. A long black tulle skirt covered black pirate boots. Long, straight blonde hair fell to her waist. Steampunk’s requisite Victorian goggles wrapped her top hat. Around her neck, she wore a necklace with an oval pendant about three inches long, painted with the face of a man in the style of a sixteenth-century portrait miniature.

  She waited for him to finish the song, then cleared her throat.

  “Something you want to hear?” he asked. He strummed, waiting for a response.

  She set their conversation to private. “No, Thomas Paine. I have something for you to hear.”

  His fingers froze on the strings. No one had recognized him before.

  “I wanna talk about Sovereign seasteaders. And Dr. Who. And a run on the cryptobanks. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will soon. Oh! And here’s an ima
ge file. It’s my version of the virtual you. Hope you like it.” A freakish, crooked grin split only half her face. Perhaps she hadn’t mastered the visual emotion-capture yet.

  The image file was of a rectangular fabric banner, white, with gold fringe around its edges. At its center, a man’s face designed from the composite images of Peter Bernhardt and Thomas Paine. She had entitled it “Veronika’s Veil.” It matched the portrait around her neck.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

  The other half of her mouth smiled. “Come on in. Let’s talk.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Major Tom received the IP addresses of a computer with an old-fashioned mixed reality headset in Santa Barbara, California. That’s where she wanted to talk.

  After one second, during which he had verified that she wasn’t monitoring him in any way that might compromise his security, he asked, “So how do I know you?” In the time it took for her to answer, he learned a good deal about her:

  Name(s): Veronika Gascon, born Ronald Gascon. Name change occurred four years ago.

  Place of birth and hometown: Santa Barbara, CA

  Age: 22

  Parents: Anita Gascon (56, webzine editor) and Michael Gascon (57, professor of theoretical physics at UC Santa Barbara)

  Siblings: Rachel (26, management analyst) and Robert (24, member of modern dance company)

  Records included her homeschool high-school diploma at age twelve, impeccable standardized test scores, and online college classes worth three master’s degrees in computer science, fine art, and linguistics.

  He found the chosen name of Veronika interesting. “Veronica” was derived from the Latin vera icon—true image. As Jesus carried his cross to Calvary, Veronica was the saint who wiped the sweat from his brow and found his face forever imprinted on her cloth. That relic was supposedly in Saint Peter’s Basilica and had magical powers. And here she had made her own version of Veronica’s Veil with his face on it.