The Drucker Proxy

by Lior Samson

  “Not you. Who’s next of kin?”

  Barbra raised her hand.

  “Okay, you fill me in.”

  Barbra outlined what had transpired. “And he said if Todd is non compis mentis, they have power of attorney. I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means not mentally competent. It’s Latin, legalese. And, Mr. Bannon, do you have a ruling to that effect?”

  “It’s Turndale, Bannon Turndale. And no, we do not have a ruling, but”—he gestured toward the bed— “res ipsa loquitur.”

  Attorney Garlock laughed. He turned to Barbra. “Attorney humor. More Latin. Literally, ‘the thing speaks for itself,’ hardly the case here.” He put his hand to his ear and cocked his head toward the bed. “Nope, not a word.”

  “Laugh if you will, but the matter is self-evident.”

  “Non compis mentis is a legal construct, as you well know. It is not self-evident but, in contested cases, requires a judicial ruling, as you also well know. I’m going to ask that you leave the hospital and not return until and unless you have a court order in hand. As far as the hospital is concerned, you have no standing and no right even to be here. I assume there will be no need to summon security.”

  “No need. Come!” He signaled his unnamed and still silent junior partner to follow with a snap of his fingers. “We’ll be back, papers in hand.”

  Barbra reached toward the hospital attorney. “I can’t thank you enough for your help.”

  “Oh, ma’am, there’s no need to thank me. I was not helping you. I’m only looking out for the interests of the hospital, which is my job. I would suggest you get your own attorney to look out for your interests and your husband’s. If those two come back with a court order and all the proper documents that protect us, we will follow the law.”

  Becca, who had been silent throughout the whole confrontation, reached for her mother’s hand. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to bring in the cavalry. Next time they try anything, they’ll be facing my lawyer, Todd’s, and the whole recently expanded legal department of Drucker Unified. The company has a big stake in this, and it has a lot of resources.” She picked up the copy of the contract left by Turndale. “I’m going to start by getting them working on this. And an injunction to prevent the hospital from doing anything without my approval.”

  “Wow, you’re pretty, well, you know, tough, Mom.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet. Have you ever ridden in a helicopter? No? Well, I’m going to get one to pick us up here and fly us to Drucker headquarters so we can meet in person with the legal team pronto. You want to see tough? Wait until you see those guys. They’ll eat the likes of Mr. Turndale and Mr. Garlock for lunch.”

  — 10 —

  The scene at the hospital was surreal. Crowded into the hospital room were three of Drucker Unified’s legal team plus Turndale and his shadow from Existendia, Leah Goldstein for Barbra, Hal Workman in his retro Seventies suit on behalf of Coleman Todd Drucker, a nurse and two doctors, Chase Garlock and two more attorneys for the hospital, and the hospital administrator, plus Judge Isabella Rodrigues and a court stenographer.

  Becca Drucker was holding her mother’s hand as they stood in the doorway, almost edged out of the room. “What is it with lawyers and the old-fashioned look?” She whispered and nodded toward Turndale, then Workman.

  “I don’t know, sweety. Lawyers are a strange species.” She bent her head low to keep from being heard. “With these two, I think it’s like peacock feathers. Flamboyant but reaching for understatement.”

  The proceedings took less time to complete than it took to assemble the people in the room. Judge Rodrigues took testimony synopsizing the medical findings before asking a series of questions of the unconscious man in the bed, questions that went unanswered. She made her ruling and left with her stenographer.

  Turndale failed in his attempt not to look too smug as he declared victory. “Well, that’s settled. If we might all vacate the room to give the bereaved widow and daughter a few minutes, before the doctors complete their … their work.”

  “Aren’t you jumping the gun, Mr. Turndale?” Barbra pushed her way to the front of the assembled group. “I may be bereaved, but I am not a widow, not yet.”

  Attorney Chase Garlock edged toward Turndale and his colleague. “Indeed, you are jumping the gun, counsel. Not all requirements of the hospital have been met. There is a lot of paperwork that needs to be completed first. Then you need to get a direct court order to turn off the ventilator, which the hospital will challenge, and dot-dot-dot. It ain’t over.”

  “No, it ain’t, as you so ineloquently put it, but these things can be expedited.”

  “What’s the hurry, counsel? The patient isn’t going anywhere.”

  “There’s a lot at stake here.”

  “I bet there is, and you have a lot of us in this room wondering just what and just how much. Anyway, finish the paperwork first, Turndale, then we’ll see what happens next.”

  The room slowly cleared leaving Barbra and Becca with Leah Goldstein.

  “Mom, can I ask a question?”

  “Sure honey.”

  “I thought we had decided to, you know, let Daddy go. But that’s what those people want to do. Why are we fighting them? And, I mean all these lawyers, too? They’re fighting them.”

  Leah Goldstein spread her hands. “Mind if I try to answer, Barbra?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So, it’s like this, honey. It’s about who’s in charge, who has the authority to act on your father’s behalf. That company is trying to claim that they have that right, and if they can make medical decisions on his behalf, that sets a precedent for other provisions in their contractual arrangements made with him.”

  “Why does that matter if … if he’s dead?”

  “We don’t know, exactly, because this case is taking us into uncharted legal territory.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, it’s because of what that company, Existendia, does. Your father contracted with them to upload a kind of copy of his brain, his personality, to their computers as a way to—”

  Becca jumped in. “To, like, live on! Like on that Hulu series, ‘Second Pass’.”

  “Well, yes. Like. That’s a good word, a teen favorite but also an appropriate choice in this case. Like living on. The question is, how much like living on and how much not.”

  “But, so, Daddy would be, like, alive but in a computer. Why wouldn’t we want that? He’d still be here. We could talk and stuff. That sounds like a good thing.”

  “Maybe it does, but as I said, there’s a lot at stake, more than we know at this point. Maybe the future of a multi-billion dollar company. Maybe your future.”

  — 11 —

  Bannon barged into Aram Netsky’s office waving a thick wad of paper. “We got it. I told you it was just a matter of time. I told you I was good.”

  “That you did. Over and over you told us all. And it’s about time you made good on the claims. How many weeks has this dragged on? I really don’t see why this stupid legal stuff can take so long. It’s just words and paper. So when?”

  Bannon glanced at his watch. “Four o’clock. This afternoon.”

  “And you’re sure they’ll be no more hitches, no last minute appeals or injunctions?”

  “None, their last course of action has been exhausted. We’re in.”

  “All right. I’m going to put us in play.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait?”

  “No, we want continuity. We need to broker computing and storage resources in the cloud. Once we have those locked in, it takes hours to complete the upload. Plus, the whole client side down here has to be initialized and proofed. We don’t just turn a switch and say shazzam.”

  “But it’s just computers, and it’s already all in the cloud, isn’t it? Turn the switch and launch the app. I saw the demo.”

  “Bannon, Bannon, you have been too long isolated in you
r paperwork tower with your head buried in contract mumbo-jumbo. That was a demo, a soft simulation. This is the real thing, four years on and eighty-thousand programmer-hours of computer coding later.” He stood and came around from behind his desk. “We are talking about the connectome of the human brain, Bannon, petabytes of data. We have, what, three dozen clients signed up by now? Their stuff is all archived. We have to bring our digital Mr. Drucker up to live storage, to fast access. And there’s the whole tiered architecture in our modeling software. There’s not enough computing power in the world to actually run an accurate neuron-by-neuron simulation of one entire human brain in real-time, even if we did have the actual complete connectome to simulate, which we don’t. We have a fuzzy, simplified, approximation, which is just barely enough but still enormous.”

  “But I thought we emulate the complete …”

  “You thought that’s what we do because you never dug beyond the demo. That was for you, for the angel investors—all technical hype and diluted details. So, we’ve now got this enormously complex client-side software—that’s the stuff here—running all the layers and layers of peripheral processing, vocal personality approximation, visual-field and aural pre-processing, all connecting to the outside world based on a petabyte or two of configuration data kept here. That’s all linked by a really fat pipe to the array of leased supercomputer capability that runs much simpler software in very tight loops doing neuron-by-neuron emulation on a collection of cleverly fudged pieces of the approximate connectome of our Mr. Drucker. And back to the pre-processing and output layers here in a closed loop.

  “It works because we have modules here that pretend to be some parts of the brain that already have fairly well-understood functions. For instance, we don’t send the complete visual field to the cloud as raw data from our retina substitutes; we send the predigested results from a software visual cortex. It saves connection bandwidth and reduces the size of the connectome that needs to be simulated. Plus, the hi-res resonance imaging we used to map his brain is good enough for models of some processes, but not for something as complicated and detailed as the visual cortex. Same for hearing, parts of the motor strip, and so on. Even though we are only emulating a fraction of the connectome and at a rough approximation, it takes one hell of a lot of cloud resources to do it in anything close to real-time.”

  “I know all that, Aram. I’m not one of your geek squad, but I’m not a moron.”

  “So you say, but what you never seem to quite grasp is the scale, what it takes in storage and computing power to make this thing work and the time it takes to get it to the point we can, as you so crudely expressed it, launch the app.” He returned to his desk and reached for his keyboard. “Now, let me get the Go Team started on their job and begin to feed the data and run all the cross checks. You just finish your job and begin to feed the funds that power this so-called app.”

  — —

  Progress bars and scrolling summaries filled four of the six screens in front of Aram. On the last two screens, Aram multi-tasked between live conversation threads with his team and a last-minute patch to fix a bug in the code for recognizing and classifying edges of objects in the visual field.

  Netsky would be the first to admit he was not a people person. He preferred to lead from behind a keyboard and monitor. Face-to-face encounters were stressful, and when he was anxious, he all too easily lapsed into impatience and sarcasm. While texting and instant messaging, he was a reasonable individual, although no one would call him charming. In person, no one liked him.

  The Go Team had been through dozens of trials and rehearsals, even one full-scale upload that cost enough to cause eyebrows to raise among the board of directors. But there were always hitches and glitches with real data and live ops. The pressure of human interaction could leave Aram flailing, but programming under pressure was a drug of choice for him, computerized cocaine that sent him sailing and brought out his best.

  As an officer in the company and a part owner, he should have been conducting from a podium or watching from a balcony, but he was Aram Netsky, software engineering and neuroscience genius, by his own declaration the greatest engineer and scientist on the planet that nobody had ever heard of. He had only five published papers to his credit, but they had been enough to get him the funding to launch Existendia. By rights, he should have been CEO, but Chief Technical Officer suited him better.

  Now, with the curtain going up in less than an hour, he was in the orchestra pit, moving from instrument to instrument, looking over the shoulders of his people by remote access, pointing out missed details and making on-the-spot suggestions. And coding. He finished the new visual edge-discrimination patch, cranked through unit test and regression testing on the whole visual subsystem, and plugged it in live. He could be arrogant to the point of recklessness, but real-world performance invariably proved his over-confidence was justified. The patch worked perfectly.

  At four minutes past four, Bannon knocked a tattoo on the doorjamb and leaned in. “I just got the text message. He’s ours.”

  Part 3

  Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

  – D. H. Lawrence

  — 12 —

  Coleman blinked. The well-lit room—half law office, half computer lab—looked familiar, although his perspective seemed odd and the colors were harsh and too saturated. Disoriented, he struggled to make sense of the experience as his thoughts juddered in erratic bursts. The implications slowly sunk in. “I can see,” he said. “I guess that means …” He was rattled by the sound of his own voice, flattened and uninflected, as if it had been auto-tuned by an inept music producer. “I made it, huh? So it works.”

  Aram Netsky swiveled and leaned forward in his chair and scanned each of the six stacked monitors before answering. “Of course it worked. This may be our first full digital proxy installation, but not the first test of the system. And in this case, there was a trial run once, even before …” His keyboard rattled with a burst of typing.

  “I … I can’t move my arm. I can’t feel anything. I’m …”

  “Everything is fine. This is a server-only installation. Mobility comes later, along with full sensory input. It will take some time and training to get your new brain to sort things out and to tweak all the parameters.” He switched windows. “Based on experiences with digitally linked prosthetics, we’re estimating that full adaptation could take up to a year, although that might be a strained extrapolation. We had a trial run on a test proxy upload that we managed to train into full remote control of a robot in less than three months, but that was a special case.”

  He brought up an archive file. “For now, I need to ask you some questions—for the record. I have my personal assistant, Di Fiora, and a colleague here as witnesses. You already know Bannon Turndale, from Legal, behind him is Johanna Ross, head of our neuro-psych group. We also have a court-appointed clerk.” He glanced toward the end of the elongated desk. The clerk seated there tapped a key to start the official legal recording. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? Just to verify the installation.”

  Coleman nodded.

  “Please answer aloud, yes or no, for the record. On the monitor, I can see activity on your motor strip, but not always what you are trying to do. That has to be worked out through the sensory-motor mobility interface training. So, can you answer some questions.”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess. Yes.”

  “For the record, please state your full name and date of birth.”

  “Coleman Todd Drucker. I was born on 21 January 1991. Tell me. When …? How long ago did I …”

  “Seven weeks ago. You lost control of your Tensora on Old Topanga Canyon Road. The driver-assist system was unable to take back control in time to prevent leaving the road and the rollover. But, not to worry. With durable power of attorney and personal representative papers in place, we were able to move quickly
to acquire the cloud resources and complete the upload from our secure archives. The computing power needed is non-trivial, as you well know, but available at a price. These days, the slowest part of the process can be the legal matters—considering the finances at stake—but, fortunately, we have Bannon Turndale heading our legal team, and we’re confident all matters will be resolved soon.”

  “How old was I.”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “So the files were only a year plus old. How was I doing? Will there be enough in the estate?”

  “The trust you set up should be more than adequate. The recent merger was a good move.”

  “Merger?” Even through the processing of the voice synthesizer, the surprise was evident.

  “You acquired Unified ModulArch Construction in a leveraged deal. The stock of the new Drucker Unified took a tumble after your accident, but it’s recovered nicely.”

  “I guess I have some catching up to do.”

  “There will be plenty of time for that later—all the time in the world, in fact—but for now we need to complete these formalities. What was your maternal grandmother’s maiden name—please spell it out—and where was she born?”

  “Grosz, G-R-O-S-Z. She was born in Lodz, Poland.”

  Netsky picked up an encrypted storage capsule nearly the size of a paperback and held it in front of the camera. “Do you recognize this object?”

  “Yes, it’s the backup copy of my connectome upload. That’s my signature across the face.”

  “For the record, have you ever shared, with anyone in any form, the passphrase that you used to lock this copy?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “I am docking the capsule with this terminal. When I ask you for the passphrase, please say it slowly and clearly aloud, then wait for the checksums to be validated against the checksums on our server copy. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Passphrase, please.”

  “Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tsar meod.”