by Lior Samson
Part 4
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.
– Richard Dawkins
— 18 —
Becca had taken to spending her late afternoons at the extended-care facility for head-trauma patients, talking to her father and playing music for him. “I got some of the titles from your home library, Daddy. I’ll play ones you favorited, okay?”
She leaned over the bed to look for any sign, any reaction. “If you can hear me, wiggle your finger.” She watched both hands. “If you would like some music, open your eyes.” Nothing. “I love you, Daddy. If you love me, move your eyes.” The form in the bed lay still and silent except for slow and steady breathing.
“I’m going to put in the earbuds now. Then I’m going to put on your ‘Kadima’ playlist. I had to Google that. Hebrew for ‘forward,’ right? As in ‘adelante’ in Spanish. See, I do pay attention in school. And I really love it at Camp Cah-Wee-Lah, but sometimes I wish you had sent me to Hebrew camp. I mean, I know we’re Jewish—well, you and I are—but we never do any Jewish things. I always wondered about that. Anyway, here is your ‘Kadima’ playlist. I hope you like it.” She tapped the glyph on her phone and watched for a reaction.
She brought up a reader app and picked up on where she had left off with the latest Emojack fan-fic story. Whenever the crawl at the bottom of the screen would display a “Next Up” message from the audio player, she would bring up the sound as the track started so she could see if she knew the music. She recognized Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” but the Reznicek “Overture to Donna Diana” was new to her.
Emojack, an over-the-top YA adventure story with a non-binary gender subtext, had been an active fan-fic thread for more than a year. One passage about Sasskon the Acquirer in the new chapter made her think of her father. She looked up just in time to see his eyes suddenly pop open, then widen. The crawl on her phone declared: Now Playing: Wagner “Ride of the Valkyries.”
— —
Jerry Pendrake marched into Aram Netsky’s office with a grin too wide for his narrow face. He stopped before the curved desk and struck a power pose but said nothing.
Netsky looked up. “What? You should have told me you were coming. You know I don’t like to be interrupted.”
“Okay.” Pendrake pivoted and marched toward the door.
“Now what the hell is that? What do you want, Jerry?”
“Nothing. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. We can discuss it at the next exec team meeting.” He stopped in the doorway.
“What’s gotten into you, Jerry? You sure have had some burr in your underpants lately.”
“Just doing my job. See you at the meeting tomorrow.”
“You don’t have a job, other than the one I mandate, keeping the juice flowing in the money pipeline. At that, you have failed miserably of late. Why, for instance, haven’t we been aggressively expanding the client base?”
“Because nobody wants to put up a few hundred thousand down payment with a company everyone knows is in its death throes. That’s why. See you. Go back to your geeky tweaking.” Pendrake headed for the door.
On the edge of losing it, Netsky worked his hands in and out of fists. “Just tell me what the fuck is going on, Jerry.”
“You really want to know, do you? You actually want to know what I have been up to as CEO of the company, what I’ve been doing. And you, as CTO, actually care.”
“Okay, you made your point. You’re CEO and I’m just the CTO. But I still am the majority stock holder. Now”—his voice raised many decibels and nearly an octave— “goddamn tell me what the fuck this is about!”
“Looks like we could be acquired. By Cloudastics. I’ve been in touch with people I know on the board, working the back channels, playing hard-to-get. And we have agreement in principle. I negotiated the outlines of a deal that works out really well for us, considering.”
“Why am I the last to know that something like this was going on?”
“Because,”—he held up his fingers in air-quotes—“you don’t like to be interrupted, you don’t like to be bothered with business matters, because you have been eyeballs deep into problem solving on the model, because …”
“All right, I get your point. So where are we in this rescue fantasy.”
“About to be rescued. Basically we just need final board approval on both sides, and the spigot turns on again.” Pendrake folded his arms and resumed his power pose before walking out the door.
— 19 —
Coleman Todd Drucker was becoming the star patient at the head-trauma facility. At Barbra’s insistence, he was moved from the extended-care wing to the rehab wing, and daily therapy sessions were started. The diagnosis was upgraded from coma to persistent vegetative state and then to minimally conscious. His responsiveness to his environment wavered, but he was often at his best during afternoons when his daughter spent time with him.
Barbra, who sometimes took a late lunch break to join Becca at the facility, offered a warm greeting as she entered Cole’s room. “Hey, Becca. Hello, Todd. How are my two favorite people today?”
“Mom, you’re late.”
“I had a meeting with a group at UCLA that has an experimental treatment program involving something called beta-NCGF. It’s a growth factor for cortical neurons. It’s supposed to promote new brain cells and connections in adults. They think it might help patients who have had head trauma and are minimally conscious. Between that and the transcranial stuff, maybe we can help him recover.”
“Did you hear that, Daddy? You’re going to get better. I know you can do it.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, darling. It’s all experimental.”
“My hopes are already up. Daddy is already doing eye-blink Morse code. I’ve been teaching him.”
“What?”
“Yeah, the rehab people were doing the one blink for yes, two for no. Really tedious, slow. Daddy finds it frustrating. Isn’t that right, Daddy?” He blinked, slow, quick, slow, slow.
“What was that? I thought it was supposed to be one for yes, two for no.”
“He does that with the rehab people. With me he uses letters—to practice his Morse code. That was Y for yes. Right, Daddy?” There was a long series of fast and slow blinks. “He said, ‘R-I-G-H-T’. See, he can say anything. I told you he was still there. Do you want to talk with him?”
“Talk with him? Ohmygod, I can’t believe this. Really? You’ve done this?”
“Really. We did it, me and Daddy. He’s working on doing it with his finger, but it’s not as reliable as his blinking. My friend Gitee—she’s a total techno-geek—is working on this finger thingy that can connect to a tablet with software that reads the Morse code and then does text-to-speech so that he can talk. Right, Daddy?” More blinks. “He says yes, Y for yes”
“Todd, Todd, if you can hear me, I love you.”
“He can hear you, Mom. See, he just said ‘I-L-Y-2’, I love you too. We use a lot of texting stuff. It’s faster.”
One of the surgeons leaned forward. “This is a miracle. And if the NCGF therapy helps …”
“Yeah, Daddy’s back. He’s coming back.”
— —
It was never clear just what did the trick, but Cole’s recovery accelerated. The finger-twitch reader assembled by Becca’s friend was never needed, because, within weeks of starting the beta-NCGF treatment, Cole was talking. At first his speech was slurred and indistinct, but with intensive speech therapy, his daughter’s daily visits, and some inner stubbornness, he made steady progress. Slowly, he regained use of his arms as well, but the verdict was that the spinal cord injury would leave him in a wheelchair.
With his recovery, both physically and mentally, Existendia was without a legal leg to stand on. Coleman Todd Drucker was not only alive, but also in charge of his own affairs. It was the team at Workman, Baum, and O’Neill LLC who decided that keeping Existendia in the dark as to the pa
ce and extent of his recovery would be a good strategy to keep them from preparing a counter punch and to catch them off guard later.
Cole was practicing with his joystick-controlled wheelchair when the call came in from Hal Workman. “Hey, Coleman, how is it going?”
“It’s going about three miles-per-hour. I’m not going to be winning any sprints, but at least I’m getting around on my own. Well, if my battery is fully charged. I can’t wait to get out of here, but they have this long ‘autonomy training checklist’—great term—that they want me to pass before they discharge me. It’s a pisser. That’s on the list, too, by the way.”
“Good to hear you keep making progress. I called to update you on Existendia.”
“I thought that was all settled.”
“So did we. It seems they solved their fiscal crisis, at least temporarily. And with that, they are still running the software.”
“Software?”
“You, your digital proxy.”
“Who cares? I’m back at the helm and steering the ship myself. I’ve been telecommuting to the office two hours a day. The docs say I could be home in weeks. What does it matter if they keep running a very resource-intensive piece of computer code.”
“It matters because, like you, with every passing day their software model is getting better, just as long as they keep operating it. We don’t know what they’ve accomplished, but it can’t be good. What if you become incapacitated again. With or without breaking the contract and a new will, there are no guarantees. Do you want a computer and its owners running your company, maybe dictating the welfare of your family? I’m not saying that can or will happen, but is it worth making risky bets? It’s such a legal swamp, such murky territory, that it’s better if we force them to shut down. Now.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
— 20 —
With her abstract-patterned tent dress, the substantial bulk of Di Fiora nearly filled the doorway of Aram Netsky’s office. “There’s a Mr. Coleman Drucker to see you.”
“What the … No one told me. Wait, how is that possible?”
“I really don’t know, sir. He just arrived with his lawyer, Hal Workman. They asked to see you. Should I show them in?”
“Yes, but get Bannon Turndale in here, on the double.”
Aram paused the sensory-motor training session and manually keyed the robotic arm mounted atop his desk into its parking position. “Enough for today, Drucker. Time for a nap.” He tapped an icon on the bottom left screen without waiting for a response.
While Di ushered Coleman Drucker into the office in his wheelchair with Hal Workman trailing slowly behind him, Aram deliberately kept typing. “I’m finishing a code enhancement. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Workman smiled. “Always playing the little games, eh Netsky?”
“Little games? My game, counsel, is nothing less than winning a race against mortality. It’s not against mortality, but …” He kept typing as he talked. “That race is being run as we speak.”
Workman mimicked silent applause. “Good for you. As long as you’re not running the race with the Coleman Drucker digital proxy. We thought it might be persuasive to hand-deliver the cease-and-desist order. My client decided to join me to see your reaction.” Workman held out the folded papers to Netsky, who ignored them as he continued typing. Workman placed them on the desk, then looked around. “So this is it, then, where you keep him.”
“Him? You mean the Drucker Digital Proxy? No, this is just my office, which is temporarily doubling as our sensory-motor training lab where we help the Drucker Proxy learn how to control mobility units and teach him to respond to tactile and other specialized inputs.”
“What do you mean, teach him?”
“It’s a learning process. If this were just a matter of a simple neural net, we could probably finish the job in a couple of workdays, but with an actual full-scale proxy it takes time, nearly as long as it would take a biological to learn to operate a prosthetic through motor neuron implants. Eventually we expect to get him into a fully articulated ambulatory android so he can walk around and pretty much live an autonomous life—at least as long as he’s in range of the ultra-broadband wireless. Our bio-mech team is working on customizing a Chinese service robot, a Dilong model B.”
Workman made a face of derision. “It’s all for show, to sucker in the next round of clients. Autonomous life, my ass. It’ll just be an android run by an AI pretending to be an actual person. We’ve all seen that circus trick. It’s just marketing, peddling life after death, no better than some sideshow preacher.”
Netsky did not look away from his screens but nodded toward Cole in his wheelchair. “Does he speak? Or is he just a motorized vegetable?”
Cole jogged the joystick and deftly maneuvered his wheelchair around the end of the desk, coming to a stop beside Aram, facing him. “He speaks, Mr. Netsky. And yes, he is motorized, but he’s no vegetable.”
Aram struggled not to show his surprise. “Well, quite an impressive recovery. I had no idea how far your rehab had progressed over recent weeks.”
“Well, that was the idea, our idea. You can imagine how impressed Judge Rodrigues was when I rolled in. She—”
He was interrupted by the arrival of Bannon Turndale, who surveyed the room before speaking. “We need to talk, Aram.”
Netsky nodded toward Cole. “Mr. Drucker here has arrived with a court order.”
“We need to talk. Now. In my office.” He ignored Cole in his wheelchair and turned to Hal Workman. “We’ll see about your court order, Mr. Workman.”
“See all you want, Mr. Turndale.” He picked up the papers from the desk and thrust them into Bannon’s hand. “My client is through with you. I’m working with counsel for Drucker Unified to throw out the entire agreement under which you were operating the proxy and to take custody of all the files.” His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He checked the caller ID. “I need to take this. If you gentlemen will excuse me for a few minutes.” He folded the phone, another retro accessory to match his attire: a flex-screen smartphone in a classic Motorola Razr style. “Will you be all right, Cole, while I deal with this? It will only be a minute or two.”
“Sure, go ahead. I’m sure we all can find something to talk about.”
“Not a good idea, Cole. Advice from counsel: save the small talk and just wait until I get back. Okay?” He unfolded his phone and put it to his ear as he left the room.
Bannon leaned across the semicircular desk with both palms resting on the edge. “Aram, I meant what I said. We need to talk.”
Netsky glared at him and stood without saying anything. He skirted Cole in his wheelchair and walked out the door in silence, nearly slamming it in Bannon’s face.
Bannon blocked the swinging door with his foot and turned back to Cole. “We’ll only be a few minutes. Can I get anything for you while you wait?”
“No, I’m fine. You know where to find me if there’s anything you want to discuss. This thing only has one gear.”
“Right. Okay, we’ll be right back.”
Cole, who had acquired months of practice waiting in silence with his thoughts, closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. He was startled out of his reverie by a chime tone and a voice.
“Well, look who’s here.”
Cole pivoted the wheelchair to face the voice. Behind him, a telepresence robot—a simple motorized stand topped with a display screen and web cam—rolled toward him. “What the …?” he said, his jaw dropping. The face on the screen was his.
“I didn’t realize you were …”—the animated face expressed surprise—“I thought … I assumed you were dead. How else could I be alive?” The voice from the speaker just below the screen was Cole’s. Neither the voice nor the face were perfect, but they were recognizable. “I guess they have kept me in the dark about some things.”
“I guess they have. You certainly should know better than to trust blindly. Get it in writing, I always say.”
> “I thought I had. Or you did. This is seriously weird, talking to myself.”
“Not that weird, not to me. I’m not talking to myself. I’m talking to a software simulation, a pretty good one, I’ll have to admit. But I’m the real thing, and what I’m having this conversation with is just a lot of code running an overblown mathematical model.”
“You’re wrong. I’m Coleman Todd Drucker, I’m alive, awake. I’ve been re-embodied in cloud computing.”
“You’re not. You’re not alive, not real. You’ve just been programmed to think you are … or to act the part.”
“Trust me on this. I’m alive, I’m real, and, you know what else? I am not going to die—ever.”
“Die is maybe an unfortunate choice of words. But you can be turned off, deleted, erased.” He maneuvered the wheelchair around to Aram’s place, elbowed the Aeron chair aside, and rolled up to the keyboard. “I’m betting the provision is even built into the software. I know programmers and software engineers pretty well. I know how they think.” He studied the six screens for a minute, then used keyboard shortcuts to tab through running programs and folders. “Here, this looks promising: PROXY ADMIN UTILITIES. Launch. Okay, a command prompt. What can I do here? Try a question mark. Nope. Try ‘HELP.’ Ah, that’s better: a complete list of commands and parameters. What do we have here? Oh, so many possibilities. Did you know, Mister Thinks-You-Are-Drucker, you can be reset to initial state? I guess that would wipe your memories clean. All those weeks of learning and conditioning, gone with a few taps on the keyboard. Wow, you can even be run without certain sub-models. Like a frontal lobotomy, maybe?”
The avatar cart pulled over beside him. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for a way to kill a program, the proxy program. I see how to put you to sleep, how to slow you down by running the model in background. That should prove to be disorienting, I would imagine. How would that work? If the proxy is being run at slow speed in the background, it would seem like the world had sped up and become jerky, maybe like a bad animation.” He scrolled down the command list. “But I don’t see how to delete you. Let me think. Maybe I could overwrite the connectome model with garbage. Sure, I can set up a pipeline process that reads the model, passes it through a randomizing filter, and writes it back. I don’t even have to understand anything about the model format or the emulation software. All I have to know is Unix. I just have to find the right files. Ah, here we have the directory I need. Maybe. Why don’t I just scramble everything: code, data, the works?”
