by Peter Watts
Some of our more significant findings are as follows:
1. PA did not “speak” in the conventional sense throughout the entire interview. On its face this might seem obvious—since his vocal cords had been extensively damaged, PA was forced to rely on the N2’s onboard speech synthesizer throughout—but it goes much farther than this. PA generally spoke without invoking the saccadal text interface that should have been necessary for such communication. Furthermore, his speech centers (notably Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) were often relatively inactive during conversation. We did, however, note increased activity in the nanoneural mesh that connected PA’s nervous system to SECOND at these times.
2. PA’s ability to recollect the details of specific events borders on savantism. During our interviews he often recited overheard conversations verbatim, in their entirety. We have managed to acquire independent records of two of these conversations (from streamed security surveillance of Central Station); PA’s recollection of these exchanges proved accurate, and we have no reason to doubt his account of the others. There is, however, no record of eidetic memory in his USMC personnel file.
3. When discussing events that took place prior to his integration with the N2 (childhood memories, or reminiscence about previous tours of duty), PA’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex lit up in a manner consistent with the activation of long-term memories. However, when discussing events that occurred during the Manhattan Incursion, activity in these areas declined, and throughput between SECOND and its associative coelomic meshes increased significantly.
4. When PA considered theoretical or tactical problems (such as the most efficient route through complex topography or the assessment of local cover), activity in the prefrontal cortex increased only marginally. However, when considering problems with a significant moral or ethical component (e.g., lethal containment of infected civilians), PA’s anterior cingulate gyrus lit up as it would in any normal human. (SECOND’s input channels also became more active at these times, although outgoing signals did not increase; this is consistent with the “passive monitoring” profile of heuristic biochips when in learning mode.)
5. PA’s speech patterns tended to vary with the type of experience he was describing at any given time. He spoke of interactions with his fellow marines and “conventional” battlefield events (whether against the Ceph or human paramilitary) using the familiar argot of the typical foot soldier, and while PA did evince an interest in science not often found in his demographic, he showed no great expertise beyond what one might acquire from a healthy dose of nature documentaries. However, when describing radically atypical experiences—his journeys through landscapes heavily modified by Ceph technology, for example, or the visions he attributed to the N2’s previous host—his vocabulary improved and his sentence construction formalized somewhat. In other words, PA proved to be most articulate under circumstances where someone of his educational background would normally be most lost for words; this coincided with increased activity levels throughout the SECOND-Neurosomatic Complex (see #6, below). This is reminiscent of the serial manifestation of “alters” reported in cases of multiple personality disorder, albeit far less extreme; it was merely PA’s linguistic skills that changed, not his fundamental personality.
6. Distribution of processing workload changed over time across the SECOND-Neurosomatic Complex (SNC). On some occasions activity would be centered in PA’s brain, on others in SECOND and its associated meshes, on still others distributed relatively evenly across the entire metasystem. There exists a weak but significant correlation between these distributions and the subject’s vocabulary and speech patterns. PA was most articulate when processing activity was evenly distributed throughout the SNC, or when concentrated in the architecture of the N2. He was least articulate (and most given to the casual use of slang and profanity) when his own brain was the primary locus of activity. While these properties fluctuated from moment to moment, PA’s overall mean eloquence and articulations scores increased by 7% and 9% (respectively) over the course of the interrogation. This suggests an ongoing off-load of cognitive processes from organic to artificial system elements.
7. At a more fine-grained scale, on several occasions as many as two (possibly three) loci of high cognitive activity were simultaneously present across the SECOND-mesh elements of the system (in addition to the locus more consistently discernible within PA’s brain itself). The signatures of these loci were similar to those of standard functional clusters, but were of far greater magnitude. The significance of these “islands of cognition” remains unclear: They could be artifacts of a background autoarchiving subroutine, or an emergent property of SECOND’s parallel-processing architecture. We are continuing to explore these possibilities.
Preliminary Conclusions:
A significant proportion of PA’s cognition is being “outsourced” to the SECOND biochip and the associated networks proliferating throughout the N2. While this level of integration is certainly unprecedented in magnitude, we all do something similar every time we let our iBalls plan our daily schedules, or use the Cloud to store our vital information. The difference is that we maintain volitional control over our activities, using our “virtual exocrania” as essentially glorified secretaries. In the case of Patient A it is difficult to establish where the centers of volition even are from one moment to the next, or even if they still reside exclusively within his biological brain. It is almost as though PA’s consciousness has become detached from its own substrate; during the course of this interrogation all three investigators had the experience of hunting down a cognitive locus, only to find nothing but baseline activity when the relevant clusters came into focus—as if the system had rerouted itself in response to our investigations, abandoning each set of coordinates a moment before we got there.
There is no known mechanism to explain how any mind could perform such a feat; it is more likely that Subject A’s mental processes have simply become less constrained by virtue of the greater computational volume available to them. (Put crudely, they simply have more room to move around.) What does seem certain, however, is that much of what we regard as the “person” that is Subject A now resides outside his own head. We are no longer justified in regarding the Nanosuit and its wearer as separate entities.
1 To whom correspondence should be directed.
2 While the committee could classify the Nanosuit and its associated technologies as an asset vital to national security—opening the door to outright expropriation—we have been advised to proceed cautiously on this front. HRC will have certainly anticipated such a move and is likely to have put countermeasures in place. It would be unproductive to put these to the test under current circumstances.
3 See DHS Bio-23A-USMC/4497C-4014 for biographical and medical background on this individual.
4 For example, A reports an extended period of intermittent consciousness—we estimate no less than two hours—between the time he was injured and the time of his integration with the N2. NODAR analysis undertaken later the same day, however, shows conclusively that A’s heart had been effectively destroyed, presumably as a result of enemy fire on the battlefield. It is medically impossible for him to have survived for more than a few minutes, even on a tissue-metabolic level, in that condition.
5 The alternative use of a more experienced interrogator who would merely pose as a low-status, nonthreatening individual was rejected since A’s enhanced perceptions might have been able to detect the subtle behavioral and physiological cues that inevitably accompany any staged performance.
HIVE
Not really sure what’s real here, and what’s the spawn of my fevered, fetid, infested imagination. I see Ling Shan, although I’ve never been. I see constellations in an alien junkyard, spinning slowly on the surface of an invisible globe. A voice threads through it all, a voice that talks as though we’re old friends although I can’t quite make out the words. I’ve never heard it before.
SYSTEM START flickers a
t the corner of my eye.
CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS.
SYNAPSE CHECKSUM …
The boot crawl scrolls over my visions, eats them away like acid. By the time it’s gone through its song and dance there’s nothing left to see but two words: PHAGE ISOLATED.
I can make out what the voice is saying, now. It’s telling me to wake up. It sounds worried.
It calls me son.
I open my eyes and look up at the dome of smoke covering Manhattan. There’s something up there that doesn’t belong somehow, bright threads of blue and yellow lacerating the overcast like veins of quartz. It takes me a moment to remember what it is.
Oh, right. Sunlight. Sky. It jerks for a moment, as if someone just fucked with the vertical hold in my eyes.
“Come back, son. Focus.”
Tactical returns, slow and halting. Icons flicker on and off and on again, as if not quite sure they’re in the right place. The sky jerks again, but this time I realize it’s not just my eyesight: Something’s—tugging at me. I lift my head.
Those fucking ticks. Those bloodsuckers. One of them has its hooks into the N2. It’s pretty much all the wake-up call I need: I hate those things. I kick the little fucker and am back on my feet in a second, reaching for a gun that isn’t there, looking up and down a street that seems to be hosting a goddamn tick parade. Some of them carry nothing but the swollen bladders on their own backs. One or two are actually dragging body parts, like ants taking crumbs to the nest.
My own personal chaperone is back, trying to take me down by the ankle. My gun lies a dozen meters away: Golem Boy don’t need no goddamn carbine to stomp it like a big ugly zit. None of the others seem to notice. They don’t seem interested in anything that moves under its own steam.
“I’m getting a limited feed from your suit, but for now it’ll have to do.” A little window opens up in my visual field and there he is, standard old white dude, maybe midsixties, looks like he was cut-and-pasted out of some black-and-white video from a hundred years ago. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. Jack Hargreave, at your service. Nathan Gould might have mentioned my name, although I don’t imagine he had much good to say about me.”
Actually, old man, Nathan says you want me dead.
On the other hand, Tara Strickland says you want me alive. It’s Lockhart who wants me dead, and I know for a fact that Lockhart has an absolute fucking hate-on for Jack Hargreave.
“I have to ask you to take Nathan’s opinions with a grain of salt. He’s a fine man, I think the world of him personally, wouldn’t have kept him on so long if I didn’t. But he’s also something of a fuckup, pardon my French. All those psychotropics he dropped out on the left coast—they’ve dulled his edge a bit. Not quite the clear thinker he once—well, we could spend hours on the long and sordid relationship between Nathan Gould and Jack Hargreave, but right now there are far more pressing concerns.
“You are standing not far from the diseased bureaucratic heart of this city. And while you’d think that airlifting all the politicians out of the place should have had a cleansing effect, sadly, what’s replaced them isn’t a lot better. Go on, see for yourself. Follow the parade.”
He does not pat me on the head or offer me a Milk-Bone. Probably only because the N2 doesn’t come with those options.
“By the way,” Hargreave adds after a couple of seconds have passed and I still haven’t saluted. “I’m given to understand someone may have told you you’re dead. I would urge you not to put too much faith in definitions designed primarily to allow the health insurance industry to cut benefits at the first appearance of a hangnail. Life and death are far more malleable than most people imagine, as you are finding out for yourself; and while, yes, you may technically fall into the latter category at the moment, I have access to certain—remedies—denied most policy-holders. Don’t you worry, son. I’ll be right there with you, and if you do this for me—for the planet—we’ll get you patched right up. After all, it’s my technology that’s already made you such an active corpse.”
He has a point. This, this high-tech infestation wrapped around me—it’s Hargreave’s property. He built the damn thing, or pirated it at least. He designed the people-friendly interface that papers over all those scary alien guts that I hope to Christ someone understands. And he’ll be right here with me. Of course you will, Jack. You are my Lord and my Shepherd, and you’ve probably been walking with me since the moment I died. A comm link without an off-switch is the least of your divine powers: I bet you’ve built overrides and remotes into every fucking circuit in this thing.
Still, that whole not-being-dead thing. That would be really nice.
Hargreave wants me to follow the parade? I follow the parade.
I’m in a shallow depression of cracked asphalt, a street collapsed into some hollow space below, ankle-deep in wastewater from half a dozen broken mains. Hargreave leads me from the valley of the shadow. He leads me through half-assed barricades, past schools of dead yellow cabs and burning police cars. Something bleats from the rooftops; I look up in time to see a blur of pink flannel before the baby bursts like a grapefruit against the pavement. Its mother hits a second later without a sound.
Infected. Infected.
“Stay the course, son,” Hargreave says sadly. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”
A woman cries out from a shattered window twelve stories above Liberty Street; a man and his daughter call for help from a balcony over Fulton. Sometimes I see them before they see me; I cloak, and creep past without ever raising their hopes.
He tries to distract me with tales of our mutual acquaintance. “Don’t get me wrong about Nathan; his heart is definitely in the right place, he’s the same humanitarian he ever was. He’s just—lost that edge that once made him so brilliant. That ability to make intuitive leaps, counterintuitive leaps, that distinguish the great minds from the merely competent. Case in point: He finds the black box in that second skin of yours and he just assumes it’s some kind of blueprint: the genspecs to fight the spore.”
Three stories’ worth of old iron fire escapes lie smashed on the sidewalk; someone’s hung a bedsheet from the railing of the fourth, painted a slapdash NEED FOOD & WATER for any Meals On Wheels truck that might be cruising past.
“Ten years ago Nathan would have seen the truth instantly. The suit doesn’t contain the specs for a weapon. The suit is the weapon. It just needs to be activated.”
He takes me through an abandoned field hospital: Quonset huts lined up in an underground parkade, all cots empty, body bags stacked in neat virgin piles. Down in some subterranean food court I pass through an improvised checkpoint blocked out in chain link and razor wire: rows of tables, suitcases and backpacks with their contents turned out and spread under racks of purple UV. Ticks clatter past, draining the dead while Hargreave natters like a Discovery Channel voice-over: “Think of the Argentine Cattle Crisis two years ago, or the British BSE outbreak in the last century. The issue was not slaughtering the animals, the problem was disposal. What do you do with millions of rotting corpses? Here you see the Ceph’s answer. They wipe us out, they break us down, they reduce the environmental impact almost to zero. Exemplary, really.”
The ticks have spilled onto Dutch Avenue. I’m starting to see that this isn’t a parade after all. It’s a drainage basin, full of little tick streams that join up to form mighty tick rivers that converge on—
I turn the corner at Spruce.
I have no idea what happened here. I think this used to be City Hall—three stories of arched windows, topped by a domed tower almost as high again—and I think the space in front of it used to be a park. But some giant has jammed a spade into the crust of the planet and just twisted. There’s a rift in front of me, a canyon where the ground has opened up. The road runs off its edge and ends in tatters like a hacked-off limb. An eighteen-wheeler leans over the break, cab dangling in midair; it looks almost curious, craning its neck to see down into the pit. Broken sewer pipe
s jut from the cliff face. There used to be a subway line down there, too; it’s been chopped in half like a worm by a shovel, the track line pulled into daylight and torn apart, subway cars scattered around the gap like cheap-ass Chinese toys. There are outfalls everywhere, and fires, and down through the mist and the smoke I see the vague shapes of uprooted trees and fractured asphalt.
There’s something else down there, too, something deeper than the merely human wreckage. I can only catch glimpses through the pieces of rock and road blocking the way, but that segmented bony aesthetic is almost familiar by now. Way down deep, built into bedrock under one of the most densely populated cities in the world: an architecture that couldn’t have been put together by anything we’d think of as hands.
Way off on the far side of City Hall I see a silhouette in the smoke; it looms maybe twice as high as the dome that foregrounds it. Another Ceph spire, and I’m praying to fucking Allah it’s already shot its load.
This is Tick Mecca. This is the point of their pilgrimage, this is where they bring the liquefied dead of Manhattan: a clacking, clicking river flowing down into the center of the earth.
“You have to go down there, son,” Hargreave says solemnly
I’m not your fucking son, Jack.
But I go down anyway.
What happens if I just say no? Good question.
I was keeping an eye out, you know. Ever since the suit mutinied at Trinity. That was a kick in the throat, man—kinda paled next to being dead, but it added insult to injury. Like I’d been on a leash all that time and just hadn’t known it, because SECOND’d never yanked me to heel before.
