Final Book

by Peter W Prellwitz

  I swept an arm. "All this, Miss DeChant, is my mind. Every nook and cranny, including what I've used, what others such as yourself have used, and even some still unexplored sections."

  "And what of the room?"

  "You were the one who put me on that. I had always known I was in my mind whenever I was, well, out of my mind. Every sharding episode didn't evict me, it just shuffled us around as a barrier was breached and a different persona came to the surface. But all of us have the same address." I tapped my head. "Up here. All of us ... and one other thing."

  I nodded in understanding. "Of course! The memory capsule that Professor LeClaire put into me. Your pardon, mademoiselle. Into you."

  "Actually, he didn't put it into either of us, Miss DeChant. He embedded it into an unused portion of my mind. It sat there, tapping into my mind but not having full access to my cognitive abilities to truly take root. It would be inactive while it lay in a quiet, unused corner of my head. Inactive and undetectable by the NATech ghouls that pulled you apart after the raid on your home in 2315. Dollars to doughnuts LeClaire knew that and planned accordingly."

  "Dollars to doughnuts?" I asked, the phrase being unfamiliar to me.

  "Sorry. Old habit. I still use a lot of old phrases. I should try to cut down. Dollars to doughnuts means it was a sure thing. LeClaire knew what he was doing.

  "Anyway, it remained in a nearly dormant condition for more than two centuries, until December, 2543, when I was riped as the line processing core for a foundry located on the Thames, near London. And with very straightforward duties - the core only carried out four basic instruction sets over ninety-eight percent of the time - the professor's precious little keyed memory encapsulated mnemonic inlay had ideal ground to grow and mature in. That's why this area is so flat and featureless; because the foundry ripe was flat and featureless. I'm sure the other machine ripes look similar to this. No amount of binary programming can match human imagination. We should be thankful that the KME didn't end up in the pleasure ripe. I'm not even going to try to imagine what that landscape looks like.

  "It plugged away at its primary program for one hundred and twenty years. Then, about three years ago, the Resistance tracks down the ripe, swipes it from the foundry and pours it into this body, making me into me again. They messed up a tad on the plumbing, but that's made my trip through life just that much more interesting."

  "And what was the KME's primary program, Abigail?"

  "To design, create, and then implement unbound trinary code. After it had done so, it would wait for the original persona - me - to be restored."

  "How long did it take to accomplish this creation?"

  "I've used that same trinary code to calculate that very thing, Miss DeChant. Sixty-nine years."

  "And that's all it was designed to do?"

  "Yes and no. LeClaire only designed it to create UTC for two reasons. One, that's all he had time for. And two, once that goal was achieved, the KME would use the KME and proceed from there, reacting to situations as best it could.

  "Good thing, too. A couple months after I was revived, I was forced into a sharding episode. There were indications that I'd had smaller episodes prior to that. I was a prime candidate to become a Shard, which as you know is a very unstable, very painful, and very short experience.

  "The KME recognized that and began developing a solution. I was unintentionally helping it by my heavy accessing of the puterverse. Whenever I was puting, the KME was able to accelerate its calculations and expand its scenarios. It used my first serious episode as an opportunity to teach me how to visualize and use UTC. That way, when I recovered, I would spend even more time in the puterverse. An added benefit was that I actually designed some UTC myself, which had been LeClaire's ultimate goal: to have a human mind grasp and use UTC. Through me, he had achieved that goal.

  "Now the problem was to keep me alive long enough to use it. My sharding episodes were very spread apart initially, but they were present. The KME wasn't fooled. It knew my episodes would continue and that the time between shards would decrease. So it created the room we were just in. Why it looked like an airport waiting room, I have no idea."

  "I do, Abigail," I volunteered. "It looked much like the old Paris airport. There was a brief period in the 2280's when it was quite popular to imitate the 1980's. Paris was like everyone else and designed a portion of its spaceport to look three centuries old. Professor LeClaire was quite amused by it and visited it frequently. He occasionally took me to dinner there."

  I laughed. "I'd have never figured that one out, Miss DeChant. Thanks for the fill-in.

  "So it built this place, knowing it would be needed in order to begin repairing my shards. Into the room, the KME placed representatives of each of the ripes, including the computers, even though they would not be used during my reintegration."

  "Why not?"

  "Why?" I countered. "I have the keys to UTC. Compared to what I can do now, even the most sophisticated binary machine has the computing power of a turnip."

  "And the girl and I?" I whispered, afraid of the answer.

  "I'm getting to that. Let me tell this in order. Once the KME had constructed this place and populated it, it then began the real work of modifying the ripe barriers in my mind so that it could institute a structured collapse at the right moment. That moment is now at hand.

  "I think it was about the time NATech attacked the Third that the KME realized it had to accelerate the process, which was both good and bad. It was good because you and I had already met as a result of our raping at the hands of NATech SS." I shuddered at the memory, feeling dirty. "We needed to meet and understand each other in order for the final reintegration to work properly. Since we were the ones who initiated it, instead of the KME having to do it, we greatly increased our chances at establishing a relationship. A relationship that I value greatly.

  "The bad part was, when Posen starting using his micro inducer on me, he tore down much of the work the KME had done on the barriers. There was a dangerously high chance that I would slip into cascading sharding episodes, something the KME would not be able to stop. An added danger was that Posen worked for NATech, and their top dog, Chris Young, very much wanted my KME."

  "He knew about it?" I said, startled.

  "He more than knew about it, Miss DeChant. He was the one that made it possible for LeClaire to create one. Young is the main bad guy through all this. He lived during my time - even worked for me - and was the one who created the puterverse."

  "That I knew," I nodded. "I would say that every school girl is taught that, which is true, though I started life as a fifteen year old, and never attended school. But I can also say that during riping, every domestic persona is given a good deal of general information so she might function well as a hostess and companion. After LeClaire purchased me, I continued to study, hoping I might better serve him."

  "LeClaire didn't purchase you, Miss DeChant, nor did we just happen to be put together. You were given to him by Young, who knew that it was me being riped. Young wanted the most stable mind he could get to hold the KME, and I was his choice. I also know he took a perverse pleasure having me riped into a woman. He saw it as a type of revenge, or something."

  "So he knew that LeClaire would design a memory capsule?"

  "Or something like it, yes. LeClaire was one of the best minds of his era - maybe of any era - and Chris had been following his career closely. Even when LeClaire was in his thirties - years before you were riped - he had made astounding advances in the application of sonics to the brain. It was, in fact, his achievements with sonics in general - along with Earth's enforced isolation - that guided technology from that point on. Sonics is used today in many fields, from weapons to medicine."

  "So why didn't M'sieur Young just design the KME himself? Wasn't he a computer with endless resources?"

  "Yes, he was. But he'd fallen into the most common trap of all. Thinking computers were superior in every way to humans, he transferred him
self into a specially built region, essentially a self-riping. From there, he planned to design and implement stable BTC to better control the planet."

  "BTC? Not UTC?"

  "That's right. Chris was a smart cookie, but he always lacked that extra bit of imagination that reaches beyond reason. He knew UTC could never exist, so he abandoned it immediately.

  "But he did want the BTC. There are three kinds of trinary code; pseudo, bound and unbound. Pseudo uses complex matrices of binary to simulate trinary. When implemented, it creates mock emotions and limited judgment. But there's no depth. The emotions are not 'felt' and therefore cannot be used to affect judgment. On top of that, the coding is tedious, bulky, and prone to bugs and eventual failure if not constantly maintained. Chris is using PTC now, and is probably expending a good deal of his admittedly vast resources to keep it running.

  "Bound trinary code goes to the next level. It uses larger and larger binary matrices to simulate emotion. With BTC, there are indications that once a matrix reaches a critical point --actual trinary code, code using twos as well as ones and zeros - it would self-generate, collapsing the matrix into a tighter trinary package. A machine with BTC in its programming would begin to feel actual emotion.

  "There are several drawbacks to BTC, however. First, it remains bound to binary code, hence the name. Second, while the emotions are real, they are chaotic. Third, these emotions still cannot be applied to judgment, either a symptom or cause of the chaos. And finally, BTC is subject to instant and catastrophic failure if the host matrix is modified incorrectly.

  "Unbound trinary code is the real prize. UTC freely mixes in zeros, one, and twos in its programs, and is bedrock stable. Coding takes up very little room, and creates true emotions; fully stable and applicable to true judgment."

  "You mean, you've created life."

  "In a way," I agreed. "At first I found the thought very uncomfortable. Life can only be created by God. But God chooses to create life through procreation. As a woman, I can bear children. While I do not create that life, I do bring it into the world. Mike and Kiki are similar to my bearing children. I made them, but if they have true life, I did not give it to them, God did. I only brought them into this world.

  "So, getting back to Chris and LeClaire. Chris was certain that if given the proper tools and motivation, LeClaire would solve the BTC instability problem and provide him with what he thought was the ultimate compiling code. So Young arranged for LeClaire's life to be trouble free, brought him up to a position more prestigious than even LeClaire deserved - at least early in his career, and provided a perfect subject and servant; me, riped as you.

  "At first, everything went just as Chris planned. LeClaire continued advancing his work, getting closer and closer to creating a mnemonic inlay capable of building stable bound trinary code That it took decades for LeClaire to do his work meant nothing to =Chris. He is essentially immortal. Besides, the longer LeClaire took to complete his work, the better chance there was that he would use you as the KME recipient."

  "Why, Abigail?"

  "Because LeClaire would want to use a subject that he knew and trusted. Young had calculated that LeClaire would be tempted to betray him if he ever thought through the implications of a binary persona using bound trinary code. And since by this time you had been with him for forty plus years, you were the perfect choice.

  "But Chris made some mistakes. His first mistake was that he had never given a second thought to LeClaire creating unbound trinary code. His second mistake was that he has a rather low opinion of flesh, and he badly underestimated LeClaire's ingenuity and resourcefulness. But his biggest mistake was that he was so supremely confident in his own logic and abilities, he never checked his work. It was a failing he had even when he was human.

  "LeClaire had developed a KME capable of designing UTC. And he had not only figured out what would happen if Chris got his hands on the KME, he had also figured out that Chris would know he knew. And with that conclusion, LeClaire knew he was under a sentence of death.

  "So when LeClaire was ready to implant the KME, he acted. On the morning of December 3, 2315, LeClaire reported a power leakage in his private laboratory."

  "I remember," I said with a nod. "I was the one who placed the call."

  "That makes sense. I'll also wager you don't remember much more after that."

  I frowned. "Well, the technicians arrived and went to work. Since it was nearly lunch time, Professor LeClaire asked me to prepare them lunch as well, which I did."

  "Really?" I asked softly. "What did you serve them?"

  "If my memory is correct, the tall one, Francis, had a wedge of cheddar and an apple, with chilled white wine. The sturdier man, Pierre, had a quarter kilo of cold beef with an ale."

  "Uh-huh," I said. "What did you serve them?"

  "I just told you, Abigail," I said, perplexed. "I served the tall one, Maurice, a crisp salad of lettuce, tomato ..."

  "What did you say, Miss DeChant?"

  "I said, a bowl of onion soup ... with ..." I raised a hand to my mouth.

  "That's right. You can remember, Miss DeChant. But every time you remember, it's something different, isn't it?"

  "Oui, Abigail. But I'm so very positive it was a cold chicken leg ... and ... what is wrong?" I felt my heart beginning to race.

  "What you're remembering is an injected memory pattern. It's made to mimic a real memory, but is not as stable. NATech uses this technique frequently to trap the Resistance when they're restoring a Cue. Unless you're looking for it, it's very difficult to pin down because the person with the false pattern never realizes it. LeClaire used it on you that morning in December. He used it again that evening." I smiled and sighed. "Between the two of us, Miss DeChant, we cover a lot of firsts in the riping field. Frankly, I think it's time we took advantage of that."

  "But why did Professor LeClaire do that to me?"

  "He had to, because those technicians were not there to fix his leakage. They were there to assist him in establishing the real KME. Then, later that day, he established a partial KME in your section of my mind. He then injected another memory pattern that under scrutiny would reveal that he had flat-lined you at about five that evening, just prior to the KME being inlaid. To throw them off the real KME. He succeeded. During your autopsy, the phony KME was discovered, and LeClaire's experiment was considered invalid."

  "You mean to say that Professor LeClaire killed me?"

  "You must understand, Miss DeChant. LeClaire already knew your lives were forfeit. My mind would continue, of course. But your persona was over. By flat-lining your brain waves, he saved you the agony of sonic interrogation that would have killed you anyway. And despite your memories of that afternoon and evening, he had actually flat-lined you that morning, shortly after his associates arrived."

  "It all seems so cold and cruel," I said sadly.

  "Oh, get off it, Miss DeChant!" I exclaimed irritably. "This is NATech we're talking about. LeClaire was a genius, and he had compassion for you. And he didn't want to see a world crushed by a power-mad puterverse demigod wielding UTC irresponsibly. But the man made his living by creating methods of mental suppression, coercion, and manipulation. He was as irresponsible as Young. He didn't give a damn about the consequences of creating UTC. Not really. Sure, he took steps to see it didn't fall into the wrong hands. But he still created it. He intended it for me, but he had no idea who I was. For all he knew, I was worse than Chris. He just didn't want Chris to have it because he knew Young was going to kill him. LeClaire was never an innocent in all this. You should know that, Miss DeChant. You lived with the man for forty-one years."

  "You are right!" I cried, feeling pangs of guilt and shame. "He was always pleasant to me, and we were rarely together in public, except at formal gatherings or occasional meals. But you are right. I heard many things about him, things that should have made me hate him, they were so cruel. But I never lost my respect for him. Perhaps I am not innocent as well, no?"

&n
bsp; "No!" I exclaimed, regretting my harshness. "You are the innocent in this, Miss DeChant. I'm sorry if I've made you feel bad. How can you control your feelings for LeClaire? You were made for him. In the same way your sexual desires were cut off, your conscience was blunted in how you viewed LeClaire. Nothing he did could have changed your overwhelming need to serve and respect him. So don't blame yourself." I smiled at her. "I don't blame you, and I'm the soulner here."

  "Thank you, Abigail." I wiped a tear away. "I am so grateful that you are my soulner. You make me feel so alive, so real."

  "Then I suppose now is the best time to tell you." She looked at me curiously and I took a deep breath.

  "You had asked earlier about you and the girl. What would become of you. The truth is, in one sense, neither you nor the girl are real. Neither of you has a soul, nor true control over your actions, nor a real ability to better yourselves." She looked about to cry again.

  "In another sense, though, both of you are as real as me. You see, Miss DeChant, you are me. So is the girl."

  "Abigail! What ... what do you mean?" I asked.

  "Let me show you." And I took her hands. Her eyes widened suddenly, and then she was gone, fading away with a shimmer of light. In the last moment, I saw a peaceful smile illuminate her face, and her eyes came alive with the spark of true life.

  "Ah, Miss DeChant. I see you've successfully negotiated the KME's tricky path. Good girl!"

  I twisted around from my position on the ground and saw a tall man standing over me, smiling coldly. I gasped and raised a hand to my mouth.

  "Professor LeClaire!"

  Chapter Five

  He reached a hand down and helped me to my feet. Unlike me, he was fully clothed, dressed in his favorite sweater and slacks. He seemed to be in his early forties, the age he was when I first came to serve him. Thinking that, I looked at myself.

  I was young again! My middle-aged body, feeling the creaks and protests of advancing years, was replaced by the slim physique of my youth. I gently touched my skin, feeling the soft, smooth ...