“You should sit down,” I told Kaften, pointing to the Adirondack chairs near the door.
He shrugged, but sat anyway. One of his soldiers climbed the steps up from the beach, while another came through the doorway where Kaften had been standing. His snipers, Crassen and Myer. We’d all been through every inch of the house. Every drawer and cabinet. Under the bathroom and kitchen sinks. Every nook and cranny in the garage. We searched it all, hoping for some clue, some kind of indication as to where she had gone.
Not a single fucking thing.
The house was absolutely clean. No personal information. No records. No mem chips. Nothing. One of the grunts had even gone through the place room by room with a battle forensics kit, and all he had turned up was a collection of hair—mine and hers. If he found any evidence of our coupling, he kept his mouth shut.
No sign of Alice. No sign of Mesa.
“How’s the leg, Sarge?” Boyd asked.
“I’m fine,” Kaften said, although his bravado was lost in his pallor.
Boyd eyeballed him, disbelief plainly on his face. He hovered, but Kaften grunted and waved him away. Watching Boyd’s pathetic ministrations unmoored something in me, an errant thought that drifted through my skull, fighting through the sludge of recriminations and pity. I seized it, trying to churn the depths for his name.
What was his fucking name?
From Yuan’s research, body-shifting wasn’t as easy as it sounded. It wasn’t simply a matter of dumping your memories into somebody else’s head. DRMR did that already, with no discernible side effects, save for the intended ones. Shifting was a more arduous task that required transferring an entire consciousness and supplanting the entire core of an individual with somebody else’s. Although the research was dressed up in technical language and ignored the moral implications in favor of strict science, body-shifting was akin to snuffing out an entire soul. The procedure eliminated the very essence of life and individuality, turning the “host” body into an empty husk that could be occupied by an alternate. It was the equivalent of slapping a for-rent sign on somebody’s forehead.
My blood ran cold at the idea of Mesa being used that way. Alice could wipe Mesa’s mind clean, reformat her brain as a blank slate, and set up residence inside her, leaving her own body behind.
I had no idea why Alice would want to do this or why she had chosen Mesa. Her plans were wrapped up in too many other layers, and I was learning how complex and confusing her motives were. She always had an ulterior motive, and she thought several steps ahead, rigging the game to the point where the players didn’t even know what they were engaged in. I wasn’t sure I would bother asking for an explanation if I found her.
I didn’t know Alice’s level of technical expertise, but I figured that the complex operations of the brain, human neurology, and the ties that bound mind, body, and soul were far beyond her. She would need help. She would need a doctor—like Dr. Sanjar Hashmi, whom I had met on this deck after spending three days in a coma. He had injected me with medichines, supposedly to save my life, supposedly for the sole purpose of helping my body speed up its blood replication and to mend my injuries.
I remembered him clearly. A chubby man in old, cheap beggar’s clothes, his fat fingers probing my bullet wounds. Round face. Thin locks of wispy white hair clotting his forehead. His bulbous nose flecked with blackheads.
I told Kaften about my time there and about Hashmi. I told him everything I knew about Yuan’s research and my hunch that Hashmi was helping Alice Xie carry out the dead general’s research experiments.
“Did it work?” one of the grunts asked.
Yuan and a few other post-doctoral researchers had experimented with body switching on cats. They documented the personality characteristics of four felines they had adopted from the humane society. Each had distinct personalities, behavioral patterns, movements, and habits. Each was truly unique. One was proud, where another was timid but engaging. The third was shy and quiet, and the fourth was energetic and approachable. They varied in age, with the youngest being a small, two-month-old kitten, and the oldest was twelve years old.
They’d shaved the cats’ heads and bored holes in their skulls to fit them with cybernetic prosthetics that would capture, record, and measure brainwave fluctuations and neurological input and output. They developed small DRMR units that were implanted into each and then set about studying the animals’ cognitive functions and memory creation and storage.
The cats were divided evenly into a test group and a control group. The test group was injected with a beta-blocker called propranolol, which caused a disconnect between emotion and memory, affecting the areas of the brain responsible for memory formation, like the amygdale.
So many human memories are linked to emotion. It impacts who we are, who we become, how we behave, and how we learn. One of the most powerful emotions of all is fear. The researchers subjected the test group to frightening situations—loud noises, barking dogs, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and blasts of icy water. They systematically abused and tortured the animals, all while keeping them amped up on beta-adrenergic receptor blockers in order to interfere with how their small brains created memories of those terrifying events.
The highly potent mix of drugs was successful, and the cats’ long-term memories contained almost zero evidence of the trauma they had been subjected to. Although the DRMR records captured every instance of harm, their brains did not commit the memories to storage and showed no evidence of ability to recall the instances of fright. The researchers had shown how to prevent the felines from creating new memories, and then they moved on to eliminating the memories the cats already had.
Building on years of prior research, Yuan and his postdocs began targeting molecules in the brain, rather than specific structures. PKMzeta molecules link the different cells of the brain, creating a rapid, nearly instantaneous network for communication and dissemination of information and responses. This molecular network also controls memory recall that shapes learned behavior. By injecting the test group with another drug called ZIP, the researchers were able to begin destroying the cats’ long-term memories.
Slowly and persistently—using a combination of drugs, beta-blockers, and enzyme inhibitors—Yuan’s group was able to chip away at the basic fundamentals of both test cats’ personalities. At each step, they recorded the changes, until virtually nothing was left. After nearly a year, the two cats were reduced to, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than lumps of fur. They were basically comatose.
Then the researchers began transferring memories from the control group into the barren landscape of the test group’s brains, rebuilding the networks of PKMzeta molecules in order to strengthen memory retention. They were given booster shots to support enzyme reactions, but feedback from the brain activity registers led them to continue with mild doses of beta-blockers in order to make the body-shifting less stressful. As the experiment proceeded, the researchers noted that as the memory transfer solidified, the host bodies became more agitated. They speculated that the control-group personalities had begun to realize they were not in their own bodies and were lashing out in fear and panic. The cats had been declawed, and that proved to have been a wise precaution when one cat began attacking itself. Lacking sharp claws, it bit itself repeatedly, mangling its paws and wherever else it could reach along its flanks. Researchers sedated the cat and gave it a stronger batch of beta-blockers. Eventually, its strange behavior began to subside, and it began to behave more naturally. The PKMzeta molecules took root, and after several months, the control-group personalities had successfully implanted in the test-group bodies.
The researchers then noted that body-shifting was perhaps an imprecise term or, perhaps more accurately, that the results of their research had failed to meet their initial hypothesis. The process ended up being less of a full-scale body shift and more of a hardline replication, similar to cloning. The memory transference was such a success that researchers observed al
most no difference in personality between the control group and test group. They spent months documenting behavior and individual patterns and noted no incongruities between the two groups. Each cat matched its alternate, point by point. Their eating, sleeping, and bathroom schedules were perfectly synched, as were the way they walked and behaved. Even the tonal qualities of the test cats’ meows had adjusted to reflect those of the control group. Although the test cats couldn’t perfectly mimic the sound of their original bodies, the researchers noticed distinct changes in tone, pitch, and frequency.
“So yeah,” I said. “It worked.”
Crassen let out a low whistle.
“Damn,” Myer said, looking at me the way a person looks at somebody close to the deceased at a funeral, unsure of what else to say.
I considered how Yuan’s research might be applied to human subjects. I tried very hard not to think about what could have been done to Mesa over the last few days. I tried not to think that maybe she was already a vegetable and that if I ever found her, she would be nothing more than an empty shell that had once been my daughter.
“All right,” Kaften said, slowly dislodging himself from the lounge chair and getting one solid foot beneath him, as if the matter were settled. “We find this Dr. Sanjar Hashmi and have a word with him.”
Although Kaften was bombastic, finding Hashmi was a difficult task. If the PRC was good at anything, it was limiting access to information. Much of the general population lacked access to the online datastores, and wireless hookups were virtually non-existent. In some fundamental ways, California had been bombed back to an earlier century. Net cafes had been lost to the history books, and strict prohibitions existed on the installation and upgrading of cybernetic implants. Those of us who were indigenous were lucky our new overlords hadn’t forced the surgical removal of our implants. Even that was due mostly to the interference of the UN, humanitarian organizations, and human rights groups. Not all POWs had been so fortunate, and scores of people had been unable to escape the clumsy surgeries to neuter their augmentations.
Even those who were powerful enough to be considered elite had very limited, heavily monitored access to the net, and their page returns were routinely filtered, censored, and sanitized, if not entirely forbidden by the strict PRC firewalls.
One of Kaften’s tech specialists created his own secure network, covertly piggybacking the PRC’s datalines, in order to reach a hacker’s satellite where he could log in to the freenet. Once he was inside, the job became a matter of sifting through enormous amounts of data. What should have been a simple name search yielded hits for movies, books, unrelated public profiles for various social media networks, viral videos, shopping lists, and mem recordings. Even after some extensive filtering, we encountered data that was too recent and entries that were too new—a reminder of how much the outside world had moved on.
The vast majority of California had ceased to be. A connectivity map laid over the United States would have black holes where California, New York, DC, and maybe a handful of other cities used to be. That’s what we were facing. We were looking for a man lost in a black hole, a void of information. Whatever data trails Hashmi may have once had—a webpage for his business if he was in private practice or a staff bio if he taught at any of the local universities or worked at a hospital—were buried under newer, more relevant search patterns. Unless the datastores that may have once kept Hashmi tied in to the electronic world were housed in underground server units, those records now ceased to exist. Even finding a cached page was hard—but not impossible.
Eventually, we found him. A small fragment of a ghost, lost deep in the electronic ether. We unearthed a single cached m-log, which was similar to a vlog, but devoted solely to the sharing of memories and relied heavily on advertising. The site itself was inaccessible, and we had stumbled across what was, for all intents and purposes, a screenshot of a page. At the top was a small, short video ad for a neurological clinic on Wilshire. The clinic was near the VA hospital, and it probably had survived largely on referrals from there. After extracting the advertisement, we found that the names of the staff were encoded in the video’s meta tags, which was where we finally found Hashmi.
The clinic was in a commercial district, surrounded by moderately sized white office buildings on one side of the street and larger, newer, glossy-black office constructs on the other side. The Wells Fargo complex dominated one corner of the avenue, but the building was in tatters. I remembered footage from about a decade ago when, at the height of the collapse, the bankers were attacked in the street by a riotous mob and the building was firebombed by people who found themselves solvent one minute and then homeless the next, their fates sealed in between the span of a breath.
We spent more time than I had wanted on plotting our route from our makeshift fort at Alice’s house to the clinic and tapping into satellite feeds to gauge PRC troop movements and checkpoints. None of us, me in particular, were eager for a confrontation with the overlords. Not when we were so close.
Time itself had become a heavy weight, bowing my shoulders, while stomach acid burned through my core. By the time Kaften authorized a plan, the darkness was infinite, and a large orange orb hung in the sky. I watched the broken reflections of the hunter’s moon against the waves and tried to still my soul. If I closed my eyes for too long, I saw Mesa, her eyes blank and damning as if there were nothing left of her to save.
When we finally left, Crassen drove slowly. I sat in the passenger bucket seat while Kaften was sprawled in the back, his injured leg up on the bench while he leaned against the door. Boyd sat in the storage area all the way in the rear. Kaften had ordered Myer to stay behind in case Alice returned. He was hiding up in the bluffs, watching her house through a sniper’s scope.
I was jacked into the hacker’s satellite, monitoring PRC movements and watching for random roadside stops or checkpoints that had sprouted along our pre-defined route. The ride was smooth and the road barren, save for us. Crassen stuck to side streets through largely dark and empty neighborhoods, staying away from the more common, more heavily trafficked routes. Hardly any souls were in sight, maybe the occasional bus, whose bright-yellow lights shined through the windows, empty save for the driver and one or two elderly Asians. Crassen stopped for the lights and stop signs, intent on not drawing attention to our vehicle. The curfew was lax these days, not as bad as the early days of the occupation, when it struck an hour before sundown. But it was still randomly, and oftentimes violently, enforced. So I was careful not to let my attention stray and to keep my focus centered on the retinal heads-up display of the city map.
Crassen turned down Wilshire and drove through a desolate neighborhood of empty office buildings, barely distinguishable from one another in the night. Past where Wells Fargo used to be, the pharmacy across the street was a bombed out wreck, more of a soot stain against the white structure it neighbored than anything else. I squinted past the r-HUD, into the darkness, hoping to make out an address as our tracking blip closed in on the destination marker. All I saw were dirty white buildings that would need to be torn down and rebuilt if they were to ever be occupied again.
A flash of light off to the side caught my eye, then a buzzing whine drew my attention. Before any of us had a chance to say or do anything, the missile struck the ground behind us. The force of the explosion lifted the back of the jeep off the road, and Kaften was sent tumbling forward, into the foot wells behind the front seat. The jeep crashed back down, the rear wheels gone, with a sickening, crunching squeal as bare metal skidded across concrete. Crassen lost control of the vehicle, and it fishtailed.
They were shooting at us, but the bullets were useless. The thick munitions-proof glass stopped the rounds, leaving compressed circular fractures around flattened, copper-colored rounds.
Crassen tried to recover from the spin, but the front passenger tire popped, sending sparks flying up from the bare rim as it ground against the road. The front of a building came up on us qu
ickly, filling the windshield.
I shot forward in my seat, the seatbelt snagging hard and keeping me from going anywhere. My collarbone and waist hurt badly, and the belt stabbed into my neck. Crassen winced in pain, but Kaften, who hadn’t had time to pick himself up from the floor, seemed fine where he was.
“PRC?” he asked.
“I still don’t have any readings on them. It can’t be them,” I said.
“Well, if it’s not them, they’ll be here soon. They won’t ignore explosions and gunfire in the middle of the night.”
“We gotta get out of here,” Crassen said. He sounded calm, at least.
I pulled my gun, racked the slide back, and made sure a round was chambered. I looked back at Kaften. He was up and ready to go, a gun in his hand, too.
The gunfire was coming from the driver’s side, so Kaften and I got out first to lay down cover fire, giving Boyd a chance to get out through the rear hatch and come around to our side. Crassen was climbing over the center console to get out through the passenger door. We laid down short, three-round bursts, trying hard to conserve ammo. A short bark of pain nearby meant we’d hit somebody.
“C’mon, this way.” Kaften pointed toward the building. The front end of the jeep was an accordion against the thick concrete. Broken glass on the ground framed a mangled strip that had been the bumper.
Kaften shouldered his way through the front entrance, where the door was nothing more than a thin sheet of plywood under layers of graffiti, and we filed in behind him, covering one another. The building’s windows were busted, and rough planes of wood had been sloppily nailed over the openings from inside. We could easily see outside through the gaps.
We were in the lobby of a small office complex, an open area with stairs to either side going up. An elevator bank sat between the stairs and what I guessed was a janitor’s closet, although the door was unlabeled. The restroom doors were missing, and the rooms had been stripped of virtually everything, right down to the ceramic tiles.
Convergence Page 23
