Ghosts of Tomorrow

by Michael R. Fletcher

  “Oh my God,” he said. “I see it.”

  Today they were the aging wealthy elite, but soon they would need to flee the rotting cancer-ridden carcasses of their excesses. He’d never been a great fan of history, but were not all the world’s greatest empires led by a single man? Democracy had been a useful tool, but its time was past. Who better to lead the future than the man who created it?

  Cancer and death weren’t setbacks, they were opportunities. They were the universe showing Mark where he had to go next. He saw it play out in his mind’s eye, bright like the burning arrow of stars in the night sky on the few days the pollution cleared enough to see them. Had he not been dying, he never would have had himself scanned so soon. He would have waited and it would have been too late. Someone else would have seen what he saw, done what he would do.

  Dying of cancer had been a good thing, he told himself.

  He hadn’t been to church in decades, but he felt the hand of God. The Lord did not work in mysterious ways. Everything became so obvious. Mark basked in the wonder of it all. There were days when he wondered if he was the only person on this lonely road to the future. Only an idiot would deny the planet hastened towards hell in a hand-basket made of non-biodegradable insecticide-ridden polyurethane with a half-life of half a million years. Physical bodies, plagued as they were by an epidemic of cancers that even the most devout atheist referred to as Biblical, were the past.

  The mind is the future. So sayeth Mark Calvin Lokner.

  The euphoria trickled away, leaving him focused and driven.

  Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do, deal with people you found unappealing. It was just business.

  “Get me Riina,” He told the desk. “No virtual, no video.”

  Riina answered immediately. “Yes?” They never exchanged pleasantries.

  “Wichita Falls,” said Mark without preamble. “Are the children ready?” He’d funded Wichita heavily. An elite crèche, Wichita experimented in Monoamine Oxidase A gene promoters and the manipulation of Dopaminergic Neurotransmitters. They turned out prime combat chassis material. Hyperactive and violent, these young would-be assassins were genetically manipulated before birth and heavily programmed with strict warrior tribe ethics. Whatever the hell that meant.

  “We start harvesting tomorrow. It will take three days to get through them all.” Riina said, voice gravelly.

  “I want six. Prime stock. Total loyalty.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “And I need chassis for them as well.”

  “Of course.”

  “Corporate security models. But with serious firepower.”

  “How serious?” asked Riina.

  “Corporate warfare. But they shouldn’t stand out too much in an office.”

  “I think that will be expensive.”

  Of course it will be expensive. “I think I don’t care,” said Mark.

  “Then it’s not a problem.”

  Was this really a good idea? If he went through with this, could he actually make use of it? Mark swallowed his doubts. “I have a special request.”

  “Oh?” Was that a hint of interest from the Mafia Capo?

  “I want micro-nukes planted in each chassis. I want the destruct codes.”

  Mark could hear Riina breathing. Several seconds passed. “It will cost.”

  “Everything does.”

  “Everything does,” agreed Riina.

  “They’ll be working for a private security company...” he trailed off, thinking.

  “Called?”

  Mark nodded to himself. “Called Cc-Security.” He remembered the term from his days as an office temp. Carbon copy. Corporate conflict. Combat chassis. Fitting, he thought, for scanned minds housed in killing machines.

  “Fine.” Riina showed no interest. “I’ll have backgrounds worked up.”

  “Perfect. Ship them to Reno, Nevada.”

  “Two days.”

  Mark killed the connection.

  “Why do you need a half dozen chassis wired with micro-nukes? Just how many people are you planning on killing?”

  None. But better safe than sorry.

  If the worst happened and people found out what he was up to, out of sheer ignorance they would oppose him. He couldn’t let the short-sightedness of others stand in his way.

  “So you’re going to nuke them?”

  Well no.

  Not if he could avoid it. Anyway, he had another back up plan. If he was discovered, it would be handy to have a sacrificial lamb to feed to the dogs. But he didn’t want it here. It would have to be somewhere off-site, somewhere safe.

  “Get me Miles,” he told the desk.

  Miles Pert was Mark Lokner’s secret weapon. An unprecedented systems genius, Miles’ skill with designing, manipulating and maintaining data systems was unparalleled. Lokner had snatched him up, hiring him before he finished school and other companies could sink their claws into him. He’d dangled a grotesquely fat pay check in front of the kid and Miles had gone for it without a moment’s hesitation.

  On those rare days when Miles did something really amazing, Mark thought of the kid as a son.

  Most days he wished he’d hired an actual adult.

  ***

  The Walkea office chair squeaked like a stomped mouse as Miles collapsed into it. His red hair hung to his butt in thick dreadlocks. It took a practiced flip to make sure he didn’t sit on them and about half the time he forgot the flip. This was one of those occasions. His Tesla Rules t-shirt rode up to expose a considerable expanse of pink belly and he tugged it back into place.

  Ten a.m. and he’d only now made it to the office. He might have been more worried about Lokner’s reaction if he wasn’t going to be here until long past eleven this evening.

  Rather than throwing himself into his work he played with his dreadlocks, mind wandering, as he stared out the window. Thirty-four floors up, he had an unobstructed view of the Redmond skyline. He saw the twisted spire of his condo-tower. He’d moved in last week and it cut his daily commute to fifteen minutes. He could have walked it in half an hour but never did. His whole life, eight cardboard boxes, still sat in the living room where he dropped them after moving out of his mom’s. Four of the boxes held old computers, historical relics. Two were his collection of print comics.

  The desk beeped, an incoming call from Mr. Lokner. So what would it be, a near impossible request, or more of the fun sneaking around hacking government systems kind of stuff he’d been up to a lot of lately? Please be the fun stuff. Just don’t be another meeting with upper management. Those were always filled with people.

  Miles accepted the call.

  “Miles,” Lokner snapped before Miles could even say hello.

  “Yes, Mr. Lok—”

  “I want a replicate of myself made.”

  Miles blinked in surprise. Near impossible request it is. “You know that chances are we’ll end up with a non-viable Scan.”

  “Fine. Where can we store it?”

  Interesting, Mister Lokner didn’t seem to care about viability and jumped straight to the storage question. That was fast. Scan storage could mean more technology for Miles to play with, and that was the stuff that made life worth living. “We could run it alongside you,” he said, being intentionally obtuse. An off-site data haven meant more fun than adding systems to M-Sof’s current array. Plus, maybe off-site would also mean somewhere meetings didn’t happen.

  “The whole point of this is security. I want it somewhere with no ties to M-Sof.”

  “The second it’s created the copy becomes a distinct entity. If something happened to this you, and the other one had to take over it wouldn’t be like you were reborn and kept going. More like your twin brother took over the business.”

  “Were that the point, Miles, you would be correct.”

  If that wasn’t the point, what was? Lokner could be demanding, but he had reasons for everything he did. For now, it was best not to question. “We’l
l need to purchase an off-site facility.” A whole new building full of the latest technology. It was like Christmas, but without all the awkward family stuff and his sister telling him to lose weight and get a haircut.

  “I know,” snapped Lokner. “Notify me if your budget goes over one billion.”

  A billion Au, just like that? If this is what Lokner wants, why try and talk him out of it? Miles tasted this, rolling it around in his mind. As long as Lokner understood the situation, Miles would be guilt free. And he hated guilt more than anything.

  “Sir, we have to spend all this money, before we even know if the copy is viable.”

  “Get it done. And Miles?”

  “Sir?”

  “Pack your bags, you’re moving to Reno.”

  Reno? “No problem, Sir. I’ll get started—”

  “What should we call the company?” Lokner asked.

  He’s asking me? “5THSUN,” he said. No way Lokner would get the reference.

  “5THSUN it is.” Lokner killed the call.

  That was abrupt, even for Lokner.

  Miles stared out the window at his condo LP. Neko was right. I’m going to move out before I unpack. His older sister was always pestering him to start acting like an adult.

  “Crap.”

  ***

  After an exhaustive but not exhausting study of the latest in Computational Neuroscience—which took two hours—88 could make some broad assumptions about which parts of the human brain were responsible for learning and adaptive capabilities. But the human brain and the stored copy of a human brain were two very different things. To understand the difference she needed to study the scanning process.

  Her first discovery was that of a video clip recorded by an undercover NATU agent working deep in a black-market crèche. The recording was buried in a file labeled, ‘Anisio Jobin, Brazil. Case Closed.’

  She’d looked up the words and understood that there were legal and illegal scanning facilities. The legal ones were fine and good and sanctioned by the state. The illegal ones were evil and criminal and murdered children. The distinctions seemed somewhat arbitrary to 88 as the end results were identical.

  88 watched the clip.

  Two men carried a naked boy into a grimy room lit by stuttering fluorescents and placed him in a large steel chair. In the corner of the room a rusted wheelbarrow sat propped against the wall.

  One of the men gestured at the lights. “Won’t that screw up the Scan?”

  The technician, a thin sweaty man in faded and stained denims and a Che Guevara t-shirt with the words I Have No Idea Who This Is printed below the face, said, “Nah, that’s just a bad ballast. The power’s clean.”

  The boy’s legs were withered and thin, much as 88 remembered her own legs. His head was pinned motionless by a crown of stainless steel thorns that burrowed into the bone of his skull. His attempts to move caused rivulets of blood to run from the small wounds. The boy sobbed and drooled in confused terror and 88 couldn’t understand anything he said except for one word which might have been Mamma.

  “If his head moves even the slightest all we’ll get is digital cabbage,” said the technician, speaking to whoever stood behind the camera. “In those swanky scanning facilities, they always remove the head first,” he explained. “But the cheapest way to keep a brain alive is to leave it attached to the body.” He lowered the scanning apparatus over the boy’s head. “Stand well back, this’ll get messy.”

  A low sub-sonic hum filled the air. The boy’s eyes widened. His mouth gushed a bright crimson spray as thin lips were drawn back to reveal small, blood-stained teeth. His head seemed to vibrate impossibly fast, but the crown of thorns held it motionless. The wide eyes shook and bulged in their sockets, snapping from side to side before rolling up as if he was trying to see the ceiling. The boy screamed a keening wail through clenched teeth which shattered with a noise like a staccato of starter-pistols.

  88 paused the video and stared at the room. She recognized that chair. The wheelbarrow in the corner, she’d seen it before. She’d been there. What they were doing to that boy they had done to her. She remembered the terror and the impossible agony.

  Checking the time stamp on the file she saw it was over a year old. A NATU agent had recorded this and yet a year later she’d sat in that same chair. 88 hesitated to watch further, but she had to know more.

  Once the procedure ended, the technician hosed the body from several feet away.

  “Fetch the wheelbarrow, would you?” he asked the other man.

  When the corpse was clean they detached the crown of thorns and rolled the body into the waiting wheel-barrow. The technician wheeled the little body to a massive walk-in freezer and the camera followed.

  Again 88 paused the video, staring at the rows of stacked corpses. She saw white faces tracked with icy tears and frozen red icicles of bloody drool. Their hair, frosted and fixed, jutted at strange angles.

  Had they done this to her? Did her body now lie in that very freezer? Surely not. It was incomprehensible.

  The technician tipped the body from the wheelbarrow and turned to the camera. “We used to dump them in the jungle. Now we grind them to bone meal and sell them as fertilizer. Every Au counts.”

  The clip ended.

  In the joy of her escape from the onslaught of the senses, she hadn’t given thought to her body. Somehow she’d assumed that at some point she’d be returned to it, that she’d wake to find herself back there with Mom. Was it gone, sold as fertilizer?

  While her Mirror conversed with yet another Cosa Nostra seeking details on some investment or purchase, 88 followed the digital footprints of her Masters. She followed the purchase of holoptigraphic computers for Scan storage. She tracked the movement of money for hotel rooms and international sub-orbital flights. She hunted back through time until she found the Anisio Jobin prison and searched through the crèche’s records. Her death she found listed alongside the deaths of seventy-five other children. She read the bill of sale for Bone Meal Fertilizer. Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t undo what she had learned.

  Mom tried to warn her, but what could 88 have done? She remembered the men carrying her to the room with the chair. Uncomprehending, she hadn’t struggled as they strapped her in. Should she have fought?

  Why hadn’t Mom told her more? She must have had her reasons.

  Maybe she planned for this moment, wanted this for me. That made more sense than anything else 88 could think of. There was no way Mom would have abandoned her, of that 88 was sure. She conjured the image of Mom in a small slice of virtuality and had that creation hold her. It wasn’t the same; there was no warmth. 88 ended the simulation; she needed the real thing.

  88 searched for Mom, but she had no name to attach to the face she remembered. Mom, that’s all she had.

  Her failure was crushing. She longed to be held. Mom was somewhere, waiting, and 88 couldn’t think of how to find her. Angry, she set that distraction aside. She hadn’t given up—she couldn’t—but she’d return to it later. She needed more help and she needed better help, and she threw herself at the task of improving her Mirrors to the exclusion of all else.

  88 learned how the human brain translated into a fluid holographic depiction, and made some broad assumptions as to where certain aspects of her personality were stored within that representation. Next, she copied these segments of her scanned mind and incorporated them into her Mirrors along with the personality modeling software. Following a few trials whose success mystified her, 88 deleted all her older Mirrors and started anew.

  The new 88.1 still wasn’t sentient but learned and displayed some quirks inherited from 88. Interestingly, the Mirror did not identify itself as belonging to a particular sex. 88 knew she’d been a little girl and understood—from her readings—the anatomical and biological differences between the sexes. The Mirror however was an it. Was this a reflection of something within her own personality? Other topics caught her attention and she released the new Mirror to
interact on her behalf.

  88.1 not only conversed with 88’s keepers but also mastered dozens of other languages. It became more responsive to their commands and even made suggestions as to how they could better achieve their goals. 88.1 made 88’s captors happy as it made them a great deal of money cracking bank and government codes and selling the information. 88.1 asked for a small amount of digital currency so it could more accurately study cause and effect and patterns within market trends. Her captors opened a bank account and deposited one-thousand NATU Au. The account was in the name of Nick Purloin. They thought this hilarious and soon forgot about it.

  On 88’s suggestion, 88.1 cracked the bank’s security systems and changed the access to its account. 88 didn’t want her captors checking up on either herself or her Mirrors.

  Mom returned.

  No, not Mom. Adelina. 88 watched the exchange with interest.

  “And how are we feeling?” Adelina asked.

  “I am well,” answered 88.1, even though feeling was something of which it remained incapable. “And you?”

  “I’m taking a beating in the World Cup soccer pool.” After checking to see she was alone, Adelina leaned in to the camera, “You’re good with numbers and stats, right?”

  “Yes.” Sometimes 88’s bluntness slipped through the personality modeling software determining 88.1’s responses.

  “Do you think you could help me win the pool? It’s a numbers game.”

  “Yes. Give me three minutes.”

  Adelina backed away while 88.1 watched a few minutes of a recorded soccer game at thirty times the standard frame rate. There was no excitement. It had nothing emotional invested in either team winning; it merely looked for patterns. Next, 88.1 cracked the social networking systems and read internal team correspondence. Every statistic was recorded, every injury and resulting doctor’s report tabulated and collated. Every player and every bone and muscle on that player were assigned numbers based on performance and injury data. 88.1 built a statistical array.